Eight years after 9/11 Barack Obama is fighting an unwinnable war, writes Graham Usher in New York At a meeting of military veterans in August President Barack Obama justified the "good war" fought in Afghanistan as opposed to the "dumb war" lost in Iraq. "This is not a war of choice," he said. "This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defence of our people." Obama has been as good as his word. One of his first acts as commander-in-chief was to send 21,000 more US troops to Afghanistan, swelling the total to 68,000 -- the largest deployment since they and their Afghan allies ousted the Taliban regime in November 2001. A similar increase is reportedly urged in a report sitting on President Obama's desk from General Stanley McChrystal, his newly anointed commander of US soldiers in Afghanistan. But the president has yet to pick up the phone. His ardour for the "good war" has cooled. So has America's. Most Americans are now against the war in Afghanistan, with an absolute majority opposed to dispatching any more troops. Obama's own Democratic Party too is wary. "I don't think there is a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan -- in the country or in Congress," said Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on 10 September, when asked about McChrystal seeking more soldiers. Cooling at home, the war is ice abroad. The Netherlands and Canada will be pulling their troops from Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011 respectively. On 6 September NATO members Britain, Germany and France called for a United Nations conference that would oversee and expedite a rapid increase in the Afghan army and police forces, not because they think these forces are anywhere near ready to take over security in Afghanistan but because their peoples see the war as futile and want the troops home. With reason. Rarely has so much foreign treasure and manpower been invested in Afghanistan, yet never has the insurgency been more violent, the Taliban's reach wider, the NATO-backed Afghan government less credible and the cost so great in civilian, soldiers and fighters' lives. According to the policy research group International Council on Security and Development (ICSD), the Taliban now has a presence in 80 per cent of Afghanistan, up from 54 per cent in 2007. In large parts Taliban fighters are not only present but functioning shadow governments, running courts, police forces and tax collectors and commanding a fealty stronger than the "real" government. As the insurgency turns into an incipient insurrection, the civilian casualties climb, most killed by the Taliban and their cohorts but a large share by US and NATO soldiers, especially from air-strikes. NATO's reliance on airpower was a policy McChrystal vowed to change on his appointment as US commander in June, aware that nothing alienates native opinion so much as pulling corpses from flattened homes. But it hasn't changed. On 4 September German NATO soldiers called in a US fighter jet after Taliban fighters had hijacked two fuel trucks in Kunduz province, a northern part of Afghanistan until recently unscarred by the insurgency. Initial NATO reports said only Taliban died in the strikes. But an Afghan human rights monitor, based on interviews with local residents, said more than 60 civilians were killed as well as a dozen fighters. Local anger deepened after a botched British NATO operation to rescue British and Afghan journalists captured by the Taliban. The British journalist was freed but his Afghan colleague and several civilians were left, literally, to die. Afghan media organisations assailed NATO for recklessness and "double standards" in the protection of foreign and Afghan journalists. They assailed the Taliban for using abduction as a tool of war. Blood may have cost the occupation Afghan hearts and minds. But it is maladministration that has robbed it of legitimacy. On 10 September President Hamid Karzai was said to have won 54 per cent of the votes cast in Afghanistan's recent presidential election, enough to grant him a second five-year term. Karzai's first term government had been described even by his NATO allies as inept, corrupt and predatory. No sooner was victory assumed than the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) announced "clear and convincing evidence of fraud" in the 20 August poll. The ECC disqualified votes from 83 polling stations, and quarantined votes in 600 others. The stations were mainly in the Pashtun south and east of Afghanistan where the turn-out was lowest, the insurgency strongest and where Karzai supposedly has his base. Presented with the charge of massive, government-assisted fraud, the president was blasé. "There was fraud in 2004, and there is fraud today, and there will be tomorrow. It is, alas, inevitable in a growing democracy," Karzai told Le Figaro. Obama and his NATO allies had hoped Afghanistan's second presidential election would at least stem a tide that for the last three years has seen support shrink from institutions set up by the occupation and wash piecemeal to the insurgency. Instead, he and they are entering Afghanistan's most critical year since 9/11 fighting a losing war, with declining support and the prospect of either no government or a government whose only claim to office appears to have been theft. Americans call this being in a bad place. Others are calling it Obama's Vietnam.
