[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Afghanistan: A War We Can't Believe In

[Bill Totten]

Why Obama's Favorite War Is Less Winnable Than Iraq

by Ted Rall

TedRall.com (March 04 2008)


Five years after the Republicans got us into war against Iraq, Democrats
want to double down on a war that's even more unjustifiable and
unwinnable - the one against Afghanistan. By any measure, US troops and
their NATO allies are getting their asses kicked in the country that
Reagan's CIA station chief for Pakistan called "the graveyard of
empires". Afghanistan currently produces a record 93 percent of the
world's opium. Suicide bombers are killing more US-aligned troops than
ever. Stonings are back. The Taliban and their allies, "defeated" in
2001, control most of the country - and may recapture the capital of
Kabul as early as this summer.

"So", asks The New York Times, "has Afghanistan now become a bigger
security threat to the United States than Iraq?" Barack Obama's answer
is yes. He spent last year parroting the DNC's line that Bush "took his
eye off the ball" in Afghanistan when we invaded Iraq. Thankfully, he
abandoned that hoary sports metaphor. Iraq, he says now, "distracted us
from the fight that needed to be fought in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda.
They're the ones who killed 3,000 Americans."

Sorta. But not really.

Osama bin Laden bragged about ordering the East Africa embassy bombings
in 1998, yet has repeatedly denied a direct role in 9/11. He's probably
telling the truth. The hijackers were mostly likely recruited by Islamic
Jihad, which is based in Egypt. Saudis, including members of the royal
family, financed the strikes against New York and Washington. Pakistani
intelligence funded and supervised the camps where some of them trained.

Al Qaeda may have been peripherally involved in 9/11; its leadership
certainly knew about the plot ahead of time. They may have fronted some
of the expense money. But 9/11 wasn't an Al Qaeda operation per se.

Afghanistan's connection to 9/11 was tertiary. At the moment the first
plane struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center, most of Al
Qaeda's camps and fighters were in Pakistan. As CBS News reported on
January 29 2002, Osama bin Laden was in a Pakistani military hospital in
Rawalpindi on 9/11. The Taliban militia, which provided neither men nor
money for the attacks, controlled ninety percent of the country.

It has long been an article of faith among Democrats that Afghanistan is
the "good war", a righteous campaign that could be won with more money
and manpower. But the facts say otherwise. The US Air Force rained more
than a million pounds of bombs upon Afghanistan in 2007, mostly on
innocent civilians. It's twice as much as was dropped in Iraq - and
equally ineffective.

Six years after the US invasion of 2001, according to Director of
National Intelligence Michael McConnell, the US/NATO occupation force
has surged from 8,000 to 50,000. But the Americans are having no more
luck against the Afghans than had the Brits or the Soviet Union. The
US-backed government of Hamid Karzai controls a mere thirty percent of
Afghanistan, admits McConnell. (Regional analysts say in truth it is
closer to fifteen percent.) Most of the country belongs to the charming
guys who gave us babes in burqas and exploding Buddhas: the Taliban and
likeminded warlords. "Afghanistan remains a failing state", says a
report by General James Jones, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander.
"The United States and the international community have tried to win the
struggle in Afghanistan with too few military forces and insufficient
economic aid".

If he becomes president, Obama says he'll "ask more from our European
allies" to win in Afghanistan. But he won't get it. As The New York
Times puts it: "Why help the United States in Afghanistan, the European
logic goes, when America would be able to handle Afghanistan much more
easily if its GIs weren't bogged down in Iraq?"

Obama says he would send two more American combat brigades - between
3,000 and 8,000 troops. If 158,000 troops can't subdue Iraq, how can
58,000 do the job in Afghanistan?

They can't.

Afghanistan's population is nineteen percent larger than that of Iraq.
Its area is 49 percent bigger, with infinitely rougher terrain. Obama's
proposed "surgelet" would result in troop strength of less than one
sixth of the 400,000 dictated by official US counterinsurgency doctrine
for a nation the size of Afghanistan.

Afghans say spring could mark the beginning of the end of the United
States' first experiment in post-9/11 regime change. For more than a
year, Taliban commanders have controlled the key Kabul-to-Kandahar
highway. "On one convoy last year we were forty vehicles and only twelve
got through", Sadat Khan, a 25-year-old truck driver explained to the UK
Telegraph as he pointed to "roughly patched bullet holes in the cab of
his truck". Cops loyal to Karzai expect to be massacred. "Maybe we will
lose thirty per cent of us this spring, maybe sixty per cent", police
commander Mohammad Farid told the paper. He'd already been shot.

The Taliban say they'll retake Kabul this year and reestablish the
Islamic fundamentalist government led by Mullah Omar. No one knows
whether they'll succeed. But they've already begun to strangle the city
of Kabul. They're destroying its nascent telecommunications
infrastructure, driving out foreign NGOs and businesspeople with
terrorist attacks, and cutting off access to the remaining highways.
Talibs promise to continue to target NATO troops, betting that Canada
and other members of the coalition will pull out under pressure from
antiwar voters. Bogged down in Iraq, the US won't be able to send more
soldiers to Afghanistan. Karzai's puppet regime won't last long.

If Obama is so eager to keep fighting Bush's wars, he'd be smarter to
focus on the more winnable of the two: Iraq.
_____

Ted Rall is the author of the book Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia
the New Middle East? (Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing, 2006), an
in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign
policy challenge.

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/


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