By Michael Seraphinoff

In July of 2001 Muslim insurgents from a mountainous border region swept down onto two small agricultural villages where I have family and friends. The village militia and reserve policemen tried to resist, but the insurgents had superior firepower and after a brief fire fight, in which one young man from the village of Lesok was killed, the villages were taken.

Several of the village men, who had led the resistance, were singled out during that period and led away, never to be seen again. My cousin Mitre and his family and my good friend Drakce were among the luckier ones. The insurgents looted and then torched their homes and then ordered them at gunpoint, along with nearly a thousand other village men, women and children, to walk away with nothing but the clothes on their backs to the villages of Ratae and Zilce in the valley below.

These people would become refugees for many months after. Their homes and businesses would be looted and their churches destroyed. U.S. and NATO forces that were stationed about forty miles away at the time would not know how to react to this latest outbreak of ethnic violence. U.S. military advisors had armed and trained both sides in the conflict in the past, as US foreign policy had shifted over time, depending on the perceived enemy of our national interests.

This particular war had a somewhat happier ending than most in the Balkans and elsewhere. Perhaps only a thousand people died in the fighting over a six month period. Most of the tens of thousands of refugees were able to return to their villages within a year. And U.S. and French negotiators forced the warring sides to accept a peace treaty that satisfied no one but which is still being honored eight years later.

It was, no doubt, easier to bring about peace there on the edge of southeastern Europe than anywhere in the nearby Middle East, but the U.S. still maintains a military presence just over the border from the Macedonian Republic homeland of my cousins. Camp Bondsteel in Albanian Kosovo will probably need to remain for many years to come, but the U.S. troops number less than 10,000 and no one has been shooting at them in recent times.

I believe that my years of personal, familial and academic involvement with the turbulent, religiously and ethnically diverse Balkan lands does serve to inform my opinion on the conflict in Afghanistan. The parallels between the Balkan conflicts and those in the nearby Middle East are far greater than the parallels with our war in Vietnam.

I believe that President Obama is wrong to send more US troops to patrol the countryside of Afghanistan. As in the Balkan conflicts, we have managed at various times to ally ourselves and arm and train both sides in the conflict. As in the Balkans, our interests would be best served by facilitating negotiations between the warring parties. And, as in the Balkans, rather than spending billions on weapons, putting more soldiers on the ground, and then later paying for their medical care or survivor’s benefits, we could spend billions less on “carrot and stick” negotiations in which we provide reconstruction funds and/or highly selective and targeted military strikes.

More of our own soldiers on the ground will only serve to inflame the insurgency. For every suspected Taliban insurgent that we destroy, along with the inevitable “collateral damage” we inflict upon his family and friends, we will create a dozen new insurgents all sworn to death of the American occupiers. The Afghan faction that we support today does not need more time to train and field more troops. What they need is for the U.S. to stop fighting in their stead, and for the U.S. to begin negotiations with their opponents. That will really get the Afghan government’s attention. It will motivate them to pay much more attention to the military situation as well as their care and treatment of the Afghan people that they presume to represent and govern.

President Obama’s decision to heed his military advisors’ call for more troops is the old mistake of over-reliance on the military to solve an essentially social, economic and political crisis. The foundations of a parliamentary democracy have been laid there. It is now time to build upon that foundation.

Our troops will once again be told to search out and destroy the “bad guys” who plant roadside bombs by engaging in house to house searches. Despite some of the rhetoric in Washington, the reality on the ground will be that our young soldiers will try to eradicate the hated and feared enemy by any and all means they can manage. This will only make the eventual negotiations that much more distant and difficult.

If we are going to end up negotiating a future peace in which the Taliban become just one more faction vying for power in parliamentary elections, why not begin that process now rather than later, after thousands more have suffered in the war? Today we tolerate neo-nazis openly spreading their political and social message in the parliamentary democracies of Germany and Austria. That will also have to be a necessary term of the peace agreement we will eventually conclude in Afghanistan. It is simply a fact that our enemies must also be granted certain rights that all are denied during war time. We learned that hard lesson long ago at home, where ideologically very hostile factions today accept the results of elections and leave their guns in the closet.

I am not advocating immediate and full withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Afghanistan. That could also lead to disaster. But I am arguing for a change in U.S. foreign policy there. We have failed to recognize the real enemy there; the grinding poverty and desperate conflict among factions competing for highly limited food, shelter, medicine and the like.

Frankly, and I do not mean to sound flippant, but instead of our Island County, for example, sending some hundred more young people to Afghanistan over the course of the next several years, at an estimated cost of around a million dollars each, let’s clear out all of that hoarded, unused wealth in spare rooms, garages, and storage lockers: the sofas, the table ware, TVs, radios, computers, cell phones, blankets, dresses, coats, shoes and more. Let’s spend maybe only several hundred thousand dollars to ship it all over on our bombers, and then let them use their highly sophisticated, pin-point accurate targeting systems to drop it all on the war-weary, desperately poor people of Afghanistan, as part of a “carrot and stick” negotiating process. And let’s put those same hundred young people whose lives we were liable to lose or ruin in a war into school and then to work building a more perfect society here at home.

Dr. Michael Seraphinoff of Greenbank is a scholar, teacher, translator, in Balkan Studies.