Why West Lost Afghan War

[bwv]

No doubt this will become the verdict of history:

http://the-diplomat.com/2010/07/01/why-w...fghan-war/

July 01, 2010
By Michael Scheuer
The former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit says the US-led coalition has already lost the war in Afghanistan. A shake-up in military leadership won't change that.


Recent events surrounding Afghanistan shouldn’t confuse anyone, as the reality of the situation still lies in one simple statement: The US-NATO coalition has lost a war its political leaders never meant, or knew how, to win.

‘Winning’ in Afghanistan was never anything more than killing Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, as many of their fighters and civilian supporters as possible and then getting out immediately with the full knowledge that—as Mao said long ago—insurgencies always rebuild and the process might need to be repeated.

The best and most appropriate response to al-Qaeda’s September 11 raid, then, would have been a unilateral US punitive expedition that inflicted massive death and destruction on the enemy and delivered a clear warning to Islamists not to pick fights with the United States. Indeed, many Islamists expected this response, which is why they poured vitriol on bin Laden and expected the US military to set back their movement a decade, if it did not destroy it completely.

Faced with this criticism, bin Laden simply said ‘wait,’ adding (in paraphrase) that the Americans and their allies can’t stomach casualties, that they won’t use their full military power and will unite Afghans by trying to Westernize them via popular elections, installing women’s rights, dismantling tribalism, introducing secularism and establishing NGO-backed bars and whorehouses in Kabul. Bin Laden was right; it seems he is, among other things, a keen student of the West’s past nation-building operations.

Since June 1, the parade of incompetents crossing the Afghan stage is stunning: Gen. Stanley McChrystal, US President Barack Obama, Gen. David Petraeus, Afghan President Hamid Karzai—the list is long. McChrystal, saddled with a dead-end strategy devised by David Kilcullen, John Nagl and other counterinsurgency ‘experts,’ gave access to himself and his staff to Rolling Stone, long among the most anti-military US journals.

For his trouble and indiscreet words, McChrystal was fired by Obama—who, with his senior advisers, merit all the negative things said about them—and replaced by that purveyor of military snake oil, Gen. Petraeus. Even as the transitory success of the Iraq ‘surge’ is unravelling, Petraeus takes the Afghan command saying everything is okay (within a week the Pentagon’s media machine was telling Congress and Western publics that the ‘Afghan war is on track.’)

While this has played out, Hamid Karzai reportedly met with Sirajuddin Haqqani—a major Afghan insurgent leader—and prepared to surrender under the guise of creating a coalition regime. For all his failures and fabulously corrupt relatives, Karzai can easily solve the dilemma the West can’t even frame accurately: Question: What does the Taliban and its allies want? Answer: Power. So Karzai is talking to Haqqani, and probably Taliban leaders, to see if there’s a governing arrangement that will give him a role in post-NATO Afghanistan and doesn’t lead to his execution after the last NATO trooper leaves. The chance of this is near nil, however, and so Karzai and his family will have to step up the pace of their alleged thievery and get ready for an early exit that leaves the West holding the bag.

[JasonC]

We didn't.

Nobody has laid a glove on us.

But doom mongers monger doom. It's a living I guess, rather like shoveling manure.

[Herr Straße Laufer]

It's why Michael Scheuer no longer works for the CIA? :chin:

And, if you think about it, under the Nato forces less Afghan citizens have been killed than under the Soviet or Taliban occupations?



HSL

[bwv]

, if you think about it, under the Nato forces less Afghan citizens have been killed than under the Soviet or Taliban occupations?

not exactly a compelling argument for victory for a war that has now run longer than Vietnam

[Herr Straße Laufer]

Actually I was not giving a compelling argument for the war.
If I did it would be to unleash the lions with 100% power to eliminate the enemy. I would not allow them to shoot at us and then walk away because they have their hands empty.
I'd be in it to win it. I would not go into details to the media and I would not make a hard set date for getting out.
Get out when you win. Fight to win, not to play pussy foot with idiots, a**holes, and evil. Both foreign and domestic.



HSL

[bwv]

Actually I was not giving a compelling argument for the war.
If I did it would be to unleash the lions with 100% power to eliminate the enemy. I would not allow them to shoot at us and then walk away because they have their hands empty.
I'd be in it to win it. I would not go into details to the media and I would not make a hard set date for getting out.
Get out when you win. Fight to win, not to play pussy foot with idiots, a**holes, and evil. Both foreign and domestic.



HSL

The Soviets did not pussy foot, nor did the Brits

The Nazis, with unlimited brutality, weren't even able to stop insurgents in the areas they conquered

You just cannot win these nation-building exercises and even if you could, they would be hardly worth the cost. How many American lives is that shithole of a country worth?

[JasonC]

Two dueling illusions, both of mind bending arrogance.

War isn't a one off aberration that you can make not exist by getting it over with. Yes that is what Grant and Sherman and a whole American tradition want them to be, but wishes are not horses. Out in the corporeal world, war is a normal part of the human condition in all times and places and it isn't going away, ever, full stop.

