Lianne Gutcher | Kabul | May 24

The Independent - Two foreign medical workers and their three Afghan translators have been abducted in a remote part of north-east Afghanistan.

The women and their interpreters were travelling on horseback between the districts of Yaftal and Ragh in Badakhshan province when they were snatched by gunmen on Tuesday evening. The nationalities of the women were not disclosed.

The team, thought to have been with the Swiss aid organisation Medair, were on a trip to help women and children in rural areas. Abdul Maroof Rasek, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said the group was taken to a town in Ragh, adding: "So far, the kidnappers have not been in touch with officials or police, and there has been no ransom demand."

He said district elders had been asked to ask for help find the kidnap victims and negotiate their release.

Alissa J. Rubin | Kabul | May 22

NYT - The leading American diplomat in Afghanistan, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, will leave his post this summer after less than a year, an American Embassy spokesman said Tuesday.

“The ambassador has with regret confirmed that he is going to be stepping down," said the spokesman, John Rhatigan, who is based in Kabul.

Robert Naiman:

At the intersection of Cermak and Michigan streets in Chicago yesterday, veterans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq told their stories when they threw back their service medals in protest at NATO leaders, echoing a famous protest against the Vietnam War.

A lot of media coming out of Chicago last night focused on street skirmishes between a handful of apolitical adventurists and the Chicago police. But some media got the real story.

Zach LaPorte, a 28-year-old mechanical engineer from Milwaukee who served in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, said, "I witnessed civilian casualties and civilians being arrested in what I consider an illegal occupation of a sovereign nation," Reuters reported. Former U.S. Army Sergeant Alejandro Villatoro of Chicago, who served during the Iraq 2003 invasion and in Afghanistan in 2011, said: "There's no honor in these wars... There's just shame."

Washington | May 19

AFP - France's President Francois Hollande used his White House debut on Friday to restate his intention to get French combat troops home from Afghanistan this year - breaking with NATO's 2014 schedule.

Hollande met President Barack Obama for the first time since taking office three days ago, ahead of a testing weekend of international summits, with G8 leaders at Camp David and NATO chiefs at a 61-nation gathering in Chicago.

"I recalled to President Obama that I had made a promise to withdraw our combat troops from Afghanistan at the end of 2012," Hollande said, as the two leaders spoke to reporters in the Oval Office.

"I also stipulated that there would still be support in another form," Hollande said, adding that the French withdrawal would be done in consultation with French allies in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Obama did not dispute Hollande's position, but stressed that NATO states must sustain their commitment to help "Afghans build security and continue down the path of development."

Washington is currently soliciting funding from its allies to ensure training and financing for Afghan armed forces after NATO combat troops leave - which it estimates could cost around $4 billion a year.

Apart from Afghanistan, both sides sought common ground, with Obama styling the partners as complimentary as cheeseburgers and French fries, though alarm over the euro zone tempered Hollande's visit.

(Title corrected - mb)

Props to McClatchy Newspapers & special correspondent Jon Stephenson for doing what should have been done weeks ago by a major US news outlet: interviewing survivors of US Army Staff Sgt Robert Bales' notorious massacre in Afghanistan earlier this year:

“I told the women inside our room: ‘Let’s run! Let’s get out of here,’ ” recalled Rafiullah, who like many Afghans goes by only one name. In the next compound, a short distance from the house where Rafiullah had been sleeping, Haji Mohammad Naim awoke to the sound of dogs barking wildly in the street.

“Then there was shooting, and the dogs stopped barking,” said Naim, who’s in his 50s.Shortly afterward, there was pandemonium at Naim’s front door as Rafiullah and a handful of terrified women and children poured into his yard, seeking shelter. Minutes later, another woman and a young girl emerged from the darkness.

“She was screaming and crying,” Naim said of the woman. “She said, ‘My husband has been martyred,’ ” meaning that he’d been killed.

Islamabad | May 17

AFP - Several Western embassies here on Wednesday received letters containing suspicious powder and threats to poison Nato soldiers in Afghanistan, Pakistan officials said.

Islamabad police chief Bani Amin said that embassies had received small packets containing black powder, which had been sent for laboratory analysis.

The letters said "poison" would be hidden in the Nato supplies should Pakistan decide to lift a nearly six-month blockade on supplies for American and Nato troops fighting the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Senior Pakistani security officials said that the French embassy, and the Australian and British High Commissions had received suspicious packages.

"Embassies have received one sachet each. The problem is that it is in a meagre quantity and difficult even to test. It seems somebody has committed some mischief. We are sending it to a laboratory," Amin said.

Back in summer 2010 I suggested that there was a worrying emerging pattern of "green on blue" attacks in Afghanistan - that far from each being an "isolated incident" from which "it's very difficult to draw a generalisation", a comparison of the frequency of such attacks with those in Iraq might suggest it was going to be a whole lot harder to stand up the Afghan security forces than expected. That idea has taken on more credence within the past two years as the number of "green on blue" attacks has snowballed from a handful to dozens.

Today, the New York Times has a detailed report on just one of those attacks, on March 1 this year, in which two Americans and their two Afghan attackers died - and which destroyed an armored vehicle as well as half the base before a helicopter gunship ended the fighting. A third conspirator was caught and the NYT's Matthew Rosenberg writes:

The coalition and Afghan Army would now have a rare opportunity to interrogate an Afghan soldier who had turned on coalition forces; most are quickly killed in ensuing firefights. Why had three men attacked American soldiers they barely knew? Was it a personal grudge against Americans? Or had they turned to the Taliban?

Sajjad Tarakzai | Islamabad | May 14

AFP - Pakistan said Monday it was time to "move on" and repair ties with the United States and NATO, the strongest sign yet that it may reopen supply routes into Afghanistan closed for nearly six months.

Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar made the remarks a day before Pakistani leaders are to discuss ending the blockade, and thereby cave in to a key demand from the West in time to attend a NATO summit in Chicago on May 20-21.

Islamabad shut its Afghan border to NATO supplies after US air strikes killed 24 soldiers on November 26, provoking a major crisis in Pakistani-US relations on top of the outcry from the raid that killed Osama bin Laden the previous May.

"It was important to make a point, Pakistan has made a point and we now need to move on and go into a positive zone and try to conduct our relations," Pakistan's foreign minister told a news conference.

"We are trying to put this relationship, you know, in a positive zone and I am quite sure that we will be successful in doing so."

Kabul | May 13

BBC - A senior Afghan peace negotiator has been shot dead in Kabul, officials say.

Arsala Rahmani was a former Taliban minister and a key member of Afghanistan's High Peace Council, which leads Afghan efforts to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban.

Correspondents say his death is a major blow to President Hamid Karzai as Mr Rahmani was a key figure in reaching out to Taliban commanders.

The new French President, Francois Hollande, intends to announce his nation's accelerated departure from Afghanistan at the upcoming Chicago summit of NATO members on May 20 and 21, withdrawing all French forces by the end of this year. President Obama will meet with him beforehand, presumably to try to change his mind as Obama has said there would be no "rush to the exits" for NATO.

But Obama might instead consider a new poll by the CS Monitor that shows a majority of Americans - even Republicans - disagree with his policy of staying to pay and die for another decade in Afghanistan.

By a margin of 63 percent disapproval to 33 percent approval, respondents rejected a description of the deal that will include a US troop presence and billions of dollars in monetary support for Afghan forces in the decade after 2014, according to a Monitor/TIPP poll conducted April 27 to May 4.

...Respondents in the TIPP poll were asked: “The US plans to remove most American forces from Afghanistan by 2014. To help Afghanistan after 2014, the US will sign a 10-year deal that keeps some US troops there and the US will also spend several billion dollars a year on the Afghan military. Do you approve or disapprove of such US involvement in Afghanistan beyond 2014?”

