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17 May 2010 By Tom
Engelhardt
On stage, it would be
farce. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s bound to play
out as tragedy.
Less than two months ago,
Barack Obama flew into Afghanistan for six hours --
essentially to read the riot act to Afghan President
Hamid Karzai, whom his ambassador had only months
before termed “not an adequate strategic partner.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen
followed within a day to deliver his own “stern
message.”
While still on Air Force
One, National Security Adviser James Jones offered
reporters a version of the tough talk Obama was
bringing with him. Karzai would later see one of
Jones’s comments and find it insulting. Brought to his
attention as well would be a newspaper article that
quoted an anonymous senior U.S. military official as
saying of his half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a
reputedly corrupt powerbroker in the southern city of
Kandahar: “I'd like him out of there... But there's
nothing that we can do unless we can link him to the
insurgency, then we can put him on the [target list]
and capture and kill him." This was tough talk indeed.
At the time, the media
repeatedly pointed out that President Obama, unlike
his predecessor, had consciously developed a
standoffish relationship with Karzai. Meanwhile, both
named and anonymous officials regularly castigated the
Afghan president in the press for stealing an election
and running a hopelessly corrupt, inefficient
government that had little power outside Kabul, the
capital. A previously planned Karzai visit to
Washington was soon put on hold to emphasize the
toughness of the new approach.
The administration was
clearly intent on fighting a better version of the
Afghan war with a new commander, a new plan of action,
and a well-tamed Afghan president, a client head of
state who would finally accept his lesser place in the
greater scheme of things. A little blunt talk, some
necessary threats, and the big stick of American power
and money were sure to do the trick.
Meanwhile, across the
border in Pakistan, the administration was in an
all-carrots mood when it came to the local military
and civilian leadership -- billions of dollars of
carrots, in fact. Our top military and civilian
officials had all but taken up residence in Islamabad.
By March, for instance, Admiral Mullen had already
visited the country 15 times and US dollars (and
promises of more) were flowing in. Meanwhile, U.S.
Special Operations Forces were arriving in the
country’s wild borderlands to train the Pakistani
Frontier Corps and the skies were filling with
CIA-directed unmanned aerial vehicles pounding those
same borderlands, where the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda,
and other insurgent groups involved in the Afghan War
were located.
In Pakistan, it was said, a
crucial “strategic relationship” was being carefully
cultivated. As the New York Times reported,
“In March, [the Obama administration] held a
high-level strategic dialogue with Pakistan’s
government, which officials said went a long way
toward building up trust between the two sides.” Trust
indeed.
Skip ahead to mid-May and
somehow, like so many stealthy insurgents, the carrots
and sticks had crossed the poorly marked, porous
border between Afghanistan and Pakistan heading in
opposite directions. Last week, Karzai was in
Washington being given “the red carpet treatment” as
part of what was termed an Obama administration “charm
offensive” and a “four-day love fest.”
The president set aside a
rare stretch of hours to entertain Karzai and the
planeload of ministers he brought with him. At a joint
news conference, Obama insisted that “perceived
tensions” between the two men had been “overstated.”
Specific orders went out from the White House to curb
public criticism of the Afghan president and give him
“more public respect” as “the chief U.S. partner in
the war effort.”
Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton assured Karzai of Washington’s long-term
“commitment” to his country, as did Obama and Afghan
War commander General Stanley McChrystal. Praise was
the order of the day.
John Kerry, chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, interrupted a
financial reform debate to invite Karzai onto the
Senate floor where he was mobbed by senators eager to
shake his hand (an honor not bestowed on a head of
state since 1967). He was once again our man in Kabul.
It was a stunning turnaround: a president almost
without power in his own country had somehow tamed the
commander-in-chief of the globe’s lone superpower.
Meanwhile, Clinton, who had
shepherded the Afghan president on a walk through a
“private enclave” in Georgetown and hosted a
“glittering reception” for him, appeared on CBS’s
“60 Minutes” to flay Pakistan. In the wake of
an inept failed car bombing in Times Square, she had
this stern message to send to the Pakistani
leadership: "We want more, we expect more... We've
made it very clear that if, heaven forbid, an attack
like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to
have been successful, there would be very severe
consequences." Such consequences would evidently
include a halt to the flow of U.S. aid to a country in
economically disastrous shape. She also accused at
least some Pakistani officials of “practically
harboring” Osama bin Laden. So much for the carrots.
