Battleland

War Fatigue

  • Share
  • Read Later
ISAF

General John Allen, left, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker

The latest New York Times-CBS poll confirms what has become increasingly clear: nearly seven of 10 Americans want out of Afghanistan.

This should come as no surprise.

What comes as a surprise is the FDA-approved sugar coating that persists:

Ryan Crocker, the able U.S. ambassador to Kabul, “warns against war fatigue in Afghanistan,” according to the Christian Science Monitor. “If we decide we’re tired…they’ll be back,” he says of Al Qaeda. “We know what they did once. They haven’t gotten any kinder or gentler in the decade.”

There’s a fundamental disconnect for you: 10 years of war has turned al Qaeda into basement mold? We’ve been told for years that our drone strikes, special operators, and attacks in a half-dozen countries have turned al Qaeda into a rusty husk of what it was on 9/11. Americans increasingly see beyond the cant: they know we have few, if any, combat boots on the ground in Pakistan, in Yemen, in Somalia, in Iran, in North Korea. What makes Afghanistan so exceptional?

Marine General John Allen explained Monday how the Afghan government is scrubbing pro-Taliban recruits out of its largely U.S.-funded forces. Such turncoats increasingly are turning their guns — and vests — on Americans and other allies there ostensibly to help (nearly 25% of allies casualties so far this year are from such “green-on-blue” – Afghan-on-allied – attacks).

“The Afghans themselves, who also suffer from what is euphemistically called green-on-green, they have taken a lot of steps themselves with an eight-step vetting process,” Allen said. “They’ve worked very closely within the National Directorate of Security to place counterintelligence operatives inside their schools, inside their recruiting centers and inside their ranks, the idea being to spot and assess the potential emergence of an individual who could be an extremist or in fact a Taliban infiltrator.”

But that, of course, misses the point. Former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst John McCreary spells it out in his latest NightWatch blog post:

The US Marine General has put the best face on a deteriorating situation, but he and his command have no way to detect a Taliban infiltrator…it is folly to find some comfort that a Pashtun shooter might have been a Taliban infiltrator in a uniform, rather than a Pashtun nationalist in a uniform who tired of soldiering or Western disrespect for the Quran…NATO is no more capable of detecting an infiltrator than were the Soviets or the British before them. Neither side can trust the other. Afghans already are responsible for their own security, only the NATO command fails to grasp that fact.

The bottom line is becoming increasingly clear: the U.S. public never signed up for a decade-long war in Afghanistan. That’s the fault of the Bush Administration, which decided to try to rebuild a war-wracked country instead of simply ousting the Taliban after 9/11, and the Obama Administration, which doubled-down as a way of proving its martial bona fides. But it’s also the fault of the Congress, which resolutely refuses to declare war.

The American hubris, in hindsight, is blinding. American generals like Allen, and diplomats like Crocker, are the muscle and brains of U.S. foreign policy. It’s sad to watch them twitch, reflexively, long after public support for the effort they’re resolutely championing has evaporated.