(Originally posted at Deny My Freedom)Yesterday saw some amazing pieces in remembrance of those who lost their lives on September 11, 2006. Obviously, the events of that day have changed the very fabric of our nation, and touched the hearts of everyone in ways we may never understand. Out of this moment of national unity came the Bush administration's call for retaliation, and we were presented with the opportunity to simultaneously seek revenge upon the organization that had harmed us, and bring liberty and freedom to a region gripped by the iron fist of extremist terror.
...or so we were told.
Five years later, the War on Terror's first chapter is still being written, even though the book's author has moved on to bigger and more powerful plot lines. The forgotten introduction has continued to fester however, and we are now facing a nearly half-decade of conflict in Afghanistan, with little to no progress. Is this really what George Bush considers his Iwo Jima?
The BBC took a look at the predicament facing Afghanistan, and the picture they paint
is not encouraging:
Mullah Omar and his band of armed illiterates first emerged in 1994 from within the frustrated Pashtun community to fill the law and order vacuum created by the internecine fighting of the Afghan warlords after the Soviets were driven out.
Whatever their critics say, the Taleban did make southern Afghanistan a lot safer for ordinary people than it is now.
Five years ago when the Taleban were driven out and the old regional warlords came back, so did a lot of robbery, rape and murder.
Senior Afghan officials believe security, or the lack of it for local people, undermined the initial support for the coalition forces, and helped push too many into the arms of the Taleban.
Now, with the Taliban on the resurgence in the until recently neglected South, the country's population is facing a situation that increasingly resembles the Soviet occupation of the late 1970s.
The Americans have done no worse at chasing down their enemies than the Soviets did in southern Afghanistan two decades earlier.
Like the Russians, the Americans have had to put up with their most-wanted men skipping across the border into Pakistan to avoid capture.
We know this because, unfortunately for the US intelligence agencies, a flash disk containing a number of their top secret documents was lost and turned up for sale in a bazaar near the US airbase at Bagram. The disk, which has been seen by the BBC, contains a long list of wanted men, their believed whereabouts and their links to Bin laden.
It also shows that the American intelligence agencies believe that over the years many of the people who might lead them to Bin Laden, like Mullah Omar or the Hezb-e-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, have often been hiding out in Pakistan.
Want more proof of the degeneration we are seeing in the security situation in Afghanistan? No quite completely sold on the idea that we are seeing a replay of the Soviet-era conflict? Howabout this for deja vu:
Canada is reportedly preparing to send 15 Leopard tanks and an additional 120 soldiers to bolster the NATO contingent in Afghanistan.
An armored unit at Wainwright military base, near Edmonton in the western Alberta province, has received orders to prepare for deployment to Afghanistan on September 17, The Globe and Mail reported.
[...]
In Brussels, alliance ambassadors met on Monday after a call last week by NATO's military chief, US General James Jones, for reinforcements of up to 2,500 troops to handle a growing number of attacks by the Taliban militia, ousted from power in 2001.
As more and more forces are sent to the area, including armored units in the South, we are going to see the realities of the asymmetric warfare being waged upon Western forces in the country. If you haven't read Pericles' piece on the subject from earlier this summer, you definitely need to.
Asymmetric warfare works in a very specific situation: The winner of the symmetric war wants to govern the region (or hand it off to a local client government) at a finite cost. If the asymmetric warriors - in this setting let's call them insurgents and their opponents occupiers - can make the territory ungovernable and establish themselves in such a way that they cannot be crushed within the cost parameters of the occupiers, then eventually the occupiers will have to give them at least part of what they want.
In other words, insurgents win by not losing. If the occupiers find the status quo unacceptable, but have no acceptable way to bring the insurgency to an end, then it is only a matter of time before they realize their goals cannot be achieved. It's up to the occupiers to decide when to stop the bleeding and admit defeat, but they have lost. This is the story of the Americans in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, and white settler governments in various parts of Africa. It is arguably the story of the Americans in Iraq as well.
[...]
Americans have a hard time grasping this basic fact: Right up to the day the occupying power admits defeat and pulls out, it continues to wield overwhelming force. It may never lose a pitched battle. It may - right up to the end - be able to go where it wants, killing and destroying at will.
That doesn't mean it's not losing.
The success of the Iraqi insurgency will undoubtedly represent a blueprint for the promulgation of anti-Western factions within each and every country our forces occupy. This is not to say the United States should view these developments as an insurmountable obstacle, but it is certainly true that any level of foresight by this administration should have anticipated the problems inherent in the haphazard way they undertook the Afghanistan mission. Regardless of how one looks at the conflict in Iraq, it is simply impossible to claim that the focus of this administration on Iraq over Afghanistan had any positive effects toward the stability of either country, or the achievement of any of our foreign policy goals.
And now we see Iraq's problems cascading through the region. Suicide bombs, which until very recently were unheard of in Afghanistan, are now becoming as commonplace as in Iraq. The latest deaths reported from the field seem to reflect this, such as this weekend's tragic suicide bombing that claimed the lives of sixteen, including two Americans.
Five years after 9/11, The Nation notes that Afghanistan is a place of chaos and fear:
In the week leading up to the 9/11 anniversary several rockets hit central Kabul and the airport and one NATO solider was killed by a suicide bomb. At least one other IED was discovered before detonation. And now the US military has announced that they believe a "suicide cell" is operating inside the capital--so sealing Kabul's four main entrance points might not prevent further attacks.
In the south, British-led NATO forces are engaged in an all-out fight against Taliban guerrillas, in the grandly named Operation Medusa. Since early August NATO forces (know locally under the acronym ISAF) have had twenty-three soliders of various nationalities killed and an undisclosed number wounded. Six ISAF troops have died in the last week alone.
[...]
There are reports of civilian casualties filtering from the Operation Medusa battleground, but follow-up investigation by journalists--particularly non-Afghan reporters--is impossible as the Taliban are almost totally hostile to the press.
At a September 10 press briefing, NATO spokesman Mark Laity attempted to assure journalist that there would be a full investigation into civilian deaths, while an officer in the south simply affirmed that the Taliban in the Panjwayi-Zhari area of Kandahar Province "have suffered significant attrition."
"They don't seem to understand that if you kill one person you make an enemy of the whole family," said Omar, an increasingly pessimistic Kabul businessman.
If ever there were to be a phrase to describe this administration's approach to foreign policy, it would be that of this Kabul businessman: They don't seem to understand.
Five years after 9/11, we have a world that presents many more dangers than it did on that sad day. We have taken the cohesive support of the international community, and squandered it in the name of a constructed myth of marching democracy. This administration has been content to topple statues by day, and waltz in ignorant bliss as the power-vacuum they create suck away any chance for peace and stability in Afghanistan and beyond. Left to pick up the shattered pieces, NATO is now finding itself increasingly overwhelmed by a nation abandoned to warlords in the name of expediency.
Five years after 9/11, the people of Afghanistan are still waiting for the freedom we assured them was coming.
May mercy find us all.