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COMMENT
The Bush
administration's Afghan
spring
By Tom Engelhardt
If Iraq has been the disaster zone of Bush
foreign policy, Afghanistan is still generally
thought of as its success story - to the extent
that anyone in our part of the world thinks about
that country at all any more. Before the invasion
of Iraq, Afghanistan experienced a relative flood
of American attention. It was, after all, the
liberation moment. Possibly the most regressive
and repressive regime on Earth had just bitten the
dust. The first blow had been struck against the
September 11 attackers. The media rushed in - and
they were in a celebratory mood.
As Bush
administration efforts quickly turned toward Iraq,
however, so did media attention. By June 2003,
just two months after the invasion of Iraq, the
American Journalism Review tells us, "Only a
handful of reporters remained in the struggling
country on a full-time basis, while other news
organizations floated correspondents in and out
when time and resources permitted."
More
recently, just Newsweek, the Washington Post, the
Associated Press, and possibly the New York Times
(which seems to have Carlotta Gall back on the
beat) consider Afghanistan - the devastated land
that has been the crucible for, and breeding
ground for, so many of the crises and problems of
our era - important enough to have full-time
reporters assigned to it.
There was a
burst of media attention last October for the
Afghan presidential election, won by Hamid Karzai.
It was a demonstration of something we've seen
since in Iraq and elsewhere - that people
everywhere feel understandable enthusiasm at the
thought of determining their own fates with their
own hands (however limited their ability to do so
may be in reality). It was, in fact, with the
Afghanistan election that the Bush
administration's "Arab Spring" blitz, its present
success story about spreading democracy worldwide,
with an emphasis on the Middle East, really began.
Since then, what news Americans have
gotten about Afghanistan has consisted largely of
infrequent reports on the deaths of small numbers
of American troops there; statements, interviews
and press conferences by various American generals
or officials on the ever-improving situation in
the country, or on the Pentagon's sudden
willingness to tackle the drug problem there;
pieces on "abuses" of Afghan prisoners by American
troops or Central Intelligence Agency agents; or
statements about how we must stay in the country
until a struggling new democracy truly takes root
in that impoverished land.
Throw in the
odd propaganda visit by an American dignitary and
you more or less have Afghan news as it exists in
this country. After all, in most of Afghanistan
there are no reporters. Even the 5,000 European
troops guarding the capital, Kabul, under the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization banner have but
recently begun to make it beyond Kabul's bounds.
The Americans alone have given themselves the run
of the country and they have generally preferred
to keep the news to themselves.
The last
wash of Afghan news came when, after a year of
planning, Laura Bush made it there for six hours
last week to "offer support for Afghan women in
their struggle for greater rights", to meet
Karzai, and to have a meal with American troops at
Bagram Air Base. Standing next to an Afghan woman,
shovel in hand, she also had her picture taken and
disseminated in the American press. The caption in
my hometown paper says she was "posing for a
photograph at a women's dorm at Kabul University
and planting a tree". As a photo, nationalities
aside, it might easily have graced the pages of
Soviet Life magazine and come from a distant
imperial era.
Drugs
So
Afghanistan has once again become the land that
time forgot. Given the present Bush democracy
blitz and given the country's "success" - a
"struggling" or "nascent" democracy or
"semi-democracy", liberated from one of the worst
regimes on earth and helped back onto its feet by
17,000-plus American troops stationed on its
territory, it seems a case worth revisiting. What
follows is the best assessment I can offer - from
this distance - based at least to some extent on
more fulsome reporting done for media outlets
outside the United States.
