US-Afghan military operations suspended after attacks

[jimmy olsen]

Took them long enough, this should have been done well before it got to this point.

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/17/13923373-us-afghan-military-operations-suspended-after-attacks?lite

US-Afghan military operations suspended after attacks

By Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News chief Pentagon correspondent

Most joint U.S.-Afghan military operations have been suspended following what authorities believe was an insider attack Sunday that left four American solders dead, officials told NBC News.

"We're to the point now where we can't trust these people," a senior military official said. So far this year, 51 NATO troops have been killed in these so-called blue-on-green attacks. Sunday's attack came a day after two British soldiers were shot dead by an Afghan policeman, Reuters reported.

"It's had a major impact on our ability to conduct combat operations with them, and we're going to have to back off to a certain degree," the official said.

The suspensions of the joint operations are indefinite – according to one official, they "could last three days or three months."

The escalating violence — including a NATO airstrike that killed eight Afghan women and girls gathering firewood — is straining the military partnership between Kabul and NATO as the U.S. begins to withdraw thousands of troops sent three years ago to route the Taliban from southern strongholds.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the airstrike; the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force later extended its regrets over those deaths.

The U.S. training mission and joint combat patrols are "critical" to the U.S. plan to withdraw all combat forces by as early as the middle of next year and almost all U.S. military from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

In May, President Barack Obama announced that he and Karzai signed an agreement that would see the removal of 23,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the summer's end.

"As our coalition agreed, by the end of 2014 the Afghans will be fully responsible for the security of their country," Obama said at the time. But the president was clear that the U.S. would stay engaged into the future.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

[Hansmeister]

I'm still working with the ANA, but I'm part of a small group. Now I'm trying to teach the ANA leadership how to persuade their own Soldiers not to shoot us.

I only got 6 more weeks of this.

[Tamas]

I am starting to think that Afghanistan will make Iraq look like a spectacular success.

[Phillip V]

Obama needs to triple down and order another Surge in Afghanistan.

[OttoVonBismarck]

We simply cannot save Afghanistan from itself. Our primary reason for going in there was the Taliban controlled like 90% of the country and was openly harboring Al-Qaeda. I don't particularly care who controls the country when we leave, but there is really no reason we need a large ground presence there to stop international terrorist camps from hanging out in the region. We simply heavily bomb any of the faction that harbors international terrorism and give money to those that don't. Basic carrot-and-stick, I wouldn't even be surprised if the Taliban would opt to receive American money in exchange for kicking out objectionable terrorist groups.

The reality is Afghanistan, once we leave, will probably be a lawless crazy region for a generation if not more. The Taliban sucks but we didn't go into Afghanistan because the Taliban are assholes, we went in because they were giving safe haven to a terrorist group that was international in scope. The Taliban, while objectionable, didn't appear to be by and large a security threat to the United States. They were primarily motivated with keeping power in Afghanistan. I don't see any reason we can't abandon Afghanistan's problems without still keeping a vigilant eye on the region in case Al-Qaeda type groups start to have an undesirably large presence.

[CountDeMoney]

Everybody in the Afghan national police and the army are going to melt away the moment we disappear, taking their weapons and training with them back to their little tribal conflicts, making it look just like it was in 2001, in 1991, in 1981, 1881, 1651 and so on.

In the end, we'll be reduced to defending the Kabul government in Kabul proper and read-reacting to Al Qaeda-related issues.  The 95% of the rest of Afghanistan will go back to business, Afghanistan-style.

[Viking]

I'm still working with the ANA, but I'm part of a small group. Now I'm trying to teach the ANA leadership how to persuade their own Soldiers not to shoot us.

I only got 6 more weeks of this.

sigh... I knew it... it just had to be you.

[Hansmeister]

I am starting to think that Afghanistan will make Iraq look like a spectacular success.

