Us Soldiers Are Again Butchered in Afghanistan

Here nosotros go again! Years afterwards nearly Americans forgot about the longest state of war this land e'er fought, American soldiers are over again existence deployed to...

Here we go again! Years after nigh Americans forgot most the longest war this state ever fought, American soldiers are over again beingness deployed to Afghanistan. For almost 16 years now, at the command of 3 presidents and a sadly forgettable succession of generals, they have gone round and round like and then many motorists trapped on a rotary with no leave.

This time their numbers are officially cloak-and-dagger, although variously reported to be three,500 or 4,000, with another 6,000-plus to follow, and unknown numbers later on that. But who can trust such figures? Afterward all, we just found out that the U.S. troops left behind in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan after Pres. Barack Obama tried to finish the state of war there in 2014, repeatedly reported to number 8,400, actually accept been "closer to 12,000" all this time.

The conflict, we're told, is at present a "stalemate." We need more than American troops to break information technology, in part by "grooming" the Afghan National Ground forces so its soldiers tin can all-time their Taliban countrymen plus miscellaneous "terrorist" groups. In that way, the U.S. war machine — after merely a few more years of "the foreseeable futurity" in the field — tin claim victory.

But is whatsoever of this necessary? Or smart? Or even truthful?

A prominent Afghan diplomat doesn't call up and so. Shukria Barakzai, a longtime fellow member of the Afghan parliament now serving as Afghanistan'due south administrator to Norway — herself a victim in 2014 of a Taliban suicide bomber — told me only weeks ago, "The Taliban are then over! They only desire to become home, but you lot Americans won't let them."

She reminded me that the Taliban are not some invading army. That would be u.s.a.. They are Afghan citizens, distinguished from their countrymen chiefly past their farthermost religious conservatism, misogyny, and punitive arroyo to governance. Think of them as the Afghan equivalent of our own evangelical right-wing Republicans. You notice some in nigh every boondocks. And the more y'all rile them upwards, the meaner they get and the more followers they gain.

Just in times of peace — which Afghanistan has not known for 40 years — many Taliban nigh probable would return to being farmers, shopkeepers, villagers, like their fathers before them, possibly imposing local police force and guild but unlikely to seek control of Kabul and risk bringing the Americans down on them again.

Few Afghans were Taliban sympathizers when the United States overthrew the Taliban regime in 2001. Now in that location are a great many more and they control significant parts of the country, threatening various provincial capitals. They claim to be willing to negotiate with the Afghan government — only only afterwards all American forces have left the country.

For the Trump administration, that's non an option. Think what a negotiated peace would hateful for our private arms manufacturers for whom America's endless wars across the Greater Middle Due east are a bonanza of guaranteed sales. Instead, the president has put "his" generals in the Oval Office to do what generals do.

Those in charge now — James Mattis, H.R. McMaster and John Kelly — are all veterans of the Afghan or Iraq wars and consequently subject to what Freud labeled the "repetition coercion … the blind impulse to echo earlier experiences and situations," oft in the expectation that things will turn out differently.

You'd think these particular generals, having been through it all earlier, would remember that very little or cipher ventured in Afghanistan or Iraq past "the greatest military the world has ever known" has worked out as advertised. As Freud pointed out, yet, "The coercion to repeat … replaces the impulsion to recall."

Simply I was in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan too and, strangely enough, I remember a lot.

U.S. Army Special Forces in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan in 2001. Photo via Wikipedia

'Where is the money you promised the states?'

I first went to Kabul in 2002 to work with women and girls simply emerging from five long years of solitude in their homes. I constitute a slaughter-house, a city in ruins. Whole districts had been reduced to rubble by civil war among factions of the mujahidin, the Afghan fundamentalists who, with U.S., Saudi, and Pakistani back up, had driven the Red Ground forces out of their state in 1989, only to be overwhelmed by the onslaught of the Taliban in the 1990s.

By 2001, when Americans made plans to flop Kabul to unseat that Taliban regime, Secretarial assistant of Defense Donald Rumsfeld complained that there were "no good targets left to bomb." When we finished bombing anyway, thousands of Kabulis had been killed, thousands had fled, and thousands more than remained, living in makeshift shelters among toppled houses or in the blue U.N. tents that came to encircle much of the fallen metropolis.

