Obama’s War
Posted by John Steele on December 7, 2009
The following, taken from Counterpunch, was written just before Obama’s speech at West Point.
It’s Obama’s War Now
A “Necessary War” — for a Gas Pipeline
By GARY LEUPP
There are now at present some 68,000 U.S. troops and 42,000 allied forces occupying Afghanistan, in league with the Northern Alliance warlords and the corrupt and feeble Karzai regime in Kabul. President Obama clearly wishes to increase the figure and will announce before an audience of West Point cadets Tuesday that he will add over 30,000 more while pushing the Europeans to add 10,000. This will bring the total number of occupation forces to around the level of the Soviet deployment at its peak in the 1980s.
The Soviets were trying to protect the secular government in Afghanistan and to discourage Islamic fundamentalism, a potential threat to the neighboring Soviet Central Asian republics such as Uzbekistan. What is Obama trying to do?Because make no mistake about it, this is Barack Obama’s war now. With this announcement he will have personally increased the force in Afghanistan by over 50,000 troops in response to appeals from his generals.
Obama’s mantra about the conflict in Afghanistan is that it is a “war of necessity.” But this is really just a version of the neocon “War on Terror” trope, which is to say that it implies that it is the natural, reasonable retaliatory response to the 9-11 attacks. (They started it, after all, so we have to take the war to them.)
But neocon strategy has always required the simplistic conflation of disparate phenomena, and the exploitation of public ignorance and fear, in the execution of policy. Who are they, after all? The invasion of Iraq required the Big Lie that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11. The earlier invasion of Afghanistan required the clever sleight-of-hand by which the mainly Saudi Arab but international al-Qaeda was equated with the purely Afghan Taliban. “We don’t distinguish between terrorists and the governments that support them,” Bush declared.
This was almost a boast that the U.S. would be boldly ignorant as a matter of public policy, and a warning to the empirical rationalists of the world that the White House was in the grip of truly simplistic minds and would indeed shamelessly exploit popular Islamophobia as they pleased even as they made elaborate public gestures in support of religious tolerance. (The calculated message was: Be scared, world, because we’ve got cowboys in power, and hell, we can get kinda crazy when we’re pissed!)
The fact is, there was and is a difference between al-Qaeda, an international jihadist organization that wants to reestablish a global Caliphate and confront the U.S., and the Taliban, which wanted to stabilize Afghanistan under a harsh interpretation of the Sharia but maintain a working relationship with the U.S. And now, eight years after being toppled, the Taliban are back with a vengeance, demonstrating that they have a real social base. Moreover a Pakistani Taliban has emerged across the border as a direct consequence of the U.S. invasion.
Any number of intelligence reports have pointed out the obvious: more troops just breed more “insurgency.”
Obama’s national security advisor, Gen. James Jones, has stated clearly, “The Al Qaeda presence [in Afghanistan] is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.” If there had been a “necessity” to destroy al-Qaeda in Afghanistan that matter has been taken care of. What does Obama think necessary to achieve now?
I imagine he will argue that the Taliban must not be allowed to return to power. But doesn’t that mean implicitly acknowledging that they have genuine roots in Afghan, particularly Pashtun society? The best military estimates put the number of Taliban militants at no more than 25,000, with fully-armed fighters around 3,000. There are about 100,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army (ANA) in addition to all the foreign occupying troops. ANA forces are often described as of “poor quality,” meaning they are illiterate, and mainly attracted by the money. But the Talibs are also generally illiterate and many of them fight largely for the pay as well. Why is it whole provinces like Nuristan have come under Taliban control despite all the counterinsurgency manpower?
Why in attempting to “secure” Helmand province in an anti-Taliban offensive over the summer did the U.S. forces discover that their ANA allies included almost no Pashtuns but were disproportionately Tajiks? Why were U.S. forces unable to dislodge the Taliban from Marjeh, a city of about 50,000 people and hub of the opium trade?
The problem isn’t too few forces. Were that the case the increasing number of forces over the last several years would have produced a better, not worse, security situation. The problem is the premise that imperialists can re-colonize a country under the pretense of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency or liberation in the face of mass resistance.
But why is Obama so intent on staying the course in Afghanistan? What is so important about Afghan policy that the Man of Change can’t change it, even when 57 per cent of the people of the U.S. say they want out?
