News From the Forgotten War: 100 Afghan Insurgents "Breach" U.S. Base

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 6:49 AM on July 14, 2008.

This appears to have been an unusually large and well-coordinated attack (via the BBC):

More than 100 insurgents breached a US outpost in north-eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, killing nine US troops in hours of fierce fighting, Nato says.

The militants used rocket propelled grenades and homemade mortars to bombard the base, close to Pakistan's border, from several sides.

The attack caused one of the single worst losses of life for foreign troops since operations began in 2001.

It came as international and Afghan forces fought militants in many areas.

One soldier from the US-led coalition was also killed by a bomb in the southern province of Helmand.

I think it's easy to forget, given our military's significant advantage in technology and air-power, that our opponents are fighting for their own land, have nowhere else to go, and are much more willing to die for their cause than we are for ours. It's the equalizing factor in "asymmetrical warfare."

The attack occurred along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a region that has seen a lot of fighting and been the focus of quite bit of attention in our political debates (recall the brouhaha over Obama's statements on the subject).

But it's been a truncated debate; with little appreciation of the enormity of the gap between how Americans perceive the conflict and the way Pakistanis and Afghans view it. We tend to think of "Islamic extremists" as a more or less homogeneous group who have a shared ideology and have long viewed the U.S. as a common enemy. As such, Americans by and large see our occupation of Afghanistan as a legitimate response to the attacks of 9/11 -- Osama Bin Laden's presence was welcomed by the Taliban, ergo the Afghan government was complicit in the attacks.

It's a complex situation, and those who live in the region see it quite differently. For them, Bin Laden was a rather minor player in an intra-Muslim civil war that had nothing to do with the United States. As far as their perception goes, we're invaders, and a majority believes that our goal is to divide and control the Islamic world. (If you didn't catch it at the time, check out my interview with historian Andy Worthington for more on this point.)

This perceptual gap is then, of course, exacerbated by the realities of war. Noam Chomsky says that the commercial media tend to put the hard news at the end of their stories; consider some of the final graphs from this BBC piece:

'Wedding procession' attacked

The fighting is close to where US forces were accused of killing 47 civilians in an air strike in Nangarhar province a week ago.

The US military said they were militants.

In initial reports, the U.S. military claims that every last person they kill is a "militant," but we know that modern warfare is not clean; bombs are not all that smart. So the decision -- universally accepted by America's political class (and most Americans) -- to respond to acts of terror with raw military power inevitably fuels a sense of injustice that in turns drives more people to violent extremism. As opposed to stabilizing the region, we're pouring fuel on the fire.

Last year, The New York Times reported that American leaders, including our best and brightest, were taken completely by surprise by the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan:

Two years after the Taliban fell to an American-led coalition, a group of NATO ambassadors landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, to survey what appeared to be a triumph -- a fresh start for a country ripped apart by years of war with the Soviets and brutal repression by religious extremists.

[...]

At a briefing from the United States Central Command, they were told that the Taliban were now a "spent force."

"Some of us were saying, 'Not so fast,'" [Nicolas] Burns, now the under secretary of state for political affairs, recalled. "While not a strategic threat, a number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear."

But that skepticism had never taken hold in Washington. Since the 2001 war, American intelligence agencies had reported that the Taliban were so decimated they no longer posed a threat, according to two senior intelligence officials who reviewed the reports.

The American sense of victory had been so robust that the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan had long since moved on to the next war, in Iraq.

Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions that helped send what many in the American military call "the good war" off course.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan -- the "Pakistani Taliban" -- has gained an enormous amount of strength since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002. Over in foreign policy special coverage, we're running a very interesting piece titled "Pakistan's America Problem" by Zia Mian from Foreign Policy in Focus. Mian offers some eye-opening data on Pakistanis' view of the world in which they live and the conflict(s) in which they've become embroiled:

A poll conducted at the end of May 2008 by the Pakistan Institute for Public Opinion for the U.S. groups Terror Free Tomorrow and the New America Foundation revealed the intensity of public opposition to American policies. The poll found that 60% of Pakistanis believe the U.S. "war on terror" seeks to weaken the Muslim world, and 15% think its goal is to "ensure US domination over Pakistan." About one-third of Pakistanis now have a positive view of al-Qaeda, twice as many as think positively of the United States.

The poll revealed that 44% of Pakistanis believe the United States is the greatest threat to their personal safety (India is a distant second at 14%). The Pakistani Taliban ... are seen as a threat by less than 10%. Al-Qaeda barely registers as a threat, slightly surpassing Pakistan's own military and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

Similarly, when asked who was most responsible for violence in Pakistan today, the poll found that over 50% of Pakistanis blame the United States. About 10% blame respectively India and the Pakistan army (and ISI). The Pakistani Taliban was blamed by less than 5%.

This, again, is about perception. But perception in a climate of instability leads to real, and really poor, outcomes. Mian cites a Congressional Research Service report (PDF) that found that the U.S. has given Pakistan nearly $11 billion in military and economic aid -- 70 percent of it military -- since 2002. But the situation just continues to deteriorate.

All of this represents a staggering, if quiet, human tragedy. Those 9 soldiers who were killed were no doubt convinced that they were there to protect their country. They no doubt acted with bravery, and their families now face a loss that's difficult to imagine.

The same can be said for those "militants" who attacked them, and therein lies the real issue in terms of the "war on terror." It's a war of perception as much as anything else, and despite all our vaunted hard power, we appear to be losing the battle of perception on a number of fronts.

Tagged as: casualties, terrorism, pakistan, afghanistan

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.