CommentsWORDS ON WAR - The next war on Afghanistan will be a silent war, one waged behind the shadowed windows of board rooms and bank vaults, an economic war, fought with sanctions and debt–weapons indiscriminate as cluster bombs–that will almost certainly inflict much more misery and death than the hot war of the last 20 years. It’s already started.
The best thing Biden has done in his life is to pull the US out of Afghanistan. He did it in the sloppy way Biden does everything and that–when combined with the Pentagon’s usual incompetence (some of it, perhaps, even deliberate)–presents the images of chaos the neocons and their press lackeys are now histrionic about. But getting out of this 40-year entanglement, a progressive knotting into as Thomas Pynchon might say, was always going to be messy, bloody and slammed with recriminations from those who had a stake in the war going on forever.
It took three months, thousands of airstrikes, hundreds of special ops raids and thousands of civilian casualties for the US to drive the Taliban from power in the fall of 2001. Twenty years later, the Taliban retook control in less than two weeks with, so far at least, a minimum of bloodshed.
To hear the neocons yelp and moan, the Taliban entered Kabul like the Wehrmacht rolling into Paris, instead of a peasant army, whose weapons are basically found materials from 40 years of war. As austere and reactionary as the Taliban are, their roots among a war-weary populace must be much deeper than we’ve been led to believe. Indeed, they are likely viewed as the lesser-evil, when compared to the corrupt puppet regime the US has propped up for two decades through the use of torture, drone strikes and bribes.
The Afghan “debacle” was not its end, but the 20-year-long war itself–from the 1st missile strikes that killed unsuspecting peasants who had no idea why they were being targeted to the people losing their grips and falling to their deaths from the wheel-wells of US planes they thought would fly them to safety.
The official budget for US national intelligence agencies in 2020 was: $62.8 billion, add on another $23 billion for Military Intelligence programs for a total of $85.8 billion. The black budget pushes this even higher. Really getting our money’s worth, eh?
The airwaves are flush with commentary on how the “collapse” of Afghanistan proves the US didn’t learn the “lesson” of Vietnam. Of course, if US foreign policy was about learning from past mistakes, there’s no evidence it learned the lessons from Korea, Congo, Guatemala, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Lebanon, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Grenada, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Syria…It’s not about “learning.” It’s about understanding who profits from these seemingly failed interventions/invasions/occupations.
The NYT is concerned that the Taliban’s routing of the US-trained Afghan military threatens American “credibility.” US credibility was lost when it invaded Afghanistan in response to a plot hatched, funded and largely executed by Saudi militants.
Even though it’s been burned into the national consciousness and exploited to justify wars abroad and repressive laws at home, most Americans still have apparently no idea who launched the 9/11 attacks or why–even though Bin Laden’s fatwa spells out the reasons with chilling clarity.
Patriotic Textbooks are certainly a concern when it comes to teaching US history, but here’s Reuters suggesting that it was the Taliban who financed, plotted and executed the attacks of 9/11 and not a group of Saudi militants, outraged by the presence of US troops on “holy” land.
A lot of people are bringing up Ron Paul this week, reciting his perceptive criticisms of the Afghan war after it began. But where was Paul when the vote was taken to authorize the War on Terror during the revenge fever in the days following 9/11, when the nation really needed a voice of restraint? Paul cast an ignominious vote for the AUMF, a vote that mustn’t be forgotten despite his later turn against the neocon wars. There was only one Member of Congress who stood up against the blind rush into Afghanistan: Barbara Lee. Credit her.
Bernie voted for the 2001 AUMF authorizing the Afghan War and all that followed. Even now, 20 years later, he continues to view the war as kind of failed humanitarian project, citing only US lives lost and pinning the blame on the Afghans themselves for being “corrupt” and “ineffectual”. Not his finest hour (or years, or decades)…
“Permanently”…? Ask the Brits and Soviets how that turned out for them.
As always with Pence, it’s hard to tell what he means by “crisis,” but for once he’s right that lives (mainly Afghan) would have been saved if the US had left Afghanistan 19, 15, 10, 5 or even 2 years earlier. He and Trump had the chance to do it and didn’t. Biden did and is now getting the hypocritical wrath of those who started the war and those who didn’t have the guts to end it.
“I’m not endorsing the Holocaust, but…”
Shortly after writing a column in late 20o1 praising Bush for conquering Afghanistan and pronouncing the Taliban “gone,” the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for journalism. His second.
When assessing blame for the 40-year-long torment the US inflicted on Afghanistan, let’s not forget the minor–though in his mind probably much grander–role played the laptop bombardier himself, Christopher Hitchens: mocking, petulant and already punch-drunk on his own depravity, as the bombs began to fall on Kandahar…
With 20 years of reflection, Rachel Maddow comes off even more clueless and bigoted than Hitchens, blaming the Afghans for the destruction and looting-by-contract of their own country: “Part of the reason even that scale of investment over 20 years didn’t materially change more … is because so much of what we put into Afghanistan was shoveled off and diverted by the boatload by a fantastically corrupt elite.”
The liberals (like Maddow) rehabilitated Bolton after he turned on Trump and now the big fat chickenhawk has come home to roost…
The real “corrupt elite” weren’t Afghans, who were pikers in comparison to the grifting of Pentagon, State, & CIA contractors, lobbyists, & revolving door generals, slurping up long-term, no-bid contracts that continued to pay off no matter how ineffectual or criminal their work.
