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The Times breaks the bad news:
Four American soldiers died in a roadside bomb in Afghanistan today, making 2009 the deadliest year for foreign troops there since the 2001 invasion.
With four months of the year still to go, today’s deaths in Helmand province bring the number of foreign forces killed in 2009 to 295, according to the website icasualties.org, which compiles official data. The previous deadliest year was 2008, when 294 foreign troops died.
Civilian casualties are also rising. The Pashtuns rejected election participation.
It’s not working. It’s time to leave.
13 Comments
You increase the number of troops and start an offensive to clear insurgents out of the Helmand Valley, you sort of expect people to die, both in Helmand and wherever the insurgents strike back.
How do you get from deaths are increasing (and remember, I’m kinda slow) to it’s not working?
the questions for me are: what is the plan? is it achieveable? when can we bring troops home? I’m pretty concerned about a continuing drawn-out morass
Everyone’s concerned about a long mess accomplishing nothing, but after five years of nothing nothing or less, I can’t see how you declare failure a few weeks after we start to try.
macaquerman,
Have you ever served in a war?
I did, in Viet Nam.
I know what failure in war looks like.
Afghanistan has failure written all over it.
Actually, Art, I was drafted for that one, but refused to serve.
I sort of think I can spot a failure also, but just like unhappy families, each war is different. This one is a whole lot different from that one.
You’re not slow; you just don’t agree. To address your point about pushing into strongholds, here’s a quote from the most recent Afghanistan NGO Safety Office quarterly report:
Holbrooke and Gates can dodge the question all they want, but if we’re using COIN as our paradigm, the definition of success is simple: the “sea” in which the insurgents swim (the Pashtuns) have to stop supporting the insurgency and start supporting the central government. Ninety to 95 percent of the Afghan sections of Pashtunistan did not vote, and it does not matter whether they stayed home out of fear of reprisal, disgust with the central government, or loyalty to the Taliban–from the perspective of COIN, those shadings are irrelevant. It’s a binary evaluation–do the Pashtuns embrace the processes and authority of the central government? If not, you’re losing.
If you widen your evaluation beyond COIN, though, one might consider whether our strategy is empowering democratic reformers or silencing them. Well, starting with the 2002 loya jirga, the government we’re propping up silenced them.
Or, we could look at the simple evaluative tool set out by McChrystal:
The most recent data of which I’m aware says no, not so much.
The troop deaths, while very significant, are not the only reason I consider the Afghanistan war a failure. The point of the above is to say that it’s another sign that it’s not working.
Do you think our strategy is working, and if so, why?
Derrick, what we’ve done since soon after the beginning has been absolutely unsuccessful.
What we do now won’t be entirely successful, but it’s unlikely to be more of the same, and there’s really nothing I can see that precludes a fair degree of success.
Of course, we aren’t ever likely to agree as long as you’re positing success as being reliant on a strong (and/or lasting) central government in Afghanistan. i doubt the likelihood of that about as much as you do, but I’m unsure that we really need for that to happen.
My views on what constitutes success here aren’t fully formed, but I don’t think that turning Afghanistan into Minnesota is central. I’m not even fully certain that Afghanistan’s success is central to our concerns.
Too early to evaluate, then?
I’m not positing success on Minnesota-in-Afghanistan either. If it seems that way, it’s only because I often argue from within the COIN paradigm (which I absolutely reject, by the way) to show COINdinistas that by their own metrics we are failing and people are dying for it.
My metric for success is very simple: we are failing to the extent that we’re killing people (and wasting lives and national wealth in the process). We are winning to the extent that we support democratic movements and true human rights reformers, and to the extent that we avoid killing people. “The only way to win is not to play,” etc.
As silly as it might sound after all this time, I actually do think that the next six months (pardon my Friedman unit) will be informative.
I don’t agree with giving it more time, but I understand. What are you looking for, and are there things that would cause you to say, “that’s it, I’m done, let’s go”?
I can’t really say exactly what I’m looking for, but a bunch of it is centered around how much we can push the insurgents out of the areas they hold and whether they increase terror bombings and other noxious tactics in response. I’m looking for a change in public opinion, hoping that it starts to become common to not openly side with the Taliban. I don’t expect to see a big-time shift, but more of a hedging of bets.
Not everything that I look for will be on the Afghan side of the border. I think that if we fail to control both sides, we’re losing.
I’ve been reading the Pakistani English-language press for a couple of years, and seeing something like this editorial would have been unthinkable a year ago.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009826story_26-8-2009_pg3_1
Links to the Daily Times are difficult. I’m pointing to the first editorial on the ed page.
Agreed. President “trust me” has no plan
Obama is a killer.
He has no soul.
He has a beautiful family.
He kills. They support him.