In Bed With the U.S. Army
Ann Jones: In Bed With the U.S. Army
TomDispatch regular Ann Jones approaches Afghanistan and the American war effort from quite a different perspective. She’s proven a rarity in the way she’s reported back to us in these years. She arrived in Kabul in 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to work with Afghan women on their problems. Unlike almost any other American who wrote about the experience, she embedded herself in an Afghan world.
Ann Jones points to many of the problems with COIN and the last nine years in her narrative in this article…worth a read and some thinking.
Rdan,
I read the article, and this jumped out at me:
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not making a case for filthy trenches. But why should war be gussied up like home? If war were undisguisedly as nasty and brutish as it truly is, it might also tend to be short. Soldiers freed from illusions might mutiny, as many did in Vietnam, or desert and go home.”
Is she advocating that soldiers mutiny? Frag their officers? She commented about her father’s experience in WW I – does she think we should be fighting like that (and with that level of losses???). And deserting in Afghanistan is a one-way ticket to a body bag…
Then add her incredibly depressing style, I found the article a lot less informative than most of the embed reporters. Just not much there. YMMV
Islam will change
***Then add her incredibly depressing style, I found the article a lot less informative than most of the embed reporters. Just not much there. YMMV ***
There’s lots of information there Buff. We’re losing. You just don’t like anyone messing with your fantasies.
The fundamental problem is simple. There is no reason for any Afghans other than perhaps a few hundred thousand urban afghans and and another couple of hundred thousand allies and family members of the “Northern Alliance” thugs to prefer the Karzai government to the Taliban. Both the Afgahn government and Taliban are brutal. But the Taliban is notably less corrupt. If we were really interested in winning wars, we’d have sided with the Taliban which was running the country (badly) when we got there and will probably be running the country (badly) within a year or three of our departure.
Why, exactly, are we investing American lives and dollars in that god forsaken wasteland? Let the Russians, Indians, Chinese, Pakistani’s, Iranians and the other miscellaneous stanis deal with the place. They have a dog in that fight. We don’t. And neither do our NATO allies who are for a certainty packing their bags and making their reservations. Almost all of them will be leaving just as quick as they can go through the charade of handing their areas of control over to the more or less imaginary Afghan Army and National Police.
I think a couple comments at Tom’s suggested she emphasized WWI, but I read it as a a statement of common notions of general public perception, such as Ninja warriors. I find common perseptions of Iraq for instance to be way off the mark in their varieties.
I took the meaning of other comments related to technology, living situations and style, and such in the battle for loyalties to be less about the American soldier and needs and more about how it looks from the outside…but then I have scanned some of her other work. Certainly Afghanistan is different enough from Iraq (certainly more urban centers) and used to a centralized governance.
Losing? Is this the same losing that lost us Iraq?
Yes, her anti-war and less than uncaring attitude to the plight of the Afgani’s and US soldiers comes through loud and clear(at least in this article). Like I said, it just didn’t come with much information about what’s actually going on there. Sorry, I have seen much better reporting.
“Why, exactly, are we investing American lives and dollars in that god forsaken wasteland?”
Ask Obama, you voted for his policies and he’s escalating there. Did you really mean to ask that question of the ‘good war.’?
Nice to see how easily your willing to throw 30+ million Afghans back under the yoke of tyranny without any hope. Truely a progressive trait.
Islam will change
Rdan,
The emphasis on WW I and the paragraph I quoted just didn’t fit wit the rest of the article. She actually mentioned mutiny twice. I got the impression she wanted to see our troops dieing of deseases and exposure – something the US military has gone to great lengths to reduce to almost zero. Does she know that the French troops who did mutiny in WW I did so becuase they didn’t see any successes when going over-the-top vs. the dug-in German troops? And that was after almost 4 years of trench warfare!
I do not see many parellels between WW I Western Front vs. today’s Afghanistan other than a war is going on…YMMV.
And I have found a lot of common perseptions about Iraq & Afghanistan to be way off the mark – Michael Moore’s entire movie being a good place to start…
Islam will change
Well, we do agree on some things. I will ask her to clarify. But I do not think the idea we went in was about democracy or the Taliban, and that if we were actually serious about helping Afghanistan rebuild a different approach is needed, well beyond what money would buy.
You mean we are still over in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Guantanamo? That was sarcasm if anyone was wondering. I have a funny feeling we will still be in those places come next presidential election, and Obama can run a a platform of withdrawal again. Like Vietnam soured an entire generation on War, these excurisons have soured me on war, and the immense expense of those wars. Enough already.
The reasons for going into Iraq were the following:
1. One is weapons of mass destruction,
2. Saddam’s support for terrorism
3. The criminal treatment of the Iraqi people
and a possible 4th reason being an overriding fear of Saddam supporting terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. You can argue after the fact it these reasons hold up but they were the reasons given at the time. We lost most of our troops maintaining the peace after accomplishing the mission.
The mission in Afghanistan was the destruction of the Taliban as a government and the destruction of terrorist networks inside Afghanistan.
The Taliban was ousted from power using mostly a local force. This decision was made knowing that the Soviets had sent in 625,000 ground forces and had lost 15,000 with 55,000 wounded. This was taken as a way not to do it. Fighting the war in a unconventional way was a decision of the Bush administration with a look back at the history of war in Afghanistan. Today we have abandoned this strategy and have sent in our Reservist, National Guard, and regular forces to kick down doors and fight in a more conventional way. The Soviets had over half a million men in country and today we are trying to do it with a combined force of about 1 fifth the size. The numbers don’t seem to work now and the strategy was never there. Fighting men are best at blowing things up and killing people. They are less skilled at social work. If the administration can’t let them do what they’re good at then they ought pack up and bring our troops home.
Ann Jones is currently in Papua New Guinea and won’t be coming by. Maybe later.
