Afghanistan Reconstruction Costs Top WWII’s Marshall Plan

America’s $104B in Afghanistan Is Failing


Excerpt:

So far, the United States has poured more than $104 billion into Afghanistan reconstruction efforts - that’s more than all the money spent on reconstructing Europe after World War II. Much of that money, as auditors have noted, has been lost to waste, fraud and abuse. In 2010, SIGAR accountants told The Fiscal Times they could only account for less than 10 percent of that money

Comment: More. These articles disabuse the often stated view that the US has not done enough for Afghanistan. We've given our blood ... we've given our $$ .. time for the Afghans to own up for their own future

Plymouth oak leaves in Afghanistan

Kathee pressed them (from oak tree in back yard) and sent them to Roger. Roger hung in bunk area and took photo to send us (w post card from his sister)

Endless Afghanistan? .... "until the end of 2024 and beyond"

US-Afghan agreement would keep troops in place and funds flowing, perhaps indefinitely

Excerpt:

Afghanistan would allow Washington to operate military bases to train Afghan forces and conduct counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaeda after the current mission ends in 2014. For that foothold in this volatile mountain region wedged between Pakistan and Iran, the United States would agree to sustain and equip Afghanistan's large security force, which the government in Kabul currently cannot afford. The deal, according to the text, would take effect on Jan. 1, 2015 and “shall remain in force until the end of 2024 and beyond.” It could be terminated by either Washington or Kabul with two years advance written notice.

Comment: Yikes!

Afghani Universities .... $934.4 million of US aid for ungrateful students

U.S. Funds Buy No Love at Afghan College

Excerpt:

Nangarhar University is a symbol of American largess: U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for dormitories, classrooms and computer labs.

Increasingly dominating the campus of Afghanistan's second largest university, however, are Islamist activists who openly sympathize with the Taliban.

"The Taliban are the people who are defending this country," said Hamad, a leader of the self-appointed Nangarhar University student council that organizes regular demonstrations against the U.S. and President Hamid Karzai's government. "The foreign troops are invaders."

The council is described by other students as a well-organized group that can muster hundreds of protesters on a moment's notice. Afghan and U.S. officials are taking note: Nangarhar University student demonstrations, which routinely block the main highway connecting Kabul to Jalalabad and the Pakistani border, feature the white flag of the Taliban and the green flag of Hezb-e Islami, the movement of anti-U.S. warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

The students sometimes also fly the black banner used by al Qaeda. Afghanistan's national flag, explains Hamad, a 24-year-old Islamic-studies student from the northern province of Baghlan who didn't want to have his full name used, "has not maintained its integrity."

The student militancy sweeping Afghan campuses ahead of the U.S.-led coalition's withdrawal next year isn't limited to Nangarhar. In late May, hundreds of students rallied outside the Afghan capital's prestigious Kabul University to protest against legislation that criminalizes violence against women. "That demonstration really made me worried, that's where you can see the radicalization of the youth," said Najla Ayubi, a women's rights activist and former judge.

This rise of extremism among Afghan students—some of the biggest direct beneficiaries of U.S. assistance—underscores the lack of goodwill that more than a decade of American taxpayer money has bought here. It also harks back to a potent precedent in recent Afghan history. Many of Afghanistan's mujahedeen warlords who combated the Soviets, each other and the U.S. over the past three decades, including Mr. Hekmatyar, started out in politics as student activists in the 1970s.

...... The international community's investment in the Afghan university system is part of a larger development portfolio: Since 2002, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent a combined $934.4 million on education here.

Comment: Makes me sick! Frankly this is but a microcosm of virtually all US aid to the Arab world. Examples ... Iraq & Egypt.

Roger deploys to Afghanistan

 Minn. National Guard Unit Deploys to Afghanistan

 Excerpt:

Their mission will be to clear roads of improvised explosive devices that could injure or kill U.S. troops as they patrol and largely withdraw from a country three times the size of Minnesota. "It can be dangerous, (but) we're prepared," Capt. Matt Jukkala, commander of the 849th Mobility Augmentation Company based in Litchfield, said in an interview. The company, of which four out of five soldiers will be going on their first overseas deployment, will train for several months in Ft. Bliss, Texas, before arriving in Afghanistan in the Fall.

