Ellsberg: "No Success That Will Be Lasting" In Afghanistan

By Steve Hynd

Daniel "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg talks to Real News Network about Afghanistan. He says that he wrote McChrystal's assessment thirty years ago, only with the names changed; that counter-insurgency cannot succeed for a foreign occupier and that there can be no success that will survive after U.S. troops leave Afghanistan.

Watch it:

Ellsberg should be followed by reading Paul McGeogh's blistering critique of McChrystal and Obama's Afghan plan, which I noted yesterday and Andrew Sullivan picked up on today.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, we're getting more signs that foreign occupiers using counter-insurgency tactics do not establish lasting changes.

Today, two blasts in Baghdad's Green Zone killed at least 132 and injured 520. Meanwhile, the Mahdi Army are back in charge in the Sadr City district of the Iraqi capital, providing security and social services, rather than the Iraqi National Army. And Iraq still can't agree election law because they still haven't buried their various factional feuds.

COIN sounds, on paper, like a prescription for "Can we invade it? Yes we can!", but when foreign occupiers try to turn that paper into reality it inevitably fails to deliver all its many promises.