Among Democrats, 13 percent strongly approved, 17 percent somewhat approved, 19 percent somewhat disapproved, and 46 percent strongly disapproved. Among Republicans, the percentages skewed only slightly more positive, 15, 22, 20, and 38, respectively. For independents, the percentages were 12, 21, 15, and 49.

As America approaches it's own presidential elections in November, neither Obama nor his opponent are listening to the will of the people. May 20th and 21st are likely to see large protests calling upon them to uphold democracy and change their staid course on Afghan withdrawal. This time, there's unlikely to be a "freedom fry" anywhere in sight.

New French President François Hollande is losing no time in keeping at least one of his campaign promises. He'll announce France's early exit from Afghanistan at the NATO summit in Chicago later this month.

Manuel Valls, Mr Hollande's communications director, confirmed that France would use the summit to "announce the withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan between now and the end of the year."

Both NATO boss Anders Fogh Rasmussen and President Obama are expected to try to talk Hollande out of his earlier withdrawal, I suspect not because it would really hurt the mission there but because the optics look bad for the stick-the-coursers.

Meanwhile, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee say they believe that the Taliban has grown stronger since President Obama sent 33,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan in 2010. The Surge (tm) was a failure and there's absolutely no argument for staying a moment longer left. Dave Dayen has the details.

Kabul | May 7

Reuters - Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Monday that the strategic pact sealed by U.S. President Barack Obama last week was at risk of being "meaningless" if Afghans do not feel safe, according to a statement, which referred to recent civilian casualties by NATO.

Karzai called U.S. General John Allen, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, to the palace on Monday to discuss what he said were dozens of civilian casualties caused by NATO in four provinces since Sunday evening.

"Karzai signed the strategic pact with the United States to avoid such incidents (civilian casualties) and if Afghans do not feel safe, the strategic partnership loses its meaning," a presidential palace statement said.

Natalie DiBlasio | May 6

USA TODAY - An Army wife who witnessed her husband's death during a Skype video chat said she saw a bullet hole in a closet behind him after he collapsed, the (New York) Daily News reported.

Capt. Bruce Kevin Clark, stationed in Afghanistan, fell suddenly on Monday during a routine Skype conversation with his wife, Susan Orellana-Clark, the Daily News reported.

The family released a statement today describing what Orellana-Clark saw in the video feed.

"Clark was suddenly knocked forward," the statement said. "The closet behind him had a bullet hole in it. The other individuals, including a member of the military, who rushed to the home of CPT Clark's wife also saw the hole and agreed it was a bullet hole."

The statement says the Skype link remained open for two hours on April 30 as family and friends in the U.S. and Afghanistan called for help.

"After two hours and many frantic phone calls by Mrs. Clark, two military personnel arrived in the room and appeared to check his pulse, but provided no details about his condition to his wife," the statement said.

Jim Hruska is decidedly underwhelmed by the Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States of America:

Without the advice and consent of the Senate, Mr. Obama and Mr. Karzai's partnership lacks even the heft of a Civil Union, and is therefore not worth the paper on which it is written. Where are the references to the imperative for a Senate vote? The lack of discussion suggests that the United States has something to gain from this "agreement", which make Afghanistan into a major non-NATO ally."

Which suggests the question: How can the 3rd poorest and most corrupt nation in the world, with a Gross National Product of $16 billion, morph into a major ally? Exactly what does "security and defense cooperation"actually translate into in definable parameters? How did the security and defense of Afghanistan become a strategic objective of U.S.policy? Why would we even care?

[Insert requisite noun, verb, & 9/11 here.]

Related: Ex-State Dept spokesperson PJ Crowley: "The strategic partnership agreement makes sense from a policy standpoint...but the odds of success are no better than 50-50."

Update: JPD, in comments, outlines the 2nd rule of holes:

Ask yourself one simple question: When you're going to wallpaper over the hole in the wall and leave, what's more credible in helping deny the existence of the hole? Cheap wallpaper, or expensive wallpaper?

