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US Making a Deadly Mistake in Afghanistan, Says Former Diplomat. The war that Barack Obama promised to end two years ago is instead being expanded again, with reports of more airstrikes and ground combat to come, and a former top State Department official who resigned the last time the U.S. president surged in Afghanistan says all the latest escalation will achieve is a longer war with a lot more dead.
“The renewed airstrikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan will have the same effect as the thousands and thousands of previous airstrikes we have conducted against the Afghan insurgency,†said Matthew Hoh, a former U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan who resigned from his post in 2009 to protest the war. By that time, President Obama had deployed 30,000 more troops since taking office to fight al-Qaida and the Taliban; six weeks after Hoh quit, Obama sent another 30,000, roughly tripling the size of the U.S. occupation he inherited from President George W. Bush.
“American airstrikes will make for triumphant press releases from the U.S. military in Kabul,†Hoh told teleSUR, “and it will kill many Taliban fighters, and also many civilians, but strategically and long term the airstrikes will not significantly weaken the Taliban.†In fact, more bombs—like the ones that fell on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz last year, killing over 40 people—may only help the insurgency even as it eliminates insurgents “by providing more public support to them due to the civilian casualties the airstrikes cause.â€
All signs are that the cycle will continue. No one who stands a chance of winning the race for White House is calling for an end to the 15 years of failure. From Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump, the consensus is the same as it ever was: perpetual occupation for peace and security that's always just around the corner, if we'd only be patient. “The U.S. does not have a strategy," Hoh said, at least not "in any way that any person who has ever put together a plan of action or strategy for a business, construction project or even a kids’ soccer game would expect." Rather, he argued, “the U.S. is simply reacting to events.â€
And for every U.S. reaction over the last decade and a half, there has been an equal and opposite action from the Afghan insurgency. For the country to fulfill its progressive potential, those with power—and troops and drones—will have to decide it is the time for the deadly cycle of idiocy to stop.
#Afghanistan #politics #stupidism
There's the Dacia option, the isolate the minority-backed insurgency, or the neverending story.
Antiterror only works in places where there is a militant minority opposed to the wishes of the majority. Like Chechnya or Malaysia, where the majority are largely secular people who simply want to get on with their lives and aren't diehard Wahabis or Communists like the insurgents.
It won't work in Afghanistan, which is a patchwork of competing faiths and ethnicities, levels of class warfare between landless or hardscrabble peasants against powerful clan landlords, inter clan disputes, inter village disputes, etc. Each one jumping sides to maximize their chances of success
The only option that would work in Afghanistan is at least 500,000 troops and total tyranny with mass executions, the Dacia option.