How does an occupation of Afghanistan enhance a vital national security interest? What clear attainable objective is our occupation of Afghanistan addressing? The risks and costs have not been fully and frankly analyzed. We are just chasing a worldwide phantom in a country which estimates have stated contains only 100 Al Qaeda members. President 43 decided that "Shock and Awe" would capture bin laden "dead or alive". Other non-violent policy means were not even addressed. The US, unlike NATO, has not discussed a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement. We will just stay there until we are convinced that the Al Qaeda threat is reduced as a result of our occupation of Afghanistan. The fact that we are likely generating more terrorists than we killing makes you believe that the consequences of our action have not been fully considered. More and more US citizens are stating that they want the US to withdraw. Obama doesn't have the support of his own party on escalating our presence in Afghanistan. We don't have genuine broad international support as the article "UK: Taliban must be in government" described NATO's plan to leave Afghanistan.
If we only would follow what we learned from Russia's recent experience in Afghanistan. The article "Soviet lessons from Afghanistan" at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8365187.stm
detailed how in June 1986, almost a year since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had taken the decision to start withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan that as the article states "But even with the backing of a 100,000-strong Soviet army and billions of rubles in aid, the Afghan Government struggled to establish its legitimacy and authority much beyond the capital - much like President Hamid Karzai's Western-backed administration today.
This bleak assessment of the situation in late 1986 by the Soviet armed forces commander, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, sounds eerily familiar.
"Military actions in Afghanistan will soon be seven years old," Mr Akhromeev
told Mr Gorbachev at a November 1986 Politburo session.
"There is no single piece of land in this country which has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nonetheless, the majority of the territory remains in the
hands of rebels.
"The whole problem is that military results are not followed up by political
actions. At the centre there is authority; in the provinces there is not.
"We control Kabul and the provincial centres, but on occupied territory we
cannot establish authority. We have lost the battle for the Afghan people".
We are making the same complaints now as the article illustrates "As the Politburo discussed a new aid request from Kabul in January 1987, Marshal
Sergei Sokolov said: "In 1981, we gave them 100m roubles of free assistance. And all of that went to the elite. And there was nothing in the hamlets - no
kerosene, no matches."
The article "A Muddle Called Afghanistan" at
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/14-0
states "It is impossible to win a war that you cannot define. That seems to be the main lesson to be drawn from Afghanistan, where a so-called victory seems ever more unreachable. It is also the conclusion of several experts on the region, who fear U.S. forces would be mired forever in that unjustly punished country."
It reminds us of the former Foreign Service officer's reason for resigning as the article continues "There are increasing doubts that a plain increase in the number of soldiers fighting in Afghanistan can lead to a victory progressively more difficult to define. Matthew Hoh, a former Foreign Service officer and former Marine Corps captain who became the first U.S. official to resign in protest over the Afghan war, declared to the Washington Post, "Upon arriving in Afghanistan and serving in both the East and South (and particularly speaking with local Afghans) I found that the majority of those who were fighting us and the Afghan central government were fighting us because they felt occupied."
Can an increase in the number of foreign forces subdue a naturally proud and
nationalistic people? In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, U.S. National Security adviser Mr. James Jones offered a sobering view. When asked whether he agreed with General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, that a troop increase was needed he responded, "Generals always ask for more troops....You can keep on putting troops in, and you could have 200,000 troops there and Afghanistan will swallow them up as it has done in the past."
We are going to be the last ones in Afghanistan as we were in Iraq and in addition to all of the heartbreak of wasting our youths' lives we are throwing our money away.
The article "Afghan Escalation Would Make One-Year Pentagon Budget Almost As Big as Entire 10-Year Health Bill" at
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/24990
describes just how insane this action. Why spend a cent on a country whose major asset is cocaine? Why the main-streams media's covering-up the simple math that as the article states "But as you'll see in the story, there's no attempt to put the costs into any context - specifically, there's no mention that an escalation in Afghanistan would mean outlays for the one-year Pentagon budget is approaching the total outlays of the entire 10-year health care bill."
