[Hayden was pro-Obama in the CA primary]
http://www.alternet.org/story/91645/
Obama Wants to Shrink One War, But Expand Two Others
By Tom Hayden
AlterNet
July 16, 2008
Barack Obama has restated his phased withdrawal plan
for Iraq in response to public questioning, but
committed himself to expanding the wars in Afghanistan
and Pakistan.
Any proposal to transfer American troops from Iraq to
Afghanistan and Pakistan is sure to cause debate and
questions among peace activists and rank-and-file
Democrats. The proposal potentially represents a wider
quagmire for the US government and military.
On Iraq, Obama said nothing especially new in his July
14 New York Times op-ed piece and his foreign policy
speech in Washington today. In both, he forcefully
restated his commitment to combat troop withdrawals
after his recent statements suggesting that he would
"refine" his views when he consults military commanders
on the ground. He neglected to address how many
American "residual forces" he would leave behind in
Iraq to fight Al Qaeda and "protect American service
members," though he made additional US trainers
conditional on the Iraqis making "political progress."
It is a proposal that seems to promise a phased
diminishing of the American military presence, not a
complete withdrawal.
Many independent analysts question the wisdom of
leaving some 50,000 American troops as advisers,
trainers and counter-terrorism units in Iraq after the
withdrawal of 140,000 by 2010. Those forces would be
protecting a sectarian political regime that is linked
to death squads, militias and a detention system now
holding 50,000 Iraqis in violation of human rights
standards.
It is quite possible that Obama's regional diplomacy,
including hard bargaining with Iran, could facilitate a
decent interval for American troop withdrawals and a
more stabilized Iraq, as suggested by former CIA
director John M. Deutch.
Obama smartly exploited the recent call by Iraqi prime
minister Nuri al-Maliki for a US withdrawal deadline,
although al-Maliki's timeline was twice as long as
Obama's. In this face-saving scenario, the Pentagon
would follow "the Philippine option," in which the
client government formally requested that the United
States close its bases. This option was advocated
openly by the Marines' commander in Iraq in 2004. The
United States withdrew only obsolete naval forces from
the Philippines, however; today we spend hundreds of
millions on a secret war against Islamic forces in the
southern Philippines. Obama might do the same.
These public policy ambiguities are not simply Obama's
problem; they are caused by a mainstream media that
stubbornly refuses to ask any questions about those
"residual forces." For example, how will "residual
forces," tied to the regime the Americans put in power,
be more successful on the battlefield than the
departing 170,000 combat troops?
But Obama's proposals for Afghanistan and Pakistan are
far more problematic. They can be described in everyday
language as either out of the frying pan and into the
fire or attacking needles by burning down haystacks.
The Pentagon paradigm is to defeat Al Qaeda militarily
while refusing to address, and thereby worsening, the
dire conditions that gave rise to the Taliban and Al
Qaeda operatives in the first place. In careful prose
based on reputable sources, Ahmed Rashid's new Descent
into Chaos (Viking, 2008) provides a horrific portrait
of Afghanistan:
It is estimated by RAND that $100 per capita is the
minimum required to stabilize a country evolving out of
war. Bosnia received $679 per capita, Kosovo $526,
while Afghanistan received $57 per capita in the key
years, 2001-2003.
When the United States installed the Hamid Karzai
government, Afghanistan ranked 172nd out of 178 nations
on the United Nation's Human Development Index. It has
the highest rate of infant mortality in the world, a
life expectancy rate of 44-45 years, and the youngest
population of any country. In 2005, 95 percent of
Kabul's residents were living without electrical power.
Seven hundred civilians were killed in the first five
months of 2008 alone, according to the United Nations.
Despite some gains in media and currency reform, plus a
modest increase in the number of children in school,
this was the path of least reconstruction. And despite
images of Afghan democracy that made loya jirga tribal
gatherings appear to be the birth of participatory
democracy, a warlord state was entrenched by the CIA.
There are some 36,000 US troops stretched across
Afghanistan, another 17,500 under NATO command, and
18,000 in counterinsurgency and training roles. They
are so aggressively combat-oriented that the Afghan
government itself continually objects to the rate of
civilian casualties. It costs the Pentagon $2 billion
per month to support 30,000 American troops. According
to Rashid, "Afghanistan is not going to be able to pay
for its own army for many years to come-perhaps never."
