Welcome to The Cahokian...
A thousand years ago Cahokia — across the Mississippi from what is now St. Louis — was one of the biggest cities in the world. Now it's an empty green spot next to the highway. I'm a middle-aged gay man living in New York City, center of the world, future footnote on somebody's future map. Welcome to the new world.
A few years ago the headline "Rumsfield Hypes Al Qaeda to Ward Off More Defense Cuts" would have surprised no one. And yet there it is today: "Leon Panetta Hypes Al Qaeda to Ward Off More Defense Cuts." Note the difference: Leon Panetta, Obama's new Democratic Secretary of Defense. Yes, Panetta is complaining that the debt ceiling deal threatens the military budget, according to the Times: "Mr. Panetta warned that if a Congressional panel could not reach agreement on cuts to the nation’s deficit, “it could trigger a round of dangerous across-the-board defense cuts that would do real damage to our security, our troops and their families, and our ability to protect the nation.” At a follow-up news conference, an unnameable Pentagon official said "“I would expect them to focus on entitlements and taxes,” the official said. He added that although “they have the right to focus on whatever they want,” more than $400 billion in budget cuts to the Pentagon would “go from the hard and manageable to the not-so-manageable.” In other words, the Bush, er, OBAMA, administration is arguing that cuts should be made to social programs instead of defense spending.
And yes, this was just days after Panetta was declaring that Al Qaeda was "almost defeated." More news from the Malabar Front, no doubt! Mission accomplished!
Oh yeah and how is that war in Afghanistan going? Have you noticed how whenever anything bad happens there now it's "NATO" this or "NATO" that? The American media is in shameful collaboration with the U.S. government attempting to divert attention from the fact that America owns the war in Afghanistan just as the Soviet Union once did. Here's the good news: It's only civilian deaths! "Although the number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan has steadily risen in the past year, with a 15 percent increase in the first half of 2011 over the same period last year, NATO deaths had been declining — decreasing nearly 20 percent in the first six months of 2011 compared with 2010." Well, that was until the Taliban shot down a "NATO" (American) helicopter killing thirty "NATO" (American) soldiers. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end!
When Panetta was confirmed to replace outgoing Secretary (and Bush appointee) Robert Gates, the first thing he did was rush off to Iraq and begin to rattle tired, worn sabres against Iran. He also has begun to twist the arms of the dysfunctional Iraqi government to get them to "request" that American forces stay behind after the scheduled departure to deal with the Iranian "threat." All of a sudden the administration is recycling the years-old Bush trademark claims that Iraqi IEDs originate in Iran and that Iranian leaders are now cooperating with Al Qaeda. It's just so pathetically transparent. Did the disgusting Panetta find a bunch of undated memos in his new desk and just decide they would make him sound like a tough guy?
Then there's this fascinating article in the NY Times today, "Moral Flip-Flop? Defining a War." It's about a top State Department legal adviser going through hoops to suggest the President has the right to do whatever he wants in fighting a war. The subject of the article is one of those Bush lawyers like John Yoo? Not even close: alleged liberal icon Harold Koh, the architect apparently of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's policy of not consulting congress before attacking the sovereign nation of Libya.
Today is the birthday of the heroic Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This week Jeh C. Johnson, the defense counsel for the Department of Defense, stated: "I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack." He then went on to compare Dr. King's compassion and support for striking sanitation workers shortly before his death to today's military: “I draw the parallel to our own servicemen and women deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, away from the comfort of conventional jobs, their families and their home."
These are obscene statements. Let's remember what Dr. King really stood for:
"Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents....Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and non-violence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know of his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition....
At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried here to give a voice to the voiceless of Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for our troops must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor....
Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam and the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop must be ours....
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death....
If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight."
--From his speech at Riverside Church, April 1967. Read the whole speech and try to resolve the obscenity of the wars started by Bush and continued by Obama with his words. Not. Possible.
Sunday I got it in my head to listen to a bunch of Laura Nyro, one of my favorite singer-songwriters. I loaded up my iPod and have been reliving her songs. Well it turns out yesterday would have been her 63rd birthday; sadly she passed on in 1997. My favorite Laura Nyro song, and there are very many Laura Nyro songs I love, is "Save the Country."
