Losing the "Good War"

The US continues to stumble and blunder its way down the path to disaster in Afghanistan, the other useless, senseless war. The killing of more than 90 Afghan civilians, now confirmed, has roused even the US puppet to bold action:

President Hamid Karzai dismissed an Afghan Army general and another officer Sunday for their parts in a commando operation in western Afghanistan that Afghan officials say killed more than 90 civilians.

The attack Friday, the officials said, killed mostly women and children and occurred when a joint patrol of Afghan Army commandos and U.S. embedded Special Forces trainers called in airstrikes on a compound in the village of Azizabad.

The US-led NATO forces intend to subdue the Afghan insurgency with its airpower, fully aware it cannot match the numbers of the defenders, who have a long history of defeating invading armies. But War analyst William Lind argues there's no surer or faster way to lose a counterinsurgeny than by calling in airstrikes. While using air superiority to counter the insurgents' home court advantage may sound good on paper, Lind reveals why such an approach is bound to lose:

It is a disaster on every level. Physically, it inevitably kills far more civilians than enemies, enraging the population against us and driving them into the arms of our opponents. Mentally, it tells the insurgents we are cowards who only dare fight them from 20,000 feet in the air. Morally, it turns us into Goliath, a monster every real man has to fight.

In other words, we must look at ourselves as others -- in this case, the defenders -- see us. And that's something we're incapable of doing.

Worse, the Afghan puppet regime is so corrupt and so infiltrated by the Taleban and the warlords, the US can't really trust it. The report reveals the civilians were killed because the US forces were purposely fed false information:

A tribal elder from the region who helped bury the dead, Haji Tor Jan Noorzai, said people in the village were gathered in memory of a man who was anti-Taliban and was killed last year, and that tribal enemies of the family had given out false information.

"It is quite obvious: The Americans bombed the area due to wrong information," he said by telephone. "I am 100 percent confident that someone gave the information due to a tribal dispute. The Americans are foreigners, and they do not understand. These people they killed were enemies of the Taliban."

So. It appears the Taleban grasps exactly what Lind's trying to tell heedless US military leaders, that in counterinsurgency, boots on the ground (assuming they're smart boots) are the most effective weapon, and bombs from above are the worst. The Afghan insurgency knows that so well, it's using that as a strategy, feeding false information to the US giant to tangle it up in its own resources even more.

DC is stabbing at ghosts in Afghanistan, but ends up hitting the very people it must win over to succeed. So the actual result of the use of air power is to turn even more Afghans against the US. A brutal strategy, perhaps, but this is war.