An Insight Into Afganistan

Jonathan Kay on one of the best articles ever to be written about the war in Afghanistan
Posted: December 09, 2007, 12:03 AM by Jonathan Kay
Filed under: Jonathan Kay

The January, 2008 issue of Vanity Fair has an extraordinary article about the war in Afghanistan by Sebastian Unger, who embedded earlier this year in the singularly violent Korengal Valley with a platoon from Battle Company, part of the Second Battaltion of America's 503rd Infantry Regiment (airborne).

To read this article is to appreciate that thousands of American troops in Afghanistan are facing conditions as bad, or worse, than our own Canadian fighters. The portrayal of day-to-day life at a front-line firebase in this area of eastern Afghanistan is truly terrifying.

Reading the article, one simultaneously is filled with (1) admiration for the amazingly skilled, brave and humane American soldiers taking the fight to the Taliban in this part of Afghanistan; and (2) despairing of our chances of winning a war in a country where it seems so easy for terrorists to stir up local outrage at Western forces. Good soldiers like those of Battle Company can fight bravely and effectively, day in day out for months, killing dozens, or even hundereds, of bad guys and protecting the whole area while aid pours in. But let them slip up once and kill civilians being used as shields by the bad guys, and the whole valley declares jihad.

Unger makes a strong case that the Americans are doing a million times better than the Russians did in the 1980s, when they killed anything that moved, and thereby made enemies everywhere. But even so, the Afghan war may ultimately prove a failed effort for the simple reason that the traditional Muslim tribesmen in the country's rural areas can be whipped up against any Western force on the flimsiest of pretexts. That's a cultural fact, not a military one. And so the finest soldiers in the world may not be able to change it.

jkay@nationalpost.com