He will say on Tuesday evening, as eloquently as he and his speechmakers can manage the task, that we simply cannot afford to let Islamist extremists back into power so that they might harbor terrorists who’ll attack the United States.
But recall there was a time when the U.S. State Department was hell-bent to drive a secular government out of Afghanistan—one that wanted to educate girls and establish local clinics and curb the power of the tribal chiefs and mullahs—and determined to assist the most profoundly reactionary forces in Afghanistan with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar at their head in establishing an alternative Islamist regime. Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski thought the pro-Soviet Saur Revolution in 1978, in which left-wing Afghan Army officers staged a coup and the Democratic People’s Party seized power, producing a backlash from the mullahs and tribal chiefs, was a golden Cold War opportunity.
Even before Soviet forces crossed the border in December 1979, the CIA was organizing Afghan and international forces to challenge the leftish government and Brzezinski was urging the fighters to view their struggle as a jihad or Holy War. This continued of course through the eight bloody years of the Reagan administration. The jihadis won, Washington’s friends established a regime in 1993, immediately fell out among themselves plunging the country into Tajik-Pashtun civil war involving the bombing of Kabul (hitherto spared in the fighting). Washington politely distanced itself, having lost interest with the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving ally Pakistan to deal with the mess.
Pakistan opted to support the Taliban, a force which against the motley backdrop of opium-dealing, boy-raping warlords seemed attractive by virtue of its reputation for moral probity if nothing else. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto later explained Islamabad needed to embrace the Taliban to maintain the trade lines through Central Asia. The U.S. kept its distance from the harshly fundamentalist group, which took power in 1996, withholding diplomatic recognition. But it was historically responsible for its inception and the descent of Afghanistan into the disaster of medieval reaction that began with the stoning of adulterous women in soccer stadiums and culminated with the blasting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001.
The sins of U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan are just staggering. Imagine what might have happened had the U.S. just stayed out of Afghan affairs from the late 1970s and allowed that experiment in secular. reformist government in a highly conservative Muslim society to take its course without billions in arms to precisely the sort of fighters who are being vilified as “Islamic extremists” and “terrorists” today. There may have never been an international CIA-coordinated mujahadeen movement, no young Osama bin Laden persuaded to suspend his studies to head up Arab holy warriors in coordination with the CIA, no total collapse of Afghan society, no “blowback.” Unfortunately people in this country are generally clueless about the recent history of Southwest Asia and the role of U.S. administrations in producing the very problems about which they complain. (I don’t include Obama among these; he knows what he’s doing. Hence total moral culpability.)
The Taliban never invited Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan; he was there when they took power, guest of a warlord who had been hostile to themselves. He had flown in from Sudan, booted out by the government there following a demand from the U.S. The Taliban extended to him the hospitality required by the pashtunwali code, in appreciation for his services in anti-Soviet struggle in the 1980s. But as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair have documented on this site, from 2000 the Taliban initiated talks in Frankfurt with the EU, facilitated by the Afghan-American businessman Kabir Mohabbat, to transfer bin Laden out of the country. Mohabbat was employed from November by the National Security Council to negotiate with the Taliban about bin Laden’s fate.
The Taliban, who had confined bin Laden and his key aides to his compound at Daronta, 30 miles from Kabul, invited the U.S. to send one of two Cruise missiles as the easiest way to solve the problem but the Clinton administration delayed in taking action. The Bush administration also dispatched Mohabbat repeatedly to Kabul—three times in 2001—to discuss bin Laden. In other words, at minimum, on can say that the State Department knew, and we should know, and Obama should know, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are two very different things.
So if the president argues that we need to continue the fight with more troops to keep the Taliban down, to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a center of international terrorism, he’s going to be speaking so much eloquent nonsense.
He will probably not address the recent comment by the Prime Minister of Pakistan, the country after Afghanistan itself most victimized by U.S. aggression in the region. Speaking in English Yousef Raza Gilani told reporters:
“Our only concern is that when US sends more troops to Afghanistan’s Helmand area, if there will be influx of militants they will be moving to Balochistan. This is the concern that we already discussed with the US administration, that influx of militants towards Balochistan should be taken care of otherwise that can destabilise Balochistan.
“A stable Afghanistan is in Pakistan’s interest – but at the same time we also do not want our country to be destabilized. We have asked US administration to consult us in case of any paradigm shift in the policy… so that we can formulate our strategy accordingly.”
