Le correspondant du New York Times John Burns, qui a couvert l'humiliation de l'Union soviétique en Afghanistan à la fin des années 1980 et le triomphe des talibans dans ce pays au milieu des années 1990, signe aujourd'hui cet excellent article sur Kandahar, centre du pouvoir afghan et prochain objectif du général américain Stanley McChrystal, dont la stratégie militaire pourrait s'avérer aussi futile que celle de l'URSS. L'article est à lire jusqu'à sa chute éloquente, mais j'en cite un extrait dans le texte en priant un de nos collaborateurs de le traduire :
When I walked through the Kandahar rubble in the spring of 1989, the Soviet Union's collapse, hastened by the imperial overreach in Afghanistan, was barely three years away. Now, like others with experience of that time, I find recollections of the Soviet debacle sounding like a tocsin in the mind, warning of the miseries that await America if the war's trajectory remains as it is, toward expanding influence for the Taliban and their Al Qaeda cohorts, and mounting signs, for the corrupt Kabul government and its frustrated allies, that the war against the Islamic militants may ultimately be unwinnable.
In the summer of 2010, Kandahar, again, is at the heart of the matter. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American commander, has been signaling for months that the crucial engagement of the war, aimed at loosing the tentacles the Taliban have wound around the city and its outlying districts, would begin sometime this spring or summer. True to the form he set since taking command in Kabul last year, when he warned that the war was on its way to being lost unless radical new strategies were adopted, the general has left no room for illusion. In effect, he has said, the struggle for Kandahar may determine the outcome of the war.
(Photo The New York Times)