When you begin
to look around, you quickly find that just about
everyone - Bush proponents and critics alike -
seems to agree on at least some of the following
when it comes to the experiment in "democracy" in
Afghanistan: The country now qualifies, according
to the Human Development Index in the UN's Human
Development Report 2004, as the sixth worst-off
country on Earth, perched just above five absolute
basket-case nations (Burundi, Mali, Burkina Faso,
Niger and Sierra Leone) in sub-Saharan Africa. The
power of the new, democratically elected
government of Hamid Karzai extends only weakly
beyond the outskirts of Kabul. Large swathes of
Afghanistan are still ruled by warlords and drug
lords, or in some cases undoubtedly warlord/drug
lords; and while the Taliban was largely swept
away, armed militias dominate much of the country
as they did after the Soviet withdrawal back in
1989. In addition, a low-level guerrilla war is
still being run by elements of the former Taliban
regime for which, in areas of the south, there is
a growing "nostalgia".
Women, outside a
few cities, seem hardly better off than they were
under the Taliban. As Sonali Kolhatkar,
co-director of the Afghan Women's Mission, told
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!:
We hear ... about [how] five million
girls are now going to school. It is wonderful.
When I was in Afghanistan, I noticed that in
Kabul, certainly schools were open, women were
walking around fairly openly with not as much
fear. Outside of Kabul, where 80% of Afghans
reside, totally different situation. There are
no schools. I visited the Farah province, which
is a very isolated, remote province in western
Afghanistan and there were no schools except for
the one school that the Afghan Women's Mission
is funding that is administered by our allies,
the members of RAWA [Revolutionary Association
of the Women of Afghanistan]. Aside from that
one school for girls, there are no schools in
the region. And so we hear all of these very
superficial things about how great Afghan women
are, you know, the progress they're making. The
UN just released a report recently on
Afghanistan where they described Afghanistan's
education system as, quote, "the worst in the
world". And, you know, we never hear that. Our
media, when they covered Laura Bush's trip, will
not mention, will not do their homework, and
will not mention these
facts. According to the UN report,
"Every 30 minutes a woman in Afghanistan dies from
pregnancy-related causes ... 20% of children die
before the age of five ... [and] the poorest 30%
of the population receive only 9% of the national
income, while the upper 30% receive 55%."
Reconstruction throughout the country has
been faltering; funds promised by international
bodies and states have not been delivered in
anything like the amounts agreed on; the new
Afghan National Army, being trained by the
Americans, is a weak reed when it comes to
national (or local) security; most
non-governmental aid organizations, many of which
largely abandoned the country because it was so
perilous for their workers, have yet to return or
are just barely testing the waters again; and what
economic growth there is seems to exist largely
thanks to the drug trade, which is said to account
for 60% of the country's gross domestic product.
Having cornered most of the world's supply
of opium poppies and a growing slice of its
heroin-production facilities, Afghanistan seems to
be well on the way to becoming the globe's
narco-state par excellence. It has "bumper
harvests that far exceed even the most alarming
predictions", according to "senior Pentagon
officials" quoted by Thom Shanker of the New York
Times.
Paul Rogers, the canny geopolitical
analyst for the openDemocracy website, sums the
situation up this way:
Afghanistan is returning to levels
of production typical of the chaotic period
after the withdrawal of Soviet military forces
in 1989. According to United Nations sources,
opium poppy cultivation from 2003-04 increased
by 64%; around 120,000 hectares (300,000 acres)
are now under cultivation. The most recent UN
Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report,
Afghanistan: Opium Survey 2004, finds that
Afghanistan now accounts for 87% of the world's
illegal production of opium ... On the basis of
the 2004 estimate, 2.3 million people in over
330,000 households are involved in production,
10% of the Afghan
population. According to the Times'
Shanker, "One military officer who has served in
Afghanistan gave a more pointed assessment: 'What
will be history's judgment on our nation-building
mission in Afghanistan if the nation we leave
behind is Colombia' of the 1990s?" It's an apt
analogy, though economically Colombia looks like
paradise compared to Afghanistan.
Until
recently, the Pentagon actively resisted in any
way interfering in the burgeoning drug trade - in
part, undoubtedly, because it was funding local
warlords involved in the trade. The recent
organized murder (on the eve of his departure from
the country) of a British development specialist,
Steven MacQueen, who had been involved in a
small-scale project to wean Afghan farmers from
opium growing, was but one ominous sign of the
direction the new democracy seems to be taking.