Balochistan is over 40 per cent of the land area of his country. It is beset with ethnic unrest; some of the majority Balochis resent the fact that they receive few profits from the exploitation of the uranium and copper of their region, and are neglected by Islamabad. There is an armed insurgency led by members of the Bugti tribe. This has some support from educated Pakistanis critical of “Punjabi chauvinism” who accuse the state of trying to keep Balochis backward. (While listed as “terrorist” by the State Department this movement is a separate phenomenon from the Taliban.)
State Department officials have dismissed Pakistani concerns. Isn’t that typical though? They have been dismissing them since the initial invasion in 2001, and as Pakistan becomes more and more destabilized, the U.S. merely repeats its demands for more military cooperation, continues its drone strikes across the border, and pursues its goals in the region in what Islamabad perceives as disregard for its interests. Pakistan has its own problems that policy-makers in the U.S. State Department seem either not to understand or to willfully ignore as it exacerbates them.
And President Obama will not mention that according to the Asia Foundation’s 2009 poll in Afghanistan 56 per cent of respondents say they have some sympathy for the motivations of the armed groups, including the Taliban and Hekmatyar’s outfit, opposing occupation. He won’t note how the PR strategy of depicting this effort as a “liberation” symbolized by the removal of the burqa has been long since quietly shelved, since the burqa is actually back with a vengeance and the warlords upon whom the U.S. must rely to maintain order have always laughed at U.S. proposals for social reform. They know that’s not what the troops are there for.
The U.S. intervened indirectly in Afghanistan in the ‘80s, with no thought for the welfare of the Afghan people and with tragic consequences for them, in order to fight the Soviets and the imagined menace of “communism.” To do that it nurtured a ferocious Islamist extremist trend. There’s never been any acknowledgement of error or apology and don’t expect one. It all made sense at the time from a U.S. imperialist point of view.
What makes sense now, from a U.S. imperialist point of view? Just look at the map. Realize that Afghanistan has no products the U.S. corporate world wants or needs. During the Cold War, Iran, Iraq, Turkey sometimes played crucial roles in U.S. geostrategic thinking but Afghanistan was practically conceded to the Soviet camp even before 1978. It only acquired significance as a Cold War battleground when U.S. strategists realized (in Brzezinski’s words) that they could “bleed the Soviets…the way they did us in Vietnam.” More recently, it has acquired significance as U.S. energy corporations do global battle with the Russians over access to Caspian Sea natural gas.
At present Europe is dependent on the supply of gas via Russia from the Caspian Sea, principally from Turkmenistan. This gives Moscow enormous political leverage when it comes to such matters as NATO’s decision to admit Georgia or Ukraine. U.S. policy has been to build pipelines from the Caspian avoiding Russia or Iran. Construction of the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline which will pump the gas straight to the Indian Ocean and on to world markets has been long delayed due to the fighting in Afghanistan.
The pipeline will run through Helmand province, then into Pakistan’s Balochistan. If it all works out, this will represent a highly significant improvement in the geostrategic position of the U.S. in the region, including in the event of another world war (such as might be provoked by a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and unpredictable repercussions of such action).
But Obama will not be talking about the history of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, or the feelings of the Afghan people about occupation, or the reactions of the Pakistanis to the unmitigated disaster on their doorstep, or the real geopolitical reasons for U.S. interest in this backward impoverished Central Asian nation that has been “the graveyard of empires” since the time of Alexander the Great.
He will say it’s still a necessary war to defend Americans from terrorist attack. We should recall, once again, the observation of Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering during the Nuremburg trial that while “naturally the common people don’t want war … the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
We should respond: No it’s not necessary! in the streets that day and those following—until we force Obama to end what are now unmistakably his criminal imperialist wars.
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Religion.
Gary said
This has some support from educated Pakistanis critical of “Pashtun chauvinism” who accuse the state of trying to keep Balochis backward.
I misquoted inadvertently. Please correct this to “Punjabi chauvisnism.”
John Steele said
OK – it’s corrected.
Very informative piece, btw – a sharp analysis.
Ka Frank said
Along with the US troop escalation, there has been a surge of US private contractors, who now make up 57% of the American forces in Afghanistan.
