It's time, as a start, to stop calling our expanding war in Central and South
Asia "the Afghan War" or "the Afghanistan War". If US President Barack Obama's
special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke doesn't
want to, why should we? Recently, in a BBC interview, he insisted that "the
'number one problem' in stabilizing Afghanistan was Taliban sanctuaries in
western Pakistan, including tribal areas along the Afghan border and cities
like Quetta" in the Pakistani province of Balochistan.
And isn't he right? After all, the US seems to be in the process of trading in
a limited war in a mountainous, poverty-stricken country of 27 million people
for one in an advanced nation of 167 million, with a crumbling economy, rising
extremism, advancing
corruption, and a large military armed with nuclear weapons. Worse yet, the war
in Pakistan seems to be expanding inexorably (and in tandem with American war
planning) from the tribal borderlands ever closer to the heart of the country.
These days, Washington has even come up with a neologism for the change:
"Af-Pak", as in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations. So, in the name
of realism and accuracy, shouldn't we retire "the Afghan War" and begin talking
about the far more disturbing "Af-Pak War"?
And while we're at it, maybe we should retire the word "surge" as well. Right
now, as the Obama plan for that Af-Pak War is being "rolled out", newspaper
headlines have been surging when it comes to accepting the surge paradigm. Long
before the administration's "strategic review" of the war had even been
completed, Obama was reportedly persuaded by former Iraq "surge" commander, now
US Central Command commander, General David Petraeus, to "surge" another 17,000
troops into Afghanistan, starting this May.
For the past two weeks, news has been filtering out of Washington of an
accompanying civilian "surge" into Afghanistan ("Obama's Afghanistan 'surge':
diplomats, civilian specialists"). Oh, and then there's to be that
opium-eradication surge and a range of other so-called surges. As the headlines
have had it: "1,400 Isle Marines to join Afghanistan surge", "US troop surge to
aid Afghan police trainers", "Seabees build to house surge", "Afghan Plan
Detailed As Iraq Surge 'Lite'", and so on.
It seems to matter little that even Petraeus wonders whether the word should be
applied. ("The commander of the US Central Command said Friday that an
Iraq-style surge cannot be a solution to the problems in Afghanistan.") There
are, however, other analogies that might better capture the scope and nature of
the new strategic plan for the Af-Pak War. Think bailout. Think AIG.
The costs of an expanding war
In truth, what we're about to watch should be considered nothing less than the
Great Afghan (or Af-Pak) bailout.
On Friday morning, the president officially rolled out his long-awaited
"comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan", a plan without a
name. If there was little news in it, that was only because of the furious
leaking of prospective parts of it over the previous weeks. So many trial
balloons, so little time.
In a recent 60 Minutes interview (though not in his Friday
announcement), the president also emphasized the need for an "exit strategy"
from the war. Similarly, American commander in Afghanistan, General David
McKiernan, has been speaking of a possible "tipping point", three to five years
away, that might lead to "eventual departure".
Nonetheless, almost every element of the new plan - both those the president
mentioned on Friday and the no-less-crucial ones that didn't receive a nod -
seem to involve the word "more"; that is, more US troops, more US diplomats,
more civilian advisors, more American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization
military advisors to train more Afghan troops and police, more bases and
outpost buildings, more opium-eradication operations, more aid, and more money
to the Pakistani military. Strikingly large-scale as that may be, all of that
doesn't even include the "covert war", fought mainly via unmanned aerial
vehicles, along the Pakistani tribal borderlands, which is clearly going to
intensify.
In the coming year, that US Central Intelligence Agency-run drone war,
according to leaked reports, may be expanded from the tribal areas into
Pakistan's more heavily populated Balochistan province, where some of the
Taliban leadership is supposedly holed up. In addition, so reports in British
papers claim, the US is seriously considering a soft coup against Afghan
President Hamid Karzai.
Disillusioned with the widespread corruption in, and inefficiency of, his
government, the US would create a new "chief executive" or prime ministerial
post not in the Afghan constitution. Karzai would supposedly be turned into a
figurehead "father of the nation". Envoy Holbrooke has officially denied that
Washington is planning any such thing, while a spokesman for Karzai denounced
the idea (both, of course, just fed the flames of the Afghan rumor mill).
What this all adds up to is an ambitious doubling down on just about every bet
already made by Washington in these past years - from the counter-insurgency
war against the Taliban and the counter-terrorism war against al-Qaeda to the
financial love/hate relationship with the Pakistani military and its
intelligence services underway since at least the president Richard Nixon years
of the early 1970s. (Many of the flattering things now being said by US
officials about Pakistani chief of the army staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kiani,
for instance, were also said about the now fallen autocrat General Pervez
Musharraf when he held the same position.)
Despite that mention of the need for an exit strategy and a presidential
assurance that both the Afghan and Pakistani governments will be held to
Iraqi-style "benchmarks" of accountability in the period to come, Obama's is
clearly a jump-in-with-both-feet strategy and, not surprisingly, is sure to
involve a massive infusion of new funds. Unlike with AIG, where the financial
inputs of the US government are at least announced, we don't even have a
ballpark figure for how much is actually involved right now, but it's bound to
be staggering. Just supporting those 17,000 new American troops already ordered
into Afghanistan, many destined to be dispatched to still-to-be-built bases and
outposts in the embattled southern and eastern parts of the country for which
all materials must be trucked in, will certainly cost billions.