Steve LeVine at Foreign Policy mag:

"It is too late to try to build ‘Afghanistan right,'" Anthony Cordesman concludes in an exceptionally clear piece for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Cordesman ticks off the crippling weak spots that fatally undermine peace with honor in Afghanistan. Without saying so explicitly, he forecasts a best-case return to the pre-9/11 status quo -- the Taliban in the center, vying for national power against canton-based local strongmen around the country, anchored by a refortified Northern Alliance.

Cordesman is right as far as he goes. Yet like numerous wise hands weighing in similarly in the wake of President Barack Obama's weekend accord with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Cordesman is reluctant to draw a line under his stacked-up facts and provide the sum of the parts: There is no further constructive role for the U.S. military in Afghanistan. If American troops leave, Afghanistan is likely to devolve into civil war; if they stay, there will be the same outcome.

...Writing at the Financial Times, Ahmed Rashid laments a stubborn Vietnam-era mentality -- "the hubris of the U.S. military, which at the back of its mind still believes there are battles, if not a war, to be won; Taliban to be killed; and at least some success to be gained. They are wrong." Rashid says that the Taliban leadership must be negotiated with, that it fears civil war as much as its opponents.

Rashid is partly right, but veers off-track when he suggests that there is still something for the U.S. to do at the negotiating table. The Taliban may fear civil war, but only to the degree they are in charge in Kabul. If they are not, they will fight that civil war until they are.

It may be unpalatable to some, but this is exactly right and has been for several years.

Anna Mulrine | Washington | May 2

CSM - The presence of Al Qaeda and Taliban safe havens in Pakistan remains unresolved – and may be beyond the capacity of the US military to fix, a new report to Congress concludes.

Largely overshadowed by President Obama’s trip to Afghanistan, the Pentagon Tuesday released a congressionally mandated report on the progress of the war that acknowledged a “resilient” Taliban and pointed to “long-term and acute challenges" for a US military whose presence on the ground will decline considerably in many of the most violent areas of the country in the months to come.

** The Report:Report on Progress Towards Security and Strategy in Afghanistan/United States plan for Sustaining the Afghanistan national Security Forces(PDF) April 2012 ~ link fixed

Kabul | May 2

AFP - Afghanistan: At least two explosions were heard in the Afghan capital Kabul Wednesday shortly after US President Barack Obama paid a surprise brief visit to the country.

One of those explosions was a suicide car bomb that struck the Jalalabad road area, which is home to several foreign military bases, Kabul's police chief Mohammad Ayoub Salangi told AFP.

There were no immediate details on casualties or the target, he said.

The US embassy, which neighbours the AFP bureau in Kabul, said its embassy was "under lockdown" and warned staff to "take cover, move away from the windows".

check comments for updates

I, like many on the left, was disgusted by Bush's "mission accomplished" electioneering victory lap in 2003, and his continual use of the military as a backdrop for his political-advertising. Unlike many on the left, I'm no less disgusted now that Obama's doing it too.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday paid a surprise visit to Afghanistan, touching down in the war-torn country one year to the day after al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden died at the hands of elite American troops in neighboring Pakistan.

Obama planned to make a roughly 10-minute televised address to the nation at 7:30 p.m. from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

The bold emphasis is mine. I'm sure no-one thinks the timings accidental but, as an aside, am I the only one who feels it more than a little exceptionalist in the worst sense that media reporters know, and readers know, they don't mean Obama will be giving an address to the people of the nation he's actually in?

Meanwhile, Bernhard at Moon Of Alabama gets deeper into the weeds of those under-reported "green-on-blue" attacks I wrote about yesterday as well as examining the Pentagon's spin as it tries to put a false gloss on figures that demonstrate alleged progress in Afghanistan.

And talking of spin - see how many lies, deceptions, PR slants and evasions you can find in this transcript of an official DoD briefing to the Pentagon press pool about the Section 1230 Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan and the official Fact Sheet on the newly signed agreement. I'll get you started.

