I get frustrated by the discussion of operational goals in Afghanistan, similar to the way I got frustrated by the discussion that Bush/Cheney “botched” the Iraq occupation.

Both describe extant conditions truthfully and accurately, but by doing so kind of implicitly legitimize the much more important strategic question of whether we should be doing this at all.

If we just skip over that whole discussion and instead spend our time trying to decide what goals are achievable and what the best operational methodology for achieving them might be, we seem to have accepted that there is a compelling reason for the American military presence in Afghanistan in the first place.

If that’s where we are, then sure, go ahead and escalate and escalate again, try to find a way to “defeat” an army that is not an army and cannot be defeated. Try to find a way to bring essentially a stone age agrarian nation into the twenty first century, to create a viable economy and respect for the rule of law, and do this in a few years before we elect a new president and embark on a different approach.

Seems to me to be nothing more than a self-perpetuating tragedy…

mikey

Americans never learn. More body bags, more lost treasure. Hubris is American as apple pie.

As long as there is money to made on bombs and uniforms and tanks, there will never be a decline in war masking.

Flesh is burning.

…I’m not hearing a lot of “hard-but-not-hopeless” in there, though I know Ex believes that. That just sounds pretty bleak. We don’t know what it means to hold?

When one can’t answer “yes” to the question, then logically the answer must be “no”.

Just because the Obama Administration has better “intentions” than its criminally malevolent and incompetent predecessor, the Bush/Cheney Administration, that doesn’t necessarily change the state of play.

A clusterfuck is still a clusterfuck no matter who’s in charge.

How much longer until a member of the Bush family serves in one or the other?

Who is supporting the insurgency? Financial resources are probably largely from opium, but is that all? Where are the insurgents getting/buying weapons & how do they get into Afghanistan? Rarely to insurgencies succeed without outside support.

…Update: Josh Foust is not happy.

And via the AP, neither apparently is Anthony Cordesman:

…Also Wednesday, a longtime observer of the fighting in Afghanistan, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, offered a scathing review of the war effort.

Cordesman spent the past month in Afghanistan as part of a team of outsiders helping McChrystal assess the state of the war…

I’m a bit troubled by the “stone age agrarian nation” reference. Afghanistan boasts one of the world’s oldest and most colorful civilizations and people with aspirations that are, for the most part, not too different from our own. If the country’s infrastructure is “stone age” – well, whose fault is that? OK, the Russians are probably just as much to blame as we are. The expression, bombed back to the stone age might be considered.

I think a debate on tactics and level of troop and resource commitment is a very valid one to have. I do, however, support our mission there, for all the same reasons I supported our missions in ex-Yugoslavia – we should be working to find the right tactics to help the Afghans build a viable Afghan state for the Afghan people after having thoroughly trashed the place, not only since 9-11 but going all the way to when we waged a proxy war there with the Russians. The Taliban were/are unequivocally the worst, most oppressive, most ccorrupt, most thoroughly thuggish jerks one could conceive of.. easily on par with the goons running North Korea and far worse than the lots in the Sudan, Myanmar or in Iran, for that matter. We’re talking about people who lethally abuse their own citizenry, banning education, blowing up their own schools, committing untold atrocities, selling drugs out of one hand and executing drug dealers by crucixion with the other.

If we hadn’t already invaded the country in 2001, I’d say, fine, let’s stay out and do what we can diplomatically. But we did, we broke the place much worse than it was already broken mostly because we got distracted with our illegal oil war in Iraq, and unlike Iraq far from everybody there wants us to leave – the government wants us to stay, heck, even the Chinese, who normally oppose every type of US engagement in the region, want us to stay. Even the Russians work with us tehre. Leaving abruptly would probably tank Pakistan and destabilize a few other ’stans fighting Taliban-like insurgencies of their own, to boot (most critically Kygyzstan). I think we need to figure out how to make continuing engagement there work. For now, at least, we have to be there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11…..opium.html

And from Arnaud de Borchgrave in the Washington Times:

Britain, U.S. at cross-purposes?

