who are the countries still left in the NATO coalition there?

Is Obama on board with 45,000 more troops? We can’t fight another war where the politicians do things half assed.
Tell me how many troops we need to get Ossama and will we go after him? Otherwise Afghanistan is a waste of time Ossama can always send more fighters over the border.

Just too damn bad for the people in Afghanistan that the Bush administration give the Taliban every possible opportunity to regain the territory that they lost control of after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

From the time that they invaded Iraq the Taliban came out of the cracks,many have died and suffered due to another one of the Bush administrations catastrophic mistakes. Many have suffered.

Our MSM went along with abandoning Afghanistan again. there has been little to no coverage of what was going on in Afghanistan from the time the Bush administration illegally invaded Iraq up until recently.

On This Week Peggy Noonan tried to spin that NOW the American public is paying attention to what is going on in Afghanistan. Hello Peggy the American public follows the MSM’s lead
http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/

40 years ago this weekend. Still haven’t learned the lesson.

Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box.

Spencer great questions . . . thanks.

Most of us progs know what Af/Pak is all about, just like Iraq.

Oil/Gas, distribution lines for same.

Only in Af/Pak, there’s ALSO all that herion and IT’S distribution routes and the profiteering to launder stuff like lost arms and munitions and pallets of money to influence peddle so that SOMEone in the USA is at to top of the food chain in terms of making money and influencing affairs to their better.

Not for influence that would be for the better of we the people, or THEIR people’s.

Sigh. Milo Minderbender is still as busy as he used to be. Alas for the rest of the world.

Just dream of the TRILLIONS OF $$$$ we’d have for domestic rebuilding and jobs investements if we brought them ALL home, NOW, without them damned boxes.

40 years and more and we’re (leaders) still doing all the wrong things and letting it happen.

“GIMME AN F!”

Oughtta link to the whole song.

Where were you 15 Aug 69? Just curious.

Got ourselves in a real pickle playin’ favourites between India and Pakistan.

May I recommend the carpet bombing of Cambodia?

-Richard Nixon’s Ghost

On a grassy knoll in Sullivan County, New York. Shouldn’t it have been obvious? Heard Country Joe yell “What’s that spell?”

Your link is much better. Thanks.

TROOPS
HOME
NOW

Why aren’t we having a debate in America about this fucking war, anyway?

I find Cordesman’s requirements woefully incomplete. Where is the pony? There should always be a pony.

I don’t do mind reading or knowledge by osmosis.

Pre-8/15/69, I was in Naval ROTC. Woodstock showed me the light.

This refers to McChrystal’s interview on current status in Afghanistan:

http://rawstory.com/08/news/20…..al-admits/

This is typical military reaction to taking over a new job – tell everyone how bad things are and ask for the moon to fix them.

But it begs the question: “What is our objective in Afghanistan?” How in the Hell do you define Cordesman’s achievable terms?

We are getting sucked in deeper and deeper. The current cost of $4 billion a month will escalate. Is everyone checking the KIA reports for our troops? They are on the wrong side of the slope.

Get out now. We don’t have a winnable policy there and can only waste more lives and dollars by continuing what we are doing.

Get out now.

Let’s all repeat that a gadzillion times to anyone who will or won’t listen.

More from Joe

I hear that death sound, baby,
Oh, like an echo in my brain.
I hear that death sound, baby,
Oh, like an echo in my brain, brain.
Well, there’s a part of us dying,
You know that things will never be the same,
Ah, never be the same!
I feel the black nails a-poundin’ now,
Yes, into the coffin of our love.
Hear the black nails a-poundin’ now,
Yes, into the coffin of our love.
Well, like a black shrouded hunter now,
Don’t you know that I have killed a snow white dove,
Oh, I’ve killed the dove.

Well, the time sands keep a-fallin’ now
On towards our ending day.
Yeah, the time sands keep a-fallin’
Towards our ending day.
I see the minutes chasing the hours,
Yes, to the words that we should say,
Ah — we should say.

