Bon Voyage, America !!

[lem34]

Bon Voyage, America !!


06.06.2012

By Imran Malik


The Chicago Summit sealed the withdrawal plan of the US/NATO/ISAF from Afghanistan. Although all present there tried to put up a very brave face yet it was obvious to all and sundry that the US/NATO/ISAF combine was leaving the Afghan Theater of War but hardly as victors! Victors in war have a different body language and a certain spring in their gait. None was apparent in Chicago and least of all in the Americans.

They appeared to be embittered, frustrated, irritated, agitated, angry, fuming, writhing in some sort of an internal agony. It came across as the pain of defeat, of failure. They seemed to be in too big a hurry to bring this colossal misadventure to a close, ASAP. And anyone, (read Pakistan) who was not playing ball or helping an orderly retreat from the region was unceremoniously and summarily snubbed and sidelined!

The Afghan campaign has been a resounding failure for the US and its coterie of submissive allies. Its failure has been epitomized by not only the whittling down of the Afghan campaign's strategic aims and objectives but also by an unseemly desire to egress from the region.

The failures of this sorry Afghan campaign are multifaceted.

Geopolitical Failure:

By occupying the Central position (Afghanistan) in the region the US had intended to contain China, sit at the under belly of the Central Asian Republics (CARs) and by implication Russia's and deny them all an approach to oil rich Iran, the ME, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. By its departure by 2014 these grand objectives will go even further beyond reach. The US has also failed to install India as its regional plenipotentiary in Afghanistan! The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - SCO, will thus get enough breathing time and space to organize and exert itself as a viable and competing pole to the US in the region. This will reduce the US footprint and effectiveness in the region too with very far reaching geopolitical implications.

Geostrategic Failure:

This has been by far the most pronounced failure of all. Al Qaeda and the Taliban have not been sufficiently decimated or neutralized to make them ineffective militant entities at the regional and international levels. Sure OBL has "ostensibly" been neutralized but that is yet subject to internationally and universally acceptable verification. Al Qaeda and the Taliban have not been successfully engaged in any sort of a political dialogue either to neutralize them. The terrorist threat though decimated is still a very potent reality (some elements may have re-located to the Arabian Peninsula) and the US/NATO/ISAF Combine will leave it as such as they abandon the region - once again! Elements like the Haqqani Network (HN) and the Tehrik -e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) will never allow a US backed political dispensation to settle down and rule Afghanistan from a central location like Kabul and will keep the region on the boil. Pakistan's and Iran's nuclear programmes will continue as active vibrant entities and may go beyond the reach of immediate and proactive US oversight. So what has the US actually achieved here in real terms!

Geo-economic Failure:

With its departure from Afghanistan the US dominance of the fossil and mineral riches of the South Central Asian Region (SCAR) and the Greater Middle East Region (GMER) fades away effectively. The known mineral riches of Afghanistan, Pakistan, the CARs, Iran et al will all move out of hawkish US control and oversight. The US will not be able to exercise the desired final say on the mining, refinement, export, trade and price of all these mineral resources. The western multinationals will not be able to exploit these riches as they probably would have had the US shown more staying power and resolve in the region. The New Silk Road Project (NSRP) that would connect Europe-the SCAR right upto India may yet be inordinately delayed.

Diplomatic failure:

The US has failed to deal with a "red-hot" Pakistan. It should have co-opted both Pakistan and Iran, the two major countries in the region and the only two with unmatchable influences inside Afghanistan, in order to achieve her strategic objectives. Instead she managed to antagonise both. Thus she has been unable to find willing regional allies to help her win the war. She has classically failed to co-opt Pakistan's experienced and highly professional military, use her unmatchable geographical location, or exploit Pakistan's influence inside Afghanistan on a long term basis and to her advantage. Neither has she been able to "befriend or engage" or "divide and eliminate" the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It has also failed to engage the Taliban in meaning-ful result oriented negotiations to bring this disastrous military faux pas to an early and acceptable closure. As of now of all the regional and near-regional players that matter only a "peripheral India" could be considered to be somewhat close to the US. Failed regional diplomacy, indeed!

