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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Lessons from lost
wars By Tom
Engelhardt
You would think that, after a
decade of watching this double debacle unfold,
there might be a full-scale rush for the exits.
And yet the drawdown of US "combat" troops in
Afghanistan is not scheduled to be completed until
December 31, 2014 (with thousands of advisors,
trainers, and special operations forces slated to
remain behind); the Obama administration is still
negotiating feverishly with the government of
Afghan President Hamid Karzai on an agreement that
- whatever the euphemisms chosen - would leave
Americans garrisoned there for years to come; and,
as in Iraq in 2010 and 2011, American commanders
are openly lobbying for an
even slower withdrawal schedule.
Again as
in Iraq, in the face of the obvious, the official
word couldn't be peachier. In mid-December,
Panetta actually told frontline American troops
there that they were "winning" the war. Our
commanders there similarly continue to tout
"progress" and "gains", as well as a weakening of
the Taliban grip on the Pashtun heartland of
southern Afghanistan, thanks to the flooding of
the region with US surge troops and continual,
devastating night raids by US special operations
forces.
Nonetheless, the real story in
Afghanistan remains grim for a squirming former
superpower - as it has been ever since its
occupation resuscitated the Taliban, the least
popular popular movement imaginable. Typically,
the United Nations has recently calculated that
"security-related events" in the first 11 months
of 2011 rose 21% over the same period in 2010
(something denied by the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO).
Similarly, yet more
resources are being poured into an endless effort
to build and train Afghan security forces. Almost
$12 billion went into the project in 2011 and a
similar sum is slated for 2012, and yet those
forces still can't operate on their own, nor do
they fight particularly effectively (though their
Taliban opposites have few such problems).
Afghan police and soldiers continue to
desert in droves and the US general in charge of
the training operation suggested last year that,
to have the slightest chance of success, it would
need to be extended through at least 2016 or 2017.
(Forget for a moment that an impoverished Afghan
government will be utterly incapable of supporting
or financing the forces being created for it.)
The Pashtun-based Taliban, like any
classic guerrilla force, has faded away before the
overwhelming military of a major power, yet it
still clearly has significant control over the
southern countryside, and in the last year its
acts of violence have spread ever more deeply into
the non-Pashtun north.
And if US forces in
Iraq didn't trust their local partners at the
moment of departure, Americans in Afghanistan have
every reason to be far more nervous. Afghans in
police or army uniforms - some trained by the
Americans or NATO, some possibly Taliban
guerrillas dressed in outfits bought on the black
market - have regularly turned their guns on their
putative allies in what's referred to as
"green-on-blue violence".
As 2011 ended,
for instance, an Afghan army soldier shot and
killed two French soldiers. Not long before,
several NATO troops were wounded when a man in an
Afghan army uniform opened fire on them.
In the meantime, US troop strength is
starting to drop; NATO allies look unsteady
indeed; and the Taliban, whatever its trials and
tribulations, undoubtedly senses that time is on
its side.
Depending on the kindness of
strangers Weak as the several outfits that
make up the Taliban may be, there can be no
question that they are preparing to successfully
outlast the greatest military power of our time.
And mind you, none of this does more than touch on
the debacle that the Afghan War could become. If
you want to judge the full folly of the American
war (and gauge the waning of US power globally),
don't even bother to look at Afghanistan. Instead,
check out the supply lines leading to it.
After all, Afghanistan is a landlocked
country in Central Asia. The US is thousands of
miles away. No giant ports-cum-bases as at Cam
Ranh Bay in South Vietnam in the 1960s are
available to bring in supplies. For Washington, if
the guerrillas it opposes go to war with little
more than the clothes on their backs, its military
is another matter.
From meals to body
armor, building supplies to ammunition, it needs a
massive - and massively expensive - supply system.
It also guzzles fuel the way a drunk downs liquor
and has spent more than $20 billion in Afghanistan
and Iraq annually just on air conditioning.
To keep itself in good shape, it must rely
on tortuous supply lines thousands of miles long.
Because of this, it is not the arbiter of its own
fate in Afghanistan, though this seems to have
gone almost unnoticed for years.
Of all
the impractical wars a declining empire could
fight, the Afghan one may be the most impractical
of all. Hand it to the Soviet Union, at least its
"bleeding wound" - the phrase Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev gave to its Afghan debacle of
the 1980s - was conveniently next door.
