Officially, the war in Afghanistan is now America's longest, 104 months. One can quibble with that interpretation. Nearly 300 American military personnel had been killed in Vietnam before August 1964 when Congress codified the lie of Tonkin Gulf into carte blanche for President Johnson to take whatever action he chose. And nearly 300 were killed after the departure of the last U.S. combat troops in March 1973. Then, too, there were the Indian wars, whose major battles and massacres, in which tens of thousands were killed, extended over the first 122 years of U.S. independence.
That historical objection doesn't reduce the pain of the eight-and-a-half years spent so far in Afghanistan. Nor does the fact that, in terms of U.S. and NATO fatalities, this war has come comparatively cheap. "Only" 1108 American military personnel have lost their lives in Afghanistan since October 2001 (with another 708 NATO forces dead). That's about equal to the number of U.S. soldiers killed in the long-forgotten Philippine-American War of 1898-1913 and a mere third as many as died in the even-more-forgotten First Seminole War of 1816-1818.
But the highest fatality rate for Americans in Afghanistan has occurred in the past 17 months, accounting for 43 percent of the total since the war began. In the past four days, 13 American military personnel, and four other NATO personnel, have been killed. And, as Andrew Bacevich continues to say, as he did in an April interview with Bill Moyers, there is "no end in sight."
Just as in Iraq and Vietnam, the Afghan toll, military and civilian, is unknown. What we do know is that, as in every war, civilians, whether killed by other Afghans, foreign jihadis or Americans, are taking the brunt of the violence.
There is, of course, another U.S. casualty in Afghanistan, the drain on the U.S. treasury, now calculated at about $300 billion and steadily accumulating. To what end? Can the war achieve, as President Obama has said since March 2009, the disruption, dismantling, defeat and destruction of al Qaeda and the extremists who back it? Thus far, neither the old or new strategy has been able to guarantee the safety of a single mayor.
The full complement of troops in the second surge into Afghanistan - the first began in February 2009 - is not quite completed. So critics have justifiably argued that it's a little early to claim that the allegedly new strategy has failed. But the Pentagon has its doubts about General Stanley McChrystal's plan, just as some drone operators in the CIA have their doubts about the administration's extensive use of unmanned planes and their missiles because they may be doing more harm than good.
There's a hint of a change in direction in Kandahar Province, the Afghan region originally targeted for heavy military action this month, as noted by Rod Nordland in Afghanistan Strategy Shifts to Focus on Civilian Effort:
The commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, insisted that there never was a planned offensive. “The media have chosen to use the term offensive,” he said. Instead, he said, “we have certainly talked about a military uplift, but there has been no military use of the term offensive.”
Whatever it is called, it is not happening this month. Views vary widely as to just when the military part will start. General Zazai says it will begin in July but take a break for Ramadan in mid-August and resume in mid-September. A person close to Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar, says it will not commence until winter, or at least not until harvests end in October. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.
American officials, on the other hand, say it has already begun, not with a bang, but with a steady increase of experts from the United States Embassy and NATO and aid workers — a “civilian surge” — accompanied by a quiet increase in American troops to provide security for them. The Americans strongly deny that they planned an offensive they are now backing away from.
So everybody who has been saying there would be a big offensive, bolstered by the surge of more than 30,000 new troops, was wrong? OK. The fog of war gets foggier.
Whatever its outcome, the war that has now been dubbed America's longest is certain to become longer still, its costs greater, the graves it fills more numerous even as it only occasionally makes the (often bizarre) headlines.
At rethinkafghanistan, Daniel Ellsberg says:
It's a hopeless, indefinitely prolongable stalemate ... in which blood seeps into the ground of Afghanistan like the oil gushing into the Gulf beneath the surface of American consciousness. It can go on indefinitely until ... Congress does what it did in Vietnam, which was the only way that war could be ended. And that was, pressed by popular desire to see the war and the gushing of money and lives ended, Congress cut off the well, cut off the gusher of money. Year after year in Vietnam each American president concluded "this is a bad year for me to lose in Vietnam." It was never a good year.
Where the hell is that popular desire?