– NATO...Are Its Final Days Just Ahead


NATO under the gun
By MIDDLE EAST TIMES

It is clear that the security situation is going south in Afghanistan, a country many coalition countries want to shield their troops from. Attacks against civilians and U.S.-led coalition forces are on the increase. The Taliban, believed to have been routed shortly after the war began in 2001, appear to be making a comeback.

Their attacks are getting bolder and deadlier. More than 37 civilians died Monday when a suicide car bomber targeted Canadian soldiers serving with the international force. The next day and another attack, this one even deadlier than the first: 100 killed, the country's worst such attack yet. Three Canadian soldiers serving with the International Security Assistance Force were wounded Monday in a car parts market, just 150 feet from the Pakistan border in the town of Spin Boldak.

The French news agency, AFP, reported that "A spokesman for the extremist Taliban movement said his group had carried out the blast."

A spokesman for the Taliban? Weren't these guys supposed to be hiding in caves in the most remote, inaccessible parts of the border areas? Were they not supposed to stay away from cellular phones for fear of being tracked by the super sophisticated electronic gadgetry and satellite listening devices that Western forces have available?

Yet, here they are now making press statements and talking to members of the media. That, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. Talking to the media is the way democracy works – in democratic societies. But given half a chance the Taliban, should they ever come to power again, would just as soon silence the very media they are now using to spread their bulletins.

Afghanistan has regressed. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was established to defend Western Europe from the Soviet Union and its communist satellite states after World War II, finds itself today fighting a war in a part of the world it never imagined it would have to.

Unlike Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan poses a real danger to the security of Western Europe, and ultimately to that of North America; which is why it is imperative that NATO not only makes a firm stand in the country, but goes a step further by winning the war, if that is still possible.