“There are still pockets where we believe there to be some Taliban hiding out. Perhaps lying in wait,” Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters. “We expect the fighting will remain with us for weeks as we go about clearing those hold outs.”Morrell stressed that although the U.S. is prepared for additional combat, the military has moved from the clearing phase of the operation to holding and building.
“Things are trending in the right direction there,” Morrell added.
Not everyone agrees.
The war in Afghanistan [...] is indeed a near replication of the Vietnam War, including the assault on the strategically meaningless village of Marjah, which is itself a perfect re-enactment of Operation Meade River in 1968. But the callous cynicism of this war [...] and the mainstream media's brainless reporting on it, have descended past these sane parallels. We have now gone down the rabbit hole.
Oh, I think we went down the rabbit hole a long, long time ago.
Two months ago, the collection of mud-brick hovels known as Marjah might have been mistaken for a flyspeck on maps of Afghanistan. Today the media has nearly doubled its population from less than 50,000 to 80,000 [...] and portrays the offensive there as the equivalent of the Normandy invasion, and the beginning of the end for the Taliban.In fact, however, the entire district of Nad Ali, which contains Marjah, represents about 2 percent of Regional Command (RC) South, the U.S. military's operational area that encompasses Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul, Nimruz, and Daikundi provinces. RC South by itself is larger than all of South Vietnam, and the Taliban controls virtually all of it. This appears to have occurred to no one in the media.
[...]
The possibility that wasting massive amounts of U.S. and British blood, treasure, and time just to establish an Afghan Potemkin village with a "government in a box" might be exactly what the Taliban wants the coalition to do has apparently not occurred to either the press or to the generals who designed this operation.
[...]
Yet the media is breathlessly regurgitating Pentagon pronouncements that we have "turned the corner" and "reversed the momentum" in Afghanistan with fewer than 45,000 men under arms in all of RC South (including the Afghan army and police) by fighting for a month to secure a single hamlet.
[...]
For his part, as the Economist noted this week, Karzai has made fools of all the Western officials who sternly admonished him to begin a new era of transparent democracy, seizing control of the Electoral Complaints Commission to dismiss its independent members.
The most pressing problem is displaced civilians.[...]
[Aid] workers say that the families cannot find temporary housing or medical assistance either in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, or Kabul. Many hundreds of other residents have had their homes and livelihoods destroyed in the fighting.
[...]
Depending on which official is speaking, Marja is either a teeming “population center” of 85,000 residents or an isolated farming town of about 50,000 or a district with about 125,000 people. But if Marja is a district, it is unrecognized by the Afghan Interior Ministry. And if Marja is a town, then it needs to hold a constitutionally mandated election to choose a mayor, and not face a governor forced upon it by Kabul.
Regardless of Marja’s status, the choice of new “district governor,” Haji Abdul Zahir, does not make sense. Mr. Zahir has lived in Germany for the last 15 years and had never set foot in Marja until two weeks ago.
Good government will matter little, though, if the local economy is in a shambles. Marja’s agricultural base relies primarily on opium, and any new counternarcotics policies will wreak havoc; arresting or killing the drug traffickers will ultimately be the same as attacking local farmers. The timing of the offensive could not be more damaging: opium is planted in the winter and harvested in the spring, which means those who planted last year cannot recoup their investment.
[...]
If they cannot harvest their opium, they are in danger of defaulting on their [loans from narcotics smugglers or Taliban officials] — a very dangerous proposition.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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