With the first anniversary of those momentous events approaching, there is growing resentment among many Arabs who feel that their revolutions have been hijacked by forces not originally anticipated. Demonstrations in Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait in the last few days are acute symptoms of the prevailing mood in the region.

Two opposing trends are at work. The pressure from below succeeded in overthrowing the regimes in Algeria and Tunisia and President Hosni Mubarak, though not the ruling military order, in Egypt. But the pressure from above has been decisive in the overthrow and lynching of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi after NATO’s intervention. It also continues to sustain Bahrain’s minority Sunni ruling class, thanks to the entry of Saudi troops and Western military assistance.

In Syria, Bashar al-Assad is much more resilient, despite every conceivable attempt by the United States and its Arab and European allies. I say “every conceivable attempt” because the prospect of the United Nations Security Council approving a Libya-type full-scale Western-led intervention in Syria is much less likely. The Russians and the Chinese would not play ball with America, Britain and France.

Even so, external forces look determined to decide Syria’s fate. A lot depends on whether the Syrian armed forces will mostly remain loyal to the regime. Rumors of defections from the Syrian military thrive, but for now the military as an institution appears to be with Assad––just about. However, with the United States determined to eventually see regime change in Syria too, the course of events there could be even more bloody. Its implications for the Middle East, starting from neighboring Lebanon, will be very serious indeed.

What began so hopefully in the Arab world a year ago has transpired into something bloody and ugly. Authoritarian regimes, assisted and sustained by great powers, have long dominated the region. Although the Cold War ended and the Soviet threat ceased more than two decades ago, the United States continues to pursue its grand strategy in the region with increasing and desperate vigor. The need for oil and support for Israel remain the two fundamental planks of U.S. foreign policy. The Arab Spring threatened the status quo, and with it America’s interests, in the Middle East. It had to be reversed.

What we see now is a counterrevolution from above, trying to frustrate the will of the people. After Libya, the only exception is Syria. Democracy would be very welcome there, as it would be throughout the Arab world. But turmoil inspired by foreign powers is not what the region needs.

The supreme irony in all this is that both Libya and Syria, now being targeted by Washington on grounds of humanitarian intervention, had actually collaborated with the torture program during America’s “war on terror.” The Libyan and Syrian regimes accepted detainees rendered by the U.S. and British intelligence agencies and tortured them in their notorious prisons. As for old friends like Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, they had to be abandoned. They had served their purpose and become liabilities. The tide of popular opposition to them had become unstoppable.

Political expediency demanded that they be sacrificed in the interest of Washington’s alliance with the military in Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia, and the pace of change be controlled. Emboldened by Washington’s understanding and encouragement, the Egyptian military has been tightening its grip in the country. A climate of fear and sorrow pervades the streets of Cairo in advance of parliamentary elections beginning on November 28. And in response to calls for limiting military assistance to Egypt, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has reaffirmed that the United States is against “imposing any conditions.”

Egypt is the biggest, most powerful country in the Arab world. Compliance of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the leading oil exporter and most influential in the Islamic world, is vital for Israeli security and the continuing U.S. supremacy in the Middle East.

Hence it is vital for the Obama administration that the rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, with smaller Gulf states, remain beholden to Washington.

Double standards of international law for friends and foes is the name of the game while the United States pursues its grand strategy in the Middle East. Not learning lessons from the calamitous legacy of America’s wars under the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, and more recently from George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” it is “Carry On Barack Obama.”

As we approach the next chapter of recent bloody history, it is difficult to escape a deeper sense of foreboding.

[END]

In the struggle against global laissez faire capitalism that has brought the current economic collapse, protesters won an important victory last week in Britain, while stalemate continued in Greece. The alliance between the church, the main financial district called the City of London and Mayor Boris Johnson against the Occupy London protest crumbled. They had threatened legal action to remove peaceful demonstrators occupying an area near the London Stock Exchange for several weeks.

Legal moves against the protesters might lead to police action and violence. In particular, the readiness of St Paul’s Cathedral, the seat of the Bishop of London, to go to High Court split the church. Senior priests began to resign, signaling a crisis for the British establishment. Facing a growing sense of disquiet over possible use of force to remove peaceful demonstrators, the Corporation of London and St Paul’s Cathedral dropped the threat of immediate legal action.

In Greece, Prime Minister George Papandreou threw down the gauntlet to the two most powerful member-states of the European Union––Germany and France. To salvage the Greek economy and the European currency, they had agreed to finance a huge rescue plan, involving the International Monetary Fund and other sources, only days before. In the face of widespread demonstrations against draconian cuts in wages and public services, and rumors of a possible military coup, the Greek prime minister announced a referendum on the European Union rescue package.

Initially, the Greek cabinet gave its backing to the referendum plan, but the leaders of other EU member-states were furious. Deep political splits began to appear in Greece’s body politic. Germany and France have a lot to lose if Greece should default on its massive debt. Any government in Athens must have the people’s mandate to implement draconian austerity measures. Already, Greek people have started to take matters in own their hands.

Timing was of essence for Prime Minister Papandreou. First he agreed on a mega rescue deal with other European partners. When such a deal looked certain, he returned home and announced his referendum plan. European leaders, opposition politicians in Greece, even in his own Socialist Party, were surprised and angry. What might have been a straightforward move to secure a people’s mandate, if the timing was right, seemed to be an opportunistic attempt to save his government.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, leading paymaster of the euro bailout package, bluntly told Papandreou to accept the rescue deal with all conditions attached––or get out. Such warnings were bound to cause widespread offense in Greece, not least because the country had been under German occupation during the Second War. At the G20 summit in the French Mediterranean city of Cannes, European leaders waited to welcome the Chinese leader, Hu Jintao, hoping that China would contribute to the euro bailout.

Hu’s response: “To resolve the eurozone’s debt crisis, Europe still needs to rely on itself.” The Chinese are shrewd investors.

How did we get to this point? The question is posed frequently, though rarely answered truthfully.

The current globalization phase, beginning at the end of the Cold War around 1990, extended the markets across state boundaries. The movement of money, goods and services on a massive scale across national boundaries required regulations, but they also had to be relaxed in ways not seen before, to facilitate the ease of transfer. The Nobel Prize winning Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz points out that the ‘driver’ behind this phase of globalization is corporate interests.

Many transnational corporations are bigger than most national economies. Powerful corporations export not only goods and services, but also a certain culture of borrowing, cheap labor and money. Corporate interests are fundamentally linked to consumption, for profits are driven by consumption.

Corporate investments have flown to destinations of cheap labor and weak unions––China and Southeast Asia, India, Turkey, Southern European countries and South America. Factories in the United States and Western Europe have closed, new plants have spread in Asia and South America. Acceleration in this phenomenon in the last two decades has resulted in massive job losses in the industrialized world. Most products bought by Western consumers now come from the emerging economies.

Corporate profits have steadily grown, but the overall purchasing power of Western consumers has declined to alarming levels, caused by rising unemployment and shrinking incomes of those still in work. Government revenues, too, have been declining in the West, which has demonstrated a propensity to spend enormous sums of money on wars abroad and to cut public services at home.

For too long, consumers and governments tried to maintain the status quo by borrowing money at artificially low interest rates and cheap goods manufactured abroad. Loans secured on the real state to finance the lifestyle in the West sent property prices sky high. The crash had to come.

The case of the Greek tragedy is stark, but Greece is not alone. For a long time, its people have not been paying taxes they should have been paying. The country has been borrowing to maintain living standards, pay wages of government employees, to hold events like the Athens Olympics in 2004. The party had to be over one day–and that day has come. Less than a quarter century after long celebrations of victory over communism began in the West, capitalism has flopped.

[END]

Almost every country proclaims its commitment to human rights, but the conduct of international diplomacy is very different in practice. Freedom and human rights are sacrosanct as long as they do not test relations with friendly governments and do not come too close to home. If the Dalai Lama’s visit fails to materialize, as seems likely, this will be the second time in two years that the South African authorities have denied a visa to one of the world’s most revered figures.

In 2009, Pretoria refused him entry to attend a Nobel laureates’ conference. The reason given was that the Dalai Lama’s presence would “detract attention from the 2010 football World Cup.” Then, Desmond Tutu, a central figure in the struggle against White minority rule before the end of apartheid in 1994, denounced it as “disgraceful,” accusing the government of “shamelessly succumbing to Chinese pressure.” That event was cancelled. As on the previous occasion, Pretoria denies acting under Chinese pressure now.

That relations with China play no part in the South African government’s policy toward the Dalai Lama is difficult to believe. Pretoria’s dithering over his visa application came as South Africa’s deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, embarked on a mission to Beijing to attract Chinese investment. China’s clout has been important for South Africa’s entry into the club of emerging economies, Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). South Africa’s “economic miracle” in less than two decades is, in large part, due to Chinese investment. The South African deputy president’s host in Beijing was Vice President Xi Jinping, tipped to be China’s next leader.

The Dalai Lama last visited South Africa in 1996. Nelson Mandela was president and post-apartheid South Africa, though struggling, was at its zenith. It would be fair to note that subsequent presidents, Thabo Mbeki and Alfred Zuma, are no Mandela, who is now too old and frail to be active in public life. From the heights of idealism and adulation for Mandela and his country, South Africa has entered the arena of twenty-first century geopolitics and alliances based on immediate self-interest. In the first six months of 2011, South African exports to China amounted to nearly 40 billion rands; imports from China were a little more than that. The South African economy is booming. Like other emerging countries, South Africa plays an increasingly important role in the geopolitics of the African continent and beyond. Not even Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama can be allowed to get in the way.

It is necessary to cast our eyes beyond the current topic of concern and remember other examples of how geopolitical considerations undermine the principle of decency and rationale underpinning justice and morality. In October 2009, Barack Obama canceled a meeting with the Dalai Lama in Washington, as the Chinese official campaign against him took on a particularly aggressive tone. Obama thus became the first American president not to welcome the Dalai Lama in the White House since 1990. Stung by widespread criticism and amid worsening relations with Beijing over a multibillion dollar weapons deal between the United States and Taiwan, the U.S. president did meet the Dalai Lama in 2010.

In 2008, Gordon Brown, then British prime minister, chose not to meet the Tibetan spiritual leader at his official residence, 10 Downing Street, for fear of offending the Chinese leadership. Instead, Brown had a brief meeting with him at the official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, also refused to see him, as did the Estonian prime minister and speaker of parliament this year.

The South African government’s failure not to even respond to the Dalai Lama’s visa application is extraordinary. It is offensive to him and offensive to Desmond Tutu, who invited him. It is another episode in a long sequence of timid submissions by world leaders in the face of China’s muscular diplomacy and the West’s decline. That we should witness the absence of real leadership that will stand by what is right is a tragedy.

