Ann Marlowe is back, declaring Khost a success and the British incompetent boobs, based on all her expertise of both Afghan culture and counterinsurgency doctrine. And when I say expertise, I really mean her repeated quoting of civilian-hating LTC Custer in every single story she writes about the damned place.
Is this even worth rehashing by now? We’ve established the woman is a propagandist hack who can’t even get basic facts right. For example, since when does Khost have a million people? Certainly not from the Central Statistics Office, which puts its population at less than half that.
The point is clear. Other embeds—who don’t just mindlessly repeat whatever a single soldier tells them—have a dramatically different story to tell about Khost, the province Marlowe declares a success despite a 40% increase in violence over the past year:
This is Tani District Center, an American combat outpost in Afghanistan’s Khost Province, about 12 miles from the border with Pakistan…
This summer, Taliban and other militants are crossing from Pakistan into Tani to attack Afghan, U.S. and NATO forces. The violence has escalated from the occasional firefight to full-scale battles in the past week.
But really, the fundamental problem we face is personality . Just ask Ann Marlowe, counterinsurgency expert extraordinaire, who apparently doesn’t seem to get that structural problems are driving conflict in Afghanistan, not the miraculous actions of a charismatic Army LTC… especially if a single month without him can unravel all the “progress” he made. We’ve run out of T.E. Lawrences, it seems.
Previously:
They Say We’re Winning in Khost
They Say We’re Winning in Khost, Pt. II
They Say We’re Winning in Khost, Pt. III
The Media Hates You, Pt. Whatever
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust