Obama Is Leading the U.S. Into a Hellish Quagmire

America now has more military personnel in Afghanistan than the Red Army had at the peak of the Soviet invasion and occupation of that country. According to a Congressional Research Service report, as of March of this year, the U.S. had 52,000 uniformed personnel and another 68,000 contractors in Afghanistan -- a number that has likely grown given the blank check President Obama has written for what's now being called "Obama's War."

That makes 120,000 American military personnel fighting in Afghanistan, a figure higher than the Soviet peak troop figure of 115,000 during their catastrophic 9-year war. Just this week, General McChrystal, whom Obama appointed to command American forces in Afghanistan, is talking ofsending tens of thousands more American troops. At the height of the Soviet occupation,Western intelligence experts estimated that the Soviets had 115,000 troops in Afghanistan -- but like America, the more troops and the longer the Soviets stayed, the more doomed their military mission became.

We're also heading into the same casualty trap as the Soviets did. This summer has been the deadliest in the eight-year war for American troops. While the number of uniformed Americans killed in combat in Afghanistan may seem comparatively low -- just over 800, most of those since 2007 -- the Soviets also suffered relatively light casualties. Between December 1979 and February 1989, just 13,000 Soviets were killed in Afghanistan, a seemingly paltry figure when you compare it to the 20 million Soviets killed in World War Two, and the millions upon millions who died in the Civil War and Stalin's Terror. Unlike America, Russians have a reputation for tolerating appalling casualty figures -- and yet the war in Afghanistan destroyed the Soviet Empire. Which only proves that crude number comparisons explain nothing at all in warfare today, particularly when that war is an occupation of an alien environment like Afghanistan.

Why hasn't anyone pointed out that America's troop commitment now exceeds the Red Army's? For some inexplicable reason the corporate media has decided to shuffle the figures and exclude the US military contractors from the total figure of US military personnel. It makes no logical sense -- we still count the Hessians among the British forces in the War of Independence. It's as if the only thing left that Americans are capable of is accounting fraud -- the only talent we perfected over the past decade was how to move all the bad numbers off the official books, as if it's become an instinctive reflex.

But just as those accounting tricks didn't change all those banks' and funds' insolvency, so the American media's troop-counting tricks, in which contractors are "off books," can't make the disaster in Afghanistan disappear. We're already more deeply invested in our Afghanistan war than the Russians were, and as we head into our ninth year -- the magic number for when the Soviets pulled out and their empire collapsed -- President Obama is dragging the country deeper into that disaster. (Moreover, if you add in all the NATO personnel -- useless as they are as a "fighting" force -- the number of Western troops already far exceeds the number deployed in the Soviet Union's "unwinnable" war.)

The Afghanistan War has somehow escaped most of America's attention. People just assumed that since Obama is a decent guy with a sharper mind than Bush's, he must know what he's doing in Afghanistan, and his intentions can't be bad -- so why bother paying attention, when we have all these other problems here at home? Besides, war isn't a fun topic anymore. Thanks to Bush and Cheney, any talk of war is a total bummer, whether you're from the right or the left. And Americans don't like bummers -- instead, America is always "moving on" from its bummers. Nothing bums Americans out more than losing wars, which helps explain why Afghanistan is the most we've-moved-on subject of our time. The problem is that you can't move on from something while it's still a problem -- but try telling that to a nation of delusionals.