Afghanistan: the lost decade. There is one set of figures about the war in Afghanistan that puts the problems of trying to end it into their true perspective.
The US is spending $120bn more in fighting the war this year than the Afghan exchequer is raising in tax revenue. Even the cost of the war to Britain, at £6bn (according to a former UK ambassador's evidence to the foreign affairs select committee) is over three times what Kabul can afford. So in what sense is Kabul ready to take over Afghanistan's security when foreign troops stop combat operations in less than three years' time?
Ten years on from the Bonn conference in 2001, with so many mistakes made, the basic questions only pile up. Then, Pakistan's strategic relationship with US was not in doubt. There are slivers of good news. Congressional investigation uncovers Afghan horror hospital. Urban Target Complex National Monument. [Image: Yodaville, via Google Maps].
Yodaville is a fake city in the Arizona desert used for bombing runs by the U.S. Air Force. Writing for Air & Space Magazine back in 2009, Ed Darack wrote that, while tagging along on a training mission, he noticed "a small town in the distance—which, as we got closer, proved to have some pretty big buildings, some of them four stories high. " As towns go, this one is relatively new, having sprung up in 1999. But nobody lives there. As one instructor tells Darack, "The urban layout is actually very similar to the terrain in many villages in Iraq and Afghanistan. " The Urban Target Complex, or UTC, was soon "lit up with red tracer rounds and bright yellow and white rocket streaks," till it "looked like it was barely able to keep standing": The artillery and mortars started firing, troops advanced toward the target complex, and aircraft of all types—carefully controlled by students on the mountain top—mounted one attack run after another.
Another Killing Machine: Another Newly Invented Machine in Afghanistan. No country in the world has suffered so much and for so long at the hands of two super powers in the last thirty years than Afghanistan.
One after the other they invaded Afghanistan wreaking complete havoc and causing tremendous loss of life and property as well as destroying the entire infrastructure of that wretched country. Deadwood - By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. When Richard Holbrooke became the Obama administration's Afghanistan point man in January 2009, Summer Coish was keen to join his civilian operation.
She had the requisite credentials: a master's in public health and experience working on foreign development projects. For the previous five years, she had been splitting her time between New York and Kazakhstan, where she and a friend had started a glossy biannual magazine about Central Asia. Although she dug a little deeper into her savings to print each issue of Steppe, the publishing venture had swelled the list of contacts on her mobile phone. The American Agenda in Afghanistan: a Civilian’s Review.
Kabul.
One thing true we can say about war is that truth is its greatest casualty. I am a volunteer teacher. Four years ago I responded to a call from then candidate Barack Obama for a new kind of soldier to wage peace, one without a uniform, without a gun. The Afghan Disaster. By FRANKLIN C.
SPINNEY The PR disasters over the last three months — including pictures of American troops urinating on Afghan corpses, the burning of Qurans, and the massacre of Afghan civilians, including women and children, by at least one deranged American soldier — have morphed into a grand strategic debacle. Deal to Continue Afghanistan Night Raids Is Near. Matt Robinson/Reuters American soldiers waited for a helicopter to pick them up after a night raid by the 101st Airborne Division in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, in February.
The night raids’ deep unpopularity with the Afghan public has long put Mr. Karzai at odds with his American backers, who say the operations are among the most effective tools they have to combat the . An agreement on the raids, after months of sometimes contentious negotiations, would allow Kabul and Washington to move toward completion of a broader pact that lays out the strategic relationship between the two countries after the official end of the combat mission here in 2014. Afghan and American officials hope to have that broader agreement concluded in time for a NATO summit meeting planned for May in Chicago. Top general can't spin Afghan failures - Afghanistan. After an Afghan soldier killed two British troops in Kabul on Monday, Gen.
John Allen, chief of the international forces in Afghanistan, told reporters in Washington it was the 40th such attack in recent years. “An erosion of trust has emerged,” he conceded. Top US Commander Examines Leadership Issues in Afghan Killings. Luis Ramirez | Pentagon March 26, 2012 The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Marine Corps General John Allen, said Monday he is looking into possible leadership failures that might have led to the killing of 17 Afghan villagers, allegedly by a U.S. soldier this month.
U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder. Support for Afghan War Falls in U.S., Poll Finds. The survey found that more than two-thirds of those polled — 69 percent — thought that the United States should not be at war in Afghanistan.
