Net tightens around Bush, Cheney and accomplices
The Indict Bush and Cheney movement is on the move!
Ninety-six organizations and prominent individuals have signed on to a call for Congress to take action against torture. They are demanding that Congressional subcommittees subpoena Bush, Cheney and others so that they must answer for their criminal acts.
A huge thank you to everyone who is helping this movement grow.
The action by the 96 organizations comes only weeks after a large coalition of human rights organizations and prominent lawyers sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to hold firm against pressure from Dick Cheney and others to narrow the scope of a Special Prosecutor investigating Bush-era crimes.
This growing wave of action has been set in motion by the thousands of people who have tirelessly lobbied Congress, collected petitions, and taken to the streets throughout the country. These efforts must lead to real accountability for the top-level officials behind the most egregious violations of civil and human rights of our time. They must lead to indictment.
Cheney is really feeling the pressure! He has tried to escape justice by endless evasions.
A recently released FBI summary of a May 2004 interview shows that Cheney either refused to answer or "could not recall" the facts 72 times. Seventy-two!
Cheney’s severe memory loss is symptomatic of the epidemic of lies and deceit that spread under the former Bush administration. It is high time we stamp out this disease.
Scores are rallying under the flag of justice and accountability raised by our movement. People are marching shoulder to shoulder to bring about real change. We must continue to build on this momentum.
.JPG)
Friday, November 13, 2009
Opinion: U.S. is doing no good in Afghanistan
By Malalai Joya
As an Afghan woman who was elected to Parliament, I am in the United States to ask President Barack Obama to immediately end the occupation of my country.
Eight years ago, women's rights were used as one of the excuses to start this war. But today, Afghanistan is still facing a women's rights catastrophe. Life for most Afghan women resembles a type of hell that is never reflected in the Western mainstream media.
In 2001, the U.S. helped return to power the worst misogynist criminals, such as the Northern Alliance warlords and druglords. These men ought to be considered a photocopy of the Taliban. The only difference is that the Northern Alliance warlords wear suits and ties and cover their faces with the mask of democracy while they occupy government positions. But they are responsible for much of the disaster today in Afghanistan, thanks to the U.S. support they enjoy.
The U.S. and its allies are getting ready to offer power to the medieval Taliban by creating an imaginary category called the "moderate Taliban" and inviting them to join the government. A man who was near the top of the list of most-wanted terrorists eight years ago, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has been invited to join the government.
Over the past eight years the U.S. has helped turn my country into the drug capital of the world through its support of drug lords. Today, 93 percent of all opium in the world is produced in Afghanistan. Many members of Parliament and high ranking officials openly benefit from the drug trade. President Karzai's own brother is a well known drug trafficker.
Meanwhile, ordinary Afghans are living in destitution. The latest United Nations Human Development Index ranked Afghanistan 181 out of 182 countries. Eighteen million Afghans live on less than $2 a day. Mothers in many parts of Afghanistan are ready to sell their children because they cannot feed them.
Afghanistan has received $36 billion of aid in the past eight years, and the U.S. alone spends $165 million a day on its war. Yet my country remains in the grip of terrorists and criminals. My people have no interest in the current drama of the presidential election since it will change nothing in Afghanistan. Both Karzai and Dr. Abdullah are hated by Afghans for being U.S. puppets.
The worst casualty of this war is truth. Those who stand up and raise their voice against injustice, insecurity and occupation have their lives threatened and are forced to leave Afghanistan, or simply get killed.
We are sandwiched between three powerful enemies: the occupation forces of the U.S. and NATO, the Taliban and the corrupt government of Hamid Karzai.
Now President Obama is considering increasing troops to Afghanistan and simply extending former President Bush's wrong policies. In fact, the worst massacres since 9/11 were during Obama's tenure. My native province of Farah was bombed by the U.S. this past May. A hundred and fifty people were killed, most of them women and children. On Sept. 9, the U.S. bombed Kunduz Province, killing 200 civilians.
My people are fed up. That is why we want an immediate end to the U.S. occupation.
MALALAI JOYA spoke at San Jose State University Saturday and signed copies of her new political memoir, A Woman Among Warlords, co-written with Derrick O"Keefe. The survivor of four assassination attempts, she was elected to Afghanistan"s parliament in 2005 and kicked out in 2007 by the warlords. She wrote this article for the Mercury News.
As an Afghan woman who was elected to Parliament, I am in the United States to ask President Barack Obama to immediately end the occupation of my country.
Eight years ago, women's rights were used as one of the excuses to start this war. But today, Afghanistan is still facing a women's rights catastrophe. Life for most Afghan women resembles a type of hell that is never reflected in the Western mainstream media.
In 2001, the U.S. helped return to power the worst misogynist criminals, such as the Northern Alliance warlords and druglords. These men ought to be considered a photocopy of the Taliban. The only difference is that the Northern Alliance warlords wear suits and ties and cover their faces with the mask of democracy while they occupy government positions. But they are responsible for much of the disaster today in Afghanistan, thanks to the U.S. support they enjoy.
The U.S. and its allies are getting ready to offer power to the medieval Taliban by creating an imaginary category called the "moderate Taliban" and inviting them to join the government. A man who was near the top of the list of most-wanted terrorists eight years ago, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has been invited to join the government.
Over the past eight years the U.S. has helped turn my country into the drug capital of the world through its support of drug lords. Today, 93 percent of all opium in the world is produced in Afghanistan. Many members of Parliament and high ranking officials openly benefit from the drug trade. President Karzai's own brother is a well known drug trafficker.
Meanwhile, ordinary Afghans are living in destitution. The latest United Nations Human Development Index ranked Afghanistan 181 out of 182 countries. Eighteen million Afghans live on less than $2 a day. Mothers in many parts of Afghanistan are ready to sell their children because they cannot feed them.
Afghanistan has received $36 billion of aid in the past eight years, and the U.S. alone spends $165 million a day on its war. Yet my country remains in the grip of terrorists and criminals. My people have no interest in the current drama of the presidential election since it will change nothing in Afghanistan. Both Karzai and Dr. Abdullah are hated by Afghans for being U.S. puppets.
The worst casualty of this war is truth. Those who stand up and raise their voice against injustice, insecurity and occupation have their lives threatened and are forced to leave Afghanistan, or simply get killed.
We are sandwiched between three powerful enemies: the occupation forces of the U.S. and NATO, the Taliban and the corrupt government of Hamid Karzai.
Now President Obama is considering increasing troops to Afghanistan and simply extending former President Bush's wrong policies. In fact, the worst massacres since 9/11 were during Obama's tenure. My native province of Farah was bombed by the U.S. this past May. A hundred and fifty people were killed, most of them women and children. On Sept. 9, the U.S. bombed Kunduz Province, killing 200 civilians.
My people are fed up. That is why we want an immediate end to the U.S. occupation.
MALALAI JOYA spoke at San Jose State University Saturday and signed copies of her new political memoir, A Woman Among Warlords, co-written with Derrick O"Keefe. The survivor of four assassination attempts, she was elected to Afghanistan"s parliament in 2005 and kicked out in 2007 by the warlords. She wrote this article for the Mercury News.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
How To Demilitarize Your Church
No more turning holidays into military appreciation days. No more special military appreciation days. No more recognizing current members of the military or veterans. No more encouraging current members of the military or veterans to wear their uniforms on the above-mentioned holidays. No more treating military personnel differently from other occupations. No more references to military personnel "serving" in the military. No more unspecific and unspecified prayers for "the troops in harms way." No more military guest speakers. No more justifying service in the military because the Bible mentions soldiers. No more "God Bless Our Troops" or "Pray for Our Troops" or "Thank a Veteran" slogans on church signs, bulletins, and websites. No more equating patriotism with admiration for the military. No more calling soldiers returning from overseas heroes. No more blasphemous nonsense about the troops dying for our freedoms like Christ died for our sins.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Afghanistan: Time to Leave
Patrick Cockburn, our award-winning reporter who has covered the region for more than 30 years, explains why it is best for the world, and Afghanistan, if our troops are brought home
by Patrick Cockburn
Britain should start withdrawing, not reinforcing, its troops in Afghanistan. Sending extra troops is unnecessary and will prove counter-effective. The additional number of British troops is small, but the US is poised to send tens of thousands more soldiers to the country. The nature of the conflict is changing. What should be a war in which the Afghan government fights the Taliban has become one which is being fought primarily by the American and British armies. To more and more Afghans, this looks like imperial occupation.
With regard to disputes in Washington and London about sending more troops, it is seldom mentioned that Afghans are against the deployment. Contrary to Western plans, just 18 per cent of Afghans want more US and Nato/Isaf forces in Afghanistan, according to an opinion poll carried out earlier this year by the BBC, ABC News and ARD of Germany. A much greater number of Afghans - 44 per cent - want a decrease in foreign forces.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Taliban have been able to win some support. The cruelty of their rule before 2001 is becoming a distant memory and they are successfully portraying themselves as the defender of the country against foreign occupation. Matthew P Hoh, the senior American civilian representative in Zabul Province east of Kandahar, resigned last week convinced that the US military should not be in Afghanistan. As a former US marine officer who served in Iraq, he says in his resignation letter that the US has joined in on one side in a 35-year-old civil war between the traditional Pashtun community and its enemies. "The US military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency," he says. "Our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people."
What is true for the Americans in Zabul is true for the British in Helmand. It may seem to military commanders on the ground that, with more troops, they could hold more ground and send out more patrols. Throughout history, generals have believed they are a few thousand troops short of victory. But Afghans, who have long experience of war, think more foreign troops means greater violence, more dead and wounded Afghans. Support for the Taliban is highest in those areas where there have been US or Nato shelling or air strikes inflicting civilian casualties. In other words, the Taliban's best recruiting sergeants are the American and British armies.
The future good of Afghanistan is not the first reason why Britain has an army of 9,000 troops there, according to Gordon Brown. He said on Friday that they are there to protect people walking the streets of Britain: "Our children will learn of the heroism of today's men and women fighting in Afghanistan protecting our nation and the world from the threat of global terrorism." We are fighting there, he adds, so we are safe in our homes and guarded against the atrocities carried out by al-Qa'ida not only in London, but across the world.
The problem with this argument is that al-Qa'ida is based in Pakistan not Afghanistan. There is no particular reason why its leaders should return to Afghanistan since they have a measure of support in the Pakistani intelligence services and among fundamentalist jihadi organisations. If Britain has sent 9,000 troops abroad to fight al-Qa'ida, then they are in the wrong country. Mr Brown slyly tries to evade this point by claiming that "three-quarters of terrorists' plots originate in the Pakistan-Afghan border regions". His sudden geographic imprecision avoids having to admit that they originate in Pakistan and not in Afghanistan. The US military says there only 100 al-Qa'ida militants in the whole of Afghanistan.
In reality, the presence of a large British military force in Afghanistan is making Britain a more dangerous not safer place to live in. Interrogation of would-be suicide bombers captured before they could blow themselves up reveals that their prime motive since 9/11 has been opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In portraying Britain as being at war with al-Qa'ida, Mr Brown, like President Bush and Tony Blair, has walked into the trap laid by al-Qa'ida at the time of 9/11. Its aim was not only to show the US was vulnerable to armed attack, but to provoke retaliation against Muslim countries. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qa'ida's chief strategist, stated soon after 9/11 that the purpose of the provocation was to tempt the US into reprisals and open the way for "clear-cut jihad against the infidels".
In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US and Britain have faced similar dilemmas. These wars were started by President Bush, with Tony Blair trotting along behind, in the expectation that they would be short and cheap. The initial military assaults were wholly successful, but the American and British armies were then caught up in prolonged, bruising, guerrilla wars. By then, too much prestige was at stake and too much blood had been spilt for a withdrawal. The puniness of the armed insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, in each case probably a few tens of thousands of fighters, makes the humiliation of retreat all the greater.
The main reason for Britain's military commitment in Afghanistan was to maintain its position as America's principal ally in the world. As recently as 2006, this seemed a sensible strategy, but any engagement in Afghanistan, as a brief look at any history of the region will show, is always going to be dangerous. The Taliban had not really been defeated on the battlefield in 2001: its militants had gone back to their villages or taken refuge over the border in Pakistan. It took time for the Pakistan government, on which they were highly reliant, to decide that it was safe to unleash them once more because the US was too bogged down in Iraq to do much about it.
By this time also, the government of President Hamid Karzai, below left, had gone far to discredit itself. It is less of an administration than a racket. Its officials probably make more money out of opium and heroin than the Taliban. Some 12 million Afghans, 42 per cent of the population, live below the poverty line, trying to survive on 45 cents (just over 25p) a day. They are malnourished or starving, and feel little loyalty to a government in which ministers live in their "poppy palaces", built with the profits of the drugs trade, and foreign aid consultants earn $250,000 a year.
"Sadly, the government of Afghanistan has become a byword for corruption," said Mr Brown. "And I am not prepared to put the lives of British men and women in harm's way for a government that does not stand up against corruption." Taken at face value, this means Britain will withdraw its troops since it is a certainty in Afghanistan that a government so viscerally crooked is not going to reform. "Cronies and warlords should have no place in the future of Afghanistan," continued the Prime Minister, but Mr Karzai's election victory was attained by allying himself with the most blood-stained warlords in the country. Presumably, Mr Brown's pledge is no more than rhetoric.
