DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Washington's singular
accomplishment By Tom
Engelhardt
In the method, there is
madness; in the comedy, nightmare; in the tragedy,
farce.
And despite everything, there's
still good news when it comes to what Americans
can accomplish in the face of the impossible! No,
not a debt-ceiling deal in Washington. So much
better than that.
According to Thom
Shanker of the New York Times, the United States
military has gathered biometric data - "digital
scans of eyes, photographs of the face and
fingerprints" - on 2.2 million Iraqis and 1.5
million Afghans, with an emphasis on men of an age
to become insurgents, and has saved all of it in
the Automated Biometric Information System, a vast computerized
database. Imagine: we're
talking about one of every 14 Iraqis and one of
every 20 Afghans. Who says America's a can't-do
nation?
The Pentagon is pouring an
estimated US$3.5 billion into its biometric
programs (2007 through 2015). And though it's been
a couple of rough weeks when it comes to money in
Washington, at least no one can claim that
taxpayer dollars have been ill-spent on this
project. Give the Pentagon just another five to 10
years in Iraq and Afghanistan and the biometric
endeavor of a lifetime should be complete. Then
Washington will be able to identify any Iraqi or
Afghan on the planet by eye-scan alone.
Be
proud, America!
And consider that feat a
bright spot of American accomplishment (and not
the only one either) in a couple of weeks of
can't-do news from the Greater Middle East. After
all, despite those biometric scans, an assassin
managed to gun down Our Man in Kandahar (OMK),
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president's
half-brother, in his own residence. He was the
warlord the US military buddied up with as US
troops were surging south in 2009 and who helped
bring American-style "progress" to the Taliban
heartland.
Before he was OMK and our great
ally in southern Afghanistan, he was OEK (Our
Enemy in Kandahar), the down-and-dirty,
election-fixing, drug-running evil dude whom one
American military official more or less threatened
to take out. ("The only way to clean up Chicago is
to get rid of Capone" was the way that Major
General Michael Flynn, the top US military
intelligence officer in the country, put it at the
time.)
And before he was OEK, he was CMK
(the Central Intelligence Agency's Man in
Kandahar), right up there on the agency's payroll;
and even before that, speaking of Chicago, he was
a restaurateur in that city who ... but I'm losing
track of my point, as Americans have a knack for
doing in Afghanistan.
Anyway, as I think I
was saying, OMK-OEK-CMK was assassinated by Sardar
Mohammad, a man he trusted and saw six days a
week, a local "police commander" who, according to
the Washington Post's Joshua Partlow, "spent years
as an ally of the United States in the war against
the Taliban". He was also reputedly a "trusted CIA
contact" who had worked closely with US Special
Forces. He had, so associates believe, either been
turned by the Taliban in the past few months or
was a long-time sleeper agent.
And then
when security couldn't have been tighter, at a
service in a Kandahar mosque where hundreds
(including top government officials from the
region) had gathered to pay their respects to the
dead capo, a suicide bomber wearing a turban-bomb
somehow slipped inside and blew himself up,
killing among others the chief of the Kandahar
province religious council.
In other
words, even though the US military tried to flood
the zone in southern Afghanistan, its claims of
progress and improved security are already giving
way to a nowhere-to-hide Taliban world. These
events could certainly be considered the
insurgency's symbolic goodbye to General David
Petraeus, the US "surge" commander there, who was
just handing over command and readying himself to
return to Washington to become CIA director.
In a further sign of deteriorating
security, an advisor to Afghan President Hamid
Karzai was assassinated (along with a member of
parliament) in heavily guarded Kabul when a squad
of Taliban gunmen stormed his walled compound.
To look on the bright side, though, that
turban bomb may prove useful indeed to the
Homeland Security lobby and the Transportation
Security Administration back in the US. After all,
it's one more thing to strip off in airports along
with the usual assortment of wallets, belts,
baseball caps and footwear; and it's a surefire
Homeland Security Department fear-stoker, hence
fundraiser, to add to suppository bombs and
possibly mythical but well-publicized surgically
implanted bombs. (And bad news for any Sikhs with
air travel in mind.)
Franchising a
no-friends policy Biometrics aside, there
were some other startling numbers out of the
Greater Middle East recently. As it happened, some
non-military types were also looking into eyes,
not for retinal patterns, but patterns of thought.
Pollsters from IBOPE Zogby International checked
out 4,000 sets of eyes in six Middle Eastern
countries - Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,
the United Arab Emirates and Morocco - at least
five of which qualify as US allies, and in none of
which has the US bombed, invaded, or carried out a
night raid in recent memory.
And still,
favorable opinion about the United States had
plunged dismally since the early, heady days of
the Barack Obama presidency. In many cases, the
numbers are now below those registered in the last
year of the George W Bush era (and you can imagine
what they were). Only 5% of post-Arab-Spring
Egyptians, for instance, claimed to have a
"favorable view" of the United States, and across
the six countries, only 10% of respondents
"described themselves as having a favorable view
of Obama".
This spring, Pew pollsters
found similarly plunging favorability ratings in
the Greater Middle East. More recently, they asked
Pakistanis about the CIA drone strikes in that
country's tribal borderlands and came up with a
polling near-impossibility: 97% of Pakistanis
looked on them negatively!
