We’re barely six months away from the July 2011 date that President Obama invoked as the beginning of the end for the war in Afghanistan back when he announced his decision to escalate it last year. That date has been serially discredited, and the year on the lips of the assholes in charge is not 2012 or even 2013, but 2014. And 2014 isn’t being cited as the year things finally end, but as the time when the Afghani Government will be strong enough to allow us to merely begin disengaging. To put that in perspective, consider that by 2014 we may have soldiers in Afghanistan who were just five years old for the 2001 terrorist attacks that are the putative reason for our continuing bloodletting in that place.
Realistically, no one has any idea when this war will end. The various resistance forces we lump under the heading of “Taliban” aren’t going anywhere. With our departure from Iraq, we have the troops to continue the war at our current troop levels more or less indefinitely. American public opinion remains the most likely limiting factor, but it can only be usefully expressed every two years, and at the moment Afghanistan barely rates as an issue. Until the public votes against the war, it war will grind on, seemingly of its own volition.
While it grinds, there is plenty of time for looking at it in detail, and that it where conversations like this one between Nir Rosen and Glenn Greenwald come in handy. For example, anyone with more than a CNN level familiarity with Iraq knows that the ethnic cleansing that went on in Iraq’s cities was notorious for having corpses show up overnight as a message to others. Frequently those people became corpses in rather gruesome ways, including death by power drill. But did you know that power drills were a very specific type of calling card? It’s true:
It wasn’t so much General Petraeus who defeated the Sunni Arab insurgency as Black & Decker, and by that I mean power drills. In a sense, power drills were the hallmark of Iraqi militiamen, the signature way of killing somebody. If you found a body, and they had power drill marks on it, you knew that that guy was killed by Shia militiamen. If you found a body that was beheaded, you knew he was killed by Sunni militia. And it was just Shia brutality in the civil war, you just had more Shias, which basically eventually taught Sunnis their place in the new Iraq, in an inferior marginalized one.
Fun, eh? That the civil war in Iraq got brutal enough that slow, tortuous murder with power drills became a signature tactic isn’t the kind of thing you’re likely to see reported on American television. But that’s Iraq, and we do seem to be finally on our way out of there. How about some horrible things from Afghanistan? We’ve got those too, and it makes a mockery of anyone who uses the terms “counterinsurgency” or, god help them, “COIN” with a straight face:
So even from an American counter-insurgency point of view, it’s just much too challenging. They are living in bases remote from the population, they go out, they rumble along a road slowly for a couple of hours, shake hands with an elder in a village, drink tea with him, they feel like they’re Lawrence of Arabia or something, and then they rumble back to their military bases a couple of hours away in time for the chow hole to be opened to get a burger before going to play video games in their rooms.
Meanwhile, that night, the Taliban can knock on the door of the elder whose hand we shook, and remind him who his neighbor is, and who is watching him, and undermine any deal you’re going to strike with that guy.
More fun, eh? But as bleak as all that is, at this point it’s mostly blood under the bridge. Hopeless counterinsurgency tactics are the order of the day, and that isn’t going to change until the government – our government – finally realizes that the humiliation of leaving is less than the humiliation of staying. Which is how we get to the final stage, where Greenwald asks Rosen if there’s any truth the pro-war argument that is the last refuge of the humane: that Afghanistan would get even worse if we left. The short answer is no, the long answer is still pretty short:
I think that one way or the other the Taliban are gaining control of Afghanistan.
Whether or not these unvarnished views of the pointless and life shattering destruction we’ve wrought in those two forlorn countries helps muster serious domestic political opposition to their continuation is a matter of some debate. Given how little the average voter pays attention to even American news, much less the little nuggets of horrible truth that make it through all the censorship (official and unofficial), it seems doubtful. In the meantime, there’s nothing to do but watch the steady flow of bad news and hope that the unremitting frustration and futility of the war seeps into enough American brains before too many more drill bits go into anyone else’s.
