Afghanistan: The Beginning of the End?

Let's talk about Afghanistan a bit more. Via Steve Gilliard I see reports that indicate not just an uprising by the Taliban, but that various of the tribes are also starting to attack the Coalition. There are a lot of misconceptions about Afghanistan. The US didn't defeat Afghanistan when it invaded, what it did was bribe the various tribal leaders to rise against the Taliban, and provide sufficient air support to make it impossible for the Taliban to stand against them. Without that air support, odds are the Taliban would have crushed such an uprising, they were, simply, better more coordinated soldiers than the tribes, taken as a whole. Since then the peace has been maintained through systematic bribery, letting the Warlords grow opium (something the Taliban had put a stop to - with extreme prejudice), and in general by letting the tribes and warlords do their thing without much interference. The Afghanistan "government" is a joke, and always has been. It doesn't do more than control the capital, and sometimes not even that. The route to victory in Afghanistan - a lasting victory, was economic. Roads, jobs, infrastructure in general - flooding the country with money and opportunity, so that for most people times got better... a lot better. That wasn't done, and it looks like it may now be too late for it to be done. Throughout history the Afghanis have been willing to tolerate foreign invaders for only so long. It looks like that "so long" is about up. I'm not sure what the trigger was, though I suspect it was misguided drug war policies, where idiot commanders thought they really should destroy opiuim fields rather than smile and look the other way.

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Mobs run riot in city seized by fury over US convoy collision

BLOODY riots flared across the Afghan capital yesterday as thousands marched in protest at the deaths of several passengers in a car involved in a collision with a US military convoy.

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  thanks to Antiwar.com

Afghan parliament: Prosecute U.S. troops
Bush pledges investigation into deadly accident that sparked anti-U.S. riots

Parliament demanded prosecution of U.S. soldiers involved in a deadly road crash that sparked Kabul’s worst unrest since the Taliban’s downfall, and President Bush spoke Wednesday with the Afghan leader and pledged a full investigation.

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Afghanistan-- the spark of an intifada?
by Helena Cobban

The events in Kabul today looked ominously like the events in Gaza that triggered the Palestinians' First Intifada against Israel at the beginning of December 1987. Today, as back then, a vehicle that was part of the foreign presence in the country apparently went out of control and ended up killing and injuring a number of the indigenous citizens... Today, as then, that lethal event triggered a response from the citizens that revealed a huge amount of pent-up anger and resentment... (Today, as then, the spokesmen for the foreign presence had previously been saying "all is fine and normal" with the general situation... But the eruption of anger gives the lie to that claim.)

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Kabul under Curfew after Anti-US, anti-Karzai Riots
14 Dead, over 100 Wounded
50 Killed in US Airstrike
by Juan Cole

The Bush administration is in the midst of "imperial overstretch" on a grand scale. Taking on al-Qaeda and the Taliban, convincing Pakistan to change its policies, and reconstructing Afghanistan would have been a tough enough job. It might not have been possible even with the investment of enormous resources and personnel. Afghanistan is large and rugged and desperately poor. Bad characters are still hiding out in the region, who have proved that they can reach into the United States and hit the Pentagon itself. Instead of doing the job, Bush ran off to Iraq almost immediately. Even as our brave troops were being killed at Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan in spring of 2002, Centcom commander Tommy Franks was telling a visiting Senator Bob Graham that the US "was no longer engaged in a war in Afghanistan" or words to that effect, and that military and intelligence personnel were being deployed to Iraq. The US troops in Afghanistan would have been shocked and disturbed to discover that in the Centcom commander's mind, they were no longer his priority and no longer even at war! As for money, Iraq has hogged the lion's share. What has been spent on reconstruction in Afghanistan is piddling. Bush's Iraq imbroglio, or "Bush's Furnace," as history might well call his trillion-dollar purchase, has sucked up money and resources on a vast scale and left US personnel in Central and South Asia to struggle along on the cheap. Afghanistan defeated the British Empire in its heyday twice, and is not an enterprise that can be accomplished without significant resources. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

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