The United States did not learn from the vicissitudes that the utmost care with the war plans must be dedicated to the withdrawal. This is so important at the tactical level, fighting in battles and isolated, as in war strategy as a whole. The same goes for the acts of everyday politics, as it should be also the conduct of ordinary life. When we have a project, we can predict their difficulties, and establish what to do if it fails.
The great nation of the North is geographically impregnable, situated between two major oceans, with a strong ally to the north, Canada, and a weak and awkward neighbor, Mexico, south, but that does not make it invincible in international conflicts. The myth of its military is based on technological superiority, but the weapons, however powerful they are, are a complement to the warfighter. More powerful than the artifacts is the human will. It was this desire, transformed into bravery, who defeated the Americans in Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan. In the war started in 1979, the Taliban and its ally, Osama bin Laden, told with all the resources Americans - but that aid was not decisive for the defeat of Moscow. What decided it was the willingness of Afghans to fight in defense of their arid land, made for the most part, deserts and valleys, high rocky mountains, with few fertile areas, some of them cultivated poppy, the raw material for opium and its derivative, heroin.
The United States know they can not stay in Afghanistan. If not for the internal political difficulties, before the de facto power that dominates the country - the famous military-industrial complex, Eisenhower denounced 50 years ago - in blatant consolidated alliance between the Pentagon and Wall Street, and Obama would determine the immediate return of troops home.
Again, the Pentagon and State Department have not been able to plan the withdrawal at the right time, through a combination of military actions to diplomatic understandings. The gap between the two institutions is old in the United States, and corresponds to a usurpation of duties: the diplomats want to wage war and the military seek to impose the policy guidelines. This conflict has always been arbitrated by the president, when heads of state had real authority over the nation. At that time, trapped by unemployment, the criminal shenanigans of the bankers and the re-articulation of the far right, Obama begins to lose all their political uppers. Is every day more like Nixon, in his melancholy decline when forced out of Vietnam, and in the longing for re-election, had to appeal to the operation failed - and denounced by the press - of Watergate.
In examining the problems of withdrawal after a losing battle, von Clausewitz in his classic study of the war - Vom Kriege - says that defeat in battle (and the idea can be extended to the overall war) destroys the moral energy of armies than their physical energy. He concludes the thought by saying that, unless the circumstances are reversed, a second battle will end with the complete defeat, if not end up in the final destruction of the vanquished.
The Secretary of Defense, nominal head of the Pentagon, Robert Gates, confirmed that he had begun preliminary talks with the Taliban, and justified, saying that wars always end in political understandings. There are two fixes that can make the Gates. The first is that wars would be avoided with the political talks - and the Bush administration refused to talk not only with the Taleban government, and refused the peace efforts of Saddam Hussein, obstinate in invading Iraq after ten years of wear on the bombing of the territory. For many military spending, so much blood spilled, so many young Americans dead, if, after all, the political solution will be - repeating what happened in Southeast Asia? The other is to repair that, however rhetorical meanderings do when looking for an understanding with the Taliban, the United States admit that they lost the war. A war is only won when forcing the enemy to accept our will. This has not happened in Iraq, where resistance remains strong, even in Afghanistan where the Taliban, every day more, get support greater population and greater military results.
The United States lost another war, and it will continue losing until his people to expel the bankers and generals of power by exercising their political representatives.
Translated from the Portuguese version by:
Armando Rozário
Petroamerica
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