Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA The pressure of an expanding war
By Tom Engelhardt
Cooper's report is filled with official denials that these negotiations involve
Washington in any way. Yet if they succeed, an American citizen, a former US
ambassador to the UN as well as to Kabul, would end up functionally atop the
Karzai government just as the Obama administration is eagerly pursuing a
stepped-up war against the Taliban.
Why officials in Washington imagine that Afghans might actually accept such a
figure is the mystery of the moment. It's best to think of this plan as the
kinder, gentler, soft-power version of the Kennedy administration's 1963
decision to sign off on the coup that led to the assassination of South
Vietnamese autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem.
Then, too, top Washington officials were distressed that a puppet
who seemed to be losing support was, like Karzai, also acting in an
increasingly independent manner when it came to playing his appointed role in
an American drama. That assassination, by the way, only increased instability
in South Vietnam, leading to a succession of weak military regimes and paving
the way for a further unraveling there. This American expansion of the war
would likely have similar consequences.
5. Expanding war in Pakistan: Meanwhile, in Pakistan itself,
mayhem has ensued, again in significant part thanks to Washington, whose
disastrous Afghan war and escalating drone attacks have helped to destabilize
the Pashtun regions of the country. Now, the Pakistani military - pushed and
threatened by Washington (with the loss of military aid, among other things) -
has smashed full force into the districts of Buner and Swat, which had, in
recent months, been largely taken over by the Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas
we call "the Pakistani Taliban".
It's been a massive show of force by a military configured for smash-mouth war
with India, not urban or village warfare with lightly armed guerrillas. The
Pakistani military has loosed its jets, helicopter gunships, and artillery on
the region (even as the CIA drone strikes continue), killing unknown numbers of
civilians and, far more significantly, causing a massive exodus of the local
population. In some areas, well more than half the population has fled Taliban
depredations and indiscriminate fire from the military. Those that remain in
besieged towns and cities, often without electricity, with the dead in the
streets, and fast disappearing supplies of food, are clearly in trouble.
With nearly 1.5 million Pakistanis turned into refugees just since the latest
offensive began, UN officials are suggesting that this could be the worst
refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Talk about the
destabilization of a country.
In the long run, this may only increase the anger of Pashtuns in the tribal
areas of Pakistan at both the Americans and the Pakistani military and
government. The rise of Pashtun nationalism and a fight for an "Islamic
Pashtunistan" would prove a dangerous development indeed. This latest offensive
is what Washington thought it wanted, but undoubtedly the old saw, "Be careful
what you wish for, lest it come true," applies. Already a panicky Washington is
planning to rush $110 million in refugee assistance to the country.
6. Expanding civilian death toll and blowback: As Taliban attacks
in Afghanistan rise and that loose guerrilla force (more like a coalition of
various Islamist, tribal, warlord, and criminal groups) spreads into new areas,
the American air war in Afghanistan continues to take a heavy toll on Afghan
civilians, while manufacturing ever more enemies as well as deep resentment and
protest in that country. The latest such incident, possibly the worst since the
Taliban was defeated in 2001, involves the deaths of up to 147 Afghans in the
Bala Baluk district of Farah province, according to accounts that have come out
of the villages attacked.
Up to 95 of the dead were under 18, one Afghan lawmaker involved in
investigating the incident claims, and up to 65 of them women or girls. These
deaths came after Americans were called into an escalating fight between the
Taliban and Afghan police and military units, and in turn, called in
devastating air strikes by two US jets and a B-1 bomber (which, villagers
claim, hit them after the Taliban fighters had left).
Despite American pledges to own up to and apologize more quickly for civilian
deaths, the post-carnage events followed a predictable stonewalling pattern,
including a begrudging step-by-step retreat in the face of independent claims
and reports.
The Americans first denied that anything much had happened; then claimed that
they had killed mainly Taliban "militants"; then that the Taliban had
themselves used grenades to kill most of the civilians (a charge later
partially withdrawn as "thinly sourced"); and finally, that the numbers of
Afghan dead were "extremely over-exaggerated", and that the urge for payment
from the Afghan government might be partially responsible.
An investigation, as always, was launched that never seems to end, while the
Americans wait for the story to fade from view. As of this moment, while still
awaiting the results of a "very exhaustive" investigation, American spokesmen
nonetheless claim that only 20-30 civilians died along with up to 65 Taliban
insurgents. In these years, however, the record tells us that, when weighing
the stories offered by surviving villagers and those of American officials,
believe the villagers. Put more bluntly, in such situations, we lie, they die.
