How a ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad

From tomorrow's NY Times:


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/world/asia/12afghan.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

August 12, 2007


How a ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad
By DAVID ROHDE and DAVID E. SANGER

A year after the Taliban fell to an American-led coalition, a group of NATO ambassadors landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, to survey what appeared to be a triumph — a fresh start for a country ripped apart by years of war with the Soviets and brutal repression by religious extremists.

With a senior American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, leading the way, they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters, with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders. At a briefing from the United States Central Command, they were told that the Taliban were now a “spent force.”

“Some of us were saying, ‘Not so fast,’ ” Mr. Burns, now the under secretary of state for political affairs, recalled. “A number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear as a political and military force.”

But that skepticism never took hold in Washington. Assessments by the Central Intelligence Agency circulating at the same time reported that the Taliban were so decimated they no longer posed a threat, according to two senior intelligence officials who reviewed the reports. The American sense of victory was so robust that the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan were packing their guns and preparing for the next war, in Iraq.

Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions that helped send what many in the American military call “the good war” off course.

...

agencies for the past few years.

...

Like Osama bin Laden and his deputies, the Taliban had found refuge in Pakistan and regrouped as the American focus wavered. Taliban fighters seeped back over the border, driving up the suicide attacks and roadside bombings by as much as 25 percent this spring, and forcing NATO and American troops into battles to retake previously liberated villages in southern Afghanistan.

They have scored some successes recently, and since the 2001 invasion, there have been improvements in health care and education, as well as the quality of life in the cities. But Afghanistan’s embattled president, Hamid Karzai, said in Washington last week that security in his country had “definitely deteriorated.” One former national security official called that “a very diplomatic understatement.”

President Bush’s critics have long contended that the Iraq war has diminished America’s effort in Afghanistan, which the administration has denied, but an examination of how the policy unfolded within the administration reveals a deep divide over how to proceed in Afghanistan and a series of decisions that at times seemed to relegate it to an afterthought as Iraq unraveled.

Statements from the White House, including from the president, in support of Afghanistan were resolute, but behind them was a halting, sometimes reluctant commitment to solving Afghanistan’s myriad problems, according to dozens of interviews in the United States, at NATO headquarters in Brussels and in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

...

Afghanistan was only done out of necessity -- NO one would have supported doing Iraq but NOT Afghanistan. It was early in the "War On Terror" game, the bush junta still needed to put up at least pretense of legitimacy.

They came into office hoping to find a pretext for invading Iraq, and what they got was an attack on the country by a force based on Afghanistan. The people of the country demanded that attack on Afghanistan, and the administration took it as an opportunity for a bait and switch, in the process botching badly what might have been a redounding success if persevered at properly.

Put bluntly, there is nothing wrong with the situation in Afghanistan that could not have been cured and prevented with large quantities of cash in 2002 and into the present. Everything from war-lordism to poppy cultivation to reflexive support for extreme religious obscurantism could have been dissolved to nothing under a gentle rain of fifty dollar bills....

;) However, one must point out that plenty of fifty dollar bills have been rained upon the Narco warlords of the Northern Alliance. I do not believe that that has worked out very salubriously for the common people of Afghanistan.

To be honest, I was against bombing Afghanistan from the beginning. No one seems to remember, but the Taliban WAS attempting to negotiate with us over Bin Laden -- a fact that was briefly reported, then quickly buried. We could have tried something short of war, at least to begin with.

Yes, the Taliban were/are nasty buggers, and the people of Afghanistan certainly deserve a chance at something better. But I really have a problem with the concept that dropping bombs on people will improve their lives.

sw

Afghanistan faced then, and for that matter faces now, several very pressing problems, chiefly rebuilding homes, establishing communications infrastructure, and the predominance of private tribal armies over national forces. All of these are susceptible to money. The private armies pay their men, and while it is not much, it pays better than farming by a long sight. If government sponsored construction work payed twice what the private armies can pay, and service in the national army paid four times what private army service paid, the private armies would melt away, to their merest cores of kinship among bandits.

My inclination was, and is, to completely disregard the reported 'overtures' of the Taliban leadership in September on those lines. There is not the slightest reason to suspect they were sincere, and every reason to believe they were mere posturings for propaganda and to perhaps delay the inevitable a little longer. It is a pretty standard move, after all. Once the jet-lines struck the buildings, there really was no other course events could have taken in regard to the country in which that operation was based. Ghandi himself, were he President of the United States at that time, would have had to give the order for attack, if he wished to renain in office: the people here would not have stood for anything short of it.

So? How then would it have hurt to at least call their bluff? What's wrong with delaying a war a bit on the off chance that much destruction and deaths of innocents could be avoided?

And, I hope you know I have the greatest respect for you, but I must call shenanigans on your presuming to know what Gandhi would have done. An enlightened leader would have risen above the hysterical bloodlust of the mob with statesmanship and honor, even at the cost of his popularity and/or position.

Peace,
sw

This is at core a democracy, and no political leadership could have stood in place against the rage animating the people of the country at that time. War, or depart office, would have been the only choices before the most dedicated pacifist conceivable.

