The Afghanistan Chapter

Here's another chapter from my 2002 book Boomerang! Or, How Our Covert Wars Have Created Enemies Across the Middle East and Brought Terror to America. Since Afghan policy has been in the news of late, I thought this might be timely (previously posted chapters include Egypt, Pakistan and Libya). This is the chapter as originally written; my editor then requested I add a lengthy rebuttal to a magazine article belittling the idea that energy policy could have anything to do with our intervention in that part of the world. Perhaps I'll post that separately later on....

The history of Afghanistan and the U.S. involvement in it provide a stark example of the costs of using countries as pawns and of elevating control of resources such as oil over human rights. The consequences, as we have suddenly learned on September 11, have hit home.

The root of the terror inflicted on Afghanistan can be traced back to its very identity as a nation: its borders represent a clumsy imposition of colonial administration by the British Empire. Like those of so many other colonial remnants, its arbitrary boundaries are a recipe for tribal and ethnic conflict. About a dozen major ethnolinguistic groups have been forced under the umbrella called Afghanistan. Some are of Persian descent, like the Tajiks in the northeast and the Pashtuns in the southeast, who also spread across northwestern Pakistan. In the northwest are Turkic tribes, like the Uzbeks bordering Uzbekistan and the Turkmens of neighboring Turkmenistan. Then there are the Baluchs in the southwest, who are part of the theoretical country known as Baluchistan, which would also take up chunks of eastern Iran and western Pakistan if it were allowed to exist. Diversity can be a strength to any nation, but such advantage doesn’t accrue when mandated by the whim of an empire – nor when communities are intentionally divided by borders.

Wherever you draw the borders, this turf has been the stomping ground of imperial armies since the time of Alexander the Great – who was the last to successfully conquer it, in 329 BC. The British and Russian empires fought several wars there in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was known as the “great game,” a struggle to counter each other’s influence over various resources and land routes between Europe and Asia. But the locals weren’t keen on being occupied and repeatedly humbled the infidels. Afghanistan achieved full independence in 1919.

Not all empires are created equal, and US support for the fanatical Islamic guerrillas known as the mujahedin was, ostensibly, a benevolent response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. How could the world’s greatest democracy have stood by and not thwarted Soviet imperial ambitions? It’s a compelling appeal to principle. But one fact gets in the way of our lofty image of the US as crusader for freedom: our intervention predated the Soviets’ move and was designed with two objectives in mind: provoke the Soviets to invade, and squelch a popular move toward socialism.

Libya: Oh Fer Gawd's Sake

Belgrade or Tripoli?

One week ago, the Great Kinetic Action of 2011 passed the 78-day mark, meaning it's lasted longer than the air campaign to drive Yugoslavia out of Kosovo. And yesterday we heard from "one senior offical" who, like the rest of us, has no idea how this ends:

Almost three months into the campaign of air strikes, Britain and its Nato allies no longer believe bombing alone will end the conflict in Libya, well-placed government officials have told the Guardian. 

Instead, they are pinning their hopes on the defection of Muammar Gaddafi's closest aides, or the Libyan leader's agreement to flee the country. 

"No one is envisaging a military victory," said one senior official who echoed Tuesday's warnings by Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, head of the navy, that the bombing cannot continue much beyond the summer.

Oh fer Gawd's sake. Is it just me, or are military and political strategists supposed to work out some sort of endgame before it starts?

Three and a Half and Counting

I mentioned earlier that this country is currently fighting three and a half wars.

So in war #1, Afghanistan, we hear from outgoing War Secretary Bob Gates that what we really need is a "long-term military presence there," apparently by leasing bases from the government there. This, of course, requires that we help maintain a government there who's willing to keep leasing us military bases. That accounts for the long-term part. In the short term, "a debate is raging" over whether our impending troop withdrawal should be a token reduction or something more substantial. Do not hold your breath.

In war #2, Iraq, we hear from incoming War Secretary Leon Panetta that he expects that Iraq will be asking us to stay a little longer. And according to his testimony today, he's okay with that. As we discussed last month, support for extending such an invitation is far from universal in Iraq. But I'm going to assume Leon knows better than I do whether the invite is coming. So we'll keep the file open on wars 1 and 2 for now.

