Obama's Failed Mission in Afghanistan
The announcement by Leon Panetta to reporters while on the way to the 2012 Munich Security Conference that the U.S. is looking to end combat operations in Afghanistan by the middle of next year may have come as a surprise to our NATO allies, also en route to the gathering, but no one looking at the failed military and political ambitions of both the Obama and the Bush administrations in the war-torn nation can reasonably have expected anything else.
As far back as November of last year, senior officials in the administration have signaled that the President was exploring a speedier transition of our troops' combat role to training Afghans to provide for their own defense of their dubious government. Tentative plans were said to have been made for President Obama to unveil his revised strategy before the annual NATO summit in May.
Even before the signals and the rest from the White House, there were key developments which made it clear that to continue, either the President would need to undergo another ambitious campaign to rally allies away from their almost certain plans to turn away from their part in the U.S. folly, or the administration and Pentagon would have to devise a way to overcome the mounting problems with logistics, getting supplies to the troops, and the apparent outer limits of the President's belief in what the military forces can accomplish on the offensive against a scattered and determined insurgency.
As if to underscore the folly of their escalated military offensive, U.S. troops have all but withdrawn from Kandahar, the Pentagon's self-proclaimed center of their terror war in Afghanistan, in a posture of retreat which began last October. Under the qualifying language of 'transition' and 'handover', the administration hopes to determinately pull the rug out from under whatever goals and ambitions propelled the President to adopt Bush's dubious defense of the Karzai regime, double down on the occupation, and try to effect a knockout blow to the Taliban resistance.
There can be no more resounding admission of the failure of the NATO offensive against the Taliban than this speedier exit. Our closest ally in the mission, Britain, must have been thinking the same thing when they decided in December to begin planning an earlier exit for their own beleaguered forces.
It's not very likely the U.S.-led NATO will ever be able to emphasize their 'political' aims over the destructive and destabilizing impact on the communities of Afghanistan from the devastating, U.S.-led military offensive. Through the force of our weapons - outside the limits that our constitution proscribes for the use of our military defenses - we're representing a corrupt regime and imposing it on the Afghan population, especially in regions which were not engaged in elections that we claim gives the new government legitimacy.
Even our would-be puppet, Karzai, has bristled and balked at the prospect of more destructive NATO conquest in Afghanistan on his behalf. The once-willing accomplice has seen the political writing on the wall and appears to be looking to settle for the assumption of power wherever the Taliban would allow. His reported outburst at the beginning of the Kandahar campaign, threatening to 'join the Taliban', was a open-warning to the U.S. that he recognizes there is no 'political solution' that can be reasonably carved out of the devastating, withering military campaign.
The military is quietly hoping we don't notice that they didn't actually transform their Afghanistan misadventure from the leveling of homes, the taking of resistors lives, and the destruction of farmland and livestock into the nation-building success that they intended for the mission to highlight.
In fact, the UN has reported the civilian death toll in Afghanistan was at its deadliest last year with 3,021 said killed, despite the presence and activity of their would-be protectors. The planned drawdown is not born out of any political success or victory, but out of a certain realization that there will never be a defining end to the resistant violence there which will transform the country politically.
The only course left for a stalemated and faltering U.S. invasion force is to pull back to the capital from their offensive positions in the south of the country and stage a desperate, last-stand defense of their propped-up, yet insolent regime.
The premise behind President Obama's initial 'surge' of U.S. troops into Bush's Afghanistan quagmire was to 'push back' resisting Afghans enough to allow some sort of political reconciliation. That effort is predictably bogged down by the difficulty in getting the disparate tribes and factions to accept the central authority NATO has set up in Kabul. There's even more difficulty in getting their installed government to accommodate the interests and demands of the resisting rest of the war-split nation.
The U.S. military offensive against the Taliban was an abject failure in achieving the goals behind the offensive. What happened to the promised ability of the U.S.-led NATO forces to protect the residents of Afghanistan against Taliban blowback from their invasion? The ability to protect innocent civilians from NATO attacks, or insulate them from the negative consequences and effects of the NATO military advance? The ability of NATO to provide and deliver the services and amenities of the central government to the displaced residents? Nonexistent.
An October Pentagon report to Congress also indicated that Afghan civilians are dying in record numbers. "Civilian casualties -- most caused by the Taliban -- reached an all-time high this summer with approximately 450 civilians killed in July," it said. "Attacks using homemade bombs, or IEDs, also reached an all-time high this past summer, with about 750 IED detonations recorded in July."
Predictably, resisting Afghans have avoided the areas where U.S. troops have masses and have scattered their violence around the capital and elsewhere, killing former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani just last September.
Soon, our military will have the bulk of our forces hunkered down around Kabul, building dirt fortresses with guard towers to surround our unpopular junta, just to cling to the appearance of progress; just to 'stay the course' in the months before the elections as President Obama postures as 'strong' and capable on defense.
President Obama and his republican Pentagon holdovers led our nation to this retreat. They're prepared to tolerate the continued deaths of our our soldiers as our troops eventually hunker down there; tolerate the thousands drastically wounded; waiting for some declared 'victory' to materialize out of our their desperate defense of their own lives against the Afghans that the President and the Pentagon claim we're liberating.
We've been in Afghanistan longer than our country fought WWII. No matter to our leaders, though. 'Freedom's' cause for occupation supporters is nothing more than a repression of one group or another within the sovereign nation we invaded into accepting our military forces' false authority over them; and cynical manipulation and control of the Afghan government Karzai lords over by the intimidation of our military occupation.
Our nation's possessive militarism in Afghanistan and elsewhere has divided our nation from within, and, from without against our restive allies. The escalated occupation has ignored whatever Afghans might regard as freedom in our insistence that their country be used as a barrier against the terror forces we've aggravated and enhanced in Pakistan. Yet, the soldiers the President insisted on continuing to commit to his retreat to Kabul are mostly fighting and dying because they're not wanted there by the majority of the Afghan people. Our soldiers are fighting to control the Afghans, and they are busy fighting to get the U.S. to release that control.
All the while, most of the original threatening figures in our terror war have been killed -- their violent spawns made witness to the worst of al-Qaeda's warnings about U.S. imperialism, are more than satisfied to have the bulk of our nation's military forces bogged down and fighting for their lives in Kabul.
"Time is running out before the international community transfers control to Kabul by the end of 2014, and many key objectives are unlikely to be achieved by then," the October report warned.
"Our bottom line in Afghanistan is ‘in together, out together'." Panetta told reporters this week. "As an alliance, we are fully committed to the Lisbon framework and transitioning to Afghan control by 2014 . . . We hope Afghan forces will be ready to take the combat lead in all of Afghanistan sometime in 2013. . . .
Ready or not, its becoming increasingly clear that President Obama can't leave Afghanistan fast enough to outrun the mission's abject failure.
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