Which is the argument I made back in 2007 here when people were saying that we should focus on "the good war" in Afghanistan instead of Iraq.  We had a chance to make Iraq work (unfortunately that was pissed away by Obama when he decided to pull out), but Afghanistan is a stretch.  We could have done a lot better in Afghanistan, but we fucked it up every chance we got.  Our military establishment is extremely inept when it comes to counterinsurgency.  I was horrified by what I found when I arrived in country.  Well, I'm going to write a book and give some think-tank speeches after I return.

[Syt]

Well, I'm going to write a book and give some think-tank speeches after I return.

Will you post excerpts on your blog?

[Viking]

1 - we are never going to succeed if we want to succeed more than the afghans. The only thing we really can do is to make Afghanistan, as the Eisenhower administration might have put it, "Safe for democracy". The Afghans have to build it themselves.

2 - we are never going to succeed if we can be attacked and insulted with impunity by both our friends and enemies. We need to start screwing over people and groups that oppose our objectives, sabotage our objectives and try to harm our people.

To put it simply, we will only succeed if the people of Afghanistan respect us and want to succeed. Our ultimate threat against our supposed friends has to be unilateral withdrawal.

[Hansmeister]

We simply cannot save Afghanistan from itself. Our primary reason for going in there was the Taliban controlled like 90% of the country and was openly harboring Al-Qaeda. I don't particularly care who controls the country when we leave, but there is really no reason we need a large ground presence there to stop international terrorist camps from hanging out in the region. We simply heavily bomb any of the faction that harbors international terrorism and give money to those that don't. Basic carrot-and-stick, I wouldn't even be surprised if the Taliban would opt to receive American money in exchange for kicking out objectionable terrorist groups.

The reality is Afghanistan, once we leave, will probably be a lawless crazy region for a generation if not more. The Taliban sucks but we didn't go into Afghanistan because the Taliban are assholes, we went in because they were giving safe haven to a terrorist group that was international in scope. The Taliban, while objectionable, didn't appear to be by and large a security threat to the United States. They were primarily motivated with keeping power in Afghanistan. I don't see any reason we can't abandon Afghanistan's problems without still keeping a vigilant eye on the region in case Al-Qaeda type groups start to have an undesirably large presence.

The key problem is that the Afghanistan Constitution is basically a revised version of the Constitution the King wrote, whose main flaw is that all power is centralized in the person of the President.  Local government is appointed by the President, not elected.  Given the Afghan proclivity to resist central authority it has no chance of working.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I didn't know much/anything about the Afghan constitution, but I really feel we screwed the pooch in general with our nation building in a constitutional sense. To me Iraq's constitution should have adopted more of an American flavor, and I think Iraq is a good example of the kind of country that would benefit from an American style arrangement.

[Darth Wagtaros]

We simply cannot save Afghanistan from itself. Our primary reason for going in there was the Taliban controlled like 90% of the country and was openly harboring Al-Qaeda. I don't particularly care who controls the country when we leave, but there is really no reason we need a large ground presence there to stop international terrorist camps from hanging out in the region. We simply heavily bomb any of the faction that harbors international terrorism and give money to those that don't. Basic carrot-and-stick, I wouldn't even be surprised if the Taliban would opt to receive American money in exchange for kicking out objectionable terrorist groups.

The reality is Afghanistan, once we leave, will probably be a lawless crazy region for a generation if not more. The Taliban sucks but we didn't go into Afghanistan because the Taliban are assholes, we went in because they were giving safe haven to a terrorist group that was international in scope. The Taliban, while objectionable, didn't appear to be by and large a security threat to the United States. They were primarily motivated with keeping power in Afghanistan. I don't see any reason we can't abandon Afghanistan's problems without still keeping a vigilant eye on the region in case Al-Qaeda type groups start to have an undesirably large presence.

The key problem is that the Afghanistan Constitution is basically a revised version of the Constitution the King wrote, whose main flaw is that all power is centralized in the person of the President.  Local government is appointed by the President, not elected.  Given the Afghan proclivity to resist central authority it has no chance of working.