Come on, people Come on, children Come on down to the Glory River Gonna wash you up And wash you down Gonna lay the devil down Gonna lay that devil down
Come on, people Come on, children There's a king at the Glory River And the precious king He loved the people to sing Babes in the blinkin' sun Sang "We Shall Overcome"
I got fury in my soul Fury's gonna take me to the glory goal In my mind I can't study war no more Save the people Save the children Save the country, now
She recorded it many times; among my favorite versions is the live acoustic/vocal harmony version on the CD anthology released just before her passing; it's also been covered beautifully by many other musicians. It's such a simple statement, a sort of reworking of the old spiritual "Study War No More," and despite its late-1960s vintage, it's lost none of its evocative power. With its gospel allusions and oblique reference to Martin Luther King Jr it transcends utopian naivete, saying to me, anyway, that we can do this... if we want to.
It resonates to me now as I read an article in the paper about how the country's two unjust foreign wars are registering near zero in importance to voters in the upcoming elections. Americans are so shut off from these events it's as if we have trained ourselves not to gaze upon the horror, hoping it will go away if we don't pay attention to it. Movies about the wars go made but unseen, photos of the fighting and the dead on all sides go unprinted. I notice on the radio now it is always reported of casualties in Afghanistan that "NATO soldiers" rather than "American soldiers" have been killed in Taliban attacks, knowing that nobody will care. Except the families of the dead American "NATO soldiers," perhaps. Nevermind the total American denial of the value of Afghan or Iraqi life.
There's no election choices we can make coming up that will end these wars, that will end war. That should give us all pause. There's a lot of fury in the American soul, most of it misdirected and misguided. How much longer can Americans waste their fury on the ridiculous objects of Fox News' or even MSNBC's and ComedyCentral's contempt? So much wrong in this country and people are up in arms over government spending? There is so much to overcome.
Thanks Laura Nyro for your love and wisdom: In my mind I can't study war no more
"A dozen U.S. soldiers are charged with organizing a secret 'kill team' which allegedly murdered Afghan civilians at random and cut fingers and other body parts from corpses as trophies. Charging documents released Wednesday shed new light on the cases against 12 soldiers who served a year in southern Afghanistan with a Stryker infantry brigade. The most serious accusations involve five soldiers -- Calvin Gibbs, Adam Winfield, Jeremy Mortlock, Andrew Holmes and Michael Wagnon II -- who are said to have slain three Afghans earlier this year. According to reports, those men would likely be charged with premeditated murder, but may face additional charges relating to obstructing justice, possessing human body parts and retaining mortar rounds for personal use..."
This is Afghanistan they're talking about. You know, the good war, the one supposed to be preventing actual terrorists (as opposed to Saddam's imaginary ones) from attacking the U.S. I wonder who's winning that war? Because it sure looks like it's become a war of terrorist vs. terrorist to me.
Speaking of terrorists, a crazed anti-gay pastor of a microchurch in Florida may or may not have cancelled his plans to burn some holy Qurans to celebrate the anniversary of 911. The crazed anti-gay inbred morons of the Westboro Baptist Church may join in. Meanwhile, Muslim houses of worship in Tennessee and New York State have been targeted by bigots and arsonists. The proposed Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan continues to be attacked by right-wing Republicans, Zionists, and the odd liberal or two. Or three. People in government are actually suggesting Muslim Americans should be deprived of their rights.
All this hate against Muslims. Go on any blog to any discussion of Muslims, mosques or Islam and you'll find commenter after commenter reciting similarly worded tirades about Muslims overrunning Europe, inflicting Sharia law on civil societies, now setting their sights on our shores. Read these comments, these blogs, these news stories. Respectable news organizations ponder American anxiety over Muslims. Change Muslims to Jews. Change Mosque to Synagogue. Change Islam to Judaism. Do you not feel a chill down your spine?
