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The Europeans carry a very small part of the burden in Afghanistan. Most of that burden is carried by the Union Jack. The workhorse in “Obama’s Vietnam” are the US forces under the Stars and Stripes. Increasingly voices from around the globe are asking the question “Why are we in Afghanistan“. One of those voices is Joe Klein.
Nato is in a cleft stick and the idea that, unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is the “right war” is a self-deluding trap. A military “surge”, the favoured Obama policy, may produce short-term local advances but no sustainable improvement, and as yesterday’s Guardian reported, it will cost the US and Britain enormous sums. Pouring in aid will take too long to win hearts and minds, and if normal practice is followed, the money will mainly go to foreign consultants and corrupt officials. Talking to the Taliban makes sense under Najibullah-style national reconciliation. But the Taliban themselves are disunited, with a host of local leaders and generational divisions between “new” and “old” Taliban. Worse still, since the war spilt into Pakistan’s frontier regions, there are now Pakistani Taliban.
What of the better option, a phased Nato withdrawal? It will not produce benefits as clear or immediate as the US pull-out from Iraq. Most Iraqis never wanted the US in the first place. They know the destruction the invasion brought, have stepped back from sectarian war, and now have a government which has pressed Washington to set a timetable to leave. In Afghanistan the risks of a collapse of central rule and a long civil war are far greater. The Guardian, Saturday 14 February 2009 Jonathan Steele. Nato is deeper in its Afghan mire than Russia ever was
According to many analysts, NATOs existence is at stake. If it can’t control a country like Afghanistan, what can it do against the former USSR?
The two-fold, “Western alliance” strategy at the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater, as it stands, consists of the US and NATO occupying the parts of Afghanistan not occupied by the Taliban while Washington bribes Islamabad to let it attack Pashtun peasants inside Pakistan’s Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA).
No wonder that after de facto losing a war in Iraq to a bunch of “irregulars” with Kalashnikovs, the Pentagon is now terrified that NATO is about to lose the war in Afghanistan for good, thus proving to the whole world its absolute irrelevancy – and shattering once and for all the shaky pillar of US hegemony over Europe. NATO is incompetent even at lying. A NATO report in January claimed that “only” 973 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2008, and “only 97″ of these by NATO. This month a UN report confirmed that NATO was lying. According to the UN, at least 2,118 Afghan civilians were killed in 2008 – 828 of them by the US or NATO. Everyone’s talking about US fighter jets and CIA Predator drones raising hell out of three secret Pakistani air bases – with Islamabad’s complicit silence. But nobody talks about the “humint”, or human intelligence, component of the US’s covert war in Afghanistan, conducted by what the New York Times defines, with spectacular hypocrisy, as “military units operating outside the normal chain of command”.
US special forces are part of this deadly mix. A recent UN report identifies these US commandos as the key culprits as far as the killing of Afghan civilians is concerned. Washington happens to identify similar outfits – if they operate under a different banner, or religion – as “terrorists”. Backstage at the theater of ‘terror’ By Pepe Escobar. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009)
US soldiers situated along the Afghan-Pakistan border. David Furst / AFP / Getty 
The problem in Afghanistan is not the US forces or NATO. Any occupation that tries to whip up the Afghans into shape is destined to fail. This basis lesson is lost to most Western Armies that invade and try to occupy the “Graveyard of Empires”. Presiden’t Obama’s Vietnam conjures up lessons from days gone by. Obviously those lessons from Maiwand and the Kremlin are lost to the new generation of British and American policy makers. The CIA is fixated upon the “safe havens” in FATA. It is amazing that the Secretary of Defense is unable to see that all of Afghanistan is a “safe haven” for the Taliban. The Taliban don’t have to traverse dozens/hundreds of miles to find a safe haven in Pakistani FATA–the Taliban can find the safe haven right there in 80% of the territory that NATO has gifted to the Taliban in Afghanistan
“Things have gotten a bit hairy,” admitted British Lieut. Colonel Graeme Armour as we sat in a dusty, bunkered NATO fortress just outside the city of Lashkar Gah in Helmand province, a deadly piece of turf along Afghanistan’s southern border with Pakistan. A day earlier, two Danish soldiers had been killed and two Brits seriously wounded by roadside bombs. The casualties were coming almost daily now.