Death Sound Blues

I have a lot less respect for Cordesman than Spencer. Cordesman is an American militarist. And although he is supposed to have the rep of being a hardheaded realist the truth is he usually completely misses the point and his own recommendations are as unrealistic in their way as the failed policies he criticizes. Look at them:

– up to 45,000 new U.S. troops

(This means keeping the US military overstretched indefinitely and US service people doing multiple combat tours. It also ignores the perilous state of the US economy and that we simply don’t have the resources to fight the imperial wars Cordesman thinks we should.)

– reducing or eliminating the caveats NATO countries place on their troops’ operations in Afghanistan

(Yeah, good luck with that. The reason those caveats and limitations are there is precisely because NATO countries don’t want their troops used as cannon fodder by American commanders. Europeans would probably like to start cutting back their commitments rather than increasing them. Cordesman is of course oblivious to this.)

– eliminating not only the Taliban but the “control and influence” of the Hekmatyar and Haqqani networks that are part of the insurgent syndicate

(Again this is about expanding the war in Afghanistan at a time when we are unable to handle the war we have.)

– bankroll and train the expansion of the Afghan police and Army to a total end-strength of 400,000 by 2014

(The current Afghan budget is something like $800 million. It takes something like $4 billion just to maintain the poorly functioning army and the corrupt police. So of course we would have to bankroll them but could we motivate them? And as always I see no indication of how the army would be ethnically divided up. Ethnic divisions in Afghanistan are real and the idea that you can just increase the size of the army without taking this into account is idiocy.)

– actively confront the corruption of the Afghan government, including “bypass[ing] the corrupt, provide direct aid at district and local level, and reward[ing] honest Afghan officials and officers”

(Well so much for the fiction of national sovereignty. We will work with Afghan officials as long as they do what they are told. Afghanistan is a very corrupt state. But Cordesman seems to think that this corruption is confined to a few high ranking officials. It isn’t. It is systemic and pervasive and includes the highest to the lowest.)

– massively reforming the international aid effort so that countries deliver on the money they promise Afghanistan

(and explain to me how that aid can be delivered in a war zone amid all the corruption.)

– “Limiting the threat from Pakistan, Iran and other states

(Breathtaking in its stupidity. We can’t even fix Afghanistan how precisely does Cordesman think we can fix these much larger countries?)

This is the thing that always gets me about Cordesman. He is considered a defense expert but scratch the surface, and his recommendations betray a frighteningly naive belief in American power untethered by any real world limitations and constraints on it.

The illusion that there really is such a thing as counter-insurgency absent a political settlement of some kind.

The best we can hope for is to clean out al Quaeda in Pakistan, preventing them from crossing back into Afghanistan. Period. That is the best that we can hope for. Bush lost the chance for nation-building–wait a minute–Bush didn’t believe in nation-building; that was what went wrong in the Balkans.

The strategic importance of oil is the US military’s dependence on it. Changing the energy source for the US military changes US strategic and which countries are more vital to US interests. The pipeline to supply Pakistan and India is no longer the pony that we’re supposed to find.

Some adults have to call Bull bleep on the entire Afghan enterprise.

The Taliban is not a military threat to the continental USA
AQ is not a threat to the USA

Whatever hostilities these groups may have toward the USA should be handled diplomatically or with police type work when they do mischief.

Neither of those are actual states that can be defeated and sign a surrender treaty.

This is PURE BS.

And all the rubbish about AQ being a threat is completely exxagerated, but never questioned.

If AQ was behind bombing the embassing in Africa, then find the guilty and try them. Don’t invade a nation and destroy it to save it.

This is the MIC in search of a theater to do war.

My, my.

How to put this delicately. There are two missions in Afghanistan, one of which has no purpose there. The other was agreed upon by more than 30 countries, donated to by more than 60 countries, and is being executed by more than 40 countries, and is the mission Mr. Cordesman is talking about. It is the implementation of the Bonn Agreement, signed December 5, 2001. Believe it or not, it’s the legitimate mission there, the other, Operation Enduring Freedom, has no basis in reality, because its mission is to hunt those responsible for September 11th under the September 18, 2001 AUMF, and it’s been known for years that their quarry is not in Afghanistan, it is in Pakistan, and was long protected, and still to some extent is protected, by the Pakistani government.

