The War is Lost

October 18, 2009 3:05 PM by Jeffrey Tucker (Archive)

A wonderful piece of reporting in the New York Times today, one which pretty well establishes what everybody -- except the average American -- seems to know: the war is over and the U.S. has lost; moreover, the enemy that the U.S. supposedly vanquished is alive and growing:

Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of "Al Qaeda lite," a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.
Living side by side with the Haqqanis' followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.

I had written about the ties between Pakistan's intelligence services and the Taliban while covering the region for The New York Times. I knew Pakistan turned a blind eye to many of their activities. But I was astonished by what I encountered firsthand: a Taliban mini-state that flourished openly and with impunity.

The Taliban government that had supposedly been eliminated by the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was alive and thriving.

All along the main roads in North and South Waziristan, Pakistani government outposts had been abandoned, replaced by Taliban checkpoints where young militants detained anyone lacking a Kalashnikov rifle and the right Taliban password. We heard explosions echo across North Waziristan as my guards and other Taliban fighters learned how to make roadside bombs that killed American and NATO troops.

And I found the tribal areas -- widely perceived as impoverished and isolated -- to have superior roads, electricity and infrastructure compared with what exists in much of Afghanistan.

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Comments (12)

Nikolaj

Just as war in Iraq was "lost" until was won eventually.

C'mmon, only thing New Yoork Times wants to do is to lessen the burden on their guy, who won the Nobel Prize for peace and now it would be quite inconvenient if he would have to do some unpopular things, like surge, similar to that successfully implemented in Iraq, and to attract bad will that way from European communists who adore him and who gave him a Nobel Prize.

Published: October 18, 2009 5:12 PM
Ted Amadeus

The first unwritten rule of war is win quickly and decisively with overwhelming force. It's not politically or religiously correct to the soft-minded American altruists in wishy-Washington, but it's nonetheless the case. If you're not willing to commit to doing that, you will lose, and this "nation building" waste of time & money is insuring our defeat the longer we drag it out. We have failed to make the impression a conqueror must: To cause the enemy to realize by your sheer force and willingness to use it, how wrong they were to ever oppose you in the first place!

Published: October 18, 2009 5:28 PM
David C

...and to top it off, the US is probably propping them up. Our war on drugs in Afghanistan has probably made the Taliban rich beyond their wildest dreams, and our paying Pakistan billions per year are propping up the corrupt ruling class, leading to even more corruption and creating better resentment for the USA and wide popular support for Al Qaeda.

And, in all honesty, the cynical side of me says the US oligarchs want it that way. Nothing like a perpetual war to justify endless confiscation of other peoples money.

Published: October 18, 2009 5:30 PM
Walt D.

I was just listening to C-Span. First Henry Kissinger and then Alexander Haig were explaining why we lost.

Then a caption came on showing that this program was broadcast in 1998! They had been taking in generalities, which applied to Afghanistan, but they were in fact referring to Vietnam!

Published: October 18, 2009 5:48 PM
Dewaine

If no one else can see it, at least the Russians can see the resemblance of the USA to the former USSR. Here is a lesson in humility: being beaten by an enemy with no navy, no air force, and no organized army.

FIRST The USSR (1979 to 1989)
http://english.pravda.ru/world/asia/16-02-2009/107105-usa_ussr_afghanistan-0

"Russia marked the 20th anniversary of the withdrawal of the last Soviet troops from Afghanistan on February 15. The Soviet Union lost over 14,000 people during ten years of the war – from 1979 to 1989. Over a thousand military men became disabled individuals as a result of the war. The soldiers of the Soviet Army were absolutely unaware of the big political game around Afghanistan. .."

NOW the USA (2001 to present)
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090915/D9ANJVM00.html

"...Leading Democrats in Congress have signaled they do not support a troop increase now, and maybe not at all. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, has the unhappy task of telling the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday why the United States should stay the course and commit to what he calls a "properly resourced counterinsurgency effort"...

Mullen has sounded increasingly alarmed about the growing technical capabilities of a resurgent Taliban and about the lackluster support among Afghans for the foreign-run enterprise that purports to protect them from a homegrown insurgent movement..."

Published: October 18, 2009 11:40 PM
Dr.Akbar

As Churchill once said, “Americans will always do the right thing, only after they exhaust every other possibility"

Things are out of hand for the U.S and that is for sure, for combined with difficult terrain are some very powerful neighboring countries that are not at all too happy with American interventionism.

Everyone here knows it’s not about Freedom or liberty mumbo jumbo but about securing American Imperial Corporate designs. The perpetrators of 9/11 were "allegedly" Saudi's (yet nothing substantial to prove it) and you come across half way round the globe blaming men(Taliban-non Saudis) without basic needs to cater for themselves and who live in caves, to "Smoke them outta their holes" as Bush put it. But whoever may have caused 9/11, no one here is ready to swallow the pill for killing more than a million of innocent people, all collateral damage.

It was really not about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq for example, but that Saddam wanted to shift to Euro in oil exchange. Saddam had to be eliminated. But so were about a million or more innocent beings in a short span of Shock and awe. The U.S killed and achieved 10 times more innocent headcount than what Saddam did in a decade.

