The Ongoing Disaster in Afghanistan

Afghanistan is not my AO. I got nothing.

I will say that the level of ass-covering and hand-wringing at echelons above reality just keeps growing throughout CENTCOM (Middle East through the Central Asian States). I'm afraid some Retired-On-Active-Duty colonel will pass something like this all the way down until a couple of sergeants are standing in front of Congress, spitting Copenhagen into styrofoam cups and acquainting the investigatory panel with the term "goatfuck."
 
Shouldn't Afghanistan get its own thread? Weren't we (the Western free world) fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda there? ISIS is in Iraq and Syria yeah?

All this Russian action makes me wonder if they had ammunition that was about to expire so they decided to just launch something. Or the big red button needed some exercising after Crimea and Ukraine.
 
ISIL has been reported in Afghanistan. At least, they're now woofing shit about being in Afghanistan, and the news picked it up last month. I have no idea if it's true, or if it's like four guys who made themselves a flag and said they're ISIL.

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Again, though, really not my AO. I've never been, don't intend on ever going. I had the good fortune to be in a unit that was working conflict mediation and relief operations in the Horn of Africa when all my buddies were standing up the Afghanistan surge. I still see Afghanistan as a great big frosty glass of Fuck That.
 
From the latest edition of The Economist:

Afghan ordeal: America’s endless goodbye

It is almost a year since Barack Obama claimed to have brought America’s longest war, in Afghanistan, to a “responsible end”. Yet it has not ended—over 5,000 Afghan soldiers and police have been killed this year by the Taliban—and the residual Western force of 13,000 soldiers, mostly Americans, has often been drawn into the fray. Both points were illustrated by the American bombing of a hospital in Taliban-controlled Kunduz on Saturday, which killed at least 22 people. The rise of a new wing of the Taliban, affiliated to Islamic State, and enduring political turmoil in Kabul, are among the reasons to believe the conflict will worsen. This has called into question Mr Obama’s pledge to withdraw almost all the remaining American troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016. The deadline is now likely to be extended: Mr Obama will bequeath America’s unending war to his successor.

Afghan ordeal: America’s endless goodbye
 
The war against Afghanistan began shortly after Sept 11. That was 14 years ago. Even if it ended in 2016, that would be 15 years. An 18 year old soldier sent there would have been 3 years old at the time. After Sept 11, I remember people volunteered - some for armed forces, others in other forms of patriotism. People chose to fight against terror, against what happened on Sept 11, but do any of the 18 year olds now really understand it? It's a generation of war.

I remember I was in Sears when George Bush announced the first strike (and a lot of international allies and goodwill was there). Somehow that descended into his second term victory declaring on 60 minutes, or was it Meet the Press - "I'm a war president. I make decisions with war in mind."

It seems naive that I was so misguided that I believed in the virtue of a just war.

And what has happened since? The Taliban were defeated and then not and then defeated and then not. Mullah Omar is dead, but another takes his place. Bin Laden is dead, but another takes his place.

Somehow I thought it would end better than the Soviets. Better than the British.

I remember going to a museum tour with one of my uni professors in the Hellenistic section. "You see, for Alexander the Great, Afghanistan was no problem."

Why are we still in that God forsaken desolate wasteland?
 
Fwiffo said:
Why are we still in that God forsaken desolate wasteland?
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I'm a little drunk, so let me start by saying that none of this reflects the official stance of the U.S. military.

Short answer? Big Army fucked it up.

Longer answer: the PNAC fucked it up and Big Army gave them all the help they need.

The original mission in Afghanistan after 9/11 was an unconventional warfare (UW) mission. UW is the primary function of U.S. Army Special Forces; it's the art of clandestinely training up guerrilla units to overthrow an opposing government in a denied area. The plan was to use SF to train up the Northern Alliance, use the Northern Alliance to curb-stomp the Taliban, and then surreptitiously waterboard a few of those cocksuckers until they told us where UBL was. Hey, it's a living.

This is how you beat terrorists. You go after their supporters, you deny them safe haven, you get intel after you knock out their support base, you develop the intel and take them down. It's not pretty and it's not nice. I work in CT; not a day goes by when the Dalai Lama wouldn't smack me in the head.

