Posted on 12/15/2019 3:03:48 PM PST by robowombat
'We Are Never Going to Get the U.S. Military Out of Afghanistan'
BY ROBERT SPENCER
Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said it: “We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave.”
That explains why we haven’t been able to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan after all these years: there is nothing going on there that will provide any stability, and there will not be, so apparently the State Department establishment wants us to stay there until the end of time.
In reality, the new revelations in the Washington Post make it clearer than ever that it is long past time to end the fool’s errand in Afghanistan. Michael Brendan Dougherty sums it up in National Review: “The more troubling revelation in the Post’s story was that multiple presidents and generals had lied elaborately to the public about the war, pretending it was going well even though they’d privately concluded that our objectives were contradictory and our strategy was a mess. Worse yet was the lying they did to themselves, creating endless color-coded metrics and then manipulating the data that was measured by them.”
An Army colonel who served as a senior adviser on Afghanistan during the Obama administration explained: “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible. Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
Although the Post’s revelations are being treated as if they were explosive, they’re really nothing new. It has been obvious for a considerable period that no one knows what to do about Afghanistan, even as authorities put the best possible face on the proceedings. The former chief of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, was asked a year ago what the U.S. should do in Afghanistan now. McChrystal responded:
I don’t know. I wish I did … If we pull out and people like al-Qaeda go back, it’s unacceptable for any political administration in the [United States]. It would just be disastrous, and it would be a pain for us. If we put more troops in there and we fight forever, that’s not a good outcome either. I’m not sure what [is] the right answer. My best suggestion is to keep a limited number of forces there and just kind of muddle along and see what we can do. McChrystal was not alone. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, said much the same thing at that time:
Were we not to put the pressure on Al-Qaeda, ISIS and other groups in the region we are putting on today, it is our assessment that, in a period of time their capability would reconstitute, and they have today the intent, and in the future, they would have the capability to do what we saw on 9/11. Dunford added: “If someone has a better idea than we have right now, which is to continue to support the Afghans and continue to put pressure on those terrorist groups in the region, I am certainly open to a dialogue on that.”
Right. But the fact is that al-Qaeda and the Taliban and the Islamic State are in Afghanistan, and just biding their time until we leave. Are we going to stay there until the end of time? What we should do is pull out and adopt a strategy modeled after the old containment strategy that was used in the Cold War. I’ve harshly criticized the foreign policy establishment for retaining old Cold War paradigms and failing to adapt to the new realities of the world, particularly the resurgent jihad, but in this case, the wonks would do well to revisit some Cold War history.
What would be contained today would be jihadis: we would focus our efforts on preventing them from ever leaving Afghanistan and sowing mayhem anywhere else, while giving up our quixotic aspirations of Wilsonian nation-building. Accompany that with a robust and unapologetic affirmation of American values (freedom of speech, equality of rights of women, etc.) instead of the support we have given to Sharia in Afghanistan (and previously in Iraq), and an honest acknowledgment of the motivating ideology behind jihad activity, and we might actually start getting somewhere.
But none of this is likely to be done. And meanwhile “green-on-blue” attacks, in which a member of the American military is murdered by someone who was supposed to be on his side, continue to occur with dreary regularity. One of the elements of the establishment media’s rap sheet on me, which supposedly establishes that I’m a bigoted “Islamophobe,” is that I’ve said that there is no reliable way to distinguish jihadis from peaceful Muslims, because peaceful Muslims have not made any particular effort to separate jihadis from their communities. Yet these ongoing insider attacks in Afghanistan prove me correct. These murders keep happening because there is no reliable way to distinguish an Afghan Muslim who supports American troops from one who wants to murder them, and political correctness prevents authorities from making any attempt to do so anyway, because it would suggest that Islam is not a Religion of Peace. And so ever more U.S. troops are sacrificed to this madness.
The fool’s errand in Afghanistan has no goal, no endpoint, no definition of victory. It should have been ended years ago, and should be ended now. What are we fighting for at this point, anyway? The Taliban are never going to surrender. American forces have supervised the implementation of an Afghan constitution that enshrined Islamic law as the highest law of the land. Yet Islamic law is nothing like the democratic principles that we went into Afghanistan to defend (over here) and establish (over there). Sharia institutionalizes the oppression of women and non-Muslims, extinguishes freedom of speech, and denies the freedom of conscience.
Was that what we were fighting for?
Nonetheless, America continued to pour out her blood and treasure for this repressive state, with no clear objective or mission in view other than a never-defined “victory.” No one has defined what victory would look like in Afghanistan. What could it possibly look like? Has the Ghani regime ever allowed women to throw off their burqas and take their place in Afghan society as human beings equal in dignity to men? Does the Ghani government, or any Afghan government that would follow it, ever intend to guarantee basic human rights to the tiny and ever-dwindling number of non-Muslims unfortunate enough to live within its borders? Of course not.
