Afghanistan 2050

Afghanistan 2050: Other Voices on AfPak

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In addition to the futurist Afghanistan 2050 Roundtable going on here at Chicago Boyz, I’d like to point out some bloggers and academics dealing with the region’s present:

Chris Albon – US Military And Pakistan Flood Relief

Since July, monsoon rains have caused heavy flooding in many areas of Pakistan. The United Nations estimates more than 20 million people are affected. In response the disaster, the United States has launched a civilian and military relief effort in the country. As part of that effort, US military fixed and rotary wing aircraft are ferrying people and supplies to and from the flood zone. Below are thirteen photos from that military response.

Please consider donating to the NGO flood relief effort here or elsewhere

Spencer Ackerman – Petraeus: Here’s My Afghan Redeployment Strategy

…. Some units pulled out of stable districts might find themselves heading for more volatile ones. “You maybe take one company and send it somewhere else. Maybe send it home,” Petraeus explains. “We want to reinvest some of the transition.” It won’t necessarily be the case that a unit that “thins out” from a district heads directly home. “Some will, certainly,” Petraeus qualifies. “And this is all premature.”In keeping with Petraeus’ admitted addiction to PowerPoint, the general passes on a briefing slide, titled “Transition,” to explain his thinking. The assessment for drawing down will be built around “Districts, Provinces, Functions [and] Institutions,” looking for what can be handed to Afghans with minimal disruptions in security. In our interview, he elaborates that “institutions” means U.S. functions like training the Afghan security forces – jobs that don’t have to remain American duties indefinitely. According to the slide, it’s a process that will draw on what security gains the U.S. command in charge of training Afghan security forces believes the Afghans can maintain; and the Afghan government itself.

Pundita – On the matter of indicting Oxfam and International Red Cross for war crimes, and a grim warning for U.S. military, Former PM Nawaz Sharif says Pakistan doesn’t need Western flood aid, and other tales of flood aid to Pakistan and Taliban blitzkrieg in North Afghanistan. NATO blindsided. I do not want to hear they didn’t get help from Pakistan military

….Same basic message to United Nations, IMF, World Bank, and the rest of the so-called international community. Stop helping Pakistan’s regime rape their country’s poor. Every time they get away with stealing from you, you’re just reinforcing the idea that they do nothing wrong — else why do you keep giving to them? Just stop it, you goddamn fools. Just stop.The Taliban said they would donate USD 20 million to flood relief effort if the regime wouldn’t take money from Western governments. Hold to them their offer. Then shake the country’s rich until they collectively cough up a billion USD for flood relief. That’s how it’s done. That’s how civilized humans act when extorted by fiends.

Walter Russell Mead –The Roots of Pakistan’s Rage and Pakistan’s Crisis: It’s More Than The Militants

Things were tough enough during my stay. On my way in from the airport in Karachi, traffic was unusually light. Roving gangs of armed thugs were roaming through the city, pillaging gas stations. The police force was laughably overwhelmed; the only gas stations that stayed open had battalions of private security. Meanwhile, up to 100 people died there in violence between the organized gangs of criminals known in that unhappy city as political parties, schools and businesses are closed in fear, and tens of thousands of families already living at the margins of existence are losing their daily wages until peace returns. One night during my visit a vicious goon threw a hand grenade into a group of worshipers performing their evening prayers in a Karachi mosque; nothing in this city is sacred anymore.

In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, formerly known as the Northwest Frontier Province, and currently on the front line of the COFKATGWOT (the currently nameless Conflict Formerly Known As The Global War On Terror) assassins killed the son of a prominent official and Safwat Ghayyur, the Commandant of the Frontier Constabulary. Three million people became homeless in the early stages of the flood; since then monsoon rains continue to inundate the highlands, and successive flood crests is move inexorably down river, spreading devastation through the Punjab and overspreading the country’s most valuable and productive agricultural land across both Punjab and Sindh.

Hat tip to Eddie!

2050: Newly Published History of the American Army’s Disaster in 2016

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“Irregular warfare is more intellectual than a bayonet charge”
TE Lawrence

In 2050 historians analyzing the reasons for the disastrous defeat of the United States Army at the hands of the Turkish and Iranian militaries in 2016 over the fate of Kurdistan seem to have reached a consensus that it was due to nearly 15 years of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan that had so depleted the Army’s material, moral, and organizational capacities that it simply lost the ability to fight against a sophisticated enemy.

In 2011 senior American Army Generals were able to show enough relative progress on the ground in Afghanistan that they persuaded lawmakers and the American President that the United States needed to maintain a significant ground presence for at least five more years in Afghanistan. Meanwhile the situation in Iraq began to deteriorate significantly to the point where the Shia government after a string of high-casualty producing bombings declared war on AlQueda in Iraq and its Sunni insurgent allies. As the civil war in Iraq thawed and reached the levels of 2007 again certain neo-conservative pundits combined with a bevy of senior American Army officers and counterinsurgency experts made a concerted argument to reinsert five American combat brigades to quell the violence. It didn’t work, they couldn’t stop it, and the civil war had to run its course. Sadly these brigades over the next two years took combined casualties of upwards to 70 a month. By the end of 2015 the Iraqi Shia Government had finally crushed, albeit brutally, their sunni resistance. It was at that point when the US presence in Iraq ended. The reinjection of combat brigades into Iraq combined with the ongoing operations in Afghanistan meant that over the course of three years close to two thirds of the American Army’s combat brigades were deployed, meaning that they spent a year deployed with only 6 months back at home station. Afghanistan, by 2015 and the American Army’s departure was really no different than it was in 2011 when senior Army Generals made their pitch to congress; the corrupt Afghan government controlled parts of the country like Kabul and other areas while the Taliban controlled much of the rest. In 2015 Afghanistan resembled the Balkans, a rough but still stable peace followed until the present day.