[END]

]]> http://deepaktripathilibrary.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/south-africa-the-dalai-lama-and-chinas-muscular-diplomacy/feed/ 0 deepaktripathi http://deepaktripathilibrary.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/bias-against-understanding-terrorism/ http://deepaktripathilibrary.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/bias-against-understanding-terrorism/#comments Sun, 28 Nov 2010 19:00:20 +0000 deepaktripathi http://deepaktripathilibrary.wordpress.com/?p=231 ]]> Deepak Tripathi

Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism, University of Surrey, 4 October 2010

The events of September 11, 2001 and the “war on terror” have made an undeniable impact on human and international relations. Increasingly, these relationships have come to be seen and interpreted through the prism of counter-terrorism, migration and a selective focus on “religious fundamentalism” of a certain kind, namely Islamic fundamentalism. The result has been a loss of context. The way it has changed media discourse over the last decade is more obvious. However, the nature of scholarship on terrorism and political violence has also come under pressure. The themes of migration and security, democracy and the rule of law have become more salient at the expense of the historical context, which explains imperialism, great power rivalries and other causes of conflict where the Western world has played a crucial role. Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 declaration of “The End of History” has proved short-lived and his prediction that Western liberal democracy would become universal is far from being achieved. Over the last twenty years there have been two major wars and numerous minor conflicts around the globe.

With this context in mind, I will offer a personal critique of the debate about terrorism and political violence as it has evolved in recent years. Focusing on Afghanistan since the early 1970s, I will discuss the war in its various stages and the evolution of a “culture of violence”. I will explain the internal, regional and international dimensions of the Afghan conflict and offer an indicative analysis of the failure to learn from the recent past, let alone long-term history.

First of all, I want to thank the Centre for asking me to give this talk, and to thank you for coming. I am delighted to be here. As you know, I have had a career in journalism. I went into journalism at an early age; in my late teens, but by early twenties, I was well established and found myself working for the federal government in Washington. So while I have had a long eventful, very interesting working life, the sense of fulfillment was tinged with some regret. Occasionally, I have reflected – success in finding a job perhaps came too early. I missed being close to scholarship long enough. So occasions such as this one have a special meaning for me. I am glad to be here; glad to be talking about a subject that has been close to me for many years.

Journalists and academics have an interesting relationship. Journalism is instant, scholarship reflective. Journalists are sometimes called frivolous, inconvenient, mischievous; academics deep, serious, thinking people. Disparagingly, we are called “hacks.” On the other hand, I recall occasions when a colleague in my own profession would summarily dismiss me by saying: “Deepak is not punchy enough; he is an academic.” We both have our detractors. But  on a serious level there exists a common purpose: challenging the status quo; questioning conventional wisdom. Science cannot progress, the boundaries of knowledge cannot be pushed unless we question what is now.

Now to the topic of my talk: “Bias Against Understanding Terrorism.” If there were any suggestion of frivolousness or mischievousness about it, I would deny that. I have chosen this topic to challenge the conventional wisdom which has been accumulating rapidly in the last decade, mainly in the West, but also in other parts of the world. “Terrorism” was always a highly contested term, but the ease with which “terrorism” and “freedom” – these two central terms – have entered common usage is remarkable. Remarkable because whereas they were both contested terms before, they are even more poorly defined now in the wake of September 11, 2001. Many of us have bought into the idea that we are all engaged in fighting for “freedom” and against “terrorism” when both terms remain largely undefined.

What is “freedom?” The mere fact of participation in an electoral exercise and putting our vote in the ballot box, or something more? Does taking part in periodical elections, only to see state control over citizens’ lives further tightened mean freedom? Volatility of public opinion and the “tyranny of the majority” that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about so eloquently constantly haunt minorities and their freedoms that democracy is supposed to protect. In Europe, we are witnesses to the French government’s expulsion of Romani people and planned legislation to revoke the citizenship of certain immigrants who have acquired French nationality in recent years. Some opinion polls suggest these actions are popular in France.

I want to briefly talk about freedom in a different context which does not receive sufficient attention in the West. As many as three million nomads, people of Kuchi tribes, inhabit Afghanistan and the north in Central Asia, constantly on the move. Waves of Kuchi communities are used to migrating from north to south in Afghanistan and across the frontier inside Pakistan in harsh winter to relatively milder climate, only to move north again when spring arrives. Freedom means something different to them and they would not barter their freedom for the right to vote once every few years. Their movements have been disrupted, they are more endangered by war. Ask them what is freedom.

I was in India a few months ago, where we hear Maoist terrorists are active. The Indian press is full of stories about them. To describe them as “Maoist terrorists” is plain wrong. These are tribal people who know little, if anything, about Maoism or who Mao was. I heard accounts of what is happening in the remote areas of central India. Suddenly one day, workers hired by the state, or by a private firm, arrive in a remote tribal community. An area is cleared of trees, flattened. To appease the local tribal community, a small building, a school, is erected. The tribal population of the village is told: “Look, we have built a school for you.” Often, within days, the entire little village has disappeared from that spot; moved deep inside the forest. The tribes don’t want such rapid change in their life. Ask them what freedom is to them. The point I am trying to make is this: the “war on terror” is a war fought in the name of two concepts; both undefined despite ceaseless use of the terms “freedom” and “terrorism.” But, in fact, these terms have become tools to protect the majority against minorities, and the mighty against the weak and vulnerable. The right of self-defense of the powerful has superseded the right of the underdog to resist.

There has never been a universally accepted definition of terrorism and the United Nations has consistently failed to agree on how to define this phenomenon. Less than three decades ago, Ronald Reagan proclaimed that “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.” Soviet communism has since collapsed, but geopolitical factors still play a critical part in the states’ determination of policy, more so in this post-Cold War era. Two decades after Francis Fukuyama, one of the leading lights of neoconservatism, declared “The End of History” and “universalization of Western democracy” in his 1989 essay, history has delivered a sharp rebuke to those who forget or ignore it. We are witnesses to two, I would say, three major wars: Afghanistan, Iraq and the wider “war on terror”. “Terrorism” and “terrorist” have become much overused terms of abuse for non-state groups and a handful of states while friendly states, and client regimes, can employ extreme repressive measures, and overwhelming force, and justify them in the name of self-defense.

So what is “terrorism” and what are its causes? The next part of my paper deals with these questions in trying to understand the phenomenon of terrorism, casting aside the subjectivity that clouds the debate today. I will attempt to look at “terrorism” and “political violence” (both terms are subsumed here) as part of a “culture of violence.” I will focus on Afghanistan, though parallels can be seen in Iraq, Palestine and other conflicts.

The conflict in Afghanistan can be seen in four separate but overlapping, sometimes simultaneous, stages. These stages are: internal conflict; great power involvement; state disintegration; and foreign indifference and the rise of extremism. These are the four main building blocks of a culture of violence. The question I want to raise here is: How did this dialectic play out in Afghanistan?

The last two decades of the twentieth century were a period of intense struggle between competing ideologies – a struggle which was played out in the Afghan conflict. Afghanistan was caught up in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union as early as the 1950s. The clash of capitalism and communism, both essentially Western ideologies, magnified the internal divisions in what is a tribal system in that country. Such a society has two essential characteristics – an inner weakness born out of social fragmentation, and a defensive instinct to react violently against foreign interference. These very characteristics were reinforced as intervention by massive military-economic aid and secret intelligence operations grew in Afghanistan and the country fell under Soviet domination. Afghan Communists became bolder and they seized power in a bloody coup in 1978. The rise of communism radicalized Islamic groups in Afghanistan.

Imposition of a Soviet-style system on a deeply religious people was the beginning of a chain of events which shook the Communist regime in Afghanistan. Rebellions in rural areas, mutinies and desertions in the armed forces and escalating internal warfare in the ruling People’s Democratic Party created a crisis in the country. The deeper the crisis became, the more repressive measures were used by the first Communist regime in 1978-1979.

The nature of such a chain reaction, or dialectic, is self-perpetuating. A dialectical process acquires a life of its own by virtue of what is described as the power of ‘negativity’. Negativity is what comes into being in opposition to the ‘subject’. The first ‘subject’ is a thesis in the shape of an event or force which is gradually stripped of its immediate certainty after coming into existence as it embarks on a “pathway of doubt.”

Simply put, a thesis is what rises in its environment as a distinct entity, its character imposing itself before reaching a point at which that entity begins to come under challenge by the negative force which the original thesis created. In the ensuing struggle between the thesis and its negative, or antithesis, the certainty of the original entity progressively weakens as doubts over its viability are raised. This explanation of the nature of dialectic is based on an acknowledgment that things are multi-faceted and always in the process of becoming something else.

The conflict between a thesis and its negative is a process which slowly strips the former of properties that determined its certainty and lends the latter contradictory properties. What is obtained in such a process is a reconciliation between the two – a synthesis. While the original and its negative were contrary to each other, their synthesis preserves both, and stresses unity once again. It is at this point that the synthesis transforms itself into another thesis, leading to further contradictions and conflict before reaching another stage of resolution. So the dialectical progression goes on. It has no beginning, and no end.

We can now begin to understand in dialectical terms the advent of various external and internal forces that eventually conspired to create a culture of violence in Afghanistan. When a small group of Communist sympathisers in the armed forces, representing an ideology that was foreign and contrary to the basic character of Afghan society, seized power in 1978, it was an event that was bound to lead to profound consequences. Under the Communist regime, there was a short-lived experiment to restructure Afghan society on the Soviet model – an experiment carried out by coercion, including purges, imprisonment, torture and assassination of opponents. The Marxist experiment provoked violent opposition that became progressively more stubborn as measures of the Communist regime acquired greater ruthlessness. There was resistance not only in wider society, but also within the regime. It took many forms – the Parcham (or Banner) faction against the Khalq (the Masses) faction, internal dissidents within Khalq, ethnic Pashtun against non-Pashtun, communist against anti-communist and so on. As the conflict escalated, fear and chaos began to take hold and the outcome was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

The scale of violence was altogether different during the years of Soviet occupation. The overwhelming war machine of the Communist superpower was at work and, in the final major confrontation of the Cold War, the United States threw its vast resources in support of the anti-Communist Mujahideen groups to fight that war machine. Weapons of terror were used by all sides and the conflict produced millions of victims. The violence committed by the Soviet occupation army was answered by the Mujahideen opposition on the ground.

