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I spent several days last week giving guest lectures about the Afghanistan War to freshmen and seniors at Anderson High School in Austin, Texas. It's no secret that I loathe this brutal, futile war that's not making us safer. So, when I talk to kids about it, I state my biases up-front, and I do my best to represent my opponents' views fairly. In the process of playing devil's advocate during these talks, I usually ask people if they remember how they felt on 9/11. I do this because I think it's a good way to get into the mindset of decision-makers who led us down this road back in 2001. But this year, something startling happened: When I asked the students this question, they laughed at me.
"Dude, that was a long time ago," they giggled. "We were, like, in 3rd grade or something." In other words, no, Mr. Old Guy, we don't remember. We weren't even 10 years old when that happened.
Year 10. That's where we are, starting today. We are now in the Afghanistan War's 10th year. Of course most of those kids don't remember what they felt like when the towers fell. It was almost a decade ago, more than half of their lives ago.
It's startling to be reminded how long ago 9/11 was because our public figures keep talking about the Afghanistan War like it started last year. General Petraeus let us know back in February in a Meet the Press interview that we were just then getting "the inputs about right," and were now "starting to see some of the outputs." Nine years into this war, and Petraeus lets us know they're just getting warmed up. Good God.
U.S. foreign policy luminaries have this habit of talking about Afghanistan like it's some sort of laboratory experiment, some controlled environment where we can just start over if Counterinsurgency Hypothesis A doesn't pan out. We talk about it like it's therapy, where "making progress" is good enough. But Afghanistan isn't a controlled environment where we can safely discard old models and just roll up our sleeves and start over; it's the Graveyard of Empires (tm), and it's full of people who die when we wipe their slates clean. And as far as progress goes, please fire any public servant who utters those words to cover their inability to produce results.
Dana Perino said we're making progress... remember her? She was the last president's spokesperson. You remember, that president so terrible we don't even like talking about him in polite company. And he said we were making progress, along with the last two commanding officers of the Afghanistan mission we kicked to the curb for various forms of stupidity.
We've been making progress for nine-plus years now, progress into the deadliest year for U.S. troops since the war began, progress into record levels of suicide terrorism directed at Americans, progress into war debt so high we'll probably never be able to pay it off. No more progress in Afghanistan, please. I want these poor high school kids, who don't remember how they felt back in the Paleolithic Era when the war began, to be left with something resembling the country in which I was lucky enough to grow up.
The war in Afghanistan isn't making us safer. According to Robert Pape's research, since the Afghanistan and Iraq wars began, suicide attacks around the world increased by a factor of six, and 90 percent of all suicide attacks are now anti-American. According to Homeland Security back in May:
"The number and pace of attempted attacks against the United States over the past nine months have surpassed the number of attempts during any other previous one-year period."This has also been the deadliest year for U.S. troops in Afghanistan already with several months left to go. We are not safer. We are less safe.
The war in Afghanistan isn't worth the cost. War costs have already exceeded $1 trillion and will go much higher once the cost of caring for the veterans kicks in. It costs us $1 million per troop, per year to occupy that country. And civilian deaths in Afghanistan are up more than 30 percent so far this year; I strain to imagine a goal that would make that level of death "worth it."
We are 10 years into this godforsaken catastrophe of a war with virtually no chance of a turnaround brought about by military force. We are not about to turn a corner. We are not about to turn the tide. Despite Petraeus' "dark before the dawn" rhetoric, the spike in violence we're seeing now is consistent with a well-established pattern of ever-increasing violence as the insurgency metastasizes across the country. Here's a chart to illustrate from the Afghan NGO Safety Office, showing the level of insurgent-initiated violence:
Year 10 has to be the last year of this war. The president doesn't need to wait until next July to start pulling out troops. He should start withdrawals today, this afternoon, before dinner. He should drag generals by the four-starred shirt to the radios to give the signal if that's what it takes. He should admit that our national interest isn't served by throwing a 100,000-plus-troop war machine at a dirt-poor country to catch fewer than 100 nutcases. We should be in the White House's face, in the Pentagon's face, every day, telling them that we won't tolerate mealy-mouthed dithering on "conditions" while our sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers get ground into record numbers of amputees and coffin-filler.
And we should make damn sure they know we won't sit around and watch while they drag kids too young to really remember how they felt on September 11, 2001, into a war that we're too proud to admit is a failure.
It's not working. It's not going to work. It's over. Shut it down. Bring them home.
If you want to help us make sure this war's 10th year is its last year, join us at Rethink Afghanistan.
Follow Derrick Crowe on Twitter: www.twitter.com/derrickcrowe
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-rushing/afghanistan-9th-anniversa_b_756550.html
2,000 US soldiers have died in Afghanistan, versus 50,000 in Vietnam.
Being a US soldier in Afghanistan is now about 3x as dangerous as being a US fishermen.
