War in Afghanistan: Campaign Progress, Political Strategy, and Issues for Congress
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Dates and time periods associated with this report. Showing of 25 pages in this report. Context This report is part of the collection entitled: Who People and organizations associated with either the creation of this report or its content. Creator We've been unable to identify the creator s of this report. Publisher Library of Congress. About Browse this Partner. Iraq has strengthened al Qaeda.
It's now a training ground for terrorists from around the world. In writing about suicide attacks in the war in Afghanistan, security analyst Anthony Cordesman noted that in The use of mines in Afghanistan also began to drastically increase in Military and defense analyst John Pike noted, "The insurgency in Afghanistan has been very carefully studying the lessons learned by the insurgents in Iraq.
In September , the Washington Times reported that the Taliban had learned to build simpler, cheaper, deadlier anti-personnel mines made of hard-to-detect non-metal components, such as carbon harvested from everyday batteries and plastic, according to a confidential U. The Pentagon report, which spoke of a Taliban mine research-and-development program, described the latest mines to appear in the Afghan war as "less costly", "smaller, lighter, more quickly constructed", "small and easily transported and emplaced", "easily camouflaged", "extremely difficult to detect", "lethal".
In January , The Independent reported military experts saying that insurgents in Afghanistan had developed a new generation of deadly 'undetectable' bombs made out of wood, with no metal or electronic parts. Chris Hunter , a former bomb disposal expert, described them as "mass produced" and "being wheeled out on an industrial level.
You see them everywhere. A particularly troubling feature of the IED phenomenon is the ease with which the technology is refined and spread. Bombers have been known to record their attacks, then post the images to the Internet , along with instructions on how to make the devices. The techniques are constantly being shared and refined by hundreds of insurgent groups. Security experts say there are now up to IED attacks a month in other countries around the world. The powerful remote-controlled IED that killed 13 people in Algeria last June was probably based on designs originally from Iraq , and many think it is only a matter of time before these devices appear in large numbers in the West.
The current war in Afghanistan is not about democracy, women's rights, education or nation building. Al-Qaida, the other excuse, barely exists. Its handful of members long ago decamped to Pakistan. The war really is about oil pipeline routes and western domination of the energy-rich Caspian Basin. Opposition to the war in Afghanistan often has at its core the view that the U.
In a June article in the Toronto Sun entitled "These wars are about oil, not democracy", defence analyst and journalist Eric Margolis remarked on the U. As American analyst Kevin Phillips writes, the U. The US is trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don't care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose. And we don't like that. Because Afghans are now being made to suffer for these Arab fanatics, but we all know who brought these Arabs to Afghanistan in the s, armed them and gave them a base.
It was the Americans and the CIA. And the Americans who did this all got medals and good careers, while all these years Afghans suffered from these Arabs and their allies. Now, when America is attacked, instead of punishing the Americans who did this, it punishes the Afghans. Opium production in Afghanistan has thrived since the U. According to United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime UNODC data, there was more opium poppy cultivation in each of the past five growing seasons — , than in any one year during the Taliban five-year rule — In July , the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar , argued that opium was against Islam and banned its cultivation.
Even compared to — the year before the Taliban opium ban of — saw effect — the overall opium-related income in the Afghan economy had risen nearly fourfold by , reflecting higher export volumes as well as higher prices. By , the U.
Some will say it is twice that, for this war, like the war in Iraq, was funded off-budget with no transparency. To continue this war at its current level and to escalate it beyond its current scope is a trillion dollar question. Thousands have protested federal spending to rebuild America's schools, roads, bridges and critical infrastructure, but are they willing to do the same when their taxes are being spent to rebuild Kabul? By October , news reports indicated U.
In September , foreign policy veteran William R. Polk suggested that the real cost of the war in Afghanistan to the U. In September , the U. Congressional Budget Office estimated that a speedier withdrawal of U. We've been there eight years already, and how many more years are we supposed to be there? How many more Americans are supposed to die? How many more tens and tens of billions of dollars are we supposed to be spending at a time when we have a record-breaking deficit?
In December , U. President Barack Obama announced a surge of yet another thirty thousand U. However, the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee with authority over the Pentagon's budget, U. The congressman also called for a surtax to finance the war, saying the U. By February , with thousands more U.
Meanwhile, the cost of the war to U. That's always been an issue in Afghanistan. In February , U. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly warned that it would be unwise to ever again engage in such a "costly — and controversial — large-scale American military intervention" as in Afghanistan or Iraq. In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it.
War in Afghanistan: Campaign Progress, Political Strategy, and Issues for Congress. Congressional Research Service. Summary. This is a. War in Afghanistan: Campaign Progress, Political Strategy, and Issues for Congress. Primary view of object titled 'War in Afghanistan.
