Afghanistan: Too FUBAR to fix

by: Blue Girl

Tue Aug 03, 2010 at 20:30:00 PM CDT

I'll give you an example from my earliest days of blogging...before anyone outside the military had ever heard the term MRAP, I was writing about the folly of going to war in jeeps. Having a nephew patrolling the mean streets of Ramadi in 2005 and then Baqubah the second time in 2007-08 made me just a wee bit tetchy about it. Call me selfish, but I don't give a fuck about your tax rates. I wanted him - and every other American in harms way because of bullshit and lies - home in one piece.

Iraq is a war I never supported and pretty much predicted the outcome of in late 2002.

Afghanistan, on the other hand, is a war I came "this close" to volunteering for. I was set to go, had my MFA and AOC (that is what medical officers get instead of an MOS) and the paperwork was done, all but my signature. The recruiter who fell on his knees and gave thanks the minute he got a look at my resume suggested waiting a minute, because signing bonuses were going to go up, and there was no way in hell I wouldn't deploy.  

Before that happened a few weeks later and I afixed my signature and got a one-way ticket to Ft. Sam for AMEDD, I totally fucked up one of my knees playing soccer with my son who needed another player for a pick-up game. I had surgery to repair it...again...and by the time I was released by my orthopedist six months later, when he was convinced that training for and completing a two mile PT run wouldn't undo all the work he had put into reconstructing a knee that actually needed replacing, Bush started beating the war drums for Iraq.

No way in hell I was volunteering then.

I knew the minute the first troop carrier rolled into Iraq that Afghanistan would become a lost cause and the Taliban that had been vanquished would return with a vengeance.

I never bought the "Graveyard of Empires" canard. That is because in the beginning, we were firing on the right cylinders and on-track to actually make some progress and do some real good for the Afghan people, who have suffered horribly for decades, since the best intentions of a benevolent King who wanted to experiment with democracy allowed hard-line factions to emerge on both the left and the right. Long story short: They have barely known a minute of peace since 1967, when the Khalk and Parcham factions formed when the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which had been closely allied with the Soviet Union, broke apart.

The politics were getting pretty rough already and matters weren't helped in the early '70s when Mother Nature stepped in and tossed a severe drought into the mix, to go along with the corruption and the lack of services and infrastructure and the grinding poverty in the rural areas while in the cities, (some) people lived lush lives, studied in universities, danced in discos and lived, for all intents and purposes, a modern, westernized lifestyle.

Conditions were ripe, to say the least, for a coup to transpire, and that is exactly what happened in the summer of 1973 while the King, Zahir Shah, was in Italy receiving medical treatment. Sardar Daoud Khan assumed power, declared Afghanistan a republic and himself the new republic's first president and prime minister.

The best that can be said about Daoud Khan's republic is that it floundered. He knew that economic and social reforms were badly needed, and he tried to carry them through, but he failed. Within a few short years, disillusionment set in, and by the spring of 1978, it boiled over. A couple of uprisings later, a full-blown civil war erupted, and that set the stage for the Soviets to invade the country a year later.  

When the Soviets finally left, a decade later, a communist government emerged for a minute, but it fell within three years, and that was followed by four years of anarchy and five years of Taliban rule. And for the last nine years, the country has been occupied by NATO/ISAF forces.

And from the very beginning, before my timeline starts in the 60s, the CIA has been operating in the country, meddling in affairs and angling for influence, because Afghanistan favored the Soviet Union over the west during the Cold War.

Remember how General McChrystal called Marjah a "bleeding ulcer"? Marjah was one of the CIA's grand ideas back in the day, and it isn't really a city, per se. It's more a settlement. It is a collection of a few thousand compounds that occupy two or three acres each, scattered among poppy fields and irrigation canals that were built in the late 50s and through the 60s. USAID supplied cash in an effort to help the Afghan government at the time resettle nomadic Pashtuns and distract them from an independence movement that was percollating on both sides of the Af-Pak border. I've seen the declassified CIA manuals on the development plans for Marjah. It was supposed to be the country's breadbasket, but as soon as the first wheat crop was harvested the fields were planted with poppies and poppies have been what the region has produced ever since.

Before those USAID/CIA resettlement efforts, there was no Marjah. After those efforts, the region has no strategic value.

That is where we are now, and after things were actually going pretty well at first, and there was a chance to do some real good for the people of Afghanistan, too. And after thirty years of war, anarchy and chaos that was followed by religious tyranny, they could frankly use a break.

It took me a long time to get to the point of giving up on Afghanistan. It really did. And it pisses me off still, and will forevermore, that the opportunity was squandered. Along with far too much blood and treasure, and with no end in sight.

It costs a million dollars to keep one pair of American boots on the ground in Afghanistan for one year because there is no infrastructure, and everything has to be airlifted in by choppers. Having spent a little bit o' time aboard whirly-birds, I can not imagine a more terrifying feeling that airlifting a thousand gallon bladder of diesel fuel or gasoline over hostiles who might have shoulder-launch missiles, and I doubt that it's just me.

At this point, I just hope the Hail Mary works and Petraeus manages to declare victory and come home, because the American people are war-weary, and ready for this to be over. It isn't just that support has waned. It's worse than that, and that is bad enough. Now, nearly nine full years on, a whopping 43 percent of the American people think it was a mistake to ever go into Afghanistan in the first place. Even though the plotters and masterminds behind the terrorists who attacked us and killed 3000 really had found safe haven in Afghanistan and the invasion was legally and morally justified.

The poll questions came about a month after the dismissal of the top U.S. military official in the country and just days after the leak of more than 91,000 sensitive documents about combat operations in Afghanistan. But Gallup officials said Americans views of the war have been increasingly pessimistic since last summer, suggesting the latest round of bad news isn't solely to blame.

The poll results also suggest waning support for the president's strategy for the war. Of those surveyed 57 percent disapprove of his handling of Afghanistan, while only 36 percent support him. Just one year ago those numbers were reversed: 56 percent approved, 34 percent disapproved.

In addition, 57 percent of those surveyed believe the president should set a firm deadline for the withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan. A third of that group want a withdrawal "as soon as possible."

This president is not the one who lost Afghanistan. The previous president lost it, in March 2003. Not only that, I actually believe that the American people are realizing this, hence those numbers. It doesn't have to be Obama's Vietnam, unless he chooses to further escalate things in spite of the will of the people whose children are fighting it and the staggering, unaffordable cost of waging it that we are stuck with the bill for because the tax-cut fairy didn't leave a trillion dollars under the Pentagon's pillow.