[THS] Simon Jenkins: Afghanistan is a catastrophe

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25919.htm

Afghanistan is a catastrophe. But we will have to wait for a new Chilcot to admit it

Our leaders would rather avoid embarrassment than be honest about the horrific
futility of the wars we are fighting

By Simon Jenkins
July 12, 2010 "The Guardian" - - As British troops retreat from the fortress of Sangin
in south Afghanistan, a sleepy room in Westminster again plays host to the Chilcot
inquiry into the Iraq war. The British establishment is strangely dotty. Chilcot is like
reviewing Passchendaele during the Battle of Britain, or Boudicca's charioteering after
the charge of the Light Brigade. American congressmen tear their generals apart
when fighting stupid wars. The British prefer to avoid embarrassment.

Sangin should now, after three years of "hearts and minds", be safe in the hands of
Afghan army and police units. It is not, any more than is the rest of Helmand, the
province allotted to British troops to pacify in summer 2006. Instead it is a forward
operating base under perpetual siege, one that the Americans must abandon to the
enemy or defend at battalion strength.

The Helmand fiasco was both predictable and predicted. When I (and others) spoke
to the Nato commander, General David Richards, in Kabul in early June 2006, his
blithe self-confidence was unnerving. He was about to implement the order of the
then defence secretary, John Reid, to send 3,000 British troops south to "establish
the preconditions for nation-building". Richards was dismissive of such US operations
as Enduring Freedom and Mountain Thrust. They just bombed villages and recruited
Taliban. He promised to win hearts and minds by "creating Malayan inkspots".

His listeners were incredulous. Had he heard or read nothing of the Pashtun Taliban,
of their reputation as insurgents and their obsession with fighting anyone and
everyone? We were airily waved aside as whingeing no-hopers. Britain would triumph
because "the Afghans basically hate the Taliban". This was the time of Reid's
notorious "not a shot fired" remark. It led to a woeful lack of troops, armoured cars
and helicopters, and an appalling attrition rate of one in four soldiers killed or
wounded.

Helmand has been a classic of generals telling politicians what they want to hear ­ as
before Iraq that function was performed by spies. In three and a half years, 312
British soldiers have died as their exposed patrols offered nothing but target practice
for the Taliban. Sangin, Musa Qala and Marjah are blazoned across Britain's front
pages, not as victories but as intractable hell-holes. The once-booming settlement of
Sangin has reportedly been reduced to a squalid drugs entrepot and ghost town, like
a battlefield which each side must keep recapturing to save face. The Americans now
seem intent on restaging the battle of Dien Bien Phu.

There is simply no good news out of Afghanistan. Iraq was always easy in
comparison. It would eventually exhaust itself and consent to some form of brutal
authority, allowing the west to "declare victory and retreat". Afghanistan is quite
different. Its innate xenophobia should, in 2001, have been exploited to drive a
wedge between the Taliban and al-Qaida. Instead, invasion and occupation have
thrown them together, while the nation-building ambition of liberal interventionism
has gone potty.

Everyone involved in this wretched war knows it has failed, yet leaders must tell us
the contrary. In London last month the hero of the hour, General David Petraeus,
declared "progress is being made", that "Marjah is in reasonably good shape" and
that Afghanistan was "enjoying a rising tide of security".

David Cameron and his defence secretary, Liam Fox, dare not tell the truth while
their troops are in the battlefield. They talk of leaving "when the Afghan forces can
defend themselves", which is moonshine, or "when the streets of London are safe",
which is never. Yet he also talks about withdrawing by 2015. Whitehall showers the
Afghan regime with aid, knowing that most is stolen within days. It is in the grip of
Orwell's crimestop, or protective stupidity. The foreign secretary, William Hague,
forgets the warning of Chatham, father of his hero, Pitt, against a nation betraying
itself "by its own credulity, through the means of false hope, false pride and
promised advantages of the most romantic and improbable nature".

What is intriguing is no longer the catastrophe itself but rather how it came to pass.
How did two democracies, operating in a climate of open debate, find themselves
trapped in a decade of bloodshed, extravagance and mendacity? How did they
accept the deaths of hundreds of their young men and thousands of non-combatant
foreigners in a cause they could articulate only in irrelevant cliches about democracy,
security and female emancipation?

A stab at an answer comes in a book by Garry Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern
Presidency and the National Security State. It was the advent of nuclear terror,
according to Wills, that allowed democracies to grant their leaders extraordinary
power to "push buttons", in effect to declare "one-man wars" without the customary
deliberation. Given that power, presidents (and prime ministers) inevitably abused it.
Nixon could assert during Watergate that a crime, "when the president does it, is not
a crime". Dick Cheney and George Bush could bring kidnap, detention, assassination
and torture within the discretion of "commander in chief". If domestic politics
required it, the president would find and wage a war. Cheney made eight trips to the
CIA's headquarters to demand it prove a link between Iraq and 9/11. When evidence
of Iraq WMD was not forthcoming, Cheney ­ like Tony Blair ­ simply asserted it:
"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

We no longer need Chilcot to tell us that there was no shred of intellectual honesty in
the claim that Iraq posed a military threat to the west. Yet the period is fast acquiring
similarities with Weimar Germany. People knew what was happening but dared not
say. The normal ramparts of democracy ­ courts, habeas corpus, civil liberty,
freedom of speech, fearless intelligence ­ fell down before "national security" as
defined by a political cabal. Politics ceased to be the lubricant of democracy and
became the source of its poison.



