[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Barack Obama and Afghanistan

[Bill Totten]

More of the Same, Packaged as Change

by Marc Herold

www.counterpunch.org (August 06 2008)


When asked in Berlin by CNN's Candy Crowley whether he believed the
United States needed to apologize for anything over the past seven and a
half years in terms of foreign policy, candidate Obama responded, "No, I
don't believe in the US apologizing. As I said I think the war in Iraq
was a mistake ..."

So what does our contemporary "charmer of change", Barack Obama, propose
regarding Afghanistan?

In mid-December 2006, a charter member of the US defense intellectual
establishment and enthusiast of precision bombing, Anthony Cordesman,
fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, advanced a
set of proposals which would allegedly allow the US to win the war in
Afghanistan. The essence involves: far greater amounts of military and
economic "aid'; the economic aid must be managed from the outside; the
aid should focus upon projects like roads, water and to a lesser degree,
schools and medical services; NATO allies especially slackers like
France, Germany, Italy and Spain need to increase aid to Afghanistan;
US military forces are too small "to do the job" because of competing
demands from Iraq and, hence, again those same NATO allies must provide
larger, stronger and better-equipped forces to engage in combat (without
political constraints); and as in Iraq, emphasis needs to be upon proper
training of Afghan army and police forces. Cordesman wants the US to
furnish an additional $5.9 billion during the current fiscal year. In
effect, Cordesman proposes nothing which has not long ago been suggested
(even back in the days of Vietnam where the official clamor was for more
"aid" and Vietnamizing the fighting).

Candidate Obama appears to have adopted wholesale what Cordesman was
proposing about two year ago with one qualification: Obama recognizes
that the US's traditional European NATO allies will not provide large
numbers of additional fighting forces, hence Obama proposes rotating
three divisions or about 10,000 US troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan.

If we examine candidate Obama's most important prepared foreign policy
speech to-date, that given on July 14 2008, we find the elements of what
as president he might do in Afghanistan.   He forthrightly casts his
interest in Afghanistan purely in terms of "making America safer":

"I will focus this strategy on five goals essential to making America
safer: ending the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight against
Al Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and materials
from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy security; and
rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century".

In other words, Obama is committed to "finishing the fight against Al
Qaeda and the Taliban", translated as the fight against "Muslim
extremism".  Notwithstanding that this examplifies a worst case example
of fallacious sunk-cost reasoning, George W Bush and candidate McCain
would not disagree.  He continues

"Our troops and our NATO allies are performing heroically in
Afghanistan, but I have argued for years that we lack the resources to
finish the job because of our commitment to Iraq. That's what the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said earlier this month. And
that's why, as President, I will make the fight against Al Qaeda and the
Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have
to win .... We need more troops, more helicopters, more satellites, and
more Predator drones in the Afghan border region. And we must make it
clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out
high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our
sights ... Make no mistake: we can't succeed in Afghanistan or secure
our homeland unless we change our Pakistan policy. We must expect more
of the Pakistani government, but we must offer more than a blank check
to a General who has lost the confidence of his people."

Resources need to be focused upon Afghanistan because it "is the war we
have to win".  In July 2008, the International Herald Tribune called it
"the war of necessity against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan". Why? Candidate
Obama points to Taliban controlling parts of Afghanistan and Al Qaeda
possessing an "expanding base in Pakistan". These are alleged to be
spawning grounds of "another attack on our homeland". George W Bush and
candidate McCain would concur in being in error.

Very solid reasons now exist why Al Qaeda is not interested in mounting
Palestinian-style attacks in America. Any attack would have to be bigger
than 9/11. As the ever-prescient Mike Scheuer writes,

"Al-Qaeda does not want to fight the United States for any longer than
is needed to drive it as far as possible out of the Middle East, and its
doctrine for so doing has, in Osama bin Laden's formulation, three
components: (a) bleed America to bankruptcy; (b) spread out US forces to
the greatest extent possible; and (c) promote Vietnam-era-like domestic
disunity. Based on this doctrine, al-Qaeda leaders have decided that
attacks in the United States are only worthwhile if they have maximum
and simultaneous impact in three areas: high and enduring economic
costs, severe casualties, and lasting negative psychological impact."

