The Shame and Folly of Obama's Afghan War

By Dave LIndorff

There are so many things wrong with Obama’s “New and Improved”
Afghanistan War that it’s hard to know where to begin, but I guess the
place to start is with his premise.

If America needs to be fighting in Afghanistan because Al Qaeda
planned and launched the 9-11 attacks from there back in 2001, as the
president claimed in his lackluster address to the cadets at West Point
last week, then we would have to assume either that Al Qaeda is still
there, or that if we were not there fighting, that Al Qaeda would be
back to plan more attacks.

Well, we know Al Qaeda is not there, because US intelligence
reports that there are “fewer than 100” Al Qaeda operatives in
Afghanistan at most at this point, and probably a good deal fewer.
Maybe even zero. Al Qaeda has long since moved on to Pakistan and
thence to other countries far removed from Afghanistan (even Defense
Secretary Robert Gates, after speculating that Osama bin Laden “might
be” hopping back and forth across the border with Pakistan like a kid
doing a double-dare game, concedes that in truth no one in the US has
any idea where bin Laden is, or whether he is even in South Asia). But
would Al Qaeda come back if the Taliban, ousted back in 2001 by US
Special Forces, were to return to power in Kabul? Not likely. As the
New York Times reported in last Sunday’s paper, the Afghan Taliban have
convincingly broken with Al Qaeda, because of the latter organization’s
targeting of the Pakistani government, which has long had a supportive
relationship with the Afghan Taliban. Besides, the Taliban in
Afghanistan have a clear goal of ruling Afghanistan, and the US has
already demonstrated both that it can live and work with a Taliban
government, as it was doing before the 9-11 attacks, and that it will
punish the Taliban if they allow Al Qaeda a free hand inside their
country. So the odds of a re-established Taliban regime in Afghanistan
inviting Al Qaeda to move back in and set up shop are somewhere around
zero.

Ergo, whatever he may say, the current Christmas ramp-up in the war
announced by Obama has nothing to do with 9-11, nothing to do with
combating terrorism, and nothing to do with protecting American
security.

What about the bogie-man of a so-called “failed state”? Obama said
a failed state in Afghanistan could mean a return of Al Qaeda or other
terrorist organizations.

The problem with this second argument is that Afghanistan already
is a failed state, if the definition of a failed state is one in which
there is no effective central government. For that matter, Afghanistan
has been a failed state since the overthrow of Mohammed Najibullah, the
Communist leader who had the country largely unified and who was
instituting reforms like protecting the rights of women, building
roads, etc. (the very things the US says it wants to do), until he was
driven out of power and ultimately hung by forces, including the
Taliban) organized and armed by the CIA. Actually, the truth is that
Afghanistan has always been something less than a real nation, with
different ethic groups occupying different regions of the country
largely operating like autonomous little countries. To expect such a
situation to somehow coalesce into something resembling a European
nation-state is simply ludicrous. In fact, the only commonality uniting
the various ethnic groups within Afghanistan actually is
religion—they’re nearly all Islamic—which suggests that the Taliban,
for all their medieval fundamentalism, may have a significant edge in
the nation-building game.

Moving on to strategy, Obama talks about effectively doubling the
number of US and NATO forces fighting in the country (the term
“fighting” is used loosely because many of the European forces are
barred by their governments from actually engaging in combat), with the
goal being, reportedly, to protect the cities from Taliban attacks (and
good luck with that!) and giving the current government in Kabul time
to build up a 400,000-man army that supposedly would take over the job
of security.

Hmmmm. If you protect the cities, by definition you leave the
countryside around the cities unprotected, right? But you cannot do
that in a country that is largely rural, so the US will inevitably
resort to search-and-destroy run-outs into the countryside, and of
course air attacks by bombers and remote-controlled drones, in a doomed
effort to keep the Taliban at bay. But such actions, as America leaned
when it tried the same policy in Vietnam, inevitably mean massive and
disproportionate civilian casualties—the so-called “collateral damage”
of war. And civilian casualties are not the way an army wins “hearts
and minds.” In fact, a high rate of civilian casualties means the
destroying of hearts, minds, limbs, families, houses, etc., and the
concomitant creation of blood enemies. So we start out by making more
enemies outside the city gates.

