Afghanistan — the next disaster
By
Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
After
six plus years, the war in Afghanistan drags on. The media
occasionally cites casualties, but if it doesn’t involve National
Football League veteran Pat Tillman’s execution by his own
comrades, Afghanistan gets sparse attention. A few stories feature
the growing number of Afghan and Iraq War vets on American streets.
But the aspiring candidates ignore such “blowback.” Instead, they
demonstrate verbal aggression, a characteristic thought necessary for
victory. “We’ve got to get the job done there [Afghanistan],”
Barack Obama asserted without specifying what the “job” is. (AP,
Aug 14, 2007)
Obama
called for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and sending them to “the
right battlefield,” Afghanistan and Pakistan. To pressure Pakistani
President Pervez Musharraf to act against terrorist training camps,
Obama would use military force — if he became President — against
those “terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000
Americans.” (Bloomberg, Aug 1, 2007)
In
mid January, Bush dispatched 3,200 additional marines to Afghanistan.
Curiously, the uncurious media didn’t ask why U.S. and NATO forces
continue to fight there. Nation Building? With little or no budget
for reconstructing the country?
Junior
partners, the British leaders, haven’t learned lessons any better
than their Yankee counterparts. Defense Minister Des Browne predicted
British troops could stay there for “decades.” Did he not learn
that from 1839 to 1842 British troops fought in Afghanistan so they
could take that sphere away from Russia? Now, NATO makes war there,
says Browne, to insure that it would not again “become a training
ground for terrorists threatening Great Britain.”
In
the 19th
Century, the British Empire suffered disastrous losses when it
invaded Afghanistan and erected a puppet regime in Kabul — just as
the United States did (Hamid Karzai) after Bush’s 2001 invasion.
The puppet fell quickly when the British could not quell resistance.
By 1842, Afghan mobs attacked Englishmen who remained in Kabul. The
British army retreated toward India, its officers believing they had
negotiated safe passage. Afghan “insurgents” slaughtered some
16,000 English soldiers.
In
2001, the British and other NATO forces marched in to capture or kill
Osama Bin Laden and overthrow the Taliban. Six plus years later, Bin
Laden remains hidden — probably in Pakistan — and the Taliban have
returned to Afghanistan to mount a major insurgency in areas they
once controlled. In addition, Afghani
farmers
have produced bumper opium crops that end up as heroin in
western
cities and profits for the Taliban leaders who tax the growers. Like
its British-backed predecessor, the U.S. puppet government in Kabul
controls virtually no territory.
Browne
omitted that terrorists have found training grounds elsewhere — in
English cities, for example, and on the web. They can buy from
hardware or agricultural stores — lest anyone forget where the
Christian Oklahoma bombers (pre 9/11) got their explosives. The U.S.
army provided training to Timothy
McVeigh,
convicted and executed for his role in the Oklahoma City explosion.
Those bombers didn’t need Afghanistan; nor did the fiends who
blasted the Madrid train station, or the killers who hit the London
underground. European and U.S. cities offer ample meeting places and
the U.S. and British armed forces have taught hundreds of thousands
of young men and women to kill with efficiency.
The
Russians had also failed to grasp lessons of fighting a people
determined to resist. Approximately 15,000 Red Army soldiers died
from 1979
until 1988 when the Soviets withdrew. The
humiliation speeded the implosion of the Soviet Union.
Bush
ignored these facts as well as centuries of experience when he
ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. Indeed, the lack of success in
Afghanistan
has not stopped the major presidential candidates from pledging
to stay the course
there. Wars
of choice in Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq have shown that Americans
and their European junior partners don’t easily tolerate taking
casualties abroad, especially in wars their leaders cannot
successfully explain.
The
overwhelming sentiment against Iraq will turn to Afghanistan as
casualty rates continue or accelerate. Yes, the Taliban government
harbored Bin Laden and offered training to would-be militants but,
ask millions of people, which country supplied the funds for the
Taliban takeover of Afghanistan? Saudi Arabia, our dear and loyal
ally! Who paid for the madrasas (religious schools) where the young
Afghan boys and teens learned their religious ideology — including
beating an effigy
of
George Bush I — and got military training?