The United States, under then President Bush, was probably the only country in the coalition formed by the Bonn Agreement not to put the decision to participate in front of its legislature. So what you are describing as mission creep is really not mission creep at all. It’s that the authorized mission has no basis, and the mission that was diplomatically agreed to, signed on the dotted line and committed to, was never presented before the People’s House.

Personally, I think that due to little things like honor, compassion, humanity, and the rule of law, the ISAF mission is the only one which the United States has committed to in a long time that is worth doing. I think it is far too militarized, it’s basically a peacekeeping troops plus civilian nation building mission at heart, and I think it’s far to often presented as a war that the U.S. can win in the press.

But if you didn’t know that this isn’t mission creep, don’t blame the people trying to implement it. Blame those who misconstrued it in the first place, who deliberately subverted it, and who never ever addressed it, and that would be people from every part of the political spectrum, with a special place in hell reserved for Rumsfeld, Tenet, Bush, and Pervez Musharraf. Over on Glenn Greenwald’s blog, every time I attempted to bring up inconvenient things like this very reality, I got excoriated. Both the neocons and the antiwar crowd participate in this deception, so finding somebody that actually wants to know what’s happening in Central/South Asia is difficult. But this time, you brought it up, so I feel a bit liberated. Go ahead, defend your notion of “mission creep”. And then go read the Bonn Agreement and the follow on donors meetings agreement in Tokyo and Berlin. The ink is long dry on this commitment.

My, My – you might want to read the Bonn Agreement and the Security Council implementation again.

Where does it call for an open ended commitment for anything??

It, plus the donors meetings progress reports, call for a nation building commitment and a military role only for peacekeeping (except in excepted sections talking about U.S. Operation Whatever It’s Called This Year). There were follow on documents signed in Berlin and after the meeting in Tokyo too, 2004, 2005. Those nations pledged to get Afghanistan’s infrastructure back together. Nation building takes as long as it takes, which means that it is by nature open ended. It doesn’t need to be, after all, Germans can actually implement police forces, Italians can actually build ring roads, Americans can actually build schools, British can actually wind down drug trades, but that would mean basically sticking to the mission. If that’s what you wish to call mission creep, fine.

But what’s being criticized here is mission creep from hunting down and destroying al Qaeda to nation building. There is no such creep.

Just remember when you bitch about the length of the commitment and the uselessness to immediate short-term American interests, that this mission would have been blue helmets except for those in the U.S. and Europe who object to the U.S. and European citizens ever being the faces below those helmets. The preference is for those faces to be brown or black, isn’t it?

I’ve never heard anyone who bitches about nation building in Afghanistan ever, ever, ever complain about Pakistanis dying so far from home in the Congo or Nigerians dying far from home in Darfur. Only white people should never do these things, right? It isn’t just our prisons and our torture that are destroying our name. It’s also our complete lack of any honor or equality.

I was only looking for what the commitment of my country – the USA – was in regard to the Bonn Agreement, etc. And as you so clearly point out – there is nothing in writing and only some ethereal notion that “nation building takes a long time”. Sorry, bringing a first growth Bordeaux to its peak takes a long time also, but I am not sure I want to make the investment.

As to your other musings on curing the ills of the USA and the world – good luck.

Who’s going to be the Imperial Govenor?
Where are the career Colonial Agency civil servants? All the other empires had them.
Who’s going to run the Cabinet Level Colonial Department?

To achieve:

“actively confront the corruption of the Afghan government, including “bypass[ing] the corrupt, provide direct aid at district and local level, and reward[ing] honest Afghan officials and officers”

Are you nuts?

What do you believe european faces below Blue Helmets would be called, except colonialism?

The europenas did this for many years. They becuase unwelcome, and the US was a great part of forcing them to leave.

Go read up on the “Suez Crisis”

My wife was sitting in a muddy field in central New York State, listening to some incredible music, surrounded by at least a half-million people, in what turned out to be, for the weekend, the third largest city in New York, and by far the safest city of its size in the country (perhaps in our entire history).

I, unfortunately, was stuck in Albuquerque with a sports car with a blown engine and two tickets to Woodstock in my backpack.

You and Ackerman hit the main point hard – what are we doing there? I saw the recent headline where apparently we are there to kill a list of fifty drug dealers.

