With just one win (Kuwait) in our last five major wars (Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq), Tuesday offered a reminder of how outdated and ineffective our military has become, despite all the money we lavish on it. NYT:
Nine boys collecting firewood to heat their homes in the eastern Afghanistan mountains were killed by NATO helicopter gunners who mistook them for insurgents … The victims included two sets of brothers (AP: “four of the nine boys killed were 7 years old, three were 8, one was 9 years old and one was 12”). … The only survivor, Hemad, 11, said his mother had told him to go out with other boys to collect firewood because “the weather is very cold now.” … [A] tree, Hemad said, saved his life by covering him so that he could not be seen by the helicopters, which, he said, “shot the boys one after another.”
Time presumably will reveal whether US forces or some other NATO members operated the gunships. It doesn’t matter for the general point: this is just one example of repeated civilian tragedies. Before state of the art military technology like machine guns and high powered explosives became widely distributed, as it is today, public opinion may have mattered far less in war (events like the Boston Massacre notwithstanding): rifles trump bows and arrows. Today, when an IED costs $100-200, our dismal 1/5 record, with the two current wars arguably our weakest performances of the lot, suggests civilian support is critical, probably determinative — and fiercely against us today in at least one more Afghan village.
and what have we accomplished? We never even captured Bin Laden, which was really the only goal that made much sense to begin with. Obama’s a dope to have continued this wicked path for so long- it’s time to stop making things worse by killing and maiming people in foreign countries, and in turn having our own soldiers maimed and killed. We’ve got plenty of problems here that demand our attention and resources.
if we had been willing to risk sending Americans into the caves after him instead of cowardly relying on the Afghans to do it.
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p>In any case, we really had no choice but to invade Afghanistan after 9/11, but perhaps we should have exited as soon as we put the new government in place. Or perhaps if we had put more resources into Afghanistan after the invasion instead of throwing everying at Iraq, we would have a much better situation there – who knows?
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Young boys carrying firewood vs. adult men pointing guns at you – really!?
or from a helocopter, you may know what the targets are, but can’t possibly have the intelligence on just what those targets really are… we’re taking ‘educated guesses’ on innocent peoples’ lives every day there, and every day there we’re getting things wrong.
I was picturing someone in a helicopter flying low enough that he could look down and easily tell whether the people on the ground were boys carrying firewood or men carrying guns. I wasn’t thinking that intelligence had anything to do with it, just eyesight.
Did you see the video leaked through Wikileaks on the helicopter strike on the Reuters employees? They had no idea what the hell was going on, the helicopters shooting them were not all that close by from the look of things.
That video is here. It also shows the helicopter firing on a van that arrived to try and carry away some of the wounded. There were children visible in the van. The audio has one of the men in the helicopter saying “Look at that – right through the windshield.” He was talking about where some of the rounds from the gun went. The children were in the front seat of the van.
In the normal sense of a war, we won in both Afghanistan and Iraq: we successfully defeated the forces and overthrew the governments of both countries, and we did it very efficiently in both cases. I don’t think it fair to characterize this as a 1/5 record. I would call it more like a 3-2-1 (I give Korea a tie).
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p>Where we have done poorly is in managing the reconstruction of both countries in the face of continued armed opposition, ineffective local governments and rampant corruption. In Kuwait, we simply restored the previous government so there was nothing for us to do.
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p>I think we all know by now that acting as a foreign police force is not really a winnable scenario for anyone.
You, I, and the rest of the world give Korea a tie (hostilities ended with a ceasefire, officially the war still continues), so I guess we agree on that, and Kuwait and Vietnam too, evidently. Iraq and Afghanistan, however, are no more victories than Bush’s Mission Accomplished speech was the end of the Iraq war. In Iraq, we are limping out, unloved, with oil production down, Iran vastly strengthened, relatively speaking, and a very unstable local government. At a cost of trillions of dollars that has helped starve our economy of investment capital and contributed to the recession, and without destroying even one WMD. Insofar as victory advances our interests, it is a tough sell. In Afghanistan, Bush and Obama have entered a civil war against the Taliban, which we also are losing: withdrawing from territory, which the Taliban then control, backing a flagrantly corrupt local administration, and so on. I completely agree that we have won every set piece tank battle etc. that we fought in both locations. So what. We did in Vietnam too, and we lost that war. That is my point: war has changed, along with the world, since WWII, our military more or less has not, and we are losing.
We left all territory in the hands of our enemies. I call that a loss.
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p>Of course, Vietnam and Korea were different from both WWII and Afghanistan/Iraq in the they were both proxy wars with Communist superpowers that we could not afford to fight directly because of the risk of nuclear war. That is why both would have been very hard to win outright.
