What the hell is going on in Afghanistan? Do most Americans have any *idea* what is being done in their name, what the strategy and tactics are there, what the plan is for winning?
I sure don't know the answers, I happened to catch a radio interview the other day with two journalists who have been traveling around Afghanistan talking to people – and more than ever, it has me thinking that this is Obama’s Vietnam and we need to end this war (transcript and link to audio).
The portrait these guys (Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley) paint is of a blunding military that doesn’t know what it’s doing, is running around killing and humiliating people – often the wrong people – and just making everything worse the more they do. Listen to this appalling story they tell:
Last March this guy, who was a Taliban imam, Mullah Sahib Jan, entered the process of reconciliation with the Karzai government, brought in fifty Taliban fighters. They brought in a string of weapons that they handed over to the government. And then this mullah, this former Taliban imam, took a position with the local reconciliation council in Logar province. And according to the officials there that Rick and I interviewed, they would send him out into hardcore Taliban areas to try to preach to the Taliban that there were benefits to joining the government. They were offering them housing, jobs and economic support in return for handing in their weapons. Well, ten months later, Mullah Sahib Jan’s bullet-riddled body was found about 500 yards from his house by his sons, who were escorted there by US Special Operations Forces who had raided their home and gunned down Mullah Sahib Jan in the middle of the night. They tied up his sons. They put the women into one room. They kept his sons blindfolded and handcuffed for about six hours, and then a translator came to them and showed them a picture, and they said, "This is the man that we killed." And it was their father.
The reporters (they were on the Democracy Now radio show) say that “The leadership of the Taliban acknowledged that the so-called targeted killing campaign of senior Taliban leadership has been successful, but they say that it’s only producing new generations of leaders within the Taliban that are actually more radical than the previous generation.”
And then we entered Mullah Zaeef’s house, and we interviewed him. And what he was saying is, look, if you kill all of the old-school Taliban leaders, people who actually were part of a government that had diplomatic relations with Muslim countries, that knew how to negotiate, you’re not going to like what you create in that, because this new generation—and he said to us, "I know this new generation. They’re more radical."
The new generation, Scahill reports, sometimes refuse to take orders from Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. “A few months ago, Mullah Omar sent an emissary to a new Taliban commander to try to say that ‘you’re violating some of the rules of Taliban combat,’ and they literally murdered his emissary.”
This recalls a book I read a few years ago called The Starfish and the Spider, which explains how there are two kinds of political organisms – centralized, and decentralized. When you chop the head off a spider, it dies, and a centralized organization falls apart. When you pull the leg off a starfish – even the biggest leg, it just grows back. When you chop the head off a decentralized, highly motivated guerrilla organization, it will grow a new head, or arm – and maybe many. The authors contrast the easy time the Spanish had conquering the mighty but highly centralized Aztec empire (they just killed Montezuma & the rest took care of itself) with their failure further north to subdue the seemingly more primitive Apaches (who had a more informal, decentralized and thus resilient structure).
So even putting aside the cases where blundering US military forces kill and humliate the wrong people in Afghanistan, the leadership-decapitation strategy is probably counterproductive. I'm sure assassination is not always counterproductive in history, but if you're not careful, what replaces the severed part can be (hydra-like) worse than what was there before.
The result of all this? Documentary filmmaker Rick Rowley says, “Well, you know, every time that I go to Afghanistan, the situation deteriorates. By every available metric, the US is losing the war on the ground. The insurgency is gaining strength. Every time I go back, roads that were safe the trip before are no longer safe.”
Here’s another story Rowley relates:
In this one neighborhood, which is not a Taliban stronghold at all, there had been, over the course of a couple months, four Special Operations Forces raids that all appear on the surface to have been conducted on bad intelligence and to have killed innocent people. I mean, these are not—and the only reason we know about these stories is because the families involved were connected, educated families who were participating in the government, not the kind of people who would be part of the Taliban insurgency at all. . . . They killed an entire farm family named Shams-ur-Rahman, I mean, a father and his four sons. They wiped out the male side of a family at night. And an area that was completely peaceful and pro-government erupted after that.
