Article

2016-12-26 Afghanistan

Dr. Godfrey Garner: Why America Failed in Afghanistan

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Posted by Besoeker 2016-12-26 13:04|| || Front Page|| [2 views ] Top

#1 Cause we didn't go Mongol?

Who, by the way, dealt with the same problem and succeeded. Very rough on the locals, but they made their point.

Posted by Procopius2k 2016-12-26 13:35|| 2016-12-26 13:35|| Front Page Top

#2 While we're on the topic of failure, anyone want to venture a guess as to who maintained proponency for the following (which by the way, drove the effort for many years, and may still be driving the effort):

The Joint Prioritized Effects List or JPEL is a list of individuals who coalition forces in Afghanistan try to capture or kill. The Task Force 373 is working through the list. According to the Afghan War Diary German troops listed Shirin Agha with the number 3145 and on 11 October 2010 German troops killed Agha. Coalition forces are authorized to kill or capture individuals named on the list.[1][2][3]
According to a document from the 2010 Afghan War Diary the list has 2,058 names. That list provided the intelligence basis for a pace of some 90 night-raids per month in late 2009.[1]
PBS Frontline reported that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was executing targets on the Joint Prioritized Effects List. John Nagl, a former counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus, described JSOC’s kill/capture campaign to Frontline as “an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine.”[4]
Individuals on the list are assigned priority levels on a scale of one to four, with one being the most important.[5] Since October 2008 the NATO defense ministers decided that drug networks would now be "legitimate targets" for ISAF troops. The United Nations estimated that the Taliban was earning $300 million a year through the drug trade, and according to a leaked NSA document "the insurgents could not be defeated without disrupting the drug trade."[5] In the opinion of American military commanders such as Bantz John Craddock, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Europe at the time, there was no need to prove that drug money was actually being funneled to the Taliban to declare Afghan couriers, farmers and dealers as legitimate targets of NATO strikes.[5] In early 2009 Craddock issued an order to expand the JPEL list to include drug producers, but such targets at least had to be investigated as individual cases after a complain by the German NATO General Egon Ramms that the order is "illegal" and a violation of international law.[5]

Posted by Besoeker 2016-12-26 13:41|| 2016-12-26 13:41|| Front Page Top

#3 “Turns out I’m really good at killing people,” Obama said quietly, “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”

Posted by Besoeker 2016-12-26 13:52|| 2016-12-26 13:52|| Front Page Top

#4 It's no mistake that the product sold as a learning toy is an ant farm, not a cockroach farm...

Posted by M. Murcek 2016-12-26 14:44|| 2016-12-26 14:44|| Front Page Top

#5 Complainer without a solution.

Posted by Crart Phomons7346 2016-12-26 15:06|| 2016-12-26 15:06|| Front Page Top

#6 We 'lost' in Afghanistan and Iraq because we bet that Islam was compatible with Democracy. It was overly-optimistic but now that the Islamic people had the chance I have no guilt about walking away and letting them slaughter each other.

Help the Kurds, get the translators and others that helped the US Military out of the region, and let the place burn.

Posted by rjschwarz 2016-12-26 15:07|| 2016-12-26 15:07|| Front Page Top

#7 Graft and corruption, largely unheard of before 9/11, today is the norm.

Largely unheard of? Cultures do not change that dramatically, though a) when we were not there we were not hearing of it, and b) the amounts available for the activity were no doubt somewhat lower before we arrived -- though as I recall the Taliban were also involved in the lucrative opium trade after initially abjuring it.

Now to read the article. ;-)

Posted by trailing wife 2016-12-26 15:45|| 2016-12-26 15:45|| Front Page Top

#8 the author perpetuates the mistake made in Afghanistan, which was to portray an ethno-religious conflict as an ideological one.

Posted by phil_b 2016-12-26 18:00|| 2016-12-26 18:00|| Front Page Top

#9 Largely unheard of? Cultures do not change that dramatically, though a) when we were not there we were not hearing of it, and b) the amounts available for the activity were no doubt somewhat lower before we arrived -- though as I recall the Taliban were also involved in the lucrative opium trade after initially abjuring it.

The use of the word "unheard" is deliberate and meant to mislead.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2016-12-26 18:40|| 2016-12-26 18:40|| Front Page Top

#10 That's the most unheard of thing I ever heard of.

Posted by Abu Uluque 2016-12-26 19:28|| 2016-12-26 19:28|| Front Page Top

#11 US hasn't had a decisive win since WWII. We are the NY Jets of super powers.

Posted by Regular joe 2016-12-26 20:53|| 2016-12-26 20:53|| Front Page Top

#12 Back after reading the article: the author's position is that the Special Forces units completed their goal in 2002, and should have then left the Afghans to put their country back together again. It was when the political goal of introducing democracy was added to the mission, and all sorts of other goals for imposing improving the lives of the locals in various comtradictory but expensive ways that failure was assured.

Posted by trailing wife 2016-12-26 22:41|| 2016-12-26 22:41|| Front Page Top

#13 Afghanistan and Iraq (and what is to come) are or were neither opportunities to get Vietnam right this time nor opportunities to repeat Vietnam.

The Vietnam war was a limited not-cold war in the context of a global cold war.

The other wars were initiated by a massive attack on the US.

As long as the US&Western establishment refuses to think outside of the Vietnam framework we will be losing wars we cannot afford to lose.

Posted by Elmerert Hupens2660 2016-12-26 23:18|| 2016-12-26 23:18|| Front Page Top

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