Pakistan to Sambhalta nahin, India chalayenge ..
Abe ********** Tera Adha Desh To Naxal Ke Hathon Me Hai Aur Tu Pakistan Ke Sanbhalne Ke Taaane Deta Hai
USA vacating Afghanistan because of money not because of force
Taliban is just a lame duck infront of USA.
The Impending Afghan Defeat
July 11, 2013
Frustrated over negotiations for a stay-behind force of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, President Obama is now weighing the possibility of a faster withdrawal and a “zero option” on troops going forward. That may signal the belated recognition of twin American defeats in the Afghan and Iraq wars, says Beverly Bandler.
By Beverly Bandler
Americans hate the word “defeat” but that is what we face in Afghanistan. After nearly 12 years, the longest war in U.S. history is winding down with an almost inconceivably staggering cost in blood, treasure and what economists call opportunity cost — the value of the best alternative forgone.
As Tom Engelhardt, author of
The End of Victory Culture, wrote, “Leave the mystery of who beat us to the historians.”
President Barack Obama and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan participate in a joint press conference in the East Room of the White House, Jan. 11, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)
Yet, while future historians may provide the details of the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan, one assessment is possible now: The United States was defeated most of all by its own arrogance and ignorance. The cause for this defeat was bipartisan, implicating both Democrats and Republicans, neoconservatives and neoliberals as well as hubristic officials at the CIA and tunnel-vision generals dispatched by the Pentagon.
The folly dates back more than three decades to 1979 when President Jimmy Carter’s hard-line national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski devised a plan to poke at the Soviet Union by helping Islamist mujahedeen warriors harass the Soviet-allied government in Afghanistan. Brzezinski hoped the provoked Russian bear would fall into an “Afghan trap.”
After the Soviets invaded to protect the embattled regime in Kabul, President Ronald Reagan ratcheted up covert U.S. military assistance into the hundreds of millions of dollars and got Saudi Arabia to send a matching amount. The mujahedeen’s supply lines and much of the command and control was delegated to Pakistani intelligence which favored the most radical Islamists, including Saudi militant Osama bin Laden and his Arab fighters.
In 1989, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew the battered Soviet army and sought a power-sharing arrangement that would merge the Kabul regime with the CIA-backed mujahedeen. But President George H.W. Bush – heeding the advice of his deputy national security adviser (and former senior CIA official) Robert Gates – rebuffed Gorbachev’s offer and pressed on, seeking a clear-cut U.S. victory.
Passing up Gorbachev’s peace offer represented a major opportunity lost. Instead of a possible peace deal, the Afghan conflict continued inconclusively for years as the country descended deeper and deeper into civil war with various well-armed warlords battling for turf and power.
Finally, Pakistan’s ISI – the Inter-Services Intelligence – recruited a new force of militant Pashtuns from Afghan refugee camps and supported their drive on Kabul. This force, known as the Taliban, took power in 1996, ruthlessly disposed of its rivals, imposed a fundamentalist version of Islam – and granted safe haven to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization.
We will probably never know how much U.S. money (along with Saudi funds) was funneled to the most brutal of the fundamentalist fighters from the “Islamic Right,” including bin Laden. But the Afghan covert operation was one of the longest and most expensive in CIA history, with funding beginning with about $20 million in 1980 and rising to around $630 million per year in 1987. An ABC News report said $3 billion was poured into the Afghan resistance via the CIA.
The end result of that massive investment was that – by the late 1990s – the radical Taliban was in power and the stage was set for an escalation of al-Qaeda’s war against its new enemy, the United States. The group hit American targets in the Middle East and Africa before taking aim on New York and Washington in the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Classic Blowback
It was a classic case of what’s known in the intelligence trade as “blowback,” retaliation for some violent intervention in some faraway land, an unintended cause and effect. In this case, many Americans expressed bewilderment over “why they hate us” so much that young men would commit mass suicide and murder thousands of innocents to get revenge. There was little collective American knowledge about the devastation inflicted by U.S. foreign policy on Afghanistan and other Muslim lands.
President George W. Bush exploited this national confusion by providing his own nonsensical answer, “because they hate our freedoms.” Bush also harnessed American fury over 9/11 to brush aside a Taliban offer to negotiate bin Laden’s surrender and instead launched an invasion of Afghanistan.
U.S. forces and allied Afghan militias quickly ousted the Taliban but failed to get bin Laden, who managed to flee to Pakistan. Bush then pivoted U.S. military attention to Iraq, leaving the Afghan occupation/reconstruction to muddle along as the U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai stumbled and Taliban regrouped.
In 2009, President Barack Obama refocused U.S. attention on Afghanistan, as he pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq. He also acquiesced to demands for a larger Afghan military escalation from then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, General David Petraeus and other leftovers from Bush’s high command.
Obama was finally able to complete the mission of eliminating bin Laden with a Special Forces raid into Pakistan on May 2, 2011. But the Gates-Petraeus counterinsurgency “surge” in Afghanistan bogged down with little measurable success. Finally, Obama began to withdraw U.S. forces amid continuing squabbles with President Karzai about the size of an American stay-behind force.
On Tuesday, the New York Times
reported that an “increasingly frustrated” Obama is now considering an accelerated withdrawal of the remaining U.S. combat troops by mid-2014 and a “zero option” going forward, meaning no U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan and the Karzai government left to face the Taliban, more or less, alone.
The prospect of so much invested in American blood and treasure with so little to show for the effort has led journalist Ann Jones to cite the Afghan War as a threefold failure: “no peace, no democracy, and no reconstruction.”
Looking back over the past 11½ years – from 9/11 to today – it now appears clear that the United States fell into its own “Afghan trap,” becoming just the latest nation taught painful lessons from “the graveyard of empires.” Or as Sir John Templeton once said, “The four most expensive words in the English language are: ‘This time it’s different.’”
An Enduring Crisis
It seems now that the only thing that will be enduring from Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan will be the human suffering of the survivors and the fiscal crisis caused by fighting the Afghan and Iraq wars on borrowed money.
Professor Linda J. Bilmes of Harvard’s Kennedy School estimated that the total costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars will be between $4 trillion and $6 trillion, making them “the most expensive wars in U.S. history.” She added: “One of the most significant challenges to future U.S. national security policy will not originate from any external threat. Rather it is simply coping with the legacy of the conflicts we have already fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The latest casualty figures indicate a U.S. death toll in Afghanistan of 2,249, along with about 1,100 more dead among coalition allies. Summarizing just part of the costs for the Afghan people, Chalmers Johnson wrote in 2004: “1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees, and 10 million unexploded land-mines.”
The long litany of U.S. miscalculations resulted from a willful ignorance of Middle East and Afghanistan history by Washington’s “group think” community, not to mention the refusal of these “experts” to learn from the lessons Vietnam and the more recent Soviet experience in Afghanistan.
The corporate media and the U.S. public also must accept a share of responsibility for the fiasco, being so easily manipulated by flag-waving jingoism and by
Hollywood movies, such as the Cold War propaganda of “Charlie Wilson’s War” which reveled in the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.
Today, at home, the U.S. is itself challenged with an “unraveling” due to dysfunctional polarized politics and a weakened economy, a good part of the latter the result of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
“Mark the moment,” wrote Tom Engelha
The Impending Afghan Defeat | Consortiumnews
All due to this exhortation above...