What kind of country is this one becoming? What nation is in the throes of its birth? Who are these people who believe all Muslims share in the collective guilt of September 11? Who are these people who allow that insinuation, whose silence becomes acquiescence? Among the silent are allegedly progressive politicians. They know that the leaders of the Cordoba House initiative have nothing to do with terrorists, no specific links to Al Qaeda, well, as far as they know. But in their silence, or in their weak assertion that perhaps the proposed community center is legally right but morally unwise, they reveal a corruption in their hearts. They're willing to sacrifice Muslims on an altar of intolerance. The Carl Paladinos, Rick Lazios, and Sarah Palins of this world, these are the would-be Goebbelses and Himmlers of our time just waiting for their chance. And those who remain silent while Muslims are dehumanized and demonized and presumed guilty by association, they are the Good Germans who could have said something, but didn't. Nevermind the fact that many of those killed on 911 were Muslims. Nevermind that the biggest victims of Al Qaeda worldwide have been Muslims. Nevermind that Muslims aren't one monolithic mass. Nevermind that most of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people killed in the American wars of this new millennium have been Muslims.
"I just have to commit one act and the Americans will destroy themselves..." --Osama bin Laden
Who is winning this war that began on that beautiful and sad morning nine years ago? I don't think it's the good guys. It's another war that needs to end before the cancerous malignant rot at its core metastasizes. So who is profaning the memory of all those innocent people who died on September 11, 2001? It's not the people building mosques.
President Obama got on TV last night to announce the fulfillment, more or less, of his campaign promise to bring the war in Iraq to an end. Something more than half of all U.S. troops have been pulled out of Iraq, and those remaining, those 50,000 remaining, are supposedly to refrain from war-like things like actual combat. Of course this war hasn't really looked like a war with battles and combat for a number of years, but I guess these soldiers will just not go out looking to get blown up by IEDs. Most of these remaining occupation forces are supposed to come home next year, leaving some unspecified number of private mercenaries and military forces to protect the massive American embassy and various American interests.
Meanwhile a debatable number running somewhere between a hundred thousand and a couple million Iraqis are dead, including the dictator Saddam Hussein. Americans haven't really come to terms with this fact (many of them don't actually seem to care even slightly), but all these Iraqis are dead because of the terrible terrible lies told by the Bush administration, and acquiesced to by a majority of Republican and Democratic politicians. It's like the unbelievable plot of an "Onion" article: President Bush actually used the attack by one tiny group of people on the U.S. to invade another sovereign nation that had nothing whatsoever to do with that attack, and a majority of the population egged him on. The sole achievements of this war were the creation of an unstable, barely governable, terrorist-filled state in Iraq and the bankruptcy of the U.S. economy. The deaths of a few thousand American volunteer soldiers -- and the mauling of many thousand more -- don't seem to be something Americans are willing to dwell on. It is to Obama's credit, and more importantly the American people's credit, that in the last election the anti-Iraq war candidate won. Given what we have seen since that election domestically, that vote was some kind of miraculous flash in the pan. I wish that all the American soldiers in Iraq had now left, but it does seem that the travesty of the American invasion is on its way to ending, even as the wake of tragedy in its path is unerasable.
Unfortunately, Obama should not have been described as an actual anti-war candidate in that he also promised to escalate the American war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a campaign promise he has sadly also fulfilled. I've written at great length here about how the American war in Afghanistan now also needs to come to an end. Last night Obama continued to project winding down U.S. involvement there next year as well. What the next year of occupation at the side of a corrupt puppet government will actually achieve is anyone's guess. Needless to say there will be plenty of work in the undertaking business.
And there are few grounds for optimism about the near future. There is so much evidence that the unleashed monster of war will not be so easily put back in its cage. War-mongers like former U.N. representative Bolton are literally shrieking for an attack against Iran. The blood-drenched Republicans are set for a comeback in midterm congressional elections in the fall, and these are Republicans lurching to the right to appease the teabagger lynch mob.
