… you’ve already lost the war:
After months of deadly and often demoralizing fighting alongside mediocre Afghan forces in one of the Taliban’s most intractable strongholds outside Kandahar city, the Americans in this Army company are asking themselves if it had been worth it.
“I’m ready to get out of here,” said Sgt. Joshua Middlebrook, 25, of Sanford, N.C., as the patrol made its way back to base after coming up dry in the search. “I’m tired of picking up body parts.”
American forces have been dying in record numbers this summer. The death toll in June was the highest in nearly nine years of war — until July, when U.S. deaths in Afghanistan reached a new monthly record of 66.
Many of the killings occurred here in Kandahar province, where President Barack Obama is gambling that an unfolding military campaign can dislodge Taliban fighters from their spiritual homeland and allow the U.S.-led military coalition to gain the upper hand. […]
Though American military strategists said they are making slow headway, some U.S. soldiers aren’t confident it will be good enough to assuage skeptical Americans back home and to convince wary Afghans to back the anemic Kabul government led by President Hamid Karzai.
“Some days I feel like we’ve made a difference,” Middlebrook said. “Other days, not so much. Maybe it won’t last and the Taliban will move back in. I don’t know.”
We will leave Afghanistan. It’s only a question of when. People will die when we leave, but they are dying now, and we are the ones killing many of them. There is no magic bullet that will win the war in a way that will achieve our goals of an American friendly government that does whatever we ask when we ask it to do something and that is just as true a statement if Karzai somehow manages to retain power.
The only intelligent thing to do is to leave now, but we will not do so. Why? Not because of the situation in Afghanistan. Not because of Al Qaeda. Not because of an untrustworthy and unreliable Pakistani Intelligence Service with ties to religious fundamentalists in the region out the wazoo. Because our presence there has not changed any of those facts on the ground and we could stay for 50 years and none of them would change.
No we won’t leave because no President and no political party wants to be tagged as having lost Afghanistan. Just like no one wanted in the late 40’s and 50’s to be blamed for having “lost China.”
Just as there are those who still believe we could have won the Vietnam war, there will always be those who feel that, for whatever reason, Afghanistan is “winnable” (whatever that means). They will never accept the truth that it was a mistake to occupy Afghanistan and expect a different outcome than what the Soviets experienced in the 80’s. They will always believe the slogans and the propaganda and the simplistic idea that this war is being fought to preserve our freedoms or save the Afghan women or defeat the terrorists or whatever excuse makes the most sense to them.
So for reasons that have nothing to do with what is right for our troops, our national security, our economy, the Afghan people, etc. we will stay “over there.” The US government, including the Obama administration which adopted a plan of escalation, willing sent our troops into that quagmire, and now that we are stuck there we are resisting the only logical answer to our dilemma: throw a rope to our troops and pull them out. All to preserve the egos of the Generals, and foreign policy experts, and last but not least the politicians who fear being blamed for a policy that was flawed from the very beginning, as any historian could have told them.
.
The difference was already clear in Iraq and equally we witness the difference in attitude between US forces and some NATO/ISAF forces like the Dutch in Uruzgan. The US troops are fighting men, need a “clear picture” who and where the enemy is. The insurgents game of “hide and seek” is not in the US Army soldier’s handbook. The US Army is a fighting machine as displayed in the Second World War in the Pacific, North Africa, Italy and the beaches of Normandy. Thereafter only failures in land wars: Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq and Afghanistan. The Balkan War with F-16’s stationed in Italy and the 1st Gulf War were played out in the air with cruise missiles and long range stealth bombers stationed in Missouri and Diego Garcia.
As an occupying power, the US doesn’t have the qualities for nation building. Apparently the old European colonial powers have a remarkable different attitude and quality to persevere in rebuilding a nation. I have written about the troops from The Netherlands in the Iraqi province of al-Muthanna and the very low number of deaths incurred (a handful).
The Dutch have pulled out of Uruzgan , their policy of 3-D’s was copied for the US forces under McChrystal.
