This diary is primarily to give you a head's up on a great article over at Tom Dispatch on the current situation in Afghanistan. Here Be Dragons This was posted by TomDispatch a couple of days ago, but unfortunately got very little attention.
If you want to know why the US is having all kinds of trouble in Afghanistan this is the article to read.
If you want to know why it costs $1 million a year to keep a soldier in Afghanistan this is the article you want to read.
Hopefully you will all go and read the full article by Ann Jones who has reported on the Afghan war for 8 years, but recently spent her first time "in bed" with the military.
Here are a couple of short quotes to tempt you. The first excerpt is a fine example of how small cultural faux pas can wreck a theoretically valid plan.
one widespread practice in the military that’s gone unreported by other embedded journalists helps explain why. So here’s a TomDispatch exclusive, courtesy of Afghan-American men serving as interpreters for the soldiers. They were embarrassed to the point of agony when mentioning this habit, but desperate to put a stop to it. COIN calls for the military to meet and make friends with village elders, drink tea, plan "development," and captivate their hearts and minds. Several interpreters told me, however, that every meeting includes some young American soldiers whose locker-room-style male bonding features bouts of hilarious farting.
To Afghan men, nothing is more shameful. A fart is proof that a man cannot control any of his apparatus below the belt. The man who farts is thus not a man at all. He cannot be taken seriously, nor can any of his ideas or promises or plans.
Then we have the costs. look at what goes on at a forward operating base (FOB).
The base’s streets are laid out on a grid. Tents in tidy rows are banked with standard sand bags and their super-sized cousins, towering Hescos filled with rocks and rubble.
The tents are cooled by roaring tornados of air conditioning, thanks to equipment fueled by gasoline that costs the Army about $400 per gallon to import. It takes fuelers three to four hours every day to refill all the giant generators that keep the cold air coming, so I felt guilty when, to prevent shivering in my sleep, I stuffed my towel into the ducts suspended from the ceiling of my tent.
Even in distant FOBs like this one, the building boom is prodigious. There’s a big gym with the latest body-building equipment, and a morale-boosting center equipped with telephones and banks of computers connected to the Internet that are almost always in use. A 24/7 chow hall serves barbequed ribs, steak, and lobster tails, though everything is cooked beyond recognition by those underpaid laborers to whom this cuisine is utterly foreign.
The we have the waste
In a typical mess-up on the actual terrain of Afghanistan, Army experts previously in charge of this base had already had a million-dollar suspension bridge built over a river some distance away, but hadn’t thought to secure land rights, so no road leads to it. Now the local American agriculture specialist wants to introduce alfalfa to these waterless, rocky mountains to feed herds of cattle principally pastured in his mind.
Reports like this by Ann Jones, who has actually lived with the people the US is trying to win over, provide a "feel" that it noticeably absent in the mainstream media. It is very difficult to see, after reading this piece, and others, how the US can expect to "win" in Afghanistan using current strategies, COIN related or not.
Put simply the ability to connect with people in simple clothing and simple homes when you are wearing full gear and sweeping through town with your high tech equipment, fully guarded at every moment, is basically impossible.
The entire population of Afghanistan is only about 30 million. The entire GDP of the country is only about $10 billion. That is equal to what it costs to keep 10,000 US troops in the country at $1 million per soldier. With close to 70,000 troops in the country the US is spending 7 times the GDP of the country, just on its troops (let alone on ancillaries, development etc.).
If this is not clearly obvious as a profoundly stupid approach, I do not know what is.