Page 1 of 2 Fighting the 'good' war
By Jack A Smith
The United States invasion and occupation of Afghanistan entered its ninth year
in October, and the majority of Americans now oppose the war. So far it has
failed to achieve US objectives, and it is likely the Obama administration's
expansion of the war will compound the failure.
Al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and the Taliban's Mullah Omar - Washington's
principal enemy leaders in the Afghan war - are not only alive, free and still
taunting the White House after all these years, but appear to believe they now
have the upper hand in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden's purpose has always been to draw the United States ever deeper into
armed conflict with Islamic society in order to degrade America's image,
undermine its economy, and gain recruits. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan
played directly into al-Qaeda's hands, as will Washington's effort to widen the
Afghan
conflict, especially as it penetrates Pakistan and alienates its masses of
people in the process.
So far the two wars launched by president George W Bush have cost the US the
antagonism of much of the Muslim world, serious erosion of its own democracy
and reputation, and over a trillion dollars. Even if the wars end soon, says
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E Stiglitz, the overall expenditure -
including everything from long-term care for severely injured troops to
interest on the war debt - will exceed $3 trillion, enough to end world poverty
and hunger.
Speaking about Afghanistan this summer, President Barack Obama declared: "This
is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity." Many war opponents argue
that it is indeed a war of choice, and that international police work would
have been far more successful and just.
We'll discuss this later in the article, along with the fact that the
Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, and for that matter the September 11, 2001
attacks, a tragedy that need not have occurred had Washington taken less
war-like actions in the key year of 1978, as well as 2001 and 2003. The fact
that the US has intervened deeply and for long periods over the past 31 years
in a civil war in poverty-stricken, virtually pre-industrial Afghanistan, is
probably not understood by many Americans.
On assuming office, Obama instructed the Pentagon to devise a winning strategy
for Afghanistan. Within weeks, the White House agreed to a new war plan
submitted by General Stanley McChrystal that was supposed to lead to a US
victory. In March, Obama expanded the Afghan war when he heeded a Pentagon
request and ordered 21,000 more US troops to join the battle.
Several months later, however, McChrystal reported that the situation has
deteriorated to the point where the war - ever more clearly displaying its
neo-colonial aspect - "will likely result in failure" within a year unless his
forces increase by a minimum of 45,000 troops and a maximum of 80,000.
Obama has been engaged in "re-thinking" his war strategy since receiving the
general's verdict several weeks ago. He is expected to soon decide whether to
deploy a larger number of additional troops to join 68,000 American fighters
already scheduled for Afghanistan and about 50,000 North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) soldiers. This total presumably includes the 13,000 troops
Obama also deployed without informing the American people, until the Washington
Post broke the story in mid-October.
The White House is investigating two options for continuing the conflict - both
of which would intensify the war and spread it more deeply into Pakistan. As
briefly summarized by The Economist on October 17 they are "manpower-intensive
counter-insurgency (COIN), which aims to win over the Afghan population and
build a stable government; and counter-terrorism, which seeks to deal narrowly
with threats to the West, mainly through air strikes or raids by Special
Forces".
McChrystal, who appears to be supported by top Pentagon brass, backs COIN,
which includes a counter-terrorism aspect as well as "winning the hearts and
minds" of the Afghan people, an effort that utterly failed when tried in
Vietnam, and will fail in Afghanistan. Vice President Joseph Biden and some
other administration advisers back the lower intensity counter-terrorism option
without greatly expanding the number of troops or engaging in "nation
building".
If McChrystal's minimum request is accepted, it means a combined US-NATO force
of over 160,000 troops, not including scores of thousands of "contractors"
doing duties previously performed by soldiers until recent years.
Scott Ritter, the former United Nations chief weapons inspector who testified
before the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, had this
to say about McChrystal's request for more troops in a Truthdig.com article on
October 29:
McChrystal operates under the illusion that American
military power can provide a shield from behind which Afghanistan can remake
itself into a viable modern society. He has deluded himself and others into
believing that the people of Afghanistan want to be part of such a grand social
experiment, and furthermore that they will tolerate the United States being in
charge. The reality of Afghan history, culture and society argue otherwise. The
Taliban, once a defeated entity in the months following the initial American
military incursion into Afghanistan, are resurgent and growing stronger every
day. The principle source of the Taliban's popularity is the resentment of the
Afghan people toward the American occupation and the corrupt proxy government
of Hamid Karzai. There is nothing an additional 40,000 American troops will be
able to do to change that basic equation.
At this stage the
US, NATO and their Afghan forces enjoy at least a 12-1 advantage in troop
strength against the opposing forces, not to mention air power, drone attacks
and an enormous technological, logistics and communications advantage. This
increases to 20-1 if McChrystal's minimum kicks in - and that's evidently still
not enough to defeat the insurgency.
The latest word from the White House and Pentagon is that the new strategy may
devolve to holding Afghanistan's 10 largest cities and leaving the countryside
to fend for itself, except for air strikes.
Our guess is that Obama will view the issue politically, as well as militarily,
and being an inveterate centrist will try to merge both positions, increasing
the number of troops but fewer than McChrystal desires. No one knows for sure,
but he is intentionally creating suspense to magnify the importance of his
eventual plan.
The Washington Post reported on October 26 that Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently conducted theoretical war games to
examine "the likely outcome of inserting 44,000 more troops into the country to
conduct a full-scale counter-insurgency effort aimed at building a stable
Afghan government that can control most of the country. It also examined adding
10,000 to 15,000 more soldiers and Marines as part of an approach that the
military has dubbed counter-terrorism plus."
