The Long Crisis

Posts Tagged ‘Afghanistan’

Until last night I stlll had a little hope that President Obama would be a different kind of President. A thoughtful President capable of setting a new course for an America that has become the most militarized nation on earth. A nation that seems determined to be always at war. A nation that has lost it’s once inspiring luster as a home for freedom and liberty and become a nation intend on imposing its will on the rest of the world.

If you doubt our nations militarism then answer one question. Why would we at great expense have over 700 military bases , many of them huge, in over 150 countries around the world? We are so insecure with all of that far flung security that we spend as much on national defense as the rest of the world combined. It seems that some kind of sickness has infected our leaders in Washington, D.C. and that newly elected officials immediately catch an incurable form of it.

As a Vietnam War veteran I can tell you in all honesty that many years ago I’ve heard all of this nonsense about a “focused strategy” . The names may be different but the BS is the same. I’m very certain that Obama’s war will end in tragedy.

I cried like a baby when I saw the TV images of the US evacuating Saigon in a panic in helicopters full of scared shitless US military and a few lucky Vietnamese civilians who were able to get onboard. I fear I will be watching a similar scene a few years from now as American helicopters evacuate the American Embassy in Kabul. It will not be a pretty sight.

Mr. President you really do need to rethink Afghanistan. Here is a little personal on the ground insight. I lived in Lahore, Pakistan for 30 months in the early 90’s and had many Pakistani friends, some of them at high levels in the government. I can assure you that the culture in that region of the world is extremely different from our own. I lived in a lovely part of Lahore and had at the everyday life level fantastic neighbors.

But the cultural differences were profound. My “friends” hoped to gain some advantage from knowing me and were very upfront about it, even if it were a little thing like a drink of Johnny Walker Black scotch now and then. Things that Americans would call corruption and vice were considered perfectly normal and the way you do business.

Pakistan is not Afghanistan nor is Afghanistan the same as Vietnam. However, the culture of corruption is very similar. Many high level Afghanistan officials are playing us. They are getting rich off of our money and our efforts in their country. They would be happy to see us pour in money and blood into the country forever. There is no way we are going to change the culture of corruption in that part of the world.

With all due respect to VP Joe Biden and to President Barack Obama we need to rethink Afghanistan. Don’t let American hubris get in the way of sound policy. We need to get our military out of that country ASAP.

And please President Obama don’t give me this total BS about the Taliban being a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. What they want is for us to be out of their country. The most powerful nation on this planet has little to fear from the Taliban, except in the extreme terrain of their own country. The Taliban have no air force, no tanks, no heavy transport vehicles, only light weapons, and total at most only a few thousand fighters. Most of them would be happy to return to farming once the foreigners, mostly Americans, have returned to their own homeland. Or to fight the neighboring tribe.

If we fear the Taliban shame on us. Except in trying to occupy their own nation. Then they are transformed into a fierce enemy. No American would be less of a fighter if we once again were fighting on our own soil. The Taliban are mostly Pashtuns, some of the most independent, fierce when the occasion calls for it, and tribal people on earth. There are Russian generals who know their fighting capabilities well. The Russia generals and 115,000 Soviet soldiers withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 after nine brutal years of combat.

Perhaps a few Russian generals of the Soviet era in Afghanistan should be invited to Washington for a briefing. I expect that they would be more honest in their comments and more upfront as to their views on our prospects for a favorable outcome to Obama’s War than our own always optimistic generals.

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The Afghanistan War is not going well. After nearly nine years of conflict the Taliban are growing stronger and now control as much as 70% of the countryside. The following video, “Obama’s War”, is an on the ground presentation of some of the harsh conditions faced by US Marines in combat operations as well as interviews of Americans, Afghans, and Pakistanis, both military and civilians, looked to for advice by President Obama.

The following is from the excellent PBS coverage of the war and explains some of the difficult and outrageously expensive issues and options that are now on Obama’s plate.
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In Obama’s War, veteran correspondent Martin Smith travels across Afghanistan and Pakistan to see first-hand how the president’s new strategy is taking shape, delivering vivid, on-the-ground reporting from this eight-year-old war’s many fronts. Through interviews with top generals, diplomats and government officials, Smith also reports the internal debates over President Obama’s grand attempt to combat terrorism at its roots.

“What we found on the ground was a huge exercise in nation building,” says Smith. “The concept’s become a bit of a dirty word, but that’s what this is. We started with the goal of eliminating Al Qaeda, and now we’ve wound up with the immense task of re-engineering two nations.”
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I warn you. After watching the video it is hard to see for the United States any good way out of a highly complicated conflict involving Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, NATO, and US interests in the region. Whatever action decided upon by President Obama is sure to unleash a round of protest and criticism that will endanger Obama’s opportunity for a second term in office.

Nation building under the best of circumstances is a difficult task. If even a lite version of nation building in Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most backward, and tribal nations on earth, is one of the US’s objectives in “winning” the war the task will be almost impossible to complete in any of our lifetimes, if ever.

