Obama Warned About Afghan Escalation: Out of Frying Pan, Into Fire?
Out of the frying pan into the fire? In his race for the White House, Barack Obama called long and often for sending many more troops to Afghanistan (even before we withdraw quite a few from Iraq). It was a required thing to say on the campaign trail to show toughness and also to make the politically winning point that President Bush had fought the wrong war, in Iraq, when we had not yet cleaned out Afghanistan.
Did he really mean it? If so, is it really the right thing to do, especially with our chief national security threat now coming from within -- in the form of our economic crisis?
The New York Times on Sunday presented a host of op-eds on Iraq and Afghanistan, including one from a guy named Rumsfeld and another from someone called Chalabi. The ones related to the Afghan conflict should raise questions for readers, and I hope, the Obama team. Just as the new pieces appeared, the Karzai government revealed that Obama had called the nation's leader and pledged to increase U.S. support. The NATO commander wants to nearly double troop strength there.
This past August, I devoted a column here to this subject after a brief flurry of front-page articles on Afghanistan arrived to mark U.S. deaths there finally hitting the 500 mark. The war in Afghanistan, long overlooked, is now getting more notice, I observed, before asking: "But does that mean the U.S., finally starting (perhaps) to dig out of Iraq, should now commit to another open-ended war, even for a good cause, not so far away?"
Nearly everyone in the media, and on the political stage, still calls this the "good war." Obama has even said "we must win" there. But it's the same question we have faced in Iraq: What does he define as "winning"? How much are we willing to expend (in lives lost and money) at a time of a severe budget crunch and overstretched military? Shouldn't the native forces -- and NATO -- be doing more? And what about Pakistan? And so on.
We've been fighting there even longer than in Iraq, if that seems possible.
Few voices in the mainstream media -- and even in the liberal blogosphere -- have tackled this subject, partly because of long arguing for the need to fight the "good war" as opposed to the "bad war." But now some commentators -- with impeccable pro-military credentials -- are starting to sound off on the dangers.
Back in August, I was reduced to quoting Thomas Friedman from a recent New York Times column:
The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want....Obama needs to ask himself honestly: "Am I for sending more troops to Afghanistan because I really think we can win there, because I really think that that will bring an end to terrorism, or am I just doing it because to get elected in America, post-9/11, I have to be for winning some war?"
And I reprinted at length comments from Joseph L. Galloway, the legendary war reporter, based largely on a recent paper written by Gen. Barry McCaffrey after his tour of the war zone. McCaffrey had said "we can't shoot our way out of Afghanistan, and the two or three or more American combat brigades proposed by the two putative nominees for president are irrelevant." Galloway noted sardonically: "We can't afford to fail in Afghanistan, the general says, but he doesn't address the question of whether we can afford to succeed there, either."
Now the New York Times presents several cautionary views. Here are three of them, hardly a group of lefty peaceniks.
Anthony Cordesman, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies:
[N]o one involved believes that the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan's northern territories can be fully won, or even transferred to Afghan and Pakistani hands, by even the end of President Obama's first term. For at least the next two to three years, the war will intensify, and virtually all of the additional burden will be borne by the United States.
Leaks of a new National Intelligence Estimate have shown that we are now losing the war for several reasons: a lack of Afghan competence; a half-hearted Pakistani commitment to the fight; a shortage of American, NATO and International Security Assistance Force troops; too few aid workers; and nation-building programs that were designed for peacetime and are rife with inefficiency and fraud&hellip.As things stand, it will almost certainly take until 2011 to bring enough military advisers into Afghanistan to train its army and police forces to the level where locals can replace international troops. And with increasing terrorist attacks on non-governmental groups, many aid workers are being forced to leave the country.