Complicating the situation, Washington's hand-picked Afghan leader, President
Hamid Karzai, is presiding over an apparently thoroughly corrupt government and
an alienated population. His brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is a suspected drug
lord and wheeler-dealer extraordinaire, who has been on the US Central
Intelligence Agency's payroll since the beginning of the war, along with
innumerable warlords and disreputable officials. The United Nations has
ascertained that August's elections were so fraudulent, mainly by far from
Karzai's side, that a run-off election was set for November 7 between the
incumbent and his independent rival, Abdullah Abdullah, who won 30.5% of the
vote.
On November 1, Abdullah - who had long been associated with the US-supported
Northern Alliance, for which he was a deputy foreign minister at one time -
announced his withdrawal from the second round of voting. He attributed his
decision to the refusal by the government and election commission to accept his
recommendations for changing balloting rules to prevent foul play. Victory was
therefore handed to Karzai, who gets another five-year term.
The Obama administration has been far more critical of Karzai than Bush, and it
is said to have preferred a Karzai-Abdullah power-sharing arrangement to Karzai
alone. Since Abdullah withdrew without calling for an election boycott or
public demonstrations on his own behalf, he may yet end up associated with the
new government in some fashion.
Even though the election affair has not transpired precisely the way Washington
wished, it will have little impact on White House war plans. Obama, who
heretofore identified Afghanistan as the main danger, not Iraq, now says the
danger has spread to Pakistan as well - an unanticipated but logical result of
the Bush wars. The tribal areas of Pakistan are the target of increased US air
power, missile attacks, pilotless drones and special forces engagements.
The Obama administration is exerting heavy pressure on the Islamabad government
of President Asif Ali Zardari, and investing another $7.5 billion in new aid,
to intensify efforts to crush al-Qaeda, the Pakistan Taliban (which was only
formed in 2007) and other groups in the mountainous western section of the
country. This has created increasing anti-American sentiment among the masses
of people in Pakistan who think Zardari is a virtual puppet of Washington. In a
public opinion poll last August, some 60% of the Pakistani people view the US
as the greatest threat to their country, compared to India or al-Qaeda. (See
Why Pakistanis see US as the bigger threat , Asia Times Online,
November 2)
In order to prevail in Afghanistan - or in AfPak, as the two-front war is
described - Obama evidently is considering a major compromise with the Taliban.
Associated Press reported on October 9 that "President Obama is prepared to
accept some Taliban involvement in Afghanistan's political future," both
locally and in the central government. In addition the White House and Pentagon
will seek to bribe the Taliban to stop attacking US troops, as was done with
the Sunni resistance in Iraq, by inducing former opponents to get on
Washington's payroll. The Pentagon is putting aside $1.3 billion to pay Taliban
effectives who wish to "reintegrate into Afghan society".
Most Americans have little understanding of what's going on in Afghanistan, and
no knowledge of the complex events that led up to Bush's bombardment and
invasion in October 2001, weeks after the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and
World Trade Center. The fact is that today's war in Afghanistan is one of
several disastrous consequences of US interference in Afghanistan starting in
1978.
Land-locked, rugged, Texas-sized with a population of about 29 million, and
strategically located where the rich geopolitical resources of the Middle East
and Central Asia converge, Afghanistan gained independence from colonial Great
Britain in 1919. A monarchy was established in this desperately poor country
until overthrown by a military coup in 1973. Another coup took place in April
1978, this time led by leftist forces and military officers determined to enact
reforms to "bring Afghanistan into the 20th century".
The resulting ruling group, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan
(PDPA), set about introducing modernizing reforms, including laws conferring
equality upon the country's oppressed women, and improving the lot of working
people and subsistence farmers. The law granting rights to women was observed
in Kabul and some big cities, but usually ignored elsewhere in territory
controlled by the warlords and Islamic fundamentalists.
The PDPA's immediate establishment of closer relations with the neighboring
Soviet Union set off alarm bells in Washington, which feared Moscow would gain
an important pawn in the Cold War geopolitical chess game. Within months,
president Jimmy Carter and national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
decided to subvert the new leftist regime by "secretly" aiding right-wing
warlords and ultra-orthodox religious groups who were beginning an armed
struggle to overthrow the PDPA government.
The planning was fully operational by mid-1979. Working with the Pakistani
intelligence agency over the years, the CIA poured a minimum of $8 billion into
the coffers of warlords and fundamentalist fighting groups. By early 1979, CIA
operatives started training the mujahideen (the collective name of the Muslim
fighters) at camps it set up in Pakistan, then in Afghanistan itself. The US
also supplied them with sophisticated arms (such as Stinger anti-aircraft
missiles), military advisers, and logistical information for the next decade.
Writing in Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia,
journalist-author Ahmed Rashid said the training camps "became virtual
universities for future Islamic radicalism". In the words of William Blum in
his book, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, "The war
had been a rallying point for Muslim zealots from throughout the world ...
Thousands of veterans of the war ... dispersed to many lands to inflame and
train a new generation of terrorists ready to drink the cup of martyrdom."
Among the recipients of US largesse and support in the mid-1980s was Osama bin
Laden and his new group of mostly foreign fighters in Afghanistan that by 1988
was formally titled al-Qaeda. (The name means, "the Base", a reference to their
training camp.) Bin Laden - the scion of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family - also
received support from Pakistan and from sources in Saudi Arabia.
By the summer of 1979, the right-wing rebel forces were becoming a serious
threat to the Kabul regime, which eventually requested that Moscow send troops
to defend the regime. One year and nine months after the PDPA took power, the
Red Army began arriving in December 1979. (We specify the exact time period
because the Western mass media often suggest that deep US involvement began
after, not at least a half year or more before, the arrival of Soviet troops,
and rarely mention their presence was requested by the Kabul government.)
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