Oh What A Lovely War In Afghanistan: We’re Staying Till ‘The Job Is Done’

Here we go again: a top UK General telling us the war in Afghanistan is going well and we have to stay as long as it takes to “finish the job“.

Lieutenant General James Bucknall, the outgoing commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, says the war has to continue because otherwise we will be betraying the “investment in blood” spilt by British soldiers who have been killed, soon to reach 400. Applying this logic, the Americans would still be in Vietnam, where over 50,000 of their troops died.

Bucknall is like a compulsive gambler who thinks if he just keeps betting he will eventually recoup all past losses. But unlike the gambler at the casino tables, Bucknall is gambling with peoples lives in a war which has seen ten years of carnage, with no return on the “investment”, whether in blood or treasure.

Bucknall of course makes no mention of the six British soldiers who died in the two weeks prior to him insisting that “we owe it to those who have gone before” to continue the war. Nor does he say how many more will have to be “gone” until we “see the job through”.

But it’s not just the lives of British soldiers that have been lost. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed, their deaths unrecorded by their killers and unreported by the western media — and never mentioned by those like Bucknall who commanded the slaughter.

It’s all been a price worth paying according to Bucknall, who is adamant — like all his predecessors — that western forces are progressively stabilising the country and re-establishing security.

“We are taking out 130-140 mid-level Taliban leaders every month”, he proclaims triumphantly. A somewhat pathetic sign of progress, after six years of British troop deployment in the region, is the ability of a provincial governor to travel between Lashkar Gah and Nad Ali by road instead of helicopter.

But it is when Bucknall says the clearest indication that NATO is winning is found in Kabul — “a flourishing capital city that is much safer than Karachi” — that you have to ask what world he is living in. On 5 December, the day after Bucknall’s confident assertion about Kabul safety, 55 worshippers at a mosque were killed by a suicide bombing. This was following a series of high profile attacks launched by the Taliban this year in the city, which included:

• June 28: 21 killed, including 10 civilians, when suicide bombers storm Kabul’s luxury Intercontinental Hotel.
• August 19: Nine people, including a New Zealand special forces soldier, die when suicide bombers attack the British Council cultural centre in Kabul.
• September 13/14: Taliban attacks targeting locations including the US embassy and headquarters of foreign troops kill at least 14 during a 19-hour siege.
• September 20: Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghanistan’s former president leading efforts to find a peace deal with the Taliban, is assassinated in a suicide attack at his home in Kabul’s supposedly secure diplomatic zone.
• October 29: 13 US troops operating under Nato are among 17 people killed in a car-bomb attack on a foreign military convoy in Kabul.

Bucknall is not alone in his delusion. The latest catch phrase of the western occupiers is “Fight, Talk, Build”.

Whatever politicians and generals say, the “fight” part is not going well. The last two years have seen the highest casualty rate since the start of the war for US forces — who are doing the bulk of the fighting. And there are currently only four areas in the whole of Afghanistan where there is no Taliban or insurgent activity.

The US is desperate to implement the “talk” part of the strategy, which is why they are holding secret meetings with Taliban representatives and are trying to arrange for a Taliban office to be established in Qatar — to help, it is said, peace negotiations to take place.

How the US and NATO — or Bucknall come to that — can square this recognition that negotiations are an essential pre-condition to ending the war, while at the same time assassinating the very people they want to talk peace with, is beyond satire. The Taliban have clearly come to the same conclusion, hence in September their assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was leading the Afghan government’s attempts at negotiation.

But where the “talk” strategy is most obviously running into the sand is in the collapse of the US-Pakistan relationship, which has been a cornerstone alliance in America’s “war on terror”.

Pakistan is seething with anti-American ferment due to the almost daily US drone attacks, which violate both international law and Pakistani sovereignty, and kill far more civilians than the targetted “insurgents”. Then came the US airstrike a week ago that “accidently” killed at least 24 Pakistani soldiers, which has taken the alliance close to breaking point..

As for “build”, there is very little to show for the $70 billion which have been spent on reconstruction over the past ten years. Afghanistan is the world’s most corrupt country, so it’s hardly surprising that on some reconstruction projects an estimated 30% of the cost has been attributed to corruption - whether payments to relatives and cronies of the US puppet President Karzai and the warlords he cultivates to bolster his regime, or in kickbacks for the Afghan security services.

Billions more has been wasted in lucrative contracts for western companies, paid huge sums for reconstruction projects, many of which have been left unfinished or not even started.

But the biggest joke in the “build” part of the strategy is the central pillar of the US-NATO “exit strategy”: to remove all foreign combat troops from the line of fire by the end of 2014 and replace them with the Afghan army and police. Supposedly, by then these forces will be ready to take over all security in the country, and effectively act as a surrogate army continuing the war, while the US and its allies keep tens of thousands of troops in the country to act as ‘trainers and advisors’, with their only military involvement being air strikes and drone attacks that carry no risk of US casualities.

The US and NATO are embarked on a frantic recruitment campaign aimed at mobilising a 352,000-strong Afghan army. The 10% desertion rate of recruits after finishing training and the drug addiction of 15% of troops are perhaps one way to guage the prospects of achieving this.

But even if the army and police numbers can be expanded on this scale, the costs of maintaining such a huge security force are clearly beyond what could be afforded by the Afghan economy. It’s estimated these plans would cost $8 billion a year, eating up 50% of Afghanistan’s GDP, which is $900 per head of the population in a country where the average yearly income is $450.

No wonder the Karzai government has said Afghanistan will need at least $10 billion in foreign aid annually to survive economically when the occupying armies have left. This would be far in excess of the $3 billion a year that the US gives to Israel, recipient of one fifth of America’s total foreign aid budget.

The picture painted by Lieutenant General James Bucknall of an enemy ever closer to defeat and a war with some kind of victory in sight is plainly an Alice in Wonderland concoction.

The war in Afghanistan has lasted longer than the two 20th century world wars combined and is the longest in US history. Once you are resolved to delay indefinitely an admission that it has been an utter catastrophe for both the warmongers and their victims, refusing to look reality in the face becomes an imperative.

Source: http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php/afghanistan-and-pakistan/976-oh-what-a-lovely-war-in-afghanistan