Were it that simple Templeton. Rarely is.
Military Objectives:
U.S. Strategic Objectives, CENTCOM, OIF Military Objectives “destabilize, isolate, and overthrow the Iraqi regime and provide support to a new, broad-based government; destroy Iraqi WMD capability and infrastructure; protect allies and supporters from Iraqi threats and attacks; destroy terrorist networks in Iraq, gather intelligence on global terrorism, detain terrorists and war criminals, and free individuals unjustly detained under the Iraqi regime; and support international efforts to set conditions for long-term stability in Iraq and the region.”
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL34387.pdf
Strategic Objective: (2003)
The U.S.Central Command (CENTCOM) OIF campaign plan “A stable Iraq, with its territorial integrity intact and a broad-based government that renounces WMD development and use and no longer supports terrorism or threatens its neighbors.
Strategic Objective: (2005)
A peaceful Iraq, united, stable, and secure, well-integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism
Strategic Objective: (2007)
a unified, democratic, federal Iraq that can govern itself, defend itself, and sustain itself, and is an ally in the war on terror.
***Losing? Is this the same losing that lost us Iraq? ***
Yep. You don’t want to admit it, Buff, but we got our infidel butts thrown out of Iraq. In fact, wanting us to get the hell out of their country appears to be the only thing that Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis can agree on. (The kurds might like us to stay, but they are only 20% of the population).
I know that you think we won. That is complete and utter nonsense. All we have to show for that little exercise in imperialism is a debt of around 500B, a few thousand casualties, a lot of wounded and we didn’t even end up with much Iraqi oil. The Iraqis got their backs up — failed to pass the US written oil bill — and auctioned of contracts back in December, Most of the oil contracts for the next decades went to Russia, China, France … and BP.
The Spanish have a nice word for undertkings like Iraq — “atascadero”
Nicely outlined for official Centcom goals. But what is your point Jimi? Goals were simple?
***Nice to see how easily your willing to throw 30+ million Afghans back under the yoke of tyranny without any hope. Truely a progressive trait. ***
Buff. No one, not even you, can seriously believe for one minute that the Karzai government — which stole the last election — represents ‘freedom’ and the taliban represents tyranny. That’s simply nuts.
Beat the gold plated spears, and the posh operating bases, with all the luxury of the states flown in, in to plough shares.
Afghanistan and Iraq are abortive steps on the road to preserving the American empire.
Boot’s article about historic ‘demobilizations’ impeding the accumulation of empire are true to the empire agenda. Both Iraq and Afghanistan incursions are the US showing its appearance of dominance in the Eurasian land mass. But it only works for the warfare state initiated, such as buffpilot, jimi, and me before I recognized how awefully I spent my working life.
An article in Washington Post, 1 Aug 2010 by former Sec Def Perry and a fellow named Hadley state that dominating central Asia is a wildly aggressive and unaffordable “national interest’ to justify taking 5% or so of GDP away from the old, and needy to enrich the military industrial complex.
Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan ended any better than Vietnam,regardless of the media and military “experts” hogwash.
I will post the Perry articles tonight.
ilsm will not change.
***Well, we do agree on some things. I will ask her to clarify. But I do not think the idea we went in was about democracy or the Taliban, and that if we were actually serious about helping Afghanistan rebuild a different approach is needed, well beyond what money would buy.***
Lest we forget, the reason that we went into Afghanistan was to bring Osama bin Laden to justice — something that, for whatever reason, didn’t happen. I’d like to see hearings to find out what went wrong, because I think that particular screw-up really may not have been the Bush administration’s fault. It may never have been a realistic objective. Or maybe we don’t have the right sort of orgnizations with the right training to handle problems like that. We really ought to find out.
But anyway, the attempt to westernize the country was pure mission creep and unlikely to work. The communists tried pretty much the same thing three decades ago and ultimately failed spectacularly. We seem to learned exactly nothing from their failure. I have no idea what it is that the folks in Washington think they are going to accomplish in Afghanistan. But I’m pretty sure they don’t have a snowball’s chance of succeeding.
So, I think eventually we will declare victory and come home. And not too long thereafter, the fundamentalists — who may or may not call themselves Taliban — will return to power. And the western reforms will be largely forgotten. And the only real difference between 2015 and 2000 will be that the Taliban in 2000 was trying — with some success — to surpress the opium trade whereas the fundamentalists in 2015 will most likely embrace it.
These “goals” have nothing to do with the US constitution.
The common defense is here in the US.
vt,
You keep missing the elephant in eth room. We are not leaving. Did you miss Obama’s speech? 50,000, that’s fifty thousand, US troops will still be in Iraq after the ‘withdraw’.
We won. Get over it. The idea that we got our infidel butts kicked is hilariously detached from reality. Ask Obama.
And yet the Karzi government has a chance, if we stay to turn into something better. The Taliban’s Islamic based tyrranny – not a chance. But you have continually stood with the tyrannts. It just shows you which side your on. the fact that you seem to want to revel in a US defeat is even more revealing…
Islam will change
ilsm,
And comments like this is why your devorced from reality… call me when we are pulling our diplomates off the rooftops of Bagdad.
Islam will change
Rdan,
It looks like to me all military objectives were acheived….so any claims that Iraq is not a victory as far as the American perspective are false claims but…..
It is important to leave that 50,000 troop force (I agree with Obama), and parts of the intelligence machine there because the overall strategic objective is not quite secure enough for us to bail, and at the same time call it a complete victory.
It will be many years before we will be able to see if our overall strategic objective was met, If things keep going the direction they have been going for the past three years, then I suspect the perspective of many Americans, and many across the world will change to a more positive outlook, and the history books will show how America not only changed the face of the Middle East, but made one of the largest contributions to the security of humanity itself.