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.

I Don't Know the Answer to This Question

When one man, Abdul Hanan, complained that “more people are dying,” First Lt. Jake Weldon told him that the Taliban “take away your schools, they take away your hospitals; we bring those things.”

Mr. Hanan remained doubtful. Some people have fled the area, fearful of violence since the Marines have arrived. He asked, “So you want to build us a hospital or school, but if nobody is here, what do we do?”

Read the whole article. The Marines have a near-impossible task in Afghanistan, given the size of Helmand Province.[1] Hamid Karzai, the Mayor of Kabul President of Afghanistan, has been on the job for nearly eight years (he was installed by the Bush Administration until he won the election five years ago). There is no meaningful local security force in Afghanistan, leaving it to NATO and the Americans to supply security.[2]

The problem there, of course, is that Afghans have a long history of limited willingness to tolerate the presence of foreign forces. The Taliban's leadership are a brutal bunch, but they are Pashtuns, which make up over 40% of the population.

The West (NATO and the U.S. commands) has been in Afghanistan for nearly eight years. It can be argued that the window for a favorable outcome has come and gone. We cannot flood the country with troops. Afghanistan has far rougher terrain, few paved roads and is nearly 50% larger than Iraq and we have far, far fewer troops in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

According to Unicef, the literacy rate for young people (15-24) in Afghanistan is 49% for men, 18% for women; the corresponding statistics for Iraq are 89% and 81%. Faced with widespread illiteracy (the numbers are undoubtedly worse in the remote areas that are under Taliban control), the geniuses running this war only now have figured out that they should use radio stations to try to reach the Afghanis.

The Taliban have the support of enough people to win an insurgency. They have a place of refuge, where western forces cannot go. And they have funding, both from the growing of opium and the sale of heroin into the wholesale black market and from elements of the Pakistani intelligence community. If we cannot break at least one of the three legs of their insurgency, we can stay and pour in more troops and all we are doing is running up the butcher's bill, for they will outlast us.

And therein lies the answer to Mr. Hanan's question.

[1]I saw "near-impossible" because the Marines have a well-deserved reputation of accomplishing the impossible.

[2]The blame for the failure to build up any sort of meaningful indigenous security forces rests with the Bush Administration, which starved the effort in Afghanistan in order to go on Bush's Most Glorious Iraqi Adventure.

One Reason Why Afghanistan Is So Hard.

They have little reason to trust us. This is from an e-mail which I received this morning:

We have a problem with our government that arose from the GOP and is now structural within the Federal government: There is always money for killing people and for buying the gear with which to wage war. There is very little money for helping people.

A lot of people complained with Bush41 turned his back on Afghanistan after the Soviets left. (Still more complained when Bush41 and Clinton approached Eastern Europe with an attitude of "we won, you lost", forgetting that most cultures in the world have memories longer than the mayfly-length memory of Americans.)

Much of the shit in Afghanistan now flows from Bush41's refusal to help. In spite of whatever we promise to do in Afghanistan, our enemies can point to our actions following the withdrawal of the Red Army and say: "The Americans promised to help you then and they left. Why trust them now?"

And they are right about that. If the Taliban were to magically disappear from the face of the Earth, we would leave and let Afghanistan descend, once more, into Warlordistan. The GOP and the nativist wing of the Democratic Party would scuttle any attempts for meaningful long-term aid to Afghanistan, absent an existing security threat.

Until we deal with our own problem, we stand little chance of ever prevailing.

Amateurs Worry About Tactics, Professionals Worry About Logistics

So let's talk logistics.

President Obama has ordered roughly two more divisions into Afghanistan. I'm having a rough time trying to figure out what the rate of supply is for an Army division in combat.

A US Army division in Europe during WW2 consumed about 600+ tons of goods a day, which was ten times or so of the rate of consumption from WW1. I've seen reports that 1,000 tons a day is a rough working figure.

