U.S. policy in Afghanistan failing, too

November 26, 2007

In Iraq, the Bush administration has had so little success meeting its own benchmarks, officials have quietly thrown out its list of goals and redefined “success” by moving the goalposts closer. In Afghanistan, regrettably, it’s more of the same.

A White House assessment of the war in Afghanistan has concluded that wide-ranging strategic goals that the Bush administration set for 2007 have not been met, even as U.S. and NATO forces have scored significant combat successes against resurgent Taliban fighters, according to U.S. officials.

The WaPo story is really worth reading in its entirety, not only because it paints a dejecting picture of a policy that isn’t working, but also because it shows administration officials trying to spin what is clearly bad news.

For example, U.S. troops are performing brilliantly, and successfully racking up battlefield victories. And then, there’s everything else: “the Taliban’s unchallenged expansion into new territory, an increase in opium poppy cultivation and the weakness of the government of President Hamid Karzai as signs that the war effort is deteriorating.”

The contrasting views echo repeated internal disagreements over the Iraq war: While the military finds success in a virtually unbroken line of tactical achievements, intelligence officials worry about a looming strategic failure.

This really doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the U.S. has a policy for Afghanistan, and a strategy to help the country advance, what difference does it make if there are “tactical achievements”? It’s like praising a marathon runner who can run really quickly in the wrong direction — the speed is certainly impressive, but it’s still a pointless exercise.

Over the past year, all combat encounters against the Taliban have ended with “a very decisive defeat” for the extremists, Brig. Gen. Robert E. Livingston Jr., commander of the U.S. task force training the Afghan army, told reporters this month. The growing number of suicide bombings against civilians underscores the Taliban’s growing desperation, according to Livingston and other U.S. commanders.

But one senior intelligence official, who like others interviewed was not authorized to discuss Afghanistan on the record, said such gains are fleeting. “One can point to a lot of indicators that are positive . . . where we go out there and achieve our objectives and kill bad guys,” the official said. But the extremists, he added, seem to have little trouble finding replacements. […]

Overall, “there doesn’t seem to be a lot of progress being made. . . . I would think that from [the Taliban] standpoint, things are looking decent,” the intelligence official said.

The WaPo added that, at least privately, senior White House officials “express pessimism about Afghanistan.”

That seems appropriate. It’s not every president who can say he’s had two war policies fail.

In Vietnam we won every battle and still lost the war. I am hardly surprised by the same thing happening in Afghanistan. Military victory means very little against an insurgency. Like Martin Sheen said in Apocalypse Now, for the Afghans there are only two ways home: death or victory. Moreover, Afghanistan has never been conquered, by anyone. The British Empire dashed itself upon those jagged peaks, as did the Soviet Empire. Of course, American exceptionalism suggests that it could never happen to us. Unfortunately, American exceptionalism is load of malarky.

  • Afghanistan falling into the hands of the Taliban:
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,2214994,00.html

    Quote from within:

    The council goes as far as to state: “It is a sad indictment of the current state of Afghanistan that the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when … and in what form. The oft-stated aim of reaching the city in 2008 appears more viable than ever and it is incumbent upon the international community to implement a new strategic paradigm before time runs out.”

    Another miserable failure…
    Makes you wonder why Google wiped that bit of Bush-truth from their data stores:
    http://searchengineland.com/070125-230048.php

  • One thing I really don’t understand is who is actually in full charge of the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. I mean who is physically present and “running the show” in each country, not commanding the strategy and tactics from the White House? I certainly haven’t heard of a Norman Schwartzkopf in charge of any of the Bush administration’s warmongering. How can anything go right when you don’t have a capable or brilliant commander on the ground?

  • When suicide bombings are less frequent, it means our strategy is working. When suicide bombings are more frequent, that “underscores the Taliban’s growing desperation, according to Livingston and other U.S. commanders.”

    Makes sense to me.

  • I read this article yesterday, and all the way through it, I kept having to make sure I was reading about Afghanistan and not Iraq, because the problems seem to be the same, and even though it is on a somewhat smaller scale, the implications for failure are huge.

    What’s disturbing is that, just as with Iraq, no one seems to be able to merge the tactical with the strategic and then implement a plan or policy for success on all fronts; for all the tactical success, it still seems to escape them that it’s not getting better – and is actually getting worse.

    Really depressing news.

  • Moreover, Afghanistan has never been conquered, by anyone

    Pah! Mad Alex managed it (at the price of being saddled with the termagent Roxanne), but the US seems a bit short of military geniuses of the first rank (to be fair, who isn’t).

    The sad thing is, if the troops & treasure that got sunk into Iraq had been invested in Afghanistan, a win might have been possible there (at the very least, by massively bribing every tribal leader to go along): but that ship sailed long ago.

  • even as U.S. and NATO forces have scored significant combat successes against resurgent Taliban fighters, according to U.S. officials.

    Well, in the War in Drugs, we’ve had lots of successes for years, but there are still plenty of drugs out there. When this happens it goes to show that the strategic thinkers and the planners responsible for the anti-whatever policy aren’t all that great. It’s a shame that such great troops as the U.S. troops are being used for something they’re totally inappropriate for (i.e., single-handedly defeating, through military operations almost exclusively, every person in the world’s desire to engage in acts of terrorism).

  • It makes perfect sense; the better armed, trained and supported army will always win on the occasions the enemy chooses to stand and fight in a manner that allows the stronger army to fight the way it prefers to fight. As Jackpine pointed out in the opening salvo, however, this is all the way across town from an insurgency, which no army wishes to fight.

    Oddly enough, insurgencies almost never develop in countries that are ripe for the plucking and yearning to breathe free, where the invaders are on the side of the angels. Insurgencies grow and flourish in countries where the invader is unwelcome, and where the invading country is unable to present a desirable alternative in a convincing manner.

  • One thing I really don’t understand is who is actually in full charge of the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. — anney, @3

    Yeah… Whatever happened to that war czar, one-string Lute? Has anyone — apart from the DoD paymaster — heard anything from him since the nomination/confirmation?

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