{"id":180012,"date":"2018-12-05T05:23:37","date_gmt":"2018-12-05T05:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=180012"},"modified":"2018-12-09T07:12:47","modified_gmt":"2018-12-09T07:12:47","slug":"america-is-headed-for-military-defeat-in-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=180012","title":{"rendered":"America Is Headed For Military Defeat in Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Danny Sjursen \u2013 The American Conservative Nov 30, 2018<\/h1>\n
\"Marines<\/a>

Marines with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, sprint across a field to load onto a CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter during a mission in Helmand province, Afghanistan, July 4, 2014. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Joseph Scanlan \/ released)<\/p><\/div>\n

There\u2019s a prevailing maxim, both inside the armed forces and around the Beltway, that goes something like this: \u201cThe U.S. can never be militarily<\/em> defeated in any war,\u201d certainly not by some third world country. Heck, I used to believe that myself. That\u2019s why, in regard to Afghanistan, we\u2019ve been told that while America could lose the war due to political <\/em>factors (such as the lack of grit among \u201csoft\u201d liberals or defeatists), the military could never and will never lose on the battlefield.<\/h5>\n
That entire maxim is about to be turned on its head.\u00a0Get ready, because we\u2019re about to lose this war militarily.<\/h5>\n
Consider this: the U.S. military has advised, assisted, battled, and bombed in Afghanistan for 17-plus years. Ground troop levels have fluctuated from lows of some 10,000 to upwards of 100,000 servicemen and women. None of that has\u00a0achieved<\/a><\/span> more than a tie, a bloody stalemate. Now, in the 18th year of this conflict, the Kabul-Washington coalition\u2019s military is outright losing.<\/h5>\n
Let\u2019s begin with the broader measures. The Taliban controls or contests more districts<\/a><\/span>\u2014some 44 percent\u2014than at any time since the 2001 invasion. Total combatant and civilian casualties are forecasted<\/a><\/span> to top 20,000 this year\u2014another dreadful broken record. What\u2019s more, Afghan military casualties are frankly unsustainable: the Taliban are killing more than the government can recruit. The death rates are staggering, numbering 5,500 fatalities in 2015, 6,700 in 2016, and an estimate<\/a><\/span> (the number is newly classified) of \u201cabout 10,000\u201d in 2017. Well, some might ask, what about American airpower\u2014can\u2019t that help stem the Taliban tide? Hardly. In 2018, as security deteriorated and the Taliban made substantial gains, the U.S. actually dropped<\/a><\/span> more<\/em> bombs than in any other year of the war<\/em>. It appears that nothing stands in the way of impending military defeat.<\/h5>\n
Then there are the very recent events on the ground\u2014and these are telling. Insider attacks in which Afghan \u201callies\u201d turn their guns on American advisors are back on the rise, most recently in an attack<\/a><\/span> that wounded a U.S. Army general and threatened the top U.S. commander in the country. And while troop numbers are way down from the high in 2011, American troops deaths are rising. Over the Thanksgiving season alone, a U.S. Army Ranger was killed<\/a><\/span> in a friendly fire incident and three other troopers died<\/a><\/span> in a roadside bomb attack. And in what was perhaps only a (still disturbing) case of misunderstood optics, the top U.S. commander, General Miller, was filmed carrying his own M4 rifle around Afghanistan. That\u2019s a long way from the days when then-General Petraeus (well protected by soldiers, of course)\u00a0walked around the markets of Baghdad in a soft cap and without body armor.<\/h5>\n
More importantly, the Afghan army and police are getting hammered in larger and larger attacks and taking unsustainable casualties. Some 26 Afghan security forces were killed on Thanksgiving, 22 policemen died<\/a><\/span> in an attack on Sunday, and on Tuesday 30 civilians were killed<\/a><\/span> in Helmand province. And these were only the high-profile attacks, dwarfed by the countless other countrywide incidents. All this proves that no matter how hard the U.S. military worked, or how many years it committed to building an Afghan army in its own image, and no matter how much air and logistical support that army received, the Afghan Security Forces cannot win. The sooner Washington accepts this truth over the more comforting lie, the fewer of our adulated American soldiers will have to die. Who is honestly ready to be the last to die for a mistake, or at least a hopeless cause?<\/h5>\n
Now, admittedly, this author is asking for trouble\u2014and fierce rebuttals\u2014from both peers and superiors still serving on active duty. And that\u2019s understandable. The old maxim of military invincibility soothes these men, mollifies their sense of personal loss, whether of personal friends or years away from home, in wars to which they\u2019ve now dedicated their entire adult lives. Questioning whether there even is a military solution in Afghanistan, or, more specifically, predicting a military defeat, serves only to upend their mental framework surrounding the war.<\/h5>\n
Still, sober strategy and basic honesty demands a true assessment of the military situation in America\u2019s longest war. The Pentagon loves metrics, data, and stats. Well, as demonstrated daily on the ground in Afghanistan, all the security (read: military) metrics point towards impending defeat. At best, the Afghan army, with ample U.S. advisory detachments and air support, can hold on to the northernmost and westernmost provinces of the country, while a Taliban coalition overruns the south and east. This will be messy, ugly, and discomfiting for military and civilian leaders alike. But unless Washington is prepared to redeploy 100,000 soldiers to Afghanistan (again)\u2014and still only manage a tie, by the way\u2014it is also all but inevitable.<\/h5>\n
The United States military did all it was asked during more than 17 years of warfare in Afghanistan. It raided, it bombed, it built, it surged, it advised, it\u2026everything. Still, none of that was sufficient. Enough Afghans either support the Taliban or hate the occupation, and managed, through assorted conventional and unconventional operations, to fight on the ground. And \u201con the ground\u201d is all that really matters. This war may well have been ill-advised and unwinnable from the start.<\/h5>\n
There\u2019s no shame in defeat. But there is<\/em> shame, and perfidy, in avoiding or covering up the truth. It\u2019s what the whole military-political establishment did after Vietnam, and, I fear, it\u2019s what they\u2019re doing again.<\/h5>\n
Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army officer and a regular contributor to <\/em>The American Conservative. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, <\/em>Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge<\/a>. Follow him on Twitter\u00a0@SkepticalVet<\/a>.<\/em><\/em><\/h5>\n

Source <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unless America is prepared to deploy more than 100,000 troops to Afghanistan (again), everything points towards impending defeat. A combat veteran explains <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[60,61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-180012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Afghanistan","category-Commentary"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=180012"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180016,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180012\/revisions\/180016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=180012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=180012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=180012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}