Page 1 of 2 Kabul 2009: War of the Worlds redux
By Tom Engelhardt
An unremarkable paragraph in a piece in my hometown paper recently caught my
eye. It was headlined "White House Believes Karzai Will Be Re-elected," but in
mid-report Helene Cooper and Mark Landler of the New York Times turned to
Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal's "redeployment option".
Here's the humdrum paragraph in question: "The redeployment option calls for
moving troops from sparsely populated and lawless areas of the countryside to
urban areas, including Kandahar and Kabul. Many rural areas 'would be better
left to Predators,' said an administration official, referring to drone
aircraft."
In other words, the United States may now be represented in the Afghan
countryside, as it already is in the tribal areas on the Pakistani side of the
border, mainly by Predators and their even
more powerful cousins, Reapers, unmanned aerial vehicles with names straight
out of a sci-fi film about implacable aliens.
If you happen to be an Afghan villager in some underpopulated part of that
country where the US has set up small bases - two of which were almost overrun
recently - they will be gone and "America" will instead be soaring overhead.
We're talking about planes without human beings in them tirelessly scanning the
ground with their cameras for up to 22 hours at a stretch. Launched from
Afghanistan but flown by pilots thousands of miles away in the American west,
they are armed with two to four Hellfire missiles or the equivalent in
1,200-kilogram bombs.
To see Earth from the heavens, that's the classic viewpoint of the superior
being or god with the ultimate power of life and death. Zeus, that Greek god of
gods, used lightning bolts to strike down humans who offended him. We use
missiles and bombs. Zeus had the knowledge of a god. We have "intelligence,"
often fallible (or score-settling). His weapon of choice destroyed one
individual. Ours take out anyone in the vicinity.
He made his decisions from Mount Olympus; we make ours from places like Creech
Air Force Base outside Las Vegas, and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson,
Arizona. Those about whom we make life-and-death decisions, as they scurry
below or carry on as best they can, have - like any beings faced with the gods
- no recourse or appeal. Seen on screens, they are, to us, distant, grainy
figures, hardly larger than ants. This is what "implacable" means.
Soothing the children
And none of this strikes us as strange. Quite the opposite, it represents
reasonable policy. Comments like the one quoted above are now commonplace. In
the Washington Post, for instance, Rajiv Chandrasekaran recently recorded the
thoughts of an anonymous US officer in Afghanistan: "If more forces are not
forthcoming to mount counter-insurgency operations in those parts of the
province, he concluded, the overall US effort to stabilize Kandahar - and by
extension, the rest of Afghanistan - will fail. 'We might as well pack our bags
and go home ... and just keep a few Predators flying overhead to whack the
al-Qaeda guys who return.'"
We know as well that, in the Washington debate over what to do next in the
Afghan War, Vice President Joe Biden has come down on the side of
"counter-terrorism". He wants to put more emphasis on those drones and on
special operations forces, while focusing more on Pakistan (though without
dropping US troop levels in Afghanistan).
At the same time, the Pentagon has just created an Afghan Hands program and a
Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordination Cell, two units focused on improving military
performance in the AfPak theater of operations over the next three to five
years. All of this represents the norm for military and civilian leaders who,
whatever their differences, believe wars that go on for endless years thousands
of miles from home are the sine qua non of American safety.
And none of this seems less than reasonable to us, especially given the much
publicized "success" of the drone assassination program in taking out Taliban
and al-Qaeda leadership figures. What does strike us as strange, though, is
that the locals, whether in Pakistan or Afghanistan, find all this upsetting. A
recent US poll in Pakistan typically reported "that 76% of the respondents were
opposed to Pakistan partnering with the United States on missile attacks
against extremists by American drone aircraft".
Then again, we take it for granted that the people of such backward lands are
strange, touchy types. Not like us. In George Packer's recent New Yorker
profile of Richard Holbrooke, the president's special representative for
Afghanistan and Pakistan, there were some classic lines reflecting this.
Packer describes Holbrooke on a flying visit to Afghanistan this way: "He
seemed less like a visiting emissary than like a proconsul inspecting a vast
operation over which he commanded much of the authority." When that same
proconsul makes it out of impoverished, shattered Afghanistan (where the US
Embassy, at one point, had to deny he had engaged in a "shouting match" with
Afghan President Hamid Karzai) and into Pakistan, a fractious, disturbed,
unnerved country of genuine significance, he packs the proconsul away and,
according to Packer, becomes Washington's cajoler-in-chief.
As Packer writes, "In moments when I overheard him talking to Pakistani
leaders, he took the solicitous tone of someone reassuring an unstable friend.
'It's like dealing with psychologically abused children,' a member of his staff
said. 'You don't focus on the screaming and the violence - you just hug them
tighter.'"
So, if Afghan and Pakistani peasants in the mountainous tribal borderlands are
so many ants or rabbits, Pakistani leaders are "children". It matters little
that Holbrooke has a reputation himself as an egotist and a screamer who
demands to get his way. (Among diplomats back in the 1990s when he was
negotiating in the former Yugoslavia, one joke went: What's the most dangerous
place in the Balkans? The answer: Between Dick Holbrooke and a camera.)
Packard reports Holbrooke's disappointment over the amount of aid Congress is
ponying up for Pakistan (US $7.5 billion) and, to add to his set of
frustrations, there's this: "Because of Pakistan's sensitivity about its
sovereignty, he had been unable to persuade its military to allow American
helicopters to bring aid to the refugees," who had been driven from the Swat
Valley by the Taliban and a Pakistani military offensive.
Let's think about that for a moment, especially since it's a commonplace of
American reporting from the region and so reflects official thinking on the
subject. Karen DeYoung and Pamela Constable, for instance, write in a
Washington Post piece: "Pakistanis, who are extremely sensitive about national
sovereignty, oppose allowing foreign troops on their soil and have protested US
missile attacks launched from unmanned aircraft against suspected Taliban and
al-Qaeda targets inside Pakistan."
In fact, let's reverse the situation.
Imagine that, after the next Katrina, Pakistani military helicopters based on a
Pakistani aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Mexico are preparing to deliver
supplies to New Orleans. Of course, you also have to imagine, minimally, that
the Pakistanis are in the process of building a three-quarters of a billion
dollar fortress of an embassy in Washington DC (to be guarded by armed
Pakistani private contractors), that Pakistani drones are regularly cruising
the Sierra Nevada mountains, launching missiles at residences in small towns
below, that the Pakistanis are offering billions of dollars in desperately
needed aid to a hamstrung American government and military in return for not
complaining too much about whatever they might want to do in the United States,
that top Pakistani military and civilian officials are constantly shuttling
through Washington demanding "cooperation", and finally that Pakistani
reporters covering all this regularly point to an "extreme American sensitivity
about national sovereignty", as illustrated by a bizarre unwillingness to
accept Pakistani aid delivered in Pakistani military helicopters.
Then again, you know those Americans: combustible as spoiled kids.
Such reversals are, of course, inconceivable and so, nearly impossible to
imagine. Today, were a Pakistani military helicopter to approach the US coast
with anything on board and refuse to turn back, it would undoubtedly be shot
down. So much for American touchiness.
But here's a question that comes to mind: why is it that Americans like
Holbrooke seem to feel so at home so far away from home? Why, for instance, do
US military spokespeople so regularly refer to our indigenous enemies in Iraq
as "anti-Iraqi forces," and in Afghanistan as "anti-Afghan forces"? Why does
our military in Iraq speak of the neighboring Iranians as "foreign forces"
without ever including our own military in that category?
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