McNamara's Ghosts in Afghanistan

Robert McNamara died the other day as seven American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.

It wasn't the deaths on the same day that made me remember McNamara's folly.

It was the sense that McNamara's ghost is hovering over the new graveyard of America's future.

McNamara's team of Ivy Leaguers was dubbed "the best and the brightest" by the disillusioned war correspondent David Halberstam. They were deluded by their arrogance into believing computer-driven measures of success, like body counts. Though liberal and secular in temperment, they held a faith-based belief in victory. Fifty-eight thousand Americans died, along with countless Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, because of these best and brightest. Not one of them went to jail. McNamara went to the World Bank.

Today another Ivy League president has placed his faith in Ivy League generals and an inbred crowd of three hundred national security advisers drawn from the same elite circles. They are the new best-and-brightest, and I believe history will show they are marching to folly in their "Long War."

General Petraeus is an Ivy Leaguer. So is his surrogate spokesman in Washington, John Nagl at the think tank of the best-and-brightest, the Center for a New American Security. So is Gen. Stanley McChystal, the Special Operations spook presiding over Afghanistan and Pakistan. So are Petraeus' Harvard collaborators on the new Marine and Army counterinsurgency manual. So is their top counterinsurgency guru, David Kilkullen, who writes of reviving the Vietnam Phoenix program of detention and targeted killings, not only in Afghanistan, but globally. [For dummies, Phoenix involved the detention, torture and killing of 25,000 alleged Vietcong civilians, and the rounding up millions of peasants into "strategic hamlets" to protect them from any Vietcong still in the jungle. The debacle was terminated in 1971, but Kilcullen, who probably wasn't born then, keeps hope alive, saying the program was misunderstood. McNamara would have loved Kilcullen, a Ph.D who openly believes in "armed social science."]

I first heard of Robert McNamara as an undergraduate editor at the University of Michigan, when a dean of humanities told me that McNamara, a UM graduate and president of Ford Motors, was an exceptionally bright man with whom dialogue about war and peace was finally possible.

I was skeptical, however, of McNamara's application of scientific management techniques to corporate, government and military policy. I couldn't understand the mystique of intelligence, detached as it was from an understanding of a world in unpredictable transition.

From the perspective of McNamara's funeral, we can take a reckoning. The Vietnam War was the greatest American folly of the twentieth-century. Applied to large universities, the same scientific management approaches provoked the Free Speech Movement. And of course, Ford is in ruins.

The brightest were clueless and, in Barbara Williams' verse,

When the very good have stopped their quest
The very worst are called the best.

For what earthly purpose did those seven Americans die in southern Afghanistan? Are there al Qaeda there? Not by anyone's account. If they were fighting the Taliban as distinct from local people, the reasons are elusive. Apparently the Taliban of southern Afghanistan are part of a host organization that will welcome the return of al Qaeda whom, we are warned, will use their new caves to plot strikes against our homeland.

You can have the IQ of a plant to smell this stupidity.

The Pentagon predicts an 18-month war for southern Afghanistan before they can clear, build, hold and hand over the rubble to an Afghan army inferior to the Taliban.

The logical move now for the Taliban would be to draw the young Americans into a bloody quagmire in Kandahar and Helmand, then turn up elsewhere using hit-and-run attacks as they did this week against the gates of NATO or isolated American bases elsewhere.

In an example of further idiocy masked as intelligence, a Pentagon spokesman yesterday said the seven deaths were "what we expected." [LAT, July 7] The Taliban and "other insurgents" had engaged in "less direct combat than was expected by the military", Nagl of the CNAS told the press. [LAT, July 7]. They Taliban and these "other insurgents" used roadside bombs instead of throwing themselves in front of the American guns. This was a surprise. That's what happens when you go into "Indian country", said a Pentagon official.

