Afghanistan Policy Is Something Obama Needs To Take Another Serious Look At

Yesterday the NY Times reported that the military is preparing a big troop buildup in Afghanistan. This could be a terrible miscalculation and I'm only slightly less worried about it under Obama than I was under Bush. In fact... when you think about which politician is more like Alcibiades... well, it sure isn't Bush. Steven Pressfield's historical novels, set even before John McCain was born, Tides of War (about Athens' penultimate-- in as much as it lead to the destruction of Athens as a world power-- disastrous campaign in Sicily) and The Afghan Campaign, should serve as fair warning to Obama that hubris is what ends big strong empires... and this one isn't immune, not by a long shot.

Is Obama going to succeed where everyone since Alexander the Great failed-- and he only succeeded by stashing Hephaestion and marrying an Afghan chief's daughter, Roxana-- including the British and the Soviets when they made the mistake of trying to invade and conquer Afghanistan?

The Times reported that Maj. Gen. Michael Tucker, deputy commander for operations for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, told Pentagon reporters that military leaders are anticipating a ''very active winter'' of insurgency attacks and said that there's a "very huge building campaign that has already begun. We're pushing dirt as we speak to prepare for the arrival of these forces.''

He could not quantify the number of buildings or contractors involved, but said the military has done several in-depth studies over the past month and a half to determine exactly how many buildings, helicopter pads, dining facilities and even latrines will be needed.

Damn, I wish they would have read Thucydides' report instead! Or perhaps this report from my old college professor, Michael Parenti who begs that before we sink any deeper into the Afghan quagmire we learn something about recent Afghani history and the role our country has played heretofore. I want to offer some of what he's written about it with a note that soon after graduating from the college he was teaching at I traveled to Afghanistan and spent the better part of a year there. In 1969, when I was there, women were not seen on the streets, rarely even in chadri, and I had the feeling I had traveled further in time-- back in time-- than in distance. From my experience Parenti knows what he's talking about.

Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People's Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators.

The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. "It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it," writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time.

The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.

The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes.

A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been "a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city's university. Afghan women held government jobs-- in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women."

The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world's heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a "genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope."

But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government's dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children.

Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers.

A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.

It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the country-- that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas.

In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.

The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.

After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year.

Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as "a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers."

Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in the world.

Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah's name against the purveyors of secular "corruption."

In Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called the Taliban-- heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan-- fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes.

The Taliban reign of terror was unimaginable, although if you're one of the 10 million people who read Khaled Hosseini's book The Kite Runner-- or even if you only saw the movie-- you probably can imagine. (See the trailer below.) The U.S. government had no problem working-- even coddling these barbarous thugs because they were right wing thugs-- i.e., "our thugs." Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher publicly bragged that he was a brother of these monsters and was proudly photographed in Afghanistan with them costumed and playing mujahideen. "As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. Not until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban's oppression of women." Since then tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines and God knows how many from hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water. More have fled to Iran and Pakistan.

While claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas reserves. A decade before 9/11, Time magazine (18 March 1991) reported that US policy elites were contemplating a military presence in Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution of the USSR removed the one major barrier against pursuing an aggressive interventionist policy in that part of the world.

US oil companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked region. US officials opposed using the Russian pipeline or the most direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, they and the corporate oil contractors explored a number of alternative pipeline routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the Mediterranean or across China to the Pacific [and, of course, across] Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean... The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention.

One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, "there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11 tragedy." But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather than private accumulation.

US intervention in Afghanistan has proven not much different from US intervention in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had the same intent of preventing egalitarian social change, and the same effect of overthrowing an economically reformist government. In all these instances, the intervention brought retrograde elements into ascendance, left the economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many innocent lives.

The war against Afghanistan, a battered impoverished country, continues to be portrayed in US official circles as a gallant crusade against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has been a means to other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social order, gaining profitable control of one of the last vast untapped reserves of the earth's dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US bases and US military power into still another region of the world.

In the face of all this Obama's call for "change" rings hollow.

Good professor to have studied under, right? But Parenti is hardly the only voice worth listening to regarding Afghanistan. Patrick Seale is a British journalist specializing in the Middle East. Last week he speculated that the West is rethinking its Afghan War strategy, having come to the conclusion that there is no military solution. "Clearly," he wrote, "the notion of 'victory' in Afghanistan is being quietly redefined to mean reconciliation, economic development and nation-building rather than a military defeat of the Taliban." Robert Gates and Hamid Karzai seem to have come around to this way of thinking. The big problem: Obama!

During his election campaign, he pledged to take the war to Al-Qaeda's tribal sanctuaries in Pakistan, with or without the agreement of the Islamabad government. It must be hoped that he will be persuaded that any such strategy would be a grave mistake, inflaming Pashtun passions and destabilizing Pakistan.

This year has seen the worst violence in Afghanistan since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001. At least 4,000 have been killed, about a third of them civilians. It is surely time to bring the killing to an end.