Obama and his government itself are engaged in a number of troubling efforts: an upcoming "peace" negotation meant to be the effective surrender of the Palestinians to Israel; an effort to assassinate without trial people around the world it deems criminal terrorists -- including American citizens; and covert efforts to militarily engage in Yemen and Somalia. The U.S. has not shown that it is done with the corrupting use of extralegal murderous mercenaries (the so-called "contractors").
So I wish I could say the "war" was over. But it's not. It's gonna sputter on a little longer, wasting a few more lives, shedding a few more buckets of tears, and solving absolutely nothing at all.
(The photo above showing a grieving mother is from the Soviet War Memorial at Treptow, outside Berlin, in the former East Germany; photographed by me ca. 1995)
It is a horrible image: a woman with her nose cut off by the fundamentalist Taliban as punishment for violating their particularly backward interpretation of law and morality. But is it worse than the image on the right? A girl with her face burned and scarred simply for being in the wrong place in the wrong time during an American raid in May of 2009?
Time's argument is the familiar one that the Taliban are so awful, so barbaric, that the United States is obligated to protect Afghan women from their return to power, no matter what. (See the recent Unrepentant Marxist for a useful post noting Time's grim history as ruling class mouthpiece.) But the Time article omits the truly backward interpretation of law and morality, the one that grants the American military (including its spy agencies) the unfettered right to assassinate whom it pleases whenever it pleases, "collateral" damage of innocent bystanders or surrounding communities be damned.
As I have argued before, the problem is that American violence against Afghan civilians is just as bad as Taliban violence. Americans seem to be oblivious to the horror being committed in their name first by Bush and now by the Obama administration. And as I have also argued before, the problem is that war will not solve the problems of the Afghan, or for that matter American, people. The Time article itself notes that the horrible disfigurement shown on its cover was done since the overthrow of the Taliban regime, in an area outside the control of the Afghan central government: U.S. military might did not protect the woman on the left...as surely as it consigned the one on the right to agony.
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) has done massive amounts of work documenting and arguing against the Taliban's anti-women policies, and they've been recognized in the media for doing so. But their understanding is deeper than that of the media: RAWA argues for the defeat of the Taliban along with the defeat of the Karzai government and for the end of the American occupation. RAWA calls for the Afghan people to rise up against U.S. war criminals. (And for the record RAFA also condemns the ruling Afghan Communists of the 1980s).
Time magazine is trying to claim there is humanitarian good in the war in Afghanistan. But this is just not true. The question "What happens when we leave Afghanistan" is asked here by Time on its cover as pure propaganda: juxtaposed with this photo we are meant to make an immediate emotional answer. This is a false question, because the answer to the question "What happens when the U.S. stays in Afghanistan" is just as bad.
Sunday the independent Wikileaks site released tens of thousands of classified American documents from its war in Afghanistan, dating from the early years of the war under President Bush through the first year of the war under President Obama. The documents were released in advance to three major news organizations, including the New York Times, which published some of them along with an analysis on Monday. The leaked documents show a war failing to meet the stated objectives of its masters. They show a history of attacks on civilians in Afghanistan and in the border regions of Pakistan, and document an insurgency strengthened in response to these attacks. They also show the collusion of Pakistan's secret police with the Taliban, despite the stated U.S. alliance with the governments of Pakistan, both with the military dictatorship of Musharraf favored by President Bush and the civilian government that followed favored by Mr. Obama.
Also on Monday, news of an alleged attack, not yet confirmed by the American military, in which a NATO attack in southern Afghanistan resulted in the deaths of over 50 civilians, including at least half women and children.
The United States attacked Afghanistan in retribution for the 9/11 attacks: Al Qaeda was based there, guests of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the regime so-called The Taliban that had unified the country in 1996 after smashing the rule of the warlords. A few years earlier those mujahedeen warlords, financed and aided by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Iran, had defeated the pro-Communist government that had ruled since 1978; that government was backed by Soviet troops for a decade.
