Folks -

So, here we are: Six years after the opening of Operation Iraqi Freedom (which still has its own website: http://www.mnf-iraq.com/ ), and about seven and a half years into Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan (Centcom maintains its own website: http://www.centcom.mil/en/topics/significant-operations/operation-enduring-freedom/ ).

While the world chiefly remembers May 1, 2003, as the day that President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, under the banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished", few remember that Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defense Secretary was in Kabul on the same day, proclaiming an end to major combat operations in Afghanistan.

A new report of that event is directly below.

And underneath that report is a column by David Brooks, the New York Times correspondent, which tells how the Americans – and of COURSE, their allies, the Afghans – are going to win the war.

In 1974, after being rejected by more than a dozen publishers, who didn’t see any market for a thinly disguised personal account of the Vietnam War, Joe Haldeman’s "The Forever War" was published. It won the Nebula Award and the Locus Award in 1975, and the Hugo Award in 1976. In 2008, Dexter Filkins, one of the foreign correspondents for the New York Times, had his account of covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq published. It, too, is titled "The Forever War".

Reading the columns below, one can understand why.

On the evening of March 20, 2003, an acquaintance posted an email on a message board I am a member of, which was so lyrical and descriptive, that I reformatted it in poetic form, without changing words or punctuation, using the Subject as the title. Six years on, it holds up well:

 

 

Some folks are tying yellow ribbons around trees.

I guess that’s what I’ll do later on.

A friend of mine whose son-in-law is ‘over there’,

I think the 101st airborne, communications, 

He told her via email,

When you see the black helicopters, that’s us going in.

I thought there wasn’t much left to do.

Shows how much I know.

I was surprised as she chatted,

She knew a lot and guessed at much more.

She picked at her hair as she talked,

Pulling out the roots.

She says her son asked the folks behind to pray for them.

This is the worst he’s ever been, she says,

And he did a tour under the other Bush,

Lost his teeth from sand blasting that time, Desert Storm,

And – oh – his third child born with the usual birth defects,

Another gift from that war, what the guys breathed in,

Those unacknowledged wounds that never heal,

The country says they’re fantasy.

He’s career military, she says, was retired.

But they called him back to serve.

He was one of the first ‘over there’.

And now he’s glad to take that first breath in the morning,

Feel the grip of his tattered boot-straps,

Smell the sweat that means he’s in his tent

Not in a hospital.

from day to day 

She says her son is hanging in there, putting in his time,

Whatever he has left she’d like to share.

But she doesn’t know till the message arrives

That he has lived another day,

Or all that’s left is that yellow ribbon

That I’ll tie one day for her son.

 

 

For your contemplation.

Jim Szpajcher

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2634-2003May1?language=printer

Rumsfeld Announces End of Afghan Combat

 

by Vernon Loeb, Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, May 2, 2003; Page A16

 

KABUL, Afghanistan, May 1 — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that 8,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan have ended major combat operations and will shift their focus to stabilizing and rebuilding the country.

 

Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said he doubted that the size of the U.S. force here could be reduced until the summer of 2004, when it will have finished training and equipping between 9,000 and 12,000 soldiers in a new Afghan national army. About 4,500 Afghans have been trained to date.

 

"After that it probably can be smaller, because I think the Afghans can take over most of the controls," McNeill said. "I think there’s still going to be combat operations. There are some areas [along the Pakistani border] that are going to be a little bit messy for some time to come yet. But in most of the country you’ll find more security than has existed here in decades."

 

Rumsfeld, who arrived in Kabul after a five-country tour of the Persian Gulf region, announced the transition from major combat to stability operations in Afghanistan as President Bush made a similar declaration aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln with respect to Iraq.

 

But Rumsfeld told reporters after meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai that there was no comparing the two conflicts. In Afghanistan, he said, a relatively small U.S. force has been engaged in rooting out the remnants of al Qaeda since the Taliban fell in late 2001.

 

In Iraq, by contrast, a force of 135,000 U.S. and British troops had been assembled to fight a conventional army, he said, and has been capable of moving to postwar operations much more quickly.

 

Rumsfeld underscored that smaller-scale combat operations will continue in Afghanistan against pockets of Taliban and al Qaeda resistance. But he said he hoped the beginning of a more deliberate reconstruction phase will encourage other countries and nongovernmental organizations to step forward and help rebuild the country. U.S. forces will help staff eight reconstruction teams by the end of the year in important regional cities, he said.

 

Karzai, who addressed reporters with Rumsfeld, denied that he was incapable of traveling freely throughout Afghanistan out of fear for his safety. "With regard to my movements in Afghanistan, I think I can move much freer than lots of other heads of state can move in their countries," he said.

 

Karzai insisted that his government was making slow but gradual progress in asserting central authority over the regional warlords who hold sway in some provinces by virtue of strong ethnic ties and sizable local militias.

 

"Afghanistan has gone through 30 years of anarchy, war and instability," Karzai said. "The consequences of that is a true weakening of the institutions that govern any state, not just Afghanistan. Politically, the country is very, very strongly cohesive. But we have to give this nation the institutions that will provide it with the administration that is needed."

