Are 4,200 in Iraq and 555 in Afghanistan enough U.S. dead for victory?

(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

This evening the Associated Press reported the following —

As of Saturday, Nov. 15, 2008, at least 4,200 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003…

And —

As of Saturday, Nov. 15, 2008, at least 555 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001…

No count of the number of dead Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, or others killed during the invasion and subsequent occupations.

I have a simple question: have we seen enough members of the U.S. military to die yet for the U.S. to declare victory?

Iraq

Just on Wednesday, the Washington Post reported an Iraqi soldier killed two U.S. soldiers and wounded six others.

After months of ignoring the obvious in Iraq, even the rhetoric from the NY Times is changing. Yesterday the newspaper reported how Militants now turn to small bombs in Iraq attacks. Small, “sticky bombs”, “usually no bigger than a man’s fist and attached to a magnet or a strip of gummy adhesive,” are now the weapon of choice for the insurgent groups in Iraq.

Light, portable and easy to lay, sticky bombs are tucked quickly under the bumper of a car or into a chink in a blast wall. Since they are detonated remotely, they rarely harm the person who lays them…

They are also contributing, in the midst of an uptick in violence, to a growing feeling of unease in the capital.

Note that last sentence well since it marks a rhetorical change. The violence in Baghdad is now increasing. While it has been for the past 6 months, the news agencies had been reporting violence was down due to the “surge”. Is this shift an acknowledgment of the security change in Iraq or an attempt to pressure Obama to keep U.S. forces deployed there?

Sticky bombs have frequently been used to attack Iraqi government and military officials and important businessmen. In July, Faris Amir, the deputy general director of Baghdad’s traffic police, was wounded by a sticky bomb attack. In September, an executive at Al Arabiya, the satellite channel, narrowly survived an assassination attempt by sticky bomb, which destroyed his car. In October, the lawyer Waleed al-Azzawi and the police commander of Diwaniya Province, Omar Abu Atra, were killed in Baghdad by sticky bombs.

Back in mid-September, I wrote a diary arguing that Americans got bored or why the “surge” in Iraq worked, but really violence was increasing. Interestingly, the NY Times and most other news groups failed to notice this trend during the presidential campaign.

But now that a new president is soon to take charge, the Iraqis are worried according to McClatchy Newspapers. While “many Shiite Muslim Iraqi politicians had supported Obama’s call for withdrawing U.S. troops within 16 months of his inauguration; the security pact would give them another year. Privately, however, most officials who attained power with the support of the Bush administration worry about the difficulties of proceeding without a U.S. blank check.”

Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, the occupation is failing in a slow motion. On Thursday, the NY Times reported that 18 Afghans and one U.S. soldier were killed when “insurgents struck an American military convoy in a crowded market in” the Bati Kot district of eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province. 74 people were wounded in the suicide car bomb attack.

While earlier in the week, the NY Times reported that a U.S. airstrike reportedly hit an Afghan wedding.  officials said a missile fired from a U.S. warplane “had killed 40 civilians and wounded 28 others at a wedding party in the southern province of Kandahar.” In response, the U.S. said “If innocent people were killed in this operation, we apologize and express our condolences to the families and people of Afghanistan.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said that his first request to President-elect Obama would be “to end the civilian casualties.” Karzai has also been having secret talks with the Taliban to end the fighting.

U.S. General David Petraeus has suggested, according to McClatchy Newspapers, that Afghanistan needs “a reconciliation plan with some Taliban members“. The Financial Times reported that U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said U.S. talks with the Taliban were conceivable.

“There has to be ultimately, and I’ll underscore ultimately, reconciliation as part of a political outcome to this… That’s ultimately the exit strategy for all of us.”

So since talks with the Taliban are ultimately going to be the way out of Afghanistan, then what was the purpose of the past seven years? Certainly the U.S. could have held talks with the Taliban in 2001 or 2002 or anytime in the past seven years.

Go for broke

The goal of Osama bin Laden was to bankrupt the United States by dragging our country into protracted wars of attrition. This strategy proved effective with the mujahedeen fighters battling the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Now the United States is going broke through a combination of financial shenanigans and our country’s misuse of our military to solve political problems. Currently, the $500 billion annual base budget for the Pentagon is at the highest level since World War II. Plus, the Pentagon gets $100 billion each year to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now with the U.S. facing financial collapse, even the Pentagon expects cuts in military spending, according to the NY Times.

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven themselves not to be the answer. After 4,200 U.S. military members have been killed in Iraq and 555 U.S. military members killed in Afghanistan and countless civilians killed in the fighting in the region, can we declare victory yet and bring our troops home? How many more deaths are needed to achieve victory?

^{Cross-posted at Daily Kos.}