Grim Appraisal of War in Afghanistan

National Security Team Delivers Grim Appraisal of War in Afghanistan

Monday 09 February 2009

by: Craig Whitlock, The Washington Post  

Munich - President Obama's national security team gave a dire assessment Sunday of the war in Afghanistan, with one official calling it a challenge "much tougher than Iraq" and others hinting that it could take years to turn around.

    U.S. officials said more troops were urgently needed, both from America and its NATO allies, to counter the increasing strength of the Taliban and warlords opposed to the central government in Kabul. They also said new approaches were needed to untangle an inefficient and conflicting array of civilian-aid programs that have wasted billions of dollars.

    "NATO's future is on the line here," Richard C. Holbrooke, the State Department's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told attendees at an international security conference here. "It's going to be a long, difficult struggle.... In my view, it's going to be much tougher than Iraq."

    Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, said the war in Afghanistan "has deteriorated markedly in the past two years" and warned of a "downward spiral of security."

    In addition to more combat troops, Petraeus called for "a surge in civilian capacity" to help rebuild villages, train local police forces, tackle corruption in the Afghan government and reduce the country's thriving opium trade. He also suggested that the odds of success were low, given that foreign military powers have historically met with defeat in Afghanistan.

    "Afghanistan has been known over the years as the graveyard of empires," he said. "We cannot take that history lightly."

    The White House is conducting a strategic review of the war in Afghanistan and says it will unveil the results before NATO holds a 60th-anniversary summit in early April.

    Obama administration officials have said they expect to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total U.S. deployment there to about 66,000. U.S. allies have a combined 32,000 troops in Afghanistan operating under NATO command. NATO officials have pressed European members of the alliance to send more, but few countries have been willing.

    Germany, which has 3,500 troops in Afghanistan, the third most of any country, has questioned the need for more combat forces. Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said more attention should be paid to training Afghan forces and to reconstruction projects.

    "We won't win with military alone," he said at the conference. "There will be no development without security. But without development, we won't have security, either."

    The debate over troops has led to a split within NATO. Jaap DE Hoop Scheffer, NATO's secretary general, told conference attendees on Saturday that European members of the alliance needed to do more of the "heavy lifting" in Afghanistan.

    British Defense Secretary John Hutton openly disagreed with his German counterpart, saying the need for more combat troops was the highest priority in Afghanistan. Reconstruction efforts, he said, would fail if the Taliban remains strong.

    "We kid ourselves if we imagine that other contributions right now are of the same value, because they're not," he said. Britain has 8,900 troops in Afghanistan and has said it will probably send more.

    Afghan President Hamid Karzai said his country had made large strides since the U.S.-led military invasion in 2001. He said Afghanistan was home to a thriving free press, 17 universities, and schools for thousands of girls who had been barred by the Taliban from receiving an education. In 2001, he said, Afghanistan had no paved roads; now it has 2,500 miles of new highways.

    U.S. officials said one of the thorniest problems in Afghanistan is its flourishing drug trade, which accounts for an estimated 90 percent of the world's heroin supply. But Karzai, who faces reelection in August, dismissed portrayals of Afghanistan as being run by drug barons.

    "Yes, we produce poppies. Yes, we are insecure because of that," he said. "Are we a 'narco-state,' as we've been called the past few years? No, we are not."

    Karzai said the only way to bring stability to Afghanistan is to eventually negotiate a deal with the Taliban. He also blamed Afghanistan's slow recovery on a lack of coordination among donor countries.

    U.S. and European officials agreed that poor coordination is a major obstacle. "I've never seen anything remotely resembling the mess we've inherited," Holbrooke said.

    But some officials suggested the Afghan government was also responsible.

    Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush, cited a fumbled attempt by the United Nations last year to name Paddy Ashdown, a British diplomat, as the overseer of international aid projects in Afghanistan. Ashdown's appointment was torpedoed by Karzai, who saw it as an infringement on Afghanistan's sovereignty.