Comment: Sad goodbye yesterday

Shades of the 'Pericope de Adultera'

Afghan Taliban publicly execute woman accused of adultery; men cheer Excerpt:

A man Afghan officials say is a member of the Taliban shot dead a woman accused of adultery in front of a crowd near Kabul, a video obtained by Reuters showed, a sign that the austere Islamist group dictates law even near the Afghan capital.

In the three-minute video, a turban-clad man approaches a woman kneeling in the dirt and shoots her five times at close range with an automatic rifle, to cheers of jubilation from the 150 or so men watching in a village in Parwan province. "Allah warns us not to get close to adultery because it's the wrong way," another man says as the shooter gets closer to the woman. "It is the order of Allah that she be executed".

Comment: the 'Pericope de Adultera is the famous passage from John 8. And there is an interesting similarity - Where was the man?

No. 39 Is Afghans' Loneliest Number

No. 39 Is Afghans' Loneliest Number

Excerpt:

The curse of 39, which swirled through Kabul over the past year, is the latest myth in a largely illiterate country steeped in rumor, superstition and urban legend.

And it isn't limited to cars.

Afghans with 39 as part of their cellphone numbers have to endure so much derision that some have blocked people from seeing their number when they call. Others have switched their phone numbers altogether.

To avoid being needlessly ridiculed, Afghans who are 39 years old will sometimes tell people they are "one less than 40."

"I have one more year to go," said Baryalai, a 38-year-old Kabul shopkeeper who is bracing for a year of mocking, insults and off-color banter.

Some Afghans see nefarious origins in the curse of 39 and believe that it started in neighboring Iran. Not that many Afghans would know it, but 39 also happens to be the international country code for Italy, whose prime minister is facing trial on charges that he paid an underage girl for sex and then tried to cover it up. He denies the accusations.

Famous Kabul numerologist Sediq Afghan, head of the International Center for Mathematical Philosophy, based in a crumbling building across the road from a U.S. base, says he used a complex series of calculations to divine the meaning of 39.

He came up with three answers: present, illiterate and pimp.

"This number is a sickness for Afghans," said Mr. Afghan, who pointed out that there are verses in the Quran with the number 39. His countrymen, he complained, "only see the negative side."

Mr. Afghan added that the legend had ancient roots. As a child, he said, he heard stories of a man who was killed for teasing his host about 39.

Comment: That's Jimmy Carter (39th President of the United States ) in the lower left! Maybe there's something to this!

Time to exit Afghanistan?

The small footprint that eliminated bin Laden

Excerpts:

Many salient facts about the tracking of terrorism’s most prolific killer to his lair — some lair: not a remote cave but an urban compound — must remain shrouded in secrecy, for now. But one surmise seems reasonable: bin Laden was brought down by intelligence gathering that more resembles excellent police work than a military operation.

Granted, in nations as violent as Afghanistan and Pakistan, the line between military operations and police work is blurry, and military and other forms of intelligence gathering cannot be disentangled. Still, the enormous military footprint in Afghanistan, next door to bin Laden’s Pakistan refuge, seems especially disproportionate in the wake of his elimination by a small cadre of specialists.


Jim Lacey of the Marine Corps War College notes that Gen. David Petraeus has said there are perhaps about 100 al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. “Did anyone,” Lacey asks, “do the math?” There are, he says, more than 140,000 coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, or 1,400 for every al-Qaeda fighter. It costs about $1 million a year to deploy and support every soldier — or up to $140 billion, or close to $1.5 billion a year, for each al-Qaeda fighter. “In what universe do we find strategists to whom this makes sense?”

Comment: George Will also comments on Libya:

And the more we couch our thinking in military categories, the more we open ourselves to misadventures like the absurd and deepening one in Libya.

