Afghanistan: “It’s Just Damage Limitation Now”
---
U.S. and allied generals tells us things are getting better inside Afghanistan, and they believe that by the time allied combat troops leave by the end of 2014, Afghanistan’s own security forces will be able to defend the nation. Do you believe them? Why or why not?
I’ve seen no evidence to suggest the ANSF are ready to take over.
You have to understand that it’s not a national security force. It’s the Northern Alliance, the historical enemies of the southern Pashtuns and the Taliban.
In the rush to get to Iraq, we handed control of the army, police and intelligence agency to the Northern Alliance, and the same old warlords whose behavior had led to the Taliban’s rise to power in 1996.
I think we were doomed to fail from that moment on. Southern Pashtuns often see the security forces we’re supporting as being almost as foreign as us and there for vengeance.
I was in the Arghandab valley in 2010 and the 101st Airborne were very nervous about clearing a village called NMK because they knew it would be laced with IEDs.
A few days before the operation, some Afghan soldiers ran into the village alone, and came back a few hours later, delighted. “How did you do it?” asked the American captain, astounded. “Did you offer the locals $50 for each IED they revealed, like we trained you?” “No,” said the ANA captain, excitedly, “we told them `show us the IEDs or start digging your own grave’.” That sums up the situation pretty well. Sadly I think that the phrase “transition” is a euphemism covering up our failures.
http://nation.time.com/2012/09/19/afghanistan-the-best-thing-we-can-do-is-leave/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Tea boys and old men
Plans are one thing, reality another. After all, when invading US troops triumphantly arrived in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in April 2003, the White House and the Pentagon were already planning to stay forever and a day - and they instantly began building permanent bases (though they preferred to speak of "permanent access" via "enduring camps"
as a token of their intent.
Only a couple of years later, in a gesture that couldn't have been more emphatic in planning terms, they constructed the largest (and possibly most expensive) embassy on the planet as a regional command centre in Baghdad. Yet somehow, those perfectly laid plans went desperately awry and only a few years later, with American leaders still looking for ways to garrison the country into the distant future, Washington found itself out on its ear. But that’s reality for you, isn’t it?
Right now, evidence on the ground - in the form of dead American bodies piling up - indicates that even the Afghans closest to us don't exactly second the Obama administration's plans for a 20-year occupation. In fact, news from the deep-sixed war in that forgotten land, often considered the longest conflict in American history, has suddenly burst onto the front pages of our newspapers and to the top of the TV news.
And there's just one reason for that: despite the copious plans of the planet’s last superpower, the poor, backward, illiterate, hapless, corrupt Afghans - whose security forces, despite unending American financial support and mentoring, have never effectively "stood up" - made it happen. They have been sending a stark message, written in blood, to Washington’s planners.
A 15-year-old "tea boy" at a US base opened fire on Marine special forces trainers exercising at a gym, killing three of them and seriously wounding another; a 60- or 70-year-old farmer, who volunteered to become a member of a village security force, turned the first gun his American special forces trainers gave him at an "inauguration ceremony" back on them, killing two; a police officer who, his father claims, joined the force four years earlier, invited Marine Special Operations advisers to a meal and gunned down three of them, wounding a fourth, before fleeing, perhaps to the Taliban.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/201282873530364972.html
