[R-G] Landau: Afghanistan -- The Next Disaster

[Anthony Fenton]

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2008-03/01landau.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Afghanistan -- The Next Disaster March 01, 2008
By Saul Landau

After six plus years, the war in Afghanistan drags on. The media  
occasionally cites casualties, but if it doesn't involve National  
Football League veteran Pat Tillman's execution by his own comrades,  
Afghanistan gets sparse attention. A few stories feature the growing  
number of Afghan and Iraq War vets on American streets. But the  
aspiring candidates ignore such "blowback." Instead, they demonstrate  
verbal aggression, a characteristic thought necessary for victory.  
"We've got to get the job done there [Afghanistan]," Barack Obama  
asserted without specifying what the "job" is. (AP, Aug 14, 2007)

Obama called for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and sending them  
to "the right battlefield," Afghanistan and Pakistan. To pressure  
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to act against terrorist  
training camps, Obama would use military force -- if he became  
President -- against those "terrorists holed up in those mountains  
who murdered 3,000 Americans." (Bloomberg, Aug 1, 2007)

In mid January, Bush dispatched 3,200 additional marines to  
Afghanistan. Curiously, the uncurious media didn't ask why U.S. and  
NATO forces continue to fight there. Nation Building? With little or  
no budget for reconstructing the country?

Junior partners, the British leaders, haven't learned lessons any  
better than their Yankee counterparts. Defense Minister Des Browne  
predicted British troops could stay there for "decades." Did he not  
learn that from 1839 to 1842 British troops fought in Afghanistan so  
they could take that sphere away from Russia? Now, NATO makes war  
there, says Browne, to insure that it would not again "become a  
training ground for terrorists threatening Great Britain."

In the 19th Century, the British Empire suffered disastrous losses  
when it invaded Afghanistan and erected a puppet regime in Kabul --  
just as the United States did (Hamid Karzai) after Bush's 2001  
invasion. The puppet fell quickly when the British could not quell  
resistance. By 1842, Afghan mobs attacked Englishmen who remained in  
Kabul. The British army retreated toward India, its officers  
believing they had negotiated safe passage. Afghan "insurgents"  
slaughtered some 16,000 English soldiers.

In 2001, the British and other NATO forces marched in to capture or  
kill Osama Bin Laden and overthrow the Taliban. Six plus years later,  
Bin Laden remains hidden -- probably in Pakistan -- and the Taliban  
have returned to Afghanistan to mount a major insurgency in areas  
they once controlled. In addition, Afghani farmers have produced  
bumper opium crops that end up as heroin in western cities and  
profits for the Taliban leaders who tax the growers. Like its British- 
backed predecessor, the U.S. puppet government in Kabul controls  
virtually no territory.

Browne omitted that terrorists have found training grounds elsewhere  
-- in English cities, for example, and on the web. They can buy from  
hardware or agricultural stores -- lest anyone forget where the  
Christian Oklahoma bombers (pre 9/11) got their explosives. The U.S.  
army provided training to Timothy McVeigh, convicted and executed for  
his role in the Oklahoma City explosion. Those bombers didn't need  
Afghanistan; nor did the fiends who blasted the Madrid train station,  
or the killers who hit the London underground. European and U.S.  
cities offer ample meeting places and the U.S. and British armed  
forces have taught hundreds of thousands of young men and women to  
kill with efficiency.

The Russians had also failed to grasp lessons of fighting a people  
determined to resist. Approximately 15,000 Red Army soldiers died  
from 1979 until 1988 when the Soviets withdrew. The humiliation  
speeded the implosion of the Soviet Union.

Bush ignored these facts as well as centuries of experience when he  
ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. Indeed, the lack of success in  
Afghanistan has not stopped the major presidential candidates from  
pledging to stay the course there. Wars of choice in Korea, Vietnam  
and now Iraq have shown that Americans and their European junior  
partners don't easily tolerate taking casualties abroad, especially  
in wars their leaders cannot successfully explain.

The overwhelming sentiment against Iraq will turn to Afghanistan as  
casualty rates continue or accelerate. Yes, the Taliban government  
harbored Bin Laden and offered training to would-be militants but,  
ask millions of people, which country supplied the funds for the  
Taliban takeover of Afghanistan? Saudi Arabia, our dear and loyal  
ally! Who paid for the madrasas (religious schools) where the young  
Afghan boys and teens learned their religious ideology -- including  
beating an effigy of George Bush I -- and got military training?