As of 2006, Afghanistan's economy still rested on
producing 90 percent of the world's opium, an eerie
narco-state parallel with the US counterinsurgency in
Colombia, where most of America's supply of cocaine
originates.
Afghanistan is an unstable police state. By 2005, the
Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission cited 800
cases of detainee abuse at some thirty US firebases.
"The CIA operates its own secret detention centers,
which were off limits to the US military." Ghost
prisoners, known as Persons Under Control are held
permanently without any public records of their
existence. Warlords operate their own prisons with
"unprecedented abuse, torture, and death of Taliban
prisoners." And as the US lowered the number of
prisoners at Guantnamo, it increased the numbers held
at Bagram, near Kabul. As of January, 2008, there were
630 incarcerated at Bagram, "including some who had
been there for five years and whom the ICRC had still
not been given access to." After weeks of hunger
strikes about detention conditions, the Taliban
recently orchestrated a jailbreak of hundreds of
Afghanis from the Kandahar prison, an inside job.
As in Iraq, the US contracted for police training in
Afghanistan with DynCorp International. Between 2003
and 2005, the US spent $860 million to train 40,000
Afghan police, "but the results were totally useless,"
according to Rashid. Even Richard Holbrooke described
the DynCorp training program as "an appalling jokea
complete shambles."
When the Taliban government was overthrown, the US
installed a Westernized Pashtun, Hamid Karzai, a former
lobbyist for Unocal, who had been out of the country
during the jihad against the Soviet Union. But for the
first time in 300 years, the Pashtun tribes themselves
were violently displaced from power. At 42 percent of
the population, they remain by far the largest Afghan
minority, heavily concentrated in Kandahar and the
southern provinces and across the federally
administered tribal areas in western Pakistan. These
are the areas that the Pentagon, the New York Times and
Barack Obama (like John Kerry before him) designate as
the central battlefront of the war on terrorism.
The question is not simply a moral one. Is an expanded
war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, fueled by troop
transfers from Iraq, winnable? In what sense?
Transferring 10,000 American troops from Iraq to
Afghanistan, which Obama proposes, is symbolic, a
potential down payment on the treadmill of further
escalation. (In his statement, Obama supports "at
least" two additional brigades for Afghanistan.) The
future of the Pentagon's "rear" in Iraq will be
questionable if fifteen combat brigades are withdrawn
under Obama's plan, while the Pentagon's new "front"
line cannot be secured with two brigades sent to
southern and eastern Afghanistan. At best these might
be holding actions until the next administration makes
a decision about its ultimate strategy. Obama may be
proposing an escalation simply in order not to lose, a
pattern well-documented in Daniel Ellsberg's history of
the Vietnam War.
But the US escalation policy already is deepening, with
bipartisan support-or silence-so far. In keeping with
counterinsurgency strategies going back to America's
long wars against native tribes, the Pentagon has
fostered the ascension of a new Pakistani general,
Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, whose background includes
training at Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth. An
unnamed US military official praises Kayani "for
embracing new counterinsurgency training and tactics
that could be more effective in countering militants in
the country's tribal areas. Over $400 million is being
spent to recruit a "frontier corps" of to "turn local
tribes against militants." CIA and Special Forces
operatives already have invaded Pakistan to set up a
secret base from which to hunt Osama bin Laden-before
Mr. Bush leaves office-as well as fighting Al Qaeda and
the Taliban on the ground and from pilotless Predator
drones.
All this constitutes yet another preventive war by the
United States, this one in violation of Pakistan's
sovereignty and against the stated policies of the
newly elected Pakistani government, not to mention the
overwhelming sentiment among Pakistan's people. On the
Afghan front, the Taliban will be able to retreat in
the face of greater US firepower, or attack like
Lilliputians from multiple sides if the US concentrates
its forces around the Pakistan border. Further violence
and tides of anti-American sentiment could sweep across
the region into Pakistan with unpredictable results.