I can say what I'm about to say because I wasn't in the military when what I'm about to talk about happened. These guys I'm about to talk about were not my leadership and there's no Article 88 violation here. We clear?

Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Libby, Pipes, Pearl, and the rest of those lowlife shitbags in Bush's war cabinet came from an outfit called the Project for a New American Century. These are the pricks who cherry-picked the intel on Iraq; who somehow punked Colin Powell into saying the words "Winnebagoes of Death" on national TV. The PNAC had a plan for American hegemony in the Middle East clear back in the 90's; they had gone to the Clinton White House with an idea to overthrow Saddam Hussein and set up Iraq as an American puppet state and power projection base, with the whole war financed by oil revenues that would go to American companies. The idea was rejected by the Clinton White House as, and I quote, "badly flawed." The paper was called Rebuilding America's Defenses. Look it up. I'll wait.

So while we're doing the right thing and the hard thing in Afghanistan, the reconstituted PNAC and an oil-baron president with a room-temperature IQ see their opportunity to get on with things. They get us so wrapped around the axle on Iraq -- aluminum tubes, yellowcake, Winnebagoes of Death, and the whole schlamozzel -- that half the country starts to think that Saddam Hussein helped the Taliban blow up the Empire State Building and you're a terrorist if you point out that he didn't. In the Gulf, young Joes are painting the words "For 9/11" on bombs that we're getting ready to drop on Baghdad. I still don't know how the fuck we got there. To be fair, I wasn't paying attention. But because it's my job to help catch badguys, I have to go back through all the missteps that put their feet in the starting blocks and the mistakes and the lies are stunning. I mean, stepping-on-a-rake, Wile-E-Coyote-discovering-the-tunnel-is-painted-on-the-canyon-wall, stunning.

There is one rationale for going after Iraq, and it was explained to me once this way:

Suppose you're in a bar, and there's a guy at a table with a few of his buddies and he's giving you the stinkeye. You flip him off and go up and get a beer. When you turn around with your beer, the guy is standing right there, and he cold-cocks you. Knocks you out.

When you come to, he is long gone. His taillights are leaving the parking lot. But his buddies are standing around pointing and laughing as you get up.

What are you going to do? You can't kick his ass; he's gone. You can, however, go beat the crap out of his buddies. And it looks like you can take them. Saddam Hussein, and Omar al-Bashir and a couple of other dictatorial fucksticks? That's those guys. Pointing and laughing after 9/11.

Is kicking their ass the right thing? No. Is it legal? Hell, no. Will it make you feel better and get your point across? Oh, yeah.

And that's what Bush went with. It would make him look good. 20 vets a day killing themselves right now over shit they did over there, but man, Bush looks good. And his brother would do it again. Just ask him. Oh, wait; someone did.

If we had put ten percent of the Iraq war cost into UW ops in Afghanistan, we'd have had UBL and the Taliban would be an asterisk in the history books. Instead we pulled nearly everyone out of Afghanistan and refocused on Iraq. SF teams, who are as elite as it gets because to do their job as trainers and teachers they have to be, got retasked into direct action; they became glorified door-kickers and QRF and they've been misused as direct action for so long that now 99% of the Army -- the goddamn ARMY! -- doesn't know the difference between Rangers and SF. I have to explain the role of SF to colonels. Regularly.

So focus on Iraq. Enter Halliburton. Enter Big Army. Enter reconstruction contracts. Enter energy conglomerates. And enter the defense contractors. Hoo boy. There was no way we weren't going into Iraq. Holy shit, the money.

Conventional operations are expensive. Big Army LOVES conventional operations. Shit breaks. Ammo stores get used up. Gas gets burned. Satellites get put up. New computer systems get tested. The tankers and artillery guys and infantry finally have a use; they're not getting cut anymore. It costs trillions to fight a good, solid, ass-kickin' American war. Defense contractors clean up. Military budgets explode.

Unconventional warfare is unpopular with a lot of the military-industrial complex because it's cheap, it's quiet, and when it works, no one knows you've done it though it looks like a huge foreign policy breakthrough when SecState is shaking hands with the guy who just overthrew a repressive, murderous asshole and has gotten the lights back on in some banana republic.