The war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan is often portrayed as one in which the Afghan resistance took on a superpower and won. This is an over-simplification, because such a view ignores the dialectical nature of the conflict which triggered intervention by other external powers in opposition to the USSR. The Mujahideen victory could not have been possible without the military and financial support from America and its allies, notably Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and China. American and Pakistani intelligence services were deeply involved in the planning and execution of the war against the Soviet occupation forces. The role of Pakistan in the recruitment and training of anti-communist guerrillas was critical.

State intervention from outside also brought foreign militants to Afghanistan. The military government of Pakistan allowed thousands of Islamic radicals to train and fight in the conflict, which made them battle-hardened and reinforced their fundamentalist ideology. After the defeat of communism, they were left without a cause and many returned to their own countries to engage in struggle against regimes they regarded as un-Islamic and corrupt.

Islam has been a powerful force in modern Afghanistan. It was the main source of resistance to change from above, whether imperial powers like Britain and Russia tried to impose that change, or internal regimes such as those of Mohammad Daud and subsequently under Communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Religion, interwoven with a tribal system, provided the core of this resistance. It was endorsed by local mullahs who found their position in society threatened. The war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan went beyond this. Islam was used as a political ideology to bind together the disparate factions and their members at the insistence of President Zia of Pakistan and with the active support of the CIA-ISI alliance.

The idea of Islam as a political ideology, not merely a religion, to be used to reshape and control society is sometimes described as ‘Islamism’. Afghanistan is a deeply religious country, but Islamism had not taken root in the wider Afghan society before the Communists seized power in 1978. In the early 1970s, religious militancy was primarily concentrated in Kabul, where a relatively small number of educated Afghan fundamentalists fought for influence with left-wing groups in student politics and the armed forces. However, the Islamists became isolated in later years. Almost all prominent activists had fled to Pakistan by 1975, when an attempt to overthrow President Daud failed.

At this stage, the Islamist movement of Afghans underwent internal turmoil as it prepared to oppose the Daud regime. The movement split into two significant groups: the Hizb-i-Islami, dominated by ethnic Pashtuns and led by Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, and the mainly-Tajik Jamiat-i-Islami under the leadership of Burhanuddin Rabbani. The Pashtun-Tajik divide was to prove permanent, but both groups had a lot in common with their Middle Eastern counterparts. They both recruited members from the intelligentsia. Many of the activists of these Islamist groups had been students in scientific and technical institutions. They were joined by more educated Afghans and foreign militants who eventually fought against the Soviet occupation forces. They were Sunni Muslims with a strong anti-Shi‘a stance, reflecting the wider trend in the Arab world against Iran. Sunni Arab regimes, threatened by the growing Shi‘a militancy following the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, wanted to keep Iranian influence in check. Their answer was to support anti-Shi‘a forces, whether it meant the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, in his war with Iran or Sunni militants in Afghanistan.

It has been suggested that the ideology of the Afghan Islamists was ‘borrowed entirely’ from two foreign movements: the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt, and the Jamaat-i-Islami of Pakistan. Just like these two movements, the Afghan Islamists opposed secular tendencies and rejected Western influence. Within Islam, they opposed Sufi influence, with its emphasis on love and universality of all religious teachings. Rabbani was among those prominent Afghans who had spent years at al-Azhar University in Cairo and had been active in the Muslim Brotherhood. Hikmatyar, on the other hand, was close to Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami, which was itself influenced by the Brotherhood and its ideologue, Sayed Qutb. The writings of Qutb were a source of inspiration to a large number of Arabs who fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The main appeal of Qutb comes from his assertion that the world is ‘steeped in jahiliyyah’, the Arabic term for ignorance. He argues that this ignorance originates from the rebellion against God’s sovereignty on earth. Qutb attacks communism for denying humans their dignity and capitalism for exploiting individuals and nations. He claims that the denial of human dignity and exploitation are nothing but consequences of the challenge to God’s authority. The solution advanced by Qutb is that Islam acquires a ‘concrete form’ and attain ‘world leadership’, but this is possible only by initiating a movement for its revival.

Qutb does not openly preach violence, but other ingredients of a revolutionary brand of Islam are present in his writings. He recognises that there is a significant body of educated people who are disillusioned with the existing order. These people represent a constituency for change in a number of Middle Eastern countries, where economic and social problems, corruption and a lack of involvement in political processes have created a wide gulf between governments and the people. Qutb rejects the Communist and capitalist systems alike and  asserts that Islam is the only alternative. His vision is idealistic and its attraction very strong for the alienated looking for political adventure.

The Muslim Brotherhood was hostile to successive Egyptian governments and firmly aligned itself with the Palestinian cause after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. When Anwar Sadat became president of Egypt in 1970 following the death of Nasir, he promised to implement Islamic law and released all Brotherhood members from jail in an attempt to pacify the movement. But Sadat’s decision to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 resulted in a new confrontation, which led to his assassination in September 1981. The Muslim Brotherhood went underground and, in subsequent years, developed a complex network of more than seventy branches worldwide.

The disintegration of the Afghan state system between 1992 and 1994 and the subsequent rise of the Taliban turned Afghanistan into a haven to which foreign fighters could return without fear of retribution. Many more new Islamic radicals came from the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East to study, train and fight in Afghanistan during the Taliban period. They developed personal contacts with each other, learned about the Islamist movements of other countries and planned cross-border activities.

No other veteran of the Afghan conflict has achieved worldwide notoriety like Osama bin Laden. He had his initiation to radical Islam as a student at King Abdul Aziz University in the Saudi city of Jiddah, from where he got a degree in economics and management. It was there that bin Laden developed a deep interest in the study of Islam and used to hear recorded sermons of the fiery Palestinian academic, Abdullah Azzam. In the 1970s, Jiddah was a centre of disaffected Muslim students from all over the world and Azzam was a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood. His influence encouraged bin Laden to join the movement.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, bin Laden moved with several hundred construction workers and heavy equipment to the Afghan-Pakistan border and set out to “liberate the land from the infidel invader.” He saw a desperately poor country taken over by tens of thousands of Soviet troops and millions of Muslims bearing the brunt of the military machine of a superpower. Afghans neither had the infrastructure or manpower to mount effective resistance to the occupation of their country.

Osama bin Laden created an organisation to recruit people to fight the Soviets and began to advertise all over the Arab world to attract young Muslims to Afghanistan. In just over a year, thousands of volunteers, including experts in sabotage and guerrilla warfare, had arrived in his camps. Their presence clearly suited CIA operations in Afghanistan. Bin Laden’s private army became part of the Mujahideen forces based in Pakistan and supported by the United States. Military experts with a close understanding of US policy estimated that a “significant quantity” of high-technology American weapons, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, reached bin Laden and were still with him in the late 1990s.

Bin Laden helped build an elaborate network of underground tunnels in the mountains in eastern Afghanistan in the mid-1980s. The complex was funded by the CIA and included a weapons depot, training facilities and a health centre for the Mujahideen. He set up his own training camp for Arab fighters and his following increased among foreign recruits. But he became increasingly disillusioned by two things: one, the continuing infighting in the Afghan resistance after the Soviets left; the other, America’s disengagement from Afghanistan that many saw as abandonment. Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia to work for his family business.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and it looked as though the security of Saudi Arabia was under threat,  he urged the royal family to raise a force from the Afghan war veterans to fight the Iraqis. Instead, the Saudi rulers invited the Americans – a decision that greatly angered bin Laden. As half a million US troops began to arrive in the region, bin Laden openly criticized the Saudi royal family and lobbied Islamic leaders to speak out against the deployment of non-Muslims to defend the country. It led to a direct confrontation between him and the Saudi royal family.

He left for Sudan, which was going through an Islamic revolution. He was warmly welcomed, not least because of his wealth, in a country devastated by years of civil war between the Muslim north and the Christian south. His relationship with Sudan’s de facto leader, Hasan al-Turabi, was close and he was treated as a state guest in the capital, Khartoum. Returning veterans of the Afghan conflict were given jobs and the authorities allowed bin Laden to set up training camps in Sudan. Meanwhile, his criticisms of the Saudi royal family continued. The Saudi authorities finally lost patience and revoked his citizenship in 1994. Osama bin Laden was not to return to his homeland again.

These events had a lasting impact on bin Laden. He had fallen out with the United States and the Saudi ruling establishment and his freedom of movement was severely restricted. In Khartoum, he began to concentrate on building a global network of Islamist groups. His business, Laden International, had a civil engineering company, a foreign exchange dealership and a firm that owned peanut farms and corn fields. Other business ventures failed, but he had enough money to support Islamic movements abroad. Funds were sent to militants in Jordan and Eritrea and a network was set up in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan to smuggle Islamic fighters into Chechnya. He set up more military training camps, where Algerians, Palestinians, Egyptians and Saudis were given instructions in making bombs and carrying out sabotage.

The ideological nucleus of what became al Qaeda also attracted Ayman al-Zawahiri, regarded as Osama bin Laden’s deputy. Al-Zawahiri was born into a leading Egyptian family and fell under the influence of revolutionary Islam at an early age. His grandfather, Rabia‘a al-Zawahiri, was once head of al-Azhar Institute, the highest authority of the Sunni branch of Islam. His great-uncle, Abdul Rahman Azzam, was the first Secretary-General of the Arab League. When he was a boy of 15, Ayman al-Zawahiri was arrested for being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He trained as a surgeon, but his radical activities led to a rapid advancement in the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. By the late 1970s, when he was still in his twenties, he had taken over the leadership of the group.

In October 1981, al-Zawahiri was arrested with hundreds of activists following the assassination of President Sadat by members of his group at a military parade. The authorities could not convict him of direct involvement in the murder, but he was sentenced to three years in prison for possessing weapons. He left Egypt after his release – first going to Saudi Arabia and then to Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, from where large numbers of foreign fighters entered Afghanistan during Soviet occupation.

There is evidence that the association of Ayman al-Zawahiri with the Afghan resistance started just before his arrest in Egypt in 1981. He was a temporary doctor in a clinic run by the Muslim Brotherhood in a poor suburb of Cairo, where he was asked about going to Afghanistan to do some relief work. He thought it was a ‘golden opportunity’ to get to know a country which had the potential to become a base for struggle in the Arab world and where the real battle for Islam was to be fought. On his way to Afghanistan several years later, al-Zawahiri briefly worked as a surgeon in a Kuwaiti Red Crescent Hospital in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar. He made frequent visits inside Afghanistan to operate on wounded fighters, often with primitive tools and rudimentary medicines. Ayman secured his place in the Afghan resistance as someone who treated the sick and the wounded – just as Osama had secured his by virtue of being a wealthy Arab who spent his money and time helping people in an impoverished country which had been devastated by Soviet forces.

