[Kzin]

The price we pay for 100,000 American troops occupying the wrong country ....

An Afghan Symbol for Change, Then Failure
By DAVID ROHDE

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — It began last summer.

On a July morning, Taliban gunmen shot dead the province’s most powerful cleric as he walked to the main city mosque to lead morning prayers. Five months later, they executed a teacher at a nearby village school as students watched. The following month, they walked into another mosque and gunned down an Afghan engineer working for a foreign aid group, shooting him in the back as he pressed his forehead to the ground and supplicated to God.

This spring and summer, the slow and methodical siege of this southern provincial capital intensified. The Taliban and their allies set up road checkpoints, burned 20 trucks and slowed the flow of supplies to reconstruction projects. All told, in surrounding Helmand Province, five teachers, one judge and scores of police officers have been killed. Dozens of schools and courts have been shuttered, according to Afghan officials.

“Our government is weak,” said Fowzea Olomi, a local women’s rights advocate whose driver was shot dead in May and who fears she is next. “Anarchy has come.”

When the Taliban fell nearly five years ago, Lashkar Gah seemed like fertile ground for the United States-led effort to stabilize the country. For 30 years during the cold war, Americans carried out the largest development project in Afghanistan’s history here, building a modern capital with suburban-style tract homes, a giant hydroelectric dam and 300 miles of canals that made 250,000 acres of desert bloom. Afghans called this city “Little America.”

Today, Little America is the epicenter of a Taliban resurgence and an explosion in drug cultivation that has claimed the lives of 106 American and NATO soldiers this year and doubled American casualty rates countrywide. Across Afghanistan, roadside bomb attacks are up by 30 percent; suicide bombings have doubled. Statistically it is now nearly as dangerous to serve as an American soldier in Afghanistan as it is in Iraq.

Helmand’s descent symbolizes how Afghanistan has evolved since the initial victory over the Taliban into one of the most troubled fronts in the fight against terrorism.

The problems began in early 2002, former Bush administration, United Nations and Afghan officials said, when the United States and its allies failed to take advantage of a sweeping desire among Afghans for help from foreign countries.

The Defense Department initially opposed a request by Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and Afghanistan’s new leaders for a sizable peacekeeping force and deployed only 8,000 American troops, but purely in a combat role, officials said.

During the first 18 months after the invasion, the United States-led coalition deployed no peacekeepers outside Kabul, leaving the security of provinces like Helmand to local Afghans.

“Where the world, including the United States, came up short was on the security side,” said Richard Haass, the former director of policy planning at the State Department. “That was the mistake which I believe is coming back to haunt the United States now.”

The lack of security was just one element of a volatile mix. Twenty years of conflict had shattered government and social structures in Afghanistan, the world’s fifth poorest country, where the average life expectancy is 43.

American officials said the country was more destitute than they had envisioned, yet the $909 million they provided in assistance in 2002 amounted to one-twentieth of the $20 billion allocated for postwar Iraq. Officials quintupled assistance to $4.8 billion by 2005, but then reduced it by 30 percent this year.

The Taliban leadership, meanwhile, found safe haven in neighboring Pakistan. And Robert Grenier, the C.I.A.’s former top counterterrorism official and Islamabad station chief, said Pakistani officials largely turned a blind eye to Taliban commanders, who later seeped back across the border.

The government of President Hamid Karzai, hailed as Afghanistan’s eloquent new leader in 2001, has increasingly been criticized for indecisiveness, corruption and inaction.

In Helmand, the absence of security and government control enabled the province to become the largest heroin-producing area in Afghanistan.

By 2005, local Taliban fighters and drug traffickers had formed an alliance against the government. Today, the province’s educated elite accuses local officials of engaging in drug trafficking, and impoverished farmers say they grow poppy to survive.

[Led by a 160 percent increase in Helmand’s opium crop this year, Afghanistan’s overall production grew by 50 percent to a record 6,100 metric tons, United Nations officials said Saturday. Afghanistan now produces 92 percent of the world’s supply of opium poppy, the basis for heroin.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/wo.../05afghan.html

Let freedom ring baby .... at least this war helped out somebody: Oona's dealer! Former dealer, former, I'm sure, sorry Oona.

[WerrtZer]

Brits are getting their asses handed to em in Afghanistan big time the last month or so....the US should never have pulled out and expected NATO troops to take up the slack. But it's easy to be wiser after the fact...I mean it's not as if anyone knew it was going to go down like this when all the resources were piled into Iraq now is it?

[bad1]

Originally Posted by KzinKiller

The price we pay for 100,000 American troops occupying the wrong country ....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/wo.../05afghan.html

Let freedom ring baby .... at least this war helped out somebody: Oona's dealer! Former dealer, former, I'm sure, sorry Oona.

I never said this is winnable..that doenst make it a mistake. Cancer patients know that its never beaten...they just hope to keep it in remission. Its the same principle.

[bad1]

Originally Posted by WerrtZer

Brits are getting their asses handed to em in Afghanistan big time the last month or so....the US should never have pulled out and expected UN peacekeepers to take up the slack. But it's easy to be wiser after the fact...I mean it's not as if anyone knew it was going to go down like this when all the resources were piled into Iraq now is it?

The UN is a fucking joke.

How did the driving lessons go? I tried to make a "wertzersmom" handle and tell everyone that you died during driving lessons...but for some reason the approval email never went.

[Rodd]

Sounds like a sweet ass cash crop economy to me!

[Kzin]

Originally Posted by 1bade wok

The UN is a fucking joke.

How did the driving lessons go? I tried to make a "wertzersmom" handle and tell everyone that you died during driving lessons...but for some reason the approval email never went.

What's with the stealth edit putting the UN in the mix? It's a NATO operation and not 'peacekeeping' in any way, it's a military operation to destroy the Taliban, just woefully understaffed and underfunded while we're pinned down on our fool's errand in Iraq.

[WerrtZer]

Originally Posted by KzinKiller

What's with the stealth edit putting the UN in the mix? It's a NATO operation and not 'peacekeeping' in any way, it's a military operation to destroy the Taliban, just woefully understaffed and underfunded while we're pinned down on our fool's errand in Iraq.

That was me....I mistakenly entered UN instead of NATO (how did I ever confuse those two lol)

Don't turn this into a UN are useless bitchfest...we know. Typo

[Fox Hush]

Wasn't Afghstan a joint effort, i mean even the way thats written puts more blame on everyone not just us.

I know we spear head things but anything that goes wrong always bites us in the ass more than anyone esle.

[D8alus]

Originally Posted by Shoki

Wasn't Afghstan a joint effort, i mean even the way thats written puts more blame on everyone not just us.

I know we spear head things but anything that goes wrong always bites us in the ass more than anyone esle.

burden of leadership