I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan. The views expressed below are my own.
There's a lot of hate speech floating around out there. You're used to it by now. The President is a black Muslim Nazi, LGBT destroy families, immigrants are disease-ridden criminals. It's not just that these lies are offensive, though, is it? It's that they hint at something darker, more wicked underneath. The argument isn't that immigrants have diseases (they don't), so let's try to help them. It's that they have diseases, so they're filthy and must be hunted down and annihilated. The folks who spread this hate speech are not lying out of altruism or compassion, they're lying as an expression of the dangerous, sociopathic capacities they possess. We know this from our foreign policy as well. It's not just that the overt anti-semitism of terrorist videos will double you over with vomit, it's the psycho undercurrent of suicide bombings that really keeps us awake at night.
I thought about this when I read Steve Hynd's "COIN is like Soviet Communism?," wherein he exposes counterinsurgency not as a strategy, but an ideology. He's right, but it's not just that counterinsurgency is a demented ideology, that it propagates vicious lies like obliterating a houseful of Afghan civilians is "protecting the population." It's that COIN is a symptom of an idea more primeval and dangerous: violence is the solution. The fundamental idea behind counterinsurgency is that war is the right tool for the job. It may look different and sound different, but it's still war, still violently brutalizing a population, us and them, for isolated and selfish political ends.
And much like the hate speech in our political discourse, you only need to scratch the surface of this ideology to see the fascist and criminal tendencies underneath. Here's Ann Marlowe writing in World Affairs:
More and more, I suspect that it's the brutality that works, not the COIN. It's moving hundreds of thousands of people across a country, or shooting all the men in a village as a reprisal for terrorism, or taking hostages, or doing extra-judicial kidnappings. Of course, the brutality would work without the COIN, too. Brutality works. But that's not who we are.
COIN makes sense intellectually, especially in the pellucid prose of David Galula, who wrote better in English than Roger Trinquier in French. Part of the reason it makes sense is that COIN is congruent with our culture's bias toward a perspectival view of reality. As General McChrystal keeps saying, counterinsurgency is a matter of perception.
In Algeria, the French were able to forcibly resettle villagers, build miles-long walls to close Algeria's borders, and, of course, torture terrorists, or simply toss them out of planes if they wouldn't talk. And that war didn't end well. In Malaya, the British achieved success, but also with forcible resettlement of inconveniently located villagers and many other heavy-handed measures that would be completely beyond the pale today. Also, in both of these countries, the counterinsurgents essentially were the government, with long involvement on the ground.Speaking of which, the Sri Lankan government seems to have succeeded against the Tamil Tigers, but if we could use their measures we would win in Afghanistan too. When the US government fought insurgents in the South after the Civil War, it declared martial law and shot enemy suspects on sight.
Excuse my language, but this is some heavy, disturbing shit. This sick bastard is rationalizing crimes against humanity. It's past stealing bread to feed to your family and to the point of justifying genocide. Completely absent are any Enlightenment achievements like rule of law and the value of human life. But this is exactly what we should expect when we have the obvious, blaring warning signs of COIN. It starts with a little bit of violence, a little bit of war, but it starts expanding (devolving?). We need 30,000 more troops. We need to expand our extra-judicial killings and kidnappings, more drone strikes and more night raids. Is it any surprise that Ann Marlowe says skip the development and "the talking part", and jumps straight to reptilian sins like displacement and ethnic cleansing?
This is not some loose, rhetorical "slippery slope" argument, this is actually happening. Ann Marlowe published that yesterday. Yesterday, May 20, 2010, almost a decade after the United States of America aggressively invaded and occupied Afghanistan, Ann Marlowe said our soldiers should commit war crimes against humanity to win. And she's not just dredging up ancient history from the Civil War, Sri Lanka was ethnically cleansed last year. The annihilation of the Tamil people happened right before our eyes, and we're so poisoned with war that our only reaction was "we need more of that!"
This is why we need to completely remove the military from Afghanistan, bring every last troop home. And more importantly, this is why need to avoid getting sucked into stupid media games. This is why we need to take such a hard line against our politicians. These ideas and debates have real consequences. Democrats want to look tough on national security, and now 1,000 Americans are dead. We want a fine-tuned, population-friendly counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, and now thousands of Afghans and Pakistanis are dead. We so believe in this concept of "victory" in Afghanistan that we have honest, thoughtful discussions on whether or not crimes against humanity are a good tactic.
Bring the troops home. We have better solutions to the problem, and we have other issues to deal with. Join us on Rethink Afghanistan's Facebook page and collaborate with the tens of thousands of others around the country working to bring this war to an end.
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While drugs and terrorism are not necessarily the two faces of the same coin in Afghanistan, the war on drugs and the war on terrorism may serve the same.. which should be considered in the methods used to counter both.. For the Sake of People, It Is the Right Thing to Do.
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