In subsequent years, al-Zawahiri emerged as an intellectual and the main ideological force behind Osama bin Laden. He enunciated clear distinctions between his and other Islamist groups. Al-Zawahiri saw democracy as a ‘new religion’ which must be destroyed by war. He accused the Muslim Brotherhood of sacrificing God’s ultimate authority by accepting the idea that people are the source of authority. Other Islamist groups were also condemned for accepting constitutional systems in the Arab world. In his view, such organisations exploit the enthusiasm of young Muslims, who are recruited only to be directed towards “conferences and elections (instead of armed struggle).”

The further al-Zawahiri went in his consideration of modern social systems, the more radicalised he became in reaction. He implied that the moral and ideological pollution was made worse by material corruption. He complained that the Muslim Brotherhood had amassed enormous wealth. This material prosperity, he said, was achieved because its leaders had turned to international banking and big business to escape the repressive and secular regime of Nasir in Egypt. Joining the Muslim Brotherhood created opportunities for its members to make a living. Their activities were driven by materialistic, rather than spiritual, aims. These views amounted to a complete rejection by al-Zawahiri and his organisation, the Islamic Jihad, of other Islamist groups and brought the Jihad closer to Osama bin Laden and his network.

The influence of the Palestinian-Jordanian academic, Abdullah Azzam, was central in all this. Azzam was a child when Israel was founded in 1948 and had been active in the Palestinian resistance movement from an early age. He had links with Yasir Arafat, but their association ended when he disagreed with the secular philosophy of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, eventually coming to the view that it was far removed from “the real Islam.” Azzam’s logic was that national boundaries had been drawn by infidels as part of a conspiracy to prevent the realisation of a trans-national Islamic state. And he came to the view that his goal was to bring together Muslims from all over the world.

Abdullah Azzam saw in the Afghan conflict an opportunity to realise this ambition. Recruitment of volunteers from all over the Muslim world to fight the Soviet occupation forces was to be an important step towards his goal to set up an Islamic internationale. To achieve this, these volunteers would train, acquire battle experience and establish links with other radical Islamic groups. The Mujahideen resistance in Afghanistan had already established a legendary reputation which would inspire potential followers all over the world. The resistance could eventually become a highly-motivated and trained force, ready to destroy the decadent West and export the Islamic revolution to other parts of the world.

In November 1989, Azzam and his two sons were assassinated in a bomb attack as they drove to a mosque in Peshawar to pray. The identity of their murderers remained a mystery, but rumours persisted about a link with bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. It was reported that while they both supported the idea of extending the struggle to overthrow Arab regimes, Azzam wanted the job completed first in Afghanistan by replacing the Communist regime of Najibullah with a Mujahideen government. Other players, including the Soviet and Afghan secret services, also had an interest in removing Azzam. Whoever was responsible for his assassination, its most significant consequence was that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri gained almost total control of the network of foreign fighters linked to the Afghan conflict.

The split between Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam in the late 1980s was the beginning of al Qaeda. Whereas Azzam insisted on maintaining the focus on Afghanistan, bin Laden was determined to take the war to other countries. To this end, bin Laden formed al Qaeda. His main goal was to overthrow corrupt and heretical regimes in Muslim states and replace them with the rule of Shari‘a, or Islamic law. The ideology of al Qaeda was intensely anti-Western and bin Laden saw America as the greatest enemy that had to be destroyed.

To sum up, we need to consider the dialectic I have been explaining that led to the creation of al Qaeda’s ideology to understand the organization itself. The two main ideologies to emerge after the Second World War were communism and free-market liberalism.  Competition between them during the Cold War obscured the challenge they faced from a third force, radical Islam in the Middle East. The first significant manifestation of this force was the Islamic revolution in Iran in the late 1970s. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s created an environment in which the challenge from radical Islam was directed against communism. America strengthened it by pouring money and weapons into the Afghan conflict, but failed to recognise that the demise of the Soviet empire would leave the United States itself exposed to assaults from groups like al Qaeda.  In time, this failure proved to be a historic blunder. And it created a “culture of violence” – a condition, fuelled by war, in which violence permeates all levels of society, and becomes part of human nature, thinking and way of life.

[END]

The Afghanistan War Diary, released by Wikileaks, has exposed as never before a culture of lies, deceit, violence and manipulation of information in the current United States-led war in that country. The volume, more than 90,000 secret records of actions taken by the American military from January 2004 to December 2009, and the depth of the culture they depict, are staggering. Their significance is immense. Their release is of interest to me not least because in my book, Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan, published in March 2010, I have systematically identified and analyzed the Bush administration’s naïve calculations, strategic and operational blunders, disregard for history and other cultures, even downright prejudices that have brought so much harm to so many. The Afghan War Diary makes a major contribution to that debate.

In historical terms, the significance of these documents is comparable to that of the Mitrokhin files uncovered nearly two decades ago. The defection of the KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, with detailed notes of thousands of top secret files to Britain after the Soviet state collapsed, has long been celebrated in the West as an intelligence coup. But Mitrokhin defected after the Soviet Union had disintegrated. The Afghan Diary has been published when the West is still fighting the war in Afghanistan. Although it was already looking unlikely that the U.S.-led occupation forces would secure their adversary’s surrender in Afghanistan’s mountains, the publication of these documents makes it probable that the impact on public opinion will be a turning-point in the current war.

The Mitrokhin archive was an account of Soviet military-intelligence activities and culture of lies, deception and violence in great detail. The trail went deep inside Afghanistan in the decisive phase of the Cold War in the 1980s. In another book Breeding Ground: Afghanistan and the Origins of Islamist Terrorism, I have discussed the KGB’s infiltration into Afghan society in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the Soviet security service’s role before and after the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, based on Mitrokhin’s account.

With the United States left as the only, but increasingly tired, superpower now, the Afghan Diary does something similar. It tells the story of the American military and the Central Intelligence Agency, their activities and culture during the Afghan war in the early twenty-first century. The Obama White House was quick to denounce the release of the war logs by Wikileaks and shared with the New York Times, Guardian and Der Spiegel. The administration called it “irresponsible” and an act that placed “troops in danger.” The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, responded by saying the files showed that “thousands of war crimes” might have been committed in Afghanistan. And he promised to reveal more.

Official reaction in Washington and friendly capitals has been all over the place. President Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, dismissed the leak as making no new revelations. But Washington’s furious reaction against Pakistan’s spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate for keeping close ties with the Afghan Taliban made it look as though the Obama administration had learned of the relationship for the first time. When asked what had changed after the disclosures, the British foreign secretary William Hague’s response was “nothing.” Even some seasoned journalists like the BBC’s Frank Gardner said there were “few great surprises” to those following the “twists and turns of the Afghan conflict.” Some events had previously been reported in the press and keen followers of news might have suspected that other similar occurrences had taken place. What is striking here is the scale of recorded information and the pattern it points to. The Pentagon launched an immediate inquiry to find out who leaked the documents. Obviously, they came from someone within the Department of Defense.

Again, there are parallels between this and the Mitrokhin affair. The war in Afghanistan has become expensive and unpopular in the United States and elsewhere as it has progressed since the U.S.-led invasion in October 2001. Like Mitrokhin, the leaker inside the Pentagon, almost certainly a loner, must have had ready access to a huge mass of documents, probably an insider occupying a key position. The individual must have been so disillusioned with American policy as to be willing to take great personal risk in collecting and forwarding the files in electronic format to Wikileaks. Almost twenty years before, Mitrokhin had made notes of KGB files on paper, smuggled the files to Latvia after the Soviet Union had been dissolved and, having failed to persuade the U.S. embassy in Riga about his authenticity, took refuge in the British embassy in the Latvian capital. The timing and the manner of Mitrokhin’s escape thus minimized danger to himself.

What does the Afghanistan War Diary tell us? To what extent was the information therein already known? And what is its significance now?

I have said at the outset that the leaks uncover a culture of lies, deception, wanton violence and media manipulation through manufactured or wrong information. The existence of a hitherto undisclosed death squad named “Task Force 373” would go some way toward explaining that culture. TF 373, a special forces “black” unit created to hunt down targets for assassination or detention without trial, has a list of two thousand senior Taliban and al Qaeda figures. The documents reveal that, in many cases, the black squad simply killed suspected “militants” without attempting to capture them. Its members also killed civilian men, women and children, even Afghan police officers who came in their way.

A deeply frightening pattern of extrajudicial killings of innocent civilians emerges. In May 2008, the United Nations special rapporteur Philip Alston went to Afghanistan to investigate reports of gratuitous violence against innocent civilians and “suspected militants” against whom nothing had been proven. Alston warned that foreign forces in Afghanistan were neither transparent nor accountable. Afghans who attempted to find out who killed their loved ones “often came away empty handed, frustrated and bitter.” Fifty-two civilian deaths were recently reported with graphic pictures on international television of the scene of destruction and villagers digging graves for their loved ones. Local residents of Rigi village in Sangin district gave accounts of how missiles were fired from air, resulting in the carnage. The Afghan president Hamid Karzai bitterly complained. A terse NATO statement said “there was no evidence of casualties beyond insurgents” and that a joint NATO-Afghan government investigation was going on.

I describe acts of indiscriminate killing by U.S.-led forces from the beginning of the war on Afghanistan in October 2001 in Overcoming the Bush Legacy. Although the Wikileaks War Diary starts more than two years later in January 2004, the origins of the culture of violence can be traced back to the late 1970s. Then a small group of pro-Soviet Afghan nationalists seized power in Kabul. President Carter began a secret program of aid to mujahideen groups fighting the pro-Moscow government. As the conflict escalated from a low-level guerrilla campaign, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev ordered a military invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. I discuss in Breeding Ground how President Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski came out with the idea to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan, to give them “their Vietnam.” The Soviet Union lost and disintegrated. But the war in Afghanistan never ceased. In the last ten years of the twenty-first century, decisions taken by George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been like pouring oil on the fire. The Guardian newspaper said on July 25, 2010:

Now, for the first time, the leaked war logs reveal details of deadly missions by TF 373 and other units hunting down Jpel targets that were previously hidden behind a screen of misinformation. They raise fundamental questions about the legality of the killings and of the long-term imprisonment without trial, and also pragmatically about the impact of a tactic which is inherently likely to kill, injure and alienate the innocent bystanders whose support the coalition craves.