In fact, all three of bin Laden's components have been realized -
casualties, costs, and domestic disunity - all without a follow-up to
the 9/11 attack.

And how will this victory over radical Islam be accomplished? Obama's
recipe for success involves:

o Sending two to three combat brigades (each of 3-5,000 troops) to
Afghanistan;
o Pressure NATO allies to follow suit;
o More use of drones, aircraft, et cetera ;
o Training Afghan "security" forces;
o Supporting an Afghan judiciary;
o Proposing an additional $1 billion in non-military assistance each
year with safeguards to see no corruption and resources flowing to areas
other than Kabul;
o Invest in alternative livelihoods to poppies;
o Pressure Pakistan to carry the fight into its tribal areas and reward
it for so doing with military and non-military aid;
o Should Pakistan fail to act in the tribal areas, the United States
under Obama would act unilaterally;

New? Change? President George W Bush and candidate McCain have long
signed on to exactly these policies.  Certainly both would also see
Afghanistan primarily through the lens of "making America safer". George
Bush Senior did just that during 1988-1990 when America was presumed
safer once the Soviets were out of Afghanistan. Then, he cut and ran.

Candidate Obama adopts the Pentagon's military solution - defeating Al
Qaeda and the Taliban - without paying much attention to either what
gave rise to these groups or to the complexity of tribal society on the
Afghan-Pakistan border. Even more importantly, he fails to acknowledge
that the current bombing, night-time assaults upon villages, hooding and
abducting suspects, kicking down doors and entering women's quarters, et
cetera is forging an unlimited supply of recruits to the resistance. No,
all we hear is "Our troops and our NATO allies are performing heroically
in Afghanistan ..." The complete failure to improve life for those
living in rural southern, eastern and northeastern Afghanistan alongside
unbridled corruption, profligiate wealth and Afghanistan's current
culture of official impunity further stokes the resistance. All we hear
is a vague promise of $1 billion more aid per year.

As Patrick Buchanan points out candidate Obama has absolutely no exit
strategy from Afghanistan, other than a presumed military victory. He
utterly fails to understand the axoim of the guerrilla strategy: the
guerrilla wins if he fails to lose. For the guerrilla it's not about
winning pitched battles, it's about continuing the fight. The Taliban
and associates have no difficulty with that: fighters from the Pashtun
borderlands and monies from trhe Gulf States (and eslewhere).

Moreover, Buchanan continues

"And, using the old ten-to-one ratio of regular troops needed to defeat
guerrillas, if the Taliban can recruit 1,000 new fighters, they can see
Obama's two-brigade bet, and raise him. Just as Uncle Ho raised LBJ
again and again. What does President Obama do then? Send in 10,000 more?"

The aim of shifting two to three US combat brigades to Afghanistan,
greatly increasing the use of drones in order to unleash the fire power
of Hellfire missiles or the "guided" bombs of B1-B's, letting US Special
Forces and Navy Seals Teams loose to sow mayhem in the border regions on
both sides of the Durand Line merely serves to continue the status-quo
of death and destruction. Yet there are those like Ann Marlowe in the
Wall Street Journal who believe that the military solution in
Afghanistan is to employ special forces to deal with the "bad guys"
infiltrating from Pakistan. For her, "defeating the enemy is best
accomplished by highly trained fighters who travel light".  Does Ms
Marlowe who was thrice embedded with US occupation forces in Afghanistan
recall the Green Berets in Vietnam or the Soviet Spetsnaz  in Afghanistan?

