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| Afghanistan | |
| America's Forgotten War | |
| 2006-03-30 | |
| By SEBASTIAN JUNGER More than four years after the invasion of Afghanistan, 20,000 U.S. soldiers are still there, pitting their diplomatic skills—and massive airpower—against the Taliban's terror tactics This now, too, is war: an American colonel striding through the market of a mud-walled Afghan town, scanning the produce. There's lots of it—fresh tomatoes, peppers, carrots—which one vegetable seller attributes to a new storage facility in nearby Kandahar functioning as it should. Otherwise, the produce would be overpriced and imported from Pakistan. All this, in some indirect way, is good news for the American military, which for four years has been fighting an infuriatingly low-level war in the mountains of Afghanistan. If there's plenty of food, according to this line of thought, the locals are doing well and will support President Hamid Karzai's fragile coalition government in Kabul. And if they support the government, they won't help the insurgents, who have kept 20,000 American soldiers pinned down in an almost forgotten war. As a result, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Stammer walks through town every week or so to take the pulse of the community. Minutes earlier he finished up a visit to a local girls' school—built with American money—where he had knelt down in front of the headmistress and knifed open several boxes of school supplies for the children. The supplies had been sent by his wife, and included soccerballs bought by the women's soccer team at the University of Texas. The schoolmistress thanked him, and another person added that if he "heard anything" he would let Stammer know. By that, he meant that he would call if he got word of Taliban activity in the area—which, in turn, might allow Stammer to pre-empt an attack on American soldiers. By all measures the situation in Afghanistan may be skidding dangerously off the rails. American military deaths in the past year—nearly a hundred—almost equal those for the three preceding years combined. According to a recent internal report for the American Special Forces, opium production has gone from 74 metric tons a year under the Taliban to an astronomical 3,600 metric tons, an amount which is equal to 90 percent of the world's supply. The profit from Afghanistan's drug trade—roughly $2 billion a year—competes with the amount of international aid flowing into the country and helps fund the insurgency. And assassinations and suicide bombings have suddenly taken hold in parts of Afghanistan, leading people to fear that the country is headed toward Iraq-style anarchy.
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| Posted by:john |
| #12 I find it hard to fathom why we have not made a major operation (Airstrikes followed by napalm, followed by ground troops) to destroy the bulk of the poppy fields and deny our enemies that economic resource. Immediately after any such strike, the jihadis would gather up a school full of children, take them into a burnt-out field, tie them up, douse them with gasoline, and set them on fire. Once the flames burnt down, they would invite every camera crew they could find to show the world "what the Americans did". |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2006-03-30 20:48 |
| #11 rjschwartz: We should use napalm. We have napalm. We can't use napalm. In the campaign against Baghdad, we used concrete-bombs. The enemy got the message. |
| Posted by: Listen to Dogs 2006-03-30 20:23 |
| #10 Matt, "The Pefect Storm" is actually a true account of the Andrea Gail. No one actually knows what happened but the Andrea Gail was lost in the fall of 1991. I was living in the Boston area at the time and it was big news there. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2006-03-30 19:11 |
| #9 I don't read this as doom and despair, or waah, waah. I see a guy who is not a Ranger reporting on their life - full pack, 10,000 feet, dealing with sh*t. It's a tough job - both the soldiers' job and Junger's. Sometimes the news is bad, sometimes it's good, and mostly you just won't know for a while, but you just keep doing your job. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2006-03-30 18:55 |
| #8 I find it hard to fathom why we have not made a major operation (Airstrikes followed by napalm, followed by ground troops) to destroy the bulk of the poppy fields and deny our enemies that economic resource. At the very least it might convince the poppy growers to stop paying for Taliban soldiers. At very most it might bankrupt then and help us win. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2006-03-30 18:33 |
| #7 How long are the Paks going to get away with this? |
| Posted by: john 2006-03-30 18:14 |
| #6 waah, waah, waah interesting stuff about Pakistan... waah, waah, waah |
| Posted by: Iblis 2006-03-30 18:10 |
| #5 I hope with left the Indian Government a copy of "Lithium 6 for Dummys" Being stockpiled right now... http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ja98albright "India also did not reveal whether the fusion material used in the thermonuclear device was lithium deuteride, tritium, or both. Bhabha started producing lithium 6 almost a decade ago and began producing tritium even earlier. Bhabha also recently opened a tritium production plant, which can extract significant quantities of tritium from the heavy water irradiated in its CANDU power reactors." |
| Posted by: john 2006-03-30 18:09 |
| #4 Junger's most well-know piece of writing is "Perfect Storm", in which the entire fishing boat crew drowns at the end, so we're not talking about a guy who necessarily looks on the bright side of things. (Good movie, though- you get to watch George Clooney drown.) |
| Posted by: Matt 2006-03-30 17:58 |
| #3 I hope with left the Indian Government a copy of "Lithium 6 for Dummys" |
| Posted by: 6 2006-03-30 17:45 |
| #2 If you want to make an American intelligence officer blanch, ask him whether the Pakistani military is supporting the Taliban. Officers like McGary seem willing to talk about it all day long—it's their men who are dying, after all—but intelligence officers inhabit that awkward world where politics and war intersect, and the wrong question can literally set them to stammering. |
| Posted by: john 2006-03-30 17:28 |
| #1 Doom ! Despair!! Agony!!! That poor man really needs to take a Seratonin re-uptake inhibitor or he'll become seriously depressed. For the first time in two generations the Afghan people have the chance to build a peaceful society, and they are slowly and inconsistently inching in that direction. It would be absurd and unfair to expect them to reach the standards of Western civilization in less than half a decade, even if they didn't live in that particular neighborhood. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-03-30 17:17 |