The Mound of Sound

One reason (but just one of several) why we’ll never “win” in Afghanistan is that there are too many wars going on. The Americans are waging one war in Afghanistan. NATO (ISAF) is waging another. Then there are the American military campaigns involving Iraq, Pakistan and – yes, Iran. Each of them constantly bounces off all the others.

Most of these wars are long past their “best before” date. They’ve dragged on inconsequentially too long. Stand in one place in the mud and eventually you’ll sink down to your knees.

Now some senior American officers are musing about US forces being in Afghanistan for generations. From the Globe & Mail:

“Lest anyone think this is a soft or peaceful process, [US Navy] Cdr. Dwyer’s base was rocked, every minute or so all day, by the terrifying shock of its line of 155-mm howitzers firing their village-destroying shells over the hills and into the Korengal Valley.

The building of mosques and roads is matched with absolutely ferocious fighting in places such as Korengal — the Americans are much more willing to use air strikes and heavy artillery, with the resulting heavy civilian casualties, than other militaries.

There are good reasons to be suspicious of this approach.

“We do not believe in counterinsurgency,” a senior French commander tells me. “If you find yourself needing to use counterinsurgency, it means the entire population has become the subject of your war, and you either will have to stay there forever or you have lost.”

The Americans obviously see it differently.

“We’re trying to raise the opportunity cost of picking up a weapon or growing poppy,” says Alison Blosser, a Pashto-speaking State Department official.

(The Americans, unlike Canadians or Brits, have a surprising level of co-operation between their foreign-affairs people and their military officers these days.)

“We want to get to the point where there’s long-term sustainable employment that leads to economic growth. … If the insurgents do decide to come back, they will face a great wall of resistance from a population that has experienced economic development.”

It sounds good. But I should mention that eastern Afghanistan is facing the highest military casualty rate in the war’s history at the moment, and a British report has just concluded that their heavy-handed poppy-eradication strategy is creating hundreds more Taliban fighters.

I ask one officer how long it is going to take to make this new strategy bear fruit.

“Look,” he says, “we’re still in Germany and Japan 60 years after that war ended. That’s how long it can take. I fully expect to have grandchildren who will be fighting out here.”

At last. The Globe & Mail has finally realized that trying to get people to pay for access to their online version isn’t going to work. It’s just not worth it.

Finally the paper has followed last year’s lead by The New York Times and transformed its internet edition into a free paper.

The good news is that you’ll now get unfettered access to the likes of Jeffrey Stevens, Lawrence Martin and John Ibbitson. The bad news is that you’ll now get unfettered access to the likes of Christie Blatchford, Marcus Gee, Rex Murphy and Margaret Wente.

It was conceived by Donald Rumsfeld and that alone might go some way to explaining why Arican nations have been stubbornly unwilling to allow American forces a toehold on their continent.

Afrikom (actually “AfriCom” or Africa Command) is a tribute to America’s too little, too late attitude to Africa; Washington’s foreign affairs disasters in the Middle East; and the dramatic spread of Chinese influence into many African countries. Africans now know that the kindly grandma with the big teeth really is a wolf after all.

Africa has become of great strategic interest to the United States. A quarter of America’s imported oil comes from Nigeria and Angola. And the Chinese are going into overdrive to tie up Africa’s vast natural resources. Suddenly Africa matters – a lot.

It’s a tale of bungled diplomacy and an awfully bad reputation. From the Washington Post:

“With its headquarters on the continent, liaison groups of 20 to 30 military personnel
established in key countries and U.S. units brought in to help with development and relief tasks, the command was envisioned as an example to Africans of how their own armed forces and civilians could work together for the good of their nations.
The trouble was, no one consulted the Africans. “Very little was really known by the majority of people or countries in Africa who were supposed to know before such a move was made,” said retired Kenyan army Lt. Gen. Daniel Opande. Worry swept the continent that the United States planned major new military installations in Africa.

“If you know the politics of Africa,” said Opande, who has headed U.N. peacekeeping forces in Sierra Leone and Liberia, “you know there are certain very powerful countries who said, no, we are not interested in having a headquarters here.” South Africa and Nigeria were among them, and their resistance helped persuade others.”

“I think everyone thought it would be widely greeted as something positive,” the Africom officer said. “But you suddenly have wide publics that have no idea what we’re talking about. . . . It was seen as a massive infusion of military might onto a continent that was quite proud of having removed foreign powers from its soil.”

The United States “equates terrorism with Islam,” senior Kenyan diplomat Bethuel Kiplagat said, and few African governments wanted to be seen as inviting U.S. surveillance on their own people.”

AfriKom is set to go into business on October 1st. For the foreseeable future it’ll have to look on Africa from a distance, from its headquarters in Stuttgart.