For some four years, US Special Forces had free reign in the Afghan
province of Kunar. With what effct? Kunar today is one of Afghanistan's
most volatile provinces just as it was when the Soviets unleashed their
elite Spetsnaz units there. Britain could not seal the border between
the Irelands with 40,000 soldiers. The Soviets with 120,000 troops under
a unified command structure and three times as many Afghan  satrap
soldiers could not quell the mujahideen resistance. Candidate Obama
advocates a policy of escalation simply in order not to lose. In doing
such, he follows in the footsteps of Gordon Brown's ambassador in Kabul
who threatens "to stay for thirty years" in an endless campaign of
despair from which withdrawal is perceived as politically impossible.
Thirty years for what?  A campaign to prop up an embattled, corrupt,
unpopular puppet regime in Kabul, a task for which Britain and its NATO
allies are terribly undermanned? No, but rather as Jenkins points out to
keep NATO alive in Europe. NATO's agitated chief, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer,
certainly appears as a man fighting for his job. He should be as most
Europeans see the Afghan conflict as wrong, immoral, America's war, all
about oil, and probably lost. For them NATO was created to deter the
Soviet Union, not to supply foot soldiers to America's wars in the
Muslim world.

Most alarmingly, candidate Obama and others before him (including George
W Bush) crudely conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda when in fact, the two
groups share very little and do not regard each other with high esteem.
 The Taliban and Al Qaeda represent two very different entities. The
former comprise an ethno-national phenomenon rooted in space, appealing
then and now to a loosely aligned movement, largely of Pashtun Afghans.
The Taliban have profound roots in parts of Afghanistan. They form only
part of the disparate resistance to the US/NATO occupation (other parts
being nationalists, those seeking revenge for injury to family, those
involved in poppy cultivation who perceive the West as threatening their
livelihoods, those frustrated with Karzai's and the West's failed
promises, unemployed men, et cetera). Al Qaeda, on the other hand, is a
de-territorialized, stateless organization formed to wage violent jihad
anywhere in the world against those deemed to be Islam's enemies. From a
group spatially located in Afghanistan during the Taliban era, Al Qaeda
has transformed itself into a decentralized, floating coalition of
militant groups united in jihad. But for candidate Obama a simple
undefined enemy exists: a unified Al Qaeda and Taliban who will be
crushed by a few more brigades of occupation soldiers, Global Hawks in
the skies and a billion dollars annually. Obama's informal adviser,
Afghan scholar Barnett Rubin, has long been arguing that "the problem
really is in neighboring Pakistan, where Taliban and Al Qaeda commanders
lurk".

Encouraging cross border air and ground attacks raises the ire of the
fiercely independent Pashtun tribals in the borderlands and further
isolates a weak, post-Musharef regime in Islamabad bent on its own
independent course of action. Moreover, Pakistan has lost thousands of
its troops in fighting in the tribal lands under Musharef. The recent
killing of eleven Pakistani frontier soldiers by US Hellfire misslies
promises to be a harbinger of the future. The elected political leaders
of Pakistan's borderlands virulently oppose Obama's unilaterialism, for
example, the wily governor of the North-West Province, Owais Ghani,
spoke out forcefully against Obama's hinting at US incursions.

Pahstun nationalism is far cry from Al Qaeda's world jihad. Indeed, a
quite convincing case can be made that the best antidote to a resurgent
Al Qaeda would be support for the Taliban. But such fine-tuning escapes
candidate Obama and his entourage of former Clinton foreign policy
advisers (for example, Susan Rice, Anthony Lake, et cetera) and of
others adocating "nation-building". Change? George W Bush, John McCain
and Barack Obama are united in advocating policies which cement an
alliance between Al Qaeda and the Taliban. They all priviledge a
military approach over a civilian one of negotiating.

On the "winning hearts and minds" dimension, candiate Obama promises an
extra $ 1 million annually to be spent mostly outside Kabul. The record
of US monies budgeted for Afghanistan is clear (See Table at
http://www.counterpunch.org/herold08062008.html).