Just four months ago, 53 percent said that Americans should no longer be fighting in the conflict, more than a decade old. The increased disillusionment was even more pronounced when respondents were asked their impressions of how the war was going. The poll found that 68 percent thought the fighting was going “somewhat badly” or “very badly,” compared with 42 percent who had those impressions in November.
The latest poll was conducted by telephone from March 21 to 25 with 986 adults nationwide. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. US paid close to $50,000 per shooting spree death, American official tells NBC. By NBC News and news services Updated at 11 a.m. ET: KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- The United States paid close to $50,000 in compensation for each Afghan killed in the shooting spree attributed to a U.S. soldier in southern Afghanistan, a U.S. official told NBC News on Sunday. The official, who asked not to be named, would not say exactly how much was paid to the families, but added the amount was close to the $50,000 reported by Afghan officials.
The conflicting Afghan shooting reports - GlobalPost. KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Conflicting reports from eyewitnesses, U.S. officials and local leaders show, if anything, how little is known for certain about what happened in the early morning hours of March 11, when Staff Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine women and children. About the only facts the U.S. military and local Afghans agree on is the number of people killed during the shooting — which took place in two remote villages in Kandahar Province, a half-mile from a U.S. military outpost — and that the killings occurred sometime in the early morning hours.
While Sgt. Bales is in custody in the United States for the shooting, locals swear that multiple soldiers participated and that they communicated via walkie-talkies, indicating the attack might have been a more organized operation. “ISAF is looking into all the witnesses accounts who are deemed credible and we will investigate that,” Lt.
Kandahar massacre par for the course in Afghanistan. There are still many questions surrounding the horrific massacres in Afghanistan: did Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, now formally accused of 17 murders, act alone? What could make someone snap so suddenly and completely? Is the US military to blame for not screening their soldiers properly? One thing, however, is becoming clear: the US war effort in Afghanistan is drawing to a painful and shameful close. Ever since the rampage in Kandahar on March 11, the airwaves, newspapers and web pages have been devoted to a harsh reexamination of our goals and accomplishments in Afghanistan. Afghanistan and the Roman Empire.
As Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stepped off the plane in Afghanistan recently, he accurately summed up the evils of war. Arriving to calm Afghani reaction to the massacre of sixteen civilians in their homes by a U.S. soldier, Panetta said that "war is hell. " The Secretary went on to predict that these "incidents are going to take place. Debating the U.S. Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement. "There is too much to lose, too many more soldiers to be debased into monsters, too many more innocent lives to be lost.
" Kabul. War in Afghanistan. Obama: Killing Afghans as serious as killing Americans. The Art of Lying. If you want to know how things could have gone so horribly wrong in Afghanistan last weekend, you must read Thomas Harrington’s brilliant piece in Common Dreams. The article contains no reference to the soldier reported to have walked out of a US base in Kandahar and killed a whole bunch of people. Soldiers as Terrorists. The sun had not risen. In the dark, a man walked into homes of people and killed nine children, four women, three men. This is what criminals do, what terrorists do. NPR and NYT on Americans v. Afghans - Glenn Greenwald. The New York Times yesterday conveyed important and exciting evidence of American progress in Afghanistan which I believe we can and should all find inspiring; it concerns the reasons the protests in Afghanistan over the slaughter of 16 villagers by a U.S. soldier were not as intense as feared: Many observers say, the Americans have had a lot of practice at apologizing for carnage, accidental and otherwise, and have gotten better at doing it quickly and convincingly.
I don’t mind admitting that I beamed with nationalistic pride when I learned of our country’s impressive evolution: our nation’s government is so practiced in “apologizing for carnage” that it’s becoming a perfected art. This pride become particularly bountiful when I heard NPR’s Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep yesterday talk to The Washington Post‘s Rajiv Chandrasekaran about the same topic and I learned how much worse the Afghans are by comparison (h/t dubo6254).
Anand Gopal — Afghan killings product of failed strategy. NATO’s measured exit plan in Afghanistan faces new obstacles. American Morlocks: Monsters of a murderous Afghan policy - Afghanistan. Nearly eight years ago, on April 1, 2004, former speechwriter and Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan Peggy Noonan wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, where she was a contributing editor. It began like this (emphasis in original): Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.