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Obama’s muted but substantial escalation of the war in Afghanistan shows exactly why the
decisive section of American big business decided to turn the helm of
their system over to him. The new flavor is “Bush lite.”
That is, it is a continuation of the same policies that are
characteristic of U.S. capitalism in decline but
with an attempt to appear more flexible and
collaborative with U.S. allies.
Obama’s Afghhanistan proposal
displays some balancing between “progressives” and right-wingers in the
U.S. The escalation will be less
than the military commanders asked for and less than the right
demands—but not much less.
And
there is some window dressing about a timeline for the massive U.S. military intervention to
end. But the time limit is vague, and it is not a great concession to
admit that there has to be an end sometime to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.
Of
course, the right wing is uneasy when there is even talk of an exit date.
But a Florida Panhandle newspaper (the News
Heraldof
Panama City, one of the most right-wing areas of the country), which
opposed the setting of any time limit, noted in an editorial:
“Wednesday,
both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates testified at a Senate hearing that the withdrawal target was,
shall we say, flexible. Clinton said the administration is
not ‘locked in’ to a 2011 exit, only that ‘there can be the beginning
of a responsible transition’ by that date. Talk about
soft-pedaling the situation. That’s like saying you’re prepared to
start a 1,000-mile trek by taking one step forward.”
Indeed!
However, Afghanistan has hardly any long-term
economic or strategic value to the United States, unless it eventually becomes
host to a pipeline linking the Central Asian oil fields to Pakistan. But it seems that the oil
companies have accepted that as a pretty remote prospect. In any case,
the U.S. interest in Central Asian
oil seems to be more political than economic—designed to prevent China from gaining access
and more economic independence. That makes the scheme very speculative.
Pakistan, minus the mirage of an oil
pipeline, does not have much strategic value to the U.S. That is why the U.S. put its relations with the
country on the back burner after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan. During the Cold War,
Pakistan was a useful pawn against an India that was neutralist and
friendly to the Soviet Union. That situation has long since ceased
to exist.
The
U.S. covert intervention in Afghanistan when it was ruled by a
pro-Soviet regime, which created the Jihadist
threat, was an episode in the now bygone Cold War. Obama
had to assure Pakistan that the U.S. would not forget it again,
as it did after the end of the Afghan-Soviet war.
Obama’s speech was carefully crafted to reassure the right
wing, and for that it even drew praise from Republican heavy Karl
Rove. But the president failed to mollify a lot of liberals and
progressives. The outcries of betrayal of some of the liberal
columnists on the Huffington
Post are piteous to behold. Some
of them complained that he chose West Point as the platform for
his speech. But they were merely fooling themselves. To play to a
right-wing audience, Obama needed to
appeal specifically to the military chiefs.
One
of the Huffington commentators,
David Sirota, asked: “Where’s
the antiwar movement and the marches and the organizing and
the protesting? Where are all those well-funded groups that
protested George W. Bush’s war policy? Or was all that really just
about hating George Bush and embracing blind Partisan War
Syndrome?”
The
answer is that broad sections of the antiwar movement believed
that Obama offered a change from the war
policies of Bush and the neo-cons. He had such a different image
and style from Bush. But then, lo and behold, he turned out to be just
a bourgeois politician. Fooled again!
And
like any of the second team of defenders of the capitalist system,
liberals or Social Democrats, Obama, once in
office, has to demonstrate to the ruling class that he is as devoted to
their interests as their first team, the right wing. The liberals
should really be angry at themselves for their gullibility, and not Obama.
One
of the Huffington Post columnists,
Robert Borsage, did point to the
handwriting on the wall: “... his speech left me with a
haunting foreboding. Surely this is the way that great imperial
powers decline. Their soldiers police the ends of the earth. There is
always another enemy, always a threat—sometimes imagined, often
real—that must be faced. And meanwhile, the productive economy
declines, the rich live increasingly off investments abroad, the
poor depend on public sustenance, the middle declines. No battle is so
costly that it cannot be afforded. ... The secret state expands. The
country finds itself constantly at war.”
