Afghan Envoy Holbrooke and Senate in La La Land

"Man, those dudes are in La La Land," a young intern said to me on the
way out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on
Afghanistan on June 14, his eyes rolling. "You can't win in
Afghanistan. Don't they read history?"

It had been hard to sit through hours of Special Envoy Richard
Holbrooke's storytelling about some far-off land he called
Afghanistan. In his Afghanistan, there were new gains in agriculture
and a reduction on poppy production for opium. We were empowering
women and rebuilding everything from the rule of law to the electrical
grid. President Karzai was really intent on tackling corruption. There
was an exciting soon-to-be-unveiled program to integrate the
lower-level Taliban. We were making significant gains in training the
Afghan security forces, and we had real commitments from the Pakistani
government to crush Al Qaeda.

We've heard this tall tale for the past eight years, which made some
of the Senators a bit skeptical--although not skeptical enough to stop
funding the war.

The most skeptical were the Republicans, who also happen to be the
most anxious to keep fighting there, indefinitely. Senator Bob Corker
said that despite more than an hour of testimony by Holbrooke, "I have
heard nothing, nothing" about how progress will be measured. "I have
no earthly idea what our objectives are on the civilian front."

Ranking Republican Richard Lugar was also confused about our
objectives. Sometimes, he said, it seems that we are trying to "remake
Afghan economic, political and security culture", which is "beyond our
resources and powers." Other times it seems the goal is simply to
prevent Afghanistan from being a haven for terrorists. Either way,
Lugar didn't think we could accomplish the President's desire to begin
withdrawal by July 2011.

Holbrooke, while trying to support the President, admitted that he was
leery of setting a date certain for leaving. This is, after all, "not
where you would choose to defend the American homeland...It's the most
remote and logistically difficult place the U.S. has ever fought in
our history," Holbrooke said, adding that "Fate and destiny have put
us there."

Senator John Kerry, the Committee chair, showed his imperial stripes
when he complained that the Afghans weren't stepping up to the plate.
"The problem is that the key element of this strategy is the one over
which we have the least control, and that is the willingness and
ability of Afghans to assume ownership of the efforts," Kerry
lamented. All the billions and our best efforts are irrelevant, he
said, if the Afghans continue to be bystanders in what they perceive
as a fight between the West and Al Qaeda.

Holbrooke chided his predecessors who had trained Afghan security
forces for years, at enormous costs, without realizing that we had to
also teach them to read and write. Literacy, he assured the senators,
is now part of our training. No one asked why the Taliban fighters,
who are also illiterate, were outmaneuvering both the Afghan security
forces and U.S. military.

Referring to the pending U.S. offensive in Kandahar, Kerry admitted
that the presence of the U.S. military whips up the insurgency. "Prior
to American troops announcing they were going to go in (to Kandahar),
there were not assassinations. There was not a level of violence,"
Kerry said. "The mere announcement has now brought on the process of
assassination and intimidation, and I doubt that we are going to have
enough troops to be able to pacify the city."

Several times during the hearing Holbrooke insisted that Afghanistan
was not the unwinnable war of Vietnam, and that we had real security
issues in Afghanistan. Ironically, on the very same day of the
hearing, Senator Kerry released--for the first time ever--some 1,200
pages of transcripts from private meetings 40 years ago of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee about the Vietnam War. They showed the
Senators expressing the same concerns about not having a reliable
partner, getting overly-rosy reports from the administration,
wondering how much the war would cost in lives and dollars, and having
hard time picturing what victory might look like.

"Some of the parallels are almost eerie,'' Kerry said, insisting the
lawmakers should learn from the past. But that learning has escaped
Kerry himself, who continues to support what has now become Obama's
Vietnam and America's longest war.

The most concrete rationale for staying in Afghanistan emerged when
the senators asked about recent reports of enormous mineral wealth
such as copper and lithium. Holbrooke said the mineral wealth not a
new discovery, but there were now modern techniques that now allowed
the minerals to be more easily mined. Holbrooke assured the senators
that we are helping Afghans develop their resources and strengthen
their economy. Oh yes, he added, we want to make sure that the U.S.
has "a level playing field" in getting access to those minerals.

Meanwhile, on the ground in Afghanistan, young soldiers are assuring
that "level playing field" with their lives. On the day of the
hearing, eight soldiers were killed, bringing to 33 the number of
American troops killed this month amid the worst bloodshed of the
nine-year conflict.

The young intern who spoke to me about La La Land has more sense than
Obama, Holbrooke or the Congress that continues to fund this disaster.
Or maybe he is just less jaded than politicians like Senator Lugar who
supports the war but remarked, during the hearing, that the U.S. had
become stuck in a "slow-motion caravan to ultimate failure." La La
Land, it seems, is not poor Afghanistan, but Washington DC, where
politicians send our youth off to fight and die in an endless war they
themselves don't believe in.