Afghanistan - Herding Cats

Oh it's all so simple - send more troops to Afghanistan and we win! I wish.

Actually the awful truth is that Obama's best generals, including David Petraeus and Stan "Westmoreland" McChrystal, can't spell out what it's going to take to win. The best The Best can do is tell Obama what it's supposedly going to take not to lose.

Fact One - Obama's military isn't fighting to win in Afghanistan, it's fighting - by its own admission - not to lose.

Fact Two - Obama's military, the most powerful in the world by far, doesn't know how to win the war in Afghanistan. They know what they'd like to try, but they don't know how to win. They know what they'd like to try but, then again, so has every bemedalled stuffed uniform who has driven this clown car since they arrived in 2001.

So the strategy Petraeus/McChrystal have dropped on Obama (and NATO) is to throw more kindling on the fire in order to stay warm while they hope something, somehow turns around. That's the plan. Pretty lousy plan, don't you think?

In fact, the plan is so lousy that I don't think it's a battle plan at all. What Obama's really been given is a plan to stick him with the blame for the defeat these jackasses have already achieved. I've said it before, I'll say it again. In this peculiar sort of warfare, the issue is often decided years before the government side realizes it has lost. The fighting keeps going on well after the real war is effectively over. And I'm pretty sure we're in that surreal interval right now.

If, eight years down the road, the best plan they can come up with is a strategy not aimed at winning but merely at "not losing", they're telling you they've lost.

Remember when we knew it as the "Taliban insurgency"? That's changed. It's now the "Taliban-led insurgency." It's the Taliban plus, plus, plus... It's the Taliban plus Haqqani and plus Hezb-e-Islami (Hekmatyar's outfit) and plus sundry nationalists and plus aggrieved locals out for revenge and plus various criminal organizations who find it expedient to make common cause against Kabul and its Western patrons. By the time Karzai's fraudulent election win is finalized, there'll be plenty more to swell the Taliban Plus ranks. By American estimates, the bad guys have grown by 25% over the past year alone. From McClatchey Newspapers:

"The rise can be attributed to, among other things, a sense that the central government in Kabul isn't delivering (on services), increased local support for insurgent groups, and the perception that the Taliban and others are gaining a firmer foothold and expanding their capabilities," the U.S. official said.

"They (the insurgents) don't need to win a popularity contest," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the center-left Brookings Institution in Washington. "They are actually doing a good job in creating a complex psychological brew. The first part is building on frustration with the government. The second part is increasing their own appeal or at least taking the edge off of the hatred that people had felt for them before. But on top of that they are selectively using intimidation to stoke a climate of fear. And on top of that they have momentum."

James Dobbins, a retired ambassador who served as the first U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, said the new estimate shows how the war, which entered its ninth year this month, has been intensifying.

"It tells you that things are getting worse, and that would suggest that the current (U.S.-led troop) levels are inadequate," Dobbins said. "But it doesn't lead you to a formula that tells you what the adequate troop levels should be."

The estimated increase in the insurgents' ranks occurred as the numbers of U.S., British and other Western troops also increased, possibly suggesting that the growth in international forces is bolstering an impression among many Afghans that they're under foreign occupation.

McClatchey also reports that Obama has begun retaliatating against his general's subterfuge by fighting leak with leak. Someone high up in the Pentagon sought to screw Obama by leaking Westmoreland-McChrystal's warning that, without 40,000 more American troops, the Afghan war could be lost within a year. Now Obama's team is turning the tables, leaking that what McChrystal has actually requested is not just 40,000 more soldiers but 80,000.

...[McChrystal's] resourcing plan offers President Barack Obama three options based on the estimated risk, said two U.S. military officials, who requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly and because the proposal remains classified.

The low risk option, which McChrystal has said offers the best chance to contain the Taliban-led insurgency and stabilize Afghanistan, calls for 80,000 additional U.S. troops, while his medium risk option puts the number at 40,000 to 45,000, the officials said.

"This is a fully resourced COIN (counter-insurgency) strategy with the low-risk option," one official said. The current Army counterinsurgency manual, however, estimates that an all-out COIN campaign in a country with Afghanistan's population would require about 600,000 troops.

So, even if McChrystal did get his extra 80,000 US troops and NATO's numbers somehow hold, he'll still have about one-third the number of counterinsurgent troops prescribed by his army's own doctrine. And, with one-third of the prescribed force strength, he's going to take on a rapidly resurgent Taliban-led insurgency plus secure the civilian population in the countryside plus straighten out Kabul plus fight corruption by Afghan authorities in the field.

Kids, this guy is blowing smoke and even if you can't feel it, you can sure as hell see it.