Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Yes, we could ... get out!
By Tom Engelhardt
Yes, we could. No kidding. We really could withdraw our massive armies, now
close to 200,000 troops combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and that's not
even counting our similarly large stealth army of private contractors, which
helps keep the true size of our double occupations in the shadows). We could
undoubtedly withdraw them all reasonably quickly and reasonably painlessly.
Not that you would know it from listening to the debates in Washington or
catching the mainstream news. There, withdrawal, when discussed at all, seems
like an undertaking beyond the waking imagination. In Iraq alone, all those
bases to dismantle and millions of pieces of equipment to send home in a
draw-down operation worthy of years of intensive effort, the sort of thing that
makes the desperate British evacuation from Dunkirk in World War II look like a
Sunday stroll in the park. And that's only the technical side of the matter.
Then there's the conviction that anything but a withdrawal that would make
molasses in January look like the hare of Aesopian fable - at least two years
in Iraq, five to ten in Afghanistan - would endanger the planet itself, or at
least its most important country: us. Without our eternally steadying hand, the
Iraqis and Afghans, it's taken for granted, would be lost. Without the help of
US forces, for example, would the Maliki government ever have been able to
announce the death of the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Not likely, whereas the US
has knocked off its leadership twice, first in 2006, and again, evidently, last
week.
Of course, before our troops entered Baghdad in 2003 and the American
occupation of that country began, there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq. But that's a
distant past not worth bringing up. And forget as well the fact that our
invasions and wars have proven thunderously destructive, bringing chaos,
misery, and death in their wake, and turning, for instance, the health care
system of Iraq, once considered an advanced country in the Arab world, into a
disaster zone (that - it goes without saying - only we Americans are now
equipped to properly fix). Similarly, while regularly knocking off Afghan
civilians at checkpoints on their roads and in their homes, at their
celebrations and at work, we ignore the fact that our invasion and occupation
opened the way for the transformation of Afghanistan into the first
all-drug-crop agricultural nation and so the planet's premier narco-nation.
It's not just that the country now has an almost total monopoly on growing
opium poppies (hence heroin), but according to the latest UN report, it's now
cornering the hashish market as well. That's diversification for you.
It's a record to stand on and, evidently, to stay on, even to expand on. We're
like the famed guest who came to dinner, broke a leg, wouldn't leave, and
promptly took over the lives of the entire household. Only in our case, we
arrived, broke someone else's leg, and then insisted we had to stay and break
many more legs, lest the world become a far more terrible place.
It's known and accepted in Washington that, if we were to leave Afghanistan
precipitously, the Taliban would take over, al-Qaeda would be back big time in
no time, and then more of our giant buildings would obviously bite the dust.
And yet, the longer we've stayed and the more we've surged, the more resurgent
the Taliban has become, the more territory this minority insurgency has spread
into. If we stay long enough, we may, in fact, create the majority insurgency
we claim to fear.
It's common wisdom in the US that, before we pull our military out,
Afghanistan, like Iraq, must be secured as a stable enough ally, as well as at
least a fragile junior democracy, which consigns real departure to some distant
horizon. And that sense of time may help explain the desire of US officials to
hinder Afghan President Hamid Karzai's attempts to negotiate with the Taliban
and other rebel factions now. Washington, it seems, favors a “reconciliation
process” that will last years and only begin after the US military seizes the
high ground on the battlefield.
The reality that dare not speak its name in Washington is this: no matter what
might happen in an Afghanistan that lacked us - whether (as in the 1990s) the
various factions there leaped for each other's throats, or the Taliban
established significant control, though (as in the 1990s) not over the whole
country - the stakes for Americans would be minor in nature. Not that anyone of
significance here would say such a thing.
Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans really have in one of the most
impoverished lands on the planet, about as distant from us as could be
imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously? Yet, as if to defy
commonsense, we've been fighting there - by proxy and directly - on and off for
30 years now with no end in sight.
Most Americans evidently remain convinced that ''safe haven'' there was the key
to al-Qaeda's success, and that Afghanistan was the only place in which that
organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even though perfectly real
planning also took place in Hamburg, Germany, which we neither bombed nor
invaded.
In a future in which our surging armies actually succeeded in controlling
Afghanistan and denying it to al-Qaeda, what about Somalia, Yemen, or, for that
matter, England? It's now conveniently forgotten that the first, nearly
successful attempt to take down one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993
was planned in the wilds of New Jersey. Had the Bush administration been paying
the slightest attention on September 10, 2001, or had reasonable precautions
been taken, including locking the doors of airplane cockpits, 9/11 and so the
invasion of Afghanistan would have been relegated to the far-fetched plot of
some Tom Clancy novel.
Vietnam and Afghanistan
Have you noticed, by the way, that there's always some obstacle in the path of
withdrawal? Right now, in Iraq, it's the aftermath of the March 7 election,
hailed as proof that we brought democracy to the Middle East and so, whatever
our missteps, did the right thing. As it happens, the election, as many
predicted at the time, has led to a potentially explosive gridlock and has yet
to come close to resulting in a new governing coalition. With violence on the
rise, we're told, the planned drawdown of American troops to the 50,000 level
by August is imperiled. Already, the process, despite repeated assurances,
seems to be proceeding slowly.
And yet, the thought that an American withdrawal should be held hostage to
events among Iraqis all these years later, seems curious. There's always some
reason to hesitate - and it never has to do with us. Withdrawal would
undoubtedly be far less of a brain-twister if Washington simply committed
itself wholeheartedly to getting out, and if it stopped convincing itself that
the presence of the US military in distant lands was essential to a better
world (and, of course, to a controlling position on planet Earth).
The annals of history are well stocked with countries that invaded and occupied
other lands and then left, often ingloriously and under intense pressure. But
they did it.
It's worth remembering that, in 1975, when the South Vietnamese Army collapsed
and we essentially fled the country, we abandoned staggering amounts of
equipment there. Helicopters were pushed over the sides of aircraft carriers to
make space; barrels of money were burned at the US Embassy in Saigon; military
bases as large as anything we've built in Iraq or Afghanistan fell into North
Vietnamese hands; and South Vietnamese allies were deserted in the panic of the
moment. Nonetheless, when there was no choice, we got out. Not elegantly, not
nicely, not thoughtfully, not helpfully, but out.
Keep in mind that, then too, disaster was predicted for the planet, should we
withdraw precipitously - including rolling communist takeovers of country after
country, the loss of ''credibility'' for the American superpower, and a
murderous bloodbath in Vietnam itself. All were not only predicted by
Washington's Cassandras, but endlessly cited in the war years as reasons not to
leave. And yet here was the shock that somehow never registered among all the
so-called lessons of Vietnam: nothing of that sort happened afterwards.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
