Down the AfPak Rabbit Hole

[tekisui]

Source: Foreign Policy

The village of Marjah is a meaningless strategic backwater. So why are the Pentagon and the press telling us the battle there was a huge victory?

(snip)

Two months ago, the collection of mud-brick hovels known as Marjah might have been mistaken for a flyspeck on maps of Afghanistan. Today the media has nearly doubled its population from less than 50,000 to 80,000 -- the entire population of Nad Ali district, of which Nad Ali is the largest town, is approximately 99,000 -- and portrays the offensive there as the equivalent of the Normandy invasion, and the beginning of the end for the Taliban. In fact, however, the entire district of Nad Ali, which contains Marjah, represents about 2 percent of Regional Command (RC) South, the U.S. military's operational area that encompasses Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul, Nimruz, and Daikundi provinces. RC South by itself is larger than all of South Vietnam, and the Taliban controls virtually all of it. This appears to have occurred to no one in the media.

Nor have any noted that taking this nearly worthless postage stamp of real estate has tied down about half of all the real combat power and aviation assets of the international coalition in Afghanistan for a quarter of a year. The possibility that wasting massive amounts of U.S. and British blood, treasure, and time just to establish an Afghan Potemkin village with a "government in a box" might be exactly what the Taliban wants the coalition to do has apparently not occurred to either the press or to the generals who designed this operation.

In reality, this battle -- the largest in Afghanistan since 2001 -- is essentially a giant public affairs exercise, designed to shore up dwindling domestic support for the war by creating an illusion of progress. In reporting it, the media has gulped down the whole bottle of "drink me" and shrunk to journalistic insignificance. In South Vietnam, an operational area smaller than RC South, the United States and its allies had over 2 million men under arms, including more than half a million Americans, the million-man Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), 75,000 coalition troops, the Vietnamese Regional Forces and Popular Forces (known as "Ruff-Puffs"), the South Vietnamese police, the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG) and other militias -- and lost.

Yet the media is breathlessly regurgitating Pentagon pronouncements that we have "turned the corner" and "reversed the momentum" in Afghanistan with fewer than 45,000 men under arms in all of RC South (including the Afghan army and police) by fighting for a month to secure a single hamlet. Last year this would have been déjà vu of the "five o'clock follies" of the Vietnam War. Now it feels more like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. "How can we have more success," Alice might ask, "when we haven't had any yet?"

So here we are in the AfPak Wonderland, complete with a Mad Hatter (the clueless and complacent media), Tweedledee and Tweedledum (the military, endlessly repeating itself and history), the White Rabbit (the State Department, scurrying to meetings and utterly irrelevant), the stoned Caterpillar (the CIA, obtuse, arrogant, and asking the wrong questions), the Dormouse (U.S. Embassy Kabul, who wakes up once in a while only to have his head stuffed in a teapot), the Cheshire Cat (President Obama, fading in and out of the picture, eloquent but puzzling), the Pack of Cards army (the Afghan National Army, self-explanatory), and their commander, the inane Queen of Hearts (Afghan President Hamid Karzai). (In Alice in Wonderland, however, the Dormouse is "suppressed" by the Queen of Hearts, not the White Rabbit or the Cheshire Cat, so the analogy is not quite perfect.)

full article at link: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/01/down_the_afpak_rabbit_hole

[unhappycamper]

1. Afghanistan is so Vietnam.

All we need are the Five O'Clock Follies.

But then again we get the 24/7 Follies.

[ananda]

2. Our media is folly personified.

So is war.

[asdjrocky]

3. But what about the children?

The children of the military contractors, and Congress critters, and Presidents and the MIC?

Have you even thought about the children? How will these children ever get into Ivy League schools so they can take their proper place among the ruling class if we don't keep the war machine going so we can keep the profits of their war mongering parents up, up, up?

[robdogbucky]

4. Down the Rabbit Hole Part Deaux

Tekesui: Another thread on this excellent piece was posted yesterday afternoon and it is now on page 6 and falling fast. This thread appears to be following that one, in that by this afternoon it will be gone from memory.

Why don't DUers care more about this situation? I for one love to read some balance to the propaganda surge currently in operation to promote this latest adventure. These guys are real experts with real experience. It also contains actual hard news not found anywhere else, like the observations of the Queen of Hearts Karzai losing it these last few months and the propaganda surge attendant to it actually masks what could now be a very public unraveling of his head and his regime. Yet our population looks at the corrupt elections that took place there and Karzai's moves to quash any investigations, etc., as if it is to be expected and we continue with unqualified support of that puppet.

Do DUers prefer it when self-proclaimed war historians compare war to a dental visit and respond in droves to that bit of insanity? I guess emotions are a larger part of political discourse than other factors then. Or, it is just a "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing," type of situation.

Is that what it takes for something to garner attention here? Do we have to be sensational, ridiculous, dramatic?

Is that why mass demonstrations were so effective in the 60s and early 70s? Something has to be so in the face of the public that they cannot avoid it, cannot avoid discussing it, cannot avoid taking emotionally charged positions on the issue before folks get riled up? Something that stops traffic, creates inconvenience that can't be avoided thus getting discussed around the water cooler.

Or are DUers all in concert and agreement with the opposing view presented in this article? So much so that they are jaded and do not feel the need to acknowledge what is consensus here anyway?

I am wondering about these things and if DU is such a reliable place to find reason and sanity any more.



Just my dos centavos


robdogbucky

[tekisui]

5. The wars receive little attention now that they are

run by a Democrat. What used to be one of the most important issues at DU, war, sinks fast. If liberals who pay attention can't bring themselves to care about endless war, how could it be expected that the average American would.

I really don't know how to get people to care about killing and dying for endless and unnecessary wars.