The US and Britain have tumbled into a second war in Afghanistan that they weren't expecting. Justifying their own misjudgements, American and British leaders claim that Afghanistan is a war that has to be fought because it is the epicentre of the war against international terrorism. These threats are all grossly exaggerated. The Afghan Taliban comes from the Pashtun community, which is 42 per cent of the population. The majority of Afghans will always oppose them. Of course, present Afghan or Pakistani leaders have every interest in painting themselves to their foreign backers as the one alternative to the Taliban.
"The Pashtun insurgency," says Mr Hoh, "is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal an external enemies." Britain should not be part of that assault that will not succeed in crushing a regional Pashtun rebellion on behalf a non-Pashtun state. Once this is accepted, then the need for a large combat force in southern Afghanistan disappears. What ultimately happens in Afghanistan should be left to the Afghans.
© 2009 The Independent
by Patrick Cockburn
Britain should start withdrawing, not reinforcing, its troops in Afghanistan. Sending extra troops is unnecessary and will prove counter-effective. The additional number of British troops is small, but the US is poised to send tens of thousands more soldiers to the country. The nature of the conflict is changing. What should be a war in which the Afghan government fights the Taliban has become one which is being fought primarily by the American and British armies. To more and more Afghans, this looks like imperial occupation.
With regard to disputes in Washington and London about sending more troops, it is seldom mentioned that Afghans are against the deployment. Contrary to Western plans, just 18 per cent of Afghans want more US and Nato/Isaf forces in Afghanistan, according to an opinion poll carried out earlier this year by the BBC, ABC News and ARD of Germany. A much greater number of Afghans - 44 per cent - want a decrease in foreign forces.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Taliban have been able to win some support. The cruelty of their rule before 2001 is becoming a distant memory and they are successfully portraying themselves as the defender of the country against foreign occupation. Matthew P Hoh, the senior American civilian representative in Zabul Province east of Kandahar, resigned last week convinced that the US military should not be in Afghanistan. As a former US marine officer who served in Iraq, he says in his resignation letter that the US has joined in on one side in a 35-year-old civil war between the traditional Pashtun community and its enemies. "The US military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency," he says. "Our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people."
What is true for the Americans in Zabul is true for the British in Helmand. It may seem to military commanders on the ground that, with more troops, they could hold more ground and send out more patrols. Throughout history, generals have believed they are a few thousand troops short of victory. But Afghans, who have long experience of war, think more foreign troops means greater violence, more dead and wounded Afghans. Support for the Taliban is highest in those areas where there have been US or Nato shelling or air strikes inflicting civilian casualties. In other words, the Taliban's best recruiting sergeants are the American and British armies.
The future good of Afghanistan is not the first reason why Britain has an army of 9,000 troops there, according to Gordon Brown. He said on Friday that they are there to protect people walking the streets of Britain: "Our children will learn of the heroism of today's men and women fighting in Afghanistan protecting our nation and the world from the threat of global terrorism." We are fighting there, he adds, so we are safe in our homes and guarded against the atrocities carried out by al-Qa'ida not only in London, but across the world.
The problem with this argument is that al-Qa'ida is based in Pakistan not Afghanistan. There is no particular reason why its leaders should return to Afghanistan since they have a measure of support in the Pakistani intelligence services and among fundamentalist jihadi organisations. If Britain has sent 9,000 troops abroad to fight al-Qa'ida, then they are in the wrong country. Mr Brown slyly tries to evade this point by claiming that "three-quarters of terrorists' plots originate in the Pakistan-Afghan border regions". His sudden geographic imprecision avoids having to admit that they originate in Pakistan and not in Afghanistan. The US military says there only 100 al-Qa'ida militants in the whole of Afghanistan.
In reality, the presence of a large British military force in Afghanistan is making Britain a more dangerous not safer place to live in. Interrogation of would-be suicide bombers captured before they could blow themselves up reveals that their prime motive since 9/11 has been opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In portraying Britain as being at war with al-Qa'ida, Mr Brown, like President Bush and Tony Blair, has walked into the trap laid by al-Qa'ida at the time of 9/11. Its aim was not only to show the US was vulnerable to armed attack, but to provoke retaliation against Muslim countries. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qa'ida's chief strategist, stated soon after 9/11 that the purpose of the provocation was to tempt the US into reprisals and open the way for "clear-cut jihad against the infidels".
In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US and Britain have faced similar dilemmas. These wars were started by President Bush, with Tony Blair trotting along behind, in the expectation that they would be short and cheap. The initial military assaults were wholly successful, but the American and British armies were then caught up in prolonged, bruising, guerrilla wars. By then, too much prestige was at stake and too much blood had been spilt for a withdrawal. The puniness of the armed insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, in each case probably a few tens of thousands of fighters, makes the humiliation of retreat all the greater.
The main reason for Britain's military commitment in Afghanistan was to maintain its position as America's principal ally in the world. As recently as 2006, this seemed a sensible strategy, but any engagement in Afghanistan, as a brief look at any history of the region will show, is always going to be dangerous. The Taliban had not really been defeated on the battlefield in 2001: its militants had gone back to their villages or taken refuge over the border in Pakistan. It took time for the Pakistan government, on which they were highly reliant, to decide that it was safe to unleash them once more because the US was too bogged down in Iraq to do much about it.
By this time also, the government of President Hamid Karzai, below left, had gone far to discredit itself. It is less of an administration than a racket. Its officials probably make more money out of opium and heroin than the Taliban. Some 12 million Afghans, 42 per cent of the population, live below the poverty line, trying to survive on 45 cents (just over 25p) a day. They are malnourished or starving, and feel little loyalty to a government in which ministers live in their "poppy palaces", built with the profits of the drugs trade, and foreign aid consultants earn $250,000 a year.
"Sadly, the government of Afghanistan has become a byword for corruption," said Mr Brown. "And I am not prepared to put the lives of British men and women in harm's way for a government that does not stand up against corruption." Taken at face value, this means Britain will withdraw its troops since it is a certainty in Afghanistan that a government so viscerally crooked is not going to reform. "Cronies and warlords should have no place in the future of Afghanistan," continued the Prime Minister, but Mr Karzai's election victory was attained by allying himself with the most blood-stained warlords in the country. Presumably, Mr Brown's pledge is no more than rhetoric.
The US and Britain have tumbled into a second war in Afghanistan that they weren't expecting. Justifying their own misjudgements, American and British leaders claim that Afghanistan is a war that has to be fought because it is the epicentre of the war against international terrorism. These threats are all grossly exaggerated. The Afghan Taliban comes from the Pashtun community, which is 42 per cent of the population. The majority of Afghans will always oppose them. Of course, present Afghan or Pakistani leaders have every interest in painting themselves to their foreign backers as the one alternative to the Taliban.
"The Pashtun insurgency," says Mr Hoh, "is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal an external enemies." Britain should not be part of that assault that will not succeed in crushing a regional Pashtun rebellion on behalf a non-Pashtun state. Once this is accepted, then the need for a large combat force in southern Afghanistan disappears. What ultimately happens in Afghanistan should be left to the Afghans.
© 2009 The Independent
Saturday, November 7, 2009
The Evil Empire
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The US government is now so totally under the thumbs of organized interest groups that “our” government can no longer respond to the concerns of the American people who elect the president and the members of the House and Senate. Voters will vent their frustrations over their impotence on the president, which implies a future of one-term presidents. Soon our presidents will be as ineffective as Roman emperors in the final days of that empire.
Obama is already set on the course to a one-term presidency. He promised change, but has delivered none. His health care bill is held hostage by the private insurance companies seeking greater profits. The most likely outcome will be cuts in Medicare and Medicaid in order to help fund wars that enrich the military/security complex and the many companies created by privatizing services that the military once provided for itself at far lower costs. It would be interesting to know the percentage of the $700+ billion “defense” spending that goes to private companies. In American “capitalism,” an amazing amount of taxpayers’ earnings go to private firms via the government. Yet, Republicans scream about “socializing” health care.
Republicans and Democrats saw opportunities to create new sources of campaign contributions by privatizing as many military functions as possible. There are now a large number of private companies that have never made a dollar in the market, feeding instead at the public trough that drains taxpayers of dollars while loading Americans with debt service obligations.
Obama inherited an excellent opportunity to bring US soldiers home from the Bush regime’s illegal wars of aggression. In its final days, the Bush regime realized that it could “win” in Iraq by putting the Sunni insurgents on the US military payroll. Once Bush had 80,000 insurgents collecting US military pay, violence, although still high, dropped in half. All Obama had to do was to declare victory and bring our boys home, thanking Bush for winning the war. It would have shut up the Republicans.
But this sensible course would have impaired the profits and share prices of those firms that comprise the military/security complex. So instead of doing what Obama said he would do and what the voters elected him to do, Obama restarted the war in Afghanistan and launched a new one in Pakistan. Soon Obama was echoing Bush and Cheney’s threats to attack Iran.
In place of health care for Americans, there will be more profits for private insurance companies.
In place of peace there will be more war.
Voters are already recognizing the writing on the wall and are falling away from Obama and the Democrats. Independents who gave Obama his comfortable victory have now swung against him, recently electing Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia to succeed Democrats. This is a protest vote, not a confidence vote in Republicans.
Obama’s credibility is shot. And so is Congress’s, assuming it ever had any. The US House of Representatives has just voted to show the entire world that the US House of Representatives is nothing but the servile, venal, puppet of the Israel Lobby. The House of Representatives of the American “superpower” did the bidding of its master, AIPAC, and voted 344 to 36 to condemn the Goldstone Report.
In case you don’t know, the Goldstone Report is the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. The “Gaza Conflict” is the Israeli military attack on the Gaza ghetto, where 1.5 million dispossessed Palestinians, whose lands, villages, and homes were stolen by Israel, are housed. The attack was on civilians and civilian infrastructure. It was without any doubt a war crime under the Nuremberg standard that the US established in order to execute Nazis.
Goldstone is not only a very distinguished Jewish jurist who has given his life to bringing people to accountability for their crimes against humanity, but also a Zionist. However, the Israelis have demonized him as a “self-hating Jew” because he wrote the truth instead of Israeli propaganda.
US Representative Dennis Kucinich, who is now without a doubt a marked man on AIPAC’s political extermination list, asked the House if the members had any realization of the shame that the vote condemning Goldstone would bring on the House and the US government. The entire rest of the world accepts the Goldstone report.
The House answered with its lopsided vote that the rest of the world doesn’t count as it doesn’t give campaign contributions to members of Congress.
This shameful, servile act of “the world’s greatest democracy” occurred the very week that a court in Italy convicted 23 US CIA officers for kidnapping a person in Italy. The CIA agents are now considered “fugitives from justice” in Italy, and indeed they are.
The kidnapped person was renditioned to the American puppet state of Egypt, where the victim was held for years and repeatedly tortured. The case against him was so absurd that even an Egyptian judge ordered his release.
One of the convicted CIA operatives, Sabrina deSousa, an attractive young woman, says that the US broke the law by kidnapping a person and sending him to another country to be tortured in order to manufacture another “terrorist” in order to keep the terrorist hoax going at home. Without the terrorist hoax, America’s wars for special interest reasons would become transparent even to Fox “News” junkies.
Ms. deSousa says that “everything I did was approved back in Washington,” yet the government, which continually berates us to “support the troops,” did nothing to protect her when she carried out the Bush regime’s illegal orders.
Clearly, this means that the crime that Bush, Cheney, the Pentagon, and the CIA ordered is too heinous and beyond the pale to be justified, even by memos from the despicable John Yoo and the Republican Federalist Society.
Ms. deSousa is clearly worried about herself. But where is her concern for the innocent person that she sent into an Egyptian hell to be tortured until death or admission of being a terrorist? The remorse deSousa expresses is only for herself. She did her evil government’s bidding and her evil government that she so faithfully served turned its back on her. She has no remorse for the evil she committed against an innocent person.
Perhaps deSousa and her 22 colleagues grew up on video games. It was great fun to plot to kidnap a real person and fly him on a CIA plane to Egypt. Was it like a fisherman catching a fish or a deer hunter killing a beautiful 8-point buck? Clearly, they got their jollies at the expense of their renditioned victim.
The finding of the Italian court, and keep in mind that Italy is a bought-and-paid-for US puppet state, indicates that even our bought puppets are finding the US too much to stomach.
Moving from the tip of the iceberg down, we have Ambassador Craig Murray, rector of the University of Dundee and until 2004 the UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, which he describes as a Stalinist totalitarian state courted and supported by the Americans.
As ambassador, Murray saw the MI5 intelligence reports from the CIA that described the most horrible torture procedures. “People were raped with broken bottles, children were tortured in front of their parents until they [the parents] signed a confession, people were boiled alive.”
“Intelligence” from these torture sessions was passed on by the CIA to MI5 and to Washington as proof of the vast al Qaeda conspiracy.
Amb. Murray reports that the people delivered by CIA flights to Uzbekistan’s torture prisons “were told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they’d been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes.”
