Sunday, November 1, 2009

War Notes: November 1, 2009

Over 1,000 U.S soldiers have been injured during combat in the last three months fighting in Afghanistan. That is a quarter of all troops injured since the 2001 invasion, representing a massive spike. The military has attributed the high injury rate to increased military operations since the surge began earlier this year, and the increased insurgent use of roadside bombs.

It seems logical that in the aftermath of Abdullah's withdrawal, the presidential run-off election will be canceled. The only thing that could make this fiasco worse would be to actually go forward with the election and deliver Karzai a farcical 95% or 100% victory. Meanwhile, Peter Gailbraith, the whistleblowing U.N official who exposed the U.N's complicity in Karzai's election fraud, reports the following:
[Gailbraith] said that UN workers overseeing the latest poll run-off had contacted him in recent days to say that nothing had changed and that the second-round vote will again involve fraud on a grand scale.
"It's a sure thing,"Mr Galbraith said. "It is beyond blatant. This is in your face. It has become clear that Karzai has no intention of instituting reforms. He simply intends to repeat the same fraud. It is the same exercise as before."
Reuters is reporting, in contrast, that the Karzai team is pushing to ahead with the election. We will report on the final decision, which presumably should come soon.

In this Sunday's Week in Review, New York Times writer Alissa Rubin offers words of caution for those who look to stability in Iraq as a model for Afghanistan. Rubin spent years in Iraq covering the war, and is now being deployed to Afghanistan. She warns that the surge has not been as successful as advertised, with enormous ethnic tensions simmering below (or above the surface):
So the lesson I take away is never to underestimate hatred or history or the complexity of alien places...Terrible things happened in Iraq over the last six years, and I go to Afghanistan feeling that we owe it to everyone who has died in Iraq — Iraqi and American — not to forget, not to gloss over, not to think in terms of success and failure, or victory and defeat, but to see as best we can, through a glass darkly.

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