The White House is using its December review to try to spin the disastrous Afghanistan War
plan by citing “progress” in the military campaign, but the available
facts paint a picture of a war that’s not making us safer and that’s not
worth the cost.
The White House is using its December review to try to spin the disastrous Afghanistan War
plan by citing “progress” in the military campaign, but the available
facts paint a picture of a war that’s not making us safer and that’s not
worth the cost.
Let’s take a look at just the very broad strokes
of the information. After more than nine years and a full year of a
massive escalation policy:
Pakistan is playing a double game with the U.S. and
the military strategy lacks credible prospects for a turnaround.
And
yet, we are told we can expect a report touting security gains and
“progress,” and that there’s virtually zero chance of any significant
policy change from this review. It sort of begs the question: just what
level of catastrophe in Afghanistan would signal that we need a change
in direction?
Insurgency Growing and Getting Stronger
This cat is already out of the bag, no matter how hard the Pentagon tries to reel it back in. In the ironically named “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan,”
published several weeks ago, the Pentagon told Congress that the
insurgency’s organizational and geographic reach are qualitatively and
geographically expanding. This growth is reflected in other statistics.
According to USA TODAY, U.S. troops were hit with 7,000 more attacks
this year compared to last year. About 3,800 troops were killed and injured by IEDs, about 1,000 more than last year. These statistics depict an insurgency with unbroken momentum, despite administration and military claims to the contrary.
“Despite
these huge costs, the situation on the ground is much worse than a year
ago because the Taliban insurgency has made progress across the
country. It is now very difficult to work outside the cities or even
move around Afghanistan by road. The insurgents have built momentum,
exploiting the shortcomings of the Afghan government and the mistakes of
the coalition. The Taliban today are now a national movement with a
serious presence in the north and the west of the country. Foreign bases
are completely isolated from their local environment and unable to
protect the population.”
The insurgents’ momentum is clearly shown by the number of attacks they’ve initiated across the country so far this year. According to the Afghan NGO Safety Office (ANSO),
“The
[Taliban] counter-offensive is increasingly mature, complex &
effective. Country wide attacks have grown by 59% (p.10) while
sophisticated recruitment techniques have helped activate networks of
fighters in the North where European NATO contributors have failed to
provide an adequate deterrent (p.11). Some provinces here are
experiencing double the country average growth rate (p.12) and their
districts are in danger of slipping beyond any control. Clumsy attempts
to stem the developments, through the formation of local militia’s and
intelligence-poor operations, have served to polarize communities with
the IEA capitalizing on the local grievances that result. In the South,
despite more robust efforts from the US NATO contingents,
counterinsurgency operations in Kandahar and Marjah have similarly
failed to degrade the IEA’s ability to fight, reduce the number of
civilian combat fatalities (p.13) or deliver boxed Government.”
Here’s a helpful chart from ANSO’s report that shows the level of ever-escalating insurgent attacks across Afghanistan.
The White House wants to weasel out of the implications of the data
above by saying that the reason the statistics are going south is
because, as Petraeus so often says, “when you take away areas important
to the enemy, the enemy fights back.” So, we’re “on offense,” as
President told troops few weeks ago during his trip to Afghanistan.
Well, so what? The 1976 Buccaneers went on offense, too, but that didn’t mean they won games.
“One
of the iconic exchanges of Vietnam came, some years after the war,
between Col. Harry Summers, a military historian, and a counterpart in
the North Vietnamese Army. As Summers recalled it, he said, ‘You never
defeated us in the field.’ To which the NVA officer replied: ‘That may
be true. It is also irrelevant.’”
Pakistan’s Double Game
That brings us to Pakistan. According to the New York Times,
two new National Intelligence Estimates “offer a more negative
assessment [than the administration's upcoming review] and say there is a
limited chance of success unless Pakistan hunts down insurgents
operating from havens on its Afghan border.” But that’s some serious
wishful thinking, since Pakistan has long used the Taliban as a cat’s
paw to combat growing Indian influence in Afghanistan. Pakistan wants
the militants who threaten it internally suppressed, but it finds the
militants who threaten the Karzai regime useful. Fixing that problem
would requite U.S. policy follow the roots of their support of the
Taliban all the way up to the India/Pakistan animosity, and nothing–nothing–in the U.S.’s military-first strategy comes close to doing so.
These
statistics go hand-in-hand with the huge rise in civilian casualties,
which number some 2,400 this year so far, according to the Campaign for
Innocent Civilians in Conflict.
Time for the White House to Get Real
The
Obama Administration is kidding itself if it thinks the American people
will buy this attempted whitewash of the failure of the escalation
strategy in Afghanistan. We are in the grips of a desperate unemployment
crisis, wrapped in a larger economic meltdown. We are not ignorant of
the $2 billion dollars sent per day on the war, and we want that money,
and those young people, back here at home so we put people back to work.
Following
the death of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the president should take a
step back and realize that we all have to travel down that road some
day. He should think about what legacy he wants to leave behind him.
Postponing a final end to U.S. military action in Afghanistan until 2014
puts U.S. taxpayers and American troops on the hook for an enormous
investment of blood and treasure in a failing enterprise with no
prospects for a turnaround.
A real, honest review would
objectively conclude that the enterprise is failing and that the best
alternative is to start removing U.S. troops immediately to stave off
continued economic and social damage caused by this war that’s not
making us safer nor worth the cost.
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