Drawdown in Afghanistan
Friday, June 24th, 2011
Exactly WHEN were we going to get out of Afghanistan,again?
Posts Tagged ‘afghanistan’
Turning the Corner
Sunday, June 26th, 2011
Turning the Corner
If ever there was an overused cliche, it has to be: “turning the corner.” Along with “the light at the end of the tunnel,” and “beginning a new chapter,” these stale chestnuts should be banned from any self respecting political speechwriter’s cupboard. And yet every day we are subjected to speeches in which we have “turned the corner” on fundraising, or winning an election, or even the economy and job creation.
Now, in a stunning display of mediocre speech writing, President Barack Obama has once again trotted out this tired, expired rhetorical horse and proceeded to flog it mercilessly, telling a group of soldiers at Fort Drum that America has indeed “turned the corner,” in Afghanistan.
That a Commander-in-Chief should grasp at straws when trying to boost the morale of troops – especially troops who are fighting a war that has been going on for ten years – is no surprise. However, the fact that Mr. Obama used the phrase almost in the same sentence as the one in which he informs those same troops they’ll have to keep fighting and killing, and dying – virtually forever – borders on the obscene. Telling soldiers we have turned the corner and then declaring only five thousand troops are coming home is like the pilot who tries to temper the bad news that the fourth engine has caught fire by saying: “but we’re making really great time.”
The war in Afghanistan is nowhere near over. We are nowhere near withdrawing our troops from the Middle East. Declaring the pitiful “drawdown” from Afghanistan as some kind of watershed moment in our invasion and occupation of that country is specious. It is an insult, both to the intelligence of the American people and the honor of those that serve in the armed forces.
Of course one can see how the visual of turning the corner would appeal to a politician who ran his last campaign on the promise of “change.” There are many kinds of corners, however. One wonders, just what sort of corner the president is referring to? Is it the sort of definitive absolute decision implied by taking the “exit only” ramp on the highway? Or is it more of a gradual turn that might morph into a chicane or “ess” curve, the kind that bends back around so we might actually wind up at the end of the day going in the same direction as we were when the whole debacle started.
Are we in a car? On foot? Or perhaps we’re on a train. This railroad image is particularly disturbing because of the implications of inevitability. For many trains, coming around the bend tends to be a more or less constant condition:
And of course as any engineer can tell you, it doesn’t matter how many corners you turn; if the bridge is out, you’re still headed for disaster.
By signaling that he plans to withdraw only 10,000 troops this year and maybe 20,000 more by 2014, the President hardly seems to be implying the kind of sharp turn that so many American’s – and presumably the soldiers as well – were hoping for. Ultimately, what may be needed in Afghanistan is not to turn the corner, but to turn completely around and head back in the other direction. That was what many of us thought Candidate Obama was referring to with his rhetorical eloquence calling for change and hope.
Apparently with regard to war at least, the change Mr. Obama visualized had less to do with reversing direction even significantly altering our course. The only corner president Obama seems intent on turning is the one in his imagination. For the rest of us it’s full steam ahead and damn the missing trestle.
Wikileaks Exposé: Special Forces Counterinsurgency Handbook
Monday, September 6th, 2010
NOTE: In an effort to finally get past the “wikileaks/rape” fiasco I will devote the next few posts to analyzing some of the content the brave folks at Wikileaks have unearthed.
Special Forces Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Handbook:
If anyone wants to really get a handle on what’s going on in Afghanistan, I heartily suggest you look up author Nick Turse’s outstanding piece on Alternet on September 3rd. Entitled: “5 Jaw-Dropping Stories in Wikileaks’ Archives Begging for National Attention,” Turse outlines several of the documents uncovered by the Wikileaks gang that have gotten little to no mention in the mainstream media.
The first one to catch my eye – and the topic for this piece – is the “U.S. Special Forces Southern Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Handbook of 2006.” This document, which according to its introduction, “provides guidance to the commanders and staffs of combined-arms forces that have a primary mission of eliminating insurgent forces…,” offers a stunningly clear example of why the United States will never achieve success in Afghanistan.
