Nine years into the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the goals have never been particularly clearly defined. But with the war still going poorly one thing is certain: they aren’t being met.
So reports have officials now shrinking their overall goals for the war, whatever those are. Anti-corruption efforts are ‘essential’ one day and impossible the next. At times officials vow to ensure the Taliban will never return to power, while others openly talk about reconciliation and finding a “role” for the Taliban in ruling the country. Al-Qaeda is cited as an excuse for the war, but officials admit the group’s leadership is long gone and only a handful of al-Qaeda members even remain.
Which is perhaps part of why officials never seem to accomplish any goals — they can’t agree on what they are. But paring back expectations is really more of the same, and another excuse to keep the war going in the face of mounting evidence of what a colossal failure it has been.
The few tangible metrics we’ve been presented with, like the growth and training of Afghan security forces, are never met and still always expanded. Claims of “progress” are forever met with rising death tolls and official ambivalence. The July 2011 date became the “end of 2014” date, and even that is already being disavowed by some officials.
The Afghan War has been going on for so long it seems to have a momentum of its own, and rather than worrying about having possible goals to meet the default position seems to be to continue the war with an end only really coming if some sort of victory-seeming condition appears on its own.
The US will be forced to 'pare back' like they did in Iraq. They are bankrupt and China has stopped buying their Treasury Junk Bonds. Pare back my A$$! Crash and burn is more like it…
Whatever the goal is, the outcome will be that Afghanistan will look much the same as Iraq: a total failure!
America is hopeless at building an Empire. Time it gave up, tried to repair what's left of its own house!
"Whatever the goal is, the outcome will be that Afghanistan will look much the same as Iraq: a total failure!" Not quite. Iraq is pumping oil again and American companies have the contracts – and on their terms of course!
A new Afghanistan policy is certainly needed. The current NATO effort in Afghanistan, primarily military, has failed after nine years of effort and a tripling of foreign military and civilian personnel. Unarmed government employees can no longer travel safely in 30 percent of the country’s 368 districts, according to published United Nations estimates, and there are districts deemed too dangerous to visit in all but one of the country’s 34 provinces. US leaders agree that there will be no military solution in Afghanistan.
Anatol Lieven: "Thus the desire to bring democracy, freedom, “good governance” and an improvement in the status of women to Afghanistan were laudable goals in themselves, but the result has been a ghastly masquerade, involving descriptions of the present Afghan government and political system not one of which corresponds to reality. Meanwhile the equally laudable desire to bring development to Afghanistan has ensnared us in calculations of “progress” which are virtually Soviet in their misrepresentation of the facts and the experience of ordinary Afghans."
The current US political strategy is ‘reconciliation and reintegration’ of the Taliban. Decoded, this amounts to little more than amnesty and surrender. It hasn't been effective. A recent $250 million program to lure low-level Taliban fighters away from the insurgency has stalled, with Afghans bickering over who should run it, and international donors slow to put up the money they had promised. The flow of Taliban fighters seeking to reintegrate has slowed to a trickle — by the most optimistic estimates, a few hundred in the last six months.
What is needed instead is a new US policy of genuine accommodation with the Taliban to include understanding and addressing their positions and grievances with the goal of forming a power-sharing Afghan government. Recent reports suggest that most Afghans, tired of the all-pervasive insecurity, want negotiations with the Taliban.
Other factions would also have to be accommodated. Afghanistan's three largest ethnic minorities oppose Karzai's outreach to the Taliban, which they said could pave the way for the fundamentalist group's return to power and reignite the civil war.
There are signs that because of a lack of progress such a policy is currently under consideration in Washington. The Guardian has reported that "feelers had been put out to the Taliban. Negotiations would be conducted largely in secret, through a web of contacts, possibly involving Pakistan and Saudi Arabia or organisations with back-channel links to the Taliban."
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, possibly the next British Prime Minister, has urged the Afghanistan government to consider bringing Taliban supporters into its political system. “Afghanistan will never achieve a sustainable peace unless many more Afghans are inside the political system, and the neighbors [nearby countries] are onside with the political settlement,” said Miliband,
President Karzai has not needed urging to talk to the Taliban. Karzai hosted a June peace conference where he called insurgents "brothers" and "dear Talibs," He asked the United Nations to remove Taliban leaders from the international sanctions black list and ordering the freeing of Taliban suspects from government custody. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters in Washington on July 14 that the Obama administration has agreed only to delist Taliban and al-Qaeda on “case-by-case basis.”
A recent report indicates that the US has already initiated talks with the Taliban. According to the Asia Times report, the Pakistan military and Saudi Arabia are acting as go-betweens to facilitate the negotiation process. The initial talks have covered two main areas – the issue of about 60 Pakistanis in the US's Guantanamo detention facility, and al-Qaeda. Another element touched on in the talks is the American demand that it maintain a military presence in northern Afghanistan, while agreeing to give control of the south to the Taliban. The Taliban do not agree with this – they want a complete US withdrawal. This remains a point of major disagreement.
The problem is that in the most recent Jirga, President Karzai informed the delegates at the outset; “There is no mention of a key Taliban demand that NATO troops leave Afghanistan,” when in fact that was one of the Taliban’s key demands. NATO is currently conducting a military offensive against the Taliban in Kandahar province.
