Page 2 of 2 Plus and minus: How to win in Afghanistan
By Tariq Ali
just couldn't bring ourselves to accept that bombing Afghans was no different
from bombing the landscape" was the way he summed up the situation.
Morale inside the army there is low, he told me. The aggression unleashed
against Afghan civilians often hides a deep depression. He does not, however,
encourage others to follow in his footsteps. As he sees it, each soldier must
make that choice for himself, accepting with it the responsibility that going
absent permanently entails. Jules was convinced, however, that the war could
not be won and did not want to see any more of his friends die. That's why he
was wearing an "Obama out of Afghanistan" t-shirt.
Before he revealed his identity, I mistook this young soldier - a
Filipino-American born in southern California - for an Afghan. His
features reminded me of the Hazara tribesmen he must have encountered in Kabul.
Trained as a mortar gunner and paratrooper from Fort Benning, Georgia, he was
later assigned to the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg. Here is part of the account
he offered me:
I deployed to southeastern Afghanistan in January 2007.
We controlled everything from Jalalabad down to the northernmost areas of
Kandahar province in Regional Command East. My unit had the job of pacifying
the insurgency in Paktika, Paktia, and Khost provinces - areas that had
received no aid, but had been devastated during the initial invasion. Operation
Anaconda [in 2002] was supposed to have wiped out the Taliban. That was the
boast of the military leaders, but ridiculed by everyone else with a brain.
He spoke also of how impossible he found it to treat the Afghans as subhumans:
I
swear I could not for a second view these people as anything but human. The
best way to fashion a young hard dick like myself [dick being an acronym for
dedicated infantry combat killer] is simple and the effect of racist
indoctrination. Take an empty shell off the streets of LA or Brooklyn, or maybe
from some Podunk town in Tennessee ... and these days America isn't in short
supply ... I was one of those no-child-left-behind products …
Anyway, you take this empty vessel and you scare the living shit out of him,
break him down to nothing, cultivate a brotherhood and camaraderie with those
he suffers with, and fill his head with racist nonsense like all Arabs, Iraqis,
Afghans are hajj. Hajj hates you. Hajj wants to hurt your family. Hajj children
are the worst because they beg all the time. Just some of the most hurtful and
ridiculous propaganda, but you'd be amazed at how effective it's been in
fostering my generation of soldiers.
As this young man spoke to
me, I felt he should be testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. The effect of the war on those carrying out the orders is leaving
scars just as deep as the imprints of previous imperial wars. Change we can
believe in must include the end of this, which means, among other things, a
withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In my latest book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power,
I have written of the necessity of involving Afghanistan's neighbors in a
political solution that ends the war, preserves the peace, and reconstructs the
country. Iran, Russia, India and China, as well as Pakistan, need to be engaged
in the search for a political solution that would sustain a genuine national
government for a decade after the withdrawal of the Americans, NATO, and their
quisling regime. However, such a solution is not possible within the context of
the plans proposed by both present Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Obama,
which focus on a new surge of American troops in Afghanistan.
The main task at hand should be to create a social infrastructure and thus
preserve the peace, something that the West and its horde of attendant
non-governmental organizations has failed to do. School buildings constructed,
often for outrageous sums, by foreign companies that lack furniture, teachers
and kids are part of the surreal presence of the West, which cannot last.
Whether you are a policymaker in the next administration or an absent-without
leave veteran of the Afghan war in Canada, Operation Enduring Freedom of 2001
has visibly become an operation enduring disaster. Less clear is whether an
Obama administration can truly break from past policy or will just create a
military-plus add-on to it. Only a total break from the catastrophe that George
W Bush, Cheney and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld created in
Afghanistan will offer pathways to a viable future.
For this to happen, both external and domestic pressures will probably be
needed. China is known to be completely opposed to a NATO presence on, or near,
its borders, but while Beijing has proved willing to exert economic pressure to
force policy changes in Washington - as it did when the Bank of China "cut its
exposure to agency debt last summer", leaving US Treasury Secretary Hank
Paulson with little option but to functionally nationalize the mortgage giants
- it has yet to use its diplomatic muscle in the region.
But don't think that will last forever. Why wait until then? Another external
pressure will certainly prove to be the already evident destabilizing effects
of the Afghan war on neighboring Pakistan, a country in a precarious economic
state, with a military facing growing internal tensions.
Domestic pressure in the US to pull out of Afghanistan remains weak, but could
grow rapidly as the extent of the debacle becomes clearer and NATO allies
refuse to supply the shock-troops for the future surge.
In the meantime, they're predicting a famine in Afghanistan this winter.
Tariq Ali, writer, journalist and filmmaker, contributes regularly to a
range of publications including the Guardian, the Nation and the London Review
of Books. His most recent book, just published, is
The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power(Scribner,
2008).
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