The Privatized War in Afghanistan by Sue Sturgis (Dec 7 MRzine)
Additional number of American troops President Obama plans to deploy to Afghanistan: 30,000
Total number of U.S. troops that will be there after the deployment: 98,000
Number of private contractors working for the U.S. in Afghanistan as of September 2009: 104,101
Percent by which that number grew between June and September: 40
Percent of the Defense Department’s workforce in Afghanistan accounted for by contractors: 57
Number of conflicts in U.S. history involving a higher percentage of contractors: 0
Percent of the U.S. presence on the ground during the Vietnam War accounted for by contractors: 13
Percent of the Defense Department’s 2008 budget devoted to contracts and grants: 82
Estimated value of Defense Department contracts in Afghanistan awarded to Texas-based Fluor and Virginia’s DynCorp: $7.5 billion
Amount Fluor’s PAC contributed to federal candidates in 2008: $305,499
Amount DynCorp’s PAC contributed to federal candidates in 2008: $51,999
Date on which a financial analyst announced that Fluor and DynCorp stood to benefit from deployment of additional troops to Afghanistan: 12/2/2009
Amount by which Fluor’s share prices rose in that afternoon’s trading: 33 cents
Amount by which DynCorp’s share prices rose: 30 cents
Month in which DynCorp disclosed in a regulatory filing that it had made payments to expedite visas and licenses, potentially violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: 11/2009
The estimated total for these illegal payments: $300,000
Date on which an investigation was announced on behalf of DynCorp investors over possible securities law violations by the company: 12/3/2009
Value of a U.S. contract with DynCorp to train Iraqi police that federal auditors said was so mismanaged they were unable to determine how the money was spent: $1.2 billion
Year in which the U.S. Commission on Wartime Contracting is scheduled to release a comprehensive study of contracting in war zones: 2011
(Click on the number to go to the original source.)
Sue Sturgis is Editorial Director and Co-Editor of Facing South. This article was first published by the Facing South on 4 December 2009; it is reproduced here with the author’s permissio
Radical Eyes said
Also from Counterpunch, this piece from Gareth Porter on the schism between Al Queda and the Taliban helps to debunk Gates, Clinton, and Obama’s conflations of the two.
http://www.counterpunch.org/porter12072009.html
Conflict Makes Nonsense of U.S. Rationale for Surge
The Taliban – Al Qaeda Schism
By GARETH PORTER
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen argued in Senate Testimony Wednesday that the 30,000-troop increase is necessary to prevent the Taliban from giving new safe havens to al Qaeda terrorists.
But that argument is flatly contradicted by the evidence of fundamental conflicts between the interests of the Taliban and those of al Qaeda that has emerged in recent years, according to counterterrorism and intelligence analysts specialiZing in Afghanistan.
Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee that, “Taliban-ruled areas could in short order become once again sanctuary for al Qaeda, as well as a staging area for resurgent militant groups on the offensive in Pakistan.”
Mullen made the same assertion in even more pointed terms. “[T]o argue that should they have…power the Taliban would not at least tolerate the presence of al Qaeda on Afghan soil is to ignore both the recent past and the evidence we see every day of collusion between these factions on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border,” he said. “Put simply, the Taliban and al Qaeda have become symbiotic,” said Gates, “each benefitting from the success and mythology of the other.”
It is well known among government officials working on Afghanistan and al Qaeda, however, that serious tensions between the two organiZations emerged after the attack on the “Red Mosque” in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad in July 2007. Western intelligence quickly discovered the attack was an al Qaeda operation, and that it marked the beginning of an al Qaeda campaign calling for the overthrow of the Pakistani government and military.
That created a serious conflict between al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, according to specialists who followed the issue closely. The Taliban leadership, which is based in Quetta, Pakistan, had been depending on assistance from the Pakistani military to increase its military capabilities and did not look kindly on that al Qaeda policy.
Despite widespread confusion over the two, the Tahreek-e-Taliban, the Pakistani jihadist group that has been an umbrella organiZation for the military campaign against the Pakistani military, is not related to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Pakistani group, which has now changed its name, is a close ally of al Qaeda, but does not see eye to eye with the Afghan Taliban.
Ignoring these turning points in the Taliban’s relationships with both al Qaeda and other Pakistani jihadi groups, Gates suggested that the three groups are closer than ever before. “What we have seen in the last year develop is an unholy alliance, if you will, of al Qaeda, the Taliban in Pakistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan,” he said.
