Afghan Exit:why, how and more in country and beyond

[flagg]

That's a good question. Personally, I think Congress will probably repeat what we did after the withdrawal in Vietnam and cut off support to whatever remains of Karzai's government. I think our interest is mainly to prevent the reemergence of the kind of support and infrastructure AQ had in the late 1990's.

Your post leaves me thinking about the Soviet withdraw from Afghanistan.

IIRC, it lasted approx 3 years.

But it fell in approx 3 months from the time the cash/aid tap got turned off.

Current day Afghanistan has approx $16-20 billion in spending(largely foreign aid), but only approx $2 billion in tax revenue.

[davidbfpo]

A short article by a novelist, which starts with:

The first British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 ended three years later in disaster. In an exclusive extract from his new book, William Dalrymple draws parallels with the current campaign

There are some odd passages, more like a travel article, but at least he talks to Afghans and citing one tribal elder, from Gandamak:

Last month some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, 'Why do you hate us?’ I replied, 'Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time.

“What did he say to that?”

He turned to his friend and said, 'If the old men are like this, what will the younger ones be like?’ In truth, all the Americans here know their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this.

Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...the-world.html

[Bill Moore]

The first British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 ended three years later in disaster.

At least they saw the light three years into their campaign, they didn't have wait 10 years plus to experiment with a better way and in the meantime continue to sacrifice our best people, our financial wealth, and our international credibility.

[davidbfpo]

A nice catchy headline, based on an internal UK MoD paper:

Both the Nato campaign and the 1979 invasion were initially attempts to impose "ideology foreign to the Afghan people", whose aims were quickly dropped when they ran into difficulty.

Nato, like the Soviets, has been unable to "establish control over the country's borders and the insurgents' safe havens", or "protect the rural population"....
"The [Soviet] 40th Army was unable to decisively defeat the Mujahideen while facing no existential threat itself, a situation that precisely echoes [the Nato coalition's] predicament"

The paper, Lessons From the Soviet Transition in Afghanistan, was prepared for the MOD's Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC), to provoke internal debate and challenge current military thinking.

Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-invasion.html

For political reasons the UK, like I suspect most ISAF contributors, does not want a public debate around what has happened in Afghanistan.