Pakistan
— another ally — not only hosted the madrasas, but offered Bin
Laden and gang ample protection before and after 9/11. Bush chose to
hit Afghanistan and Iraq, countries whose involvement was secondary
or non-existent. No major candidate addresses this issue. The press
screams the question every day — through its silence.
As
additional U.S. marines land they will discover in Afghanistan that
the old tribal forces continue to struggle for power. The largest,
the Pashtuns, have shown sympathy to the Taliban. Some tribal leaders
or their fathers received CIA aid during the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan. They used none of it to build the country, but rather
fought with each other in the post Soviet era and made it possible
for the Taliban to enter and take control.
Key
Pakistani generals promoted the Taliban in the early 1990s, and their
zealous brand of Islam spread deeply inside their country, including
within military and intelligence circles. When assassins struck
Benazir Bhutto on December 27, they delivered a severe body blow to
secular government.
The
tribal forces unleashed by “Charlie Wilson’s War (it was really
Ronald Reagan’s and CIA Chief William Casey’s war to weaken the
Soviet Union) had no interest in changing Afghanistan into a modern
democracy; another dependable cog in the big wheel of corporate
globalization.
Bush’s
neo con advisers, however, threw “democracy” at the public much
as TV preachers intone Jesus while offering to cure their flock’s
ailment with a little pressure from silver-crossed palms blessed by
God. They had no plans to transform this ancient land and people into
poorer carbon copies of themselves.
Afghans
have proved more resistant to Western efforts to change their old
life into one of a consumer society than new bacteria are to
antibiotics. William Pfaff in an excellent January 16 column quotes
Rory Stewart, head
of the Turquois Mountain Foundation in Kabul. The
United States and its western allies “should accept that we don’t
have the power, knowledge or legitimacy to change those societies.”
Stewart
noted that “War has eroded social structures and entrenched ethnic
suspicion….Power is in the hands of tribal leaders and militia
commanders. Much of Afghanistan is barren and most people cannot read
or write….The local population is at best suspicious of our
actions.” Stewart claimed that in at least one province, Helmand,
“…it is more dangerous for foreign civilians than it was two
years ago before we deployed our troops.” (Jan. 16, 2008, Tribune
Media Services) Bush’s argument relies on fear, not fact. If the
Taliban retakes control, the West would be threatened.
The
Taliban will remain after the West grows weary of this enigmatic war.
Paddy
Ashdown, the
UN’s new
envoy
to Afghanistan, warned:
“We are losing in Afghanistan — and rather than militarily, we are
losing the political mission — and in large part we are losing
because there has been a complete failure of the international
community to co-ordinate its efforts.”
That
failure, he continued “relies on the fact that we believe, for some
bizarre reason, that we have such a unique system of government in
our own countries – by the way, not a view shared by many of our
citizens – that we believe we have a right to impose it lock, stock
and barrel, along with the values and everything that goes along with
it, on other countries with the use of B-52s, tanks and rifles.”
(Doug Saunders, Globe
and Mail,
January 17, 2008)
Little
thought or planning preceded Bush’s order to invade and occupy
Afghanistan. The war makers assumed their traditional omnipotence,
that from noble intentions (or rhetoric) a stable and prosperous
nation would somehow develop. It didn’t happen, but the Taliban
returned, and gained strength and confidence. Bush responds by
dispatching more US forces, already overstretched and overstressed,
to bring force into a place where it has traditionally proven
ineffective.
Before
the next appropriation, Members of Congress and the media might read
a few verses of Rudyard Kipling on older wars in that region:
“And
after—ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our ’ologies.
A
scrimmage in a Border Station—
A
canter down some dark defile—
Two thousand pounds of
education
Drops to a ten-rupee
jezail—
No proposition Euclid wrote,
No
formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your
coat,
Or ward the tulwar’s
downward blow
Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can—
The
odds are on the cheaper man.”
(“Arithmetic on the Frontier”)
Saul
Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies Fellow and author of A
BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD.
His new film, WE
DON’T PLAY GOLF HERE
is available on DVD (roundworldproductions@gmail.com)