War #3 is the kinetic action in Libya, also in the news this week. The Financial Times is reporting that Gates' initial price tag estimate of $750 million for FY 2011 might have been low-balled a bit. According to a Pentagon memo obtained by FT, we're at $660m so far, with costs stacking up at around $60m a month. That'd be a billion, give or take, for our limited involvement, the end of which is not in sight.

Which brings us to war number three and a half, which we don't count as a full war because it's a secret. But according to an article in the New York Times – which I believe has a fairly extensive readership – we're going to be "intensifying" our involvement in the Yemeni civil war. Apparently we have just as much interest in who runs Yemen as the Yemeni people do. And why is that? Need you ask?

Libya Roundup

It's been almost six weeks since I last blogged about Libya; it was a stalemate then and it's a stalemate now.

My focus in that post was to examine "just war" doctrine, one of the tenets of which is to make sure that intervention doesn't make matters worse. Veteran war correspondent Patrick Cockburn argues that this one has  – unsurprisingly, since "wars often widen and deepen existing fissures in a society."

Doug Bandow agrees, noting that we're trapped in a "foolish Goldilocks strategy" which is "just enough to save civilians, but not quite enough to oust dictator Muammar Qaddafi."

Viktor Kostev, like many others, compares this intervention to the Kosovo war. In that case, NATO sought to break the stalemate with ever-increasing pressure on the capital city and its inhabitants. But the difference in Libya? "Though nobody would admit it, their lives are almost certainly cheaper in the minds of Western politicians than are Serbian and Albanian lives." Thus we can expect a prolonged war of attrition lasting more than the 78 days of Kosovo sorties (we're 11 days away from that now).

David Dayen of FDL reports on Western reaction to Qadaffy's latest offer to negotiate. It doesn't meet the condition of having the Q-Ball removed from power, but it does open the door  a bit. Sarkozy, meanwhile, offers a bit of comparable squishiness on that crucial sticking point. Despite any ambiguity, though, it seems like it will take a lot more bombing before any meeting of the minds is possible.

For as Cockburn notes, the rebels have no credible scenario for gaining power without air strikes to back them up, which makes regime change their minimum demand. Col. Q, in this situation, is incentivized to hang on as long as possible.

If you're under your free-article quota at the NYT site, Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger review how war fatigue - of which there was plenty even before the latest installment was added - constrains the options of the intervenors, and has to be part of Q-man's calculations. That fatigue is reflected in Wednesday's House vote to bar funding for any ground troops in Libya: only 3 Democrats and 2 Republicans voted against it. Unfortunately, that just leaves air strikes as the only kinetic option, which is a recipe for higher civilian casualties, in a war ostensibly designed to prevent them. However, as Kostev reports in another piece, planning for a ground war may have already begun.

Schmitt and Sanger also helpfully quote President Obama's March position on regime change:

Broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.

However, that seems to be a mistake we're increasingly willing to commit to.  For a comparable bit of cognitive dissonance, FDL's Attaturk points to the French foreign minister's tautological formulation on whether Qadaffy is a target of our airstrikes: "We don't want to kill him," he said. "Because we are not killers."

Winding Down Iraq

George W. Bush fans are keen to salvage something out of the wreckage of his foreign policy disasters, and one of the most-grasped-at straws is the assertion that "the surge worked." Even if it did, that hardly erases the blundering carnage that Bush's inept occupation unleashed over the previous four years.

But a few other things were happening in 2007 while US troop strength increased by 15% or so. First, the Shi'ite community in Baghdad, having been empowered by the occupation to ethnically cleanse as many Sunnis as possible out of mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad, had pretty much completed that project. Second, many of the Sunni militias outside of Baghdad turned against the local "al-Qaida in Iraq" franchise - right about the same time they started taking payments from the US. And third, Moqtada al-Sadr decided to stand down his forces and wait us out.

Arguably, these three factors had more to do with the decreased violence in Iraq that followed the surge. But a decline from 2004-06 levels of violence still leaves room for a lot of killing. And the surge, of course, did nothing to solve the underlying political differences between Iraq's three main demographics – witness yesterday's bombing in the oil-rich Kurdish turf. But it did help solve some of Bush's political problems in the US, by putting a fig leaf on an unmitigated catastrophe - and punting the hard choices to his successor.