“I was absolutely stunned,” says the British ambassador, who thought that he served a moral country that, along with its American ally, had moral integrity. The great Anglo-American bastion of democracy and human rights, the homes of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the great moral democracies that defeated Nazism and stood up to Stalin’s gulags, were prepared to commit any crime in order to maximize profits.
Amb. Murray learned too much and was fired when he vomited it all up. He saw the documents that proved that the motivation for US and UK military aggression in Afghanistan had to do with the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Americans wanted a pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan. To insure this, an invasion was necessary. The idiot American public could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to save them from “terrorism,” and the utter fools would believe the lie.
“If you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, its about energy, it’s not about democracy.”
Guess who the consultant was who arranged with then Texas governor George W. Bush the agreements that would give to Enron the rights to Uzbekistan’s and Turkmenistan’s natural gas deposits and to Unocal to develop the trans-Afghanistan pipeline. It was Karzai, the US-imposed “president” of Afghanistan, who has no support in the country except for American bayonets.
Amb. Murray was dismissed from the UK Foreign Service for his revelations. No doubt on orders from Washington to our British puppet.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
The US government is now so totally under the thumbs of organized interest groups that “our” government can no longer respond to the concerns of the American people who elect the president and the members of the House and Senate. Voters will vent their frustrations over their impotence on the president, which implies a future of one-term presidents. Soon our presidents will be as ineffective as Roman emperors in the final days of that empire.
Obama is already set on the course to a one-term presidency. He promised change, but has delivered none. His health care bill is held hostage by the private insurance companies seeking greater profits. The most likely outcome will be cuts in Medicare and Medicaid in order to help fund wars that enrich the military/security complex and the many companies created by privatizing services that the military once provided for itself at far lower costs. It would be interesting to know the percentage of the $700+ billion “defense” spending that goes to private companies. In American “capitalism,” an amazing amount of taxpayers’ earnings go to private firms via the government. Yet, Republicans scream about “socializing” health care.
Republicans and Democrats saw opportunities to create new sources of campaign contributions by privatizing as many military functions as possible. There are now a large number of private companies that have never made a dollar in the market, feeding instead at the public trough that drains taxpayers of dollars while loading Americans with debt service obligations.
Obama inherited an excellent opportunity to bring US soldiers home from the Bush regime’s illegal wars of aggression. In its final days, the Bush regime realized that it could “win” in Iraq by putting the Sunni insurgents on the US military payroll. Once Bush had 80,000 insurgents collecting US military pay, violence, although still high, dropped in half. All Obama had to do was to declare victory and bring our boys home, thanking Bush for winning the war. It would have shut up the Republicans.
But this sensible course would have impaired the profits and share prices of those firms that comprise the military/security complex. So instead of doing what Obama said he would do and what the voters elected him to do, Obama restarted the war in Afghanistan and launched a new one in Pakistan. Soon Obama was echoing Bush and Cheney’s threats to attack Iran.
In place of health care for Americans, there will be more profits for private insurance companies.
In place of peace there will be more war.
Voters are already recognizing the writing on the wall and are falling away from Obama and the Democrats. Independents who gave Obama his comfortable victory have now swung against him, recently electing Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia to succeed Democrats. This is a protest vote, not a confidence vote in Republicans.
Obama’s credibility is shot. And so is Congress’s, assuming it ever had any. The US House of Representatives has just voted to show the entire world that the US House of Representatives is nothing but the servile, venal, puppet of the Israel Lobby. The House of Representatives of the American “superpower” did the bidding of its master, AIPAC, and voted 344 to 36 to condemn the Goldstone Report.
In case you don’t know, the Goldstone Report is the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. The “Gaza Conflict” is the Israeli military attack on the Gaza ghetto, where 1.5 million dispossessed Palestinians, whose lands, villages, and homes were stolen by Israel, are housed. The attack was on civilians and civilian infrastructure. It was without any doubt a war crime under the Nuremberg standard that the US established in order to execute Nazis.
Goldstone is not only a very distinguished Jewish jurist who has given his life to bringing people to accountability for their crimes against humanity, but also a Zionist. However, the Israelis have demonized him as a “self-hating Jew” because he wrote the truth instead of Israeli propaganda.
US Representative Dennis Kucinich, who is now without a doubt a marked man on AIPAC’s political extermination list, asked the House if the members had any realization of the shame that the vote condemning Goldstone would bring on the House and the US government. The entire rest of the world accepts the Goldstone report.
The House answered with its lopsided vote that the rest of the world doesn’t count as it doesn’t give campaign contributions to members of Congress.
This shameful, servile act of “the world’s greatest democracy” occurred the very week that a court in Italy convicted 23 US CIA officers for kidnapping a person in Italy. The CIA agents are now considered “fugitives from justice” in Italy, and indeed they are.
The kidnapped person was renditioned to the American puppet state of Egypt, where the victim was held for years and repeatedly tortured. The case against him was so absurd that even an Egyptian judge ordered his release.
One of the convicted CIA operatives, Sabrina deSousa, an attractive young woman, says that the US broke the law by kidnapping a person and sending him to another country to be tortured in order to manufacture another “terrorist” in order to keep the terrorist hoax going at home. Without the terrorist hoax, America’s wars for special interest reasons would become transparent even to Fox “News” junkies.
Ms. deSousa says that “everything I did was approved back in Washington,” yet the government, which continually berates us to “support the troops,” did nothing to protect her when she carried out the Bush regime’s illegal orders.
Clearly, this means that the crime that Bush, Cheney, the Pentagon, and the CIA ordered is too heinous and beyond the pale to be justified, even by memos from the despicable John Yoo and the Republican Federalist Society.
Ms. deSousa is clearly worried about herself. But where is her concern for the innocent person that she sent into an Egyptian hell to be tortured until death or admission of being a terrorist? The remorse deSousa expresses is only for herself. She did her evil government’s bidding and her evil government that she so faithfully served turned its back on her. She has no remorse for the evil she committed against an innocent person.
Perhaps deSousa and her 22 colleagues grew up on video games. It was great fun to plot to kidnap a real person and fly him on a CIA plane to Egypt. Was it like a fisherman catching a fish or a deer hunter killing a beautiful 8-point buck? Clearly, they got their jollies at the expense of their renditioned victim.
The finding of the Italian court, and keep in mind that Italy is a bought-and-paid-for US puppet state, indicates that even our bought puppets are finding the US too much to stomach.
Moving from the tip of the iceberg down, we have Ambassador Craig Murray, rector of the University of Dundee and until 2004 the UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, which he describes as a Stalinist totalitarian state courted and supported by the Americans.
As ambassador, Murray saw the MI5 intelligence reports from the CIA that described the most horrible torture procedures. “People were raped with broken bottles, children were tortured in front of their parents until they [the parents] signed a confession, people were boiled alive.”
“Intelligence” from these torture sessions was passed on by the CIA to MI5 and to Washington as proof of the vast al Qaeda conspiracy.
Amb. Murray reports that the people delivered by CIA flights to Uzbekistan’s torture prisons “were told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they’d been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes.”
“I was absolutely stunned,” says the British ambassador, who thought that he served a moral country that, along with its American ally, had moral integrity. The great Anglo-American bastion of democracy and human rights, the homes of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the great moral democracies that defeated Nazism and stood up to Stalin’s gulags, were prepared to commit any crime in order to maximize profits.
Amb. Murray learned too much and was fired when he vomited it all up. He saw the documents that proved that the motivation for US and UK military aggression in Afghanistan had to do with the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Americans wanted a pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan. To insure this, an invasion was necessary. The idiot American public could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to save them from “terrorism,” and the utter fools would believe the lie.
“If you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, its about energy, it’s not about democracy.”
Guess who the consultant was who arranged with then Texas governor George W. Bush the agreements that would give to Enron the rights to Uzbekistan’s and Turkmenistan’s natural gas deposits and to Unocal to develop the trans-Afghanistan pipeline. It was Karzai, the US-imposed “president” of Afghanistan, who has no support in the country except for American bayonets.
Amb. Murray was dismissed from the UK Foreign Service for his revelations. No doubt on orders from Washington to our British puppet.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Friday, November 6, 2009
Such a Waste of Fine Infantry
Posted By Jeff Huber On November 5, 2009
So this platoon comes back to an Afghan village it hasn’t visited in three months. One of the village elders tells the platoon commander, "We ask you not to come here. It is better for us, and better for you." As the platoon leaves the village, the Taliban attack it and a four-hour firefight ensues.
This compelling story, told by a Knight Ridder/Tribune correspondent, perfectly illustrates the futility of the foreign policy course we are pursuing, especially in Afghanistan.
The U.S built a clinic in the village to "demonstrate to Afghans that they have more to gain from the Americans than from the Taliban." Last spring the Taliban blew the clinic up.
The platoon commander takes off his helmet and sunglasses and explains to the village elders that the Taliban have been passing through their village on their way to attack U.S. outposts along the nearby Pech River. "Unless this is stopped, you have to understand that you’ll be getting regular visits from coalition forces," the platoon commander says.
The elders politely tell him to bug off.
The platoon splits into two squads and walks away from the village. The platoon’s Afghan translator asks the journalist if he has a mobile phone. "You should call your loved ones now to say that you care about them," the translator says. "I’m telling you, the walk home from here is not a joke."
The platoon walks about 500 yards out of the village with helicopters patrolling overhead when gunfire sizzles down from the mountainside. Four hours later the fight is over. The platoon thinks they and the helicopters maybe killed five Taliban. There’s no way of knowing how accurate this assessment is. The platoon, thankfully, merely suffers two sprained ankles.
What’s wrong with this picture? Everything.
If the platoon isn’t there, nothing bad happens. If we hadn’t built the clinic, the Taliban wouldn’t have blown it up. If we didn’t have outposts along the Pech River, the Taliban wouldn’t pass through the village to attack them.
Is it any wonder the village elders don’t want the Americans in their village? Is it any wonder Afghans don’t want us in their country?
Our interventionist foreign policy creates many problems and solves few of them. It certainly doesn’t make us more secure. For every Islamo-hooligan we kill or capture we create two or more new ones.
Our policies are strategically foolhardy. They’re tactically imbecilic as well.
A platoon — roughly two-dozen troops — of the best-trained, best-equipped military in history, supported by helicopter gunships, got hung up in a four-hour battle with dudes who probably live in caves. The Americans are running out of ammo. The American helicopters fly in more machine gun bullets and grenades. The Taliban don’t have any helicopters to do that for them, but they don’t run out of ammo. Nearby U.S. bases provide covering artillery fire. The Taliban don’t have any artillery.
"Gradually," the Knight Ridder correspondent says, "the Soldiers made it to safety. The firefight had lasted about four hours. The entire operation, from dawn until the return to base, went on for about seven hours."
This is sorry stuff. This platoon, backed by airpower, didn’t defeat a Taliban ambush. It escaped from it, barely.
What was the point of the platoon’s mission? It went into an Afghan village to act tough and got run out of town by a herd of goat ropers. That sums up our entire Afghanistan experience.
Don’t confuse this firefight with one of those deals where the bad guys are mixed in with the population and Gen. Stan McChrystal’s goofy rules of engagement require our guys to tie both hands behind their backs and box with their chins. This was a straight up fight between our guys and an inferior force, and our guys were lucky to get out of it with mere joint sprains.
It was a case of a tactical situation reflecting the bathos of the strategic mindset. High command sends 20-something-year-old lieutenant and his platoon of teenagers into a village to tell a bunch of old Afghans we’re not happy that the Taliban are passing through their village to attack us.
The platoon leaves town the way it came, through a riverbed surrounded by high ground. The bad guys, who saw them come in, know exactly how to whack them coming out.
Stanley McChrystal wants to put 40,000 or more Americans in this exact same position. As George Patton would say, "Such a waste of fine infantry."
This is a sad patch in American history. We need to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon and its rabid Long War followers don’t want that to happen, and I’m losing faith in President Obama’s ability to stand up to them.
From what one reads, Obama is likely to let his generals put more good infantry into bad terrain on a pointless mission.
Alas.
So this platoon comes back to an Afghan village it hasn’t visited in three months. One of the village elders tells the platoon commander, "We ask you not to come here. It is better for us, and better for you." As the platoon leaves the village, the Taliban attack it and a four-hour firefight ensues.
This compelling story, told by a Knight Ridder/Tribune correspondent, perfectly illustrates the futility of the foreign policy course we are pursuing, especially in Afghanistan.
The U.S built a clinic in the village to "demonstrate to Afghans that they have more to gain from the Americans than from the Taliban." Last spring the Taliban blew the clinic up.
The platoon commander takes off his helmet and sunglasses and explains to the village elders that the Taliban have been passing through their village on their way to attack U.S. outposts along the nearby Pech River. "Unless this is stopped, you have to understand that you’ll be getting regular visits from coalition forces," the platoon commander says.
The elders politely tell him to bug off.
The platoon splits into two squads and walks away from the village. The platoon’s Afghan translator asks the journalist if he has a mobile phone. "You should call your loved ones now to say that you care about them," the translator says. "I’m telling you, the walk home from here is not a joke."
The platoon walks about 500 yards out of the village with helicopters patrolling overhead when gunfire sizzles down from the mountainside. Four hours later the fight is over. The platoon thinks they and the helicopters maybe killed five Taliban. There’s no way of knowing how accurate this assessment is. The platoon, thankfully, merely suffers two sprained ankles.