A standard 40' shipping container can hold 30 tons (short tons, about 26.7 metric tons) of cargo. A thousand tons of stuff would take 34 containers a day. That may include fuel, so we can cut the number of containers and add in tanker trucks, probably a lot more tanker trucks to support the mechanized vehicles and helicopters. Two divisions, at least 70 more trucks of stuff have to arrive in Afghanistan each day and my wholly unsupported guess would be maybe 100 truckloads. That's just to support the additional guys, you can quadruple that for the amount of cargo needed to support all of the foreign forces and we are also supplying the Afghan Army, so maybe quintuple that.

That is a shitload of stuff.

Go look at a map of South and Central Asia. See if you can find how the stuff gets to Afghanistan. There are few options to move that amount of stuff other than by ship to Karachi and then by truck into Afghanistan, a supply line that runs more or less right through territory disputed by Islamic militants. Afghanistan has no railroad network of note, but, as experience from back in the days of T.E. Lawrence has shown, railroads are very vulnerable to demolition devices. The trucking supply line has been attacked by militants before and most assuredly will be again.

Stuff cannot be shipped in through Iran. It may be possible to send supplies through Russia and the neighboring `stans, but the price extracted by those nations may be too high and the transshipment of war supplies through Russia may be politically untouchable, even for the Russian government.

Even if all that stuff can be sent without sporadic interdiction by the militants, there is still the issue that we are propping up arguably the most corrupt national government in the world, a government that will assuredly fall as quickly as did the government of President Najibullah after the Red Army left.

Pakistan, regardless of how much our government prods them, is still playing a lesser version of the Great Game with India. The object of their version of the Great Game, as it was between the British and Russian Empires, is control of Afghanistan. Pakistan fought three formal wars with India (all of which they lost) and has been sponsoring a sputtering guerrilla war over Kashmir for decades.

Elements of Pakistan's intelligence service have always seen the Taliban as a counterweight to India. They may be closer to recognizing that the militants recognize no borders whatsoever and that the militants now see Pakistan itself as a prize to be won. Pakistan's offensive in South Waziristan has apparently done little other than force the militants to relocate. As any study of any insurgency-type war will show, measuring how much territory a uniformed army claims to control is a false metric. In any event, the Pakistanis are concerned about their own militants, not the Afghan Taliban.

You have little chance of winning a counter-insurgency war if your enemy has a place where they can regroup, rearm, retrain and where you cannot go. That is the situation now. If Pakistan will not commit to helping to defeat the Afghan Taliban, then it matters little if the President sends in 30,000 more troops or 100,000.

With Respect, I Submit That You're Unclear on the Concept

A father of a slain Marine is criticizing the rules of engagement that were implemented to reduce civilian casualties.

As [John Bernard] sees it, the U.S. was right to go to war in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but eight years later the focus has shifted to counterinsurgency instead of hunting down the enemy. Marines are trained to "kill people and break things," not to be police officers and nation-builders, he says.

The Taliban "are tenacious and you have to fight them with the same level of tenacity," Bernard said. "If you're going to try to go over there as a peacekeeper, you're going to get your butt handed to you, and that's what's going on right now."

We should not let grieving fathers determine the rules of engagement for the same reason that we do not let grieving fathers carry out executions of those who murdered their children.

Going in with heavy forces and brutal tactics will not work in Afghanistan. The Russians went in with 100,000 soldiers and heavy artillery and air support. They dropped millions of little "toe-popper" mines on every trail and donkey track they could find. The Russians had a puppet government in place. The Russian Empire was next door to Afghanistan, they did not have to send materiel half-way around the world to supply their war. At the risk of belaboring a point, it did not turn out so well for them.

It is by no means certain that even if we and our allies send 80,000 more troops into Afghanistan that it will be successful. The government in Afghanistan is corrupt from top to bottom. President Hamid Karzai's re-election win (even if a run-off is held) has been steeped in electoral theft, a level of theft that would make even the folks at Diebold blush.

