Well, that was quick. It seems like it was only two months ago—on Oct. 21, to be precise—that Slate’s Fred Kaplan was raving about our abfab, state of the art Guided Multiple-Launch Rocket System (aka “the 70-kilometer sniper round”), our High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (a “a 15-ton wheeled vehicle carrying a computerized fire-control system that launches the weapons”), and our more than abfab military intelligence, which, in Fred’s words, “let the U.S. artillery troops know precisely where the bad guys are and, therefore, where to aim their big guns.”
Big guns, huh? Bad guys go boom? Yeah, I’m liking the sound of that. Well, unfortunately, that rap was, well, so two months ago. Now Fred’s singing a different tune, to wit: Glass Almost Empty: The White House report on Afghanistan is very bleak indeed,
“The Obama administration’s long-awaited review of its Afghanistan war strategy—or at least the unclassified five-page summary of it released Thursday—is a bleaker document than it may seem at first glance,” Fred tells us.
“On the one hand, it contains much talk of ‘significant progress’ and ‘notable’ gains in U.S. and NATO military operations. On the other hand, there’s at least as much mention of the remaining ‘challenges’ and the fact that even the gains are fragile and reversible.’"
But that’s not the bad part—at least, that’s not the really bad part. “But to put the report’s findings in these terms suggests a mixed, even glass-half-full picture (things are going well in Column A, not so well in Column B), when in fact it states very clearly that the things going badly make the things going well nearly irrelevant.”
What’s really bad is that all our “significant progress” will go for naught unless the Pakistanis crack down on the Taliban bands hiding in Pakistan, and, Fred says, that’s not going to happen, because the Pakistanis frankly don’t give a damn, or at least not enough of one.
We are waging war in Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from returning to power, for fear that they will provide some aid and comfort and shelter to the shattered, tattered remains of al-Qaida. Yet the odds against an attack on the level of 9/11 are astronomical—say, a million to one. 9/11 could have been prevented by placing locking steel doors on the cockpits of airplanes, locking steel doors that are now in place. So we are waging war, in effect, to prove that we know what we are doing, when in fact we don’t know what we are doing—wasting blood and treasure to prove that the blood and treasure we’ve previously wasted was not a waste.
And so the Obama Administration will spend, and spend, and spend, and kill, and kill, and kill, because it is the rule in the United States that only the Republican Party is allowed to end a war.
