Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan

Subject: Re: Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan


I can't read this without becoming so enraged that my coffee turns to steam
in my mouth.
Murderers! Violant murderers is what we all are ruled by. And I openly
weep when I hear some Mother, Father or sibling of a dead American declare
how proud they are of the great sacrifice their loved one paid for our
nation.
Not only have we allowed our Murdering Rulers to take the sons and daughters
of our Working Class and Poor Americans and teach them how to murder, but we
send them to their certain death by returning them time and time again to
the battlefield. And if they are not murdered themselves, they are maimed
physically or mentally to the point that their lives are forever ruined.
It doesn't matter what grand reasons or fine names our Greedy Empire gives
it, it is murder pure and simple.
We teach our innocent youth to murder up close and personal, hand to hand in
the desert sands or the steaming jungles. We teach them to play video games
in preparation for murdering from a distance, safe and snug in their little
control room hidden in the middle of the USA. We are now skilled at
murdering from up close or at long range.
And here's the real joke. This great nation, this American Empire that is
fighting a war on Terror, this peace loving nation of laws, has the worlds
greatest number of law breakers behind bars. The Empire is building
prisons, private prisons, at record breaking rates to house even more of our
lawless criminals.
America is probably the most violent nation in history. We can't even begin
to solve our own people's needs. So our corrupt leaders turn to what they
know best. Murder. Mass murder. Keep the cannons rolling and the blood
flowing. And at the helm sits the Two Faced Prince of Peace, with his
forked tongue flicking this way and that.
Murder!

Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 7:33 PM
Subject: Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan



Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
________________________________________
OpenDemocracy [1] / By Rodric Braithwaite [2]

Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan


February 21, 2014 |
On 16 December 2013 David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, told British
soldiers in Helmand in Afghanistan that they had accomplished their mission,
and that they could come home in 2014 with their heads held high.
He begged an important question: What was that mission? Was it the same as
the mission with which the Americans and their allies had entered
Afghanistan in October 2001? Or the mission with which the British had gone
into Helmand in 2006? Or was it a face-saving reformulation, designed to
demonstrate that the blood and treasure expended in Afghanistan over
thirteen years had not been spent in vain?
It is a mistake to draw historical parallels too closely, or to seek
unambiguous lessons. But looking at the past can clarify the present, even
if it offers no secure guide for the future.
The British invasions of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, the Soviet
invasion in 1979, and the American led invasion of 2001, all have one thing
in common. By a narrow definition, all the armies won their wars, though the
British suffered some humiliating defeats on the battlefield. But neither
the British, nor the Russians, nor the Americans achieved, at least through
military means, the objectives they had set themselves. All scaled their
ambitions down to aims that they could probably have achieved earlier and at
less cost. All seriously damaged their own prestige. And all wreaked havoc
on the country they claimed to have come to help.
The British invasions
A good deal of myth surrounds the three Anglo-Afghan wars (1839-1842,
1878-1880, and 1919). The first two ended with British armies defeating the
Afghan armies in the field and burning down Kabul. The third ended when the
British drove an invading Afghan army out of India. The aim of the first two
wars was to ensure British control over Afghan foreign policy, above all to
prevent the Russians getting a menacing foothold on the border of the Indian
empire.
Among British policymakers there were two schools of thought. One held that
success could only be achieved by reducing Afghanistan to a protectorate
under a British puppet, as the British had already done in so many parts of
India. The other held that it would be enough to secure Afghan cooperation
through diplomacy, subsidies, and the occasional threat of military action.
The 'forward policy' proved unsustainable: the Afghans made life intolerable
for the British occupiers. But the alternative was a success. The British
effectively controlled Afghan foreign policy for eighty years, bribing and
persuading even the formidable Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman [3] to match their
wishes. Today some Afghans regard Abdur Rahman as a traitor, though he was
probably their most effective ruler in the last three hundred years.
Thus the British very soon abandoned any idea of imposing a political
solution on Afghanistan, still less of trying to rule it in their own image.
Their Russian and American successors, however, made the mistake of
believing that they had not only the need, but the duty, to re-engineer
Afghanistan's political and social system, to bring the country, as the
Russians said, from the fourteenth into the twentieth century.
The Soviet invasion
Both the Soviet and the American invasions began with a stunning military
success. The Russians did not go in, as Western propaganda held at the time,
to threaten Western oil supplies, to secure a warm water port, or to
incorporate Afghanistan into the Soviet Union. On the contrary, they feared
that a country which bordered on their vulnerable Southern frontier was
falling into chaos under its murderous and dysfunctional Communist leaders,
a situation that would be exploited against them by the Americans.
They therefore decided to get rid of the Afghan leader Amin [4]. In December
1979, in a brilliant special forces operation, they killed Amin and replaced
him with a puppet. Their plan was then to train up the Afghan army and
police, put the political and social system on to a sound basis, and leave a
stabilised country behind them after perhaps a year. They hoped to create a
political and economic system on broadly 'socialist' principles, thus
ensuring that Afghanistan would automatically remain a reliable friend of
the Soviet Union.
The Afghan people had a different idea. Many of them had originally welcomed
the removal of Amin. But they deeply resented the presence of foreign
occupiers, infidels who tried to change their age-old ways. Resistance
spread and the Russians were sucked into a quagmire from which they
extracted themselves with much difficulty nine years later.

