In an assessment that ought to be obvious to anyone other than neo-cons and senior military brass types who love nothing better than waging war - although they are always safely far from the front - and will claim to be on the verge of victory right up until the last troops get massacred, a Newsweek column by a former Bush official, while self-serving, has nonetheless had the guts to say what too few in the mainstream media have been willing to say: we are losing in Afghanistan, we cannot win, and we need to get the Hell out of there.*
Yes, stating the obvious is heresy amongst the far right who would have the U.S. go on throwing money and young lives down a rat hole, but sooner or later the nation needs to wake up to reality. Other than a quick foray to take out Bin Laden - which the Chimperator botched because of his eagerness to invade Iraq - we should never have been in Afghanistan. Plain and simple. Lives squandered, billions of dollars wasted and we're losing. Here are some column highlights:
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The war being waged by the United States in Afghanistan today is fundamentally different and more ambitious than anything carried out by the Bush administration. Afghanistan is very much Barack Obama’s war of choice, a point that the president underscored recently by picking Gen. David Petraeus to lead an intensified counterinsurgency effort there. After nearly nine years of war, however, continued or increased U.S. involvement in Afghanistan isn’t likely to yield lasting improvements that would be commensurate in any way with the investment of American blood and treasure. It is time to scale down our ambitions there and both reduce and redirect what we do.
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The first thing we need to recognize is that fighting this kind of war is in fact a choice, not a necessity. The United States went to war in October 2001 to oust the Taliban government, which had allowed Al Qaeda to operate freely out of Afghanistan and mount the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban were routed; members of Al Qaeda were captured or killed, or escaped to Pakistan. But that was a very different war,
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My colleagues in the Bush administration had no interest in my proposal. The consensus was that little could be accomplished in Afghanistan given its history, culture, and composition, and that there would be little payoff beyond Afghanistan even if things there went better than expected.
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By the time Obama became president in 2009, the situation inside Afghanistan was fast deteriorating. . . . Since then Obama has had several opportunities to reassess U.S. goals and interests in Afghanistan, and in each instance he has chosen to escalate. . . the return of the Taliban was equated with the return of Al Qaeda, and the United States became a full protagonist in Afghanistan’s civil war, supporting a weak and corrupt central government against the Taliban.
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Today the counterinsurgency strategy that demanded all those troops is clearly not working. The August 2009 election that gave Karzai a second term as president was marred by pervasive fraud and left him with less legitimacy than ever. While the surge of U.S. forces has pushed back the Taliban in certain districts, the Karzai government has been unable to fill the vacuum with effective governance and security forces that could prevent the Taliban’s return.
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All this argues for reorienting U.S. Afghan policy toward decentralization—providing greater support for local leaders and establishing a new approach to the Taliban. The war the United States is now fighting in Afghanistan is not succeeding and is not worth waging in this way. The time has come to scale back U.S. objectives and sharply reduce U.S. involvement on the ground. Afghanistan is claiming too many American lives, requiring too much attention, and absorbing too many resources. The sooner we accept that Afghanistan is less a problem to be fixed than a situation to be managed, the better.
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