Next the idea that wars are all of choice and if you just decide they aren't worth it you won't have any. The other side gets a vote in such matters. Visit lower Manhattan if you are unclear on the point. End all the wars you like and run away home to your heart's content, and the enemy will just come looking for you.

America has enemies because America has power and other men want it; we get in their way. You can't get them to not fight you by not fighting them; they aren't fighting you in the first place because you are fighting them but because they want your power. If you renounce power instead, you will get to see why they wanted it, and you won't enjoy that very much.

Americans simply need to grow up to the fact that world leading power means the obligations of empire as they have always been (and for which the illusions of our idyllic past - which wasn't of our making but sheltered behind Britain acting then as we are acting now - are irrelevant) and with it a continual stream of new enemies, and war as a normal perennial.

And if soldiers aren't up for that, don't sign up, it is a volunteer military.

Compared to the realism of the above, we instead get "I want to win, therefore I have merely to wish it and I've won" or "I don't want to fight in the first place, therefore I don't fight and there is no fight". For all the world as though the enemy did not exist. Hey guys, if they enemy already didn't exist there wouldn't be a war. Your wishes in the matter have precisely nothing to do with it.

[bwv]

Two dueling illusions, both of mind bending arrogance.

War isn't a one off aberration that you can make not exist by getting it over with. Yes that is what Grant and Sherman and a whole American tradition want them to be, but wishes are not horses. Out in the corporeal world, war is a normal part of the human condition in all times and places and it isn't going away, ever, full stop.

Next the idea that wars are all of choice and if you just decide they aren't worth it you won't have any. The other side gets a vote in such matters. Visit lower Manhattan if you are unclear on the point. End all the wars you like and run away home to your heart's content, and the enemy will just come looking for you.

America has enemies because America has power and other men want it; we get in their way. You can't get them to not fight you by not fighting them; they aren't fighting you in the first place because you are fighting them but because they want your power. If you renounce power instead, you will get to see why they wanted it, and you won't enjoy that very much.

Americans simply need to grow up to the fact that world leading power means the obligations of empire as they have always been (and for which the illusions of our idyllic past - which wasn't of our making but sheltered behind Britain acting then as we are acting now - are irrelevant) and with it a continual stream of new enemies, and war as a normal perennial.

And if soldiers aren't up for that, don't sign up, it is a volunteer military.

Compared to the realism of the above, we instead get "I want to win, therefore I have merely to wish it and I've won" or "I don't want to fight in the first place, therefore I don't fight and there is no fight". For all the world as though the enemy did not exist. Hey guys, if they enemy already didn't exist there wouldn't be a war. Your wishes in the matter have precisely nothing to do with it.

(yawn)

Nice little junior imperialist monologue there, but given that Afghanistan currently poses no conceivable threat to the national security of the US and we accomplished the original mission, which was eliminating the Al Queda camps, we are free to stop whenever we choose. And in reality no one really cares about our military power. Our supposed allies are more than happy for US taxpayers to pay for their national defense and our enemies are happy to see us spend our way into bankruptcy playing the role of world policeman. Indeed there is considerable evidence that the whole rationale for the 911 attacks was to provoke us into a prolonged war in Afghanistan

[JasonC]

LOL.

Military spending isn't bankrupting anyone. One we aren't bankrupt, and two we spend $2 trillion a year on middle class entitlements nobody needs - because politicians toss money on bonfires for fun, pretty much, and can't think of anything better to do.

Afghanistan isn't any threat to us because it is currently a US ally with a friendly if rather puppet-esque government. And keeping it that way is something we can do in our sleep. Meanwhile the folks taking random potshots at us for oh the last 30 years are available for target practice there -as well as a number of other places.

You can declare peace as many times as you like and have all the parades you can stand, and random nutjobs will still take potshots at us whenever they feel like it, which is often. And we will shoot back. Way of the world, live with it.

[K K Rossokolski]

This is just another stage in a war that has lasted ...what?...1500 years or so. Never been constant, and the level has varied. From long periods of mostly Western domination, to points of great crisis for that domination, such as Lepanto in 1571 and the Gates of Vienna in 1683. In those days, of course,and speaking very generally, the rulers of the West were not big into political correctness, cultural relativity, rules of engagement, shit like that. Nor did they have to worry about a treasonous media, nor indeed any middle class stuff. That started to appear properly about a hundred years later. The American and French Revolutions lead to the ever-quickening rise of the middle class and a society that provided, in most Western lands, a standard of living undreamed of in history. Societies based largely on Western curiousity genius and dynamism. Absolutely necessary to this was the supply of cheap energy.
How was islam affected by this? By the Revolutions,not at all. islam is less a religion than a political system, one that appears monolithic to our more eclectic ways. But with Western societies reliant on cheap energy, our profligate ways have made us reliant on sources under islams control, opening another phase in this long long war.
Add to this a moral ambiguity in our own societies, the presence of hordes of "useful idiots" and the mistaking of licence for freedom, I think we are in big trouble. Jason C said "Visit lower Manhattan if you are unclear on the point." Are there not plans to build a mosque there? If that is true, the situation of the West is terminal. Afghanistan is meaningless No civilisation, no matter how wealthy, how apparently strong, can survive a poweful external threat whilst being undermined from within by its own institutions.