In 2001 the U.S. smashed the Taliban government, and greatly reduced Al Qaeda's presence in the region. Though it assassinated, killed in battle, or captured much of Al Qaeda's leadership, it failed to capture -- or prove that it had killed -- the top two Al Qaeda leaders including Osama Bin Laden. The Taliban government was dispersed and replaced with a corrupt puppet regime under Hamid Karzai that controls only a fraction of Afghan geography and relies heavily on so-called "Coalition" military forces (aka U.S. and tiny contingents of allies) and factions of the Mujahedeen warlords to keep a fading semblance of order in the country. Claiming he would finish the task set aside by George Bush when he decided to attack Iraq instead, Obama was elected pledging to deepen the war in Afghanistan by refocusing on the nation-building and terrorist-elimination that was clearly floundering two years ago. But the war has continued to flounder, despite changes in tactical facades, and support for the Taliban insurgency has risen along with the Afghan civilian casualties. Karzai has been revealed to be embarrassingly corrupt and unpopular. Obama has been further embarrassed by the spectacle of the crazy head of the Republican Party, Michael Steele, calling for an unwinnable war to end.
The above Soviet solidarity poster from the 1980s lauds the secular Afghan state it was then engaged in propping up. When Afghan Communists seized power in the late 1970s, they changed the national flag to a red banner and instituted land reforms and women's equality laws that provoked an insurgency. The first of several coups d'etat to rock the Communist government changed that red flag to the modified Afghan tricolor shown in the poster. (Today's flag of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Karzai's government, is the same tricolor with a different crest.)
The video below is a fascinating bit of documentary evidence filmed toward the end of the Soviet occupation. The secular bureaucrats interviewed are fascinating to me: their commitment to their progressive revolution is clearly expressed. But they seem somehow isolated from the country rising up around them, and the windswept desolation around them seems more than a little metaphorical.
The Soviets withdrew as the Soviet Union itself was collapsing upon itself. The war that the Soviets were unable to win proved some kind of last straw. No matter how much the Afghan Communists and the Soviets tried to build some kind of national unity compromise in Afghanistan, reaching out to conservative and tribal elements, the military forces of Islamic insurgents aided and financed by the CIA and Saudi Arabia were closing their grip.
Like the domino theory in reverse, the Soviet "empire" collapsed, with only a few world holdouts against the restoration of market capitalism. These were countries like Cuba and Vietnam who had fought their way to their versions of socialism through the crucible of conflict with the United States.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many opponents of the war in Vietnam argued that not only should the U.S. get out of the war and bring its troops home, but that the Vietnamese Communists deserved to win; deserved to transform their country. Not only was the U.S. war inflicted on the Vietnamese people immoral, but the cause of America's enemy was just in and of itself.
And here's a problem for many progressives today. No matter how unjust the American occupation with all its civilian casualties seem to be, many argue there is that matter of Al Qaeda and the brutally repressive Islamic fundamentalist Taliban. Here's the sad truth: the seeds of disaster that is today's Afghanistan were sowed by British colonialism in the 19th century. They have been nourished by thirty years of foreign intervention in thirty years of civil war. They've been nourished by India and Pakistan using Afghanistan as a covert battlefield for the unfinished wars between them. They've been nourished by conservative Islamic fundamentalist evangelists. None of these outside forces -- British, Russians, Americans, Saudis, Indians, Pakistanis, or Arab Salafists -- can fix the broken nation they've created. The Afghan people must have self-determination, even if it means a government that seems backward and repressive by outside standards. It can only be Afghan people themselves who liberate their country from fundamentalism, from tribalism, from poverty, from dependence on the drug trade. An earlier generation of Afghan secularists sought military solutions to advance their cause, to ultimately tragic effect. But perhaps there is a new generation of Afghans who will find a way to temper any resurgent Taliban government from repeating its tragic excesses.
This month an analyst for the American Enterprise Institute thinktank made this statement: "We don't need more troops, we need more time to let our strategy work," he said. "Afghan troops and security forces are not ready to take over. A premature withdrawal would be disastrous. President Obama should renounce the July 2011 withdrawal date." But American troops have been at it for nine years, longer than any other war in U.S. history. Things will not get "better" in a few more months or a few more years. Things will only get worse.
