Losing Afghanistan
“Taliban Are Winning: U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Warns of Rising Casualties.” Thus ran the startling headline on the front-page of The Wall Street Journal. The lead paragraph ran thus:
“The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict by increasing the number of troops in heavily populated areas like the volatile southern city of Kandahar, the insurgency’s spiritual home.”
Source for the story: Gen. Stanley McChrystal himself.
The general’s spokesman in Kabul was swift to separate him from that headline and lead. They “go too far,” he said: The general does not believe the Taliban are winning or “gaining the upper hand.”
Nevertheless, in the eighth year of America’s war, the newly arrived field commander concedes that U.S. casualties, now at record levels, will continue to be high or go higher, and that our primary mission is no longer to run down and kill Taliban but to defend the Afghan population.
What went wrong?
Though U.S. force levels are higher than ever, the U.S. military situation is worse than ever. Though President Karzai is expected to win re-election, he is regarded as the ineffectual head of a corrupt regime. Though we have trained an Afghan army and police force of 220,000, twice that number are now needed. The Taliban are operating not only in the east, but in the north and west, and are taking control of the capital of the south, Kandahar.
NATO’s response to Obama’s request for more troops has been pathetic.
Europeans want to draw down the troops already sent. And Western opinion has soured on the war.
A poll commissioned by The Independent found 52 percent of Britons wanting to pull out and 58 percent believing the war is “unwinnable.”
U.S. polls, too, have turned upside down.
A CBS-New York Times survey in late July found 33 percent saying the war was going well and 57 percent saying it was going badly or very badly. In a CNN poll in early August, Americans, by 54 percent to 41 percent, said they oppose the Afghan war that almost all Americans favored after 9-11 and Obama said in 2008 was the right war for America to fight.
The president is now approaching a decision that may prove as fateful for him and his country as was the one made by Lyndon Johnson to send the Marines ashore at Da Nang in December 1965.
Obama confronts a two-part question:
If, after eight years of fighting, the Taliban is stronger, more capable and closer to victory than it has ever been, what will it cost in additional U.S. troops, casualties, years and billions to turn this around? And what is so vital to us in that wilderness land worth another eight years of fighting, bleeding and dying, other than averting the humiliation of another American defeat?
From Secretary Gates to Gen. Petraeus, U.S. military and political leaders have been unanimous that the Afghan war does not lend itself to a military victory. Unfortunately, the Taliban does seem to believe in a military victory and triumphal return to power, and imposing upon the United States the same kind of defeat their fathers imposed upon the Soviet Union.
Whatever we may say of them, Taliban fighters have shown a greater willingness to die for a country free of us Americans than our Afghan allies have shown to die for the future we Americans envision for them.
In days, McChrystal is to provide the president with an assessment of what will be required for America to prevail.
Almost surely, the general’s answer will be that success will require thousands more U.S. troops, billions more dollars, many more years of casualties. And if Obama yet believes this is a war of necessity we cannot lose, and he must soldier on, his decision will sunder his party and country, and put at risk his presidency.
If he refuses to deepen the U.S. commitment, it is hard to see how the United States can avoid what is at best a bloody stalemate.
But if he chooses to cut America’s losses and get out, Obama risks a strategic debacle that will have our enemies rejoicing and open him up to the charge that he, the first African-American president, lost the war that America began as retribution for 9-11 and fought to prevent a second 9-11.
Had we gone into Afghanistan in 2001, knocked over the Taliban, driven out al-Qaida and departed, we would not be facing what we do today.
But we were seduced by the prospect of converting a backward tribal nation of 25 million, which has resisted every empire to set foot on its inhospitable soil, into a shining new democracy that would be a model for the Islamic world.
Now, whatever Obama decides, we shall pay a hellish price for the hubris of the nation-builders.
Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
The original goal was for America to go in, kill bin Laden and al Qaeda, DISABLE the Taliban to the extent that they would not be in position again have al Qaeda conducting ops out of Aghanistan, and then GET THE HELL OUT!
Unfortunately, the Pollyanish psychology of the neocons vis-a-vis Iraq has now seeped into the military mindset regarding the Afghan theater. This despite the fact that al Qaeda, operationally, is essentially based in Pakistan now, while their preeminent training ground is Somalia.
Afghanistan is much like Vietnam in that we have a weak, corrupt “ally” whom we are trying to save. We need to issue a public ultimatum to the Afghan government to get busy or get lost. We need to train and lead Afghan forces to take responsibility for their own country. If they show the usual lethargy and fractious cupidity, Obama can have a “Conversation ” with the American people during which he can announce our withdrawal from Afghanistan. We can win battles but we cannot remake cultures.
I honestly think the American people would understand and accept this with far more enthusiasm than one might think. The Likudniks at the Weekly Standard would howl and Victor David Hanson over at NR would write nonsense about American decline, but the public at large would breath a sigh of relief.
Get out–it does not belong to us, and since God is just, Americans should be very afraid when our chickenhawk leaders kill off wedding parties. It is better to be wronged than to engage in slaughter of innocents. It is better to die with our integrity than live by torturing others. It is time to act like real men in this country–not socialist cut throats who have been given permission to hate by their political overseers and turned into a brainless lynch mob. Killing the helpless does not make one a warrior–it makes you a slave.
Well, those gosh-darn neocons. They cut the military budget, and now they are upping the number of people being sent overseas, since the beginning of 2009.
And those gosh-darn neocons are going to put less money into health care, and cover more people.
And those gosh-darn neocons are going to spend a lot of money on “green” automobiles, buildings, and companies, so that jobs will appear and it will all cost us less.
