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Afghanistan: Mission Accomplished

brogdale said:
Short on analysis, long on narrative and yet quite an impressive, unsettling bit of tele IMHO.

e2a : AFAICS the Brooker piece bore little relation to Bitter Lake; two separate pieces of work.
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I found it fascinating. Particularly the British captain explaining how they were played by the local warlords, who used the British to get rid of their rivals by simply claiming they were Taliban. And how the British supported the police, who were essentially the warlords' militia, so local people fought back, so the British decided they must by Taliban and attacked them, which led to more people fighting the British. "Taliban" became by definition anybody shooting at you.
 
kabbes said:
I found it fascinating. Particularly the British captain explaining how they were played by the local warlords, who used the British to get rid of their rivals by simply claiming they were Taliban. And how the British supported the police, who were essentially the warlords' militia, so local people fought back, so the British decided they must by Taliban and attacked them, which led to more people fighting the British. "Taliban" became by definition anybody shooting at you.
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Exactly.
As likesfish said, many other armies have been beaten in the country, but I'd imagine that that they were, at least, able to identify their enemy.

Fascinating is a good way to describe Curtis' film....almost hypnotic in parts. Nonetheless, an impressive attempt to explain some of the geo-political 'back-story' of where we are today. I'd recommend it to many of those posting in the IS thread.
 
they were actually fighting to retake the city off the taliban rather than just dropping bombs for something to do. So its explainable.

the new US policy is just to go in and smash stuff which they can do:(
 
They knew the hospital was there :facepalm:
They have, of course been known to bomb hospitals before. The makeahift one that was inside marble mountain, but that, of course, was different because they meant it :mad:
 
Sounds like it was a spectre gunship an area weapon so not a pin point weapon. Should have known a hospital was there and not fired on it. Just because some one in the USAF knows the hospital is there does not mean the crew did. :(
 
hash tag said:
Is this what we really went in to Afghanistan for in order to make it a better place?

Afghan Woman Beheaded For Shopping Alone
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No one went to Afghanstan to make it a better place, politicians just started saying that because they thought that their electorates didn't like 'killing your enemies and denying them a safe haven' as an answer to 'what are we doing in Afghanistan?' questions.

There was - and is - a good argument that stable, prosperous, democratic countries with reasonable equality and human rights records tend not be good bases for groups like AQ, however to become that Afghanistan needed a multi-decade+ commitment of blood, treasure and effort that no-one was willing to spend, and an acceptance that the decades between the start point and the end point would be filled with disappointment, backward-steps, and imperfect results.

No one was prepared to pay for the cost of the ingredients nor wait for the cooking time - and so the cake didn't bake.
 
On TSG IntelBrief: Losing the ‘Stalemate’ in Afghanistan
Bottom Line Up Front:

• During February 9 testimony to Congress, U.S. General John Nicholson stated the more than 15-year conflict in Afghanistan was at ‘a stalemate.’

• General Nicholson testified as the head of the international coalition partnered with the Afghan government, which continues to lose ground to the Taliban.

• His request for more troops would be a major reversal of recent policy; it is uncertain what the addition of several thousand troops could accomplish in a sustainable fashion.

• At this stage, there is little room for optimism in what is the longest running foreign conflict in American history.

...
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Not looking very "accomplished" at all.
 
On War On The Rocks “SHOULDER-TO-SHOULDER” NO MORE IN AFGHANISTAN?
...
Are We Still Friends?

Most expressed confusion over an ill-defined and over-generalized expression Trump used in the campaign and now as president: his vow to eradicate “radical Islamic terror.” One Afghan official expressed dismay: “I don’t think he knows what it really means,” but he hoped Trump would come to a proper understanding and take the right measures. Another said it should be eliminated, “but in a manner that does not provoke further extremism.” Another asserted “there is no such thing as radical Islamic terror.” Instead, he said, the United States should focus on the sources of extremism, which he cited as “terror sanctuaries, safe havens, and states that produce, support, or use terrorism as part of their state policy.” Another believed the United States “must create convergence” between Muslim countries fighting terrorism, while also “applying pressure” on those countries “supporting and empowering terrorism.” Finally, one official cryptically indicated, “terror cannot be eradicated through terror,” referencing America’s growing reliance on drone strikes and covert operations (though he might also have meant the growing number of botched airstrikes by the Afghan Air Force). Instead, he thought the United States should focus on “cultural-educational strategies” and devise strong counter-narratives to defy those who espouse terrorism.