 

Since toppling the Taliban and dislodging Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, the Bush administration has maintained about 11,000 U.S. and allied combat forces here. They are aided by a 5,500-soldier International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), now headed by Germany. The ISAF operates only in the area of Kabul, the capital.

 

With major combat operations still going in the first half of 2002, the administration opposed calls to expand the ISAF and station the peacekeeping force throughout the country. Since then, the administration has modified its position and supported an expansion of ISAF, which will come under NATO command this summer.

 

So far no countries have stepped forward to contribute additional peacekeepers, defense officials said.

 

During his four-hour stopover in Kabul, Rumsfeld toured a training facility where U.S. Special Forces and private contractors are putting the new Afghan troops through a 10-week infantry training course. McNeill said there was a problem initially with Afghans not completing the training. But he said the situation has improved "dramatically" since Karzai’s government has become more involved in the recruiting process and more Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group, have volunteered for service.

 

In addition to training the new Afghan force, the Pentagon has also backed the creation of provincial reconstruction teams made up of U.S. and allied military and civilian authorities. Currently, these teams are functioning in Gardez, Bamian, and Kunduz. By the end of the year, five more teams will be established in Mazar-e Sharif, Kandahar, Jalalabad, Herat and Parwan, according to a statement released by the U.S. Embassy here.

 

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/opinion/24brooks.html?8ty&emc=ty

March 24, 2009. Combat and Community, by DAVID BROOKS

Wardak Province, Afghanistan

 

You drive up to the forward operating base in Wardak Province in an armored Humvee, with the machine-gunner sticking up through the roof and his butt swinging on a little perch just by your head. Outside there’s a scraggly downtown, with ragamuffin Afghan children, almost no old people (the median life expectancy is 45) and dust everywhere. The dust of Afghanistan piles up in front of the storefronts and covers the ruins of the buildings destroyed during the Soviet period, or during the civil war or during some lost conflict from centuries past.

 

The Humvee takes the serpentine path through the checkpoint and you pass a double line of soldiers heading out on foot patrol. There’s a soldier that looks from a distance like a child in gear, but it turns out to be a tiny American woman smiling under her armor, pack and rifle, and you think that of all the great powers who’ve humped their way over these mountains, not another one sent out warriors as unlikely or effective as these.

 

After the checkpoint, there’s a parking lot with great lines of heavy vehicles. For years, the coalition forces fought this war on the cheap, but that’s changing. The U.S. has just increased troop levels tenfold in Wardak. The parking lots are bursting with hulking machinery, the avalanche of metal America brings to a war it takes seriously.

 

There’s a line of porta-potties and you’re brought into a plywood room. There are about 25 Army Rangers inside, linebacker types with crew cuts, except for a special-ops guy, Major Moses, who is dark-skinned with a thick beard. These men have been through Iraq, and they now have the habits of counterinsurgency warfare deep in their bones in a way they didn’t just a few years ago.

 

As they talk, it becomes clear that aside from killing bad guys, they’re also trying to figure out how to reweave Afghan society.

 

Before the Soviet invasion in 1979, Afghan towns had three parallel authority structures: the tribal elders, the religious clerics and the government representatives. The Soviets decimated the tribes and the indigenous government. That left only the mullahs, and their sudden unchecked prominence helped explain the rise of the Taliban.

 

The terror and the fall of the Taliban reduced clerical authority, too. By 2002, when the coalition forces arrived, village society was fractured, social capital decimated. The resulting disorder has been a perfect nesting ground for the insurgents. The insurgents are not popular in Afghanistan, the way they sometimes were in Iraq. But they have money, and young men in the villages talk about "taking a Taliban day" – that is, accepting a few hundred bucks to plant an I.E.D.

 

Between 2002 and 2005, the coalition and the Afghans were slow to recognize the perils of social fragmentation. The general view was that warlordism and civil war were the biggest threats. Therefore, power should be centralized with the national government. The country should be restored through a strong national government spreading outward.

 

That approach has had some success. The Afghan National Army is the country’s most trusted institution. But it’s also had many shortcomings. The national police force is ineffective. The central government has rarely been able to reweave the social fabric at the village level. Nobody’s been able to establish rule of law or end rampant corruption.

 

So the Afghans and the coalition are adapting. There’s been a shift to supplement central authorities with village authority structures. Under the National Solidarity Project, villages elect Community Development Councils. Western aid agencies give the councils up to $60,000 to do local projects, but it’s not the projects that matter most. It’s the creation of formal community structures. These projects are up and running in 23,000 villages.

 

Mohammad Halim Fidai, the governor of Wardak Province, and the guys in the plywood room are creating the Afghan Public Protection Program. Under it, villages would no longer depend solely on the national police sent from Kabul. Local committees would hire their own constabulary to guard schools, bridges and neighborhoods. Alongside just 26 national policemen in the area, there will be 250 local men from the A.P.P.P.

 

The program is controversial. Many feel it will lead to a return to local militias and warlordism. But if Afghanistan is to stabilize, there have to be local authority structures. The culture of conversation and consensus has to be formalized in institutions. These local structures have to be connected upward to the central state. And that’s beginning to happen amidst the armored Humvees and the daily threat of death.