The WikiLeaks portray a war in which the United States has a vastly insufficient force on the ground that is fighting a capable and dedicated enemy who isn’t going anywhere. The Taliban know that they win just by not being defeated, and they know that they won’t be defeated. The Americans are leaving, meaning the Taliban need only wait and prepare.The article is worth reading, though, because it lays out why Pakistan has maintained relations with the Taliban and why it is in the national interest of both Pakistan and the U.S. to not obsess over that point.[1]
The U.S. cannot win this war, not with the level of involvement that the American people will tolerate. The GOP will fight any taxes to help pay for an expanded war.[2] We cannot get enough troops into Afghanistan without a draft (and without greatly expanding basic training to make it into a weight reduction clinic).
What remains to be discusses is how and when we are going to leave.
We were at this point in 1968 during the Vietnam War. Roughly 50% of the Americans killed in that war died as the Nixon Administration dithered and floundered for an exit.
We should try to do better this time around.
[1]The NY Times has an editorial today that calls on Pakistan to end its "double game". That the editorial writers in the Times even think that the Taliban will be crushed demonstrates the Times's editorial board's usual lack of grounding in reality.
[2] The deficit hawks in the GOP have closed their eyes to the fact that both of the Bush Wars have been paid for entirely by deficit spending. For the first time since the Revolution, the Federal government has made not even a fig leaf of levying any form of war taxation.
3 comments:
All of these documents are at least 8 months old, so the nonsense about how it "endangers our troops" is just that, nonsense. If our troops are still in the same goddamn positions that they were in eight months ago, we're fucked anyhow.
The only way to "win" in Afghanistan is the Tamerlane way -- extermination of entire populations, i.e., genocide. Tamerlane was the last person to successfully conquer Afghanistan back in 1370 or so, and his descendants the Moghuls then swarmed down from Afghanistan in the early 1500s and conquered all of Pakistan and Northern India. But Tamerlane had some advantages we don't have. Tamerlane had no logistics tail -- none. He fed his armies by seizing the food, weapons, and supplies of the peoples he conquered, who no longer needed it because they were, err, dead. Tamerlane was not put off by squeamish notions of killing women and children. If a province defied Tamerlane, he simply turned it into an unpeopled wasteland without bothering to try to kill only combatants. He was by all accounts possessed of an amount of viciousness that make even the Taliban look like Boy Scouts, an amount of viciousness that no army of a would-be democracy could ever contenance because it would repulse too many taxpayers.
In short: Unless we turn the U.S. into an empire led by a vicious warlord like Tamerlane, there's no point being in Afghanistan. The place can't be conquered short of doing it the Tamerlane way. Temporarily occupied, yes. Conquered, no.
'Nuff said on that, we already knew all the above, just felt like ranting...
- Badtux the History Penguin
Hell, even the Soviets and the Germans couldn't generate that degree of viciousness. Though the Germans did come close, at times.
The Nazis invented the gas chambers because it was a more "humane" way of killing Jews compared to just shooting them or chopping off their heads. Great humanitarians, yessiree. Tamerlane would have just handed axes to his soldiers and said "Kill them all." And left piles of stinking bodies in his wake.
Compared to Tamerlane, everybody who's invaded Afghanistan in the years since has been the warmaking equivalent of Dennis Kucinich. Even the Soviets.
War is hell. But Tamerlane's brand of war was a special kind of hell... maybe the Khmer Rouge did that kind of war in Cambodia. But they're the only folks I can think of who were anywhere as vicious as Tamerlane.
- Badtux the War Penguin
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