What’s wrong with this picture? Everything.
If the platoon isn’t there, nothing bad happens. If we hadn’t built the clinic, the Taliban wouldn’t have blown it up. If we didn’t have outposts along the Pech River, the Taliban wouldn’t pass through the village to attack them.
Is it any wonder the village elders don’t want the Americans in their village? Is it any wonder Afghans don’t want us in their country?
Our interventionist foreign policy creates many problems and solves few of them. It certainly doesn’t make us more secure. For every Islamo-hooligan we kill or capture we create two or more new ones.
Our policies are strategically foolhardy. They’re tactically imbecilic as well.
A platoon — roughly two-dozen troops — of the best-trained, best-equipped military in history, supported by helicopter gunships, got hung up in a four-hour battle with dudes who probably live in caves. The Americans are running out of ammo. The American helicopters fly in more machine gun bullets and grenades. The Taliban don’t have any helicopters to do that for them, but they don’t run out of ammo. Nearby U.S. bases provide covering artillery fire. The Taliban don’t have any artillery.
"Gradually," the Knight Ridder correspondent says, "the Soldiers made it to safety. The firefight had lasted about four hours. The entire operation, from dawn until the return to base, went on for about seven hours."
This is sorry stuff. This platoon, backed by airpower, didn’t defeat a Taliban ambush. It escaped from it, barely.
What was the point of the platoon’s mission? It went into an Afghan village to act tough and got run out of town by a herd of goat ropers. That sums up our entire Afghanistan experience.
Don’t confuse this firefight with one of those deals where the bad guys are mixed in with the population and Gen. Stan McChrystal’s goofy rules of engagement require our guys to tie both hands behind their backs and box with their chins. This was a straight up fight between our guys and an inferior force, and our guys were lucky to get out of it with mere joint sprains.
It was a case of a tactical situation reflecting the bathos of the strategic mindset. High command sends 20-something-year-old lieutenant and his platoon of teenagers into a village to tell a bunch of old Afghans we’re not happy that the Taliban are passing through their village to attack us.
The platoon leaves town the way it came, through a riverbed surrounded by high ground. The bad guys, who saw them come in, know exactly how to whack them coming out.
Stanley McChrystal wants to put 40,000 or more Americans in this exact same position. As George Patton would say, "Such a waste of fine infantry."
This is a sad patch in American history. We need to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon and its rabid Long War followers don’t want that to happen, and I’m losing faith in President Obama’s ability to stand up to them.
From what one reads, Obama is likely to let his generals put more good infantry into bad terrain on a pointless mission.
Alas.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Scott Ritter on Afghanistan: Don’t Believe the Hype
Is the war in Afghanistan worth the sacrifice of even one American life? Former U.N. weapons inspector and U.S. Marine, Scott Ritter says, “No! And to date no one has articulated anything that remotely resembles a cause worthy of the death of even one American—let alone the hundreds who have already lost their lives.”
“There is no sense of urgency [to go to war in Afghanistan] other than the political element,” he said to us. “Sure there’s urgency if you’re an American politician who has invested political capital into the notion of the urgency of bringing stability to Afghanistan. ... We are allowing the battle in Afghanistan to be defined by a domestic American political imperative. There is no urgency in Afghanistan, there is urgency in Washington, D.C.” Ritter said.
“There is no sense of urgency [to go to war in Afghanistan] other than the political element,” he said to us. “Sure there’s urgency if you’re an American politician who has invested political capital into the notion of the urgency of bringing stability to Afghanistan. ... We are allowing the battle in Afghanistan to be defined by a domestic American political imperative. There is no urgency in Afghanistan, there is urgency in Washington, D.C.” Ritter said.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
23 CIA agents convicted of kidnapping, torture trial in Italy
They acted under orders from Bush and Cheney. Today, however, an Italian court convicted 23 American involved in the CIA's kidnap and rendition/torture program.
Around the world, and right here in the United States, outraged people are demanding that the architects of the criminal enterprise – Bush and Cheney – be brought to justice.
Twenty-two of the convicted Americans were immediately sentenced to five years in jail.
The other convicted American, Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady, was given the harshest sentence: eight years in prison. "I am not guilty. I am only responsible for following an order I received from my superiors," Lady was quoted as saying by the newspaper Il Giornale.
As the Associated Press writes, "The trial is the first by any government to scrutinize the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, which human rights advocates charge was the CIA's way to outsource the torture of prisoners to countries where it is practiced." The defendants were tried in abstentia and are considered fugitives.
This is a crucial step on the road to justice. But it must go to those at the top, to the architects of these criminal acts.
It is noteworthy that the defense offered by the attorneys of the convicted was that they were following the orders of the Bush/Cheney White House.
From Italy to Spain and Germany, court proceedings have taken place or are underway against Bush-era crimes.
'We The People' must let the world know that the American people too will not tolerate torture, secret prisons, kidnappings, assassinations and wars of aggression. Unless Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are held accountable before the law it will send a message to the world that future U.S. officials can repeat these dastardly acts with impunity.
Around the world, and right here in the United States, outraged people are demanding that the architects of the criminal enterprise – Bush and Cheney – be brought to justice.
Twenty-two of the convicted Americans were immediately sentenced to five years in jail.
The other convicted American, Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady, was given the harshest sentence: eight years in prison. "I am not guilty. I am only responsible for following an order I received from my superiors," Lady was quoted as saying by the newspaper Il Giornale.
As the Associated Press writes, "The trial is the first by any government to scrutinize the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, which human rights advocates charge was the CIA's way to outsource the torture of prisoners to countries where it is practiced." The defendants were tried in abstentia and are considered fugitives.
This is a crucial step on the road to justice. But it must go to those at the top, to the architects of these criminal acts.
It is noteworthy that the defense offered by the attorneys of the convicted was that they were following the orders of the Bush/Cheney White House.
From Italy to Spain and Germany, court proceedings have taken place or are underway against Bush-era crimes.
'We The People' must let the world know that the American people too will not tolerate torture, secret prisons, kidnappings, assassinations and wars of aggression. Unless Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are held accountable before the law it will send a message to the world that future U.S. officials can repeat these dastardly acts with impunity.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Let's Call for an Immediate End to the U.S. Occupation
Those who make the case that withdrawing U.S. troops will unleash another bloody civil war where Afghan women and men will be at the mercy of the Taliban and warlords, are raising the exact same justification made for the war in 2001: that it's our moral duty to protect Afghans from fundamentalist violence. This logic ignores the fact that we have nurtured and created the very fundamentalist violence that targets Afghans as explained above. By empowering war criminals and protecting a corrupt government that has forgiven the crimes of all sides including the Taliban, and that even includes some Taliban leaders, all we have done is complicate a war that was on-going. "A member of RAWA who goes by the pseudonym Zoya in a U.S. speaking tour last month made it clear that it's hard to imagine things getting worse if the U.S. does pull out immediately. The damage isn't being prevented by the United States - it's being carried out by the United States.
Instead of subjecting Afghans to the three oppressive forces of a stronger Taliban, a corrupt and criminal government, and a deadly foreign occupation, the first thing we Americans can control most directly is to end our occupation immediately. This alone won't address the Taliban and Northern Alliance. But it will reduce the oppressive forces at work, and potentially reduce the legitimacy of the warlords and the motives driving the Taliban.
How do we undo the damage we have subjected innocent Afghans to? Afghans themselves have the answers to that. Surveys have shown that a majority of Afghans want a complete disarmament of our warlord allies - essentially that the U.S. needs to take back the guns we put into the hands of the Northern Alliance and their private militias. Surveys have also shown that Afghans want war crimes tribunals to hold all the corrupt and criminal fundamentalists accountable in some sort of court, perhaps even the International Criminal Court (U.S. government officials shouldn't be exempt from this type of accountability either). With weapons, warlords, and U.S. troops gone, real democracy could potentially take root and pro-democracy forces could someday operate freely. Many have also called for a massive Marshall Plan for poverty-stricken Afghanistan, to flood the country with money in the hands of small groups, organizations, and civil society, and eventually to help rebuild the country with a strong, non-drug-based economy. With all the money freed up from military operations that would be fairly feasible.
As for the Taliban, even the U.S. government publicly admits that the Pakistani government's own agencies have long supported the renegade army as a tool for national and regional stability. With the U.S. troops gone, the Taliban's raison d'être inside Afghanistan would be greatly weakened. If the United States were to take the lead in regional talks between Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia, and China to address the Pakistani government's fears of a hostile regime in Afghanistan, it would go a very long way toward undermining the Taliban.
These measures are necessary but may not guarantee stability for Afghanistan. Still the current occupation only guarantees instability, so at the very least the time for a non-military solution is now. In other words, we can choose to repeat a failed experiment with predictably negative results by extending the war in any number of ways. Or we can implement the complex, constructive measures that could potentially help stabilize Afghanistan, undermine the fundamentalist misogynist criminals, help the Afghan people take back their country, and undermine the conditions for violence.
These are complex demands to make of the Obama administration. But it has taken a complex set of destructive American policies and many years to destroy Afghanistan. It will take a similar amount of time and complexity, as well as trial and error, to help rebuild Afghanistan for ordinary Afghans, and by extension make Americans safer. We can make these demands as secondary points in our call for an end to the war. But the primary demand easily fits on a protest placard: "End the U.S. War in Afghanistan NOW." Let's make that call loudly, clearly, and ubiquitously, as soon as possible, so that Obama and Congress can't ignore us any longer.
Instead of subjecting Afghans to the three oppressive forces of a stronger Taliban, a corrupt and criminal government, and a deadly foreign occupation, the first thing we Americans can control most directly is to end our occupation immediately. This alone won't address the Taliban and Northern Alliance. But it will reduce the oppressive forces at work, and potentially reduce the legitimacy of the warlords and the motives driving the Taliban.
How do we undo the damage we have subjected innocent Afghans to? Afghans themselves have the answers to that. Surveys have shown that a majority of Afghans want a complete disarmament of our warlord allies - essentially that the U.S. needs to take back the guns we put into the hands of the Northern Alliance and their private militias. Surveys have also shown that Afghans want war crimes tribunals to hold all the corrupt and criminal fundamentalists accountable in some sort of court, perhaps even the International Criminal Court (U.S. government officials shouldn't be exempt from this type of accountability either). With weapons, warlords, and U.S. troops gone, real democracy could potentially take root and pro-democracy forces could someday operate freely. Many have also called for a massive Marshall Plan for poverty-stricken Afghanistan, to flood the country with money in the hands of small groups, organizations, and civil society, and eventually to help rebuild the country with a strong, non-drug-based economy. With all the money freed up from military operations that would be fairly feasible.
As for the Taliban, even the U.S. government publicly admits that the Pakistani government's own agencies have long supported the renegade army as a tool for national and regional stability. With the U.S. troops gone, the Taliban's raison d'être inside Afghanistan would be greatly weakened. If the United States were to take the lead in regional talks between Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia, and China to address the Pakistani government's fears of a hostile regime in Afghanistan, it would go a very long way toward undermining the Taliban.
These measures are necessary but may not guarantee stability for Afghanistan. Still the current occupation only guarantees instability, so at the very least the time for a non-military solution is now. In other words, we can choose to repeat a failed experiment with predictably negative results by extending the war in any number of ways. Or we can implement the complex, constructive measures that could potentially help stabilize Afghanistan, undermine the fundamentalist misogynist criminals, help the Afghan people take back their country, and undermine the conditions for violence.
These are complex demands to make of the Obama administration. But it has taken a complex set of destructive American policies and many years to destroy Afghanistan. It will take a similar amount of time and complexity, as well as trial and error, to help rebuild Afghanistan for ordinary Afghans, and by extension make Americans safer. We can make these demands as secondary points in our call for an end to the war. But the primary demand easily fits on a protest placard: "End the U.S. War in Afghanistan NOW." Let's make that call loudly, clearly, and ubiquitously, as soon as possible, so that Obama and Congress can't ignore us any longer.
Friday, October 30, 2009
McChrystal Doesn’t Get It—Does Obama?
by Scott Ritter
There is a curious phenomenon taking place in the American media at the moment: the lionization of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the American military commander in Afghanistan. Although he has taken a few lumps for playing politics with the White House, McChrystal has generally been sold to the American public as a “Zen warrior,” a counterinsurgency genius who, if simply left to his own devices, will be able to radically transform the ongoing debacle that is Afghanistan into a noble victory that will rank as one of the greatest political and military triumphs of modern history. McChrystal’s resume and persona (a former commander of America’s special operations forces, a tireless athlete and a scholar) have been breathlessly celebrated in several interviews and articles. Reporters depict him as an ascetic soldier who spouts words of wisdom to rival Confucius, Jesus and Muhammad.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Gen. McChrystal to “fix” the war in Afghanistan in the way that his boss, that earlier military prophet Gen. David Petraeus, “fixed” Iraq. Whether by accident or design, McChrystal’s mission became a cause célèbre of sorts for an American media starved for good news, even if entirely fabricated, coming out of Afghanistan. One must remember that the general has accomplished little of note during his short tenure to date as the military commander in Afghanistan. His entire reputation is built around the potential to turn things around in Afghanistan. And to do this, McChrystal has said he needs time, and 40,000-plus additional American troops. There are currently around 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s request would raise that number to around 110,000 troops – the same number as the Soviets had deployed in Afghanistan at the height of their failed military adventure some 20 years ago.
