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2 The US fans Afghanistan
flames By Tom Engelhardt and
Nick Turse
Is it all over but the
(anti-American) shouting - and the killing? Are
the exits finally coming into view?
Sometimes, in a moment, the fog lifts, the
clouds shift, and you can finally see the
landscape ahead with startling clarity. In
Afghanistan, Washington may be reaching that
moment in a state of panic, horror, and confusion.
Even as an anxious US commander withdrew American
and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
advisers from Afghan ministries around Kabul last
weekend - approximately 300, military spokesman
James Williams tells TomDispatch - the ability of
American soldiers to remain on giant fortified
bases eating pizza and fried chicken into the
distant future is not in doubt.
No set of
Taliban guerrillas, suicide bombers, or armed Afghan
"allies" turning their
guns on their American "brothers" can alter that -
not as long as Washington is ready to bring the
necessary supplies into semi-blockaded Afghanistan
at staggering cost. But sometimes that's the least
of the matter, not the essence of it. So if you're
in a mood to mark your calendars, late February
2012 may be the moment when the end game for
America's second Afghan War, launched in October
2001, was initially glimpsed.
Amid the
reportage about the recent explosion of Afghan
anger over the torching of Korans in a burn pit at
Bagram Air Base, there was a tiny news item that
caught the spirit of the moment. As anti-American
protests (and the deaths of protestors) mounted
across Afghanistan, the German military made a
sudden decision to immediately abandon a 50-man
outpost in the north of the country.
True,
they had planned to leave it a few weeks later,
but consider the move a tiny sign of the
increasing itchiness of Washington's NATO allies.
The French have shown a similar inclination to
leave town since, earlier this year, four of their
troops were blown away (and 16 wounded) by an
Afghan army soldier, as three others had been shot
down several weeks before by another Afghan in
uniform. Both the French and the Germans have also
withdrawn their civilian advisors from Afghan
government institutions in the wake of the latest
unrest.
Now, it's clear enough: the
Europeans are ready to go. And that shouldn't be
surprising. After all, we're talking about NATO,
whose soldiers found themselves in distant
Afghanistan in the first place only because, since
World War II, with the singular exception of
French President Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s,
European leaders have had a terrible time saying
"no" to Washington. They still can't quite do so,
but in these last months it's clear which way
their feet are pointed.
Which makes sense.
You would have to be blind not to notice that the
American effort in Afghanistan is heading into the
tank.
The surprising thing is only that
the Obama administration, which recently began to
show a certain itchiness of its own - speeding up
withdrawal dates and lowering the number of forces
left behind - remains remarkably mired in its
growing Afghan disaster. Besieged by demonstrators
there, and at home by Republican presidential
hopefuls making hay out of a situation from hell,
its room to maneuver in an unraveling,
increasingly chaotic situation seems to grow more
limited by the day.
Sensitivity
training The Afghan War shouldn't be the
world's most complicated subject to deal with.
After all, the message is clear enough. Eleven
years in, if your forces are still burning Korans
in a deeply religious Muslim country, it's way too
late and you should go.
Instead, the US
command in Kabul and the administration back home
have proceeded to tie themselves in a series of
bizarre knots, issuing apologies, orders, and
threats to no particular purpose as events
escalated. Soon after the news of the Koran
burning broke, for instance, General John R Allen,
the US war commander in Afghanistan, issued orders
that couldn't have been grimmer (or more feeble)
under the circumstances. Only a decade late, he
directed that all US military personnel in the
country undergo 10 days of sensitivity "training
in the proper handling of religious materials".
Sensitivity, in case you hadn't noticed at
this late date, has not been an American strong
suit there. In the headlines in the last year, for
instance, were revelations about the 12-soldier
"kill team" that "hunted" Afghan civilians "for
sport," murdered them, and posed for demeaning
photos with their corpses. There were the four
wisecracking US Marines who videotaped themselves
urinating on the bodies of dead Afghans - whether
civilians or Taliban guerrillas is unknown - with
commentary ("Have a good day, buddy… Golden - like
a shower"). There was also that sniper unit
proudly sporting a Nazi SS banner in another
photographed incident and the US combat outpost
named "Aryan." And not to leave out the allies,
there were the British soldiers who were filmed
"abusing" children.
And that's just the
tip of the iceberg when it comes to how Afghans
have often experienced the American and NATO
occupation of these last years. To take but one
example that recently caused outrage, there were
the eight shepherd boys, aged six to 18,
slaughtered in a NATO air strike in Kapisa
Province in northern Afghanistan (with the usual
apology and forthcoming "investigation," as well
as claims, denied by Afghans who also
investigated, that the boys were armed).
More generally, there are the hated night
raids launched by special operations forces that
break into Afghan homes, cross cultural boundaries
of every sort, and sometimes leave death in their
wake. Like errant American and NATO air
operations, which have been commonplace in these
war years, they are reportedly deeply despised by
most Afghans.