Rory Slaughter, former British Foreign Service officer:
Afghanistan does not matter as much as Barack Obama thinks. Terrorism is not the key strategic threat facing the United States. America, Britain and our allies have not created a positive stable environment in the Middle East. We have no clear strategy for dealing with China. The financial crisis is a more immediate threat to United States power and to other states; environmental catastrophe is more dangerous for the world. And even from the perspective of terrorism, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are more lethal.
President-elect Obama's emphasis on Afghanistan and his desire to send more troops and money there is misguided. Overestimating its importance distracts us from higher priorities, creates an unhealthy dynamic with the government of Afghanistan and endangers the one thing it needs -- the stability that might come from a patient, limited, long-term relationship with the international community. ..When the decision was made to increase troops in 2005, there was no insurgency. But as NATO became increasingly obsessed with transforming the country and brought in more money and troops to deal with corruption and the judiciary, warlords and criminals, insecurity in rural areas and narcotics, it failed. In fact, things got worse. These new NATO troops encountered a fresh problem -- local Taliban resistance -- which has drawn them into a counterinsurgency campaign.
Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense:
President Bush's decision to increase combat troop levels in Iraq in January 2007 sent a clear message that he was determined not to abandon a people to death squads and terrorists. We will need the same commitment to helping the people of Afghanistan succeed, but that does not mean we will achieve it with the same tactics or strategies.
The way forward in Afghanistan will need to reflect the current circumstances there -- not the circumstances in Iraq two years ago. Additional troops in Afghanistan may be necessary, but they will not, by themselves, be sufficient to lead to the results we saw in Iraq. A similar confluence of events that contributed to success in Iraq does not appear to exist in Afghanistan.What's needed in Afghanistan is an Afghan solution, just as Iraqi solutions have contributed so fundamentally to progress in Iraq. And a surge, if it is to be successful, will need to be an Afghan surge.
Left unanswered in the current debate is the critical question of how thousands of additional American troops might actually bring long-term stability to Afghanistan -- a country 80,000 square miles larger than Iraq yet with security forces just one-fourth the size of Iraq's. Afghanistan also lacks Iraq's oil and other economic advantages. It is plagued by the narcotics trade. Its borders are threatened by terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan. Fractured groups of Pashtun tribesmen on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border do not yet appear willing to unite and take on the insurgents in their midst, as Arab tribes did in Iraq.
Further, Afghanistan has a long history of defeating foreign armies that sought strength in numbers. The Soviet Union tried to occupy Afghanistan with hundreds of thousands of troops -- and withdrew, defeated and broken. More United States troops could raise tensions, particularly in Afghanistan's Pashtun south, where the insurgency is strongest...
In a few weeks, the new commander in chief, Barack Obama, will assume the responsibility of leading a nation at a time of war. Time and flexibility are the two constants of military success. In a struggle with an adaptable, thinking enemy, there is no single template for success. More is not always better. One size does not fit all.
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Greg Mitchell is editor of Editor & Publisher and its new blog. His latest book, on Iraq and the media, is "So Wrong for So Long."
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Corrected:
By nature, armies are ostentatious: Generally, they are composed of soldiers that wear uniforms and officers that studied military strategy. So Armies are usually made up of easily identifiable members who stand and fight.
During the Revolutionary War however, the un-uniformed colonial militias fought for their independence using Hit and Run tactics that proved more effective than the traditional battlefield behavior the Redcoats were accustomed to. The Redcoats were sitting ducks.
On the other hand, Terrorist Organizations are secret societies by nature, whose members are unrecognizable as such, if encountered on the street. The only way their behavior can be predicted (and dealt with) is by infiltrating their organizations or intercepting their communications, neither of which benefit from invading and occupying a country in which terrorists have recruited followers.
Maintaining a military presence in those countries doesn't enhance the security of the USA and in fact, does just the opposite. Furthermore, since terrorists are indistinguishable from everyone else, their members can move freely across borders and regroup where ever local conditions are favorable to their goals.
Part II
By infiltrating their organizations, intercepting their communications and using satellite surveillance, any formal training camps Terrorists establish can be removed without occupying the country in which they are located.