We have been in Afghanistan for eight years, most of which the previous Administration pissed away because they did what they always did: Do a job less than half-assed and call it victory. We are in a war where the population is not behind us and the local government is a huge cesspool of corruption, from the cop on the street and the local administrators right up to the top man's family.

We have seen this movie before. It is time to cut a deal, the same sort of deal that Richard Nixon cut in 1973 and leave while we still can. The Chickenhawks of the Right will gnash their teeth for the next few decades, but as many of us have pointed out, they haven't felt strongly enough about this to go serve themselves.

End this war.

Dumb Fucking Mercs

Erik Prince, founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, is still calling to replace U.S. troops in Afghanistan with private military contractors. In an interview on MSNBC on Tuesday, Prince pointed to the East India Company in India during British colonization as a source of emulation for U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

First off, if that would have worked in Afghanistan, one would have reasonably expected that Her Majesty's Government would have done that when they installed Shah Shuja in 1839. Indeed, that first war between Afghanistan and the Brits was, on the British side, largely overseen by the British East India Company. So if colonizing Afghanistan was possible, they had centuries' worth of expertise.

Second, I really doubt that there is much support for giving Afghanistan to a fucking greedy mercenary. I have little doubt that they would fuck things up, even worse than now exists, and then a certain mercenary commander would go whining to his sister, a high government official, to try and get a bailout by the American military.

Third, I suppose I can think of little that would inflame support for the Taliban more than turning over the conduct of the war to the Butcher of Nisour Square. (Other than turning it over to the IDF.)

No Blood for Lithium?

If you thought that we were leaving Afghanistan anytime soon, think again:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

Russia not far to the north, China to the east, no, we're not leaving Afghanistan.

I have to wonder, though, if the New York Times has rehired Judith Miller, since they seem to be once again carrying water for the Pentagon.

Afghanistan: Let's Declare Victory and Leave

(Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been holding secret talks with Taliban officials in the hope of persuading them to make peace with his government, his spokesman told Reuters on Tuesday, confirming a New York Times report.

And there's more:

Increasingly vexed by Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, Mr. Obama is trying to figure out what form a residual force might take after the bulk of American troops leave by December and what would happen if no Americans stayed behind at all. The debate has rekindled some of the tensions within the administration that divided it in its early days. ... Dysfunction reigns in Kabul. American aid dollars have disappeared. Terrorism suspects may be released from Afghan prisons. And Mr. Karzai has refused to sign an agreement for a residual force beyond December, and instead has been fruitlessly contacting the Taliban about peace talks that have yet to materialize.

While Washington has long been frustrated by Mr. Karzai, what little patience remains has ebbed in recent weeks as he blamed American forces for terrorist attacks on civilians, threatened to release prisoners deemed dangerous by the international coalition and likened the United States to a “colonial power.”

That the government of Afghanistan is corrupt from the top to the bottom has been documented ad nauseum. Afghanistan is a kleptocracy on a scale so vast that even Tsar Vladimir III is saying: "Guys. Really?"

That this is the outcome that we are seeing should have not come as a surprise to anyone. Trying to "fix" Afghanistan was a high-risk endeavor from the start.

It is far past time to leave.

Same Tune, Different War

Cue up the Orchestra of Optimism:

The recent reports circulating in Washington’s national security establishment about the Afghan battleground of Marja show glimmerings of progress: bazaars are open, some 1,000 children are in school, and a new (and only) restaurant even serves goat curry and kebabs.

In Kandahar, NATO officials say that American and Afghan forces continue to rout the Taliban. In new statistics offered by American commanders in Kabul, Special Operations units have killed 339 midlevel Taliban commanders and 949 of the group’s foot soldiers in the past three months alone. At the Pentagon, the draft of a war assessment to be submitted to Congress this month cites a shift in momentum in some areas of the country away from the insurgency.