Almost 3,000 innocent American civilians died in an unprovoked attack on 9/11. If, as reported above, yesterday 50 innocent Afghan civilians died in an unprovoked American attack, and the week before that a handful died in a predator attack, and the month before that a few more were killed, and as revealed by Wikileaks many many more in the years before that, how many of these attacks add up to 3,000? Is the goal of the U.S. to equal Al Qaeda in its savagery against innocent civilians? The U.S. has already proved its brutality with the entire Iraq adventure. Setting aside for our argument about the Afghan conflict the unknown thousands (millions?) of Iraqis who have lost their lives since 2003, how many Afghan (and Pakistani) civilians must pay the price for 9/11? And if Americans care only about American lives and not the lives of other human beings, how many American soldiers must be sacrificed to avenge those 3,000 civilians? How deeply must the American economy be ruined by unlimited military spending to make up for the crushed steel of 9/11?
What the Wikileaks documents represent is the handwriting on the wall. Osama bin Laden on the loose or not, the U.S. must get out of Afghanistan. It must end a war and occupation that is only prolonging human misery, not ending it. Barack Obama was elected in part because of his pledge to end the Iraqi occupation, even if only gradually. He has attempted to assuage his critics with vague mutterings about beginning to draw down U.S. presence in Afghanistan next year, at the same time as other members of his government like Hillary Clinton talk about needing years more to achieve American goals. But Obama is wrong: American troops need to come home now, just like in Iraq. Here is the ugly truth: resurgent Taliban rule cannot be worse than what is happening now, because the U.S. is already party to terrorism against the Afghan people. There is no Afghan N.L.F. to transform social relations in Afghanistan, but an optimistic reading of history shows that human beings have a great ability to liberate themselves when left to their own devices. Freedom will come to the common people of Afghanistan, but it will never arrive in crates of guns from abroad.
It's clear that General Stanley McChrystal, head of the US war effort in Afghanistan, committed serious insubordination to President Obama, his boss, as reported in Rolling Stone Magazine. As of this writing, General McChrystal is heading home at Obama's request, and a meeting between the two is scheduled for tomorrow.
Now I'm not actually in the business of telling the U.S. War Machine who should be pressing its buttons. It's clear that McChrystal represents the worst of American military culture, and not only because of the repulsive counterinsurgency strategy being executed in Afghanistan or because of the casual anti-gayness revealed in the RS article. McChrystal is the embodiment of the arrogant delusion that the U.S. has the need and right to police the world, and of the big lie that turning young Americans into psychotic killing machines makes the population here at home safer.
So by all means, President Obama, you should probably fire Stanley McChrystal. But why stop there. General Petraeus? He needs to go also. Defense Secretary Gates? Him too. And before these three can plot a coup and while we're waiting for them to be brought up on war crimes charges, you should probably put them all in prison. I'd even agree that Guantanamo might be the perfect place for them...especially if you return Guantanamo to its rightful owners, the people of Cuba. Let's move on to the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yeah, fire them all. The U.S. military delegation to NATO? Time for them to go. General Odierno or whoever is in charge of the US troops left in Iraq? Have them organize the immediate withdrawal of the remaining forces and then accept their resignation. Anyone who has made a decision in the military to target Iraqi, Afghan or Pakistani civilians? Fire them. Any officer who enabled the US invasion of Iraq in the first place? Get the hook. And that military budget? I think you can find some better uses for that.
There's plenty for all those soldiers to do fighting the oil spill in the gulf, and in organizing a defensive militia and guard to protect the American people from evildoers. All those soldiers over there need to come home.
What don't you see on these stamps from the early years of the (Soviet-backed) Democratic Republic of Afghanistan? The top stamp celebrates the International Year of the Child, 1979. The bottom, celebrates Mother's Day in the Revolution from 1980. What's missing? The burqa!
Yes, the full-body covering for Afghan women, face concealed behind a mesh mask, so condemned by Western feminists, was not the fashion under Afghanistan's progressive secular government in the years of, and before, the so-called Soviet invasion. Women worked, served in government, served in the armed forces, went to school, and didn't wear the burqa. You may thank the Western-backed Mujahedeen, and its primary backers Ronald Reagan, George Bush I and Saudi Arabia, and the Taliban for the burqa.
