A version of this post's headline is the lead story in today's Washington Post. Tell us something any mediocre student of Afghanistan's history could have deduced a decade ago. For over two millennium no outside power has ever been able to successfully conquer and recast Afghanistan for any notable period of time. The last to arguably do so was Alexander the Great who married into the feudal like war lord hierarchy in order to pull it off. But none of history's lessons mattered to the American hubris that led the nation to war under Chimperator Bush in both Afghanistan and then Iraq. Now, billions of wasted dollars later and thousands of wasted lives later, a report says that the U. S. goal in Afghanistan is crumbling and is not sustainable. When are our leaders - especially our military leaders - going to start facing reality? The Middle East adventure begun by the Chimperator and Emperor Palpatine Cheney has always been a fools errand. Here are story highlights:*
The hugely expensive U.S. attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan has had only limited success and may not survive an American withdrawal, according to the findings of a two-year congressional investigation to be released Wednesday.
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The report calls on the administration to rethink urgently its assistance programs as President Obama prepares to begin drawing down the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan this summer.
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The report, prepared by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic majority staff, comes as Congress and the American public have grown increasingly restive about the human and economic cost of the decade-long war and reflects growing concerns about Obama’s war strategy even among supporters within his party.
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[I]t says that the enormous cash flows can overwhelm and distort local culture and economies, and that there is little evidence the positive results are sustainable. The report also warns that the Afghan economy could slide into a depression with the inevitable decline of the foreign military and development spending that now provides 97 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
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Even when U.S. development experts determine that a proposed project “lacks achievable goals and needs to be scaled back,” the U.S. military often takes it over and funds it anyway, the report says. It also cites excessive use and poor oversight of contractors.
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[A]n increasing number of lawmakers on both sides have called for a more wholesale reconsideration of Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan, saying that the war’s cost cannot be sustained at a time of domestic economic hardship. They point as well to changing realities on the ground, including signs of growing extremist violence in Pakistan and the killing last month of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
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Last week, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan said in a separate report that billions of dollars in U.S.-funded reconstruction projects in both countries could fall into disrepair over the next few years because of inadequate planning to pay for their ongoing operations and maintenance. That report warned that “the United States faces new waves of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
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Foreign aid expenditures by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan, about $320 million a month, pale beside the overall $10 billion monthly price tag for U.S. military operations.
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[E]vidence of successful aid programs based on “counterinsurgency theories” is limited, the Senate committee report says. “Some research suggests the opposite, and development best practices question the efficacy of using aid as a stabilization tool over the long run.”
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Other than a quick, limited assault on the Taliban (something Bush/Cheney screwed up), the U.S. should never have gone into Afghanistan. Now, the question is how many more billions of dollars and how many more lives will be squandered for nothing? We need to get out now.
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