Afghanistan has Become Harder to Win but not Impossible

By Con George-Kotzabasis

“Pessimism comes from the passions, optimism from the will”. Taro Aso, Prime Minister of Japan.

The author is right to excavate the wisdom of Thucydides from the ruins of the Peloponnesian war. But the profound insights and political fecundity of Thucydides can be used in variable ways and historical contexts. For example, on the issue of preemptive strike he said, “It was... praiseworthy to get one’s blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong.” Thus Afghanistan, as one could consider its military ‘denizens’ as a great threat to the West that must be prevented.

Moreover, the quote from Thucydides is incongruous to his own assessment of the war in Afghanistan as his estimation clearly was at the time not that the Taliban could not be defeated and “kept under”, but the failure of the defeat laid in political and military mistakes. He states that “the time for pacifying Afghanistan was when the Taliban fled into the hills or went to ground after our 2001 invasion...and broken the feudal warlords with the full force of the world behind us.”

Hence the author clearly places the blame for not accomplishing the defeat of the Taliban on the political and military errors of the Bush administration and not that on a new “Petraeus template”--although he himself at least in the past believed otherwise--applied in Afghanistan victory will continue to be elusive and unachievable. If the Petraeus new strategy In Afghanistan involves the correction of past political and military mistakes, as it was done in Iraq, and some sort of unity among the provincial warlords based on common interests against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, then victory against the latter is more than possible.