America, Are We Tired of Losing Yet?

No, today’s blog is not about Trump’s polarizing rhetoric, his ill-conceived immigration program, his fierce opposition to universal healthcare, his amplification of income inequality, his alienation of traditional allies as he embraces genuinely malevolent autocrats and his failing trade wars. Today, it’s all about our post-World War II military legacy – well developed long before Donald Trump’s election – in which we (today) spend about 41% of the entire global military expenditures and have not won a major military conflict since 1945.

No, I’m not talking about our tremendous victories invading Grenada in 1983 or descending on Panama in 1989 to arrest Manuel Noriega.

I’m talking about Vietnam – a clear victory for the communist north in 1975. The Korean War ended in an armistice (1953), a standstill agreement, that has not served to deter a dictatorship that maintains concentration camps and is armed with nuclear weapons with the ballistic missiles to deliver them, even to American shores. Iraq, in which Iranian surrogates took control with the ignorant complicity of the United States. Or our whack-a-mole approach to Islamic terrorism, claiming victory without seeing resulting peace and stability… just continuing violence all over the world. Our forces in Afghanistan peaked in 2011 with 100,000 troops. Distracted by our failed “mission [never] accomplished” in Iraq… we watched the Taliban rebuild and retake control of just about every part of that nation (with a few warlords) outside of the region around capital city Kabul.

What did we gain? Was our military effort in Central Asia and the Middle East (the Afghan war is the longest in U.S. history) worth it? Even with fears of unleashing Islamist terrorist fighters to ply their trade without much in the way of restriction, most Americans would agree with Donald Trump’s focus on ending our fight in Afghanistan.

·         A Pew Research Center survey found 64% of veterans said Iraq wasn't worth fighting, along with 58% who said the same about Afghanistan.

·         Comparatively, 62% of US adults said Iraq wasn't worth it along with 59% who expressed the same view on Afghanistan.

·         Nearly 19 years after the war in Afghanistan began, the US military is still present in the country, the conflict is ongoing, and American service members are still dying. BusinessInsider.com, July 11^th.

“You may not have noticed, but the Trump administration is racing to reach a peace agreement with the Taliban, the Islamic militants who once sheltered terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and have been battling U.S. troops since 2001.

“As the latest round of closed-door talks wraps up in Qatar, a potential deal appears in sight — and it doesn’t look pretty… By all accounts, the current draft includes the withdrawal of about 5,400 U.S. troops in exchange for a Taliban pledge to cut ties with Al Qaeda. It doesn’t require the fundamentalists to support democratic elections or guarantee the hard-won rights of Afghan girls and women.

“Those big issues would be left for later talks between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed government of Ashraf Ghani. Until now the Taliban has refused such talks, dismissing the Kabul government as an illegitimate ‘puppet regime.’… And yet, the proposed pact may be the only way for the United States to withdraw from a grinding war it has been unable to win. Whether it would produce a lasting peace is far less certain.

“After 18 years, more than 2,400 U.S. military dead and 20,000 wounded (plus more than 1,100 NATO troops killed), the Taliban appears to have outlasted us… U.S. commanders call the war a stalemate. But that’s optimistic. Pentagon figures show that the Taliban has increased the percentage of the Afghan population under its control — at least, that’s what they showed until the Trump administration stopped releasing the statistics…

“The deal reportedly will require the Taliban to police areas it controls to prevent Al Qaeda and IS-Khorasan from gaining a foothold. The Taliban will promise to enter good-faith negotiations with the Afghan government to end the war, including a potential power-sharing arrangement.” Doyle McManus

Guess what you can take to the bank? Ashraf Ghani can tell you. His government’s tenure is living on borrowed time. And if the Taliban breach…

Given that the United States has yet to figure out how to win an “asymmetrical war,” there was no way to win in Afghanistan absent total nuclear destruction. Yet our forces are still in every corner of the globe, stretched to the max… so those major-power forces concentrated in specific regions, like China, will always have a tactical and strategic advantage over any American military presence in the same theater.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and we spend so much more than anyone else on military strength, a force that has not won a major war in almost three-quarters of a century, that we have been unable to provide universal healthcare, increase our average life expectancy, reduce homelessness and poverty or support quality retirement to our own people, benefits that are routine in the rest of the developed world.