Five years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan is panic-stricken by security and reconstruction challenges. The two are closely linked and pose the biggest threat to stability in Afghanistan’s southern frontier, where Taliban fighters and poppy farmers have revived in recent years. Unless the security situation improves, reconstruction will continue to languish. Of course, it is already too late to mention that the United States should have originally sought to create a neutral Afghanistan and defer the Iraq adventure until Afghanistan was secure however, as the things are moving now this lost war, is beyond ‘reconstruction’ or ‘improvement’.
This is evident as Al-Qaeda posted a video Friday showing what it claimed to be an insurgent attack on U.S. and Afghan forces in Afghanistan, in an apparent attempt to disparage American claims of winning the war against the Taliban. The video argues that the Afghan people support the insurgents and assist their attacks on U.S.-Afghan forces, and it comes as the United States and Britain deploy more troops to the country after the worst year of insurgency-related violence since the Taliban regime was overthrown in 2001.This video again serves al-Qaeda’s anti-American agenda. It was titled ‘Holocaust of the Americans in the land of Khorasan, the Islamic emirate: Capture of an American post, Arghandab.’ Khorasan refers to Afghanistan.
America is trapped
It was a little late for America to realize that the 9/11 attacks were planned and executed to provoke exactly the type of response that US did (attack Afghanistan). The goal of the attack was not to destroy the World Trade Center, it was to lure US into a trap that would sap their strength, destroy their international credibility and cause US to compromise their values. President Bush however took the bait, and now the trap has been sprung.
Can America escape the trap?
It is virtually impossible to get out of there however, if the U.S.-Afghan forces guarantee greater cooperation between Afghan, Pakistani, U.S., and NATO militaries in the border areas and winning hearts and minds of tribal people on the border areas within Afghanistan as well as Pakistan because they share ethnic group and family ties. US need to realize that the heavy-handed military approach that has dominated the strategy in both countries works against this effort and has contributed to the greater insecurity in the tribal regions. Most importantly there must be an effort to root out corruption and mismanagement that has been halting the process of reconstruction, pulling together the locals to drift towards the Taliban and getting the troops closer to the target.