The Karzai government is weak indeed.
Parliamentary elections have just been postponed
for the third time - until September. Warlord
Abdul Rashid Dostum, the new defense minister, is
probably a bona fide war criminal (and former
American ally) with 30,000 militia under his
command. And this is but to scratch the surface of
a nearly lawless land destroyed by decades of war
against the Soviets, of civil war among warlords,
of war and rule by the Taliban, and of bombing and
invasion by the US (which paid the Northern
Alliance and other warlords to do most of its
war-fighting work for it and has been dealing with
the results of that decision ever since).
The Afghan story may, in many ways, be the
saddest tale on Earth today, which, given the role
of the country in our recent history, may also
make it the most dangerous story around. Who now
remembers a time in the 1950s and early 1960s
when, in peaceful Cold War competition for
influence with the Soviets, we were building
ranch-style houses near Kandahar in a country that
had a middle class and was reasonably prosperous.
Today, it's as if that took place on the other
side of the moon. But let's not assume that
everyone other than the drug lords in Afghanistan
is unhappy. Take the Bush administration and the
Pentagon, for example.
Bases
Just the other day, Air Force Brigadier
General Jim Hunt gave an interview in which he
announced an US$83 million upgrade for the two
main US bases in Afghanistan: Bagram Air Base,
north of Kabul, and Kandahar Air Field in the
south. A new runway to be built at Bagram will be
part of a more general effort, said Hunt, "We are
continuously improving runways, taxiways,
navigation aids, airfield lighting, billeting and
other facilities to support our demanding
mission."
The general offered some other
figures relating to that mission: "One hundred and
fifty US aircraft, including ground-attack jets
and helicopter gunships as well as transport and
reconnaissance planes, were using 14 airfields
around Afghanistan. Many are close to the
Pakistani border. Other planes such as B-1 bombers
patrol over Afghanistan without landing."
Strange, those 14 airfields, since in Iraq
the US has reportedly been building up to 14
permanent bases (or "enduring camps"). You have to
wonder whether there's something in that number.
In certain numerological systems, 14 is evidently
associated with "addiction". The question is: What
exactly are America's air-field upgraders and base
builders addicted to?
Hunt typically
explains the addiction, or mission, this way: "We
will continue to carry out the ... mission for as
long as necessary to secure a free and democratic
society for the people of Afghanistan." But here's
the curious thing: We're ramping up our air bases
in Afghanistan at the very moment when our
generals are also claiming that the left-over
guerrilla war being carried out by Taliban
remnants is on the wane.
After another of
those American drop-ins on Karzai and his country,
General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint
chiefs, recently announced from the relative
safety of Kabul airport that Afghanistan was
"secure" ("Security is very good throughout the
country, exceptionally good"), even as he
suggested that "the United States is considering
keeping long-term bases here as it repositions its
military forces around the world". In the process,
he also discussed what he and others politely call
a future "strategic partnership" between the
Pentagon and Karzai's Afghanistan (which is a
little like saying that a lion and a mouse are
considering forming an alliance).
In
recent months, guerrilla attacks had indeed fallen
off radically, though a particularly fierce Afghan
winter may in part have been responsible. As
spring arrives, the pace of the fighting seems
again to be picking up somewhat. Still, if you
were considering Afghanistan in isolation, the
logic of our generals and officials might seem to
indicate that, as the war against Taliban and
al-Qaeda remnants winds down, so should American
troop strength and base positioning.
That,
on bases at least, the opposite seems to be
happening might lead you to scratch your head -
especially if your only source of information was
our largely demobilized press in which the news is
reported (when it is) more or less country by
country and days can pass before you run across a
piece that includes, say, three or four countries,
no less discusses the actual geo-political look of
things. Throw in the fact that Pentagon basing
policy is considered an inside-the-paper story for
policy wonks and that US bases - wherever located
- are not considered subjects worthy of
significant coverage.