Today, Barack Obama fans are keen to point out that he kept his campaign promise to end US combat operations in Iraq - though, it should be remembered, that promise included the presence of a residual force.  Keeping the promise was made easier for Obama by the Iraqis themselves. During Bush's lame-duck months, they renegotiated the status of forces agreement with the US, more or less forcing Bush to agree that all US troops would leave Iraq by December 31, 2011.

Now that it's 2011, the US has been broadly hinting that if the Iraqis want to extend an invitation for our troops to remain past the deadline, they really really really need to let us know soon - so we can begin planning an orderly withdrawal if they don't. But the deadlines implied in those broad hints have come and gone with nothing more than a vague suggestion from Nouri al-Maliki that if it's okay with parliament, it's okay with him.

But parliamentary approval is unlikely to come, because most Iraqis really really really want US troops to leave. That's a bit of a conundrum if Obama want to keep the "residual forces" part of his promise. There are still 40,000 troops there, but crucially, there are also 70 US bases, built at considerable expense, with some of them among the largest in the world. How this needle gets threaded is something observers have been observing with much harrumphing and raising of eyebrows.

Part of the answer was on NPR yesterday - the State Department plans to roughly double the number of mercenaries - er, contractors - working in country. That this shell game will impress the Iraqis is unlikely, but it may well provide a fig leaf for their own government's political conundrum (that is, mollifying allies in both Washington and Teheran). Meanwhile, Moqtada has made it known that his cease-fire ends on New Year's Eve, and has already resumed territorial pissing.

George W. Bush had to have the difference between Sunnis and Shi'ites explained to him when he made the decision to invade Iraq. Now he's given the world a Shi'ite-dominated government there, with many resulting tectonic shifts yet to play out. How our endgame in Iraq plays out is still of utmost importance – if there ever is an end.

Learning From History

I'm right in the middle of an excellent book by Andrew Bacevich called Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War. Bacevich is one of those apostates - like Chalmers Johnson or John Perkins or Wendell Potter - who spend a lifetime of privelege as an insider in this inside game of ours. Then, for one reason or another, they have a moment of clarity, a conscience that kicks in, an epiphany about the injustice they've been furthering. Their atonement has led to some excellent books, and Bacevich's is full of insights about the evolution of US security strategies from Truman to Obama.

This Book I Read

I recently finished War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges. Hedges, a former divinity student, went on to report from war zones in Central America, the Middle East, Sudan, the Punjab, and the Balkans. He's seen a lot of war, and wrote the book to demythologize it, to examine what attracts so many of us to war. It's a powerful, unsettling, and deeply-felt tome.

Hedges describes the attractions of war for nations, institutions, and individuals, most certainly not excluding himself. As a combat journalist, he got hooked on the adrenaline of danger, and the moral certitude of his profession's nobility. A line from the book opens the film The Hurt Locker: "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years."

Bin Laden in Bosnia

Mujeheddin warriors in the Balkans, circa 1995

What was Osama bin Laden doing in Sarajevo in November, 1994? Apparently, the same thing as the United States: supporting the Alija Izetbegović-led faction of the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. By this time, Bosnia was mired in carnage and Izetbegović needed all the help he could get.

But this is the same Izetbegović who rejected a peace plan in early 1992. That is, he rejected it, but only after signing it, along with his Serbian and Croatian counterparts. The Carrington-Cutileiro peace plan was negotiated and agreed to by all sides in the conflict before the Bosnian War broke out. And as Indian General Satish Nambiar reflected:

It is ironic that the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia [in 1995] was not fundamentally different from the Lisbon Plan drawn up by Portuguese Foreign Minister Cuteliero and British representative Lord Carrington to which all three sides had agreed before any killings had taken place, or even the Vance-Owen Plan which Karadzic was willing to sign.

The CIA's Greatest Hits: 6 Bonus Tracks

I just made a deal to put out a new edition of my 1994 book, The CIA's Greatest Hits. Along with fixing any bonehead errors and adding updates to existing chapters (Libya, for one), there will be six chapters of new material, each with a new cartoon. Here's a sneak preview of the Agency's new material - though I know many of you still prefer their early work best....

Kosovo: The 1999 war in Kosovo reflects a familiar pattern with the CIA: alliances with drug-runners, terrorists and gangsters. The lucky ally in this case was the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which succeeded in wresting the territory from Serbia with the help of a 78-day US bombing campaign. What’s interesting is that al-Qaeda may also have been involved – on the same side as the US.

