From Bad to Worse

I’ve been struggling for months with how to respond to the question everyone keeps asking me: “What do you thing about the surge in Afghanistan?” It’s always worded a bit different. Some ask it seemingly reluctantly, wanting to know but not sure how to ask it. I do love Afghanistan. I long to see more of the country… but cannot. I want so badly to see a chance for improvement. I want to but the final card just dropped. I just read that Abdullah Abdullah is going to drop out of the runoff election with Karzai. Abdullah has been pushing for a power sharing deal and the sacking of the head of the election commission. Karzai has been stonewalling and apparently all bets are now off.
I was listening to an interview with the former deputy head of the UN’s mission in Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith. He was sacked by Ban Ki Moon prior to the primary election for pushing too hard for free and fair elections. His specific complaint was that too many polling places were going to be designated. Now before you scoff and ask why that is a bad thing it’s important to remember that many parts of the country are still outside the direct control of Kabul. Mr. Galbraith’s complaint was that to open polling places that likely would not be manned would allow easy ballot stuffing. If the polling place never opens except on paper it’s too easy to make up imaginary votes and record them. He made these specific complaints before the first election and low and behold what happened? Exactly that! The UN threw out so many votes for Karzai that a second election was warranted.
A few days ago I heard that the “Independent “ Election Commission in Afghanistan was going to open even MORE polling places for the runoff election. I heard that and thought “it’s over”. It’s a bold move to be sure. Even more phantom polling places to record make believe votes. It was clear to me Karzai was going to steal this election at any cost, the greedy bastard. Now the story about Abdullah, I no longer have any hope that we can have a positive impact on the country.
In 1963 we supported a coup d’etat against Diem in South Vietnam. This was a regime change of a government we were “supporting” we all know how that one ended. So now we have an illiterate government, of our own creation, running the country we are fighting in. This can’t possibly end well. More cash, more troops, it won’t matter. You simply can’t bring peace and stability to a country without a central government short of straight up colonization and that is but a short tern solution which also generally ends badly.
I was hopeful that General McCrystal’s strategy of protecting the populace would improve conditions but how can that possibly work when the central government is horribly corrupt? How do you hand off control of a country to someone only interested in raping it?
Does this mean I think the Taliban are a good alternative? Hell no! The Taliban are an evil Pakistani construct, not an Afghan movement. We look to have burned all our bridges though. We have played this misadventure so badly from the get go that we no longer have any options. I hate to say this. I love Afghanistan and want above all else to put on rose colored glasses and pretend we can fix the mess. I simply can’t pretend any longer. This tears me up but I can’t ignore it. We need to extricate our troops and let the Afghans decide their own destiny.
At this point the best we can do is work feverishly to cut all the funding strings to the Taliban and drug lords. This we CAN do. We know who these people are. We know how to disrupt international funding channels. If we were to effectively limit outside influence from Afghanistan, our own included, the country would sort itself out. Will we do that? No. Too bad. You have no idea how angry this all makes me. Here we go again…

Back in the Saddle

Just two months back from Afghanistan. I live in a privileged beach community on the West Coast. Given I didn’t have anything to do with combat in Afghanistan and actually enjoyed my time there I should have had an easy transition. At least I would have thought so. My first month or so was vacation time. I thought I would accomplish so much. Not so, to my dismay. Last month I spent back at Corporate America. I returned to most of my duties. Things began slowly, boring, bland. I wondered what the hell I was doing there, in my little cubicle. It’s been a strange transition. I’ve been away before but never for so long, especially never so long without a break.

I heard my wife telling her best friend that I was burned out from working more than six months without a day off. It didn’t feel like the cause though. I am glad she has friends to confess to, to confide in. I had one once. It’s important to have someone other than a spouse to talk to. So here I am, a bit better now. The turning point seems to have been a dream in which I died. I’ve never died in a dream before. The strange thing is that I was falling and knew it would end badly. Rather than taking control of the dream as I usually have I concentrated on relaxing and letting go. At impact I was suddenly somewhere else. Someone was walking toward a fence with me to see the carnage. A person had landed badly, fatally, from some great distance. When I looked I saw it was my body lying there. I was not feeling bad, just curious. There I stood looking at my shattered form on the concrete. I told my friend about the dream but shortly thereafter they vanished. So, here I am somewhat transformed, somewhat back to normal, but lacking a key person in my life. Cest la vie.
Yesterday I climbed mount San Jacinto. It was my first ascent since I began the foray into Central Asia and the bowels of petroleum management. The last peak was San Gorgonio in Sep 08. I love mountains. They help me maintain balance. They make me feel at home. I suppose I’ve always liked abandoned places. Places forgotten. In High School I used to go to the old LA Zoo, long abandoned. It was like ruins in the middle of a city. Anyway I finally made it back up a mountain for the first time since staring at those wonderful peaks surrounding the Shamali Plain. Climbing early you manage to miss most other people, at least on the ascent. It was comforting to sit at the summit for a short while in relative privacy. I can’t imagine a better vantage point from which to contemplate the world. Taoists have the right idea.

Out Of The War Zone Into The Fire Zone

I’ve been back in So Cal for six weeks now. I’ve had this ongoing internal debate on weather to retire the blog or keep writing. People keep reading it so I decided I should keep writing it. The LA basin is in for a hell of a fire season. It’s early in the season and already the Station Fire has charred 160,000 acres of local mountains. A new fire is raging as I write this. This new fire is upwind from the canyon I live in and with Santa Anna winds blowing, that can be worrisome. I spent six months in Afghanistan and generally felt safe. If some dumbass shoots at you, bullets can be sent back post haste. If Katushka rockets or mortars are inbound, they generally come in threes or fours, they are short lived attacks and infrequent. Mind you this is from my experience at Bagram not at Helmond, Kandahar, Patika, Ghazni, etc. That said, my community lies anxiously waiting for the end of the Santa Anna’s. We are at the mercy of random arsonists. Cowardly bastards that should be severely punished. Such is life in the alleged bastion of democracy.
There is a major debate in the USA right now about Afghanistan. Should we send in more troops and prove we could have won in Vietnam or do we cut our losses and pull out? I am asked my opinion about this almost daily. My friends and neighbors want to hear the opinion of someone who has seen Afghanistan. I am struggling with the answer. Anyone who has read this blog knows I think highly of the potential of Afghanistan. I think highly of the resourcefulness of the Afghan people. I would love nothing more than to be able to tell people we should send in more troops and that we can win this in under a year. I would love to… but I cannot. I am have this melancholy feeling that we already shot our wad in Central Asia. We had the initiative and going into 2003 we threw it away on the whims of a fascist administration. (As I write this you should know I choose my words carefully) We have really screwed this war up. You can’t invade and then throttle back and pretend all is well. The initial good will of the Afghans, happy to be free of the despotic Taliban Regime, is long gone. The average Afghan wants peace. They want their homes intact, not bombed. They want the mines and ordinance removed, not limbs removed by explosives. We are in a sad state of affairs in Central Asia today.
If the US Army were still led by soldiers who had fought in the hell of Vietnam we might have stood a chance. Insurgencies are ugly. Fighting an enemy who look like civilians is a nasty business full of misidentification and tragedy. I worry that the senior officers raised in the turkey shoot of Desert Storm are completely out of their element now. The lack of effective leadership I witnessed at the field grade officer level leaves me full of unease. I read General McCrystals guidance. It was sound. Unfortunately I don’t have faith that the current Army leadership is capable of understanding and implementing that guidance. If we leave Afghanistan in a quagmire it will not be the Taliban Insurgency that beat us it will have been our own ethnocentrism that kicked our ass.