Gates of Hell: Afghanistan War Could Rip Apart NATO

posted by Bill Arnett @ 2:24 PM Permalink

From Huffington Post:

NATO's survival is at stake in the debate over how the United States and Europe should share the burden of fighting Islamic extremism in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Sunday.

"We must not _ we cannot _ become a two-tiered alliance of those willing to fight and those who are not," Gates told the Munich Conference on Security Policy, where Afghanistan was a central topic.

"Such a development, with all its implications for collective security, would effectively destroy the alliance," he added.[…]

A central theme of Gates' speech was his assertion that al-Qaida extremists, either in Afghanistan or elsewhere, pose a greater threat to Europe than many Europeans realize.

So now that we have destroyed Afghanistan, allowed the Taliban to return stronger that before, and allowed Afghanistan to become the largest supplier of opium in the world, NATO "must" commit more troops there or it will be their fault Afghanistan is lost and that any future terrorist attacks occur, not because bush pulled out the bulk of American troops on a personally desired incursion into Iraq to commit genocide and steal the natural resources of the country, OIL.

The Iraq Oil War has become a financial black hole sucking every bit of money out of our economy AND all the money we can borrow from the Chinese. And this is precisely why Sec. Gates is going to NATO, hat in hand, begging for more support to cure a problem of American creation that may not have any solution, no matter how many troops or how much money we pour into the effort.

I guess it still has not dawned on Gates that it is American actions, those of the bush maladministration, that have exponentially increased the threat of future terrorist attacks, that no amount of money wasted, and no matter how many lives are sacrificed in these useless wars, any group committed to using terrorism tactics will always succeed somewhere; terror is a tactic as old as time. The War on Terror, not a specific entity that can be shot and killed, is doomed to failure from the start, no matter how many times bush, chenet, mccain, and all those other republicans claim otherwise. You can no more defeat terrorism any more than you could win the war on poverty, the war on drugs, and all the other non-entity things with which we claim we are "at war."

Maybe NATO is simply led well enough and smartly enough to recognize these things and just refuse to play a fool's game.

Labels: Afghanistan war, bush war doctrine, cheney secrecy, diplomacy, disinformation, fear mongering, foreign policy, hypocrisy, NATO