Leaving Afghanistan By Haviland Smith

Rural Ruminations  (http://rural-ruminations.com/)

Leaving Afghanistan

February 28, 2012

By Haviland Smith

Reasonably careful attention to the news media, shows that writers and talking heads are increasingly surprised that things are not going our way in the Middle East.  Recently a number of commentators have expressed surprise that Iraq looks to be sliding toward chaos and indignation at the recent killings of some of our advisor/soldiers in Afghanistan.

We have now been in Afghanistan for over a decade. That is twice as long as we were involved in World War II – and longer than any foreign war in our history.  We went to Afghanistan to redress the attack of 9/11.  We then completely took our eyes off the ball and invaded Iraq, an act that may well turn out to be the greatest foreign policy gaff in the history of the United States.

We went into Afghanistan on the premise that we were fighting the Global War On Terror (GWOT) and in fairly short order we had completely eliminated Al Qaeda from the Afghan countryside.  By 2002, GWOT/Afghanistan was all over.  In 2003, we invaded Iraq, destroying whatever planning continuity we may have had for Afghanistan.  And guess what happened.  As time dragged on, the struggle in Afghanistan ceased being a counterterrorism program and became a counterinsurgency with Afghan people rising up against us.  The Bush administration avoided acknowledging that.  They purposefully continued to call it counterterrorism.  It’s easier to get sympathy and support fighting terrorists than it is fighting insurgents.

The problem here is that, according to the US Army’s own experts, a counterinsurgency program requires 25 troops for every 1,000 indigenous residents, which would have meant a commitment of 850,000 US troops to effectively combat the Afghan insurgency.  So, by 2011, ten years in, we were fighting an insurgency with a force that was one eighth the size required by the facts on the ground.

How did we manage to get to the point where we are so roundly disliked by the Afghans?  A look back on our behaviors in Afghanistan show a pattern that clearly was not designed to win Afghan hearts and minds.   The torture and abuse of Afghan prisoners at Bagram began in 2002 and came to public light in 2005.  Helicopter and drone attacks have regularly caused collateral civilian damage.  Afghans have seen American soldiers urinate on Afghan dead.  And most recently, we have been burning Korans, which is an incredible sacrilege in Islam.

This is certainly not to say that we have purposefully committed these acts.  Clearly, the haze of war, cultural ineptitude and plain old stupidity are co-responsible.  What is fact, however, is that we are the foreigners in Afghanistan and we have been there for over a decade.  The average Afghan, if he remembers at all, thinks we came to get rid of Al Qaida.  And we did, by 2002 at the latest.  So they ask, why have we stayed?