Stats Show Trump’s Afghanistan Surge Has Failed

[enhanced_deficit]

Stats Show Trump’s Afghanistan Surge Has Failed


Stats Show Trump’s Afghanistan Surge Has Failed
LONG LOST WAR
Despite unprecedented aerial bombardment and the latest troop escalation, the Taliban had a really good 2019.
Spencer Ackerman
Published Jan. 31, 2020

Omar Sobhani/Reuters

New statistics about the United States’ generational war in Afghanistan show that President Trump’s 2017 surge of more than 7,000 troops there failed. The latest figures represent an epitaph for a conflict now tied with the occupation of Haiti as America’s longest overseas misadventure.
Inheriting the war from George W. Bush and Barack Obama and influenced by then-National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump increased the 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 15,000—it’s between 12,000 and 13,000 today—and returned what he called “attacking our enemies” to prominence within the war effort. It had taken a back seat to training Afghan forces since the Taliban shrugged off Obama’s larger troop surge.

The U.S. attack largely came from above. In October 2017, shortly after Trump announced his mini-surge, his then-commander, Gen. John Nicholson, pledged that a “tidal wave of air power” was forthcoming—one that would spell “the beginning of the end for the Taliban.”
This week, the Air Force released statistics showing that Nicholson’s rhetoric was warranted, mixed metaphor notwithstanding. In 2019, the military conducted 7,423 airstrikes in Afghanistan, more than five times the 1,337 airstrikes of Obama’s final year as commander in chief. At the height of Obama’s Afghanistan surge, the high-water mark for airstrikes was 5,411 in a single year (2011). In three years, Trump has launched 19,146 airstrikes in Afghanistan, more than the 18,758 of Obama’s entire first term.

All of which was very Trumpian. The president has made no secret of his antipathy for the Afghanistan war: He punctuated his announcement of the surge by saying he had gone against his own instincts. Like Obama before him, Trump has complained to numerous close aides and friends that he’s felt boxed in by hawkish advisers. According to three people who’ve discussed the wars with Trump since 2017, he’s complained that he keeps getting told that withdrawal from Afghanistan (and Iraq) would make him “look weak” and “look soft,” something entirely anathema to Trump. The massive bombing campaign, in a way, offered a political alternative.

But it played into one of the war’s most persistent fantasies. “Clearly the notion that we can add more airstrikes and create some sort of decisive victory in which the Taliban surrender or sue for peace has not been realistic—not when there were 100,000 troops on the ground [and] not realistic today,” said Chris Kolenda, a retired colonel and Afghanistan veteran who has spent the past decade calling for peace talks with the Taliban to salvage something positive from the war.

A just-released quarterly report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction underscores Kolenda’s point. It shows that Trump got nothing out of the Afghanistan war after putting in much. Far from the “beginning of the end” that Nicholson forecast, the Taliban is in some of its best shape since its overthrow by U.S.-backed forces in 2001.

...
It contradicts the logic of Trump’s escalation: that intensified fighting is necessary to compel the Taliban to agree to terms. But the reality is that dubious proposition died during Obama’s surge, when secret preliminary talks with the Taliban during the height of the war broke down, and the war has operated on its own momentum ever since. That’s why Trump, when announcing the resumed talks in November, shrugged over Taliban making a peace deal: “If they do, they do, and if they don’t, they don’t.”

thedailybeast.com/statistics-show-trumps-afghanistan-surge-has-failed



Related



Tracking Donald Trump's evolving positions on Afghanistan

By Louis Jacobson

When Donald Trump announced a way forward for the United States in Afghanistan, his decision to keep troops in the country was a sharp contrast to what he had said as a private citizen.
It wasn’t, however, all that different from what he had said as a presidential candidate.
Confused?
Trump acknowledged the discrepancy in his positions in his Aug. 21 speech.
"My original instinct was to pull out -- and, historically, I like following my instincts," Trump said. "But all my life I've heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office."
We traced Trump’s evolving stance on the 16-year war in Afghanistan, first as a citizen, then as a presidential candidate, and now as a president.

Citizen Trump: The war is a waste of money and American lives

As a private citizen, Trump tweeted that the United States should get out of Afghanistan more than a dozen times.
Here’s the chronological list. (Hat tip to the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake.)