The Afghanistan War Diary is littered with accounts of civilian casualties, ranging from shootings of innocent people to air attacks resulting in massive loss of life. American and allied commanders often deny these incidents, describing them either as Taliban propaganda or claiming that the dead were Taliban insurgents. One incident would illustrate this. In September 2009, there was a major scandal in the northern Kunduz province, where a German commander ordered the bombing of a crowd looting two hijacked fuel tankers. The immediate log note circulated to NATO allies recorded him authorizing the attack by an American F-15 jet “after ensuring that no civilians were in the vicinity.” The “battle damage assessment” confirmed, it claimed, that fifty-six purely “enemy insurgents” had died. Media reports forced an official inquiry, which concluded that there had been “between thirty and seventy civilian deaths.”

The War Diary goes on to record several instances of the insurgents firing on American aircraft that were suppressed from the public records. In May 2007, a Chinook helicopter was hit by a missile in Helmand, killing everyone on board. The United States claimed that the helicopter was struck by “lucky shot from a rocket propelled grenade” with no heat-seeking device. A month before that incident, a British Chinook helicopter crew had reported that a missile passed the aircraft before exploding just fifty feet from it. And in July 2007, the crew of a C-130 transport plane reported that a rocket flew past as they refueled at 11,000 feet. Despite official denials, there is evidence that the risk is taken seriously. Military aircraft leaving flares to distract enemy missiles are regularly seen in the sky.

It is worth recalling President Reagan’s decision to supply heat-seeking Stinger missiles to anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan in 1986. It turned the tide against the Soviet occupation forces. Britain supplied less sophisticated, but still lethal, Blowpipe missiles to the Afghan resistance. The decision by President Reagan and his CIA director William Casey, both avowed anti-Communists, to supply the hi-tech Stinger missiles is discussed at length in my book Breeding Ground. There had been a fierce debate in the CIA and the Defense Department for many months before their delivery to the anti-Soviet Afghan forces via Pakistan. Some in the Reagan administration strongly opposed the move, arguing that the weapon was too advanced to pass on to unreliable forces. But I explain in Breeding Ground that Reagan and Casey were determined to make any sacrifice and pay any price to ensure that the Soviet Union was defeated. They appeared to have no regard for future consequences.

As I write this article, reports are coming in of another German reconnaissance plane being lost in Kunduz province, a Taliban stronghold in the north where insurgent activity has been spreading. It will be the fourth German aircraft to have been lost in Afghanistan this year. In my book Breeding Ground I make the point that the Stinger anti-aircraft missile had highly advanced heat-seeking missile technology in the 1980s. Its deployment in Afghanistan via Pakistan’s spy agency ISI came with the obvious risk that the technology could one day be used against the United States and allies. Now the Afghanistan War Diary raises the haunting question, “Have the Taliban, and by implication Pakistani intelligence, got that technology”? If so, the consequences for the West and for Pakistan’s traditional adversary India are ominous.

That there continues to be a close relationship between Pakistan’s ISI and the Afghan Taliban is neither new, nor surprising. Afghanistan is a frail neighboring state bordering on Pakistan. Pakistan’s interest in Afghanistan is a historical fact of the region’s politics. What is surprising, though, is that the Bush administration was naive enough to forge an anti-Taliban alliance with Pakistan’s military ruler General Pervez Musharraf within hours of the 9/11 attacks. And President Obama continues to hope that the present military-civilian ruling establishment will deliver despite South Asia’s geopolitics pointing in the opposite direction.

[END]

CounterPunch - Palestine Chronicle 

The British government’s decision to withdraw troops from Sangin in Helmand province marks a watershed in the relentless conflict in Afghanistan. The military mission has been very costly for the United Kingdom, with a third of the total casualties sustained in one district alone. More than a hundred lives of soldiers lost and many more wounded coming home is a sign of how difficult the mission has been. In a classic display of guerrilla tactics of asymmetrical warfare, the armed opposition has refused to fight a modern army equipped with high-tech weaponry on its enemy’s terms. Instead, the insurgents have fought on their terms, using rudimentary explosive devices and small weapons with devastating effect. Reaction of Afghans in Sangin will shock many in Britain.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph (July 7, 2010), Ben Farmer reported local residents saying little that is complimentary about the British. One resident openly complained that, in their four-year deployment in Sangin, the British brought only fighting and too little development. The previous Anglo-Afghan wars have left a particularly bitter legacy, although there is also a tendency that things look far better on the other side. Afghanistan remains a fragmented country like it has been for centuries. Rubbing salt in British wounds, an Afghan from a small neighboring settlement said that areas under American control had done better. Ask people in US-controlled areas and their reaction would likely be the opposite. Afghans regularly protest against civilian deaths at the hands of US-led occupation forces all over the country, although many die in suicide attacks directed against people supposed to be cooperating with NATO and the US-installed government in Kabul. Among the latest this month were anti-US and anti-government demonstrations in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Residents came out to protest against civilians killings in the south and the east. News travels fast in that devastated country.

‘Afghanistan: Now It’s America’s War,’ said the Independent newspaper’s front-page story loudly in black. For eight years, the British people’s growing unease had been ignored. The United Kingdom, with a population of 62 million and fewer than 200000 regulars (and 42000 volunteers) in the armed forces, had been punching way above its weight. Former prime minister Tony Blair’s personal kinship with George W Bush in his ‘war on terror’ cost the United Kingdom dearly, in economic, political, moral terms. With Blair’s New Labour losing the May 2010 general election, it was relatively easier for the emerging Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government to face up to the reality of the Afghan conflict. The inevitable was bound to happen.

There has been a distinct cooling in the relationship between London and Washington since President Obama’s inauguration. Partly it is because President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are no longer in power. But equally significant, Britain’s new prime minister, David Cameron, and Obama have not made a good start. The Conservative Party is generally pro-military and, in opposition in parliament, voted for war against Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The Liberal Democratic Party, with a much more democratic structure, has significant sections in its membership opposed to, or circumspect about, war. The overall effect of a coalition between the two parties now runs counter to Britain’s continuing involvement in the Afghan conflict that has taken a heavy toll. The rhetoric about continued military involvement in Afghanistan is gloomy. Official statements emphasize the need for British troops to come home as soon as Afghanistan is ‘stable’. What it means remains undefined. The timescale often mentioned is 3-4 years, meaning before the next election.

Initial encounters have a determining effect on relations between leaders. From this perspective, Obama and Cameron did not appear to connect well. Of course, diplomatic niceties were maintained. The British are particularly adept at that. But the difference of emphasis in Washington and London over Afghanistan cannot be hidden. And the megaphone diplomacy over the BP oil spill laid bare the reality that the days of ‘special relationship’ – an exaggerated claim – were decidedly over. President Obama did not hesitate to resort to raw nationalism undermining that ‘special relationship’ to deflect domestic criticism of his handling of the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

In doing so, Obama stepped back a decade into the past before British Petroleum and Amoco merged to form an international oil giant that was regarded as much American as it was British until the accident. He resorted to new rhetoric, way below his previous standards, to speak of an assault on US shores (not true because the rig that broke down was extracting oil within US continental waters). The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig leased by BP was owned by Transocean, a company that traces its origins to Alabama in the 1950s. With its headquarters now based in Switzerland and offices in the United States and other countries, Transocean quenches the business ethos of ‘drill baby drill’ very well. And Obama’s ‘kicking ass’ remark was not the sort of political language heard in Europe. Senior figures, including ex-diplomats and politicians, began to react publicly, calling for the need to ‘send a message’ to the Americans. A telephone call from the British prime minister David Cameron followed. The conversation was courteous, the message clear. The oil disaster was saddening and frustrating. But it would be in no one’s interest to crush BP and to let the temperature rise any further. Obama responded that he had no interest in undermining the value of BP, but that was precisely the result. Obama was accused of holding ‘his boot on the throat’ of pensioners whose incomes depended on investments in the company.

Expediency, always a strong motive, propels political leaders to do the unexpected. They are not averse to injecting political venom into the body of an ally when they want to deflect domestic criticism. Eight years on, the ‘coalition of the willing’ President George W Bush assembled following his infamous threat ‘you’re either with us, or against us’ to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq, that alliance is unraveling. And we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of yet another phase of great power adventurism in Afghanistan.

[END]

History News Network, May 3, 2010

A little more than a year after Barack Obama succeeded George W Bush as president, United States military hardware and troops are transferring to the Afghan theater in yet another attempt to control the insurgency.  Despite the ‘surge’ that General Stanley McChrystal asked for and President Obama approved after weeks of reflection, militants on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border continue to defy American power.

High-profile military operations against the Taliban in Helmand, and more recently in Kandahar, illustrate both abilities and limitations of a superpower.  This is not new.  The Soviet occupation forces went through a similar experience during their occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.  Like the Soviets, the Americans are increasingly finding that it is possible to wrest control of specific areas, but only as long as their troops are in occupation of those areas.  As they move on for other operations, the insurgents make a comeback.

There are similarities between the recent American surge approved by President Obama and the increase in the Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan after Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the USSR in 1985.  Early on, Gorbachev had decided to bring his troops home following a costly war in Afghanistan.  But he also ordered reinforcements similar in size to the American surge now. Ostensibly, it was to give the Soviet armed forces one last chance to win the Afghan war, but more realistically because the Soviet Union needed to reinforce before a planned withdrawal.  Troops being withdrawn have to partially disarm. The heavy equipment to be transported cannot be operational at the same time. Soldiers moving out carry light arms for self-defense, not heavy lethal weapons for attack. At the same time, the surge of more mobile units is intended to warn the enemy of more trouble coming.

President Obama has already announced that American troops will begin to leave Afghanistan by the middle of 2011. My recent visit to South Asia reinforced this impression.  Obama is smart enough to know history and its lessons.  He has disappointed many of his liberal supporters who had expected much more from him.  But there is not much doubt that he would like to withdraw from Afghanistan. Re-election in 2012 would depend on it to a considerable degree, along with the economy.  The wreckage of military ventures abroad and economic collapse at home left by the preceding administration must be prominent on Obama’s mind. What Obama will achieve is by no means certain.  But there are lessons to be learned from the past.

The presidency of George W. Bush was rooted in a manifesto we know as the Project for the New American Century. The project was born in reaction to the Clinton presidency in the post-Cold War decade of the 1990s.  The alliance of neoconservatives and the Christian Right provided George W Bush with core support.  Above all, the Bush presidency will be remembered for America’s foreign military ventures in the shape of three wars:  the Afghan war, the Iraq war, and a third war, borderless and timeless – the “global war on terror.”

The events of 9/11 posed an unprecedented security challenge.  The most important questions in Washington at the time should have been:  Where to start and where to stop?  What should be the scale and proportion of America’s response?  However, such considerations were absent as the talk of a “long war” or “generational war” illustrated, certainly in the first term of President Bush.

