Mad Maxistan: Can Afghanistan be saved?
Afghanistan: Uphill all the way. (LA Times photo)
America’s involvement in Afghanistan in 2009 has begun to look like its involvement Iraq in 2005: Insurgency is growing. The government we helped install is feckless and at least partly corrupt. We don’t have enough troops to pacify the countryside. Our coalition partners are growing restless. We’re trying to train a reluctant national army to take over the security role. And everything is complicated by the nation to the east.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, is conducting a sweeping review of U.S. options. He could recommend increasing the U.S. troop presence, which rose to 62,000 last March, but that is not certain.
Gen. McChrystal recently told the British newsmagazine The Economist, “Afghanistan is this tremendously complex, Mad Max, utterly devastated society that’s got to be repaired, and I don’t know if we can fix it. But we can’t ignore it. And I believe there are certain forces here, maybe just the will of the people, fatigue with war — there is a tremendous desire to sort it out.”
But just how one sorts out Afghanistan is anyone’s guess.
Even more so than Iraq, Afghanistan is less a nation than a hodge-podge of ethnic, tribal and sectarian allegiances. Governing them from Kabul, the capital, has proved to be beyond the abilities of President Hamid Karzai. He was installed as interim leader by the United States and its allies after the Taliban government was bombed out of power in retaliation for granting safe haven to al Qaida before and after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Karzai subsequently was elected president in 2004 and quickly reached an easy accommodation with the warlords who control the nation’s heroin trade. Ten days ago, he may have been re-elected, but allegations of vote fraud are rampant. At the very least, he is expected to win a run-off election on Oct. 1.
Meanwhile, casualty rates among U.S. and NATO forces are rising. The United States has lost 176 troops so far this year, the highest total since “Operation Enduring Freedom” began in 2001. The eight-year total of U.S. fatalities is 806; coalition partners have lost 539.
Al Qaida leaders and warriors find easy haven in Pakistan. Their Taliban allies have grown into a nasty fighting force. “Last week I spoke to a couple of Army Rangers who had just engaged the enemy,” Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Time magazine’s Joe Klein. “They said it was like fighting the Marines.”
When U.S. forces attack from the air, they run the risk of civilian casualties, which angers Afghans and adds to the number of insurgents joining the Taliban cause.
Sometime this fall, probably about the time his health care reform package is coming to a vote in Congress, President Barack Obama will face a decision about what to do with what he recently called “a war of necessity.” Gen. McChrystal’s recommendations will be on his desk by then, as well as readiness reports; too many soldiers and Marines are worn out from repeated tours to war zones.
We’d recommend he read reporter Phillip O’Connor’s story from last Sunday’s Post-Dispatch about Army Cpl. Gunnar Zwilling of O’Fallon, Mo., who was among nine soldiers killed in July 2008 in a botched mission to establish an outpost in eastern Afghanistan; 27 others were wounded. Two days after the attack, the outpost was abandoned.
The mission was dubious to begin with, the goal hazy, the tactics uncertain and the enemy underrated — in short, a metaphor for America’s entire eight-year experience in Afghanistan. Whatever Mr. Obama’s decision this fall, those things must change.
The military experts at the Post are quick to blame a “dubious” policy in Afghanistan and condemn the entire mission, but have no answers to provide a clear path to victory.
Oh wait, President Obama doesn’t believe we can achieve “victory”, but believes our war there is one of “necessity”. With that clarity of vision, finding those answers will not be easy
As Phillip O’Connor’s report illustrates, war is an enterprise that punishes bad tactics swiftly, and as in every war, mistakes made by the Chain of Command cost people their lives. Western allies face the daunting task of trying to fight a ruthless guerilla enemy while minimizing civilian casualties and acknowleding Pakistani sensibilities. Excepting perhaps Britain, our NATO partners in Afghanistan are ill-prepared to fight a counter-insurgency, and the Obama Administration is still trying to develop a strategy for the campaign. On top of all that, Afghanistan has been a bottomless pit for many of the countries who’ve tried to pacify it over the centuries.
