DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Mission failure:
Afghanistan By Tom Engelhardt
Imagine for a moment that almost once a
week for the last six months somebody somewhere in
this country had burst, well-armed, into a movie
theater showing a superhero film and fired into
the audience. That would get your attention,
wouldn't it? James Holmes times 21? It would
dominate the news. We would certainly be
consulting experts, trying to make sense of the
pattern, groping for explanations. And what if the
same thing had also happened almost once every two
weeks in 2011? Imagine the shock, imagine the
reaction here.
Well, the equivalent has
happened in Afghanistan (minus, of course, the
superhero movies). It even has a name:
green-on-blue violence. In 2012 - and twice last
week - Afghan soldiers, policemen, or security
guards, largely in units being trained or
mentored by the US or
its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), have turned their guns on
those mentors, the people who are funding,
supporting, and teaching them, and pulled the
trigger.
It's already happened at least 21
times in this half-year, resulting in 30 American
and European deaths, a 50% jump from 2011, when
similar acts occurred at least 21 times with 35
coalition deaths. (The "at least" is there
because, in May, the Associated Press reported
that, while US and NATO spokespeople were
releasing the news of deaths from such acts,
green-on-blue incidents that resulted in no
fatalities, even if there were wounded, were
sometimes not reported at all.)
Take July.
There have already been at least four such
attacks. The first, on July 1, reportedly involved
a member of the Afghan National Civil Order
Police, a specially trained outfit, shooting down
three British soldiers at a checkpoint in Helmand
Province, deep in the Taliban heartland of the
country. The shooter was captured.
Two
days later, a man in "an Afghan army uniform"
turned his machine gun on American troops just
outside a NATO base in Wardak Province, east of
the Afghan capital Kabul, wounding five before
fleeing. (In initial reports, the shooter in all
such incidents is invariably described as a man
"in an Army/police uniform" as if he might be a
Taliban infiltrator, and he almost invariably
turns out to be an actual Afghan policeman or
soldier.)
Then, on July 22, a security
guard gunned down three police trainers - two
former US Customs and Border Protection agents and
a former United Kingdom Revenue and Customs
Officer (while another retired Border Protection
agent and an Afghan interpreter were wounded).
This happened at a police training facility near
Herat in Afghanistan's generally peaceful
northwest near the Iranian border.
The
next day, a soldier on a military base in Faryab
Province in the north of the country turned his
gun on a group of American soldiers also evidently
working as police trainers, wounding two of them
before being killed by return fire.
Note
that these July attacks were geographically
diverse: one in the Taliban south, one east of the
capital in an area that has seen a rise in Taliban
attacks, and two in areas that aren't normally
considered insurgent hotbeds. Similar attacks have
been going on for years, a number of them far more
high profile, including the deaths of an American
lieutenant colonel and major, each shot in the
back of the head inside the heavily guarded Afghan
Interior Ministry in Kabul; the killing of four
French soldiers (and the wounding of 16) by an
Afghan non-commissioned officer after an argument;
the first killing of an American special forces
operative by a US-trained Afghan commando during a
joint night raid; an elaborate attack organized by
two Afghan soldiers and a civilian teacher at a
joint outpost that killed two Americans, wounded
two more, and disabled an armored vehicle; and the
2011 shooting of nine trainers (eight American
officers and a contractor) in a restricted section
of Kabul International Airport by an Afghan air
force pilot.
In 2007-2008, there were only
four green-on-blue attacks, resulting in four
deaths. When they started multiplying in 2010, the
initial impulse of coalition spokespeople was to
blame them on Taliban infiltrators (and the
Taliban did take credit for most of them). Now, US
or NATO spokespeople tend to dismiss such violence
as individual pique or the result of some personal
grievance against coalition forces rather than
Taliban affiliation. While reaffirming the
coalition mission of training a vast security
force for the country, they prefer to present each
case as if it were a local oddity with little
relation to any of the others - "an isolated
incident [that] has its own underlying
circumstances and motives". (Privately, the US
military is undoubtedly far more worried.)
In fact, there is a striking pattern at
work that should be front-page news here.
Green-on-blue attacks have been countrywide, in
areas of militant insurgency and not; they
continue to escalate, and (as far as we can tell)
are almost always committed by actual members of
the Afghan military or police who have experienced
the American project in their country in a
particularly up-close and personal way.
