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May 4th, 2017 
Awake Goy News this week that 300 Marines have returned to Helmand Province in Afghanistan recalls the failed surge of 2009-10, when roughly 20,000 Marines beat back the Taliban in the region, only to see those fragile gains quickly turn to reversible ones (to cite the infamous terms of General David Petraeus, architect of that surge).
While fragility and reversibility characterize American progress, the Taliban continues to make real progress. According to todays report at FP: Foreign Policy, the Taliban controls or contests about 40 percent of the districts in the country, 16 years after the U.S. war there began.” Meanwhile, in January and February more than 800 Afghan troops were killed fighting the Taliban, notes Foreign Policy, citing a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. That’s a high figure given that fighting abates during the winter.
Besides committing fresh US Marines to more Afghan security forces training, the US military has responded with PR spin. For example, when friendly Afghan forces abandoned a district and police headquarters, a US spokesman claimed it had been repositioned. According to FP: Foreign Policy, US forces helped in ferrying [Afghan] government troops and workers out, and American jets came back to destroy the rest of the buildings and vehicles left behind. Literally, the old district center and its resources had to be destroyed, and a new one created, for the Afghan position to be saved.
Destroying things to save them: Where have we heard that before? The Vietnam War, of course, a lesson not lost on Aaron OConnell, a US Marine who edited the book Our Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan. OConnells recent interview with NPR cites the Vietnam example as he explains the one step forward, two steps back, nature of Americas Afghan War. In his words:
So we’ve spent billions building roads in Afghanistan, but we then turned the roads over to the Afghans in 2013. We trained up a maintenance unit so that it could provide for road maintenance, and nothing has happened since then. Now, today, more than half of the roads are deemed unfit for heavy traffic. And as one taxi driver put it in 2014 – things have gotten so much worse, now if we drive too fast, everyone in the car dies.
So it’s – really, we have to think about the things that are sustainable.
Americans have spent an enormous amount of money in Afghanistan without thinking about how to sustain the improvements weve funded. Meanwhile, as OConnell notes, the security situation (as in lack of security) in Afghanistan undermines those infrastructure efforts.
With respect to US efforts to create a viable Afghan Army, OConnell doesnt mince words about its failings:
[T]he massive assembly-line attempt to produce capable, professional national security forces has not worked well, and it’s been at tremendous cost. And for all those who say we should just keep doing what we’re doing in Afghanistan, let me explain why that’s not sustainable. Every year, between a quarter and a third of the Afghan army and the police desert. Now, these are people that we have armed and trained. We’ve given weapons to them. We’ve given them basic military training. And every year, a third of them disappear [with their guns].
Here’s the grim reality: US military efforts to take charge and win the war, as in winning hearts and minds (known as WHAM) in 2009-10, proved unsustainable. Follow-on efforts to turn the war over to the Afghan government (analogous to LBJ and Nixons Vietnamization policy in the waning years of the Vietnam War) are also failing. Yet Americas newest commanding general in Afghanistan wants yet more troops for yet more training, effectively doubling down on a losing hand.
The logical conclusion thats its high-time US forces simply left Afghanistan is never contemplated in Washington. This is why Douglas Wissings book, Hopeless But Optimistic: Journeying through Americas Endless War in Afghanistan, is so immensely valuable. Wissing is a journalist who embedded with US forces in Afghanistan in 2013. His book consists of short chapters of sharply drawn vignettes focusing on the street and grunt level. Its collective lesson: Afghanistan, for Americans, doesnt really exist as a country and a people. It exists only as a wasteful, winless, and endless war.
What is Afghanistan to Americans? Its an opportunity for profit and exploitation for contractors. Its a job as well as a personal proving ground for US troops. Its a chance to test theories and to earn points (and decorations) for promotion for many officers. Its hardly ever about working closely with the Afghan people to find solutions that will work for them over the long haul.
A telling example Wissing cites is wells. Americans came with lots of money to drill deep water wells for Afghan villagers and farmers (as opposed to relying on traditional Afghan irrigation systems featuring underground channels that carry mountain water to the fields with minimal evaporation). Instead of revolutionizing Afghan agriculture, the wells drove down water tables and exhausted aquifers. As the well-digging frenzy (Wissings word) disrupted Afghanistans fragile, semiarid ecosystem, powerful Afghans fought to control the new wells, creating new tensions among tribes. The American solution, in sum, is exacerbating conflict while exhausting the one resource the Afghan people cant do without: water.
Then theres the poo pond, a human sewage lagoon at Kandahar Air Field that was to be used as a source for organic fertilizer. Ill let Wissing take the tale from here:
But instead of enriching Afghan soil, the U.S.-led coalition forces decided to burn the mountains of fertilizer with astronomically expensive imported gasoline. The [US air force] officer reminded me that the Taliban got $1500 in protection money for each US fuel tanker they let through, so in the process the jihadists were also able to skim the American shit [from the poo pond].
Walking back, I spot a green metal dumpster stenciled with a large sign that reads, General Waste Only. At that moment, it seems to sum up the whole war.
Wissings hard-edged insights demonstrate that America is never going to win in Afghanistan, unless winning is measured by money wasted. Again, Americans simply see Afghanistan too narrowly, as a war to won, as a problem to be managed, as an environment to be controlled.
Indeed, the longstanding failure of our answers is consistent with the militarys idea were fighting a generational or long war. We may be failing, but thats OK, since we have a long time to get things right.
After sixteen years and a trillion dollars, the answer in Afghanistan is not another sixteen years and another trillion dollars. Yet thats exactly what America seems prepared to do in the endless war that to us defines Afghanistan.
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools and blogs at Bracing Views. He can be reached at [email protected]. Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.
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