( cross-posted at a blog of my own )
This October 7th will mark a full ten years of United States involvement in Afghanistan. Already beaten is the previous record for longest modern involvement in Afghanistan held by the Soviet Union (9 years, 50 days), and at present the conflict continues to look like one with no discernible end in sight. With the cost of 2,269 coalition soldier lives (1,413 American), as many as 34,000 Afghan civilians, and more than 383 billion dollars later the war still has no discernible goal, end, or organized plan to get troops out of harm’s way.
While starting two years before the U.S.-led war in Iraq, the Afghanistan campaign found itself relegated to the back-burner for most of the last decade, mainly because the Afghanistan war was seen as the “just war” – we actually had reason to be there instead of Iraq. Most of the anti-war movements and protests throughout the 2000′s centered around this idea – choosing to target Iraq first and Afghanistan second.
Drawdowns to U.S. involvement in Iraq would eventually come, and that combined with a change in leadership in the White House seemed to satisfy a large portion of the anti-war movement – or at least the parts of the movement that did all the fund raising, organizing, and managed to get the media attention (however scarce and mocking, at times). The general feeling with the start of the Obama administration in 2009 was "Iraq is winding down. Let’s finish up this whole Afghan thing, get out, and be on with our day."
The anti-war movement fell silent, and bodies kept coming home in coffins.
When Afghanistan last had the soul national spotlight in 2001 and the first half of 2002 the goals were rather clear for the American public to understand, and were supported with huge majorities of the population. At the start of the war, some 88% of Americans were on board with the war, as the case laid out was unmistakeably simple. The goals were to capture Osama Bin Laden and root out the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, which would hopefully prevent that nation from being used as a base of operations to launch large scale terrorist attacks in the future. Originally this was done with small teams of soldiers working with the resistance movement against the Taliban in the country – the Northern Alliance. While coalition forces focused on targeting Bin Laden, the Northern Alliance advanced on positions they themselves were kicked out of after years of struggle against the formally strong Taliban.
After routing Taliban positions across northern Afghanistan in November of 2001, Bin Laden and perhaps a few thousand other fighters fell back to the difficult terrain of Tora Bora to make a last stand in December. Intense aerial bombardment would cause Bin Laden to allegedly broadcast messages telling his remaining fighters that it was okay to surrender on December 14th:
Our prayers were not answered. Times are dire and bad. We did not get support from the apostate nations who call themselves our Muslim brothers. Things might have been different. I’m sorry for getting you involved in this battle, if you can no longer resist, you may surrender with my blessing.
At around this time, local Taliban fighters were negotiating a cease fire to allow them time to surrender with the Northern Alliance troops that were spearheading the ground efforts in the area. Later this would appear to turn out as a clever ruse to allow Bin Laden and other top Taliban officials to escape through the mountain passes and into the largely lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northwestern Pakistan. Still alive, Bin Laden would see his role as the leader of the Taliban, or the voice for much of anything else aside from occasional propaganda, gradually decrease over the next few years, and fade.
Putting a tremendous amount of careful effort into getting Pakistan to be on “our side” for the Afghanistan campaign, the United States did not subsequently follow up with an invasion or incursion into Pakistan to continue the search for Bin Laden, instead focusing on continuing to drive back the Taliban in the rest of the country. With the national capital at Kabul secure and American forces consolidating their presence around Bagram Airfield north of the city, the number of troops in Afghanistan would gradually tick up and over 10,000.
With the Taliban largely routed from the country’s central and south in early 2002, but with Bin Laden still a fugitive, the first main change in the communication of “the mission” to the American people occurred – our priority was now to make Afghanistan a stable and thriving democracy, and to assist in their reconstruction. This task is otherwise known as nation building and typically entails multi-year commitments at major cost. Further peering into these realities quickly found its way to the back burner if not off the stove completely as the second half of 2002 was dedicated to making the case for the coming war in Iraq.
Six years would tick by with Afghanistan as a second, third, or tenth story of the day, as Iraq continued to dominate the headlines. Anti-war protests would crop up in America and around the world as the war dragged on for years longer than all were told to expect. While the Iraq war would be a hot political issue in American elections in 2004 and 2006, it would be supplanted in 2008 by the economic crisis – an economic crisis caused in part by the government spending over a trillion dollars to support these wars in the first place.
By the time President Obama was elected in November of 2008, the decision to draw down in Iraq was largely a no-brainer, and combat units would be removed from the country within a year and a half. Afghanistan would sit in the background, still, even though by this point a new neo-Taliban insurgence would be striving to take control of wide swaths of southern and central Afghanistan that coalition forces swept through years earlier.
The 2010 election cycle came and went with barely a mention of Afghanistan by either party. The 2012 election cycle is starting to warm up and yet the current deployment of some 100,000 U.S. troops in a hostile environment with no discernible end in sight ongoing, next to no politicians from either side of the isle seem interested to any extent whatsoever to even bring up the topic – not even for photo opportunities.
Locked in a mindset that government needs to get smaller and stop spending so much money, the Republicans have nothing to say about the cost of continuing operations in Afghanistan. They are incensed at President Obama’s proposed 2011 budget which calls for an operating deficit of $1.65 trillion. Currently the U.S. is expected to spend $107.3 billion – or 6.5% of the deficit – on Afghanistan operations alone. Massive cuts currently being planned for public and social services for American people can be patched just by using this money in other places (an additional $65.1 billion is slated for Iraqi operations). The Afghanistan War will, this year, account for 11.5% of the already massively bloated defense budget ($928.5 billion). Yet none of these numbers, or attempts at renewed fiscal responsibility, are mentioned by the Republicans.
Mindsets that prevail in elected Democrats are even more difficult to discern. Being the anti-war party, or at least the party that rode anti-war sentiment to power in 2006, the silence from the so-called liberals in power in this country has been deafening. While there are occasional discussions here and there on far flung cable news shows, or even lesser important outlets, there is no organized force putting pressure on the Obama White House like there was on the Bush White House, and the champions of that message are certainly nowhere to be found in the President’s own political party.
Ordinary Americans have moved on by force – having to focus instead on very real problems laid at their door – the economy and continuing very slow recovery. Anti-war sentiment still exists and exists in large quantities – a January, 2011, poll found that 72% of Americans want troops pulled from Afghanistan at a quicker pace than what is currently on the table. These views span party lines largely as 66% of conservative voters responded by saying troop levels should either be reduced or completely pulled out as fast as possible.
With neither major political party taking anything near what can be considered a very loud, boisterous stance on this major issue, just where is the American public supposed to turn? As an anti-war voter in the 2012 elections, just who are you supposed to vote for representativly, senatorially, or presidentially? Barring some unforeseen sea change in conditions on the ground – which would likely have to be very negative in order to catch the attention of our media – this will most certainly not be an issue in the 2012 Presidential campaign. Just what, then, is to be done? The band will keep playing on and soldiers and civilians will continue to die – and for what, exactly?
Democracies should be better than this.
Sources:
Pre-war support: http://www.aei.org/...
Tora Bora details: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
January, 2011 support: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
January, 2011 support from the Tea Party: http://www.caivn.org/...