Tag: Afghanistan Corruption

Monday Wake Up Call – August 23, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Chaco Canyon, NM – 2021 photo by Freek Bouw. This is the best collection of ancient ruins north of Mexico.

On February 29th, 2020, the US signed an agreement with the Taliban in Doha that provided for a full US and international troop withdrawal on a 15-month timetable. The Taliban promised to take measures to restrict the activities of other terrorist groups (like al-Qaeda) and to negotiate a ceasefire and a political settlement with the Afghan government. (Read the full text of the agreement here.)

Many in the media are asking how the Taliban succeeded so quickly. They’re blaming the Biden administration’s execution of the withdrawal, but that agreement has a lot to do with why things are so chaotic.

Here is a Twitter thread by Joel Cawley about the agreement: (emphasis by Wrongo)

1/ There’s a lot of disinformation floating around on what exactly was agreed in Doha. The more you read this, the more you realize how amazingly out of touch our current commentary has become.

2/ This document specifically spells out a mutual understanding that the Taliban will negotiate a settlement with the Afghan government, just as they did. Less clear, but 100% tacitly implied throughout, is that the Taliban will be the new rulers.

3/ In other words, we knew those “settlements” were surrender agreements. All the Taliban had to do was show this document to each Afghan provincial leader and they could see we were now backing the Taliban.

4/ We even spell out our intent to then provide the Taliban, as Afghan’s new ruling party, development aid, UN recognition, and immunity from any future US military incursion or even threat.

5/ This wasn’t an intelligence failure. We agreed with them in advance on what they would do. This is a failure to properly advise and inform the incoming administration of a critical foreign policy agreement.

It’s clear that Trump’s failure to agree to an orderly transition may have delayed Biden’s team’s full understanding of their agreement with the Taliban. Michael Semple of the Irish Times writes about the consequences of the agreement:

“The US talked up the prospects of a…settlement and the hopes that it would hand over to a power-sharing administration including the Taliban. But throughout the 2018-2021 peace initiative, the Taliban leadership gave their fighters an entirely different narrative. Unambiguously….Taliban fighters were told that they had defeated the US in the war and that the US had agreed to hand over power to them as they left – ‘the Americans have handed us the keys of the presidential palace’ was a frequently repeated phrase.”

Semple adds: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)

“Critically, the 2020 deal between the US and Taliban severely curtailed the use of American air power against the Taliban, although [it allowed] the Taliban…to fight on against the Afghan government.”

The US basically quit the battlefield a year before our troops actually left. In the last year, when the US should have been building the resilience of Afghan forces, we reduced our financial support for the Afghan government, weakening a key military advantage which Afghan forces had enjoyed over the Taliban. And after the agreement was signed, the Taliban enjoyed full freedom of movement across the country and started to build their military pressure.

Sarah Chayes, a former NPR reporter who covered the fall of the Taliban in 2001, subsequently ran two non-profits in Kandahar for 10 years. She speaks Pashtu, and eventually went to work for two NATO commanders, and later for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Her blog post about the fall of Afghanistan is well worth your time:

“Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with US fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints….I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince US decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were.”

She notes that the Taliban are a creation of Pakistan:

“The Taliban were a strategic project of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. It even conducted market surveys in the villages around Kandahar, to test the label and the messaging. “Taliban” worked well. The image evoked was of the young students who apprenticed themselves to village religious leaders.”

About Hamid Karzai, America’s first puppet president, she says: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)

“During my conversations in the early 2000s about the Pakistani government’s role in the Taliban’s initial rise, I learned….[that] Hamid Karzai, the US choice to pilot Afghanistan after we ousted their regime, was in fact the go-between who negotiated those very Taliban’s initial entry into Afghanistan in 1994….Karzai may [also] have been a key go-between negotiating this surrender, just as he did in 1994,”

She also wonders about the role of Trump’s chief negotiator for the agreement, US Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. He’s an old friend of Karzai’s. She asks:

“Could…Biden truly have found no one else for that job, to replace an Afghan-American with obvious conflicts of interest, who was close to former Vice President Dick Cheney and who lobbied in favor of an oil pipeline through Afghanistan when the Taliban were last in power?”

