Sent: Sunday, October 11, 2009
Re: US Afghan troops losing heart;
"We don't threaten West" - Afghan Taliban
"The United state does not intend to leave Afghanistan until all the Middle
Eastern Energy sources are used up, at least fifty years or more. The
explosion of NATO countries and troops are intended to take up the wars
now and any in the future and to fund Ameica's joining, leading them.
All the Stans countries are targeted and Iran, the powerhouse of that area,
to be put on a leash. Israeli agression and cause of Middle Eastern
instability is key."
Suzanne suzannedk@gmail.com
***
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/obamaswar/
PBS FRONTLINE:
Obama's War
On air and online October 13, 9 p.m.
(The featured TV Review in today's LA Times Calendar - D9)
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/opinion/11rich.html?th&emc=th
Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco
By FRANK RICH
NY Times Op-Ed: October 10, 2009
THOSE of us who love F. Scott Fitzgerald must acknowledge that he did get
one big thing wrong. There are second acts in American lives. (Just ask
Marion Barry, or William Shatner.) The real question is whether everyone
deserves a second act. Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great
Afghanistan debate is the Beltway credence given to the ravings of the
unrepentant blunderers who dug us into this hole in the first place.
Let's be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and
treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 - when there was no Qaeda
presence in Iraq - bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that
ensued. Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that
America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their
mess - even though the number of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to
fewer than 100, according to the president's national security adviser, Gen.
James Jones.
But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was
"the central front in the war on terror" when the central front was
Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that
it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan
as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has
consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.
To appreciate this crowd's spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest
standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could
be made after 9/11. It's not just that he echoed the Bush administration's
constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda's attack on America.
Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of
fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we
would win the Iraq war "easily." Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and
the Shiites would "probably get along" in post-Saddam Iraq because there was
"not a history of clashes" between them.
What's more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about
Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing
threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American
resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.
Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could "in the long term"
somehow "muddle through" in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse
President Obama of wanting to "muddle through" there.) Even after the
insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging
about the "remarkable success" of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007,
some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony
"truce" ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain
gave Musharraf a thumb's up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of
2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn't even merit a
mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.
He takes no responsibility for any of this. Asked by Katie Couric last week
about our failures in Afghanistan, McCain spoke as if he were an innocent
bystander: "I think the reason why we didn't do a better job on Afghanistan
is our attention - either rightly or wrongly - was on Iraq." As Tonto says
to the Lone Ranger, "What do you mean 'we,' white man?"
Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain
still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren
in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall
Street Journal's op-ed page to assert that "we have no choice" but to go
all-in on Afghanistan - rightly or wrongly, presumably - just as we had in
Iraq. Why? "The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the
Soviet collapse," they wrote. "The result was 9/11. We must not make that
mistake again."
This shameless argument assumes - perhaps correctly - that no one in this
country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did
make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq
in 2003 - and we did so at the Three Amigos' urging. Then, too, they
promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 - even though no
one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we're being asked to pay for their
mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country
where Al Qaeda has largely vanished.
To make the case, the Amigos and their fellow travelers conflate the Taliban
with Al Qaeda much as they long conflated Saddam's regime with Al Qaeda. But
as Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post reported on Thursday,
American intelligence officials now say that "there are few, if any, links
between Taliban commanders in Afghanistan today and senior Al Qaeda
members" - a far cry from the tight Taliban-bin Laden alliance of 2001.
The rhetorical sleights of hand in the hawks' arguments don't end there. If
you listen carefully to McCain and his neocon echo chamber, you'll notice
certain tics. President Obama better make his decision by tomorrow, or
Armageddon (if not mushroom clouds) will arrive. We must "win" in
Afghanistan - but victory is left vaguely defined. That's because we will
never build a functioning state in a country where there has never been one.
Nor can we score a victory against the world's dispersed, stateless
terrorists by getting bogged down in a hellish landscape that contains few
of them.
Most tellingly, perhaps, those clamoring for an escalation in Afghanistan
avoid mentioning the name of the country's president, Hamid Karzai, or the
fraud-filled August election that conclusively delegitimized his government.
To do so would require explaining why America should place its troops in
alliance with a corrupt partner knee-deep in the narcotics trade. As long as
Karzai and the election are airbrushed out of history, it can be
disingenuously argued that nothing has changed on the ground since Obama's
inauguration and that he has no right to revise his earlier judgment that
Afghanistan is a "war of necessity."
Those demanding more combat troops for Afghanistan also avoid defining the
real costs. The Congressional Research Service estimates that the war was
running $2.6 billion a month in Pentagon expenses alone even before Obama
added 20,000 troops this year. Surely fiscal conservatives like McCain and
Graham who rant about deficits being "generational theft" have an obligation
to explain what the added bill will be on an Afghanistan escalation and
where the additional money will come from. But that would require them to
use the dread words "sacrifice" and "higher taxes" when they want us to
believe that this war, like Iraq, would be cost-free.
The real troop numbers are similarly elusive. Pre-emptively railing against
the prospect of "half measures" by Obama, Lieberman asked MSNBC's Andrea
Mitchell rhetorically last week whether it would be "real counterinsurgency"
or "counterinsurgency light." But the measure Lieberman endorses - Gen.
Stanley McChrystal's reported recommendation of 40,000 additional troops -
is itself counterinsurgency light. In his definitive recent field manual on
the subject, Gen. David Petraeus stipulates that real counterinsurgency
requires 20 to 25 troops for each thousand residents. That comes out,
conservatively, to 640,000 troops for Afghanistan (population, 32 million).
Some 535,000 American troops couldn't achieve a successful counterinsurgency
in South Vietnam, which had half Afghanistan's population and just over a
quarter of its land area.
Lieberman suggested to Mitchell that we could train an enhanced, centralized
Afghan army to fill any gaps. In how many decades? The existing Afghan
"army" is small, illiterate, impoverished and as factionalized as the
government. For his part, McCain likes to justify McChrystal's number of
40,000 by imbuing it with the supposedly magical powers of the "surge" in
Iraq. But it's rewriting history to say that the "surge" brought "victory"
to Iraq. What it did was stanch the catastrophic bleeding in an unnecessary
war McCain had helped gin up. Lest anyone forget, we still don't know who
has "won" in Iraq.
Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is poorer, even larger and more populous, more
fragmented and less historically susceptible to foreign intervention. Even
if the countries were interchangeable, the wars are not. No one-size surge
fits all. President Bush sent the additional troops to Iraq only after Sunni
leaders in Anbar Province soured on Al Qaeda and reached out for American
support. There is no equivalent "Anbar Awakening" in Afghanistan. Most
Afghans "don't feel threatened by the Taliban in their daily lives" and
"aren't asking for American protection," reported Richard Engel of NBC News
last week. After eight years of war, many see Americans as occupiers.
Americans, meanwhile, want to see the fine print after eight years of fiasco
with little accounting. While McCain and company remain frozen where they
were in 2001, many of their fellow citizens have learned from the Iraq
tragedy. Polls persistently find that the country is skeptical about what
should and can be accomplished in Afghanistan. They voted for Obama not
least because they wanted a new post-9/11 vision of national security, and
they will not again be so easily bullied by the blustering hawks' doomsday
scenarios. That gives our deliberating president both the time and the
political space to get this long war's second act right.
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