In
addition, these attacks are, again as far as
anyone can tell, in no way coordinated. They are
individual or small group acts, in some cases
clearly after significant thought and calculation,
in others just as clearly impulsive. Nonetheless,
they do seem to represent a kind of collective
vote, not by ballot obviously, nor - as in Lenin's
phrase about Russia's deserting peasant soldiers
in World War I - with their feet, but with guns.
The number of these events is, after all,
startling, given that an Afghan who turns his
weapon on well-armed American or European allies
is likely to die. A small number of shooters have
escaped and a few have been captured alive
(including one recently sentenced to death in an
Afghan court), but most are shot down. In a
situation where foreign advisors and troops are
now distinctly on guard and on edge - and in some
cases are shadowed by armed compatriots ("guardian
angels") whose job it is to protect them from such
events - these are essentially suicidal acts.
So it's reasonable to assume that, for
every Afghan who acts on such a violent impulse,
there must be a far larger pool of fellow members
of the security forces the coalition is building
who have similar feelings, but don't act on them
(or simply vote with their feet, like the 24,590
soldiers who deserted in the first six months of
2011 alone). Unlike James Holmes's rampage in
Aurora, such acts, extreme as they may be, are not
in the usual sense mad ones. And scattered and
disparate as they may be, they have a distinctly
unitary feel to them. They seem, that is, like a
single repetitive act being committed, as if by
plan and program, across the length and breadth of
the country - or perhaps a primal Afghan scream of
rejection of the American and NATO presence from
an armed people who have known little but
fighting, bloodshed, and destruction for more than
three decades.
If the significance of
green-on-blue violence hasn't quite sunk in yet
here, consider this: such acts in such numbers are
historically unprecedented. No example comes to
mind of a colonial power, neocolonial power, or
modern superpower fighting a war with "native"
allies whose forces repeatedly find the weapons
they have supplied turned on them. There is
nothing in our historical record faintly
comparable - not in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century Indian wars, the Philippine Insurrection
at the turn of the last century, Korea in the
early 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s,
or Iraq in this century. (In Vietnam, the only
somewhat analogous set of events involved US
soldiers, not their South Vietnamese counterparts,
repeatedly turning their weapons on their own
officers in acts that, like "green-on-blue"
violence, got a label all their own: "fragging.")
Perhaps the sole historical example that
comes close might be the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
That, however, was a full-scale revolt, not a
series of unconnected, ever escalating individual
acts.
Whatever the singular bitterness or
complaint behind any specific attack, a cumulative
message clearly lurks in them that the US military
and Washington would undoubtedly prefer not to
hear, and that reporters, even when they are
toting up the numbers, prefer not to consider too
deeply. To do so would be to acknowledge the
full-scale failure of the ongoing American mission
in Afghanistan. After all, what could be more
devastating 12 years after the invasion of that
country than having such attacks come not from the
enemies the US is officially fighting, but from
the Afghans closest to us, the ones we have been
training at a cost of nearly $50 billion to take
over the country as US combat troops drawdown?
What we're seeing in the most violent form
imaginable is a sweeping message from our Afghan
allies, the very security forces Washington plans
to continue bolstering up long after the 2014
drawdown date for US "combat forces" passes. To
the extent that bullets can be translated into
words, that message, uncompromising and
bloody-minded, would be something like: your
mission's failed, get out or die.
If the
Aurora shootings got all the attention here last
week, far more Americans are dying at the hands of
Afghan allies than died in James Holmes's hail of
gunfire. And yet the message from the more deadly
of those rampages is barely in the news and few
here are paying attention.
In reality, the
American mission in Afghanistan failed years ago.
It's as if we refused to notice, but the Afghans
we were training did. Now, they are sending a
message that couldn't be blunter or grimmer from
that endlessly war-torn land. Not to listen is, in
fact, to condemn more Americans to death-by-ally.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of
the American Empire Project and author of The
United States of Fear as well as The End of
Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's
TomDispatch.com. His latest book,
co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator
Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare,
2001-2050. To listen to Timothy MacBain's
latest Tomcast audio interview in which Engelhardt
discusses the historically unprecedented nature of
green-on-blue violence, click here or download it
to your iPod here.
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