Bush and his PNAC cockgobblers were having none of that pansy quiet war stuff. Big war. Big Army. Big noise. Shock and Awe, bitches. Fuck Afghanistan; Iraq! Gonna have us a big goddamn war. Gonna be a war president.

We could have won Afghanistan. Easily, quietly, and likely with less than a hundred guys on the ground. Probably zero loss of American lives. Civil Affairs -- the Special Operations humanitarian teams -- and the State Department could have patched the shitty little place back together for pennies when the dust settled and we could have, I don't know, given them back electricity and bluejeans and called it good.

Why are we back in Afghanistan?

We're back there because we never should have left in the first place. When we did go back in, we went back in with conventional units and half-assed it; the only way to make it work was The Surge: thousands of troops, Big War, JDAMs for Jesus, exactly the way we never should have done it in the first place. It was a bad decision but at that point it was the only thing to do. No, seriously.

Now, to tie this back into current events, we've been doing UW in Syria. It hasn't been going well, for a number of reasons that I can't get into. But note that the same assholes who are pushing hardest for conventional US forces in Syria right fucking now (RFN, as we say), happen to be A.) on the boards of defense contractors who don't make money on UW -- there are no big-ticket items or massive support needs; and/or B.) violently opposed to this administration getting a foreign policy win. If a guy was paranoid he might think that the Train and Equip mission was being torpedoed at much higher levels by people who really, really, want to see us get back into the Big War business. But I'm not paranoid and I won't say this is happening. I won't blame you if you do, though.

I now read about ISIL in Afghanistan and I want to lose my goddamned mind.

I love this country and I love my job. There are days when I feel guilty getting paid. I believe -- truly believe with my heart -- that the U.S. military is, at its core, an unrivaled force for good and decency in the world and I say that with a straight face and a combat patch. But man, we got misused. We are trained attack dogs. It's the owner who unleashes us that is to blame for what we do and where. In my line of work, an irresponsible Commander in Chief is a workplace hazard. I came in when we had a good one who knows when and where to use us; I'm lucky. A lot of us weren't.

Next question.
 
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^A very perspicacious analysis that, one that reflects what have been my opinions all along. I always felt that the "War on Terror" was a job for Spec Ops--just the way Bin Laden was taken out.

On a slightly different note, the Islamic State is fighting the Assad regime in Syria, which "we" don't like. They are now fighting the Taliban, whom we have been fighting for 14 years. They are against Al-Quaeda, about whom no comment seems necessary. They also really, really hate Iran ("most evil enemy of Islam in the world"), which is also supposed to be "our" archenemy. All of this leads me to wonder, why, then, are we so hostile to the Islamic State? Seriously? After all, we are perfectly chummy with Saudi Arabia, which strikes me as merely a slightly more mellowed version of the Islamic State, with more oil. In fact, on some issues, like women's education, Islamic State is considerably more progressive than our Saudi buddies. For that matter, they are also more tolerant of Christians, mirabile dictu, so long as they pay jizya.
 
Jan Libourel said:
why, then, are we so hostile to the Islamic State? Seriously?
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Because they want you dead. You, personally. They'd prefer to kill me, but they'll settle for you.

If the Islamic State were setting up their country in the middle of nowhere because they'd been persecuted unfairly and just wanted to be left alone to live in peace, a la Tibet, we'd probably be working with them to make it happen. But they are an apocalyptic cult that leverages jihadist rhetoric to motivate their adherents to attack western civilization in an attempt to subjugate the world. That's an ass-kicking. On top of that, they use chemical weapons, they enslave their perceived enemies, and they crucify children. That's not propaganda; they put that shit on YouTube.
 
So Afghanistan will never be able to stand alone by itself?

Or some perverted form of it?
 
Fwiffo said:
So Afghanistan will never be able to stand alone by itself?

Or some perverted form of it?
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It used to do just fine. It was doing fairly well until -- wait for it -- the (ahem) Russians invaded it and took out its functioning government.

