Washington Lost Afghan War - They Just Hate to Admit It

Rasa - NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says the US-led alliance is close to having its goal of 16,000 troops for Afghanistan, and that he is “absolutely confident” they will have enough by 2018 - and that they will win.

News ID: 434874

Date: 19 November 2017 - 23:46

RNA - After the US announced their own escalation of the Afghan War, they began to push NATO to commit more troops to the country. With many NATO nations having withdrawn from Afghanistan in recent years, they are not very interested in going back.

The alliance is in the know that they have lost the war on Afghanistan. They just hate to admit it:

What the US-led alliance has to do to understand how badly they have lost in Afghanistan is get their air forces to carry their leaders over there and fly along the route from Kabul to Kandahar, or Kabul to Jalalabad, and have a look at the roads. That’s all they need to know. Roads.

According to the Pentagon, the occupiers spent $3 billion over 16 years paving roads in Afghanistan. In 2001, they had exactly 50 miles of paved roads. By 2016, they had paved somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 miles of them. But that same year, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction did an inspection and reported that 95 percent of those roads were either damaged or completely destroyed. Not to mention that almost every mile of those roads on which they spent $3 billion are too unsafe to travel on.

According to the United States Agency for International Development, an arm of the State Department, it would cost the occupiers another $8 billion to get those roads up and running again. With no guarantee they wouldn’t get themselves blown off by an IED in the first mile.

Roads are absolutely essential to any functioning country. The occupiers got to be able to get from one place to another without dying or at least without completely destroying their trucks and military gears. Without the trucks, without the roads, without the basic texture of transportation, the whole thing about permanent occupation falls apart.

If the US-led alliance can’t do something as basic as pave Afghanistan’s roads and keep them safe and passable, they have lost. They have no business occupying there for one more minute. They should pack up all of their tanks and Humvees and helicopters, and they should load all of occupying soldiers on C-130’s and get out of there.

Sitting around Pentagon war rooms and on cable news panels talking about troop surge, some kind of reset, a new strategy that will take them from 16 straight years of losing and get them to winning is just wishful thinking. They can’t win. And no amount of talk, no new strategy, no amount of money, no additional troops are going to change it.

It's pure folly to think that there's some answer the Trump White House can come up with now, some new commander they can insert like a new ammunition clip, and that's going to solve the problem. It won’t.

All the occupiers really need to do is know history, of course. They are wrong to assume that more troops and more generals and more budget will give them magic powers to win this time. It won’t. If still in doubt, they should ask the Russians.

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