END GAME IN AFGHANISTAN

Victory in war can always be promised but never assured.

With time costs increase, and pride is put at issue, which is why withdrawal will hurt, and be painful politically. So it it with Afghanistan. The stakes are ratcheted higher by the month. Defeat, we are told, will be a victory for terrorism. Still, even though nominally NATO is on the mission the patriotic cause for the USA might be save money.

Robert Sheer describes the war against the Taliban as meaningless now since it was originally conceived against al Qaeda. He writes:

There is no serious evidence that the Taliban instigated the 9/11 attacks or even knew about them in advance. Taliban members were not agents of al-Qaida; on the contrary, the only three governments that financed and diplomatically recognized the Taliban—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan—all were targets of bin Laden’s group.

To insist that the Taliban be vanquished militarily as a prerequisite for thwarting al-Qaida is a denial of the international fluidity of that terrorist movement. Al-Qaida, according to U.S. intelligence sources, has operated effectively in countries as disparate as Somalia, Indonesia, England and Pakistan, to name just a few. What is required to stymie such a movement is effective police and intelligence work, as opposed to deploying vast conventional military forces in the hope of finding, or creating, a conventional war to win. This last wan hope is what the effort in Afghanistan—in the last two months at its most costly point in terms of American deaths—is all about: marshaling massive firepower to fight shadows.

The Taliban is a traditional guerrilla force that can easily elude conventional armies. Once again the generals on the ground are insisting that a desperate situation can be turned around if only more troops are committed, as Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal did in a report leaked this week. Even with U.S. forces being increased to 68,000 as part of an 110,000-strong allied army, the general states, “The situation in Afghanistan is serious. …” In the same sentence he goes on to say “but success is achievable.”

But what that “success” would mean is obscure, or more plainly not known. If winning was to be losing, withdrawing would be winning. Perhaps only Charles De Gualle has made that call in Algeria, which unlike American Vietnam or American Afghanistan had a sizable colonial population. But the what happens to Pakistan? Is Pakistan supporting the American war in Afghanistan?

The interesting possibility is that the war machine may be out of joint with the time. An escalating war in Afghanistan, combined with the subsidy to the financial sector may call into question political and economic priorities The values debate may transform the political landscape.

Alexandra the Great it has been said was on the way to China when he visited Afghanistan. He looked around and went elsewhere for plunder. So where now is Obama going?

ELSEWHERE:

In a guest post at Tom Dispatch, David Swansong illustrates the similarity and continuity of the Obama and Bush Administrations.
Karen DeYoung in The Washington Post observes that the military resurgence of the Taliban (Pashtun National Resistance?) has been surprising to senior American Military Officials. She observes:

. . . President Obama faces crucial decisions on his war strategy and declining public support at home, administration and defense officials are studying the reasons why the Taliban appears, for the moment at least, to be winning.

Any assessment would suggest that Obama is far more intellectually competent than Bush, but his decisions may also be reflecting group think. Whatever Richard Nixon’s faults as I recall he had somebody around the table who would buck the consensus.

We expected a lot from Obama, but maybe it is all too much for one person, and perhaps he did not have in economics, in foreign policy and in military policy to hit the ground running. Maybe Obama needs to reach out to Jimmy Carter?

James Carroll some weeks earlier had reflected on America’s dark mood and concluded that it was not just economic distress but as too “the massive moral and military defeat many see coming.” Empathy it seems was made into an obscene emotion by the chorus of media freak show entertainers.

THE JIG IS UP:

Whatever the tawdry motivations of the invaders  – piplelines and other theft – the game is over for them in Afghanistan. Once again, it seems the great game has been won by players who live closer to the scene.

As always the arrogance of the powerful knows no boundaries, and the entrenched belief is that murder can be assauged by money, but to act in such as way as to be despictable putting in doubt any conviction in justice or humanity. So it is now that American power in its granduer looks woeful and pathetic.

Reuters does it best to report on the crime at ABC Online, as if the world can forget what has happened here.

Shakespeare is more apt:

What hands are here? Hah! They pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
(MacBeth, Scene 2)

I know that the US political space is all that matters to Americans, but of course there are other people on this planet. And it seems that the Afghanistan occupation is a NATO project of some description as well as having some form of imprimatur from the UN. Juan Coles notes, in passing:

The SPD wants a timetable for German withdrawal from Afghanistan, while Merkel stands for an open-ended commitment of the sort insisted on by President Barack Obama. The Kunduz air strike is a much bigger deal in Europe and Afghanistan than it is in the US. The Potsdam district attorney’s office is even considering filing criminal charges against the German colonel who ordered the air strike.

Uberpowerdom and poor eyesight tend to run along the same path, and while the mighty one is carousing along the path, fueled by the immense ego, the others tend to be forgotten. The action in the reaction could never have been foreseen.

Juan Cole further reports:

Abdul Matin Sarfaraz reports from Kunduz Province that locals are now saying that the NATO bombing of two hijacked fuel trucks killed more that 150 civilians and left 20 others wounded. Some 15 children were among the dead. Villagers told the visiting reporter that the Taliban had left the site after inviting the villagers to take the petroleum in the trucks, which had become hopelessly mired in a riverbed. They showed him 50 graves of dead civilians. He adds, “A 50-year-old woman bitterly cried while standing in front of her ruined house. She said her three sons, husband and a grandson perished in the bombardment.”

Kunduz residents are furious. This weekend, an NYT reporter and his translator appear to have been kidnapped when they went out to the site of the bombing. One Afghan pundit remarked dryly that when the US recently announced a new strategy in Afghanistan, no one suspected it would be . . . mass murder.

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