Lots of Kinder Gentlers will blame us for Afghanistan because the Taliban arose out of the Mujahideen that we trained in the 80's, but we wouldn't have been there at all if Russia hadn't been bayoneting babies and wiping out villages with Hinds.

Where we did drop the ball was in the rebuilding effort. Charlie Wilson's War doesn't lie. That is exactly what happened, especially the last meeting with Appropriations. That's why we have what we have now. But we're coming to a point where apparently the Taliban are scared shitless that ISIL will take over Afghanistan. That's bothersome.

I don't study Afghanistan. I don't know enough about it to know what's wrong with it or how to fix it.
 
Countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq need authoritarian leaderships. The various tribal and ethnic groups will never coexist in harmony. Americans still fail to understand a republic will not be able to root in those parts of the world.
 
Rain Man said:
It used to do just fine. It was doing fairly well until -- wait for it -- the (ahem) Russians invaded it and took out its functioning government.
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Actually, the "functioning government" was anything but! It was a brutal, bloody communist tyranny that had seized power in the previous year, and a large segment of the Afghan people, especially in conservative, rural areas, had risen up against. It was to shore up the communist government that the Soviets intervened. Overall, the situation in Afghanistan had been pretty chaotic since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1973.

The Yazidis are in a different situation from the Christians, since the Yazidis are considered pagans and devil-worshippers by the Muslims, whereas Christians are "people of the Book," and thus protected under the Law of the Prophet so long as they remain submissive and pay up. Theoretically the same protection applies to Jews. Although I would not wish to be a Christian living under the rule of the Islamic State, much less would I like to be a Jew. In theory, a Jew should be personally safe if he paid the jizya, but I wouldn't want to check it out personally, were I Jewish.
 
Jan Libourel said:
Actually, the "functioning government" was anything but! It was a brutal, bloody communist tyranny that had seized power in the previous year, and a large segment of the Afghan people, especially in conservative, rural areas, had risen up against. It was to shore up the communist government that the Soviets intervened. Overall, the situation in Afghanistan had been pretty chaotic since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1973.
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My mistake. I wasn't around for that. And like I said, not my AO.

Pauly Chase said:
Countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq need authoritarian leaderships. The various tribal and ethnic groups will never coexist in harmony. Americans still fail to understand a republic will not be able to root in those parts of the world.
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This. I don't know about Afghans, but Iraqis are very comfortable under the pimp hand of authority. We really need to put another hardline autocracy in both these places; some really bad motherfuckers who will play nice with us and keep the riffraff down. But then, there's a whole generation of spoon-chested, neckbearded, Regina Spektor-listening neo-peaceniks who think that that guns are evil and the whole Middle East can just hug it out. Those fucksticks will be running for office soon. Our days of propping up dictators may be at an end. Quel dommage.
 
^Well said. I always figured that the best we could hope for in Iraq would be a "kinder, gentler" version of Saddam Hussein after the original was unwisely toppled by the Bush regime. These days I don't know if Iraq (or Syria, for that matter) can ever be restored as functioning, unitary states.

"...And the whole Middle East can just hug it out." Emend "hug" to "slug," and that pretty well summarizes my attitude for the region. I do feel sorry for the poor Christians who are caught in that mess, though.
 
Peace can come many ways. Eradication of all opposition can be peaceful too.
 
ISIS makes a lot of money by selling oil. To whom? And how do they transport it?
AFAIK, they don't have access to a harbour, and if they did the transport routes should be easily traceable.
I read that the US lead forces have bombed a big oil refinery run by ISIS, mostly the control buildings and making it non-operational.
Should they not rather track the buyers of that oil, get hold of the bank accounts and block/ empty them?
Or is the oil thing just a cover for the big $ coming from supporters in Saudi-Arabia and the UAE?

I also read that the bombings of ISIS by the allied forces are mainly done in a way to force ISIS to face Assad's troops. So if they are not exactly meant to take ISIS out, what's the point, now that Russia is supporting Assad?
If the Russians can effectively hit ISIS targets, so should the allied forces. Combined forces should be able to take care of the ISIS problem fairly quickly. And then find a solution for the Assad situation.
 
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