You won’t ever “end” Afghanistan as a sanctuary for bad guys, just as, despite our busting guts prison numbers and the largest economy and wealthiest nation status, we haven’t ended our drug dealers; haven’t ended our home grown terrorists, etc. If that’s the goal, it’s ridiculous. What Ackerman mentions about keeping up the Afghanistan ploy to keep a staging grounds for US Pakistani goals makes a lot more sense, but then what you have to ask, and what needs to be asked over and over given Obama’s equation of the Afghan war uh occupation uh terrorist hunt uh nation building uh security and stablization operation uh GITMO replacment uh the Afghan Whatever as being an “Af-PAK” Whatever, is WTH is our mission in PAKSITAN?

*sigh*

Take what you want and leave the rest. The agreements are documents for accomplishing something. They do, in fact talk about revisiting for progress evaluations. None of them ever says the mission is short termed. If you interpreted that as do a few things, make nice, brew some tea and then leave admit it. The work hasn’t been accomplished. If you want to walk away from that, fine. If I ever did that with a patient, it would be called abandonment, and I could go to jail, so maybe you and I don’t think the same way. But that’s fine. Once we’re over the compassion thing, I’m sure there’s a whole lot on our own shores that doesn’t need to get done, either. Like health care, for instance.

How convenient that someone else should always do the dying, isn’t it? No, I’m not nuts. As I said, the commitments at Bonn, Tokyo and Berlin were for a nation building mission that is very much largely non-military. There was a time when the principal organization from the U.S. on the ground in such a thing would be called USAID. There is a peacekeeping component. Staffed by NATO because of objections to blue helmets. The entire thing was very much welcomed by the Afghans in 2001/2 because they wanted an end to their war. And it was their war. Go read up. Rumsfeld and Tenet subverted that by funding warlords, and many countries reneged on their commitments. None of that stacks up to something feared as colonialism, it stacks up to breaking promises. The Pakistanis nurtured the Taliban, with funds acquired by, among other things, greatly expanding the heroin trade. When cracks in the seams appeared by 2006 due to NATO fuck ups, they attacked. Now the problem is something that might never have occurred if people did what they pledged to do, and people coughed up money they pledged to cough up. But there was an agreement to do re-development, a.k.a. nation building. And that isn’t a commitment to spend oh, say, 14.3 months there and clear out.

If the U.S. wishes to withdraw, or NATO wishes to withdraw, or whatever, then so be it. It breaks all those promises, and leaves that area worse than before, due to the U.S. export of prison theology. But call it what it is. Failure. And it’s failure at a task that other countries, much less well endowed, are able to accomplish, so no, it is not an inevitable thing. Even if the original apologist for colonial boots called the place the graveyard of empires. As I pointed out, on a personal level, that kind of failure is called abandonment. And it’s a felony. So people advocating it may do so, but not from any high ground whatsoever.

There are a lot of ills in this world. I don’t think it is the job of the US to solve all of them. If you want to do that on a personal level, then I say good for you and good luck. Just don’t try and commit the rest of your fellow citizens to something they may not feel as strongly about as you do.

Who’s job is it, then?

Grow up.

Hunh? That was uncalled for. Instead of pushing realpolitik and ‘we can’t solve everybody’s problems’, and ‘grow up’, maybe you should just take my attempt to speak truth to the considerable power of your point of view in venues like this at face value. I have said multiple times, if what you are advocating is what the U.S. wants to do, so be it. But the U.S. made a commitment, one that, at the time, was demanded by other nations with the U.S. trying hard to avoid it. Now you want to renege, and if I think that’s not honorable or mature, and I point out that when an emergency medical person touches the patient and then decides not to follow through, it’s abandonment, you tell me to grow up. I don’t think so. I’d ask you to look at your stance, tell me how it measurably differs from Lindbergh style isolationism, and give me a mature reply. And tell me about my own stance, which is that this work in Afghanistan should not be a military mission, but is should be something we stay and accomplish as promised. Without resorting to ‘grow up’.

I didn’t commit my fellow citizens there, a couple of dozen countries asked for it and the U.S. and others signed the agreement. Get out of the agreement if you must, but don’t throw empty rhetoric at me for thinking that commitments to bring peace to a failed country through restoring civil institutions should be honored, and finished in good faith.