Michael Scheuer, the former CIA official once charged
with tracking down Osama bin Laden, suggests that the
American delusion is that "by establishing a minority-
dominated semi-secular, pro-Indian government [in
Kabul], we would neither threaten the identity nor
raise the ire of the Pashtun tribes nor endanger
Pakistan's national security." In his recent book,
Marching Towards Hell, Scheuer wrote that "for the
United States, the war in Afghanistan has been lost. By
failing to recognize that the only achievable US
mission in Afghanistan was to destroy the Taliban and
al-Qaeda and their leaders and get out, Washington is
now faced with fighting a protracted and growing
insurgency. The only upside of this coming defeat is
that it is a debacle of our own making. We are not
being defeated by our enemies; we are in the midst of
defeating ourselves."
The beginning of an alternative may require unfreezing
American diplomacy towards Iran and considering a
"grand bargain" instead. Teheran is the single power,
according to CIA director Deutch, that could
destabilize the US withdrawal from Iraq. It happens
that they were America's ally against Afghanistan not
so long ago. The Iranians have lost thousands of police
and soldiers themselves in a border war against Afghan
drug lords. As William Polk wrote in Violent Politics,
"ironically, the only effective deterrent to the trade
is Iran." In exchange for security guarantees against a
US-directed regime change, Iran may be willing to
discuss cooperation with the "Great Satan" to stabilize
its borders with Iraq and Afghanistan. Improbable? That
depends on whether one thinks the alternative is
unthinkable.
Only a short time ago, the United States was supporting
the jihadists in the same tribal areas as they ventured
to destroy the Soviet occupation. In the same years,
the United States was hosting the Taliban for talks on
a possible oil pipeline across Afghanistan. Since
twists and turns seem to be the only pattern in divide-
and-conquer strategies, it is possible that Obama
thinks being tough towards Afghanistan and Pakistan is
a defensive cover for withdrawing from Iraq, and he
later will follow up with unspecified diplomacy after
he takes office. But history shows that creeping
escalations create a momentum and constituency of their
own. Obama might get lucky, lower the level of the
visible wars and embrace a diplomatic offensive. But
North and South Waziristan could be his Bay of Pigs.
To borrow a popular phrase of the season, ending one
war Iraq to start two more in Afghanistan and Pakistan
seems to be a dumb idea.
http://www.alternet.org/story/91645/
Obama Wants to Shrink One War, But Expand Two Others
By Tom Hayden
AlterNet
July 16, 2008
Barack Obama has restated his phased withdrawal plan
for Iraq in response to public questioning, but
committed himself to expanding the wars in Afghanistan
and Pakistan.
Any proposal to transfer American troops from Iraq to
Afghanistan and Pakistan is sure to cause debate and
questions among peace activists and rank-and-file
Democrats. The proposal potentially represents a wider
quagmire for the US government and military.
On Iraq, Obama said nothing especially new in his July
14 New York Times op-ed piece and his foreign policy
speech in Washington today. In both, he forcefully
restated his commitment to combat troop withdrawals
after his recent statements suggesting that he would
"refine" his views when he consults military commanders
on the ground. He neglected to address how many
American "residual forces" he would leave behind in
Iraq to fight Al Qaeda and "protect American service
members," though he made additional US trainers
conditional on the Iraqis making "political progress."
It is a proposal that seems to promise a phased
diminishing of the American military presence, not a
complete withdrawal.
Many independent analysts question the wisdom of
leaving some 50,000 American troops as advisers,
trainers and counter-terrorism units in Iraq after the
withdrawal of 140,000 by 2010. Those forces would be
protecting a sectarian political regime that is linked
to death squads, militias and a detention system now
holding 50,000 Iraqis in violation of human rights
standards.
It is quite possible that Obama's regional diplomacy,
including hard bargaining with Iran, could facilitate a
decent interval for American troop withdrawals and a
more stabilized Iraq, as suggested by former CIA
director John M. Deutch.
Obama smartly exploited the recent call by Iraqi prime
minister Nuri al-Maliki for a US withdrawal deadline,
although al-Maliki's timeline was twice as long as
Obama's. In this face-saving scenario, the Pentagon
would follow "the Philippine option," in which the
client government formally requested that the United
States close its bases. This option was advocated
openly by the Marines' commander in Iraq in 2004. The
United States withdrew only obsolete naval forces from
the Philippines, however; today we spend hundreds of
millions on a secret war against Islamic forces in the
southern Philippines. Obama might do the same.