But as a new White House review of President Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan gets under way, the rosy signs have opened an intense debate at the Defense Department, the White House, the State Department and the intelligence agencies over what they really mean.

Right. Anybody who doesn't remember the optimistic statements as the Iraq spun deeper into chaos between 2004 and 2007 hasn't been paying attention. Of course, some people do know this:

A former C.I.A. official with longtime experience in Afghanistan said that the recent statements about American progress in Afghanistan reminded him of what was sometimes written about the Russians before they began withdrawing from Afghanistan in defeat in 1988, when they had been at war there for nearly 10 years. “I don’t find many people I talk to who really believe any of this,” he said.

Governments always want to sell a rosy vision of the war's progress to their people, whether the government is a democracy, a monarchy or a dictatorship.

One might recall what Emperor Hirohito said to his nation after almost every Japanese city was burned to the ground by fire raids, the seas blockaded by mines and submarines, and two cities nuked: "The war has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage." Or one might recall the "Five O'clock Follies", where PR flacks for MACV kept handing out meaningless statistics of how many VC and NVA soldiers had been killed and how many tons of bombs had been dropped. All of which didn't mean a thing.

If we are not careful in Afghanistan, we are going to suffer a "light is at the end of the tunnel" moment, as happened in the Vietnam War.

Cue the Helicopters

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.

So Much Trump to Choose From

Any of these topics would be worth a full-on post in their own right.

Let's lead off with Trump's inability to grasp one of the principles of democracy: A free and independent press. His campaign is denying press credentials to non-sycophantic news outlets. Let's be clear about this: Trump regards "unfair coverage" as "stories which displease His Orange-Haired Mightiness". He truly does not understand the role of press in politics. Trump thinks that the reporters should all be licking his boots. He would have hated H.L. Mencken.

Of course, Trump blames the media for doing such egregious things as reporting what he's said. No doubt that Fox News and his online echo chambers will start parroting that line.

Next:  We all know that Trump is surrounded by Russian stooges.

But now, it appears that Trump has surrounded himself with idiots:

Donald Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson said on Saturday the US' military effort in Afghanistan "was Obama's war." ... "If you want to go way back, we can look at the troop surge, and after 2007 al Qaeda was essentially in ashes," Pierson said. "It was Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who then destroyed the entire rollout by wanting to pull out early... That is the reason why ISIS is a global issue."

Then Pierson pivoted to the Afghanistan theater.

"Remember, we weren't even in Afghanistan by this time. Barack Obama went into Afghanistan, creating another problem," Pierson said.

Blackwell asked her to clarify, and she said, "That was Obama's war, yes.

So much fail in so little time. The Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq, which mandated the 2011 pullout, was negotiated and signed by George W. Bush. Furthermore, American troops have been in Afghanistan for nearly fifteen years, beginning in 2001. The presence of troops in varying numbers has been continuous since then.

But hey, isn't it a bit of a stretch to expect anyone in the Trump campaign to have even a minimal understanding of those inconvenient things called "facts"?

Next:   Trump appeared at a rally in Connecticut yesterday. It's been 28 years since the state went for a Republican presidential candidate. Other than Fairfield, CT being an easy trip from his home, why the fuck would he waste his time there? Why wouldn't he hold a rally in a state where he has a chance of winning?

Either Trump is too lazy/arrogant to bother to mount a real campaign or he is, at this point, just phoning it in.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Militants blasted their way into two transport terminals in Pakistan on Sunday and torched more than 160 vehicles destined for U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan, in the biggest assault yet on a vital military supply line, officials said. The U.S. military said its losses in the raid near the northwestern city of Peshawar would have only a "minimal" impact on its operations against resurgent Taliban-led militants in Afghanistan.

Right. A large majority of the supplies into Afghanistan come through Pakistan, for reasons obvious to anyone who cares to look at a map. Karachi is the closest seaport to Afghanistan. The next neighbor to Afghanistan which has a relatively convenient seaport is Iran, so forget that idea. Any other feasible route is going to require very long overland routes by train or truck through either China or Russia. (Yeah. Let's ship containers of sensitive military equipment through Russia or China. That's a terrific idea.)

