No sooner do I repeat in comments my conclusion that the only achieveable objective in Afghanistan is denial of territory, i.e. preventing Al Qaeda and the Taliban from reestablishing themselves there, and that only by remaining in the country indefinitely, than Der Spiegel runs an article on the impossibility of victory in Afghanistan:
Almost seven years have passed since the overthrow of the Taliban regime, and in those seven years half of the world has tried to bring a better future and, most of all, peace to this new country, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. As part of the NATO military operation known as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), 40 nations have 60,000 soldiers deployed in the country. There are 26 United Nations organizations in Afghanistan, and hundreds of private and government agencies are pumping money, materials and know-how into the country’s 34 provinces. But anyone seeking success stories or asking about failures will encounter reports that do not seem to be coming from the same country.
According to the speeches and statements Western military officials, diplomats and politicians are constantly churning out, the security situation has improved substantially, the military successes are obvious and the Taliban are as good as defeated. But peace and Afghanistan, say the Afghanis when speaking to a domestic audience, are still two incompatible words.
Last year, 1,469 bombs exploded along Afghan roads, a number almost five times as high as in 2004. There were 8,950 armed attacks on troops and civilian support personnel, 10 times more than only three years earlier. One hundred and thirty suicide bombers blew themselves up in 2007. There were three suicide bombings in 2004.
There is no peace anywhere in Afghanistan, not even in the north (more…), which officials repeatedly insist has been pacified. Anyone who travels the country — making the obligatory rounds to its ministries, speaking with Western ambassadors, UN directors, ISAF commanders and provincial governors, and meeting with women’s rights activists, narcotics officers and police chiefs — is bound to return with many dark questions and an ominous feeling that this mission is not a task to be measured in years, but in decades, many decades.
Hat tip: PoliGazette
Their analysis prescribes a need for a forty-fold increase in NATO forces in the country—obviously beyond the realm of possibility. A forty-fold increase on the part of the United States would require us not only to remove all of our forces from Iraq (which neither presidential candidate is proposing) but to increase the total size of our military enormously. Additionally, supporting a soldier in Afghanistan costs us three times what supporting a soldier in Iraq does. Congress is already complaining about the level of present costs. Increasing the amount spent a hundred-fold is just not in the cards. We’re rich but we’re not that rich.