In more dangerous Pakistan, meanwhile, the best-and-brightest are high-fiving themselves after pressuring the wary Pakistan army into invading the Swat Valley and preparing to assault South Waziristan. This operation has created more casualties than any time since Pakistan was founded and, according to the NY Times, American aid workers are being barred from refugee camps where pro-Taliban forces distribute food and medicine paid for by American taxpayers. In a recent incident obscured by the fog of war, the Taliban last week apparently attacked a site connected with Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

In Iraq meanwhile, the Pentagon and mainstream media are upset by the very Shi'a coalition put in power by the American military bragging about the US withdrawal and holding a national day of celebration. Only the brightest are blind to the American effort to disguise failure in Iraq with a decent interval, as orchestrated by Henry Kissinger in Vietnam.

None of this makes any Americans safer. If anything, more civilians will grow to hate us in both countries, some of those civilians will join the Taliban or al Qaeda, the Europeans will soon be abandoning the NATO military mission, Russia will be enjoying payback for what the Americans did to them in Afghanistan, and President Obama will be trapped like Gulliver in a Long War he cannot afford, can never win and dare not lose.

The best and brightest, by their own definition, are incapable of being wrong. McNamara couldn't admit his mistake for decades and still remained at loss for words in the painful final moments of the film Fog of War.

The new best-and-brightest are like McNamara in this respect too: their arrogance makes a mistake inconceivable.

It took an anti-war movement to provoke Daniel Ellsberg, one of the original best-and-brightest, to finally break ranks and tell the truth. Another movement and another Ellsberg are needed now, before the mistake becomes a permanent one.

TOM HAYDEN is the author of Ending the War in Iraq [2008], the Tom Hayden Reader[2008] and this year's The Long Sixties.

Comments

[Rule Of Law]

Tom--nobody lives forever. Let's take it to the streets one more time and get our country back!

[Openeyes]

What do you propose Mr. Hayden?

The Afghan government controls the capital, Kabul, and basically nothing else in the country. If we leave, the Taliban will take over. Whether they attack us again or not, they will clearly be able to fund terrorism outside of Afghanistan and will at a minimum return the country to the fundamentalist Islamic nightmare it was previously. We should want this?

This is not Viet Nam. This is not a proxy war with Russia or China.

This also is not Iraq, with some bogus excuse to justify invading and seizing oil. This about stabilizing a country in a very sensitive part of central asia.

I don't like the fact that we have to be there either, but do you seriously think it would be better for us to just leave and to let Afghanistan return to Taliban control?

If you have a solution to the problem of creating a stable Afghanistan without U.S. involvment, by all means, share it, we're all listening.

[socalsue]

So, where do we start, Tom? I may be disabled, but I'm willing to get involved, again, in a vibrant anti-war movement.
It's past time we got this together.

[glennleon]

its all about the money

[AnotherMcIntosh]

Tom,

Thank you for all your good work and your continued involvement. This country and our civilization continues to need good leadership.

At the Ivy League schools, they must teach that structured group-think is more important than facts and logic. It is something that has worked for them.

[Rule Of Law]

Tom, you were once the leader of a movement. Perhaps it is time for you to break ranks with the sell outs in Congress and lead "Another movement...before the mistake becomes a permanent one."

[godsbreath64]

I thought Tom would have balanced the post primary Obama ticket, constitutional society, species and planet, but thats me. Movement is ripe, though, to be sure.


"Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes, turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name." --William Morris, "A dream of John Ball" (1886)


We do need today's Elsbergs to step up.

[Rule Of Law]

And all the other revolutionary icons of the 60s. Tom knows those guys, and a lot of them are still with us. They know how to run a movement, and if Tom doesn't take advantage of this opportunity to build one with those people and teach us how it is done, then I truly believe that we have no hope!!!

[celticjag]

Forty two years ago, MLK in his speech "Beyond Vietnam" charged that "that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today...my own government" Thinking of Obama, the quote from Alphonse Karr comes to mind, "the more things change, the more they remain the same" or one from a commentator, "same old dog, just a new collar".

[Rule Of Law]

As someone pointed out to me long ago, MLK was allowed preach equality and integration and equal rights, primarily because the effects of it would only be felt among the masses: the oligarchs would never see Their schools integrated or their kids bussed all over the county, or people of color in their neighborhoods.

But When Dr. King began to preach about the War and the economy--taking the side of union workers in an ongoing strike--he was assassinated! The lesson learned between that murder and of Jay Eff Kay who had printed real silver certificates and threatened to end the FED, was that you can march all you want, but don't every mess with the money!

