On February 15, 1989, Bill Keller, who was then the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times (he is today The Times’ executive editor) wrote: “The last Soviet soldier came home from Afghanistan this morning, the Soviet Union announced, leaving behind a war that had become a domestic burden and an international embarrassment for Moscow. […] Lieut. Gen. Boris V. Gromov, the commander of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, walked across the steel Friendship Bridge to the border city of Termez, in Uzbekistan, at 11:55 A.M. local time (1:55 A.M., Eastern time), 9 years and 50 days after Soviet troops intervened to support a coup by a Marxist ally. ‘There is not a single Soviet soldier or officer left behind me,’ General Gromov told a Soviet television reporter waiting on the bridge. ‘Our nine-year stay ends with this.'”
Today–Saturday, Nov. 27, 2010–the American occupation of Afghanistan markes its 3,338th day, one day more than the Soviet occupation, with no end in sight. The Graveyard of Empires is living up to its reputation. American pretensions are not.
Click On:
- Afghanistan Study Group
- Offshoring War: How Obama—and Those Moments of Silence—Insult Military Sacrifice
- Firing McChrystal Isn’t Enough. Fire the War.
- “Pacific” a Sequel To Exalt War Passions
It was al-Qaeda’s hope to imprison the United States in an endless, hopeless war, just as the Soviet Union had been. A-Qaeda succeeded beyond expectations. Al-Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan. Hasn’t been since the early days of the way in late 2001. It’s safely settled in the Pakistani highlands of Waziristan and Balochistan, where the view of the American carnage is better. Al-Qaeda is the only clear winner. And the parallels between the Soviet and the American disasters in Afghanistan are, like the dead and maimed, piling up.
At its height the Soviet occupation had 115,000 troops deployed. There are now 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan on top of 112,000 private contractors working for the Pentagon alone (thousands of them mercenaries). The Soviets lost 15,000 troops. Americans have lost 1,404 at last count, western forces as a whole have lost 2,231. That figure doesn’t include the number of foreign contractors and mercenaries. And of course, as always in war, it doesn’t compare with the loss of civilians, who never get as much attention: Just in In the first half of 2010, 1,271 civilians were killed, according to the United Nations.
This year American taxpayers spent $104 billion on the Afghan war. Here, according to the Afghanistan Study Group, is what that bought us:
- double-digit percentage increases (in a negative manner) in nearly all key areas of metrics and indicators, including a 58% increase in American combat deaths;
- an Afghan election more crooked than 2009′s stolen election;
- an increase in support for the Taliban;
- a dramatic increase in the instability of the previously, relatively, stable north of the country;
- a failure to deliver “government in a box” to Marjah or clear Kandahar City;
- the revelation that key aides of President Karzai are on the Iranian payroll;
- the near collapse of the Kabul bank;
- US intelligence verification of Pakistani support for the Taliban;
- disclosures of a massive increase in Coalition night raids and air strikes resulting in weekly tallies of dead Taliban that are somehow not matched by reports of decreases in Taliban operations, but rather by a nearly 60% increase in Taliban attacks; etc.
Robert Wright on Nov. 23 called the occupation “worse than Vietnam.” Unlike Vietnam, which did not make America more vulnerable to enemy attack, the Afghan occupation does: “Just as Al Qaeda planned, it empowers the narrative of terrorist recruiters — that America is at war with Islam.” There is no better recruitment video for jihadists. “And the cost of the Afghanistan war already exceeds the cost of the Vietnam and Korean Wars combined, even in inflation-adjusted dollars. At $100 billion a year (seven times the gross domestic product of Afghanistan) this war is feeding a deficit that will eventually take its toll in real, human terms. I encourage Tea Partiers and other fiscal conservatives to ponder the tension between deficit hawkism and military hawkism.”
Here’s a photo gallery of the human, and inhuman, sides of the conflict.
[nggallery id=42]
elaygee says
Is there no one in National leadership with the courage to say the war in Afghanistan is a complete waste and get us out fast?
Think what we could do here with oiver $100 billion a year.
NortonSmitty says
Is there anybody that can’t see the fact that the porno loving playboy that owns North Korea would never get the stones to thumb his nose and shell South Korean civilians if he and the rest of the world didn’t realize that our military has been stretched past the limit?
After ten years fighting two unnecessary wars on the other side of the world, shortened leaves and extended tours, the loss of re-enlistments and morale caused by the stop-loss policy as well as using the same equipment with only field repairs for rotating troops, the world knows we couldn’t fight on another front at anywhere near the force we could project even five years ago. I’m not even going to factor in the realization we can’t afford it.
So for all of the gung-ho chickenhawk REMF asshats we have allowed to waste our forces with unecesarily long wars with even worse battle plans and strategy than we had even in Viet Nam, surprise! Ten years and you couldn’t see this coming? This is what we get for your incompetence. This is why you don’t waste the lives, treasure and strength of the American war machine, as great as it is, unnecessarily, cause when you have a real reason to use it, it’s not at it’s best if it’s been depleted and your options are limited. The rest of the world didn’t forget this basic truth or think they were exceptional. It’s been that way for every army since the beginning of war and it always will.
I just wish that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bush and yes, Obama were the only ones who had to figure out how to wash the taste of Tinpot North Korean shit out of their mouths instead of all of us. And it’s just beginning.
Liana G says
What also encourages the support and recruitment of these freedom fighters is the unfair / cowardly (as seen by these freedom fighters) tactics America – the greatest military might – also engages to fight its battles. Soldiers sitting in the deserts of AZ, CA etc. operating remote controlled drones to swoop down and obliterate entire villages under the guise of going after marked targets – that were never in the area to begin with. A guise for a more sinister motive, to punish and send a message to the people for supporting their soldiers, their heroes; while we in America sit here in our glass houses and parrot the evilness of these people for defending their homeland from the true evil.