Conflicting ideas on talks with ‘moderate’ Taliban

…Gen. Petraeus does not think there are moderate Taliban elements and thinks negotiations with the enemy would undermine the entire NATO effort. But the Brits have little choice in the matter. The home front is crumbling…

…”Talks about talks” were started by King Abdullah Sept. 24 through 27 when the Saudi monarch held a private dinner in Mecca for several key Afghan players — President Hamid Karzai’s brother Abdul Qayum; former Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil, who spent two years in a U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base near Kabul before being freed unconditionally; Mullah Mohammad Tayeb Agha, Mullah Omar’s former spokesman; and the former Afghan ambassador in Islamabad, Mullah Abdul Salem Zaeef, a daily global television fixture during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, who later did time at the Bagram jail.

The Afghan war is now President Obama’s war, and anything that could provide an honorable exit, short of the democracy all now concede is an opium pipe dream, would be embraced eagerly by U.S. allies…

…The catalyst for last September’s secret talks was Nawaz Sharif, the former Pakistani prime minister ousted by then army chief Pervez Musharraf in 1999. Mr. Sharif is now waiting for the collapse of President Asif Ali Zardari’s tottering government before returning to power with a hefty financial assist from the Saudis, who hosted him during his seven years in exile.

Mr. Sharif presumably can bring a little more Saudi funding to Pakistan’s depleted treasury than the paltry $1.5 billion a year the U.S. Congress has been arguing about for months…

Afghanistan is stone age in an instituional sense. None to speak of, no leaders who know anything about building institutions, and who want only absolute power. And many leaders who want Afghanistan to revert to the stone age, or at least the 7th century.

Besides, war changes countries forever. There’s no going back to what Afghanistan was 30 years ago when the different ethnic groups got more-or-less along in a loose confederation. Soviet KGB had a very effective opperation to create ethnic strife, and the change that wrought is permanent.

All the kings horses and all the kings men can’t put that back together again.

From your link:

Last year, the insurgents made as much as $300 million from the opium trade, by United Nations estimates

That’s my problem. IIRC, U.S. & Saudis were funding about $600 million each per year toward the end. Even with that, the Soviets would have won, until the Stingers came alone.

That’s a 100% for sure!

remember, the Pakistanis play there as well and Pakistani interests probably provide additional support. The ISI has long played both sides off against the middle, both in their country and in Afghanistan, regardless of which regime was in charge in Islamabad, and I’m quite certain they still are. One has to consider that Pakistani itself exists on the brink, and interests there want to hedge their bets.

I’ve speculated that too. And India & Russia & China. Remember the borders. But I’m looking to find information, not indulge in idle speculation.

I guess I’m just not that pessimistic, and neither are the couple of Afghans I know. I don’t know.. I have to think there is something we can do to help the place and its people.

If the U.S. can do anything, it is certainly NOT military. Wars make every underlying problem worse.

Oh, and remember that the insurgents’ enemy, the U.S., is much better equipped and trained than the Soviets were in their day. So if anything, the insurgents should be losing even worse than they did after the Soviet invasion. To be sure, Soviets had somewhat more troops there, like 160,000 I think, but were inferior in every other capability. Nothing against the Soviet capabilities, just that military technology has improved since then.

Where did you come up with that? Ashraf Ghani was the coordinator of the institution building in Afghanistan in 2002-3, he was largely successful, and is an expert, on economics and development. He’s running for president. Ramazan Bashardost is also running, on an anti-corruption campaign. Many of the Afghan nationals who were doing the coordination in the early rebuilding effort have fled, but would come back if the effort were going to pay off. Even supposedly backwards places like Bamiyan had universities and could have them again. The South, were the irrigation fixed so it could do better than opium, potentially supports the whole country in agriculture and can support cash crops as well. The populace favors basically anything that will simultaneously bring relief from the warlords and the Taliban, even those who think the U.S. has terminally botched the job think that. The nation existed as far more than a bunch of 7th century tribes for a long time. That Europeans and Americans (of both the U.S. and Canadian varieties) et alia are incompetent at buttressing institutions and providing the necessary security isn’t really a reflection on the Afghans, it’s a reflection on the first world countries and their incompetence and backwardness.