McChrystal, or more accurately, his staff, has authored a not-so-secret report that outlines the reasoning behind this massive increase in American military involvement in Afghanistan. Rightly noting that the American-led effort is currently failing, McChrystal argues that only a massive infusion of U.S. troops, and a corresponding “surge” of American civilians, can achieve the stability necessary to transform Afghanistan from the failed state it is today. A viable nation capable of self-government, the new Afghanistan could maintain internal security so that terrorist organizations like al-Qaida will not be able to take root, flourish and once again threaten American security from the sanctuary of a lawless land. This concept certainly looks good on paper and plays well in the editorial section. And why shouldn’t it? It touches on all the romantic notions of America as liberator and defender of the oppressed. The problem is that the assumptions made in the McChrystal report are so far removed from reality as to be ludicrous.
McChrystal operates under the illusion that American military power can provide a shield from behind which Afghanistan can remake itself into a viable modern society. He has deluded himself and others into believing that the people of Afghanistan want to be part of such a grand social experiment, and furthermore that they will tolerate the United States being in charge. The reality of Afghan history, culture and society argue otherwise. The Taliban, once a defeated entity in the months following the initial American military incursion into Afghanistan, are resurgent and growing stronger every day. The principle source of the Taliban’s popularity is the resentment of the Afghan people toward the American occupation and the corrupt proxy government of Hamid Karzai. There is nothing an additional 40,000 American troops will be able to do to change that basic equation. The Soviets tried and failed. They deployed 110,000 troops, operating on less restrictive lines of communication and logistical supply than the United States. They built an Afghan army of some 45,000 troops. They operated without the constraints of American rules of engagement. They slaughtered around a million Afghans. And they lost, for the simple reason that the people of Afghanistan did not want them, or their Afghan proxies.
Some pundits and observers make note of the fact that the Afghan people were able to prevail over the Soviets only because of billions of dollars of U.S. aid, which together with similar funding from Saudi Arabia and the logistical support of Pakistan, allowed the Afghan resistance to coalesce, grow and ultimately defeat the Soviets and their Afghan allies. They note that there is no equivalent source of empowerment for the Taliban in Afghanistan today. But they are wrong. The Taliban receive millions of dollars from sympathetic sources in the Middle East, in particular from Saudi Arabia, and they operate not only from within Afghanistan, but also out of safe havens inside Pakistan.
Indeed, one of the unique aspects of the Afghan conflict is the degree to which it has expanded into Pakistan, making any military solution in one theater contingent on military victory in the other. But the reality is that the more one employs military force in either Afghanistan or Pakistan, the more one strengthens the cause and resources of the Islamic insurgents in both places. Pashtunistan, once a fanciful notion built around the concept of a united Pashtun people (the population in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan are primarily drawn from Pashtun tribes), has become a de facto reality. The decision by the British in 1897 to separate the Pashtun through the artificial device of the so-called Durand Line (which today constitutes the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan) has been exposed today as a futile effort to undermine tribal links. No amount of military force can reverse this.
Thus the solution itself becomes the problem, thereby creating a never-ending circular conflict which has the United States expending more and more resources to resolve a situation that has nothing to do with the reality on the ground in Afghanistan, and everything to do with crafting a politically viable salve for what is in essence a massive self-inflicted wound. It is the proverbial dog chasing after its own tail, a frustrating experience made even more so by the fact that any massive commitment of troops brings with it the fatal attachment of national pride, individual hubris and, worst of all, the scourge of domestic American politics, so that by the time this dog bites its tail, it will be so blinded by artificialities that rather than recognize its mistake, it will instead proceed to consume itself. In the case of Afghanistan, our consumption will be measured in the lives of American servicemen and women, national treasure, national honor, and, of course the lives of countless Afghan dead and wounded.
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991 and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of numerous books, including "Iraq Confidential" (Nation Books, 2005) , "Target Iran" (Nation Books, 2006) and his latest, "Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement" (Nation Books, April 2007).
There is a curious phenomenon taking place in the American media at the moment: the lionization of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the American military commander in Afghanistan. Although he has taken a few lumps for playing politics with the White House, McChrystal has generally been sold to the American public as a “Zen warrior,” a counterinsurgency genius who, if simply left to his own devices, will be able to radically transform the ongoing debacle that is Afghanistan into a noble victory that will rank as one of the greatest political and military triumphs of modern history. McChrystal’s resume and persona (a former commander of America’s special operations forces, a tireless athlete and a scholar) have been breathlessly celebrated in several interviews and articles. Reporters depict him as an ascetic soldier who spouts words of wisdom to rival Confucius, Jesus and Muhammad.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Gen. McChrystal to “fix” the war in Afghanistan in the way that his boss, that earlier military prophet Gen. David Petraeus, “fixed” Iraq. Whether by accident or design, McChrystal’s mission became a cause célèbre of sorts for an American media starved for good news, even if entirely fabricated, coming out of Afghanistan. One must remember that the general has accomplished little of note during his short tenure to date as the military commander in Afghanistan. His entire reputation is built around the potential to turn things around in Afghanistan. And to do this, McChrystal has said he needs time, and 40,000-plus additional American troops. There are currently around 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s request would raise that number to around 110,000 troops – the same number as the Soviets had deployed in Afghanistan at the height of their failed military adventure some 20 years ago.
McChrystal, or more accurately, his staff, has authored a not-so-secret report that outlines the reasoning behind this massive increase in American military involvement in Afghanistan. Rightly noting that the American-led effort is currently failing, McChrystal argues that only a massive infusion of U.S. troops, and a corresponding “surge” of American civilians, can achieve the stability necessary to transform Afghanistan from the failed state it is today. A viable nation capable of self-government, the new Afghanistan could maintain internal security so that terrorist organizations like al-Qaida will not be able to take root, flourish and once again threaten American security from the sanctuary of a lawless land. This concept certainly looks good on paper and plays well in the editorial section. And why shouldn’t it? It touches on all the romantic notions of America as liberator and defender of the oppressed. The problem is that the assumptions made in the McChrystal report are so far removed from reality as to be ludicrous.
McChrystal operates under the illusion that American military power can provide a shield from behind which Afghanistan can remake itself into a viable modern society. He has deluded himself and others into believing that the people of Afghanistan want to be part of such a grand social experiment, and furthermore that they will tolerate the United States being in charge. The reality of Afghan history, culture and society argue otherwise. The Taliban, once a defeated entity in the months following the initial American military incursion into Afghanistan, are resurgent and growing stronger every day. The principle source of the Taliban’s popularity is the resentment of the Afghan people toward the American occupation and the corrupt proxy government of Hamid Karzai. There is nothing an additional 40,000 American troops will be able to do to change that basic equation. The Soviets tried and failed. They deployed 110,000 troops, operating on less restrictive lines of communication and logistical supply than the United States. They built an Afghan army of some 45,000 troops. They operated without the constraints of American rules of engagement. They slaughtered around a million Afghans. And they lost, for the simple reason that the people of Afghanistan did not want them, or their Afghan proxies.
Some pundits and observers make note of the fact that the Afghan people were able to prevail over the Soviets only because of billions of dollars of U.S. aid, which together with similar funding from Saudi Arabia and the logistical support of Pakistan, allowed the Afghan resistance to coalesce, grow and ultimately defeat the Soviets and their Afghan allies. They note that there is no equivalent source of empowerment for the Taliban in Afghanistan today. But they are wrong. The Taliban receive millions of dollars from sympathetic sources in the Middle East, in particular from Saudi Arabia, and they operate not only from within Afghanistan, but also out of safe havens inside Pakistan.
Indeed, one of the unique aspects of the Afghan conflict is the degree to which it has expanded into Pakistan, making any military solution in one theater contingent on military victory in the other. But the reality is that the more one employs military force in either Afghanistan or Pakistan, the more one strengthens the cause and resources of the Islamic insurgents in both places. Pashtunistan, once a fanciful notion built around the concept of a united Pashtun people (the population in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan are primarily drawn from Pashtun tribes), has become a de facto reality. The decision by the British in 1897 to separate the Pashtun through the artificial device of the so-called Durand Line (which today constitutes the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan) has been exposed today as a futile effort to undermine tribal links. No amount of military force can reverse this.
Thus the solution itself becomes the problem, thereby creating a never-ending circular conflict which has the United States expending more and more resources to resolve a situation that has nothing to do with the reality on the ground in Afghanistan, and everything to do with crafting a politically viable salve for what is in essence a massive self-inflicted wound. It is the proverbial dog chasing after its own tail, a frustrating experience made even more so by the fact that any massive commitment of troops brings with it the fatal attachment of national pride, individual hubris and, worst of all, the scourge of domestic American politics, so that by the time this dog bites its tail, it will be so blinded by artificialities that rather than recognize its mistake, it will instead proceed to consume itself. In the case of Afghanistan, our consumption will be measured in the lives of American servicemen and women, national treasure, national honor, and, of course the lives of countless Afghan dead and wounded.
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991 and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of numerous books, including "Iraq Confidential" (Nation Books, 2005) , "Target Iran" (Nation Books, 2006) and his latest, "Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement" (Nation Books, April 2007).
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Afghanistan Isn’t Worth One More American Life
by Joe Galloway
The debate over our creeping military mission in distant Afghanistan grows ever hotter, and before we march even deeper into trouble, perhaps it’s time to dig out the old Powell Doctrine and answer the eight questions it poses.
Gen. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said these questions all must be answered with a loud YES before the United States takes military action. He listed his questions in the 1990 run-up to the Persian Gulf War, drawing heavily on the Weinberger Doctrine that was laid down by former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger during the debate over America’s ends and means in Lebanon.
1. Is a vital national security interest threatened? 2. Do we have a clear, attainable objective? 3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed? 4. Have all non-violent policy means been exhausted? 5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement? 6. Have all the consequences of our action been fully considered? 7. Is the action supported by the American people? 8. Do we have broad international support?
Those questions weren’t asked and answered before we invaded Afghanistan late in 2001, and by the time we invaded Iraq early in 2003, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was declaring the Powell Doctrine "outmoded" as he ran premature victory laps around a fleeting success in Afghanistan.
The Bush administration is gone, but both Iraq and Afghanistan are still with us, and now a new president is overseeing a slow-motion U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and a slow-motion U.S. escalation in Afghanistan.
It can fairly be argued that not a single affirmative answer can be given to Gen. Powell’s eight questions with regard to the actions now planned or under way in Afghanistan. Had those questions been asked about Iraq in early 2003, not a single affirmative answer could have been given.
There was, in the beginning in Afghanistan, a vital national security interest in toppling the Taliban government and killing or capturing the Taliban’s murderous guests, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorists. We toppled the Taliban, but we let al-Qaida flee over the rugged, mountainous border into Pakistan.
Even before that, we began to let Afghanistan fester, starved of U.S. manpower and money, and turned our attention to Iraq, where Rumsfeld had estimated that victory would be ours and our troops would be home in six months or so.
We no longer have a vital national security interest or a clearly attainable goal in Afghanistan. Our stated goal is to deny any future sanctuary to al-Qaida in Afghanistan — but al-Qaida isn’t based in Afghanistan and hasn’t been for years.
We’ve changed presidents, changed commanding generals and ambassadors, changed our tactics and changed the numbers of American boots on the ground in a buildup that’s expected to reach a total of more than 70,000 U.S. troops by the end of this year.
The new U.S. military commander in Kabul, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, wants more U.S. troops — somewhere between 14,000 and 45,000 more, at least for now — to fight the newly resurgent Taliban guerrillas who control well over half the country, but he’s been told that he shouldn’t ask for them anytime soon.
With the country in recession, the budget deficit spinning into the trillions of dollars, American casualty rates in Afghanistan at record highs and public approval of the president and the war in Afghanistan falling like rocks, the White House desperately wants some breathing room.
That’s politics, folks, and it runs counter to an important corollary to the Powell Doctrine: If you’re determined to fight a war, choose a commander whom you trust and a strategy that you back, and then give your military leaders all the resources they say they need to achieve your objective.
If you can’t do that, if your objective isn’t clear, if the American people and the international community aren’t with you, then order a withdrawal and explain why.
For God’s sake, don’t ratchet up slowly, buying time with the bodies of dead and wounded American soldiers, while you try to sell the wrong war in the wrong place against the wrong enemy to the American people.
For eight years, we’ve heard presidents and other politicians talk about setting conditions for a democratic central government in a country — really a bunch of tribes and clans — that’s never had such a thing in 2,000 years and seemingly doesn’t want one now.
The national treasure we’ve invested in that effort has propped up an ineffective and corrupt Kabul regime. Its only economic success has been the restoration of the opium trade. Afghanistan is now the world’s leading producer of opium and heroin, whereas under the Taliban government that was a death penalty offense.
It’s time to make a decision, Mr. President, and I hope that for our sake and yours, you make the right one. Afghanistan isn’t worth the life of one more American soldier, much less the hundreds and thousands that an open-ended commitment to a war that we cannot win would cost.
