ANOTHER FAKE REGIME

Afghanistan’s national election held this week is a sham... The candidates include US groomed politicians, and drug-dealing warlords... Washington is hoping to build a compliant Afghan “democracy” that will continue to offer bases to US troops and warplanes. Afghanistan’s majority, the Pashtun tribes, have little voice in the election charade. (And) The largest, most popular party in Afghanistan, Taliban, and its smaller ally, Hisbi-Islami, have been excluded as “terrorists”...
Washington’s current plan is to install a new, post-Karzai Afghan client regime in Kabul, and keep control of the 400,000-man Afghan police and army who fight for US dollars. The tame Afghan regime will then “invite” some 16,000 US soldiers and airmen, plus large numbers of tribal mercenaries, to stay on and keep Taliban at bay..."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/06-3

AFGHANISTAN WAR BY NUMBERS

Number of US military personnel killed in Afghanistan since 2001: 2,150

Number of US service members wounded in Afghanistan badly enough to go to hospital since 2001: 19,415

Current annual cost of keeping a US soldier in Afghanistan: $2.1 million

Number of US troops now in Afghanistan: roughly 51,000

Annual average unemployment rate for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans2002-2012; 10% (average annual unemployment rate for vets of previous wars: 6.3%)

Afghan civilians killed in political violence or war 2006-2012: 14,728

Amount of money US has spent to rebuild Afghanistan: $100 billion

Proportion of the $100 billion wasted or misspent or stolen or given to militants or not received by intended recipient: 85%

Population of Afghanistan: 30 – 34 million

Amount of US aid since 2001 per person: roughly $3,333

Per capita annual income of Afghanistan: $470

Number of Taliban willing to run for elective office while there are US troops in that country: 0

Number of US and allied foreign troops killed by members of supposedly friendly Afghanistan National Army in 2012: 62 . (The number is much less this year [12], but only because joint operations were suspended for a long period).

Number of women allowed by the election commission to run for president of Afghanistan in 2014: 0

Percentage of annual Afghanistan gross domestic product from the opium trade: 25%

Percentage of the remaining 75% of the annual Afghanistan gross domestic product from foreign aid: 97%.

http://www.juancole.com/2013/10/american-quagmire-afghanistan.html

AFGHANISTAN EXIT

"… the exit from that country is going to take more time and effort. No seacoast, no ships, bad roads, high tolls, IEDs.  Trucking stuff out is problematic; flying it out, wildly expensive, especially since a lot of the things are really, really big. Take MRAPs, for example -- that’s Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles -- 11,000 of them, weighing 14 tons or more apiece. For that workhorse transport plane, the C-17, a full load of MRAPs numbers only four.

The equipment inventory keeps changing, but estimates run to 100,000 shipping containers and about 50,000 vehicles to be removed by the end of 2014, adding up to more than $36 billion worth of equipment now classified as “retrograde.”  The estimated shipping bill has quickly risen to $6 billion, and like the overall cost of the war, it is sure to keep rising. 

Seven billion dollars worth of equipment -- about 20% of what the U.S. sent in to that distant land -- is simply being torn up, chopped down, split, shredded, stomped, and, when possible, sold off for scrap at pennies a pound.  Toughest to break up are the weighty MRAPs.  Introduced in 2007 at a cost of $1 million apiece to counteract deadly roadside bombs, they were later discovered to be no better at protecting American soldiers than the cheaper vehicles they replaced.  Of the 11,000 shipped to Afghanistan, 2,000 are on the chopping block, leaving a mere 9,000 to be flown to Kuwait, four at a time, and shipped home or “repositioned” elsewhere to await some future enemy. 

The military is not exaggerating when it calls this colossal destruction of surplus equipment historic.  A disposal effort on this scale is unprecedented in the annals of the Pentagon. The centerpiece of this demolition derby may be the brand-new, 64,000-square-foot, $34-million, state-of-the art command center completed in Helmand Province just as most U.S. troops left, and now likely to be demolished.  Or the new $45 million facility in Kandahar built as a repair center for armored vehicles, now used for their demolition, and probably destined to follow them. Taxpayers may one day want to ask some questions about such profligate and historic waste, but it’s sure to keep arms manufacturers happy, resupplying the military until we can get ourselves into another full-scale war.

So this exit is a really big job, and that’s without even mentioning the paperwork.  All those exit plans, all the documents to be filed with the Afghan government for permission to export our own equipment, all the fines assessed for missing customs forms (already running to $70 million), all the export fees to be paid, and the bribes to be offered, and the protection money to be slipped to the Taliban so our enemies won’t shoot at the stuff being trucked out.  All that takes time.

But when it comes right down to it, the United States has a surefire way of ending a war, no matter when it actually ends (or doesn’t).  When we say it’s over, it’s over..." 

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/01-6>http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/01-6

IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS WILL COST $4-6 TRILLION

"Costs to U.S. taxpayers of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will run between four and six trillion dollars, making them the most expensive conflicts in U.S. history… While Washington has already spent close to two trillion dollars in direct costs related to its military campaigns in the two countries, that total “represents only a fraction of the total war costs”… The single largest accrued liability of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is the cost of providing medical care and disability benefits to war veterans…"

http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/03/iraq-afghanistan-wars-will-cost-u-s-4-6-trillion-dollars-report/>http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/03/iraq-afghanistan-wars-will-cost-u-s-4-6-trillion-dollars-report/

AFGHANS DEMAND WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. FORCES

"Hundreds of residents of Afghanistan's eastern province of Wardak are marching on Kabul Saturday demanding US special operations forces pull out of their territory...  the Karzai-appointed Ulema Council, whose members represent the country’s Islamic clerics, issued a statement seconding the call for withdrawal... "
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/03/16-1>http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/03/16-1

KARZAI ORDERS U.S. FORCES OUT OF PROVINCE

"... Last week President Karzai banned Afghan forces from calling in US or NATO airstrikes on residential areas, following the deaths of 10 civilians on a raid in the eastern Kunar province... (This week)... Karzai... said that troops belonging to the U.S. military's special forces are “harassing, torturing and murdering innocent civilians... and ordered NATO's International Security Assistance Force to stop all special force operations out in Afghan's Wardak province and demanded that all U.S. special forces must be gone from the province within two weeks..."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/02/24>http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/02/24

U.S. LOST THE IED WAR

"... an ...  important story has been quietly unfolding: the U.S. loss of the pivotal war of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to the Taliban... the U.S. troop surge could not reverse the very steep increase in IED attacks and attendant casualties that the Taliban began in 2009... the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organisation (JIEDDO)... spent more than 18 billion dollars on high-tech solutions aimed at detecting IEDs before they went off... (but) the Taliban simply produced and planted even larger numbers of bombs to continue to increase the pressure of the IED war...
"The counterinsurgency strategy devised by Gen. David Petraeus... pushed thousands of U.S. troops out of their armoured vehicles into (dismounted) patrols on foot in order to establish relationships with the local population... The main effect of the strategy, however, was a major jump in the number of “catastrophic” injuries to U.S. troops from IEDs...

"A June 2011 Army task force report described a new type of battle injury – “Dismount Complex Blast Injury”– defined as a combination of “traumatic amputation of at least one leg, a minimum of severe injury to another extremity, and pelvic, abdominal, or urogenital wounding”... the number of triple limb amputations in 2010 alone had been twice the total in the previous eight years of war..."

http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/10/how-the-u-s-quietly-lost-the-ied-war-in-afghanistan/