Military failure:

The heartless and cruel drone campaign had just too much "collateral damage" for the Pakistanis to absorb. More than 90% of the casualties were civilians. The US to this day remains adamant, unmoved and unrepentant. This in turn caused thousands to join the ranks of the militants thus proving to be a counter-productive strategy. The "Massacre at Salala" and its arrogant treatment by the US and its President alienated the US' most important and vital partner in Pakistan - the military. The lack of an apology ensured a breakdown in the military to military relations severely circumscribing overall US-Pak relations. The nadir in relations was reached by the blockade of NATO supply routes by Pakistan. Thus the US managed to antagonize one of the most potent and efficient fighting machines in the region- an erstwhile willing ally!

Intelligence failure:

The US has claimed the death of OBL - but has not given any solid verifiable proof as in the cases of Saddam Hussain and Moamer Qadaffi. Why not? Even if we assume that OBL has been eliminated as the US claims but then does this mean that Al Qaeda as a viable militant organization too has ended? What about Al Zawahiri and Mullah Umar? If the US "knows" that they are in Pakistan then why does it not carry out another couple of Abbotabads to get them? Or why don't they give the information to the Pakistanis and challenge them to go get them. Or embarrass the ISI into action by giving out their locations? Most of the earlier intelligence successes against Al Qaeda were achieved through superb collaborative work between the CIA and the ISI. Unfortunately, US arrogance, haughtiness and self-righteousness caused the breakdown in what could have been an historical intelligence collaboration between the two. Raymond Davis has and Dr Shakil Afridi will severely test US-Pak relations.

The Obama Administrations Failure:

This was epitomized by the "infighting" between the State Department on one side and the CIA and Pentagon on the other. This "war within" the Obama Administration caused a series of confused policy decisions which led to the alienation of Pakistan. Further the members of the US Congress put a series of unacceptable conditions on aid to Pakistan which led to a literal breakdown of communication between the two. The ruthless and arrogant manner in which President Obama snubbed President Zardari at Chicago has added to the anti-americanism sentiment in Pakistan. And now the pressure to "let free" Dr Shakil Afridi is going to test the relationship even further. This may yet tear the US-Pak relationship to bits and may even cause the downfall of President Zardari's Government!

Afghanistan is thus set to become the graveyard of yet another Empire - the US this time! The US seems to have been ill-served by its diplomats, soldiers and spies. The overall Afghan Campaign has failed to meet most of its geo-political/strategic/economic objectives. The US/NATO/ISAF Combine is now apparently marking time to get home. Their minds are made up, the schedules of departure need only to be made public. Pakistan needs to unblock the NATO supply routes to make the egress as easy as possible! She is likely to do so very soon.

Bon Voyage, America!!

Bon Voyage, America !! - English pravda.ru

Or you could say Get lost Americans and don't come back. Nice to see Russian newspapers give time and space to Pakistani analysts

 

[Veritas]

The psychobable in the first paragraph was enough... on top of it, posted by Aryan_B.

 

[LeGenD]

Amazing brain fart from Mr. Imran Malik. Looks like he was not granted access in to Afghanistan.

Here are some facts:-

1. Removal of Taliban regime from power in 2001 (Taliban has been reduced to Rag Tag status)

2. Creation of Afghan government in 2002. First elections held in 2004.

3. Creation of ANSF in 2002. Check its latest status here: http://www.nato.int/nato_static/assets/pdf/pdf_topics/20120418_120418-Backgrounder-ANSF-en.pdf

4. Elimination of Osama Bin Laden and hundreds of other terrorists.

5. ISAF casualties significantly lower in 2012:

6. Reconstruction efforts ongoing in Afghanistan.

----------------------

Yes, problems in Afghanistan persist but you have to give credit where due.

It is premature to jump to conclusions on Afghanistan before 2014.

 

[Bratva]

For the typical Indians and especially for Legend. Read my signature, what active serving American Lt. Colonel has who served in Afghanistan and what he has to say about Afghan War. This report is especially dedicated to ignorants.!

Truth, lies and Afghanistan - February 2012 - Armed Forces Journal - Military Strategy, Global Defense Strategy

 

[Oldman1]

Not to mention the U.S. is going to provide aid and train the Afghan military after leaving in 2014 just similar to Iraq. Which means the Taliban will have to keep on fighting for many years to come just like Iraq. Blow up a few mosques and security posts but not enough to takeover Afghanistan.

 

[Bratva]

The psychobable in the first paragraph was enough... on top of it, posted by Aryan_B.

You have guts to post this comment because report was written by PAKISTANI. Go read what LT.COLONEL DAVIS has to say about afghan war. Only white people analysis will satisfy your white boot licking slave mentality.

