From: DR AWATAR SINGH SEKHON <assekhon@shaw.ca>
Date: 2010/6/30
Subject: [bangla-vision] Worse Than a Nightmare by Bob Herbert. "Dr Awatar Singh Sekhon (Machaki) Comments"
To: worldmedia2000@yahoogroups.com, pakistanpost@yahoogroups.com, pakistanaffairs@yahoogroups.com
Cc: bangla-vision@yahoogroups.com, 1984genocide@yahoogroups.com, sikh@yahoogroups.com, isyf@yahoogroups.com
President Janab Usman Khalid ji
Worse Than a Nightmare
BOB HERBERT in New York Times June 27, 2010
(If the USSR could not occupy a contiguous Afghanistan after being its sole provider from 1949 to 1979, there is no hope for the USA to succeed. Against the Soviet Union, the Afghans had support of the USA, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and much of the Muslim world. Against the US the Afghans have no foreign support. Yet, more than 70 % of the territory is not under the control of Kabul. The first thing the USA has to realise is that there is no prospect of a military victory in Afghanistan - surge or no surge. The second is that the earlier they stop killing Afghans inside Pakistan and Afghanistan, the better the prospects for a deal. The third is that the Afghans, like Americans, believe in deals; deals (not Islam) are their ideology. A 'deal' is not just possible, it is the only exit strategy. The Americans wanted to make a deal with Afghans after the exit of USSR. They did not know, who with and on what terms. Pakistan was unhelpful because it did not know either; it had a Sindhi Prime Minister and a fauji President who was already unpopular.
America of today has been described as an "out of work couple who have adopted a baby with special needs". Actually two babies - Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both have corrupt and inept government who do not have effective control. But Pakistan does have an effective judiciary and armed forces. The Americans know it and are dealing with the military. One can only guess what the Pakistani military are telling them. But if I was the one talking to them I will tell them of the three facts outlined in paragraph above. Then I will say that the Afghans and the neighbours of Afghanistan have one supreme interest that the USA shares with them. They want to keep Russia as far away from their soil as possible. It is because they want to stay free and sovereign and are afraid that Russia may re-occupy those countries if America lost interest or resolve.
If that is understood, the rest is easy. US need not choose friends; it should accept all and any who talk to them and are in control of a significant territory. Stop military operations and start a draw down of forces ASAP. Then talk. They will see that money talks much more eloquently than the military. Finally, keep India out unless the Americans want that the only remaining empire in the world - the Indian empire - should also perish in the mountains of Afghanistan.
+Usman Khalid + Secretary General Rifah Party of Pakistan)
President Obama can be applauded for his decisiveness in dispatching the chronically insubordinate Stanley McChrystal, but we are still left with a disaster of a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won and that the country as a whole will not support.
No one in official Washington is leveling with the public about what is really going on. We hear a lot about counterinsurgency, the latest hot cocktail-hour topic among the BlackBerry-thumbing crowd. But there is no evidence at all that counterinsurgency will work in Afghanistan. It s not working now. And even if we managed to put all the proper pieces together, the fiercest counterinsurgency advocates in the military will tell you that something on the order of 10 to 15 years of hard effort would be required for this strategy to bear significant fruit.
We ve been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade already. It s one of the most corrupt places on the planet and the epicenter of global opium production. Our ostensible ally, President Hamid Karzai, is convinced that the U.S. cannot prevail in the war and is in hot pursuit of his own deal with the enemy Taliban. The American public gave up on the war long ago, and it is not at all clear that President Obama s heart is really in it.
For us to even consider several more years of fighting and dying in Afghanistan at a cost of heaven knows how many more billions of American taxpayer dollars is demented.
Those who are so fascinated with counterinsurgency, from its chief advocate, Gen. David Petraeus, all the way down to the cocktail-hour kibitzers inside the Beltway, seem to have lost sight of a fundamental aspect of warfare: You don t go to war half-stepping. You go to war to crush the enemy. You do this ferociously and as quickly as possible. If you don t want to do it, if you have qualms about it, or don t know how to do it, don t go to war.
The men who stormed the beaches at Normandy weren t trying to win the hearts and minds of anyone.
In Afghanistan, we are playing a dangerous, half-hearted game in which President Obama tells the America people that this is a war of necessity and that he will do whatever is necessary to succeed. Then, with the very next breath, he soothingly assures us that the withdrawal of U.S. troops will begin on schedule, like a Greyhound leaving the terminal, a year from now.
Both cannot be true.
What is true is that we aren t even fighting as hard as we can right now. The counterinsurgency crowd doesn t want to whack the enemy too hard because of an understandable fear that too many civilian casualties will undermine the hearts and minds and nation-building components of the strategy. Among the downsides of this battlefield caution is a disturbing unwillingness to give our own combat troops the supportive airstrikes and artillery cover that they feel is needed.
In an article this week, The Times quoted a U.S. Army sergeant in southern Afghanistan who was unhappy with the real-world effects of counterinsurgency. I wish we had generals who remembered what it was like when they were down in a platoon, he said. Either they never have been in real fighting, or they forgot what it s like.
In the Rolling Stone article that led to General McChrystal s ouster, reporter Michael Hastings wrote about the backlash that counterinsurgency restraints had provoked among the general s own troops. Many feel that being told to hold their fire increases their vulnerability. A former Special Forces operator, a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, said of General McChrystal, according to Mr. Hastings, His rules of engagement put soldiers lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing.
We are sinking more and more deeply into the fetid quagmire of Afghanistan and neither the president nor General Petraeus nor anyone else has the slightest clue about how to get out. The counterinsurgency zealots in the military want more troops sent to Afghanistan, and they want the president to completely scrap his already shaky July 2011 timetable for the beginning of a withdrawal.
We re like a compulsive gambler plunging ever more deeply into debt in order to wager on a rigged game. There is no victory to be had in Afghanistan, only grief. We re bulldozing Detroit while at the same time trying to establish model metropolises in Kabul and Kandahar. We re spending endless billions on this wretched war but can t extend the unemployment benefits of Americans suffering from the wretched economy here at home.
The difference between this and a nightmare is that when you wake up from a nightmare it s over. This is all too tragically real.
--
Palash Biswas
Pl Read:
http://nandigramunited-banga.blogspot.com/
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