2009/07/12

Afghanistan: A messy year 2009

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This screen capture of a recent presentation of Petraeus (video) shows how the quantity of "Security incidents" changes in cycles and grows in strength. This statistic does not seem to include combat initiated by ISAF/OEF/ANA/ANP forces.

It's going to be a messy year.

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The loss of blood and treasure in Afghanistan hurts us, but the duration of the war may hurt us in the long term even more.
It's undeniable that the Western forces engaged in Afghanistan adapt themselves to some degree to this conflict. The theater's conditions change these forces, and we might end up being much better prepared for yet another Iraq or Afghanistan conflict than for the real next conflict. Some people even claim that we'll be more often engaged in this kind of conflict in the future decades than in conventional conflicts and "peacekeeping" military missions.

One answer might be to pull out, another would be a delicate balance between the ongoing mission and preparing for realistic future missions.
Sadly, the latter becomes ever more difficult as the intensity of the war in Afghanistan increases.

Sven Ortmann
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1 comment:

  1. It might be of interest that up to 2011 a similar count of incidents (ANSO incident data) is described pretty well by an exponential of a linear expression plus a harmonic function ( exp[a+b*t + c*sin(d*t)] ).

    But it's a pretty slow growth for an exponential, it's going to take around 19 years until there is even one incident per inhabitant per year! (2031 there would be about 41 million incidents, so even with population growth that seems a safe prediction assuming the model is correct)

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