- US President Barack Obama gestures as he speaks during a press conference on November 20, 2010 in Lisbon, as part of a NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) Summit of Heads of States and Government held on 19-20 November 2010. (Photo by PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU/AFP/Getty Images)
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By : Ed Koch ( Jpost )
November 24, 2010 (KATAKAMI / Jpost) --- President Barack Obama met with his NATO counterparts in Lisbon last week. According to the November 21 New York Times, they agreed “to the goal of a phased transfer of security responsibility to the Afghan government by the end of 2014, but NATO officials acknowledged that allied forces would remain in Afghanistan at least in a support role well beyond that date.”
Further, if the Afghan army isn’t ready by the end of 2014 to “manage its own security, 2014 was not a hard and fast deadline for the end of combat operations.” Why would anyone think that Afghan forces will ever be combat ready and able to defend their own country against the Taliban? Surely it is by now an unsolvable mystery why the Afghan military forces, trained for 9 years by US and NATO troops, is currently unable to defend their country while the Taliban is capable of major successful strikes in Kabul, the capital, and apparently governs large parts of the country either by night when US army patrols return to their bases, or 24 hours a day when US forces don’t dare enter the neighborhood.
Further, if the Afghan army isn’t ready by the end of 2014 to “manage its own security, 2014 was not a hard and fast deadline for the end of combat operations.” Why would anyone think that Afghan forces will ever be combat ready and able to defend their own country against the Taliban? Surely it is by now an unsolvable mystery why the Afghan military forces, trained for 9 years by US and NATO troops, is currently unable to defend their country while the Taliban is capable of major successful strikes in Kabul, the capital, and apparently governs large parts of the country either by night when US army patrols return to their bases, or 24 hours a day when US forces don’t dare enter the neighborhood.
We know that the Taliban is supplied with substantial funding from the local drug trade. We know that drug trade is dominated by the Karzai family, and that President Karzai’s own brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is acknowledged to be a drug kingpin. We know that Afghanistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. We know that Iran regularly sends millions of dollars to President Karzai for his personal use. We know all of these things because The New York Times reporters day after day, week after week, year after year, have reported how the Karzai government has cooperated with the Taliban forces seeking to bring them into the Afghan government. Bizarrely, the US government has cooperated with those efforts, while our soldiers die in the killing fields of Afghanistan.
In June of this year, the Wall Street Journal reported:
In June of this year, the Wall Street Journal reported:
“More than $3 billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years, a sum so large that US investigators believe top Afghan officials and their associates are sending billions of diverted US aid and logistics dollars and drug money to financial safe havens abroad. The cash -- packed into suitcases, piled onto pallets and loaded into airplanes -- is declared and legal to move.
But US and Afghan officials say they are targeting the flows in major anticorruption and drug trafficking investigations because of their size relative to Afghanistan's small economy and the murkiness of their origins. Officials believe some of the cash, if not most, is siphoned from Western aid projects and US, European and NATO contracts to provide security, supplies and reconstruction work for coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization spent about $14 billion here last year alone. Profits reaped from the opium trade are also a part of the money flow, as is cash earned by the Taliban from drugs and extortion, officials say. The amount declared as it leaves the airport is vast in a nation where the gross domestic product last year totaled $13.5 billion. More declared cash flies out of Kabul each year than the Afghan government collects in tax and customs revenue nationwide. ‘It's not like they grow money on trees here,’ said a US official investigating corruption and Taliban financing. ‘A lot of this looks like our tax dollars being stolen. And opium, of course.’”
We also know that President Karzai endangers American and other NATO troops (we have about 100,000 troops in Afghanistan while the rest of NATO has 40,000) by demanding according to The Times, “that the NATO led coalition stop carrying out night raids and limit airstrikes, which military commanders consider among their most effective tools but which have caused civilian casualties."
Nevertheless, despite his protestations, our young men and women continue to die to protect a corrupt government and country where many people hate us.
The Times reported on November 21 that “At a closed door meeting here, General David H. Petraeus, the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, set out his strategy for the transition, confirming that the kind of operations Mr. Karzai has criticized, including drone missile strikes and nighttime raids would continue aggressively.”
If the Afghan government persists in denouncing and objecting to our tactics, I have no doubt that they, not we, will prevail. Our being in Afghanistan and the way we conduct ourselves is subject to his approval. We have said many times that we will leave Afghanistan whenever and if ever the Afghan government demands we do. Why should they ever demand we leave? We are their piñata. The US obviously doesn’t want to leave. To date, we have spend over $300 billion on the Afghan war and we have suffered 1,273 US troop deaths. NATO has suffered 822 troop deaths. We have suffered over 7,000 combat injuries. Those injuries are the worst kind, coming primarily from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) roadside bombs, causing many amputations and brain injuries.
What do we have to show at this point for the bloodbath we have suffered and the billions we have expended? We are hindered in defending ourselves by a corrupt Afghan government with a particularly corrupt Afghan President playing a double game with our sworn enemy, Iran. The latter sees Afghanistan as a satellite tribal area to be bought not only with Iranian bribes, but also with religious and ethnic ties.
Afghans know that Iran will be there forever, while the US will ultimately leave if not tomorrow, and not in 2014, sometime in the future when ultimately a now apparently lethargic American public finally wakes up and demands we leave. We would have left long ago were we still defended by a draft army instead of a volunteer army.
Surely, the combination of spilled blood with the expenditure of billions of dollars on the war in Afghanistan, when we are now contemplating reductions in Social Security benefits and educational funds for teaching our children, will cause the American public to rise up in wrath and say “No,” with a mighty roar. The question of remaining in Afghanistan, while not even an issue in the 2010 election, will become one in the presidential election of 2012.
Why this ongoing stupid war which cannot be won on the ground because there is nothing worth winning has not received the attention that it deserves from the American public is a conundrum. Nevertheless, the American public, even if at times it acts too slowly, will ultimately act. Getting out of Afghanistan now, not in 2014 or thereafter, is the right thing to do. (*)
