Sketchy dead Taliban
Unprecedented Violence Makes Afghanistan Deadliest Front Yet in War on Terror
Damn, nine soldiers were killed in a Taliban assault Sunday. Besides the downing of a chopper in 2005, this is the single deadliest attack on American troops of the war. It comes a week after the war’s Kabul biggest Kabul bombing, on the Indian Embassy, which killed 40 and injured 200. A few weeks earlier, the Taliban staged a crazy-bold prison break which freed 400 fighters. Last month 46 US soldiers died in Afghanistan, by far the highest tally of the war. Exhale…
How bad is it? Well, applied to Iraq, where there’s more than four times as many troops, last month’s Afghanistan death total would have topped 170. By comparison, the worst month in Iraq, November 2004, saw 141 killed. Therefore, Afghanistan right now the most violent front per capita of the War on Terror.
To think, seven years in, things are worse than ever—maybe worse than ever imagined. That quagmire Johnny Apple q-headed back in 2002 is fully upon us, even though he was ridiculed for writing it at the time.
Today, the NYT shows why it’s the most important news organization in the world (by a factor of like five), featuring both an intrepid cover story from Pakistan’s tribal areas and an oped by Barack Obama on the War on Terror. The two Times’ stringers were detained for three days in the Tribal Areas after reporting on a Taliban-held marble quarry. And Barry O says he would send two combat brigades, about 10,000 more troops, to Afghanistan.
Here’s some copy about yesterday’s battle the AP report:
Militants with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars attacked the remote base in the village of Wanat in the mountainous northeastern province of Kunar at about 4:30 a.m. Sunday, with insurgents firing from homes and a mosque.
An unknown number of militants got inside the outpost, the reason the fighters were able to inflict such high casualties…
Ok, so the US Army, the most sophisticated and heavily armed fighting force in world history, somehow had a base breached by a bunch of illiterate AK-47-toting kids? I’m shocked. I’m angry and depressed.
There’s no question that this Taliban 2.0 is more powerful, organized, and well-funded than the one that took Afghanistan in the late 90s. That’s right folks, we invaded Afghanistan to remove the Taliban only for a stronger Taliban to emerge. “Regime change” actually helped the Taliban mobilize popular support. And years of battling the US have forced the Talib to become smarter, better fighters.
Is there a solution? The Taliban are hardly moderates, but as rulers they were isolationists. Unfortunately, the Taliban are Pushtu and follow a super-duper strict code of hospitality—one so deep that they’d never consider turning on their Al Qaeda guests. The world could live with the Taliban were Al Qaeda not living on their land. No negotiated settlement would erase Al Qaeda’s dedication to global jihad. Sadly, there is no near-term solution. Still, the occupation is failing…
Here’s Juan Cole on Obama’s Afghan plan:
TAGS: Al-Qaeda, attack, Barack Obama, free, India, insurgents, Iraq, kids, Mosque, NATO, NPR, obama, paris, Politics, russia, Taliban, warI don’t know whether Senator Obama really wants to try to militarily occupy Afghanistan even more than is now being attempted. I wish he would talk to some old Russian officers who were there in the 1980s first…
If the Afghanistan gambit is sincere, I don’t think it is good geostrategy. Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq. If playing it up is politics, then it is dangerous politics…
Search and destroy in Afghanistan is an even worse example of going overboard. My advice to his campaign team is to give more thought to how he can take a strong enough position on an issue to win on it, without giving away the whole store.
We who admire him don’t want Afghanistan to become an albatross around the neck of a President Obama.
Afghan tribes are fractious. They feud. Their territory is vast and rugged, and they know it like the back of their hands. Afghans are Jeffersonians in the sense that they want a light touch from the central government, and heavy handedness drives them into rebellion. Stand up Karzai’s army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there. “Al-Qaeda” was always Bin Laden’s hype. He wanted to get us on the ground there so that the Mujahideen could bleed us the way they did the Soviets. It is a trap.
Beware.
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