But, of course, our
strategists in Washington pay notoriously little
attention to the press and, from the beginning,
they've been thinking in the most global of terms
as they plan various ways to garrison the parts of
the world - essentially, its energy heartlands -
that matter most to them. And if you turn, for
instance, to a striking piece in Asia Times Online
by Ramtanu Maitra (US scatters
bases to control Eurasia Mar 30), you
can get a sense of what all this Pentagon basing
activity really adds up to. Maitra reports that a
decision to set up new US military bases in
Afghanistan - up to nine scattered across six
different provinces - was taken during Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld's drop-in on Kabul Airport
in December. These small bases, expected to be
small and "flexible", are to be part of a new
American global-basing policy that "can be used in
due time as a springboard to assert a presence far
beyond Afghanistan".
As Maitra points out,
Senator John McCain, the number two Republican on
the Senate Armed Services Committee, while on a
Kabul drop-in of his own and after talks with
Karzai, proclaimed himself committed to a
"strategic partnership that we believe must endure
for many, many years" and assured reporters that
the "partnership" should include "permanent bases"
for US military forces. (He later backtracked on
the bases, his statement perhaps being a bit too
blunt for the moment.)
For our Afghan
bases to make much sense, you have to consider as
well those 14 (or so) permanent bases in Iraq, our
many other Middle Eastern bases, our full-scale
access to three or more Pakistani military bases,
our penetration of the once off-limits former SSRs
of Central Asia, including the use of an air base
in Uzbekistan and the setting up of a base for up
to 3,000 US troops at Manas in impoverished
Kyrgyzstan (where "the Tulip Revolution" has just
ejected a corrupt pro-Russian regime). In fact,
you have to see that from Camp Bondsteel in the
former Yugoslavia to the Manas base at the edge of
China, the US now effectively garrisons most of
the heartland energy regions of the planet.
As Maitra comments:
Media reports coming out of the
South Asian sub-continent point to a US intent
that goes beyond bringing Afghanistan under
control, to playing a determining role in the
vast Eurasian region. In fact, one can argue
that the landing of US troops in Afghanistan in
the winter of 2001 was a deliberate policy to
set up forward bases at the crossroads of three
major areas: the Middle East, Central Asia and
South Asia. Not only is the area energy-rich,
but it is also the meeting point of three
growing powers - China, India and Russia. On
February 23, the day after McCain called for
"permanent bases" in Afghanistan, a senior
political analyst and chief editor of the Kabul
Journal, Mohammad Hassan Wulasmal, said, "The US
wants to dominate Iran, Uzbekistan and China by
using Afghanistan as a military
base." Throw in our access to
potential bases in the former Eastern European
satellites of the former Soviet Union (Romania and
Bulgaria in particular) and you have the Pentagon
positioned in quite remarkable ways not just in
relation to the oil lands of the planet, but also
in relation to our former superpower adversary.
People ordinarily say that the Soviet Union "fell"
in 1990 as the Berlin Wall came down, but in fact
the Soviet Union has never stopped "falling".
Susan B Glasser and Peter Baker, until recently
Moscow bureau chiefs for the Washington Post,
quote "analysts" as now speaking of "the second
breakup of the Soviet Union". Some were even
daring to ask the ultimate question: "Could Russia
itself be next?"