Chayes concludes: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“I hold US civilian leadership, across four administrations, largely responsible for today’s outcome. Military commanders certainly participated in the self-delusion. I can…find fault with generals I worked for or observed. But the US military is subject to civilian control. And the two primary problems identified above — corruption and Pakistan — are civilian issues. They are not problems men and women in uniform can solve. But…no top civilian decision-maker was willing to take either of these problems on. The political risk, for them, was too high.”

When you read all of this, you realize that America’s end game in Afghanistan was bound to be a clusterfuck!

Wrongo has a problem with those who are treating the instantaneous collapse of the Afghani government and army as some sort of argument against Biden’s decision to abide by Trump’s negotiated agreement. The media has now decided to cover the withdrawal, but out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC in 2020, a total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan.

Those five minutes covered the February agreement between the US and the Taliban.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Americans are shocked at what the media are now feeding them. And isn’t it astounding how the people who were totally wrong about Afghanistan keep being invited back on TV to tell us what we should be thinking about what’s happening now?

Time to wake up America! We need to acknowledge the errors by giving them a true perspective, even if it doesn’t fit the Blue vs. Red agenda.

To help you wake up, listen to this new tune by The Killers, “Quiet Town”, about the good and bad in small town life:

The animated video is very nice.

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Afghan Finger Pointing, Part I

The Daily Escape:

Sand Beach, Stonington ME – 2021 Photo by Erin Hutchinson Via Maine Nature Lovers

Billions of words will be written about America’s spectacular and embarrassing failure in Afghanistan. Today, let’s focus on a few of the failures in Afghanistan by our military. For context, America along with our western allies, have failed badly in the four Middle East wars we’ve engaged in over the past 20 years: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and ISIS in Iraq (again), and Syria.

We’ve had 20 years to think about our goals, and to refine our military strategy and tactics. In each case, we fought an enemy that had no air or naval power, who largely had light weapons (rifles, machine guns and rocket grenades), light truck-type vehicles mounted with heavy machine guns, and the ever-present Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

In Afghanistan, the Taliban enemy favored using speed and maneuver tactics over guerilla warfare.

The Guardian offers background on our military’s training in Afghanistan:

“It started its multibillion-dollar training of Afghan forces in 2002 and three years later took control of training both the police and military, so US military trainers have had nearly two decades to ready the Afghan forces for the Taliban insurgency.”

And when we took over standing up a national Afghan army, we began by transforming it from a mobile light-infantry force that was the equivalent of the Taliban’s, into a combined-arms service with army, air force, and special forces elements.

That is, we remade them in our military’s image and likeness.

This decision meant that the costs of training, equipping, and maintaining the Afghan National Army would be ruinous, but the US taxpayer was paying for it, so not a problem. We had to teach them map reading because our way of fighting is coordinates-based. We taught them to fly helicopters, and to maintain them. We taught them the logistics necessary to get spare parts and aviation gas to remote bases.

This created the self-licking ice cream cone, a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself. Our military’s task required advanced military weapons, supplies and training that could only be provided by our glorious military-industrial complex defense contractors.

It worked for 20 years.

There’s a US military agency called the “Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Redevelopment” (SIGAR) that monitors and audits our spending in Afghanistan. SIGAR found that since 2005, the US military had been attempting to evaluate the battle-readiness of the Afghan troops they had been training, but by 2010, acknowledged that its monitoring and evaluation procedures:

“…failed to measure…factors such as leadership, corruption and motivation – all factors that could affect a unit’s ability to put its staffing and equipment to use during actual war-fighting”.

By 2014, it was decided that those assessment reports should be classified, presumably to hide the poor results. SIGAR also found the US military was persistently over-optimistic about Afghan military capability, even though it had no reliable evidence to justify that assessment.

Know that the Generals in charge of Afghanistan through these many years weren’t dumb enough to think that they were building an Afghan army that could win a war with the Taliban. But they said just that. And according to the WaPo, they lied their asses off the whole time:

“In the summer of 2011, Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV made a round of public appearances to boast that he had finally solved a problem that had kept US troops bogged down in Afghanistan….Under his watch…US military advisers and trainers had transformed the ragtag Afghan army and police into a professional fighting force that could defend the country and keep the Taliban at bay.”