The handbook begins by defining insurgent groups as: “…all types of unconventional forces and operations… and includes guerrilla; partisan; insurgent; subversive; resistance; terrorist; revolutionary; and similar personnel, organizations, and methods.” It goes on to state that “Insurgent activities include acts of a military, political, psychological, and economic nature… for the purpose of eliminating or weakening the authority of the local government or an occupying power(ital. mine) and using primarily insurgent and informal groupings and measures. An insurgent force is the outward manifestation of a resistance movement against the local government by some portion of the population of an area.”
The problem with this definition of course is that it is broad enough to cover just about any kind of uprising imaginable from roadside bombings and actual armed attacks to peaceful protest marches. Ironically, it is so complete and all encompassing it even includes uprisings that seek to throw off the yoke of an occupying power.
In this case folks, that would be us.
To put this document into perspective, we invade Afghanistan, we throw out the existing government – such as it was – we occupy the country with soldiers, and install a corrupt puppet government. Now, according to this handbook, any citizen of Afghanistan who resists the rule of that puppet government or our military occupation is, by definition, an insurgent and thus a legitimate target for “elimination.”
From a practical standpoint, the fact that this document lumps active fighters such as guerrillas and terrorists together with more passive resisters such as partisans and subversives means “coalition soldiers” are faced with the daily task of having to identify which Afghans among the general population are friends and which are enemies. The assertion that supposed insurgent activity includes acts of a “political, psychological, and economic nature,” means that virtually anything anyone does in the country to change the status quo can be viewed as an act of an insurgency. Given the fact that Afghanistan’s population is around 29 million with support for the Karzai government around 52% and support for America’s soldiers at 38% that’s a shitload of potential “insurgents.”
As if the ambiguity of who is an enemy isn’t bad enough, at times the handbook’s instructions for how to deal with insurgency seem positively schizophrenic. Consider the following two passages:
“Civic action can include assistance to the local population as construction or rehabilitation of transportation and communication means, schools, hospitals, and churches; assisting in agricultural improvement programs, crop planting, harvesting, or processing; and furnishing emergency food, clothing, and medical aid in periods of natural disaster.”
Contrast that touchy, feely, hopey, changy directive with the following:
“Use of fires: Coalition forces enjoy a large advantage in the availability of fires, indirect and aerial, to influence the battle. Using such fires wisely can dramatically affect the outcome of tactical engagements and offer a tool, which with careful use can alter the strategic outcome of the fight against the ACM. (Anti Coalition Militants.)”
So, our soldiers are to take part in agricultural improvement programs, crop planting and harvesting, but only after we’ve burned all the fields to wipe out anyone who takes up arms in an effort to convince us to go home.
It is hard to overemphasize the bizarre nature of this document as a guide for soldiers in the field. In the first chapter the handbook presents the perfectly reasonable statement that: “Resistance movements begin to form when dissatisfaction occurs among strongly motivated individuals who cannot further their cause by peaceful and legal means.”
But where a reasonable, rational person might conclude that the way to defuse resistance movements would be to find some way for those “strongly motivated individuals” to find peaceful and legal means to advance themselves, the Handbook’s solution leaves no doubt that peace is not where its true priorities lie:
“The best method of separating an insurgent force from the populace is by killing the insurgent… The planning, preparation, and execution of the operation are aimed at sudden, complete encirclement that will totally surprise the guerillas… once the encirclement is firmly established, the guerilla force is methodically and thoroughly eliminated.”
In other words, you can shoot, blow up and kill anyone that looks like a militant, but only if you go back and build a post office after you’re done. This is completely crazy. It is a mission that is self defeating from the word go. But the craziest part is yet to come.
Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) is quite literally the battle for hearts and minds of the people fought not with guns or with civic deeds but with PR. (Public relations is an idea that is extremely difficult in a place like Afghanistan where the literacy rate is so low and where the population lives in rural areas with no radios or TVs, much less internet.) But not to worry, the handbook has the answer.
Mobile radio stations. Stations on wheels that can: “…pass messages on to the most remote villages through word of mouth, allowing friendly forces to tailor messages and programming to specific villages…. Currently, radio stations broadcast command information, deception messages, and PSYOP messages that follow approved themes.”
