English I Essay on the Causes of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars
Title:Afrighanistan? International terrorism
Full Text:
The real danger is that the world turns its back on another poor place threatened by jihadists
AFTER 11 years spent waging war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, almost $1.5 trillion in direct costs and hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the Western public feels it has learned a hard lesson. It is more convinced than ever that even the best-intentioned foreign intervention is bound to bog its armies down in endless warsfighting invisible enemies to help ungrateful locals.
Echoes of Afghanistan rang loud earlier this month when French forces swooped on advancing columns of Islamists threatening the Saharan state of Mali. And they were heard again, a few days later, when a unit of bearded, gun-toting jihadists from the "Signed-in-Blood Battalion" seized a gas plant and slaughtered dozens of foreigners in next-door Algeria--more than in any single Islamist terror attack since the bombing of a Bali nightclub in 2002. Here, it seemed, was the next front of the global war on terror and also a desert quagmire to entrap vainglorious Western leaders.
Yet all wars are different. The lessons from one campaign need not map neatly onto the next. Looking at the arc of instability, stretching from Somalia and Sudan in the east through Chad to Mali in the west, as if it were just another Iraq or Afghanistan, is misleading. It is also, if it discourages outsiders from helping defuse dangerous conflicts, harmful. Though intervention always holds dangers, in Africa it need be neither so long-drawn-out as in Baghdad and Kabul nor so hopeless.
Mali's ghost
The origins of the conflict that has captured the headlines (see pages) are not, primarily, either regional or global but local. Since time immemorial, lawlessness and violence have had a toehold in and around the vast Sahara desert and the terrain that stretches eastward across to Somalia in the Horn of Africa. But in the past few years the anarchy has
Full Text:
The real danger is that the world turns its back on another poor place threatened by jihadists
AFTER 11 years spent waging war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, almost $1.5 trillion in direct costs and hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the Western public feels it has learned a hard lesson. It is more convinced than ever that even the best-intentioned foreign intervention is bound to bog its armies down in endless warsfighting invisible enemies to help ungrateful locals.
Echoes of Afghanistan rang loud earlier this month when French forces swooped on advancing columns of Islamists threatening the Saharan state of Mali. And they were heard again, a few days later, when a unit of bearded, gun-toting jihadists from the "Signed-in-Blood Battalion" seized a gas plant and slaughtered dozens of foreigners in next-door Algeria--more than in any single Islamist terror attack since the bombing of a Bali nightclub in 2002. Here, it seemed, was the next front of the global war on terror and also a desert quagmire to entrap vainglorious Western leaders.
Yet all wars are different. The lessons from one campaign need not map neatly onto the next. Looking at the arc of instability, stretching from Somalia and Sudan in the east through Chad to Mali in the west, as if it were just another Iraq or Afghanistan, is misleading. It is also, if it discourages outsiders from helping defuse dangerous conflicts, harmful. Though intervention always holds dangers, in Africa it need be neither so long-drawn-out as in Baghdad and Kabul nor so hopeless.
Mali's ghost
The origins of the conflict that has captured the headlines (see pages) are not, primarily, either regional or global but local. Since time immemorial, lawlessness and violence have had a toehold in and around the vast Sahara desert and the terrain that stretches eastward across to Somalia in the Horn of Africa. But in the past few years the anarchy has