The record of great powers fighting long or generational wars against insurgents is not good.  The United States learned this in Vietnam.  The Soviet Union did so in Afghanistan.  A long war suits insurgent forces deeply embedded in the locale and culture of the theater.  They enjoy considerable support in the battleground. Denial of this reality is often fatal.  A United States president has numerous issues to deal with.  But the overwhelming weight of events of the last decade leads to the conclusion that the Bush presidency was all about war.  The foreign ventures he embarked on within months of inauguration eclipsed everything else during his presidency.  It is therefore appropriate to evaluate the Bush presidency’s legacy in terms of the “war on terrorism.”

The objective of the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 was regime change. There has been a long debate about the true objective of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq:  weapons of mass destruction or regime change.  Time and events seem to have settled that debate.  It was claimed that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons that could be activated within 45 minutes. Such weapons were not found.  A lot more about the considerations and deliberations between Washington and London, and in each capital, has come to light.  We know more about the private communication between President Bush and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the run up to the Iraq invasion – communication that other significant figures who should have been made aware of did not know.  And we have learned from Tony Blair that even with knowledge of there being no weapons of mass destruction, he would have employed other arguments to remove Saddam Hussein.

Much has been said about mistakes being made in Afghanistan and, more specifically, Iraq.  The biggest error of judgment was that two very different countries were given the same treatment of military power.  In doing so, the interveners appeared to act with vengeance more than a planned strategy. Otherwise, why would Afghanistan – an utterly failed state – be subjected to sustained destructive air power and left without a serious attempt at rebuilding for so long? And the primary intervener moved on to Iraq to dismantle a well-organized state structure, after the dictator had been overthrown.  By treating Afghanistan and Iraq in the same way, the interveners did the opposite of what was needed in each country.

To view al Qaeda and the various nationalist movements in the Arab world as one “enemy” in the “war on terror” was an historic miscalculation.  The determination under the Bush presidency to crush nationalism in the Muslim world exacted a high price from the West.  But countries in the region paid, and continue to pay, a price even greater.  Al Qaeda’s terrorist violence has been answered by the terror of American military power.  Differing agendas of regional powers became fused with America’s aims in the “war on terror.” The impact was huge across the region, producing anger, resentment and outright rebellion in the wider populace.

In a country without national infrastructure, or where infrastructure is destroyed, there will be certain consequences. The essence of the state’s role is maintaining order.  It does so by means of coercion, taxation and distribution.  In a country such as Afghanistan, self, family, clan, tribe and ethnic group acquire much greater significance.  In a failed or weak state, other agencies – a village elder, tribal chief or warlord – replace the state.  They command popular following, because they make things happen.

In Iraq, two early decisions by the American administrator Paul Bremer after the 2003 invasion triggered a multi-layered conflict.  By Order Number 1 of May 16, Bremer dissolved the Ba’ath Party.  In an article in Le Monde diplomatique, the British academic Toby Dodge described the Iraqi population a month after the arrival of the U.S. forces as dominated by a Hobbesian nightmare.  Dodge estimated that between 20,000 and 120,000 senior and middle-ranking Iraqi officials lost their jobs in the civil service purge alone.  They would have constituted the very force capable of restoring order amid chaos and violence. Dodge wrote that seventeen of Baghdad’s twenty-three ministries were completely gutted, stripped of all portable items like computers, furniture and fittings – all within three weeks. There were not enough American troops to stop it.

Bremer’s Order Number 2 dismantled the most important state institutions and subordinates such as government ministries, Iraqi military and paramilitary organizations, the National Assembly, courts and emergency forces.  It was essential to be prepared with alternatives to take over the functions of these organizations in a country of 30 million people.  Bremer’s two edicts left a vacuum that was rapidly filled by new violent players.

I want to offer a brief explanation of the nature of the other conflict – the Afghan war – since the 1970s.  It also applies, to an extent, to Iraq.  Afghanistan has striking parallels with other conflicts in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere.  These conflicts can be seen in four separate yet overlapping, often simultaneous stages. This is how:

Stage 1:  internal conflict.  In Afghanistan, internal conflict is a fact of history. For simplicity, let’s begin from the “decade of liberalism and modernization” in the 1960s.  The conflict escalated after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1973 – and again after the 1978 coup by young Soviet-oriented military officers, who feared that President Daud was taking the country too close to the United States.  

Stage 2:  increase in great power involvement.  External intervention fuels the unrest, and upsets the balance of forces locally.  This, in turn, attracts more external forces, until they begin to dictate the scale and course of events. But their unacceptability among local players, and active resistance by local groups, hinder the creation and functioning of institutions.

Stage 3:  state disintegration.  In Afghanistan, the death of the state was slow, taking more than two decades.  In Iraq, too, considering the effects of sanctions and isolation, we are talking about more than a decade.  After Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, the final blow came relatively quickly.

Stage 4:  foreign indifference and rise of extremism.  I have in mind the decade of the 1990s and the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan.  The Soviet state had been defeated and had disintegrated.  For the United States, exhausted and occupied with the urgency to manage the wreckage of the Soviet Union, most importantly its nuclear arsenal, Afghanistan was simply not a priority.

There is a general lesson to be learned.  A prolonged war leads to fatigue and indifference among external interveners. A culture of violence matures. Expectations on all sides are altered and violence becomes a way of life.  Actors left behind acquire a habit of using coercion.  And citizens come to expect solutions to be found through violence.  That few intervening powers grasp this lesson is a tragedy.  

We have at present a mix of the McChrystal plan of military surge and counterinsurgency and President Obama’s wish to start drawing down the combat forces in mid-2011.  His wish is driven by the 2012 presidential election in America. And it is dependent upon recruitment, training and ultimately guaranteed discipline of a 300,000-strong Afghan national force.

However, history shows that integrity in the Afghan armed forces is difficult to achieve.  Tribal realities among Pashtun officers and rank-and-file soldiers – and distrust for Pashtuns among non-Pashtuns – cannot be wished away. It would require a generation to transform the culture of the armed forces and the country even if the United States and the allies had the will.  In the absence of that will, I have some fears.  They are:  

1. As soon as President Obama begins to draw down the combat forces in mid-2011 (or soon before), altering the balance of power, dramatic shifts of loyalties will occur in the Afghan armed forces.  This has happened before and could happen again.
2. The Karzai government cannot survive if the military disintegrates along tribal and ethnic lines.  The Afghan armed forces and police lack cohesion already.
3. Afghanistan has weapons in abundance.  Guns poured into the country, with the best possible intention of equipping the military, would fall into the wrong hands.  And I am not even talking about increased activity by Pakistan’s ISI and other regional players.

All of these are ingredients of a state of nature again.

The answer is a long-term regional project, led but not dictated by the United States, involving Iran, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China and India; and a deliberate policy of demilitarization, however difficult and painful. Internally, a type of tribal democracy, certainly outside Kabul and the other main cities, is what is realistic to hope for.

But the current state of America’s relations with China, Iran and Russia do not favor such a prospect.  Tensions have grown with Pakistan and Turkey.  And I know there is uncertainty, if not outright unhappiness, over the Obama administration’s policies elsewhere in the region.  This makes cooperation much more difficult.  The current strategy in Afghanistan lays too much emphasis on military tactics.  And it does not appreciate nearly enough how objectionable, how provocative, foreign military presence is to Afghans.  The sentiment goes beyond the Taliban.

[END]

Former Congressman Charlie Wilson, who died on February10, was America’s answer to James Bond, the fast-moving, globe-trotting character in Ian Fleming’s novels, who foiled enemies and conquered beautiful women with ease. Wilson’s achievements in Congress were not many. Often he had other things on his mind. However, as a member of the House Appropriations Committee, his helpful role in pouring money and weapons into Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s is beyond dispute. Wilson’s portrayal by George Crile in his book Charlie Wilson’s War and by Tom Hanks in the 2007 Hollywood film enhanced his reputation.

The prime mover of United States policy to support Islamist groups in the final phase of the Cold War was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. President Carter himself signed the first, secret, order that began channeling U.S. aid to the Mujahideen. The move lured the Soviet Union into a disastrous military invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. The prosecution of the war against the Soviet occupation forces would have been impossible without President Ronald Reagan and his CIA director, William Casey. From Kalashnikovs to advanced Stinger missiles, all that might help the Mujahideen in defeating the Soviet Union was fair game. Such was their ideological commitment and focus on the bull’s eye, without sufficient regard for what might follow.

In later years, when he had retired from Congress, Charlie Wilson seemed to acknowledge what few defense hawks of that era can do even now. Speaking of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan following the Soviet defeat, he said, “That caused an enormous amount of real bitterness in Afghanistan and it was probably the catalyst for Taliban movement.” His comment, in 2001, was extraordinary for the fact that it was made at all when the trend of ahistorical abstractions had become fashionable. Despite the monstrous nature of the 9/11 attacks, the notion that terrorism started on that day lies at the heart of problems in countering it.

Afghanistan has puzzled and challenged external intervenors throughout its history. Each time, impudence has made military intervention look easy. Initial military successes have followed. Why it has been difficult to extricate without paying a high price tells something about the Afghan people that no intervenor seems to have really understood. The British and the Russians found this in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now the United States and allies are in a similar situation. President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 ambition of transforming Afghanistan into a Western-style democracy has been scaled down under the Obama administration. What to do instead is far from clear, except to resort to the fire-fighting measures of Gen. Stanley McChrystal to prevail over the Taliban, and to raise large Afghan military and police forces to take over security, so U.S. troops can draw down or get out.

Afghans are much more canny and wise than their detractors think. The formulation of a successful plan for the country requires a deeper understanding of Afghan society, its potential and limits. It is important to recognize that not all Afghans who have taken up arms to oppose foreign troops are Taliban. The presence of foreign troops in the country tends to unite Afghans. It is particularly true of Pashtun tribes, dominant in the south and east. When foreign troops are not in the country, tribal conflict comes to the fore. The same Afghan code of honor, which dictates that every protection and hospitality must be extended to a guest, also expects the guest not to behave in a manner contrary to the interests of the host. There were indications both before and after 9/11 that many Afghans felt Osama bin Laden was crossing the limits of this code and were uncertain about how to deal with him.

When leaders have emerged without outside intervention, Afghan society has been relatively peaceful. This was the case for four decades before the monarchy was overthrown in 1973 by the king’s own cousin. For centuries, attempts to create a centralized system in Afghanistan have failed. The Pashtun tribal system and various smaller ethnic communities have been, and want to remain, decentralized.

Afghanistan needs a plan that shows proper regard for these characteristics of Afghan society. Such a plan must have regional powers – Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, China and India – as cosignatories. But with the recent deterioration in U.S. relations with China and Iran, it is difficult to see how a start can be made.

