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It
has become fashionable for commentators to say that the Obama administration has come to a crossroads in
its strategy for the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. It would be more accurate
to say that it has come to the end of the road. It has no way to go
forward except over a cliff, no matter how difficult the road back may
be.
It
has become clear that the U.S.-supported Afghan government is
discredited and impotent and that the insurgency has reached the point
where the commander of the U.S. forces, Gen. McChrystal, says it cannot be defeated militarily
without a massive escalation of U.S. forces. Reportedly, McChrystal is asking for 40,000 more troops. The
current U.S. contingent will soon be
68,000. The Soviet forces in Afghanistan reached 100,000 before the
Kremlin decided to cut and run.
Some
of the more astute commentators have noted that a U.S. “surge” is likely to fuel a
countersurge of the insurgency, since a much
bigger occupation force would be certain
to arouse more local antagonism.
Public
opinion polls are showing that the Afghan war does not have the support
of a majority of the American people. And the war is apparently still
more unpopular among the main allies of the United States—Britain, Germany, and Italy. Italian Premier Berlusconi
is threatening to withdraw Italian forces. In Germany, the war was a major issue
in the recent elections.
There
the question is complicated by two factors. One: For economic reasons,
German army recruits are drawn largely from the former East Germany, where social discontent
remains high and is growing. Two: one of the worst atrocities of the
air war was committed by German pilots.
The
British Guardian reported Sept. 11 on a bombing by a German plane
that killed up to a hundred villagers who had gathered around fuel
tankers hijacked by the Taliban in order to take away free gasoline. In
this desperately poor area, a little free fuel for the coming winter
was a powerful attraction. But while the local people were
collecting fuel, the tankers were bombed, causing a murderous
explosion:
“At
first light last Friday, in the Chardarah
district of Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan, the villagers gathered
around the twisted wreckage of two fuel tankers that had been hit by a Nato airstrike. They
picked their way through a heap of almost a hundred charred bodies and
mangled limbs which were mixed with ash, mud and the melted plastic of
jerry cans, looking for their brothers, sons and cousins. They called
out their names but received no answers. By this time, everyone was
dead.”
The
remains were unrecognizable, and so the village elders simply gave out
body parts to the various aggrieved relatives so that they would have
something to bury. The Guardian quoted one of the local people:
“I couldn’t find my son, so I took a piece of flesh with me home and I
called it my son. I told my wife we had him, but I didn’t let his
children or anyone see. We buried the flesh as it if was my son.”
A
tragedy like that will not be quickly forgotten. It is comparable to
the Mylai massacre in Vietnam. It is hardly
likely that the Afghan villagers are going to accept foreign occupation
and the nominal rule of a corrupt government when they are in constant
danger of being burned alive or blown to pieces by planes flying so
high they cannot even see them.
The
U.S. client ruler, Karzai, has often complained about the slaughter of
innocent people in NATO bombing attacks. But he has been no more
effective in stopping them than he has been in building a credible
administration.
The
recent elections sunk whatever was left of Karzai’s
credibility. In the first place, they were basically a tribal contest,
pitting a Tadzhik challenger against the Pushtun Karzai. The Tadzhiks and Uzbeks were
the base of the Northern Alliance, which was the military ally of the
U.S.-led invasion. The U.S.-backed Karzai was
a Pushtun tribal notable who Washington hoped
would give a national image to the coalition that they were backing.
But the Pushtun are the base of the Taliban,
and Karzai’s alleged election victory came
from areas that were in fact dominated by the Taliban,
and in which few if any people actually voted. Moreover, the Karzai supporters engaged in massive ballot box
stuffing that has been easily documented.
The
British Guardian reported Sept. 19: “The
shaky footage [of a video made by election monitors] shows two election
monitors inspecting a book of 100 ballot papers that are still stitched
together, as they were intended to arrive at the polling station in
rural Afghanistan. But something is wrong; instead of being
pristine, ready for the voter to make his or her mark, each paper bears
a large blue tick next to the name of one candidate: Hamid Karzai.
“As the monitors flick through the pad, the back of the
ballots clearly show the authorization stamp of election monitors,
validating them as votes ready to be put in the ballot box and counted.
“’We found it the day after the elections,” one of the
monitors in the footage told me. ‘They were trying to put it in one of
the [ballot] boxes but didn’t have time, so we took it home and filmed
it. If we had given it back to the election committee they would have
used it again, so we burned it, but filmed it to protect ourselves if they
come and threaten us’”
The Guardian reporter talked to a local election
official from Paktiya province who had fled to Kabul fearing
reprisals from Kazai supporters who had seen
him collect evidence of fraud: “He showed me a series of photographs taken inside a
brown cardboard voting booth in a village in Paktiya
province of Afghanistan. One shows a man marking a
big pile of ballot papers in the name of Hamid
Karzai. Another shows a pile of election ID
cards spread in front of an unidentified man wearing black shoes. ‘This
man brought 120 cards and he used each of them to vote three times,’
said the official.