Going after the supply train is a time-honored tactic.

Whither Afghanistan?

The U.S. Army general picked to lead U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan warns the security situation there is deteriorating despite a valiant effort by Afghan forces.

The reasons are slightly unpalatable. The Bush Administration established (or allowed) a government of kleptocrats. The Obama Administration has been either unwilling or unable to change that. Afghanistan is the third most-corrupt nation on the planet.

Like the Iraqi army, the Afghan army has been plagued by officers who have cared more about lining their own pockets than fielding an effective army. Their army has ranks filled with ghost soldiers, names on a roster that don't correspond to a living person, so that the officers can pocket their pay. Equipment has been stolen and sold, often to the enemy. Public improvement projects have been repeatedly built with shoddy materials; the contractors skim the difference between what was spec'd and what was built-- often paying off the officials who awarded the contracts.

Because it would seem to be easy as pie to obtain a post in the army by bribery, the enemy has had little trouble in salting the Afghan army with agents who wait for an auspicious time and then slay their supposed comrades, superiors and advisers.

By invading Afghanistan, the neocons who were then in charge thought that they were striking a mortal blow against the Taliban and al Qaeda. But what they were really doing was punching a tar-baby. And now we're pretty well stuck there.

Unless the Pakistanis finally get tired of letting the Taliban operate within their borders, there will be no change to the situation. There is no sign of the Pakistanis ever doing that. When the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan rolls around, I predict that things will be no better than there were at the 5th, 10th or 15th anniversaries.

And, unless we follow the advice of Se. George Aiken, we'll still be there.

When Skull Thickness is Measured in Meters; Army Edition

A former commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan said Wednesday that corruption, not the Taliban, is the worst threat to the future of the war-torn country.

"For too long we focused our attention solely on the Taliban as the existential threat to Afghanistan," Ret. Gen. John Allen told a Senate subcommittee. "They are an annoyance compared to the scope and the magnitude of corruption."

No fucking shit, Sherlock.

You can find stories on corruption in the Afghan government going back to the first days after we dropped Our Man Hamid into the job as president in 2001. Afghanistan is tied for the ranking of Most Corrupt Nation on Earth for 2013. In 2007, Afghanistan ranked higher, only the 9th most corrupt nation on the globe.

But now we have a retired (as in "not required to stick to the official talking points") general who is admitting that Afghanistan is corrupt.

Ye Gods, what's next? An admission that one can get wet while standing outside during a rainstorm? What the fuck did he think was going to happen when we were flying in pallets of Benjamins to pay for things? Did anyone not notice the large mansions in Kabul that had been built by civil servants who were officially paid a couple hundred bucks a month? There are news story after news story on Afghan corruption, going back over a decade. If you were to print them all out, the word count would rival a Russian novel.

And all this is news to an Army general and to the dodderheads in the Senate?

The bind moggles. I can't even come close to the level of snark that is called for on this one. This is a job for a professional.

Afghanistan (and Firefox)

What with opening and closing oodles of tabs in Firefox, I've forgotten where I saw the link to this article about Afghanistan:

"We" are not winning in Afghanistan. Talk of crushing the Taliban seems as bleakly unrealistic as it has ever been. Indeed, when the President of Afghanistan tries to talk to Mullah Omar – one of America's principal targets in this wretched war – you know the writing is on the wall. And even Mullah Omar didn't want to talk to Mr Karzai.

The failure of this war is all Chimpy's. The Taliban had been chased out, but rather than build on a battlefield success, Bush turned his back on Afghanistan to go fight another war. It is as though the cops, having chased the burglars away from a jewelry store, leave the area without making sure the store is secured.

