Afganistan

Looks like Bu$hCo's good war has officially gone to shit, just like his vanity war in Iraq. Via The Raw Story.

British defense expert Michael Clarke told CBC that NATO's greatest weakness has been its failure to follow up on its military successes. NATO politicians play down these complaints, but some of the military leaders have begun to voice them openly.

"NATO miscalculated from the start," CBC explained, "believing the Taliban were thoroughly beaten for good back in 2002." As a result, many of the 37 nations participating in the NATO mission provided units that were unprepared for a combat role and reluctant to confront the Taliban when it reemerged in the south of the country two years ago.

This has largely left the US, British, Canadian, and Dutch forces to bear the brunt of active combat. NATO has even resorted to hiring helicopter services from private military contractors because risk-adverse member nations will not commit their own.

My emphasis.

Just A Reminder

Over there.

Two car bombs exploded in an outdoor market in Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 56 people and injuring scores....

&, over there.

U.S. troops die in chopper crash

Now Wait Just A Minute

I thought that we are fighting a global war on terror? Right? & that we need to defeat the enemy of freedom, namely the radical Islamists. Right? Like a lot of progressives, I support(ed) our efforts in Afganistan, after all, they provided sanctuary to al Qaeda & Osama bin Laden. Boy, was I ever wrong & apparently stupid. Here's what Senator Doctor Bill Frist had to say while visiting Afghanistan:

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan war against Taliban guerrillas can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Islamic militia and its supporters into the Afghan government.
....
"We're going to need to stay here a long time," Frist said.

The senator said he was warned to expect attacks to increase. There appears to be an "unlimited flow" of Afghans and foreigners "willing to pick up arms and integrate themselves with the Taliban," he said.

He said the only way to win in places like the volatile southern part of the country is to "assimilate people who call themselves Taliban into a larger, more representative government."

"Approaching counterinsurgency by winning hearts and minds will ultimately be the answer," Frist said. "Military versus insurgency one-to-one doesn't sound like it can be won. It sounds to me ... that the Taliban is everywhere."

Emphasis added.

What the fuck? Who's in charge? Who's on Frist? Or is it first? The ReThugs have clearly lost what little minds they had left. I'm going to eat a big Polish sausage with some hot & sweet honey mustard. Oh, & what are we going to do about Senator Doctor Bill Frist aiding & abetting the enemy?

Sick, Sick Bastards

Here's how Dan Bartlett, a White House Counselor to Bu$hCo, described the "compromise" worked out over torture:

"We proposed a more direct approach to bringing clarification. This one is more of the scenic route, but it gets us there."

This is a White House person, & he describes getting to a torture permitting bill as "the scenic route"? Jesus Christ stuffed with fish, what have we become? & this follows on Bu$hCo's remark to Wolf Blitzer concerning Iraq:

BLITZER: Let's move on and talk a little bit about Iraq. Because this is a huge, huge issue, as you know, for the American public, a lot of concern that perhaps they are on the verge of a civil war, if not already a civil war…. We see these horrible bodies showing up, tortured, mutilation. The Shia and the Sunni, the Iranians apparently having a negative role. Of course, al Qaeda in Iraq is still operating.

BUSH: Yes, you see — you see it on TV, and that's the power of an enemy that is willing to kill innocent people. But there's also an unbelievable will and resiliency by the Iraqi people…. Admittedly, it seems like a decade ago. I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there's a strong will for democracy.

Via The Carpetbagger Report.

Here's a breakdown of Bu$hCo's historical comma:

American dead - 2703
American wounded - 19,945
Other coalition troops - 232
US military deaths - Afghanistan - 338

As far as the Iraqi deaths, well, remember Tommy Franks' response to a question about how many Iraqis were killed.

“We don’t do body counts.”

The estimated Iraqi civilian death toll, from Iraq Body Count is a minimum of 43,491 & a maximum of 48,283. Quite a comma, eh? & these "leaders" have shown absolutely no ability to understand mistakes & then correct them. They have really fucked up the country. On a decidedly brighter note, I was able to gavage The Twins this a.m. & can report that they are growing cuter by the minute. They also seem to have an iron will when it comes to understanding the use of the human nipple. Understand, however, that they are still a week away from the normal gestation for twins, that's right - The Twins are a month old. Pics to follow.

Nice Job, Bu$hCo

Too bad you didn't finish it.

In a small, sunlit parlor last week, 20 little girls seated on rush mats sketched a flower drawn on the blackboard. In a darker interior room, 15 slightly older girls memorized passages from the Koran, reciting aloud. Upstairs was a class of teenage girls, hidden from public view.

The location of the mud-walled home school is semi-secret. Its students include five girls who once attended another home school nearby that was torched three months ago. The very existence of home-based classes is a direct challenge to anti-government insurgents who have attacked dozens of schools across Afghanistan in the past year, especially those that teach girls.

"We are scared. All the home schools are scared. If I even hear a dog bark, I don't open the gate. I go up on the roof to see who is there," said Mohammed Sulieman, 49, who operates home schools for girls in several villages in the Sheikhabad district of Wardak province.

