"The US mission in Afghanistan will "likely result in failure" unless troops are increased within a year, the top general there has said in a report. Gen Stanley McChrystal made his assessment in a copy of a confidential report obtained by the Washington Post.He recently called for a revised military strategy in Afghanistan, suggesting the current one is failing.

More than 30,000 extra US troops have been sent to Afghanistan since May - almost doubling the US contingent. The number of US troops in Afghanistan is already set to rise to 68,000 by the end of the year.

But in his latest assessment, Gen McChrystal is quoted by the Washington Post newspaper as saying: "Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term [next 12 months] - while Afghan security capacity matures - risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible." He warned that "inadequate resources will likely result in failure".

Gen McChrystal said that 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."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8266072.stm

That may be true if anyone can define just what the "US mission" is in Afghanistan. I thought George Bush sent the army into that country to wipe out the followers of Osama Bin Laden's Al Queda for their role in the staging of 9-11.

Given Bush's limited attention span, he seems to have forgotten all about that mission when he decided to go after Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Is that forgotten mission the one that General McChrystal is talking about ? If so, it might help if we shifted the troops to the mountains of northern Pakistan where everyone who should know seems to think Bin Laden has been hiding for years now.

Unfortunately, it looks like the mission that the good general may see as threatened is the entirely different and illusory project of creating some facsimile of a functioning western-style democracy in what we call Afghanistan. If that's the mission, then President Obama would do well to take a time-out and ask who and how this mission was invented.It's all starting to sound eerily like all those previously failed imperial attempts to master a country that even the Afghans have never been able to master with a strong central government of any kind, much less a functioning democracy. Even worse, coming from an American general assessing the role of US troops fighting a land war in Asia, the mission assessment sounds uncomfortably too much like Vietnam, deja vu.

It's true that George Bush created this mess by invading Afghanistan without a clear mission and then running off to Iraq to fight the wrong war. The big question is whether Obama is about to make things much worse, not better, eight years later, by re-committing America and some very reluctant European allies to a war that may be as unwinnable as was Vietnam, crippling what's left of America's world leadership in the post-Bush era and trashing Obama's presidency "a la Lyndon Johnson" in the process.

If you take a look at the countries that have sent combat troops to Afghanistan, you will see that 99% of the total is a combination of US (over 60%) or other western countries. There is not a single combat troop from Asia, Africa or South America. No Chinese, no Russian, no Indian.

You start to wonder if this phase of world history is nothing more than the old western colonials powers with their new world cousins in America, Canada and Australia trying to rebuild their empire in a new form. Why is fighting terrorism in Afghanistan only a western job ?