More:

“…later….Caldwell said….the Obama administration’s decision to spend $6 billion a year to train and equip the Afghan security forces had produced a remarkable turnaround. He predicted that the Taliban-led insurgency would subside and that the Afghans would take over responsibility for securing their country by the end of 2014, enabling US combat troops to leave.”

Now we see the reality: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…according to documents obtained for the forthcoming Washington Post book “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” US military officials privately harbored fundamental doubts for the duration of the war that the Afghan security forces could ever become competent or shed their dependency on US money and firepower…..Those fears, rarely expressed in public, were ultimately borne out by the sudden collapse this month of the Afghan security forces…”

The US military leaders lied – to Congress, and to the American people. They classified the data that their lies were based on, so oversight was mostly impossible. If you need to lie for 10 years about the progress you’re making on the job, it’s likely that you’re bad at your job, the project is simply wrong on its face, or both.

And this week, despite Biden and others saying it was a complete surprise that Kabul fell without a shot, US intelligence officials admitted to NBC on the condition of anonymity, that there was in fact intelligence indicating a Taliban takeover could happen as quickly as it did. A Western intelligence official said:

“…there absolutely was intelligence reporting that it could happen this fast. This was not a surprise.”

A US official said: “we knew the Taliban would take over….We knew most Afghans wouldn’t fight. It was faster than expected, but not that much.”

Now they tell us. What they told us for 10+ years was a pipe dream. That’s why it’s folly to listen to former generals and politicians who suggest that things would have been any different if we waited another six months before withdrawing.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the bulk of it falls on the military. They were on the ground.

  • They were the ones who built an Afghan military that was completely unsuitable for the battle at hand.
  • They apparently never grasped the full extent of the Afghan corruption that was undermining the mission.
  • They advised four US presidents that things would work out if they could just have a little more time and a few more troops.

No one wants to be the bearer of bad news. No one wants to admit they can’t do the job they’ve been tasked with. These things also happened to the generals in Vietnam, and the Pentagon swore at the time it would never happen again.

But it did, once they found themselves in a similar situation.

We shouldn’t forget that the Afghan military did fight. They’ve been fighting for years, taking many more casualties than we did. According to Brown University, about 70,000 of them died during the same period that the US military lost 2,442. Many in the Afghan military hadn’t been paid in months. Some were sent to remote bases to fight without food and other basic supplies. No wonder they surrendered their weapons without a shot.

As a former US Army officer, Wrongo is sad to say that Afghanistan will be remembered as a great shining military disaster, a head-on collision of the neo-con nation-building fantasy with reality.

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We’re Done in Afghanistan

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Atlantic Beach, FL August 2021 photo by Razvan Balotescu

The finger pointing has already begun, but it was always going to end badly. Should we be surprised? Sure, Biden has made mistakes, the same kind as those of his predecessors. He believed what he was told by the CIA and the military, neither of which should be trusted about anything they say regarding Afghanistan.

The foreign policy and military establishment are now doing everything they can to blame Biden, but the bottom line remains that Afghanistan is a massive failure on their part. They continued telling him the same bullshit they told Bush II, Obama, and Trump.

The images coming from Afghanistan are disturbing, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. We spent $2 trillion to prop up the government that failed, and to train and equip the Afghan military over the past 20 years. And they fell in a week. (Full disclosure: Wrongo owns shares in a defense contractor that trained the Afghan military.)

From the WaPo: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s military that allowed Taliban fighters to walk into {Kabul]… Sunday despite 20 years of training and billions of dollars in American aid began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government’s lowest-ranking officials.

The deals…were…described by Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and a US official.

Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces, according to interviews with more than a dozen Afghan officers, police, special operations troops and other soldiers.”

It’s almost like the Taliban were familiar with Afghan culture and society! It’s clear that the US Military and Government sure as hell were not. Former Vice-President Cheney of Halliburton will probably need yet another heart transplant when he hears that Kabul fell without a shot fired.

It’s difficult to know whether the CIA, military, and neo-con foreign policy types involved in criticizing Biden are liars or are deluded. Do they think that America just needed a little more time on the ground in Afghanistan? Or do they know the only real alternative here was an indefinite, colonial occupation, something they know shouldn’t be politically or morally acceptable?