(C) 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
The debate over our creeping military mission in distant Afghanistan grows ever hotter, and before we march even deeper into trouble, perhaps it’s time to dig out the old Powell Doctrine and answer the eight questions it poses.
Gen. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said these questions all must be answered with a loud YES before the United States takes military action. He listed his questions in the 1990 run-up to the Persian Gulf War, drawing heavily on the Weinberger Doctrine that was laid down by former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger during the debate over America’s ends and means in Lebanon.
1. Is a vital national security interest threatened? 2. Do we have a clear, attainable objective? 3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed? 4. Have all non-violent policy means been exhausted? 5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement? 6. Have all the consequences of our action been fully considered? 7. Is the action supported by the American people? 8. Do we have broad international support?
Those questions weren’t asked and answered before we invaded Afghanistan late in 2001, and by the time we invaded Iraq early in 2003, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was declaring the Powell Doctrine "outmoded" as he ran premature victory laps around a fleeting success in Afghanistan.
The Bush administration is gone, but both Iraq and Afghanistan are still with us, and now a new president is overseeing a slow-motion U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and a slow-motion U.S. escalation in Afghanistan.
It can fairly be argued that not a single affirmative answer can be given to Gen. Powell’s eight questions with regard to the actions now planned or under way in Afghanistan. Had those questions been asked about Iraq in early 2003, not a single affirmative answer could have been given.
There was, in the beginning in Afghanistan, a vital national security interest in toppling the Taliban government and killing or capturing the Taliban’s murderous guests, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorists. We toppled the Taliban, but we let al-Qaida flee over the rugged, mountainous border into Pakistan.
Even before that, we began to let Afghanistan fester, starved of U.S. manpower and money, and turned our attention to Iraq, where Rumsfeld had estimated that victory would be ours and our troops would be home in six months or so.
We no longer have a vital national security interest or a clearly attainable goal in Afghanistan. Our stated goal is to deny any future sanctuary to al-Qaida in Afghanistan — but al-Qaida isn’t based in Afghanistan and hasn’t been for years.
We’ve changed presidents, changed commanding generals and ambassadors, changed our tactics and changed the numbers of American boots on the ground in a buildup that’s expected to reach a total of more than 70,000 U.S. troops by the end of this year.
The new U.S. military commander in Kabul, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, wants more U.S. troops — somewhere between 14,000 and 45,000 more, at least for now — to fight the newly resurgent Taliban guerrillas who control well over half the country, but he’s been told that he shouldn’t ask for them anytime soon.
With the country in recession, the budget deficit spinning into the trillions of dollars, American casualty rates in Afghanistan at record highs and public approval of the president and the war in Afghanistan falling like rocks, the White House desperately wants some breathing room.
That’s politics, folks, and it runs counter to an important corollary to the Powell Doctrine: If you’re determined to fight a war, choose a commander whom you trust and a strategy that you back, and then give your military leaders all the resources they say they need to achieve your objective.
If you can’t do that, if your objective isn’t clear, if the American people and the international community aren’t with you, then order a withdrawal and explain why.
For God’s sake, don’t ratchet up slowly, buying time with the bodies of dead and wounded American soldiers, while you try to sell the wrong war in the wrong place against the wrong enemy to the American people.
For eight years, we’ve heard presidents and other politicians talk about setting conditions for a democratic central government in a country — really a bunch of tribes and clans — that’s never had such a thing in 2,000 years and seemingly doesn’t want one now.
The national treasure we’ve invested in that effort has propped up an ineffective and corrupt Kabul regime. Its only economic success has been the restoration of the opium trade. Afghanistan is now the world’s leading producer of opium and heroin, whereas under the Taliban government that was a death penalty offense.
It’s time to make a decision, Mr. President, and I hope that for our sake and yours, you make the right one. Afghanistan isn’t worth the life of one more American soldier, much less the hundreds and thousands that an open-ended commitment to a war that we cannot win would cost.
(C) 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Obama's Empire: An Unprecedented Network of Military Bases That is Still Expanding
The 44th president of the United States was elected amid hopes that he would roll back his country’s global dominance. Today, he is commander-in-chief of an unprecedented network of military bases that is still expanding.
by Catherine Lutz
In December 2008, shortly before being sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama pledged his belief that, "to ensure prosperity here at home and peace abroad", it was vital to maintain "the strongest military on the planet". Unveiling his national security team, including George Bush's defence secretary, Robert Gates, he said: "We also agree the strength of our military has to be combined with the wisdom and force of diplomacy, and that we are going to be committed to rebuilding and restrengthening alliances around the world to advance American interests and American security."
Unfortunately, many of the Obama administration's diplomatic efforts are being directed towards maintaining and garnering new access for the US military across the globe. US military officials, through their Korean proxies, have completed the eviction of resistant rice farmers from their land around Camp Humphreys, South Korea, for its expansion (including a new 18-hole golf course); they are busily making back-room deals with officials in the Northern Mariana Islands to gain the use of the Pacific islands there for bombing and training purposes; and they are scrambling to express support for a regime in Kyrgyzstan that has been implicated in the murder of its political opponents but whose Manas Airbase, used to stage US military actions in Afghanistan since 2001, Obama and the Pentagon consider crucial for the expanded war there.
The global reach of the US military today is unprecedented and unparalleled. Officially, more than 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and territories (the unofficial figure is far greater). The US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, with 26,000 buildings and structures, valued at $146bn (£89bn). The bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over.
The official figures exclude the huge build-up of troops and structures in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, as well as secret or unacknowledged facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places. In just three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, £2bn was spent on military construction. A single facility in Iraq, Balad Airbase, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles, with an additional 12 square mile "security perimeter". From the battle zones of Afghanistan and Iraq to quiet corners of Curaçao, Korea and Britain, the US military domain consists of sprawling army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges and berthed aircraft carriers (moved to "trouble spots" around the world, each carrier is considered by the US navy as "four and a half acres of sovereign US territory"). While the bases are, literally speaking, barracks and weapons depots, staging areas for war-making and ship repairs, complete with golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sale showrooms and toxic industrial sites. In addition to the cultural imperialism and episodes of rape, murder, looting and land seizure that have always accompanied foreign armies, local communities are now subjected to the ear-splitting noise of jets on exercise, to the risk of helicopters and warplanes crashing into residential areas, and to exposure to the toxic materials that the military uses in its daily operations.
The global expansion of US bases - and with it the rise of the US as a world superpower - is a legacy of the Second World War. In 1938, the US had 14 military bases outside its continental borders. Seven years later, it had 30,000 installations in roughly 100 countries. While this number was projected to shrink to 2,000 by 1948 (following pressure from other nations to return bases in their own territory or colonies, and pressure at home to demobilise the 12 million-man military), the US continued to pursue access rights to land and air space around the world. It established security alliances with multiple states within Europe (NATO), the Middle East and south Asia (CENTO) and south-east Asia (SEATO), as well as bilateral agreements with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAS) were crafted in each country to specify what the military could do, and usually gave US soldiers broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed and environmental damage caused. These agreements and subsequent base operations have mostly been shrouded in secrecy, helped by the National Security Act of 1947. New US bases were built in remarkable numbers in West Germany, Italy, Britain and Japan, with the defeated Axis powers hosting the most significant numbers (at one point, Japan was peppered with 3,800 US installations).
As battles become bases, so bases become battles; the sites in east Asia acquired during the Spanish-American war in 1898 and during the Second World War - such as Guam, Thailand and the Philippines - became the primary bases from which the US waged war on Vietnam. The number of raids over north and south Vietnam required tons of bombs unloaded at the naval station in Guam. The morale of ground troops based in Vietnam, as fragile as it was to become through the latter part of the 1960s, depended on R&R (rest and recreation) at bases outside the country, which allowed them to leave the war zone and yet be shipped back quickly and inexpensively for further fighting. The war also depended on the heroin the CIA was able to ship in to the troops on the battlefield in Vietnam from its secret bases in Laos. By 1967, the number of US bases had returned to 1947 levels.
Technological changes in warfare have had important effects on the configuration of US bases. Long-range missiles and the development of ships that can make much longer runs without resupply have altered the need for a line of bases to move forces forward into combat zones, as has the aerial refuelling of military jets. An arms airlift from the US to the British in the Middle East in 1941-42, for example, required a long hopscotch of bases, from Florida to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Trinidad, British Guiana, north-east Brazil, Fernando de Noronha, Takoradi (now in Ghana), Lagos, Kano (now in Nigeria) and Khartoum, before finally making delivery in Egypt. In the early 1970s, US aircraft could make the same delivery with one stop in the Azores, and today can do so non-stop.
On the other hand, the pouring of money into military R&D (the Pentagon has spent more than $85bn in 2009), and the corporate profits to be made in the development and deployment of the resulting technologies, have been significant factors in the ever larger numbers of technical facilities on foreign soil. These include such things as missile early-warning radar, signals intelligence, satellite control and space-tracking telescopes. The will to gain military control of space, as well as gather intelligence, has led to the establishment of numerous new military bases in violation of arms-control agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. In Colombia and Peru, and in secret and mobile locations elsewhere in Latin America, radar stations are primarily used for anti-trafficking operations.
Since 2000, with the election of George W Bush and the ascendancy to power of a group of men who believed in a more aggressive and unilateral use of military power (some of whom stood to profit handsomely from the increased military budget that would require), US imperial ambition has grown. Following the declaration of a war on terror and of the right to pre-emptive war, the number of countries into which the US inserted and based troops radically expanded. The Pentagon put into action a plan for a network of "deployment" or "forward operating" bases to increase the reach of current and future forces. The Pentagon-aligned, neoconservative think tank the Project for the New American Century stressed that "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein".
The new bases are designed to operate not defensively against particular threats but as offensive, expeditionary platforms from which military capabilities can be projected quickly, anywhere. The Global Defence Posture Review of 2004 announced these changes, focusing not just on reorienting the footprint of US bases away from cold war locations, but on remaking legal arrangements that support expanded military activities with other allied countries and prepositioning equipment in those countries. As a recent army strategic document notes, "Military personnel can be transported to, and fall in on, prepositioned equipment significantly more quickly than the equivalent unit could be transported to the theatre, and prepositioning equipment overseas is generally less politically difficult than stationing US military personnel."
Terms such as facility, outpost or station are used for smaller bases to suggest a less permanent presence. The US department of defence currently distinguishes between three types of military facility. "Main operating bases" are those with permanent personnel, strong infrastructure, and often family housing, such as Kadena Airbase in Japan and Ramstein Airbase in Germany. "Forward operating sites" are "expandable warm facilit[ies] maintained with a limited US military support presence and possibly prepositioned equipment", such as Incirlik Airbase in Turkey and Soto Cano Airbase in Honduras. Finally, "co-operative security locations" are sites with few or no permanent US personnel, maintained by contractors or the host nation for occasional use by the US military, and often referred to as "lily pads". These are cropping up around the world, especially throughout Africa, a recent example being in Dakar, Senegal.
Moreover, these bases are the anchor - and merely the most visible aspect - of the US military's presence overseas. Every year, US forces train 100,000 soldiers in 180 countries, the presumption being that beefed-up local militaries will help to pursue US interests in local conflicts and save the US money, casualties and bad publicity when human rights abuses occur (the blowback effect of such activities has been made clear by the strength of the Taliban since 9/11). The US military presence also involves jungle, urban, desert, maritime and polar training exercises across wide swathes of landscape, which have become the pretext for substantial and permanent positioning of troops. In recent years, the US has run around 20 exercises annually on Philippine soil, which have resulted in a near-continuous presence of US soldiers in a country whose people ejected US bases in 1992 and whose constitution forbids foreign troops to be based on its territory. Finally, US personnel work every day to shape local legal codes to facilitate US access: they have lobbied, for example, to change the Philippine and Japanese constitutions to allow, respectively, foreign troop basing and a more-than-defensive military.
Asked why the US has a vast network of military bases around the world, Pentagon officials give both utilitarian and humanitarian arguments. Utilitarian arguments include the claim that bases provide security for the US by deterring attack from hostile countries and preventing or remedying unrest or military challenges; that bases serve the national economic interests of the US, ensuring access to markets and commodities needed to maintain US standards of living; and that bases are symbolic markers of US power and credibility - and so the more the better. Humanitarian arguments present bases as altruistic gifts to other nations, helping to liberate or democratise them, or offering aid relief. None of these humanitarian arguments deals with the problem that many of the bases were taken during wartime and "given" to the US by another of the war's victors.
Critics of US foreign policy have dissected and dismantled the arguments made for maintaining a global system of military basing. They have shown that the bases have often failed in their own terms: despite the Pentagon's claims that they provide security to the regions they occupy, most of the world's people feel anything but reassured by their presence. Instead of providing more safety for the US or its allies, they have often provoked attacks, and have made the communities around bases key targets of other nations' missiles. On the island of Belau in the Pacific, the site of sharp resistance to US attempts to instal a submarine base and jungle training centre, people describe their experience of military basing in the Second World War: "When soldiers come, war comes." On Guam, a joke among locals is that few people except for nuclear strategists in the Kremlin know where their island is.
