When Politicians forget the First Amendment, it is time for the People to remember the Second.
The Pentagon predicts the pace of attacks in Afghanistan by a resurgent Taliban is likely to rise this year, despite U.S.-led efforts to capture key leaders.
“We’re going to increase troops by 2009,” Bush said, without offering details about exactly when or how many.
It amounted to a reiteration of the promised buildup of U.S. troops before Bush leaves office in January. He said coalition forces have doubled in size over two years, and pledged that the twin strategy of fighting extremists and supporting Afghanistan’s civil development “is going to work.”
In terms of public attention, the war in Afghanistan has been obscured by the far costlier and deadlier one in Iraq.
But it is a matter of consensus within the Bush administration, and between the U.S. and key allies, that there are far too few troops in Afghanistan to fight the accelerating Taliban and to train Afghan soldiers and police.
Overall, roughly 32,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, including 14,000 serving with NATO forces and 18,000 conducting training and counterinsurgency.
That’s the largest U.S. presence since the war began
Recall if you will that the war in Afghanistan is also known as the War that Pretty Much Everybody Generally Agrees On and we did everything that the Left bitterly complains that we did not do in Iraq: we were retaliating for an attack on our soil as opposed to launching a pre-emptive war, we have provided humanitarian aid, we went in with our allies, have worked closely with the UN, and we have used diplomacy with neighboring countries (specifically Pakistan) in the region.
The trouble is that we quickly routed the enemy and ran out of available targets, established a new government with a lot of work to do, have had to rebuild Afghanistan’s infrastructure from the ground up as the result of thirty years of war, have found that some of our allies are often unwilling to commit enough troops or to aggressively engage the enemy, and neighboring Pakistan is unable or unwilling to control their border areas; making it impossible to completely root out the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. There is no timetable for withdrawal nor should there be.
Barack Mullah Omar Obama is not happy with the current situation at all:
He said overall ground forces should be increased by 65,000 Army soldiers and 27,000 Marines “to relieve the strain on our troops and to increase our capacity to put boots on the ground.”
This is all stunning to me for two reasons:
1. If Afghanistan has now surpassed Iraq in violence, this means that our Surge tactics have been correct in Iraq and a valid blueprint now exists for defeating an Islamist insurgency.
2. Obama opposed the Surge in Iraq, but supports one in Afghanistan; indicating that he knew all along what was needed to win and was therefore deliberately voting for defeat in Iraq.
In fact, all of the Democrats have been telling us that the sending more troops into Iraq did not do enough to ensure stability and that less troops should have been used, as I quoted in yesterday’s post on this topic. For the sake of intellectual consistency, shouldn’t it follow that we should be pulling troops out of Afghanistan to “shift the burden” to the Afghan government? Just a thought.
Regardless of whether or not the Democrats ever wanted to fight the war in Iraq, al-Qaeda was quite specific in declaring that it was the central front in their war against us. Fighting them to the finish was the right thing to do and Democrats such as Obama did their best to thwart that effort. Had we listened to the likes of him and abandoned the effort in Iraq, there is not a doubt in my mind that we would have seen the creation of a new al-Qaeda safe haven in that country, a moral victory would have been given to our enemies, and their efforts would have increased against us in Afghanistan and beyond. Insurgencies are waiting games for the insurgents and a lack of resolve on our part is exactly what the enemy is counting on, according to the Pentagon assessment (PDF) sourced above:
The Taliban’s strategy hinges on their ability to prevent the Afghan government and ISAF from achieving victory, and the international community eventually losing the will to tactically intervene in the counterinsurgency effort. The insurgency’s critical capabilities are its ability to project strength and a mystique of the inevitability of Taliban rule that is constantly sustained through a focused information effort; in other words, not losing is winning.
It is hard to see how losing in Iraq would have benefited our efforts anywhere else that we are fighting an insurgency if they know that we are unwilling to face the awesome superweapon known as the roadside bomb for a protracted amount of time.
Terrorism and jihadism and Islamism and whatever else you want to call the obscene beliefs and practices of our enemies is not going to work no matter where they try it. They do nothing more than kill and terrorize innocent Muslims and get themselves destroyed whenever our troops find them in the open. Without popular support and the ability to defeat even small numbers of Coalition troops in any engagement, their movement cannot last:
The preponderance of both insurgencies’ influence stems from the use of fear and intimidation tactics. As a result of these efforts, in the minds of the Afghan people, insurgent forces are cognitively becoming separated from the respected mujahidin fighters that defeated the Soviets and sustained Afghans for decades.
Violence increased in Afghanistan in 2007. A significant factor in the increase in violence was aggressive Afghan and international force tactics combined with insurgent recognition that, while they cannot defeat Afghan and international forces on the battlefield, they can harm political will by increasing casualties. Violence may also have increased because Afghan and international forces are asserting control over a greater area in increased numbers, thus increasing their exposure to insurgent attacks.
Attack levels alone are not always a good indicator of the security situation. Even in areas where insurgent activity is high, Afghan and international forces often have the full support of the local population. Khowst Province again provides a success story. In this eastern province the level enemy activity and attacks remains relatively high, but most of the population lives without fear, trusting the government to keep them safe.
If US troops are no longer needed in Iraq, they should absolutely be sent as reinforcements to Afghanistan to repeat the Petraeus strategy. At least this time Obama is on our side.
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