When asked about the “America First” foreign policy, one officer responded:

It was always America first! We understand — the U.S. is not a charity organization. But if Trump really believes in “America First,” then he has to focus on Afghanistan because this country gave America a problem and will continue to if it is ignored.​

One officer understood that some of the president’s policies were populist in nature, meant to rally his base of supporters, and might even help him gain support in America. However, he warned that his statements would “increase anger among less educated and radical groups who are less familiar with U.S. politics, making it very hard for moderate forces to convince people” through a more inclusive narrative. Another officer noted this policy would “feed the extremism” and put American nationals “in danger everywhere in the world.” Instead of providing “greater opportunity for terrorists” through Trump’s rhetoric of exclusion, an officer recommended “we strengthen interaction and communication between Muslims and non-Muslims.”
...
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Afghanistan, a topic barely mentioned by Trump.
 

That could also be said of the post-Basra British Army. This is deployment is only going to increase under Trump as the Pentagon has been given pretty much a freehand. That institution is now run by a Marine like Chivers.
 
On Bloomberg Afghan Deaths Soar to Highest on Record as U.S. Weighs Strategy
Almost sixteen years after the U.S.-backed ouster of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains in the grip of a war with “shockingly high” death rates among security forces and a record number of casualties among civilians, according to the U.S. government watchdog monitoring the country’s reconstruction efforts.

Civilian casualties rose to 11,418 last year, the highest since the United Nations began keeping records in 2009. In the first six weeks of this year, 807 Afghan soldiers were killed, John Sopko, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said in a quarterly report to Congress issued late Sunday.
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America's longest shooting war getting hotter and barely reported apart from Trump's ant-IS stunts.
 
On SWJ There is No “Stalemate” in Afghanistan: We’re Losing
Let’s Not Kid Ourselves: This is No “Stalemate”

In recent Congressional testimony, Gen. John Nicholson suggested that the situation in Afghanistan is a “stalemate.” However, the Taliban now contests or controls about 40% of the country—up from 30% one year ago. Moreover, as the insurgency increases its stranglehold on the countryside, the fight is increasingly encroaching on the country’s urban centers, as the Taliban’s capture of Kunduz City in two consecutive years shows. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats stated in a May 11th Senate hearing that security is likely to continue to deteriorate through 2018.

Stalemate suggests that opposing sides have fought one another to a standstill. Prolonged stalemate implies that opposing sides might be ready for a negotiated peace. But the reality is that the insurgency is gaining ground, not losing it. The hard truth is that we’re losing the war, not winning it. Peace in Afghanistan has been discouragingly elusive, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

Both the U.S. and NATO Will Increase Troop Levels

Although President Donald Trump has asked the military for a coherent strategy before approving a troop increase, it seems inevitable that we’ll be sending more troops to the embattled country. NATO is likely to follow a concurrent course. But even the higher end of the range of consideration—5,000 additional U.S. troops—will not be enough to quell the emboldened insurgency. With similar troop levels in the early stages of the war, the country descended into chaos as the U.S. focused attention and resources on Iraq.
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Slowly losing and this points out producing refugees on a level not much short of Syria.
 
kebabking said:
No one went to Afghanstan to make it a better place, politicians just started saying that because they thought that their electorates didn't like 'killing your enemies and denying them a safe haven' as an answer to 'what are we doing in Afghanistan?' questions.

There was - and is - a good argument that stable, prosperous, democratic countries with reasonable equality and human rights records tend not be good bases for groups like AQ, however to become that Afghanistan needed a multi-decade+ commitment of blood, treasure and effort that no-one was willing to spend, and an acceptance that the decades between the start point and the end point would be filled with disappointment, backward-steps, and imperfect results.

