Tue 18 May, 2010
McChrystal doesn't like getting his ass kicked by the Taliban.
The US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who was boasting of military progress only three months ago, confessed last week that “nobody is winning”. His only claim now is that the Taliban have lost momentum compared with last year.
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Equally worrying for the American and British governments is the failure so far of General McChrystal’s strategy of using his troops to seize Taliban strongholds and, once cleared, hand them over to Afghan forces. He sold this plan, under which he was promised an extra 30,000 US troops, last November but all the signs are that it is not working. Starting in February, 15,000 US, British and Afghan troops started taking over the Taliban-held area of Marjah and Nad Ali in Helmand province. Dozens of embedded journalists trumpeted the significance of Operation Moshtarak, as it was called, as the first fruits of General McChrystal’s new strategy which was meant to emulate the supposed success of the “surge” in Iraq in 2007.
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Lack of success in Marjah is feeding doubts about the promised US-led offensive in Kandahar, parts of which are under Taliban control. The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has warned against destroying the city in order to save it. There has been an attempt by the US military to rebrand the attack “Co-operation for Kandahar”. Local elders have lobbied against it on the grounds that it will bring nothing but ruin to their city.
So far the much-heralded attempt to turn the tide in Kandahar has simply terrified local people about what is to come. US and Nato supply columns thunder through the narrow streets, the soldiers guarding them gesturing menacingly to Afghan vehicles not to get too close. “An atmosphere of terror is hanging over Kandahar,” Ahmad Wali Karzai, the president’s much-criticised brother who is also head of the local council, is quoted as saying. “People are breathing terror here.”
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Part of the US and British lack of success may be rooted in a failure to understand what happened in Iraq. The US media swallowed the official version that an alliance with the Iraqi tribes combined with new military tactics aimed at defending the civilian population had turned the tide against the Sunni Arab insurgency. There is something in this but not much. The main reasons why the Sunni Arabs ended their insurgency against the US occupation was that they were being slaughtered by the Shia-dominated government and the Sunni have been largely driven from Baghdad.
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The semi-official Pakistani view is that the US, Britain and Nato forces have become entangled in a civil war in Afghanistan between the Pashtun community, represented by the Taliban, and their Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara opponents who dominate the Kabul government. They expect the Pashtun to go on fighting until they get a real share in power. One Pashtun, a former colonel in the Pakistani army, said: “It will be difficult for the Americans and British to win the hearts and minds of the people in southern Afghanistan since at the centre of Pashtun culture is a hatred of all foreigners.”
You mean to tell me our military can’t defeat a bunch of cave dwelling, uncultured, barbaric people? Even with 6.7 billion dollars a month in funding? And McChrystal has the balls to say nobody is winning this war?
Somebody needs to punch this sore loser in the dick.
One Response to “Things are going great in Afghanistan
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Tags: Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, War on Terror, We Are Sore LosersComments (1)
cft says:
Our government’s unwillingness to so much as say “we’re losing” is a reflection of the bloated and ineffectual state of the military/industrial/ideological complex and its continued immersion in the mythologies and strategies of the Cold War. As long as no one ever feels comfortable saying “it’s over” or “we’re in over our heads,” our foreign policy will continue to be overburdened by the weight of our country’s wishful thinking.
What’s kind of funny to contemplate is the extent to which the USSR was defeated in Afghanistan for pretty much the exact same reasons (albeit with some very different specific circumstances): no one was willing to admit that the nation was simply not up to the task, that it had declined and its foreign/military policies and assumptions had atrophied. You might trace this problem of leadership in Soviet Russia back to Stalin, who, through terror and charismatic authority, hoarded all of the political power to himself, and when he died, he left a massive hole that was never really filled up again.
Military policy inevitably gets tangled in a web of self-delusions unless there is strong political leadership willing to reign it in. The US hasn’t had political leadership with that kind of real power since FDR. I actually think that Obama does personally have gravitas such as we’ve not seen in a US president since maybe FDR. But the conditions are vastly different today: industrial and finance capital rule the roost.
I just realized that I’ve kind of been free-associating. Hope that’s okay! Anyway, cheers, and thanks for this interesting post….