By Paul Weiser
The time has come to decide where we're going with the war in Iraq. One path to such reconsideration, that few have followed, is the emotional arc which led us to believe we could easily triumph there. They key, this column will propose, is Afghanistan.
The British, playing the Great Game, stopped at what is now Afghanistan. The place was good enough as a locale in which to compete with the Russians, otherwise worthless - cut-up terrain, obstinate people. Then the Russians made their mistake: tricked by the ease with which they'd beaten America in Southeast Asia, they decided to invade Afghanistan. America responded by leveraging Afghanistan's superlative resources of friction, helping the Russians beat themselves with their chracteristic clueless brutality.
The Taliban arose from the resulting Afghan anarchy, and after 9/11 we again exploited conditions in Afghanistan to form a Northern Alliance which chased them to the Pakistani border. The ease of this regime change let us think Iraq would be as easy.
The trouble is, totalitarianism had never taken hold in Afghanistan as it had in Iraq. Afghans were happily and peacefully fragmented after the Taliban fell; Iraqis kept looking fearfully over their shoulders for the next Saddam to arise among either Shiites or minority Sunnis. Our error, in short, was to validate these fears by insisting on a unified Iraq - historically a cobbled-together "country" much like Afghanistan.
The solution is ethnic separation: Kurdistan, a Sunni republic and a Shiite republic backed by American firepower to defend each against Iran, Turkey and Syria. Link this with a promise to intervene if any of the three grows tyrannical or aggressive by American standards and the Afghan trap into which the Russians stumbled becomes the Afghan triumph America has almost succeeded in throwing away by insistence on an inappropriate status quo.
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