In putting the case for an early Soviet withdrawal to his colleagues in the
Politburo, Gorbachev said: 'We could leave quickly, without worrying about
the consequences, and blame everything on our predecessors. But that we
cannot do. We have not given an account of ourselves to the people. A
million of our soldiers have passed through Afghanistan. And it looks as if
they did so in vain. So why did those people die?' Gorbachev, in fact, found
himself in much the same place as Cameron a quarter of a century later. He
no longer hoped to achieve the broader ambitions the Russians had set
themselves of re-engineering Afghan society in the interests of progress and
stability. Instead he needed to find a way of declaring 'mission
accomplished' without repudiating the sacrifices that had been made by the
Soviet soldiers.
In one sense, Gorbachev had a surprising success. The Americans, the
Pakistanis, and the Afghan guerrilla fighters, the mujahedin, had all been
determined that the Russians should be humiliated. In addition, the
Pakistanis and the mujahedin aimed to set up an Islamic government in Kabul
to replace the Communists. But in protracted negotiations in Geneva in 1988,
the Russians managed to secure a deal which allowed them to withdrew their
forces in good order, leaving behind their own man, Najibullah [5], and an
Afghan army capable of defending him.
It was a short lived triumph. Najibullah and his army were almost completely
dependent on Russian supplies of fuel, food, weapons, and ammunition. When
Russia went bankrupt at the end of 1991 and cut off supply, the army split
and Najibullah's regime collapsed in a welter of intrigue. There followed a
vicious civil war and the victory of the Taliban.
The American invasion
In 2001 the Americans also went into Afghanistan with a simple and
achievable aim: to destroy Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organisation
which had master-minded the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, and
to overthrow the Taliban regime which had given him comfort.
In this limited objective they were almost completely successful, though
Osama escaped to Pakistan. But, like the Russians before them, they then
expanded their aims. They proceeded from an entirely flawed premise - that
Al Qaeda could not regroup outside Afghanistan and that the Taliban too were
terrorists (though they had never planted a bomb outside their own
territory). Another British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, caricatured the
proposition thus: British soldiers were fighting the Taliban in Helmand
because plots against targets in Britain were being elaborated in the
mountains of Pakistan. So indeed they were: and they were countered by good
cooperation with Pakistani intelligence and good police work in Britain. The
fighting in Helmand was almost wholly irrelevant.
Like the Russians before them, the Americans concluded that the best way to
stabilise Afghanistan in the longer term, and to prevent it once again
becoming a terrorist haven, was to re-engineer its politics and society,
though this time the principles were to be those of Western democracy,
rather than those of Soviet socialism.
This time too the Afghan people begged to differ. Ordinary Afghans were
little more interested in the ideas promoted by Western unbelievers than
they were in the ideas of the Russian infidels who had preceded them. The
Taliban regrouped. The Americans, too, were sucked into a quagmire. But this
time the war lasted even longer.
This time too the invaders successfully cleared the way for their withdrawal
by setting in place a friendly regime with an army and police force capable
of defending itself. This time too they promised to support the regime with
military and economic advice and assistance for as long as it took. This
time too there was an inevitable doubt about how long the foreigners would
retain the political will to go on supporting their friends in Afghanistan
once they were no longer present there.