In March , U. According to estimates near the beginning of , the U. By May , the Washington Post reported that in the face of increasing deficit spending and yet more cuts to domestic programs in the U.
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Spending by the U. According to a senior administration official: Military and civilian officials agree that the cost of the Afghan war is staggering, and another senior administration official involved with Afghanistan policy stated that the cost of the war was now "the new pound gorilla" and policy discussion was shifting from "Is the strategy working?
In September , a decade into the U. How have we paid for this? Spending on the wars and on added security at home has accounted for more than one-quarter of the total increase in U. They wrote that the costs of the wars would continue to burden U. The future debts from the war — including interest payments on all the borrowed money, replacing worn and destroyed military equipment, and decades of paying for the medical and disability benefits of hundreds of thousands of veterans — "are not listed anywhere in the federal government's budget" and would "continue to compromise America's investments in its future for decades.
On September 19, , U. President Barack Obama 's proposed plan to reduce U. We are mortgaging our Nation's economy on a war, which, even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years to come. Success and victory, whatever they may be, will be realized not in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations.
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The war in Afghanistan, launched October 7, as U. The war in Afghanistan surpassed the length of official U. Congressman Bruce Braley reported that American military commanders in Afghanistan very clearly expect — under the best-case scenario — a "significant U. His report of the expectations of a continued U. General David Petraeus , U. Ambassador and former general Karl Eikenberry , as well as other military officials. In December , a week after U. President Barack Obama announced a surge of another thirty thousand U. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, stated that the Afghan government being supported would not be able to secure the country on its own "for another 15 to 20 years", suggesting a U.
At the end of December , following a visit to Afghanistan as part of an eight-member congressional delegation, U. Congressman Brian Higgins warned that U. The military assessments say this is a generational commitment. I will tell you this whole 18 months of drawing down troops is not going to happen. The military assessments are very clear: In order to stabilize Afghanistan, you essentially have to rebuild it. You can't accomplish that in 18 months, five years, or in a decade, and you'll be lucky to accomplish that in 20 years. McChrystal told me he will know in 18 months if this will work.
A January U.
Defense Department report assessing progress in Afghanistan concluded that building a fully competent and independent Afghan government would be a lengthy process that would last, "at a minimum, decades. The head of the British Army and former ISAF commander, General Sir David Richards , stated on August 8, that he believed Britain could still be militarily involved in Afghanistan in "30 to 40 years" time, raising the possibility of a military presence in Afghanistan until the year Asked how long U. Defense Secretary Robert Gates replied it was "unpredictable" and "perhaps a few years".
However, over the longer term, Gates said that even if security were achieved, progress in building Afghanistan's economy and government institutions would remain "a decades-long enterprise", and that the United States was "committed to that side of the equation for an indefinite period of time. American defense analyst John Pike of GlobalSecurity. And it may get worse before it gets better More and more people feel that it is a never ending story, that this war has been dragging on now for longer than the second world war, that we see too little results and we really don't know why we are there.
After 7 years and 7 months of war in Afghanistan, Mikhail Gorbachev announced on July 20, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, saying that the Soviet Union wanted to henceforth see an independent, sovereign Afghanistan with a non-aligned government. The complete withdrawal of Soviet troops took place over roughly one year and a half, ending on February 15, , with the Soviet—Afghan War having lasted approximately 9 years and 2 months in its entirety. In December , the U. There is barely an important piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another.
Nevertheless, much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centres, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory that we seize. In November , with , troops in Afghanistan and the war soon heading into an 8th year, the military counter-insurgency was not working. His strong assessment was that the army needed more resources, and he warned that without more men and equipment "this war will continue for a very long time". By the peak of the Soviet deployment in , Moscow had , troops in Afghanistan.
In September , with , to , foreign troops in Afghanistan under U. A page report by U. Failure to provide adequate resources also risks a longer conflict, greater casualties, higher overall costs and ultimately, a critical loss of political support. Any of these risks, in turn, are likely to result in mission failure. It is sometimes frightening to see how similar NATO military operations are to Soviet ones in the s. On July 20, , the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan was announced, and within a little over a year and a half the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was completed.
The decade-long war in Afghanistan has also been increasingly compared to the Vietnam War , and increasingly characterized as a quagmire. In the spring of , the war in Afghanistan surpassed the length of official U. What I found being in Afghanistan was all too familiar of problems not only in Iraq, but in Vietnam years ago. We are fighting a war a half a century later that we lost for similar reasons a half a century earlier. In September , an article by the New York Times ' Frank Rich noted a new aspect in the strong parallels between the wars, the eerie similarity between the political maneuvers in and a half-century before, when John F.