Then in early 2016 the war started between the United States and Turkey and Iran over the fate of Kurdistan. Both Turkey and Iran had become fed up with the constant attacks and concomitant separatist movements of their Kurdish populations and decided to ally together and act once and for all to crush Kurdish desires for independence. The Iraqi government requested American assistance and only a short while after pulling its remaining brigades out of Iraq sent in Brigades from the 101st and 82nd Airborne, 1st Cavalry and 4th Infantry Divisions; many of these Brigades had just returned from deployments to either Iraq or Afghanistan. The outcome was not pretty. American commanders, so long accustomed to training and operational deployments that involved stability and counterinsurgency operations were unable to perform the most basic tasks of combined arms synchronization. The Army’s soldiers too lacked essential individual skills of fire and movement; artillery battalions were unable to mass fires, and even though the Navy and Air Force had substantial amounts of airpower in the region the Army on the ground was unable to coordinate it against an enemy who stood and fought. Operational level logistics quickly collapsed due to the fact that a majority of it had been conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan by contractors, and those contractors refused to deploy again to Iraq to fight the Turks and Iranians. The Army under the zeitgeist of counterinsurgency had bought into Lawrence’s quip and had come to place priority for its senior commanders to be able to build trusting relationships with local populations instead of how to conduct combined arms maneuver.

The American Army was beaten and bloodied badly. It lost nearly as many soldiers in this short three month war against the Turks and Iranians than it did in almost 15 years of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It took it another twenty years to recover from this disaster but by 2050 China and Russia had established dominance in Asia, Europe, and Africa to the detriment of vital American interests.

Such is the fate, historians concluded in 2050, of Armies that become seduced by the promise of nation building at the barrel of a gun. There are such things as savage small wars of peace, but there are also savage wars of war, and the latter tends to be much bloodier if armies are unprepared.

Afghanistan:2050

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August 15, 2050 marked the 35th Anniversary of the fall of Kandahar when the fundamentalist Taliban reclaimed the city and began imposing Sharia Law across the southern half of what had been pre-2015 Afghanistan. The fall of Kandahar marked the end of a fourteen year effort by the United States and a coalition made up of NATO countries to prevent the return of the Taliban regime after the September 11, 2001 attack in New York. The war, by far the longest in U.S. history had claimed 3,149 American wars dead, and had cost over $900 billion in an attempt to keep the frayed and fractured country together while it tried to stop incursions by the Taliban, supported by militants and the Pakistani Intelligence Service with monetary support from wealthy oil rich Middle East families bent on spreading their brand of religion.
The separation, led to a buffer zone extending southwesterly from the Hindu Kush to the Iranian border. Pakistan saw their western tribal region begin to seethe in an attempt to break-away to join in a greater Pashtunistan. After fighting a short war to save face, Pakistan eventually saw this as a positive move, as Pashtunistan became a buffer state on its western border and a source for allies in the event of war with India.

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Afghanistan 2050: “A Muslim Yugoslavia”

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“We snatched anarchy from the jaws of defeat”
– Henry Kissinger

Historians tracing the origins of the short but terrible Indo-Punjabistani nuclear exchange of 2024 over the issue of Kashmiri independence generally look to the rapid disintegration of Pakistan into secession, civil war and democide a decade earlier during the conclusion of the “American war” in Afghanistan.

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Afghanistan 2050: A Political Watershed

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. . . Thus ends our discussion of the military aspects of the Afghan campaign. The political roots of the campaign and how they developed – everyone obviously has their own individual story as to how their own family was affected by the momentous events this war helped to set in motion – are not so easily discernible today. President Bush’s decision to invade the country and overthrow the Taliban government in 2001 seemed a logical response to the events of 11 September, but was in reality predetermined by decades of ideological and political confusion which only came to its inevitable end with the withdrawal of Successor States forces in 2018. In effect American policy makers fancied themselves metaphysicians capable of driving human historical events/the development of political cultures through the use of military power. While the tendency among Bush Studies academics is to argue that Bush represents a unique model followed by his three successors, this puts too much influence on the man and not the times, nor the history which made those times what they were. It is difficult to imagine today, but in the waning years of the US Empire three great tendencies came together and imploded pretty much simultaneously. The first was the notion that the US, alone among the political communities of the world, possessed a special mission from God to influence and change the world; we can refer to this as the “shining city on the hill” delusion. The second was the “liberal”/Enlightenment view of the US as a new start, the perfect humanist society which would reform the corruption of the past; refer to this as the Founding Fathers’ assumption.

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