1) despite previous reports that the big commitments the US and its allies are to make after 2014 - troop levels and funding - are still to be decided, the briefers helpfully told reporters that "Commitments from the Afghans are specifically mentioned repeatedly in quite a bit of detail in the Strategic Partnership Agreement." Hypocrisy in action from the occupiers? It sure smells like it. Even so, the briefers didn't explain the all-important metrics by which progress towards those commitments will be judged by a bilateral commission to "assure the donor community that the Afghans are making the kind of progress that they need to make". We still don't know if we'll ever be told what they are. Shades of measuring surge "success" and "momentum".

2) They'll stand up as we stand down? It'll take at least a Friedman Unit to find out, apparently, even after 10 years and $billions of building, training, mentoring and partnering:

I think it'll be a -- certainly be a big test this summer as we have the Afghans more in the lead than we ever have before. And so I think the best time to answer your question will be in the fall after this fighting season is over, after we've had a chance to see how the Afghan security forces perform.

3) Perhaps the most wonderful lie by omission of all:

President Obama has been clear: we do not seek permanent military bases in Afghanistan. Instead, the Strategic Partnership Agreement commits Afghanistan to provide U.S. personnel access to and use of Afghan facilities through 2014 and beyond.

Bases built by US contractors on the US government's budget dollars, staffed and very certainly commanded by US government personnel who will be entirely immune from local laws and equipped almost exclusively with US war machines. That those aren't going to be "permanent" or "US bases" is entirely a clever use of semantics.

Laura King & Aimal Yaqubi | Kabul | May 1

LA Times - Once again, NATO officials and Afghan villagers are telling dramatically different stories about a night raid: an attack in which U.S. and Afghan forces swooped down on a residential compound in the hours before dawn searching for insurgents.

Early Tuesday, the target was a compound in the district of Qarghayi, in Laghman province, east of the capital, Kabul. Two men were killed.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force identified the pair as insurgents; Afghan officials and neighbors said they were fighting-age men who were trying to defend their home against unknown invaders.

Sonia Verma offers a decent (if somewhat cursory) outline in today's Globe and Mail of the actually-existing geopolitical landscape post-OBL (which stands in contrast to Peter Bergen's recent proxy-Obama2012 victory lap breathlessly commemorating POTUS' alpha-male action movie moment):

One year after Operation Neptune Spear, al-Qaeda still exists, though in a more fractured form. The group’s ability to carry out large-scale attacks has been compromised. Meanwhile, America’s counterterrorism campaign is gradually shifting from Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan to Yemen and the Horn of Africa. The shaky alliance between the West, led by the United States, and Pakistan, has been plunged into a crisis from which it has not yet recovered. Since Mr. bin Laden’s death, each side has viewed the other with simmering suspicion. But perhaps the most enduring legacy of Mr. bin Laden’s killing is that no one who helped him hide for so long, essentially in plain sight, has been held accountable – and that may have poisoned relations between Pakistan and its Western allies for the foreseeable future.

Standard read-the-whole-damn-thing rules apply.

Related: Navy SEALs for Truth? C'mon. You knew it was coming.

Update: CFR's Linda Robinson further unpacks lingering OBL blowback, specifically re: US/Pakistan relations.

The most direct impact of bin Laden's death on Afghanistan was actually the crisis the Abbottabad raid caused in the already troubled U.S.-Pakistan relationship, and the spillover effects from that. It threw the Pakistan military and the political system into crisis, causing Pakistan to react with more anti-Americanism and more hostility and suspicion along the border. Attacks from Pakistan into Afghanistan quadrupled last year, though they are down again now. So the net effect was to make cross-border cooperation more difficult and increase Pakistan's tendency to pursue its own agenda. That includes things like the Haqqani network's attacks in September in Kabul on ISAF and the U.S. embassy, and the giant truck bomb in Wardak against the U.S. coalition base in Sayed Abad.

[...]

