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Is the race to the exit beginning in Afghanistan?
Is the race to the exit beginning in Afghanistan?
By M K Bhadrakumar – August 7, 2011
Is the race to the exit beginning in Afghanistan? - Indian Punchline
It may seem a minor detail that the US special forces men (known as SEAL) who were killed in the Taliban attack Friday night in Wardak province in Afghanistan were drawn from the same unit that undertook the Abbottabad operation. But it will get played out in a big way in the Afghan bazaar. An unquantifiable factor is that in the Afghan perceptions Taliban fighters would increasingly look like men from Mars. These are the incidents that become the stuff of legends. No doubt, the propaganda boost for the Taliban from the Wardak incident is going to be enormous — and its psychological impact on the Afghan mind no less. The contrast with the Afghan government that isn”t getting its act together can’t be sharper.
Quite obviously, the killing in Wardak took a back seat in the US media — nay, the western media — in comparison with the downgrading of US’ credit rating. Another sign of the priorities of the Barack Obama administration and the US’s western allies in the coming months. The Afghan war merits all the attention that the Obama administration and NATO countries can spare and what it is going to get may be far short of that. So, what happens next? If one or two incidents of large scale casualties take place, all bets are off. Obama may call it day. As things stand, Time magazine featured an exceptionally gloomy picture of the state of play in Afghanistan.
The Time story doubts whether the new US ambassador Ryan Crocker, who is a genuine area specialist and a ‘consummate diplomat’ and struck up a good record in Iraq is going to make much of a difference. Time says that everyone it interviewed in Afghanistan agreed that “things are bad and is only going to get worse.” It ends with a devastating quotation from an unnamed ‘foreign analyst’, presumably a high-level American based in Kabul: “The situation here [in Afghanistan] is toxic and unraveling… Transition is simply a code word for managing defeat and retreat. It’s just a matter of how we [US] put a domestic political wrapper around it so it doesn’t look like defeat and retreat.” And the incredible part is that the Time story was written before the Wardak incident. Read it here []Post-Petraeus Afghanistan: Turning Defeat into Transition -- Printout -- TIME.
By M K Bhadrakumar – August 7, 2011
By M K Bhadrakumar – August 7, 2011
Is the race to the exit beginning in Afghanistan? - Indian Punchline
It may seem a minor detail that the US special forces men (known as SEAL) who were killed in the Taliban attack Friday night in Wardak province in Afghanistan were drawn from the same unit that undertook the Abbottabad operation. But it will get played out in a big way in the Afghan bazaar. An unquantifiable factor is that in the Afghan perceptions Taliban fighters would increasingly look like men from Mars. These are the incidents that become the stuff of legends. No doubt, the propaganda boost for the Taliban from the Wardak incident is going to be enormous — and its psychological impact on the Afghan mind no less. The contrast with the Afghan government that isn”t getting its act together can’t be sharper.
Quite obviously, the killing in Wardak took a back seat in the US media — nay, the western media — in comparison with the downgrading of US’ credit rating. Another sign of the priorities of the Barack Obama administration and the US’s western allies in the coming months. The Afghan war merits all the attention that the Obama administration and NATO countries can spare and what it is going to get may be far short of that. So, what happens next? If one or two incidents of large scale casualties take place, all bets are off. Obama may call it day. As things stand, Time magazine featured an exceptionally gloomy picture of the state of play in Afghanistan.
The Time story doubts whether the new US ambassador Ryan Crocker, who is a genuine area specialist and a ‘consummate diplomat’ and struck up a good record in Iraq is going to make much of a difference. Time says that everyone it interviewed in Afghanistan agreed that “things are bad and is only going to get worse.” It ends with a devastating quotation from an unnamed ‘foreign analyst’, presumably a high-level American based in Kabul: “The situation here [in Afghanistan] is toxic and unraveling… Transition is simply a code word for managing defeat and retreat. It’s just a matter of how we [US] put a domestic political wrapper around it so it doesn’t look like defeat and retreat.” And the incredible part is that the Time story was written before the Wardak incident. Read it here []Post-Petraeus Afghanistan: Turning Defeat into Transition -- Printout -- TIME.
By M K Bhadrakumar – August 7, 2011