Video Source: RethinkAfghanistan.com

The inaugural decade of the new century will be remembered for two phenomena above all: savagery of human nature, and the United States, the world’s sole hegemon, going rogue, taking other nations with it. As we were about to leave the twentieth century, and many in the west were enjoying unprecedented prosperity at the end of the 1990s, the prospect of a clash of ideologies was becoming a reality. Instead of the ‘menace’ of communism, the neoconservatives and the religious Right in the United States had found another enemy in radical Islam. It was one of the supreme ironies that the confrontation would be between President George W Bush and the ideology that his father George HW and Ronald Reagan had promoted in their fight against Soviet communism when they were in the White House during the last phase of the Cold War.   Having seen off the ‘Soviet threat’, the hegemon that emerged victorious had a fatal belief in its own destructive power. In refusing to learn lessons from the past, the hegemon invited worse. The new confrontation was not going to be between two equals, aware of the certainty of mutual destruction in the event of an all-out war. The primary characteristic of the new confrontation would be its lack of symmetry, making it more brutal. For when combatants are not equals and mutual destruction is not certain, the dominant side becomes vulnerable in other ways.

Overwhelming power leads to impudence and disregard for law and reason. Institutions that are there to protect the innocent and the weak begin to lose their meaning. In a world without restraint, the underdog is often depicted as evil and brutality becomes the norm. With too much power comes the belief that it is easy to crush the ‘enemy’. But the underdog has strength in numbers, paving the way to atrocities on all sides. All of this has been witnessed in the savage first decade of the new century.

To view al Qaeda and the many nationalist movements in the Islamic world as one ‘enemy’ during the ‘war on terror’ has been an historic miscalculation. The project under the presidency of George W Bush to crush nationalism in the Middle East has exacted a high price from the West. But countries in the region have paid a price even greater. Al Qaeda’s terrorist violence has been answered by the terror of American military power. The lives of millions of people have been destroyed or blighted. In 2010, a year after Barack Obama’s ascent to the presidency, the initial euphoria has evaporated and gloom has set in.

Unlike the Cold War that ended in the 1980s, the United States has no superpower rival in the new century, and the balance of threat of mutual annihilation is absent. Instead, one side in the new conflict has overwhelming destructive power and has become insolent. The underdog has strength in numbers and is prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice – in acts of suicide attacks. Fear has lost its deterrent quality. Death is no longer an unwelcome prospect for a growing number of people living without hope. And for an alarming number of humans, the rationality in martyrdom has replaced the rationality in survival. Humans are at their most dangerous when they no longer fear death.

Iraq Hubris

In the wake of the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation wrote a commentary titled ‘The Long War Against Terrorism’. A retired lieutenant-colonel in the US Army, and a leading neoconservative ideologue, Carafano began with these words: “Two years down the war on terror. How many more to go? We don’t know.”[1] Boastfully, he argued that America’s ‘long war’ against terror was similar in scope and duration to the Cold War. The military establishment, delighted with the enlargement of the Pentagon budget following the return of Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary in the Bush administration jumped at the term. It gained currency in the war lexicon within a few months. In 2006, Rumsfeld invented a phrase of his own, describing it as ‘a generational conflict akin to the Cold War’, likely to go on for decades.[2]

These assertions were based on flawed thinking, and comparisons with the Cold War were not relevant. America’s victory over the Soviet Union was achieved not by bombing the Soviet state out of existence. The victory was achieved by draining the Soviet economy and resolve through an arms race and regional proxy wars. America’s ‘enemy’ in the new century is a ghost army of guerrillas, with little else to lose except their lives. And they are only too willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. The hegemon, in possession of the most sophisticated war technology, decided to confront the loose army of guerrillas equipped with little more than light weapons, explosives and simple timing devices, able to move at will across frontiers.

In The Art of War, believed to have been written in the sixth century BC and still regarded as one of the most influential works about war strategy and tactics, the Chinese general and military theorist, Sun Tzu, said:  

       Warfare is the way of deception.           

       Therefore, if able, appear unable.           

       If active, appear not active.           

       If near, appear far.           

       If far, appear near.           

       If they have advantage, entice them.           

       If they are confused, take them. 

       If they are substantial, prepare for them. 

       If they are strong, avoid them.[3] 

‘Shock and Awe’, the post-Cold War doctrine written at the United States National Defense University in 1996, was designed to paralyze the enemy and achieve rapid dominance by overwhelming force in battle. The truth is rather different. Provided the enemy removes himself and recovers from the effects of high-altitude bombing and missile attacks, in time he will improvise tactics to fight an effective guerrilla war that a conventional army will find difficult to sustain. A great military power wants rapid victory. The underdog prefers a long war. This, and not merely the use of overwhelming power and lightning speed, are the essence of Sun’s doctrine of warfare. 

Gabriel Kolko, a historian of the Left, observes that while most European nations and Japan have gained insights from the calamities that have so seared modern history, the United States has not.[4] “Folly is scarcely an American monopoly,” says Kolko, “but resistance to learning when grave errors have been committed is almost proportionate to the resources available to repeat them.” The United States is by no means the only major power that refuses to learn from past mistakes. When countries with overwhelming destructive power fail to prevail in war, they are disposed to employing even more firepower. But the record of this tactic against guerrilla forces is not one of success. 

Contrary to the initial belief in George W Bush’s administration, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became nasty, brutish and long. They show few signs of ending in the new decade. In 2007, the US National Intelligence Estimate for Iraq had admitted that ‘the term “civil war” accurately describes key elements of Iraqi conflict, including the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence … and population displacements’.[5] The specter of failure loomed large at the end of the Bush-Cheney presidency. From that unpleasant reality arose the military surge in the final phase of the Bush administration. 

More than 20000 additional US troops were deployed, mostly around Baghdad, the scene of the worst conflict.[6] While American reinforcements defended the Iraqi capital, Washington’s proxies in the Sunni Awakening movement were used to suppress al Qaeda violence in Anbar province covering much of Iraq’s western territory. This twin approach was the last chance for George W Bush to claim success in reducing the escalating violence. With a Shi‘a-dominated regime in Baghdad and a Sunni Awakening movement unhappy at the prospect of US withdrawal, Iraq remains a highly unstable country. 

Politicians crave for success. When an unpleasant reality threatens success, a politician seeks to create an illusion, or at least a new reality that will make it possible to claim success. For this, success must be redefined and the politician’s own conduct shown to accomplish the goal. Enoch Powell, one of the most controversial British politicians of the twentieth century, said, “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and human affairs.”[7] It is the worst nightmare for any politician and utmost is employed to avoid this risk. 

In October 2002, Obama, aspiring to become a member of the US Senate in Washington, gave a speech at the Federal Plaza in Chicago.[8] It was a defining address that would set him apart all the way to the presidency in 2008 and after. In a move to demonstrate that he was not just some anti-war politician, he repeated a critical sentence again and again: “I don’t oppose all wars.” He reminded Americans that his grandfather signed up for war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and fought in General Patton’s army, ‘in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil’. 

In the same vein, Obama reminded that, after the 9/11 attacks on America and upon witnessing the dust and tears, he supported the Bush administration’s ‘pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance’. Indeed, he pledged that he himself would ‘take up arms to prevent such tragedy happening again’. To fellow Americans, Obama said, “I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.” Thus began his mission to establish himself as a future commander-in-chief . It was also the beginning of a more nuanced political journey that would take him to the White House seven years later. 

While he did not oppose all wars, he was against a ‘dumb war’ – which America went for without a thought and preparation. At a time when Democratic lawmakers in Washington had decided to go along with the ‘war on terror’ of the Bush administration, and a large number of them supported Bush in his determination to open another front against Iraq, Barack Obama was constructing a different platform. He described the gathering campaign to invade Iraq as a cynical attempt by ‘armchair weekend warriors’ to impose their own ideological agenda, ‘irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne’.  

Just six weeks after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, President Bush announced that ‘the United States and our allies have prevailed’ in the war for Iraq.[9] A banner in the background loudly declared – ‘Mission Accomplished’. However, persistent conflict, the subsequent civil war and disintegration of Iraqi society shattered early illusions of a quick victory and an ever grateful Iraqi nation. There were no more illusions to entertain, but reality – an awful reality of violence and chaos. For public figures who had supported sending troops to Iraq, it was a heavy burden to carry. For Bush administration officials, it became a nightmare. 

Those who expected a dramatic shift in American policy after the Bush-Cheney administration were soon disappointed. Obama had already established that he was no anti-war politician, rather one with a much more cautious disposition and considerable intellect. These qualities had given him a more focused approach and a certain facility to articulate. The original justification for the Iraq War that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction had long been discredited. Five years after President Bush announced that America and its allies had prevailed in the Iraq, the occupation forces had been unable to suppress the insurgency. A vicious civil war had not only caused much loss of life and property, but also polarized the country. Millions of Iraqi refugees had fled to Jordan, Syria and to other destinations.[10] 

Afghanistan: Obama’s War   

On war, Obama was more nuanced. Iraq was ‘a war of choice’, part of the reason why Afghanistan was neglected and why America could not go after Osama bin Laden as aggressively as it should have.[11] As a consequence, America ‘paid an extraordinary price in blood and treasure’ and fanned the anti-American sentiment that ‘actually makes it more difficult for us to act in Pakistan’. Despite this, ‘we have to, as much as possible, get Pakistan’s agreement before we act’. However, America should ‘not hesitate to act when it comes to al Qaeda’. 

Afghanistan thus became Obama’s war, just as Iraq had been Bush’s. And the scene was set for a rapid American ‘surge’ and an escalation of conflict in a country that had suffered neglect for almost seven years. In July 2008, nearly four months before he was elected, candidate Obama pledged to reinforce the US occupation forces by 10000 troops.[12] In February 2009, after a review of US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama sanctioned reinforcements on a bigger scale for Afghanistan.[13] He appointed General Stanley McChrystal, a counterterrorism specialist, Commander of the occupation forces in Afghanistan.[14] Pilotless drone attacks became more frequent across the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier, killing militants and civilians in greater numbers. 

The findings of an opinion poll conducted by the Gallup Organization in Pakistan were published in August 2009.[15] Almost 60 percent Pakistanis thought the United States was the greatest threat to their country. About 18 percent viewed India as a threat and 11 percent the Pakistani Taliban. An even bigger majority of two-thirds opposed US military operations in Pakistani territory. These were depressing results for a country that was pouring billions of dollars in Pakistan and Afghanistan every year. 

