The "good" war ...

Stays on top today - G

Ain't going so good:

A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.

The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.

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The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.

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Long, with a ton of documentation.

What this article tells me is we have no coherent strategy in the Afghan theater. If we're out to "win hearts and minds", you can't have SOF teams roaming the countryside with a "license to kill". If we want the locals on our side, we can't go killing them wholesale with unmanned drones these people see, in their 10th Century way, as the closest thing to Aliens. But (9 years on) it's too late to "unring" that bell.

Had we done any research on the culture over there (and the arbitrary political divisions the British drew up before they were chased out left), and began to understand it, before we went in, we wouldn't have enlisted the Pakistanis in our cause. We would have known that ethnic boundaries overlapped borders and many in the Pak government had allegiance to those across the border. We would have known we could only buy their loyalty for so long and that money, like water, does not run thicker than blood. At this point, they're just extorting as much as they can from us before we finally pack up and leave.

Had they asked any of us who'd played a part in "Charlie Wilson's War" 30 years ago, they would have learned that the only reason we saw some success then (we paid through the nose at the time too) is because the US, the group that would become Al Qaeda, and the Pakistanis had a common enemy in the Soviets. They didn't detest us any less than the Soviets but we served their purposes (Stinger missiles, unlimited small arms, ammo, explosives, and, of course, money) until the Communists were gone.

I'm sure there were some in our government, at the time, who knew this Afghan adventure would only end up with the result we have now and counseled against it. But, if you'll remember, we were out for vengeance; "Dead or Alive" and all that good shit and nobody listened to the levelheaded folks. If you weren't gung-ho, you were a traitor.

Personally, I thought it would be quick, Osama's dead ass hung from the fence in front of the White House, and that would have been it. Then they blew it at Tora Bora as all eyes were on the prize (oil) in Iraq. And the "war" drags on.

My dear friend Gordon believes our mission might have been right-minded at one time and might have met with some success had it been run better from the beginning. I'd like to think so too but with the Bush administration (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld) holding the reins, Afghanistan, like Iraq, was doomed to failure. To them, Afghanistan was merely an entry point, taking advantage of a national tragedy to put us on a war footing, to allow them to realize their primary goal, taking the oil fields of Iraq. There was no commitment to do anything related to "winning".

Afghanistan is lost. There is nothing we can do now to "win hearts and minds" and "bring democracy" to that place. There is nothing we can do but pack up and leave. Hopefully, this article will cause enough people to wake up and smell the coffee and realize we're throwing hundreds of billions of dollars down a dry hole.