Things we don't understand - Afghanistan, part 4

Based on information I hear from an American officer deployed in Afghanistan, the American people know essentially nothing about the Afghan people, their culture or how the U.S. military operates. The view of reality that I get makes talk of any sort of success sound either like outright fabrication or sheer naivety. For the most part, the press is AWOL. Maybe "embedding" journalists has succeeded in quieting them. Or, maybe the press has just lost interest, i.e., ad revenues.

My prior Afghanistan post described the occasional attack on Baghram airbase and how the military deals, or more accurately doesn't deal, with that nuisance. In one recent rocket (or mortar)  attach, the incoming shell hit a pole above a B hut on the airbase. Four U.S. soldiers in the B hut were injured but not killed because the shell exploded above the hut. Although it was unusual, a large enough piece of the shell remained for finding a fingerprint on the shell.

Who did the fingerprint belong to? One of our stalwart Afghan allies - an Afghan employee working on the airbase. Within a few weeks of that incident, another Afghani employee at the airbase was caught pacing off the distance from a target building on the airbase to a location from which an attack could be launched. Nobody can make stories like this up.

Given our apparent inability to win many Afghan hearts or minds, what is it we think we can accomplish? All our Afghan military allies care about is getting a paycheck and ignoring our troops at best or killing them at worst. Sure, there will be truly committed Afghan allies, but it sounds like they are outnumbered by about twenty to one and embedded in the Afghan culture. Other than dictatorship, Afghan culture does not seem to be compatible with other forms of government like democracy.

Can you recall the fall of Saigon and the helicopters getting pushed off the deck of the aircraft carrier? Although were were truly committed people in the South Vietnamese army, that wasn't nearly enough. They were swept aside shortly after the U.S. withdrew. Our military situation today feels very much like that sorry episode.

Vietnam vs. Afghanistan

In Vietnam, we had a viable and aggressive press. We had some idea of what was going on, despite the U.S. government's best efforts to keep the public in the dark. Remember the secret bombing of Cambodia? Eventually we found out. These days the U.S. government apparently doesn't have to work as hard to keep the public in the dark. The press and most the public just do not seem to care very much. Maybe the cost, about $377 billion so far, is too low to be of interest in view of our current fiscal problems.

What does success look like?

Given the situation, it is hard to see how we can succeed in Afghanistan. It is hard to imagine what success would even look like. Will it be like Iraq, where people are ready to riot over a chronic lack of electricity and other basic services while having to live with the "tolerable" level of violence (a mere 4,000 deaths in 2010) and massive Iraqi government incompetence and corruption? That's what America's $774 billion has bought us, Iraq and the rest of the world so far. Was it worth it? Will Afghanistan turn out any better? At the moment, it doesn't look like it. But, more time and money will tell. It is still to early to know if Iraq will have some sort of happy ending. Afghanistan is still few years behind that.