A problem with criticism of the Afghanistan War:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of legitimate criticisms to make of the US intervention in Afghanistan. Some targets of legitimiate criticism are such things like use of UAVs that end up missing targets and killing innocent people, things like eschewing an offer to co-operate with the Islamic Republic of Iran on an issue (which in hindsight takes on an uglier edge than it did at the time) and to a very real extent bailing out of this war to go fight Iraq a second time. Another reality is that he's risking either war or much greater involvement of Pakistan, and if we go to war with Pakistan it magnifies every disastrous consequence of a war with Iran sixfold or more.

One area that I neither understand nor consider legitimate is to attack the current President over how he's handling things like the (complete lack of leadership on the part of) the government run by Hamid Karzai. Afghanistan's been in one or another war since Leonid Brezhnev approved the Soviet Armed Forces' invasion of it. This was a long and bloody conflict, and once the Soviets withdrew there was a civil war that the Taliban proved the most formidable faction in until we came in. Either way, this will be in December 30 years of war in Afghanistan.

Thirty years of war in Germany were sufficient to level the place and critically weaken it. Germany didn't recover for a matter of centuries. 27 years of war in what is now the People's Republic of China arguably contributed a great deal to why the PRC is what is today. Long periods of war tend to malform societies affected by them, and they tend also to encourage corruption, graft, and to weaken over time desire to participate in or to even bother with the infrastructure of society. Afghanistan's already seen the results of one superpower fighting in it, and in October the USA will have spent eight years there. And if we still have significant number of troops there in October 2011 then we will have been at war there as long as the Soviets were.

President Obama is an average leader. He's capable of more than even his supporters sometimes profess that he is, but he's also capable of seeing through at least enough of a military victory to suppress the Taliban. President Obama has inherited a crisis 30 years in the making, and IMHO, while as noted there are many legitimate criticisms of his war effort there to make, I feel that the President should be given some leg room to fight the war as he wishes, by both his supporters and his critics, to shape up what's not working and to improve what is. Because to expect an average leader to improve on a legacy that started with Premier Brezhnev is frankly to expect him to work miracles. The President is just a man, and he does make mistakes.

I suppose if I were to sum this up in a sentence or two it would be that Afghanistan's been in chaos for 30 years. President Obama as an average leader has more promise to work through the legacy of 30 years of war than his predecessors. Yet it is not fair to blame him for all the mistakes dating back to President Carter and the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev.

Comments

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

I suppose you think if someone had killed Hitler in his artist phase we could have avoided WWII, too.

The 'US military equipment' you might have a point on, that was totally us, but a handful of obsolete Stingers aren't exactly turning the tide in the Afghan occupation. The Muhajadeen would have experience in fighting well-armed mechanized armies no matter what, because there was a well-armed mechanized army on their front door, and had the Soviet army not pulled out in 1988, they'd have done so a year or two later as their whole country disintegrated, leaving the exact same power vacuum and destroyed infrastructure. Had we worked to make Afghanistan a Soviet client state rather than a local threat to Soviet security and forestalled the invasion entire, as we can see in all the other former Soviet client states, they wouldn't have had a whole lot softer fall and would have been just as ripe for Islamic warlord theocracy in a marginally less squalid hellpit. Maybe the commies wouldn't have left quite so many rusty T55s around for the warlords to play with had they been capable of an orderly withdrawal, though given what happened in most of the former WP I doubt it, maybe there'd be more schools left standing in Kandahar for the warlords to blow up instead of the Russians.

Most of the real powers in al Qaeda weren't purely Afghanistan-based anyway, like Osama himself they were adventurers who shopped around all the theaters of conflict between the Arab world and everybody else in the seventies and eighties, learning to fight Americans, Soviets, Israelis, Europeans, and each other alike. Basically we're talking about a scenario where the exact same timeline of Afghan history with cosmetically different players who would have done all the same things, at most a year or two later than they actually did. You have to dial back pretty much the entire Cold War and our support of Israel, too, to find a point where something we did directly lead to the state of Afghanistan.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do. Because WWII was impossible without someone like Hitler. A German revanchist war over Danzig would have been likely, and the Weimar Republic was re-arming with the aid of the Soviet Union anyway. But it took a man of Hitler's charisma to make the nightmare that was WWII feasible.

I would note that I don't believe that the Carter Administration was capable of leading the USSR by the nose *into* Afghanistan but I certainly believe that several US Administrations chose to prolong the war so as to weaken our rival imperialistic power. And that's my point-the Soviet and US militaries were very close in their military organization and firepower, and at the time of the Soviet invasion the Soviet military was actually at its peak of power and strength next to the US one.

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

Someone like Hitler. There were seventy million people in prewar Germany. Finding another Hitler would not have been difficult. Hell, there was a running rivalry among several viable leaders within the Nazi party, before Hitler killed all his competition. It's not like Röhm or Papen had radically different policies or were incapable leaders. And the Nazi party wasn't even the only crazy fascist movement in the game, similar groups were popping up everywhere at the time. Hitler came to power because Germany really wanted what he was selling, he filled a niche. Osama fills a niche, and to get where he is he had to scramble to the top amongst suitably similar opposition much the same way. They might have controlled the specific course of events, how much the Jews were persecuted vs. how much the homosexuals or which specific American seats of power got blown up, but the broad strokes depended on much bigger and less easily controlled historical forces. To undo WWII, you have to undo Versailles; Islamic fundamentalist uprising, the Cold War. How would a shorter Soviet invasion, culminating in an extended period under xenophobic Soviet rule, have made a different Afghanistan? Like I mentioned elsewhere, they're far from the only country all fucked up and run by bad dudes because of imperialist ventures.

[mrsilence.livejournal.com]

Interesting point about the beginnings of all this:

http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

It's a bit of a nutter site, but it contains a direct transcript with an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur by Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski confessing (crowing actually) that he and Carter deliberately initiated covert action in Afghanistan at least 6 months before the invasion, and that they knew it would increase the likelihood of a Soviet invasion, and were very pleased when the invasion did occur. He's careful in that he doesn't claim direct responsibility, but he obviously knew that he was tipping the scales and that without that pressure, the invasion may well have not occurred.

So basically he admits that Soviet claims of the invasion being provoked (at least in part) by secret U.S. aid to militant groups was true.