NATO Chief Disavows 2014 Drawdown Date, Insists War to Continue Indefinitely

New Speculative Date Already Being Shrugged Off in Favor of Promises of Eventual Victory. The replacement of the July 2011 drawdown date with a more speculative 2014 date is scarcely completed, and already that date too is being disavowed by NATO Secretary General and Afghan War enthusiast Anders Fogh Rasmussen. According to Rasmussen, NATO troops will remain in the nation and will contiue their nearly nine year war “indefinitely,” pledging that the troops would only leave once it became impossible for the Taliban to take over in Afghanistan. It is perhaps inevitable that those officials with dreams of some ill-defined “victory” in Afghanistan would bristle at any drawdown date at this point, as the repeated escalations of the war have not brought victory any closer and have instead only made matters worse, with record death tolls coming virtually every month. Rasmussen, for his part, has predicted even more casualties in the months ahead, but claims that the large number of NATO troops being killed just proves how desperate the Taliban is getting. Armed with this assumption, he will no doubt continue to have such reasons for optimism as the war continues to worsen.

WSJ: Petraeus Sharpens Afghan Strategy. Gen. David Petraeus plans to ramp up the U.S. military's troop-intensive strategy in Afghanistan, according to some senior military officials, who have concluded that setbacks in the war effort this year weren't the result of the strategy, but of flaws in how it has been implemented. The officials said Gen. Petraeus, who took over as allied commander in Afghanistan this month and is conducting a review of the war, intends to draw on many of the same tactics he implemented to turn around the war in Iraq—and which his predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, introduced in Afghanistan. But the officials said Gen. McChrystal put too much attention on hunting down Taliban leaders, at the expense of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, which focuses on protecting civilians and bolstering popular support for the government. Supporters of Gen. McChrystal dispute that assessment, dismissing any notion there were flaws in how he fought the war.

[Editor's Comment:] This war was never meant to be "won". It was neither meant to be won or lost. Whatever we want to call this "war", it fundamentally was meant to be an occupation, an endless one at that. -That is, it was, and still is, meant to last until all the resources have been looted and until the territory has outlived its strategic usefulness to the people who started it. There will be no withdrawal until then. The occupation will undoubtedly outlast us all. There will be no peace in Afghanistan in our lifetime(s). This is the ugly truth.