Smoking Crack in Afghanistan

The Pentagon wants to buy 10,000 "blast-proof" trucks for use in Afghanistan. The trucks have to be smaller and lighter than an MRAP,just as blast-resistant, capable of off-road operation, and they want them by last Tuesday.

I suspect somebody is seriously smoking hash and, at times like this, I really miss Lurch at Main & Central. He'd have been all over this.

I'm not a vehicle expert, but I've seen stories that explained that any blast-resistant vehicle has to have a minimum ground clearance of three feet in order to stand a chance of surviving a mine blast. High ground clearance means lessened stability. You can only lighten armor so much before it becomes ineffective, which is why a standard cop-type vest can be defeated by a Tokarev or a rifle round.

But even if the DoD gets those armored trucks, there is no thought as to how they are going to get there or how the additional troops will be supplied. I doubt very much if we can supply over 100,000 troops long-term by air cargo alone.

We had a window of opportunity to at least stand a chance of stabilizing Afghanistan. That window was slammed shut by the Bush Administration, which took the resources needed to secure Afghanistan and poured them into Iraq. Because of the criminal neglect of the Afghan War by George W. Bush, the Taliban now arguably control much of the country, they control much of the bordering provinces in Pakistan and it is possible that the Taliban may end up with both countries.

The Taliban was able to establish itself in Afghanistan because of the official policy of "benign neglect" established by President George H.W. Bush, so there is a weird bit of symmetry in that father and son managed to lose the same nation to the Taliban.

Only the consequences this time around appear to be ever so much more severe.

Afghanistan: A Reason (or an Excuse) to Bug Out

Abu Muqawama on September 8th:

Before the Afghan elections, every assessment you could read and every opinion you could solicit from policy-makers was the same: the worst outcome of the Afghan elections would be one that, in either the first or second round of voting, delivered the election to Hamid Karzai with a narrow margin of victory amidst wide-spread allegations of corruption and ballot box-stuffing. The overwhelming fear was of "another Iran" -- only with our fingerprints all over it.

The worst-case scenario now appears to have been realized.

And then, a day later:

When people look back on the Afghanistan war, this might be the moment when historians will judge we should have cut the cord on the Afghan government. If we believe Generals McChrystal and Petraeus, and we believe a counterinsurgency campaign to represent our best chance of success in Afghanistan, then we have a big problem. Because if we believe what we ourselves have learned about counterinsurgency campaigns, we understand that we cannot be successful in one if the host nation government is seen as increasingly illegitimate -- and that's what the Karzai government is.

Add to that this article which suggests that things are getting dicey between the Taliban and al Qaeda, and we may have something.

We may have an exit being marked.

Both sides would have to throw their erstwhile allies under the bus: We have to abandon Karzai and the Taliban has to abandon al Qaeda and any support for other terrorist groups, such as the home-grown ones in Pakistan that have made the Swat Valley a mess and who are trying to gin up a war between Pakistan and India.

Of course, it won't be that overt. The Taliban would likely feed good targeting information to the CIA. A series of Hellfire missiles will complete the decapitation of al Qaeda. Some heavily-laundered payments will find their way into Taliban-controlled accounts. 200 years ago, an emissary would bring a basket to Kabul with the heads of bin Ladin and al-Zawahiri inside, but the drones can do the dirty work nowadays.

Most of Karzai's senior staff have stolen enough money by now that they can have a leisurely retirement in some French city. Karzai will either stay behind, proclaiming that he is the president of Afghanistan and he'll be executed, or he can leave with the American troops and take a "wingnut welfare" no-show job with the Heritage Foundation.[1]

This could work.

[1] Of course, the Republicans will bleat for the next fifty or so years that "the Democrats sold out Afghanistan", but fuck them.

All Hail President Thieu Karzai!

Afghanistan’s last presidential challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, dropped out of the race on Sunday, accusing the government of profound corruption and electoral fraud even as the Obama administration rallied around President Hamid Karzai.

