Lt. Gen. William Caldwell is the Commander of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan as well as the general in charge of the Combined Security Transition Command. He gave a briefing yesterday at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. He seems like a capable and honest fellow. But he admitted that only 2 to 3 percent of the people that are currently being recruited into the Afghan national police and armed services are coming from the ethnically Pashtun southern region of the country.
I think that that fact alone is one of the most telling signals that we’re screwed. The Pashtun People are the key ethnic group in Afghanistan, and if they are not buying into the national government then we’re failing in Afghanistan. It’s really that simple. People can make any arguments they want about why we have an interest in creating a stable country there, but we’re not going to achieve that if the Pashtuns aren’t invested. The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is a Pashtun. But he appears to inspire very few of his brethren to believe in his government. I want good things for Afghanistan. But I just don’t see any signs that we’re succeeding there.
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WASHINGTON: Blackwater Worldwide’s legal woes haven’t dimmed its prospects in Afghanistan, where the company is a contender to be a key part of President Barack Obama’s strategy for stabilizing the country. Now called Xe Services, the company is in the running for a Pentagon contract potentially worth $1 billion to train Afghanistan’s troubled national police force. Xe has been shifting to training, aviation and logistics work …
The Afghan national police training contract is expected to be awarded soon and Xe is among five companies eligible to compete. Obama is ramping up efforts to expand and improve the Afghan army and national police into a force able to handle the country’s security burden so US troops can begin withdrawing in July 2011. The private sector’s help is needed because the US doesn’t have a deep enough pool of trainers and mentors with law enforcement experience. Under an existing defense contract, Xe already trains the Afghan border police – an arm of the national police – and drug interdiction units in volatile southern Afghanistan, according to the documents.
Rethink Afghanistan
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."“I want good things for Afghanistan.“
You don’t bring good things to any country with bombs.
Could you get more boring?
Yes, you can bring good things to a country with bombs. We have probably learned that lesson too well, but it wasn’t debated much after we defeated Germany and Japan. It isn’t the bombs, it’s what you do once they stop dropping.
“Yes, you can bring good things to a country with bombs.“
Now THAT’s funny.
“It isn’t the bombs, it’s what you do once they stop dropping.“
It’s far better if the bombs never drop.
Yes, it is far better that the bombs never drop, but it is also better if people in your country don’t set up camps to train militants and suicide attackers to menace your neighbors and even people on the other side of the earth. It is better if you don’t behave as Japan and Germany behaved. The test of a military effort isn’t whether or not a bomb is dropped, but whether it makes things better in the end.
That would need to be refined to ask for whom it makes things better – Lockheed-Martin and Chase benefit from all conflicts, the poor generally suffer more (canon fodder, collateral damage, etc.) from all conflicts…
who benefits when the Taliban are not in charge and your country isn’t sending fighters into China, Kashmir, Chechnya, and lower Manhattan and the Pentagon? A whole lot of people.
I agree in this instance of Afghanistan, I’m just saying that it needs to be stated because everyone knows that we invaded Iraq to Protect Our Freedoms™. The average Afghan doesn’t benefit from our venture over there, however, so I wouldn’t expect a whole lot of assistance from them – would we help the Chinese to hunt down and kill Americans after they (rightfully?) invaded us? I do expect that governments imposed upon a people will fail the instant the coercive force that sustains such governments is removed. That being the case the only viable solution for Afghanistan (from our POV) is the utter eradication of the Taliban, but do we have the stomach for that? Anything short of that will end in failure – an eventual return to the status quo – a situation from which which nobody benefits.
I get criticized for being militaristic when I write that our military effort isn’t working and should be scaled back dramatically. I think we were justified to go into Afghanistan and the fact that NATO is there with us supports my argument. I think the people of Afghanistan, by and large, are better off even under a corrupt Karzai government than they were under the Taliban. That’s not true for everyone, naturally, and part of the reason I am not very supportive of this surge is because we’re doing it in the service of an unworthy government. I think the window of opportunity was squandered during the Bush years and we’re just doubling down on a policy that helps the Afghans so marginally that is isn’t worth the lives and money it costs.
Clearly Bush screwed up Afghanistan (and the world’s support) and clearly Obama didn’t have the option (politically) of shutting down the whole enterprise, leading us to where we are now. However, I don’t believe that anyone is better off under a government that they believe (rightfully) to be illegitimate as they will fight that government at every opportunity. It also bears mentioning that they will obviously ignore the government altogether if the it cannot exercise authority beyond its own capitol – anarchy with a nominal Karzi government is little different from anarchy with a nominal Taliban government.
At the end of the day, the sooner we can get out of there the more everyone will benefit.
No, you get criticized for being militaristic when you say that military violence is a justifiable response to a crime committed by non-state actors who were not even from the country attacked, and that it is an effective way to make things better for a country whose actions you see as antithetical to U.S. interests. You get criticized for being militaristic when you use all kinds of fuzzy America-centric arguments to justify U.S. military violence.
And whether or not Afghans are better off is not for you to determine sitting in your safe, secure home on the other side of the earth, nor is it for U.S. military and government propagandists to decide. Numerous studies and on-the-ground observations in Afghanistan strongly suggest tat the Afghans are not only not overall better off in a country devastated by American military violence and all that cascades from it, many are if anything worse off. Women and girls in particular are not better off, but are worse off in most of the country.
