OPINION - Editorial

Too soon to tell

Pentagon Papers II surface

Now we know officially what has been an open secret for much of this decade: This country and its Afghan ally are losing their joint war for the hearts, minds and bodies of that country's long divided people.

That was the burden of a joint study now released by the Pentagon's inspector general, which conducted it together with the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. In the understatement of the year if not the decade, all agreed: "On the sole quantifiable metric discussed publicly to date--expanding security to 80 percent of the Afghan population by the end of 2019--Afghanistan made no significant progress in 2017." Ya think?

Richard Burr, the chairman of this country's Senate Intelligence Committee, was only stating the obvious when he noted that the Taliban's latest attack on civilians in Kabul was but one more demonstration that the Taliban was "nowhere near folding" and that the country's government-in-name-only wasn't capable of protecting its own subjects.

Once upon a long-ago time Afghanistanism was editorialspeak for writing about subjects so far away from home that any assertions made couldn't be readily checked out. But these assertions are all too open to doubt. And the American government's claims don't pass the smell test. When it comes to understatements, this country's deputy secretary of state--John Sullivan--came back from visiting Kabul with a less than glowing report. He said that, after talking to top officials of the Afghan regime, he had to conclude that the news he brought home did not add up to a "rosy situation." Or as Mr. Sullivan told the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, the attacks in Kabul last month were "a real shock to many people in the government." Both theirs and ours. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. But in this case, the officialdoms of both countries profess to find themselves shocked--shocked!--to get bad news. More than 2,400 American troops have died in Afghanistan since this country became embroiled there. And, alas, surely more will be lost at this fatal rate.

A new commander-in-chief of this country's armed forces, Donald J. Trump, had indicated that American strategies may be expendable. President Trump has touted still another new approach to getting the Taliban to the peace table so that Islamist terrorists will no longer be able to use that country to start wars on the West, namely the United States of America and her allies.

This is where we came in. For during the country's long ordeal in Vietnam, the sole Quantifiable Metric was the body count of the enemy's troops, which continued to mount but with little or no effect on that long war's eventual outcome. What the Pentagon and Afghanistan's counterpart aren't revealing now is information about the size, capacity and preparedness of official Afghan forces. Such information is all classified, though whether that's being done to protect Afghanistan's nominal army from the wrath of public opinion in that country or in this one is far from clear.

Wars are easy enough to start; it's finishing them that's the far greater challenge. So instead of replacing strategies for the Afghan army to use, how about just replacing the army itself? Which would seem the next tack for the West to take in this Great Game of Nations in which none of the players ever seem to draw a winning hand--not the Russians or Chinese or even Genghis Khan's Golden Horde. And so now Afghanistan's official army may be supplemented by a new Afghan militia. "This force," concludes the Pentagon's report, "is designed to be an evolution of the Afghan Local Police, which has a mixed record of improving security in some areas and committing human-rights abuses in others."

Just last fall, the commander of American forces in Kabul--General John Nicholson--assured the press and public that "we have turned the corner" in Afghanistan since the Taliban have been obliged to change their approach from attempting to take over heavily populated cities to "guerrilla-style warfare" featuring suicide attacks instead of territorial gains. "The Taliban," said the Pentagon's report, "has a history of adapting to changing conditions and shifting their tactics in response to operations against them." Much as the flu virus mutates to escape first detection and then opposition. This latest disappointing report from the Pentagon cautioned that "changes in Taliban operations do not necessarily signal that momentum has irreversibly shifted."

Around every corner lies another corner waiting to be crossed--under fire. Round and round all go till all fall down. It's much too early to predict either victory or defeat in embattled Afghanistan, or as the sage Zhou Enlai replied when an American secretary of state named Henry Kissinger asked him what the party line was these days when it came to interpreting the history of the French Revolution: "It's too early to tell." Clever people, these Chinese, and patient ones, too.

Editorial on 02/21/2018

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