Brits Say: We Can't Win in Afghan

[babylonsister]

Brits Say: We Can't Win in Afghan
posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 10/06/2008 @ 10:45am


For all the talk about Afghanistan being the "right war," and with both Obama and McCain insisting that they want to send thousands of additional US forces there, our British allies have let the camel, so to speak, out of the bag. Meanwhile, more and more information is coming out to confirm that the government of Afghanistan is negotiating with (gasp!) the Taliban. This is important stuff.

First, here are the quotes from British Ambassador Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, whose leaked comments in a French cable were reported at the end of last week. In them he says that sending more troops to Afghanistan would make the problem worse, not better, and that the NATO forces in Afghanistan are "part of the problem, not part of the solution":

"The current situation is bad, the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust. ... The presence of the coalition, in particular its military presence, is part of the problem, not part of its solution. Foreign forces are the lifeline of a regime that would rapidly collapse without them. As such, they slow down and complicate a possible emergence from the crisis. ...

"It is the American presidential candidates who must be dissuaded from getting further bogged down in Afghanistan. {Sending more troops} would have perverse effects: it would identify us even more strongly as an occupation force and would multiply the targets {for the insurgents}.

"We must tell {the Americans} that we want to be part of a winning strategy, not a losing one."

Equally astonishingly, not leaked but speaking on the record, the UK's Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith says point-blank, as the London Times headline proclaims, "We can't defeat Taliban, says Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith":

"We're not going to win this war. ... It's about reducing insurgency to a manageable level that's not a strategic threat."

more...

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/368911

[knowbody0]

1. the Russians learned this first

but it was too late, they went broke.

[DemoTex]

4. Depends on what you mean by "first."

The First Anglo-Afghan War, a catastrophe for the British, ended in 1841. Dost Mohammed Khan (Amir of Afghanistan) said it best, "I have been struck by the magnitude of your resources, your ships, your arsenals; but what I cannot understand is why the rulers of so vast and flourishing an empire should have gone across the Indus to deprive me of my poor and barren country."

Fight in Afghanistan at your peril.

[ShortnFiery]

2. History backs up the Brit's analysis.

:shrug:

http://www.slate.com/id/115851/

Before the Soviets, it was the British who learned this lesson the hard way. In the 19th century, the British, who controlled India, and the Russians, who wanted to, angled for advantage in the Afghan terrain separating their empires. So dramatic were these diplomatic and military adventures that the British writer Rudyard Kipling, taken with the coinage of a British army captain, affixed a name to the imperial contest for control of Afghanistan: the Great Game. (In 1990, Peter Hopkirk, an English journalist, used the phrase as the title of his spellbinding, if distressingly Orientalist, history of that imperial struggle.)

[Joe Chi Minh]

5. From in an article on it in todays' Daily Mail on the subject:

"An MOD spokesman said: We have always said there is no military solution in Afghanistan. Insurgencies are ultimately solved at the political level, not by military means alone."

The first half of the article linked below is primarily about the heroin trafficking, the second part about realistic expectations and policies in relation to ending the war.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1068951/Natos-general-demands-new-heroin-crackdown-Afghanistan--attack-current-British-policy.html

[watercolors]

3. grandson was in Afgan 18 months, said same

He is appalled at the amount of money wasted there. Said we should leave, we will never accomplish anything! Hell he is only 25 and can see the senseless of it all.