I was cruisin’ around Mekong tributaries tryin’ to kill Charlie.

Screw this 30 country commitment crap.

bring peace to a failed country through restoring civil institutions should be honored, and finished in good faith.

Do you believe that we can actually improve conditions for the Afghan people in general? Trying to defeat insurgents could take decades with no appreciable difference in the current political makeup, which is a US supported puppet. You could argue that Karzai isn’t a puppet but seen through Afghan eyes I suspect he’s certainly considered as such. How much support do you think civilian authorities from Western countries would get from Afghans?

We got a lot of support and commitment when the agreement was signed. There were very specific failures. Karzai is corrupt, but what he started as was weak, and some very simple but un-classy jobs didn’t get done. Back then, puppetry wasn’t an issue, but it helps the anti-war rhetoric to think so. As I mentioned, the ring road wasn’t fixed, it was essential to extending the central government beyond Kabul. As I mentioned, the UNAMA and the UNDP both regarded, from prior experience, the building of the civilian police as absolutely essential to establishing both security and the rule of law. Instead the Germans underfunded it and didn’t do it. As I said, the warlords were supposed to be disarmed. That was also a number 1 UNDP priority, from, again, prior experience. Instead, $1 Billion was funneled through CIA and Defense to strengthen them even while ISAF forces were trying to disarm them. See? It wasn’t about this is inevitable, it was a problem of commitment and desire to see the goal really accomplished.

As for the insurgency, I think you’re making a mistake thinking about it. The Taliban is very much a Pakistani creation for the purposes of regional hegemony. On this board and lots of others, people just assume this is like the Iraqi insurgency a few years ago, or the Vietnamese — an indigenous popular uprising. It isn’t. But they are active in 1/3 to 1/2 the country now, and all that was since 2006 when they launched their offensive out of Pakistan into Kandahar. Why aren’t things running in the rest of the place? Probably because we handed the mission, and still hand the mission, to the military. 3 weeks training by the U.S. military doesn’t produce a quality policeman, civilian police need more than that, and they need civilian training, so it’s not a good match. I use that only as an example, but you can find a laundry list of them with not much effort. And if all that were corrected, perhaps the NATO military mission could be greatly reduced. The other mission shouldn’t be there at all, it isn’t capable of accomplishing anything since al Qaeda doesn’t live in Afghanistan. As far as I’ve been able to research, it’s really there to justify the prisons and keep the AUMF active. Bring it home.

Then there’s the heroin. It isn’t just an individual choice by a peasant farmer to feed a family. There’s plenty of documentation saying it’s not like that, but on boards such as this one, there’s one model, it’s based on 1960’s People’s Liberation insurgencies, it’s based on unrealities like importing motives from Colombia to Afghanistan, and importing beliefs and methods and everything else from Iraq and Vietnam. When the Vietnam war ended, within not too much time, there was peace and a government. That most certainly won’t happen in Afghanistan on an immediate pull out. Think Somalia. And no, it wasn’t always that way before we showed up. It started downward and dropped out of the twentieth century in the late ’70’s. What we found was the result of that, not some kind of millenium old tradition.

Sorry, I got carried away and didn’t answer one of your questions. What the Afghans want is freedom from the warlords and freedom from the Taliban, and help getting their economy and society going again. Provide that and it will be accepted and welcomed. Provide something else and it won’t. Recently RAWA called for the U.S. to get out. Did you read it? They complained about the deaths of civilians in air strikes. They’re right. Absolutely right.

But, they also complained that the U.S. was opening negotiations with the Taliban, and with Hekmatyar and Khalili. That they saw as a double cross. But that’s what everyone advocating a quick exit has been calling for. See why it seems just a bit like Lindbergh?

A lot of words and you haven’t managed to answer my question. Don’t bother now, colour me gone.

Okay, sorry.

I believe you are the one who started with the “My, my” comment.

Have a great day in your world. Goodbye.

Hunh?
I will. Have a great day in your world, too. Goodbye? Okay, no dissent on the left, either, huh.

I think the folks arguing with you have no problem with dissent, and greatly doubt that they fail to understand commitment and honor.
perhaps you might consider discussing whether the mission that you’re describing is practicable.