Two things make this "incident" at Bala Baluk more striking. First of all,
according to Jerome Starkey of the British Independent, another Rumsfeld
creation, the US Marines Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC), the
Marines' version of JSOC, was centrally involved, as it had been in two other
major civilian slaughters, one near Jalalabad in 2007 (committed by a MarSOC
unit that dubbed itself "Taskforce Violence"), the second in 2008 at the
village of Azizabad in Herat Province. McChrystal's appointment, reports
Starkey, has "prompted speculation that [similar] commando counterinsurgency
missions will increase in the battle to beat the Taliban".
Second, back in Washington, National Security Advisor James Jones and head of
the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, fretting about civilian casualties in
Afghanistan and faced with President Karzai's repeated pleas to cease air
attacks on Afghan villages, nonetheless refused to consider the possibility.
Both, in fact, used the same image. As Jones told ABC's George Stephanopoulos:
"Well, I think he understands that ... we have to have the full complement of
... our offensive military power when we need it ... We can't fight with one
hand tied behind our back ...".
In a world in which the US is the military equivalent of the multi-armed Hindu
god Shiva, this is one of the truly strange, if long-lasting, American images.
It was, for instance, used by president George H W Bush on the eve of the first
Gulf War. "No hands," he said, "are going to be tied behind backs. This is not
a Vietnam."
Forgetting the levels of firepower loosed in Vietnam, the image itself is
abidingly odd. After all, in everyday speech, the challenge "I could beat you
with one hand tied behind my back" is a bravado offer of voluntary restraint
and an implicit admission that fighting any other way would make one a bully.
So hidden in the image, both when the elder Bush used it and today, is a most
un-American acceptance of the United States as a bully nation, about to be
restrained by no one, least of all itself.
Apologize or stonewall, one thing remains certain: the air war will continue
and so civilians will continue to die. The idea that the US might actually be
better off with one "hand" tied behind its back is now so alien to us as to be
beyond serious consideration.
The pressure of an expanding war President Obama has opted for a
down-and-dirty war strategy in search of some at least minimalist form of
success. For this, McChrystal is the poster boy. Former Afghan commander
General McKiernan believed that, "as a NATO commander, my mandate stops at the
[Afghan] border. So unless there is a clear case of self-protection to fire
across the border, we don't consider any operations across the border in the
tribal areas".
That the "responsibilities" of US generals fighting the Afghan War "ended at
the border with Pakistan", Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt of the Times report,
is now considered part of an "old mind-set". McChrystal represents those "fresh
eyes" that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked about in the press
conference announcing the general's appointment. As Mazzetti and Schmitt point
out, "Among [McChrystal's] last projects as the head of the Joint Special
Operations Command was to better coordinate Pentagon and Central Intelligence
Agency efforts on both sides of the porous border."
For those old enough to remember, we've been here before. Administrations that
start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked
in - psychically, if nothing else - if things don't work out as expected and
the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation
without end. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into
an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only
failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked
into a policy of applying ever greater force, with the goal of, as the Post's
Ignatius puts it, cracking the "Taliban coalition" and bringing elements of it
to the bargaining table.
So keep an eye out for whatever goes wrong, as it most certainly will, and then
for the pressures on Washington to respond with further expansions of what is
already "Obama's war". With McChrystal in charge in Afghanistan, for instance,
it seems reasonable to assume that the urge to sanction new special forces
raids into Pakistan will grow. After all, frustration in Washington is already
building, for however much the Pakistani military may be taking on the Taliban
in Swat or Buner, don't expect its military or civilian leaders to be terribly
interested in what happens near the Afghan border.
As Tony Karon of the Rootless Cosmopolitan blog puts the matter: "The current
military campaign is designed to enforce a limit on the Taliban's reach within
Pakistan, confining it to the movement's heartland." And that heartland is the
Afghan border region. For one thing, the Pakistani military (and the country's
intelligence services, which essentially brought the Taliban into being long
ago) are focused on India. They want a Pashtun ally across the border, Taliban
or otherwise, where they fear the Indians are making inroads.
So the frustration of a war in which the enemy has no borders and we do is
bound to rise along with the fighting, long predicted to intensify this year.
We now have a more aggressive "team" in place. Soon enough, if the fighting in
the Afghan south and along the Pakistani border doesn't go as planned, pressure
for the president to send in those other 10,000 troops General McKiernan asked
for may rise as well, as could pressure to apply more air power, more drone
power, more of almost anything. And yet, as former CIA station chief in Kabul,
Graham Fuller, wrote recently, in the region "crises have only grown worse
under the US military footprint".
And what if, as the war continues its slow arc of expansion, the "Washington
coalition" is the one that cracks first? What then?
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