Remember the Afghan War?; We lost!

As Colonel Danny Sjursen notes in his Tom Dispatch article, history provides a primer into the future of our efforts to "win" the war in Afghanistan.  Hard to believe, but a collection of warring tribes and sects and villages and a religious movement (the Taliban)--who collectively despise and hate the government in Kabul--can fight and beat the greatest military in the world.  Despite the bravery of our US forces, they try to do the impossible: unify Afghanistan and create a central democratic government.  The tribes don't defeat the United States, they just have to reach a stalemate.

Nevertheless, the policymakers refuse to realize we can never win.  From Bush Jr to Obama to the current occupant of the White House--and the alternative, Hillary Rodham Clinton--all refuse to accept this difficult proposition: the US cannot win this war.

That’s right, the local “Taliban” -- a term so nebulous it’s basically lost all meaning -- had managed to drastically alter U.S. Army tactics with crude, homemade explosives stored in plastic jugs. And believe me, this was a huge problem. Cheap, ubiquitous, and easy to bury, those anti-personnel Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, soon littered the “roads,” footpaths, and farmland surrounding our isolated outpost. To a greater extent than a number of commanders willingly admitted, the enemy had managed to nullify our many technological advantages for a few pennies on the dollar (or maybe, since we’re talking about the Pentagon, it was pennies on the millions of dollars).  Links in original.

Even Bloomberg News, no bastion of progressive politics has noted the negative trends going on: [Almost sixteen years after the U.S.-backed ouster of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains in the grip of a war with “shockingly high” death rates among security forces and a record number of casualties among civilians, according to the U.S. government watchdog monitoring the country’s reconstruction efforts.]  (emphasis added)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-01/afghan-deaths-soar-to-highest-on-record-as-u-s-weighs-strategy

US policymakers need to face these facts: operations in Afghanistan have a deleterious effect on the entire US military as reported in Business Insider: "

Years of complex operations and the ongoing demands of units in the field have left the armed forces struggling to maintain both operational capacity and high levels of readiness, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office."]  (Links in original)

So the time has come for our imperious leader to turn his eyes from the false promise of peace with the North Koreans--does anyone seriously think Kim Jong Un will give up his nuclear weapons?--and fix the mess in Afghanistan by getting the Hell out of there and saving lives of American men and women, husbands and mothers, sons and daughters.

US Fighting in Afghanistan Longer than USSR

If United States forces cannot defeat a Pashtun insurgency, what sense does it make to keep troops there?

[US forces have now stayed longer in Afghanistan than the Soviet army during Moscow's ill-fated intervention...


"When the Soviets came in, everybody wanted to fight against them," admits General Nur al-Haq Ulumi, a powerful leader under the Communist regime, who was military commander for the whole of southern Afghanistan. He adds that, in complete contrast, "when the Americans arrived in 2001, everybody supported them and nobody wanted to fight them."

The popularity of the Americans and their foreign allies has not lasted. They are increasingly blamed by Afghans for the continued violence and as sponsors and protectors of a deeply unpopular government. As the US, Britain and almost 50 other states reach their 10th year of military action in Afghanistan, the dilemmas facing them resemble the problems that the Soviet army wrestled with a quarter of a century ago.

The Soviet Union and the US both proved unable to break a military stalemate in which they occupied the cities and towns, but were unable to crush an Islamic and nationalist rebellion in the countryside, where three-quarters of Afghans still live. Geography has not changed. Today, as in the 1980s, the guerrillas cannot be conclusively defeated so long as they can move backwards and forwards across the 1,600-mile border with Pakistan and enjoy the support (open in the case of the Soviets; covert in the case of the Americans) of the Pakistani army.] emphasis added

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghanistan-land-of-the-unvanquished-2153883.html