The War will Rage On Until Kabul is Surrounded

What I've noticed in reading the media reports coming out of Afghanistan as the Taliban have engaged in a pitched battle since Friday to take control of the Ghazni City and cut the vital Kandahar-Kabul highway is that the United States military is just flat-out lying now. A good example is taken from Mujib Mashal's "Why the Taliban’s Assault on Ghazni Matters for Afghanistan and the U.S.":

But much like the Afghan government, the United States military played down the extent of the crisis, in assessments completely at odds with the information from the locals. 

A statement by the United States military said, for example, that the main highway to the south remained open. But passengers on both sides remained stuck, and local Afghan officials said the highway was closed. 

It is unclear how many American troops are on the ground in Ghazni. But in cities such as Farah and Kunduz — assaulted by Taliban militants in 2015, 2016 and this year — the American military sent teams of Army Special Forces to call in airstrikes and fight alongside their Afghan commando counterparts.

An even more telling passage is found in "Were Victims Friend or Foe? U.S. Airstrike Leads to New Dispute With Afghan Allies" by Farooq Jan Mangal and Rod Nordland which was published Friday. The story is about a U.S. airstrike in Logar Province that killed 17 Afghan police and pro-government volunteers who were battling the Taliban. Mangal and Nordland widen their scope to take in other deadly errant U.S. airstrikes of late:

The episode on Tuesday was the latest in a series of cases in which the outcomes of American airstrikes were disputed, and occurred as the tempo of coalition air actions in support of their Afghan allies has risen sharply. With only about 14,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan — compared with 140,000 at the peak of the deployment — most of the ground operations are being conducted by Afghan forces, whose air force is small and poorly equipped.

In the first six months of this year, United States forces dropped more than 3,000 bombs across Afghanistan, nearly double the number for the same period last year and more than five times as many as the number for the first half of 2016.

For this same six-month period, the United Nations documented a 52 percent increase in civilian deaths from airstrikes compared with the first half of 2017.

On July 19, an American airstrike in the Chardara District of northern Kunduz Province killed 14 members of one extended family, including women and children, according to Afghan officials in the area.

On Friday, Colonel O’Donnell said that the American investigation of the July 19 airstrike in Kunduz had been closed after determining that there were no civilian casualties. “After carefully considering all relevant and reasonably available information, which included a review of the Afghan government’s report of findings, our investigation found no credible information to corroborate the allegations,” he said.

Aerial video footage showed a single bomb dropped on two homes where the Taliban had been firing from for more than an hour, he said, and the firing stopped as soon as the bomb was dropped.

The American military spokesman said that no Afghans had come forward to document any civilian deaths, and the only complaints received were two that documented damage to homes and one injured person.

A New York Times reporter at the scene, however, was given a list of the names of all 14 fatalities from the same extended family. The list was provided by family members and verified by government officials and the Kunduz hospital, where 12 of the dead were taken. The victims included five women, seven children aged 2 to 14, and two men, a father and an uncle to the children. 

Told about that, Colonel O’Donnell said, “When we’re presented with any credible evidence, if something is provided to us we will take a look at it.”

The U.S. is in a spot so tight it has very little room to turn. Peace with the Pashtun Taliban would not be recognized by the Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmen, not to mention a large part of the 9/11 mythologized U.S. population. The war will rage on until Kabul is surrounded, which the U.S. will deny right up until the moment the last diplomats and military advisers are airlifted away.