We have to get a grip on those gosh-darn neocons. Let’s start with Rush Limbaugh. How about, “For every penny a radio station spends to pay for a RUSH LIMBAUGH program, let’s fine them an equal amount, and give it to public radio”.
We need a new FCC DIVERSITY CZAR:
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/52435
You have to wonder about the culpability of the U.S. military in all this, or at least the culpability of what can seem the always-there generals who wanna make a name for themselves and persuade the politicians that oh yeah, sure we can build this or that nation if only their advice is taken.
After all if the military had just flatly said to Bush or to Obama “hey, we can topple the Taliban in going after al Queda but unless you wanna commit 500,000 or more troops in Afghanistan indefinitely (and a la’ Vietnam) and thereby make it *the* central American mission for the next decade, we can’t ‘build’ a society there on the cheap.”
Instead, kinda like Vietnam, you seem to invariably get these glamour generals—many if not most of whom seem to have gotten some Ivy League “anti-insurgency” training that’s detracted from their understanding of history but makes ‘em attractive to the Time and Newsweek set—whispering in the politician’s ears that sure, the French in Algeria and etc. etc. were just sooo less sophisticated than we are now and they dress up their crap with fancy-ass phrases like “force-multipliers” and etc. and the politicians say “well sure, okay, if it only means another (fill in the blank modest number) of men now of course it’s worth it,” and bang, we’re off to the races. (For six months, when another big splotch of men are needed, and then another and another.)
So how come the institutional mass of the military doesn’t rise up to fight getting dragged into these unwinnable things when these glamour-guy generals do this? The Joint Chiefs, for instance? All the new money such adventures promise? All those opportunities for new promotions?
Something seems to me rotten in our military. Maybe it wasn’t their job to point out the bloody obvious that by chasing the Taliban into Pakistan the latter would be destabilized. (Although the lesson of what happened when we chased the NVN into Laos and Cambodia would not seem to have been too obscure.) But it sure as hell seems to have been its job to have starkly pointed out the very real possibility that building a stable nation on the rocky soil of immense Afghanistan wasn’t going to happen with a measly 50,000 men nor in any time frame less than decades-long in length. And if that meant bluntly contradicting the dulcet words of this or that latest rock-star-wanna-be general, so be it.
Cheers,
We live in the present; we cannot go back to re-live the past.
Historically, American government runs its foreign policies ad hoc, but call them “Strategy”.
For example, always siding with the foreign criminals to win so called “Cold War”.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, James “Jimmy” Carter and Roland “Wicked” Reagan brought Islamic criminals into power in Afghanistan by defeating Soviet Union supported government of Dr. Nazib Allah.
Today, Dr. Nazib Allah’s ghost haunts American soldiers as it did haunted 3,000 innocent lives on September 11, 2001.
When Dr. Nazib Allah was brutally murdered and hanged from a light-post by the Islamic criminals, officials in Washington laughed their hearts out with so much joy!
If American government had not helped Islamic criminals, Dr. Nazib Allah’s government would have prevailed and, as a result, Afghanistan would have been a problem of Russia today, not America’s.
American government brought 9/11 tragedy onto itself by siding with the Islamic criminals.
As the adage goes, if you are so inclined to become a friend of snakes, be prepared to get bitten as well.
Americans got bitten extremely badly on September 11, 2001, by the same snakes American government provided so much “milk” with.
French learned the lessons of history. British imperialists learned history as it went from global domination to complete isolation.
But, Americans deny history and, therefore, are doomed to repeat it.
I’m with Ranger on this one. Whatever weak reason there may have been to intervene in Afghanistan disappeared years ago. But, like every government program, its failure is used as justification for more men, more money, more meddling. Enough already.
Can’t we admit the painfully obvious, that our intervention has been an enormous waste of men and treasure? Even in booming economic times, our occupation of that pathetic country was and is immoral and self-destructive. In an economic collapse that is only now beginning, to continue throwing money down the Afghan rathole is evidence that our leaders don’t give a damn about the American people, let alone the poor Afghanis. The same goes for Iraq and Pakistan.
Wake up people Neocons have been replaced by something much worse.. Nation building liberal hawks … We barely hear a peep from Fox News, Rush, Sean, Levin, Dick morris, and all the pro war republicans .. they are certainlty not pushing this .. its Chicago libs .. not the giulianis . Which boggles my mind even more .. with no pressure from the usual pro war guys, Christ even Ralph Peters is agreeing with Pat and writing similar articles for newscorp .. So why on earth is Obama doing this?
Even Krauthammer saying this is not necessary ..
Afgan War against al Qaeda and Taliban is clear Money Laundering War.
Unfortunately, every body still believes that it’s war against someone or somebody co-called terrorists.
Fairy Tale, it is bisiness as usually and everywhere at the modern time, free market economy – free movements of goods, money an e.x. regarding business environment, culture, region and business structure.
RANDOM OPINION …While it did take time, the United States does understand well – tribal nations. It would have been expected that the United States sign treaties it would not adhere to and establish small land areas for the tribes to reside within. Instead of arms – the US could import alchohol and establish distilleries for the tribes. This worked once. It seems that the US has strengthened their resolve, fueled their determination and quite unexpectedly, gave them the perfect vehicle in which to experience an event for which they would all die for. They have nothing left to lose and the US for all it’s political turmoil and confusion of the issue – have nothing more to offer than taxpayer money and more potential dead bodies of men who are not prepared for this type of adversary. Seems those guys over there really understand the Art of War.