Sage advice for Obama on Afghanistan

By Manuel E. Yepe

A CubaNews translation

Journalist Mark Danner offers President Barack Obama very good advice in his new book, Stripping Bare the Body, and in an interview with Bill Moyers, host of a popular program on the PBS television network, aired October 20.

Mark Danner has been a professor of journalism and international relations at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as at Bard College in New York. For more than 25 years he has reported from places as critical and “dangerous” as Iraq, the Balkans, Haiti… and Washington, D.C.

Recalling his experiences in Haiti, Danner observes that the strongest military power in the world, with 300 million inhabitants, has on two occasions in the last century occupied that small country of 7 million inhabitants, trying to alter its dynamics and has been unable to change things there. It has failed miserably “not least because when you apply American power… you start the forces of nationalism in reaction. And we’ve seen that in every place Americans have intervened, including Afghanistan.”

He acknowledges that in Iraq the United States was able to unseat Saddam Hussein, who represented the Sunni minority that held power, as well as establish a government controlled by the Shia, who make up the majority of Iraq’s citizens.

But “now, it’s a Shia power, sympathetic to Iran. It’s unclear whether this invasion at the end of the day really helped American interests at all,” Danner says. “We do know that it left 100,000 or more Iraqis dead. It politically destroyed the Bush administration. And it left the American public…skeptical indeed about future U.S. military deployments.”

“And this is what Obama has been left with, when he has to try to cope with Afghanistan. A public exhausted and skeptical,” is how he puts it in the interview.

According to Danner, the United States is still living “in the backwash of the War on Terror.” It is still living through Bush’s “state of exception,” “a state of soft martial law, a state of emergency, a state of siege that was imposed after 9/11. Whereby warrantless surveillance was allowed without the supervision of the courts.

Whereby widespread detention was allowed, not only of illegal aliens but American citizens. “The use of torture or extreme techniques of interrogation is permitted” and legally certified within the Department of Justice. And all of these things represent the legal shadow and the political shadow of the ‘war on terror.’

Danner also sees a grave problem for Obama in the fact that, in order to change any of these measures by Bush, the new president runs the risk of making himself very vulnerable politically in the event of a new terrorist attack.

This is seen not only in the open defense of torture by the former vice president Dick Cheney, but also in the accusations that Obama is putting the country’s security in danger by renouncing use of such “resources.”

Danner maintains that if the United States is losing its war against the “Muslim terrorists” it is because everything taking place has been benefiting the tactics of the extremists, because it promotes the unity of Muslims and hatred for the United States.

By contrast, Obama has announced a different policy and “has an African name, he’s Black, he has a Muslim middle name,” and he is speaking “about a world of inclusion, of cooperation, and not of unilateralism.” This is a threat to Osama Bin Laden’s plans because Obama projects an image opposite to the one that helps the plans of the terrorists, Danner continues.

“I would not like to be in President Obama’s position in making choices on Afghanistan. I think he’s in a terrible place, where this war is already deeply unpopular among the American public, and deeply unpopular within his own political party.

“If he expands it dramatically, as his general, his hand-picked general has suggested by sending 40,000 or more new troops… he will lose much of his Democratic support” and he will “be reliant on Republican support.” But “if he rejects this recommendation, the Republicans will attack him and it will be part of the bill of particulars that will be cited against him in the event of another attack, along with the renunciation of torture.”

“I think the war is going badly there,” Danner stated. “And frankly it’s going badly here. I’m glad the Obama administration, I think the president himself, in the wake of the Afghan elections,” has understood that “the partner on the ground there was corrupt and illegitimate.”

Danner believes that the United States must be clear that the objectives that brought it there were, in his opinion, very limited. “We need to be clear about the fact that our presence on the ground is going far toward undermining the very raison d’etre for our presence, which is to say, we don’t want to encourage future terrorist attacks on this country. We don’t want to allow large scale jihadist organizing… but our presence in Afghanistan is a major rallying cry for these groups… I would gradually disengage from Afghanistan.”

Manuel E. Yepe Menéndez is a lawyer, economist and journalist. He teaches at the Superior Institute of International Relations in Havana.

http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs2756.html

A CubaNews translation by Will Reissner.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.