Speculators

Marcy Wheeler is like one-woman truth squad, debunking GOP torture apologists' claims that it was really W and Cheney's waterboarding program we have to thank. Cheney himself speculated along those lines: "I would assume the enhanced interrogation program we put in place produced some of the results that led to bin Laden's ultimate capture." [emphasis mine]

Well, that's their story, and they're sticking to it. It's quickly become one of the official GOP talking points in their response to this week's geopolitical earthquake. As Wheeler, AKA Emptywheel, inconveniently points out, though, not only did the waterboarded terrorists not give out the actionable intelligence during their years of torture, they gave out plenty of false leads that led to the US squandering millions of dollars chasing wild geese.

Sarajevo & Abbotabad

I had a great time today as a substitute teacher for 7th grade social studies classes. On the teacher's desk were plans for me to teach about the causes of World War I, but I knew many of the kids would be interested in talking about the death of bin Laden. My job was to weave together the connections between those two topics. Luckily that wasn't hard to do.

Libya: A Just War or Just a War?

Our story so far:

The Libya Chapter
The Libya Ambivalence
Toward a Shallower Ambivalence
Libya: He's a Rebel
Libya: Qadaffy's Defenders
Libya: Place Your Bets
Libya: Friends Like These
Libya: Opportunity Costs
Libya: Damage, Collateral and Otherwise

In thinking about whether the kinetic action in Libya is justified, it helps to consider the long tradition of Just War Doctrine. As I recall, supporters of the Iraq War tried to claim, ludicrously, that the conditions enumerated therein were met. As a refresher, those conditions are:

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success; 
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power as well as the precision of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

Libya: Damage, Collateral and Otherwise

Our story so far:

The Libya Chapter
The Libya Ambivalence
Toward a Shallower Ambivalence
Libya: He's a Rebel
Libya: Qadaffy's Defenders
Libya: Place Your Bets
Libya: Friends Like These
Libya: Opportunity Costs

Wars are obviously a lot easier to get into than out of. That alone should be grounds for avoiding them whenever possible. Beyond that, of course, is the Shit Happens Doctrine. War supporters invoke it regularly whenever complaints of atrocities arise: "Hey, this is war; get over it."

Which is exactly the reason why extreme caution needs to be employed before ever going down that road. Atrocities are inevitable, no matter how righteous the cause – indeed, those most certain of the righteousness of their cause are prone to committing (and excusing) atrocities. And the other side's atrocities – real, exaggerated, or fabricated – are then the impetus for ever more stringent efforts to defeat them.

Libya: Opportunity Costs

Our story so far:

The Libya Chapter
The Libya Ambivalence
Toward a Shallower Ambivalence
Libya: He's a Rebel
Libya: Qadaffy's Defenders
Libya: Place Your Bets
Libya: Friends Like These

In previous posts, we've explored some of the principal objections to the kinetic activity in Libya: uncertainties about the rebel forces, the strength of Qadaffy's support, the unpredictable nature of the outcome, and the hypocrisy of supporting violent repression in other Arab lands.

It's been said we couldn't just "stand by" and watch Qadaffy slaughter his opponents. In the cases of Bahrain and Yemen, we not only stood by, but held their coats for them while they did the job with our weapons (albeit on a smaller scale than Colonel Q). But the flip side of that hypocrisy is that we are also standing by and watching slaughter on a comparable or larger scale, in lands that don't happen to sit above crude oil supplies - or create refugee flows into Europe.

We have certainly stood by and watched similar abuses in Myanmar, Eritrea and Turkmenistan, to name a few. There were no UN resolutions to impose a no-fly zone in Darfur, for example. And while the civil war in Libya may have led to thousands of deaths so far, deaths in the Democratic Republic of the Congo number in the millions.

Libya: Friends Like These

Our story so far:

The Libya Chapter
The Libya Ambivalence
Toward a Shallower Ambivalence
Libya: He's a Rebel
Libya: Qadaffy's Defenders
Libya: Place Your Bets

One of the lessons of the Egyptian uprising was supposed to be that the US has a lot more leverage in urging reform on our client states than in imposing it by force on our adversaries. When Barack Obama told the Egyptian military that they would lose legitimacy if they fired on their own people, they took the hint, greasing the skids for Mubarak, and placing their bets on being able to manage the transition as best they can.