But how will such U.S funds be brought to a countryside largely
controlled by a hostile resistance? Many parts of Afghanistan most
desirous of improving everyday living are simply off-limits to
non-governmental organizations, let alone the US Government. The US/NATO
strategy of relying upon an ink blot of "aid" radiating out from two to
three dozen heavily fortified PRT bases and scores of US forward
operating bases is at best very limited. So in order to "secure" the
countryside which will then be lavished with candidate Obama's annual
largesse of an extra billion dollars, the US/NATO needs to either bomb
or take ground casualties, expel the resistance, and especially hold
territory. Building another well or a school has little meaning in the
Pashtun code of honor (Pashtunwali), but the killing of a family member
demands revenge be taken against the perpetrator. Simon Jenkins has
stressed that American, Canadian, British, Dutch and even Estonian
troops (those brave "new Europeans" forming part of the "coalition" of
the bribed ) simply snatch and hold towns for a while but are unable to
command local loyalty. "They cannot hope to garrison every settlement".
Musa Qala retaken by the British with much fanfare is a typical case, a
success which is a failure.

In other words, candidate Obama promises nothing other than what already
is: more prolonged low-intensity conflict with endless death and
destruction. If the US military escalation of the past two years is any
indication, a further escalation as he proposes will simply lead to more
dead Afghan civilians, a countryiside and towns racked with the deadly
explosions of IED's and suicide bombers followed by the destruction
unleashed by equally deadly close air support (CAS) strikes. A strong
correlation exists during 2004-2007 between levels of US occupation
soldiers in Afghanistan, tonnage of bombs dropped and numbers of dead
and injured Afghans. Will the monetary value of dead Afghan remain about
one-tenth that of an Alaskan sea otter? Will yet more CAS air strikes
continue killing ten times more Afghan civilians per ton dropped than
the numbers killed in Serbia in 1999? Why should an Obama future be
different?

The candidate of change in Afghanistan? History has clearly shown it's
easy to invade and conquer Afghanistan but it's terribly difficult to
govern and exit honorably. Obama is no Mikhail Gorbachev who took Russia
out of the Afghan fiasco when he realized what many Russian leaders had
been too scared to admit in public - that Russia could not win the war
and the cost of maintaining such a vast force in Afghanistan was
crippling Russia's already weak economy. The cost of America's wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan was $171 billion in FY2007 and an estimated $195
billion in FY2008.

Candidate Obama, his Clinton era advisers, and sadly all too many others
fail to recognize a web of inter-connected, persistent constraints, or
of given realties. One might label them as the "five cannots":  US/NATO
cannot send 400,000 combat troops to garrison Afghanistan's towns,
hamlets and countryside (which is a pre-condition for reconstruction to
win hearts and minds ); the US/NATO cannot impose a powerful central
government upon Afghanistan ; the US/NATO cannot neutralize the very
effective least-cost weapons of choice of the Afghan resistance (IED's
and suicide bombers);  the US/NATO cannot seal the Afghan-Pakistan
border and hence will not eliminate the vital sanctuary so necessary to
a guerrilla movement); and lastly, the Pakistan government has never
been able to dominate its vast tribal borderlands and there is no reason
to believe such will change. Those who choose not to understand these
"five cannots" advocate change in a vacuum. A military impasse begets a
political solution.

The perceived poison of a foreign occupation, the rampant corruption,
the all-too-frequent desecration of Islam by the occupiers, the sheer
folly of the US/NATO seeking to extend the writ of a central government
to the Pashtun tribal regions , the spiraling count of civilian deaths
has shifted the Afghan struggle towards a war of national liberation.
Anatol Lieven of King's College (London) puts it aptly. Afghanistan is

"Becoming a sort of surreal hunting estate, in which the US and NATO
breed the very terrorists they then track down".

Candidates Obama and McCain promise more of the same carnage packaged as
change.

_____

Marc Herold is an Associate Professor of Economic Development & Women's
Studies at the University of New Hampshire. He can be reached at
Marc.Herold at unh.edu .