No one was prepared to pay for the cost of the ingredients nor wait for the cooking time - and so the cake didn't bake.
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It's like a soufflé which needs care taken to turn out right. But they fucked the recipe years back and it's all buggered up now
 
likesfish said:
Thing is only the most Batshit loon would celebrate a taliban victory :( they are and were the worst possible goverment .
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Well yes but the standards are pretty low in Kabul. A lot were pretty glad to see the back of the likes of warlords like Hekmatyar the last time round when the ISI switched to backing the Taliban. The honeymoon didn't last but the reality is if Pindi doesn't like who is ruling Kabul it's unlikely to be stable. That's been our fundamental problem up there. Very hard to beat an insurgency backed by a neighbouring power with an interest in strategic depth.

Taliban courts do get looked to for dispute resolution by a lot of rural Afghans. They are widely perceived as fairer than tribal law. The Taliban are looked on as a model of governance by a lot of Syrian rebels in Idlib. It's what both AQ and elements in Ahar al Sham support. IS differ mainly in having an Iraqi Baath heritage when it comes to population management which tends to rely a bit more on mass graves.
 
Yossarian said:
They suck, but aren't they just Saudis without oil?
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They're certainly not quietist Royal loving Salafi which is what most Saudis are. The Taliban are mostly indigenous Pashtun groups often with Deobandi backgrounds. There is an old history of Wahhabi missionary work up there. Churchill reported fighting troublesome "taliban" (i.e. scholars) on the NW frontier as a young man. The Taliban was a new thing but the Muhj were often not so different ideologically. The Taliban leadership were often veterans of that war. They've been Saudi/Pakistani supported but that's mostly a geopolitical Great Game rather than ideological.
 
Also kabul's rule extends as far as goverment forces can shoot :(
Those pictures of women wearing western clothes from the 1970s were taken in kabul the posh bits the rest of the country was rather undeveloped apart from the bit the local goverment was massacring the soviets invaded orginally because their puppet was getting a bit murder happy and given the scum both sides supported in the cold war that was quite a bar to cross :(.

When the British first moved into Helmund so of the more isolated villages assumed they had invaded from india again :D.
Red faces all round whwn the translator passed that one one :rolleyes:
 
On TDB Who Set Off the Enormous Bomb in Kabul? ‘Not Us,’ Say Taliban. Don’t Believe It.
...
The identification with ISIS, he said, also draws attention away from the most likely perpetrators, the Taliban and the allied Haqqani Network, both of which operate out of Pakistan.

A senior aid to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, whose office windows were shattered by the blast, also agreed that the Taliban, despite the group’s denials, were behind the new attack and leaving it to ISIS to claim, especially since the civilian casualty count was so high.

“Today’s enormous explosion absolutely was a Haqqani Network type attack,” Ghani’s aide told The Daily Beast. “ISIS [in Afghanistan] cannot carry out such a large and sophisticated attack.”

An Afghan intelligence officer with experience investigating other such attacks in Kabul says he simply does not buy the Taliban denial. “Last year militants attacked the biggest Afghan military hospital and more than 100 were killed,” he said. “The Taliban denied it was responsible and ISIS claimed it, but within a few hours we established that the whole cell behind the attack was Afghan Taliban based in Peshawar, Pakistan.”
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Getting more like Baghdad on a bad day. Just as the US is talking about upping troop levels again.

Big attacks in Kabul often get linked to the Haqqanis who are basically old Pakistani assets. Very capable people, they've been described as providing the social infrastructure AQ grew out of.
 
CrabbedOne said:
On TDB Who Set Off the Enormous Bomb in Kabul? ‘Not Us,’ Say Taliban. Don’t Believe It.
Getting more like Baghdad on a bad day. Just as the US is talking about upping troop levels again.

