"RESTREPO"
“Restrepo” is a fascinating documentary aired on the National Geographic channel last night and available on DVD. It tells the story of a platoon deployed in a hornet’s nest in Afghanistan. Aside from the human-interest story of the traumatization of boys sent into harm’s way, the movie illustrates the dysfunctionality of the present strategy in Afghanistan.
The mission of the platoon in manning an outpost overlooking the Korengal Valley is to provide security for Afghans to build a road through the valley. The road is intended to make travel through the valley more efficient, thereby enhancing the prosperity of the villages along the way, presumably contributing to the “winning of hearts and minds” of the local citizenry. That’s the theory.
In practice, however, the platoon is under virtually continuous fire from the local Taliban, and barely able to defend itself, let alone provide adequate security for road builders on the floor of the valley. Moreover, the Taliban the platoon is fighting are relatives of the villagers whose hearts and minds this operation is supposed to be winning. Consequently, the mission is doomed to failure. Soldiers will die.
This microcosm of the war, therefore, demonstrates the fatal flaws in the strategy now being implemented in Afghanistan. The U.S. can’t win the hearts and minds of the population by shooting their relatives or attempting to build infrastructure in the middle of a hot war zone. Moreover, even in the unlikely event the U.S. is successful in winning the population’s hearts and minds and building a self-sustaining democratic central government within a culture with a centuries-old tradition of non-democratic theocracy and warlordism, what benefit does such an outcome provide the United States?
The stated benefit is supposedly to deny al-Qaeda sanctuary and a base of operations from which to attack the U.S. and Europe. However, al-Qaeda doesn’t need a whole country to perform its mischief, and in any event, can do so from remote bases in Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen even if sanctuary in Afghanistan is denied them. Does the U.S. government propose to invade these countries too?
In the end, the platoon abandons the Restrepo observation post without having accomplished the mission -- a fitting metaphor for the war itself.
Who will be Walter Cronkite today and say, in effect:
“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.”
“And that’s the way it is.”