These public policy ambiguities are not simply Obama's
problem; they are caused by a mainstream media that
stubbornly refuses to ask any questions about those
"residual forces." For example, how will "residual
forces," tied to the regime the Americans put in power,
be more successful on the battlefield than the
departing 170,000 combat troops?
But Obama's proposals for Afghanistan and Pakistan are
far more problematic. They can be described in everyday
language as either out of the frying pan and into the
fire or attacking needles by burning down haystacks.
The Pentagon paradigm is to defeat Al Qaeda militarily
while refusing to address, and thereby worsening, the
dire conditions that gave rise to the Taliban and Al
Qaeda operatives in the first place. In careful prose
based on reputable sources, Ahmed Rashid's new Descent
into Chaos (Viking, 2008) provides a horrific portrait
of Afghanistan:
It is estimated by RAND that $100 per capita is the
minimum required to stabilize a country evolving out of
war. Bosnia received $679 per capita, Kosovo $526,
while Afghanistan received $57 per capita in the key
years, 2001-2003.
When the United States installed the Hamid Karzai
government, Afghanistan ranked 172nd out of 178 nations
on the United Nation's Human Development Index. It has
the highest rate of infant mortality in the world, a
life expectancy rate of 44-45 years, and the youngest
population of any country. In 2005, 95 percent of
Kabul's residents were living without electrical power.
Seven hundred civilians were killed in the first five
months of 2008 alone, according to the United Nations.
Despite some gains in media and currency reform, plus a
modest increase in the number of children in school,
this was the path of least reconstruction. And despite
images of Afghan democracy that made loya jirga tribal
gatherings appear to be the birth of participatory
democracy, a warlord state was entrenched by the CIA.
There are some 36,000 US troops stretched across
Afghanistan, another 17,500 under NATO command, and
18,000 in counterinsurgency and training roles. They
are so aggressively combat-oriented that the Afghan
government itself continually objects to the rate of
civilian casualties. It costs the Pentagon $2 billion
per month to support 30,000 American troops. According
to Rashid, "Afghanistan is not going to be able to pay
for its own army for many years to come-perhaps never."
As of 2006, Afghanistan's economy still rested on
producing 90 percent of the world's opium, an eerie
narco-state parallel with the US counterinsurgency in
Colombia, where most of America's supply of cocaine
originates.
Afghanistan is an unstable police state. By 2005, the
Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission cited 800
cases of detainee abuse at some thirty US firebases.
"The CIA operates its own secret detention centers,
which were off limits to the US military." Ghost
prisoners, known as Persons Under Control are held
permanently without any public records of their
existence. Warlords operate their own prisons with
"unprecedented abuse, torture, and death of Taliban
prisoners." And as the US lowered the number of
prisoners at Guantnamo, it increased the numbers held
at Bagram, near Kabul. As of January, 2008, there were
630 incarcerated at Bagram, "including some who had
been there for five years and whom the ICRC had still
not been given access to." After weeks of hunger
strikes about detention conditions, the Taliban
recently orchestrated a jailbreak of hundreds of
Afghanis from the Kandahar prison, an inside job.
As in Iraq, the US contracted for police training in
Afghanistan with DynCorp International. Between 2003
and 2005, the US spent $860 million to train 40,000
Afghan police, "but the results were totally useless,"
according to Rashid. Even Richard Holbrooke described
the DynCorp training program as "an appalling jokea
complete shambles."
When the Taliban government was overthrown, the US
installed a Westernized Pashtun, Hamid Karzai, a former
lobbyist for Unocal, who had been out of the country
during the jihad against the Soviet Union. But for the
first time in 300 years, the Pashtun tribes themselves
were violently displaced from power. At 42 percent of
the population, they remain by far the largest Afghan
minority, heavily concentrated in Kandahar and the
southern provinces and across the federally
administered tribal areas in western Pakistan. These
are the areas that the Pentagon, the New York Times and
Barack Obama (like John Kerry before him) designate as
the central battlefront of the war on terrorism.
The question is not simply a moral one. Is an expanded
war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, fueled by troop
transfers from Iraq, winnable? In what sense?