Meanwhile, we are unlikely to make the cities safe either because
it’s damnably easy for bombers to slip in and pop one off in a crowded
bazaar or school or office building, as the Taliban have already
repeatedly demonstrated.

But even assuming the best of luck with protecting a handful of
Afghan cities, the idea of creating a functioning army of 400,000, as
Obama and his generals have called for, and upon which Obama bases his
promise to “start bringing home” troops in July 2011, is surely a
pipe-dream (literally really, given that the current army is already
awash in opium addicts). The Afghan Army at present numbers 90,000, but
it is rife with corruption and, moreover, is largely composed of
Tajiks, the dominant ethnic group in northern Afghanistan, who are
widely despised by the Pashtun, who are concentrated in the south and
east of the country, and other minority groups. The idea that a Tajik
or Tajik-led army could succeed in the south and east, where the
Taliban are strongest, is fanciful at best and tragic at worst.
Furthermore, most of those in the current military, if they aren’t drug
addicts, are either corrupt, or just temporary workers, staying in as
long as there is a paycheck and no fighting, but quick to go AWOL when
they have enough cash, or when a mission is ordered that involves real
fighting. There is close to no chance that a true national army capable
of securing most of the sprawling land of Afghanistan under central
government control could be created. As hard as it’s been for the US
military occupation force in Iraq to train and field an Iraqi army, at
least the US there has been working with a trained officer corps
inherited from Saddam Hussein, and with a core of soldiers who had
already served, and with new recruits who are literate, and who have a
some desire to rebuild a national government. Afghanistan has none of
those things.

And about that July 2011 “deadline” for starting to bring home US
troops from Afghanistan. This was nothing but a PR feint for Obama’s
liberal supporters—a fig leaf to get them on board his war express. In
fact, by late last week, White House and Pentagon officials were all
back-pedaling and explaining that July 2011 was just the date that the
first handful of US troops would “start coming home.” In fact, if that
even really does happen, it turns out that under Obama’s new war plan
for Afghanistan, US troops will be deep in the swamp of Afghan battle
for years after 2011—a clear acknowledgement that the plan for training
an Afghan army to take over from the US is also just so much talk.

One can speculate about why Obama is so clearly sabotaging his
presidency with this doomed crusade in Afghanistan. Some speculate that
he was sandbagged by his generals, and certainly Gen. Stanley
McChrystal crossed the line into improper politicking and
insubordination to his commander-in-chief when he went public to lobby
for the addition of more than 40,000 additional troops. But Obama could
have survived that treachery had he wanted to, by playing Harry Truman
and sacking McChrystal for insubordination. There are those who say it
is all about wanting to build a pipeline for transporting oil to the
Indian Ocean and bypassing Russia. But that begs the question of how
such a pipeline, if it were built, could ever be kept secure from
sabotage, running as it would have to, through both Afghanistan and
Pakistan (besides, back in 2001 the US was once negotiating with the
Taliban government to get permission for Unocal to build such a line,
which would have made some sense if there was no war going on). It
could also be that this war is all about providing an argument for ever
higher spending on the military at a time when there is really no good
justification for it in a nation that already spends more on arms and
troops than all the rest of the world combined. But really, the
military has demonstrated its ability to keep on winning increased
appropriations even when wars are winding down and threat levels are
reduced. That, after all, is what the fake “war on terror” has been all
about—keeping the American public frightened and willing to keep
throwing money at the Pentagon. No, to me the best argument for this
new war campaign may be simply that, like presidents Johnson and Nixon
before him, Obama doesn’t want to be tagged as the president who lost a
war.

And for that, we can expect to see thousands of young Americans die, and tens or hundreds of thousands of Afghanis die.

To make matters worse, once more Americans start coming home in a
parade of flag-draped coffins, the war for Obama, and for whoever
succeeds him after his own failed tenure as president, will be
self-promoting and effectively permanent. As we saw in the case of the
Indochina War, those dead soldiers and Marines will become a fearsome
impediment to any effort to end this longest of wars, and a grisly
justification for continuing to send more young people after them to be
chewed up and killed. For what president, beginning with Obama, will
have the political and personal courage to say that those who died in
Afghanistan died in vain?

__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net