The most bizarre strategy in the PSYOPS arsenal is the “mobile mullah,” a cleric or religious leader friendly to coalition forces who can use his influence to convince local tribal leaders that, for example: “Now is the time to stop fighting and rejoin your families.”
The Counterinsurgency Handbook contains lots of perfectly good strategies for killing people. It quite convincing that the United States Army has the capability to roast and toast anybody in Afghanistan they come across who might be classified as an insurgent. The problem is, by creating such a broad definition for who is a terrorist, the Handbook creates a scenario where soldiers on the ground are faced with the unenviable task of deciding whether the people they meet on a daily basis deserve a daycare center or a daisy cutter.
Perhaps the most telling factoid about the document is the fact that while the word “guerrilla” is used 34 times and “insurgent” is used 151 times, words like “maybe,” “perhaps,” “ethical,” and “moral” do not appear at all. Mass murderers on death row have more questions raised about the rightness of their executions than do the nameless, faceless, Afghans both militant and civilian, who continue to die as a result of this handbook.
For me, this document is absolutely frightening. Not because it lacks morality but rather because it is not unique. The Handbook is merely the latest in a long series of tactical and strategic planning documents for executing a militaristic and imperialistic foreign policy that sees imposing our military might on the world as the United States manifest destiny. Because it defines insurgents as anyone around the world who resists our military might, it is quite simply a manual for perpetual war.
That the handbook doesn’t once question the right or even the wisdom of a foreign policy that calls for our soldiers to fight “insurgencies” wherever they find them is worse than immoral. It represents the ultimate in Hubris. Authors such as Andrew Bacevich and Chalmers Johnson have pointed out, counterinsurgency as a foreign policy was thoroughly discredited in past conflicts like Viet-Nam. And yet here it is, alive and well in the pages of a military handbook that is currently being used in Afghanistan.
The release of documents such as this Handbook is one more example of why Wikileaks and other “whistle blowing” sites like it are so important. It is also one more example of why everyone has a responsibility to open sites like this to see for themselves what is really being done in their names around the world.
In the words of Pierre de Vos: “Secrecy is the enemy of Democracy.”
Let’s Talk Numbers
Friday, August 20th, 2010
According to Jack Kem, the Deputy to the Commander of NATO training mission in Afghanistan, the Afghan army now stands at around 134,000 troops. The number of police stand at 115,000.
Add this to the almost 120,000 NATO troops and their attendant 100,000 private contractors and you get a combined number of around 379,000 souls devoted to fighting the Taliban.
To put this into perspective, according to Major-General Richard Barrons, as of March 3, 2010, Taliban forces are estimated to number about 36,000 insurgents.
379,000 against 36,000. I’m no math genius but this looks to me like the Taliban are out numbered Ten to one.
Or to put it another way, with a population of barely 30 million, there are there is one soldier, policeman or foreign contractor for every 77 people in the country.
And the cost? The US has ponied up more than 335 billion dollars for it’s war effort in Afghanistan so far with no end in sight. This staggering amount of money has been spent on a country where two-thirds of the population live on fewer than 2 US dollars a day.
This is past insanity. It is bat shit crazy.
What is even crazier is that the enemy we are afraid of, al Qaeda, according to our own C.I.A. numbers as few as 50 men!
We have poured a third of a trillion dollars into a dirt poor country to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat’ a rag tag bag of fundamentalist nut jobs who’s greatest “victory” over our country was to highjack four airliners using box cutters and fly them into buildings?
300 billion dollars to hunt down 50 guys? Talk about over kill.
To put it into further perspective, Neighboring Pakistan has recently been the victim of catastrophic flooding that has affected some 20 million people. The US military has offered the use of four Chinook Helicopters and two black Hawk helicopters to support flood relief.
Six helicopters to help relief efforts for 20 million people?
By any measure, the United States has completely lost perspective as to what is important in the world. You can’t defeat box cutters with daisy cutters. Thousands of soldiers can’t defeat terrorists who aren’t there. And drones armed with Hellfire missiles are no use against catastrophic floods.
Morality of War in Afghanistan
Thursday, August 19th, 2010
Since the dawn of history, men have fought wars of aggression.