Just in the last year,
we've seen "the Rose Revolution" in Georgia, "the
Orange Revolution" in Ukraine, and now "the Tulip
Revolution" in Kyrgyzstan, all heavily financed
and backed by groups funded by or connected to the
US government and/or the Bush administration. As
Pepe Escobar of Asia Times Online writes (The Tulip
Revolution takes root, Mar 26)
The whole arsenal of US foundations
- National Endowment for Democracy,
International Republic Institute, Ifes, Eurasia
Foundation, Internews, among others - which
fueled opposition movements in Serbia, Georgia
and Ukraine, has also been deployed in Bishkek
[Kyrgyzstan] ... Practically everything that
passes for civil society in Kyrgyzstan is
financed by these US foundations, or by the US
Agency for International Development (USAID). At
least 170 non-governmental organizations charged
with development or promotion of democracy have
been created or sponsored by the Americans. The
US State Department has operated its own
independent printing house in Bishkek since 2002
- which means printing at least 60 different
titles, including a bunch of fiery opposition
newspapers. USAID invested at least $2 million
prior to the Kyrgyz elections - quite something
in a country where the average salary is $30 a
month. American policymakers have
been aided greatly by the harsh and heavy-handed
rule of corrupt local leaders and by the crude
politics of Russian President Vladimir Putin who,
in his attempt to protect the Russian "near
abroad" has positioned himself to fail in country
after country. As Ian Traynor of the British
Guardian writes, "He has managed to maneuver
himself into the unenviable position of being
identified as a not very effective supporter and
protector of unsavory regimes throughout the
post-Soviet space." And, of course, they have been
aided by the genuine urge of peoples from
Kyrgyzstan to Ukraine not to be under the thumb of
various Putin-style semi-autocrats - or worse.
(You could say, in a way, that the "near
abroads" of both former superpowers have been
falling away for years now; for, in a similar
manner, an urge to break away and implement new
forms of democratic and economic independence from
Washington's diktats has been evident in our
former Latin American "backyard" - from Argentina
to Bolivia, Brazil to Venezuela - the difference
being that the Latin American version of this has
lacked the funds from a distant superpower.)
The result of all this has been that, with
the exception of Belarus and Siberia, Russia has
been pushed back into something reminiscent
perhaps of its borders several centuries ago. This
has to be a dream result for former anti-Soviet
cold warriors like Vice President Dick Cheney and
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. After all,
they've accomplished what even the most rabid cold
warriors of the early 1950s could only have
dreamed of. They have turned "containment" into
"rollback".
In the meantime, the Pentagon,
firmly ensconced in an ever-expanding set of bases
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia,
has Iran militarily encircled. With approximately
160,000 troops (not counting mercenaries) and all
those planes and helicopters, it now occupies two
countries right in the oil and natural gas
heartlands of the planet.
In fact, though
their situations are in many ways different, there
are certain (enforced) similarities between Iraq
and Afghanistan. In neither country did we arrive
with an exit strategy, because in neither case did
we plan on departing. Both countries are ruled by
exiles, effectively installed by us. Realistically
speaking, both the government in Baghdad's Green
Zone and the one in Kabul are, in the kindest of
terms, "wards" of the United States. Both lack the
ability to defend themselves. The Iraqi government
is essentially installed inside a vast American
military base and, as Maitra points out, "the
inner core of Karzai's security is run by the US
State Department with personnel provided by
private contractors". (As a little thought
experiment, try to imagine this in reverse. What
would we make of an American president whose
secret service was made up of foreigners hired by
the government of Karzai?)
In both
countries, democratic elections of a sort were
conducted not just under the gaze of, but under
the actual guns of, the occupiers (though when it
comes to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, the
Bush administration quite correctly insists that
democratic elections shouldn't be run in an
occupied country). Above all, in both countries,
the Bush administration is eager for a "strategic
partnership", which means that its officials are
eager to remain free to act beyond anyone's laws,
in any manner of their choosing, and with almost
complete imperial impunity.
Jails
In recent months, the best news reporting on
Afghanistan has focused on the detention and
jailing practices of Americans in that country and
has been based largely on limited investigations
conducted by one or another part of our
government. A December Washington Post piece by R
Jeffrey Smith, while discussing "a wide range of
shortcomings in the military's handling of
prisoners in Afghanistan", managed to mention that
we have "roughly two dozen" prisons in that
country. Smith's piece began:
A recent classified assessment of US
military detention facilities in Afghanistan
found that they have been plagued by many of the
problems that existed at military prisons in
Iraq, including weak or nonexistent guidance for
interrogators, creating what the assessment
described as an "opportunity" for prisoner
abuse. In such pieces, there are
always "shortcomings" in American practices or
dangerous "opportunities" still available for
"abuse". (The word torture is seldom used in the
US media in such situations). The major abuses
almost invariably turn out to have been largely
over by the time the investigation being reported
on took place. The Smith piece ends typically: "US
forces have 'tightened up procedures for training
up our people to handle and care for the
prisoners', Keeton said. They now have standard
operating procedures in place, she said, and
mechanisms to enforce them." All of which proves
true until the next batch of horrors pours out.
