Dec 24 marks the 3000 day of the US/NATO occupation of Afghanistan. It is also the 30th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of that war-ravaged country.
For the record, here are the top-ten reasons to reverse President Obama’s plans for a troop surge in Afghanistan.
10. We can’t afford it.
The US government is massively in debt, the USA is in hock to the Chinese, the budget has a huge deficit, and tax revenues are down because the economy is in the toilet. Waging the war in Afghanistan currently costs US taxpayers about $1000 every second, or $86.4 million per day. And that’s before the surge.
At a time when the US is trying to rise out of an economic recession, fund healthcare initiatives, it seems jaw-droppingly foolhardy to burden the economy with the war in Afghanistan. The war could even bankrupt the US.
9. Most Afghans do not want us there.
Most ordinary Afghans dislike the Taliban, but they like foreign forces even less. The only ones who say they want the US and NATO to stay are those in the Karzai puppet regime or who work for US and NATO forces.
The largest ethnic group in Afghanistan is the Pashtun people — 42% of the population. The Taliban are mainly Pashtun. The name “Taliban” means “students” in Pashto, the Pashtun language. A noteworthy Pashtun proverb is: “Me against my brother; me and my brother against our cousin; the three of us against the world.” This credo reveals a lot about the Pashtun culture, and thus about the Taliban. If others are absent, they fight each other. If others are present, they fight the “other”.
We are the “other” in Afghanistan. Only some actively fight against us, but almost all resent our presence. Afghanistan is not France. We will never be seen as liberators in Afghanistan. Those who fight us will continue to do so until we leave, and then they will go back to fighting each other. It is the Pashtun way.
8. No clear “success” goal has been defined.
The Bush administration originally said its goal was to kill or capture the Al Qaeda leaders who masterminded the September 11 2001 attacks on the US, particularly Osama bin Ladin. When bin Laden and other key Al Qaeda operatives escaped at Tora Bora, the official goal was changed to deposing Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, on the grounds that the Taliban had harbored Al Qaeda. Bush declared victory after the Taliban were removed from power and a western-leaning puppet regime was installed in its place. But the Taliban weren’t actually destroyed; they just faded into the population, bided their time, and now are attempting a comeback. And Osama bin Laden is still at large.
But Bush is history. What about the Obama administration? What is their goal in Afghanistan?
Obama said during his presidential campaign that he intended to refocus US efforts towards bringing justice to those who actually attacked the US on September 11 2001. That would be Al Qaeda’s leadership. Obama repeated this theme during a recent interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes”. He said that when the bulk of the American public supported invading Afghanistan in 2001, “they signed up to go after Al Qaeda.” True.
However, now the Obama administration now says its goal is to “stabilize” Afghanistan. The American people did not “sign up for that” and are not on board with that plan.
But even ignoring American’s lack of support for stabilizing Afghanistan, what does “stabilizing” mean? What would count as a “stable” Afghanistan? The country has never had any stability, ever. It has never even really been a country in the western sense of the word. No Afghan central government, whether installed by the English, the Russions, the Taliban, or the US, has ever had any control over more than a few limited areas of the country — mainly the region around Kabul. Most of Afghanistan is a collection of independent medieval fiefdoms. Even the national borders are purely an invention of the west, ignored by the Pashtun people who move freely between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Consider the Obama administration’s plan to train tens of thousands more Afghan police and troops. They are supposed to help bring stability and order to their country. Think about that for a moment: arming people who tend to fight against each other when there is no outsider (such as ourselves) to fight against. What’s to stop those we have armed and trained from pulling a military coup? What’s to stop some of them from joining with their Pashtun borthers in Pakistan to attack the Pakistani government? What’s to stop various warlords and clans from organizing their own militias and start fighting each other? Arming large numbers of Afghans is not a formula for stability. As Afghan American journalist Mizgon Zahir points out, it is a formula for chaos and civil war.
If a stable Afghanistan is our goal, then we will be there forever, because Afghanistan never has been and never will be stable.
7. No clear “failure” criteria have been defined.
Under what circumstances would we decide to cut our losses and leave Afghanistan? We don’t know. I am afraid the Obama administration does not know.
How bad must things get — how many US troop deaths, how many Afghan civilian casualties, how much money spent, how many Afghan government corruption scandals, how much economic pain here in the US — before the US command would say “OK, enough is enough. This isn’t working.”
No such point has been specified, so we are caught like a bug about to get washed down a drain, unable to recognize the point of no return. The situation in Afghanistan could get worse — much worse — and during the downward slide there would be no pre-defined trigger-point at which the Obama administration would assess the situation as hopeless and withdraw. After every setback in the campaign to “stabilize” Afghanistan, the official assessment will be “OK, now things can’t get any worse.” And the situation will continue to get worse.
Afghanistan really is Vietnam all over again.
6. History indicates that the campaign is doomed.
No previous attempt by outside forces to subdue the Afghan people has ever succeeded. Both the English and the Russians tried. Despite having superior firepower and greater troop numbers, both were driven out. The Russians predicted they would be more successful than the British were. They were wrong. Their failed attempt to subdue Afghanistan is cited as an important factor in the bankruptcy and collapse of the Soviet Union. Now the US believes it will be more successful than the Russians were. Why? Upon what is that assumption based? No clear explanation has been offered.
