I have argued before that the Twin Wars against Terror and in Iraq are both seriously off course due to mismanagement and incompetence at the Pentagon and the White House. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, resistance to occupation comes in waves, but each wave is progressively higher and if something is not done to radically change how the US and the coalition are going about their business then disaster awaits. As the situation worsens again and again, from great beginnings, it becomes increasingly likely that the coalition will be unable to disengage for the forseable future or that the newly installed governments will prove effective stabilising influences.
Two astounding articles appear in the Independent newspaper today. Read them both, NOW - they will disappear behind a subscriber-only firewall in seven days. This is stuff the American media will not tell you.
Article one. The headline is Iraq is a bloody no man's land. America has failed to win the war. But has it lost it?
A prize-winning reporter, on the ground in Iraq, takes Bush's "Mission Accomplished" of two years ago to task, pointing out that most of the US deaths and injuries have occurred since Bush's speech. He has some telling snippets, including the fact that President Talabani, so upbeat about government acheivements, has 3,000 Kurdish peshmerga militia with heavy weapons protecting his home!
There is no doubt that the US has failed to win the war. Much of Iraq is a bloody no man's land. The army has not been able to secure the short highway to the airport, though it is the most important road in the country, linking the US civil headquarters in the Green Zone with its military HQ at Camp Victory.
Ironically, the extent of US failure to control Iraq is masked by the fact that it is too dangerous for the foreign media to venture out of central Baghdad. Some have retreated to the supposed safety of the Green Zone. Mr Bush can claim that no news is good news, though in fact the precise opposite is true.
Embedded journalism fosters false optimism. It means reporters are only present where American troops are active, though US forces seldom venture into much of Iraq. Embedded correspondents bravely covered the storming of Fallujah by US marines last November and rightly portrayed it as a US military success. But the outside world remained largely unaware, because no reporters were present with US forces, that at the same moment an insurgent offensive had captured most of Mosul, a city five times larger than Fallujah.
"Why has the vastly expensive and heavily equipped US army failed militarily in Iraq? After the crescendo of violence over the past month there should be no doubts that the US has not quashed the insurgents whom for two years American military spokesmen have portrayed as a hunted remnant of Saddam Hussein's regime assisted by foreign fighters."
The failure was in part political. Immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein polls showed that Iraqis were evenly divided on whether they had been liberated or occupied. Eighteen months later the great majority both of Sunni and Shia said they had been occupied, and they did not like it.
But the US Army must also shoulder the blame.
From the start, there was something dysfunctional about the American armed forces. They could not adapt themselves to Iraq. Their massive firepower meant they won any set-piece battle, but it also meant that they accidentally killed so many Iraqi civilians that they were the recruiting sergeants of the resistance. The army denied counting Iraqi civilian dead, which might be helpful in dealing with American public opinion. But Iraqis knew how many of their people were dying.
The US army was also too thin on the ground. It has 145,000 men in Iraq, but reportedly only half of these are combat troops. During the heavily publicised assault on Fallujah the US forces drained the rest of Iraq of its soldiers. "We discovered the US troops had suddenly abandoned the main road between Kirkuk and Baghdad without telling anybody," said one indignant observer. "It promptly fell under the control of the insurgents."
The shortage of US forces has a political explanation. Before the war Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, and his neo-conservative allies derided generals who said an occupation force numbering hundreds of thousands would be necessary to hold Iraq. When they were proved wrong they dealt with failure by denying it had taken place.
"The greatest failure of the US in Iraq is not that mistakes were made but that its political system has proved incapable of redressing them. Neither Mr Rumsfeld nor his lieutenants have been sacked."
Article two: Headline: In Afghanistan, the Taliban rises again for fighting season.
Instead of fizzling out, the Taliban have staged what has become a now-annual spring resurgence, and with a surprising new fighting spirit. Particularly worrying are signs that al-Qa'ida may once again be taking an interest in the war in Afghanistan.
Reports indicate that more sophisticated tactics are being used and that new weapons are being smuggled in over the Pakistan border. When a Romanian soldier was killed near Kandahar last month it was a modern anti-tank mine that blew up his armoured personnel carrier, not an improvised bomb or one of the old Soviet landmines that frequently don't work.
Further north along the Pakistan border, near Khost, the war has become a hot one - human waves of Taliban fighters launch night assaults against the fortified bases of an Afghan mercenary force recruited by the CIA. Those insurgents are under the command of an old warlord with links to Saudi Arabia - Jalaluddin Haqqani - whose Pakistan-based operations seem to have received a new infusion of Gulf money.
"The US military machine cannot really be damaged by a low-level insurgency that refuses to die, and US forces suffer nothing like the terrible casualty figures in Iraq. But increasingly it looks less and less as if the US military has won and more and more as if GIs are bogged down in a guerrilla war that threatens to go on for years to come. "
Those on the Right who continually present themselves as apologists for Bush's rush to the Iraq War and who continually claim that things are getting brighter in either Iraq or Afghanistan are just plain wrong. They are King Canutes, vainly denying the incoming tide. Something big needs to be done a total paradigm change. The US must cease acting as Al Qaida's best recruiter and seriously begin to win hearts and minds - most obviously by sacking the incompetents responsible for these escalating messes and redirecting new zeal to reconstruction but also by holding those who led the world into the distraction of war in Iraq by blatant lies and duplicity accountable.
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