The Duel (45 page)

In February 2008, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell presented a bleak survey of the situation on the ground to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:

Afghan leaders must deal with the endemic corruption and pervasive poppy cultivation and drug trafficking. Ultimately, defeating the insurgency will depend heavily on the government’s ability to improve security, deliver services, and expand development for economic opportunity.

Although the international forces and the Afghan National Army continue to score tactical victories over the Taliban, the security situation has deteriorated in some areas in the south and Taliban forces have expanded their operations into previously peaceful areas of the west and around Kabul. The Taliban insurgency has expanded in scope despite operational disruption caused by the ISAF [NATO forces] and Operation Enduring Freedom operations. The death or capture of three top Taliban leaders last year—their first high-level losses—does not yet appear to have significantly disrupted insurgent operations.

Since then the situation has only deteriorated further, leading to calls for sending in yet more American and NATO troops—and creating ever deeper divisions inside NATO itself. In recent months, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador to Afghanistan, wrote a French colleague (in a leaked memo) that the war was lost and more troops were not a solution, a view reiterated recently by Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the British defense chief, who came out in public against a one-for-one transfer of troops withdrawn from Iraq to Kabul. He put it this way:

I think we would all take some persuading that there would have to be a much larger British contingent there. . . . So we also have to get ourselves back into balance; it’s crucial that we reduce the operational tempo for our armed forces, so it cannot be, even if
the situation demanded it, just a one-for-one transfer from Iraq to Afghanistan, we have to reduce that tempo.

The Spanish government is considering an Afghan withdrawal and there is serious dissent within the German and Norwegian foreign policy elites. The Canadian foreign minister has already announced that his country will not extend its Afghan commitment beyond 2011. And even if the debates in the Pentagon have not been aired in public, it’s becoming obvious that, in Washington, too, some see the war as unwinnable.

Enter former Iraq commander General David Petraeus, center stage as the new CENTCOM commander. Ever since the “success” of “the surge” he oversaw in Iraq (a process designed to create temporary stability in that ravaged land by buying off the opposition and, among other things, the selective use of death squads), Petraeus sounds, and behaves, more and more like Lazarus on returning from the dead—and before his body could be closely inspected.

The situation in Iraq was so dire that even a modest reduction in casualties was seen as a massive leap forward. With increasing outbreaks of violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, however, the talk of success sounds ever hollower. To launch a new “surge” in Afghanistan now by sending more troops there will simply not work, not even as a public relations triumph. Perhaps some of the one hundred advisers that General Petraeus has just appointed will show this to him in forceful terms.

Barack Obama would be foolish to imagine that Petraeus can work a miracle cure in Afghanistan. The cancer has spread too far and is affecting U.S. troops as well. If the American media chose to interview active-duty soldiers in Afghanistan (on promise of anonymity), they might get a more accurate picture of what is happening inside the U.S. Army there.

I
LEARNED
a great deal from Jules, a twenty-year-old American soldier I met recently in Canada. He became so disenchanted with the war that he decided to go AWOL, proving—at least to himself—that the Afghan situation was not an inescapable predicament. Many of his fellow
soldiers, he claims, felt similarly, hating a war that dehumanized both them and the Afghans. “We just couldn’t bring ourselves to accept that bombing Afghans was no different from bombing the landscape” was the way he summed up the situation.

Morale inside the army there is low, he told me. The aggression unleashed against Afghan civilians often hides a deep depression. He does not, however, encourage others to follow in his footsteps. As he sees it, each soldier must make that choice for himself, accepting with it the responsibility that going AWOL permanently entails. Jules was convinced, however, that the war could not be won and did not want to see any more of his friends die. That’s why he was wearing an “Obama out of Afghanistan” T-shirt.

Before he revealed his identity, I mistook this young soldier—a Filipino-American born in Southern California—for an Afghan. His features reminded me of the Hazara tribesmen he must have encountered in Kabul. Trained as a mortar gunner and paratrooper from Fort Benning, Georgia, he was later assigned to the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg. Here is part of the account he offered me:

I deployed to southeastern Afghanistan in January 2007. We controlled everything from Jalalabad down to the northernmost areas of Kandahar province in Regional Command East. My unit had the job of pacifying the insurgency in Paktika, Paktia, and Khost provinces—areas that had received no aid but had been devastated during the initial invasion. Operation Anaconda [in 2002] was supposed to have wiped out the Taliban. That was the boast of the military leaders, but ridiculed by everyone else with a brain.

He also spoke of how impossible he found it to treat the Afghans as subhumans:

I swear I could not for a second view these people as anything but human. The best way to fashion a young hard DICK like myself—DICK being an acronym for ‘dedicated infantry combat killer’—is simple and the effect of racist indoctrination. Take an empty shell off the streets of L.A. or Brooklyn, or maybe from some
Podunk town in Tennessee . . . and these days America isn’t in short supply. . . . I was one of those No Child Left Behind products. . . .

Anyway, you take this empty vessel and you scare the living shit out of him, break him down to nothing, cultivate a brotherhood and camaraderie with those he suffers with, and fill his head with racist nonsense like all Arabs, Iraqis, Afghans are Hajj. Hajj hates you. Hajj wants to hurt your family. Hajj children are the worst because they beg all the time. Just some of the most hurtful and ridiculous propaganda, but you’d be amazed at how effective it’s been in fostering my generation of soldiers.

