The 30,000 “surge troops” essentially 3 combat divisions with support and ancillary units, are slated to be rotated home within the next year.
Good! It is a start. There is no such thing as instant withdrawal unless we are willing to leave every single bit of useful military hardware behind. That should not happen. The cost of replacement is too high. The Afghans don’t need it. Their army will not maintain it, will most likely sell or loot it if we leave it to them.
We left a lot of hardware to the ARVN. Most of it was sold for black market profits, stripped for parts and then sold for scrap, captured by the PAVN, or thrown into the ocean because fleeing ARVN leaders used it to escape to nearby U.S. navy ships. We don’t need to repeat that mistake.
However, I believe that as we draw down our forces in Afghanistan two things will happen. First, attacks upon our troops will increase in frequency and in efficacy. Taliban and other anti-Karzai forces will co-opt the official Afghani army to join them, using their uniforms to more closely approach our compounds and patrols. 2nd, the official army leaders and civilian officials will increase their rates of theft and looting in preparation for their planned bailouts. When the last U.S. combat unit leaves Afghanistan, there will be no government capable of or willing to oppose the Taliban. We will see a route such as no one has seen since 1975.
So what we need to do is to pull back from risky, poorly defensible positions into strong interdiction bases. We need to stop any patrols not necessary for continued security of those bases. The Afghan army needs to take over all ground combat roles. Looting of U.S. provided equipment, plants, and other resources should be stopped immediately.
We allowed micro-management similar to that which made Vietnam so hard to fight to prevent the capture of bin Laden at Tora Bora. The Bush admin handed the nation two botched wars that resulted in no way to determine victory. So it is time to follow the Nixon pattern; declare that we won and pick up our toys. We can at least sell them for scrap if they are too badly used up. I don’t want to see Afghans hanging onto choppers like Vietnamese.
Posted at 09:26 PM ET, 06/22/2011
President Obama’s Afghanistan speech confirms America’s decline
“The American Century just ended. This was the phrase coined by Henry Luce, which so aptly described America as the modern-day colossus, more powerful than any nation had ever been. Wednesday night, President Obama said that power had reached its limit. He was bringing 10,000 troops home from Afghanistan. The war was not finished, but we are.
“America, it is time to focus on nation building at home,” the president said…”
“I have heard this speech before. I heard echoes of Richard Nixon explaining “Vietnamization.” Gonna turn the war over to our stolid allies. We put them on their feet. We trained them. We supplied them. We schooled them at our elite military academies. They looked splendid in their uniforms. But when the U.S. pulled out, South Vietnam collapsed. It will happen again in Afghanistan. I think Obama knows that. He fought this war -- authorized the West Point surge -- because he did not know how to get out. Now, he does. As any previous president could have told him, it’s by getting out…”
“Something similar has happened in Afghanistan. Bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaeda has been riddled by drones. The job is done, or done enough, and we are broke and in need of some R&R. Obama surely knows his history and does not want it repeated -- neither as tragedy nor as farce. We are not Henry Luce’s America -- not because we no longer want to be, but because we no longer can be.”
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