There is an incredible piece in Rolling Stone regarding the revival of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Those of you who have been on this site for a while know that the Taliban and Afghanistan are a particular area of interest for me and the focus of my diaries.
More about the article after the fold.
The Rolling Stone article titled "How We Lost the War We Won" can be found at:
http://www.rollingstone.com/...
There are a couple of passage that really symbolize our problem in Afghanistan. First, we are throwing money at a problem that can't be solved with US Dollars:
By the time we reach the town of Salar, only 50 miles south of Kabul, we have already passed five tractor-trailers from military convoys that have been destroyed by the Taliban. The highway, newly rebuilt courtesy of $250 million, most of it from U.S. taxpayers, is pocked by immense craters, most of them caused by roadside bombs planted by Taliban fighters. As in Iraq, these improvised explosive devices are a key to the battle against the American invaders and their allies in the Afghan security forces, part of a haphazard but lethal campaign against coalition troops and the long, snaking convoys that provide logistical support.
and another
But even as Rumsfeld spoke, the Taliban were beginning their reconquest of Afghanistan. The Pentagon, already focused on invading Iraq, assumed that the Afghan militias it had bought with American money would be enough to secure the country. Instead, the militias proved far more interested in extorting bribes and seizing land than pursuing the hardened Taliban veterans who had taken refuge across the border in Pakistan. The parliamentary elections in 2005 returned power to the warlords who had terrorized the countryside before the Taliban imposed order. "The American intervention issued a blank check to these guys," says a senior aid official in Kabul. "They threw money, weapons, vehicles at them. But the warlords never abandoned their bad habits — they're abusing people and filling their pockets.
The second problem has always been the Pakistani government. They supported the Taliban until it was politically impossible for them to do so and they have reverted back to their side. As Senator Obama says, without pressure on Pakistan, which is the Taliban's only support in the area, we can't win in Afghanistan.
The government of Pakistan, seeking to retain influence over what it views as its back yard, began helping the Taliban regroup. With the Bush administration focused on the war in Iraq, money poured into Afghanistan from Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists, who were eager to maintain a second front against the American invaders. The Taliban — once an isolated and impoverished group of religious students who knew little about the rest of the world and cared only about liberating their country from oppressive warlords — are now among the best-armed and most experienced insurgents in the world, linked to a global movement of jihadists that stretches from Pakistan and Iraq to Chechnya and the Philippines.
Finally, I am not sure that additional troops will help. Putting aside the fact we don't have the troops to send over there, the article provides a crass quote, which unfortunately may be incredibly accurate.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates also admitted to Congress that the Pentagon is stretched so thin in Iraq, it will be unable to meet even a modest request for 10,000 more troops in Afghanistan until next spring at the earliest. But those closest to the chaos in Afghanistan say that throwing more soldiers into combat won't help. "More troops are not the answer," a senior United Nations official in Kabul tells me. "You will not make more babies by having many guys screw the same woman."
The result of this incompetence has been deadly for our soldiers as well as those third parties who have dedicated their lives to make that country and the world a better place.
The numbers tell the story. Attacks on coalition and Afghan forces are up 44 percent since last year, the highest level since the war began. By October, 135 American troops had been killed in Afghanistan this year — already surpassing the total of 117 fatalities for all of 2007. The Taliban are also intensifying their attacks on aid workers: In a particularly brazen assault in August, a group of Taliban fighters opened fire on the car of a U.S. aid group, the International Rescue Committee, killing three Western women and their Afghan driver on the main road to Kabul.
In any case, I could go on but the article lays out the failed mission in Afghanistan far better than I ever could. My wish is only that the MSM get away from William Ayers, lipstick on pigs, robocalls and start focusing on the problems that are killing our troops. I just hope this article gets read and spread around - it is informative and illustrates that our current strategy in Afghanistan simply does not, can not and will not work. It is time to sit down and develop a strategy to deal with an area that is the actual center of the war on terror and home to the terrorists who bombed us on 9/11 and those who seek to harm us in the future.