Afghanistan: A Disaster That Cannot be Won

While Barack Obama has removed General McChrystal after his latest episode of diarrhea of the mouth, the move does nothing to solve the disaster that is Afghanistan. As Michael Hastings and others have noted, too little real reporting is coming out of Afghanistan - and Iraq too for that matter - because too many journalists fear that telling the truth will end their "access" to top military brass who continue to push the myth that Afghanistan is a winnable situation. Something that I have been saying from the get go and which the USA should have known after watching the former Soviet Union's 10 year debacle in that country. The sad truth is that since the time of Alexander the Great, no foreign power has been able to successfully control the wilds of Afghanistan. And even Alexander maintained ostensible control by retaining local satraps who swore loyalty to him after merciless assaults by Alexander's army. But unfortunately, the USA never seems to learn from experience and its military leaders seem to always think that they can somehow prevail where no one else ever has. The result? Needlessly lost American lives and squandered billions of dollars. On the reporting issue, Huffington Post has a piece where Hastings sums up what has been lost in today's American mainstream news media:
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Look, I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising. My views are critical but that shouldn't be mistaken for hostile - I'm just not a stenographer. There is a body of work that shows how I view these issues but that was hard-earned through experience, not something I learned going to a cocktail party on fucking K Street. That's what reporters are supposed to do, report the story.
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As for what is really happening in Afghanistan, The Economist has a lengthy article that looks at the ongoing debacle (note how one has to read a foreign news source to get the sad truth rather than the spin the military is feeding to American reporters). Here are some highlights:
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Mr Obama once described the fighting in Afghanistan as “a war of necessity”. The president must now put necessity aside and pose two fundamental questions. Can the American-led coalition still win in Afghanistan? And if so, how?
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In June Afghanistan surpassed Vietnam to become, by some measures, the longest campaign in America’s history. More than 1,000 of its men and women have been killed and almost 6,000 injured. Yet the Taliban are rampant, assassinating tribal leaders and intimidating their people. A survey in 120 districts racked by insurgency, a third of Afghanistan’s total, found little popular support for Mr Karzai. Over a third of their inhabitants backed the insurgents.
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The real test will come in Kandahar. Worryingly, one of General McChrystal’s last acts was to postpone the operation there until the autumn, amid signs that local people were not yet ready to back it. Even so, Mr Obama owes it to the West and to the Afghan people to determine whether COIN can in fact succeed under his best general. The Afghan war may yet end in an ignominious retreat. But nobody should welcome such an outcome.
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As for the dishonesty of America's leadership on the issue of Afghanistan, Bob Herbert has a column in today's New York Times that calls a spade a spade. Here are highlights:
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No one in official Washington is leveling with the public about what is really going on. We hear a lot about counterinsurgency, the latest hot cocktail-hour topic among the BlackBerry-thumbing crowd. But there is no evidence at all that counterinsurgency will work in Afghanistan. It’s not working now. And even if we managed to put all the proper pieces together, the fiercest counterinsurgency advocates in the military will tell you that something on the order of 10 to 15 years of hard effort would be required for this strategy to bear significant fruit.
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We’ve been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade already. It’s one of the most corrupt places on the planet and the epicenter of global opium production. Our ostensible ally, President Hamid Karzai, is convinced that the U.S. cannot prevail in the war and is in hot pursuit of his own deal with the enemy Taliban.
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Those who are so fascinated with counterinsurgency, from its chief advocate, Gen. David Petraeus, all the way down to the cocktail-hour kibitzers inside the Beltway, seem to have lost sight of a fundamental aspect of warfare: You don’t go to war half-stepping. You go to war to crush the enemy. You do this ferociously and as quickly as possible. If you don’t want to do it, if you have qualms about it, or don’t know how to do it, don’t go to war.
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We’re like a compulsive gambler plunging ever more deeply into debt in order to wager on a rigged game. There is no victory to be had in Afghanistan, only grief. We’re bulldozing Detroit while at the same time trying to establish model metropolises in Kabul and Kandahar. We’re spending endless billions on this wretched war but can’t extend the unemployment benefits of Americans suffering from the wretched economy here at home. The difference between this and a nightmare is that when you wake up from a nightmare it’s over. This is all too tragically real.