Afghanistan disaster!

The war in Afghanistan has been going on since the end of 2001.  Initially, it was intended to be a small counterinsurgency war designed to root out Osama bin Laden.  Bush had a significantly difficult time with this and was never able to achieve the two stated goals.  Capturing or killing bin Laden and defeating the Taliban.

Obama took over following his inauguration in January of 2009.  He followed this up with a troop surge strategy reminiscent of how Bush managed to calm things down in Iraq.  I criticized that move at the time because I believed it was a wrong decision.  A surge was not the answer, rather, it was a path toward ending up like the Soviets during the 1980s.  There has been some reporting on the casualty figures, including some reporting on how Bush didn't know what he was doing, that we were losing in Afghanistan.  Maybe we were losing and giving credit where it is due, Obama has certainly succeeded at making the situation on the ground safer with his surge.  Or, at least that is what we are meant to believe.  I think what the surge accomplished was to be able to secure certain areas as well as force the Taliban into hiding, but has it achieved a victory?  This is an important distinction, because nothing short of complete victory will result in peace in that country, in my opinion.  Ironically, that also seems to be the opinion of this writer.

I suppose whether or not it is a disaster largely depends on how you define success.  If you define success based on casualties per capita, then perhaps you could argue this war has been a success.  However, I'm generally pretty straightforward in looking at this issue, so I pretty much just go by the numbers.  This chart shows the growth of troops in Afghanistan over time.  Note the "quiet surge" of Bush in '07 and '08.  In other words, the surge that nobody ever announced until it was already done.  However, the Obama "surge" started in March of 2009 and apparently didn't end until March of 2010.  That's a heck of a "surge".  This is more like committed troop deployment.  The whole point of a surge strategy is that it is supposed to be temporary.  Obama recognized this when he announced the surge, stating that we'd begin drawing down the troops by December of 2011.  Well, this hasn't exactly happened.  In fact, in his visit to Afghanistan, the President made it clear he hopes to have Afghanistan on track to where we can significantly draw down troops by the end of 2014.  That's three years LONGER than his initial strategy.  That isn't a surge.

In Iraq, the surge was started in 2007 and the country was stable by 2008 and we had all troops withdrawn by 2011.  That's not a 4 year surge, but rather a strategy for winning and getting out.  So far, the Iraq government remains viable, although I continue to withhold final judgement on whether or not we "won" anything there.  Here, the surge started in 2009 and to his credit has become more stable.  Stable enough that a sitting President thought it was safe enough for him to "visit" a warzone.  I disagree with him on this decision, but that's just my opinion.  I thought it was a rather foolhardy thing to do actually.  Nonetheless, if he is successful in getting our troops out by 2014  (this assumes he gets another term to do it), then this surge will have taken 5 years from beginning to end.  I still see no evidence that this 2014 deadline is anything more than a political hope.  After all, we still have over 90 thousand troops there.

Finally, let's just look at the numbers.  The media made a huge deal out of every single soldier's death when Bush was President.  I'm not opposed to this.  Since I am generally not in favor of war, highlighting and honoring as many of our war dead is noble and necessary.  However, in recent times, the media seems to have forgotten that anyone is dying over there at all.  Is that because of who is President or because this is an election year or both?  I don't know, but it is awfully convenient.  After all, the President has always stated that this is the war he supports.  Therefore, many people see this as the "good" war.  Ridiculous to me, but that's the way things are.  Now, here's an interesting statistic.  Would you believe me if I told you that Bush had fewer casualties than Obama in Afghanistan?  Probably not.  After all, Bush had 8 years and Obama has just over 3 years.  Also, Bush had a disaster on his hands according to the media which Obama's surge fixed.  Well...I have to admit that reality also surprised me.  It seems that 67 percent of the dead and over 82 percent of the wounded soldiers in the Afghanistan war have come in the 3 years since Obama took over.  That's astounding!  You can't define that as success.  Can you?  Sure, per capita figures are probably much better for Obama, but 2/3 of all the dead in the war in 3 of the 11 years?  And this isn't just deaths early on in the surge.  There were 41 deaths in April of 2012.  That's the most since October, but I bet you hadn't heard about that.  So fine, maybe we have a political victory like we seem to have won in Iraq?  Not really, the Taliban don't seemed deterred, as evidenced by their attacks following the President's visit yesterday.  At any rate, I leave it to the individual to decide if we are being "successful" in Afghanistan, but to me, it seems like we are just being political.  Rather than throwing everything we have at the Taliban, we seem content to secure most of the country and try to "negotiate" with an enemy that would just assume nuke us all (yes, I know that is opinion stated as fact).  This strategy didn't work in Europe, it has yet to be proven that it'll work in Iraq and I highly doubt it'll work in Afghanistan.

Here's our actual casualty figures to date.

Afghanistan casualties:

	Wounded	Dead		Percentage	Obama	Bush
Bush	2696	645		Wounded	82.4	17.6
Obama	12626	1312		Dead	67	33
Total	15322	1957