So are all the solutions that consist of simplistic go or stay binary choices. This isn’t a Clash song, it’s a necessary stabilization, whether it’s done militarily or not (I personally think large parts need to be demilitarized). The police are the basis for rule of law in societies even though they are usually ignored in debates in countries like western ones where the debate centers around the government and the courts. Those police are not functioning. And there is a massive drug money corrruptor in the South. And other countries that are exerting, or trying to exert, hegemonic power in the region. So why is it all reduced to tribals and great power politics all the time? It’s complicated and any real solution will be complicated.

I would tend to doubt that the Chinese are supporting the Taliban with tangible aid (although I also don’t think they have a problem with the Taliban being part of a future coalition government, as long as stability can be assured). The whole point of China’s SCO alliance was to stop groups like the Taliban from undermining the central Asian ’stans (particularly Chinese ally Kyrgyzstan). This being said, there’s quite a bit of Chinese aid going into Afghanistan now, under US military supervision and protection. Remember, the Chinese want desperately to put a pipeline through there, and they’re counting on the US to help clear the way for it. Its possible some of this aid and investment (as well as our own weapons) may get diverted if more regions fall to the Afghanistan.
http://online.wsj.com/article/…..32957.html

Russia is a more interesting question. Russia recently authorized US weapons and munitions supply flights over its own territory.. but unlike the Chinese, they have no tangible economic interest in US success and a few scholars have suggested that some factions in Russia may want to facilitate instability there – with the US footing the bill for it, so to speak. Andalso unlike China, Russia has no particular fear of Islamic insurgency. In fact, instability in the other ’stans may drive the other ’stans facing their Taliban insurgencies back toward Moscow. This being said, I really don’t think Russia would risk openly supporting the the insurgency against the US and the SCO states would probably view any revelation of such support to be no lses than an attempt by Russia to destabilize their own governments.. risking a regional war. Medvedev/Putin are two very smart people, too smart, I think to play with matches in Afganistan.

http://www.voanews.com/english…..-voa49.cfm

Holbrooke said that more money is being sent from the Gulf than is generated from opium sales.

I’m sorry you took offense to my shorthand characterization. It wasn’t meant to belittle them. And I’ve spent many nights with both pathans and uzbeks, and they are some of the finest people on the planet. For whatever that’s worth.

But c’mon. No electrification. No water. No roads. No governance. No judiciary, no law enforcement. How you gonna turn that around? Where’s the billions that are required to bring that population into the most minimal of twentieth century life? Refrigeration? Nope. Medical care? They know a LOT about treating wounds, but not much to be done with disease. I’ll be delighted to call it something different. Tell me what I should call it.

It’s not an indictment of the people. It’s a broken nation, with artificial borders drawn by arrogant westerners who didn’t understand the people, the culture or the geography. Water? Agriculture? Economy? Transportation? Anyone? Bueller?

mikey

Ghani’s impressive, but it takes more than a couple of people and a couple of years to establish a functioning country that’s been as damaged as Afghanistan.

oops. that Russian VOA link broke

Its
http://www.voanews.com/english…..-voa49.cfm

Yes, you’re probably right about China. WRT Russia I’ve read the same stuff as you, that they want to draw in the U.S. empire into the same ignoble end as the Soviet empire. Nothing I’ve read has had any real evidence, though. U.S. is trying to buy off India with weapons sales an nuke foregiveness, but India has interests of it’s own and having a Pak influence over Afghanistan is not one of them. Trouble is, I’ve only read bits & pieces, again mostly speculation, and I so I don’t have a clear idea of what’s going on. Only the hypothesis that without a lot of outside help, the insurgency should be easy to crush.

Remember that under the communist era, women’s role in society increased significantly, and they became over half the doctors, iirc. When Taliban took over there was a viscious backlash. Medicine in Afghanistan R.I.P.

