Tag Archives: withdrawal

Obama to Announce Afghanistan Drawdown

22 Wednesday Jun 2011

Posted by in Afghanistan, Obama

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

In an address to the country tonight, President Obama is expected to announce the beginning of troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. The Washington Post is reporting that the numbers will be 5,000 by the end of this summer, another 5,000 by the end of the year and possibly another 20,000 by the end of 2012. Not enough and not fast enough for me, and according to Pew, not for the majority of the American people:


Numbers which have increased substantially among just about every political and demographic group since June of last year:


Back to WaPo:

“Even by drawing down the 30,000 reinforcements, there still will be great uncertainty about how long the remaining 70,000 troops would stay there, although the U.S. and its allies have set Dec. 31, 2014, as a target date for ending the combat mission in Afghanistan.

…If Obama were to leave the bulk of the 30,000 surge contingent in Afghanistan through 2012, he would be giving the military another fighting season — in addition to the one now under way — to further damage Taliban forces before a larger withdrawal got started. It also would buy more time for the Afghan army and police to grow in numbers and capability.”

“Grow in numbers…” An audit from SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) showed that even though we’ve spent nearly $30 billion since 2002 to train and equip Afghan security forces, “Afghanistan’s government does not know exactly how many people work for its national police force.” And according to the Pentagon’s own report, “there are currently no Afghan National Police units that are able to operate independently.”

“…and capability.” This from an investigation into a 2009 battle in which 8 Americans were killed and 22 wounded:

“[F]irst-hand accounts from the battle at Keating, detailed in witness statements included in the investigation, provide a different, highly critical view.

One of the harshest came from two Latvian soldiers stationed at Keating and responsible for mentoring the three dozen Afghan troops at the base in mountainous Nuristan province near the Pakistan border. In interviews conducted after the attack, the Latvians told the U.S. investigators that the Afghan soldiers lacked “discipline, motivation and initiative.”

Close to 300 insurgents attacked Keating at dawn with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and guns. As the chaos of combat enveloped the base, the Latvians said they saw three Afghan soldiers at the aid station waiting to be treated for minor scratches and cuts. An Afghan platoon sergeant was in a corner of the station, curled up in a fetal position, they told the investigators.

Later, they opened a door to one of the buildings and found several other soldiers and Afghan security guards sitting on beds “anxiously waiting.” None of them had weapons at the ready or made an aggressive move when the door swung open. In other buildings, they found Afghan soldiers “in ones and twos, hiding under blankets in the fetal position.”

Whether we leave Afghanistan in stages or all at once, whether we do it in 2012, 2014, or 3014, Afghanistan is going to be what Afghanistan has always been. Not an actual country but a region on the map with lines drawn around it, with a weak, corrupt central government, and with never-ending tribal disputes and clashes. The only difference any kind of timeline will make is how many billions of dollars we pour in and how many flag-draped coffins we take out.

A Milestone in Colossal Stupidity

27 Saturday Nov 2010

Posted by in Afghanistan, Obama, Obama administration, Pentagon, war on terror

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Proving Santayana right, today marks a milestone in the Afghanistan quagmire. A milestone in colossal stupidity:

“On Saturday Nov. 27, the United States and its allies will reach a grim milestone: they will have been in Afghanistan a day longer than the Soviet Union had been when it completed its 1989 withdrawal.”

And the end is not in sight:

“Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell last week made clear that the 2014 date for an end to combat operations agreed by NATO was an “aspirational” deadline. And an Afghanistan progress report by the Pentagon to the U.S. Congress released Tuesday made clear that despite the Obama Administration’s “surge” of some 30,000 extra American soldiers into the war zone, progress has been modest and the insurgency continues to expand.”

2014? What happened to July 2011?

“…it appears as if President Obama isn’t prepared to cut his losses in the war and order a sharp drawdown of troops next July, when, at least according to his stated policy, US forces will begin to leave Afghanistan. Worse, it looks like the much anticipated December 2010 presidential review of war policy is being reduced to a rubber-stamp approval of General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency scheme.

…Obama is increasingly in harmony with Petraeus. The president and the general are “meshing well, advisers say,” they reported, adding that the president strikes a “deferential tone” toward Petraeus even though Petraeus “has made clear that he opposes a rapid pullout of troops from Afghanistan beginning next July.”

A “deferential tone?” Who’s in charge here? That would be a rhetorical question, the answer is obvious.

“When asked by a reporter about the US “exit strategy” for Afghanistan, the senior defense official took issue with the term. “We don’t have an exit strategy. We have a transition strategy. The US commitment to Afghanistan is continuing, enduring, and long-lasting.”

A “transition” that, according to the former number two U.N. diplomat in Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith, could take 100 years:

“We’re talking about something that will take 100 years, generations,” says Galbraith, “You can equip them. You can provide some training, but you can’t make them honest. You can’t make them literate. You can’t make them committed to the notions of policing that we have in the West,” he says.”

Once again, we’ve been here before. Apparently the lesson was unlearned. More on the Pentagon’s report to Congress, with the appropriate editing inserted:

“The Pentagon’s semiannual report to Congress on the war in Vietnam Afghanistan paints a picture of a country where corruption remains rampant, violence has increased, and a well-funded Vietcong Taliban insurgency continues to make troubling gains.