I lodged with an aging American woman who had lived in Afghanistan since the 1960s when her hubby, a businessman, took part in America's Cold War competition with the Soviet Wedlock for the allegiance of Afghans. The first morning, when I awoke chilled to the bone, she thrust some filthy paper bills into my hand, wrapped a woolen scarf around my head, and sent me out into the snow in search of bread.

I turned a corner into a field of tumbled walls and in that location, on what had in one case been some other corner, heat poured from an aboriginal brick bake-oven. I joined a line of men and waited my turn until long, apartment loaves, hot from that oven, were thrust into my arms. Those hard-eyed Afghan men watched as I handed over my shabby bills and wrapped the loaves in the tail of my scarf. Who was I? What was I doing here? Past week's end, they would nod a greeting and brand a space in the queue for me.

The Afghans I met were similar that then. Wary and guarded simply curiously open and expectant. The Taliban was finished. Done. Gone. Some of its members, in manifestly sight, had joined the new American-installed regime, just at least they had changed the colour of their turbans and, for the fourth dimension being, their tune. Poor and suffering every bit most Afghans were, they were prepared to spring at a new kickoff, and they were open to anyone who seemed to have come up to assist.

As the American presence increased, Afghan optimism only expanded. Local leaders attended "advisory" meetings chosen by American officials and never even complained about the aggressive military dogs — unclean by Islamic standards — that searched the premises and sometimes sniffed the Afghan men themselves.

They listened to American plans to establish in their country the very best political arrangement imaginable: commonwealth. In that location was talk of respect for human rights; in that location were promises of investment, prosperity, peace and above all "development."

Near the end of the second year of such meetings, an Afghan rose — I was there — to ask two embarrassing questions: "Where is the money you promised u.s.? Where is the development?" The American ambassador had a ready answer.

The promised funds were being used at first to establish American offices with heating, ac, the Internet, the works — and to pay American experts who would eventually provide the promised development and, in the process, inculcate respect for homo rights and, oh aye, women.

Let the states not forget women. In 2005, First Lady Laura Bush flew into the majuscule to dedicate a refurbished American dormitory for women at Kabul University. Afterward all, the Bush assistants had "liberated" Afghan women. War machine security once again sent in the dogs, leaving bawling students to burn their defiled article of clothing afterward.

By 2011, all the same, the State Department had dropped women's rights from its fix of designated objectives for the land and somehow human rights disappeared without detect, too. Still, a succession of American ambassadors advised Afghan leaders to exist patient. So they were for what seems, in retrospect, like a very long time. Until, eventually, they were not.

A Talib beats a woman. Photo via Wikipedia

The experts speak

Between and then and 2015, I returned to Afghanistan almost every year to lend a paw to organizations of Afghan women and girls. I haven't been back in 2 years, though — not since I recognized that, as an American, I am now a chance to my Afghan colleagues and their families.

The accession of witless insults, like those dogs, or the pork ribs in the MREs that the U.S. military easily out to Afghan soldiers, or countless fatal U.S. air strikes on villages, hospitals, wedding parties and Afghan National Security Forces have all added up over the years, making Americans unwelcome and their Afghan friends targets.

You lot undoubtedly noticed some of the headlines at the time, just the Afghanistan story has proven so long, complicated, and repetitive that, at this point, information technology's hard to recall the details or, for that thing, the cast of characters, or even why in the globe we're still there doing the same things once again and again and again.

The short version of that long history might read like this. The United states bombed Afghanistan in 2001 without giving the Taliban authorities either time to surrender or to negotiate the surrender of their land's about problematic foreign guest, the Saudi Osama Bin Laden. The Bush-league administration so restored to ability the ultra-conservative Islamic mujahidin warlords first engaged by the CIA under William "Pecker" Casey, its devout Catholic director, to fight the "godless communists" of the Soviet Spousal relationship in the long proxy state of war of the 1980s.

Afghans polled in 2001 wanted those warlords — state of war criminals all — banned forever from public life. Washington, nonetheless, established in Kabul a authorities of sorts, threw vast sums of cash at its selected leaders heading an administrative state that did not yet exist and and then, for years to come, alternately ignored or denounced the resulting abuse it had unthinkingly built into its new Afghan "democracy." Such was the "liberation" of the state.

