Without US Air Support, Afghan Forces Begin to Crumble

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Entirely predictable. Obama doesn’t have a strategy for Afghanistan. He has plausible deniability.

One of the differences is that this year, the American forces, and their close air support, have been almost completely absent from the field. And though the Afghan forces are holding on, for the most part, they are taking punishingly heavy losses.

The Taliban offensive in northern parts of Helmand Province began in earnest in June, after the last American troops pulled out of the area, and has continued at a fierce tempo.

Given the area’s long tradition as a Taliban stronghold, the authorities expected the June and July offensive, which at some points threatened the fall of both Sangin District and Musa Qala District. What has been unusual is the apparent determination of the Taliban to continue pressing the fight.

The insurgents even managed to infiltrate the Afghan National Army’s main base in Helmand Province, Camp Shorab Maidan, formerly called Camp Bastion when it served as Britain’s main base in Afghanistan.

Now, it is the headquarters of the army’s 215th Corps. The infiltration was not the first on the sprawling base, and the insurgents managed to destroy aircraft during a raid on the base in 2012. But this one took three days to completely subdue, even after the authorities insisted it was over on both the first and again on the second day. The British had handed the base over to the Afghans only a month earlier.

When it takes you three days to secure your own base, you’re in big trouble. This is why Obama delayed a complete pullout. He’s been briefed thoroughly on what will happen and he’s playing the plausible deniability game.

Instead of repeating his mistake with ISIS, he’s keeping the US indefinitely in a halfway point with enough engagement to make it look like he’s still involved, but not enough to actually a real difference.

Nationwide, Afghanistan has lost more than 5,000 police and soldiers in the fighting this year, more than any previous year, according to official Afghan data that has not been formally released, but that was obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by Western officials familiar with the data.

The year has also hit a new high for civilian deaths in the fighting, which the United Nations estimates will exceed 10,000 by the end of 2014.

So much for smart power and courageous restraint.

  • Texas Patriot

    Without an ideological counterbalance to the forces of Islamic Jihad, there is nothing for Afghans to fight for. The idea that a Muslim nation could be reorganized and restructured to fight against those who uphold the teachings and the life example of Muhammad and his followers is patently absurd.

    • Pete

      Yeah, yeah, yeah keep harping on that.

      While you are at it misuse the aphorism “You cannot beat something with nothing.”

      Just because the a group in this case the TaliBLAM says the are reformists and have something new and improved or claim they are going back to original formula does not mean that we must change things.

      Does the counterbalance have to be ‘new & improved’ or “Look Shiny!”?

      What is wrong for Afghanis praying 5 times a day, going on haj when they can afford it and choosing their own imans?

      The TaliBLAM say they are reformers. Merely calling yourself a reformer or trying to act as one through force of arms does not make your ideals or cause good or just or even new. It could merely mean that the wheel has turned yet another revolution and has come back to the same sordid point,

      Journalists should dump the use and abuse of ‘reform’

      • Texas Patriot

        It’s hard to imagine that any of the so-called moderate Muslim governments will be standing five years from now. The only thing we accomplished by our invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is to accelerate the Islamization of the entire region.

        • Pete

          The region was already Islamicized. Islam counted for 85% of countries at least with most 95% to 100% Muslim.

          With or without the Taliban or Saddam, Muslims would have immigrated from those countries to the west because of poverty of persecution.

          With or without the Taliban or Saddam the immigration would be substantial in changing demographics with or without a war.
          Never pushing back against acts of war or other provocations just gives you all the characteristics if a Welcome mat. Salafis do not respect welcome mats.

          • Texas Patriot

            Pete: The region was already Islamicized.

            As indicated in today’s excellent article by Magdi Khalil, Islam was asleep until the early 1970s. With the attack on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, Islam began to wake up, and that’s what’s happening in the Middle East and around the world today.

          • Pete

            I liked the article.

            However when has the Muslim Brotherhood been asleep?

            The were founded in the 1920s and they have never been asleep. You cannot prove that they were.

            Read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright.

            Nasser must have been some confused choir boy.

            ***
            The Looming Tower is a much tougher slog than Charlie Wilson’s War but it is a very worthwhile to read it.

          • Texas Patriot

            Pete: However when has the Muslim Brotherhood been asleep?

            Sayyid Qutb and a small circle of followers “woke up” to the call of traditional Islam in the 1920s, but their influence and their scope was rather limited for the next fifty years. The spark that ignited the worldwide bonfire of Islamic Jihad was the attack on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Since then there has been a non-stop series of Islamist-inspired terrorist events around the world, and that trend is still accelerating today.

