War Handwavium

digby quotes Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, who was General Petraeus’ counter-insurgency advisor in Iraq. He says that US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qa’ida leaders, at the expense of more than 700 civilian lives.

Let’s just say that every civilian we kill has, two surviving family members or friends who decide to join al queda to avenge the death of the innocent. That means when we killed those 14 al queda leaders, we created 1400 new al queda recruits. And some of the hawks want to send another 60,000 troops and keep America in Afghanistan for the next five years so we can do more of this.

It reminds me of a scene from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Mickey is the apprentice of a powerful sorcerer and Mickey creates a broom to do some manual labor for himself, carrying water from a well to a cistern in the sorcerer’s work room. When things go wrong, when the room is flooded with water, Mickey realizes that he can’t stop what he started.

So, Mickey takes an axe to the broom and chops it into a hundred little pieces. Mickey thinks he’s solved the problem, but every one of those slivers turns into another broom. And now Mickey is awash in brooms and over his head with water.

At least Mickey realizes that it wouldn’t be a good idea to take the axe to the brooms and create more. It seems that some of the war hawks want to do just that in Afghanistan. They’re over their heads and they’re flooding the counry with war. What should be remembered is these hawks are simpletons like Mickey. They’re mere apprentices who dream of how powerful they’ll become once they master the sorcery of war.

For every al queda leader we kill, we kill 50 innocent civilians and create a hundred potential new al queda recruits. The sorcerer’s apprentices are over their heads in Afghanistan.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/golden-years-by-digby-elizabeth.html

We are nearing the point where the American war in Afghanistan will be the longest war America has ever fought in its entire history.

Granted, someone else holds the record for “longest war evah”, but do we really want to be in Afghanistan for a hundred years plus one, just to get in Guinness?

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/long-war-by-digby-those-of-you-who-are.html

Afghanistan will hold a new election between the incumbent president Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah.

An investigation into election fraud threw out enough ballots that Karzai’s share of the votes dropped below 50%.

One of the reasons Afghan people don’t support the central government is because they view it as corrupt. If the new election occurs without the taint of fraud, that might help the central government expand its influence beyond the capital city.

One problem, though, is that winter is coming to Afghanistan and that won’t make it easy for people to vote.

Another problem is that the Taliban has been targeting voters and may target more voters. Given the first vote was tainted with fraud, many Afghan civilians may decide that the whole thing is crooked and decide it isn’t worth risking their lives to vote.

Put simply, the US needs to make sure this election is honest if America wants to see a stable central government in Afghanistan anytime soon.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/10/200910201225598138.html

Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) husband is multimillionaire, Richard Blum. Mr. Feinstein owns about 25% of a company called URS. URS does a lot of contracts with the US Military. Contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars a pop.

Charles Lewis, executive of the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity watchdog group in Washington, asked “Why hasn’t she expressed outrage about some of the potential conflicts with people in or close to the Bush administration?” Dick Cheney’s connections with Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, was fodder for outrage over Cheney’s invasion of Iraq. Maybe Misses Feinstein didn’t object to Cheney’s conflict of interest because she had her own conflict of interest.

Glenn Greenwald highlights Feinstein’s voting record. She authorized the Iraq invasion, she funded the Iraq war without a timetable for withdrawal that her fellow Democrats wanted. She supported the Patriot Act. She helped General Hayden get confirmed as CIA director even though he presided over the illegal wiretapping program. The supported Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General even after he refused to answer basic questions about torture. And in October of 2009, she used her position as Chair of the Intelligence Committee to gut most proposed reforms to the Patriot Act.

And now Misses Feinstein is leading the charge to put public pressure on Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan. A war that could profit her husband with millions of dollars.

If you are a Democrat and you live in California, I suggest you write your Little Orphan Annie of a Senator and tell her that she should stop working to get her Daddy Warbucks of a husband military contracts and start working to end Bush’s wars and Bush’s Patriot Act and Bush’s wiretapping programs.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/13/afghanistan/

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/04/27/BA284459.DTL

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/10/11/afghanistan___the_proxy_war/

dday over at digby’s Hullabaloo pointed this out.