[Rule Of Law]

"ever" not every....

[AnotherMcIntosh]

Your observatioon, "don't every mess with the money!," is right on the mark.

The most recent example of that was shown when the Feds indicted Blago, now a former governor and just one of many of the corrupt Illinois politicians. His corruption didn't surprise anyone. For five years, the Feds had an open investigation of him. It's possible that they have open investigations on all Chicago politicians.

One day, however, he publicly announced that the State of Illinois would discontinue doing business with the Bank of America because the BofA would not pay severance payments to factory workers whose place of employment had been closed down.

The wheels of justice were put into motion and they immediately arrested him.

[Guitarsandmore]

War is always a mistake; it's just putting your finger in the dike until the real solution reveals itself.

Creating a healthy economy with schools and educated people that can read and write might prevent the Middle East from becoming a terrorist breading ground but then again it might not. There may always be terrorists as long as we occupy land in the Middle East and/or are forced to buy their oil. Middle Easterners don't want us there and until we leave we are the enemy.

When CIA analysts are running around saying our only hope is to have a terrorist detonate a large bomb inside the U.S. then you know the best and brightest are not occupying the halls of government, no matter what their credentials indicate.

[Rule Of Law]

War is not only always a mistake, it is the is the biggest money maker ever devised for the banks and corporatocracy! Wall Street loves a good war. Why do you think we have two of them now, and maybe more in Central America or East Asia soon?

[Alcove-One]

Chicago 7
Hayden 0

[outnow]

Ellsberg spoke out and even apologized for waiting until the late Sixties. McNamara waited until the late 90's!!!!

Ellsberg made sure that the Pentagon Papers were published. He used to hang out with Nixon in the San Clemente. Whitehouse. He worked for the Rand Corp and spent much time in Vietnam.

Ellsberg was prosecuted for treason but the case was dismissed by Federal Judge Matt Byrne.

Reading the Pentagon Papers gives you some idea of what war is really all about. Interestingly, Kissinger and Nixon were actually opening trade with China so our jobs would go overseas and the bankers could run up huge mountains of debt. In 1968 through 1973, the gold window was shut and the U.S. had to devaluate its currency.

Each way is a re-run of the last. JFK told McNamara to go ahead and the kill ratios were the propaganda statistics each evening until Walter Cronkite finally said the obvious. The war was a boondoggle or fiasco.

Che' Guevarra, I think it was, who said that the U.S. needs more Vietnams to learn its lesson. McNamara finally admitted that their civil war was viewed as part of the Cold War. It was all theoretical, at best. At worst it was a series of war crimes. McNamara did come forward finally.

Ellsberg's revelations and whistleblowing provided the pre-view of what McNamara finally admitted to, just much earlier.: Poor decision-making with a great deal of fabrication.

[marignymitch]

The war industry is running the Pentagon and we're in Againistan/Pakistan for that industry's profit. Who needs a reason other than that for permanent war? Lucky for that industry we have plenty of youngsters to sacrifice on the altar of 'capitalism' and plenty of Americans who couldn't care less about the financial and moral health of the country. Plus we have an allegedly bright and talented president who is eager to pursue self-destructive military politicies.

Are we incapable of learning from Vietnam? Heck, we've already forgotten the lessons of Iraq.

The war industry is on easy street as long as the nation and its leaders are asleep and the Chinese are willing to finance it.

[dexxjones]

yeah i dont see any high-minded intent in this bunch or the previous, despite their credentials and political leanings (on both sides) what i see are more cogs helping to feed the money-war machine. again.

the rest of us are rendered dumb by a criminally bad education system, crap "processed" food (high fructose corn syrup anybody?) pharmaceutics and rush limbaugh in ever city (and sometimes on more than one station). add class warfare and you have a society of fat, unhealthy zombies either playing video games, mooning over a dead pedophile or struggling to buy the crap food and overpay for the crap home

until the rest of us can shake the distractions and poisons and distractions, these "elites" will continue to rape us and we will continue to bend over. and its not getting better.