Outside View: 'Out of that damned spot'

There are some things that are true and will always remain true. One truth is that you cannot create a modern, secular society from a primitive theocracy, controlled by tribal leaders and war lords, infested with corrupt politicians and drug-trafficking thugs. Add to this toxic misery a violent populace of desperately poor, uneducated, hysterics.

There is no Aristotelian syllogism necessary to prove that Afghanistan is not worthy of any more American lives. The country, if it can truly be called a country, rather more a geographic space lost to time and evolution as the more appropriate description of Afghanistan.

We engaged in Afghanistan to rid ourselves of al-Qaida and the Taliban. Al-Qaida has left Afghanistan because, despite all else, al-Qaida is not a collection of dumb people. They are vicious, treacherous, thuggish, vile things, but are not dumb.

Al-Qaida left and went on to someplace where we are not. The Obama administration must realize they are gone. They went to Pakistan maybe, Somalia maybe, the Sudan maybe, Iraq maybe, Iran maybe.

Wherever they are, they are not in Afghanistan. That much we know, or clearly should know, but might not because we have an intelligence community that could not find al-Qaida with both hands in a hall of mirrors at high noon if al-Qieda were their distended derrieres. And we pay these people good money.

The only thing we are in Afghanistan for now is to decimate the Taliban.

The Taliban remain in distant provinces in formidable defensive positions. We would suffer unacceptable causalities in any attempt to dislodge them, so we cannot and will not make that attempt.

The Taliban will do what the Iranian-sponsored Shiite government in Iraq did. They will lay low, avoid confrontation until we leave, then resurface to take control.

We tried to pave the whole of Afghanistan with the veneer of our civilization and political culture, expanding billions of dollars to train the Afghan police and military and we have failed.

We are absurdly fearful that the Afghan military and police may turn the weapons we supplied them against us even now.

The huge amount of money we have sent to Afghanistan to do these things has largely ended up in the off-shore accounts of its political leadership and their families. The Afghan drug lords have seen their share of the world market for heroin increase tenfold while we vainly attempted to suppress the cultivation of the poppy.

The American defense contractors, and the politicians who lobby for them, have made an astonishing amount of money from this war. They are quite content that we stay in Afghanistan.

The whole of that country is now aflame, first over the desecration of the Koran, now the massacre of 16 civilians, allegedly by an American soldier. The people are doing great violence to Americans who have gone to the place, and risked their lives by going to that place, for their benefit. They have not the courage to see it that way.

They will always regard us as infidels anxious to betray Islam at any opportunity. That belief is fully nurtured by the Taliban and is the most effective weapon the Taliban possess.

This absurdity will never end. We will always stumble into some act to offend, no matter how well-intentioned or how unselfish the Americans who go to Afghanistan may be.

The Taliban are an intuitive part of Afghan society and culture. Like a piece of the genetic code implanted after centuries of blind immersion to the faith. The Taliban seemingly emerge from the Afghan people's genetic blueprint. As much an anticipated growth as is any other physical property of their body's or mind's, it is manifest in their physiological being.

Islam promises the Afghan people the bliss of paradise, after the pain, tedium and endless drudgery of their life on Earth. Life for most Afghans is certainly drudgery. They are impoverished, uneducated, made to suffer all manner of indignities and virtually enslaved to the elite of their society. Who among them would not grasp at any hope?

Islam is that single, in fact only, hope.

Islam in Afghanistan is the absolutism of religion intertwined with the state. Islam is impossible to hold to in a secular democratic society. There is not an example of a society anywhere, at any time, where intellectual and individual discovery is permitted when Islam, in its fundamental form, prevails without conflict. It simply cannot be.

We cannot think to win in Afghanistan. We cannot even hope to survive in Afghanistan.

(Morgan Strong is a former professor of Middle Eastern history and was an adviser to CBS News' "60 Minutes" on the Middle East.)

(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)