What Price Afghanistan?
"The narrative . . . has been too negative."
So says Defense Secretary Robert Gates of political and press commentary about the war in Afghanistan. It reminds him of the pessimism of June 2007, before the Iraqi surge began to succeed, said Gates.
But the narrative is coming now not just from critics of the war but stalwart defenders. John McCain says the war effort could be headed for "crisis" and holds President Obama responsible for announcing a timetable for withdrawal starting next summer.
And how optimistic can Americans be when, last month, in the ninth year of our longest war, the U.S. field commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said the Taliban have fought us to a draw.
Eight years ago, the Taliban seemed finished.
Since then, we have poured in scores of thousands of troops, spent $300 billion, lost 1,000 soldiers and seen thousands more wounded. Yet, the Taliban have never been stronger or operated more broadly.
Unfortunately, the narrative the Pentagon deplores is rooted in reality.
The battle for Marjah, said to be a dress rehearsal for June's decisive Battle of Kandahar, appears not to have been the triumph advertised. The Afghan government and police failed to follow up and take over the Marjah district. The Taliban continue to execute those working with the Americans.
Kandahar, with 800,000 people, is 10 times as populous as Marjah and the spiritual capital of the Taliban.
And we now learn the Battle of Kandahar will not take place in June.
Indeed, it is not going to be a battle at all, but a struggle for the hearts of the people, to persuade them to rise up against the Taliban, work with the Americans, and transfer their loyalty to Kabul and President Hamid Kharzi.
The people of Kandahar apparently do not want U.S. protection any more than they want a battle for the city. And how can President Kharzi win their loyalty when his drug-lord brother, Wali Kharzi, is the Al Capone of Kandahar?
As for President Kharzi himself, after a Taliban rocket attack on his loya jirga, the national council, this month, he got rid of his interior minister and his intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, in the biggest shakeup of his time in office. Both men had strong ties to the Americans, and Kharzi is said to have suspected that their first loyalty was to the Americans.
Shown evidence of the Taliban role in the attack on the loya jirga, says Saleh, Kharzi told him he thinks the Americans were behind it.
Kharzi, says Saleh, has lost all confidence that the United States and NATO have the perseverance to see the war through, and he is working in secret back channels to cut a deal with the Taliban.
From Harvard researcher Matt Waldman of the London School of Economics, reported in the London Telegraph, comes the explosive charge that Pakistani Intelligence is now fully collaborating with the Taliban.
On June 16, The New York Times reported that Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group behind the Mumbai massacre, is operating in Afghanistan, attacking Indian aid workers. Like the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba received early support from Pakistani intelligence.
What is going on in Afghanistan?
It appears that Pakistan, by maintaining ties to the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba, wants to ensure that if and when the Americans do depart, as Obama signaled we would begin to do next July, Afghanistan will move into Islamabad's orbit, not New Delhi's.
For the United States and NATO, however, casualties are rising to the highest levels of the war. June is shaping up as the bloodiest month ever.
While Barack Obama has promised a review of U.S. strategy and policy in December, at the present rate, hundreds more young Americans will by then have given up their lives.
For what?
To succeed in creating in Afghanistan a country where the Taliban have been driven permanently from power and there is no chance of al-Qaida's returns, we need a government in Kabul and an Afghan army and police that can follow up U.S. military gains by taking control, protecting the population and providing social reforms.
We don't have that government. We have, instead, a regime that has no confidence we will stay the course and is thus dealing behind our backs with the enemy who is killing our troops.
It is simply not credible that the United States and its NATO allies, some of whom—like the Dutch—are pulling out, can prevail in this war in 12 months so America can begin coming home, as Obama has promised, unless Obama is willing to write Afghanistan off.
If he is, he should tell us now and save those Americans lives.
If he is not wiling to see Afghanistan fall, he should tell us what it will take, and how long, to avoid a defeat and win this war.
For saying the U.S. can succeed in the next 12 months in what we have failed to accomplish, at a rising cost in blood and money, for the last eight years, is not credible.
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Has anybody noticed? Osama Bin Laden, the reason for invading the Afghans in the first place, is still at large.
Actually, Benazir Bhutto had said that Osama bin Laden is long dead. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnychOXj9Tg
Catching or killing Osama bin Laden, if it ever was the objective of this war, is no longer that objective. Maintaining the illusion of American imperial competence is.
