From the "We're Losing That War, Too" Files

In all the news about the freezing up of the credit markets and so on and so forth, capped with McCain's little grandstand maneuver of "I'm suspending my campaign ... nevermind", this story didn't get much traction:

Remember that little war in Afghanistan, the one that Bush was so proud that he "won?" It's not going so well. In fact, it is going so badly that there is a new National Intelligence Estimate that calls the situation in Afghanistan "grim." (H/T to C&L)

Of course, that NIE officially won't see the light of day.

There were two ways that war could have worked out. One would have been a massive punitive raid, pull out, wait to see whoever got power and then backed them with the provisio that they no longer hosted al Qaeda. The second would be to go all in, with enough troops to guarantee security and then to rebuild the country, an endeavor that would have taken a decade, at least, and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Even that might not have been enough, for the U.S. did not have the hundreds of thousands of soldiers it would have taken to fully occupy the country. Even the Soviet Union couldn't do that, and they were just next-door.

The Bush Administration chose a middle course, neither guaranteeing security nor providing enough aid to make a real difference. Less than 18 months after the Taliban fled, the President of Afghanistan had to go to Washington to plead with the Bush Administration and the Congress that they not forget about Afghanistan.

Without enough forces on the ground to guarantee security, the Taliban came back.

Without enough forces on the ground to keep the Taliban out, the undermanned ground forces had to resort to air power, to dropping large bombs on villages, with the all-too-predictable outcome of "collateral damage," which is mil-speak for "killing lots of civilians." Killing civilians is a losing strategy in a counter-insurgency campaign, unless you are willing to kill almost all of them (which we are not).

I, for one, do not see how Bush's Afghan Adventure can end in a good way at this point. We do not have the troops, whether our own or allied, to pour into there. We do not have the money to do a serious rebuilding of the nation, not when we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year in Iraq and now to bail out those greedy fucks in the financial sector. even if we were to send in the troops and development aid necessary, too many people now despise the U.S. because of the over-reliance on air power to attack the Taliban guerrillas.

Afghanistan should have signs by border: "Abandon All Hope, All Armies That Enter Here." That country has been the grave of imperial armies for many centuries. As far as I know, the last foreign general who was able to conquer and hold Afghanistan was Ghengis Khan. Since then, Afghanistan apparently has been ruled by various groups or clans of local origin and those foreign nations that were foolish enough to send armed troops rued that decision.

The result in Afghanistan is a clear rebuke to the Bush Administration's feeling that they were immune from the forces of history. They are not and as a result, we are reliving the experiences of the British and the Russians.

Heckuvajob, Chimpy.