- Will More US Troops Really Help in Afghanistan?
- America’s Medicated Army
- The Key to Afghanistan: India-Pakistan Peace
- Are the Taliban Making a Comeback?
- Pakistan: Negligent on Terror?
And then there were the daily frustrations of Armour’s job: training Afghan police officers. Almost all the recruits were illiterate. “They’ve had no experience at learning,” Armour said. “You sit them in a room and try to teach them about police procedures — they start gabbing and knocking about. You talk to them about the rights of women, and they just laugh.” A week earlier, five Afghan police officers trained by Armour were murdered in their beds while defending a nearby checkpoint — possibly by other police officers. Their weapons and ammunition were stolen. “We’re not sure of the motivation,” Armour said. “They may have gone to join the Taliban or sold the guns in the marke
t.”
The war in Afghanistan — the war that President-elect Barack Obama pledged to fight and win — has become an aimless absurdity. It began with a specific target. Afghanistan was where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda lived…Afghanistan has been a slow bleed against an array of mostly indigenous narco-jihadi-tribal guerrilla forces that we continue to call the “Taliban.” These ragtag bands are funded by opium profits and led by assorted religious extremists and druglords… The Aimless War: Why Are We in Afghanistan? By JOE KLEIN Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008
- Obama’s Exit strategy: Negotiating with the Taliban
- Indian genocide of Muslim: Sang Parvar’s Gujarat pogroms: Confidence building in South Asia should depend on apprehension and prosecution of the culprits of Gujarat tried by the the International Court of Justice
The causes and consequences of the Soviet withdrawal and Najibullah’s eventual fall have led to some of the phoniest myths of the cold war. Claims that US-provided Stinger missiles forced the Russians to give up and that this humiliation provoked the Soviet Union’s collapse are nonsense. Moscow’s ally Najibullah fell four months after the USSR died, when the Kremlin’s new ruler, Boris Yeltsin, cut fuel supplies to the Afghan army and Abdul Rashid Dostum, the leading Uzbek commander, defected to the mujahideen. Until that moment, they had not captured and held a single city.
Another myth is that the west “walked away” after the Russians left. If only it had. Instead Washington and Pakistan broke the Geneva agreement by maintaining arms supplies to the mujahideen. They encouraged them to reject Najibullah’s repeated efforts at national reconciliation. The mujahideen wanted all-out victory, which they eventually got, only to squander it in an orgy of artillery shelling that left Kabul in ruins and produced the anger that paved the way for the Taliban. If western governments are now paying a high price in Afghanistan, they have brought the disaster on themselves.
The Taliban will not drive Nato out militarily. The notion that Afghans always defeat foreigners is wrong. The real lesson of the Soviet war is that in Afghanistan political and cultural disunity can slide into massive and prolonged violence. Foreigners intervene at their peril. The Guardian, Saturday 14 February 2009 Jonathan Steele. Nato is deeper in its Afghan mire than Russia ever was
The rhetoric from Washington makes the right sounds “there is no military solution” to Afghanistan, “we have to win the hearts and minds of the people“, “we have engage them in dialogue” etc. etc etc. The facts on the ground show more trops, more drone attacks and the same old Vietnam style counterinsurgency operation which never work.
In some ways, Helmand province — which I visited with the German general Egon Ramms, commander of NATO’s Allied Joint Force Command — is a perfect metaphor for the broader war. The soldiers from NATO’s International Security Assistance Force are doing what they can against difficult odds. The language and tactics of counter-insurgency warfare are universal here: secure the population, help them build their communities. There are occasional victories: the Taliban leader of Musa Qala, in northern Helmand, switched sides and has become an effective local governor. But the incremental successes are reversible — schools are burned by the Taliban, police officers are murdered — because of a monstrous structural problem that defines the current struggle in Afghanistan.
