Is Afghanistan Worth Securing?
By M. Ashraf Haidari
Letter to the Washington Post Editor
June 19, 2010
In “In
Afghanistan, a waiting game to outlast the Obama administration" (OP-ED,
June 17), Mr. George F. Will is unduly pessimistic about the US war and peace
efforts in Afghanistan at a time when such thinkers should be realistically
hopeful and support Presidents Karzai and Obama. Yes, Americans are time-driven
and expect things to be done before or on a set deadline. But America must know
and learn from her past experience with peace operations overseas that sticking
to artificial timelines for the sake of short-term domestic issues is not an
option for the long-term intertwined national security interests of America and
Afghanistan.
Mr. Will wonders if it is worth American blood and treasure to continue
fighting alongside Afghans to win the peace in Afghanistan. The fact is that if
the United States and Afghanistan's other partners exit from the country
prematurely, the Taliban and Al Qaeda will have scored a strategic victory
overnight. And such strategic victory against the US and NATO will have
unprecedentedly emboldened terrorists and extremists worldwide to take on
another equally vulnerable nation in the region, which is festering with
potentially collapsed and failing states.
So, indeed, the price to pay for not staying the course in Afghanistan will
have become far more costly than anyone could imagine; 9/11 is just one example.
Abandoning Afghanistan again—as the West once did in early 1990s—before Afghans
can stand on our own will neither further the cause of global peace nor the US
national security but undermine both. The US and NATO must stay the course as
long as necessary to succeed in Afghanistan so that the country will never again
become a no man’s land and a base of terrorist operations against the United
States and her NATO allies.
M. Ashraf Haidari is the Political Counselor of the Embassy of Afghanistan in
Washington, DC. His last letter on "Stay
the Course in Afghanistan" in response to George F. Will's "Time
to Get Out of Afghanistan" appeared in the Washington Post on September 7,
2009.
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