A recent Dana Priest piece for the Post on
long past crimes against Afghans has a similar
flavor. ("The CIA's inspector general is
investigating at least half a dozen allegations of
serious abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, including
two previously reported deaths in Iraq, one in
Afghanistan and the death at the Salt Pit, US
officials said. A CIA spokesman said yesterday
that the agency actively pursues allegations of
misconduct.") Such acts (or crimes) are normally
dealt with in the American press as individual
cases - just as recently stories of the various
"extraordinary renditions", global kidnappings of
terror suspects, and the like, many of whom then
passed through Afghan jails, have trickled out
largely as individual tales of terror and
mistreatment, even if sometimes then toted up.
They are essentially part of what really is the
"bad apple" school of journalism, largely based on
various military or official investigations of
what the military, intelligence agencies, and the
Bush administration have done.
To see the
larger patterns in this you usually have to look
elsewhere. For instance, Emily Bazelon of Mother
Jones magazine had this to say (From Bagram to Abu
Ghraib)
Hundreds of prisoners have come
forward, often reluctantly, offering accounts of
harsh interrogation techniques including sexual
brutality, beatings, and other methods designed
to humiliate and inflict physical pain. At least
eight detainees are known to have died in US
custody in Afghanistan, and in at least two
cases military officials ruled that the deaths
were homicides. Many of the incidents were known
to US officials long before the Abu Ghraib
scandal erupted; yet instead of disciplining
those involved, the Pentagon transferred key
personnel from Afghanistan to the Iraqi prison
... Even now, with the attention of the media
and Congress focused on Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo, the problems in Afghanistan seem to
be continuing. As it turns out, the
problems are indeed continuing and in a form that
simply cannot be read about in the mainstream
media in this country. Adrian Levy and Cathy
Scott-Clark went to Afghanistan for the British
Guardian and traveled the country investigating
American detention practices to produce a piece,
"One huge US jail", that really should be read in
full by every American. They do what any good
reporter should do: They attempt to put together
the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, take in the
overall picture, and then draw the necessary
conclusions.
They start by saying,
"Washington likes to hold up Afghanistan as an
exemplar of how a rogue regime can be replaced by
democracy. Meanwhile, human-rights activists and
Afghan politicians have accused the US military of
placing Afghanistan at the hub of a global system
of detention centers where prisoners are held
incommunicado and allegedly subjected to torture."
Then, based on their own investigations, Levy and
Scott-Clark lay out the geography of detention in
America's Afghanistan:
Prisoner transports crisscross the
country between a proliferating network of
detention facilities. In addition to the camps
in Gardez, there are thought to be US holding
facilities in the cities of Khost, Asadabad and
Jalalabad, as well as an official US detention
center in Kandahar, where the tough regime has
been nicknamed "Camp Slappy" by former
prisoners. There are 20 more facilities in
outlying US compounds and fire bases that
complement a major "collection center" at Bagram
air force base. The CIA has one facility at
Bagram and another, known as the "Salt Pit", in
an abandoned brick factory north of Kabul. More
than 1,500 prisoners from Afghanistan and many
other countries are thought to be held in such
jails, although no one knows for sure because
the US military declines to
comment. They conclude that - US
courts having made Bush administration detention
centers in Guantanamo, Cuba - vulnerable to
potential prosecution, "What has been glimpsed in
Afghanistan is a radical plan to replace
Guantanamo Bay ... [as an] offshore gulag - beyond
the reach of the US constitution and even the
Geneva conventions." They add:
However, many Afghans who celebrated
the fall of the Taliban have long lost faith in
the US military. In Kabul, Nader Nadery, of the
Human Rights Commission, told us, "Afghanistan
is being transformed into an enormous US jail.
