MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

US soldiers patrolling in Afghanistan. (Photo: DVIDSHUB)

We are nearing the 16th year of the Afghan War, which began on October 7, 2001, with the US military invasion of the country. The assault was jingoistically dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom. Today, the longest war in US history still has no end in sight.

Alarmingly, according to the New York Times, Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster are urging President Trump to initiate a new surge of troops. This would add thousands more soldiers to the 8,400 who are still currently serving there, should Trump approve the plan.

In a commentary in Consortium News, James W. Carden writes:

In his 2014 book Restraint: A New Foundation for US Strategy, [Barry] Posen correctly observes that U.S. objectives in Afghanistan are "probably unachievable." After all, "despite much US and NATO instruction" Afghanistan’s "military, and police remain poorly trained, inadequately armed, sometimes corrupt, and only intermittently motivated."

What to do? Send in more troops, as per Mattis and McMaster? No: the wisest course of action would be for the U.S. to moderate its goals, which, according to Posen, "means ratcheting down the US counterinsurgency, nation-building project in Afghanistan at the earliest possible time."

As the latest iteration of the counterinsurgency debate kicks off this week, the time to consider serious alternatives to America’s current (and failed) strategy in Afghanistan is now.

In a May 6 column in Politico, journalist Douglas Wissing -- who was embedded in Afghanistan three times -- observes:

Afghanistan today remains the largest U.S. military foreign engagement. From the peak of about 100,000 boots on the ground during the Obama-era surge, there are still almost 10,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, plus up to 26,000 highly paid contractors for the Department of Defense and other agencies. Each soldier costs about a million dollars a year. Economists estimate the Afghan war has already cost U.S. taxpayers around a trillion dollars. For the 2017 fiscal year, U.S. military and State Department operations in Afghanistan are costing about $50 billion—almost a billion dollars a week. (As a reference, the initial budget request for operations against ISIS in Syria was only $5 billion.)

Of course, that's the financial cost. The cost in lives and casualties is grim. The Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimates:

About 104,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan war since 2001. More than 31,000 of those killed have been civilians. An additional 41,000 civilians have been injured since 2001.

These are conservative estimates. There are likely to be countless unrecovered bodies, and record-keeping is difficult in a largely rural country. Recent grisly deaths -- including those resulting from the US dropping the most powerful non-nuclear bomb on a suspected ISIS site, as well as a terrorist attack in downtown Kabul -- indicate that the nightmare of death in Afghanistan will not end anytime soon. The whole nation remains an arid and dusty killing field, pitting the Taliban and allied forces against each other in an interminable war in which civilians and combatants are often indistinguishable.

In addition, as of this month, there have been more than 2,200 US military deaths and 20,000 service men and women wounded in action, according to US Department of Defense figures. What does one tell a family who loses a child in Afghanistan? What are these soldiers dying "for"? Can anyone in the White House or Pentagon articulate the current US mission in Afghanistan? Is one of their motivations for still being there a Vietnam War-era notion that the most powerful military force in the world can't afford the "shame" of losing a war?

The New York times article ends with this foreboding warning:

Still, Mr. Trump’s heavy reliance on military commanders risks a repeat of what some critics viewed as a weakness of the Obama administration’s troop debate...: its overemphasis on a military solution.

"This whole decision is being seen too narrowly, through a military prism," said Daniel F. Feldman, who served as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan under Mr. Obama. "It has to be seen in a more integrated way. It requires a more aggressive diplomatic component."

The original US invasion of Afghanistan was supposedly meant to punish the Taliban rulers for harboring al-Qaeda prior to 9/11, and to precipitate regime change. What is the goal now that the war is entering its second decade?

Douglas Wissing cogently writes in his Politico commentary:

There is a truism that generals always fight the last war, but in the case of the unending Afghanistan war, the last one is still this one. It appears the generals want to re-escalate with the same failed 21st-century way of war, which governmental and corporate beneficiaries have perverse incentives to continue. Military, intelligence and development corporations need contracts. And elected officials need campaign contributions from those corporations’ lobbyists.

Wissing raises the notion that we should look to the military-industrial complex itself for an explanation of the continuing US occupation of Afghanistan. If Trump decides on a new surge to back the Kabul government, just remember that the Pentagon-corporate revolving door will be a large factor in the decision.