 

[LeGenD]

For the typical Indians and especially for Legend. Read my signature, what active serving American Lt. Colonel has who served in Afghanistan and what he has to say about Afghan War. This report is especially dedicated to ignorants.!

Truth, lies and Afghanistan - February 2012 - Armed Forces Journal - Military Strategy, Global Defense Strategy

You do not need to explain to me the 'ground realities' of the Afghan campaign.

Did this comment - "Yes, problems in Afghanistan persist but you have to give credit where due" - escaped your eyes?

Afghanistan is at war; obviously lot of issues persist but many of them have nothing to do with US. You cannot expect US to change Afghanistan in to Japan now.

If you can refute any claim of mine, then please do so. Otherwise, no need to pinpoint me.

 

[Bratva]

Amazing brain fart from Mr. Imran Malik. Looks like he was not granted access in to Afghanistan.

Here are some facts:-

1. Removal of Taliban regime from power in 2001 (Taliban has been reduced to Rag Tag status)

2. Creation of Afghan government in 2002. First elections held in 2004.

3. Creation of ANSF in 2002. Check its latest status here: http://www.nato.int/nato_static/assets/pdf/pdf_topics/20120418_120418-Backgrounder-ANSF-en.pdf

4. Elimination of Osama Bin Laden and hundreds of other terrorists.

5. ISAF casualties significantly lower in 2012:

6. Reconstruction efforts ongoing in Afghanistan.

----------------------

Yes, problems in Afghanistan persist but you have to give credit where due.

It is premature to jump to conclusions on Afghanistan before 2014.

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.

Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.

Now beat this claim.

 

[LeGenD]

Now beat this claim.

Maybe his expectations are too high.

Remember that US is doing everything in Afghanistan from SCRATCH.

Now some questions for you:-

1. You think that ANSF is fake?

2. That Karzai government does not exists?

3. That Osama Bin Laden and hundreds of other terrorists have not been killed?

4. That their is Taliban regime in Afghanistan?

5. That their is no reconstruction effort ongoing in Afghanistan?

6. That ISAF casualties are not lot lower in 2012?

----------------

To say that US have accomplished nothing in Operation Enduring Freedom is BS in absolute sense.

 

[Mercenary]

US will be here until 2024.

So much for Bon Voyage

 

[somebozo]

The taliban were and are a menace and from time to time it was proven they wouldn't mind turning their guns against Pakistan..the dispute between Pakistan and USA is not elimination of Taliban, actually Pakistan co-operated with USA to remove Talibans from power. The dispute is between certain interests of USA and Pakistan in the region.

 

[Thomas]

You have guts to post this comment because report was written by PAKISTANI. Go read what LT.COLONEL DAVIS has to say about afghan war. Only white people analysis will satisfy your white boot licking slave mentality.

Lt. Col. Davis’ Afghan report: He talks a good game, but there’s not much to it
Monday, February 20, 2012
By Joseph J. Collins

Lt. Col. Davis




I spent yesterday morning with Lt. Colonel Dan Davis's 84 page report, Dereliction of Duty II. It is a dog's breakfast, written by someone whom I have met many times in the Army: People who see things as true or false, right or wrong, and people are divided into good guy truth tellers or bad guy liars. Davis's bad guys are generals Petraeus, Allen, and Caldwell, but he likes generals Chiarelli, Thurman, Perkins, (who have not been in the top jobs in Afghanistan) and General Dempsey. Except Davis hasn't gone over Dempsey's assessments on Afghanistan which -- no surprise -- sound much like Allen's and Petraeus's.

I was prepared for a real critique and came away profoundly disappointed. Every veteran has an important story, but this work is a mess. It is not a successor piece to HR McMaster's book on the Joint Chiefs during Vietnam, or Paul Yingling's critique of U.S. generalship that appeared in Armed Forces Journal a few years back. Davis is not a hero, but he will go into the whistleblower hall of fame. If years hence, he doesn't make full Colonel, it will be construed as punishment, but there is nothing in this report that suggests he has any such potential.

Let's look at the basics:

The title: Dereliction of Duty II ... sorry, this is tantamount to delusions of grandeur. McMaster's book by the same title was well-researched and well-written. Davis's work is neither. Davis's work should be called ‘Dereliction of Civility' or maybe, ‘Death by Semi-anonymous Anecdote,' or ‘My Turn for Warhol-hood.'