The mission I was describing is practicable, but it isn’t basically a military mission, it’s more typical of a U.N. mission. All the expertise to do it is around. The use of troops in such a mission are for peacekeeping, and some of the ‘fighting’ required is easily done with threats of U.N. sanction (e.g. against those who harbor and support the Taliban). It can be laid out quite clearly and has been before in the documents I mentioned. What cannot happen in it is ‘victory’ since it isn’t a war its the arrestation of war.

It can’t be a military mission since there are tasks that cannot or should not be done by troops — training police was the example I gave. It can’t be done by relief organizations (this is a criticism of the Europeans mostly) who look good on TV (and are good on relief efforts) because it isn’t relief work and it screws up and retards the development of internal infrastructure when they work in the area for too long. What cannot also happen is that a clear timetable for when it is completed can be worked out until the parties executing the work decide that they can work off of and be held to a timetable.

Otherwise, it was just pretty much completed in Angola by lesser parties than the Great And Powerful U.S. But maybe we just aren’t all that. Pakistan originally hid and protected the Taliban on the belief that the U.S. would tire of the mission and they could move back into power at that point. What do you think happens if the NATO mission withdraws, given that item? Something we promised the Afghan people would not happen.

Now am I making sense?

BTW, Spencer’s post has been picked up by the NYT.

Please don’t equate me with anyone saying that you’re not making sense.

I understand what you were saying and what you’ve just said.
I think that what you would like to have happen is desirable, but trying to do this stuff in the middle of a war zone is complicated and made more complex when there are organized and armed groups determined to see that it doesn’t happen.

Overall it might be like trying to put your pants on two legs at a time while holding the baby. It might be possible but it will take much time, practice, concentration and plenty of bruising.

Wow. Thanks for that link!!!

“…a reasonable level of security and stability for the Afghan people; a decent standard of living by current Afghan standards; and the end of Afghanistan as a sanctuary for international terrorism.

If these are U.S. interests at stake, then Cordesman’s first two definitions are means to the ultimate end of the third: ending Afghanistan as a sanctuary for international terrorism.”

I don’t see where Cordesmann claims those are all U.S. interests, first of all. But even if he did, it’s not by virtue simply of reference to terrorism that a decent outcome is necessary for U.S. interests. Basic Afghan wellbeing in any endstate is a basic component for the U.S. to consider its efforts in Afghanistan any kind of long-term success as well. This is a key point that seems to be largely missed in discussions of Afghanistan’s strategic significance. At stake in Afghanistan for the U.S. is not only or even primarily a potential American security threat. Rather, our international standing as a nation that discharges responsibilities that it elects to take on is at stake. By electing to invade the country and change the government there, and continue to occupy the country for years partially for our own purposes, we took on the responsibility to make an effort commensurate with a reasonable expenditure of our resources at rebuilding the country in a way that provides for basic government functionality and minimal human flourishing. It is in our interest now that the iraq misadventure has been deprioritized to put forth that effort, to the extent that a prudent expenditure of resources allows, because to do so will raise confidence in our country’s intention to restore itself to a position of global leadership. I believe that is clearly an objective that is consistent with, even necessary to, our vital interests, and that will pay dividends in our relations in the international community across a range of issues for years to come. Beyond that, such questions of Afghan wellbeing became our concern from an ethical perspective when we deposed their government, and it is in our interest to act in accordance to moral duties we incur by virtue of elective actions we choose to undertake. These are the reasons that acting to promote Afghan wellbeing in and of itself serves U.S. interest, not merely as an instrument to managing threats to physical U.S. security emanating from the region.

Ondelette, I agree with almost all of what you are saying. I tend to think that you’re a bit optimistic to think that sanctions could somehow drive Taliban out of Afghanistan — I think there remains a legitimate military role there for combat-minded NATO forces. But it is just a role within the broader effort that must take place, most or at least much more than is now the case of which needs to be non-military/humanitarian in nature. And I agree with nearly all of your comments vis-a-vis the international and moral character of our commitments to such efforts. It matters not that they were made in 2001 or 02 and it is now 2009. I’m glad you are here to make these points.

I wonder: are you THE Ondelette who frequents Glenn Greenwald’s digs?