As promised, it is time to examine President Obama’s true ‘Strategy for Afghanistan,’ in terms of military activities, and how they differ from what has occurred since the initial invasion in 2001, and in order to do so, it is important to understand how we got to where we are in the first place.

As previously discussed, the war in Afghanistan was ventured into by the Bush Administration ‘by protest’ (in that, most of the leading members, such as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) really had no interest in Afghanistan.  Iraq was the ‘war of choice’ because it was thought it could not only be done quickly and cheaply, but that there were likely to be enormous economic spoils for the US to exploit, starting just after the ‘victory parades’ in which flowers thrown by the Iraqi people would herald and accompany the breathtaking advances of the mighty US military.

Of course, we all now know how THAT went, but keeping to the subject here, this meant that operations in Afghanistan were to be kept to the absolute minimum, with little effort to either oversee the newly installed Afghan government, or attend to the actual conditions among the civilian populace in the countryside.

While the initial invasion of Afghanistan went remarkably smoothly (only about 2,000 US Special Forces troops were used), this was largely because much of the actual fighting was accomplished by the Afghans themselves (of the ‘Northern Alliance’) with US air cover/interdiction and close coordination/communication via the US SF troops.  Once ‘victory’ had been achieved, the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies were in fact, largely driven from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and the Bush Administration figured they had ‘done the job’ and could then focus on the upcoming war with Iraq (where the money via oil was thought to lie).

Of course, the fact that Osama Bin Laden had escaped, as did virtually all of the senior Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership was certainly annoying, but this was not considered critical to the main theme of ‘victory’ in Afghanistan, and planning and propaganda were all re-directed towards the upcoming war in Iraq, and of course, once that war began with the horrific fall-out that entailed, more and more assets both military and civilian that might have been made available to Afghanistan, were almost exclusively focused towards Iraq.

This is not to say that Afghanistan was ignored entirely, as additional troops WERE sent to Afghanistan as the years went by. This was because the situation there increasingly deteriorated, but the new troops were never in sufficient quantities, or with a significantly new strategy other than what had gone on before, with an over-reliance on air power, and scattered ‘camps’ (read ‘fire-bases’) to try to hold on to ‘key terrain,’ while expecting the newly-minted Afghan government to handle all the ‘civilian issues’ with the help of a variety of NGO’s, many of which were sponsored by the UN.  In fact, NO comprehensive ‘post-war’ civilian strategy had been created or employed by the US Defense Dept for Afghanistan (though one HAD been created by Colin Powell’s State Dept, just like Iraq, this was summarily over-ruled and ignored by Donald Rumsfeld).

As a result, after ‘victory’ had been declared, tens of thousands of Afghans that had been driven into Pakistan by the initial campaign began to return in large numbers.  And among those many thousands, many thousands of Taliban and Al Qaeda returned also, and because there was essentially NO checking/screening of ANY of these ‘refugees’ as they returned, the seeds of insurgency were planted once again in virtually every part of the recently ‘conquered’ Afghanistan…

END of Part 1.