Our Mounting Disaster in Afghanistan from MOJO 17DEZ10

The waste of life, both of American service personnel, NATO troops and Afghan troops and civilians, Iraqi troops and civilians has got to end. The waste of American resources, money and time, has got to end. This war is over, it is time to cut our losses and leave Afghanistan and Iraq to sort things out on their own. No more propaganda from the American government, no more manipulation of public opinion, no more lies. We are still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are sick of it, and are sick of the deception from the U.S. military, the administration and the military-industrial complex. End the wars now. 

— US Army Sgt. Robert Newman/Flickr

Richard Holbrooke's last words, spoken to his Pakistani surgeon before he was sedated for surgery a week ago, were "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan." The White House has since taken pains to tell us that he was speaking in jest, and perhaps that's just as well. Because recent news suggests that the war is neither going to end nor come to anything resembling a successful conclusion anytime soon.
Start with Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai. His attitude toward the United States, which has been all but clinically bipolar for quite some time, turned even more heated than usual recently when he met with several American officials to discuss the fate of private security firms. The Washington Post reports what happened:

As he spoke, he grew agitated, then enraged. He told them that he now has three "main enemies"—the Taliban, the United States and the international community. "If I had to choose sides today, I'd choose the Taliban," he fumed. After a few more parting shots, he got up and walked out of the wood-paneled room.

It is practically an axiom of counterinsurgency that success depends (among other things) on the active help of an effective and sympathetic government. It's become increasingly clear that we no longer have that in Afghanistan, if we ever did. The Karzai government is almost stunningly corrupt, it has effective control over only a fraction of the territory of Afghanistan, and Karzai himself in recent months has repeatedly gone into rages both public and private against the American occupation. It's no longer possible even for paid optimists to pretend that we have his support in any but the most technical sense.
Then there's the US intelligence community, which recently reported to Congress that the Afghanistan war cannot be won unless Pakistan gets serious about rooting out Taliban militants on its side of the border. But the report goes on to say the Pakistani government and military "are not willing to do that," according to an official quoted by AP. "The document says Pakistan's government pays lip service to cooperating with US efforts against the militants, and still secretly backs the Taliban as a way of hedging its bets in order to influence Afghanistan after a US departure from the region."
Military commanders dispute the intelligence analysis, but their protests are hard to take seriously. Pakistan has been supporting the Taliban for over a decade, they barely even pretend these days to prevent them from crossing the border at will, and they know perfectly well there's no real leverage we can bring to bear to change their behavior. As Andrew Exum put it in an otherwise positive report after a recent visit to Afghanistan, "I do not see a coherent or otherwise effective strategy for dealing with the sanctuaries in Pakistan. I do not see it anywhere in the US government or within NATO, whose writ only extends to the borders of Afghanistan anyway."
Finally, support for the war in the US has fallen off a cliff. ABC News reports: "Public dissatisfaction with the war, now the nation's longest, has spiked by 7 points just since July. Given its costs vs. its benefits, only 34 percent in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say the war's been worth fighting, down by 9 points to a new low."
The argument for optimism is that NATO forces have made substantial tactical gains in the past year: intelligence gathering is better, local support is stronger, security is improving, and the Taliban is in retreat. You can read a pretty good version of this case here, from Peter Mansoor and Max Boot. But tactical improvements only get you just so far. Our big long-term problems—lack of central government support, lack of Pakistani support, and lack of American public support—suggest pretty strongly that the war in Afghanistan isn't winnable in any ordinary sense of the word. It's hard to say if this has sunk in at the White House, which released its latest review of Afghanistan on Thursday and apparently plans to stay the course. Sort of. Troop withdrawals might begin next year, but only in token numbers. The new deadline is 2014, and even that's vague.
As Fred Kaplan says in his informative take on both the White House review and the thorny politics of the AfPak region, "Nothing about this war gets any easier." At this point, it's difficult to conclude that further US fighting in Afghanistan can do anything more than delay the inevitable—and possibly make it worse when it finally comes to pass. Without active support from Kabul, Islamabad, and the American taxpayer, tactical gains can never be more than limited and temporary. As bad as an American withdrawal from Afghanistan would be, our continued presence in the face of an impossible situation only makes it worse. A year ago Afghanistan still couldn't fairly be called anyone's Vietnam. Today, it's Obama's.

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Afghan Envoy Holbrooke and Senate in La La Land 15JUL10 from Alternet

THE deception of the American people on the reasons we are still in Afghanistan continues by the cowardly war pigs in power, and the blood of American and NATO forces and Afghani children, women and men continues to stain the hills and valleys and farms, villages and cities of Afghanistan. The war profiteers of  the American military-industrial complex pile their pieces of silver ever higher, not caring about the suffering, pain, death and destruction their greed has wrought.

We are developing a $10 billion a year war machine in Afghanistan, a country with a $14 billion economy. Just imagine if we were investing in schools and hospitals and sewage systems and renewable energy systems and transport systems and in training government officials in modern government and left most of our troops and weapons back home. Would the taliban or al qaeda still be a threat to us from Afghanistan? I doubt it. But it seems we are damned and will have to experience another Vietnam until the waste of thousands of lives and billions of dollars forces us to finally admit defeat and bring our men and women home.