Then there is the unpleasant fact that even if we do somehow prevail by defeating the Taliban and denying access to al-Qaeda of operating bases in Afghanistan there is even a greater problem with al-Qaeda and an extreme Islamic fundamentalist movement in Pakistan. With anti American sentiment already running high in Pakistan, a nation of about 180,000,000 citizens, any American boots on the ground campaign in Pakistan would be complete madness and could escalate out of control with dire consequences.

For the United States and President Obama I fear that there really is no good way out of a complicated conflict. Watch the video and then see how you feel.

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It takes huge amounts of supplies and equipment to keep the US military going in any part of the world. To keep our forces supplied in Afghanistan is especially difficult.

Afghanistan is a land locked country so at great expense the US transports by air a significant percentage of the necessary food, ammo, Gatoraid, medical supplies, heavy equipment, troops, and everything else that a modern military force requires. From the US to Afghanistan is about a 17 hours flight. Even the expense of flying in toilet paper adds up.

While some supplies are sent from the US by ship they then have to be trucked long distances, say from the port of Karachi, in Pakistan, then by dangerous torturous roads into Afghanistan. The risk of supply convoys being attacked by insurgents or being hit by IED’s is always present. In the Afghanistan War there is just no easy or cheap way to supply our armed forces or the tens of thousands of contractors who must also be supplied.

David Wood is an experienced war correspondent who has written and filed the following account of the amazing air bridge to Afghanistan. As David Wood points out only the US is presently capable of or would even try to supply a major war theater by air. But the effort is not easy and the air lift forces and equipment are beginning to show the strain, especially with the escalation of the war under President Obama.

After reading the article give a little thought to how difficult and expensive it is going to be to supply any increase in troop levels. President Obama has already ordered an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan. As Obama’s War has been of late going badly there is talk of troops beyond that number being requested by American commanders.

How many more? It may well depend on how many we can support. Read the article and then wonder to yourself, as I did, just how many more missions our fleet of 30 to 50 year old cargo planes can safely fly. In the end we may have to withdraw from, or at least scale down, operations in Afghanistan because operating our aging fleet of cargo aircraft has become too dangerous and our air lift crews are being over worked, perhaps dangerously so. Then there is the enormous expense of it all.

It is unlikely that we can even supply our present force level entirely by ground when that ground is IED dangerous and long overland supply routes are impossible to completely defend. The Air Bridge to Afghanistan may be the weakest link in the United States determination to prevail in a conflict involving disastrously long supply lines.

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ABOARD FLIGHT REACH 4060 – At a cost of $44,351 an hour, this venerable leviathan of a C-5 cargo plane has struggled off a South Carolina runway bound for Afghanistan, some 17 hours away, carrying a cargo of two.

The payload consists of two very heavy armored trucks, known as MRAPs (Mine Resistant, Armor Protected vehicles). They are built specifically to resist the blast of roadside bombs, the main killers of American troops in Afghanistan. The huge trucks, each weighing 60,000 pounds, are lashed with webs of 25,000-pound test chain to the steel-plate deck of the C-5’s enormous cargo hold. There’s room in here for another three MRAPS, but even the C-5, largest cargo plane in the Pentagon’s inventory, couldn’t lift them. As it is, we carry barely enough fuel to make it up the coast to Bangor, Maine, to gas up for the next leg.

Only the United States can – and perhaps only the United States would – choose to fight a long-distance war by air. Especially a war in Afghanistan, a landlocked country accessible only by barely improved goat paths across tortuous mountain passes where laboring convoys are regularly set upon by insurgents and brigands.

That leaves the skies.

With little notice, the United States has established an unprecedented air bridge to Afghanistan. This aerial artery carries an unending stream of troops, munitions, ammo, water, concertina wire, tires, MRAPs, filing cabinets, relocatable buildings, porta-potties, cash, computers, rations, fresh blood and everything else needed for a long military campaign. Return trips bring out the dead and the injured: since 2001, roughly 135,000 wounded patients have been airlifted home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The numbers that describe the “air bridge” to Afghanistan are staggering, in part because the effort is almost invisible. Painted a dull, battleship gray, the airlifters – huge C-5s, the more modern C-17s with their lower cargo capacity but shorter takeoff and landing requirements, along with fleets of aerial refueling tankers — drone out of two major East Coast ports, at Dover, Del., and Charleston, S.C., with little fanfare. They are hardly the glamorous jets the Air Force uses in recruiting ads.

Long-haul airlifters like Reach 4060 haul 350 tons of cargo and 360 troops into Afghanistan every day from the United States. Most of the MRAPs and other heavy cargo go by sea (a container ship can carry 400 C-17-loads of stuff). Still, airlifters have flown 4,189 MRAPs to the war zone despite the airfare (which I figure at $376,983.50 apiece).

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To read the reminder of this article go to Air Lift to Afghanistan : An Invisible Bridge. To gain a better understanding of the war effort in Afghanistan be sure to read other David Wood well written and informative posts at www.politicsdaily.com

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