from The Great Debate UK:
Past and present: a correspondent in Iraq
-Tim Cocks is a Reuters correspondent in Iraq.-
This month we reported that the number of civilians dying violent deaths in Iraq had hit a fresh low since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion -- about 125 for September.
Sounds like a lot, but for a country that only two years ago was seeing dozens of bodies pile up in the streets each day from tit-for-tat sectarian killing, it was definitely progress.
And as I prepare to end my assignment in Iraq this week, I need no argument from numbers to convince me that things are better here than when I arrived in Feb. 2008.
During my first few months, militants loyal to to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr were raising hell in Baghdad, firing mortars and rockets at the Green Zone almost every hour. We could hear or feel them thud on impact, especially when they fell short, on our side of the Tigris.
A rocket hit the BBC building opposite us, causing a blast loud enough to shake our windows, although thankfully no one at the BBC was hurt by the strike.
U.S. airstrikes on Baghdad's Sadr City slum were killing many civilians. Roadside and car bombs were erupting all over the place and the streets were largely deserted after dark.
America’s long, long Afghan war
–Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own–
Twenty years ago this month, the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan after a disastrous war that lasted nine years, seven weeks and three days. Barring military and political miracles, the United States will stay longer in Afghanistan than the Soviets did. Considerably longer.
Present U.S. plans to reinforce troops fighting a war that is, by most accounts, going badly, provide for up to 30,000 additional soldiers to be deployed over the next 12 to 18 months. By that time, the U.S. presence will almost have matched the Soviets’ stay and will exceed it by the end of 2010.
And if U.S. history is any guide, politicians running for the 2012 presidential election will describe the Afghan war as Barack Obama’s war because he switched emphasis and carried out a campaign pledge to draw down troops in Iraq and bolster U.S. forces in Afghanistan, now 36,000 strong.
Obama critics will complain about the Afghan war’s cost — probably around $70 billion a year — and demand an accounting on what it has achieved and when it will end. So far, nobody is venturing forecasts beyond “it will be long.”
General David Petraeus, the man credited with turning the tide of the war in Iraq, has spoken of Afghanistan as “the longest campaign of the long war.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates predicts “a long and difficult fight.”
By an ironic twist of history, Gates was instrumental in getting Soviet troops out of Afghanistan when he was deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the U.S. supplied anti-Soviet fighters with cash, weapons and intelligence.
I’m starting to think that we need to be more aware of the overlapping issues that carry across the area from Egypt to India. The good news is that every strategic success will have positive knock-on effect. The bad news is that blunders will have similar negative reverberations. Now if we could just have a clear strategic success…
The embedded version of Iraq’s history leaves much unsaid. Its omissions, lack of candid insight and substitution of anecdote for fact also tend to leave generations of American foreign policy to be based on derivative opinions of generally pig-ignorant hecklers with no concept of what has been destroyed there, how vastly and at what cost.If you had seen Iraq in the 1970s, you would understand the differences brought about there by American intervention as universally deleterious.And, frankly, unforgivable.