Our Taliban

[Watser?]

Foreign policy thinks the crisis in the Netherlands should serve as a warning to the US. Political populists might take the lead in anti-war activism.

The Dutch government is the latest casualty of the Afghanistan War. Over the weekend, the Labor Party in the Netherlands walked out of the ruling coalition government to protest the extension of the Dutch deployment in Afghanistan.

The Taliban is rejoicing.

Oh, perhaps you thought I meant the Taliban in Afghanistan. No, I meant the Taliban in the Netherlands. You didn't know there was a Dutch Taliban? It goes by a different name, you see. It's the Freedom Party, and it's poised to become a top vote-getter in the elections that will follow in the wake of the ruling coalition's collapse.

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Unless the antiwar faction of the Democratic Party grabs the steering wheel, the peace movement stands a good chance of getting outflanked. A nativist antiwar movement, which wants "our boys" back home to patrol the borders against the very people who keep our economy going, could steal the populist vote from the Democrats and from the left in general. We have to counter with a campaign that translates the dollars spent on war into dollars that could be spent on jobs.

So let the Dutch political crisis serve as a warning. There are always people like Geert Wilders waiting in the wings. Last time the Democrats screwed up so royally on a war-vs.-economy issue, we got Richard Nixon for nearly six years. This time around we might get something a whole lot worse.

Foreign Policy in Focus | Our Taliban

Not that Wilders will profit much from this crisis, but it explains some of the reasons why the Labour Party could not afford to back down over this. They have been slaughtered by populists on both the left and right for years and this is the only subject that both those parties (SP, Socialist Party and PVV, Wilders' Freedom Party) agree on, so they out-populisted them both in one go.