The report, “Progress Toward Security and Stability in Vietnam Afghanistan,” which was released this week, actually cites little in the way of progress in the war, a major US undertaking that is rapidly losing popular support among Americans and threatens to become a political burden on President Johnson Obama.”

The song remains the same, only the names have changed.

The Semantics of Perpetual War

06 Tuesday Jul 2010

Posted by in Afghanistan, Iraq, Obama administration, war on terror

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

I can change my name to Buick and sit in the garage—it doesn’t make me a car. Likewise, whether it’s called “combat operations” or “stability operations” in Iraq—it’s still a war. And leaving 50,000 troops there isn’t a “withdrawal.”

“President Obama has set an August deadline for the end of the combat mission in Iraq…The August deadline might be seen back home as a milestone in the fulfillment of President Obama’s promise to end the war in Iraq, but here it is more complex. American soldiers still find and kill enemy fighters, on their own and in partnership with Iraqi security forces, and will continue to do so after the official end of combat operations.

[…]

What soldiers today would call combat operations — hunting insurgents, joint raids between Iraqi security forces and United States Special Forces to kill or arrest militants — will be called “stability operations.” Post-reduction, the United States military says the focus will be on advising and training Iraqi soldiers, providing security for civilian reconstruction teams and joint counterterrorism missions.

“In practical terms, nothing will change,” said Maj. Gen. Stephen R. Lanza, the top American military spokesman in Iraq. “We are already doing stability operations.”

[…]

“I like to say that in Iraq, the only thing Americans know for certain, is that we know nothing for certain,” said Brett H. McGurk, a former National Security Council official in Iraq and current fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This much IS certain. The end is not in sight for the practice of perpetual war. In Iraq or Afghanistan.

In Defense of Michael Steele—Sort Of

03 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by in Afghanistan, Congress, Democrats, George W. Bush, Iraq, Obama, Politics, Republicans, terrorism, war on terror

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I can’t believe this, but I’m going to defend the remarks of RNC Chairman Michael Steele, at least in part. Which is more than I can say for the response from the DNC.

Of course Steele’s accusation that Afghanistan is “a war of Obama’s choosing” is ridiculous. Afghanistan was a war of no one’s choosing, it was a response to the attacks on September 11, 2001. And the reason Afghanistan deteriorated into the situation President Obama inherited was because of the choices of the Bush administration, who neglected Afghanistan for 7 years in the misguided pursuit of the “war of their choosing” in Iraq.

But to be fair, President Obama has made some significant choices in relation to Afghanistan. He chose to increase the number of troops there soon after taking office. He chose to replace Gen. McKiernan with Gen. McChrystal, which included a choice to shift strategy from McKiernan’s more conventional approach to McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan. Because of this change in strategy the president chose to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan by another 30,000.

When Obama replaced McChrystal recently, the president chose to bring in Gen. Petraeus and stick with counterinsurgency despite a growing number of indications, including the grumblings by McChrystal and his staff included in the Rolling Stone piece, that it isn’t working.

Steele was right on the money with this part of his remarks:

“Well, if he is such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? Alright, because everyone who has tried over a thousand years of history has failed, and there are reasons for that.”

That brought this reaction from the DNC:

“Here goes Michael Steele setting policy for the GOP again. The likes of John McCain and Lindsey Graham will be interested to hear that the Republican Party position is that we should walk away from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban without finishing the job. They’d also be interested to hear that the Chairman of the Republican Party thinks we have no business in Afghanistan notwithstanding the fact that we are there because we were attacked by terrorists on 9-11.

“And, the American people will be interested to hear that the leader of the Republican Party thinks recent events related to the war are ‘comical’ and that he is betting against our troops and rooting for failure in Afghanistan. It’s simply unconscionable that Michael Steele would undermine the morale of our troops when what they need is our support and encouragement. Michael Steele would do well to remember that we are not in Afghanistan by our own choosing, that we were attacked and that his words have consequences.”

As Greg Sargent at Plum Line points out, (and Glenn Greenwald at Salon agrees) these charges are a tactic straight out of Karl Rove’s playbook, and one which the Bush administration often leveled at Democrats over the war in Iraq. That anyone who criticizes any aspect of the war is advocating for “cutting and running” and doesn’t “support the troops.”

Greenwald:

“Two points about this:   (1) there’s nothing “tough” or “rough” about the DNC statement; it’s actually lame, desperate and ineffective.  As I noted above, the 2006 and 2008 GOP-crushing elections both proved that these rhetorical insults do not work any longer.  Beyond that, attacking people for criticizing the War in Afghanistan is as dumb as when the Republicans attacked people who criticized the Iraq War.”

As Dave Dayen at Firedoglake points out, an amendment to the war supplemental in the House which called for a withdrawal timetable in Afghanistan got 162 votes, a majority of the Democratic caucus.

Greenwald concludes:

“I wonder what the DNC has to say about the fact that a majority of their Party’s House caucus are cowardly, solider-hating traitors who are betting against the Troops.”