A war started by the George W. Bush administration. And continues to be a disgusting disaster.
You deployed four times during peacetime. Yes. Not the same as deploying four times into combat or a war theatre.
Everyone is a volunteer. Oh, well. There you go. That makes it o.k.
A YEAR AGO:http://www.alternet.org/world/141478/there_is_no_reason_for_us_to_be_in_afghanistan_--_everyone_knows_it%2C_and_it_spells_defeatThere Is No Reason for Us to Be in Afghanistan -- Everyone Knows It, and It Spells DefeatTruthdig / By Chris Hedges
The confusion of purpose in Afghanistan mirrors the confusion on the ground. We are embroiled in a civil war.
July 21, 2009 |
Al-Qaida could not care less what we do in Afghanistan. We can bomb Afghan villages, hunt the Taliban in Helmand province, build a 100,000-strong client Afghan army, stand by passively as Afghan warlords execute hundreds, maybe thousands, of Taliban prisoners, build huge, elaborate military bases and send drones to drop bombs on Pakistan. It will make no difference. The war will not halt the attacks of Islamic radicals. Terrorist and insurgent groups are not conventional forces. They do not play by the rules of warfare our commanders have drilled into them in war colleges and service academies. And these underground groups are protean, changing shape and color as they drift from one failed state to the next, plan a terrorist attack and then fade back into the shadows. We are fighting with the wrong tools. We are fighting the wrong people. We are on the wrong side of history. And we will be defeated in Afghanistan as we will be in Iraq.
The cost of the Afghanistan war is rising. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed or wounded. July has been the deadliest month in the war for NATO combatants, with at least 50 troops, including 26 Americans, killed. Roadside bomb attacks on coalition forces are swelling the number of wounded and killed. In June, the tally of incidents involving roadside bombs, also called improvised explosive devices (IEDs), hit 736, a record for the fourth straight month; the number had risen from 361 in March to 407 in April and to 465 in May. The decision by President Barack Obama to send 21,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan has increased our presence to 57,000 American troops. The total is expected to rise to at least 68,000 by the end of 2009. It will only mean more death, expanded fighting and greater futility.
We have stumbled into a confusing mix of armed groups that include criminal gangs, drug traffickers, Pashtun and Tajik militias, kidnapping rings, death squads and mercenaries. We are embroiled in a civil war. The Pashtuns, who make up most of the Taliban and are the traditional rulers of Afghanistan, are battling the Tajiks and Uzbeks, who make up the Northern Alliance, which, with foreign help, won the civil war in 2001. The old Northern Alliance now dominates the corrupt and incompetent government. It is deeply hated. And it will fall with us.
We are losing the war in Afghanistan. When we invaded the country eight years ago the Taliban controlled about 75 percent of Afghanistan. Today its reach has crept back to about half the country. The Taliban runs the poppy trade, which brings in an annual income of about $300 million a year. It brazenly carries out attacks in Kabul, the capital, and foreigners, fearing kidnapping, rarely walk the streets of most Afghan cities. It is life-threatening to go into the countryside, where 80 percent of all Afghanis live, unless escorted by NATO troops. And intrepid reporters can interview Taliban officials in downtown coffee shops in Kabul. Osama bin Laden has, to the amusement of much of the rest of the world, become the Where's Waldo of the Middle East. Take away the bullets and the bombs and you have a Gilbert and Sullivan farce.
No one seems to be able to articulate why we are in Afghanistan. Is it to hunt down bin Laden and al-Qaida? Is it to consolidate progress? Have we declared war on the Taliban? Are we building democracy? Are we fighting terrorists there so we do not have to fight them here? Are we "liberating" the women of Afghanistan? The absurdity of the questions, used as thought-terminating cliches, exposes the absurdity of the war. The confusion of purpose mirrors the confusion on the ground. We don't know what we are doing.
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SIX MONTHS AGO:http://www.truth-out.org/losing-afghanistan61122Losing in AfghanistanWednesday 07 July 2010
by: Marjorie Cohn, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis
Last week, the House of Representatives voted 215-210 for $33 billion to fund Barack Obama's troop increase in Afghanistan. But there was considerable opposition to giving the president a blank check. One hundred sixty-two House members supported an amendment that would have tied the funding to a withdrawal timetable. One hundred members voted for another amendment that would have rejected the $33 billion for the 30,000 new troops already on their way to Afghanistan; that amendment would have required that the money be spent to redeploy our troops out of Afghanistan. Democrats voting for the second amendment included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and nine Republicans. Both amendments failed to pass.
The new appropriation is in addition to the $130 billion Congress has already approved for Iraq and Afghanistan this year. And the 2010 Pentagon budget is $693 billion, more than all other discretionary spending programs combined.
Our economic crisis is directly tied to the cost of the war. We are in desperate need of money for education and health care. The $1 million per year it costs to maintain a single soldier in Afghanistan could pay for 20 green jobs.
Not only is the war bankrupting us, it has come at a tragic cost in lives. June was the deadliest month for US troops in Afghanistan. In addition to the 1,149 American soldiers killed in Afghanistan, untold numbers of Afghan civilians have died from the war - untold because the Defense Department refuses to maintain statistics of anyone except US personnel. After all, Donald Rumsfeld quipped in 2005, "death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war."
