{"id":198735,"date":"2007-10-14T23:17:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-15T04:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/10\/14\/we-are-losing-afghanistan-2\/"},"modified":"2007-10-14T23:17:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-15T04:17:00","slug":"we-are-losing-afghanistan-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/10\/14\/we-are-losing-afghanistan-2\/","title":{"rendered":"We are Losing Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theaustralian.news.com.au\/story\/0,25197,22575334-2703,00.html\">Not surprising<\/a>, and largely driven by American failures:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Failure to devote sufficient resources.<\/li>\n<li>Failure to deal with Pakistani government support (by which I mean their intelligence service, the ISI) of the Taliban.<\/li>\n<li>Just plain stupidity:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">Although it is a volatile area and a centre of Taliban support, the Dutch forces had forged close links with community leaders, cutting down the fighting, until a botched <span style=\"font-size:130%;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">poppy eradication program by a US private security firm<\/span><\/span> a few months ago, analysts say.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">&#8220;Uruzgan was going OK until they went in with tractors and started ripping the poppy fields up,&#8221; said the Kabul-based security analyst. &#8220;The Dutch had a good relationship with the people down there, the local leaders, but when they rip up your crop, what do you do? You grab your gun. They didn&#8217;t even do that much damage to the crops in the end.&#8221;<\/span> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>To quote John Wilkes Booth, &#8220;Useless&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not surprising, and largely driven by American failures: Failure to devote sufficient resources. Failure to deal with Pakistani government support (by which I mean their intelligence service, the ISI) of the Taliban. Just plain stupidity: Although it is a volatile area and a centre of Taliban support, the Dutch forces had forged close links with &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1153,1098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198735"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198735\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}