Afghanistan may not have been on the list till Osama bin laden snatched the oil pipeline contract from Unocal and give it to- Argentina(of all the world!! Surely the credentials of Osama bin laden, as an anti American are not highly rated as we see it, for his family has joint business with that of Bush's and both are very close and cosy to each other, and that he was the one to provide for the excuse). As till 1999, it was CIA financing the Taliban, after all how could they afford so many dollars when they had themselves banned the poppy and its output was reduced from thousands to tens of tons. Taliban had to go too and the innocent are collaterals. The Americans are will try to hold out till they achieve some of their objectives, balkanization of Pakistan is strongly considered to be one of them. As somehow, a nuclear Pakistan makes to Israel uncomfortable. The support for corrupt and inefficient politicians in the name of democracy and the subsequent dissent amongst the masses is not misplaced. The aid goes to trash as far as they are concerned.

It’s America, at "the Golden Crescent" as they call Afghanistan for its poppy potential; the output of morphine is more than 5000 tons as of now in Afghanistan. Containers of acetic anhydride (used to convert morphine to heroine) are being transported right through Pakistan, from the Karachi seaport to Kabul. No company in the east makes acetic anhydride and it is pretty obvious that American corporate is in for some real cash other than financing the war, on the face of it. The produce is being smuggled to all parts of the world including the U.S., so that it’s an obvious conclusion that till the ‘greedy mean few’ can dupe Americans into supporting this war they will milk it to the finish, no matter how grave the consequences.

For those who don’t know why the Americans poked their nose into Vietnam may not know what the ‘Golden triangle’ meant. It was a poppy war, more than anything else.

akbar_ak@hotmail.com
Peshawar, Pakistan

Published: October 19, 2009 4:03 AM
Enjoy Every Sandwich

We won the war in Iraq? Based on what? What did we win?

Published: October 19, 2009 7:50 AM
fundamentalist

The war in Afghanistan has become a religious/ethnic war just as the Vietnam war was largely racial--Asians against Causcasians. In Vietnam, the population never supported the war or the US, so when the US pulled out after the Paris treaty was signed, and the North invaded again, the South refused to fight. Ten years trying to force democracy on an uwilling population were wasted.

We're attempting the same thing in Afghanistan. Secular Westerners viewed as infidels by all but a handfull of people in Kabul are trying to force democracy on a population that doesn't want it. And we're killing their relatives, fellow Muslims, who oppose us. The enemy has a safe haven in Pakistan where we can't touch them, just as the NV's had safe havens in Cambodia and Laos.

We'll never win the hearts and minds of Afghans because Afghans are among the most radical Muslims in the world. They will be friendly to our faces because that is the tradition of hospitality in the East. But behind closed doors they're cursing us and want us to get out. Westerners don't understand this because they take religion very lightly. Afghans don't. Mothers will murder their own children to keep them within Islam.

The Taliban are not well-trained or armed. Their advantage is their ability to blend in with the population and conduct guerilla warfare. We cannot defeat people like that. Only the Afghans can do it and if they want to do it, they don't need our help. If they don't want it, nothing we can do will succeed.

All of the warmongers point to the success of the "surge" in Iraq, but the surge didn't defeat the insurgency. The Iraqi people defeated it when they turned against it. Without the Iraqi people turning against the insurgents, the "surge" would have failed.

Published: October 19, 2009 8:01 AM
R.P. McCosker

"We won the war in Iraq? Based on what? What did we win?"

Oh, you're supposed to think the "surge" won it for "us." Now all we have to do is occupy Iraq forever, with massive permanent bases and privileged access by our governmental elites to Iraq's oil supply.

Of course neither Iraq or Afghanistan was an ever an enemy of the U.S. (Or Cuba, or Vietnam, or North Korea, or Japan, or Germany, or Spain, ad nauseum.)

That is, until the imperialistic meddlers in our post-Constitutional federal regime started whipping up a war frenzy among the American sheeple -- aided and abetted by its Mockingbird media machinery. (This David Rohde "article" being one of the more recent pieces of Mockingbird propaganda, in this case to fool the public into believing the Taliban is dangerous to America and that Obama thereby is justified in expanding his war of occupation and bringing in the NATO "allies" to help accomplish that.)

Published: October 19, 2009 12:56 PM
Reply To Dr. Akbar

Dear Dr. Akbar,

Is there any chances that Pakistan might fight against US troops should our soldiers invade Pakistan in order to attack Al-Qaeda ?

American incursions in Pakistan are happening more frequently and causing civilian casualties.

I bet Pakistak will be more efficient than the USA to get rid of the taliban threat.

Published: October 19, 2009 2:06 PM
Abhilash Nambiar

Since victory is not even definable, it would not be possible to say that the war is lost.

But like Dr. Akbar's quote by Chruchill, I too believe that, “Americans will always do the right thing, after they exhaust every other possibility"

Just like the tyrants of USSR lost power in Afghanistan, so will the tyrants of USA will lose power. A more principled class of people will come to power in the US because every other possibility would be exhausted by then. When they win the war, the people of Afghanistan will celebrate victory with the Americans, not against them. The victory in Afghanistan will be a victory against vice, not a victory against the Taliban.

I know I sound prophetic, but I see it in the nature of Americans to be intelligent and reflective once quick fix solutions fail. And when Americans are reflective, they tend to implement spectacularly beautiful and enduring solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

Published: October 19, 2009 2:43 PM
Hard Rain

The sad thing is it's become cheaper for America to bribe her enemies than to bomb them...

Published: October 21, 2009 1:31 AM