Inside the beltway, there are people who have devoted most of their adult lives to war in the greater Middle East. Obviously, they are going to oppose pulling out. It’s like setting their entire life’s work on fire. No one willingly admits their life’s work is a failure.

The idea that we need to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely has nothing to do with a coherent policy. It’s the neo-con ideology of American Exceptionalism: America is awesome, America kicks ass, America can’t fail, it can only be failed by Biden.

In this case, our “Exceptionalism” as practiced by neo-cons like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Fred Kagan, has two parts: First, our mission is to save the world. Second, the Afghans are the reason we couldn’t save the world. Both are opposite sides of the same imperialistic coin of exceptionalism. Why are the Afghans responsible for the unraveling of our illusions? And, isn’t Afghanistan a part of our illusion?

Charlie Pierce says of the neo-cons:

“None of those people have produced an adequate answer to the question of what the hell we were doing there, and what the hell we would do there for the next 10, 20, or 50 years. Sooner or later, we have to learn the lessons of history, because we’ve been deaf to them for so long. In Vietnam, we should’ve learned that the only people who really want the places in which we choose to make war are the people who live there.”

We’ve made a long series of bad decisions. First, we should have left Afghanistan after we helped the Northern Alliance beat the (then unpopular) Taliban. Instead, Bush II experimented with nation-building, drafting a constitution that created a strong central government in a country that is ruled locally. We then installed a puppet regime.

Now, we’re surprised that most people don’t like being told what to do by outsiders.

We should have seen that the Afghan government we created would collapse if we left. The particulars, especially just how quickly it ended may be a surprise, but the error can be measured in weeks, not months. And that’s not a big estimation error in a 20-year war.

There’s a lot of hindsight bias among the neo-cons and some Republicans who are saying Biden “lost Afghanistan”. It was lost years ago. The same scenario could have played out whether Bush, Obama or Trump were leading the withdrawal.

What does it say about Afghanistan, if the government and the civilian military we supported with $ trillions would only stay in place if we kept our military there as an occupying force?

The faux outrage at Biden losing Afghanistan needs to be prioritized on the list of what really matters in America today (in no order):

Afghanistan
Our mediocre education system
The Covid pandemic
Fraying social cohesion
Climate change: forest fires/drought
Vote suppression
Domestic terrorism
Economic inequality
Media lies/disinformation
White supremacy and racism

Wrongo knows which one is his lowest priority. What priority is Afghanistan for you?

Now, our mission is clear: hold the Kabul airport as long as possible and get ALL US citizens and as many Afghan partners out as we can. Along with getting out the thousands of troops we sent in the last few days to secure the airport.

The scenes of chaos at the Kabul airport raises a question of whether we should have abandoned the Bagram Air Base on July 1. It’s farther from Kabul and more difficult to defend, but we probably wouldn’t be seeing its runways swarming with Afghans if we were departing from there.

We can debate the rest later.

Lost in the discussion is the pointless tragedy of our soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for what? Listen to Eric B. & Rakim, a hip-hop duo from NYC, perform their 1992 rap, “Casualties Of War”. They were rapping about Desert Storm, but Rakim was also predicting the future:

Sample lyric:

Cause I got a family that waits for my return
To get back home is my main concern
I’ma get back to New York in one piece
but I’m bent in the sand that is hot as the city streets
Sky lights up like fireworks blind me
Bullets, whistlin over my head remind me…
President Bush said attack
Flashback to Nam, I might not make it back
Half of my platoon came home in coffins…buried in the Storm In bits and pieces…ain’t no way I’m going back to war
When I don’t know who or what I’m fighting for

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Biden Shouldn’t Backtrack on Afghanistan

The Daily Escape:

Low tide, Wellfleet, Cape Cod, MA – July 2021 photo by Jennifer O’Leary

Ever since Biden decided to pull out of Afghanistan, the media are filled with stories about how the Taliban are on the march, and how the Afghan government is giving way before them. From the Guardian:

“The Taliban have now overrun six provincial capitals in mere days. On Sunday the group claimed a huge symbolic victory when its fighters seized Kunduz, a strategic city close to the border with Tajikistan and an important political and military hub.”

