Afghanistan is lost

The road to hell is paved with good intentions an adage goes. The ongoing conflict in Afghanistan is a case in point. The war has consumed the energies of three American presidents, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Donald Trump. American intervention was allegedly intended to cut off the flow of Al-Qaeda recruits to Europe and to politically stabilize the country.

The accumulative cost of the war in Afghanistan currently stands at US$ 1.1 trillion since 2001. That’s a lot of financial resources that could be used for U.S. domestic purposes such as inner city schools, job creation, and health care.

There is an accepted dictum used by military planners to determine the number of counter-insurgency forces necessary to defeat a guerrilla-based force. That formula specifies that there should, ideally, be a 10:1 ratio between counterinsurgency forces and insurgents. Thus, with the Taliban currently having an estimated 25-30,000 fighters would require that the U.S. put some 300,000 soldiers in the field to defeat them. But this would require a major national and military commitment.

While American military personnel stood at 102,000 people in 2011, it has continuously declined and now stands at 13,000 (8,400) people. President Trump has recently announced an additional injection of another 3,900 military personnel for a total of about 17,000 army troops. This brings the total number of ground troops well short of the required 10:1 ratio to effectively neutralize or defeat the Taliban.

Afghanistan is now America’s longest and most costly war. And like Vietnam it has become “a big muddy”, with no strategic objective or purpose. It is a futile war. A corollary dictum of counter-insurgency warfare, as the French in Algeria learned and the U.S. in Vietnam, is that you can win militarily, but lose politically. And like Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan is lost. Richard Deaton,

Stanley Bridge