All over the hotel, dignitaries, who had come to the capital to discuss the future of Afghanistan’s security, locked themselves in lavatories or hid under beds as the killing began.
– The Telegraph, on the attack last week at Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel

Despite the slaughter at one of Afghanistan’s supposedly most-secure locations, President Obama still had the audacity to proclaim Kabul “much safer than it was” even as a security conference becomes way-insecure — 12 civilians, including a Spanish pilot, were killed in the attack.

Another fudge on a surge.

(Illustration found here).

Just as it was announced four NATO soldiers were killed Tuesday in Afghanistan (bringing the total to 280 for the year, nine just this month, which is only five days old), David Petraeus, retiring from the military and getting ready to take over the CIA, threw out some bullshit about how great the Afghan security forces were in handling the hotel attack: “Do you realize how quickly they cleared a massive hotel?” he asked. “These guys were all wearing suicide vests. They (the Afghan forces) took it down in a single night.”
Yeah, right.

The BBC on the situation:

That the attackers managed to get into the hotel – despite layers of security – raises huge questions over the ability of the Afghan police and military to protect citizens and property once Western forces leave the country.
…
Afghan officials are not ruling out the possibility that someone from the police or the security establishment could have helped them out.
”We are looking at everything. Sadly, the enemy has infiltrated our security forces,” said an Afghan official.

The Afghan army and security forces, i.e., the police, are a known joke.
Even foreign visitors to Kabul have to be wary of security, even after a nearly-full decade into a conflict going nowhere and although Afghan army has improved, the jury pretty-much has a verdict of disaster coming.
Read a most-excellent analysis of how bad the Afghan forces are at tomdispatch.

Meanwhile, back to big dick David Petraeus and the way-real verdict on the Afghan surge.
One of the better war reporters, Gareth Porter, crunches the numbers for Petraeus’ brainchild of surging US troops into Afghanistan and tearing the heart out of the Taliban.
Bullshit indeed.
Porter at CounterPunch:

The Taliban and allied insurgent organizations launched 54 per cent more attacks and killed or wounded 56 per cent more U.S. troops over the nine months from last October through May than in the comparable period a year earlier, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Defense and by the highly-respected Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO).
The nearly 1,571 attacks in May recorded by ANSO, which exceeded the previous monthly peak total of 1,541 attacks in September 2010, was achieved four months earlier in the fighting season than the previous peak.
…
Even as the monthly level of Taliban attacks was going down in the last quarter of 2010, the number of Taliban IEDs planted and direct or indirect fire attacks during the quarter was 130 per cent higher than in the same period of 2009, as shown in a graph in the April 2011 DOD report on Afghanistan.
That increase in attacks recorded by the Pentagon relative to the previous year matches almost exactly the increase of 132 per cent in U.S. casualties in Afghanistan in the fourth quarter relative to the same period in 2009, according to casualty data provided to IPS by the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO).
The JIEDDO data show the number of U.S. troops killed in action increased by 56 per cent from 80 in the last quarter of 2009 to 125 in the same period of 2010.
But the little-noticed number of U.S. troops wounded in action was 1,446 in the final quarter – a 140 per cent increase over the 601 wounded in the comparable period of 2009.

The only surge, of course, is in bullshit.

(Illustration found here).

Just to not soil the bloomers: UK Major General Nick Carter, commander of British forces in southern Afghanistan on Thursday presented “a devastating assessment:”

Carter admitted that “In my tour I lost 302 soldiers. Most of them American. The cost in blood and treasure has been enormous.”
He added that NATO wouldn’t know if it was winning — whatever that word signifies in a war already in its tenth year and escalating to new heights by the day — until June of 2011, “when the fighting season begins again” and the Atlantic Alliance and the Pentagon can “compare Taliban attacks with this year.”

What is happening there?
In most of the evaluations on the current status of the Afghan war have been negative, keeping the plot in line with the country’s known moniker of the “graveyard of empires” — and one of those ‘empire’ guys, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, warned the West last month:

Gorbachev said if the US and NATO do not pull their troops out of Afghanistan, another Vietnam would be in the making.
“It will be more difficult for America to get out of this situation. But what’s the alternative? Another Vietnam? Sending in half a million troops? That wouldn’t work,” Gorbachev told the state-run BBC.
“Victory is impossible in Afghanistan.
Obama is right to pull the troops out no matter how difficult it will be,” he added.
Gorbachev said that the US was in trouble as it was Washington that trained militants in Afghanistan decades ago, adding that those same militants are terrorizing the region now.