What we have here is a military strategy that
has spawned serious human rights abuses, a
system of which Afghanistan is but one part." In
the past 18 months, the commission has logged
more than 800 allegations of human rights abuses
committed by US troops. The great
game
In the current great game of armed
geopolitical chess the Bush administration is
playing, it's not quite clear who is on the other
side. Is it Putin and his desire to create a new,
more modest version of the Soviet Union? Is it
China - or rather, the anticipation of a future
oil-crazed Chinese move into the region? Is it
largely to isolate Iran and finally create
American-style regime change there? Or is it all
of the above?
Speaking of Russian-American
competition, it has, it seems, become modish for
American officials from our secretary of defense
to assorted generals to brag that, in Afghanistan,
we did in weeks what the Soviets couldn't do in
years. What the Soviets couldn't do in years, of
course, was successfully conquer Afghanistan.
(Despite present appearances, needless to say,
it's not yet clear that the Bush administration
has done so either.)
This seems to me a
bizarre, yet telling expression of American
imperial pride; even a reasonable description of
Afghan realities, as seen from Washington. After
all, the Soviets too swore they were "liberating"
the Afghans from an oppressive way of life as they
staked their imperial claim on the country back in
the late 1970s. In fact, the largest American base
in Afghanistan, Bagram Air Base, is often referred
to in the press as "the former Soviet base". If,
to put this in context, we went back to the Soviet
period and observed Soviet troops in Afghanistan
doing what American troops are now doing (as, in
fact, they did, right down to the grim detention
centers), we would certainly have employed other
terms than "democracy" or even "strategic
partnership" to describe what was going on.
It may be the case that Afghanistan will
prove the perfect Bush "democracy". It had an
election and sooner or later will undoubtedly have
more of them. Its resulting government remains
weak, malleable, and completely dependent on
American forces. The US military and our
intelligence services have had a free hand in
setting up various detention centers, prisons, and
holding camps (where anything goes and no law
rules) that add up to a foreign mini-gulag stuffed
with prisoners, many not Afghan, beyond the reach
of any court. Our 14 airfields and growing network
of bases and outposts are now to be "upgraded" as
part of a "strategic partnership" with an Afghan
government that we put into power and largely
control. These bases, in turn, should serve as a
launching pad for controlling the larger region,
and the detention and torture centers as suitable
places for the unruly of the area. Afghanistan, in
short, is in the process of becoming an
electoral-narco-gulag-permanent-base dependency,
and so qualifies as a model democracy, suitable to
be spread far and wide.
If you wanted to
come up with a little formula for what's happened
you might put it this way:
Afghan spring
American freedom of action
Afghan
democracy
American air bases
So the
Afghanis go to hell while making drugs their
export of choice; the Bush administration gets its
bases; and if you happen to be one of the American
conquerors of that benighted land, you don't
return home to parade down a major thoroughfare in
your chariot with your war booty and slaves before
you (and a slave by your ear whispering about the
vanity of conquerors) a la the Romans, but you do
get an American version of the same. You can go
out on the lecture circuit and make a fortune, or
become a play-by-play TV commentator for the next
American war to come down the pike, or if you're
Tommy Franks, former Centcom commander and
victorious general in our Afghan border war, you
might be "tabbed to join the board of directors of
Outback Steakhouse Inc" with a modest $60,000
annual compensation (plus expenses and fees).
Could life be sweeter - or meatier? Could Outback
Franks be next? Will Outback open a Bagram outlet?
Stay tuned as geopolitics meets the chain
restaurant.
Tom Engelhardt, who
runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of The End of Victory Culture, a
history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.
Published with permission from TomDispatch.
(Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt) |
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