And no matter how long American troops stay in Afghanistan, no Afghan regime is ever going to do such things. But nonetheless, we remain there. Muddling along is the order of the day.
As long as Afghanistan continues to be a major source of illegal heroin, with the aid and comfort of its corrupt government and “terrorists” the need for a US and allied presence will continue. While Agent Orange and Roundup have been identified as unsafe, and rightfully out of use, there are other agents that could destroy major portions of the poppy fields openly cultivated to produce heroin that is destroying major populations while funding the Islamic war of conquest. There is the same problem with cocaine in South American countries that permit unrestricted cultivation. Drugs are just another weapon in the war conducted by international terrorists.
Leaving Afghanistan to fall to total muslim control is leaving it to gain economic and extra-military strength to take their war to us; both through drugs and terrorism..
So we’re just cops there. Our people getting killed for what? England tried it way back in 1860’s and Russia now us.
Douglas MacArthur warned us, “never fight a land war in Asia.” We have forever ignored his advice and what do we have to show for it? Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan?
Afghanistan has been at war for 40 years. It’s not going to change any time soon.
Maybe Trump can trick/ provoke/ dare/ convince China to become the new host for this parasite of a nation. My remark is not meant to insult the individuals of Afghanistan. I have known a few. They, just as the average citizen of Iran don’t necessarily have it in for the United States, but those in their Governments do. Taliban still passes for Government over there.
Xi Jinping, president of China, may be interested in mining some of those rare earth elements said to be found in great abundance all over Afghanistan. Let them move in to some degree, the way Chinese are moving into Africa for mining.
Let them do all that ‘dirty work’ all that ‘wet work’ that must be done to manage such a land.
Never is a long long time.
There hasn’t been a single army since and including the army of Alexander the Great, that has been successful in Afghanistan.
We need to bring our people home and abandon that hell hole to the natives.
Just bring in every drum of agent orange and roundup and make sure the poppies can’t grow, then leave.
So we’re just cops there. Our people getting killed for what? England tried it way back in 1860’s and Russia now us.
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Get real. We are no longer in the 1860s when our oceans protected us. Do we want the Taliban using that country to blackmail us with missle-launched A-bombs? Now matter how good our detection science may be, they’d be able to smuggle in a few missles that could take out — wherever you live. And they’re not going to care whether they’ll lose half their population to retaliation.
The first round of Crusades lasted 196 years. And when they were over the result was the same as the beginning situation. Except that the original crusaders did not bring smelly people back with them.
The only practical solution that would produce desirable results would involve massive genocide. Containment seems to be a better alternative. That means we get out and keep them away from us.
If we can never leave then we should take over and start mining the crap out of the place. Mining might provide jobs for these fourth century heathens and start the process of giving them a reason (other than killing) to live.
I thought I saw that 4,000 troops are being withdrawn from there in the next week.
The institutionalization of corruption in the foreign policy and defense/intelligence establishments has become vast since the end of the Cold War, and like an ice berg, mostly well hidden. Touch any of its interests and the reaction is as swift as a rattle snake.
Agree. The only solution is to provide 90 days warning and then turn the place into a radiated hell so that it is uninhabitable for 300 years. Then tell NORK fatboy that he will be next.
You missed the point. Several nations went there to control the place and all failed or are failing; we’re losing people and for what? So what do we do? Go into every muzzie nation that is a threat to us?
Too true and to carry it further, G. Washington said basically the same thing exempting war one and two.
Neuter every muzzie they catch. One way or another it will end.
Agree with you and the author that containment is a better strategy. I knew we made a mistake when we allowed both Iraq and Afghanistan to form Islamic republics. I was in Iraq when we handed it back to them and I knew we did it too soon. We needed to run that place for a generation or two.
This, and. many other things, is one of the reasons I believe Bush jr will go down in history as one of our worst presidents.
It’s the fatalistic teachings of the Koran.
No western country has the stomach to do what would be required to uproot that underlying culture.
Of course, our idiot representatives think importing that sh*t is great for their re-election.
History teaches us that no outside power stays in Afghanistan. The Brits fought four wars, they didn’t stay; the USSR gave it a try, they didn’t stay long; we too will leave. Afghanistan won’t be “stabilized”, won’t change, won’t become modern. They will remain backwards, growing their poppies, sending their boys to madrases to memorize the Koran, murdering their inconvenient daughters and playing buzkashi, a polo-type game involving a goat or calf carcass.
We aren’t going to fix it. It’s not, IMHO, worth the blood or treasure to try.
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