It's a solemn 10th anniversary for Western gunplay in Afghanistan. I'll call it gunplay instead of "war" because wars are normally fought to win and we've never been fighting to win in Afghanistan, instead we've passed the time mostly banging away on the same old drum. Hint - that's why we've gotten nowhere (or worse).
On the 10th anniversary controversial former general Stan McChrystal, the American Thor who was supposed to mop the floor with the Talibs, said the US began the war with a "frighteningly simplistic" grasp of what it was getting itself in to.
"We didn't know enough and we still don't know enough. Most of us, me included, had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years."
Wait a minute. Stan the Man admitting even he had a "very superficial understanding of the situation"? And he was supposed to be the guy who was clued in, the Pentagon's own warlock. And if Stan couldn't find his counterinsurgency ass with both hands, what about his boss Petraeus? And if those two were so astonishingly inept, what about Canada's own self-made Patton, now safely-retired Rick "Big Cod" Hillier? Remember when he assured us that Canada's Kandahar Caper was a trice, a matter of merely killing "a few dozen ...scumbags"? Remember?
No, the Afghan War, as it stands on its 10th anniversary, represents the culmination of a decade of inept political and military leadership. It is the adventure for which the term FUBAR was conceived.
Like the drowning man desperately clutching the briefcase full of gold bars, America can't let go of the prospective riches of the Caspian Basin oil and gas reserves that control of Afghanistan promises. It can't let go. It can't. And so it continues to fight a war that can only be won, if it can be won at all, in a different and hostile country where it cannot dare fight beyond periodic drone attacks. And, as America flails about and begins heading to the bottom, the spectators line up along the beach to watch and wait - Afghani, Pakistani, Talib, Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Indian, Saudi and more.
And, in case you think this assessment ill-informed or unreliable, why not listen to the take on the Afghan frolic of top German general Herald Kujat who is declaring the mission a failure.
"The mission fulfilled the political aim of showing solidarity with the United States," Kujat told the German daily Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. "But if you measure progress against the goal of stabilizing a country and a region, then the mission has failed."
Kujat, however, thinks the West might have prevailed if only it treated the mission as a "military battle" rather than a stabilization mission. That might have been accurate for the German effort in the north but, in the south, the US and ISAF very much waged a military war just as the Soviets waged a military war before them and with about the same results.
Kujat is right for the wrong reasons. He's right in admitting that "the mission has failed." He's wrong, dead wrong, about why. The mission failed because we fought a military war against an insurgency that always wages political war, not military war. Insurgents don't have tanks, artillery, helicopters and jet fighters. They can't engage in military war without accepting swift extermination. Instead they wage a type of war that Kujat, Hillier, McChrystal can't seem to grasp.
In July of last year, the Pentagon's own think tank, the RAND Corporation issued an analysis of our Afghan war and why it was conclusively doomed to fail. Not surprisingly, the RAND assessment is an indictment of our incompetence and the flawed thinking of our military and political leadership.
Meanwhile Afghan prez Hamid Karzai has "vowed" he'll step down in 2014. By sheer coincidence Hamid has picked the very same year most of the West's forces will be leaving town. Wow, what a fluke.
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