One could argue that the Russians lost partly because an another strong military power — the US — was supporting the Afghans in fighting against them. Yes, but the same is true now. Many of the Taliban are the same insurgents the US trained and armed to fight the Soviets. Those insurgents have not forgotten what our CIA taught them and they still have some of the weapons we gave them. So part of the Taliban’s support came from the US. Current support comes from the narcotics trade, not to mention from Sunni Islamic nations and organizations that would love to see the US bankrupt itself waging a futile war in Afghanistan.
5. Our troops will cause more Afghan civilian casualties.
During the Bush administration, US troops going after insurgents caused thousands of Afghan civilian casualties. Officially these were accidents because “US and NATO troops do not target civilians”, but they were really negligence based on rules of engagement that placed little or no value on Afghan civilian lives, especially compared against American military lives.
The rules of engagement were supposedly changed in 2009 to decrease the number of Afghan civilians killed or injured by errant US/NATO military actions, especially airstrikes. Nonetheless, civilian casualties due to mis-identification and negligence of US troops have continued to occur at a disturbing rate. Even after Obama replaced the general in charge of the Afganistan war, civilian deaths continued.
Even one more Afghan civilian death is too many.
4. We already have more troops there than are needed for the original mission.
The US currently has about 70,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Supplementing those are about 50,000 troops from NATO countries, 75,000 contractors, and 100,000 Afghan troops.
Thus, almost 300,000 troops are fighting against roughly 10,000 Taliban while hunting for about 100 Al Queda insurgents.
Adding 30000 more combat troops will not change the balance significantly. As defense analyst John Arquilla points out, “war is not a numbers game”.
The real problem is that the US and its NATO partners are focusing on a military strategy, when the Soviet experience already showed that that strategy won’t work in Afghanistan. Our own nation’s experience shows us the same thing. The US supposedly already defeated the Taliban in 2001, when we knocked them from power. But in Afghanistan, defeated enemies don’t stay defeated. They just fade away, join your side, get training and weapons, bide their time, and come back with a vengeance.
Furthermore, the military mission has expanded far beyond the original one: capturing the Al Qaeda leaders who organized the 9/11/2001 attacks on the US. For that mission, we don’t need even the number of combat troops we currently have in Afghanistan, and we certainly don’t need to add another 30,000.
3. The troop buildup strategy is exactly backwards.
Military officials have said that they want US forces in Afghanistan to consist of more combat soldiers — “more trigger pullers” — and fewer support personnel.
That is completely backwards from what is needed. Sending more “trigger pullers” will only make things worse: more troop losses, more Afghan casualties, more angry and vengeful Afghans, and more support for the Taliban. Sending more combat troops also blows mind-boggling sums of US taxpayers’ money on what is purely an expense, in no way an investment.
Instead of more “trigger pullers”, what is needed are more well-diggers — more builders of houses, roads, bridges, clinics, and schools. Some military troops would be needed to protect the infrastructure workers, and some Special Operations forces may be needed to continue the hunt for bin Laden and his cohorts. But we don’t need anything like the number of combat troops currently planned for deployment in Afghanistan.
2. It abdicates policymaking to the military.
The US military command called for a sharp surge in the number of combat troops in Afghanistan. Some defense analyists (Ellsberg, Dreyfus) have suggested that Obama faced a “revolt” of senior military commanders if he did not agree to a troop surge.
However, it is not the President’s job to do what the military wants. It is the military’s job to do what the American people want, expressed through the President (as Commander-in-Chief) and the Congress (based on their constitutional authority to declare war). Strategic goals and policy, including military goals and policy, are supposed to be decided by civilians, leaving the military only the task of fleshing out the details of the strategy and the tactics needed to execute the strategy to achieve the goals.
In acquiescing to the demands of military commanders, Obama has apparently abdicated his constitutionally-mandated policymaking authority as Commander-in-Chief to them. Is the US headed for a military government?
1. It is immoral.
The Afghan people have been pummeled by large external superpowers for at least three decades. The landscape is full of land-mines and other unexploded bombs. Their water, power, and sewage infrastructure — previously negligible — is now virtually non-existent. Their essentially medieval, feudal society cannot progress, because as soon as anything of value is built, it is destroyed by war. Ignoring the few so-called “leaders” who enrich themselves by skimming foreign aid for their own benefit, most Afghans are impoverished beyond what Americans can comprehend.
Continuing to drop bombs and missiles on these people is beyond immoral — it is perverse.
Instead of keeping these impoverished people in a state of continuous war, we should give them a chance to dig out of the Middle Ages. If we want to help them, we could do that by getting the United Nations — not the United States — to fund infrastructure-building projects. As Greg Mortenson’s experience shows, Afghans, rather than outsiders, should be heavily involved in the planning and construction, creating a sense of ownership and protectiveness.
Merry Christmas, Ramadon, Hannukah, or Solstice, and let’s all hope for a better 2010 — Peace Pundit
