According to Time, 2,356 Americans lost their lives fighting in Afghanistan during the period of our “official” war there. Beginning yesterday, we are now in the unofficial phase. More troops will be more or less permanently stationed in Afghanistan than were stationed there in 2002 and 2003.
I don’t really know if Kabul will stagger along for a few years before falling again to the Taliban, but I don’t wish a new Saigon on the Afghan people, nor would I like to see our sacrifice come to nothing.
The Afghan people have suffered enough.
But we have suffered, too. If the edifice we have erected in Kabul is too weak to hold out, the answers must lie in Pakistan where the Taliban gathers its strength, and in Saudi Arabia where it gets much of its financial support and its ideological rocket fuel.
If the Taliban can be starved of its foreign sources of succor, it can be defeated in Afghanistan. Our troops should not die on the ground there any more.
What I don’t see here is “why”.
http://ensec.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=233:afghanistan-the-tapi-pipel
ine-and-energy-geopolitics&catid=103:energysecurityissuecontent&Itemid=358
These articles are beginning to appear in energy journals.
??? 99.9% of Americans sacrificed nothing to wage a thirteen year war in Afghanistan. Aren’t even concerned that they’ll have to pay the charge card bill for it.
It was once thought that a lesson from the Vietnam War was to limit the period of engagement. Hence, Reagan’s Grenada and Bush’s Panama and Iraq. Short.
That has now been demonstrated not to matter much. The lessons that do:
Refreshing the decor of this war with a new flag and new name.
Resolute Support is worthy of Orwell or the Bush/Cheney spin machine.
Afghanistan’s problems are for the other countries in the middle east to deal with . The USA military has done all that it has been asked to do there. They have gone above and beyond the call of duty for a long time via multiple deployments. They ALL need to come home and stay home.
If the Taliban can be starved of its foreign sources of succor, it can be defeated in Afghanistan.
Until we bring Saudi Arabia to heel, that will never happen.
Right, when they decide to cut production to raise the price of oil. That is, when the US gives them permission to. The steep decrease in the oil price is only a question of supply and demand in the sense that the Saudis will not cut production as they have done in the past to pressure the west politically (Israel) or to keep oil prices buoyant or soaring. Thus an oil glut. Why would they choose to lose so much money, to what end?: either to gein market share (devastating shale and small producers) and/or to devastate the economies of Iran and Russia (and Venezuela to boot). Whose agenda could this be?Curiously Obama seems to be publicly ignoring this development which will lead us into a period of all kinds of unpredictable consequences. He might at least say something to reassure the shale oil producers who may go bottom up and make the bond market absolutely shudder and then implode. Cheap gas at the pump will not turn out to be all roses in the long run.
Iran is part of it. The Saudis do want to see Iran bankrupt if they can have it.
The destabilization of Russia and the former soviet republics is a side effect they may not have thought through, though. Some of these countries – like Kazakstan – get like have their GDP from rubles sent back from family members working in Russia.
What sort of extremists will take advantage of that situation in these countries as their economies collapse? I can’t imagine a total clusterfuck is what the secular Saudi oil bosses are looking for.
Now that the Taliban is starting to bite them in the ass, the Pakistanis might get serious about at least not supporting them.
Is declining shale oil and tar sands oil production a bad thing? I know tar sands oil needs a lot of fracking gas and about 8 barrels of water per barrel to extract.
The war is over and the US has made the opium trade safe once again.
The stability of Afghanistan rests with the agreement among Russia, China, Pakistan, India, Turkey, Iran, and the -stans. The forum for that continuing cooperation is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
The major foreign sources of succor for the Taliban and other opponents of the the current government are from Western aid and opium sales. The answer to the central government’s weakness in Afghanistan is in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance is not totally on board. Several of the pre-war war lords are definitely not on board.
James Fallows has an excellent article in Atlantic about US national security failures. Among them is trying to recapture sunk costs–trying to redeem failure with further failure. But the neo-cons who run our country can’t give up the dream of poking Russia in Central Asia.
Time to have the big Victory in Vietnam Finally parades so that all the guys in camos can get their chance to march in formation with their recently purchased AR-15s and feel like their grandfathers did in the parades after V-J Day. Like they were “real men” who had actually done something important.
Otherwise the Freikorps are waiting for their moment. Forty years of Dolchstoßlegende about Vietnam is enough.
Empires cannot do counterinsurgency in other people’s countries. It is a logical contradiction; that’s why it keeps failing.
Right, when they decide to cut production to raise the price of oil. That is, when the US gives them permission to. The steep decrease in the oil price is only a question of supply and demand in the sense that the Saudis will not cut production as they have done in the past to pressure the west politically (Israel) or to keep oil prices buoyant or soaring. Thus an oil glut. Why would they choose to lose so much money, to what end?: either to gein market share (devastating shale and small producers) and/or to devastate the economies of Iran and Russia (and Venezuela to boot). Whose agenda could this be?Curiously Obama seems to be publicly ignoring this development which will lead us into a period of all kinds of unpredictable consequences. He might at least say something to reassure the shale oil producers who may go bottom up and make the bond market absolutely shudder and then implode. Cheap gas at the pump will not turn out to be all roses in the long run.
Lets not forget the loans the small energy producers got based upon unrealistic high energy pricing. Or the leases (state and federal) they will default on. By mid Jan. 2015 the new gov of TX will be blaming Obama for his rising unemployment. Oh, and will the Koch brothers bail out Kansas or throw Browback under the bus?
They aren’t “troops” now. They are “advisers”. And Obama wouldn’t send American boys to do what West Asian boys should be doing.