Kennedy was weighing whether to send combat troops to Vietnam. The Vietnam analogy remains haunting. Johnson in the Vietnam quagmire. Their letter to Obama argued that the military escalation could be counterproductive to creating stability in Afghanistan and could harm U. The presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban. In September and October , with U. Feingold , a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged discussion of a timeline for ending American involvement in Afghanistan. I believe it will remain a tribal entity", adding that she wanted the U.
Senator Richard Durbin , assistant majority leader in the Senate, said: In September , Senator John F. Kerry , chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a veteran and protestor of the Vietnam War , warned of repeating the mistakes of Vietnam and said that the United States needed to have an exit strategy. Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell , a retired four-star Army general, expressed skepticism that more troops would guarantee success. History tells us that there will not be a military-first solution to the situation in Afghanistan. Open-ended military intervention in Afghanistan is not in our national security interest and will only continue to give resonance to insurgent recruiters painting pictures of foreign occupation to a new generation.
Obey , chairman of the U. House Appropriations Committee stated: Otherwise we run the risk of repeating the mistakes we made in Vietnam and the Russians made in Afghanistan. Murtha , also on the House Appropriations Committee and an influential voice on military affairs, stated: The troops, no matter what the military says, are exhausted.
Feingold , a member of both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee , stated that if Obama decides to send more troops, the House of Representatives should contest it. Senator Feingold, who favors a timetable for withdrawal and opposes McChrystal's troop surge, said in an interview that his constituents were weary of war and were in "almost unanimous agreement" that "we've stayed there a long time and we need to figure out appropriately what we can accomplish.
Senate , suggested that the eight-year-old U. Referring to " mission creep " in Afghanistan, he said: I am compelled to ask: If al Qaida has moved to Pakistan, what will these troops in Afghanistan add to the effort to defeat al Qaida? On October 27, , the Washington Post reported that a U. Matthew Hoh, a State Department Foreign Service officer serving as the Senior Civilian Representative in Zabul Province submitted his resignation on September 10, with a letter outlining the reasons for which he felt he had to resign over the war, writing, "I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.
On November 4, , U. Eric Massa spoke before the U. House of Representatives to say enough is enough in Afghanistan. It is time to bring our troops home. In November , the U. Karl Eikenberry , the retired army general who commanded U. His dramatic intervention into the debate on a troop surge reportedly infruriated U.
General McChrystal, the commander of all foreign military forces in Afghanistan who had been requesting another 40, troops. While noting Obama's promise to begin bringing some troops back in July , Rep. The hundreds of billions of dollars we spend over there on war All that — mostly borrowed money — means that we're not investing at home.
It means our roads and our bridges aren't being fixed. It means our schools aren't being fixed. It means we're not investing in healthcare, and a whole range of other things that we need to do to get our economy back on track. In all, Democrats and 9 Republicans voted for the amendment.
Barbara Lee that would have required the war funds to be spent only on withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. Nearly all Republicans opposed the amendments however, and neither passed.
The maximum estimate is less than operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies. They were planned by al Qaeda operatives in Germany and Florida, and it is very unlikely that the Taleban government of Afghanistan had advance warning of them. America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home. President Barack Obama , June 23, []. By May , the Washington Post reported that in the face of increasing deficit spending and yet more cuts to domestic programs in the U. Defense Department report assessing progress in Afghanistan concluded that building a fully competent and independent Afghan government would be a lengthy process that would last, "at a minimum, decades.
In January , Republican figure Grover Norquist , founder of Americans for Tax Reform , called on conservatives to have a conversation on the possibility of withdrawing from Afghanistan. The same nationwide poll of conservatives, conducted in early January , found that the majority two-thirds of conservative and Tea Party supporters call for a reduction of U. In February , a bipartisan group of U.
Republican congressmen opposed to the continued large-scale combat operations in Afghanistan convened a meeting for GOP members which had as principle speakers Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist , Maj. Eric Egland Reserve , a career intelligence officer with experience in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. According to numerous polls, the majority of Americans now want a faster withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In February , the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution calling for an acceleration of the U. Many that have hopes in President Obama's presidency but oppose the war in Afghanistan are concerned that the war could derail plans for his presidency the way the Vietnam War ruined the presidency of Lyndon B.
As long as we are there, the war will continue, with disastrous consequences for all the things you want to do and we Americans need you to do.
Opposition to the war in Afghanistan (2001–2014)
Speaking against the war in Afghanistan, Senator Russ Feingold said: It's going to be bad for the president politically, as well as being a very unwise policy in terms of our national security. By the end of this year, the last soldier should have left Uruzghan. We're keeping our promise to the Dutch people.
Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times. Now, we must invest in America's greatest resource — our people. We must unleash innovation that creates new jobs and industry, while living within our means. We must rebuild our infrastructure and find new and clean sources of energy.
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