Shades of Anbar September 2006 - US Troops Stalemated in Afghanistan

In September of 2006 Colonel Pete Devlin USMC wrote a report that declared Anbar Province in Iraq lost to the US and Iraqi central government.

Ten months later people were reporting a dramatic turnaround in the situation in Iraq generally and Anbar Province specifically, but still declared we were losing because our troops were "stalemated"

Since mid-2005, al Qaeda has aimed not to defeat the Coalition militarily, but to drain American public support politically.

...

But al Qaeda's largest harvest from "random slaughter" strategy was realized in America. Through acts of indiscriminate violence transmitted by the media, insurgents brought their war to America's living rooms. The atrocity-of-the-day is the principal informational input most Americans receive. This forms their knowledge base. The public does not live in the villages and mahalas of Iraq. Patterns of recovery, of normalcy, are not evident.

This is the essence of 4th Generation Warfare. And al Qaeda is clearly winning it.

Going along with the above are these statistics on news coverage of Iraq in 2006 / 2007. I have sat down and counted stories but I think we are beginning to see a similar trend regarding Afghanistan.

The MRC report, "The Iraq War on Cable TV," concluded the following:

- On Fox, pessimistic coverage outweighed optimistic coverage 3-to-2;

- On MSNBC, pessimistic coverage outweighed optimistic coverage 4-to-1; and

- On CNN, pessimistic coverage outweighed optimistic coverage 6-to-1.

From this, we can conservatively infer that at least 65% of coverage is pessimistic, compared to 35% (at most) optimistic. Stories of the daily car bombing do not have to be biased. They are inherently pessimistic.

The daily car bombing is the message the insurgents want.

Today people, especially pundits on the news networks have essentially declared the war in Iraq won. And in my opinion if things continue as the have been since January 2007 they are correct.

With that in mind forgive me if I am a little skeptical of this AP article in which Richard Holbrooke essentially says that we can't win in Afghanistan:

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, said Wednesday that the foreign ministers of those countries will travel to Washington next week to meet with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other officials as the U.S. formulates a policy review.

Appearing on "The NewsHour" on PBS, Holbrooke was asked how the Obama administration sees victory in Afghanistan. "First of all, the victory, as defined in purely military terms, is not achievable, and I cannot stress that too highly," he said. "What we're looking for is the definition of our vital national security interests."

If I am reading this correctly this is diplo-speak for "we need to find a way out of here as quickly as possible without looking like a bunch of cave dwelling religious fanatics who figure the fastest way to heaven is to kill one Jew or two Americans kicked our asses."

Fortunately General McKiernan, the US Commander seems to be made of a little sterner stuff. Although he admits his troops are currently stalemated he believes that the additional troops announce today will allow him to begin to break that stalemate.

Good on him.

It will be interesting to see what Afghanistan looks like in 10 months. Very interesting because my personal feeling is that Barack Obama doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to accept an increase in casualties if operations are stepped up.