"Thus the desire to bring democracy, freedom, “good governance” and an improvement in the status of women to Afghanistan were laudable goals in themselves, but the result has been a ghastly masquerade, involving descriptions of the present Afghan government and political system not one of which corresponds to reality. Meanwhile the equally laudable desire to bring development to Afghanistan has ensnared us in calculations of “progress” which are virtually Soviet in their misrepresentation of the facts and the experience of ordinary Afghans." ——-ok, i dont know any other way to say this, but sir, you are frikin crazy, and i dont know what planet you are from, but we need to quickly quarantine the area, and yourself. the reason given for invading and murdering countless human beings, was to retaliate against "those" who committed 9/11.As has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt, 9/11 was NOT committed by 19 cave dwelling miscreants, who couldnt even manage a proper landing approach in a frikin cessna. I cant prove who did 9/11, because the despotic and criminal government of the United corporate states of amerika has destroyed all evidence, and covered up and cleaned all the tracks leading to the responsible parties. It is dangerous and flat out crazy to think otherwise, you are all a bunch of murderous life hating thugs, and you all must be cleaned out, and deprived of any existence, like cancer that must be cut out of a body, before the body dies. you sir are a tick, leach, and any other metaphor that describes defiler of life. death to tyrants!
The NATO military presence must be removed for there to be any chance of peace in Afghanistan. The Taliban leadership’s one non-negotiable demand is the complete withdrawal of Western forces. They say that this must take place before they will negotiate any settlement with the government in Kabul, but there might be some room for compromise.
The oft-repeated objection to any Taliban control in Afghanistan is that the Taliban would establish "safe havens" for al Qaeda. Paul Pillar, deputy CIA chief of the counterterrorist center under President Clinton: "The US and other Western governments say we are in Afghanistan in order to deny terror groups like Al Qaeda a safe haven from which to plan new attacks. But that is no longer a valid assumption. Terrorists don't need a sanctuary to plan attacks from. We are investing enormously in an operation that is based on a flawed assumption. The reality is that the terror threat to the West would not significantly increase if we were to leave Afghanistan."
Would any concessions to the Taliban result in the Taliban taking total control of Afghanistan? Pillar again: "This is another assumption that is rarely questioned. But prior to the U.S. intervention in 2001, the Taliban did not have uncontested control of Afghanistan. They had the upper hand in a civil war against the Northern Alliance; they had the backing of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia while the Northern Alliance had the backing of Iran, Russia, and India. The U.S. essentially threw its weight behind the Northern Alliance to drive out the Taliban."
While the Taliban is integrated somehow into the Afghan government, which is a matter for the Afghans to decide, there needs to be support for the Afghan effort in the form of a regional effort toward diplomacy and peace. President Obama needs to implement his promise of a new strategy on March 27, 2009: ". . .together with the United Nations, we will forge a new Contact Group for Afghanistan and Pakistan that brings together all who should have a stake in the security of the region — our NATO allies and other partners, but also the Central Asian states, the Gulf nations and Iran; Russia, India and China."
The main issues concern Pakistan and India, including the dispute over Kashmir and Pakistan's concern about a growing influence of India in Afghanistan, which should be limited. Pakistan should be included in a regional forum of ‘Friends of Afghanistan’ made up of Iran, Pakistan, India, China, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia: these countries would be asked to make pledges of non-interference and recognise Afghanistan as a non-aligned state with no foreign bases.
Milibanda again: "The political settlement needs to be external as well as internal, involving all of Afghanistan's neighbours as well as those parts of the insurgency willing permanently to sever ties with al-Qaeda, give up their armed struggle and live within the Afghan constitutional framework."
Perhaps the US can succeed at reconciliation in Afghanistan although it has failed in Iraq. That was the main purpose of the surge, remember, but it didn't happen. Now we've had another surge in Afghanistan but this time with a president (Karzai) who is actually in favor of reconciliation. We need to make it work. The alternative is more hundreds of billions of dollars and many lives wasted. Who wants to be the last to die for a lack of trying to end this nine-year war? President Obama has promised another reappraisal of Afghanistan war policy in December — it's time.
General Petraeus, Aug 25, 2010: "We sat down across the table in Iraq from individuals who had our blood on their hands. That's what was done in northern Ireland. It's what's done in just about any insurgency as you get to the end stages of it."
The US needs to help negotiate a return of Afghanistan back to the Afghans.
The Afghan was is a collosal success. There is only one objective: to keep the war going — on a simmer mode. In the absence of Al-Qaeda, bombing of funerals or wedding parties, a little election mess, and some banking failure keep Afghanistan in the news. In the meantime, NATO "cannot see" thousands of poppy fields, thousand of heroin labs, and hundreds of tons of opiates "smuggled" outside the country and used to drug more locals. How tiresome.
"US Aims to Pare Back Expectations in Afghanistan?" Could this possibly mean that the American ruling class (America's political/corporate/banking/military-industrial crime syndicate of liars, thieves and murderers) have given up on their goals of; building a lucrative trans-Afghan oil pipeline, seizing Afghan minerals potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars and taking over control of the poppie/opium dope trade to fund their worldwide CIA operations? Right, I didn't think so. America didn't invade Afghanistan for humanitarian and benevolent reasons, or to fight terrorism. And, it sure as hell didn't invade Afghanistan because their number one export was broccoli (think poppies). And, of course, the same goes for Iraq (think oil) as well.
"Nine Years In: What Is the Goal, Anyhow?" Now you know.