From the WaPo:

“The recent developments and gains in Afghanistan mark a sharp escalation in the pace of Taliban gains across Afghanistan, which for months had been focused on taking control of districts and increasing pressure on urban areas.“

From the NYT:

“The response from the US military to the Taliban gains was muted, showing clearly that the US’s 20-year war in Afghanistan is over and that it is for the Afghan forces to retake the cities overrun by the Taliban.”

Many politicians and former military have crawled back in front of microphones to pronounce the final withdrawal of US troops a strategic mistake. One retired UK general raised the specter of Afghanistan becoming once again, a base for international terrorism.

The thing these people aren’t saying is that the US had only 2500 troops in Afghanistan just before announcing the pull-out, a number that wasn’t going to provide significant resistance to the Taliban. And it wasn’t sufficient to blunt a return of terrorists.

What we had was a token force with a primary responsibility to protect the US embassy.

Many media outlets are opining on how the Afghan conflict has entered a new, deadlier, and more destructive phase. Foreign Policy reports that the Taliban’s military tactics may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The NYT is saying that the situation on the ground lays bare a difficult predicament for Biden.

It’s clear that for years, most of the fighting with the Taliban happened in the country’s rural areas. Now, the Taliban are pushing into cities, and many more civilians will be injured or killed. The first thing the Taliban do in each city they capture is free Taliban prisoners and seize truckloads of weapons from police and military headquarters before the US can bomb them.

This allows them to increase their numbers, and arm them, despite taking casualties.

All of this, and the looming end of the role of women as near-equal members of Afghan society, has caused a paroxysm of regret in the media for ending our 20-year effort at nation-building in Afghanistan.

But what’s wrong with Biden staying the course, doing what he said he was going to do? He needs to hold firm, even though there will likely be a “fall of Saigon” moment sometime soon.

In less than 20 years after WWII, the US helped to create functioning democracies in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. Each of those successes involved nations with cohesive populations.

That’s not the case in Afghanistan: The Hazara, the Uzbek, the Pashtun, the Tajik all (more or less) detest each other. The Shiite and Sunni factions feel the same. This was never going to be a unified and functioning democracy. That wouldn’t be cured by 20 more years of American occupation.

Adam Tooze, economist at Columbia University, reminds us that our 20-year intervention in Afghanistan has cost the US over $2.2 trillion dollars. In his blog post, “Afghanistan’s economy on the eve of the American exit” he tells us that despite Afghanistan’s huge economic needs, the ratio of military to civilian development spending was in the order of ten to one. But in many years, Western aid spending exceeded the Afghan GDP.

He asks: Where did the money go?

The answer is that tens of $ billions were swallowed by corruption. Wealthy Afghans became large property owners in the Gulf states. Today, Afghanistan’s most valuable crop is opium, which isn’t part of their GDP statistics. And since the early 2000s, opium cultivation has progressively increased.

Tooze points out the two successes: Afghan life expectancy has increased, driven by a rapid fall in infant mortality and big life expectancy gains for women. Women now outlive the men. Second, university enrollment: the number of students enrolled in universities has risen from 30,000 in 2003, to more than 180,000. In 2018, there were 49,000 female students vs. 7,200 in 2003.

Despite the good news, as per capita income increased, so has the poverty rate. Today, over half of Afghanistan’s population are officially counted as poor.

The widespread corruption and failed economic development only make rural Afghanistan a prime recruiting ground for the Taliban. The country is most likely on the verge of civil war. OTOH, it’s been a long time since the Taliban tried to manage a city. Kabul now has about 4 million residents. Let’s leave the closing thought to Tooze:

“What kind of regime could be established by the Taliban over such a city? What kind of future can they deliver for Afghanistan and for their constituency in the countryside? Little wonder that the Taliban have been assiduously courting Beijing. Afghanistan needs all the friends it can get.”

Wrongo has written 48 columns about US policy in Afghanistan. It’s doubtful that this is the last, but let’s hope we’re nearly there.

Leaving Afghanistan should prompt us to rethink our country’s place in the world: Should our military always be the first tool out of the toolbox? What did the US gain from being enmeshed in the Greater Middle East for the past 50 years?

Leaving Afghanistan should lead to a reckoning about these questions, and a consideration about what a more modest and realistic future US foreign policy would look like.