This is what the nation's Commander and Chief needs to understand in order to better protect the USA and it's citizens from terrorists and terrorism. So far, Obama doesn't appear to comprehend this, however.
By nature, armies are ostentatious: They are composed of soldiers that wear uniforms and their officers study military strategy. Armies are made up of easily identifiable members who stand and fight.
During the Revolutionary War, the colonial militias fought for their independence using hit and run tactics that proved more effective than the Redcoats traditional
By nature, armies are ostentatious: Generally, they are composed of soldiers that wear uniforms and officers that studied military strategy. So Armies are usually made up of easily identifiable members who stand and fight.
During the Revolutionary War however, the un-uniformed colonial militias fought for their independence using Hit and Run tactics that proved more effective than the traditional battlefield behavior the Redcoats were accustomed to. The Redcoats were sitting ducks.
On the other hand, Terrorist Organizations are secret societies by nature, whose members are unrecognizable as such, if encountered on the street. The only way their behavior can be predicted (and dealt with) is by infiltrating their organizations or intercepting their communications, neither of which benefit from invading and occupying a country in which terrorists have recruited followers. Maintaining a military presence in those countries doesn't enhance the security of the USA and in fact, does just the opposite. Furthermore, since terrorists are indistinguishable from everyone else, their members can move freely across borders and regroup where ever local conditions are favorable to their goals.
One thing that might be tried is an alternative cash crop to poppy. I recall that it was a success in Pakistan where the plant that produced the skin sun-blocker was grown on hillsides, until it was found in terms of human exposure that it could be hazardous. Certainly a hybridization, like that of maize or corn might return it to production.
The BBC had a story. A former heroin addict was working in Afghanistan convincing farmers there to raise pomegranates instead of a poppy. The Taleban (British spelling) were once organized against poppy I recall. In Morocco, hashish, is produced from cannabis plants, overseen by the monarchy. Cannabis, I found is native around the world, three types, and made into hashish, is sometimes used at the end of fasting for Ramadan in the Islamic regions. It is, however, a situation some, told by an anthropologist, are not too happy about, in the mountains of Morocco who oppose the monarchy there.
If we approach the problem again, but change the subsidized agricultural bases, the poppy growers and the Taleban might stop shooting at the British Army, as reported. Soybeans have transformed quite a lot of agriculture since the 1960s in different places around the world where it is grown. I wish the guy and the "pommies" well.
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Be sure and watch this 60 minutes segment with a Delta Force officer about Bin Laden.
Draw your own conclusions.
I have to assume that the then senator was honest about his pledge, as he's repeatedly made this a point, our being able to count on his honesty. He also repeatedly made a point of the fact that the "eye had been taken off the ball" like so many others in that echo chamber.
His position on Afghanistan - along with other positions taken - is the reason why he is allowed to be president. Name one politician who is for pulling out of Afghanistan, and I'll show you a ridiculed and maligned nowhere-ne
Obama said, "I'm not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.' Afghanistan runs the risk of becoming a dumb war. Others, notably the Russians and the British have failed there in the past.
To succeed, we need to put the Afghan fighters in the forefront. They're accustomed to fighting one another ( long term hobby, in fact), but this time they need to persist. Historically, their fighting is tribal and seasonal. Now it needs to be national and persistent. If the Afghans don't want to do that, then we should leave them to themselves.
The Taliban harbored Ben Laden, but we can counter them without continuing to risk American lives. We could leave them with no visible, stable, national government, and try to keep it that way. Let the place Balkanize and work to assure that it stays that way. Will Ben Laden hide out there? Sure, but we can keep him hemmed in and away from us and ours.
In 2001, there were numerous people, with some knowledge of history, who predicted what is now happening and advised against invading. They were ridiculed and denounced as traitors, and now, of course their wisdom has been conveniently forgotten.
