If, however, you did happen to be looking for a word or two to capture the whole affair, something less polite than those presently circulating, "debacle" and "defeat" might fit the bill. The military of the self-proclaimed single greatest power of planet Earth, whose leaders once considered the occupation of the Middle East the key to future global policy and planned for a multi-generational garrisoning of Iraq, had been sent packing. That should have been considered little short of stunning.
Face what happened in Iraq directly and you know that you're on a new planet.
Doubling Down on Debacle
Of course, Iraq was just one of our invasions-turned-counterinsurgencies-turned-disasters. The other, which started first and is still ongoing, may prove the greater debacle. Though less costly so far in both American lives and national treasure, it threatens to become the more decisive of the two defeats, even though the forces opposing the U.S. military in Afghanistan remain an ill-armed, relatively weak set of minority insurgencies.
As great as was the feat of building the infrastructure for a military occupation and war in Iraq, and then equipping and supplying a massive military force there year after year, it was nothing compared to what the U.S had to do in Afghanistan. Someday, the decision to invade that country, occupy it, build more than 400 bases there, surge in an extra 60,000 or more troops, masses of contractors, CIA agents, diplomats, and other civilian officials, and then push a weak local government to grant Washington the right to remain more or less in perpetuity will be seen as the delusional actions of a Washington incapable of gauging the limits of its power in the world.
Talk about learning curves: having watched their country fail disastrously in a major war on the Asian mainland three decades earlier, America's leaders somehow convinced themselves that nothing was beyond the military prowess of the "sole superpower." So they sent more than 250,000 American troops (along with all those Burger Kings, Subways, and Cinnabons) into two land wars in Eurasia. The result has been another chapter in a history of American defeat -- this time of a power that, despite its pretensions, was not only weaker than in the Vietnam era, but also far weaker than its leaders were capable of imagining.
You would think that, after a decade of watching this double debacle unfold, there might be a full-scale rush for the exits. And yet the drawdown of U.S. "combat" troops in Afghanistan is not scheduled to be completed until December 31, 2014 (with thousands of advisers, trainers, and special operations forces slated to remain behind); the Obama administration is still negotiating feverishly with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai on an agreement that -- whatever the euphemisms chosen -- would leave Americans garrisoned there for years to come; and, as in Iraq in 2010 and 2011, American commanders are openly lobbying for an even slower withdrawal schedule.
Again as in Iraq, in the face of the obvious, the official word couldn't be peachier. In mid-December, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta actually told frontline American troops there that they were "winning" the war. Our commanders there similarly continue to tout "progress" and "gains," as well as a weakening of the Taliban grip on the Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan, thanks to the flooding of the region with U.S. surge troops and continual, devastating night raids by U.S. special operations forces.
Nonetheless, the real story in Afghanistan remains grim for a squirming former superpower -- as it has been ever since its occupation resuscitated the Taliban, the least popular popular movement imaginable. Typically, the U.N. has recently calculated that "security-related events" in the first 11 months of 2011 rose 21% over the same period in 2010 (something denied by NATO). Similarly, yet more resources are being poured into an endless effort to build and train Afghan security forces. Almost $12 billion went into the project in 2011 and a similar sum is slated for 2012, and yet those forces still can't operate on their own, nor do they fight particularly effectively (though their Taliban opposites have few such problems).
Afghan police and soldiers continue to desert in droves and the U.S. general in charge of the training operation suggested last year that, to have the slightest chance of success, it would need to be extended through at least 2016 or 2017. (Forget for a moment that an impoverished Afghan government will be utterly incapable of supporting or financing the forces being created for it.)
The Pashtun-based Taliban, like any classic guerrilla force, has faded away before the overwhelming military of a major power, yet it still clearly has significant control over the southern countryside, and in the last year its acts of violence have spread ever more deeply into the non-Pashtun north. And if U.S. forces in Iraq didn't trust their local partners at the moment of departure, Americans in Afghanistan have every reason to be far more nervous. Afghans in police or army uniforms -- some trained by the Americans or NATO, some possibly Taliban guerrillas dressed in outfits bought on the black market -- have regularly turned their guns on their putative allies in what's referred to as "green-on-blue violence." As 2012 ended, for instance, an Afghan army soldier shot and killed two French soldiers. Not long before, several NATO troops were wounded when a man in an Afghan army uniform opened fire on them.
In the meantime, U.S. troop strength is starting to drop; NATO allies look unsteady indeed; and the Taliban, whatever its trials and tribulations, undoubtedly senses that time is on its side.
Depending on the Kindness of Strangers
Weak as the several outfits that make up the Taliban may be, there can be no question that they are preparing to successfully outlast the greatest military power of our time. And mind you, none of this does more than touch on the debacle that the Afghan War could become. If you want to judge the full folly of the American war (and gauge the waning of U.S. power globally), don't even bother to look at Afghanistan. Instead, check out the supply lines leading to it.
After all, Afghanistan is a land-locked country in Central Asia. The U.S. is thousands of miles away. No giant ports-cum-bases as at Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam in the 1960s are available to bring in supplies. For Washington, if the guerrillas it opposes go to war with little more than the clothes on their backs, its military is another matter. From meals to body armor, building supplies to ammunition, it needs a massive -- and massively expensive -- supply system. It also guzzles fuel the way a drunk downs liquor and has spent more than $20 billion in Afghanistan and Iraq annually just on air conditioning.
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