Reply #19: face-saving and attempting to preserve American prestige

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. . . are also credible explanations for the continued attempts to 'fix' what we helped break in Afghanistan.

What I find completely indefensible is the notion that the U.S. beneficence can overshadow the consequences and effect of an offensive U.S. military force actively engaged in attacks on segments of the Afghan population.

It stands to reason that the military is needed to protect the foreign service workers who parcel out the American-generated aid and development resources; and it makes sense that the regime we encouraged into power would need the force of our military to defend their exercise of control and influence from Kabul outward.

What doesn't make sense is expecting the residents of Afghanistan to regard our invading forces as anything more than empire-builders and opportunists just because we come in and sprinkle our beneficence and 'protection' behind the line we draw in the dirt with our advancing forces. The groups who are charged with the task of distributing the assistance have complained loudly about the implications of the aid and assistance appearing to be a mere supplement of the military mission (instead of the reverse that you seem to be arguing here)

As in Marjah, and reportedly next in the Helmand province, the orchestrated invasion and occupation of an insignificant piece of land and the scattering of resisting locals to other parts of the country; and the installation of officials to lord over the residents who remain from the regime we admit is structurally and functionally corrupt is the game behind all of the shifting of troops and rushed deployments of new recruits to the Afghan combat zone; the imposition of an American (Western) style form of government on a primarily tribal society.

Gwynne Dyer, writes (correctly) that the misadventure in Afghanistan is "just another post-imperial guerrilla war . . ." (http://www.southbendtribune.com/article/20100302/Opinion/3020367/-1/googleNews)

. . . The current generation of Western officers are in denial, as if the past half-century didn't happen. They parrot some of the slogans of the era of guerrilla wars, like the need to win the "hearts and minds" of the population, but it's just empty words. The phrase dates from the Vietnam War, but the tactic didn't work there and it isn't working in Afghanistan.

The plan, in this offensive in Helmand province, is to capture the towns (clear and hold), and then saturate the area with Afghan troops and police and win the locals' hearts and minds by providing better security and public services. It might work if all the people involved on both sides were bland, interchangeable characters from The Sims, but they are not.

The people of Helmand province are Pashtuns, and the Taliban are almost exclusively a Pashtun organization. The people who the Western armies are fighting are local men: Few Taliban fighters die more than a day's walk from home. Whereas almost none of the Afghan troops and police who are supposed to win local minds and hearts are Pashtuns.

They are mostly Tajiks from the north who speak Dari, not Pashto. (Very few Pashtuns join the Kabul regime's army and police.) Even if these particular Afghan police are better trained and less prone to steal money, do drugs and rape young men at checkpoints than their colleagues elsewhere, they are unwelcome outsiders in Helmand.

This is just another post-imperial guerrilla war, and it will almost certainly end in the same way as all the others. Thirty years ago, any Western military officer could have told you that, but large organizations often forget their own history . . .

. . . true that. 'Nuff said.