The
Shame And Folly Of Obama's Afghan War
11 December 2009By
Dave Lindorff
There are so many things wrong with Obama’s “New and
Improved” Afghanistan War that it’s hard to know where
to begin, but I guess the place to start is with his
premise.
If America needs to be fighting in Afghanistan because
Al Qaeda planned and launched the 9-11 attacks from
there back in 2001, as the president claimed in his
lackluster address to the cadets at West Point last
week, then we would have to assume either that Al
Qaeda is still there, or that if we were not there
fighting, that Al Qaeda would be back to plan more
attacks.
ATTENTION: Demonstration in Washington, DC Saturday to
protest Obama's War against Afghanistan! Make the
effort! Be there to say, "No You Can't!". For
information go to EndUSWars.org
Well, we know Al Qaeda is not there, because US
intelligence reports that there are “fewer than 100”
Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan at most at this
point, and probably a good deal fewer. Maybe even
zero. Al Qaeda has long since moved on to Pakistan and
thence to other countries far removed from Afghanistan
(even Defense Secretary Robert Gates, after
speculating that Osama bin Laden “might be” hopping
back and forth across the border with Pakistan like a
kid doing a double-dare game, concedes that in truth
no one in the US has any idea where bin Laden is, or
whether he is even in South Asia). But would Al Qaeda
come back if the Taliban, ousted back in 2001 by US
Special Forces, were to return to power in Kabul? Not
likely. As the New York Times reported in last
Sunday’s paper, the Afghan Taliban have convincingly
broken with Al Qaeda, because of the latter
organization’s targeting of the Pakistani government,
which has long had a supportive relationship with the
Afghan Taliban. Besides, the Taliban in Afghanistan
have a clear goal of ruling Afghanistan, and the US
has already demonstrated both that it can live and
work with a Taliban government, as it was doing before
the 9-11 attacks, and that it will punish the Taliban
if they allow Al Qaeda a free hand inside their
country. So the odds of a re-established Taliban
regime in Afghanistan inviting Al Qaeda to move back
in and set up shop are somewhere around zero.
Ergo, whatever he may say, the current Christmas
ramp-up in the war announced by Obama has nothing to
do with 9-11, nothing to do with combating terrorism,
and nothing to do with protecting American security.
What about the bogie-man of a so-called “failed
state”? Obama said a failed state in Afghanistan could
mean a return of Al Qaeda or other terrorist
organizations.
The problem with this second argument is that
Afghanistan already is a failed state, if the
definition of a failed state is one in which there is
no effective central government. For that matter,
Afghanistan has been a failed state since the
overthrow of Mohammed Najibullah, the Communist leader
who had the country largely unified and who was
instituting reforms like protecting the rights of
women, building roads, etc. (the very things the US
says it wants to do), until he was driven out of power
and ultimately hung by forces, including the Taliban)
organized and armed by the CIA. Actually, the truth is
that Afghanistan has always been something less than a
real nation, with different ethic groups occupying
different regions of the country largely operating
like autonomous little countries. To expect such a
situation to somehow coalesce into something
resembling a European nation-state is simply
ludicrous. In fact, the only commonality uniting the
various ethnic groups within Afghanistan actually is
religion—they’re nearly all Islamic—which suggests
that the Taliban, for all their medieval
fundamentalism, may have a significant edge in the
nation-building game.
Moving on to strategy, Obama talks about effectively
doubling the number of US and NATO forces fighting in
the country (the term “fighting” is used loosely
because many of the European forces are barred by
their governments from actually engaging in combat),
with the goal being, reportedly, to protect the cities
from Taliban attacks (and good luck with that!) and
giving the current government in Kabul time to build
up a 400,000-man army that supposedly would take over
the job of security.
Hmmmm. If you protect the cities, by definition you
leave the countryside around the cities unprotected,
right? But you cannot do that in a country that is
largely rural, so the US will inevitably resort to
search-and-destroy run-outs into the countryside, and
of course air attacks by bombers and remote-controlled
drones, in a doomed effort to keep the Taliban at bay.
But such actions, as America leaned when it tried the
same policy in Vietnam, inevitably mean massive and
disproportionate civilian casualties—the so-called
“collateral damage” of war. And civilian casualties
are not the way an army wins “hearts and minds.” In
fact, a high rate of civilian casualties means the
destroying of hearts, minds, limbs, families, houses,
etc., and the concomitant creation of blood enemies.