Consider that
another remarkable American accomplishment of the
Obama era - creating such unity of opinion in an
otherwise fractious land!
Once upon a
time, American accomplishments involved the
building of vast highway systems or massive steel
mills or even the winning of a world war, but in
tougher times you take your accomplishments where
you find them. And these polls emphasize one
thing: that what Washington continues to do in the
Greater Middle East with relentless brilliance and
on an almost unimaginable scale is to make no
friends.
Nor is it just in popularity
terms that Washington has been racking up
mind-boggling numbers in the no-friends business.
In a study it just released, the "Costs of War"
project at Brown University found that
Washington's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will, in
the end, eat $3.2 trillion to $4 trillion in
taxpayer money - and that's without adding in the
air war in Libya (perhaps a chump-change billion
dollars), the "war on terror" (in places like
Yemen and Somalia where, as Jeremy Scahill reports
in the Nation magazine, the CIA is running quite a
covert operation from a walled compound in the
confines of Mogadishu's international airport),
our continuing frenzy of base-building and ally
supporting in the Persian Gulf area, military aid
to the region, and so on.
In other words,
not making friends in the Greater Middle East
turns out to be a spectacularly budget-busting
undertaking - and so an accomplishment in its own
right. And rest assured, Washington isn't likely
to settle for 10% or 5% on those favorability
figures either, not when absolute perfection in
unpopularity is within reach.
Just in the
past weeks, in a clear effort to lower those
numbers, Washington has launched air attacks in
Somalia (at least two wounded), Yemen (50 dead),
Pakistan (at least 48 dead), Libya (no count), and
Afghanistan (at least 40, including children).
Despite what Washington officials imagine, drones
are, in practice, neither precise nor effective
weapons. But they are radicalizing instruments in
an American war that, again in practice, is not
just on but for terror.
In the same
period, ex-CIA director and now Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta landed in Iraq and promptly
launched a volley of threats at the Iranians,
Shi'ite militias in Iraq, and the Iraqi
government. Meanwhile, just to make sure
Washington doesn't lose its unique unpopularity
franchise in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the
State Department issued a "stern warning" to and
threatened prosecution of those Americans who
boarded boats in the blockade-busting Gaza
flotilla, almost none of which ever made it out of
Greek harbors.
If those favorability
numbers haven't gone lower in the brief period
since the Zogby pollsters finished their latest
round of polling, one thing can be said: it wasn't
for lack of trying.
A modern Gordian
knot Nor should we leave the subject of
no-friends franchises without making special
mention of the remarkable American one in
Pakistan. Not so long ago, an elite SEAL team set
off "SEAL-mania" in the US by launching a strike
on Osama bin Laden's hideout-in-plain-sight in
Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing the al-Qaeda leader
without a warning to the Pakistani government or
military.
The response there seems to have
been a new round of America-phobia - thus
undoubtedly fulfilling Bin Laden's fondest dream:
that even in death he would sink Washington deeper
into the quagmire of the Greater Middle East.)
A farcical ballet followed between the
Pakistani military, its intelligence services, its
civilian government and the Obama administration.
The Pakistanis promptly ordered 120 US special
operations forces training the paramilitary
Frontier Corps in those tribal areas out of the
country. It refused to issue visas for US
"equipment technicians" and arrested five men who
had aided the CIA in tracking down bin Laden.
Washington responded with the usual "stern
warnings", accused the Pakistanis of tipping off
al-Qaeda bomb-makers in those borderlands before
they could be caught, and held back equipment
meant for the Frontier Corps. Congress began to
balk on the Pakistani aid package.
The
Pakistanis, in turn, threatened to halt CIA drone
flights from the biggest of the three air bases
the agency borrows in that country. The Obama
administration responded that, with or without
those bases, its air campaign would go on, and
then sent in the drones repeatedly to hammer the
point home.
It also held back $800 million
in military aid - not enough to truly matter, but
just enough to further tick off the Pakistanis.
Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar jabbed
back by threatening to withdraw his country's
troops from the Afghan border areas. "We cannot
afford to keep our military out in the mountains
for such a long period of time," he said in a TV
interview.
Meanwhile, envoys ferried back
and forth with the usual grab bag of threats,
bribes, pleas and meaningless statements of unity
between allies. And so it went.
Think of
the Washington-Islamabad relationship, wrapped in
the disaster of the Afghan war, as a classic
can't-live-with-'em-or-without-'em marriage made
in hell. Or, if you prefer, think of it, now so
many decades and two Afghan wars old, as a kind of
Gordian knot.
In 333 BC, with a single
swift stroke of his sword, Alexander the Great
famously solved the problem of a knot on an ox
cart in Gordium (in modern Turkey) that no one
could untie. He sliced it open, so the story goes,
in what has always been considered an ingenious
response to an otherwise insoluble problem.
America's Gordian knot in Pakistan, as in
Afghanistan and the Greater Middle East, is beyond
untying. Hold back that $800 million, send in the
drones, cajole, plead, threaten, issue stern
warnings, train, equip, bribe, kill. None of it
does the trick. None of it will. Alexander would
have known what to do. Washington is clueless.
Thought about a certain way, this might be
the ultimate American accomplishment of the
present moment.
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