Afghanistan: The Other Shrub Clusterfuck

How does Team Bush define success in Afghanistan? Is it measured by the increased production of opium? Or by the ever shrinking areas under "control?":

"(It was) an enemy that demonstrated that they could react very well, (were) extremely resolute and fought to the last man," Capt. Paul Toolan, an operations officer for the Desert Eagles, said during a recent video-teleconference briefing in Fort Bragg, N.C., from battalion headquarters in Kandahar.

The briefing was a candid assessment of the enemy the battalion finds on its fourth Afghan tour. Toolan and the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Donald Bolduc, said that as teams of Green Berets and Afghan army troops have moved into Taliban sanctuaries this year, they have faced a reinvigorated adversary...

Last year, the fighting was less frequent and generally lasted only as long as it took to call in air support. The situation is different now.

Two days after the seven-hour fight at Qal'eh-ye Gaz, Special Forces entered the village of Sayhcow in Uruzgan province. The Taliban had cleared it of women and children, raised a flag and dug in for the assault...

The adversary faced this year by the Desert Eagles and other American units fighting in Afghanistan has defied military predictions that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were fading.

"It's absolutely true that the insurgency has become more effective and the insurgency has moved into more areas," says Peter Tomsen, a former special envoy who helped organize the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance in the 1980s.

According to the Desert Eagles:

• The insurgency never intended to disrupt Afghan parliamentary elections in September. The plan was to conserve military resources and wait for U.S. and Western allies to withdraw. "They had to deceive us that the elections were successful," Toolan said, "that we would be duped into a false sense of victory and leave earlier, so that they would have that ripe environment to move into open guerrilla warfare."

• Candidates linked to the insurgency ran for parliament seats. "We took United Nations candidate lists and we took a list of (insurgent) targets, and we overlaid those," Toolan said. "There were matches."

Early election results show three prominent members of the ousted Taliban regime — former commander Abdul Salaam Rocketi, former provincial governor Mawlawi Mohammed Islam Mohammadi and former senior security official Hanif Shah Al-Hussein — were elected to parliament...

Seth Jones, a political scientist with Rand Corp. who specializes in Afghanistan, says, "The issue is not that they're going to be successful today or tomorrow or even next year, but that in time, the United States and other major powers ... just do not have the political will to stay.

Easy for Seth to say--he's not getting shot at halfway around the world.

In addition to the drag caused by the quagmire in Iraq, there really is no American connection to Central Asia. That was the case twenty years ago, when our now enemies were our erstwhile allies (funny how things can change so quickly), and that's the case now.

Blowback ain't just a bitch--it's a damn tragedy. A tragedy brought about by short-sighted thinking on the part of leadership then--thanks for nothing, Team Reagan--and now.