What’s the motive, if that is so? I can understand Islamic countries supporting an insugency against the godless Soviets. But why would they want an insurgency against one of their big oil customers? And a country that has gigantic military bases in many of their countries?

oh. so we’re back to the same ol’ problem with the whole region and probably the whole planet: shrub’s buddies in Riyadh laundering US assistance into insurgencies with which to fight the US. Wonderful. ‘course if this is true we have someone in Texas we could try for treason, if we really wanted to… This being said, I haven’t seen any evidence that the Saudi’s back the Taliban militarily. AQ, perhaps, and a few other militants in Pakistan… but not the Talibs in Afghanistan.

The original reason our government used to justify invading Afghanistan was to find OBL and kill him. When the military got close enough to accomplish its objective at Tora Bora, Bush canceled the mission and withdrew most of the troops to invade Iraq. OBL escaped from the trap and fled into Pakistan where he supposedly closed the deal on a sweet location in some freakin cave where he supposedly continues to reside.

Fast Forward to Obama. Based on what he said as Candidate Obama, you probably thought President Obama intended to downsize our military force in Iraq to free up enough troops to return to Afghanistan to close the deal on OBL and then bring the troops home.

Think again, grasshopper. First on the agenda was a scenic side trip to Helmand Province to “take” and “hold” control of an overland oil pipeline. I know you’re shocked by that revelation because, after all, what does oil have to do with anything, right?

Now, our fearless leader speaks of pacifying the countryside, defeating the Taliban, making the streets of Kabul safe so three new McDonalds can bring freedom fries and democracy to the how ever many inhabitants are left in Afghanistan after we annihilate half the civilians with Hellfire missiles fired from drones at clusters of people like wedding parties and school children playing at recess. OOPS, SORRY.

Still no word on Obama, but a B1b bombing run over the border into Pakistan in May did kill 140 innocent civilians, mostly kids.

Don’t know about these dudes. No welcomin party or dancin in the streets. Whatever happened to gratitude and manners.

Will Obama’s lies never end?

I don’t think the Indians are in the business of supporting insurgencies anywhere other than, maybe, Lanka.. if they are, there hasn’t been much evidence of it. Or even rumors for that matter. So far, of the ideas mooted here, the Saudi’s and Emiri’s are probably the one group that bears the most scrutiny. Their motive (assuming they actually had one and are really somehow involved, would be because they ideologically support the Talibs… I just haven’t seen much evidence of this). These would be wealthy private individuals, who are kinda like the Christianists in the US, prepared to push their ideology by supporting co-religionist fundies.

Oh, I see that James Carville is going to advise Ghani. That ought to make him a shoo-in. /s

It’s all very murky. But this discussion has helped my think about it. Thanks.

Of course it does, and 60+ countries pledged and signed that they were up to the task. Now who’s primitive and backward? Your statement was that there was no one but those hungering for absolute power. That simply isn’t true. What is true, and was determined in 2001, and subsequently by the donor nations meetings every time they met, was that the Afghans can’t pull it together by themselves. That’s what ‘failed state’ means, or at least did until the Bush people perverted that concept, too. What’s also true is that the U.S. under Bush was operating at cross purposes. That hardly ranks as an Afghan failure though, or even a test of what the U.S. might be capable of, it’s more like an underhanded double cross, courtesy largely of Rumsfeld and Tenet. Those jerks empowered the warlords with cash and weapons because it was a cheap way to run the place so they could move U.S. resources out to Iraq.

That’s also not an Afghan failure, nor a multinational one, the U.N. was pressing for disarming the warlords even as the CIA was shoring them up. And it was the Germans who underfunded and under trained the police, initially. Europeans are just as much suckers to the almighty TV as Americans, it turns out, and they only wanted to do things that looked like beneficent Europeans handing out the stuff of life to poor Afghan refugees on TV. That’s not an Afghan failure, either. And the Pakistanis were harboring the Taliban for a comeback to reassert their hegemony. That’s not an Afghan failure.

