What does the attack on the hotel in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, tell us about the state of the war in Afghanistan? It tells us that “the insurgency is gaining strength,” Matthew Green writes in the Financial Times:
The White House says a surge of marines and soldiers into the southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces in the past year has reversed the Taliban’s momentum, laying the groundwork for the withdrawal of 10,000 US troops this year before a handover to Afghan forces countrywide in 2014.
But the attack on the hotel exposed a counter-trend: insurgents are trying to tighten their psychological grip on the capital with a two-pronged campaign to sow urban terror and extend their influence in surrounding provinces.
Jen Graves reported on the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2003 for the News Tribune. She was embedded with the military in Kandahar, hanging out on former Taliban turf. Curious what you make of this analysis that everything hinges on the psychological grip of Kabul, Jen. Seems like at the time you were there the concern wasn’t Kabul, the concern was everywhere else.
You know, when you start a Slog post with “What does X tell us about Y?” I immediately assume it’s a Mudede post. Thankfully that was not the case here.
US can leave tomorrow, or can leave in 10 years. The only difference will be the money spent, and casualties suffered. And nice cars and houses for the execs in the M-I complex.
There are two unquestioned assumptions in Matthew Green’s post:
1. That there is a “the” insurgency in Afghanistan, and
2. That this “the” insurgency is the same thing as “The Taliban”.
I submit that #1 is simply not true, and that #2 is mere propaganda.
It’s almost as if a foreign occupation and collaborating puppet government didn’t sit well with… um, who again? What? A people with a lengthy, known history of ferocious resistance to outside intrusion?
Huh.
Yeah @4, these guys are freedom fighters. Blowing up your own people to fight a foreign occupation makes perfect sense.
It’s bad enough Obama is a complete failure in almost every area of leadership, but what’s worse is that he’s continually undoing the good that Bush did…removing the protection that was built up, ignoring opportunities to support democracy, squandering technological leads in new energy and technology.
What a disaster for this nation.
look for this shit to hit the fan a few months before the 2012 election……
the tactic of suicide assaults couldn’t be stopped in america, let alone afghanistan. too many guns, too many targets.
a quarantine is the practical approach. it won’t be perfect.
@6: you live bizarro world. the disaster was bush – who reacted in exactly the way OBL planned.
Now that Bin Laden has had his head blown off, I’d be perfectly happy to see that shithole left to it’s own. If the Taliban send any more trouble our way, we can drop a butt load of bombs on their twisted asses.
@10, great idea. Let’s leave that shithole to it’s own, just like we did after we helped them get rid of the USSR. That worked out well. We had an opportunity to help build schools so they didn’t have to rely on Madrassas for their education. We had an opportunity to help them build back their banking system and economy to where it was before the USSR invaded. Instead we left that shithold to its own. How did that work out for us?
@11 – They don’t want our help. Afghanistan isn’t a “country” like we know. It’s run by a network of tribal warlords who hate each other. They’ve been fighting amongst themselves for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. You build a school in one village, and the neighboring warlord will come and destroy it.
It’s a shithole. A friend of mine who is an Afghan left it because it’s a shithole. There’s nothing that can be done there, but let them kill each other.
@12,
That may be true, but it was at least a relatively stable shithole before we went in and de-stabilized it. The warring factions at least had a tacit agreement to not go in and blow up hotels on a regular basis before our presence. If pulling our troops returned it that previous level of shittiness, then I think we could justify leaving. Otherwise, I think we broke it and we’ve got an obligation to fix it. I just don’t know if it’s even fixable at this point. In this particular regard, I don’t that it’s all that different from Iraq.
Guys, GUYS! We’ll probably never pull out of A’stan because we have an important Natural Gas Pipeline to protect! It’s the Iron Fist of a national Military standing behind the Invisible Hand of the Market again.
@5, I think you may be making some assumptions about what I was thinking when I posted that. I can’t argue with what you choose to read into things.
The fact that accidentally stepping on a rattlesnake predictably results in the snake biting you does not make the biting moral or acceptable. It just is what it is, and vilifying the snake will not serve to disenvenom you even if it WAS true all along that biting you would not serve the snake’s own best interests.