According to the
Washington Post, General McChrystal delivered a
“similar message” to the chief of staff of the
Pakistani Army. To back up Clinton’s public threats
and McChrystal’s private ones, hordes of anonymous
American military and civilian officials were ready to
pepper reporters with leaks about the tough love that
might now be in store for Pakistan. The same Post
story, for instance, spoke of “some officials...
weighing in favor of a far more muscular and
unilateral U.S. policy. It would include a
geographically expanded use of drone missile attacks
in Pakistan and pressure for a stronger U.S. military
presence there.”
According to similar
accounts, “more pointed” messages were heading for key
Pakistanis and “new and stiff warnings” were being
issued. Americans were said to be pushing for expanded
Special Operations training programs in the Pakistani
tribal areas and insisting that the Pakistani military
launch a major campaign in North Waziristan, the
heartland of various resistance groups including,
possibly, al-Qaeda. “The element of threat” was now in
the air, according to Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani
ambassador, while in press reports you could hear
rumblings about an “internal debate” in Washington
that might result in more American “boots on the
ground.”
In other words, in the
space of two months the Obama administration had
flip-flopped when it came to who exactly was to be
pressured and who reassured. A typically anonymous
“former U.S. official who advises the administration
on Afghan policy” caught the moment well in a comment
to the Wall Street Journal. “This whole
bending over backwards to show Karzai the red carpet,”
he told journalist Peter Spiegel, “is a result of not
having had a concerted strategy for how to grapple
with him."
On a larger scale, the
flip-flop seemed to reflect tactical and strategic
incoherence -- and not just in relation to Karzai. To
all appearances, when it comes to the administration's
two South Asian wars, one open, one more hidden, Obama
and his top officials are flailing around. They are
evidently trying whatever comes to mind in much the
manner of the oil company BP as it repeatedly fails to
cap a demolished oil well 5,000 feet under the waves
in the Gulf of Mexico. In a sense, when it comes to
Washington’s ability to control the situation,
Pakistan and Afghanistan might as well be 5,000 feet
underwater. Like BP, Obama’s officials, military and
civilian, seem to be operating in the dark, using
unmanned robotic vehicles. And as in the Gulf, after
each new failure, the destruction only spreads.
For all the policy reviews
and shuttling officials, the surging troops, extra
private contractors, and new bases, Obama’s wars are
worsening. Lacking is any coherent regional policy or
semblance of real strategy -- counterinsurgency being
only a method of fighting and a set of tactics for
doing so. In place of strategic coherence there is
just one knee-jerk response: escalation. As unexpected
events grip the Obama administration by the throat,
its officials increasingly act as if further
escalation were their only choice, their fated choice.
This response is eerily
familiar. It permeated Washington’s mentality in the
Vietnam War years. In fact, one of the strangest
aspects of that war was the way America’s leaders --
including President Lyndon Johnson -- felt
increasingly helpless and hopeless even as they
committed themselves to further steps up the ladder of
escalation.
We don’t know what the main
actors in Obama’s war are feeling. We don’t have their
private documents or their secret taped conversations.
Nonetheless, it should ring a bell when, as wars
devolve, the only response Washington can imagine is
further escalation.
By just about every recent
account, including new reports from the independent
Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon, the
US mission in Afghanistan is going dreadfully, even as
the Taliban insurgency gains potency and expands. This
spring, preparing for his first relatively minor U.S.
offensive in Marja, a Taliban-controlled area of
Helmand Province, General McChrystal confidently
announced that, after the insurgents were dislodged,
an Afghan “government in a box” would be rolled out.
From a governing point of view, however, the offensive
seems to have been a fiasco. The Taliban is now
reportedly re-infiltrating the area, while the
governmental apparatus in that nation-building “box”
has proven next to nonexistent, corrupt, and
thoroughly incompetent.
Today, according to a
report by the International Council on Security and
Development (ICOS), the local population is far more
hostile to the American effort. According to the ICOS,
“61% of Afghans interviewed feel more negative about
NATO forces after Operation Moshtarak than they did
before the February military offensive in Marja.”
As Alissa Rubin of the New
York Times summed up the situation in Afghanistan more
generally:
"Even as American troops
clear areas of militants, they find either no
government to fill the vacuum, as in Marja, or
entrenched power brokers, like President Karzai's
brother in Kandahar, who monopolize NATO contracts and
other development projects and are resented by large
portions of the population. In still other places,
government officials rarely show up at work and do
little to help local people, and in most places the
Afghan police are incapable of providing security.
Corruption, big and small, remains an overwhelming
complaint."