There are plenty of Afghans to run things at the top level, planners and engineers and so forth. There need to be Afghans to fill the levels below, and that was supposed to come from the building effort. It hasn’t happened, and whose fault is it? And why should the Afghans have to make a Sophie’s choice between the warlords and the Taliban because you’ve lost interest?

On a much larger note, with a professional class terrorism training operation running off $3 billion a year in heroin profits in Pakistan, what makes you think you can solve anything at all in the world, let alone make any country in the world, including the U.S., even remotely secure if you can’t handle a relatively small country where the human capital is cheap? What makes you think the rule of law won’t fail globally and permanently if that can’t happen? Afghanistan is a model for the world as it will be. All the future problems will look like that country, all the future non-diplomatic foreign policy will consist of rebuilding failed states. If the supposedly great powers can’t do that even on a small one, they’re done with, we’re just waiting until they realize it. Failure to make the transition to complex systems in thinking is just failure to keep up with reality.

I agree that the non-Afghan donors and trainers always fall a dollar short and a day late. It’s part of my pessimism.

None of my comments are meant to lay blame. Just trying to assess the situation realistically. My use of the word pessimism implies, probably correctly, that I have a great deal of difficulty evaluating evidence impartially.

As for how can rest of the world remain stable if stability can’t be brought to a small poor country like Afghanistan, it’s long history of institutions that more-or-less work. I’d add that the rest of the world ain’t very stable anyhow. Europe with 2 world wars not that long ago? Instability is the basal state, and stability is the brief period that people pass through from one type of instability to another.

I’m not so sure how much human capital there is in Afghanistan. As I understand the concept of human capital it involves quality (e.g., education) as well as quantity of people.

It might be the same motive that engendered the building and funding of the madrassas that started the Taliban
and supplied the bulk of the funding for the Afghan fight against the Soviets.

Pessimism is fine. There’s an old cure for it, a biker saying originally, “Hope for the best, expect the worst.” But climate change is going to make everything a struggle to put infrastructure together as it fails in one place after another, all the time. So it’s time to figure out how to do this one. Human capital is there but needs training. Training and jobs are not military tasks. That in itself says what’s perpetually wrong with our current solutions. But it doesn’t say it’s impossible, or even doable in the absence of hope.

Madrassas are quite different than providing funding for military operations. And, as I said, I can understand the rich ME Islamic countries supporting an insurgency against the godless Soviets, but against the U.S.? Quite a double game that would me. (They might be capable of such a double game, but I’d like to see some evidence, other than Holbrooke’s word.)

BTW It wasn’t clear from what I’ve read that Holbrooke was saying that the money was coming from Gulf governments. I would think that it is clear that there are non-governmental sources for funds and that some of them wouldn’t be adverse to bankrolling people fighting against the US.

I’m sorry. What’s your point?

Are you suggesting we go to war against every brutal dictatorship, every women-hating ideology (you’ve got a bit of a christianity problem with that one, too), every brutal regime?

This line of argument fails unless you are advocating american military intervention in upwards of twenty five nations from Somalia to Zimbabwe. So spare me, and tell me what AMERICANS spending blood and treasure in Afghanistan gets AMERICA. ‘Cause I’m all for global initiatives to solve the problems of impoverished and failing states, but the American military exists to address threats to American security. And as much as I agree with you that the subjugation of Afghan citizens under either the (Mullah Omar) Taliban or the Warlords is a BAD THING, it is NOT, repeat NOT a justification for an American military presence, and if you think it is, you’re going to have to be more strategic and less “empathetic” (sorry) in your justification…

mikey

I don’t think anyone’s saying that we should invade brutal dictactorships.. but I do think we should have some responsibility for wouldbe takeovers by brutal thugs who we enabled and who were empowered because shrub invaded and trashed their country. Just because shrub is gone doesn’t mean we can just turn our back on all or any of his bloody messes. Iraq, we should leave ASAP, because just about everybody, including the Iraqis, agree that they’ll be better off with us gone. Afghanistan is still in my you broke it you bought it category. We must eventually leave, but while we’re still there we must do everything we can to at least undo the harm to which we contributed. Otherwise, we’re no better than the Soviets were.

