Hullabaloo

Thursday, October 22, 2009

 
Golden Years

by digby

Elizabeth Bumiller wrote a typically shallow puff piece about the non-existent Golden Years in Afghanistan in the NY Times yesterday. Evidently, it was once just like Omaha Nebraska (except for all the infrastructure, education, wealth and personal liberty.)

Howie dispatches Bumiller as only he can --- and you really should read it: he was there during these "Golden Years." But he also talks about the reality on the ground today, citing another article by Johann Hari in The Independent.

As we saw on the weekend, McChrystal is doing what blinkered military leaders always do: demanding more troops while preparing to blame his inevitable failure of a stab in the back by politicians unwilling to allow the military win by fighting a war of extermination.

Every military counter-insurgency strategy hits up against the probability that it will, in time, create more enemies than it kills. So you blow up a suspected Taliban site and kill two of their commanders – but you also kill 98 women and children, whose families are from that day determined to kill your men and drive them out of their country. Those aren't hypothetical numbers. They come from Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, who was General Petraeus' counter-insurgency advisor in Iraq. He says that US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qa'ida leaders, at the expense of more than 700 civilian lives. He says: "That's a hit rate of 2 per cent on 98 per cent collateral. It's not moral." It explains the apparent paradox that broke the US in Vietnam: the more "bad guys" you kill, the more you have to kill.

There is an even bigger danger than this. General Petraeus's strategy is to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan. When he succeeds, they run to Pakistan-- where the nuclear bombs are.

To justify these risks, the proponents of the escalation need highly persuasive arguments to show how their strategy slashed other risks so dramatically that it outweighed these dangers. It's not inconceivable-- but I found that in fact the case they give for escalating the war, or for continuing the occupation, is based on three premises that turn to Afghan dust on inspection.

Argument One: We need to deprive al-Qa'ida of military bases in Afghanistan, or they will use them to plot attacks against us, and we will face 9/11 redux. In fact, virtually all the jihadi attacks against Western countries have been planned in those Western countries themselves, and required extremely limited technological capabilities or training. The 9/11 atrocities were planned in Hamburg and Florida by 19 Saudis who only needed to know how to use box-cutters and to crash a plane. The 7/7 suicide-murders were planned in Yorkshire by young British men who learned how to make bombs off the internet. Only last week, a jihadi was arrested for plotting to blow up a skyscraper in that notorious jihadi base, Dallas, Texas. And on, and on.

In reality, there are almost no al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. That's not my view: it's that of General Jim Jones, the US National Security Advisor. He said last week there were 100 al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. That's worth repeating: there are 100 al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. Nor is that a sign that the war is working. The Taliban or warlords friendly to them already control 40 per cent of Afghanistan now, today. They can build all the "training camps" they want there-- but they have only found a hundred fundamentalist thugs to staff them.

...Argument Two: By staying, we are significantly improving Afghan human rights, especially for women. This, for me, is the meatiest argument-- and the most depressing. The Taliban are indeed one of the vilest forces in the world, imprisoning women in their homes and torturing them for the "crimes" of showing their faces, expressing their sexuality, or being raped. They keep trying to murder my friend Malalai Joya for the "crime" of being elected to parliament on a platform of treating women like human beings not cattle.

But as she told me last month: "Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords." Outside Kabul, vicious Taliban who enforce sharia law have merely been replaced by vicious warlords who enforce sharia law. "The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women," she said. Any Afghan president-- Karzai, or his opponents-- will only ever in practice be the mayor of Kabul. Beyond is a sea of warlordism, as evil to women as Mullah Omar. That is not a difference worth fighting and dying for.

Argument Three: If we withdraw, it will be a great victory for al-Qa'ida. Re-energised, they will surge out across the world. In fact, in November 2004, Osama bin Laden bragged to his followers: "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen [jihadi fighters] to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qa'ida" in order to make generals race there, and we cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses-- without their achieving anything of note!" These wars will, he said, boost al-Qa'ida recruitment across the world, and in time "bankrupt America". They walked right into his trap.

This is the kind of stuff Americans should be digesting and considering while Obama gets bullied into escalating an unwinnable, tragic war that he knows is a catastrophic mistake in the making. But the Independent is a British daily and, instead, Americans are reading Mother Goose stories in the NY Times by lightweights like Bumiller, who spent 2001 until 2007 with her head stuck up Karl Rove's ass.

Digesting this is tough going, but it needs to be done. The politics of this are tough and they should be. But consider that our recent swashbuckling Republican Prez, Junior Bush, was destroyed largely because of a misbegotten war, even after 9/11. Does anyone believe that it can't happen to a Democrat?


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digby 10/22/2009 09:30:00 AM |