U.S. officials estimate that maybe 100 AQ fighters come and go from Afghanistan across the Pakistan border. Afghanistan is not much of a safe haven for al-Qaeda, though it still has some distance to go to become stable and capable of defending itself against attempts to reestablish an al-Qaeda safe haven. Most Taliban fighters on the ground are not directly connected to the al-Qaeda organization, and it is possible that at some point the Taliban senior leadership will find it in its interest to repudiate its formal ties to al-Qaeda. It is Pakistan that is the cause for greatest concern because al-Qaeda there is mixed up with a stew of various insurgent groups that do actively combine forces and cooperate on an operational level.

Nothing really all that new here. Still, the ugly (if familiar) truth certainly bears repeating, especially in light of the empty football spike sloganeering ("...and GM is alive!") that dominates the campaign discourse.

An AP exclusive report today says that the US-led coalition has been consistently under-reporting the consequences of "green-on-blue" incidents, where Afghan allies fire on NATO servicemen training or partnering with them, by the simplest method possible - it's only been reporting incidents that cause fatalities.

So how many wounded might we not be hearing about?

Well, icasualties.org has overall figures for both fatalities and wounded to date and although the US fatality to casualty ratio has historically been lower than, say, the UK's experience we can get some approximation. There have been 1954 US troops killed and 15322 wounded in Operation Enduring freedom, a ratio of 1:7.8. Given that "green on blue" attacks are at short ranges, launched by surprise, they are probably more deadly than the usual course of combat so let's say 1:8. (EDIT: my math is faulty there, as JPD points out more deadly means a lower ratio. But 1:8 or 1:7.5 it's still 900 to 1,000 total casualties of which we're only being told about a fraction.)

Three days ago, the NYT reported:

So far this year, there have been 11 attacks by Afghan security forces against coalition soldiers, resulting in the deaths of 18 people, 10 of them Americans, according to a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. That is 20 percent of the total of NATO combat fatalities this year. In 2011 there were 21 such attacks leading to 35 deaths, he said. Last year, a classified study commissioned by the American military found that 58 American combat fatalities, 6 percent, came in 26 green-on-blue attacks from May 2007 to May 2011.

The pre-2011 figures don't seem to include coalition allies but again we're approximating in lieu of firm NATO figures so that's a total of 109 deaths - which means somewhere in the region of 872 wounded for a total toll of around a thousand or more shot by their ostensible allies.

That beggars the notion that "they will stand up so we can stand down". More likely, when they stand up they will shoot at us. But as Joshua Foust wrote in 2011, after a decade of trying, and producing feel-good statements about success just around the corner, "that the Afghan Police still don’t operate in a minimally effective way is a stinging indictment not of them, but of the people training them" - that is, the US.

Brian M Downing | Apr 30 | Asia Times

The withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan will put pressure on an Afghan National Army that's divided along ethnic lines and lackluster in the field. However, insurgents who view the foreign occupiers' exit as a final victory will also desert, suggesting that from district to district, traditional Afghan peacemaking will come to the fore.

For those unwilling to pony up for a TIME sub to bypass the Great Paywall of Luce, the New America Foundation has kindly posted the full text of Peter Bergen's big OBL last days of disco cover piece. Where does the line between truth & fiction fall? That, dear friends, is above my pay grade, though I'm sure there are many here who can/will do their goddamndest to liberate subtextural reality from the margins.

A brief excerpt to whet your appetites:

Bin Laden was always scheming about how to grab more media attention. He instructed his team, "The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack is coming and due to the importance to this date, the time to start preparing is now. Please send me your suggestions on this." He proposed reaching out to the correspondents of both al-Jazeera English and al-Jazeera Arabic and wondered if he could get a hearing on an American TV network: "We should also look for an American channel that can be close to being unbiased such as CBS."

Until the end, bin Laden remained fixated on mounting another large-scale attack on the U.S., prodding one deputy, "It would be nice if you could nominate one of the qualified brothers to be responsible for a large operation against the U.S. It would be nice if you would pick a number of the brothers not to exceed 10 and send them to their countries individually without any of them knowing the others to study aviation."

