Afghan investigators inspect the body of an insurgent killed during Tuesday's attack in Kabul / Photo by Shah Marai / AFP / Getty Images
GRAPHIC CONTENT
Afghan investigators inspect the dead body of an insurgent in Kabul on September 14, 2011, inside the building where Taliban fighters attacked the most heavily protected part of Kabul the day before. A coordinated Taliban assault on the Afghan capital was quelled on September 14, after raging for 19 hours in a hail of rockets, grenades and suicide blasts that left 14 dead and six foreign troops wounded. Afghan and foreign troops battled the insurgents who targeted the US embassy and NATO headquarters, sowing fear and confusion and raising fresh questions over the government's ability to secure the country even after a ten-year war. The standoff ended when troops finally killed the two last insurgents who had held out overnight in a high-rise building under construction just a few hundred metres from the heavily guarded US embassy. AFP PHOTO/SHAH Marai (Photo credit should read SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images)
Tony Cordesman, the resident military èminence grise at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, starts out riffing more optimistically than ex-DIA analyst John McCreary on what the Kabul attack means for Afghanistan. But then he details a daunting laundry list of things going wrong that must be reversed — soon — if progress is to be made. Like McCreary, he also pulls out some Vietnam references, which drive folks in the Pentagon up their limestone walls.
Too much of what is coming out of the U.S. government on Afghanistan “increasingly is taking on the character of the daily press follies in Vietnam,” Cordesman says (echoing Battleland compatriot Mark Benjamin’s Tuesday post). “The level of realism that took place in official reporting during the initial period when the new strategy was adopted has been replaced by Vietnam-era business as usual.”
Full take here.