What is clear from the rise in number of civilian deaths in 2009 and 2010, it accompanied the surge in US troops. The Taliban forces managed to recruit sufficient numbers of insurgents (or resistance fighters) and inflict greater damage to the occupying troops.
Dutch Cabinet Falls Over Uruzgan Mission
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."There’s also the extreme difficulty of breaking the facade of a consistent American foreign/military policy. What president can just come in and say, “this war, these sacrifices, were all a big mistake, so we’re getting out now”? That’s one of the honest but genuinely damaging options no president has ever taken, and never will. We live too deeply in delusion to tolerate such clarity.
It is always very difficult to overcome the fallacy of “sunk costs” in failing situations. Future resources do not justify sunk costs. Sunk costs are sunk; they’re gone. Sinking more resources just makes the hole deeper.
Don’t forget the military-industrial-intelligence-financial complex and all the private contractors, from Halliburton to Xe/Blackwater.
War and arms sales are about the only areas of stimulus Obama has left, and are probably what’s keeping the economy afloat at all.
The situation has now become more complicated with the floods from the Indus River, which apparently has destroyed mango trees and rice paddies and will limit agricultural production. And the President of Pakistan decided to go to Europe instead of making symbolic visits to communities that are victims of the flood; he should ask George Bush how that turned out. The flooding also broke the rhythm of the Pakistani campaign to oust foreign fighters from the Northwest Territories and Federally Administered Tribal Areas near the Afghanistan border. Which is why many are asking for the politically difficult – large amounts of relief aid from the US. In a catastrophe that exceed the Haiti earthquake by a factor of 6 and is much more widespread.
The Afghani government now has responsibility for detainees at Bagram Air Base. Whether that is good or bad remains to be seen.
The idea of winning hearts and minds through infrastructure development projects is now dead in the water because of the diminished security of aid workers. Bush could have pulled this off in 2002; instead he attacked Iraq.
The earliest that there will be another decision about Afghanistan for all these reasons will be early December; it will take that long to figure out how these events are impacting the politics of the region. Most likely the ability to use a figleaf of victory over “al Quaeda” (i.e. foreign fighters) has been delayed, and the Afghan government has not yet asked for a Status of Forces Agreement. My guess of the earliest date for starting withdrawing troops is January 2012.
The success in recovery of employment will affect the way withdrawal is received. Truman failed to engage China during the postwar inflation and unemployment. Eisenhower ended the Korean War in a recovering economy and after imposing a reduction-in-force on federal jobs. Truman “lost China”. Eisenhower “ended the Korean War”. The end of the Vietnam War was a wash; some thought that we negotiated our way out; others thought that we lost because we didn’t have the “will to fight”. The politics is affected by context and by the composition of Congress.
The grunts have the worst part of it in the wind-down to an unpopular war. Part of the population blames them for going at all; the other part blames them for not “winning the war”.
Contrary to progressive conventional wisdom, we will leave and much sooner than the generals would want and with not even half-a-loaf. Remember that Obama is Mr. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
Why it will happen is that the Shanghai Coordination Organization will engineer a political settlement that stabilizes Afghanistan long enough to justify the US leaving. And part of that settlement will be the Shanghai Coordination Organization guaranteeing that non-state terror organizations will not regain a foothold in the area. And they will do that because it is in their national interest.
What Obama has succeeded in doing is making sure that David Petraeus is never a presidential candidate. He put Petraeus in a “put up or shut up” position just like he did Stanley McChrystal. They assured him that they could win, given the resources. They got the resources; they have even more supplemental appropriations this year. Either Petraeus performs (unlikely) or we are out. Just watch.
Hope you’re right.
Wars in Afghanistan are about attrition. They always are and always have been. The Afghans can endure a lot more hurt than most and when it is your turn and you have endured all the hurt you can, you withdraw defeated. That is the lesson of history.
The military is also not currently equipped or trained to fight a fourth generation war, and fourth generation wars are almost always won by the home side.
Boo would still vote for it anyway…