Afghanistan - The Avoidable Sequel to Iraq

According to AMIR SHAH and RAHIM FAIEZ of the Associated Press, "a U.S.-led coalition airstrike destroyed a mud-brick home, killing nine people from four generations of an Afghan family… The U.S. military said two men with automatic rifles were seen heading into a compound of five homes after a rocket attack on a U.S. base in the area."

No amount of foreign aid, new roads and schools, or other infrastructural assistance provided by NATO and western nations will undue the harm done by using indiscriminant airstrikes to attack two men carrying rifles. We are making the exact same mistakes in Afghanistan that we made in Iraq; it is simply taking more time for the Afghan resistance, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban to ramp up their operations to the level of those in Iraq.

We have almost certainly lost the socio-political support required to establish a secure Iraq and we are well on our way to the same outcome in Afghanistan. We can be certain that once we pull US troops out of Iraq, not only will that nation spiral into a bloodier civil war of much greater intensity, but the foreign jihadists who no longer have US targets in Iraq will likely move to Afghanistan to pick up the fight again.

Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan pointed out that if the US put as much money into his country as it has in Iraq, Afghanistan would be a paradise already.

We can prevent the same outcome in Afghanistan if we change our strategy there and simultaneously prepare for the influx of jihadists that we can eventually expect.