Bloody Afghanistan

A United States outpost in northern Afghanistan, on the border with Pakistan, came under attack by over 100 insurgents. The base was breached and nine American soldiers were killed. This BBC description of the encounter has one very odd characteristic: It doesn't mention who won the battle!

Al Jazeera tells a fuller story:

Captain Mike Finney, a spokesperson for the ISAF, told Al Jazeera that while it was a very bad day for the force in terms of numbers killed, the "insurgents haven't gained any ground".

He said the attackers had failed in their goal to overrun the outpost which the ISAF soldiers had only recently occupied.

An Afghan official said international aircraft had bombed the area during the fighting and there may also have been civilian casualties.

The war in Iraq is already lost. The only remaining questions are when, not if, the withdrawal will occur, and whether the resultant chaos will be attributed to John McCain or Barack Obama.

After that, the nation must ask itself whether the situation in Afghanistan can be salvaged.

Spencer Ackerman offers a precis of "Descent Into Chaos" by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, a work which chronicles everything Bush did wrong. Here's a flavor:

The key mistake of U.S. strategy in central Asia, from Rashid's perspective, was to confuse momentary success for lasting stability.

"The unstated strategy was to leave Karzai ineffectual in the capital, protected by foreign forces, while relying on the warlords to keep Pax Americana in the countryside and the U.S. [Special Operations Forces] to hunt down Al Qaeda," Rashid writes. "It was a minimalist, military intelligence-driven strategy that ignored nation-building, creating state institutions or rebuilding the country's shattered infrastructure."

In other words, Bush recreated the anarchic conditions that led to the triumph of the Taliban after the Soviet pullout.

Most of the money for reconstruction didn't reach the Afghan people. By 2005, a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that a small non-government organization built 40 schools in Afghanistan in 2004, spending, at most, only $20,000 on each -- while contractors for the U.S. development agency USAID built only eight schools at four times the cost.

As much as U.S. officials lamented corruption in Afghanistan -- which is real and virulent -- they ignored corruption and politicization in their own government. "In keeping with prevailing views in the Republican Party," Rashid wites, "USAID became a source of funds for Christian fundamentalist NGOs [non-government organizations] active in the Muslim world -- giving them $57 million between 2001 and 2005 out of a total of $390 million distributed to all NGOs."

Barack Obama remains committed to Afghanistan, which means that -- if he should win in November -- the reconstruction effort might turn into a morass of Chicago-style corruption and taxpayer rip-offs. Recall how Obama's allies in Illinois sunk their claws into the Iraq reconstruction funds.

I don't think the American psyche can tolerate two lost wars. Even if Afghanistan stabilizes, the inevitable bloody finale to the Iraq adventure will probably infuriate a generation of young American men, making them vulnerable to right-wing conspiracy theories. We saw this phenomenon in the wake of our loss in Vietnam; similar phenomena occurred in Germany after WWI and in France after the Franco-Prussian war. American losses in both Iraq and Afghanistan would have an even more pernicious impact.

The question is: Can Afghanistan be "won"? The country may be a tar-baby: The more we engage it, the worse things get.

A former CIA official told The Washington Independent recently, "When you have a sufficient number of occupying troops then you become the issue -- the resistance is generalized, and then you're in a situation no one has ever solved."

Barnett Rubin of New York University, one of the West's leading experts on Afghanistan, is less certain, but sympathizes with that view. "It's quite possible," he said when asked if more troops would, at this point, do Afghanistan more harm than good..."

What, then, to do?