The networks and cable channels are suddenly devoting a lot of coverage to Afghan War veterans, asking how they feel about the end of the war. They couldn’t speak to Pat Tillman, but they might have at least read from his letters and journals. Tillman’s last words before he was shot in the head by his fellow US special forces troops were: “I’m Pat Fucking Tillman!” Whether it was “friendly fire” or a kind of “fragging-in-reverse” to shut him up is still an open question.
Many of the neocons growling at Biden’s exit from the wreckage they made of Afghanistan have a convenient case of amnesia about how Poppy Bush left Iraq in 91, urging Kurdish and Shia opposition groups to rise up, then watching passively as Saddam’s helicopter gunships mowed them down by the 1000s…
Credit where credit is due…
In 2004, Alexander Cockburn and I conducted an extensive interview with an Afghan businessman named Kabir Mohabbat, who detailed the numerous efforts by the Afghan government to turn over Bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks and after–only to be repeatedly rebuffed by the Bush administration, which was hellbent on war.
If the Mujahideen were the “moral equivalent of the founding fathers” of Afghanistan, as some in the Reagan years proclaimed, then the Taliban must be the Afghan version of the Federalist Society, intent on enforcing an originalist interpretation of Sharia Law. The Taliban session at the next CPAC will be must-see streaming.
The US is out of Afghanistan (sort of), but the 2001 extra-constitutional AUMF that authorized it and the other forever wars (along with rendition, torture, and drone assassinations) remains firmly in place, grinding out lives in distant places and feeding thousands of Pentagon and CIA contractors at a trough set on auto-refill.
Andrew Cockburn writing in SpectatorWorld: “Few people realize that much of the time, the war itself was paid for by a bonus, an add-on to the main Pentagon budget in the form of a special fund for ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’ — money duly appropriated to the military for actually fighting this and other ongoing wars, rather like a police department charging extra for catching criminals. As the years passed, the Pentagon began quietly diverting its so-called ‘war budget’ to more urgent priorities, such as funding new weapons programs. By 2020 the diversion had become official — the budget request for that year brazenly acknowledged that $98 billion of the OCO money is for routine ‘base requirements’, rather than fighting abroad.”
If you invested $10,000 in the top five Pentagon contractors at the start of the Afghan War, it would be worth nearly $100,000 today.
Cost per day of the Afghan War: $300 million. (No wonder national health care is too expensive!)
Don’t fret, Pentagon contractors, the gravy train doesn’t show any sign of slowing down: As the Taliban retook Afghanistan last week, 25,000 U.S. Marines and other Navy personnel were war-gaming the capture and occupation of islands in the Western Pacific, in on one of the largest military exercises since the Cold War.
Poor Sartre, who had to spend some of the last hours of his life being interrogated by this cosplaying shithead, who a decade later had mutated into one of the world’s most slobbering Islamophobes. [See note below.]
The Afghan experience finally proved that it’s almost impossible to bomb feminism into the social and political consciousness of a country, especially when so many drone strikes hit wedding parties, even if these were targeted as a radical statement by third-wave feminists in the Pentagon about the subservient condition of women in the matrimonial state.
Tonight on Tucker: Is the Taliban “Too Woke” to Lead Afghanistan?
How many of the 4,000 Afghan “interpreters” we keep hearing about, many of whom have been left behind by the Pentagon and CIA and were key to the US’s COIN strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq, interpreted interrogations that involved torture, extracting information to led to drone strikes that killed civilians?
Let in as many as want to come with the retreating forces. But it’s impossible to deny the crucial role of translators in military occupations, dating back to Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. Although the profession sounds benign, it’s not necessarily a morally, or legally, neutral role. A 20-year occupation–of dubious legality–was enforced, brutally at times, by a counter-insurgency strategy that was almost totally dependent on translators.
The COIN strategy in brief: US troops enter a village in APCs, interrogate the villagers using Pashto or Dari speakers, bribe or threaten them into naming suspected Taliban or Al Qaeda insurgents, track down and kill–often by drone–the suspects (or the suspected suspects), even if the names offered up under duress only turn out to be those of a mean uncle or a rival poppy grower.
There needs to be some kind of War Crimes Tribunal established for Afghanistan–probably headed by what used to be called the Non-Aligned Nations–to investigate atrocities committed by the NATO alliance over the last 20 years: from torture to profiteering to extra-judicial killings. Unlike past investigations which tended to prosecute “aberrant” acts in a time of war, the tribunal should focus on the architects of the war itself and the managers, private and governmental, of the occupation.
The fact that Reality Winner went to federal prison and David Petraeus (who leaked top secret documents to his lover) didn’t and that his opinion on Afghanistan is now solicited by outlets like the New Yorker tells you all you need to know about the level of near absolute immunity afforded to foreign policy elites in the US–their rap sheets are cleansed before the blood is even dry…
The 90s version of the Taliban used to chop off hands for certain violations of their version of Sharia law. The Americans chopped off fingers as souvenirs. Incremental progress?
Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent books are Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution and The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink(with Joshua Frank) He can be reached at: [email protected] or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.
