NATO's Failure to Occupy Afghanistan Becomes Even More Glaring

The ongoing offensive by the Afghan Resistance has highlighted the failure of NATO's occupation of that country. It has reached the point that even Uncle Sam's most servile allies - France and Britain - have either begun to Cut'N'Run or are contemplating the possibility at the highest levels.

India Defense reported on 15 October that:

France plans to withdraw around 200 special forces from southern Afghanistan at the start of next year following a recent surge in violence, reported the French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche on Sunday.

Underscoring that not only the French are running away, the paper adds that, "the US was also downscaling its Enduring Freedom operation."

With news in the air that both the French and Uncle Sam are planning their retreat, Mark Townsend and Peter Beaumont report in today's Observer that the former field commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Peter Inge, warned at a public forum that British forces 'risk defeat' in Afghanistan and said the government lacked a 'clear strategy' guiding their military operations. Townsend and Beaumont write:

The remarks by the former chief of the defence staff, who also served on the Butler Commission into intelligence failures in Iraq, follow those by the present head of the British Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, who warned that the presence of British troops in Iraq had 'exacerbated' security problems in the country.

Inge's intervention, coming amid growing speculation about Britain's exit strategy from Iraq, is the first criticism of operations by a former head of the British army. His comments, made at a meeting of European experts on Tuesday and published here for the first time, reflect the growing dismay among senior military officers and civil servants involved in defence and foreign affairs, that in the critical areas of Afghanistan and Iraq Britain lacked clear foreign and defence policies separate from the US.

'I don't believe we have a clear strategy in either Afghanistan or Iraq. I sense we've lost the ability to think strategically. Deep down inside me, I worry that the British army could risk operational failure if we're not careful in Afghanistan. We need to recognise the test that I think they could face there,' he told the debate held by Open Europe, an independent think tank campaigning for EU reform.

Of course, it comes as no surprise to readers of this blog that a nation that follows the whims of Uncle Sam's foreign policy with such supine obedience, as Britain does, cannot think independently or creatively. But more obviously, Inge's comments and the other reports of NATO's failure to subdue the Afghan Resistance illustrate another failed component to the geopolitical resource grab Uncle Sam and his allies launched after alCIAda's 9-11 Black Op.