In other words, the U.S.
really doesn’t have an “adequate partner,” and this is
all the more striking since the Taliban is by no
stretch of the imagination a particularly popular
movement of national resistance. As in Vietnam, a
counterinsurgency war lacking a genuine governmental
partner is an oxymoron, not to speak of a recipe for
disaster.
Not surprisingly, doubts
about General McChrystal’s war plan are reportedly
spreading inside the Pentagon and in Washington, even
before it’s been fully launched. The major U.S. summer
“operation” -- it’s no longer being labeled an
“offensive” -- in the Kandahar region already shows
signs of “faltering” and its unpopularity is rising
among an increasingly resistant local population. In
addition, civilian deaths from U.S. and NATO actions
are distinctly on the rise and widely unsettling to
Afghans. Meanwhile, military and police forces being
trained in U.S./NATO mentoring programs considered
crucial to Obama’s war plans are proving remarkably
hapless.
McClatchy News, for
example, recently reported that the new Afghan
National Civil Order Police (ANCOP), a specially
trained elite force brought into the Marja area and
“touted as the country's best and brightest” is,
according to “U.S. military strategists[,] plagued by
the same problems as Afghanistan's conventional
police, who are widely considered corrupt, ineffective
and inept.” Drug use and desertions in ANCOP have been
rife.
And yet, it seems as if all
that American officials can come up with, in response
to the failed Times Square car bombing and the “news”
that the bomber was supposedly trained in Waziristan
by the Pakistani Taliban, is the demand that Pakistan
allow “more of a boots-on-the-ground strategy” and
more American trainers into the country. Such
additional U.S. forces would serve only “as advisers
and trainers, not as combat forces.” So the mantra now
goes reassuringly, but given the history of the
Vietnam War, it’s a cringe-worthy demand.
In the meantime, the Obama
administration has officially widened its targeting in
the CIA drone war in the Pakistani borderlands to
include low-level, no-name militants. It is also
ratcheting up such attacks, deeply unpopular in a
country where 64% of the inhabitants, according to a
recent poll, already view the United States as an
"enemy" and only 9% as a “partner.”
Since the Times Square
incident, the CIA has specifically been striking North
Waziristan, where the Pakistani army has as yet
refrained from launching operations. The U.S., as the
Nation’s Jeremy Scahill reports, has also increased
its support for the Pakistani Air Force, which will
only add to the wars in the skies of that country.
All of this represents
escalation of the “covert” U.S. war in Pakistan. None
of it offers particular hope of success. All of it
stokes enmity and undoubtedly encourages more “lone
wolf” jihadis to lash out at the U.S. It’s a formula
for blowback, but not for victory.
One thing can be said about
the Bush administration: it had a grand strategic
vision to go with its wars. Its top officials were
convinced that the American military, a force they saw
as unparalleled on planet Earth, would be capable of
unilaterally shock-and-awing America’s enemies in what
they liked to call “the arc of instability” or “the
Greater Middle East” (that is, the oil heartlands of
the planet). Its two wars would bring not just
Afghanistan and Iraq, but Iran and Syria to their
knees, leaving Washington to impose a Pax Americana on
the
Middle East and
Central Asia (in the process of which groups like
Hamas and Hezbollah would be subdued and anti-American
jihadism ended).
They couldn’t, of course,
have been more wrong, something quite apparent to the
Obama team. Now, however, we have a crew in Washington
who seem to have no vision, great or small, when it
comes to American foreign or imperial policy, and who
seem, in fact, to lack any sense of strategy at all.
What they have is a set of increasingly discredited
tactics and an approach that might pass for good old
American see-what-works “pragmatism,” but these days
might more aptly be labeled “BP-style pragmatism.”
The vision may be long
gone, but the wars live on with their own inexorable
momentum. Add into the mix American domestic politics,
which could discourage any president from changing
course and de-escalating a war, and you have what
looks like a fatal -- and fatally expensive -- brew.
We’ve moved from Bush’s
visionary disasters to Obama’s flailing wars, while
the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq continue
to pay the price. If only we could close the curtain
on this strange mix of farce and tragedy, but
evidently we’re still stuck in act four of a five-act
nightmare.
Even as our Afghan and
Pakistani wars are being sucked dry of whatever
meaning might remain, the momentum is in only one
direction -- toward escalation. A thousand repetitions
of an al-Qaeda-must-be-destroyed mantra won’t change
that one bit. More escalation, unfortunately, is yet
to come.
-- Tom Engelhardt,
co-founder of
the American Empire Project, runs
the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the
author of
The End of Victory Culture, a
history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a
novel,
The Last Days of Publishing. His
latest book,
The American Way of War (Haymarket
Books), will be published in June.
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