British soldier on patrol in Helmand province in 2009. A member of 1st Battalion, The Rifles, was killed on Tuesday during a patrol in the Nahr-e Saraj district. Photograph: Omar Sobhani/Reuters
When The End of War Is The Beginning Of War -- Alan Cowell, New York Times
LONDON — When history’s great contests wind down, they leave questions that wars cannot answer and conflicts sometimes create.
That seems as true in the myriad centennial commemorations of the start of World War I this year as in the recollection this week of President Vladimir V. Putin, who invoked Russia’s indignities at the end of the Cold War to justify the annexation of Crimea.
It was a familiar reflex. As European history showed after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, terms of peace that offer no dignity to the defeated sow the seeds of future conflict. In this century — witness the revived bloodletting in Iraq — wars that end on ill-defined terms merely store up the tinder of future conflagration.
So what is to be made of Britain’s drawdown in lockstep with the United States’ from a war in Afghanistan whose aims have shifted inconclusively as lives have been lost?
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My Comment: This is one of those must reads.
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The Sangin District is in the Helmand River Valley, Afghanistan. British forces have called it “Sangingrad,” after the tortuous battle of Stalingrad in WWII. Others have called it the most dangerous place in the world. Others have called it “No Go Valley.”
Recently U.S. and Afghan officials have investigated reports Afghan forces have given the Taliban control of multiple checkpoints in Sangin, where hundreds of Marines were wounded or killed during a difficult, years-long fight to secure one of Afghanistan’s most violent territories.
That's understandable.
news report, Jun 3, 2012:
Commander of the ANA 215th Corps, Maj. Gen. Sayed Malouk
Maj. Gen. Sayed Malouk emphasized that the public and the ANA have a common goal—peace. He added the ANA soldiers and Afghan civilian are exposed daily to the danger of war.“They’re tired of war,” said Malouk. “They’re frustrated, they no longer want to be in this war. This (war) is something that’s been imposed by other people from beyond this country; and the Afghan (insurgents) who have been fighting against the ANSF, they themselves have been victims of this war. They have been encouraged by those others.” Brigadier Gen. Ghulam Farooq, deputy commander, 215th Corps: “We’ve had continuous war in this country, we’re tired of war and we wish for peace.”
http://www.dvidshub.net/news/printable/89388
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