Where have we seen this before? Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to 1971:

In 1971, [President Nguyễn Văn] Thiệu [of South Vietnam] ran for re-election, but his reputation for corruption made his political opponents believe the race would be fixed, and they declined to run. As the only candidate, Thiệu was thus easily re-elected, receiving a suspiciously high 94% of the vote on an 87% turn-out.

The Karzai government is wholly corrupt and from what I have read, nobody, other than maybe Karzai himself, contests that point.

In trying to deal with Afghanistan, our government, going back decades, has chosen to work with the religious zealots, the thuggish and the corrupt. We have backed brutal warlords and heroin traffickers. And now we are saddled with an illegitimate government in Afghanistan, a point that the enemy will emphasize time and time and time again.

It did not have to be this way. The Taliban were hugely unpopular, they brutalized the population and executed people at a rate that would make even a Texas governor blush.[1] The Afghan people largely celebrated the fact that the Taliban were kicked out in 2001. We had a chance to replace them with a government that could have delivered an improvement in the lives of Afghanis.

But we failed. Republicans were in control and they famously disdained nation-building. The Administration of George W. Bush, just like that of his father, let Afghanistan to its own devices, providing token aid and minimal security assistance while they focused on their next clusterfuck of a war. Bush used 9-11 as an excuse to foist a lot of the responsibility off onto NATO, an organization that was designed only to repel a Soviet invasion of western Europe and which had no real experience in out-of-theater operations. NATO had neither the troops (many nations sent only Fobbits) nor the funding to do it right.

We could have. But we didn't and, to my mind, the window of opportunity to do it right for a reasonable expenditure of blood and treasure passed by 2005.

And now we are stuck in another quagmire of a war.

[1]OK, that may not be fair to the Taliban. The present and the former governors of that state would have been creaming their suits if they could have executed 3,000 people a year.

It's Your War, Now, Donnie

President* Trump put forward on Monday a long-awaited strategy for resolving the nearly 16-year-old conflict in Afghanistan, but he declined to specify either the number of troops that would be committed, or the conditions by which he would judge the success of their mission there.

In a nationally televised prime-time speech to troops at Fort Myer, Va., Mr. Trump said there would be no “blank check” for the American engagement in Afghanistan. But in announcing his plan, Mr. Trump deepened American involvement in a military mission that has bedeviled his predecessors and that he once called futile.

"Trump's plan" makes the war his war.

Smoke, mirrors and few, if any ideas. "Kill the enemy." Doing that without trying to minimize civilian casualties is a fairly terrible idea. "Rein in corruption in Afghanistan".... might as well go order the tide to reverse itself. The only Afghan regime since 1979 that was able to make inroads against governmental corruption was the Taliban, because they did it by the simple expedient of bribe-takers got shot.

Afghanistan is one of the most corrupt nations on the planet. It has been for a very long time.

And, to be blunt about it, the idea that Trump is going to come out against corruption is laughable.

"The Only Thing New in the World is the History You Don't Know."

Harry S. Truman said that. I remembered that quotation when I read this story in today's New York Times about the U.S. hiring out security to warlords in Afghanistan.

Is there anyone in Fort Fumble or in the White House who has any frakking idea whatsoever who they are dealing with over there? Do they know anything the recent history of Afghanistan?

Those are serious questions.

For if they did, they would know that Afghanistan was effectively carved up by a series of warlords after the Soviet Army left in 1989. The national government controlled only the area around Kabul. The warlords, hell, any group which had some AK-47s and could set up barricades on a highway did so and extorted "taxes" and "tolls" from travelers and truckers. The warlords' militias battled each other for influence and control of territory.

It was because of the rampant corruption and anarchy of the post-Soviet warlord era that the Taliban arose (with the help of Pakistan's ISI) and why such a group of brutal medieval religious goons were welcomed by the people of Afghanistan.

And, because our own government is aiding and abetting a rebirth of Warlordistan, w/they are sowing the seeds for a return to power by the Taliban.

Harry Truman was right.