TomDispatch Presents Ann Jones, Counterinsurgency Down for the Count in Afghanistan..., But the War Machine Grinds On and On and On

From TomDispatch this morning: an expert on Afghanistan, just embedded with the U.S. Army near the Pakistani border, offers a devastating account of just why the American war strategy is failing: Ann Jones, "Counterinsurgency Down for the Count in Afghanistan..., But the War Machine Grinds On and On and On."

Ann Jones, who worked with Afghan women for years and wrote the moving, prescient book Kabul in Winter, was just embedded with a U.S. Army unit at a forward operating base near the Pakistani border. She saw in person there and elsewhere how the American counterinsurgency strategy is flailing amid even larger policy failures. In her latest TomDispatch post, she puts together a devastating portrait of Afghanistan today, based on four questions: Why isn't the American war strategy working? (Dead civilians, broken promises, angry Afghans, and upset American soldiers.) If it's not, why does the president stick with it anyway? (False hopes of misapplied "lessons" from Iraq.) How, by comparison, is the enemy's strategy doing? (Just fine -- they've launched a "surge" of their own -- while a "creeping Talibanization" of the country is underway.) And if everything's going so badly, why can't it be stopped?

Jones answers that last question in her conclusion to this remarkable overview of Afghanistan today as a planetary disaster area and looting zone: "And so it goes round and round, this ill-oiled war machine, generating ever more incentives for almost everyone involved -- except ordinary Afghans, of course -- to keep on keeping on. There’s a little something for quite a few: government officials in the U.S., Afghanistan, and Pakistan, for-profit contractors, defense intellectuals, generals, spies, soldiers behind the lines, international aid workers and their Afghan employees, diplomats, members of the Afghan National Army, and the police, and the Taliban, and their various pals, and the whole array of camp followers that service warfare everywhere.

"It goes round and round, this inexorable machine, this elaborate construction of corporate capitalism at war, generating immense sums of money for relatively small numbers of people, immense debt for our nation, immense sacrifice from our combat soldiers, and for ordinary Afghans and those who have befriended them or been befriended by them, moments of promise and hope, moments of clarity and rage, and moments of dark laughter that sometimes cannot forestall the onset of despair." Jones has written a piece for our moment, a must-read!