All these things come to mind when I recall Democrats ridiculing George W Bush for not being able to capture Osama bin Laden in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Unfortunately for the brave men and women in harm’s way, the new Commander-in-Chief is just now coming to the realization that fighting a war is a lot harder than it looks from the sidelines.
We want Osama. That is the end we are attempting to satisfy. In truth though we do not even know if he is alive. He could be dead for all we know. The question is is all this worth one man or do we seek to destroy his organization completely or in part? If we seek complete destruction of every person that supports Osama do we have too much on our hands? Osama is a hero in the eyes of many people and the United States is the evil. So can we win the hearts and minds. I submit we can not win the hearts and minds in the United States let alone any foreign country. Suppression of Osama’s faction is obviously beyond our control given that there are about 1 billion people in his demographic group. So suppression will not work, hearts and minds will not succeed. So we are left with getting our man and possibly his top assistants. We have already gotten many of his top assistants what now. Do we tell ourselves he is dead? A comforting thought yet unproven. Thus should we stay the course and get our man even though he is not worth it? I say use technology to get our man or men and withdraw ground troops. Anybody can kill anybody else on the ground. This is our weakness not our strength our strength is technology. Lets withdraw ground forces and use technoloy until we are certain of our security.
Perhaps if our soldiers build even more infrastructure and schools (schools to be slaughterhouses for girls by bomb-wielding primates), things will magically – this time – get better. It’s taboo to say so, but the mission ought to be: in, put down the threat; drop a calling card (next time there will be fewer of you left); out. These wars have become (for a long time now), egalitarian conflicts – where our leaders choose to sacrifice our men to our enemies rather than assure an overwhelming (completely demoralizing) victory of them.
The altruism (other-ism) ideas that have a moral grip on our culture are at the root of every reward of bad conduct and torture of the good (bail-outs, countless government handout programs and welfare), but none more deadly than sending men to war with the expectation that they’ll return in body-bags, while we have the wherewithal to crush the threat from the sky.
This the war selected by Obama as ”the good war” Watch him lose it big time. Need proof? Try to remember him even mentioning ”victory”. If you can’t say it, it ain’t going to happen. The U.S. is on its way to surrender to the terrorists. Prosecute those who have kept us safe, free the bad guys, turn a war over to the lawyers anc courts…..FAILURE. Obama is taking us down his rathole of national mediocracy where he can reign as the elite
The French thought they could conquer Vietnam and when they couldn’t we went in and spent 15 years and 50,000 boys, and found we couldn’t do it either. The Soviet Union thought they could conquer Afghanistan and by the time they went home with their tails between their legs their empire was in tatters and fell soon after. And just like Vietnam, we decided we could tame the Afghans, and now here we are years later, casualties mounting, and no end in sight.
Egoist apparently thinks we can bomb Afghanistan into some kind of submission, just like LBJ thought we could win in Vietnam by bombing. Tartan says we’re surrendering to terrorists, just like we were warned of the domino effect 40 years ago in SE Asia.
The USA cannot, and should not, force any kind of government on anybody. All my life I’ve heard that kind of policy is reserved for communist, totalitarian, bullying, world-conquering regimes like the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. At the end of WWII we encouraged all European countries to free their world colonies and grant them independence, and we did everything short of all out war to keep the Soviet Union from swallowing up more territory, and now that we’ve succeeded in those aims, we are the ones becoming the new colonial power. We’ll tell you what kind of government you can have, we’ll tell you who your leaders will be, and you will like it or else.
We’ve been in Afghanistan for 8 years and we haven’t found Bin Laden and we’re no closer to installing real democracy than we were in Vietnam. Maybe in another 7 years, huh?
I’m thinking a little more like HST than LBJ.
Now that the Post has equated Afghanistan with Iraq, can we expect you to start treating President Obama with the same degree of scorn to which President Bush was subjected? Can we expect Cindy Sheehan and Code Pink to stalk Obama on holiday? Or will the left treat Obama with kid gloves? Stay tuned.