August 2009 was a bad month for the occupying powers in Afghanistan. Presidential elections were held amid widespread intimidation by men with the gun and fraud by power brokers. Despite an attempted news blackout, it emerged that voting was low outside Kabul because of Taliban threats and general indifference.[16] As few as ten percent Afghans went to polling stations in many areas. The occupation forces, in particular American and British troops, took a high number of casualties during the summer of 2009, as the Taliban consolidated their hold in the south and penetrated new areas north of the capital.  

Russia’s ambassador in Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, who was the senior KGB officer in Kabul in the 1980s, made some insightful remarks as the Obama presidency approached. In the Russian ambassador’s view, the American enterprise in Afghanistan faced grim prospects if Washington failed to learn from mistakes made by the Soviets when they occupied the country.[17] Kabulov said the Americans ‘had already repeated all our mistakes’ since overthrowing the Taliban regime in 2001. The United States underestimated the resistance, showed an overreliance on air power and failed to understand the Afghan ‘irritative allergy’ to foreign occupation. Even worse was the belief that sweeping into Kabul was all. Another flaw was to think that sending more troops would turn the tide of the war. 

Fighting an insurgency requires a difficult balance. Too few soldiers impede the ability to secure territory in a country of vast mountainous terrain such as Afghanistan. On the contrary, determined insurgents will find many more targets when reinforcements are sent to subdue them. This is likely to be the case as the 30000 or more extra American troops ordered by President Obama in December 2009 begin to arrive in Afghanistan in the new year. Regimes installed by external powers, and seen as obedient to their masters, often end up being viewed as corrupt and weak. Afghan communist rulers installed by the Soviet Union had this fate in the 1980s. In the early twenty-first century, the US-installed government of President Hamid Karzai could not avoid that image. 

When an occupation force carries out military operations at will, causing significant numbers of civilian casualties, and the leadership of that country can do little except complaining, it is a recipe for disastrous consequences. As Afghanistan became Obama’s war, 2009 turned out to be the bloodiest year in terms of military fatalities among US-led coalition troops.[18] The credibility of the presidential election giving victory to Karzai lay in tatters. And the enterprise to create a centralized state in Afghanistan appeared doomed. 

In a country without national infrastructure and system of distribution, self, family, clan, tribe and ethnic group form the basis for daily life, protection and long-term survival. With no effective central government, he who can provide these to a community – a village elder, tribal chief or warlord – will command popular following. To be the provider, he must have means of coercion, taxation and distribution. But the hegemon full of belief in its own invincibility is reluctant to appreciate the consequences of relying on force alone. Coercion leads to resistance, which necessitates even greater coercion and violence replicates. 

External intervention fuels war, and upsets the balance of forces locally. This, in turn, attracts more external forces. Increasingly, these external forces begin to dictate the scale and course of events, but the unacceptability of this trend among local players hinders the creation of new institutions and their functioning. Violence replaces law as the primary means of maintaining order. Expectations on all sides are altered and violence becomes a way of life. Actors acquire a habit of using coercion, and citizens expect solutions to be found through violence. That few intervening powers can grasp this lesson is a tragedy.

The above paper was published in the Journal State of Nature (Winter 2010).

[2] ‘Rumsfeld Offers Strategies for Current War’, Washington Post, February 3, 2006. 

[3] Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Chapter 1: Calculations, http://www.sonshi.com/sun1.html.  

[4] Gabriel Kolko, ‘The Age of Perpetual Conflict’ (Defense and the National Interest, February 3, 2006), extract from The Age of War: The United States Confronts the World  (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 2006). 

[5] See Prospects for Iraq’s Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead (Washington: D.C.: National Intelligence Estimate, 2007). 

[6] ‘Bush Will Add More than 20,000 Troops to Iraq,’ CNN, January 11, 2007. 

[7] See Enoch Powell, Joseph Chamberlain (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 151. 

[8] ‘Barack Obama’s 2002 Speech Against the Iraq War,’ October 2, 2002, http://obamaspeeches.com/001-2002-Speech-Against-the-Iraq-War-Obama-Speech.htm. 

[9] See ‘Transcript: Bush on the USS Lincoln,’ ABC News, May 1, 2003.   

[10] ‘Failed Responsibility: Iraqi Refugees in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon,’ (Brussels: International Crisis Group Middle East Report No 77, July 10, 2008), 3–33. 

[11] Senator Obama’s remarks during the Democratic presidential debate in Manchester, New Hampshire, January 5, 2008. 

[12] Juan Cole, ‘Obama is Saying the Wrong things About Afghanistan,’ Salon.com, July 23, 2008. 

[13] ‘Statement By the President on Afghanistan,’ February 17, 2009. 

[14] See ‘Profile: Gen. Stanley McChrystal,’ BBC News, May 11, 2009. 

[15] Gallup Poll in Pakistan for Al Jazeera, August 9, 2009.  

[16] Ben Farmer and David Blair, ‘Afghanistan Election: Low Turnout As Voters Fear Taliban Attacks,’ Daily Telegraph, August 20, 2009; Carlotta Gall, ‘Intimidation and Fraud Observed in Afghan Election,’ New York Times, August 22, 2009; and Paul Rogers, ‘Afghanistan: The Point of Decision’, openDemocracy, July 27, 2009. 

[17] John Burns, ‘An Old Afghanistan Hand Offers Lessons of the Past’(New York Times, October 19, 2008). 

[18] For annual figures since 2001, see http://icasualties.org/oef/.

With the passing of a disastrous decade and President Obama about to complete his first year in office, it is perhaps appropriate to look at the recent past and what may lie ahead. For the Obama presidency, it has been more of a downhill journey than a steep climb that many of his supporters and admirers in America and around the world had expected. President Obama will miss the January 22 deadline he set himself a year ago to close Guantanamo Bay prison camp. As the New York Times recently pointed out, difficulties in finding places abroad to resettle prisoners deemed innocent and Congressional resistance to approving money to transfer high-security terrorism suspects to a special prison in Illinois have made it impossible to meet the deadline. The Guantanamo prison might not be closed before 2011 at the earliest.

Obama’s health-care reform bill has had an arduous passage in the US Congress. After a long battle, the House of Representatives finally approved its version including a government-run health-care option the president wanted. It was a different matter in the Senate, where a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority could only be secured when Senate Democratic majority leader Harry Reid dropped the government insurance option to ensure support from conservative Democrats. Not one Republican senator backed the bill. And Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were forced to concede on other major issues, including restrictions on abortion coverage.

These concessions have infuriated liberals. One of the disappointed is Obama’s personal physician of 22 years, Dr David Scheiner, who does not believe the planned overhaul goes far enough to help the poor and uninsured, and will cost too much. Dr Scheiner, bitterly disappointed, said he was excluded from the list of invitees to the White House under pressure from the health lobby. Even so, President Obama congratulated the Senate, and by implication himself, on its historic vote, proclaiming “we are now finally poised to deliver on the promise of real, meaningful health insurance reform.”

Compare the content and tone of President Obama’s remarks at his inauguration, his Cairo address to the Muslim world in June and his Oslo speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009. Couched in the familiar rhetoric is increasing aggression and militarization of American foreign policy under the Obama presidency. The inauguration speech included remarks about the United State being a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers; a message to the Muslim world that America sought a new way forward, based on mutual interests and mutual respect; and a warning to those who cling to power through corruption and deceit.

In Cairo, Obama acknowledged tensions between the United States and Muslims around the world, not only rooted in historical forces, but also fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims; and a cold war in which Muslim-majority countries were treated as proxies without regard for their aspirations. Reaction from the Muslim world and outside was generally positive. The speech was seen as a possible new beginning after the three-week Israeli war on Gaza that took the lives of 1400 Palestinians in comparison to 13 deaths on the Israeli side during the last days of the George W Bush’s presidency in December 2008/January 2009.

In a surprise but divisive move, the Nobel Committee announced the award of the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama for his ‘extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’. But soon the Nobel Committee’s announcement began to look like a triumph of hope over reality. In early December, after weeks of deliberations, he announced before a uniformed audience at the West Point military academy: “As commander-in-chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.” It reminded of speeches made by George W Bush throughout his eight years of war on terror.

Within days, Obama administration officials overturned the president’s July 2011 deadline for starting a withdrawal stipulated in his speech. Sitting with Secretary of State Clinton and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mullen, Defense Secretary Gates said 3,000 more troops could be needed on top of that. Britain and other allies announced smaller increases – all taking the Afghan surge to 40,000 troops or over. The war vision of America’s military complex, projected in General McChrystal’s report, was being implemented.

For all his expressions of gratitude and humility, Obama’s acceptance speech at the Nobel award ceremony was an awkward one for the occasion. Once the almost obligatory references to figures like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela were out of the way, Obama quickly reminded the world that he was the commander-in-chief of the United States. He invoked the concept of a ‘just war’ which is waged as a last resort, and in which force is used in proportion and civilian lives are spared whenever possible. All of these are unbelievable, fanciful assertions.

In a convincingly argued, if provocative, article titled Obama’s Af-Pak War is Illegal, law professor Marjorie Cohn tackles Obama’s claims about America’s war in Afghanistan being a ‘just war’ and finds those claims wanting. Cohn points out that many Congressional Democrats are uncomfortable with Obama’s decision and calls on them to hold firm, even refusing to fund the war. A deep sense of disappointment and anger has spread among liberal and progressive supporters who had staked a lot in an Obama victory bringing a real change. But change is not the word much in use in the current Obama rhetoric.

The increase in US Predator drone attacks inside Pakistan’s territory and the resulting casualties including old people, women and children fuel anger and resentment among local tribal communities and the country’s intelligentsia. As CNN’s Peter Bergen said in his analysis at the end of October, a Gallup poll showed only 9 percent of Pakistanis supported the strikes against two-thirds who opposed. And, according to UN human rights investigator Philip Alston, drone strikes causing civilian deaths may well violate international law. Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball recently wrote that while some counterterrorism officials in the Obama administration wanted to expand drone operations to Pakistani cities, one person standing in the way of expanded strikes was President Obama.

Obama’s first year in office reveals limitations of his original thinking behind the formation of, in effect, a coalition administration; it includes President George W Bush’s defense secretary Robert Gates and Obama’s onetime rival for the Democratic nomination, secretary of state Hilary Clinton, who had threatened to obliterate Iran if it attacked Israel with nuclear weapons, which Iran did not have; and candidate Obama had accused her of echoing the ‘bluster’ of then president, George W Bush. On the military command side, two counterinsurgency hawks of the Bush presidency, General Petraeus and General McChrystal, remain in command of America’s war. The immediate future does not look bright.

The above article was published by CounterPunch on 29 December 2009.