Indeed, what comes around, goes bad around.
Mainly there’s been no intelligent intelligence on the war.
The Taliban rules 80 percent of the country and can not be beaten.
Robert Robert Baer, a Middle East expert with the US CIA, believes any chance the US and its allies had of defeating the Taliban have already been squandered because victory required reliable intelligence: ”[US intelligence agencies] have the same problem they had before 9/11. It is a system that doesn’t work.”

Even nit-wit GOP head Michael Steele can see the writing on the spattered wall, though the language is jibberish if one knows Steele: He said last summer the Afghan war “can’t be won because everyone who’s tried over a thousand years of history has failed…”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch Afghan Defense Minister Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak commented during ceremonies last week marking a year of supposedly increased national forces training that the local boys are doing better:

“This year we led some operations,” he said. “Next year we hope that we will be able to lead more operations and take the responsibility for the physical security in more districts and provinces.”
He ended his passionate address with the word “Giddy-up.”

The US needs to actually saddle up, and get the living-shit out of Dodge.

A poem from Jean Gerard, age 94: “Defragging Afghanistan”

Take Showkar Kariz for example.
It’s thirty miles northeast of Kandahar
as the crow flies over Mohammed Qasim’s head.
He’s the only remaining inhabitant now.
He looks up into a cloudless sky.

“There’s no Al Quaeda here,” says he.
“I had just dug out a child when
the second strike flew over. That time
they got him!”
He squints in the sun,
rubs his eyes.
“These are war crimes,” he says.
Silence.
Then: “Guess who came by last week,
and for what? Americans,” he says.
He’s tired. His voice shakes. “They
buried a piece of the World Trade Center
here,” he says, “and took a piece
of our mosque back to New York.”
He points
to a small mound beside a ruined wall,
sifts a handful of dust through his fingers.

Bad moon rising, and so forth…

And US GIs — along with troops from all over the world — are getting blown to bits to keep this pile of shit in office.

(Illustration found here).

And Hamid Karzai, supposedly just re-elected to a joyous second term as Afghan president, has apparently learned the trade-craft of bullshit, memory-lapse gall from a master: George Jr.
If you can’t beat ‘em, lie about it, then throw up a pious smoke-and-mirrors, holier-than-thou stream of consciousness.
From Al Jazeera English just this morning:

“Over the last few days some political and diplomatic circles and propaganda agencies of certain foreign countries have intervened in Afghanistan’s internal affairs by issuing instructions concerning the composition of Afghan government organs and political policy of Afghanistan,” the foreign ministry statement said on Saturday.
“Such instructions have violated respect for Afghanistan’s national sovereignty.”

In the past few days just about everybody that’s anybody has trashed Karzai’s government.
In the words of the UK’s Gordon Brown, who is catching bad flak for the Brits dying in the Afghan killing fields, the war there is bad news: “Sadly, the government of Afghanistan had become a byword for corruption,” Mr. Brown said in a speech to defense experts. “And I am not prepared to put the lives of British men and women in harm’s way for a government that does not stand up against corruption.”

And as President Obama contemplates troops increases (or not), he should have some sense, he should think about more than the politics — get the US out of Afghanistan.

The trouble: No one will leave.
The UK’s turd-knuckle Brown in the same breath as the above quote said it for all the bullshit political-talking assholes on the planet: “We cannot, must not and will not walk away.”

Oh, but they will, they surely will, but it won’t be pretty — just ask Alex the Great, (Brown should study his own British history) and the Soviets.

Yes, the Edwin Starr song paraphrased is the counterinsurgency of fighting dumb-shit wars.
Last month on PBS‘ “Frontline,” an interview with Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army colonel and a level head in this era of military idiots.
He’s also a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, a Vietnam veteran and the author of the 2008 book “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.”
The US military’s fog-horning a counterinsurgency program in Afghanistan is baffling:

I am baffled by the fad of counterinsurgency, and I’m especially baffled by the extent to which the American officer corps has embraced this fad.
Now, I say that from the point of view of somebody who comes from a generation when counterinsurgency was anathema to the United States military.
In the era after Vietnam, the officer corps believed with something close to unanimity that long, protracted campaigns were very much at odds not only with the well-being of the military as an institution, but frankly at odds with the interests of the country.
Post-Vietnam, the officer corps was committed to the proposition that wars should be infrequent, that they should be fought only for the most vital interests, and that they should be fought in a way that would produce a quick and decisive outcome.
What we have today in my judgment is just the inverse of that.
War has become a permanent condition.
I mean, we’ve been at war now for eight years, and for all practical purposes, nobody can say with any accuracy when war will likely come to an end.
In my judgment — I know people that would disagree with this — we are now engaged in wars where we do not have vital interests at stake.
And … we’ve now abandoned the notion that we can win wars quickly or cheaply.
Our approach to war is one in which we now accept the notion that war is an open-ended proposition and that if someday out there some outcome is reached, it’s likely to be an ambiguous outcome that really doesn’t resemble in any sense the traditional definition of military victory. …

And this shit is generational?