Big attacks in Kabul often get linked to the Haqqanis who are basically old Pakistani assets. Very capable people, they've been described as providing the social infrastructure AQ grew out of.
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if the americans hadn't decided to go for iraq in '03 and given afghanistan their real best shot - working with locals to develop infrastructure, doing your proper counterinsurgency - then maybe, just maybe, they might have emerged from afghanistan with credit having done a really good thing and restored the image of the united states. however, it is now far too late to wind the clock back to 2002, 2003 and give it another go. there's the auld military maxim about not reinforcing defeat. and the americans should ponder it before putting thousands of troops back on the ground. they had their chance and they fucked it up.
 
Pickman's model said:
if the americans hadn't decided to go for iraq in '03 and given afghanistan their real best shot - working with locals to develop infrastructure, doing your proper counterinsurgency - then maybe, just maybe, they might have emerged from afghanistan with credit having done a really good thing and restored the image of the united states. however, it is now far too late to wind the clock back to 2002, 2003 and give it another go. there's the auld military maxim about not reinforcing defeat. and the americans should ponder it before putting thousands of troops back on the ground. they had their chance and they fucked it up.
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Perhaps, though cross border insurgencies supported by a neighbouring state are notoriously hard to end. We never seemed to want to acknowledge that was the reality. The Pakistani military will have their way with Kabul. Back when Terry took Kabul first Pindi used to openly talk about Afghanistan as their 5th Province.

I concluded when Obama came in and tried an Iraq like surge he really should have gone for long and light as it was unlikely to end and we should not just betray the Afghans who partnered with us. That's were we are now anyway and barely treading water.

We (i.e. the NATO powers) don't really have the skill set or institutional endurance for "nation building". You have to put people in who really belong to the place like back in the Raj. Rule by white Landie in Kosovo does not scale up and Kosovo took far longer than expected and is still pretty messed up. Think about the Iranians and their parsimonious mission Syria. They are never leaving. But then you end up owning a neo-colonial project and how do sell that to the voter who now have an outsized fear of brown people blowing them up?

Afghanistan has fuck all strategic value to us. There are far more Salafi-Jihadis finding refuge in Afghanistan and it's borders than when we started. It spilled over into a rather large terrorist war in Pakistan that has killed 40K+ people.

An appropriate response to 9-11 would have been to do what Churchill described on the North West Frontier as "butcher and bolt". Which they did repetitively as well as bribing the natives to keep order. Unfortunately I'm not seeing how we have improved on that.
 
On War College Podcast Erik Prince’s terrible plan for Afghanistan

On the old Blackwater CEO's wacky plans for privatising the war in Afghanistan and appointing a Viceroy figure to run it as profit making venture. His old amigo Steve Bannon was a keen advocate for the plan and Prince with his Mercer clan connections certainly tells the sort of heroic mercantilist tale Trump likes to hear. The President did display a sudden interest in Afghan mineral wealth Price apparently covets as a prize. A sort of new East India company that seems a bit absent minded of what happened when their Sepoys went up the Khyber. Call it the Deep Private Sector this sort of thing has its attractions. A regular Breitbart talking head selling lovely deniable GWOT perhaps as little noticed by the US public as old CIA war in Laos. An venture full of imagined private sector efficiencies and none of those stuffy Pentagon Generals complicating things with talk of logistics, geopolitics and responsible leadership.

In fact what we have here is a wealthy, perhaps slightly crazy, well connected, very rightwing libertarian getting much richer off Pentagon pork, deploying poached Uncle Sam trained guys leading mostly underpaid 3rd world soldiers into a series of cluster fucks. Blackwater in Iraq helped screw up the SOFA negotiations causing a major headache for the Pentagon. Points to the trail of wreckage Prince has left behind him from there to Somalia, his Gulf connections and growing Chinese operations. Worries close scrutiny might reveal a truly mercenary type whose loyalty is rented.
 
bumping and old thread. Not sure why, its just I have been looking into this again of late

How Far Can Sino-India Joint Economic Cooperation in Afghanistan Go?

