By Dave Anderson:
The Washington Post has a long article on the retreat of US forces from the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan this weekend. There were many things that were worth reading, but a few lines really stood out to me:
For U.S. commanders, the Korengal Valley offers a hard lesson in the limits of American power and goodwill in Afghanistan. The valley's extreme isolation, its axle-breaking terrain and its inhabitants' suspicion of outsiders made it a perfect spot to wage an insurgency against a Western army.
U.S. troops arrived here in 2005 to flush out al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. They stayed on the theory that their presence drew insurgents away from areas where the U.S. role is more tolerated and there is a greater desire for development. The troops were, in essence, bullet magnets.
In 2010, a new set of commanders concluded that the United States had blundered into a blood feud with fierce and clannish villagers who wanted, above all, to be left alone. By this logic, subduing the Korengal wasn't worth the cost in American blood.
The US Army is finally recognizing what its intel folks and outside analysts have been saying for years; the vast majority of the fighters and their support system are shooting at the US because of local concerns. Those local concerns of who controls which smuggling route, who has power in a village, what set of rules are enforced for purdah aren't our concern or our national interest to change.
The primary interest that the US may be able to achieve in Afghanistan is to prune back the capacity of far enemy terrorist groups to organize past the squad/cellular level. Anything beyond that is a maximal goal of system transformation that guarantees another generation of a corps or more fighting in Afghanistan to determine who controls timber smuggling routes.
OTC has a post on this as well. Why would this place be any different than the rest of the country. We love war and death and it's not going to change.
ReplyDeleteSeriously folks we are so screwed.