Hardly a day passes without news from Afghanistan about a setback here or there, and I feel that the war there will end with a setback for the United States and its allies as terrific as the Arab ‘setback' in the 1967 war. Perhaps General Stanly McChrystal's resignation, or dismissal, in fact, will divert attention for a short period of time away from the realities of the progress in the war. However, the truth cannot be hidden for long, namely, that America has lost the war twice, once with the Bush administration, and another time with the Obama administration. It remains thus for the present administration to admit defeat and leave. But President Obama did not want this war to begin with. However, following his decision to pull U.S troops from Iraq, and end the so-called War on Terror, he tried to avert the accusation that he is a defeatist, and agreed to increase U.S troops in Afghanistan by 30 thousand soldiers, on the condition that the [army] gets the job done, as the generals have promised, and that the withdrawal of U.S troops begins in July 2011. The generals lost the war, and General McChrystal's interview in the Rolling Stones cannot be separated from this truth. He tried to hold the civilian leadership responsible for the defeat, and criticized the administration beginning with the President, but with emphasis on Vice President Joe Biden, the U.S Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, the U.S Ambassador in Kabul Karl Eikenberry, and even the retired general James Jones, the National Security Adviser. However, the sharpest criticism in the interview published by the magazine was the account given by its author Michael Hastings of McChrystal and his aides. He said that the commander of the coalition troops in Afghanistan is “always open to new ways of killing”. He also said that “the general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs”. But the civilian leadership is not much better. The Vice President is famous for talking too much and making too many gaffes. Holbrooke is among the remnants of the previous two administrations, and he champions policies that are not in line with those of the present administration. As for Eikenberry, he had sent a secret report in which he complained about the relationship between McChrystal and President Hamid Karzai, whom the ambassador accused of corruption. President Obama himself considers Karzai to be corrupt and unfit to rule, while Karzai believes that the Americans and their allies will not win the war, and for this reason, he has opened channels with the Taliban in Kandahar. Kandahar is in fact Karzai's home region, where his half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai resides. The latter is also accused of corruption and of having ties to the drug trade along with others in the Karzai family. Perhaps the fact of the matter is that the opinion of each individual mentioned above about the others is correct with known results: Afghanistan is at the bottom of the Worldwide Corruption Perception Index, and the only successful trade there is the drug trade. The number of the United States' casualties there has significantly exceeded one thousand, while the number of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan exceeded 300 several days ago. In spite of this, the battles ended negatively. For instance, the Marja offensive was a repeat of what happened in Helmand before: In the beginning, there were some results, but the Taliban soon retook control of the region, executing its opponents in broad daylight. As for the promised offensive on Kandahar, it has been postponed again, and it recently turned out that the U.S army has been paying tens of millions of dollars to local warlords to protect its convoys. If McChrystal did not make a mistake, as he said afterwards in the interview, there is another explanation: the situation on the ground, which I briefly outlined above, makes it inevitable for the U.S military presence in Afghanistan to continue, and to increase if the allies insist on achieving military victory. This means that the commander of the [U.S] troops in Afghanistan wanted to put the administration on the defensive in order to negotiate over the next round of the war. If the above explanation is true, then the general has blundered twice. First because he digressed, and forgot that the civilians have precedence over the military in the U.S chain of command (for instance, the president is also known as the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces). And second, because even if the administration shares the general's opinion, it cannot continue the war indefinitely. This is because the United States is practically bankrupt, and the most important cause of the U.S financial crisis and subsequently the global financial crisis was the spending on the wars of the Bush administration. All the figures related to U.S military spending are astronomical, and if this continues, another disaster will beleaguer the country, and I shall tackle this issue in an upcoming article in this column. [email protected]
