Taliban Resurgent: 9 U.S. Troops Killed in Afghanistan

Exactly two weeks ago I wrote here about the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. I wasn't writing anything original. I was summing up a torrent of reports about the rising violence in Afghanistan as well as this startling set of facts: more U.S. and western troops have been killed in Afghanistan in the last two months than in Iraq. Some 700 Afghan civilians have been killed in the fighting since the beginning of the year. The central government in Afghanistan, never strong, is losing control over Kabul, the capital. American and NATO troops are losing control over larger swaths of the Afghan countryside.

Centcom, the U.S. military's Central Command for the Middle East, is boasting of attacks in Iraq falling to a four-year low. While that in itself is not something to brag about too much, considering the considerable level of violence that reigned four years ago, the real story is how the five-year diversion in Iraq has allowed Afghanistan to revert back to an insurgent's free-for-all.

Today unnamed western officials, as the Associated Press referred to them, announced that 9 U.S. troops were killed in heavy fighting in eastern Afghanistan following an apparently Taliban assault on a remote American base. Fifteen troops were wounded. NATO officials confirmed the tally without ascribing nationalities to the dead. What's remarkable about this, besides the grim news, is the way the Pentagon is sidestepping the story. Its Web site's top story on Sunday was of Defense Secretary William Gates delivering "a tribute to servicemembers’ courage, dedication, adaptability and patriotism." The second story, from Iraq, was a run-of-the-mill dispatch from Iraq summing up variously successful coalition operations all over the country. Afghanistan rated only as the third story, and even then, to boast of an assault on July 10 that netted scores of insurgent casualties. No mention of the 9 American troop deaths. To the contrary. One reads this ironic line: "No Afghan, coalition or civilian casualties were reported, officials said."

The Pentagon was infamous for its "Five O'Clock Follies" in Vietnam, when military officials daily and routinely sugar-coated the news from the battlefield to the point that, as Ward Just wrote in 1968, "the correspondents thought everybody was lying to them." The military learned its lesson. It doesn't lie outright anymore. It doesn't even lie. It just carpet-bombs its web sites with bright and puffy news releases, letting the grim and bloody news be found out in other ways, or in the austere, almost offensively clinical language of official death notices.

The death of the nine American soldiers wasn't even the worst of it Sunday. A suicide attack at a crowded attack in the south-central part of Afghanistan killed 24 people. Quqnoos, the Afghan news service, reported on the Taliban beheading of two women for allegedly cooperating with police in a southern Afghan province, the kidnapping of a member of parliament near Kabul, and the discovery of the beheaded body of a provincial chief.

Meanwhile, this is what the American commander of the international force in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, was telling the New York Times in a Sunday interview:

"The insurgency will not win in Afghanistan” were his first words in an hourlong interview. “It is mostly localized by region — I don’t think it is that well connected at the operational, strategic level — and I think the legitimate government of Afghanistan will prevail over time,” he said. How long that will take depends on “three big ifs,” he said: how quickly Afghan capacity and ability in security and government can be built up; whether the international community stays committed in Afghanistan; and whether Pakistan curbs the militants on its side of the border.

Weren't those three big ifs the very same big ifs that dominated questions over Afghanistan's fate seven years ago, when American and NATO forces went into the country? The Times' lead story today reveals a Bush administration plan to accelerate troop withdrawals from Iraq. It's not because Iraq is doing so well: just a few weeks ago the administration was countering suggestions of draw-downs, while its own Pentagon chiefs were demanding an outright halt to any troop reduction.

Why the sudden change? "One factor in the consideration is the pressing need for additional American troops in Afghanistan," the Times report notes, "where the Taliban and other fighters have intensified their insurgency and inflicted a growing number of casualties on Afghans and American-led forces there."