Transferring 10,000 American troops from Iraq to
Afghanistan, which Obama proposes, is symbolic, a
potential down payment on the treadmill of further
escalation. (In his statement, Obama supports "at
least" two additional brigades for Afghanistan.) The
future of the Pentagon's "rear" in Iraq will be
questionable if fifteen combat brigades are withdrawn
under Obama's plan, while the Pentagon's new "front"
line cannot be secured with two brigades sent to
southern and eastern Afghanistan. At best these might
be holding actions until the next administration makes
a decision about its ultimate strategy. Obama may be
proposing an escalation simply in order not to lose, a
pattern well-documented in Daniel Ellsberg's history of
the Vietnam War.
But the US escalation policy already is deepening, with
bipartisan support-or silence-so far. In keeping with
counterinsurgency strategies going back to America's
long wars against native tribes, the Pentagon has
fostered the ascension of a new Pakistani general,
Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, whose background includes
training at Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth. An
unnamed US military official praises Kayani "for
embracing new counterinsurgency training and tactics
that could be more effective in countering militants in
the country's tribal areas. Over $400 million is being
spent to recruit a "frontier corps" of to "turn local
tribes against militants." CIA and Special Forces
operatives already have invaded Pakistan to set up a
secret base from which to hunt Osama bin Laden-before
Mr. Bush leaves office-as well as fighting Al Qaeda and
the Taliban on the ground and from pilotless Predator
drones.
All this constitutes yet another preventive war by the
United States, this one in violation of Pakistan's
sovereignty and against the stated policies of the
newly elected Pakistani government, not to mention the
overwhelming sentiment among Pakistan's people. On the
Afghan front, the Taliban will be able to retreat in
the face of greater US firepower, or attack like
Lilliputians from multiple sides if the US concentrates
its forces around the Pakistan border. Further violence
and tides of anti-American sentiment could sweep across
the region into Pakistan with unpredictable results.
Michael Scheuer, the former CIA official once charged
with tracking down Osama bin Laden, suggests that the
American delusion is that "by establishing a minority-
dominated semi-secular, pro-Indian government [in
Kabul], we would neither threaten the identity nor
raise the ire of the Pashtun tribes nor endanger
Pakistan's national security." In his recent book,
Marching Towards Hell, Scheuer wrote that "for the
United States, the war in Afghanistan has been lost. By
failing to recognize that the only achievable US
mission in Afghanistan was to destroy the Taliban and
al-Qaeda and their leaders and get out, Washington is
now faced with fighting a protracted and growing
insurgency. The only upside of this coming defeat is
that it is a debacle of our own making. We are not
being defeated by our enemies; we are in the midst of
defeating ourselves."
The beginning of an alternative may require unfreezing
American diplomacy towards Iran and considering a
"grand bargain" instead. Teheran is the single power,
according to CIA director Deutch, that could
destabilize the US withdrawal from Iraq. It happens
that they were America's ally against Afghanistan not
so long ago. The Iranians have lost thousands of police
and soldiers themselves in a border war against Afghan
drug lords. As William Polk wrote in Violent Politics,
"ironically, the only effective deterrent to the trade
is Iran." In exchange for security guarantees against a
US-directed regime change, Iran may be willing to
discuss cooperation with the "Great Satan" to stabilize
its borders with Iraq and Afghanistan. Improbable? That
depends on whether one thinks the alternative is
unthinkable.
Only a short time ago, the United States was supporting
the jihadists in the same tribal areas as they ventured
to destroy the Soviet occupation. In the same years,
the United States was hosting the Taliban for talks on
a possible oil pipeline across Afghanistan. Since
twists and turns seem to be the only pattern in divide-
and-conquer strategies, it is possible that Obama
thinks being tough towards Afghanistan and Pakistan is
a defensive cover for withdrawing from Iraq, and he
later will follow up with unspecified diplomacy after
he takes office. But history shows that creeping
escalations create a momentum and constituency of their
own. Obama might get lucky, lower the level of the
visible wars and embrace a diplomatic offensive. But
North and South Waziristan could be his Bay of Pigs.
To borrow a popular phrase of the season, ending one
war Iraq to start two more in Afghanistan and Pakistan
seems to be a dumb idea.
Hell, you're the one who
just said you know everything.....