Four years serving in Afghanistan has the same death rate as 12 years commercial fishing.
Our troops are a police force. Police take casualties, but you don't stop fighting crime.
I was born in 1950. AFGHANISTAN IS THE ONLY LEGITIMATE US WAR OF MY LIFETIME.
The only one a response to an actual attack on the US, not based on imperialism.
bin Laden is hiding in a cave, there have not been more 9/11s. Seems worth it to me, and also to all the men and women serving there WHO ARE ALL VOLUNTEERS. They believe in what they are doing, unlike the conscripts that fought our previous dirty wars. Maybe they know something we do not, them being there, us being here and all.
It is easily to argue against a classic strawman set up.
The reality, of course is quite different. There's a consensus that after defeating Taliban government, Bush administration has grossly neglected Afghanistan affairs. due to involvement in Iraq.
There was no steady progress in Afghanistan over the last 10 years. And it is pointless to use this a an argument against U.N. mandated force involvement in Afghanistan.
Right now NATO forces are re-fighting the fight that Bush Admin,. should've finished, instead of running off to IRaq.
Right now NATO forces have rejoined the fight with the alliance of Taliban and foreign Jihadists.. Hence the increased casualties among NATO troops. Of course the author neglects to state the much higher increase of causalities among Taliban forces.
The U.N. mandated forces are doing the right thing by aggressively taking the fight to the enemy (yes, they are enemies, despite it being a politically incorrect word) and working hard to degrade enemy's capabilities before the winter rolls in.
Then the negotiations can start.
Good luck to all the nation's forces bravely fighting the fundamentalist enemy in Afghanistan on behalf of the world community.
There's no indication--and i mean none--that the actions of the coalition forces have reversed what they themselves described as the growth of the insurgency, regardless of the body counts.
But.
Something was happening in September -- oh right, another round of bogus Afghan elections, which took place on September 18. If you look at the data, only 14 Coalition troops were felled in the first half of the month, while 45 died in the second half -- a rate higher than that during the whole month of September 2009. We're just over one-quarter of the way through October and already 20 Coalition troops have perished, a rate a bit higher than that of October 2009.
If you ask me, it looks like the Taliban was too busy interfering with the Afghan elections to worry about attacking Coalition troops. Once the election was over, the attacks began again.
A similar pattern happens every April, when the Taliban reportedly is too busy with the opium harvest to bother with attacking Coalition forces. The same pattern happened this year, 2010, as well.
What all this says, to me, is that the Taliban retain the initiative. They more or less choose when to engage us, and when not.
It's pleasing rhetoric to pen stuff like "aggressively taking the fight to the enemy," but that belies the reality of guerilla war generally, and this war in particular.
"The U.N. mandated forces are doing the right thing by aggressively taking the fight to the enemy (yes, they are enemies, despite it being a politically incorrect word) and working hard to degrade enemy's capabilities before the winter rolls in.Then the negotiations can start."
But, again, we heard all this back in 2004 when Gen. Barno said we were now finally fighting a classic counterinsurgency campaign, and then in 2005 Barno said: ""The diverging organization that I see evolving over the next year or so (involves) much of the organization, probably most of it, I think collapsing and rejoining the Afghan political and economic process."
So I say again, we've heard this garbage for almost a decade now. It's still garbage.
Now the Iraqi war has been won, and finally(!) U.N. forces are able to take the fight to the enemy in a serious effort to disrupt and degrade its capabilities. Obama is doing the right thing. Let's see how it turns out when the snow start falling.
That would be the proper time to evaluate the strategic situation.
Then, and only then, a coherent evaluation of the achievements (or lack thereof) will be possible. What the situation needs is flexible and rational analysis not, unyielding isolationist propaganda. People of Afghanistan who have been abandoned by the world before deserve no less. Agreed?
Even now....Karzai is just a step away from a nervous breakdown and the rural areas are still run by local thugs/warlords.
What you need to do is set up a shadow government of folks who know how to set up a public administration, get services up and running, establish a fair system of taxation, keep the money safe from corruption and guide the new leaders as they learn how to make decisions and compromise to get things done (clearly no US officials will be required as compromise within the political sprectrum is a foreign concept to most of you).
Any newly elected government officials should recieve training on issues of public administration, accounting etc so they have some basic skills to move forward so they can run their own show. Also, if a candidate has a history of corruption or an alliance with a terrorist group, he/she should not be allowed to stand for office....period.
The US and Nato expected men with the education of children to run a country......failure was easy to predict.
and if you people don't think that the russies aren't supporting the talis...think again....
the US supported the talis back in the eighty's against the russies... the russies are just returning the favor
I saw that a 29 year old Army Ranger who was killed last week in Afghanistan had been deployed 8 times in Afghanistan and 4 in Iraq.