America not really invested in Afghan war

Stuart Weiss, Las Vegas

Monday, April 13, 2009 | 2:05 a.m.

Pakistan, perhaps. Afghanistan? Impossible.

Read “The Unforgiving Minute,” a new best-seller by an Airborne Ranger officer who spent a year in Afghanistan. Neither he nor his men knew the good guys from the bad except when they were being shot at. And then his platoon could not capture or kill the bad guys because they slipped over a mountain ridge into Pakistan.

We are about to repeat a sad story that began with Vietnam and continues in Iraq: getting mired in a quagmire. Yet there is little or no outcry. Why should there be? No one is being drafted. Our imperial wars are now being fought, with exceptions such as the Airborne Ranger, largely by the poor and voiceless who have signed up for large bonuses. Except for the fact that they are American citizens, they are the equivalent of the Hessians hired by the British Empire to fight our colonial forebears during our War for Independence.

As for Pakistan, we have a potential problem because it has nuclear weapons and an insurgency we believe to be al-Qaida. But even there we can achieve nothing unless we support only what the Pakistanis are willing to do. We cannot fight their insurgency for them. We tried that in Vietnam after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and our arrogance cost us 58,000 men and a bulging budget before we said “enough” two decades later.