So we start out by making more enemies outside the
city gates.
Meanwhile, we are unlikely to make the cities safe
either because it’s damnably easy for bombers to slip
in and pop one off in a crowded bazaar or school or
office building, as the Taliban have already
repeatedly demonstrated.
But even assuming the best of luck with protecting a
handful of Afghan cities, the idea of creating a
functioning army of 400,000, as Obama and his generals
have called for, and upon which Obama bases his
promise to “start bringing home” troops in July 2011,
is surely a pipe-dream (literally really, given that
the current army is already awash in opium addicts).
The Afghan Army at present numbers 90,000, but it is
rife with corruption and, moreover, is largely
composed of Tajiks, the dominant ethnic group in
northern Afghanistan, who are widely despised by the
Pashtun, who are concentrated in the south and east of
the country, and other minority groups. The idea that
a Tajik or Tajik-led army could succeed in the south
and east, where the Taliban are strongest, is fanciful
at best and tragic at worst. Furthermore, most of
those in the current military, if they aren’t drug
addicts, are either corrupt, or just temporary
workers, staying in as long as there is a paycheck and
no fighting, but quick to go AWOL when they have
enough cash, or when a mission is ordered that
involves real fighting. There is close to no chance
that a true national army capable of securing most of
the sprawling land of Afghanistan under central
government control could be created. As hard as it’s
been for the US military occupation force in Iraq to
train and field an Iraqi army, at least the US there
has been working with a trained officer corps
inherited from Saddam Hussein, and with a core of
soldiers who had already served, and with new recruits
who are literate, and who have a some desire to
rebuild a national government. Afghanistan has none of
those things.
And about that July 2011 “deadline” for starting to
bring home US troops from Afghanistan. This was
nothing but a PR feint for Obama’s liberal
supporters—a fig leaf to get them on board his war
express. In fact, by late last week, White House and
Pentagon officials were all back-pedaling and
explaining that July 2011 was just the date that the
first handful of US troops would “start coming home.”
In fact, if that even really does happen, it turns out
that under Obama’s new war plan for Afghanistan, US
troops will be deep in the swamp of Afghan battle for
years after 2011—a clear acknowledgement that the plan
for training an Afghan army to take over from the US
is also just so much talk.
One can speculate about why Obama is so clearly
sabotaging his presidency with this doomed crusade in
Afghanistan. Some speculate that he was sandbagged by
his generals, and certainly Gen. Stanley McChrystal
crossed the line into improper politicking and
insubordination to his commander-in-chief when he went
public to lobby for the addition of more than 40,000
additional troops. But Obama could have survived that
treachery had he wanted to, by playing Harry Truman
and sacking McChrystal for insubordination. There are
those who say it is all about wanting to build a
pipeline for transporting oil to the Indian Ocean and
bypassing Russia. But that begs the question of how
such a pipeline, if it were built, could ever be kept
secure from sabotage, running as it would have to,
through both Afghanistan and Pakistan (besides, back
in 2001 the US was once negotiating with the Taliban
government to get permission for Unocal to build such
a line, which would have made some sense if there was
no war going on). It could also be that this war is
all about providing an argument for ever higher
spending on the military at a time when there is
really no good justification for it in a nation that
already spends more on arms and troops than all the
rest of the world combined. But really, the military
has demonstrated its ability to keep on winning
increased appropriations even when wars are winding
down and threat levels are reduced. That, after all,
is what the fake “war on terror” has been all
about—keeping the American public frightened and
willing to keep throwing money at the Pentagon. No, to
me the best argument for this new war campaign may be
simply that, like presidents Johnson and Nixon before
him, Obama doesn’t want to be tagged as the president
who lost a war.
And for that, we can expect to see thousands of young
Americans die, and tens or hundreds of thousands of
Afghanis die.
To make matters worse, once more Americans start
coming home in a parade of flag-draped coffins, the
war for Obama, and for whoever succeeds him after his
own failed tenure as president, will be self-promoting
and effectively permanent. As we saw in the case of
the Indochina War, those dead soldiers and Marines
will become a fearsome impediment to any effort to end
this longest of wars, and a grisly justification for
continuing to send more young people after them to be
chewed up and killed. For what president, beginning
with Obama, will have the political and personal
courage to say that those who died in Afghanistan died
in vain?
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