Look Into the Crystal Ball

When the United States invaded Afghanistan to rid them of the Taliban one of the first actions undertaken to provide security was the collection of weapons. As CNN military analyst General Don Shepperd so eloquently explained December 23, 2001;

“Well, basically, the whole idea is just collect [the weapons] in a pile and then sort them out later. But then you got to guard the pile. And the whole idea behind this, of course, is to get this country disarmed and then to take these weapons and turn them over to a new Afghan police force and also, an Afghan military. It is a daunting task. Thousands, even hundreds of thousands of weapons and ammunitions spread all across that country. So again, the basic idea is you collect it, collect it in a pile, store it, protect it, and then sort it out later for the military and the police that follow.”

And so we have spent the last five years trying to scrounge up every weapon (or better yet, weapon cache) we could find. This worked a lot better for us than rounding up suspected members of al Qaeda, as it is pretty easy to tell if an AK-47 is a gun or not, but not so easy to tell if a farmer is a terrorist or not.

But, with the "surprising" resurgence of Taliban fighting in Afghanistan, we had to find another method of controlling the country, or at least Kabul. After all, these fighters (who never completely disappeared) were now using techniques perfected by the insurgency in Iraq.

So, the government created by the best democracy on earth had this brilliant solution; re-arm the warlords they’ve spent 5 years trying to disarm. Brilliant!

But…does that mean in two years we will be handing out WMD’s on the streets of Baghdad to fight the insurgency?

~Lila Schow
Because Responsible Citizens Clean Up After Their Government
http://goodusgov.org/