{"id":11775,"date":"2017-05-17T15:44:56","date_gmt":"2017-05-17T10:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/jwt2015\/?p=11775"},"modified":"2017-06-20T14:36:43","modified_gmt":"2017-06-20T09:36:43","slug":"the-u-s-will-never-win-the-war-in-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/studykit\/currentaffairs\/daily-articles\/the-u-s-will-never-win-the-war-in-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"The U.S. will never win the war in Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

By: Katrina vanden Heuvel<\/strong><\/p>\n

President Trump hasn\u2019t decided whether to sign off on his generals\u2019 request for more troops for Afghanistan. Ironically, this would be one instance in which Trump \u2014 and the country \u2014 would benefit from repudiating President Barack Obama\u2019s example. Instead of yet another troop surge in America\u2019s longest war, now heading toward its 16thbirthday, Trump should adopt the advice that then-Sen. George Aiken (R-Vt.) offered about Vietnam in 1966: \u201cDeclare victory and get out.\u201d<\/p>\n

General John W. Nicholson testified that he wants an additional 5,000 soldiers to break the \u201cstalemate\u201d in Afghanistan. In the first months of his presidency, Obama signed off on a surge that ended with 100,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. His generals also promised to break the stalemate. Today, the Taliban controls more of the country than it has since 2001. A surge of 5,000 or even 10,000 troops won\u2019t defeat the Taliban. It is simply a recipe for more war without end and without victory.<\/p>\n

Why are we still there? We went into Afghanistan after 9\/11 to get Osama bin Laden and to punish the Taliban for harboring al-Qaeda. Now bin Laden is dead; al-Qaeda is dispersed; the Taliban has been battered. Afghan civilians have been killed, wounded or displaced in increasing numbers. The United Nations reports that there were more than 11,000 war-related civilian casualties last year, and 660,000 Afghans were displaced, adding to the country\u2019s massive refugee crisis.<\/p>\n

The war has now cost us over $1 trillion, making it the second-costliest U.S. war, after World War II. In fiscal year 2017, the war will cost about $50 billion, nearly a billion every week. We\u2019ve lost over 2,350 soldiers, with 20,000 more suffering injuries. And as Trevor Timm of the Guardian noted, in a couple of years, there will be soldiers fighting in Afghanistan that weren\u2019t even born at the time of 9\/11.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re no longer fighting to defeat an enemy; we\u2019re engaged in \u201cnation-building.\u201d Good luck with that. Afghanistan is a landlocked country, with a brutal combination of severe mountains and harsh deserts. It remains one of the poorest nations in the world, despite more than $117 billion in U.S. development appropriations since 2002. Its leading industry is illegal opium production, producing an estimate 70 to 80 percent of the world\u2019s supply. Despite the aid and the opium profits, Afghanistan is still near the bottom of multiple categories in the United Nations\u2019 Human Development Index, ranging from infant mortality to life expectancy, per capita income and more.<\/p>\n

The United States is pouring money into a corrupt sewer. The World Justice Project\u2019s 2016 Rule of Law Index ranked Afghanistan 111 of 113 countries assessed. Despite U.S. arms, aid and training, its divided and demoralized security forces can\u2019t stand up to the Taliban.<\/p>\n

We are asking our military to build a nation on the other side of the world, dispatching soldiers who don\u2019t know the language, the culture, the religion, the ethnic and sectarian divisions or the history. The one thing that may unify Afghanistan\u2019s tribes is their pride in their independence. Afghanistan is known as the \u201cgraveyard of empires.\u201d Its people routed the British forces repeatedly from 1839 to 1919 when Britain ruled the world. Its mujahideen defeated the Soviet Union\u2019s invasion in the 1980s. The United States, with the most powerful military in the world, may avoid defeat for as long as it wants to waste lives and resources, but it will not win.<\/p>\n

The military has no strategy for victory, merely a plan to avoid defeat. After 15 years, no president wants to accept defeat. Yet a feature of Trump\u2019s campaign was his scorn for the United States wasting $6 trillion in Middle Eastern wars we \u201cdon\u2019t win.\u201d He ought to read his 2013 tweet: \u201cWe should leave Afghanistan immediately. No more wasted lives. If we have to go back in, we go in hard & quick. Rebuild the US first.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama let the generals \u2014 and his arrogant national security advisers \u2014 convince him that a surge of troops could deliver victory in what he considered the \u201cgood war.\u201d After eight years, he was more sober and far wiser: \u201cAfghanistan was one of the poorest countries in the world with the lowest literacy rates in the world before we got there,\u201d he said last year, \u201cIt continues to be.\u201d The country \u201cwas riven with all kinds of ethnic and tribal divisions before we got there. It\u2019s still there.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the military dropped the \u201cmother of all bombs\u201d on Afghanistan last month, Trump boasted , \u201cWe have the greatest military in the world,\u201d and said, \u201cWe have given them total authorization, and that\u2019s what they\u2019re doing.\u201d But there is no reason to accept the military\u2019s advice on Afghanistan, given its record in the Middle East. As Andrew Bacevich has detailed, its invasion of Iraq has been the greatest debacle since Vietnam, leading to a continued quagmire and eventually to creation of the Islamic State. Its \u201chumanitarian intervention\u201d in Libya produced a failed state, scarred by violence, that provides a new breeding ground for the Islamic State. The intervention in Syria has succeeded only in contributing to the humanitarian catastrophe there.<\/p>\n

Trump should fulfill his campaign rhetoric and pull the plug. Praise the troops and bring them home. Use the money and lives saved to rebuild America. Redirect a tiny fraction of the United States\u2019 bloated military costs fighting in Afghanistan to mitigating the refugee crisis and addressing that country\u2019s needs. This is one policy area where deciding not to follow in Obama\u2019s footsteps would actually help Trump\u2019s flagging popularity.<\/p>\n

Source: https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By: Katrina vanden Heuvel President Trump hasn\u2019t decided whether to sign off on his generals\u2019 request for more troops for Afghanistan. Ironically, this would be one instance in which Trump \u2014 and the country \u2014 would benefit from repudiating President Barack Obama\u2019s example. Instead of yet another troop surge in America\u2019s longest war, now heading …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":149,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5285],"tags":[99,8325,574,257,8438,1226,1208,610,1161,8326,864,203],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11775"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/149"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}