I don’t think you can parse things that way. The only real question going into Afghanistan and Iraq was whether they could be made into governable states. It’s not over yet (and so far it doesn’t look good) but if we fail ultimately in this regard then the entire campaign has to go into the loss column, IMHO.
there’s a remote possibility of either the government in Iraq or Afghanistan to become “governable states.” Our “government” in Afghanistan is FUBAR and will be thrown out soon enough, and in Iraq whatever stability we’ve created there over the past few years will likely end either due to us pulling out more troops or from the revolutions that are going on across the Middle East. There really is no “if” about failing to create stable governments, just “when” it fails. Staying there in hopes of succeeding is only delaying the inevitable, and likely making things worse in the long run.
Iraq appears to be governable for the moment.
F’d up beyond all repair.
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p>As for Iraq being “governable for the moment,” I’ll refer you to what I already stated:
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p>How governable Iraq is “for now” is really besides the point, the more important thing is about how stable and governable it will be well after we’re gone, or how the government there will react to the people rising up there like is happening elsewhere.
the grim reaper?
In Iraq alone
over 4000 US soldiers dead
over 100,000, wounded
over 1,000,000 Iraqi deaths
millions more wounded, displaced, and still suffering
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p>and even by the cold financial calculation:
$3 trillion
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p>All of this for what exactly?
A less stable, less productive, and no more democratic country!
had we never invaded Iraq, Saddam would have been a huge target in the revolutions spreading across the Middle East. Saddam Hussein would have almost certainly fallen, at almost no cost to our country and at far less a cost to the Iraqis, particularly given the fact that their people would have benefited from the preexisting no-fly zones already established in that country, preventing Saddam from being able to employ the same level of violence Quaddafi has now initiated against his own people. We’ve done more damage to Iraq and set that country further back than Saddam could have ever dreamed of.
I am not at all arguing that our prolonged stays in both Iraq and Afghanistan are worthwhile in any cost/benefit sense. I just object to the over use of this war metaphor. What is happening in both countries is no longer a war in any conventional sense.
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p>In WWII the allies “won the war” when the axis powers surrendered, not years later when the reconstruction efforts in Europe and Japan could be considered a success.
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p>If we had left Afghanistan or Iraq after overthrowing their respective governments and then left, we could have said we
won – regardless of how horrible things would become after we left.
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p>I also think that in both cases we invaded to destroy real or perceived enemies of America, not to nation build.
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p>We should leave the “win the war” metaphor to describe actual wars that can actually be won in some objective sense.
Strategic victories are hard, especially when one starts the damn thing without a strategy. I’m not sure that the entire thing demonstrates the ineffectiveness of the US armed forces– which unseated two governments on the far side of the world within a few weeks of starting to try, and which supressed a significant guerilla campaign in Iraq along the way– as it does demonstrate the failures of our political actors.
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p>For most of the last decade, we have been “speaking loudly and carrying a small stick” and the strategic failures are a direct consequence of that.
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p>Guardian.
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p>Please at least try to make an argument, CMD: we’re attempting a reality-based discussion here.
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p>As to “failures of our political actors:” more than a bit too pat. If the military could win, I am sure the political actors would be delighted. The problem is that although we did unseat two governments, that didn’t bring either military or political victory. And there’s the rub,.
Does anyone believe that these wars are fought for ‘democracy’ or the safety of our citizenry? They are fought to the benefit of our war industries and their banks, the ‘death merchants’. And in wars of attrition the bodycount matters. It is the metric of results and promotion. The officer that doesn’t have a good bodycount is not aggressive on his Officer Efficiency Report (OER=employee review) and will not advance in grade and pay. So if you kill children it is better for you than being passed over for promotion. That’s the way the system works.
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p>As we watch the buffoonery that passes for budget negotiations, has anyone not wondered why the famously padded defense budget is not open for cuts? Is the Pentagon now autonomous and Congress under the thumb of the military? Have the American people lost not only this war but also their system of government? How long before the Pentagon feels obligated to show their strength on these shores? How long before our children count on someone’s OER?
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p>Does the “land of the free and the home of the brave” sound hollow to you? Are we history’s fools?
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p>“Military glory – that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood” –Abraham Lincoln
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You can read “War is a Racket” here. If you haven’t already, I suggest that everyone read it. Butler was a man who knew what he was talking about. Two medals of Honor demonstrate that.
Every day our country continues to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, we’re all war criminals. We are the renegade country. It hurts, but that’s only because that’s what the truth does. These sorts of incidents are happening every single day and will happen every single day in a day and age where we blow things up by remote or from half a mile away. This time, it just so happened to be a bunch of kids and there was actually a survivor, so our military has to apologize. It will do us no good. We must get out now.