Buried among the news stories last week, but not as deep as the 1,516 NATO soldiers and 850,000 civilians dead because of the fighting in Afghanistan in the more than eight-year-old war, was the little nugget that Stanley McChrystal, the US General in charge, has pretty much surrendered and said what the politicians won’t: this war can’t be won if the allied forces stay a thousand years, not because the soldiers aren’t brave, but because there’s no political will to provide them what they need to win, and because, unlike World War II, there’s no battlefield or identifiable enemy.
Worse, McChrystal said the inevitable answer is a political solution and a government that will include the Taliban, the enemy NATO faced off against. The notion that the Taliban will return in some fashion will be bitter news to the families of the soldiers who now, as in Vietnam, will have died for nothing, and to civilians who will face the renewed wrath of the same people who liked to kill girls because they showed their face or ankle, which, of course, meant they were sluts asking for it.
“I believe that a political solution to all conflicts is the inevitable outcome. And it’s the right outcome,” McChrystal, who is Commander of the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, said in an interview with the Financial Times, adding that peace negotiations with the insane leaders of the Taliban may already be underway, which means they are. He said he believed the surge of an extra 30,000 US soldiers would weaken the Taliban enough to force them to agree to a peace deal, forgetting that means they will come back to hold some power, even with the corrupt incumbent President Hamid Karzai’s government, while the NATO troops will be home wondering what the hell hit them and why they were there in the first place.
“It’s not my job to extend olive branches, but it is my job to help set conditions where people in the right positions can have options on the way forward,” he said, boilerplate language that means he’s been told a diplomatic solution will usurp his power to chase down and kill people who otherwise would chase down and kill his people, which so far has included: 703 Americans, 251 British, 31 Danes, six Estonians, 38 French, 40 Germans, 22 Italians, 15 Poles, 11 Romanians, 79 Spanish (including 62 killed in a plane crash in Turkey on the way home and 17 in a helicopter crash, proving there’s no safe ground even when you’re not deployed to combat areas;) three Norwegians, two Portuguese, two Swedes, two Czechs, one Finn, one Lithuanian and two Hungarians, although the figures can change by the hour. And unlike WWII, where there were reporters at the front giving details of the carnage, and Vietnam, where the fighting was beamed into your dining room at night so you could actually see war while you had dinner until you finally lost the stomach for fighting and forced the American government to get the hell out, the war in Afghanistan, like the war in Iraq, has gone virtually uncovered, except for reporters vetted by military and political leaders who are “embedded” where they can’t see any real fighting. Look at the newspapers, television and on-line: where are the pictures of the battles, the kind of horror that makes people realize there are people being killed and not binary codes or integers? “As a soldier, my personal feeling is that there’s been enough fighting,” McChrystal said. Not yet, because more people are going to die until politicians get to bury their all mistakes.
 Andy@NEurope.eu