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Columns
Can a mountainous area be a quagmire? The dictionary defines a quagmire as land with a soft muddy surface or a difficult or precarious situation, a predicament. A predicament is what we in the United States find ourselves in regards to the war in Afghanistan. Several years ago I wrote a column comparing President Bush in Iraq to the Uncle Remus story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby in which every time Brer Rabbit hit or kicked the tar baby the foot he hit with stuck to the tar baby, effectively imprisoning himself. Nine years in Afghanistan seems to me to be even worse than the war in Iraq. Conqueror after conqueror over the centuries since before Alexander the Great have tried to subdue the people in that wild land, and no country, including the Soviet Union and the United States has been able to do it. Most of the people live on less that $2 a day, it is 99 percent Muslim, very few are literate, but they are unconquerable! No matter how much money and American blood we pour into the country they are not going to become a democracy, and they are not going to give up raising their main cash crop —the opium poppy from which heroin is made. This is what Alexander the Great wrote his mother about the country he thought he had just conquered: “I am involved in a land of ‘Leonine’ (lion-like) people, where every foot of the ground is like a wall of steel, confronting my soldier.You have brought only one son into this world, but Everyone in this land can be called an Alexander.” We are in a predicament. Do we continue pouring money and blood into the second most corrupt country in the world (Wikipedia did not identify country number one), or do we cut our losses and try to save as much face as we can while we back out? I don’t know the answer, but it seems to me that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. I am glad I am not President Obama. He has all four feet stuck to the tar baby. ©2010 Johnson County Newspapers, Inc. |
