Things are unravelling even more in Afghanistan as the number of deaths last year was very high and President Karzai isn't "playing ball" with the Americans. Even worse, Karzai has been critical of the US and British presence in his country as having been a negative.
Stephen Walt, professor of International Relations at Harvard, writing in "The Top 10 Mistakes Made in the Afghan War" on FP, reflects on the Afghan war.
"America's long war in Afghanistan isn't likely to end well, and the American people seem to know it. Despite a wholly predictable effort to portray the war as an American victory, the United States isn't going to defeat the Taliban between now and the scheduled departure of most U.S. troops later this year. Meanwhile, relations between the United States and the Karzai government are going from bad to worse. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is not only refusing to sign a security agreement that would allow the United States to leave a residual force in country, he is also making increasingly strident accusations that the United States is to blame for recent civilian deaths.
This depressing outcome is not what most Americans expected following the rapid toppling of the Taliban back in 2001. It is therefore important that we draw the right lessons from the experience, if only to partly redeem the sacrifices made by the soldiers who fought there."
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"Finally, the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan was bedeviled by strategic contradictions that were never fully recognized or resolved. Although many American soldiers fought with skill and heroism, achieving our stated war aims was an uphill battle from the get-go.
For starters, the United States and NATO couldn't win without a much larger investment of resources over a much longer period, but it just wasn't worth that level of investment. And for all the talk about COIN, Army Field Manual 3-24, and supposedly brilliant commanders like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. Army was never designed for or adept at this kind of operation and isn't likely to get much better at it with practice. And finally, building a new Afghan state and fighting a counterinsurgency war required outsiders to pour billions of dollars into an impoverished country, but the flood of poorly managed money merely fueled corruption and ensured that much of the aid money was wasted.
No one should take any pleasure in contemplating these (and other) mistakes, especially when one considers how long the United States fought there and how shallow its learning curve was. One at least hopes that some larger lessons have been learned, and that U.S. presidents will be a lot warier of this sort of quagmire in the future. Or as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in 2011: "In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have 'his head examined.'"
Stephen Walt, professor of International Relations at Harvard, writing in "The Top 10 Mistakes Made in the Afghan War" on FP, reflects on the Afghan war.
"America's long war in Afghanistan isn't likely to end well, and the American people seem to know it. Despite a wholly predictable effort to portray the war as an American victory, the United States isn't going to defeat the Taliban between now and the scheduled departure of most U.S. troops later this year. Meanwhile, relations between the United States and the Karzai government are going from bad to worse. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is not only refusing to sign a security agreement that would allow the United States to leave a residual force in country, he is also making increasingly strident accusations that the United States is to blame for recent civilian deaths.
This depressing outcome is not what most Americans expected following the rapid toppling of the Taliban back in 2001. It is therefore important that we draw the right lessons from the experience, if only to partly redeem the sacrifices made by the soldiers who fought there."
****
"Finally, the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan was bedeviled by strategic contradictions that were never fully recognized or resolved. Although many American soldiers fought with skill and heroism, achieving our stated war aims was an uphill battle from the get-go.
For starters, the United States and NATO couldn't win without a much larger investment of resources over a much longer period, but it just wasn't worth that level of investment. And for all the talk about COIN, Army Field Manual 3-24, and supposedly brilliant commanders like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. Army was never designed for or adept at this kind of operation and isn't likely to get much better at it with practice. And finally, building a new Afghan state and fighting a counterinsurgency war required outsiders to pour billions of dollars into an impoverished country, but the flood of poorly managed money merely fueled corruption and ensured that much of the aid money was wasted.
No one should take any pleasure in contemplating these (and other) mistakes, especially when one considers how long the United States fought there and how shallow its learning curve was. One at least hopes that some larger lessons have been learned, and that U.S. presidents will be a lot warier of this sort of quagmire in the future. Or as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in 2011: "In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have 'his head examined.'"
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