    Holbrooke replied that the Obama administration would revisit the idea of a development czar with Afghan officials. "The Paddy Ashdown fiasco - and there's no other word for it - really set back the international community."

    Last week, in an open letter to Holbrooke published in the Times of London, Ashdown expressed some sympathy for "poor President Karzai" and said NATO members were chasing different goals in Afghanistan, depending on where their forces operate.

    "The British think Afghanistan is Helmand, the Canadians think it's Kandahar, the Dutch think it's Uruzgan, the Germans think it's the Panjshir valley and the U.S. thinks it's chasing Osama bin Laden." He added, "Someone needs to bash heads together out there and if anyone can, you can."

    Also Sunday, Vice President Biden held talks in Munich with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, a day after Biden said the White House wanted to "press the reset button" in its relations with the Kremlin. Ivanov praised Biden's speech, telling reporters that it was "very positive," and adding: "It is obvious the new U.S. administration has a very strong desire to change."

• U.S. air base closing which is a key to - to military operations in Afghan.
  • Grim Appraisal of War in Afghanistan - sm
    • If we had NUKED the Afghan SOB's on 9/12/2001, - we wouldn't be in the mess we are now.

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Obama stated many, MANY times during his campaign that we need to focus on Afghanistan and that he would send more troops there if he was elected president.  He said it was a mistake to put our resources into Iraq when bin Laden most likely was hiding out in the Afghanistan/Pakistan border somewhere.

the human cost of war and consequences of our foreign policies.  It is too bad that it took an election campaign to prompt the media to abandon previous censorship of these images.  If we can wage wars and perpetuate policies that bring this kind of unfathomable misery and human suffering down on village civilains(who up until now have carried the monolithic media moniker of "collateral damage") then I believe it is the media's job to report this side of the story and present these images every single time they occur.  

The Vietnam war was the first televised war.  The images that visited our living rooms nightly during the evening newcast compelled Americans with a conscience to oppose that war and call for its end.  Better late than never, I guess, but who knows what kind death and destruction could have been prevented on both sides of the conflict if we had access to these images all along?  

As a postscript observation, the images show us exactly why the tradition why diplomacy matters.  Some of us have been following this side of the story for years now.  For those voters, the war and the absence of EFFECTIVE international diplomacy and alliance building strategies are every bit as focal as the national issue of the economy.   

Indeed, in a February 17 article, the ANSA English Media Service reported (accessed from the Nexis database): "Since arriving in Italy on Saturday, Pelosi has visited the American air base at Aviano in northeast Italy and the American military cemetery in Florence and is due at the NATO Joint Forces Command in Naples Wednesday." Further, a February 19 press release issued by Pelosi's office stated: "Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Congressional delegation today were briefed by U.S. Admiral Mark Fitzgerald, Commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa, and Commander of Allied Joint Force Command Naples. Admiral Fitzgerald and his NATO staff provided information on NATO activities in the Balkans, the ongoing training of Iraqi Security Forces, and operations against pirates off the coast of Somalia." The release further stated: "On Saturday, Speaker Pelosi and the Congressional delegation visited Aviano Air Base where the Speaker pinned the Bronze Star Medal on Technical Sergeant Phoebus Lazaridis for extraordinary service in Afghanistan. The delegation paid their respects to the more than 4,400 American World War II soldiers buried at the Florence American Cemetery on the outskirts of Florence on Sunday."

On February 21, Pelosi released a statement about her trip to Afghanistan, in which she said, "For the past two days, I have led an eight Member House delegation to Afghanistan to visit U.S. troops," during which the delegation "met with U.S. military leaders, and the U.S. Diplomatic team in Kabul to better assess the best course of action to further our national security interests in preparation for the completion of President Obama's strategic review of the Afghanistan policy" and "met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is sending his own advisors to Washington as part of the review process."