Losing in Afghanistan too?

[high fly]

"Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan," said the report by the Atlantic Council of the United States, chaired by retired Gen. James L. Jones, who until the summer of 2006 served as the supreme allied commander of NATO....


Progress in Afghanistan "is under serious threat from resurgent violence, weakening international resolve, mounting regional challenges and a growing lack of confidence on the part of the Afghan people about the future direction of their country," said the report by the Afghanistan Study Group, created by the Center for the Study of the Presidency, which was also involved with the Iraq Study Group.

"The United States and the international community have tried to win the struggle in Afghanistan with too few military forces and insufficient economic aid," the report said. It highlighted the lack of a clear strategy needed to "fill the power vacuum outside Kabul and to counter the combined challenges of reconstituted Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a runaway opium economy, and the stark poverty faced by most Afghans...."

Violence has risen 27 percent in Afghanistan in the past year, with a 39 percent increase in attacks in the nation's eastern portion -- where most U.S. troops operate -- and a 60 percent surge in the province of Helmand, where the Taliban resurgence has been strongest.

Suicide bombings rose to 140 in 2007, compared with five between 2001 and 2005, according to official figures. U.S. and other foreign troop losses -- as well as Afghan civilian casualties -- reached the highest level since the U.S.-led invasion overthrew the Taliban government in 2001. "

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/30/AR2008013004314.html

[PapaBear]

It's a good thing we got Bin Laden.:furious:

[jauble]

In all reality afghanistan should be group of seperated states. So much of the world was just fucked by colonialism and we can not get past the fact that borders should not be borders becuase the fucking allies drew them

[jauble]

I wish I would have used the word "Fuck" more in that post

[Recyclerz]

Well, at least they have taken the concept of freedom of the press to heart.

Reporter sentenced to death for "insulting Islam".

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23043451/

[A.J.]

We should have had a surge there too...in 2001.

[Furtherman]

This was being reported two years ago. (http://www.ronfez.net/forums/showthread.php?t=52671&highlight=Newsweek) It's only gotten worse since.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Sections/Newsweek/Components/Photos/Mag/061002_Issue/nw_leftnavcov_OV_061002.jpg

The covers of the magazine one week in September, 2006.

[Dirtybird12]

my...nephew in-law? i dont what to call him - the kid who married my niece - he lost his eye in a gunfight over there. Said a lot of the troops are pissed becuz nobody here really understands the situation over there and probably never will.

[sailor]

my...nephew in-law? i dont what to call him - the kid who married my niece - he lost his eye in a gunfight over there. Said a lot of the troops are pissed becuz nobody here really understands the situation over there and probably never will.

what's his take on the situation?

[Dirtybird12]

what's his take on the situation?

Nothing we havent heard before. Says it's way more fucked up than Iraq. & way more fucked up & political than we'll ever know...or be told. Not enuff troops / not enuff funding - whatever that meant. Blames the low moral on Iraq too. Very bitter towards our focus on Kabul and the rest of Iraq.

Also says alot of the men & women feel like they've been forgotten about over there becuz of all the intense focus on Iraq. Nobody ever really mentions whats REALLY happening over there. I don't think Ive heard anyone even mention that place during the debates. Could be wrong tho -

Then he started explaining why things will never chill out over there. I zoned out and was distracted by his eye socket. Like it was hypnotizing me or something.
He wears an eye patch but LOVES showing us the "hole" - to freak us out.
He's in good spirits considering.

It's weird to sit down and talk to someone like that. Whos been in it.
He's a kid. Shooting people and killing people/having people trying to kill you. To be that young and already have a ton of "kills" under your belt must be a fucking drag.

He said a lot of the people there are the nicest people he's ever met.
Most are very grateful but a few of the older folks are anti-america period.

[high fly]

This was being reported two years ago. (http://www.ronfez.net/forums/showthread.php?t=52671&highlight=Newsweek) It's only gotten worse since.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Sections/Newsweek/Components/Photos/Mag/061002_Issue/nw_leftnavcov_OV_061002.jpg

The covers of the magazine one week in September, 2006.


In general I agree with you and AJ and jauble, too.

Here is another story from a year ago:

General Warns of Perils in Afghanistan
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/access/1215588161.html?dids=1215588161:1215588161&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Feb+14%2C+2007&author=Ann+Scott+Tyson+-+Washington+Post+Staff+Writer&pub=The+Washington+Post&edition=&startpage=A.15&desc=General+Warns+of+Perils+in+Afghanistan


“Army Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the outgoing top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, also warned that an even greater threat than the resurgent Taliban is the possibility that the government of President Hamid Karzai will suffer an irreversible loss of legitimacy among the Afghan population…..