Children's education was once touted as an exceptional success in this struggling new democracy. Within two years of the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban, an extremist Islamic movement that banned girls' education and emphasized Islamic studies for boys, officials boasted that 5.1 million children of both sexes were enrolled in public schools. These included hundreds of village tent-schools erected by UNICEF.

Now that positive tide has come to a halt in several provinces where Taliban insurgents are aggressively battling NATO and U.S. troops, and has slowed dramatically in many other parts of the country. President Hamid Karzai told audiences in New York this week that about 200,000 Afghan children had been forced out of school this year by threats and physical attacks.

That Other Country

The result of the United States' world leadership. Pathetic. I guess Bu$hCo doesn't mind that Poland offered just 10 soldiers, yes, 10, since they allowed use of their soil for the CIA's secret prisons, used for the torture of people.

...an inquiry by the 46-member Council of Europe in June singled out Poland, which is a member of the European Union, and especially Romania, which is due to join the EU in two years, as the two most likely locales for secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe.

But Bu$hCo can't convince our allies to do more in Afganistan, where the real battle against terrorism is continuing, & not very well, by the way.

More than a week after NATO's top leaders publicly demanded reinforcements for their embattled mission in southern Afghanistan, only one member of the 26-nation alliance has offered more troops, raising questions about NATO's largest military operation ever outside of Europe and the goal of expanding its global reach.

The plea for more soldiers and equipment to fight resurgent Taliban insurgents comes as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's forces are suffering the highest casualty rates of the nearly five-year-long conflict in Afghanistan, and as European governments are feeling stretched by the demands for troops there and in Iraq, Lebanon, the Balkans and in several African countries.

Sunday Morning

Atrios wonders why we invaded Iraq, so do I, I also wonder why we invaded Afganistan, particularly if we didn't plan to fix it after we won it. Things are not better in the world, no matter what Bu$hCo says. The facts just do not support the b.s. foaming from his mouth. I live in the woods, far from the urban life, the large targets, the close proximity to packed subways. & yet, it's clear that I will not, in the rest of my sorry lifetime, be able to go to places that I've thought about since I was a kid - the general Middle East, for one area. Now, I'm not wealthy, so it could be argued that I wouldn't have gone anyway, but for me, the possibility was what made some days bearable, some daydreams interesting. Being reality based, however, even with that brief incident a while back, means that facts have meaning, meaning that can't be twisted for politcal gain. Yet, we have Joanne Weintraub, entertainment writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel give a glowing review of ABC's atrocity of a film, The Path To 9/11. She mentions, barely, the fact that the film has serious factual problems. But that's OK she says, just enjoy it as a drama, a piece of fluff to help with boredom, with the Packer's season. But she fits right in with Bu$hCo's view of the world. The Los Angeles Times does its job a bit differently. In this story Doyle McManus discusses what the supporters of war won't - that it's way more complicated than starting a vanity war in Iraq.

• Al Qaeda, the initial focus of the "global war on terror," has been disrupted and dispersed. But it has been succeeded by a looser network of affiliates and homegrown terrorists — like those who carried out bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 — who could grow to be just as dangerous.

• The war in Iraq has become a training ground for Islamic extremists from Saudi Arabia and other countries, and some have returned home with expertise in urban warfare and explosives. Some experts fear the Persian Gulf's oil terminals could be among their next targets.

• Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon have damaged the image of the U.S. in much of the Muslim world and made it easier for terrorist organizations to win recruits. The wars and controversies over U.S. treatment of detainees also have made it more difficult for allied governments to cooperate with American counterterrorism programs, diplomats say.

• When Foreign Policy magazine surveyed more than 100 experts earlier this year, 84% said they did not believe the United States was winning the war on terrorism. In a Los Angeles Times poll, fewer than one-fourth of Americans said they believed the nation was "winning"; more than half said it was too soon to tell.

What If...

...Bu$hCo would not have begun his vanity war in Iraq? Would Afganistan be on the road to recovery, rather than in need of more NATO troops? It's too bad for Afganistan, it's not secure & it's producing a lot more opium.

James Jones, the top Nato commander in Europe and a US Marine general, said he wanted about 2,000 to 2,500 more alliance troops to expand the roughly 18,500 troops currently deployed in Afghanistan, as well as attack helicopters and transport aircrafts.

How Tough?

Wolcott.

....
One of my favorite verbal showdowns occurred on 14th Street one rainy day when two non-pugilists kept up the trash talk until one of them said, "You're carrying an umbrella, motherfucker--how tough can you be?" Which I must say got quite a chortle from us idle bystanders.

Now what has this to do with the posings of our militaristic muscle mouths?

This: It is an index of the frustration and impotence they're experiencing at not getting their way. They're waging rhetorical escalation because de-escalation is the unacknowledged order of the day, and there's nothing they can do about it.