Good thing we're in Afghanistan to stamp out terrorism huh?
People in the US military supposedly understand all this (hopefully some have read their Clifford Geertz and fully appreciate just how clueless and at-sea people are when trying to operate in a foreign culture). But if so it’s not helping. Rowley:
The US has found itself caught in this bind where they have a completely self-defeating strategy. I mean, the stated public goal—there’s near unanimity of the consensus inside the leaders of the US military that there is no military solution to this conflict, there’s only a political one, and so it’s a counterinsurgency operation, you know, fighting for hearts and minds. That’s what they say publicly. But privately, I think they know that that’s lost. And so, what’s going on in a parallel track to that is a program of assassination, of air strikes and night raids, where whatever possible political gains were made by the counterinsurgency campaign during the day are erased at night by Special Operations Forces.
You know, in ninety days over the summer, JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, conducted 500 operations in Afghanistan and claims to have killed or captured a couple thousand—or, a couple thousand, you know, high-level commanders. Now, I mean, what kind of organization, a guerrilla army, has 5,000 commanders? They’re killing people way down to, you know, minor sort of functionaries. It’s war of attrition by Special Operations raid, and it’s completely undermining the political campaign there.
The military has always been a blunt, blunt weapon. That’s why the military itself supposedly doesn't like to do nation-building. To echo the cliche, we’re trying to fix a swiss watch with a sledgehammer. In Vietnam the consequences included not just 3 million Vietnamese killed (oh yeah and 60,000 Americans) but also the fact that we seriously @#&%ed up several other neighboring countries in the process. (Q: what is the most heavily bombed country on earth? A: Laos. One planeload of bombs fell on that tiny country on average once every 8 minutes for 9 years. Result: 400,000 deaths and a disastrous Communist takeover in 1975. US invasion also led directly to takeover of Cambodia by the previously unpopular Communists, who went on to run the infamous Killing Fields there.)
What will the final toll be in Afghanistan and environs when the last American soldier leaves? And, when will that be?
Le'ts also add in that the fact that nobody likes the presence of foreign troops in their country. Even the French hated the Americans before long when we were occupying France in the 1940s, after having liberated it from the Nazis. I got just a small insight into why this would be one day when I was leaving my office in military-occupied lower Manhattan not long after 9/11. I was entering the Bowling Green subway station and there was a soldier standing by the side of the entrance. As I entered he grunted something to me.
Soldier: Grunt.
Me: sorry?
Soldier: Mumble/grunt
Me: [tentatively continues walking into the subway]
Soldier [moving to aggressively block my way and yelling angrily]: I said THIS ENTRANCE IS CLOSED! Go OVER THERE!
Nice. Soldiers aren’t trained in customer relations. A blunt instrument indeed.
Finally, Scahill also makes this interesting point:
When we would travel to a place, we were often traveling—we would go and meet with tribal leaders before we were going to go into an area to seek permission to go in there. And part of the reason that we did that is we wanted to be able to speak to people away from any version of a threat or intimidation, and we wanted to be able to speak to them clearly about what they believed. Many journalists won’t do that without security. And often what you get is—you know, journalists will be with soldiers, and then they’ll kind of take a slight segue over to the side and interview an Afghan civilian, and then that civilian is in their piece. But meanwhile, what you don’t see is, on the other side of the camera, all of the US forces that are there. So, most media outlets in this country are portraying the war entirely from the perspective of embedded troops and Afghans who are being interviewed with the perception that if they say the wrong thing, the troops are going to arrest them or come back and get them. So I think that that’s part of why there’s such a major disconnect...
I don’t know what the full costs and downsides of just up & leaving Afghanistan would be right now, but unless Scahill and Rowley are way, way off, it sure seems like we’re doing more harm than good there right now.