There, our policy — if what seem to be hourly improvisations can be dignified as a policy — began as a no-fly zone to protect civilians from wanton violence. Seven weeks later, our policy is to decapitate the government by long-distance assassination and to intensify a civil war in that tribal society, in the name of humanitarianism. What makes this particularly surreal is that it is being done by NATO.

Unpack the acronym: North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO was created in 1949 to protect Western Europe from the Red Army. Its purpose was, in Lord Ismay’s famous formulation, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.” NATO, which could long ago have unfurled a “mission accomplished” banner, has now become an instrument of addlepated mischief.

This is an episode of presidential malpractice. Obama has allowed NATO to be employed for the advancement of a half-baked doctrine (R2P — “responsibility to protect”), a quarter-baked rationalization (was it just in March that Hillary Clinton discovered that a vital U.S. national interest required the removal of Moammar Gaddafi because he “is a man who has no conscience”?) and an unworthy national agenda (France’s pursuit of grandeur on the cheap).

Final comments: I'm sure that we should not be in Libya and I think it is time to plan our exit strategy from Afghanistan

Corruption in the Karzai government undermines Afghanistan mission

Curb Corruption or Lose the War

Excerpt:

While I was in Afghanistan last year to help monitor the presidential elections, I heard that important Afghans had been taking advantage of their association with the CIA to engage in corruption, thus undermining the counterinsurgency effort. Among those alleged to be involved in corruption were the president's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, head of the Kandahar Provincial Council. He also was rumored to have received agency money for supplying gunmen against the Taliban.

Comment: Nation building in Afghanistan won't work if the government is corrupt

MRE International

A Taste of Home in Foil Packets and Powder

Comment: Article from the NYTimes

Nation-building in Afghanistan - a "Sisyphean agony"

George Will: McChrystal had to go

Excerpt:

The military is charged with a staggeringly complex task, the completion of which -- if completion can even be envisioned -- must involve many years. But when given the task, the military was told to begin bringing it to a close in a matter of 18 months.

The not quite seven months that have passed since the president announced his policy have seen sobering military disappointments and daunting evidence of how intractable is the incompetence and how manifold is the corruption of the Kabul government. For as long as we persist in this Sisyphean agony, the president will depend on forthrightness from a military commander whose judgment he trusts. That could not be McChrystal; it is Petraeus. If McChrystal had been retained, he would have henceforth been chastened, abject, wary and reticent. It is unthinkable that he could still have been a valuable participant in future deliberations with the president and his principal national security advisers. The president demanded, and the Americans in harm's way in Afghanistan deserve, better.

It is difficult, and perhaps unwise, to suppress this thought: McChrystal's disrespectful flippancies, and the chorus of equally disdainful comments from the unpleasant subordinates he has chosen to have around him, emanate from the toxic conditions that result when the military's can-do culture collides with a cannot-be-done assignment. In this toxicity, Afghanistan is Vietnam redux.

In July 1945, with the war in the Pacific still to be won and Winston Churchill engaged in the Potsdam conference, the British electorate turned him out of office. When his wife, Clementine, suggested that this might be a blessing in disguise, he replied: If so, it is very well disguised indeed.

The shattering of McChrystal is a messy blessing if the president seizes upon it as a reason for revisiting basic questions about whether Afghanistan matters so much and what is possible there and at what cost. It may be said that with the Afghan mission entering -- or soon to enter; it is late and now may become more so -- a crucial military phase in Kandahar, the cradle of the Taliban, McChrystal is indispensable. Any who may say that should heed the words of another general, one of the 20th century's greatest leaders and realists. Charles de Gaulle said: The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Comment: Sisyphus

Shot to helmet

U.S. Marine Walks Away From Shot to Helmet in Afghanistan

Excerpt:

Lance Cpl. Koenig, a lanky 21-year-old with jug-handle ears and a burr of sandy hair, is a designated marksman. His job is to hit the elusive Taliban fighters hiding in the tightly packed neighborhood near the base.

