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| Afghanistan |
| Dr. Godfrey Garner: Why America Failed in Afghanistan |
| 2016-12-26 |
| [Homeland Security Today] America for the past few years has tried in vain to extricate itself from Afghanistan. The fact is, however, try as we may, we seem to be pulled deeper into the situation. Our work with the Mujahedeen and Northern Alliance forces in defeating and driving Al Qaeda and Taliban forces out of the country within months of our entry into Operation Enduring Freedom seems a distant memory now. Today, Afghanistan is sinking back into a quagmire of chaos; an atmosphere which encourages insurgent forces such as ISIS and a resurgent Taliban, while local rule by the strong trumps national order and security in most of the country. Graft and corruption, largely unheard of before 9/11, today is the norm. ’Rule by warlord’ has to a great extent, remained triumphant over the square democracy, we have tried to force into a round hole. Last month, one of Afghanistan’s vice presidents, former Northern Alliance commander Rashid Dostum, kidnapped and held hostage one of his political opponents. The opposition candidate was kidnapped and held prisoner in one of his palaces in the northern city of Sheberghan. Something went wrong with our utopian view of what Afghanistan could be, and it is vitally important that we understand what that was. With a new administration with a seemingly new philosophy vis-à-vis America’s role in world security and international relations, we have a chance to reconsider the manner in which we pursue future conflicts. It would be folly to assume there will be fewer rather than more world conflicts that directly and indirectly affect America. It would be further folly to assume America can stand on the sidelines in all such conflicts and hope to avoid negative repercussions of such a policy. In light of this, we must reevaluate the mistakes we’ve made in the past, and Afghanistan offers a perfect lab for study. About the author: Dr. Godfrey Garner holds a PhD in counseling psychology from Mississippi State University and is currently pursuing a second PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Following two tours in Viet Nam and a lengthy break in military service, Dr. Garner rejoined and eventually retired from 20th Special Forces group in 2006. He completed two military and six civilian government-related tours in Afghanistan. His work in Afghanistan most recently has been as a counter-corruption analyst. He is published in Homeland Security Today and Foreign Policy Journal on issues relating to Afghanistan as well as other journals relating to higher education. He is the author of the novel Danny Kane and the Hunt for Mullah Omar. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #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 |
| #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 |
| #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 |
| #10 That's the most unheard of thing I ever heard of. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2016-12-26 19:28 |
| #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 |
| #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 |
| #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 |
| #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 |
| #5 Complainer without a solution. |
| Posted by: Crart Phomons7346 2016-12-26 15:06 |
| #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 |
| #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 |
| #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 |
| #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 |