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Warning to the US: beware treating Afghanistan like Iraq

All the signs are that newly-minted President Obama, and the US, are determined to commit more troops into Afghanistan - seemingly on the basis that there has been success in Iraq and because as things are going from bad to worse in Afghanistan, more troops will help get things into some semblance of order in what is already described by many as a failed State. And there is the usual refrain that in order to protect America from attack, the terrorists in Afghanistan need to be curbed.

Patrick Cockburn, who reports extensively from the Middle East, writing in The Independent, in "Warning to the US: beware treating Afghanistan like Iraq" counsels the US to reflect on what those foreigners who have been in Afghanistan have encountered before embarking on their ramping up of things in the already war-torn country.

"President Obama is likely to announce in the coming days that he will withdraw all US combat troops from Iraq by August 2010. Many of these soldiers will end up in Afghanistan where the Taliban is getting stronger and the US-backed government weaker by the day. How much has the US learnt from its debacle in Iraq?

One lesson not learnt in Washington is that it is a bad idea to become involved in a war in any so-called "failed state". This patronising term suggests that if a state has failed, foreign intervention is justified and will face limited resistance. But the greatest US foreign policy disasters over the last generation have all been in places where organised government had largely collapsed.

There was Lebanon in 1983, when 242 US marines were blown up in Beirut, Somalia 10 years later, and Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The lesson, which applies to nowhere more than Afghanistan, is that societies with weak state structures devise lethally effective ways of defending themselves.

I remember an Iraqi neurosurgeon, who had just successfully defended his hospital in Baghdad against looters with a Kalashnikov in 2003, saying to me: "The Americans should remember that even Saddam Hussein had difficulty ruling this country." Iraq was never like an east European autocracy. Even under Saddam every Iraqi owned a gun. Iraqis would not fight for Saddam's regime, but they would fight for their own ethnic or sectarian community or their country. An error made by the US was to imagine that just because Shia and Sunni Arabs hated each other that Iraqi nationalism was not a potent force.

This conviction that a victory has already been won is leading American commentators to assume blandly that the US can leave behind 50,000 non-combat troops in Iraq without any Iraqi objection. This would also be contrary to the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated with enormous difficulty and after prolonged wrangling last year."

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