Have at it, Agonist massif.

Update: Marcy Wheeler:

When I read about the imprisonment of journalists like Abdulelah Haider Shaye, or the wiretapping of Lawrence Wright and Christiane Amanpour, I think back to Bergen, who in the days after 9/11 was an important, reliable source who knew more about al Qaeda than many of the people taxpayers were paying to keep us safe. I’ve always thought, as our government targets journalists covering Islamic extremists, we’re handcuffing the next Peter Bergen, that journalist who is right now collecting the information our intelligence community is neglecting.That Peter Bergen is likely to be imprisoned, like Shaye, for talking directly to a terrorist.

And what has Bergen become, along the way? The outlet for officially leaked information–one more tool in the President’s toolbox of information asymmetry.

Speaking of tools, Brian Williams of NBC News... ok, I'll just stop right there and just let you clicky-clicky yourself. Because seriously-- what more needs to be said?

h/t jo6pac in comments

Stop me if you've heard this one before, Canuckistan:

Stephen Harper is leaving the door open once again to extending Canada’s military participation in the costly Afghanistan war.

When the Official Opposition NDP pressed the Prime Minister on Wednesday about reports the United States has asked Canada to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014, Mr. Harper said the government would “examine all options.”

[...]

If the Prime Minister extended Canada’s military deployment beyond 2014, it would be the fourth time he has prolonged the soldiering commitment to Afghanistan – including 2006, 2008 and 2010.

Speaking in the Commons on Wednesday, Mr. Harper denied reports the United States has asked Canada to keep special forces soldiers in Afghanistan past 2014, his latest promised date for withdrawal.

As our new Leader of the Official Opposition aptly noted during Question Period yesterday, Canadians "want this mission to end. It was supposed to end in 2006. It was supposed to end in 2009. It was supposed to end in 2011. It is supposed to end in 2014. When will it finally end?”"

Oh, and that last excerpted bit I highlighted, where the PM denies reports that Uncle Sam is trying to keep Canada in the Great Game for another Friedman or three? Methinks Mr. Harper is being a little coy. Mealsothinks that it's a damn good thing Afghanistan is (for now, anyway) almost completely under the Campaign 2012 Village radar.

Because, considering the collective combat exhaustion of the USian polity, the last thing the Obama team needs are ill-timed reports that it's secretly planning to continue America's excellent (and highly unpopular) imperial Central Asian misadventure past it's latest expiration date.

Nick Turse | Apr 25 | Asia Times

Recently, after insurgents unleashed sophisticated, synchronized attacks across Afghanistan involving dozens of fighters armed with suicide vests, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms, as well as car bombs, the Pentagon was quick to emphasize what hadn't happened.

"I'm not minimizing the seriousness of this, but this was in no way akin to the Tet Offensive," said George Little, the Pentagon's top spokesman. "We are looking at suicide bombers, RPG [rocket propelled grenade], mortar fire, etcetera. This was not a large-scale offensive sweeping into Kabul or other parts of the country."

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta weighed in similarly. "There were," he insisted, "no tactical gains here. These are isolated attacks that are done for symbolic purposes, and they have not regained any territory." Such sentiments were echoed by many in the media, who emphasized that the attacks "didn't accomplish much" or were "unsuccessful".

Even granting the need to spin the assaults as failures, the official American reaction to the coordinated attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital, as well as at Jalalabad air base, and in Paktika and Logar provinces, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of guerrilla warfare and, in particular, of the type being waged by the Haqqani network, a crime syndicate transformed by the conflict into a leading insurgent group.

Here's the "lede" that should have run in every newspaper in America: More than 40 years after the Vietnam War's Tet Offensive, after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, even after reviving counter-insurgency doctrine (only to see it crash-and-burn in short order), the US military still doesn't get it.

Think of this as a remarkably unblemished record of "failure to understand" stretching from the 1960s to 2012, and undoubtedly beyond.