As for the argument that bases serve the national economic interest of the US, the weapons, personnel and fossil fuels involved cost billions of dollars, most coming from US taxpayers. While bases have clearly been concentrated in countries with key strategic resources, particularly along the routes of oil and gas pipelines in central Asia, the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa, from which one-quarter of US oil imports are expected by 2015, the profits have gone first of all to the corporations that build and service them, such as Halliburton. The myth that bases are an altruistic form of "foreign aid" for locals is exploded by the substantial costs involved for host economies and polities. The immediate negative effects include levels of pollution, noise, crime and lost productive land that cannot be offset by soldiers' local spending or employment of local people. Other putative gains tend to benefit only local elites and further militarise the host nations: elaborate bilateral negotiations swap weapons, cash and trade privileges for overflight and land-use rights. Less explicitly, rice imports, immigration rights to the US or overlooking human rights abuses have been the currency of exchange.
The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous. The social problems that accompany bases, including soldiers' violence against women and car crashes, have to be handled by local communities without compensation from the US. Some communities pay the highest price: their farmland taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supplies, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on US military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. The US military has repeatedly interfered in the domestic affairs of nations in which it has or desires military access, operating to influence votes and undermine or change local laws that stand in the way.
Social movements have proliferated around the world in response to the empire of US bases, ever since its inception. The attempt to take the Philippines from Spain in 1898 led to a drawn-out guerrilla war for independence that required 126,000 US occupation troops to stifle. Between 1947 and 1990, the US military was asked to leave France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico and Venezuela. Popular and political objection to the bases in Spain, the Philippines, Greece and Turkey in the 1980s gave those governments the grounds to negotiate significantly more compensation from the US. Portugal threatened to evict the US from important bases in the Azores unless it ceased its support for independence for its African colonies.
Since 1990, the US has been sent packing, most significantly, from the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Vieques and Uzbekistan. Of its own accord, for varying reasons, it decided to leave countries from Ghana to Fiji. Persuading the US to clean up after itself - including, in Panama, more than 100,000 rounds of unexploded ordnance - is a further struggle. As in the case of the US navy's removal from Vieques in 2003, arguments about the environmental and health damage of the military's activities remain the centrepiece of resistance to bases.
Many are also concerned by other countries' overseas bases - primarily European, Russian and Chinese - and by the activities of their own militaries, but the far greater number of US bases and their weaponry has understandably been the focus. The sense that US bases represent a major injustice to the host community and nation is very strong in countries where US bases have the longest standing and are most ubiquitous. In Okinawa, polls show that 70 to 80 per cent of the island's people want the bases, or at least the marines, to leave. In 1995, the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by two US marines and one US sailor led to demands for the removal of all US bases in Japan. One family in Okinawa has built a large peace museum right up against the edge of the Futenma Airbase, with a stairway to the roof that allows busloads of schoolchildren and other visitors to view the sprawling base after looking at art depicting the horrors of war.
In Korea, the great majority of the population feels that a reduction in US presence would increase national security; in recent years, several violent deaths at the hands of US soldiers triggered vast candlelight vigils and protests across the country. And the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia, evicted from their homes between 1967 and 1973 by the British on behalf of the US for a naval base, have organised a concerted campaign for the right to return, bringing legal suit against the British government, a story told in David Vine's recent book Island of Shame. There is also resistance to the US expansion plans into new areas. In 2007, a number of African nations baulked at US attempts to secure access to sites for military bases. In eastern Europe, despite well-funded campaigns to convince Poles and Czechs of the value of US bases and much sentiment in favour of accepting them in pursuit of closer ties with Nato and the EU, and promised economic benefits, vigorous protests have included hunger strikes and led the Czech government, in March, to reverse its plan to allow a US military radar base to be built in the country.
The US has responded to action against bases with a renewed emphasis on "force protection", in some cases enforcing curfews on soldiers, and cutting back on events that bring local people on to base property. The department of defence has also engaged in the time-honoured practice of renaming: clusters of soldiers, buildings and equipment have become "defence staging posts" or "forward operating locations" rather than military bases. Regulating documents become "visiting forces agreements", not "status of forces agreements", or remain entirely secret. While major reorganisation of bases is under way for a host of reasons, including a desire to create a more mobile force with greater access to the Middle East, eastern Europe and central Asia, the motives also include an attempt to prevent political momentum of the sort that ended US use of the Vieques and Philippine bases.
The attempt to gain permanent basing in Iraq foundered in 2008 on the objections of forces in both Iraq and the US. Obama, in his Cairo speech in June, may have insisted that "we pursue no bases" in either Iraq or Afghanistan, but there has been no sign of any significant dismantling of bases there, or of scaling back the US military presence in the rest of the world. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, recently visited Japan to ensure that it follows through on promises to provide the US with a new airfield on Okinawa and billions of dollars to build new housing and other facilities for 8,000 marines relocating to Guam. She ignored the invitation of island activists to come and see the damage left by previous decades of US base activities. The myriad land-grabs and hundreds of billions of dollars spent to quarter troops around the world persist far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, and too far from the headlines.
© 2009 The New Statesman
Catherine Lutz is a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and editor of "The Bases of Empire: the Global Struggle against US Military Posts" (Pluto Press, £17.99)
by Catherine Lutz
In December 2008, shortly before being sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama pledged his belief that, "to ensure prosperity here at home and peace abroad", it was vital to maintain "the strongest military on the planet". Unveiling his national security team, including George Bush's defence secretary, Robert Gates, he said: "We also agree the strength of our military has to be combined with the wisdom and force of diplomacy, and that we are going to be committed to rebuilding and restrengthening alliances around the world to advance American interests and American security."
Unfortunately, many of the Obama administration's diplomatic efforts are being directed towards maintaining and garnering new access for the US military across the globe. US military officials, through their Korean proxies, have completed the eviction of resistant rice farmers from their land around Camp Humphreys, South Korea, for its expansion (including a new 18-hole golf course); they are busily making back-room deals with officials in the Northern Mariana Islands to gain the use of the Pacific islands there for bombing and training purposes; and they are scrambling to express support for a regime in Kyrgyzstan that has been implicated in the murder of its political opponents but whose Manas Airbase, used to stage US military actions in Afghanistan since 2001, Obama and the Pentagon consider crucial for the expanded war there.
The global reach of the US military today is unprecedented and unparalleled. Officially, more than 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and territories (the unofficial figure is far greater). The US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, with 26,000 buildings and structures, valued at $146bn (£89bn). The bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over.
The official figures exclude the huge build-up of troops and structures in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, as well as secret or unacknowledged facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places. In just three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, £2bn was spent on military construction. A single facility in Iraq, Balad Airbase, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles, with an additional 12 square mile "security perimeter". From the battle zones of Afghanistan and Iraq to quiet corners of Curaçao, Korea and Britain, the US military domain consists of sprawling army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges and berthed aircraft carriers (moved to "trouble spots" around the world, each carrier is considered by the US navy as "four and a half acres of sovereign US territory"). While the bases are, literally speaking, barracks and weapons depots, staging areas for war-making and ship repairs, complete with golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sale showrooms and toxic industrial sites. In addition to the cultural imperialism and episodes of rape, murder, looting and land seizure that have always accompanied foreign armies, local communities are now subjected to the ear-splitting noise of jets on exercise, to the risk of helicopters and warplanes crashing into residential areas, and to exposure to the toxic materials that the military uses in its daily operations.
The global expansion of US bases - and with it the rise of the US as a world superpower - is a legacy of the Second World War. In 1938, the US had 14 military bases outside its continental borders. Seven years later, it had 30,000 installations in roughly 100 countries. While this number was projected to shrink to 2,000 by 1948 (following pressure from other nations to return bases in their own territory or colonies, and pressure at home to demobilise the 12 million-man military), the US continued to pursue access rights to land and air space around the world. It established security alliances with multiple states within Europe (NATO), the Middle East and south Asia (CENTO) and south-east Asia (SEATO), as well as bilateral agreements with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAS) were crafted in each country to specify what the military could do, and usually gave US soldiers broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed and environmental damage caused. These agreements and subsequent base operations have mostly been shrouded in secrecy, helped by the National Security Act of 1947. New US bases were built in remarkable numbers in West Germany, Italy, Britain and Japan, with the defeated Axis powers hosting the most significant numbers (at one point, Japan was peppered with 3,800 US installations).
As battles become bases, so bases become battles; the sites in east Asia acquired during the Spanish-American war in 1898 and during the Second World War - such as Guam, Thailand and the Philippines - became the primary bases from which the US waged war on Vietnam. The number of raids over north and south Vietnam required tons of bombs unloaded at the naval station in Guam. The morale of ground troops based in Vietnam, as fragile as it was to become through the latter part of the 1960s, depended on R&R (rest and recreation) at bases outside the country, which allowed them to leave the war zone and yet be shipped back quickly and inexpensively for further fighting. The war also depended on the heroin the CIA was able to ship in to the troops on the battlefield in Vietnam from its secret bases in Laos. By 1967, the number of US bases had returned to 1947 levels.
Technological changes in warfare have had important effects on the configuration of US bases. Long-range missiles and the development of ships that can make much longer runs without resupply have altered the need for a line of bases to move forces forward into combat zones, as has the aerial refuelling of military jets. An arms airlift from the US to the British in the Middle East in 1941-42, for example, required a long hopscotch of bases, from Florida to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Trinidad, British Guiana, north-east Brazil, Fernando de Noronha, Takoradi (now in Ghana), Lagos, Kano (now in Nigeria) and Khartoum, before finally making delivery in Egypt. In the early 1970s, US aircraft could make the same delivery with one stop in the Azores, and today can do so non-stop.
On the other hand, the pouring of money into military R&D (the Pentagon has spent more than $85bn in 2009), and the corporate profits to be made in the development and deployment of the resulting technologies, have been significant factors in the ever larger numbers of technical facilities on foreign soil. These include such things as missile early-warning radar, signals intelligence, satellite control and space-tracking telescopes. The will to gain military control of space, as well as gather intelligence, has led to the establishment of numerous new military bases in violation of arms-control agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. In Colombia and Peru, and in secret and mobile locations elsewhere in Latin America, radar stations are primarily used for anti-trafficking operations.
Since 2000, with the election of George W Bush and the ascendancy to power of a group of men who believed in a more aggressive and unilateral use of military power (some of whom stood to profit handsomely from the increased military budget that would require), US imperial ambition has grown. Following the declaration of a war on terror and of the right to pre-emptive war, the number of countries into which the US inserted and based troops radically expanded. The Pentagon put into action a plan for a network of "deployment" or "forward operating" bases to increase the reach of current and future forces. The Pentagon-aligned, neoconservative think tank the Project for the New American Century stressed that "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein".
The new bases are designed to operate not defensively against particular threats but as offensive, expeditionary platforms from which military capabilities can be projected quickly, anywhere. The Global Defence Posture Review of 2004 announced these changes, focusing not just on reorienting the footprint of US bases away from cold war locations, but on remaking legal arrangements that support expanded military activities with other allied countries and prepositioning equipment in those countries. As a recent army strategic document notes, "Military personnel can be transported to, and fall in on, prepositioned equipment significantly more quickly than the equivalent unit could be transported to the theatre, and prepositioning equipment overseas is generally less politically difficult than stationing US military personnel."
Terms such as facility, outpost or station are used for smaller bases to suggest a less permanent presence. The US department of defence currently distinguishes between three types of military facility. "Main operating bases" are those with permanent personnel, strong infrastructure, and often family housing, such as Kadena Airbase in Japan and Ramstein Airbase in Germany. "Forward operating sites" are "expandable warm facilit[ies] maintained with a limited US military support presence and possibly prepositioned equipment", such as Incirlik Airbase in Turkey and Soto Cano Airbase in Honduras. Finally, "co-operative security locations" are sites with few or no permanent US personnel, maintained by contractors or the host nation for occasional use by the US military, and often referred to as "lily pads". These are cropping up around the world, especially throughout Africa, a recent example being in Dakar, Senegal.
Moreover, these bases are the anchor - and merely the most visible aspect - of the US military's presence overseas. Every year, US forces train 100,000 soldiers in 180 countries, the presumption being that beefed-up local militaries will help to pursue US interests in local conflicts and save the US money, casualties and bad publicity when human rights abuses occur (the blowback effect of such activities has been made clear by the strength of the Taliban since 9/11). The US military presence also involves jungle, urban, desert, maritime and polar training exercises across wide swathes of landscape, which have become the pretext for substantial and permanent positioning of troops. In recent years, the US has run around 20 exercises annually on Philippine soil, which have resulted in a near-continuous presence of US soldiers in a country whose people ejected US bases in 1992 and whose constitution forbids foreign troops to be based on its territory. Finally, US personnel work every day to shape local legal codes to facilitate US access: they have lobbied, for example, to change the Philippine and Japanese constitutions to allow, respectively, foreign troop basing and a more-than-defensive military.
Asked why the US has a vast network of military bases around the world, Pentagon officials give both utilitarian and humanitarian arguments. Utilitarian arguments include the claim that bases provide security for the US by deterring attack from hostile countries and preventing or remedying unrest or military challenges; that bases serve the national economic interests of the US, ensuring access to markets and commodities needed to maintain US standards of living; and that bases are symbolic markers of US power and credibility - and so the more the better. Humanitarian arguments present bases as altruistic gifts to other nations, helping to liberate or democratise them, or offering aid relief. None of these humanitarian arguments deals with the problem that many of the bases were taken during wartime and "given" to the US by another of the war's victors.
