Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer is never one to be warm and fuzzy. But he has laid down the gauntlet in his piece over at The National Interest. Scheuer says its time to stop lying to ourselves: we didn’t win in Iraq and we are not winning in Afghanistan. Scheuer says that while we were mourning the lost on September 11, “U.S. soldiers and Marines were fighting the rearguard actions of two lost wars against Islamist militants. Having been blocked by the leaders of both parties from winning in either Iraq or Afghanistan, these young men and women are now dying in a pair of lost causes that are being prolonged by political considerations relevant to the 2012 presidential election.” Ouch. Here’s a longer excerpt. As far as I’m concerned, he makes a very convincing case.
In Iraq, al-Qaeda and other Sunni groups have reestablished themselves and are preparing to take on the deeply anti-U.S. Shia government in Baghdad that was created with the approval of presidents Bush and Obama and the assistance of General Petraeus. American interests in the Persian Gulf region are more at risk today because of the unnecessary war in Iraq than they were when Saddam was in power. And as they watch the disaster for U.S. interests unfolding in Iraq, the best antidote the bipartisan architects of the U.S.-led invasion and the consequent boost to Iran’s regional power can suggest is that we leave three thousand U.S. troops behind to help “maintain order.” Such a force would have as much chance of maintaining order in Iraq as the 7th U.S. Cavalry had in maintaining order among the Lakota and Cheyenne on that grassy ridge in Montana in late June 1876.
In Afghanistan, there is no way to obscure our defeat as Obama, Hillary Clinton, McCain and others have labored to do in Iraq. The Taliban-led insurgency has spread across Afghanistan, and the pattern of their operations has grown familiar and apparently unbreakable. The insurgents are ascendant in any area of the country they choose to occupy until NATO forces arrive. At that point, they move out of NATO’s path to another region and establish ascendancy there. All Petraeus and his counterinsurgency advisers were able to do with the troop surge is what had been done before: U.S. and NATO forces dominate any piece of ground they stand on out to a distance defined by the reach of their weapons. Beyond that small area the insurgents are in charge, and as soon as coalition forces depart they reacquire control of the ground on which NATO stood. Interestingly, this is exactly the reality the Soviets encountered in the 1980s and that the British encountered a century earlier. Perhaps Petraeus’s counterinsurgency gurus–John Nagl, David Kilcullen, etc.–should have read a little history pertinent to their task.
The icing on the cake of the U.S.-NATO failure in Afghanistan, however, came in the early morning hours of 13 September 2011 when the Taliban launched multiple, coordinated attacks in Kabul, including one in an area known as Wazir Akhbar Khan–reputedly the city’s best-protected area and the location of NATO headquarters, the U.S., U.K., and other embassies, and offices of major Western NGOs.
While the BBC is so far reporting relatively light casualties, the insurgency’s ability to carry out this multi-target and multi-location operation in the Afghan capital lays bare the depth of the U.S.-NATO failure in the country.
You can read his full piece here.
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