          • Pete

            “was rather limited for the next fifty years.”

            I am replying to a brick wall.

            All this trials of Muslim Brotherhood Members in Egypt in the 1950s must have been but a dream.

            Zawahiri also got his start before the 1970s.

            Never mind, my mistake. I mistook “The Looming Tower” for a well researched book instead the fancy paperweight it actually is.

        • truebearing

          Then how do you explain the centuries of Muslim jihad and conquest preceding our invasion of those countries? The history of Islam didn’t begin in 2001. Muslims killed at least 80 million Hindus when they “accelerated” into India between the 12th and 16th centuries.

          Osama Bin Laden was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan well before we retaliated for 911. It was an unprovoked attack that signalled a resurgence of Muslim aggression BEFORE we sent troops to the region.

          Muslims will take whatever they can. historically, The only successful remedy to Islamic jihad has been military annihilation. We did that very thing in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Imambama followed Bush into the Whitehouse and the traitor immediately turned victories into defeats.

  • Colt

    The Taliban are scum. That whole place is corrupt and not worth the blood and treasure that we have spent there. We fought those bastards with one hand tied behind our backs.

  • Hard Little Machine

    I was thinking yesterday that ISIS and the Taliban will soon reach a critical point that makes them conceptually indistinguishable from the Iranian Revolution in 1979. They too installed violent sharia, executed 10′s or 100′s of thousands of people, stuffed women into burqas and sacrificed a million children. All that’s different is that Iran’s borders already existed and haven’t changed. ISIS and the Taliban are still banging out the edges of their dominion and when that activity stabilizes the west will literally flock to welcome them both as new countries. A lesson to be learned for the ‘palestinians’ is that while the west loves the fact that you murder Jews, they won’t respect you until you murder lots and lots of western non-Jews. Only then can you earn your own country with their blessing.

    • Pete

      You are upset. You wrote a whole paragraph instead of a 1 or 2 liner.
      That said you are correct.

  • cree

    Yeah, the time is here to see more of what some Muslims will do to other Muslims. May allah be praised.

  • Erudite Mavin

    “Without US Air Support, Afghan Forces Begin to Crumble”
    That is the idea.
    Obama uses just enough troops, air, and Navy over the years to give the appearance he is taking on Radical Islam but not close to what is need to
    do the job or having the correct policy.
    Obama’s actual policy, to let Radical Islam spread while marching in place.

  • Space Cowboy

    Obama doesn’t have a strategy for Afghanistan.

    Our strategy in Afghanistan should consist of getting the heck out of there ASAP. As lifting up Afghanis while they were murdering Americans amounted to lifting up our eternal mortal enemies, and lifting up our eternal mortal enemies the last time I checked is about as counterproductive and as idiotic as it gets.

    We should never have occupied Afghanistan to begin with, as radical Islam is not hijacking moderate Islam, since the existence of radical Islam, exactly like the existence of moderate Islam, is a PC multicultural myth.

    Indeed, what do you want Obama’s strategy to be? To protect what we won over there, when in reality we didn’t win a damn thing over there. As a matter of fact, the fantasy based nation-building mission in Afghanistan, exactly like the fantasy based nation building mission in Iraq, was incredibly counterproductive and idiotic since it amounted to lifting up our eternal mortal enemies and sabotaging our own national interests in the process at the same time. Apparently, you foolishly believe the Afghani people are so-called moderate Muslims. They are not, they are mainstream orthodox Muslims and exactly like ALL MUSLIMS IN THE WORLD, they are jihadists in one form or another as well.

    Very apparently you are as delusional and as mentally incompetent as GWB and BHO are when it comes to understanding the true nature of the enemies we face. No wonder you are so obsessed with misrepresenting Muslims as being terrorists. You don’t have a fricking clue!

  • Dan Knight

    Thank you Daniel: So, will Bam Bam let Afghanistan go to Taliban/Isis?

  • Dan Knight

    Radical Islam in the 70′s …

    Who cares about

    Lebanon
    Cyprus
    Iran, or
    East Timor?

    All of which were ‘hot beds’ of Islamization caused by ‘the Great Satan’ …

    No … I refer to the harrowing tales of my Big Oil colleagues, and their narrow escapes from such lovely bleeeep holes as Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait. These places were as dangerous in the 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s for an American oil man in the boonies as any other place on Earth at the time.

    All was peace and quiet all right – for the diplomats and the powerful and the Western Media doing their Potemkin village tours to tell us how wonderful life was.

    Meanwhile, engineers and geologists were dodging bullets, and playing spy-style, life and death, Lawrence of Arabia games to collect geophysical data …