 

Posted by medeabenjamin on @ 4:37 pm

Article printed from speakeasy: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy

URL to article: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/15/afghan-envoy-holbrooke-and-senate-in-la-la-land/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=alternet

“Man, those dudes are in La La Land,” a young intern said to me on the way out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan on June 14, his eyes rolling. “You can’t win in Afghanistan. Don’t they read history?”
It had been hard to sit through hours of Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke’s storytelling about some far-off land he called Afghanistan. In his Afghanistan, there were new gains in agriculture and a reduction on poppy production for opium. We were empowering women and rebuilding everything from the rule of law to the electrical grid. President Karzai was really intent on tackling corruption. There was an exciting soon-to-be-unveiled program to integrate the lower-level Taliban. We were making significant gains in training the Afghan security forces, and we had real commitments from the Pakistani government to crush Al Qaeda.
We’ve heard this tall tale for the past eight years, which made some of the Senators a bit skeptical—although not skeptical enough to stop funding the war.
The most skeptical were the Republicans, who also happen to be the most anxious to keep fighting there, indefinitely. Senator Bob Corker said that despite more than an hour of testimony by Holbrooke, “I have heard nothing, nothing” about how progress will be measured. “I have no earthly idea what our objectives are on the civilian front.”
Ranking Republican Richard Lugar was also confused about our objectives. Sometimes, he said, it seems that we are trying to “remake Afghan economic, political and security culture”, which is “beyond our resources and powers.” Other times it seems the goal is simply to prevent Afghanistan from being a haven for terrorists. Either way, Lugar didn’t think we could accomplish the President’s desire to begin withdrawal by July 2011.
Holbrooke, while trying to support the President, admitted that he was leery of setting a date certain for leaving. This is, after all, “not where you would choose to defend the American homeland…It’s the most remote and logistically difficult place the U.S. has ever fought in our history,” Holbrooke said, adding that “Fate and destiny have put us there.”
Senator John Kerry, the Committee chair, showed his imperial stripes when he complained that the Afghans weren’t stepping up to the plate. “The problem is that the key element of this strategy is the one over which we have the least control, and that is the willingness and ability of Afghans to assume ownership of the efforts,” Kerry lamented. All the billions and our best efforts are irrelevant, he said, if the Afghans continue to be bystanders in what they perceive as a fight between the West and Al Qaeda.
Holbrooke chided his predecessors who had trained Afghan security forces for years, at enormous costs, without realizing that we had to also teach them to read and write. Literacy, he assured the senators, is now part of our training. No one asked why the Taliban fighters, who are also illiterate, were outmaneuvering both the Afghan security forces and U.S. military.
Referring to the pending U.S. offensive in Kandahar, Kerry admitted that the presence of the U.S. military whips up the insurgency. “Prior to American troops announcing they were going to go in (to Kandahar), there were not assassinations. There was not a level of violence,” Kerry said. “The mere announcement has now brought on the process of assassination and intimidation, and I doubt that we are going to have enough troops to be able to pacify the city.”
Several times during the hearing Holbrooke insisted that Afghanistan was not the unwinnable war of Vietnam, and that we had real security issues in Afghanistan. Ironically, on the very same day of the hearing, Senator Kerry released—for the first time ever—some 1,200 pages of transcripts from private meetings 40 years ago of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Vietnam War. They showed the Senators expressing the same concerns about not having a reliable partner, getting overly-rosy reports from the administration, wondering how much the war would cost in lives and dollars, and having hard time picturing what victory might look like.
“Some of the parallels are almost eerie,” Kerry said, insisting the lawmakers should learn from the past. But that learning has escaped Kerry himself, who continues to support what has now become Obama’s Vietnam and America’s longest war.
The most concrete rationale for staying in Afghanistan emerged when the senators asked about recent reports of enormous mineral wealth such as copper and lithium. Holbrooke said the mineral wealth not a new discovery, but there were now modern techniques that now allowed the minerals to be more easily mined. Holbrooke assured the senators that we are helping Afghans develop their resources and strengthen their economy. Oh yes, he added, we want to make sure that the U.S. has “a level playing field” in getting access to those minerals.
Meanwhile, on the ground in Afghanistan, young soldiers are assuring that “level playing field” with their lives. On the day of the hearing, eight soldiers were killed, bringing to 33 the number of American troops killed this month amid the worst bloodshed of the nine-year conflict.
The young intern who spoke to me about La La Land has more sense than Obama, Holbrooke or the Congress that continues to fund this disaster. Or maybe he is just less jaded than politicians like Senator Lugar who supports the war but remarked, during the hearing, that the U.S. had become stuck in a “slow-motion caravan to ultimate failure.” La La Land, it seems, is not poor Afghanistan, but Washington DC, where politicians send our youth off to fight and die in an endless war they themselves don’t believe in.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK (www.codepink.org) and Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org).