Afghanistan Opinion: Let's Be Clear --- "The Surge" Was A Failure of US Strategy and Policy (Cohen)

Rajiv Chandrasekaran's newly-released book, Little America: The War Within The War for Afghanistan (see extract in separate EA feature) has prompted soul-searching amongst US analysts about what went wrong, more than a decade after the situation was supposedly resolved with the ousting of the Taliban.

Michael Cohen's comment for The Progressive Realist resonates, in part because it returns to the key period in 2009 --- covered extensively by EA at the time --- when the US military bounced President Obama into an expanded intervention. Ostensibly, this was for development and political resolution as well as the vanquishing of the Taliban; in practice, the development and political resolution never followed the additional boots on the ground.

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Afghanistan: Endorsing the Pentagon's "Forever War" (Engelhardt)

Tom Engelhardt writes for TomDispatch:

Sometimes it’s the little things in the big stories that catch your eye.  On Monday, the Washington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the Commander-in-Chief into the smallest of Afghan corners.  As an illustration, the Post included a graphic the military offered President Obama at a key November 2009 meeting to review war policy.  It caught in a nutshell the favored “solution” to the Afghan War of those in charge of fighting it --- Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus, then-Centcom commander, General Stanley McChrystal, then-Afghan War commander, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others.

Labeled “Alternative Mission in Afghanistan,” it’s a classic of visual wish fulfillment.  Atop it is a soaring green line that represents the growing strength of the notoriously underwhelming “Afghan Forces,” military and police, as they move toward a theoretical goal of 400,000 -- an unlikely “end state” given present desertion rates.  Underneath that green trajectory of putative success is a modest, herky-jerky blue curving line, representing the 40,000 U.S. troops Gates, Petraeus, Mullen, and company were pressuring the president to surge into Afghanistan.

The eye-catching detail, however, was the dating on the chart.  Sometime between 2013 and 2016, according to a hesitant dotted white line (that left plenty of room for error), those U.S. surge forces would be drawn down radically enough to dip somewhere below -- don’t gasp -- the 68,000 level.  In other words, three to six years from now, if all went as planned -- a radical unlikelihood, given the Afghan War so far -- the U.S. might be back close to the force levels of early 2009, before the President’s second surge was launched.

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Afghanistan Special: Bob Woodward, The US Military, and the White House's Crocodile Tears (Lucas)

I'm sorry but this is getting ridiculous. 

The Washington Post, in its continuing push of its reporter Bob Woodward's Obama Wars, publishes the first of three extracts this morning, "Military Thwarted President Seeking Choice in Afghanistan".

At some point someone has to expose the exposure and reveal the costly game that is going on here. Bob Woodward is not going to do it, because to do so would cut off his access and his books. President Obama's advisors are not going to do it because it would reveal weakness beyond the "wise compromise" they wave so furiously in Woodward's account. And the US military certainly are not going to do it because it would pull back the curtain on their triumph over the White House and the person who is supposedly their Commander-in-Chief.

I am against the US military intervention in Afghanistan. But, if it is going to happen, I would at least appreciate that it be done honestly and without these crocodile tears. I would like a President who says forthrightly, "This is what we are doing," rather than one whose advisors, over the following weeks and months, whisper to their favoured correspondent, "We didn't really like this but the military was so mean. What could we do?" 

You want sympathy, boys? Go find Oprah.

And Mr President: come out from behind your whispering staff. Face your military. Command or admit that you no longer command.

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