The Forgotten War

By all accounts, we are pulling up stakes in Afghanistan and letting NATO peacekeeping forces shoulder the burden. What we have achieved there is not victory but the APPEARANCE of victory, helped by the distraction of another, more disastrous war and a media that can't keep their eyes on more than one thing at a time.

But make no mistake, things aren't exactly peaches and cream in Afghanistan. Although that's what this this Wall Street Journal article wants you to believe, with all its talk of "the virgin market" and Yale business graduates at cocktail parties waxing poetic about the country's untapped potential. Michael Yon, a journalist who I've only recently discovered (thanks to Howard Kurtz, he said through gritting teeth), puts the article in its place:

...a Marine officer was asked to pick a story about current events and comment on it. He held a copy of the Wall Street Journal, a paper I first started reading as a teenager. The WSJ is a reliable source, and so I’ve stuck with it through the years. The Marine was holding a WSJ in front of this distinguished group of military officers that also included DEA and FBI officials, not to mention the representatives of CBS, CNN, Al Jazeera and others. As the Marine opened the paper, I said something like, “That’s yesterday’s Wall Street Journal? That’s easy. Turn to page A16 and there is a commentary about Afghanistan. It’s pure bullshit.” There was a microphone in front of me, but luckily, the crowd was mostly military and they laughed off the language. [...]

While I was there, one driver under contract for a friend — who has been doing business in Afghanistan since 1997 — was murdered. They shot his truck with RPGs and small arms fire and killed him. There were attacks every day. Even some of the bases might be in danger of being overrun. [...]

These cocktail party interviews have no place in the Wall Street Journal, and should not count as informed reporting. I very much hope that Iraq and Afghanistan become self-sufficient, prosperous countries, but misleading people who might invest money, energy and blood into these areas is no way to make that happen. I’ll still pick the WSJ out of any 10 papers, but I should hope the editors exercise more circumspection when printing commentary.

In fact, the media is not up-playing the danger in Afghanistan but seems to be grossly missing it. Unfortunately, I predict NATO and other forces will lose increasing numbers of soldiers in Afghanistan. The place is bad. Really bad. And it’s getting worse. Yesterday an Indian engineer was murdered. They cut off his head. Also, yesterday, the car bomb in the photo above exploded close by some employees of a friend. I was close by two bombings in just six days in Lashkar Gah, a place they used to call “safe.”

And then we have this disturbing news:

Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar says that he is ready to fight under the banner of al-Qaeda, according to a video broadcast by al-Jazeera TV.

"We hope to participate with them in a battle that they lead. They hold the banner and we stand alongside them as supporters," he said in the video.

The rebel warlord is classified as a terrorist by the United States.

He is opposed to the central government of Hamid Karzai and urges war against foreign troops in Afghanistan.

Mr Hekmatyar was Afghanistan's prime minister from June 1993 to June 1994. His faction, the Hezb-e-Islami, helped end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

What this says to me is that the fractious rebel forces, previously a nuisance, are starting to consolidate. The more the US pulls up stakes, the more that the Taliban and its coalition presses the advantage. From The New York Times:

Building on a winter campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations and the knowledge that American troops are leaving, the Taliban appear to be moving their insurgency into a new phase, flooding the rural areas of southern Afghanistan with weapons and men.

Each spring with the arrival of warmer weather, the fighting season here starts up, but the scale of the militants' presence and their sheer brazenness have alarmed Afghans and foreign officials far more than in previous years.

"The Taliban and Al Qaeda are everywhere," a shopkeeper, Haji Saifullah, told the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, as the general strolled through the bazaar of this town to talk to people. "It is all right in the city, but if you go outside the city, they are everywhere, and the people have to support them. They have no choice."

There's a certain sense of "damned if we do, damned if we don't" going on here. A continued presence keeps soldiers in harm's way and increases thoughts of permanent occupation. Leaving allows opportunities for the Taliban to strike. But clearly we finished this war on the cheap while nobody noticed. If we continued with the successful campaign to drive out the Taliban, which I found necessary, I don't think we'd be where we are today. We have a somewhat stable capital in Kabul, and the rest of the country literally ready to go off at any moment. The NATO peacekeeping mission is undefined. The Taliban has lots of money and lots of weapons, and you have to suspect that they're coming from Pakistan, our supposed ally. And we're losing the heartland of the country.

Uruzgan, the province where President Hamid Karzai first rallied support against the Taliban in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, is now, four years later, in the thrall of the Islamic militants once more, and the provincial capital is increasingly surrounded by areas in Taliban control, local and American officials acknowledge. A recent report by a member of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan shown to The New York Times detailed similar fears.

The new governor, Maulavi Abdul Hakim Munib, 35, who took up his position just a month ago, controls only a "bubble" around Tirin Kot, an American military officer said. The rest of the province is so thick with insurgents that all the districts are colored amber or red to indicate that on military maps in the nearby American base. Uruzgan has always been troublesome, yet the map marks a deterioration since last year, when at least one central district had been colored green, the officer said.

"The security situation is not good," Governor Munib told General Eikenberry and a group of cabinet ministers at a meeting with tribal elders. "The number of Taliban and enemy is several times more than that of the police and Afghan National Army in this province," he said.

This is actually really bad. I can envision a scenario where there is a massive offensive. That's what appears to be happening. The Taliban is moving into various cities and positioning themselves to strike. And at the same time, we're moving out and giving operational control up to the British-led NATO forces.

I'm concerned. We were right to take out the Taliban for human rights reasons alone, yet alone the fact that they were harboring terrorists. And now it appears that those factions are alive and well and preparing to again overrun the country. We failed by not finishing the job in Afghanistan. It's coming back to haunt us, but for too long the public has been missing the story over there. If Afghanistan fails we will actually be worse off than when we began this war on terror.