The link: U.S. official resigns over Afghan war (washingtonpost.com)
A quote:
Hoh was assigned to research the response to a question asked by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an April visit. Mullen wanted to know why the U.S. military had been operating for years in the Korengal Valley, an isolated spot near Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan where a number of Americans had been killed. Hoh concluded that there was no good reason. The people of Korengal didn’t want them; the insurgency appeared to have arrived in strength only after the Americans did, and the battle between the two forces had achieved only a bloody stalemate.
Korengal and other areas, he said, taught him “how localized the insurgency was. I didn’t realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometers away.” Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases.
“That’s really what kind of shook me,” he said. “I thought it was more nationalistic. But it’s localism. I would call it valley-ism.”
…
With “multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups,” he wrote, the insurgency “is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and Nato presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified.”
I think Hoh is forgetting why we went to war in Afghanistan to begin with. The original motive to attack them didn’t come from a desire to help them out and free them from the Taliban; it came because Osama bin Laden had been using Afghanistan as an operating base to attack us.
But we can go back to George W. Bush and his positive think and positive speak, how he was going to take democracy to the world, and defeat the enemy completely.
If you understand that some people in the world don’t want to or aren’t willing to live like us, and if some of those people become our enemy, and if the people in their region, many of them their friends or family, don’t want to or don’t have the will to ally themselves with us to defeat our enemies, then you understand that it’s best not to build up unrealistic expectations. If you confess up to reality, then you might be able to come up with a realistic solution.
Positive think and positive speak are important and good if you’re building on reality. Otherwise, they’re no good.
And here is John McCain talking about winning: McCain: Why we can — and must — win the war in Afghanistan (cnn.com)
McCain says,
Success in Afghanistan will emerge, as it did in Iraq, when local leaders and citizens are more and more able to take responsibility for governing and securing their own sovereign country without substantial international assistance.
Of course, I’m no expert, but it seems to me that Afghanistan and Iraq are not good comparisons, since Afghanistan is much more rural and mountainous.
And I think McCain is overstating “success” in Iraq. The whole reason the U.S. had to have a surge is because it lost control after initially having Iraq under complete control. The loss of control was due to Bush and Rumsfield’s refusal to take heed of military advisers who told them that they needed about 300,000 ground troops after the invasion, so I read.
Only God knows the future, but it seems to me that McCain is being very presumptuous in not allowing for the possibility that 28,000,000 people don’t want or aren’t willing to comply with what he thinks is best. Or that 100,000 foreigners can succeed in imposing liberty on 28,000,000 people who haven’t been willing to fight for freedom or live free in the past, to be willing to break the yoke of bad religion, to fight their own tyrants much.
Filed under: War