Why is it that Healthcare reform has to tie itself in knots to meet a 10-year budget when the Iraq invasion was approved based on being out in 6 weeks?

Why are we not doing a 10-year cost projection about Afghanistan to determine how much the war in Afghanistan will cost us and whether or not we should increase troops or pull out?

Why do conservatives get to lobby for pointless wars without contemplating their real long term costs but healthcare reform has to budget itself for the next 10 years before even thinking of getting approval?

If we’re going to do 10-year budgets for things, then I’m fine with that so long as it isn’t used selectively to obstruct some programs but not applied to others.

We could very well be in Afghanistan for at least another 5 or 10 years. If we’re going to consider sendign more troops, then it should be based on what that approach would cost over 10 years.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/costs-by-dday-heres-something-you-dont.html

Representative Grayson is on a roll. Apparently, he’s been to Afghanistan and all the nations that surround Afghanistan and had some interesting things to say about America’s intention to “win” Afghanistan by sending more troops.

Best bit:

Afghanistan is simply the part of Asia that was never occupied by the Russians or the English in the Great Game. It’s not a country; it’s not even a place. It’s just an empty place on the map. It’s terra incognita. People who live there are a welter of different tribes, different language groups, different religious beliefs.

“Afghanistan” is an artificial creation, lines on a map. The people within those lines don’t speak the same language, don’t share the same culture, and don’t have anything in common other than being humans inside this artificial line on a map.

Good stuff. Watch the whole thing. A transcript (and more) is available here:

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2009/10/alan-grayson-explains-best-policy-for.html

The main argument for continuing to keep troops in Afghanistan (or increase them) is that if we let the Taliban take over Afghanistan, then Al Queda will return and use Afghanistan as a safe haven to plan attacks against America.

Except, the Taliban already controls about 80% of Afghanistan. Al Queda has left and moved to Pakistan.

When Al Queda was operating in Afghanistan planning the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban controlled southern Afghanistan and the north was controlled by the “Northern Alliance”.

This should highlight two things: (1) since US troops have been in Afganistan, the Taliban have become more powerful and control more of the country. Part of that may be because the Central Government that we’re propping up is as crooked as they come. (2) the justification for being there fails to match reality. There is no hard and fast connection between the Taliban and Al Queda.

This justification that Al Queda follows the Taliban is about as realistic as the “Domino Theory” in Vietnam. We lost Vietnam and yet Southeast Asia didn’t fall like Dominos to the Communists.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/as-sure-as-god-made-little-green-apples.html

A little while ago, Obama said that he wasn’t going to do a knee-jerk reaction to Afghanistan and simply send more troops without a good strategy to go with a surge. Within the next day, someone leaked a military report that said America will “fail” in Afghanistan if we don’t add more troops.

The gossip going around is that someone in the Pentagon leaked the report to put pressure on Obama to do the knee-jerk reaction and send more troops.

What has been leaked *since* is that the report says that Afghanistan will need a total of half a million American troops and will take at least 5 years

If true, I’m definitely in the “need a strategy” camp before sending more troops. Half a million troops and five years is just plain crazy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-andrews/classified-mcchrystal-rep_b_298528.html

http://news.aol.com/article/the-point-afghanistan-mcchrystal-report/681449

Afghanistan’s central government has been plagued with corruption. In the latest presidential election, accusations of fraud on the part of the incumbent, Karzai, have been raised by many. Ballots from 600 of the 26,000 pollins stations in the country have been disregarded because the afghan run election commission said they have been tainted by fraud. With fraud allegations rising, a U.N.-backed commission ordered a re-count of tainted ballots.

If anyone in America is wondering why we should care about the presidential election in Afghanistan, then they’re asleep at the wheel. We cannot force a military victory in Afghanistan if the result of all we do is put a fraudulent government into power there. Local civilians have no reason to support a corrupt central government when they’re already dealing with corrupt local warlords. And trying to force them is only going to tick them off.