All of these, in turn, have
been protested again and again by Afghan President
Hamid Karzai. He has regularly demanded that the
US military cease them (or bring them under Afghan
control). Being the president of Afghanistan,
however, he has limited leverage and so American
officials have paid little attention to his
complaints or his sense of what Afghans were
willing to take.
The results are now
available for all to see in an explosion of anger
spreading across the country. How far this can
escalate and how long it can last no one knows.
But recent experience indicates that, once a
population heads for the streets, anything can
happen. All of this could, of course, peter out,
but with more than 30 protesters already dead, it
could also take on a look reminiscent of the
escalating civil war in Syria - including, as has
already happened on a small scale in the past,
whole units of Afghan security forces defecting to
the Taliban.
Unfolding events have visibly
overwhelmed and even intimidated the Americans in
charge. However, as religious as the country may
be and holy as the Koran may be considered, what's
happened cannot be fully explained by the book
burning. It is, in truth, an explosion a decade in
coming.
Precursors and
omens After the grim years of Taliban rule,
when the Americans arrived in Kabul in November
2001, liberation was in the air. More than 10
years later, the mood is clearly utterly
transformed and, for the first time, there are
reports of "Taliban songs" being sung at
demonstrations in the streets of the capital.
Afghanistan is, as the New York Times reported
last weekend (using language seldom seen in
American newspapers) "a religious country fed up
with foreigners"; or as Laura King of the Los
Angeles Times put it, there is now "a visceral
distaste for Western behavior and values" among
significant numbers of Afghans.
Years of
pent up frustration, despair, loathing, and
desperation are erupting in the present protests.
That this was long on its way can't be doubted.
Among the more shocking events in the wake
of the Koran burnings was the discovery in a room
in the heavily guarded Afghan Interior Ministry in
Kabul of the bodies of an American lieutenant
colonel and major, each evidently executed with a
shot in the back of the head while at work. The
killer, who worked in the ministry, was evidently
angered by the Koran burnings and possibly by the
way the two Americans mocked Afghan protesters and
the Koran itself. He escaped. The Taliban (as in
all such incidents) quickly took responsibility,
though it may not have been involved at all.
What clearly rattled the American command,
however, and led them to withdraw hundreds of
advisors from Afghan ministries around Kabul was
that the two dead officers were "inside a secure
room" that bars most Afghans. It was in the
ministry's command and control complex. (By the
way, if you want to grasp some of the problems of
the last decade just consider that the Afghan
Interior Ministry includes an area open to
foreigners, but not to most Afghans who work
there.)
As the New York Times put it, the
withdrawal of the advisors was "a clear sign of
concern that the fury had reached deeply into even
the Afghan security forces and ministries working
most closely with the coalition." Those two dead
Americans were among four killed in these last
days of chaos by Afghan "allies." Meanwhile, the
Taliban urged Afghan police and army troops, some
of whom evidently need no urging, to attack US
military bases and American or NATO forces.
Two other US troops died outside a small
American base in Nangarhar Province near the
Pakistani border in the midst of an Afghan
demonstration in which two protestors were also
killed. An Afghan soldier gunned the Americans
down and then evidently escaped into the crowd of
demonstrators. Such deaths, in a recent Washington
Post piece, were termed "fratricide," though that
perhaps misconstrues the feelings of many Afghans,
who over these last years have come to see the
Americans as occupiers and possibly despoilers,
but not as brothers.
Historically
unprecedented in the modern era is the way, in the
years leading up to this moment, Afghans in police
and army uniforms have repeatedly turned their
weapons on American or NATO troops training,
working with, or patrolling with them. Barely more
than a week ago, for instance, an Afghan policeman
killed the first Albanian soldier to die in the
war. Earlier in the year, there were those seven
dead French troops. At least 36 US and NATO troops
have died in this fashion in the past year. Since
2007, there have been at least 47 such attacks.
These have been regularly dismissed as "isolated
incidents" of minimal significance by US and NATO
officials and, unbelievably enough, are still
being publicly treated that way.
Yet not
in Iraq, nor during the Vietnam War, nor the
Korean conflict, nor even during the Philippine
Insurrection at the turn of the twentieth century
were there similar examples of what once would
have been called "native troops" turning on those
training, paying for, and employing them. You
would perhaps have to go back to the Sepoy
Rebellion, a revolt by Indian troops against their
British officers in 1857, for anything comparable.
In April 2011, in the most devastating of
these incidents, an Afghan air force colonel
murdered nine US trainers in a heavily guarded
area of Kabul International Airport. He was
reportedly angry at Americans generally and
evidently not connected to the Taliban. And
consider this an omen of things to come: his
funeral in Kabul was openly attended by 1,500
mourners.
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