I absolutely disagree that we have any obligation to remain in Afghanistan.

First, you have to disregard everything Obama says about anything because even if he means it when he says it, no one can safely assume that he will not change his mind.

Second, to discover his actual intent, you must ignore what he says and watch what he does.

Third, he dramatically increased the number of Hellfire missile attacks by pilotless drones on both sides of the Pakistan border, but mostly in Pakistan to levels far exceeding what happened during the Bush Administration. Appears most of the victims are innocent women and children with an occasional suspected insurgent or two thrown in. We don’t know if they really were insurgents or Taliban based on our government’s atrocious record of indefinitely detaining innocent people to indulge its torture fetish. The Afghan government has to pay $2,000 per innocent bombing victim and often pays the victim’s family after verifying the claim while the military still insists (a) no one was killed and the family is lying because they want the money, (b) if anyone was killed, they were insurgents or Taliban and not innocent civilians, (d) if innocent people were killed, the insurgents or Taliban killed them before the missile exploded, if the missile exploded the number of dead civilians was far less than claimed, etc.

Fourth, the high civilian death toll from our indiscriminate bombing is turning the civilian population against us.

Fifth, Obama has no intention to rebuild Afghanistan because there aren’t any firm plans to do it and no materiel or contractors there to do the job.

Sixth, the military already has decided we need something like 600,000 troops to pacify and control the country because the NATO members of the so called coalition of the willing have left or are about to leave and there aren’t enough armed and trained Afghan Army and police to assist us.

Seventh, the new troops were sent to Helmand Province to take and hold a major oil pipeline. That’s about all they can handle right now.

Eighth, Obama’s real goal in Afghanistan after securing the oil pipeline, is to encircle Iran, demand they abandon their nuclear power plants and stop building nuclear bombs which he knows they aren’t building, and launch an invasion when they refuse to shut down their plants.

BTW, Obama also is aggressively pursuing a plan to encircle Russia.

That’s some interesting stuff. Where do you get it?

1?
3- How did you figure out the age, sex, or affiliation of the people killed in the missile strikes?
4-What indiscriminate bombing? When? Where?
6-Surely, you don’t mean to suggest that the 600,000 isn’t inclusive of Afghans.
8- Goofy.
BTW-Goofier.

Oh? So, the Nazism in Germany got worse after we began to attack them in WWII?

I think wars tend to destroy a country and then with luck it’s rebuilt better. Isn’t that a much better description of what happened to Germany?

In Afghanistan our goal is/was to destroy Al Qaeda (and the Taliban to the extent they got/get in our way) and to help the Pakistanis to fight the Taliban which serves their purpose and helps reassure us the Taliban won’t get within a mile of any nukes. The idea of building a modern Afghan country or government seems like a stretch.

to support the Taliban or Al Qaeda or Democracy? There’s a big difference between the first, the first & second combined or the third.

It can obviously lead to no good…for them.

*crickets*

LOL 707

Afghanistan is still in my you broke it you bought it category. We must eventually leave, but while we’re still there we must do everything we can to at least undo the harm to which we contributed.

Precisely what damage do you believe we did? Did/do we owe them that for selling all their drugs here?

Maybe they would be getting off easy if we just left…them in their poverty and despair and then made opium legal here, so they would have a much lower profit-margin (if any).

Remember too, our Constitution says nothing about nation-building or helping any non-Americans. Our rationale for being there is self-defense, not to help ‘em out.

OTOH, we do help nations around the globe for various self-interest reasons. What’s our self-interest in helping Afghanistan?

I can see us being there to help Pakistan in their war, but if we’re not there to burn the poppy crop, then what’s our purpose? An oil&gas pipeline? I don’t remember Obama talking about that and I can’t see that as a reason the American public would accept for occupying a foreign country.

Actually, for a while it did…but not that’s really the point, the point is we got rid of them.