With respect to all the well-intentioned do-gooders on the coattails of the continuing US invasion of Afghanistan trying to undo some of the Taliban's oppressive anti-women policies, one wonders what the state of Afghan women might be had not the superpowers and regional powers decided to spend the last thirty years mucking Afghanistan up.
A fascinating quote from Robert Gates, the Bush Secretary of Defense held over into the Obama administration. Gates was speaking to NATO officials, and his reference is in part to the recent fall of the Dutch government over troops in Afghanistan:
“The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.”
Apparently completely unironically the New York Times headlined this story "Gates Calls European Mood a Danger to Peace." If only more "large swaths" of the public would be averse to military force then perhaps Mr. Gates could begin his obviously long-awaited retirement.
President Obama is wrong. The continuation of the war in Afghanistan will solve nothing. More people will die: if some of them are would-be "terrorists" more of them will be innocents. Irreplaceable innocents.
Afghanistan has a complicated recent history, proving nothing so much as the continued meddling of "great powers" outside their borders brings home a legacy of death and misery: both for those in the nations wrecked by the tracks of tanks and the stench of gunpowder and blood and for the citizenry of those in the "great powers" themselves faced with the backwash of terrorism and the threat of economic collapse.
The President was the first "peace" candidate to win his office campaigning against a war; and while it must be said Obama never pledged to withdraw from Afghanistan as he did from Iraq, he has clearly failed to follow through with that mandate of a war-weary American population.
Several things have been evident on the world stage lately. First, the Iraq "war" is on hold until Bush leaves office. The pro-Iran Shi'a government has been trying to wrestle authority from the pro-Iran Shi'a militias including Sadr's Jaish Al-Mahdi, and while sections of Sadr city have been destroyed or turned into walled ghettos, mostly the militias have backed down rather than stand and fight. Both Shi'a forces have been busy denouncing the U.S., who continues to sprinkle the country with money. The various Sunni forces have decided to milk the occupation for money and guns, establishing their own mini-states while they wait out Shia-U.S. drama. And meanwhile, the conflict in Afghanistan has been heating up and spilling over into Pakistan.
Since the U.S. and its Nato "allies" have taken over the job of fighting mujahedeen from the Soviets, it's increasingly evident what a trap Afghanistan is for imperialism and neocolonialism. Unable to root out the bases of so-called terrorists, or even to dislodge the Taleban medievalists, the mightiest war machine ever is about to find itself stuck in the same mud that helped destroy the Soviet Union.
Assuming Obama wins, and assuming he actually withdraws American forces from Iraq even as the violence restarts, Afghanistan will remain as dangerous quicksand. Since most Americans, even liberals and leftists--yours truly notwithstanding--believe somehow that the U.S. and Nato are doing something good in Afghanistan by punishing the 9/11 planners or preventing their resurgence, they will follow this colonial adventure blindly until it's too late to see it for what it is. Now Obama gains points for saying that the conflict in Afghanistan should be escalated while the one in Iraq should be ended. What's gonna happen if it turns out that Afghanistan is the real Vietnam here, not Iraq?
I think it's predictable that the mildly modernizing puppet Karzai regime will come to the same end as the succession of home-grown communist regimes that the Soviets rushed in to bolster. Surely the Taleban was odious and its policies abhorrent. (Though I still recall its first mention in the NY Tiems years back when it was presented as some band of religious students trying to end corruption and bring peace and a golden age to Afghanistan as it struggled to drive out the mujahedeen warlords between the occupations of great powers.) But surely the lessons of colonialism and imperialism and its meddling shows that the medicine is always as bad if not worse than the nativist brutality it seeks to remedy.
Let so-called terrorists be dealt with as a law-enforcement problem. Let the Afghan and Iraqi peoples determine their own destinies. And let the armies of imperialism be brought home... there's a country to be rebuilt. Yeah, that swords into plowshares bit sounds damned good.
