General David Petraeus is set to testify before Congress today, and he's expected to again try to put a positive spin on a war effort that's utterly failing to meet the goals set by its backers. While intelligence assessments show that tactical moves on the ground in Afghanistan have failed to fundamentally weaken the growing insurgency, Petraeus expected to offer "a mostly upbeat assessment today of military progress." Petraeus's Potemkin village tours of Afghanistan for visiting dignitaries may have "impressed" people like John McCain, but Defense Intelligence Agency head General Ronald Burgess rains all over the progress talk with the sobering news that the casualties inflicted on the Taliban have caused "no apparent degradation in their capacity to fight."
As if to underline Burgess' point, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a recruiting station for the Afghan Army, killing at least 35 people in northern Afghanistan on Monday.
Despite the assurances from the administration, the military and their think-tank allies, the massive troop escalations of 2009 and 2010 have failed to reverse the momentum of the insurgency or protect the Afghan population from insurgent intimidation and violence. From today's L.A. Times:
A report March 2 by the British Parliament's foreign affairs committee concluded that despite the "optimistic progress appraisals we heard from some military and official sources ... the security situation across Afghanistan as a whole is deteriorating."
Counterinsurgency efforts in the south and east have "allowed the Taliban to expand its presence and control in other previously relatively stable areas in Afghanistan."
"The Taliban have the momentum, especially in the east and north," analyst Gilles Dorronsoro of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the committee. "There is no change in the overall balance of power, and the Taliban are still making problems."
While the Taliban maintained momentum in 2010 and early 2011, the escalation strategy backed by Petraeus failed to protect Afghans from violence as promised, with 2010 being the deadliest year of the war so far for civilians.
One of the most hawkish of the Petraeus backers in the Senate, Senator McCain, is working hard to set the bounds for acceptable debate in Congress, but he, like the counterinsurgency campaign, is failing:
"I expect certainly some skepticism on both sides of the aisle," McCain said. "I don't see any kind of pressure to withdraw immediately."
McCain only sees what he wants to see, apparently. A Rasmussen poll conducted March 4-5, 2011, found that 52 percent of likely voters want all U.S. troops brought home this year, with more than half of those wanting them brought home immediately (31 percent of likely voters). In January, a USA TODAY/Gallup poll found that 72 percent of Americans want Congress to act this year to speed up troop withdrawals from Afghanistan (including 86 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of independents, and 61 percent of Republicans), with 41 percent strongly favoring such actions. And despite McCain's efforts to blot it out, there is, in fact, a resolution being offered before Congress "calling for Obama to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan either in 30 days or no later than Dec. 31, 2011."
Petraeus and McCain can try to spin this all they want, but the fact is that the counterinsurgency gamble failed, and the American people want our troops out, pronto. Nobody buys the counterinsurgency propaganda anymore, and the more these guys trot it out, the more damage it does to their credibility.
If you're fed up with this war that's not making us safer and that's not worth the cost, join Rethink Afghanistan on Facebook and Twitter, and join your neighbors for a Rethink Afghanistan Meetup in your hometown.