U.S. Breaks Afghanistan Quagmire Record

From Down with Tyranny:

If Russia's Soviet Union-destroying war against Afghanistan started on Dec. 27, 1979 and ended, ignominiously, on Feb. 15, 1989, guess who's been looking for the light at the end of the Salang Tunnel as long as the Russians? Earlier this week, in a NY Times OpEd, Worse Than Vietnam, Robert Wright pointed out that the U.S. War in Afghanistan, already the longest war in our nation's history, passes another milestone today: we're eclipsing the amount of time the Soviets were mired in that hellhole. Happy anniversary. It's cost about $345 billion so far, not counting the billions of dollars it will cost to treat the soldiers whose physical and mental health is being destroyed on a daily basis. It will reach over a trillion dollars by the time we get out of Dodge-- with nothing whatsoever to show for it but two shattered countries-- theirs and ours. The Wall Street Journal reminds us that we just keep increasing what we spend in Afghanistan monthly:

Between 2009 and 2010, the average monthly cost of the Iraq war fell $1.8 billion to $5.4 billion, a 25% drop. But increased spending in Afghanistan ate up that savings-- and a bit more. Monthly costs rose $2.2 billion to $5.7, billion, a 63% increase... In Afghanistan, where the military has built up additional infrastructure to accommodate the surge units, the average cost per service member is expected to rise to $694,000.

Wright's main point, though, isn't about the cost. It's about the tragedy. "The Afghanistan war," he writes, "is as bad as the Vietnam War except for the ways in which it's worse." He points out that although the Vietnam War killed far more people and was far more destructive in human terms, "strategically it was just a medium-sized blunder. It was a waste of resources, yes, but the war didn’t make America more vulnerable to enemy attack."

SNIP

It doesn't look like al Qaeda and their Taliban allies are interested in a negotiated settlement unless that settlement is for foreign forces to withdraw... period. That whole ruse with the impostor negotiator was about British wishful thinking, not diplomacy. Diplomacy, on the otherhand, has actually started the process of NATO bringing Russia back into the Afghanistan War! No, I swear I'm not joking.

It's never worked before-- and it'll never work this time. Are our strategic planners ignorant or stupid? Or brimming over with hubris? Or do they have something entirely unrelated up their sleeves? I'm afraid that with Alan Grayson effectively targeted and removed, there's no one in Congress with the will or the ambition to ever find out for us. Oh well...

Read the whole thing.

When Obama chose to double-down on Afghanistan instead of ordering the Pentagon to get the fuck out of that hell-hole and stay the fuck out, several commentators compared him not to FDR, not to JFK, but to LBJ: the president whose game-changing domestic agenda was buried in the muck and gore of an unwinnable war.

I'm thinking the most appropriate presidential analogy right now is to RMN: Nixon, who deliberately prolonged the Vietnam War until after the '72 election - four long years and more than 10,000 American deaths, all because victory was impossible and withdrawal without victory would lose the election.