Obama's Afghan Statement Was Disingenuous

During his State of the Union speech President Obama talked a little about Afghanistan, and he made it sound like our presence in that country is accomplishing a lot. He told the American people:

"Thanks to our heroic troops and civilians, fewer Afghans are under the control of the insurgency. There will be tough fighting ahead, and the Afghan government will need to deliver better governance. But we are strengthening the capacity of the Afghan people and building an enduring partnership with them. This year, we will work with nearly 50 countries to begin a transition to an Afghan lead. And this July, we will begin to bring our troops home."

I wish that was true. I would love to think our troops would be returning home quickly. Unfortunately, it looks like we'll be there several more years (and maybe many years). Secretary Gates has already admitted, after meeting with our NATO allies, that a more likely date for the withdrawal of our troops is 2014 (and some military officials believe we'll have troops there even longer than that). If any troops are withdrawn this year, it certainly won't be many.

That's because the war is just not going as well as the Obama administration would have us believe. Look at the map above, prepared in December 2010 by the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO), and you'll see that there are only 4 provinces in the entire country that enjoy a respectable degree of security. Of the rest:

9 have a deteriorating security situation
8 are moderately insecure
5 are highly insecure
8 are extremely insecure

That's because the successes enjoyed by the U.S. and its allies are not permanent. After the troops move to a new area, the insurgents move back into the area just cleared. There are simply not enough troops to keep all areas pacified while moving on to pacify new areas (and it would take hundreds of thousands of additional troops to do that -- if it could be done).

In addition, the insurgent violence is not being quelled in Afghanistan. Just the opposite. The violence continues to increase, making the country more insecure for both troops and civilians. In just the last five years, the number of violent incidents has grown each year. Consider the month of the most violent attacks for each of those years according to ANSO:

August 2006...............335 attacks
July 2007...............405 attacks
August 2008...............634 attacks
August 2009...............1093 attacks
September 2010...............1541 attacks

The rising number of attacks and lack of secure provinces shows that this is not a war that is getting better. It is getting worse. And to top it off, the puppet government we have established and are trying to protect in Afghanistan is not only unpopular and weak -- it is also corrupt and misogynistic (and cannot survive without our financial and military support).

Evidently our leaders (from both parties) quickly forget the hard-learned lessons of Vietnam, for they have gotten us into the same kind of mess in Afghanistan. We cannot use our military to force a corrupt government on a people who do not want it. We have the best military in the world, but they were built to fight a war -- not to engage in "nation-building". No nation's military can accomplish the task we gave our soldiers in Afghanistan (as even the Russians learned).

The American people are tired of this military action and don't believe we can win it. I agree. Regardless of President Obama's rosy words in his SOTU speech, it is time to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan and bring them ALL home.