And this idea about there not being a viable military solution isn't exactly new. In 2006 Anatol Lieven and Rajan Menon of the New America Foundation were writing in Newsweek that imaginitive thinking is what's needed, not more troops and more money.

Rory Stewart was a British foreign service officer and best-selling author (The Places in Between and The Prince of the Marshes). Last week he penned an Op-Ed for the NY Times about the wrong-headedness of Obama's plans for more war in Afghanistan. He makes a strong case that escalation has been not just unsuccessful and wasteful, but counterproductive.

What incentive do Afghan leaders have to reform if their country is allowed to produce 92 percent of the world's heroin and still receive $20 billion of international aid? Are they wrong to think that if they became more stable and law-abiding and wiped out the Taliban we would give them less support? That this is a protection racket where the amount of money one receives is directly proportional to one's ability to threaten trouble?

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Comments

[appleknocker]

This article should be required reading for anyone forming an opinion on Afghanistan. 99.9% of MSM commentary ignores everything that happened prior to the Soviet "aggression."

[MagisterLudi]

Violence in Afghanistan has surged nearly 30 percent this year and suicide bombings are inflicting a high toll on civilians, a new United Nations report says.

The report said Afghanistan is averaging 550 violent incidents a month, up from an average of 425 last year. It said three-fourths of suicide bombings are targeting international and Afghan security forces, but suicide bombers also killed 143 civilians through August.

"Suicide attacks have been accompanied by attacks against students and schools, assassinations of officials, elders and mullahs, and the targeting of police in a deliberate and calculated effort to impede the establishment of legitimate government institutions,"

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/03/asia/AS-GEN-Afghanistan.php

[MagisterLudi]

A recent UN report says that suicide attacks employed by the Taliban as a military technique have had little military success in Afghanistan and have instead caused an increase in public resentment.

The majority of the suicide bombers were Pakistani Pashtuns from FATA, while others were from Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province and a few were Afghan Pashtuns from refugee camps in Pakistan.
Afghanistan has found that individuals (including children) are being coerced or duped into carrying out these attacks.30

"Consequently, support for the Taliban’s tactics has steadily eroded as suicide bombings increased," said UN Special Representative Tom Koenigs. "The greatest impact of suicide bombing has been on innocent civilian bystanders and the general population. Attacks on civilians, schools, and infrastructure have also led to a decrease in the popularity of the Taliban."

[VicksieDo]

Obama should listen to this guy named Howie...ok

[davidly]

Those with interest in the region don't see military action there as counterproductive, insane as that may seem. I believe that the President-elect has his stated position on Afghanistan to thank for his new job. Reconsideration is not likely. The promise of this war cannot be broken as easily as the standard promise to the voter.

[bayside]

Why are we in afganistan anyway. One man supposely did this to us, so says a man who has lied about everything he says, and are in afganistan, no, its turkey, no, its pakistan etc.

[leftcoastliberal]

That the Taliban were originally trained and armed by the CIA makes me hate them even more, not think we should shamefacedly turn around and cede Afghanistan to their quasi-genocidal clutches. The Taliban are fascistic theocrats and the Carter and Reagan officials who supported their mujahedeen antecedents should be publicly shamed and prosecuted. That doesn't mean we should abandon the relatively secular, relatively democratic (and yes, I know, hugely corrupt, incompetent, and ineffective) government that replaced them. Obviously military force alone would be useless, and obviously more care needs to be taken to protect civilians, but the Taliban committed and act of war on the US by colluding with Al Queda to arm and train terrorists who targeted the WTC. Worse, they devastated Afghanistan more thoroughly than any foreign occupier ever could, killing millions with hunger and plunging the nation into nightmare of torture and civil conflict. Yet, since they've left, a John Hopkins university study shows, infant mortality declined by 40,000 children a year. Don't those kids figure into the equation? As Christopher Hitchens puts it, doesn't the fact that the Taliban is a Frankenstein monster of the West's creation make it all the more our responsibility to destroy them? The left has a disconnect on Afghanistan as bad as the one it had during the Stalin Hitler pact, or when old lefties were decrying the US and Britain's "imperialist" war against NAZI Germany. I strongly suspect Obama is right on this one.

[vigilantwarrior]

Parenti is on target. Afghanistan is about pipelines and countering Russia. To secure the TAPI pipeline the locals must be "pacified", which means permanent bases--as in Iraq. Obama will not be allowed to abort this project.

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/the-ones-who-attacked-us/

[Skeptic6]

Je suis d'accord. It's all about empire.

[mcantwell]

I would think that the recent terrorist attacks in India will have a great impact on the strategy going forward in Afghanistan. Pakistan is now facing alot of pressure from India, as well as the International community, to rid themselves of the Terrorist organizations they are harboring. No one wants a nuclear crisis so I suspect a lot of Diplomcay will be used.

[Skeptic6]

Assuming, of course, that the official story is accurate and the Pakistanis are lying.

[MagisterLudi]

Assume away.

