The U.S.’s top general in Afghanistan on Tuesday gave a sobering assessment of the country’s deteriorating security situation as America winds down its so-called “forever war.”
Gen. Austin S. Miller said the rapid loss of districts around the country to the Taliban — several with significant strategic value — is worrisome. He also cautioned that the militias deployed to help the beleaguered national security forces could lead the country into civil war.
Is there anyone out there who seriously thought that, at least since 2004, that it would end any other way? If there was ever a hope that it wouldn't, that ended when the Bush Administration declared victory and starved Afghanistan of resources so they could prosecute their misbegotton war with Iraq. Afghanistan became a kleptocracy, one that was funded by pallets of cash. Government officials and generals on a public salary of a few hundred dollars a month built massive mansions.
Afghanistan has consistently ranked as one of the most corrupt nations on Earth. The army and police had tens of thousands of "ghost soldiers," men who were on the payroll, but whose pay ended up in the pockets of officers. Virtually every construction project or civil works project was riddled with graft.
Afghanistan, like a certain other southeast Asian nation, was a country that floated on the largess of the American treasury and the blood of American soldiers.
This ending was carved in stone and highlighted with blood a very long time ago.
I respectfully submit that anyone who believed otherwise was either under orders to espouse the company line or has the brains of a tuber.
You didn't really think we were actually leaving, did you?
ReplyDeletesigh
ReplyDeleteI just hope this doesn't turn out to be yet another case of the US backstabbing the locals who helped us, and are now in danger of being murdered.
ReplyDeleteMagical thinking: This time it's different.
ReplyDeleteThere are some 3 thousand years of A-stan being a hotbed of internecine guerilla civil warfare.... briefly and occasionally interrupted by outsiders butting in....whereupon those incredibly skilled guerilla fighters unite (somewhat) against the outsiders....and hand them their ass.
Nobody but Genghis Khan and the Sikhs have ever conquered it...who did it with mountains of skulls...and even then their reign was brief. Anyone with sense of a turnip leaves them the eff alone. Getting involved in that country is like medieval medicine: you get bleed until you die.
We tried the magic beans of democracy in Vietnam, in Iraq and A-stan....and lately we're having trouble keeping it alive right here at home.
We handed Bagram back to the Afghans and apparently the looters have already overrun the place. They've been waiting for us to leave the whole time. What is twenty years to them?
ReplyDelete-Doug in Sugar Pine