The work: 84 pages, but 41 pages are NOT about Afghanistan at all. 12 pages are about the politics of army acquisitions programs with material going back to the 1990s. 29 pages are about the Iraq surge, an essay within the essay that asserts that the troop surge was overrated and Iraqi socio-political developments --- not U.S. troops --- were what turned the tide. My view is that the troop surge was a catalyst; it exploited these developments, but both were necessary for "success," such as it was. Time will tell about the larger piece in Iraq.

The guy who has nailed the Iraq surge stuff is Doug Ollivant, who helped plan the troop surge and later went back to the NSC to push Iraq policy. Whatever points Davis has on Iraq have been made better by other people. In any case, the fact that the surge in Iraq did or did not work was not dispositive in the case of Afghanistan. Many of the same cast of characters were involved in both surges, but a new president called for their participation and worked himself for three months on the issue before he made the surge decision.

The thesis: Give Davis a point for BLUF, bottom line up front. His thesis is in the first sentence of the paper: Senior officers "have so distorted the truth" on Afghanistan "that the truth has become unrecognizable." Exhibit A here is a statement (pg. 6 6) by Petraeus in March 2011. He excoriates Petraeus for claiming that Taliban momentum "has been arrested in much of the country," and "reversed" in places. Petraeus goes on to say in the "damning" quote that progress was still "fragile and reversible," and that "much difficult work lies ahead with our Afghan partners."

On p. 8, we find out the real problem: things in Afghanistan are not as clear as they were during the Battle of the Bulge. No kidding! Davis craves clarity and surety in the case of protracted insurgency in a fractious country that has been at war for 33 years. The generals cannot deliver clarity in this sea of ambiguity, therefore, they must be liars. As for statistics, the U.S. government has never released more.

On p. 9 and on the last page (84), Davis shows that he is stuck on the fact that as we put more assets in, the number of security incidents increased, including those caused by the enemy. He finds these stats to be proof of surge failure, and prima facie evidence that all optimistic statements or projections are lies.

But much of Davis's stats -- which I can't verify as authentic -- have other explanations: 1) The enemy gets a vote and has himself gone all in to stop the surge. (It is clear from nearly all observers, but not Davis,that the Taliban have been soundly defeated -- even if fragile-y and reverse-ibly -- in much of RC S and RC SW); 2) Adding 40,000 combat troops to the mix has stirred things up, and 3) We still have "much difficult work lies ahead with our Afghan partners," in Petraeus's phrase.

Davis cherry-picks statistics, but he never picks on any of the voluminous data about night raids that shows the vast numbers of Taliban leaders killed or captured in past two years. He also castigates LTG Caldwell, but fails to walk through his impressive stats on ANSF development. He shames himself by writing that the ANSF are cowards who aren't fighting hard.

On the ANSF, the facts get in the way of Davis's argument. Since 2007, Afghan cops and soldiers have died and been wounded in greater numbers than ISAF forces. The Brookings Index, again using USG-released numbers, confirms that. On p. 41, Davis cites redacted material about poor ANSF performance. I was in Afghanistan last spring and heard lots of the opposite story and found many Afghans in uniform who had been in the fight and were spoiling for more, just as the Marines noted in the New York Times Magazine two weeks ago. Every man or woman in uniform has a right to his anecdotes, but no matter how many anecdotes you can string together, they don't constitute data or sound judgments.

At the end of his text in his epilogue, Davis tries to give the Taliban a writeoff. He says that al Qaeda wouldn't come back into Afghanistan and that the Taliban have every incentive to disavow the al Qaeda. Except they never have, even when asked by the King of Saudi Arabia to do so (See Dexter Filkins' 2010 article in the New York Times). I think -- but can't be sure -- that Davis is trying to say that the war is not worth it, and only the lying generals want to keep the farce in perpetual reruns. I could be wrong about that ... many things in this document are unclear, although obviously the "truth."

Let me summarize: This unclassified report is not worth the reader's effort. Davis's Armed Forces Journal article promised much, but this report delivers very little.
Joseph J. Collins, a retired Army Colonel, teaches at the National War College. From 2001-2004, he was the Deputy Asst. Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations. He wrote Understanding War in Afghanistan, published by the NDU Press in 2011. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government, nor even, perhaps, those of "Pumpsie" Green. Congratulations for reading this far. Slow day, huh?