It was a triumph of speak-softly diplomacy, and stood in marked contrast to George W's big-stick ethos. This month, the contrast is a bit less glaring. Where, for instance, were our concerns for human rights and democratic yearnings when Defense Secretary Robert Gates broke bread with Bahrain's inbred kleptocracy on the eve of their brutal crackdown? If he told them that violence would lead to a loss of legitimacy, they don't seem to have gotten the message.

2006: Moral Calculus

Yet another iteration of the Law of Unintended Consequences. When it comes to the application of force, the neocons managed to combine an unseemly eagerness with an alarming incompetence and an approach to diplomacy that managed to dismay allies and embolden adversaries. Here's another look at how it was done when the "grownups" were in charge:

The destruction of Lebanon can be added to the list of blunders and tragedies made possible by the Bush administration’s dangerous incompetence. It seems like just a few months ago that Lebanon was Exhibit A in the neocons’ argument that democracy was sweeping the Middle East because Our Policy Is Working and the troops will be coming home to tickertape parades any day now. So, again –how’s that going?

Libya: Place Your Bets

Our story so far:

The Libya Chapter
The Libya Ambivalence
Toward a Shallower Ambivalence
Libya: He's a Rebel
Libya: Qadaffy's Defenders

When President Obama spoke the words "we have stopped Gadhafi's deadly advance," on Monday night, it had the ring of truth. By Tuesday morning it was a cruel joke. By Tuesday evening headlines told of "unimaginable carnage," of the sort our intervention was supposed to prevent.

Whether you support or oppose this "kinetic activity," or your views swing back and forth like the battlefield advantage, it's impossible to predict how long it will last. Unpredictability is built right into the nature of warfare – which is one reason any nation should be exceedingly cautious before embarking down that path.

In journalism, you can generally find an expert to argue any point you want to make. Here's what the experts say about Libya:

Libya: Qadaffy's Defenders

Our story so far:

The Libya Chapter
The Libya Ambivalence
Toward a Shallower Ambivalence
Libya: He's a Rebel

The president spoke last night and flatly asserted that this would be a better world without Qadaffy running Libya. And one of my principal misgivings is that there's no guarantee that that's true. Given the charges of racism, extremism and atrocities on the rebel side – let alone the number of rebel leaders who recently defected opportunistically from Qadaffy's government – the eventual outcome is a crapshoot by any measure.

Professor Juan Cole recently dismissed concerns about the rebel alliance with a wave of his hand, calling it a libel against the people of Misrata and Benghazi. Cole's "Open Letter to the Left" has been countered by BooMan and by Steve Clemens – the latter in the context of grudging support for the intervention, the former in ambivalent opposition.

For my part, I know that Cole knows more about the Middle East than I ever will, but I'm not entirely convinced by his characterization of extremist elements as "a handful" of those fighting for regime change. And even if so, what we saw in Kosovo was that war criminals make better fighters than pacifists, tend to get the backing of intervening powers, and are better equipped to police the outcome and dictate terms.

Libya: He's a Rebel

Our story so far:

The Libya Chapter

The Libya Ambivalence
Toward a Shallower Ambivalence

Like I said, if you're ambivalent about the Libya intervention, you're not alone. Among those who share your ambivalence is, reportedly, Barack Obama. Almost tautologically, being president puts you in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't environment. But that's why you get your own library for a retirement present.


I'll tell you one thing, though: if these guys are for it, I'm taking another look.

Toward a Shallower Ambivalence

I confessed yesterday to a deep ambivalence about the Libya intervention, despite my knee-jerk near-pacifism. If this is the war that ends up causing more good than harm, it'll be the exception that proves the rule. But the more I read about it, what grows deeper is not my ambivalence, but my skepticism.

My current bottom line – and I haven't reached bottom yet – is that while I have a bad feeling about this, I'm not out protesting in the streets. Yet.

I'd like to be wrong about this, and see a quick ouster of the dictator and a transition to democracy. But there's no shame in urging caution in the face of carnage.

But to argue, as I did yesterday, that this time we have more justification than Bush in Iraq, or Clinton in Kosovo is, as Matty points out, setting the bar pretty low. And I set the bar pretty high when it comes to justifying the use of military force. "They haven't lied to us this time" makes a poor battle cry – and I'm not sure it's an accurate one, either.

The principle objections raised so far include: