12-16-2019, 12:29 AM
*** 16-Dec-19 World View -- Why we can never prevail in Afghanistan
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
****
**** 'Afghan Papers' reveal we sent 175,000 soldiers into Afghanistan without 'foggiest notion' what we were doing
****
![[Image: g191215b.jpg]](http://Media.GenerationalDynamics.com/ww2010/g191215b.jpg)
Arlington National Cemetary’s Section 60 is where most of the casualties from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are buried. (Getty)
The Washington Post has published a trove of thousands of "Afghanistan
papers" that it has obtained from the Dept. of Defense under the
Freedom of Information Act. The paper is declaring these to be of
historic importance, and is comparing them to the "Pentagon Papers"
that roiled federal politics in the 1970s.
Starting in 2014, the Office of the Special Inspector General for
Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) undertook a project to interview
hundreds of people, including politicians, analysts, and soldiers,
who are Americans, Europeans and Afghans, in a "Lessons Learned" project
in order to figure out why nothing has worked in Afghanistan.
Presidents George Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump have all
promised to bring the Afghan war to a satisfactory conclusion,
defeating the Taliban, and making the country into a free market
democracy. Even today, there are still truly idiotic "peace
negotiations" going on in Doha, of all places, between US and Taliban
negotiators, but not including Afghan government officials because the
Taliban only want to negotiate with the US, but not with the Afghan
government. Can you believe this?
The project found that Bush, Obama and Trump have all done the
same things. They tried to win the war by not repeating earlier
mistakes, or the mistakes of their predecessors, but all this meant
was that they made new mistakes. And then, we're all shocked, shocked,
shocked to learn from the Afghanistan Papers that the three presidents
lied to the American people, always hiding the setbacks, always
claiming that progress was being made, always saying that the
end is in sight.
This is exasperating to me because I've written many times in the
last ten years that the war in Afghanistan CANNOT be won, or even
resolved in any meaningful way. And by that I didn't mean that
the Nato forces just had to be a little more clever. I meant that
it was literally impossible. Mathematically impossible.
I've given the reasoning many times, and I'll repeat it again below.
The reasoning is not that difficult, but the problem is that the
so-called experts in Washington really don't have a clue. Long-time
readers are aware that I learned this in 2006, when the Congressional
Quarterly and the London Times conducted surveys of supposed Mideast
experts and found that they were idiots. (See "Guess what? British politicians and journalists are just as ignorant as Americans"
from January 2007)
I was really shocked at that time to realize that I knew a lot more
than the so-called Mideast experts in Washington knew. In a sense it
isn't surprising, since I'm a Boomer and went to college at a time
when colleges actually taught something. Since then, SAT scores have
been falling, and college professors are left-wing idiots who teach
the equivalent of women's studies and sociology.
So it's not surprising that I know a lot more about analyzing
Afghanistan than the Washington experts do. As I said, the reasoning
in the analysis isn't that difficult, but it does contain some logical
subleties that are beyond the mental capabilities of the so-called
experts who graduated from Harvard or Princeton, where they leave with
no clue about the real world.
This "shocking" discovery from the Afghanistan Papers of the total
ignorance and stupidity of the so-called experts in Washington
is really amazing, when you think that there might be one or two
people in the State Dept. or DoD that can figure out what's really
going on. But my guess is that such people would be too threatening
to the élite "experts" from Harvard or Princeton, and so the people
who really know what's going on are given offices in the basement
in the boiler room, where they won't bother the élites.
Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to
Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589
were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.
The Washington Post article quotes Douglas Lute, a three-star Army
general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the
Bush and Obama administrations. He says the following in 2015:
<QUOTE>"We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of
Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing. What are we
trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we
were undertaking.
If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction
... 2,400 lives lost. Who will say this was in
vain?"<END QUOTE>
See, this is what I mean. What the hell is going on here???
We're in Afghanistan fighting a war with hundreds of thousands of
troops, and the Afghanistan "czar" for Bush and Obama says that
"We didn't have the foggiest notion" of what we were doing?
Do you understand the magnitude of this, Dear Reader? We send hundreds
of thousands of troops do a war where the don't have the foggiest notion
of what we're doing. It's so hideously unbelievable that it's almost
hysterically funny.
And if this is happening in Afghanistan, then it's also happening with
American policy in the Mideast, in Africa, in Asia, and so forth.
I realize that the regular readers of my Generational Dynamics
articles are a lot more intelligent than the so-called experts in
Washington. But if you happen to know one of the "experts" on
Afghanistan, then please send him a copy of this article. He'll
either learn about what's really going on in Afghanistan, or else
he'll change his spam filter so that all future e-mail messages from
you go into his spam folder.
****
**** Why we can never prevail in Afghanistan
****
The Iraq war was a political disaster for Bush until he adopted the
"surge" strategy in 2007. Obama and the Democrats ridiculed this
strategy until it worked, and successfully ejected AQI (al-Qaeda in
Iraq) from Iraq.
In 2009, Obama was faced with a potential political disaster in
Afghanistan. He looked at the success of the "surge" strategy in
Iraq, and decided that his surge strategy would be better than Bush's.
So he adopted a surge strategy in Afghanistan. He would be even more
successful in getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan than Bush was
in getting rid of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
As I wrote at the time, and have written many times since then, the
"surge" strategy was 100% guaranteed to fail in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda
in Iraq (AQI) was a foreign militia led by Jordanian terrorist Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, and al-Zarqawi had to import fighters from Jordan
and Saudi Arabia because the Iraqis refused to fight. (See "Iraqi Sunnis are turning against al-Qaeda in Iraq" from April, 2007)
So the "surge" in Iraq worked because it had to eject a FOREIGN
militia. But that's not true in Afghanistan. The Taliban
are NOT foreign. They're radicalized Pashtuns, and Pashtuns are
the dominant ethnic group IN AFGHANISTAN. So the "surge" can't
eject the Taliban.
And so, Dear Reader, you understand that, don't you? As a reader
of Generational Dynamics articles, you're more intelligent than the
experts in Washington for whom this concept that AQI was foreign
while the Taliban are domestic is much too subtle for the
Washington experts to understand.
But that's only one of the reasons why the surge strategy would fail
in Afghanistan with 100% certainty.
Iraq's last generational crisis war was the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s,
where the major groups (Sunnis and Shias) were UNITED in fighting
against Iran. So the Sunnis and Shias were also UNITED in
ejecting al-Qaeda in Iraq. That's why the "surge" strategy worked
in Iraq.
Afghanistan is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. The last generational crisis war
was an extremely bloody, horrific civil war, in 1991-96. The war was
a civil war, fought between the Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan
versus the Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks in northern
Afghanistan. The Taliban are radicalized Pashtuns, and when they need
to import foreign fighters, then can import their cousins from the
Pashtun tribes in Pakistan.
Indeed, it's much worse than that. The ethnic groups in Afghanistan
are COMPLETELY NON-UNITED and loathe each other. Pashtuns still have
scores to settle with the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks that formed the
Northern Alliance, especially the Shias. These opposing groups have
fresh memories of the atrocities, torture, rape, beatings,
dismemberments, mutilations, and so forth that the other side
performed on their friends, wives and other family members, and they
have no desire to be friends or to work together. They'd rather kill
each other.
In recent months, there's apparently been a new development. You
still have the Pashtuns, who have been aligned with al-Qaeda, and
other ethnic groups that loathe the Pashtuns are aligning with ISIS.
This is the very early stages of a new civil war.
Now go back and review what General Douglas Lute said in the
quote above: That we sent 175,000 troops into Afghanistan without
having "the foggiest notion" of what we were doing.
It's this stuff about the Pashtuns and the civil war that the so-called
Afghanistan experts don't have "the foggiest notion" about. And it's
really not that complicated. You don't even have to know anything
about generational theory to understand it.
You understand it, don't you Dear Reader? That's because you're
intelligent and well-informed. You can take satisfaction in the fact
that you understand why there's been one failure after another in
Afghanistan, but that the so-called experts in Washington are too
stupid to understand. This is what Lute was talking about.
So now we just have to sit back and watch these farcical peace
talks take place in Doha between the US and the Taliban -- because
the Taliban refuse to negotiate with the Afghan government!!!!!
Hahahahahahahahaha.
Sources:
Related Articles:
KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Afghanistan, Afghanistan Papers,
Douglas Lute,
Pashtuns, Taliban, Afghan civil war,
Northern Alliance, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks,
Iraq, Iran/Iraq war, Great Iraqi Revolution,
Jordan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda in Iraq, AQI,
Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria/Sham/the Levant, IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh
Permanent web link to this article
Receive daily World View columns by e-mail
Contribute to Generational Dynamics via PayPal
John J. Xenakis
100 Memorial Drive Apt 8-13A
Cambridge, MA 02142
Phone: 617-864-0010
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
Forum: http://www.gdxforum.com/forum
Subscribe to World View: http://generationaldynamics.com/subscribe
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
- 'Afghan Papers' reveal we sent 175,000 soldiers into Afghanistan without 'foggiest notion' what we were doing
- Why we can never prevail in Afghanistan
****
**** 'Afghan Papers' reveal we sent 175,000 soldiers into Afghanistan without 'foggiest notion' what we were doing
****
Arlington National Cemetary’s Section 60 is where most of the casualties from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are buried. (Getty)
The Washington Post has published a trove of thousands of "Afghanistan
papers" that it has obtained from the Dept. of Defense under the
Freedom of Information Act. The paper is declaring these to be of
historic importance, and is comparing them to the "Pentagon Papers"
that roiled federal politics in the 1970s.
Starting in 2014, the Office of the Special Inspector General for
Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) undertook a project to interview
hundreds of people, including politicians, analysts, and soldiers,
who are Americans, Europeans and Afghans, in a "Lessons Learned" project
in order to figure out why nothing has worked in Afghanistan.
Presidents George Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump have all
promised to bring the Afghan war to a satisfactory conclusion,
defeating the Taliban, and making the country into a free market
democracy. Even today, there are still truly idiotic "peace
negotiations" going on in Doha, of all places, between US and Taliban
negotiators, but not including Afghan government officials because the
Taliban only want to negotiate with the US, but not with the Afghan
government. Can you believe this?
The project found that Bush, Obama and Trump have all done the
same things. They tried to win the war by not repeating earlier
mistakes, or the mistakes of their predecessors, but all this meant
was that they made new mistakes. And then, we're all shocked, shocked,
shocked to learn from the Afghanistan Papers that the three presidents
lied to the American people, always hiding the setbacks, always
claiming that progress was being made, always saying that the
end is in sight.
This is exasperating to me because I've written many times in the
last ten years that the war in Afghanistan CANNOT be won, or even
resolved in any meaningful way. And by that I didn't mean that
the Nato forces just had to be a little more clever. I meant that
it was literally impossible. Mathematically impossible.
I've given the reasoning many times, and I'll repeat it again below.
The reasoning is not that difficult, but the problem is that the
so-called experts in Washington really don't have a clue. Long-time
readers are aware that I learned this in 2006, when the Congressional
Quarterly and the London Times conducted surveys of supposed Mideast
experts and found that they were idiots. (See "Guess what? British politicians and journalists are just as ignorant as Americans"
from January 2007)
I was really shocked at that time to realize that I knew a lot more
than the so-called Mideast experts in Washington knew. In a sense it
isn't surprising, since I'm a Boomer and went to college at a time
when colleges actually taught something. Since then, SAT scores have
been falling, and college professors are left-wing idiots who teach
the equivalent of women's studies and sociology.
So it's not surprising that I know a lot more about analyzing
Afghanistan than the Washington experts do. As I said, the reasoning
in the analysis isn't that difficult, but it does contain some logical
subleties that are beyond the mental capabilities of the so-called
experts who graduated from Harvard or Princeton, where they leave with
no clue about the real world.
This "shocking" discovery from the Afghanistan Papers of the total
ignorance and stupidity of the so-called experts in Washington
is really amazing, when you think that there might be one or two
people in the State Dept. or DoD that can figure out what's really
going on. But my guess is that such people would be too threatening
to the élite "experts" from Harvard or Princeton, and so the people
who really know what's going on are given offices in the basement
in the boiler room, where they won't bother the élites.
Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to
Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589
were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.
The Washington Post article quotes Douglas Lute, a three-star Army
general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the
Bush and Obama administrations. He says the following in 2015:
<QUOTE>"We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of
Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing. What are we
trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we
were undertaking.
If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction
... 2,400 lives lost. Who will say this was in
vain?"<END QUOTE>
See, this is what I mean. What the hell is going on here???
We're in Afghanistan fighting a war with hundreds of thousands of
troops, and the Afghanistan "czar" for Bush and Obama says that
"We didn't have the foggiest notion" of what we were doing?
Do you understand the magnitude of this, Dear Reader? We send hundreds
of thousands of troops do a war where the don't have the foggiest notion
of what we're doing. It's so hideously unbelievable that it's almost
hysterically funny.
And if this is happening in Afghanistan, then it's also happening with
American policy in the Mideast, in Africa, in Asia, and so forth.
I realize that the regular readers of my Generational Dynamics
articles are a lot more intelligent than the so-called experts in
Washington. But if you happen to know one of the "experts" on
Afghanistan, then please send him a copy of this article. He'll
either learn about what's really going on in Afghanistan, or else
he'll change his spam filter so that all future e-mail messages from
you go into his spam folder.
****
**** Why we can never prevail in Afghanistan
****
The Iraq war was a political disaster for Bush until he adopted the
"surge" strategy in 2007. Obama and the Democrats ridiculed this
strategy until it worked, and successfully ejected AQI (al-Qaeda in
Iraq) from Iraq.
In 2009, Obama was faced with a potential political disaster in
Afghanistan. He looked at the success of the "surge" strategy in
Iraq, and decided that his surge strategy would be better than Bush's.
So he adopted a surge strategy in Afghanistan. He would be even more
successful in getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan than Bush was
in getting rid of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
As I wrote at the time, and have written many times since then, the
"surge" strategy was 100% guaranteed to fail in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda
in Iraq (AQI) was a foreign militia led by Jordanian terrorist Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, and al-Zarqawi had to import fighters from Jordan
and Saudi Arabia because the Iraqis refused to fight. (See "Iraqi Sunnis are turning against al-Qaeda in Iraq" from April, 2007)
So the "surge" in Iraq worked because it had to eject a FOREIGN
militia. But that's not true in Afghanistan. The Taliban
are NOT foreign. They're radicalized Pashtuns, and Pashtuns are
the dominant ethnic group IN AFGHANISTAN. So the "surge" can't
eject the Taliban.
And so, Dear Reader, you understand that, don't you? As a reader
of Generational Dynamics articles, you're more intelligent than the
experts in Washington for whom this concept that AQI was foreign
while the Taliban are domestic is much too subtle for the
Washington experts to understand.
But that's only one of the reasons why the surge strategy would fail
in Afghanistan with 100% certainty.
Iraq's last generational crisis war was the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s,
where the major groups (Sunnis and Shias) were UNITED in fighting
against Iran. So the Sunnis and Shias were also UNITED in
ejecting al-Qaeda in Iraq. That's why the "surge" strategy worked
in Iraq.
Afghanistan is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. The last generational crisis war
was an extremely bloody, horrific civil war, in 1991-96. The war was
a civil war, fought between the Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan
versus the Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks in northern
Afghanistan. The Taliban are radicalized Pashtuns, and when they need
to import foreign fighters, then can import their cousins from the
Pashtun tribes in Pakistan.
Indeed, it's much worse than that. The ethnic groups in Afghanistan
are COMPLETELY NON-UNITED and loathe each other. Pashtuns still have
scores to settle with the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks that formed the
Northern Alliance, especially the Shias. These opposing groups have
fresh memories of the atrocities, torture, rape, beatings,
dismemberments, mutilations, and so forth that the other side
performed on their friends, wives and other family members, and they
have no desire to be friends or to work together. They'd rather kill
each other.
In recent months, there's apparently been a new development. You
still have the Pashtuns, who have been aligned with al-Qaeda, and
other ethnic groups that loathe the Pashtuns are aligning with ISIS.
This is the very early stages of a new civil war.
Now go back and review what General Douglas Lute said in the
quote above: That we sent 175,000 troops into Afghanistan without
having "the foggiest notion" of what we were doing.
It's this stuff about the Pashtuns and the civil war that the so-called
Afghanistan experts don't have "the foggiest notion" about. And it's
really not that complicated. You don't even have to know anything
about generational theory to understand it.
You understand it, don't you Dear Reader? That's because you're
intelligent and well-informed. You can take satisfaction in the fact
that you understand why there's been one failure after another in
Afghanistan, but that the so-called experts in Washington are too
stupid to understand. This is what Lute was talking about.
So now we just have to sit back and watch these farcical peace
talks take place in Doha between the US and the Taliban -- because
the Taliban refuse to negotiate with the Afghan government!!!!!
Hahahahahahahahaha.
Sources:
- The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war - At war with the truth (Washington Post, 9-Dec-2019)
- I helped write the official lies to sell the Afghanistan war (Washington Post, 13-Dec-2019)
- In Trump We Trust: Why Donald Will End the War in Afghanistan (National Interest, 15-Dec-2019)
- Where Is the Outrage Over the War in Afghanistan? (The Nation, 13-Dec-2019)
- Why the Media Is Ignoring the Afghanistan Papers (New Republic, 15-Dec-2019)
- 'Nobody wants to talk about it': Senate remains idle as Afghan war lurches on (Politico, 11-Dec-2019)
- Why the ‘Afghanistan Papers’ Matter (Foreign Policy, 10-Dec-2019)
- Top US officials repeatedly misled public about Afghanistan War – Report (CNN, 11-Dec-2019)
- Timeline - The U.S. War in Afghanistan (Council on Foreign Relations, 15-Dec-2019)
Related Articles:
- Trump considers new troop surge and strategy change in Afghanistan war (10-May-2017)
- Guess what? British politicians and journalists are just as ignorant as Americans (14-Jan-2007)
- Iraqi Sunnis are turning against al-Qaeda in Iraq (01-Apr-2007)
- American army general warns of imminent defeat in Afghanistan war (26-Sep-2009)
KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Afghanistan, Afghanistan Papers,
Douglas Lute,
Pashtuns, Taliban, Afghan civil war,
Northern Alliance, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks,
Iraq, Iran/Iraq war, Great Iraqi Revolution,
Jordan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda in Iraq, AQI,
Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria/Sham/the Levant, IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh
Permanent web link to this article
Receive daily World View columns by e-mail
Contribute to Generational Dynamics via PayPal
John J. Xenakis
100 Memorial Drive Apt 8-13A
Cambridge, MA 02142
Phone: 617-864-0010
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
Forum: http://www.gdxforum.com/forum
Subscribe to World View: http://generationaldynamics.com/subscribe