There are other "depressing" aspects of this war as well. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal reported just days before he got the ax, there is a "resilient and growing insurgency" with high levels of violence and corruption within the Karzai government. McChrystal's remarks were considered "off message" by the White House, which was also irked by the general's criticisms of Obama officials in a Rolling Stone article. McChrystal believes that you can't kill your way out of Afghanistan. "The Russians killed 1 million Afghans and that didn't work."
- snip -
The majority of Americans now oppose the war in Afghanistan. Fareed Zakaria had some harsh words for the war on his CNN show, saying, "the whole enterprise in Afghanistan feels disproportionate, a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem." Noting that CIA Director Leon Panetta admitted that the number of al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan may be 50 to 100, Zakaria asked, "why are we fighting a major war" there? "Last month alone there were more than 100 NATO troops killed in Afghanistan," he said. "That's more than one allied death for each living Al Qaeda member in the country in just one month." Citing estimates that the war will cost more than $100 billion in 2010 alone, Zakaria observed, "That's a billion dollars for every member of Al Qaeda thought to be living in Afghanistan in one year." He queried, "Why are we investing so much time, energy, and effort when Al Qaeda is so weak?" And Zakaria responded to the argument that we should continue fighting the Taliban because they are allied with al-Qaeda by saying, "this would be like fighting Italy in World War II after Hitler's regime had collapsed and Berlin was in flames just because Italy had been allied with Germany."
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Obama will likely persist with his failed war. He appears to be stumbling along the same path that Lyndon Johnson followed. Johnson lost his vision for a "Great Society" when he became convinced that his legacy depended on winning the Vietnam War. It appears that Obama has similarly lost his way.
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LAST WEEK:http://www.juancole.com/2010/12/top-ten-myths-about-afghanistan-2010.htmlTop Ten Myths about Afghanistan, 2010Posted on 12/27/2010 by Juan
10. “There has been significant progress in tamping down the insurgency in Afghanistan.”
Fact: A recent National Intelligence Estimate by 16 intelligence agencies found no progress. It warned that large swathes of the country were at risk of falling to the Taliban and that they still had safe havens in Pakistan, with the Pakistani government complicit. The UN says there were over 6000 civilian casualties of war in Afghanistan in the first 10 months of 2010, a 20% increase over the same period in 2009. Also, 701 US and NATO troops have been killed this year, compared to 521 last year, a 25% increase. There were typically over 1000 insurgent attacks per month in Afghanistan this year, often twice as many per month as in 2009, recalling the guerrilla war in Iraq in 2005.
9. Afghans want the US and NATO troops to stay in their country because they feel protected by them.
Fact: In a recent
poll, only 36% of Afghans said they were confident that US troops could provide security. Only 32% of Afghans now have a favorable view of the United States’ aid efforts in their country over-all.
Dec. 6, 2010, ABC/BBC et al. poll of Afghans
8. The “surge” and precision air strikes are forcing the Taliban to the negotiating table.
Fact: The only truly high-ranking Taliban leader thought to have engaged in parleys with the US, Mulla Omar’s number 2, turns out to have been a fraud and a con man.
7. The US presence in Afghanistan is justified by the September 11 attacks.
Fact: In Helmand and Qandahar Provinces, a poll found that 92% of male residents had never heard of 9/11.
6. Afghans still want US troops in their country, despite their discontents.
Fact: one poll found that 55% of Afghans want the US out of their country. And, the percentage of Afghans who support Taliban attacks on NATO has grown from 9% in 2009 to 27% this year!
THIS YEAR:
http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2010/03/08/fiction-of-marjah-as-city/
Fiction of Marjah as City Was US Misinformation
by Gareth Porter, March 09, 2010
For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a "city of 80,000 people" as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marjah was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centers in Helmand.
It turns out, however, that the picture of Marjah presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict.
Marjah is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers’ homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.
"It’s not urban at all," an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marjah a "rural community."
"It’s a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds," said the official, adding that the homes are reasonably prosperous by Afghan standards.
THIS WEEK:
http://www.fayobserver.com/articles/2010/12/26/1057503?sac=Local
Published: 12:00 AM, Sun Dec 26, 2010
Top 10 region stories of 2010
6. Wars taking toll on mental health
For years, studies have found that post traumatic stress disorder and other mental health problems are taking a toll on soldiers and their families.
The Fayetteville Observer took those studies a step further to see how the hidden wounds of war are affecting soldiers and their families here at home, and how the Army and the community are responding to them.
A five-day series in September revealed that Fort Bragg, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, private health providers and nonprofit support services are ill-equipped to handle a mental health crisis that is just beginning to be seen and felt in Fayetteville.
The newspaper revealed that from January through July, more than 4,000 Fort Bragg soldiers sought psychological counseling at Womack Army Medical Center, nearly double the number from the year before.
Womack already is so overwhelmed that it sent more than 1,500 active-duty soldiers to private health providers in the last fiscal year.
The prospect of getting adequate care is bleak for veterans, too. Fayetteville’s VA center has only four case workers to oversee the largest number of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans in its region.
And the worst may be yet to come.
Studies show that one in five soldiers suffers from PTSD or another mental health issue, yet up to half of them won’t seek treatment out of fear that it will harm their careers. Instead, many will drink heavily or abuse drugs, compounding their problems even more, studies show.
“You mix all this together and it’s a recipe for disaster,” one community activist said.
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