When war impends, Ma'am, delay past what is needed to marshal one's own forces only aids the enemy's defensive preparations, and makes the task more difficult. That is not something to inflict on one's own soldiery on an 'off chance'. The thing was unavoidable, and what is unavoidable is best got through quick as possible.

I'll leave you to your opinion about the unavoidability of the attack on Afghanistan.

Since I was never myself "animated by rage" after 9/11 -- other than toward U.S. imperialism as always -- my sympathy for that particular emotional reaction is rather limited.

The only "inevitability" I see is the inevitability of the ease with which those in power will cater to and stoke the basest emotions in the populace in order to serve their own purposes.

sw

Published on Friday, December 1, 2006 by truthdig

Afghan Autopsy

America began its so-called war on terror with the intention of driving the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Five years later, the Taliban is back, Osama bin Laden is still alive, and insurgent fighters cite the U.S. presence in the country as their main wellspring of rage. How did it come to this? Truthdig contributor Christian Parenti, just back from Afghanistan, reports.
by Christian Parenti

Something significant happened in Kabul on Sept. 8 when a Toyota station wagon packed with explosives rammed two U.S. Humvees at the gates of the American embassy, setting off a massive blast.
The Taliban claimed credit for the bombing, as if to say: We can now strike anywhere. When I interviewed eyewitnesses a few days after the blast, shreds of clothing and a shoe still hung from the branches of a nearby tree. Local shopkeepers described the suicide bomber as “very clean,” “dressed in white” and “wearing eyeliner.” They said he paid $100 for a cigarette just before parking in the spot from which he launched his attack against two American Humvees.

After a month traveling around Afghanistan this autumn, I was forced to a grim conclusion: This project is lost, and nothing very good will likely replace it. The reasons for the international community’s failure here are several. First, there are the immediate blunders of the occupiers who, despite extensive European involvement, are led by the Americans. Next are deeper historical dynamics dating back to the U.S. role in the anti-Soviet jihad. And finally there are much older cultural, political and economic facts about Afghanistan that have long made this a wild, lawless place, impervious to conquest and even resistant to the modernizing efforts of its urban middle classes.
The stated goal of this latest occupation has been to create a functioning state where none had existed. Thus, if Afghan institutions fail, so too does the West’s project there.

“You can’t have development without security,” says the waxy NATO spokesman in Kabul, Mark Laity. “And security without development won’t last.” Alas, neither obtains in Afghanistan.

More here:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1201-23.htm

Afghanistan: Five Years Later
by Stephen Zunes


Barnett Rubin, America's foremost scholar on Afghanistan, described the country as not having “functioning state institutions. It has no genuine army or effective police. Its ramshackle provincial administration is barely in contact with, let alone obedient to, the central government. Most of the country's meager tax revenue has been illegally taken over by local officials who are little more than warlords with official titles.” According to Rubin, the goal of U.S. policy in Afghanistan “was not to set up a better regime for the Afghan people, but to recruit and strengthen warlords in its fight against al-Qaida.”

While women are now allowed to go to school and leave the house unaccompanied by a close male relative-­rights denied to them under the Taliban-­most women in large parts of Afghanistan are afraid to do so out of fear of kidnapping and rape. Human Rights Watch reports that, despite the ouster of the misogynist Taliban, “Violence against women and girls remains rampant.”
The security situation in the countryside is so bad that groups like Medecins Sans Frontieres-­which stayed in Afghanistan throughout the Soviet war and occupation of the 1980s, the civil war and chaos of the early to mid-1990s, and the brutal repression of the Taliban through 2001-­have completely withdrawn from the country.

Yet the Bush administration continues to be in denial about the worsening situation in Afghanistan. President Bush recently declared that Afghanistan was doing so well that it was “inspiring others … to demand their freedom.” And Vice President Cheney has referred to the rapidly deteriorating Afghan republic as a “rising nation.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld earlier described the new Afghanistan as “a breathtaking accomplishment” and “a successful model.”

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1014-22.htm

US planned war in Afghanistan long before September 11

By Patrick Martin
20 November 2001


Insider accounts published in the British, French and Indian media have revealed that US officials threatened war against Afghanistan during the summer of 2001. These reports include the prediction, made in July, that “if the military action went ahead, it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.” The Bush administration began its bombing strikes on the hapless, poverty-stricken country October 7, and ground attacks by US Special Forces began October 19.

It is not an accident that these revelations have appeared overseas, rather than in the US. The ruling classes in these countries have their own economic and political interests to look after, which do not coincide, and in some cases directly clash, with the drive by the American ruling elite to seize control of oil-rich territory in Central Asia.
The American media has conducted a systematic cover-up of the real economic and strategic interests that underlie the war against Afghanistan, in order to sustain the pretense that the war emerged overnight, full-blown, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11.

The pundits for the American television networks and major daily newspapers celebrate the rapid military defeat of the Taliban regime as an unexpected stroke of good fortune. They distract public attention from the conclusion that any serious observer would be compelled to draw from the events of the past two weeks: that the speedy victory of the US-backed forces reveals careful planning and preparation by the American military, which must have begun well before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

More here: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/afgh-n20.shtml

There is not enough destruction, death &/or mayhem to warrant excitement. This War is boring so the US Media mostly ignores it. Poor ratings as a Reality Show.