Notes:

Robert Scheer, "Obama on the Brink", Truthdig.com (July 22 2008) at
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080722_obama_on_the_brink/

"Transcript of Interview on CNN" (July 25 2008) at
http://thepage.time.com/transcript-of-obama-interview-on-cnn/

Anthony H Cordesman, "One War We Can Still Win", International Herald
Tribune (December 13 2006) at
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/13/opinion/edcord.php

Speech is reproduced on The Huffington Post (July 29 2008) at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/15/obama-spokeswoman-hits-ba_n_112834.html

"Talking Sense on the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan", International
Herald Tribune (July 17 2008) at
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=14574298

Mike Scheuer, "Why Doesn't al-Qaeda Attack the US?" Antiwar.com (May 29
2008) at http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=12911

As pointed out by Tom Hayden, "Obama, Iraq and Afghanistan", The Nation
(July 15 2008) at

Explored in Thomas H Johnson and M Chris Mason, "No Sign until the Burst
of Fire. Understanding the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier", International
Security 32, 4 (Spring 2008): 41-77

Patrick Buchanan, "Obama's War", Antiwar.com (July 29 2008) at
http://antiwar.com/pat/

Ann Marlowe, "Afghanistan Doesn't Need a Surge", Wall Street Journal
(July 22 2008) at
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121668659664272147.html

Hayden (2008), op cit.

Simon Jenkins, "A Bad Attack of Beau Geste Syndrome at Our Expense", The
Guardian (July 05 2006) at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/jul/05/comment.afghanistan

Eric Margolis, "Why Europeans are not Eager to Die in Afghanistan",
LewRockwell.com (February 13 2008) at
http://www.lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis100.html

Well argued in Mark Levine, "Obama and the Taliban", Huffington Post
(July 25 2008) at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-levine/obama-and-the-taliban_b_114900.html

James Gordon Meek, "Afghanistan Experts Say John McCain and Barack Obama
are Clueless", New York Daily News (July 19 2008)

Simon Jenkins, "Stop Killing the Talkiban - They Offer the Best Hope of
Beating Al Qaeda", The Times (June 22 2008) at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/simon_jenkins/article4187504.ece

As argued in Juan Cole, "Obama is Saying the Wrong Things About
Afghanistan", Salon.org (July 23 2008) at
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/07/23/obama/

An excellent discussion of Pashtunwali may be found in Hamida Ghafour,
"Why NATO Misreads the Afghan Rulebook", Globe and Mail (May 05 2007)

Paul Gilfeather, "Coalition of the Bribed, Bullied & Blind", The Mirror
(March 22 2003) at
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views03/0323-07.htm

Jenkins, op cit.

Sean Rayment, "In Afghanistan even our Successes are Failures", The
Telegraph (August 03 2008) at
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/08/03/do0306.xml

Belasco (2008), op cit: 18

Occupation forces Commander McNeill has said himself that according to
the current counterterrorism doctrine, it would take 400,000 troops to
pacify Afghanistan in the long term (from Ulrich Fichtner, "Why NATO
Troops Can't Deliver Peace in Afghanistan", Der Spiegel (May 29 2008) at
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,druck-556304,00.html

The umbrella organization ACBAR (Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan
Relief) reported 463 insurgent attacks during May and 569 in June 2008.
Nineteen aid workers have been killed this year. The result has been
greatly scaled back aid and relief efforts ("Record Afghan Unrest
Hampering Aid NGOs", Agence France Presse (August 01 2008) at
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h9LKPSwMVEzC25r7wQ4-XuOkz4sw ).

See Johnson and Mason (2008), op cit

As Gerard Chaliand, veteran geo-strategist of so-called asymmetrical
wars, put it recently, "victory is impossible in Afghanistan ... Today
one must try to negotiate", because the Taliban control much of the
local power in the south and east of the country (Immanuel Wallerstein,
"Afghanistan: Shoals Ahead for President Obama", Middle East Online
(August 01 2008)).

Johnson and Mason (2008), op cit: 54

Anatol Lieven, "The Dream of Afghan Democracy is Dead", The Financial
Times (June 11 2008) at
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f25de8f4-37b1-11dd-aabb-0000779fd2ac.html


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