Why Good Leftists and Good Americans Should be in Favor of Clobbering the Taliban
By
David Gottfried
According to various news reports, some people in the Biden administration want to get out of Afghanistan. Perhaps they suffer from the common delusion that running away with one’s tail between one’s legs is the “progressive” thing to do.
I believe that United States aggression in Indochina was indefensible. I believe that United States aggression against Serbia was odious. I condemned United States aggression against the Dominican Republic in 1965, and I condemned United States subversion in Greece in 1967, in Guatemala in 1954, in Iran in 1953, in Chile in 1970, and I deplore so many other instances of United States imperialism.
But I believe that any thing short of an all-out campaign to annihilate the Taliban and their allies in Afghanistan would be criminal.
Of course, most Americans know very little about foreign policy and can’t even find key global players on a map. Therefore, when a conflict arises, they ask themselves “Is this another Vietnam” as if Vietnam were the only war we have ever been involved in. They have a limited conception of the people we are fighting, what the issues are and how the controversy got started.
You might want to compare the Taliban to some of our other adversaries over the years. Since Americans compare everything to Vietnam, let’s indulge their weakness and do that. The North Vietnamese, whose founding documents copied some of the language in the American declaration of independence and begged the Americans not to support French efforts to recolonize Indochina after World War Two, were very, very different from Islamic medievalists who a) have slaughtered ice manufacturers because ice was not manufactured at the time of “the prophet,” (Why don’t they also kill gun manufacturers as guns did not exist at the time of the prophet), b) are not content to merely kill their enemies but often like to use power tools to drill holes in the skulls of adherents of rival Islamic sects (The New Yorker), c) blow up the mosques of different Islamic groups when they are filled with parishioners, d) have taken a fancy to naming their children Adolf, and e) have no conception of a dividing line between a secular world and a sectarian world. Everything is on the chopping block of the Mullahs.
I can already hear the chorus of disapproval: Gottfried is such a primitive, cowboyish American war-lover. After all, those terribly dainty, cosmopolitan advocates of Western senescence and death find the stance of a Neville Chamberlain so much more elegant and gentlemanly as he sipped tea with an extended pinkie and submissively agreed that Germany would rule the Sudetenland. (Actually, Chamberlain probably went easy on Hitler not because he, Chamberlain, was a softie; he probably wanted to encourage Hitler to go East to vanquish the Soviet Union, Communism and Jews as he feared the rising tide of socialist discontent in the United Kingdom.)
The Taliban, very simply, committed an act of heinous, grievous aggression against us: They aided and abetted Al Qaeda and made it possible for Osama to drive planes into the World Trade Center. Normally, when a nation is attacked it returns fire.
Of course, at times nations don’t return fire. For example, United States vessels and people had been attacked on a few occasions, by the Japanese, in the 1930’s. The United States did not retaliate. The Japanese inferred that we were softies, and they created the debacle that was Pearl Harbor. After a United States Marine Barracks had been destroyed in Lebanon, killing over 100 servicemen, we did not fight back; we left Lebanon. After Islamic extremists blew up Khobar Towers, after Islamists sunk the Cole, and after US servicemen, sent to Somalia to feed the starving, were dragged by a truck through the filthy streets and finally killed, we did not retaliate. This failure to retaliate may have bequeathed the carnage of 9/11.
Of course, we are disgusted and exasperated at the extreme chronicity of our involvement in Afghanistan. We sent troops into Afghanistan twenty years ago, yet we still have not prevailed. In large measure, this is because we have so very few troops there. At present, 3000 lonely American soldiers stand guard in Afghanistan. New York City has more cops stationed in the relatively low crime borough of Staten Island. In World War Two, something in the vicinity of 15 million American men were in the armed forces of this country. I generally detested George Bush, but George Bush the elder sent half a million men near the border of Kuwait and Sadaam was crushed in no time. (Although I commend his manner of going into battle, I disagreed with his decision to attack Iraq. The demolition of Iraqi power ineluctably leads to the ascendance of Iran because Iraq and Iran historically scratch each other’s eyes out like two divas smoking crack.)
Some fellow leftists will disagree with me because they think that hawkishness and a belief in fighting are inherently right wing. However, they should remember that solid socialists have often been strident hawks. For example, Ben Gurion and Golda Meir, leaders in Israel in her glorious early years, were staunchly socialistic and weren’t afraid to shoot when shooting was necessary. The men and women of the Glorious Red Army, who decimated fascist scum in World War Two, were fervently left of center. Meanwhile, in Britain in the 1930’s the so called “respectable tendency,” a gaggle of rich, monarchical parasites, was opposed to helping British Workers just as they were opposed to putting the brakes on Hitler.
We can be good leftists, and as good leftists we should not find fault in fighting extreme Islamists, who Mid Twentieth Century Marxists considered among the most reactionary, illogical and oppressive people on earth.