The Long Crisis

Posts Tagged ‘Afghanistan war’

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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According to a story in the UK Guardian the US military is paying the Afghan Taliban tens of millions of dollars each year to protect it’s truck conveys which are the lifelines for American bases and troops in the country.

When will the US government and military ever learn? When you don’t understand the culture, the tribal relationships, the language, or even the type of war that you are fighting your chances for success are not good. In fact they are zero. The poor American taxpayer is paying huge sums for both sides of the war effort. We are being taken for fools and suckers.

It seems that there is a web of civilian trucking companies receiving millions in payments to transport supplies and to defend trucking conveys. Guess what? The companies that receive the US Department of Defense shipping contracts and contracts to protect the trucking conveys are allied with family members or cronies of high level officials in the Hamid Karzai government including President Karzai’s family. It’s even worse than that. The ties run straight to the Taliban.

These “trucking” companies then pay off warlords and the Taliban to “protect” the conveys from attack. So the US is funding a significant amount of the Taliban war effort against the US. The Taliban must think that Americans are the stupidest people on the face of this earth.

I lived in Pakistan not long after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan so I have some understanding of the wide spread corruption and tight family ties in that part of the world. If you are unwilling to pay for certain services you will not get the service and bad things will happen to you. Everyone is trying to get a cut of your money, especially if you are an American. One example I ran into in Lahore was with telephone service.

Every month or two a telephone company employees would call the office and ask about our telephone service. “Is it working properly” he would ask. At the time of his call we would say “yes, fine, thank you”. Within a few minutes all of our lines would go dead. It didn’t take us too long to figure out that this was the telephone company linemen’s way of reminding us that they controlled the telephone line pairs at the local office and that to get any service at all a small under the table payment had to be made. We paid as we needed the telephones. What would you do?

I’m sure that this type of extortion demand is common and not well received by the US military in Afghanistan. But as an Army officer says in the Guardian article “it is what it is.” Either you pay or bad things will happen to you.

I really wonder how much President Obama and his “dream team” understand about life in that part of the world? I Lived in Lahore, Pakistan for 30 months in the early 90’s. That doesn’t make me an expert in the affairs of the region but I expect I know more about how things work than most decision makers in Washington, D.C.

I was one of a handful of American businessmen living full time in Pakistan at the time. I worked as a financial consultant for a powerful Pakistani family so through their introductions had high level government and banking industry contacts in Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad.

I can tell you from personal experience that as a foreigner without the right contacts, introductions, and experience gained by living in the local economy you will be lost. Fortunately, I was working for a strong man with his own little army that commanded both respect and fear so enjoyed an umbrella of protection. The kind of protection that the US is paying the Taliban dearly for in Afghanistan in order to move truck conveys to American bases.

The way that America is being played by the many complicated factions in Afghanistan assures that the American effort will prove to be futile. Our leaders seem to just not know what they are up against. We are being played by the Karzai crowd as well as by the warlords, even the Taliban have joined in. American funds and ignorance have made wealthy men out of those with connections and ambition. I’m sure they will welcome an Obama surge as it will expand their profits even more.

Afghanistan will bleed America dry. My advice to Obama is simple. Don’t do it. Adding more troops to Afghanistan would be a horribly expensive blunder. The more troops the more supplies and truck conveys will be required to support those troops. That means even more funding for the Taliban protection racket. The more we surge the better funded the Taliban become. It is a fatal catch 22 loop that only a fool would get involved with.

Is there anyone in Washington who is listening? Can any rational person really believe that the Taliban pose a serious military threat to the US? Yes, I know we are told that if we pull out of Afghanistan Al-Qaeda will regroup and plot once again to attack the US mainland. Really, it is now believed that the planning for the 9/11 attack was completed more from Al-Qaeda cells in Frankfurt , Germany and South Florida, USA than from Afghanistan. What we should fear is spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to fight a war we can’t win in one of the most hostile environments on earth.

What we are now doing further destabilizes the Af-Pak region and makes the region and the world less safe. It seems to me that paying our enemies for protection is nothing but bizarre and makes the Taliban all the stronger. If we don’t have the manpower to defend our own conveys we should face up to a few bitter facts and save our treasure and our troops lives.

Can anyone in Washington give a valid reason for fighting the war in Afghanistan other than the US had hoped to run an oil pipeline through it some day? Don’t give me this freedom and democracy crap. That doesn’t play too well when you are supporting a totally corrupt government elected with votes from rigged, stuffed ballot boxes.

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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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