Perhaps our first mistake was helping bin Laden and co. overthrow the communist regime which was trying to bring the country into the 20th century. As I understrand it , the religious fanatics were rebelling because the commies were giving rights to women, and the warlords were fighting the loss of their fiefdoms. But the US helped both groups because they were anti-communist and that's all that mattered. I would be interested in the views of people who are better informed on this subject than I.
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Good Frontline report on Afganistan. Mostly down and dirty with the grunts in the field but also some good backround and analysis.
Canadian poll from a left- leaning company:
"Are the foreign countries doing a good job fighting the Taliban? Yes, say nearly two thirds (64%) of Afghans, versus 17 percent who say a bad job."
"Should Foreign Troops Leave or Stay?"
The plurality (43%) of Afghans say that foreign troops should remain “however long it takes to defeat the Taliban and restore order.”
One-quarter are looking for a relatively quick exit, either immediately (14%) or within the next year (11%).
Another quarter take the middle view of wanting them to stay either two more (12%) or three to five more (15%) years.
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Thanks for posting that poll.
The country has made a major push to improve access to education for girls since the Taliban's ouster. Fewer than 1 million Afghan children — mostly all boys — attended school under Taliban rule. Roughly 6 million Afghan children, including 2 million girls, attend school today.
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan police have arrested 10 Taliban militants involved in an acid attack this month against 15 girls and teachers walking to school in southern Afghanistan, a provincial governor said Tuesday.
"Several" of the arrested militants have confessed to taking part in the acid attack, said Kandahar Gov. Rahmatullah Raufi. He declined to say exactly how many confessed.
High-ranking Taliban fighters paid the militants a total of $2,000 to carry out the attack, Raufi said. The attackers came from Pakistan but were Afghan nationals, said Doud Doud, an Interior Ministry official.
The attackers squirted the acid from water bottles onto three groups of students and teachers walking to school in Kandahar city on Nov. 12. Several girls suffered burns to the face and were hospitalized.
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These are questions that really need to be asked and answered.
I recently watched a retired Marine colonel's appraisal of Afghanistan when he was asked if a "surge" strategy, such as that proposed by both Obama and McCain would work in Afghanistan.
He replied something to the effect that we could add additional troops to that front, be wildly successful there, and in doing so catapult Afghanistan from the 13th to the 14th century.
That made me really question what exactly we're really doing there.
Obama is scaring me more and more and I voted for him. When are we going to stop invading and raping other countries, when will these congressmen get the message,..
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If you ignore William S. Lind's preoccupation with "cultural marxism" he has always been mostly on the mark about Iraq and Afghanistan. Time to leave. We are going to have to deal with a failed state closer to home anyway. Mexico.
"On Afghanistan, Obama wants to send in more troops and win the war. But more troops doing what U.S. troops now do-fighting the Pashtun and calling in airstrikes on anything that moves-guarantee we will lose the war. As was the case in Iraq, the first necessary step is to change what our troops are doing. From what I have seen, Obama has said nothing on that score, probably because his position on Afghanistan is mere posturing intended to show he will be “tough on terrorism.
"We are going to have to deal with a failed state closer to home anyway. Mexico."
Exactly what do mean? Are you suggesting that the USA invade Mexico? What about Mexico leads you to believe that Mexico is a "failed state"? The fact that it doesn't invade other sovereign nations? It's Agrarian Reform laws? It's lack of Capital Punishment? It's Federal Electoral Institute (an autonomous organization made up of representatives from all registered political parties, that realizes and supervises elections)? It's having outlawed discrimination based on race, sex, origen, income, religious beliefs, age, capacity or preferences at the constitutional level? It's having had a full blooded Zapotec Indian named Benito Juarez as President who said: Among nations as among individuals, respect for the rights of others brings peace (Entre las naciones como las individuos, el respeto para el derecho ageno es la paz).
And just who is "We"? You and your mother?
dhinds
Guadalajara
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