So here's a question: based on the "reasons" we invaded Afghanistan, have we failed?
The ten year mark will bring the conflict dangerously close to the point where it will have been going on for longer than the First and Second World Wars combined. With the conflict lasting as long as it has done and with few prospects for victory in sight one can't help but wonder if the whole thing has been a failure on its own terms.
This is not a comfortable thought and one does not like to consider it now that hundreds of British soldiers have died fighting this war, along with around 2,000 (mostly American) international troops and countless Afghans of various persuasions.
Just as in the 1914-18 war, when the current war began the consensus seemed to be that it would be pretty much over, if not by Christmas, then certainly very quickly. And indeed it proved to be the case that the military might of the West quickly deposed the Taliban regime as it would later depose Saddam Hussein in a matter of weeks.
By this fact alone we might say that the war in Afghanistan has been a success, despite the continuing presence of the Taliban in significant parts of the country.
However deposing the Taliban was not the reason we invaded Afghanistan.
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Given the skepticism of the war policies, is there going to be anything any hope on the horizon for success, enabled by NATO?
While all this was going on, a debate emerged in policy circles and among policy-makers about what NATO can reasonably hope to achieve in Afghanistan, and what it should be trying to achieve. While training initiatives for Afghan troops and police continue, a look at how that training is being resourced is disheartening. According to NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan’s own year-end review, of the 2,800 trainer billets identified as critical, only 900 are filled, with 900 “pledged” but not yet present. That leaves another 1,000 billets empty, with no plans to fill them. A full 58% of the police and 52% of army training slots remain unfilled at year’s end. Despite this, NATO clings to its scenario of training enough soldiers and cops by 2014 to begin the drawdown of its forces.
Jack Segal, former chief political advisor to the commander of the NATO Joint Force Command in Afghanistan, says that the problems in Afghanistan go deeper, starting with the country’s constitution. The West imposed a strong central government in 2001, ignoring local governance, which is where the country needs it most. “The Afghan constitution needs to come on the table at some point,” Segal says. An element of this discussion must revolve around a critical security shortcoming: the local police. “If the regions—and particularly the larger tribal structures—had some say over their police, they might have more confidence in the security structure,” Segal says.
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Foreign Affairs is asking What's "Plan B in Afghanistan"?
The United States and its allies are not on course to defeating the Taliban militarily. There are now about 150,000 U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops in Afghanistan. This is 30,000 more troops than the Soviet Union deployed in the 1980s, but less than half the number required to have some chance of pacifying the country, according to standard counterinsurgency doctrine.
Nor, with an occupying army largely ignorant of local history, tribal structures, languages, customs, politics, and values, will the alliance win over large numbers of the Afghan Pashtuns, as counterinsurgency doctrine demands. In Sebastian Junger's phrase, the United States will not capture the "human terrain" of southern and eastern Afghanistan. In November, Afghan President Hamid Karzai told The Washington Post that he wanted U.S. troops off the roads and out of Afghan homes and that the long-term presence of so many foreign soldiers would only worsen the war. "The time has come to reduce military operations," Karzai said. "The time has come to reduce the presence of, you know, boots in Afghanistan . . . to reduce the intrusiveness into the daily Afghan life." Such attitudes are common -- and profoundly inconsistent with the counterinsurgency strategy of deploying soldiers in local communities.
The quality of governance emanating from Karzai's deeply corrupt government will not significantly improve, and without a comprehensive reform of the Afghan government, U.S. success is virtually impossible. As the counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen stresses, "You are only as good as the government you are supporting." In that context, Dexter Filkins noted in The New York Times that "Afghanistan is now widely recognized as one of the world's premier gangster-states. Out of 180 countries, Transparency International ranks it, in terms of corruption, 179th, better only than Somalia."
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ADM Mullen is warning that it's going to get worse before it gets better.
"As difficult as it may be to accept, we must prepare ourselves for more violence and more casualties in coming months," Adm Mullen told reporters in Washington on Wednesday.
"The violence will be worse in 2011 than it was in 2010 in many parts of Afghanistan," he added.
Adm Mullen said that things were likely to get harder before they got any easier.
"Now is not the time to rest on our laurels, it's the time to press on our advantages and to redouble our efforts."
Last year saw a massive surge in violence in Afghanistan with more than 700 Nato troops killed.
US President Barack Obama has said US forces would begin pulling out of Afghanistan in July 2011.