• Aug 13, 2011: "Ron Paul is right that we are wasting trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
• Oct. 7, 2011: "When will we stop wasting our money on rebuilding Afghanistan? We must rebuild our country first."
• Feb. 29, 2012: "China is getting minerals from Afghanistan http://usat.ly/t69pc1 We are getting our troops killed by the Afghani govt't. Time to get out."
• Sept. 11, 2012: "84% of US troops wounded & 70% of our brave men & women killed in Afghanistan have all come under Obama. Time to get out of there."
• Dec. 6, 2012: "Karzai of Afghanistan is not sticking with our signed agreement. They are dropping us like dopes. Get out now and re-build U.S.!"
• Feb. 27, 2012: "It is time to get out of Afghanistan. We are building roads and schools for people that hate us. It is not in our national interests."
• Aug. 21, 2012: "Why are we continuing to train these Afghanis who then shoot our soldiers in the back? Afghanistan is a complete waste. Time to come home!"
• Jan. 11, 2013: "Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA."
• Jan. 14, 2013: "I agree with Pres. Obama on Afghanistan. We should have a speedy withdrawal. Why should we keep wasting our money -- rebuild the U.S.!"
• Mar. 1, 2013: "We should leave Afghanistan immediately. No more wasted lives. If we have to go back in, we go in hard & quick. Rebuild the US first."
• Nov. 21, 2013: "We have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Their government has zero appreciation. Let's get out!"
• Nov. 21, 2013: "Do not allow our very stupid leaders to sign a deal that keeps us in Afghanistan through 2024-with all costs by U.S.A. MAKE AMERICA GREAT!"
• Dec. 1, 2014: "Now Obama is keeping our soldiers in Afghanistan for at least another year. He is losing two wars simultaneously."

Candidate Trump: The U.S. military will ‘probably’ have to stay

As a candidate, Trump regularly brought up how he had opposed the Iraq War (an assertion we found was False).

politifact.com/article/2017/aug/22/tracking-donald-trump-evolving-position-Afghanista/

 

[RonZeplin]

Dancing Wahhabi Terrorist loser Donnell

Reagan's Founding Fathers are winning.

And Donnell's Dancing Wahhabi's are losiing.

And Joe Sixpack is still footing the bill for the deranged neocon MIC.

 

[enhanced_deficit]

Reagan's Founding Fathers are winning.

And Joe Sixpack is still footing the bill for the deranged neocon MIC.

Afghans mark Soviet withdrawal as US negotiates its own exit

KATHY GANNON and RAHIM FAIEZ
,Associated Press • February 15, 2020

• 
  

1 / 7

Afghanistan-Soviet Withdrawal Anniversary
FILE - In this Feb. 7, 1989 file photo. a Soviet soldier waves as his armored convoy makes its way back to the Soviet Union along a north Afghanistan highway. Afghanistan is marking the 31st anniversary of the Soviet Union's last soldier leaving the country, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2020. This year's anniversary comes as the United States negotiates its own exit after 18 years of war, America's longest. (AP Photo/Boris Yurchenko, File)


KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan on Saturday marked the 31st anniversary of the last Soviet soldier leaving the country. This year's anniversary came as the United States negotiates its own exit after 18 years of war, America's longest.
Some of the same Afghan insurgent leaders who drove out the former Soviet Union have been fighting the U.S., and have had prominent seats at the negotiating table during yearlong talks with Washington's peace envoy.
Moscow pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, a decade after invading the country to support an allied communist government. Afghan mujaheddin, or holy warriors, received weapons and training from the U.S. throughout the 1980s to fight the Red Army. Some of those mujaheddin went on to form the Taliban.
news.yahoo.com/afghans-mark-soviet-withdrawal-us-130147755.html


Related


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQKoyJ8KRh4


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqZ-ToXjCz0


1980s, Reagan's MAGA era

USA prints extremist textbooks to radicalize Afghan children

Afghanistan in 1970s, before US radicalization intervention

Poll: Reckless Putin: "US nurtured Al-Qaeda & Bin Laden, supported terrorists in Chechnya"

 

[enhanced_deficit]

There is increasing chance now that the latest surge is come to end, thanks to 2020 election timetable in part.

So far no questions have been raised in media what was gained in return for blood and treasure lost during last 3 years of surge, hopefully media would continue to stay in line.

 

[enhanced_deficit]

Not sure if media did similar breakdowns of civilians/child casualties by the Presidential terms after Bush/Obama terms.
But it's well funded MSM, so who knows could be inaccurate or grossly deflated numbers too.


New report says 40 percent of all air strike causalities from 2016 to 2020 were children.

Of the 3,977 deaths caused between 2016-2020, nearly 1,600 were children [File: Omar Sobhani/Reuters]
7 May 2021

In the past five years, 40 percent of all civilian airstrike casualties in Afghanistan were children, new figures show.
Data published on Thursday by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) said of the 3,977 deaths caused between 2016 and 2020, nearly 1,600 were children.

“Sadly, these numbers are no surprise,” said Chris Nyamandi, country director for Afghanistan at Save the Children International. “Afghanistan has been the deadliest country for children for years.”

aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/7/afghanistan-nearly-1600-children-killed-in-the-past-five-years