[THS] Bob Herbert: Afghanistan: Worse Than a Nightmare

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25825.htm

Worse Than a Nightmare

By Bob Herbert

June 27, 2010 "New York Times" -- President Obama can be applauded for his
decisiveness in dispatching the chronically insubordinate Stanley McChrystal, but we
are still left with a disaster of a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won and that the
country as a whole will not support.

No one in official Washington is leveling with the public about what is really going on.
We hear a lot about counterinsurgency, the latest hot cocktail-hour topic among the
BlackBerry-thumbing crowd. But there is no evidence at all that counterinsurgency
will work in Afghanistan. It’s not working now. And even if we managed to put all the
proper pieces together, the fiercest counterinsurgency advocates in the military will
tell you that something on the order of 10 to 15 years of hard effort would be
required for this strategy to bear significant fruit.

We’ve been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade already. It’s one of the most corrupt
places on the planet and the epicenter of global opium production. Our ostensible
ally, President Hamid Karzai, is convinced that the U.S. cannot prevail in the war and
is in hot pursuit of his own deal with the enemy Taliban. The American public gave
up on the war long ago, and it is not at all clear that President Obama’s heart is really
in it.

For us to even consider several more years of fighting and dying in Afghanistan — at
a cost of heaven knows how many more billions of American taxpayer dollars — is
demented.

Those who are so fascinated with counterinsurgency, from its chief advocate, Gen.
David Petraeus, all the way down to the cocktail-hour kibitzers inside the Beltway,
seem to have lost sight of a fundamental aspect of warfare: You don’t go to war half-
stepping. You go to war to crush the enemy. You do this ferociously and as quickly as
possible. If you don’t want to do it, if you have qualms about it, or don’t know how to
do it, don’t go to war.

The men who stormed the beaches at Normandy weren’t trying to win the hearts
and minds of anyone.

In Afghanistan, we are playing a dangerous, half-hearted game in which President
Obama tells the America people that this is a war of necessity and that he will do
whatever is necessary to succeed. Then, with the very next breath, he soothingly
assures us that the withdrawal of U.S. troops will begin on schedule, like a
Greyhound leaving the terminal, a year from now.

Both cannot be true.

What is true is that we aren’t even fighting as hard as we can right now. The
counterinsurgency crowd doesn’t want to whack the enemy too hard because of an
understandable fear that too many civilian casualties will undermine the “hearts and
minds” and nation-building components of the strategy. Among the downsides of this
battlefield caution is a disturbing unwillingness to give our own combat troops the
supportive airstrikes and artillery cover that they feel is needed.

In an article this week, The Times quoted a U.S. Army sergeant in southern
Afghanistan who was unhappy with the real-world effects of counterinsurgency. “I
wish we had generals who remembered what it was like when they were down in a
platoon,” he said. “Either they never have been in real fighting, or they forgot what
it’s like.”

In the Rolling Stone article that led to General McChrystal’s ouster, reporter Michael
Hastings wrote about the backlash that counterinsurgency restraints had provoked
among the general’s own troops. Many feel that “being told to hold their fire”
increases their vulnerability. A former Special Forces operator, a veteran of both Iraq
and Afghanistan, said of General McChrystal, according to Mr. Hastings, “His rules of
engagement put soldiers’ lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you
the same thing.”

We are sinking more and more deeply into the fetid quagmire of Afghanistan and
neither the president nor General Petraeus nor anyone else has the slightest clue
about how to get out. The counterinsurgency zealots in the military want more troops
sent to Afghanistan, and they want the president to completely scrap his already
shaky July 2011 timetable for the beginning of a withdrawal.

We’re like a compulsive gambler plunging ever more deeply into debt in order to
wager on a rigged game. There is no victory to be had in Afghanistan, only grief.
We’re bulldozing Detroit while at the same time trying to establish model metropolises
in Kabul and Kandahar. We’re spending endless billions on this wretched war but
can’t extend the unemployment benefits of Americans suffering from the wretched
economy here at home.

The difference between this and a nightmare is that when you wake up from a
nightmare it’s over. This is all too tragically real.