….“Al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership presence inside of Pakistan remains a very significant problem,” Eikenberry testified before the House Armed Services Committee, warning of the “growing threat of Talibanization” inside Pakistan.
“A steady, direct attack against the command and control in Pakistan in sanctuary areas is essential for us to achieve success,” Eikenberry said….

….“The long-term threat to campaign success… is the potential irretrievable loss of legitimacy of the government of Afghanistan,” he said.
“The accumulated effects of violent terrorist insurgent attacks, corruption, insufficient social resources and growing income disparities, all overlaid by a major international presence, are taking their toll on Afghan government legitimacy,” he said. “A point could be reached at which the government of Afghanistan becomes irrelevant to its people, and the goal of establishing a democratic, moderate, self-sustaining state could be lost forever.”

I would add that a "surge" increasing our troops by less than 15% in 2001 may not have been enough.
We began with an overall strategy that was fatally flawed.
I would also add that these warnings go back much further, before the invasion, even.
Afghanistan is just plain ungovernable, as an editorial from October 2001 by that Kagan guy said, and we should have not tried to go really big with all that talk about a "Marshall Plan for Afghanistan."

Another person who should have been heeded in Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the Osama Bin Laden station at the CIA who laid it out beautifully in the opening chapters of Imperial Hubris.
Somewhere I have a choice quote or two from that book, published in 2004, and shall post when I can track them down.....

[high fly]

Ah.
Here we go.

Let's take a look at the original mission concept:

THE WAR PLAN
CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks, Sept., 2001, on the phone with Gen. Hugh Shelton, discussing the developement of plans to go to war in Afghanistan:
“It’ll take a week to ten days for a complete proposed course of action,” I continued. “In the meantime, we should begin ship, aircraft, and troop staging to set conditions to, One: destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan; and Two: remove the Taliban regime, and those should be the key mission tasks.
“Concur,” Hugh said. “Time is critical.”” American Soldier, by Gen. Tommy Franks, p. 251-252

“On then morning of Thursday, September 20, 2001, Gene Rouart and I boarded Spar 06 again and flew to Washington. We carried ten copies of a top secret brief outlining the concept for military operations to destroy al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.” American Soldier, by of Gen. Tommy Franks, p. 268

“Secretary Rumsfeld and I agreed that the U.S. force should remain small. We wanted to avoid a cumbersome Soviet-style occupation by armored divisions. It hadn’t worked for the Soviets, and it wouldn’t work for us. Flexibility and rapid reaction – airborne and helicopter-borne night assault by small, lethal, and unpredictable units coupled with unprecedented precision – would be the hallmarks of America’s first war in the twenty-first century.” American Soldier, by of Gen. Tommy Franks p. p.271


Franks, to Rumsfeld, “We’ve developed this campaign concept on your orders, Mr. Secretary. You informed me that the President wanted a thorough operation to destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan and remove the Taliban from power.” American Soldier, by of Gen. Tommy Franks p. 277






And now let's see what former CIA Osama bin Laden Station chief Michael Scheuer had to say in Imperial Hubris:


“In both Afghanistan and Iraq we have won the war, but we stand in danger of losing what we won because our foreign policy suffers from the King George Syndrome. Freedom is neither a spontaneous nor a universal aspiration. Other goods captivate the minds of other people from other lands, order, honor, and tribal loyalties being the most obvious. And because these other goods orient these people no less powerfully than freedom orients us, we are apt to be sorely surprised when people who are liberated turn to new tyrants who can assume order; to terrorists who die for the honor of their country or Islam; and to tribal warlords whose winner-take-all mentality is corrosive to the pluralism and toleration that are the very hallmarks of modern democracy...” ---Historian Joshua Mitchell, from “Not All Yearn to Be Free,”
----- Washington Post, Aug. 20, 2003, p. B7; quoted in IMPERIAL HUBRIS, p. 203-204

“We do not know what sort of human being with sound wisdom and conscience would consider people rulers of a country whose personal security is also maintained by foreigners – who cannot trust any of their compatriots in the entire country and cannot find any force inside the country to keep them safe inside their own palace; those who go to their own province and to their countrymen under the protection of American commandos, and even then they are attacked.” --- Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, in an open letter printed in an Afghan newspaper,
quoted in IMPERIAL HUBRIS, p. 48-49