The question now is how soon politics can supply its own antidote ­ or have these
wars drifted so far from the cognisance of ordinary people as to form a self-
sustaining estate of the realm? The first glimmer of an exit strategy is emerging from
Washington and London. Both Barack Obama and David Cameron are talking not of
victory but of money and withdrawal dates. There are desperate cries of "talk to the
Taliban", when such cries are manifestly self-defeating. Why should the Taliban talk
when we are about to run?

An eventual deal between the Pakistanis, the Taliban and the ever-scheming Hamid
Karzai is the only talk that matters. There comes a point in any conflict, as in Bosnia
and in Iraq, where sheer exhaustion on the ground draws the feuding participants to
some accommodation. In Afghanistan, continued occupation and killing merely delays
this moment.

Nato's generals will eventually retreat to Kabul. There they will build a Baghdad-style
"green zone" of fortifications and blast walls. The city will become a western client
statelet of stunning venality, floating on an ocean of corruption-fuelling dollars. It will
last as long as liberal interventionists care to enjoy a lethal cocktail of incoming
mortars and outgoing pie in the sky. When it is over, and another war begins, we
shall have a new Chilcot inquiry.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25922.htm

In an Afghan Hole? Dig Deeper

By Joel Bleifuss

July 12, 2010 "In These Times" -- Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s trash talking and his
subsequent sacking by President Barack Obama is a sign: America’s foreign policy
elite is starting to realize the United States has lost the war.

Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, McChrystal’s chief of operations, told Rolling Stone’s Michael
Hastings: “It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win.”

Like a hapless crew on a foundering ship, those holding the reins in the Afghan war
have begun to scramble for reputation preservers. And they are scarce.

One person whose reputation may survive is Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl
Eikenberry who last November warned that the United States “will become more
deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves.” In Rolling Stone,
McChrystal scoffs at Eikenberry’s pessimism: “Here’s one that covers his flank for the
history books. Now, if we fail, they can say, ‘I told you so.’ “

Others are not so lucky.

On June 22, the day after he first read the Rolling Stone article, Obama said U.S.
strategy “is determined entirely” by two criteria: the first is whether it “ultimately
makes this country safer,” the second is whether it “justifies the enormous 
 sacrifice
that those men and women are making over there.”

OK, if the war in Afghanistan is winnable, Obama must tell how it will be won. If
victory is impossible, as Mayville and other experts assert, Americans deserve to know
how fighting a futile war makes their country safer.

Second, if the war is a mistake, how does continuing the fight “justify” the sacrifice
soldiers have already made? How is the death of one soldier who died in vain justified
by the death of a second 
 a thousandth?

Part of the reason we aren’t getting straight answers is that the mainstream press
plays along with the administration’s we-can-win-in-Afghanistan fantasy.

Listen to the establishment press in the wake of the McChrystal kerfuffle.

On June 24, a New York Times editorial advised: “Reports that some State
Department officials are also advocating a swift deal with the Taliban are worrisome.
[How so?] 
 Mr. Obama needs to do a better job of explaining why [the war] is so
central to American security. [Why is it?] More important, he and his aides have to do
a better job managing it. [By doing what?]” Enlighten us, Gray Lady.

On June 24, Time magazine’s Mark Halperin fawned: “Obama turned what could
have been a crippling blow into one of the strongest moments of his presidency to
date.”

In a June 23 interview with National Public Radio, Time’s executive editor, Nancy
Gibbs, explained her magazine’s special function: “The discipline has always been,
not what do you cover, but what do you not cover. It has always been an exercise in
ignoring things 
 in saying, ‘That’s not important enough.’ ” Judging from Halperin’s
analysis of the McChrystal affair, Time has determined that what is “important
enough” is how the selection of Gen. David Petraeus will play in the Beltway, not
whether the substantive policies guiding the United States in Afghanistan are doomed
to fail.

A senior adviser to McChrystal told Rolling Stone: “If Americans pulled back and
started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular.”

But how are they to learn what is going on? Digesting empty New York Times
editorials? Waiting for Nancy Gibbs to decide what deserves to be ignored?

Americans have made enormous sacrifices for this war in Afghanistan. They deserve
honest answers from the president and from the press.

Joel Bleifuss is the editor and publisher of In These Times, where he has worked as
an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. He is on the board of the
Institute for Public Affairs, which publishes In These Times.