As this young man spoke to me, I felt he should be testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The effect of the war on those carrying out the orders is leaving scars just as deep as the imprints of previous imperial wars. Change we can believe in must include the end of this, which means, among other things, a withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Earlier I have argued that it is necessary to involve Afghanistan’s neighbors in a political solution that ends the war, preserves the peace, and reconstructs the country. Iran, Russia, India, and China, as well as Pakistan, need to be engaged in the search for a political solution that would sustain a genuine national government for a decade after the withdrawal of the Americans, NATO, and their quisling regime. However, such a solution is not possible within the context of the plans proposed by both present Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and President Barack Obama, which focus on a new surge of American troops in Afghanistan.

The main task at hand should be to create a social infrastructure and thus preserve the peace, something that the West and its horde of attendant nongovernmental organizations have failed to do. School buildings constructed, often for outrageous sums, by foreign companies that lack furniture, teachers, and kids are part of the surreal presence of the West which cannot last.

Whether you are a policy maker in the next administration or an AWOL veteran of the Afghan war in Canada, Operation Enduring Freedom of 2001 has visibly become Operation Enduring Disaster.
Less clear is whether the Obama administration can truly break from past policy or will just create a military-plus add-on to it. Only a total break from the catastrophe that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld created in Afghanistan will offer pathways to a viable future.

For this to happen, both external and domestic pressures will probably be needed. China is known to be completely opposed to a NATO presence on, or near, its borders, but while Beijing has proved willing to exert economic pressure to force policy changes in Washington—as it did when the Bank of China “cut its exposure to agency debt last summer,” leaving U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson with little option but to functionally nationalize the mortgage giants—it has yet to use its diplomatic muscle in the region.

But don’t think that will last forever. Why wait until then? Another external pressure will certainly prove to be the already evident destabilizing effects of the Afghan war in Pakistan, a country in a precarious economic state, with a military facing growing internal tensions, the reasons for which are obvious.

Globalizers often speak as though U.S. hegemony and the spread of capitalism were the same thing. This was certainly the case during the Cold War, but the twin aims of yesteryear now stand in something closer to an inverse relationship. For, in certain ways, it is the very spread of capitalism that is gradually eroding U.S. hegemony in the world. Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin’s triumph in Georgia was a dramatic signal of this fact. The American push into the Greater Middle East in recent years, designed to demonstrate Washington’s primacy over the Eurasian powers, has descended into remarkable chaos, necessitating support from the very powers it was meant to put on notice.

I
N
J
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2008, two F-15 bombers dropped five-hundred-pound bombs in Pakistan killing eleven soldiers and a major from the Frontier Corps. The Pentagon described the action as “a legitimate strike in self-defense,” leading Brian Cloughley, an extremely conservative historian of the Pakistan army (and a former commandant of the Australian Psychological Operations Unit in Vietnam) to write:

One can only regard such utterances with contempt, because those who spoke in such a way, and those who ordered them to say what they did, have no concept of loyalty to a friendly country. Nor, for that matter, do they take the slightest heed of international law and custom. The Pentagon quickly distributed a video showing an attack that was said to be a strike on an “enemy” position. There was no indication of where it was, when it was, what ordnance was used, or results of the attack. It was a fatuously amateur exercise in attempted damage control. And of course, later, in the inevitable reassessment (for which read: “We’ve been found out and had better think up a more believable version of the lies we told”), it was revealed that “a U.S. Air Force document indicates bombs were dropped on buildings near the border, and Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman conceded there may have been another strike that occurred ‘outside the view of the drone’s camera.’”

Zardari’s ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, merely denied that the air strikes had been intentionally hostile and stressed the “improving” partnership between the two countries. Cloughley’s links to GHQ in Islamabad stretch back several decades and it was clear he was giving the view of many senior officers in the Pakistan army, men who fear that such actions and the alliance with Washington will undermine the much-vaunted unity of the military high command, with unpredictable and dangerous consequences.

The key to Pakistan, as always, is with the army. If the already heightened U.S. raids inside the country continue to escalate, that much-vaunted unity of the military high command might come under real strain. At a meeting of corps commanders in Rawalpindi on September 12, 2008, Pakistani Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kayani received unanimous support for his relatively mild public denunciation of the recent U.S. strikes inside Pakistan in which he said the country’s borders and sovereignty would be defended “at all cost.” How can they be if the country’s sovereignty has already been so severely breached. All the official complaints and pleas to the United States by generals and politicians regarding the drone warfare and civilian casualties are essentially
designed for public consumption inside Pakistan. This has become even more obvious once Senator Dianne Feinstein revealed in February 2009 that the drones were being dispatched from military bases inside Pakistan. Within weeks their location had been identified via Google Earth and was widely circulated in cyberspace.

There are three interrelated power blocs in Pakistan. Of these the U.S. lobby is the most influential, the most public, and the most hated. It is currently running the country. The Saudis, who use a combination of wealth and religion to get their way, are second in the pecking order and less unpopular. The Chinese lobby is virtually invisible, never interferes in internal politics, and for that reason is immensely respected, especially within the army; but it is also the least powerful outside military circles. During the last years of the Cold War, the interests of the three lobbies coincided. Not now. The war on terror has changed all that.

What is missing is a Pakistan lobby, a strong group within the ruling class that puts the interests and needs of the country and its citizens above all else. A survey carried out last May for the New America Foundation revealed that 28 percent of Pakistanis favor a military role in politics, as compared to 45 percent in August 2007; that 52 percent regard the United States as responsible for the violence in Pakistan; and that 74 percent oppose the war on terror in Afghanistan. A majority favors a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. Eighty percent hold the government and local businessmen responsible for food scarcity and only 11 percent see India as the main enemy. Here we have the basis for a dual settlement, but none of this appeals to the country’s rulers who prefer to live in a bubble. The problem with bubbles is that they burst. Zardari’s Pakistan will stumble on, its people trapped between the hammer of a military dictatorship and the anvil of political corruption, but for how long?