If the US wanted to seriously do something to help rebuild Afghanistan, they would clean up the corruption in the central government. They would get some independent group, like the UN, to go in and make sure elections are honest. And then they would see to it that the central government becomes something that is better than the local warlords. This would result in locals switching their loyalty to the central government rather than supporting the groups who are fighting it. Instead, we’re trying to beat locals into supporting the central government, and we are functionally indifferent to how corrupt and ineffective that central government is.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090908/ap_on_re_as/as_afghan_election

When did the war in Afghanistan turn from

(1) hunting down Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda and killing them

to

(2) hunting down and killing the Taliban

?

Serioiusly. When did that happen?

We went into Afghanistan back in 2001 because Al Queda and Osama bin Laden specifically were behind the attacks on 9/11, and Al Queda and Osama bin Laden were using Afghanistan as a safe haven.

So we went into Afghanistan and chased Al Queda through the hills and let Osama Bin Laden slip through our fingers at Tora Bora. But we kept going after them.

The current assessment is that there is no significant Al Queda presence in Afghanistan. They went over to Pakistan. Osama bin Laden might be dead, for all we know, but we’re hunting for him in Pakistan now, not Afghanistan.

So, doesn’t that mean we won the war in Afghanistan? Can’t we pull out the troops?

How did the war against Osama bin Laden and Al Queda turn into a war against the Taliban?

The Taliban grew out of a local militia or warlord in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. While the Soviets were in Afghanistan, the warlords pretty much left each other alone and fought the Soviets. After the Soviets left, all the warlords started to fight each other in a civil war. The Taliban won control of the south, and a number of other warlords organized a “Northern Alliance” in (surprise) the north.

The Taliban is a fundamentalist Islamic group. They gave Osama and Al Queda a place to hide and train in Afghanistan. But they never launched an attack against the US. They’re currently fighting American troops in Afghanistan. They’re pretty much all we’re fighting in Afghanistan right now, because Al Queda has left the building, and moved on to Pakistan.

But the short of it is this: Why the hell are we still fighting a war in Afghanistan if the Al Queda who attacked us on 9/11 have boogied out? Why are we now fighting the Taliban?

Certainly it seems that given how we used Afghanistan to fight a proxy war with the Soviets, since we helped devastate Afghanistan with 8 years of Soviet occupation, (Carter funded the Afghanis to revolt against their Soviet puppets in 1979, leading to a full military occupation by the Soviets through the 1980’s), since we did all that, it only seems right that we help rebuild the country. You break it, you buy it.

But who says we need to “rebuild” Afghanistan by wiping out the Taliban militarily?

The only reason teh Taliban is a threat is because they have the support of some of the people in Afghanistan. They have hearts and minds. We want those hearts and minds. But who in the hell decided the best way to win those hearts and minds was to kill the Taliban?

Think about it. Some poor pashtun, literally poor, a dollar a day poor, decides he likes the Taliban. Maybe its for religious reasons. Maybe its because the Taliban decided to hire him for security work at the outrageous price of $8 dollars a day. Whatever the reason, the Taliban has won the heart of this particular Pashtun. This Pashtun likes the Taliban.

What do you think will happen if you kill the Taliban that this particular Pashtun likes? Do you think he’ll say “Oh, I guess I’ll give my heart and mind to the Americans now?”

More likely he’ll be pissed at America and the centralized government of Afghanistan and be that much harder to win over.

Seriously. What the hell are we thinking over there?

You want to render the Taliban ineffective? Get rid of all the goddamn corruption in the central government. Get rid of all the bribes and graft and ineffectiveness going on in the central government. Elections last month are being called rigged. Get rid of the corruption, get rid of the corrupt individuals, and hold real honest elections. Make the central government something that is BETTER than the Taliban. Something that has more to offer that Pashtun guy than the Taliban can offer him.

Otherwise, you might as well put on the shirt that says “The beatings will continue until morale improves”.