This
is, in fact, the general pattern of the decline of every empire
in history, the capitalist empires of England, the Netherlands, and Portugal—like the slave empire of Rome. The features are apparent
in the now obvious decline of American capitalism. Inevitably,
the dynamic of empire comes into conflict with the needs of the
survival of the empire itself. The American ruling class is
plummeting from one disaster to another, unable to withdraw from
its adventures.
Obama presented the Iraq war as a victory,
although admittedly a costly one. In fact, after the expenditure
of a trillion dollars, more than 4000 American lives, and the ruin of a
country, the U.S. has scored no lasting political or economic
gains and is likely to have worked against its own geopolitical ends by
dumping Iraq into the lap of Iran. U.S. businesses and private
armies like Blackwater (now “Xe”) netted huge profits, but at the expense of the
system on which they depend.
While
the liberal and progressive commentators did not take up Obama’s claims of U.S. “achievement” in Iraq, some of them did
point out the obvious reasons why the escalation is not likely
lead to any “achievement.” The Afghan government in whose defense the
U.S. is supposedly pouring out its treasure and the blood of its
young adults is even more ineffectual than the U.S. client government
in Iraq. It has virtually no political authority. Even the base it did
have when the U.S. intervention put it in
office, the Northern Alliance, may now be
crumbling.
The
Taliban have been able to extend their operations to the north,
threatening a new U.S. supply line (The
New York Times, Nov. 27). Of course,
the northern area to which the Taliban has expanded, Kunduz, is about half Pushtun,
the ethnic base of the Taliban.
There
is no indication yet that the ethnic groups that have been hostile to
the Taliban—the Tadzhiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Dari-speaking people—are now going
over to the Taliban. But there are indications that the insurgency is
becoming generally nationalist, anti-foreign. A series of
interviews that Newsweek did
with Taliban supporters showed that it was the U.S. occupation and the
military means supporting it, air power, that revived the Taliban,
after it had suffered a disastrous defeat when the U.S. first
intervened.
A
number of commentators pointed out that there is no reason to
think that the Karzai government and its
security forces will ever be self-sustaining. A case-hardened
counter-revolutionary politician with East European
sophistication, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
was cited in a Dec. 3 article in the Huffington Post as
saying: “To talk of an Afghan national army is to talk of
something that is ultimately not possible.” Brzezinski,
a Polish anti-Communist émigré, was one of the strongest advocates
of waging a covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
An
article in the Dec. 3 British Guardian also
noted doubts about the prospects of building an effective Afghan national
army: “Sceptics point to desertion rates
among army recruits of about 16%—one US estimate puts it as high
as 25%—as evidence that the new Afghan army will not hold together.
Defections by police recruits are said to be even higher...” The
author, Simon Tisdall, noted that the Taliban
has managed to infiltrate the police and that a Taliban mole killed
five British soldiers.
Obama and the U.S. commanders are in fact
talking about deals with local strongmen that will not go through
the so-called Afghan national government. But the British military
that fought in Afghanistan in the 19th century capsulized
its experience with the nostrum that it is possible “to rent” but
not to “buy” Afghan tribal leaders—that is, they shift their deals
depending on their convenience. Moreover, Afghanistan has a tradition of corrupt warlordism that makes deals with tribal
leaders and local gangs more complicated and politically
disruptive than it was in Iraq.
Also,
such practices undermine the argument against the Taliban. For all
its ruthlessness and theocratic dogmatism, the Taliban did offer a
respite from factionalism and chronic civil war in most of the country.
Although
Brzezinski expressed a lack of confidence in
the effectiveness of the Afghan government, he expressed an Old World realism in responding
to accusations of its corruption: “’Who are we to seriously be
preaching [such] a crusade?” he asked. “We have a financial sector that
is voraciously greedy and exploitative, to put it mildly. We have
a Congress which is not immune to special interests. And we have
an electoral system that is based largely on private donations
which precipitate expectations of rewards. The notion of us going
to the Afghans and preaching purity is comical. ... I
think we should just quit that stuff.”