Steve Clemons published a dispatch from the Nelson Report indicating that despite all of the Cheneyesque bluster, the Bush administration is pursuing the diplomatic route with Iran. To the dismay of the hard nosers, Bush is also reeling back his use of "Islamic fascists", which will be interpreted as a capitulation to political correctness. You even have Rumself whining that his recent appeasement slur was taken "out of context," and calling for "constructive" dialogue regarding the situation in Iraq. And then there's the happy novelty of Rudy Giuliani blowing the whistle and calling a foul on "partisan bickering", which will not endear him to the more strident dickheads in his party.

There has been a major shift in the mood climate, one which the War Party and its bloggers are resisting at the top of their lungs. But resistance is futile. As John Robb writes in an important post at Global Guerrillas, "Playing at War", we're not going to the get the grand, conclusive World War III (or IV) that same neocon ideologues crave. Conflict is being ratcheted down, dispersed. Here's what's in the cards ahead:

"Operations of low lethality. Western militaries do not have the desire, nor the sanction, to conduct the high casualty operations typically associated with real wars. Technology has been leveraged to increase the precision of attacks to limit collateral damage and save the lives of soldiers. The corollary to this is that western militaries are also fiercely protective of the lives of their soldiers. Warfare, increasingly, is supposed to be costless. What this means is that we will not see Sherman's 'March to the Sea' or Hama in the near future - and - the loss of a hundred soldiers in southern Lebanon will be enough to stop the Israeli army."

[snip]

"Muddled objectives. Given the lack of the cohesive and singular reason for war -- the survival of the state and its people through the elimination of its enemies -- the reasons for warfare will drift. This translates into a constantly shifting landscape of military objectives, where current objectives recede in favor of replacements before they can be reached. The result is confusion, mission creep, and conflict escalation.

"The upshot of this diminishment of warfare is that wars will become increasingly difficult to win."

Therefore:

"Ultimately, western societies will need to learn to live within the limits of this new framework. It is not possible for us to reverse the clock on this trend. Any mass mobilization for war that lifts existing limitations will be severely punished by both global markets and opinion (both domestically and abroad) if it ever was attempted."

This understanding seems to be slowly filtering into the visors of those in Washington, but adjusting to this new reality will deprive the most stubborn members of the War Party with the dramatic satisfaction of the final reckoning--the High Noon showdown--the climactic clash of civilizations--that they crave.

Robb:

"Given an inability to resolve conflicts through nation-building and state collapse, western states should endeavor to deescalate conflicts rather than ignite them. Escalation is a false God that promises a return of the motivational clarity found in the wars of the 20th Century. It cannot deliver this."

What we're hearing from pundits, bloggers, and likeminded belligerents this August is a baying to a false God, a nostalgic need for motivational clarity and a macho yearning for deliverance that the facts on the ground will deny them. Their commando belts tied up in knots, their umbrellas unfolded, they can turn on Bush, or on Condi Rice (as Richard Perle has done), but who can they turn to? Nobody. That's why they're egging each other on, flexing their biceps, and clinging to Mark Steyn for warmth. It's the only way to hold on to their fading relevance.

Emphasis mine. Let's hope it's true.

You Missed Nothing, Josh

Josh Marshall has this to say about the no-shame whatsoever assministration, there, I said it. Here's the whole post.

Maybe I'm missing something. But President Bush's announcement today of the transfer fourteen accused terrorists from secret prisons abroad to Guantanamo Bay seems pretty elementary in terms of political strategy, no?

As we speculated last night, President Bush wants to gin up a hail mary pre-election political fight over the constitution (no pun intended) of military tribunals for accused terrorists. This election-timed stunt is intended to put fourteen faces on the president's fight over the rules for his kangaroo courts.

So now, you're either with Bush or you're with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

What am I missing exactly?

Remember: It's all about the politics.

Ta-Da

First, we have this this report on poppy harvesting:

Afghanistan’s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said Saturday in Kabul.

He described the figures as “alarming” and “very bad news” for the Afghan government and international donors who have poured millions of dollars into programs to reduce the poppy crop since 2001.

Then, the NYT quotes a soldier in Iraq:

“As a soldier, I am going to do whatever we got to do,” he said. “As a personal opinion, I don’t think we need to be in this city, period. How much money and how many soldiers is it going to take when these people don’t want our help? They just don’t. We don’t even know who we can trust.”

But wait, we have the extraordinary news that the largest senior class in the history of the world has another member arrested.

Iraqi forces have arrested the second most senior operative in al-Qaida in Iraq, and the group now suffers from a ''serious leadership crisis,'' the national security adviser said Sunday.

It appears that the leaderless can function quite well without leaders:

Iraqi casualties soared by more than 50 percent in recent months, the product of spiraling sectarian clashes and a Sunni-based insurgency that remains “potent and viable,” the Pentagon said in its latest comprehensive assessment of security in Iraq.

During the period from the establishment of the new Iraqi government on May 20 until Aug. 11, the average number of weekly attacks jumped to almost 800. That was a substantial increase from earlier this year and almost double the number of the first part of 2004.

As a consequence, Iraqi casualties increased 51 percent over the last reporting period. The document notes that, based on initial reports, Iraqi casualties among civilians and security forces reached nearly 120 a day, up from about 80 a day in the pervious reporting period from mid-February to mid-May. About two years ago they were running about 30 a day.