By Steve Hynd
The Washington Post's reports today that General Stanley "The Escalator" McChrystal is going to ask for (this was an easy one) more troops and more nation building at gunpoint in Afghanistan.
And finally, some big-name liberal foreign policy bloggers have figured out that they've been well and truly had by their COINdinista military and think-tank friends.
When I look at the situation, I see a United States of America that�s economically battered and continues to badly lack credibility in the Muslim world. This makes me want a strategy aimed at figuring out what there is we can accomplish in Afghanistan on a reasonably short time frame before heading out. Instead, the wheels of national security policy seem to be spinning in the direction of escalating goals leading to escalating demands for resources, all in a manner that seems oddly detached from concrete considerations about costs and benefits.
it seems fair to say that the balance of evidence favors an interpretation that Afghanistan strategy is coming unmoored from the actual objectives of the war, and the actual interests at stake, and the White House is being either deluded or outright dishonest about what's happening. "Our goal is to deal with the terrorist elements that are in that country and are making life for Afghans and potentially life for millions throughout the world more dangerous through their activities," Robert Gibbs said from the White House podium today. That is simply not what's coming from McChrystal's circle...Vietnam is back.
It's not as if others haven't been predicting this all along. But the neoliberal interventionists at think-tanks like the Center For A New American Security, allied closely with the Petraeus Posse, have taken Obama's original Bush-lite mission, and its requirements, and have incrementally escalated the mission in such a way as to conceal the deep change from what Obama told us would happen to something very different indeed. As D-Day writes at Hullabaloo: "They are less concerned with dismantling Al Qaeda and more concerned with a counter-insurgency bank shot."
I think you got this just right - a voice from the wilderness indeed! Every time I see a photo of those grizzled old guys in Afghan, I wonder how anyone with any sense could possibly think those guys are gonna do whatever America thinks they should do. Any one of those guys has vastly more street sense than an entire platoon of American kids.
ReplyDeleteI suspect the Afghanis look at us as the stupid ones. Their view of us is probably a mirror of Cheney's view of them. They tolerate us because they DO RESPECT our big guns, and maybe they figure they can use our stupidity to their advantage.
Americans think poverty equals stupidity, but our leaders they should remember that arrogance is what's stupid.