From UPI, 7/7/06:
http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20060707-074813-7425r

Analysis: Losing the forgotten war

By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON (UPI) --

The war in Afghanistan is going far worse than almost anyone in the
United States -- or even in the Bush administration -- realizes.

And the bad news has been building up for a long time.

It seemed so easy when alliance forces hostile to the ruling Taliban
and spearheaded by U.S. Special Forces rolled into Kabul in late 2001
and toppled the Taliban extreme Islamist regime that had protected the
planners and perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 atrocities.

And it was the apparent ease of the conquest of Afghanistan that
whetted the appetites of Pentagon and National Security Council hawks
for the 2003 war to topple Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

After all, if overwhelming U.S. forces could remake Afghanistan so
easily in contrast to the bleeding ulcer that bled and discredited the
Soviet Union for eight years from 1979 to 1987, how hard could Iraq
be?

Things have in fact been going from bad to worse in Iraq for a long
time.

And soon the lesson may be coming home to the American people that
--although the casualties have thankfully been much less -- the same
thing is happening in Afghanistan.

And it has been happening for the same reasons.

As in Iraq, Bush administration policymakers never realized that
toppling governments in Afghanistan is actually very easy for a
super-power.

It is staying there that is hard -- and can easily turn deadly.

The British Empire conquered Afghanistan three times in 80 years -- in
1839-41, in 1878-81 and in 1919.

They never stayed.

On the first occasion, they actually tried to.

And they lost their entire army.

Out of a force of 4,000 men manning the British garrison in Kabul in
1842, only a single one survived.

The British never made the mistake of trying to stay there again.

In December 1979, the Soviets made the same mistake, and it set off
the decline and fall of the communist empire.

They too found it easy to take Kabul.

They literally did so overnight.

Fighting the guerilla war that erupted against them afterwards did not
prove so easy.

Over the next decade, 15,000 Red Army soldiers lost their lives there
and the Soviets totally lost.

For Afghanistan is not and never has been a coherent country governed
even by the kind of tyrannical but effective government that Saddam
and his Second Baath Republic maintained for 35 years over the peoples
of Iraq.

It remains a collection of tribes divided along broader ethnic lines
in broad, occasionally fluid but usually predictable alliances.

The people are overwhelmingly rural subsistence farmers and
traditionally Islamic.

Historically, they have been prone to embrace militant and extreme
fundamentalist Islamic movements.

The Bush administration's efforts at nation-building and the exporting
of instant democracy -- just add democratic ideology, hot water and
stir -- far from stabilizing the country, has inflamed increasing
sections of it against the United States and its NATO allies operating
there.

First, the very attempt to set up an effective centralized government
under President Hamid Karzai has created the very pathology it was
intended to prevent.

It has threatened the traditional political feudal ecology of
Afghanistan and prompted many tribal groups that might have remained
passive if left alone and bribed separately -- the traditional British
imperial recipe for maintaining peace there -- into flocking to the
support of the revived Taliban and their Pushtun allies.

Second, the U.S. insistence on democracy, human rights and equal
rights for woman has outraged traditional Muslims including many who
loathed the Taliban and were delighted to see them go four and half
years ago.

As happened in a quicker and more dramatically violent way in Iraq,
the presence of U.S. and allied NATO forces presented different Afghan
groups with an obviously culturally and religiously alien intrusive
enemy that it was popular and easy to react against.

Third, the determined efforts by U.S. forces to eliminate the growing
of opium threatened not just the livelihood but the physical existence
of hundreds of thousands of Afghan peasants and their families.

Opium for the drug trade is by far the most profitable crop in
Afghanistan and for a society of subsistence farmers living on the
margins of survival, nothing could be more threatening than armies of
foreign soldiers from around the world threatening their best means of
feeding their children.

None of these underlying conditions was given serious consideration by
U.S. policymakers.

The U.S. obsession with al-Qaida and the Sunni insurgency in Iraq also
put Afghan policy and resources for taming the country very much on
the back-burner in Washington.

The U.S. government over the past four years has not devoted any
serious financial or intellectual resources to Afghan planning.

The current ominous escalation in violence there against undermanned,
poorly equipped and poorly supplied NATO forces is the result.

Only worse news can be expected in the months ahead.

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317 American troops are dead, 795 have been wounded.

Where's Osama?

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