I really shouldn’t expect better
January 25th, 2008, 11:09 am · 2 Comments · posted by jhogg
The Los Angeles Times has published one of the shoddiest editorials I’ve ever read about Afghanistan. It’s pretty bleak in there, and you might want to shield your eyes, but if you’re feeling intrepid you can find the greasy monster here.
“By every measure, the war in Afghanistan is going badly, and NATO is showing the strains.”
I was advised, long ago, to not make statements about “everybody” or “everything” because these statements are really just patently untrue. When you open your editorial with needless hyperbole I’m automatically going to front you all the credibility of a Garfield cartoon.
“That’s because most of the NATO countries don’t want to fight — they believe they signed up for peacekeeping duty, not a “hot war” — and the rest have battle fatigue. The latest casualty is Canada, where antiwar sentiment threatens to bring down the government.”
Following the news is something I do. It’s, you know, my job. But I’ve obviously been watching the wrong channels or maybe surfing the wrong Webs, because these angry hordes laying siege to Ottawa have somehow escaped my attention.
“A high-level panel has recommended that the (Canadian) government insist on the deployment of at least 1,000 combat troops from another country (presumably the United States) to the free-fire zone in southern Afghanistan … Expect a showdown at the next NATO summit in Bucharest in April.”
A free-fire zone? Truly? Considering that there have been more murders in Los Angeles than TOTAL coalition deaths in all of Afghanistan this year, I can only imagine that southern California is some nightmarish Mad Max war zone where grizzled veterans prey on the peasants, rape the livestock and drive off the women.
“To keep NATO from disintegrating, the U.S. must accept that it will have to do more of the military heavy lifting and allow Canada and Britain to do less. In return, Washington should increase its efforts to persuade its partners to spend far more on grass-roots economic, political and infrastructure development.”
Gimme a break. Saying the U.S. is going to do the heavy lifting in NATO is about as radical as saying the sun will rise in the morning.
Look, I’ll be the first one to admit that U.S. policy if Afghanistan has been ham-fisted at times. When you’re surprised that Afghanistan is selling opium it’s pretty obvious that you skipped history. There’s a lot to be said about what we could be doing better, but don’t try to talk to me about problems in the region if you can’t even slip “Pashtun” into a sentence to sound smart.
January 26th, 2008 at 3:05 am
Nice post Mr. Hogg, but I doubt these rednecks realize we are still fighting a war in Sharif, much less Kabul. You earn brownie points at corporate too for giving it to The Times. But, here’s the question: Have you been to L.A.?
January 27th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Afghanistan would have been a whole lot better off if we had kept the long time CIA contacts there instead of the US doing the occupation/nation building routine. It was the CIA who ran the Taliban extremists out of Afghanistan, with the help of bribed native mercenaries. It was the CIA who cornered Bin Laden at Tora Bora, and waited in vain for the Bush administration to send in the American troops, already in theatre and itching for some payback for 9-11, to seal the deal. They were never sent, the neoconservatives relied on promises from their Pakistani allies to seal the border. The Paks never bothered, Bin Laden went free, and a couple of months later Dubya Bush made the astonishing statement that “Bin Laden is not important”.
After Bin Laden, now claimed to be dead by French intelligence sources, escaped, the Americans sent troops, mainly special forces, and they picked up where the CIA left off, making contacts with the local governments. Most folks, including the writer of the piece for the LA Times, see Afghanistan as a unified nation; but the terrain and the lack of a modern transportation system make most parts of the land almost inaccessible, and whatever governing that goes on is done by local warlords and/or tribal leaders. The special forces were making some inroads but were then called off because of the imminent threat of WMD from Iraq, and replaced not with people expert in making contacts with the local militias, but with regular army types. The regular army types proceeded to hole up in forts, the Rumsfeldian tactic that ensures maximum profits for Halliburton et al, instead of continuing the work of the CIA and the special forces to make allies with the various local governments by reaching out to them. The CIA is out the loop in political Washington. Cheney finked out one of their agents, the White House attempted to blame the failures of the intelligence community (14 members strong) of Iraq on them despite causing the problem themselves with the “Office of Special Plans”
and neither the Congress nor the press held the White House accountable for their lies. Now all of middle eastern policy comes out of Dick Cheney’s office, and those policies are not being conducted with American interests in mind, but with the interests of Cheney’s former (and future) business partners.
So now we have had six years of nothing, with the Afghanis playing us for money because they desperately need some source of income, but not trusting us at all. They have seen occupation armies come and go, and they only work with the ones who work with them.
The Americans (under Cheney) only want to work with one central government, and have structured their thinking along those lines.
Anyone familiar with Afghanistan knows that the central government only controls the capital, and that if you wish to control the other 30 or so provinces, you have to go to each individual province and make individual deals with each one. The CIA did this, and almost drove the taliban out of Afghanistan. (And the Bush administration, who had no clue to what was going on, took the credit for it). Now it is 6 years later, and the Americans have yet to re-establish the contacts with the individual provinces.
The Cheney/Bush administration will not acknowledge that they have
screwed the pooch in Afghanistan, and things will not get any better over there until a different approach is made. Right now opium is their number one agricultural export, and this has to change because along with drugs comes all the problems that drug warlords inflict upon government; lack of stability, violence over territories and most of all, no help for the people from the government, including lack of laws,
doctors and viable industry.
Where does NATO fit into to all of this? They know the basics that I know, that the USA doesn’t have their act together in Afghanistan.
Each member state has probably had to fend off pleas from Cheney for more help there, more than likely tied to some kind of extortion over economic packages for their nations. They know that Cheney will be gone in less than a year, and that his replacement will be probably be a whole lot easier to deal with.
So nothing will be done in Afghanistan until then. Same as with Iraq, everyone is now waiting on what the new American president will do.
And whomever that is will be starting over from square one, with a whole host of more important problems to deal with first.