It'd have no chance of working if it was a decentralized federation either.  It's just not a functional kind of place.

[Hansmeister]

We simply cannot save Afghanistan from itself. Our primary reason for going in there was the Taliban controlled like 90% of the country and was openly harboring Al-Qaeda. I don't particularly care who controls the country when we leave, but there is really no reason we need a large ground presence there to stop international terrorist camps from hanging out in the region. We simply heavily bomb any of the faction that harbors international terrorism and give money to those that don't. Basic carrot-and-stick, I wouldn't even be surprised if the Taliban would opt to receive American money in exchange for kicking out objectionable terrorist groups.

The reality is Afghanistan, once we leave, will probably be a lawless crazy region for a generation if not more. The Taliban sucks but we didn't go into Afghanistan because the Taliban are assholes, we went in because they were giving safe haven to a terrorist group that was international in scope. The Taliban, while objectionable, didn't appear to be by and large a security threat to the United States. They were primarily motivated with keeping power in Afghanistan. I don't see any reason we can't abandon Afghanistan's problems without still keeping a vigilant eye on the region in case Al-Qaeda type groups start to have an undesirably large presence.

The key problem is that the Afghanistan Constitution is basically a revised version of the Constitution the King wrote, whose main flaw is that all power is centralized in the person of the President.  Local government is appointed by the President, not elected.  Given the Afghan proclivity to resist central authority it has no chance of working.

It'd have no chance of working if it was a decentralized federation either.  It's just not a functional kind of place.

We'll never know since we have done such a bad job from day 1.  When I first got in country I was shocked to find out how little we had actually done to try to build something there.  It felt as if we had just arrived in country, not like we had been there over a decade.  A lot of armchair strategists will claim with a false sense of knowledge that we were doomed to fail, but the truth is despite all the time, money, and blood that we spent we never really focused on creating anything.  We've made huge strides in tactical and intelligence capabilities, but we have not evolved on nonlethal capabilities at all.

[Darth Wagtaros]

We simply cannot save Afghanistan from itself. Our primary reason for going in there was the Taliban controlled like 90% of the country and was openly harboring Al-Qaeda. I don't particularly care who controls the country when we leave, but there is really no reason we need a large ground presence there to stop international terrorist camps from hanging out in the region. We simply heavily bomb any of the faction that harbors international terrorism and give money to those that don't. Basic carrot-and-stick, I wouldn't even be surprised if the Taliban would opt to receive American money in exchange for kicking out objectionable terrorist groups.

The reality is Afghanistan, once we leave, will probably be a lawless crazy region for a generation if not more. The Taliban sucks but we didn't go into Afghanistan because the Taliban are assholes, we went in because they were giving safe haven to a terrorist group that was international in scope. The Taliban, while objectionable, didn't appear to be by and large a security threat to the United States. They were primarily motivated with keeping power in Afghanistan. I don't see any reason we can't abandon Afghanistan's problems without still keeping a vigilant eye on the region in case Al-Qaeda type groups start to have an undesirably large presence.

The key problem is that the Afghanistan Constitution is basically a revised version of the Constitution the King wrote, whose main flaw is that all power is centralized in the person of the President.  Local government is appointed by the President, not elected.  Given the Afghan proclivity to resist central authority it has no chance of working.

It'd have no chance of working if it was a decentralized federation either.  It's just not a functional kind of place.

We'll never know since we have done such a bad job from day 1.  When I first got in country I was shocked to find out how little we had actually done to try to build something there.  It felt as if we had just arrived in country, not like we had been there over a decade.  A lot of armchair strategists will claim with a false sense of knowledge that we were doomed to fail, but the truth is despite all the time, money, and blood that we spent we never really focused on creating anything.  We've made huge strides in tactical and intelligence capabilities, but we have not evolved on nonlethal capabilities at all.

Is that failure military or poltiical?