….They also can’t go after the drug trade that funds the insurgency, in part because some of the proceeds are also skimmed by the friends, officials and perhaps family members of the stupendously corrupt government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Helmand province is mostly desert, but it produces half the world’s opium supply along a narrow strip of irrigated land that straddles the Helmand River. The drug trade — Afghanistan provides more than 90% of the world’s opium — permeates everything. A former governor, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, was caught with nine tons of opium, enough to force him out of office, but not enough to put him in jail, since he enjoys — according to U.S. military sources — a close relationship with the Karzai government. Indeed, Akhundzada and Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali — who operates in Kandahar, the next province over — are considered the shadow rulers of the region (along with Mullah Omar). “You should understand,” a British commander said, “the fight here isn’t really about religion. It’s about money.”
Another thing you should understand: thousands of U.S. troops are expected to be deployed to Helmand and Kandahar provinces next spring. They will be fighting under the same limitations as the British, Canadian, Danish and Dutch forces currently holding the fort, which means they will be spinning their wheels. And that raises a long-term question crucial to the success of the Obama Administration: What are we doing in Afghanistan? What is the mission?
We know what the mission used to be — to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and destroy his al-Qaeda command. But once bin Laden slipped away, the mission morphed into a vast, messy nation — building effort to support the allegedly democratic Karzai government. There was a certain logic to that. The Taliban and al-Qaeda can’t base themselves in Afghanistan if something resembling a stable, secure nation-state exists there. But the mission was also historically implausible: Afghanistan has never had a strong central government. It has been governed for thousands of years by local and regional tribal coalitions. The tribes have often been at one another’s throats — a good part of the current “Taliban” uprising is nothing more than standard tribal rivalries juiced by Western arms and opium profits — except when foreigners have invaded the area, in which case the Afghans have united and slowly humiliated conquerors from Alexander the Great to the Soviets. The Aimless War: Why Are We in Afghanistan? By JOE KLEIN Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008
& exit strategy
… — this war has become something of a sideshow in South Asia… In his initial statements, Obama has seemed more sophisticated about Afghanistan than Bush. In an interview with me in late October, Obama said Afghanistan should be seen as part of a regional problem …
I flew by helicopter from Helmand to the enormous NATO base outside Kandahar to learn that three Canadian soldiers had been killed that morning in an ambush. I stood in a small, bare concrete plaza as the Canadian flag was raised, then lowered to half-staff. Next the Danish flag and finally the NATO flag were raised and left to rest at half-staff. A small group of soldiers from assorted countries stood at attention and saluted as the flags rose and fell. There were no American flags this day, but there soon will be. The Aimless War: Why Are We in Afghanistan? By JOE KLEIN Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008
The blame Pakistan First crowd is ever ready to punce on Islamabad
US AfPak policy review results mimic Chinese demads given to Hillary 
Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived. ~Abraham Lincoln In 1821 
The Taliban was a construct of the CIA and was armed by the CIA:–Congressman Dana Rohrabacher
Obama’s Vietnam & Cambodiazation of the Afghan war 
Solutions to “Obama’s Vietnam” 
Kabul: The Final Spring Offensive? End of NATO? 
Afghanistan: The writing is on the wall. Can Obama read it?
UK Brig. Smith: “We’re not going to win this [Afghan] war” 
Failure and Defeat in Afghanistan: Inevitable Frustration & misdirected Payback for ally Pakistan 
US Charge of the Light Brigade into Pakistan is a US failure and has to stop 
Pakistan’s do more list for the USA 
Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan & Swat run by Taliban Huge Migraine for India 
Facing the Khyber poltergeist & Ganges hobgoblin 
NATO war: UK 1880 defeats in Afghanistan
“Charge of the Light Brigade” in Afghanistan AGAIN: Unfortunately the lessons of the unmitigated disaster of “Auckland’s Folly”, (First Anglo-Afghan War 1838–42) have not been taught to the Oxbridge students. 
Bin Laden used Reagan’s USSR strategy to Destroy US Capitalism? 
Cambodiazation of the Afghan war 
Rescueing the Pashtuns of Afghania from Afghanistan 
Unite! Erase the Durand LineSolution: Fixing “AfPak” expedites the inevitable union between Pakistan & Afghanistan