For the nearly 91,000 American troops now
in that country, their 40,000 NATO counterparts,
and thousands of private contractors, the supplies
that make the war possible can only enter
Afghanistan three ways: perhaps 20% come in by air
at staggering expense; more than a third arrive by
the shortest and cheapest route - through the
Pakistani port of Karachi, by truck or train
north, and then by truck across narrow mountain
defiles; and perhaps 40% (only "non-lethal"
supplies allowed) via the Northern Distribution
Network (NDN).
The NDN was fully developed
only beginning in 2009, when it belatedly became
clear to Washington that Pakistan had a potential
stranglehold on the American war effort. Involving
at least 16 countries and just about every form of
transport imaginable, the NDN is actually three
routes, two of them via Russia, that funnel just
about everything through the bottleneck of
corrupt, autocratic Uzbekistan.
In other
words, simply to fight its war, Washington has
made itself dependent on the kindness of strangers
- in this case, Pakistan and Russia. It's one
thing when a superpower or great power on the rise
casts its lot with countries that may not be
natural allies; it's quite a different story when
a declining power does so. Russian leaders are
already making noises about the viability of the
northern route if the US continues to displease it
on the placement of its prospective European
missile defense system.
But the more
immediate psychodrama of the Afghan War is in
Pakistan. There, the massive resupply operation is
already a major scandal. It was estimated, for
instance, that, in 2008, 12% of all US supplies
heading from Karachi to Bagram air base went
missing somewhere en route. In what Karachi's
police chief has called "the mother of all scams",
29,000 cargo loads of US supplies have disappeared
after being unloaded at that port.
In
fact, the whole supply system - together with the
local security and protection agreements and
bribes to various groups that are part and parcel
of it along the way - has evidently helped fund
and supply the Taliban, as well as stocking every
bazaar en route and supporting local warlords and
crooks of every sort.
Recently, in
response to American air strikes that killed 24 of
their border troops, the Pakistani leadership
forced the Americans to leave Shamsi air base,
where the CIA ran some of its drone operations,
successfully pressured Washington into at least
temporarily halting its drone air campaign in
Pakistan's borderlands, and closed the border
crossings through which the whole American supply
system must pass. They remain closed almost two
months later. Without those routes, in the long
run, the American war simply cannot be fought.
Though those crossings are likely to be
reopened after a significant renegotiation of
US-Pakistani relations, the message couldn't be
clearer. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well
as in those Pakistani borderlands, have not only
drained American treasure, but exposed the
relative helplessness of the "sole superpower".
Ten (or even five) years ago, the Pakistanis would
simply never have dared to take actions like
these.
As it turned out, the power of the
US military was threateningly impressive, but only
until George W Bush pulled the trigger twice. In
doing so, he revealed to the world that the US
could not win distant land wars against minimalist
enemies or impose its will on two weak countries
in the Greater Middle East. Another reality was
exposed as well, even if it has taken time to sink
in: we no longer live on a planet where it's
obvious how to leverage staggering advantages in
military technology into any other kind of power.
In the process, all the world could see
what the United States was: the other declining
power of the Cold War era. Washington's state of
dependence on the Eurasian mainland is now clear
enough, which means that, whatever "agreements"
are reached with the Afghan government, the future
in that country is not American.
Over the
past decade, the US has been taught a repetitive
lesson when it comes to ground wars on the
Eurasian mainland: don't launch them. The debacle
of the impending double defeat this time around
couldn't be more obvious. The only question that
remains is just how humiliating the coming retreat
from Afghanistan will turn out to be. The longer
the US stays, the more devastating the blow to its
power.
All of this should hardly need to
be said and yet, as 2012 begins, with the next
political season already upon us, it is no less
painfully clear that Washington will be incapable
of ending the Afghan War any time soon.
At
the height of what looked like success in Iraq and
Afghanistan, American officials fretted endlessly
about how, in the condescending phrase of the
moment, to put an "Afghan face" or "Iraqi face" on
America's wars. Now, at a nadir moment in the
Greater Middle East, perhaps it's finally time to
put an American face on America's wars, to see
them clearly for the imperial debacles they have
been - and act accordingly.
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