“If all NATO members could contribute more we would be very happy,” Afghan pres.Karzai said in a TV news conference today with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

There are 43,000 NATO troops there including 15,000 members of the U.S. military. Another 16,000 U.S. soldiers, who aren’t under NATO command, are engaged in counterterrorism operations. ISAF’s commander, U.S. General Dan K. McNeill, has called for an additional 7,000 soldiers, only he wants Germany to supply most of these and the Germans are unwilling.

The reason for this call for help is to stem a resurgence of the Taliban and fight al-Qaeda. The war is in reverse as the Taliban is moving back into the country again. When you have small bands of guerrilla fighters doing hit and run attacks, it takes a lot of people to deal with them, find their camps and hideouts, destroy their sources of supply and so on. The forces that have remained in Afghanistan are simply inadequate to the task.

Compounding the problem is that Al Qaeda and the Taliban have the support of many of the tribal chiefs. This is much like the situation was in Vietnam, where the fighters blend in with the villagers in between forays. Often enough they ARE the villagers.

Rice’s visit there is seen by NATO members as “sticking it to them” by the US for not being more supportive and doing their fair share. Which they haven’t been doing for various reasons including not wanting to stir up the muslims in their own countries, who raise Hell at the slightest provocation now.

Karzai is completely dependent on the West for security and other aid, and he is expected to take a strong stand against the Taliban and its sympathizers. At the same time, he must take pains to convince Afghans he’s not an American puppet. (Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki surely feels Karzai’s pain.)

al Maliki isn’t the only one. Pakistans pres. Musharraf is in the same quandary. If we pulled out all our support of these three nations today, their streets would run red with blood tomorrow. We’ve made their leaders dependent on us for their continued power and security and the battles between us and the Islamic Fundamentalists (terrorists) will continue to escalate as long as we continue to fight them or until they either run out of warriors or we run out of patience and money. These people are slaves to Islam and will keep fighting as long as their mullahs exhort them to do so.

In the meantime, we are also supportive of Israel, which is in a state of siege between Syria, Lebanon, Iran and the Palestinians, and we are supportive of Saudi Arabia because of their oil, against their takeover by Iran, while Saudi Arabia continues to supply a great many of the Islamist terrorists as well as their funding, and funds the takeover of nations by muslim Fundamentalists and the building of mosques and Islamic schools in those nations.

Our current strategy is one of steady attrition, keep the pressure on, keep beating them down and killing them off until we win. The problem with this is that we aren’t fighting a nation bent on conquest. We’re fighting a death-cult religion endemic to a huge area that rises up to kill us simply because we’re there. Let me repeat: They attack us because we are there.

In a case like this there seem to be only two options, which is either kill them all or leave. Attrition is too slow and we may run out of lead for bullets before they run out of fanatics with knives. On that basis, the next set of options is that the war goes nuclear, or we re-institute the draft and pour several million soldiers into the fray, or we leave.

Meanwhile we are deeply in debt to China and Saudi Arabia and our currency is floundering. Russia is on the rise and becoming more belligerent almost daily, China is becoming more threatening and arrogant toward us, and the EU is becoming steadily more anti-American. Our foreign policy is a shambles which reflects the dangers in our many entanglements.

The future is looking rougher day by day and now we have a secret radical muslim who might become our next president.

quagmire

1. Swamp, marsh, bog, mire;
2. Dilemma, perplexity, entanglement, quandary, morass; see difficulty 1, 2, predicament.
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