Two former counterterrorism intelligence specialists who followed the Taliban closely until earlier this year told me this week that the facts do not support the portrayal by Gates and Mullen of the Taliban and al Qaeda as ideologically united.
“We make a serious mistake in equating the two organizations,” said Arturo Munoz, who was a supervisory operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Center from 2001 to 2009 and is now a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation.
Munoz called the Taliban “a homespun Pashtun, locally-based revolutionary movement with a set of goals that are not necessarily those of al Qaeda”.
“It is well known that deals have been made between the Taliban and Pakistani commanders,” said Munoz. “Obviously the Quetta Shura [the top Taliban leadership organ] is located there because of a deal with the Pakistani government.”
But al Qaeda’s view has been different. “The more fanatical al Qaeda types say ‘let’s tear apart Pakistani society’,” he observed.
Veteran specialist on counterterrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan Rick “Ozzie” Nelson agreed that the relationship between al Qaeda and the Taliban that has evolved in recent years is very different from the one they had up to 2001.
“The Taliban is a nationalist organization, which wants to govern Afghanistan under Sharia law, not attack the United States,” said Nelson, who was on the inaugural staff of the National Counter-Terrorism Center’s Directorate of Strategic Operational Planning in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2005 to 2007.
Nelson directed a Joint Task Force in Afghanistan until early 2009 and is now in the International Security Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The Red Mosque was a big deal,” Nelson recalled. The al Qaeda-directed assault on the mosque and subsequent Taliban reaction to its jihadist campaign in Pakistan were what convinced officials that “their goals have become more divergent”, he said.
More recently, counterterrorism analysts have noted that the gap has widened even further, as the Taliban leadership has gone public with a “nationalist” line that openly departs from al Qaeda’s global jihadist stance.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s Sep. 19 message for Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan, called the Taliban a “robust Islamic and nationalist movement” which “wants to maintain good and positive relations with all neighbors based on mutual respect”.
The message went on to assure “all countries” that a Taliban state “will not extend its hand to jeopardize others, as it itself does not allow others to jeopardise us”.
In October, the Taliban sent a letter to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization repeating its offer of good relations, despite the fact that at least three of its member states (China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) are the targets of armed resistance by jihadi allies of al Qaeda.
That line of thinking has created a firestorm among commentators associated with the al Qaeda global jihad worldview, according to Vahid Brown, research associate at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. In an article published on the Foreign Policy magazine website Oct. 21, Brown cited a series of angry responses to the Taliban leader’s message from jihadi publicists across the Middle East.
One rejoinder from one of the most influential jihadi ideologues referred to the Omar message as “dangerous utterances”, likening the nationalist line taken in it to the refusal of Hamas leader Khaled Mashal to support the Chechen jihad against the Russian government, which is anathema to the global jihadi community.
Later discussions on several jihadi internet forums clearly recognized that a major rift had developed between al Qaeda and the Taliban. One commenter even referred to “the beginning of the end of relations” between the two.
Gates tried to minimize such evidence by suggesting that Taliban officials are engaging in deception. He said Taliban leaders “recognize that the reason they are not in power right now is because they allowed al Qaeda to launch attacks against the United States”, and referred to reports that “the Taliban is saying, ‘Well let’s downplay the relationship with al Qaeda so we don’t get hit again’.”
What Gates failed to mention is that Taliban officials are furious at Osama bin Laden’s attacks against the United States, because he had given a written pledge, referred to by Mullah Omar in a June 2001 interview with conservative journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, not to attack any other country from his Afghan base.
President Barack Obama appears to have been informed about the evidence of divergent Taliban and al Qaeda interests. Senior administration officials told the New York Times in early October, evidently with the encouragement of the White House, that the Taliban was now viewed by the national security team as a group that did not have “ambitions to attack the United States”.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.
Radical Eyes said
Does anyone know what percentage of the 100,000 contractors referred to above are themselves Americans? Afghanis? Others? Are most of these contractors employing US personnel as “management” in conjunction with local “hired help”?
Green Red said
the peculiar geo-social orientation of Afghanistan has already served as a major element for decay and downfall of the Soviet Empire.
Now another so called democrat is trying to solve a problem that is really not solvable. Would it end the US empire? If not being the most important factor, but certainly it is a major factor involved.
As residents of the US, of course, we are obliged to demand the immeidate stoppage of sending soldiers and demanding immeidate US presentation in there and of course, in Iraq.