The story of the last fifteen years there is largely a sum of merely such contradictory and self-defeating acts. During that time, American officials regularly humiliated Hamid Karzai, their handpicked president. They set upwards a centralized government in Kabul and then, through Provincial Reconstruction Teams, controlled by the U.S. military, they also supported a passel of provincial warlords hostile to that regime.

They sent their military to invade Iraq, while the Taliban, who were never allowed to surrender, regrouped and went back to war. In 2007, they undermined Afghan efforts to negotiate peace with the Taliban, opting instead to "surge" more American troops into the country, doubling their numbers in 2008, and then to continue to spend a fortune in taxpayer dollars — at least $65 billion of them — training hundreds of thousands of Afghan soldiers and police to do the fighting their elected government had wanted to terminate.

In 2006 — aboriginal history at present — I published a volume, Kabul in Wintertime, partly well-nigh the scams I'd seen perpetrated by or on the U.S. military, the select crew of private American contractors flooding the country, and the cloistral experts of the U.S. Bureau for International Development. Not long after, a prominent filmmaker invited an Afghan woman who was a doctor and a member of that country's parliament, plus Anand Gopal and me, to travel to Washington.

We were to explain our experiences in Afghanistan to influential members of various Washington call back tanks who might take an effect on foreign policymaking.

We came prepared to talk, but those Washington experts asked u.s. no questions. Instead, they spent our fourth dimension together telling united states of america what to remember near the country nosotros had simply left. I remember, in detail, four young Americans, all newly minted Ivy League "experts" nosotros met at a leading "progressive" think tank. They described in swell item their 20-year programme for the economic and political evolution of Transitional islamic state of afghanistan, a land, they said, they all hoped to visit one twenty-four hour period.

The Afghan doctor finally laughed out loud, but she was not amused. "You know nothing about my state," she said, "but you lot plan its future into the next generation. This is your job?" It proved to be the job besides of two administrations. And at present, information technology seems, a third.

A Dutch howitzer in Afghanistan in 2007. David Axe photo

Fourth dimension to kill terrorists

The election of 2014, though riddled with "irregularities," brought the first peaceful transfer of presidential power in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan, from Hamid Karzai to Ashraf Ghani. With it came renewed promise that the wild dream of an Afghan-style peaceful commonwealth might piece of work after all. It was a longing barely diminished past Ghani'south choice for vice president — Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord notorious for war crimes of surpassing brutality.

2014 was as well the year Obama chose to terminate the war in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan in one case and for all. Simply he didn't. Instead he left behind those nether-counted thousands of American soldiers now being joined by thousands more. For what purpose?

American victory certainly hasn't materialized, but the greatest military machine the earth has ever known (every bit it's regularly referred to here) cannot admit defeat. Nor tin the failed land of Afghanistan admit that it has failed to become annihilation other than a failure. Afghan-American Ghani, who once co-wrote a scholarly volume tellingly entitled Fixing Failed States, surrendered his U.South. citizenship to go Afghan president, but he seems unable to fix the country of his birth.

In May 2017, Ghani welcomed back to Kabul and into public life, subsequently an absence of twenty years, the notorious Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, founder of the political party Hezb-i-Islami and nigh favored among the mujahidin during the 1980s past Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, and the CIA, and most hated by Kabuli civilians for having randomly shelled the urban center throughout the civil war of the 1990s.

In Kabul in 2002, I plant it rare to see a person who had not lost a house or a relative or a whole family unit to the rockets of "the Butcher of Kabul." At present, here he is again, his state of war crimes forgiven by a new "Americanized" president, and an Afghan civilization of impunity reconfirmed.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Donald Trump forgot his denunciation of "Obama's state of war," adopted the "expertise" of his generals, and reignited a fading burn down. This time around, he swore, "We are non nation-building again. Nosotros are killing terrorists."

The American endeavour is now to be exclusively military. At that place volition be no limits on troop numbers or fourth dimension spent in that location, nor any disclosure of plans to the enemy or the American public. There is to be no more talk of republic or women'due south rights or human being rights or peace negotiations.

