WEBCommentary(tm) - President Obama's New Military Strategy

U.S. interests in Afghanistan may be oil, the containment of the threat of renewed Soviet expansion, nuclear proliferation of neighboring Iran, closer ties with Pakistan, who possess nuclear weapons, and last but not least the Israeli ideology and struggle for its own state. The question is: "does all this affect Americans across the Atlantic?" The answer is a resounding yes. The U.S. is partially responsible for the Afghans, or mujahideen, fighting off the Soviet invasion in 1979. The interests in the Middle East has always been a given. But now in 2009 with climate change and high gasoline prices, and terrorism on the rise, has our interests increased or decreased? And do we still need to sacrifice American lives to protect these interests from abroad?

I listened to the speech Mr. Obama gave to the U.S. Military Academy about his ordering 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. It would appear that Senator McCain is in accord with the President's new strategy, and I am too... but unconvinced whether it will work. What he hopes to do, the president that is, I believe is to push the Taliban and al-Qaida back far enough to the north that the Afghan military can takeover and finish the job of driving the Taliban out after the U.S. leaves in what is predicted 2011.

This strategy on the part of the president breeds uncertainty. Call me a skeptic all you want. But I don't see the Taliban or al-Qaida responding to the wishes of either the President of the United States or any other president for that matter.

What Mr. Obama again fails to take into consideration is the fact that this war is a battle of wits, two diametrically opposed interests in the host, that is, a game theory. While the U.S. troops under the command of General McChrystal will seek militarily to drive the Taliban insurgents out of Afghanistan and Pakistan by the various psychological and physical resource methods available, i.e., bribes, trained Afghan government forces, reduced corruption in the Karzai and Pratibha Patil regimes, use CIA agents and or fake Islamic defectors of U.S. contingents or the CIA itself, to infiltrate the Taliban forces and pose as reliable and genuine recruits for the cause of the Fundamentalist's holy crusade in both Afghanistan and Pakistan against the infidels, even commit to tactics of intimidation by posing [the CIA's agents] as Taliban and al-Qaida troops in order to threaten Afghan peasants, with hopes that such a stratagem on the part of the CIA will cause hate for the insurgents effectively, while once inside the Taliban they will be sending co-ordinates back to U.S. forces for aerial assaults and will attempt to drive wedges of dissension in between Taliban Loyalists to weaken their internal bonds of unity. Sounds like a good infallible plan. But what may sound good may have bad and disappointing repercussions overtime.

What does both General McChrystal and the President think the Taliban and al-Qaida will be doing all this time as their opponents? Just sitting on their duffs letting it happen or giving up the jihad? Not hardly. Since this is as I have stated a war based on game theory, it is safe to suppose that Osama Bin Laden and his followers in al-Qaida, along with the Taliban will employ whatever methods, be they voodoo, black magic, mysticism, summoning Islamic Clairvoyants, intimidating the Afghan and Pakistani peasant enclaves with torture and murder or the reverse, that is, use virtue and good deeds to win their loyalty, and any other vile wicked schemes to offset any military strategies the U.S. may apply. But that is not all. What's more, they will, because they have nothing to lose, since they are fighting what they perceive to be a just holy war, increase and step up suicide attacks both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and in addition to that, they may then set their sights, full blown, on internal attacks in the United States. That is for two reasons, first because of the direct connection to the drug industry and U.S. abuse of illegal drugs, and second, because I predict such a strategy would shift the political and domestic focus away from the Middle East to the U.S. directly, and may weaken American morale here at home, not to mention undermine their faith in our leadership if they [the Taliban] succeeds.

To the Taliban and al-Qaida the war is not just a war to prove who is the most powerful militarily, but a war to prove Allah is on their side. This makes such a jihad, machine-driven. Like the Japanese were, during World War Two, (but most were atheist) when they bombed Pearl Harbor. Their behavior stunned American military high officials, who had no idea to win to the Japanese meant to die and die unnerved and heaven bound. Such an attitude toward a desire to defend one's religious convictions is the worst foe psychologically any army can face in battle, analogous to the attitude of the Knight’s Templars. Oh, sure the U.S. can nuke the Taliban and al-Qaida like they did the unyielding Japanese in 1945. Or they can get out of the Middle East altogether, if they fail to succeed in driving the Taliban and al-Qaida into internal self-destruction, with their tails between their legs and their heads hung low in shame.

This war seems to be about winning to the U.S., but not to the Islamic Fundamentalists. To them the war is about religious freedom from foreign Christian rule. And that basic aim is no different than the aim the American colonists had when they fought the British in the Revolutionary War, which was a human right’s struggle.

It is not going to be a downhill ski-ride for Obama. He is fighting religious Nationalists, who control a large portion of the drug industry, globally, and ethics, surrounding the cause of the Islamic brotherhood is morally indiscriminate, Antinomianism, that is, there is no moral law in war. That alone tells me what the President and the Pentagon can't see, the Taliban and al-Qaida can, and will use, to defend themselves, and Allah will forgive them, according to the Quran, when all is said and done. This is the principle of the Greater Good Doctrine, that is, there are no exceptions to immorality but there are exemptions. Worst still, as the body count rises on both sides, the American people down the road, lets say by mid-2010, will begin to question the country's real intentions once again. More United Nation's troops deployed to the region, if called for and approved by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, would only add to the overall regional devastation as the war drags on.

I don't call the uncertainty in my mind now brewing in the Middle East for the American forces there a Vietnam; I call it an Islam-nam.

On the subject of using food to bribe the Afghan peasant into aiding U.S. forces in the region to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida cannot last and will not last. If U.S. forces are scheduled to defect in 2011, and return military control to both Afghan and Pakistani military personnel, I predict in time corruption will rage once more, due to drugs and political corruption of the Afghan and Pakistani peasantry and nothing would have changed. Just like the Vietnam War after the Americans departed in 1975. The North Vietcong took over power in the south regardless of U.S. superior military might in the aftermath. So the war in Vietnam was a waste of human life and the same results will occur in Islam-nam as well; as fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews, son-in-laws, daughter-in-laws etc., (the Tet Offensive) see the value of multicultural unity through socialization based on one religious culture, Islam, whose roots go back to the prophet Muhammad in 570 to 632 A.D.

Gratuated from high school in 1971. Vietnam Veteran. Now attending College for Computer Science. Also attended the University of Cincinnati. I do have a Website posted but it is still being constructed and will be totally functional sometime this summer.