The mission
So what next?
First, Afghanistan. It is hard to establish what is really happening there
amid the competing claims of optimists who say that the country has made
significant strides in political and military organisation, women's rights,
education, and the economy, and pessimists who say that the present regime
is corrupt, divided, and hopelessly inefficient. One possibility is that,
once the Americans and their allies have left, the country will once again
be torn apart by civil war, and most of the economic and social progress
made in the last decade will be nullified. Another is that the Afghans'
immediate neighbours will be unable to refrain from meddling in Afghan
affairs, and will keep the country in turmoil. A third is that enough has
been done to ensure at least a kind of stability and a modicum of social and
economic progress. What is certain is that however much outsiders may talk
of the blood and treasure they have poured out in Afghanistan, it is the
Afghans who have suffered most in the last thirty five years. Only they will
be able to find solutions that endure.
But what about 'the mission', the latest British experience in Afghanistan
and its implications? It was a long war, painful and expensive; but it was
not, by the standards of the past, a very substantial one. It demonstrated
that the British soldier is still very good at his job. But the people of
Britain came to the view that the 'mission' had little to do with their real
interests. Their scepticism about the government's wider 'strategy' was
reinforced. They were not impressed by the pouring out of scarce resources
on powerful aircraft carriers and nuclear missile submarines for which no
serious strategic need has been advanced except, perhaps, that we need these
gadgets to help us stay up there with the Americans. Meanwhile there is no
sign that the dismal experience of Afghanistan and of Iraq is pushing the
British government and military into hammering out a genuine strategy of the
kind the country really needs. Perhaps they are not wholly to be blamed,
because it is no longer clear which country we are are talking about. A
'strategy' that is ill-adapted to the Britain of today may be even less
adapted to the Britain of 2020, when the Scots may have voted to leave the
Union and the English may have voted to leave Europe. By then the British
'mission' in Afghanistan may have paled into insignificance as the English
wrestle with the problems of defining and negotiating a sober and affordable
strategy which adequately covers their new political and military
relationships with their neighbours, their allies, and their enemies.

See more stories tagged with:
Afghanistan [6]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/wasted-blood-and-treasure-afghanistan
Links:
[1] http://opendemocracy.net
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rodric-braithwaite
[3] http://www.afghan-web.com/bios/yest/abdur.html
[4] http://www.afghanland.com/history/amin.html
[5]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-dr-najibullah-1365378.
html
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/afghanistan-pakistan-relations
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan

OpenDemocracy [1] / By Rodric Braithwaite [2]

Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
February 21, 2014 |
On 16 December 2013 David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, told British
soldiers in Helmand in Afghanistan that they had accomplished their mission,
and that they could come home in 2014 with their heads held high.
He begged an important question: What was that mission? Was it the same as
the mission with which the Americans and their allies had entered
Afghanistan in October 2001? Or the mission with which the British had gone
into Helmand in 2006? Or was it a face-saving reformulation, designed to
demonstrate that the blood and treasure expended in Afghanistan over
thirteen years had not been spent in vain?
It is a mistake to draw historical parallels too closely, or to seek
unambiguous lessons. But looking at the past can clarify the present, even
if it offers no secure guide for the future.
The British invasions of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, the Soviet
invasion in 1979, and the American led invasion of 2001, all have one thing
in common. By a narrow definition, all the armies won their wars, though the
British suffered some humiliating defeats on the battlefield. But neither
the British, nor the Russians, nor the Americans achieved, at least through
military means, the objectives they had set themselves. All scaled their
ambitions down to aims that they could probably have achieved earlier and at
less cost. All seriously damaged their own prestige. And all wreaked havoc
on the country they claimed to have come to help.
The British invasions
A good deal of myth surrounds the three Anglo-Afghan wars (1839-1842,
1878-1880, and 1919). The first two ended with British armies defeating the
Afghan armies in the field and burning down Kabul. The third ended when the
British drove an invading Afghan army out of India. The aim of the first two
wars was to ensure British control over Afghan foreign policy, above all to
prevent the Russians getting a menacing foothold on the border of the Indian
empire.
Among British policymakers there were two schools of thought. One held that
success could only be achieved by reducing Afghanistan to a protectorate
under a British puppet, as the British had already done in so many parts of
India. The other held that it would be enough to secure Afghan cooperation
through diplomacy, subsidies, and the occasional threat of military action.
The 'forward policy' proved unsustainable: the Afghans made life intolerable
for the British occupiers. But the alternative was a success. The British
effectively controlled Afghan foreign policy for eighty years, bribing and
persuading even the formidable Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman [3] to match their
wishes. Today some Afghans regard Abdur Rahman as a traitor, though he was
probably their most effective ruler in the last three hundred years.
Thus the British very soon abandoned any idea of imposing a political
solution on Afghanistan, still less of trying to rule it in their own image.
Their Russian and American successors, however, made the mistake of
believing that they had not only the need, but the duty, to re-engineer
Afghanistan's political and social system, to bring the country, as the
Russians said, from the fourteenth into the twentieth century.
The Soviet invasion
Both the Soviet and the American invasions began with a stunning military
success. The Russians did not go in, as Western propaganda held at the time,
to threaten Western oil supplies, to secure a warm water port, or to
incorporate Afghanistan into the Soviet Union. On the contrary, they feared
that a country which bordered on their vulnerable Southern frontier was
falling into chaos under its murderous and dysfunctional Communist leaders,
a situation that would be exploited against them by the Americans.
They therefore decided to get rid of the Afghan leader Amin [4]. In December
1979, in a brilliant special forces operation, they killed Amin and replaced
him with a puppet. Their plan was then to train up the Afghan army and
police, put the political and social system on to a sound basis, and leave a
stabilised country behind them after perhaps a year. They hoped to create a
political and economic system on broadly 'socialist' principles, thus
ensuring that Afghanistan would automatically remain a reliable friend of
the Soviet Union.
The Afghan people had a different idea. Many of them had originally welcomed
the removal of Amin. But they deeply resented the presence of foreign
occupiers, infidels who tried to change their age-old ways. Resistance
spread and the Russians were sucked into a quagmire from which they
extracted themselves with much difficulty nine years later.
In putting the case for an early Soviet withdrawal to his colleagues in the
Politburo, Gorbachev said: 'We could leave quickly, without worrying about
the consequences, and blame everything on our predecessors. But that we
cannot do. We have not given an account of ourselves to the people. A
million of our soldiers have passed through Afghanistan. And it looks as if
they did so in vain. So why did those people die?' Gorbachev, in fact, found
himself in much the same place as Cameron a quarter of a century later. He
no longer hoped to achieve the broader ambitions the Russians had set
themselves of re-engineering Afghan society in the interests of progress and
stability. Instead he needed to find a way of declaring 'mission
accomplished' without repudiating the sacrifices that had been made by the
Soviet soldiers.
In one sense, Gorbachev had a surprising success. The Americans, the
Pakistanis, and the Afghan guerrilla fighters, the mujahedin, had all been
determined that the Russians should be humiliated. In addition, the
Pakistanis and the mujahedin aimed to set up an Islamic government in Kabul
to replace the Communists. But in protracted negotiations in Geneva in 1988,
the Russians managed to secure a deal which allowed them to withdrew their