So by your standard Sept 11 was justified?
because things are better now?
Dave, as much as you and I have vehemently disagreed, sometimes we are very much on the same wavelength.
On that basis, BooMan, the United States is far more deserving of far more bombs than Afghanistan.
And your idea that bombs can make things better is just – well, quite hilarious, especially coming from a supposed progressive.
Let’s say that 50 years from now China invades America for some legitimate reason and installs a government to take over this failed state. I would imagine that even if they enshrine some white guy as president that a significant number of his brethren would not believe in his government – probably having something to do with it being established by outsiders, but I’m just guessing there.
How long did the state governments of the Reconstructed South last once federal troops were removed? Hamid Karzi, everyone…
Not only because it was established by outsiders, but because it was established by outsiders who violently invaded and took over the country. It is never realistic to assume that when one country forces “regime change” on another, the former is acting on behalf of or in the interest of the latter. Unfortunately for Americans, the people on whom they force regime change are all too aware that the U.S. did not violently invade them and/or overthrow and replace their government to benefit them. In fact, it appears that Americans, including otherwise thoughtful, discerning “progressives”, are just about the only people in the world who seem blissfully unaware of this, and who somehow convince themselves that their military violence is helpful to the people subjected to it.
Oscar,
Congratulations ! !
Yes, there is a part of southern Afghanistan and southern Pakistan that is populated w/ Pashtun tribes. Some would like to see a country called Pastunistan. But remember, these are Pashtuns in different tribes and the allegiance of the members are to the tribe, not to overall Pashtun family.
I still feel that the best path for the USA is unilateral withdrawal. Let India and Pakistan solve that problem.
Major retention problem:
70 percent of Afghan police recruits drop out: US trainer
Just substitute Iraqi for Afghan and Iraq, and you realize that what you have looks very much like a replay of U.S. efforts not all that many years ago to recruit and train Iraqis to serve as
proxy occupation forcespolice and military forces for the pure benefit of Iraq and its people. And of course, just like the Iraqis before them, and the Vietnamese before THEM, the Afghans just don’t have the right stuff.Whatever happened to loyalty among the wogs? Where are the days of the Sepoys? What’s a 21st century empire to do?
Succeeding at what? Continuing to pretend that terrorists will wither and die because some little patch of turf gets “pacified”? Early on I bought into the notion that Afghanistan was justified compared to Iraq, and it probably was, there being not a dime’s worth of sane rationale for Iraq.
But come on — what kind of infrastructure does it take to train people to pull off a Sept 11, an undie bomb, or an OK city? Would the Oklahoma City bombing have been prevented if the government had obliterated and wiped out the population of whatever hellhole Tim McVeigh put his explosives together in? Apparently we like to make the likes of McVeigh and the Sept 11 bombers into almost hero figures, in a Darth Vader sense, because that’s better than accepting that we were brought low by a bunch of sadsack stupid losers. That way we can justify the pleasure of collective punishment on their homebases (as long as they’re in some other country) and soothe ourselves into overlooking the reality that terror plots are hatched as effectively in Paris and London and NYC and Oklahoma city and Saudi Arabia and some dusty little town in India as they are in the geographic version of the sacrificial lamb.
I don’t know whether the Afghanistan effort is going well or going badly because there’s no way of defining what that would mean that doesn’t involve the most delusional kind of faith-based utopianism.
well, you’re thinking in terms of the 9/11 attack alone.
But, what existed in Afghanistan on 9/12 was more than some threat to America. The place was being used as a training ground to fuel wars in Chechnya, the Uighur Proviince of China, and Kashmir. It was a source for a lot of war and misery, and it was completely justifiable for the international community to intervene and try to wipe out those camps and the government that helped set them up and sustain them.
Seems to me India and Pakistan need to deal with Kashmir, not some fake international community. They are the cause of the misery there far more than some trainees from Afghanistan.
As to your other examples, how is it the “international community’s” business to help despotic imperialist countries like Russia and China hold onto their ill-gotten colonies?
I guess the real difference between us is that I don’t believe that terrorism and revolutionary activity in the US, Europe, or the place you name would be significantly different if Afghanistan and the Taliban never existed. It’s the old question about necessary and sufficient cause. Beyond that, whatever involvement in Afghanistan was justified, it was never a job for the military. As your own article suggests, it may have just made everything worse. As was totally predictable.
we disagree then. when was the last time you heard about fighting in those places? The Chechnyan war is over for the most part, Kashmir is much less violent, and the Xinjiang region is now threatened from lawless areas of Pakistan. That’s why the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan concerns everyone. It’s not just acts of mass terror, it’s the fuel for conflict all over the place.
Yeah, right, and they sure have done a dandy job of it, haven’t they?
“Fuel for conflict all over the place.”
Fuel for the B-52`s, B1 bombers,
Fuel for over 700 military bases worldwide
Fuel for CIA drug running.
Fuel for cluster bombs.
Fuel to transport almost 5,000 bodies back to Dover.
Fuel to line the pockets of arms merchants.
No Fuel for thought.
No fuel for home heating.
No fuel for infrastructure.
Something is running on empty.
Check your engine gauges.