Announcing his new militarized "strategy" in a long, vague, typically self-congratulatory speech, Trump lacked even the courtesy to mention the elected leader of Transitional islamic state of afghanistan by proper noun. Instead, he referred only to assurances given to him by Afghanistan'south "prime number minister" — an official who, every bit information technology happens, does not exist in the regime Washington ready up in Kabul so long ago.

Trump oft makes such gaffes, only he read this particular spoken language from a teleprompter and then it was surely written or at to the lowest degree vetted by the very armed forces which now is to dictate the future of Afghanistan and U.S. involvement there — and yet, a decade and a one-half later, seems to know no more than nigh the land and its actual inhabitants than it ever did.

"I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable bending," Trump claimed, and however he staked his example for escalating the state of war once again on a shopworn, cowardly ploy. Nosotros must send more than troops to honor the sacrifice of the troops we sent before; nosotros must send more troops because and then many of those we sent before got killed or damaged beyond repair.

Afghan local policemen. David Axe photo

Lessons unlearned

We tin can't allow Afghanistan to become a safe haven for terrorists, Trump insisted, echoing Obama and Bush-league earlier him. He seems unaware that the terrorists who acted on 9/11 had establish safe haven in San Diego and Oakland, California, Phoenix and Mesa, Arizona, Fort Lee and Wayne, New Jersey, Hollywood and Daytona Beach, Florida and Newton, Massachusetts, amongst other American towns and cities.

On ix/11, those 19 terrorists possessed 63 valid U.S. driver's licenses issued by many different states. It was in the The states that all xix of those terrorists found safety. It was hither, not in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan, that the prospective pilots for those hijacked planes learned to fly.

Now, every bit more than troops depart for Transitional islamic state of afghanistan, I can't assistance but think of what I learned when, after so many years of living and working amongst Afghan civilians, I finally embedded with American troops in 2010. My offset lesson was this — at that place is no such affair in the American armed services equally a negative after-activity study. Armed services plans are always brilliant. Strikes always occur as expected. Our soldiers are, it goes without saying, heroic. And goals are naturally accomplished without fail.

No wonder the policymakers dorsum in Washington remain convinced that we accept the greatest military the globe has ever seen and that someday nosotros will indeed succeed in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan, although we haven't actually won a war of whatever significance since 1945.

My second lesson — even officers who routinely file such positive reports may be blindsided by the bogus reports of others. Accept, for instance, a colonel I met in eastern Afghanistan in 2010. He was newly returned to a forwards base of operations he had commanded only a few years earlier. Overwhelmed with surprise and grief, he told me he had been "unprepared" — which is to say uninformed past his superiors — to run into "conditions" so much worse than they had been before.

He was dismayed to lose so many men in so short a fourth dimension, especially when American media attention was focused on the other side of the country where a total-calibration battle in Helmand province was projected to be decisive, but somehow seemed to be repeatedly postponed.

Judging by my own experience on forrard bases, I believe nosotros can hazard a judge or 2 about the future of the American state of war in Afghanistan as the latest troops get in. Beginning, it will exist little unlike from the atrocious by. Second, it will produce a surfeit of Afghan civilian casualties and official American self-congratulation. And finally, a number of our soldiers will return in bad shape, or not at all.

And then, of class, in that location are the dogs once again. Tthis time, a black ane — unclean, as always, by Islamic standards — in silhouette with a Taliban flag bearing an Islamic text from the Quran on its side. That was what the Americans printed on a leaflet dropped from planes over Parwan province, home of America's enormous Bagram air base. That was supposed to win Afghan hearts and minds, to utilise an indelible phrase from our war in Vietnam.

Afghans, insulted again, are in an uproar. And the U.Southward. military, all these years after invading Afghanistan, still doesn't get this matter virtually dogs. Yes, the dog thing seems a little irrational and odd, but no more than then than the Virgin Nativity or the Rapture. The obscurity of such a simple fact to the armed forces contumely again brings the Vietnam era to mind and, from a nifty Pete Seeger antiwar song, another indelible line. "Oh, when will they ever acquire?"

Ann Jones is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life without Peace in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan and most recently of They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America's Wars — the Untold Story, a Dispatch Books original. This story originally appeared at TomDispatch.

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Source: https://warisboring.com/afghanistan-again/

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