Afghanistan 2011

President Obama announced yesterday that the 10,000 of the 30,000 troops added to the Afghanistan campaign will begin returning home this year will the remaining 20,000 to return by November 2012. Of course this will still leave nearly 70,000 US troops in Afghanistan. There is much debate about the wisdom of this plan from all political perspectives.

So, what is a spiritual path for such a quagmire? I'm glad that troops will begin coming home, but how much will really change on the ground? Although the president's stated plan is to slowly draw down troops until their final departure in 2014, without clear goals for the mission, no one really knows what will happen. The goal seems to be creating a stable enough situation in terms of security that the Afghan army can take over the fight. So far they have seemed unwilling or incapable of even participating in the fight in any meaningful manner.

The unfortunate reality is that until the Afghan people need to be willing to fight for their own freedom. To date that doesn't seem to be the case. If it is not clear to them that the Taliban is their enemy, that they should be taking up arms against it to protect the freedoms they have gained, then no amount of US troops will solve the situation. You can't fight for someone else's freedom if they are unwilling to fight for it themselves.

Some sort of truce with the moderate elements of the Taliban might be possible, but the more extreme elements have no interest in a genuine truce because they have no interest in the democratic freedoms that Afghanistan has gained. They don't want rights for women. They don't want girls in schools. They don't want public elections. They want a theocratic state based on their very narrow interpretation of Islam. We know this, because this is what they had created until October of 2001, when the US helped to oust them.

Honestly I am unsure of what a true spiritual path might be in this situation. If the US were to leave rapidly now it seems all too likely that the Taliban would take control of the country again. But the longer they stay the more they become seen as occupiers (as the clearly unstable and unhelpful President Karzai called them).

Much of the problem is due to a clash of worldviews, but I'll try to articulate that in some later post.

For now, the only spiritual path I can see is some kind of negotiated deal that would retain the democratic freedoms while allowing the Taliban to practice their more medieval lifestyle (assume they can convince any of the women of the country to give up their freedoms and join them). The notion I'm suggesting is a negotiated truce that would give the Taliban the right to live like the Amish live in the US, as long as they agreed to the same non-violence as the Amish.


But that seems like an impossibly optimistic scenario. I suspect that violence and domination are so much at the heart of the true Taliban ideology that they would rather die than allow others to live as they wish.