It is the time for the Americans to call it quits in Afghanistan, writes Gamal Nkrumah For the good of his country, United States President George W Bush must withdraw his military personnel in Afghanistan. The vast majority of the people of the war-torn Central Asian country do not want foreigners policing Afghanistan -- a land that has been the "graveyard of invaders" since time immemorial. Milton Bearden's Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires explains how and why. Rudyard Kipling's poems graphically depicted the brutal Anglo-Afghan colonial wars: When you are wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut the remains, Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier... " He is right to raise the question because Bush administration's strategy in Afghanistan has been overtaken by events. Like the British and Russians before them, the Americans are bound to be thrown out of Afghanistan in disgrace, and the sooner the better. The Monday suicide bombing at Bagram, the main US base in Afghanistan, augurs ill for America. The attack took place at the very moment when US Vice-President Dick Cheney was on an official visit to Afghanistan. Cheney was on Afghan's soil, and that in itself was of great symbolic significance. The Taliban and its Al-Qaeda allies are slowly but surely making a political and military comeback. Time is on their side. Terrorism, as the Americans call it, is a war of national liberation and resistance to foreign rule in the eyes of most Afghanis. Resistance is almost always a political trump card. Taliban promptly claimed responsibility. "We knew that Dick Cheney would be staying inside the base," declared Taliban spokesman Qari Youssef Ahmedi. "I heard a loud boom," spluttered a visibly shaken Cheney. He scurried for cover in a bomb shelter. "I think they [the Taliban] clearly try to find ways to question the authority of the central government," Cheney said after re-emerging from his hideout. The Americans are most certainly destined to be outmanoeuvred by the Taliban Movement and their Al-Qaeda allies. The US-led "peace-keeping force" in Afghanistan is far from being a united front. The impression of a many-sided conflict of interest among the Western allies is difficult to avoid. For the sake of Afghanistan, the American military presence must be terminated. The American occupation of Afghanistan cannot be ameliorated or bettered in any meaningful way. The crux of the matter is that the 27,000 US troops in Afghanistan must go. Their presence in Afghanistan is not legitimated by the Al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. Their presence is unacceptable, not only to the people of Afghanistan, but to the country's neighbours and to peace-loving people the world over. Post-US occupation Afghanistan is notoriously unstable. It would be unwise of the Americans to underestimate the ideological commitment and religious conviction of the majority of the Afghan people. There is no escaping the fact that a vast section of Afghani people are sympathetic to the principles and philosophy of the Taliban. The porous 2,250km Afghan-Pakistani border cannot be controlled. The anti-American resentment among the tribes people of this border region cannot be contained. Pakistan's Waziristan, and the southern and eastern regions of Afghanistan inhabited in the main by the ethnic Pashtun people are strongholds of the resistance to the US military presence in Afghanistan. For the record, there were 139 suicide bombings in Afghanistan in 2006, a fivefold increase over 2005 and Major General David Rodriguez the commander of US troops in Afghanistan predicted an even further rise in bombings in 2007. Cheney met Afghan President Hamid Karzai, widely seen as an American stooge. What exactly will emerge from such talking shops is not clear, but in all probability it would only speed up the unwanted Americans' speedy departure from the land of the world's most ferocious fighters. Just as their forefathers routed the British, so the Afghans of today shall teach the Americans a terrible lesson in 2007. The Taliban have pledged to launch a Spring offensive against the Americans, and by God, they shall.