Pakistan -- another ally -- not only hosted the madrasas, but offered  
Bin Laden and gang ample protection before and after 9/11. Bush chose  
to hit Afghanistan and Iraq, countries whose involvement was  
secondary or non-existent. No major candidate addresses this issue.  
The press screams the question every day -- through its silence.

As additional U.S. marines land they will discover in Afghanistan  
that the old tribal forces continue to struggle for power. The  
largest, the Pashtuns, have shown sympathy to the Taliban. Some  
tribal leaders or their fathers received CIA aid during the Soviet  
occupation of Afghanistan. They used none of it to build the country,  
but rather fought with each other in the post Soviet era and made it  
possible for the Taliban to enter and take control.

Key Pakistani generals promoted the Taliban in the early 1990s, and  
their zealous brand of Islam spread deeply inside their country,  
including within military and intelligence circles. When assassins  
struck Benazir Bhutto on December 27, they delivered a severe body  
blow to secular government.

The tribal forces unleashed by "Charlie Wilson's War (it was really  
Ronald Reagan's and CIA Chief William Casey's war to weaken the  
Soviet Union) had no interest in changing Afghanistan into a modern  
democracy; another dependable cog in the big wheel of corporate  
globalization.

Bush's neo con advisers, however, threw "democracy" at the public  
much as TV preachers intone Jesus while offering to cure their  
flock's ailment with a little pressure from silver-crossed palms  
blessed by God. They had no plans to transform this ancient land and  
people into poorer carbon copies of themselves.

Afghans have proved more resistant to Western efforts to change their  
old life into one of a consumer society than new bacteria are to  
antibiotics. William Pfaff in an excellent January 16 column quotes  
Rory Stewart, head of the Turquois Mountain Foundation in Kabul. The  
United States and its western allies "should accept that we don't  
have the power, knowledge or legitimacy to change those societies."

Stewart noted that "War has eroded social structures and entrenched  
ethnic suspicion....Power is in the hands of tribal leaders and  
militia commanders. Much of Afghanistan is barren and most people  
cannot read or write....The local population is at best suspicious of  
our actions." Stewart claimed that in at least one province, Helmand,  
"...it is more dangerous for foreign civilians than it was two years  
ago before we deployed our troops." (Jan. 16, 2008, Tribune Media  
Services) Bush's argument relies on fear, not fact. If the Taliban  
retakes control, the West would be threatened.

The Taliban will remain after the West grows weary of this enigmatic  
war. Paddy Ashdown, the UN's new envoy to Afghanistan, warned: "We  
are losing in Afghanistan -- and rather than militarily, we are  
losing the political mission -- and in large part we are losing  
because there has been a complete failure of the international  
community to co-ordinate its efforts."

That failure, he continued "relies on the fact that we believe, for  
some bizarre reason, that we have such a unique system of government  
in our own countries - by the way, not a view shared by many of our  
citizens - that we believe we have a right to impose it lock, stock  
and barrel, along with the values and everything that goes along with  
it, on other countries with the use of B-52s, tanks and  
rifles." (Doug Saunders, Globe and Mail, January 17, 2008)

Little thought or planning preceded Bush's order to invade and occupy  
Afghanistan. The war makers assumed their traditional omnipotence,  
that from noble intentions (or rhetoric) a stable and prosperous  
nation would somehow develop. It didn't happen, but the Taliban  
returned, and gained strength and confidence. Bush responds by  
dispatching more US forces, already overstretched and overstressed,  
to bring force into a place where it has traditionally proven  
ineffective.

Before the next appropriation, Members of Congress and the media  
might read a few verses of Rudyard Kipling on older wars in that region:

"And after-ask the Yusufzaies What comes of all our 'ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station- A canter down some dark defile- Two  
thousand pounds of education Drops to a ten-rupee jezail- No  
proposition Euclid wrote, No formulae the text-books know, Will turn  
the bullet from your coat, Or ward the tulwar's downward blow Strike  
hard who cares-shoot straight who can- The odds are on the cheaper  
man." ("Arithmetic on the Frontier")

Saul Landau Progreso Weekly, 31 January 2008