“Since the United States did no homework on the Northern Alliance, it is not surprising that the Pashtun leaders America welded to the now Fahim-led Alliance to form a “broad-based” interim regime amounted to more dead weight and are, indeed, the kiss of death. In most ways, U.S. officials repeated the same failure they engineered in Afghanistan between 1989 and 1992, when U.S., UN, and other Western diplomats tried to construct a broad-based government meaning non-Islamist – to replace the Soviet-Afghan communist regime. The purpose of that attempt was – as is today’s – to allow the barest minimum of participation in the new regime by the mujahideen, the uncouth, violent, devout, and bearded men who had won the war. Having banished these unwashed, medieval Islamists to the periphery of politics, the diplomats intended to give the bulk of the new government’s posts and power to people more like themselves: secularized Afghans; westernized Afghans who refused to fight for their country and spent a comfortable, self-imposed exile in Europe, India, or the United States; technocrats who had worked for the Soviet and Afghan communists; tribal leaders who had emigrated to preside over refugee camps in Pakistan or Iran and avoid being shot at; the deposed Rome-based Afghan king, his effete, Italianate entourage, and their Gucci-suited “field commanders” who never fired a shot - and even Najibullah, the head butcher of the just-defeated Afghan communist regime. As always for western diplomats, a smattering of English or French, and shared an aggressive contempt for religion, were preferable as rulers to the hirsute men wearing funny looking pajama-style clothes who had merely fought and defeated a mass-murdering, superpower enemy in a ten-year war. Style over credibility every time.
Flash ahead a decade and this scenario repeats itself with a new, more ludicrous twist. This time out, the same U.S., Western, and UN diplomats intend to create an interim government from an even less credible crowd, again proving their infallibility to pick losers.....
....With no Islamist credentials and minimal tribal support the India-educated Karzai was and is a man clearly adept and comfortable hobnobbing with U.S. and British elites, but far less so at chewing sinewy goat taken by hand from a common bowl with an assembly of grimy-fingered Islamist insurgent and tribal leaders and their field commanders. Fixinf Karzai as chief of the transitional administration via a UN-run and U.S.-manipulated conference held in Bonn, Germany – another sure disqualifier for the xenophobic Afghans – we then liberally salted the new regime with well-educated, detribalized, and minimally Islamic Afghan expatriates who had been waiting in the wings in the West since the early 1990s for a prize they wanted but for which they would not risk life and limb. We then enlisted tribal warlords such as Hazrat Ali in Nangarhar Province, Pacha Khan Zadran in Khowst Province, and Moham Medshirzai in Qandahar Province to provide Karzai with military muscle in regions where the Pashtun tribes were politically and demographically dominant.
This is not a winning lineup. While Karzai and his expatriate assistants shivered in cold, dark, and bankrupt Kabul, the warlords depended on the forces of the U.S.-led coalition for support because their supposed muscle was nowhere to be found. Having ignored the foregoing checkables, the West quickly discovered that these warlords had been in exile or under domestic subordination not because they disagreed with the Taliban but because they had failed to provide leadership and security when they ruled Afghanistan before the Taliban arose( they then specialized in banditry and heroin trafficking ), had little support inside the country, and were afraid of Taleban and al Qaeda forces.Thus the government the West installed in Kabul in early 2002 was missing every component that might have given it a slim chance to survive without long-term propping-up by non-Islamic, foreign bayonets.”
--- IMPERIAL HUBRIS, p. 38-40.

“Despite the claims of “unnamed” senior U.S.officials, our profligate distribution of boxes and suitcases of cash between 7 October 2001 and the conclusion of the March 2002 battle of Shahi Kowt bought us two things: auxiliaries who created a permissive environment in which Taleban and al Qaeda forces returned to their natural state as insurgents, and the chance to install a new but already-dead government of hated minorities in Kabul. All major al Qaeda and Taleban leaders – except the former’s Mohammed Atef and the latter’s intelligence chief Qari Amadullah, who were killed by U.S. airpower – were allowed to escape by our Afghan hirelings. Most of the groups’ rank-and-file fighters also eluded our just-purchased allies to fight another day – a study by the UK-based International Institute of Strategic Studies estimates “ninety percent of bin Laden’s forces survived” – and the battles of Tora Bora and Shahi Kowt were only the most egregious examples of our allies neglecting to dog the escape hatches.” --- IMPERIAL HUBRIS, p. 51

[scottinnj]

You guys really should check out Michael Yon's Blog and his news reports from Afghanistan and Iraq.

He's pretty honest. His reports give me hope, and give me worry. About both Iraq and Afghanistan. According to him, we could win it all, or screw the pooch in both campaigns. Go check it out at:

Michael Yon Online Magazine (http://www.michaelyon-online.com/)

[Dirtybird12]

Ambassador Tariq Azizuddin was heading to the Afghan capital, Kabul, from the tribal district of Khyber when he went missing, Pakistan Television quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23111407/

[scottinnj]

I wouldn't classify Afghanistan as a loss, or losing, yet. I think it was a good idea to send in the additional Marines, but whoever the next Administration is had better get a hold of the poppy field/heroin problem, or else the warlords will be so entrenched in the farm lands that "winning the hearts and minds" of the locals will become impossible.