“He
had intended to hand his photographs to his superiors, he said, but as
election day unfolded it became obvious that his superiors were
themselves taking part in the fraud. ‘I thought I would give the
pictures to the election committee. But they were all working for Karzai.’ Fearing he had been spotted taking the
pictures, he fled to Kabul.”
The
man went on to say: “Everyone was cheating in my polling station. Only
10% registered; 100% turnout. One man
brought five books of ballots, each containing 100 votes, and stuffed
them in the boxes after the elections were over.”
While some international commentators have given
credibility to the claims of legitimacy of the presidential elections
in Iran this summer,
there can be none at all about the Afghan elections. They were
obviously and undeniably a farce. Furthermore, the
international press has reported many complaints by American military
men that they do not find any representation of the Afghan government
where they are fighting, and that the Afghan army is far from an
effective force.
All of these factors were elements in the American
defeat in Vietnam. And so, it
is not surprising that many commentators are inclined to compare Obama’s dilemma in Afghanistan with Lyndon
Johnson’s in Vietnam and to
speculate that the current U.S. president may
suffer the fate of his predecessor in the 1960s.
There is a difference between Lyndon Johnson and Obama, however. Johnson did not ascend to the
presidency on the wings of hope that he would be fundamentally
different from the other politicians of his day. In fact, he had a
pretty unsavory reputation. But Obama, as the
first Black president and the successor of a brutal right-wing
administration, was the bearer of great hopes. He has a lot of lose if
he leads the U.S. into a deeper
quagmire in Afghanistan.
Moreover, the public tolerance for the waste of money
and lives in an imbroglio in a remote third world country is far less
than it was at the beginning of the Vietnam War. The support of the
American people for foreign adventures is also being sapped now by the
suffering caused by the deepening economic decline. Johnson
could afford both “guns and butter.” Obama cannot.
Columnist Eugene Robinson raised a ringing alarm in the
Sept. 22 Washington Post: “It’s hard to read Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s
assessment of the Afghanistan war without hearing one of those
horror-movie voices that seem to come from everywhere and nowhere, a
voice that grows louder and more insistent with every page: ‘Get out.
Get out. Get out.’
“According
to the confidential report prepared for President Obama—obtained
by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post—the situation in Afghanistan is ‘deteriorating.’ The
Taliban insurgency is ‘resilient and growing.’ Afghans have a ‘crisis
of confidence’ in both their own government and the U.S.-led NATO
occupation force. The next 12 months will be ‘decisive,’ and ‘failure
to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum … risks an
outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.’”
Even
the dyed-in-the wool reactionary pundit George Will has started
raising an alarm about the dangers of getting bogged down in
Afghanistan, and has been crossing swords with other right-wing
publicists who still call for “staying the course” in
Afghanistan. But the right-wing phalanx is already threatening the Obama administration with denunciations of betrayal
of the U.S. cause in Afghanistan. The lead in the chorus has been taken
by Bush’s former secretary of state, Condoleeza
Rice.
Obama seems to be considering carrying out a tactical
retreat—that is, giving up the strategy of occupying the entire country
and instead concentrating U.S. forces around key centers.
That is more intelligent than a go-for-broke effort to flood the
country with troops so that there will be an American boot on every
rock. But such a tactical retreat means recognizing de facto
insurgent control of swaths of the countryside. That was the situation
in Vietnam before the collapse of the U.S.-backed government. In a war
of position like that, the U.S. would risk seeing a sudden collapse of
its client government in the face of a consolidated insurgent regime in
the rural areas. Then it would have either to escalate its
intervention, without any significant local political cover, or accept
a costly rout.
The
only realistic option for the U.S. is to accept total
withdrawal. That would not endanger American security anywhere near as
much as getting more deeply entangled in a costly and hopeless war in a
poor and remote corner of the world. The U.S. does not have the
resources to occupy all the marginal backward areas where al-Qaida might establish bases. It can only secure
itself against al-Qaida by political means,
by drying up its base of support. That is true of the threat of
terrorism in general, which can come from many sources.
But
whatever the judgment of Obama and his
administration, it will be difficult for them to retreat from Afghanistan and avoid expanding the war
into Pakistan given the political
investment they have made in these operations. Moreover, the
ultra-right will wage a furious campaign against the Obama government for allegedly betraying American
security.
Now
that the ultra-right is in the streets, it is vital that democratic and
progressive-minded people go into the streets in greater numbers to
stop a slide toward militarization of the country. Ultimately, the
radicalization and activation of the right raises the specter of
fascism, and the basic program of fascism is war.
It’s
clear now that it is disastrously wrong-headed to rely on the good
intentions of the Obama regime. The
relationship of forces in the streets will determine whether and when
the U.S. disengages from its disastrous foreign adventures. The
right-wing mobilizations have made that obvious.
The
sooner sane and humane people begin to act, the better the chances will
be to avoid catastrophes, even if the actions start small. The
nationwide October antiwar demonstrations can be a vital first
step.
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