The insurgent sniper hit him first. The Casper, Wyo., native was kneeling on the roof of the one-story outpost, looking for targets.

He was reaching back to his left for his rifle when the sniper's round slammed into his helmet.

The impact knocked him onto his back.

"I'm hit," he yelled to his buddy, Lance Cpl. Scott Gabrian, a 21-year-old from St. Louis.

Lance Cpl. Gabrian belly-crawled along the rooftop to his friend's side. He patted Lance Cpl. Koenig's body, looking for wounds.

Then he noticed that the plate that usually secures night-vision goggles to the front of Lance Cpl. Koenig's helmet was missing. In its place was a thumb-deep dent in the hard Kevlar shell.

Lance Cpl. Gabrian slid his hands under his friend's helmet, looking for an entry wound. "You're not bleeding," he assured Lance Cpl. Koenig. "You're going to be OK."

Lance Cpl. Koenig climbed down the metal ladder and walked to the company aid station to see the Navy corpsman.

The only injury: A small, numb red welt on his forehead, just above his right eye.

Comment: 2nd chance at life!

What does a "win" look like in Afghanistan?

Gorbachev Says Obama Should Start Afghan Withdrawal

Excerpt:

President Mikhail Gorbachev, drawing on his experience of military failure in Afghanistan in the 1980s, said the U.S. can’t win the conflict there and should begin pulling out its soldiers.

Afghanistan, where U.S. and NATO forces are battling a Taliban-led insurgency, is too fragmented between clans to be controlled militarily, Gorbachev, 78, said in an interview today in Berlin. While he said President Barack Obama would be unlikely to take his advice, Gorbachev said he saw no chance of success even with more U.S. troops.

“I believe that there is no prospect of a military solution,” Gorbachev said in Russian through a translator. “What we need is the reconciliation of Afghan society -- and they should be preparing the ground for withdrawal rather than additional troops.”

Comment: It seems that (and I am not blaming President Obama for this!) that whenever leadership uses the military option, that there is rarely a definition of what "success" looks like. And rarely a plan to get out. Our middle son served 6 years in the Marines and now is in the Army National guard. I am encouraging him to get out before his unit is deployed to Afghanistan.

"instant in season, out of season"

Moment teenage soldier went into battle against Taliban... wearing 'I love New York' pink boxer shorts


Comment: Illustrates "instant ... out of season"

The Last Jew in Afghanistan

The Last Jew in Afghanistan

Excerpt:

KABUL, Afghanistan – Behind a metal door on Flower Street, past a courtyard piled with junk, up some steep concrete stairs and along a narrow corridor with ornate metal railings in the style of Stars of David, lives the last Jew in Afghanistan. His home is a side-room off the synagogue; a thin mattress laid along one wall is his bed. In one corner, there is a small table with dusty prayer books, three folding chairs, a crumbling carpet, and a few pictures on the wall, including one of a bearded Hassidic Jew. In the corner by the door, opposite the guest’s chair, there is a small blackboard with his name spelled clearly in chalk: Zebulon Simantov. "So that journalists spell my name correctly," he said.



Afghan Jew Becomes Country's One and Only

Excerpt:

KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 26 [2005] -- When Zablon Simintov found Ishaq Levin sprawled on the cement synagogue floor last week, he immediately realized two things: His housemate and archnemesis of nearly seven years was dead, and he was now in all likelihood the last Afghan Jew still living in the country.

"I'm not sad about that," Simintov said with a frown Wednesday. He acknowledged dryly that he would not miss Levin, an octogenarian who apparently died of natural causes. Simintov, 44, had feuded bitterly with him for as long as the two men occupied separate rooms in the ruins of the only remaining synagogue in Kabul.

Moreover, the former carpet trader said he had spent years watching Afghanistan's once vibrant Jewish populace shrink to virtually nothing. The community dated back 800 years and still numbered 5,000 in 1948, but most remaining families fled the violence and repression that followed the Soviet invasion of 1979.


Comment: Sad to think that his community that once numbered in the thousands is now defunct!