Robert Scheer: "Afghanistan: Here We Go Again" (The Nation)

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"......the Afghanistan war is still without end or logical purpose. President Barack Obama's own top national security adviser has stated that there are fewer than 100 Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan and that they are not capable of launching attacks. What superheroes they must be, then, to require 100,000 US troops to contain them.

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.....conflating Al Qaeda, which he admitted is holed up in Pakistan, with the Taliban and denying the McChrystal report's basic assumption that the enemy in Afghanistan is local in both origin and focus.....

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....The Islamic fanatics who seized power in Afghanistan were previously backed by the US as "freedom fighters" in what was once marketed as a bold adventure in Cold War one-upmanship against the Soviets. It was President Jimmy Carter, aided by a young liberal hawk named Richard Holbrooke, now Obama's civilian point man on Afghanistan, who decided to support Muslim fanatics there. Holbrooke began his government service as one of the "Best and the Brightest" in Vietnam and was involved with the rural pacification and Phoenix assassination program in that country, and he is now a big advocate of the counterinsurgency program proposed by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal to once again win the hearts and minds of locals who want none of it.....

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Defense Secretary Robert Gates.... wrote a memoir in 1996 which, as his publisher proclaimed, exposed "Carter's never-before-revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen--six months before the Soviets invaded."

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To suggest that the Afghan government will be in seriously better shape 18 months after 30,000 additional US and perhaps 5,000 more NATO troops are dispatched is bizarrely out of touch with the strategy of the McChrystal report, which calls for American troops to restructure life down to the level of the most forlorn village.....

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....Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain who was credited with being as successful as anyone in implementing the counterinsurgency strategy now in vogue. In his letter of resignation as a foreign service officer in charge of one of the most hotly contested areas, Hoh wrote: "In the course of my five months of service in Afghanistan...I have lost understanding and confidence in the strategic purpose of the United States' presence in Afghanistan. ... I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative....

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<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091214/scheer2>