And since the dawn of history men have sought to justify those wars…
They have failed.
There is no moral justification for starting a war. None. While there can be honest debate about the acceptability of violence in defense of one’s life or liberty, it is a perversion of the concept of morality to claim that it is right and just to be the aggressor and preemptively attack another nation for any reason whatsoever. Whether you call it “making the world safe for democracy,” or whether you claim you are simply seeking “lebensraum,” sending soldiers into battle without provocation is wrong. It is immoral, and yes it is evil.
Fact: Since the events of Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941, no nation has attacked the United States. Despite prodigious amounts of government spin, in the past fifty years none of the conflicts in which we have engaged have been in defense of our shores. In every conflict since WW II in which the United States has begun, we have been the aggressors. Thus with regard to the defense of this nation, none of the wars and invasions we have begun were justifiable.
As I said, bullies of the past have always tried to justify their aggressive acts. The chief difference I see between wars of the past and today’s conflict is that today, those in power don’t even try to justify their actions. Take General David Petraeus for example. In a recent interview with David Gregory of MSNBC, General Petreaus spoke out on the “big issues” of the conflict in Afghanistan. He talked about “the public’s frustration with the war, the strength of the Taliban, the government of Hamid Karzai… and whether President Obama’s July of 2011 withdrawal timeline will hold.” In addition, Gregory added his own straw-man question to the mix: “Is nation building possible in the badlands of Afghanistan?”
However, no question was raised in the interview of the rightness of the United States’ cause. Not one word was devoted to the moral justification of invading and occupying Afghanistan, putting our soldiers in harm’s way, and bankrupting the country in the process.
Instead, Petraeus talked about the “importance of the mission” and how hard that mission was. But the rightness of the mission? Un uh. No way.
In addition to being morally vague, General Petraeus’ comments on the war were so ambiguous as to be practically double speak:
“What we have are areas of progress, we have to link those together, extend them and then build on it because, of course, the security progress, as you noted earlier is the foundation for everything else, for the governance progress, the economic progress, the rule-of-law progress and so forth… the trick is to get all of it moving so that you’re spiraling upward where one initiative reinforces another.”
If my head did much more “spiraling upward” it would leave my shoulders altogether.
Not only can’t Petraeus identify the moral underpinning of America’s cause, he has trouble identifying what constitutes success:
“…but if you could reduce the level of violence by some 90 to 95 percent, as was the case in Iraq, to below a threshold which allows commerce and business and outside investment to take place, where there is an election that’s certainly at least elected representatives, and now you have to see if they can come together and form a government that is still representative of and responsive to the people, as was the previous one. If that can all be achieved there, that would be a reasonable solution here as well. “
The hell with peace; the hell with freedom; the hell with winning hearts and minds, the most important moral justification for all the death and destruction we are causing is so that commerce can resume?
“If Afghanistan can become the central Asian “roundabout,” to use President Karzai’s term, to where it can be the new Silk Road, think of the implications for that, recalling that, of course, Afghanistan is blessed with the presence of what are trillions, with an S on the end, trillions of dollars worth of minerals if, and only if, you can get the extractive technology, the human capital operated, the lines of communication to enable you to get it out of the country and all the rest of that.”
Is he serious? The moral purpose behind fighting and killing and dying in Afghanistan is so that we can dig up some minerals?
In an August 14 article in Huffington Post, entitled “Why Petraeus can’t make the sale” Author Dan Froomkin identifies Petraeus’ main problem as a simple one of facing up to reality.
“That reality, increasingly obvious to national security experts and the general public alike, is that no amount of good intentions or firepower is going to advance our fundamental interests in Afghanistan — and that as much as Petraeus might be able to achieve in the next six months, or a year, little to none of it is sustainable and most of it is, even worse, counterproductive.”
I believe Petraeus’ problem to be much more basic. If the General truly cares about “making the sale” for continuing to fight a war in Afghanistan then either he or President Obama must offer up a clear and unambiguous moral reason for fighting it.
And as the United States was the one who invaded and is currently occupying Afghanistan – as well as being responsible for inflicting much of the damage – I think that is a hard sell indeed.