[Skeptic6]

Let's face it--there is a certain probability that just like Bush, the office of president is held by a figurehead. Those who control that office are behind the scenes. JFK was taken out because he did not want to play by the rules.

Obama has already stated several times that he would like to expand our activities in Afghanistan, and would not be averse to attacking Pakistan, assuming "actionable intelligence." Condoleeza Rice reported over the weekend that it was "certain" that Pakistan was responsible for the attacks at Mumbai. I presume that is based upon "actionable intelligence."

It seems to me the stage has been set.

[MagisterLudi]

I agree that diplomatic channels must be vigorously pursued. Along with aggressive attack on Taliban and especially foreign Jihadist element. Diplomacy will only succeed when facts on the ground are favorable. It is doubtful that tribal leaders would engage in a real negotiations unless operception is that coalition is doing well militarily.
My chronological plan::
1. Very aggressive 2 month military campaign In A-stan and P-stan from coalition and P-stani army. including deep penetration by special forces teams. Mining of many passes.
2. 1 month diplomatic negotiations in Riyad.
3. 1 year reconstruction
4. Repeat as necessary.

[chaos4700]

Yes, because aggressive attacks have been so fantastically successful thus far. More mines, more bombing runs, and more casualties on both sides. Oh, and /then/ start diplomacy after beating the crap out of them? Your grasp on diplomacy leaves as much to be desired as your application of military strategy as it applies to Afghanistan. And coordinating with Pakistan might have worked out better before our forces started raids across their border without permission.

Your chronological plan rather resembles the cycle we are presently locked into with Iraq. /That's/ a resounding success we need to repeat elsewhere, huh?

Bonus points for managing to work in the made-up word "Jihadist" in yet another post.

[MagisterLudi]

I noticed that the this blog ( as it customary in certain re-actionary circles) is long on accusations dire warnings and politically inspired advocacy. However, it astonishingly short on proposed solutions: one sentence and a link to newspaper "expert".
Form the very same:"the U.S. troop ‘surge’, together with the mobilization against Al-Qaeda of close to 100,000 Sunnis -- produced a dramatic reduction in violence and prepared the ground for the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), recently passed by the Iraqi Parliament."
This model will be implemented in A-stan.
Bet on it!

[arvay]

Yes, and who are the 100,000 "Sunnis" of Afghanistan? The two nations are so different that it's difficult to imagine importing a solution from one place to another. If there's some not exclusively military solution in the offing, I doubt it's been 'discovered" yet.

The fact that the insurgency has successfully re-located to the wild areas of Pakistan means that only the Pakistani army can help us here -- joint operations beyond some intelligence and a few robot strikes would be out of the question. Right now they're engaged in a bloody fight to gain control of the area, and the Mumbai attacks illustrate how easily the Islamists can upset everything and create new dangers.

We can hope that the democratic government of Pakistan survives.

Ultimately, bribery may produce better result that guns, but someone has to figure out how we and the Pakistani government can "bribe and conquer." That's for people with way more expertise than you or me.

[MagisterLudi]

Remember the Northern Alliance? THEY defeated the Taliban, with American air cover and specail forces help. Too bad some were bribed to let Al Qaeda/Taliban leadership escape. But still...

Ah, how quickly some forget... when it's convenient, eh?

[MagisterLudi]

"We can hope that the democratic government of Pakistan survives. "
Certainly a hope worth cherishing. And it is much more likely, if the civilian government takes decisive action to control the intelligence apparatus and gives up on expansionist ideas re.Kashmir.

[appleknocker]

Do you dispute the facts in Klein's article? Or do you simply chooose to ignoe them?

[GaiaTerra7]

All of our purchases are on Chinese plastic. This is a proven sink hole. Stop spending on guns and start spending on butter.

[MagisterLudi]

butter?! Maybe olive oil.....
Not sure what kills more people in the world: fattening food or guns.

[GaiaTerra7]

the phrase "guns or butter" had been used for decades. Guns being symbolic for military and butter on domestic and social spending.

[ThePeacemakers]

I'm no fan of any war or invasion.
"Control" of Afghanistan seems deceptively easy. Maybe because the median age for Afghanistan citizens is around 17. Could seem like taking candy from a baby - to everyone there fighting for control,not just the US.

But he did become the first black POTUS.
He's got big ideas. And we see that each POTUS is very concerned about legacy while in office and out of office.

[GordonMatthew]

This fellow http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JL06Df01.html gives a pretty thorough account of the resurgence of the Taliban since 2001. I don't think the US/NATO/Karzai regime ever could have come up with enough troops to pacify the Pashtun areas so it was a fool's errand from the start, and the islamist/nationalists are back in charge now.

Obama's talk about "more troops" will most likely change, when he realizes how many "more" are required to get the job done -- certainly at least twice as many as there were in Iraq . So it's time to talk to the various Islamist/nationalist factions (3 or 4 different groups) and make it worth their while to shut down the arab jihadist operations, to whom they have no particular loyalty. This applies across the border in Pakistan, obviously.