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Afghanistan – U.S. Resolved To Repeat Failures
The U.S. military and political leadership is so devoid of learning capability that it does not fight multiyear long wars. Instead it fights one disconnected campaign after the other on the very same battlefield. Each of these campaigns will repeat the mistakes that previous ones made and will have the same outcome.
Thus we have seen several increases in troop numbers in Afghanistan. Each time such a surge happened under Bush, under Obama and now under Trump, the result was an increase in Taliban activity and success.
We have seen the use of local militia forces fail under Obama when these were called Afghan Local Police. The 20,000 men strong ALP was supposedly "trained" to hold land against the Taliban. But the local police groups turned out to be local gangs who, thanks to their "official" status, could rob, rap and kill people without fear of retaliation. The suppressed population then turned to the Taliban for relief.
The idea to create such a local force was so bad that it is time to repeat it:
The American military has turned to the [idea of a local militia] force as a potential model for how to maintain the Afghan government’s waning control — without too high a cost — in difficult parts of Afghanistan at a time when the Taliban are resurgent.
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The size of the new force is yet to be finalized, but it could number more than 20,000, according to a senior Afghan official
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While the senior Afghan official insisted that only the conceptual framework of the force has been agreed to, and that details were still being sorted out, several Western officials said that preparations were already underway to pilot the new force in southern districts of Nangarhar Province.
We can predict with confidence that a year from now those very same districts of Nangarhar province will again staunchly support the Taliban.
In 2001 the CIA and U.S. special forces kicking out the Taliban with the support of northern alliance war-criminals. Arial bombing based on partisan information continued for years. After their defeat the Taliban had given up on ruling the country. They offered to dissolve in exchange for amnesty and an end of the war. But the bombing, often on direction of some local wannabe strongman, continued. Many people not involved with the Taliban or any resistance were killed and maimed. Their communities called out for help. The Taliban revived and came back to fight the invaders.
For a while the indiscriminate, unaccountable bombing seemed to calm down. But the insurgency, once revived, continued. Time then to repeat and expand the scheme – if only under a different logo and in more countries:
The C.I.A. is pushing for expanded powers to carry out covert drone strikes in Afghanistan and other active war zones, a proposal that the White House appears to favor despite the misgivings of some at the Pentagon, according to current and former intelligence and military officials.
More indiscriminate bombing will obviously lead to more resistance and more war.
An argument can be made that the U.S. military and intelligence complex is willfully and systematically creating new enemies in Afghanistan and elsewhere to justify the continuation of its campaigns.
But that argument presume that there is sufficient intellectual capacity in the Pentagon and CIA to develop and follow such a design. Arrogance, bureaucratic inertia and lack of curiosity are the simpler and maybe more likely explanations.
The main play in Afghanistan is still the TAPI pipeline, intended to link the Central Asian ‘stans, where the like of Exxon and Chevron have a large presence, to Pakistan and India (and the Indian Ocean). This effort dates back to the mid-1990s, when Unocal (now part of Chevron) was leading the effort to negotiate with the Taliban in order to open the pipeline. See Steve Coll, Ghost Wars:
The Clinton White House supported “multiple pipelines” from Central Asia along routes that did not benefit Russia or Iran. Clinton believed that these pipelines were crucial to an evolving American energy policy aimed at reducing dependence on Middle Eastern supplies. Blocking Iran from Central Asia’s new oil riches was also a key goal of American policy, but there were only a few pipeline routes that could bypass Iran. Unocal’s Afghan plan was a rare one that conformed exactly to Clinton’s policy.
Condoleeza Rice, ex-Chevron board member, pushed hard for this policy during the GW Bush Administration, and that push was taken over by Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration. Around this time Iran tried to get IPI, the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, built and was blocked by first GW Bush and then Obama – both promoted TAPI as the alternative – Clinton called this the “New Silk Road” strategy and it was a major agenda of the Obama’s 30,000 troop surge into Afghanistan (which brought U.S. troop levels up to 100,000 – now they’re what, 12,000?)
There are two competing gas-pipeline projects: “TAPI”, running from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan and on to India; and another from Iran through Pakistan to India. Instability in Afghanistan is a big impediment to the first, but America opposes the second. . . – The Economist, March 2007
Recently, in summer 2016, Chevron and Exxon committed $37 billion to expanding operations in the Tengiz in Kazakhstan, indicating the scale of U.S. oil interests in the region. That oil is exported via the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which runs through Russia. An Afghan export route would avoid Russia.
Incidentally, if you want an example of how the US media loved Putin back in 2002:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002….a-new-oil-game-with-new-winners.html
The main feature of post-Soviet transition was the immediate establishment of oligarchies and criminality. When Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency two years ago, he moved quickly to break up the oligarchies and political fiefdoms within Russia.
How the tune has changed! Regardless with Rex Tillerson, Exxon’s CEO, now running the State Department, it’s no surprise that the Afghanistan pipe dream continues as before. It doesn’t seem any more substantial, than it did under Clinton, Bush, or Obama.
Posted by: nonsense factory | Sep 15 2017 17:59 utc | 9
The thing is, is winning a concern for the Pentagon, or is a long, protracted, chronic state of war their aim? If war is as much of a US business as I have gathered through many readings (as American as apple pie), the point would be to make it last as long as possible to keep the money flowing to Raytheon, General Dynamics and the rest of the bunch. Add the heroin money they are raking in, and there are all the reasons why the US would want this war to carry on till kingdom come.
Which seems to be the case. Minerals are just a handy narrative.
The will NOT to win wars but to make them last forever, in general, also would explain why the US troops are so crappy: they are not trained to win, nor for any sort of efficiency. It calls to mind the Aztec example. How could a 5 million-strong Aztec army be defeated by a handful of Spaniards heading something like 3 million Indians who were fed up with the Aztec rule and were only too happy to help Cortez and his henchmen against them?
Because the Aztecs were not trained to kill, that’s why. They were trained to catch prisoners for their atrocious human sacrifice rites, which made them clumsy on the battlefield and easy to kill, while they lost time calculating their next move.
Bad training in both cases.
Posted by: Ghostship | Sep 15, 2017 12:03:50 PM | 6
The total value might be $1 trillion after it’s been processed, smuggled, cut and sold on the streets mostly in Europe,
In Europe? You must mean in the US. That’s where they have a mass heroin epidemic, not Europe, thankfully.
Legalising heroin in Europe would reduce the value on the street to about $6 billion and reduce criminality throughout South West Asia, the Middle East, and Europe and cut the Taliban’s budget by more than two thirds. What’s not to like.
I’m not sure I have understood correctly. I hope you are not advocating the legalization of heroin? Because it has already been done, with devastating consequences, in China and South East Asia, back when Western imperial powers ruled Asia and enforced their “legal” opium trade. Millions of people wasted away and died in opium dens, and the corruption skyrocketed. For these countries, it was a nightmarish period. So, if there is one thing that can never be legalized (unless we’re talking suicide), it’s opium and opioids.
http://www.entelekheia.fr/opium-wars-with-china-1839-1860/
But the US is quietly moving in that direction anyway, with opioids prescriptions delivered by doctors left, right and center. Once a person is hooked on prescription opioids (a process which sometimes takes as little as four to five days), but can’t get any more pills from his doctor because he is cured, you sell him your CIA-issued street heroin.
Thank you for the wonderful Cincinnati Enquirer piece about that you posted last time, BTW, B.
Posted by: Lea | Sep 15 2017 19:42 utc | 13
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