Page 1 of
2 How
quickly will the US leave
Afghanistan? By Tom Engelhardt
In the wake of several deaths among its
contingent of troops in a previously peaceful
province in Afghanistan, New Zealand (like France
and South Korea) is now expediting the departure
of its 140 soldiers.
That's not exactly
headline-making news here in the US. If you're an
American, you probably didn't even know that New
Zealand was playing a small part in our Afghan
War. In fact, you may hardly have known about the
part Americans are playing in a conflict that,
over the last decade-plus, has repeatedly been
labeled "the forgotten war."
Still, maybe
it's time to take notice. Maybe the flight of those
Kiwis should be thought
of as a small omen, even if they are departing as
decorously, quietly, and flightlessly as possible.
Because here's the thing: once the November
election is over, "expedited departure" could well
become an American term and the US, as it slips
ignominiously out of Afghanistan, could turn out
to be the New Zealand of superpowers.
You
undoubtedly know the phrase: the best laid plans
of mice and men. It couldn't be more apt when it
comes to the American project in Afghanistan.
Washington's plans have indeed been carefully
drawn up. By the end of 2014, US "combat troops"
are to be withdrawn, but left behind on the giant
bases the Pentagon has built will be thousands of
US trainers and advisers, as well as special
operations forces to go after al-Qaeda remnants
(and other "militants"), and undoubtedly the air
power to back them all up.
Their job will
officially be to continue to "stand up" the
humongous security force that no Afghan government
in that thoroughly impoverished country will ever
be able to pay for. Thanks to a 10-year Strategic
Partnership Agreement that President Barack Obama
flew to Kabul to seal with Afghan President Hamid
Karzai as May began, there they are to remain
until 2020 or beyond.
In other words, it
being Afghanistan, we need a translator. The
American "withdrawal" regularly mentioned in the
media doesn't really mean "withdrawal". On paper
at least, for years to come the US will partially
occupy a country that has a history of loathing
foreigners who won't leave (and making them pay
for it).
Tea boys and old
men Plans are one thing, reality another.
After all, when invading US troops triumphantly
arrived in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in April
2003, the White House and the Pentagon were
already planning to stay forever and a day - and
they instantly began building permanent bases
(though they preferred to speak of "permanent
access" via "enduring camps") as a token of their
intent.
Only a couple of years later, in a
gesture that couldn't have been more emphatic in
planning terms, they constructed the largest (and
possibly most expensive) embassy on the planet as
a regional command center in Baghdad. Yet somehow
those perfectly laid plans went desperately awry
and only a few years later, with American leaders
still looking for ways to garrison the country
into the distant future, Washington found itself
out on its ear. But that's reality for you, isn't
it?
Right now, evidence on the ground - in
the form of dead American bodies piling up -
indicates that even the Afghans closest to us
don't exactly second the Obama administration's
plans for a 20-year occupation. In fact, news from
the deep-sixed war in that forgotten land, often
considered the longest conflict in American
history, has suddenly burst onto the front pages
of our newspapers and to the top of the TV news.
And there's just one reason for that:
despite the copious plans of the planet's last
superpower, the poor, backward, illiterate,
hapless, corrupt Afghans - whose security forces,
despite unending American financial support and
mentoring, have never effectively "stood up" -
made it happen. They have been sending a stark
message, written in blood, to Washington's
planners.
A 15-year-old "tea boy" at a US
base opened fire on Marine special forces trainers
exercising at a gym, killing three of them and
seriously wounding another; a 60- or 70-year-old
farmer, who volunteered to become a member of a
village security force, turned the first gun his
American special forces trainers gave him at an
"inauguration ceremony" back on them, killing two;
a police officer who, his father claims, joined
the force four years earlier, invited Marine
Special Operations advisers to a meal and gunned
down three of them, wounding a fourth, before
fleeing, perhaps to the Taliban.
About
other "allies" involved in similar incidents -
recently, there were at least nine "green-on-blue"
attacks in an 11-day span in which 10 Americans
died - we know almost nothing, except that they
were Afghan policemen or soldiers their American
trainers and mentors were trying to "stand up" to
fight the Taliban. Some were promptly shot to
death. At least one may have escaped.
These green-on-blue incidents, which the
Pentagon recently relabeled "insider attacks",
have been escalating for months. Now, they seem to
have reached a critical mass and so are finally
causing a public stir in official circles in
Washington. A "deeply concerned" President Obama
commented to reporters on the phenomenon ("We've
got to make sure that we're on top of this ...")
and said he was planning to "reach out" to Afghan
President Karzai on the matter. In the meantime,
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta did so, pressing
Karzai to take tougher steps in the vetting of
recruits for the Afghan security forces. (Karzai
and his aides promptly blamed the attacks on the
Iranian and Pakistani intelligence agencies.)
General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs, flew to Afghanistan to consult
with his counterparts on what to make of these
incidents (and had his plane shelled on a runway
at Bagram Air Field - "a lucky shot", claimed a
spokesman for the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization - for his effort). US Afghan war
commander General John Allen convened a meeting of
more than 40 generals to discuss how to stop the
attacks, even as he insisted "the campaign remains
on track". There are now rumblings in congress
about hearings on the subject.
Struggling with the
message Worry about such devastating
attacks and their implications for the American
mission, slow to rise, is now widespread. But much
of this is reported in our media as if in a kind
of code. Take for example the way Laura King put
the threat in a front-page Los Angeles Times piece
(and she was hardly alone). Reflecting
Washington's wisdom on the subject, she wrote that
the attacks "could threaten a linchpin of the
Western exit strategy: training Afghan security
forces in preparation for handing over most
fighting duties to them by 2014." It almost sounds
as if, thanks to these incidents, our combat
troops might not be able to make it out of there
on schedule.
No less striking is the
reported general puzzlement over what lies behind
these Afghan actions. In most cases, the
motivation for them, writes King, "remains
opaque". There are, it seems, many theories within
the US military about why Afghans are turning
their guns on Americans, including personal pique,
individual grudges, cultural touchiness,
"heat-of-the moment disputes in a society where
arguments are often settled with a Kalashnikov",
and in a minority of cases - about a 10th of them,
according to a recent military study, though one
top commander suggested the number could range up
to a quarter - actual infiltration or "coercion"
by the Taliban.
General Allen even
suggested recently that some insider attacks might
be traced to religious fasting for the Islamic
holy month of Ramadan, combined with unseasonable
summer heat, leaving Afghans hungry, tetchy, and
prone to impulsive acts, guns in hand. According
to the Washington Post, however, "Allen
acknowledged that US and Afghan officials have
struggled to determine what's behind the rise in
attacks."
"American officials are still
struggling", wrote the New York Times in an
editorial on the subject, "to understand the
forces at work." And in that the editorial writers
like the general reflected the basic way these
acts are registering here - as a remarkable Afghan
mystery. In other words, in Washington's version
of the blame game, the quirky, unpredictable
Afghans from Hamid Karzai on down are in the
crosshairs. What is the matter with them?
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