Taliban remains strong ten years on

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Afghanistan in 2011 is far cry from the country that the architects of America's war there had imagined ten years ago. The Taliban movement, which seemed likely to melt away with little resistance in 2001, has survived and now dominates much of rural Afghanistan where insurgents make their presence felt at will.

Since 2009, security incidents - Improvised explosive devices, ambushes, suicide attacks, and assassinations - have frequently numbered more than one thousand per month. A decade after the US-led intervention, the grave humanitarian crisis caused by more than thirty years of war persists.

More than five million Afghan refugees have returned home since the collapse of the Taliban regime. Yet they have confronted life in a country where, despite the influx of tens of billions of dollars in aid, three quarters of the population still lives below or just slightly above the poverty line.

Only one quarter of residents have access to clean water. According to the UN, 60 per cent of Afghan women face physical and psychological violence. Afghanistan ranks second in the world in maternal mortality and third in infant mortality. So far this year, fighting between insurgents and coalition forces has claimed some 1500 civilian lives and swelled the numbers of internally displaced civilians to several hundred thousand.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/20119911945391549.html

[ixion]

1. Afghanistan was called a cakewalk.

Some cakewalk! :sarcasm:

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3. Apparently the "reality based community" still has something important to say. nt

[tularetom]

2. WTF do we hope to accomplish in Afghanistan?

I don't believe I've ever heard a statement of our goals and objectives in the nearly 10 years we've been floundering around over there.

I've heard a lot of platitudes about freedom and helping the people of Afghanistan but not one specific comment that explains why we've wasted thousands of lives and gazillions of dollars there.

At least they had a rationale for attacking Iraq. It was all bullshit of course, but that was their story and they stuck to it.

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4. I believe the essential function of these wars is waste.

To waste the resources and money involved so as to avoid spending them on the public good. At least I have been unable in a lifetime of study to find any other logical explanation. One must assume our leaders are morons or that they understand in some sense what they are doing, and they have been quite consistent about doing it for as long as I have been watching. Investment in the public good is always viewed as something to be minimized, avoided when possible, rather than to be maximized, and the attitude seems to be getting more intransigent as time goes on.