Afghanistan: Is It Really the End Game?

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16749-afghanistan-is-it-really-the-end-game



U.S. Army Spc. Devon Boxa, 7-158th Aviation Regiment, admires the Afghanistan landscape out the back door of her CH-47D Chinook helicopter as another Chinook follows. The choppers were flying from Kabul to Jalalabad Dec. 17, 2010.

Afghanistan: Is It Really the End Game?
Monday, 03 June 2013 14:01
By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus | Op-Ed

There is nothing that better sums up the utter failure of America's longest war than international forces getting ambushed as they try to get the hell out of the Afghanistan. And yet the April 1 debacle in Balochistan was in many ways a metaphor for a looming crisis that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States seem totally unprepared for: with the clock ticking down on removing most combat troops by 2014, there are no official negotiations going on, nor does there seem to be any strategy for how to bring them about.

"I still cannot understand how we, the international community and the Afghan government have managed to arrive at a situation in which everything is coming together in 2014 - elections, new president, economic transition, military transition - and negotiations for the peace process have not really started," as Bernard Bajolet, the former French ambassador to Kabul and current head of France's foreign intelligence service, told the New York Times.

When the Barack Obama administration sent an additional 30,000 troops into Afghanistan in 2009 as part of the "surge", the goal was to secure the country's southern provinces, suppress opium cultivation, and force the Taliban to give up on the war. Not only did the surge fail to impress the Taliban and its allies, it never stabilized the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. Both are once again under the sway of the insurgency, and opium production has soared. What the surge did manage was to spread the insurgency into formerly secure areas in the north and west.

With the exception of the current US commanders in Afghanistan, virtually everyone has concluded that the war has been a disaster for all involved.