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Afghanistan: Too Corrupt To Save?

The Daily Escape:

London street art by Bambi  – 2017 photo by Wrongo. Since then, she has done another version, where the bag says: “I love Meghan”.

On October 7, 2001 The US military with British support, began a bombing campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. That mission was called Operation Enduring Freedom. So, what has endured in the 18 years since we started bombing the Taliban? Mostly corruption. The Economist has a damning report: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Last year was the deadliest on record for civilians, according to the United Nations. America’s air force dropped more bombs in 2018 than at any other point in the war. Despite that support, the government is slowly losing ground. It now controls barely half the country’s territory, albeit two-thirds of its people.”

US forces have shifted their strategy to trying to inflict maximum casualties on the Taliban, who now control more territory than at any time since its ouster from power in 2001. This is the same as the “body count” strategy that we tried in Vietnam. But the Taliban are winning, despite America’s best efforts. We’ve backed a corrupt government that the Afghan people do not trust. The Economist illustrates that point:

“A group of middle-aged drivers explain the difference between the Taliban and the government. Both groups take money from drivers on the road, says Muhammad Akram…both are violent. But when the Taliban stop him at a checkpoint, they write him a receipt. Waving a fistful of green papers, he explains how they ensure he won’t be charged twice: after he pays one group of Talibs, his receipt gets him through subsequent stops. Government soldiers, in contrast, rob him over and over.”

We started down a path of nation-building in Afghanistan 18 years ago, but the government in Kabul doesn’t provide basic services. It has a huge security apparatus, and a big bureaucracy, but where it matters, the State, in the words of the US DOJ, is “largely lawless, weak and dysfunctional”.

No place in the country is completely safe. At boozy parties in Kabul, rich Afghans share gallows humor about the impending arrival of the jihadists at their gates.

The Taliban are no prize. Their brutal attacks make them deeply unpopular, especially in Afghan cities. But The Economist says that in rural areas, they are seen as efficient and willing to challenge arbitrary government power. According to a UN study, Afghan land disputes account for 70% of violent crimes. In government-controlled areas, well-connected figures often grab land for themselves. The Taliban, in contrast, have judges who deal with such cases brutally, but with less corruption.

The Taliban expects poppy-farmers to pay taxes on their crop, but they also provide seed capital and other support. In many areas, they help to police water use, managing disputes and limiting the over-exploitation of groundwater. Over the past few years the size of the opium crop has grown remarkably—especially in Taliban-controlled areas.

Another Economist article shows that solar panels are transforming the landscape of southern Afghanistan. Farmers used to run their pumps with diesel generators, but fuel was very expensive. Now they can pump water all day using solar.

Only 12% of the country is suitable for growing permanent crops, but since 2018, 3,600 square kilometers in south-western Afghanistan were reclaimed for cultivation from the desert by using solar power to pump water to the fields. From the Economist:

“As many as 2.5 million people…now live in what used to be desert. The price of desert land has soared, from as little as $35 for a jereb (about 2,000 square meters) to over $1,000 now. That has made landowners rich, not to mention politicians and senior police officers.”

The reclaimed territory is mostly beyond government control: Many of the settlers are hostile to the State.

This has also brought a big cost for the environment. Drinking wells are increasingly contaminated with nitrates from fertilizers, which farmers have spread near the water pumps. Shallow wells have gone completely dry. If the groundwater is exhausted, millions of Afghans will have to move.

The US and the Taliban have been negotiating directly since October over a possible American withdrawal in exchange for a commitment from the Taliban not to harbor terrorists. The Afghan government has been excluded from these talks, and they are concerned that they may be forced into a coalition government with the Taliban.

The Trump administration wants out of Afghanistan, and may not care much about who in the current government survives. The latest round of talks concluded on May 9th, with what the Taliban described as “some progress”, but the pace is glacial, and may not lead to anything.

Wrongo has been saying for years that we need to leave Afghanistan. Why are we still there? Vietnam proved we could win all the battles, get higher body counts, and still lose the war.

Will we “win” in Afghanistan? No, it’s unwinnable. You can’t win when you’re on the side that’s even more hated and corrupt than our “enemy.”

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