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Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is proposing permanent bases in Afghanistan.
A leading GOP lawmaker on U.S. military policy says he wants American officials to consider establishing permanent military bases in Afghanistan.
Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina says that having a few U.S. air bases in Afghanistan would be a benefit to the region and would give Afghan security forces an edge against the Taliban.
Graham tells NBC's "Meet the Press" that he wants to see the U.S. have "an enduring relationship" with Afghanistan to ensure that it never falls back into the hands of terrorists.
The Taliban are unimpressed.
The Taliban responded Wednesday to Graham's notion.
The Taliban rebuffed Graham in a statement issued by "the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," the title under which they ruled the nation from 1996 until the October 2001 invasion toppled the regime after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"His remarks definitely lift the curtain from the colonialist motives of America, which the Islamic Emirate has been trying in the past decade to draw to the attention of the people of the world," the Taliban said.
"In fact, the invading America wants to establish her dominance over the region and the world under the so-called war on terror," the group said.
The Taliban said they'd never accept permanent U.S. military bases in Afghanistan.
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The US has canned the IG for Afghanistan war under pressure from lawmakers.
The head of the office charged with investigating corruption in the multibillion-dollar effort to rebuild Afghanistan has resigned, the White House said Monday, following congressional demands that the White House replace him.
Arnold Fields, a retired Marine major general, was named special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction in 2008, when the office was first established along the lines of a similar effort that has uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars of waste and fraud in Iraq. Fields's resignation comes a week after he fired his two deputies, saying the organization needed "new blood."
"The President and the American people owe him a debt of gratitude for his courage, leadership, and selfless service to our nation," the White House said in a statement announcing Fields's resignation.
Fields said he intended "to use the next month to ensure a smooth transition," but no immediate replacement was named.
A bipartisan group of senators, led by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), asked President Obama in September to "begin the process of removing" Fields based on concerns they had raised repeatedly since early 2009.
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Want an alternative perspective? Here's what the Tehran Times has to say.
The West's war in Afghanistan and Pakistan is currently the longest, largest and deadliest in the world. Fatalities among U.S. troops, non-U.S. NATO and allied forces, Afghan National Army soldiers and anti-government fighters reached a record high last year: 498, 213, 800 and an unknown number (by U.S. and NATO accounts well into the thousands), respectively. The United Nations estimated 2,400 Afghan civilians were killed in the first ten months of last year, a 20 percent increase over the same period in the preceding year. Approximately a thousand people were killed by U.S. drone missile strikes in Pakistan.
It says something discouraging about a world of almost 200 nations that perhaps no more than half a dozen countries - so-called rogue states (alternatively Condoleezza Rice's ""outposts of tyranny"") - have voiced opposition to the war.
Washington's self-designated global war on terror (sometimes capitalized), in recent years more politely and antiseptically called overseas contingency operations, has not diminished in intensity but rather escalated in breadth and aggressiveness from West Africa to East Asia and against targets not remotely related to al-Qaeda, which has proven as nebulous and evasive as the West portrays it being ubiquitous.
From 2001 to the present the U.S. has engaged in and supported military operations against Marxist guerrillas in Colombia and the Philippines, ethnic Tuaregs in Mali, nominally Christian insurgents in Uganda and Shiite Houthi militia in northern Yemen in the name of combating...al-Qaeda. The Wahhabist school of extremism that characterizes al-Qaeda and analogous groups derives its doctrinal inspiration and material support from Saudi Arabia, yet last October Washington announced a $63 billion arms package with the kingdom, the largest foreign weapons deal in American history.
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And Combat Barbie, Miss Katrina Hodge (former Miss England and lingerie model), is headed to Afghanistan... in uniform.
"Combat Barbie" is headed back to the brigade.
Katrina Hodge, a former Miss England who became the first British Army soldier to win the beauty crown in 2009, is trading ballrooms for battlefields and heading to war-torn Afghanistan.
Hodge, who is a corporal in her majesty's forces and has already served in Iraq, joined a new regiment in the fall after spending a year touring some of the world's swankest hotels and exotic locales on the U.K. pageant's dime.
"At the end of the day, it's my job," Hodge told Agence France-Presse. "If that's what I've got to do, then that's what I've got to do," she said.
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The brunette bombshell was originally runner-up in the 2009 contest, but was awarded the crown after pageant officials stripped the original winner of her title for slugging another beauty queen at a Manchester nightclub.
By: Brant
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