The ‘third’ front

Conditions are enticing enough for the world powers to abandon war-torn Afghanistan once more. It’s time for America to lead its western allies in Libya. Events following Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan diverted the attention of United States and other major powers to disintegrating Communist superpower and its orbit of influence in Eastern Europe. The Taliban-controlled Afghanistan returned to the world media headlines in 1998 with US warships firing Cruise Missile on suspected hideouts of Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda and Taliban perceived the fruitless strikes as a curtain raiser to the Pentagon designs. Claiming over 3,000 innocent lives inside iconic symbols of economic and military, al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks exposed shallowness of United States’ super power status.
With the world public opinion at its back, the United States had no difficulty in seeking the UN Security Council approval for multinational invasion of Afghanistan to cleanse foreign militants and local extremists. The biggest blunder was the Allies’ failure to agree on separating Al-Qaeda from the Taliban, which caused enormous losses of human lives for Afghans and rising economic costs for the nations fighting the War against Terror.
Despite insignificant success in Afghanistan and sans UN Security Council authorization, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 only to discover Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Surely the Allies found oil in plenty besides contracts to reconstruct what was destroyed in attempt to liberate the nation from tyrant, who has longer served Washington as a vital ally.
While plans to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan remain premature when juxtaposed against the ground realities, the struggling economies of United States and Europe have another nation to liberate.
Popular uprisings in Tunis and Egypt disrupted the status quo, much to the unease of the world powers on both sides of the Atlantic. Though Washington belatedly took a U-turn from supporting Mobarak to backing the social revolutionaries, the White House has untiringly condemned Libyan tyrant Gaddafi till the Arab League hesitantly nodded for a No-Fly Zone regime under the auspices of the UN Security Council.
Russia and China abstained from the vote, paving the way for regime change in the North African oil-rich nation. Merciless Gaddafi made no concessions for the protesting public even after imposition of No-Fly Zone. With rebels engaged in fierce battles with Gaddafi forces around Benghazi, French, American and British fighter jets not only took to the skies to enforce Security Council resolution but also destroyed parked planes, helicopters, radar systems and air bases.
Today slogans of social revolutionaries are no more audible to international media with headlines solely focusing on dynamics of Allied airpower and counts of tanks and air bases destroyed on daily basis. Even Turkey’s optimism with NATO taking charge of the Libya campaign is no less than hallucination given all doors of dialogue shut on the Libyan dictator. A few words of dissent from the Arab League were only addressed to historian of the future. The ruthless use of airpower against Libya so far is read as “attempt to weaken the country in the long run and win more contracts for construction and military hardware”. Hope for a free and prosperous Libya is getting farther by each passing day. While the taxpayers in the West worry about the $250 million per day cost of operation as it enters second week, an average Muslim simply finds a third country invaded and incapacitated by ‘Christians’ for energy sources and political clout. With the demise of social revolution in Libya, the ongoing exercise is only serving extremists on both ends, widening the gulf between Islam and the West. The cost of abandoning Afghanistan while pursuing ambitious goals in the Middle East and North Africa may be much bigger than ever perceived.

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