Richard WarnickLeaked Cable: American Strategy is Destined to Fail in Afghanistan
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador in Kabul, believes that U.S. strategy is wrong and the war is as good as lost. The potentially explosive views were published by Le Canard Enchaîné, a respected French weekly, which said that they were direct quotations from a diplomatic cable written by François Fitou, the French Deputy Ambassador in Kabul.
“The current situation is bad. The security situation is getting worse. So is corruption and the Government has lost all trust. Our public statements should not delude us over the fact that the insurrection, while incapable of winning a military victory, nevertheless has the capacity to make life increasingly difficult, including in the capital.
“The presence — especially the military presence — of the coalition is part of the problem, not the solution. The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them. In doing so, they are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis (which, moreover, will probably be dramatic).”
Once again, facts that are widely known only become newsworthy when acknowledged by an official source. “Our public statements should not delude us” = we shouldn’t believe our own lies.
Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer has long maintained that the problem in Afghanistan is that any government Westerners might regard as acceptable would lack legitimacy in nearly all of the country outside Kabul. The Taliban expect to win eventually for this reason, and they are prepared to wait a long time until the foreign forces leave.
UPDATE: Although it’s clear that more troops are not going to solve the long term problem, Afghanistan commander General David McKiernan is in big trouble NOW and he’s calling for help.
UPDATE: Matt Yglesias asks the most pertinent question about Afghanistan:
I think what we need to do is step back and think a little bit more clearly about what it is we’re trying to do in Afghanistan. As of sometime in 2002, the Bush administration seemed to have decided that victory had already been achieved in Afghanistan, and it was time to start pulling resources out of there and throwing them into Iraq as Afghanistan moved into a consolidation phase. That was a terrible error. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that six or seven years later, we can just roll up our sleeves and rededicate ourselves to achieving the goals we were told we achieved years ago. The situation has changed, windows of opportunity open and close, and our mission has gotten very murky. Oftentimes when this kind of operation goes on long enough the goal becomes “succeeding” — or, rather, doing something or other that whoever’s in charge of the operation could plausibly label success. But we need to think, instead, more concretely about what it is we’re hoping to achieve in Afghanistan — specifically, does preventing portions of Afghanistan from serving as a base for terrorist operation directed at the United States really require us to establish an effective central state in Afghanistan?