forces in good order, leaving behind their own man, Najibullah [5], and an
Afghan army capable of defending him.
It was a short lived triumph. Najibullah and his army were almost completely
dependent on Russian supplies of fuel, food, weapons, and ammunition. When
Russia went bankrupt at the end of 1991 and cut off supply, the army split
and Najibullah's regime collapsed in a welter of intrigue. There followed a
vicious civil war and the victory of the Taliban.
The American invasion
In 2001 the Americans also went into Afghanistan with a simple and
achievable aim: to destroy Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organisation
which had master-minded the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, and
to overthrow the Taliban regime which had given him comfort.
In this limited objective they were almost completely successful, though
Osama escaped to Pakistan. But, like the Russians before them, they then
expanded their aims. They proceeded from an entirely flawed premise - that
Al Qaeda could not regroup outside Afghanistan and that the Taliban too were
terrorists (though they had never planted a bomb outside their own
territory). Another British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, caricatured the
proposition thus: British soldiers were fighting the Taliban in Helmand
because plots against targets in Britain were being elaborated in the
mountains of Pakistan. So indeed they were: and they were countered by good
cooperation with Pakistani intelligence and good police work in Britain. The
fighting in Helmand was almost wholly irrelevant.
Like the Russians before them, the Americans concluded that the best way to
stabilise Afghanistan in the longer term, and to prevent it once again
becoming a terrorist haven, was to re-engineer its politics and society,
though this time the principles were to be those of Western democracy,
rather than those of Soviet socialism.
This time too the Afghan people begged to differ. Ordinary Afghans were
little more interested in the ideas promoted by Western unbelievers than
they were in the ideas of the Russian infidels who had preceded them. The
Taliban regrouped. The Americans, too, were sucked into a quagmire. But this
time the war lasted even longer.
This time too the invaders successfully cleared the way for their withdrawal
by setting in place a friendly regime with an army and police force capable
of defending itself. This time too they promised to support the regime with
military and economic advice and assistance for as long as it took. This
time too there was an inevitable doubt about how long the foreigners would
retain the political will to go on supporting their friends in Afghanistan
once they were no longer present there.
The mission
So what next?
First, Afghanistan. It is hard to establish what is really happening there
amid the competing claims of optimists who say that the country has made
significant strides in political and military organisation, women's rights,
education, and the economy, and pessimists who say that the present regime
is corrupt, divided, and hopelessly inefficient. One possibility is that,
once the Americans and their allies have left, the country will once again
be torn apart by civil war, and most of the economic and social progress
made in the last decade will be nullified. Another is that the Afghans'
immediate neighbours will be unable to refrain from meddling in Afghan
affairs, and will keep the country in turmoil. A third is that enough has
been done to ensure at least a kind of stability and a modicum of social and
economic progress. What is certain is that however much outsiders may talk
of the blood and treasure they have poured out in Afghanistan, it is the
Afghans who have suffered most in the last thirty five years. Only they will
be able to find solutions that endure.
But what about 'the mission', the latest British experience in Afghanistan
and its implications? It was a long war, painful and expensive; but it was
not, by the standards of the past, a very substantial one. It demonstrated
that the British soldier is still very good at his job. But the people of
Britain came to the view that the 'mission' had little to do with their real
interests. Their scepticism about the government's wider 'strategy' was
reinforced. They were not impressed by the pouring out of scarce resources
on powerful aircraft carriers and nuclear missile submarines for which no
serious strategic need has been advanced except, perhaps, that we need these
gadgets to help us stay up there with the Americans. Meanwhile there is no
sign that the dismal experience of Afghanistan and of Iraq is pushing the
British government and military into hammering out a genuine strategy of the
kind the country really needs. Perhaps they are not wholly to be blamed,
because it is no longer clear which country we are are talking about. A
'strategy' that is ill-adapted to the Britain of today may be even less
adapted to the Britain of 2020, when the Scots may have voted to leave the
Union and the English may have voted to leave Europe. By then the British
'mission' in Afghanistan may have paled into insignificance as the English
wrestle with the problems of defining and negotiating a sober and affordable
strategy which adequately covers their new political and military
relationships with their neighbours, their allies, and their enemies.
See more stories tagged with:
Afghanistan [6]

Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/wasted-blood-and-treasure-afghanistan
Links:
[1] http://opendemocracy.net
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rodric-braithwaite
[3] http://www.afghan-web.com/bios/yest/abdur.html
[4] http://www.afghanland.com/history/amin.html
[5]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-dr-najibullah-1365378.
html
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/afghanistan-pakistan-relations
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

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