Interesting development - blunt economic power mooted to lasso the country with cash vs a Trump endorsed general/ non specific plan to kill off the Taliban bogeymen in the face of Pakistan meddling. The Afghan security forces have seen a fall in numbers of c. 11% in the last year, whilst bombings seem to be out of control in the urban areas as we have seen with the carnage so far this year. Trump and his warrior intellectual advisors are still chucking billions into the place on top of the c $3 trillion already *invested* , the ANDSF is currently awash with hi -tech kit and gunships, yet depending on what you read ( lots of reports of apocalypse now like gunship joy runs on out of the way town resulting in scores dead), Taliban (or general non governmental forces) seem to controls up to 70% of the country.

Things are going swimmingly according to uncle Sam though:

"Publicly, U.S. officials have presented an optimistic view of the situation in Afghanistan. The top U.S. general in Afghanistan said late last year that the country had “turned the corner.

Asked what his goal in Afghanistan was in the next year, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told a Congressional hearing he wanted “a more capable Afghan force, between their military and their police (and) the violence levels going down.”
On Monday, Mattis said the spate of recent attacks had been expected and the militants were “on their backfoot.”
“This is the normal stuff by people who cannot win at the ballot box, so they turn to bombs,” Mattis said."

What does the future hold for this wretched region ?
 
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Might work better than the current plan. The idea that conventional forces could win against guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan was so monumentally stupid that only the more arrogant and bloodthirsty members of two of the most compulsively violent elites (the US and UK) could have taken the idea seriously. So we saw the defeat of Britain and are gradually seeing the defeat of the US. But what is also astonishing is how badly the international 'assistance' has failed on the non-military level. I mean, it's not astonishing if you know what they were doing there, but astonishing that they understood so little about what was needed. I could probably rant about this for a while but the summary would be that in as far as external people could help at all, it was economic assistance that was needed - to improve an economy in which many people barely survive. Spending on transport and other common goods would have been a good start, both creating things people needed and creating jobs. But this went directly against the neo-liberal consensus so instead the focus was on things like improving the situation of women. I won't deny that needs to happen in Afghanistan but it is absurd to think that the white land rover crew could do it. Building roads they could have done. In one of their most symbolic acts, the US did build a new road out of Kabul - to Bagram air base. They literally built a road for their own military and went no further. So now here we are. As in Iraq, the defeat in Afghanistan is as much to do with neoliberal ideology as it is to do with military stupidity.
 
BBC in 2014
8115 said:
There were saying on the BBC breakfast news this morning, it's not really conceivable the Taliban will come back as a government. If true that's a big change.

So, on one hand maybe it has helped the security of this country (I am a little dubious as I see terrorism as like a many headed monster, you have to attack the causes or its head just pops up somewhere else).

But I reckon there have been radical and far ranging changes to Afghanistan society. Haven't they been moved much more towards a Western style democracy with a focus on security, health and education?

I'm not saying that an imperial style invasion is by any means the right way to go about doing these things, but I think there have been effects. I have seen/ heard several Afghan people saying, we should not be leaving as our work is not finished, to me that doesn't say nothing has been done?
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BBC Today
www.bbc.co.uk

Afghanistan: 'We have won the war, America has lost', say Taliban

A BBC team meets the Taliban, a group that clearly sees itself as Afghanistan's government-in-waiting.
www.bbc.co.uk
" The Taliban don't see themselves as a mere rebel group, but as a government-in-waiting. They refer to themselves as the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," the name they used when in power from 1996 until being overthrown in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Now, they have a sophisticated "shadow" structure, with officials in charge of overseeing everyday services in the areas they control. Haji Hekmat, the Taliban mayor, takes us on a tour. "
...

Airpower, particularly that provided by the Americans, has been crucial over the years in holding back the Taliban's advance. The US already drastically cut back its military operations after signing an agreement with the Taliban last year, and many fear that following their withdrawal the Taliban will be placed to launch a military takeover of the country.
Haji Hekmat derides the Afghan government, or "Kabul administration" as the Taliban refer to it, as corrupt and un-Islamic. It's hard to see how men like him will reconcile with others in the country, unless it's on their own terms.
"This is jihad," he says, "it is worship. We don't do it for power but for Allah and His law. To bring Sharia to this country. Whoever stands against us we will fight against them."
 
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