Recently, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus dug up some of the construction
and transportation costs associated with the war in Afghanistan and found that,
as an employer, the US Army Corps of Engineers comes in second only to the
Afghan government in that job-desperate country. The corps is spending about $4
billion this year alone on road-building activities, and has slated another
$4-$6 billion for more of the same in 2010; it has, according to Pincus,
already spent $2 billion constructing facilities for the expanding Afghan army
and police forces, and has another $1.2 billion set aside for more such
facilities this year. It is also likely to spend between $400 million and $1.4
billion on as many as six new bases, assorted outposts, and associated air
fields American troops will be sent to in the south.
Throw in hardship pay, supplies, housing and whatever else for the hundreds of
diplomats and advisors in that promised "civilian surge"; add in the $1.5
billion a year the president promised in economic aid to Pakistan over the next
five years, a tripling of such aid (as urged by Vice President Joseph Biden
when he was still a senator); add in unknown amounts of aid to the Pakistani
and Afghan militaries. Tote it up and you've just scratched the surface of
Washington's coming investment in the Af-Pak War. (And lest you imagine that
these costs might, at least, be offset by savings from Obama's plan to draw
down American forces in Iraq, think again. A recent study by the Government
Accountability Office suggests that "Iraq-related expenditures" will actually
increase "during the withdrawal and for several years after its completion".)
Put all this together and you can see why the tactical word "surge" hardly
covers what's about to happen. The administration's "new" strategy and its
"new" thinking - including its urge to peel off less committed Taliban
supporters and reach out for help to regional powers - should really be
re-imagined as but another massive attempted bailout, this time of an Afghan
project, now almost 40 years old, that in foreign policy terms is indeed our
AIG.
Graveyard thinking
As Obama's economic team overseeing the various financial bailouts is made up
of figures long cozy with Wall Street, so his foreign policy team is made up of
figures deeply entrenched in Washington's national security state - former
Clintonistas (including the penultimate Clinton herself), military figures like
National Security Adviser General James Jones, and that refugee from the George
H W Bush era, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. They are classic custodians of
empire. Like the economic team, they represent the ancien regime.
They've now done their "stress tests", which, in the world of foreign policy,
are called "strategic reviews". They recognize that unexpected forces are
pressing in on them. They grasp that the American global system, as it existed
since the truncated American century began, is in danger. They're ready to bite
the bullet and bail it out. Their goal is to save what they care about in ways
that they know.
Unfortunately, the end result is likely to be that, as with AIG, we, the
American people, could end up "owning" 80% of the Af-Pak project without ever
"nationalizing" it - without ever, that is, being in actual control. In fact,
if things go as badly as they could in the Af-Pak War, AIG might end up looking
like a good deal by comparison.
The foreign policy team is no more likely to exhibit genuinely outside-the-box
thinking than the team of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic
Council Chairman Larry Summers has done. Their clear and desperate urge is to
operate in the known zone, the one in which the US is always imagined to be
part of the solution to any problem on the planet, never part of the problem
itself.
In foreign policy (as in economic policy), it took the George W Bush team less
than eight years to steer the ship of state into the shallows where it ran
disastrously aground. And yet, in response, after months of "strategic review",
this team of inside-the-Beltway realists has come up with a combination of
Af-Pak war moves that are almost blindingly expectable.
In the end, this sort of thinking is likely to leave the Obama administration
hostage to its own projects as well as unprepared for the onrush of the
unexpected and unknown, whose arrival may be the only thing that can be
predicted with assurance right now. Whether as custodians of the imperial
economy or the imperial frontier, Obama's people are lashed to the past, to
Wall Street and the national security state. They are ill-prepared to take the
necessary full measure of our world.
If you really want a "benchmark" for measuring how our world has been shifting
on its axis, consider that we have all lived to see a Chinese premier appear at
what was, in essence, an international news conference and seriously upbraid
Washington for its handling of the global economy. That might have been
surprising in itself. Far more startling was the response of Washington. A year
ago, the place would have been up in arms. This time around, from White House
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs ("There's no safer investment in the world than in
the United States ... ") to the president himself ("Not just the Chinese
government, but every investor can have absolute confidence in the soundness of
investments in the United States ... "), Washington's response was to mollify
and reassure.
Face it, we've entered a new universe. The "homeland" is in turmoil, the
planetary frontiers are aboil. Change - even change we don't want to believe in
- is in the air.
In the end, as with the Obama economic team, so the foreign policy team may be
pushed in new directions sooner than anyone imagines and, willy-nilly, into
some genuinely new thinking about a collapsing world. But not now. Not yet.
Like our present financial bailouts, like that extra $30 billion that went into
AIG recently, the new Obama plan is superannuated on arrival. It represents
graveyard thinking.
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