This war is now rapidly becoming a Great Game of Musical Chairs, and no one wants to be the one left standing (read: being held "accountable" in public) when the music stops in '11.
Obama, the Pentagon, Congress, the CIA, all that lot---the leadership cadres of each player-organization are all terrified of being left holding the bag when this war sags and lurches and sways to its inevitable conclusion.
At least one good thing will come out of this: each of the player-groups will be too busy defending itself and attacking others in the press and in the courts to spend much time making trouble in the outside world, at least for the next dozen years or so.
"While Barack Obama has promised a review of U.S. strategy and policy in December, at the present rate, hundreds more young Americans will by then have given up their lives.
For what?"
Actually the best answer to this question was given in Chronicles magazine a month or two ago. Americans in their hubris, were sold on the idea that they could succede where no other Empire ever had. We should have bombed a giant Cross on Afghanistan soil after the New York attack and returned home. This all reminds me of a poem written by my old professor who raised Afghan hounds.
On high plateaus beyond Kabul
far, far from Khandahar,
no spirits of the waters cool
the hot and vacant air.
The Afghan hounds uplifted paws
halt the caravans,
as legions of the Angels pass
across the printless sands.
A man with end-stage renal disease in 2001 is unlikely to be alive in 2010. I don't think the US government really cares - OBL is just a poster boy/propaganda tool for US foreign policy.
That's quite correct, Mr. Osbree.
A lot of intelligent journalists, like Ahmed Rashid, have pointed out that as an ally of the mujahideen, bin Laden was one of the people closest to the CIA. bin Laden was a contractor who helped build training camps and medical storages for CIA in the mujahideen-Soviet operations. He made visits to the US to negotiate these matters every often.
If a principal suspect is to be named, just namedrop the man you worked with for several years.
All in all, bin Laden's son said that his father suffered illnesses regularly, and a rich spoilt man like his father was unsuited to live in the desert. It's quite likely that bin Laden indeed is dead.
Of course, 9/11 was an attack by Muslim terrorists who didn't really fit the profile of the typical rural Afghani. Out of all the possible religious fanatics, 9/11 was embarked upon by educated upper middle class men (from Lebanon and Egypt) who had mostly lived secular irreligious lives. That these young men were the ones who planned and executed this attack seems to be a fact of the attack being more politically motivated on matters of Israel/Palestine and US bases in Saudi than anything else. There just isn't as much religious motivation in people who barely ever visited mosques. But their attack still gave a damn good excuse for the US to do what it was likely to do.
We will be in Afghanistan forever. We Can't let the Chinese or Russians move in and control all those trillions of dollars in mineral deposits! Father Coughlin was talking about the Anglo-American great game in Central Asia 70 years ago and it doesn't appear we have learned much since then.
We went to Iraq under the pretext of grabbing Saddam's WMDs (I mean atom bombs). The radical left and others said we were there for oil. Which is probably true. We putataively invaded Afghanistan to root out the poorly-endowed Bin Laden. We were really there to protect the world's heroin supply. But the good news is that lithium has been discovered amongst the poppies, thus protecting the green automobile industry. However, I doubt the tycoons will ever build a lithium battery factory in that barren wasteland. The mullahs will say hard work is an affront to Miss Allah the moon goddess.
My theory is better than all your theories.
United States went to Afghanistan to create an anti-Russian, anti-Chinese front.
United States has made military allegiances in Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, and various other Russian bordering provinces.
United States has made military allegiances with Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.
United States has made military allegiances with Pakistan.
United States has made military allegiances with various Middle Eastern countries.
They are surrounding Russia and China with various points for an all out attack, and have placed missiles on their backyard.
As the great man Howard Buffet said, no nation will create as large a military as the United States does, and then allow it to remain idle. It must always be shaped up for some war, any kind of war, just for the sake of it.
What kind of an entity is created when it is created and maintained by army and police (and in such a situation what is the difference between the two?) and is enforced within a boundary which seems to have only international recognition? That region desperately needs to be left alone.
@9
Mr Sanjay, possibly. But the Imperial army is running out white men. Our birth rate is too low. When blacks and Mexicans run the officer corps New York bankers will have no ability to over-extend ourselves in stupid win-hold-win conflicts.
They should hire real mercenaries instead.
Prateek, that's the way I see it.
Loss in Afghanistan is not a sufficient enough punishment for the US.
Read and seethe:
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2010/06/23/stan-the-man-and-the-people-who-own-the-war