Such
frankness inadvertently points up the problem. The U.S. Afghan war
is thieves dealing with thieves, and as the richest of thieves the
U.S. and its private enterprise
parasites are not necessarily the cleverest.
In
the Nov. 30 issue of The Nation,
Aran Roston
revealed how the U.S. government transfers funds through a tangled
network of private intermediaries to the Taliban: “In this grotesque
carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay
suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an
accepted fact of the military logistics operation in
Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American
troops are fighting. … In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a
minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s
logistics contracts—hundreds of millions of dollars—consists of
payments to insurgents.”
But
the complications of this privatization go far beyond filling
the enemy’s coffers. The practice has also led the U.S. into a
deep covert involvement in Pakistan, which could ultimately be a
much bigger powder keg than Afghanistan. In its Nov. 23 issue,The
Nation revealed that Blackwater, now “Xe Services”
is carrying out an extensive covert operation within Pakistan that includes targeted
assassinations and kidnappings.
The
Nation offered some convincing
testimony: “The source, who has worked on covert US military programs
for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater’s involvement. He spoke to The
Nation on condition
of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said
that the program is so ‘compartmentalized’ that senior figures
within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command
may not be aware of its existence.”
Or
maybe they don’t want to know. The article continued: “’This is a
parallel operation to the CIA,’ said the source. ‘They are two separate
beasts.’ The program puts Blackwater at
the epicenter of a US military operation within
the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared
war—knowledge that could further strain the
already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan.”
Blackwater operatives are generally former military
specialists trained in the most sophisticated forms of murder, who collect huge bounties and live the lives of
adventurers. It is hard for them to be invisible. And sooner or later,
some of them are going to be caught, as four were in Falluja, where they were lynched by the local
population. That incident led the U.S. forces to destroy the city,
and the population is still suffering from the pollution caused by
the weapons used.
If
the U.S. Murder Inc. operations make messes in Pakistan, that will overshadow
the worst that happened in Iraq. The Pakistani
government is notoriously unstable and disrespected and there is
abundant evidence of complicity with jihadists
in the military and intelligence services.
At
the moment, the big business press claims that a majority of
Pakistanis support military operations against the Taliban. But
that is a recent development, apparently owing to the Taliban’s
overreaching itself. Past polls showed that a majority of Pakistanis
blamed the U.S. for the jihadist
violence. And all observers attest to a high level of anti-Americanism
in Pakistan.
Overall,
the Huffington Post columnist’s
dire view of the writing on the wall looks credible. And when
empires reach this stage of decay, it’s difficult for the rulers
to change course. In the American war effort there are just too
many irresponsible private interests involved for the national
administration to be able to defend the interests of the system as
a whole effectively.
Moreover, the
right-wing offensive that reached its peak under Bush has
created a rabidly reactionary public opinion, the crazy one fourth
of the U.S. population who will stand
in the way of any intelligent maneuvering by the top leadership of
U.S. capitalism.
The
real rulers, unlike their right-wing fan club, are not ignorant
or deluded. You cannot make huge fortunes without a certain grasp
of reality. But maneuvers by the real rulers often create
bitterness among the right. Look at the many statements by
ex-military that the U.S. was not really defeated
in Vietnam but that “weak-kneed
politicians sold us out.” There were similar statements in right-wing blogs and Tea-Party rallies that Obama would prove himself a traitor if he withdrew
from Afghanistan short of “victory.”
This
out-of-control plunge into military adventures generates
poisons that flow back into the American body politic itself. The
only way that this process can be stopped is for the American
people to take control of their country’s future by mobilizing
against the war intoxication. And they can do that only if they
organize independently of the political parties controlled by
capitalism and which serve capitalism.
The
delusion that it was possible to turn the U.S. toward humane
social values by supporting an apparently more liberal capitalist
candidate for president has now been dramatically exposed. Hopefully,
the lesson will sink in for those who genuinely want to stop the
slaughter of the innocent and the waste of American lives—and
those of soldiers from allied nations—and to pull the U.S. out of its
slide into ruin.
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