It’s probably generational in that perhaps young people — and this is not necessarily a bad thing — have bigger dreams, have bigger ambitions. Older people tend to perhaps be more given to pessimism or cynicism.
I mean, I would like to call it realism, but others might view it differently.
I hesitate to say that older people have a better understanding of the human consequences of unrealistic and naive projects, because I know that these younger fellows like Nagl and [CNAS fellow Andrew] Exum have lost friends.
But at the same time, I puzzle over why their personal losses don’t cause them to question the implications for the policy proposals that they support.
We’ve lost over 5,000 American soldiers over the past eight years between Iraq and Afghanistan.
We think Iraq is now finally winding down.
At the same time, we ratchet up Afghanistan.
So if we do indeed have a full-court-press application of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, certainly at least several hundred more American soldiers are going to die.
And I think it’s very, very important to be absolutely certain that no alternative exists that would enable us to achieve our interests in Afghanistan without all those soldiers being killed.
And I think the people who insist that it has to be done through counterinsurgency have not seriously examined all the alternatives.

Is President Obama boxed in with regards to an Afghan escalation?

I think so. … I don’t think the president has to worry too much about being criticized from the right.
I mean, he’s going to be criticized from the right on, if not on the war in Afghanistan, on any number of other issues.
By staying the course in Afghanistan, he’s not going to get more Republican votes for health care or anything like that.
But if the president alienates the core of his support, plunging more deeply into this war when many on the left or people like myself, … wary of an overly militarized foreign policy, then I think he could find the enormous public support that he had during much of the first year of his term in office collapsing pretty quickly. …
There are many glib comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam.
And maybe we’re beyond making glib comparisons. But I do think that’s one of the areas where the Vietnam comparison still has merit.
The Vietnam War destroyed the Johnson presidency, and it destroyed the Johnson domestic reform agenda. And to the extent that Obama’s war becomes this costly, open-ended proposition with no end in sight, then one possible consequence that he has to consider is that his own very ambitious and important domestic reform agenda could be placed in jeopardy. …

And is this Obama’s war?

I think so.
And the question is whether or not [it is] going to be Obama’s war in the same sense that Iraq became Bush’s war, that Vietnam became Johnson’s war; that it’s going to be the one issue that consumes his presidency; the one thing that, … for the rest of his time in office, reporters [are] going to be asking: “When is it going end? When will light become visible at the end of the tunnel? How many more soldiers are going to have to die? How many more hundreds of billions of dollars are going to be spent?”
That’s what I fear he is inviting if he allows himself to be sold this counterinsurgency program.
But the president is a smart guy, and the president, I believe, is a very shrewd man in the best sense of the word.
And so I retain at least a smidgen of hope that he will understand the trap that he’s being led into here and therefore avoid it.

Read the entire interview here.

And to highlight the coup-like seriousness of the problem, yesterday NATO indeed boxed Obama.
From the UK’s Independent via antiwar.com:

Nato defence ministers signalled their backing for the Afghan strategy put forward by the American commander General Stanley McChrystal yesterday in an implicit rejection of the alternative plan proposed by US Vice-President Joe Biden.
The general had made an unscheduled appearance at the meeting of ministers in Bratislava, Slovakia, to give a presentation behind closed doors. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary general, said: “What we did today was to discuss General McChrystal’s overall assessment, his overall approach, and I have noted a broad support from all ministers of this overall counter-insurgency approach.”

Real-bad moon rising — an insurgent War, What is it good for?

Update/Add-On:
Just discovered this evening — a way-little noted story of Seymour Hersh’s speech at Duke University 10 days ago, in which he said the US military, along with working hard in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Somalia, etc., are also “in a war against the White House — and they feel they have [President] Obama boxed in…They think he’s weak and the wrong color. Yes, there’s racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it’s true and we all know it.”
According to the Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina, Hersh also had this to say (h/t HuffPost):

“A lot of people in the Pentagon would like to see him get into trouble,” he said. By leaking information that the commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the war would be lost without an additional 40,000 American troops, top brass have put Obama in a no-win situation, Hersh contended.
“If he gives them the extra troops they’re asking for, he loses politically,” Hersh said. “And if he doesn’t give them the troops, he also loses politically.”
The journalist criticized the president for “letting the military do that,” and suggested the only way out was for Obama to stand up to them.
“He’s either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon,” Hersh said. If he doesn’t, “this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency.”

If anywhere near reality, and Hersh has been so-many times around the military block, he’s got a shitload of DOD sources — what a US-constitutional catastrophe.