Critics of US foreign policy have dissected and dismantled the arguments made for maintaining a global system of military basing. They have shown that the bases have often failed in their own terms: despite the Pentagon's claims that they provide security to the regions they occupy, most of the world's people feel anything but reassured by their presence. Instead of providing more safety for the US or its allies, they have often provoked attacks, and have made the communities around bases key targets of other nations' missiles. On the island of Belau in the Pacific, the site of sharp resistance to US attempts to instal a submarine base and jungle training centre, people describe their experience of military basing in the Second World War: "When soldiers come, war comes." On Guam, a joke among locals is that few people except for nuclear strategists in the Kremlin know where their island is.
As for the argument that bases serve the national economic interest of the US, the weapons, personnel and fossil fuels involved cost billions of dollars, most coming from US taxpayers. While bases have clearly been concentrated in countries with key strategic resources, particularly along the routes of oil and gas pipelines in central Asia, the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa, from which one-quarter of US oil imports are expected by 2015, the profits have gone first of all to the corporations that build and service them, such as Halliburton. The myth that bases are an altruistic form of "foreign aid" for locals is exploded by the substantial costs involved for host economies and polities. The immediate negative effects include levels of pollution, noise, crime and lost productive land that cannot be offset by soldiers' local spending or employment of local people. Other putative gains tend to benefit only local elites and further militarise the host nations: elaborate bilateral negotiations swap weapons, cash and trade privileges for overflight and land-use rights. Less explicitly, rice imports, immigration rights to the US or overlooking human rights abuses have been the currency of exchange.
The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous. The social problems that accompany bases, including soldiers' violence against women and car crashes, have to be handled by local communities without compensation from the US. Some communities pay the highest price: their farmland taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supplies, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on US military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. The US military has repeatedly interfered in the domestic affairs of nations in which it has or desires military access, operating to influence votes and undermine or change local laws that stand in the way.
Social movements have proliferated around the world in response to the empire of US bases, ever since its inception. The attempt to take the Philippines from Spain in 1898 led to a drawn-out guerrilla war for independence that required 126,000 US occupation troops to stifle. Between 1947 and 1990, the US military was asked to leave France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico and Venezuela. Popular and political objection to the bases in Spain, the Philippines, Greece and Turkey in the 1980s gave those governments the grounds to negotiate significantly more compensation from the US. Portugal threatened to evict the US from important bases in the Azores unless it ceased its support for independence for its African colonies.
Since 1990, the US has been sent packing, most significantly, from the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Vieques and Uzbekistan. Of its own accord, for varying reasons, it decided to leave countries from Ghana to Fiji. Persuading the US to clean up after itself - including, in Panama, more than 100,000 rounds of unexploded ordnance - is a further struggle. As in the case of the US navy's removal from Vieques in 2003, arguments about the environmental and health damage of the military's activities remain the centrepiece of resistance to bases.
Many are also concerned by other countries' overseas bases - primarily European, Russian and Chinese - and by the activities of their own militaries, but the far greater number of US bases and their weaponry has understandably been the focus. The sense that US bases represent a major injustice to the host community and nation is very strong in countries where US bases have the longest standing and are most ubiquitous. In Okinawa, polls show that 70 to 80 per cent of the island's people want the bases, or at least the marines, to leave. In 1995, the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by two US marines and one US sailor led to demands for the removal of all US bases in Japan. One family in Okinawa has built a large peace museum right up against the edge of the Futenma Airbase, with a stairway to the roof that allows busloads of schoolchildren and other visitors to view the sprawling base after looking at art depicting the horrors of war.
In Korea, the great majority of the population feels that a reduction in US presence would increase national security; in recent years, several violent deaths at the hands of US soldiers triggered vast candlelight vigils and protests across the country. And the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia, evicted from their homes between 1967 and 1973 by the British on behalf of the US for a naval base, have organised a concerted campaign for the right to return, bringing legal suit against the British government, a story told in David Vine's recent book Island of Shame. There is also resistance to the US expansion plans into new areas. In 2007, a number of African nations baulked at US attempts to secure access to sites for military bases. In eastern Europe, despite well-funded campaigns to convince Poles and Czechs of the value of US bases and much sentiment in favour of accepting them in pursuit of closer ties with Nato and the EU, and promised economic benefits, vigorous protests have included hunger strikes and led the Czech government, in March, to reverse its plan to allow a US military radar base to be built in the country.
The US has responded to action against bases with a renewed emphasis on "force protection", in some cases enforcing curfews on soldiers, and cutting back on events that bring local people on to base property. The department of defence has also engaged in the time-honoured practice of renaming: clusters of soldiers, buildings and equipment have become "defence staging posts" or "forward operating locations" rather than military bases. Regulating documents become "visiting forces agreements", not "status of forces agreements", or remain entirely secret. While major reorganisation of bases is under way for a host of reasons, including a desire to create a more mobile force with greater access to the Middle East, eastern Europe and central Asia, the motives also include an attempt to prevent political momentum of the sort that ended US use of the Vieques and Philippine bases.
The attempt to gain permanent basing in Iraq foundered in 2008 on the objections of forces in both Iraq and the US. Obama, in his Cairo speech in June, may have insisted that "we pursue no bases" in either Iraq or Afghanistan, but there has been no sign of any significant dismantling of bases there, or of scaling back the US military presence in the rest of the world. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, recently visited Japan to ensure that it follows through on promises to provide the US with a new airfield on Okinawa and billions of dollars to build new housing and other facilities for 8,000 marines relocating to Guam. She ignored the invitation of island activists to come and see the damage left by previous decades of US base activities. The myriad land-grabs and hundreds of billions of dollars spent to quarter troops around the world persist far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, and too far from the headlines.
© 2009 The New Statesman
Catherine Lutz is a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and editor of "The Bases of Empire: the Global Struggle against US Military Posts" (Pluto Press, £17.99)
Monday, July 27, 2009
Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks
by Thom Hartmann
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that "Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the US... Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total US pay in 2007, the latest figures available."
One of the questions often asked when the subject of CEO pay comes up is, "What could a person such as William McGuire or Lee Raymond (the former CEOs of UnitedHealth and ExxonMobil, respectively) possibly do to justify a $1.7 billion paycheck or a $400 million retirement bonus?"
It's an interesting question. If there is a "free market" of labor for CEOs, then you'd think there would be a lot of competition for the jobs. And a lot of people competing for the positions would drive down the pay. All UnitedHealth's stockholders would have to do to avoid paying more than $1 billion to McGuire is find somebody to do the same CEO job for half a billion. And all they'd have to do to save even more is find somebody to do the job for a mere $100 million. Or maybe even somebody who'd work the necessary sixty-hour weeks for only $1 million.
So why is executive pay so high?
I've examined this with both my psychotherapist hat on and my amateur economist hat on, and only one rational answer presents itself: CEOs in America make as much money as they do because there really is a shortage of people with their skill set. And it's such a serious shortage that some companies have to pay as much as $1 million a day to have somebody successfully do the job.
But what part of being a CEO could be so difficult-so impossible for mere mortals-that it would mean that there are only a few hundred individuals in the United States capable of performing it?
In my humble opinion, it's the sociopath part.
CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.
Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths-people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there's probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there's an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.
Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.
Today's modern transnational corporate CEOs-who live in a private-jet-and-limousine world entirely apart from the rest of us-are remnants from the times of kings, queens, and lords. They reflect the dysfunctional cultural (and Calvinist/Darwinian) belief that wealth is proof of goodness, and that that goodness then justifies taking more of the wealth.
Democracy in the workplace is known as a union. The most democratic workplaces are the least exploitative, because labor has a power to balance capital and management. And looking around the world, we can clearly see that those cultures that most embrace the largest number of their people in an egalitarian and democratic way (in and out of the workplace) are the ones that have the highest quality of life. Those that are the most despotic, from the workplace to the government, are those with the poorest quality of life.
Over time, balance and democratic oversight will always produce the best results. An "unregulated" marketplace is like an "unregulated" football game - chaos. And chaos is a state perfectly exploited by sociopaths, be they serial killers, warlords, or CEOs.
By changing the rules of the game of business so that sociopathic business behavior is no longer rewarded (and, indeed, is punished - as Teddy Roosevelt famously did as the "trustbuster" and FDR did when he threatened to send "war profiteers" to jail), we can create a less dysfunctional and more egalitarian society. And that's an important first step back from the thresholds to environmental and economic disaster we're now facing.
This article is largely excerpted from Thom Hartmann's new book "Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture."
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It," and "Cracking The Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion." His newest book is Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that "Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the US... Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total US pay in 2007, the latest figures available."
One of the questions often asked when the subject of CEO pay comes up is, "What could a person such as William McGuire or Lee Raymond (the former CEOs of UnitedHealth and ExxonMobil, respectively) possibly do to justify a $1.7 billion paycheck or a $400 million retirement bonus?"
It's an interesting question. If there is a "free market" of labor for CEOs, then you'd think there would be a lot of competition for the jobs. And a lot of people competing for the positions would drive down the pay. All UnitedHealth's stockholders would have to do to avoid paying more than $1 billion to McGuire is find somebody to do the same CEO job for half a billion. And all they'd have to do to save even more is find somebody to do the job for a mere $100 million. Or maybe even somebody who'd work the necessary sixty-hour weeks for only $1 million.
So why is executive pay so high?
I've examined this with both my psychotherapist hat on and my amateur economist hat on, and only one rational answer presents itself: CEOs in America make as much money as they do because there really is a shortage of people with their skill set. And it's such a serious shortage that some companies have to pay as much as $1 million a day to have somebody successfully do the job.
But what part of being a CEO could be so difficult-so impossible for mere mortals-that it would mean that there are only a few hundred individuals in the United States capable of performing it?
In my humble opinion, it's the sociopath part.
CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.
Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths-people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there's probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there's an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.
Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.
Today's modern transnational corporate CEOs-who live in a private-jet-and-limousine world entirely apart from the rest of us-are remnants from the times of kings, queens, and lords. They reflect the dysfunctional cultural (and Calvinist/Darwinian) belief that wealth is proof of goodness, and that that goodness then justifies taking more of the wealth.
Democracy in the workplace is known as a union. The most democratic workplaces are the least exploitative, because labor has a power to balance capital and management. And looking around the world, we can clearly see that those cultures that most embrace the largest number of their people in an egalitarian and democratic way (in and out of the workplace) are the ones that have the highest quality of life. Those that are the most despotic, from the workplace to the government, are those with the poorest quality of life.
Over time, balance and democratic oversight will always produce the best results. An "unregulated" marketplace is like an "unregulated" football game - chaos. And chaos is a state perfectly exploited by sociopaths, be they serial killers, warlords, or CEOs.
By changing the rules of the game of business so that sociopathic business behavior is no longer rewarded (and, indeed, is punished - as Teddy Roosevelt famously did as the "trustbuster" and FDR did when he threatened to send "war profiteers" to jail), we can create a less dysfunctional and more egalitarian society. And that's an important first step back from the thresholds to environmental and economic disaster we're now facing.
This article is largely excerpted from Thom Hartmann's new book "Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture."
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It," and "Cracking The Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion." His newest book is Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
The NSA Is Still Listening to You
Bush went away, but domestic surveillance overreach didn't. It's now the law, and the ACLU is fighting back
by James Bamford
This summer, on a remote stretch of desert in central Utah, the National Security Agency will begin work on a massive, 1 million-square-foot data warehouse. Costing more than $1.5 billion, the highly secret facility is designed to house upward of trillions of intercepted phone calls, e-mail messages, Internet searches and other communications intercepted by the agency as part of its expansive eavesdropping operations. The NSA is also completing work on another data warehouse, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.
The need for such extraordinary data storage capacity stems in part from the Bush administration's decision to open the NSA's surveillance floodgates following the 9/11 attacks. According to a recently released Inspectors General report, some of the NSA's operations -- such as spying on American citizens without warrants -- were so questionable, if not illegal, that they nearly caused the resignations of the most senior officials of both the FBI and the Justice Department.
Last July, many of those surveillance techniques were codified into law as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FAA). In fact, according to the Inspectors General report, "this legislation gave the government even broader authority to intercept international communications" than the warrantless surveillance operations had. Yet despite this increased power, congressional oversight committees have recently discovered that the agency has been over-collecting on the domestic communications of Americans, thus even exceeding the excessive reach granted them by the FAA.
I am an author and journalist specializing in national security issues and terrorism, and often communicate with parties in the Middle East as part of my work. Because of concerns that my communications might have been monitored, in early 2006, shortly after NSA's warrantless surveillance program was revealed by the New York Times, I became a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the NSA that argued that the program was illegal and should be shut down. We prevailed in federal district court, with Judge Anna Diggs Taylor finding that President Bush had violated both the law and the Constitution, but lost on the government's appeal when the court ruled the plaintiffs could not prove that they were personally victims of the secret eavesdropping program. In a decision worthy of Lewis Carroll, the appeals court held both that the government could refuse to confirm or deny whether it had monitored plaintiffs' communications and that plaintiffs could not challenge the constitutionality of the program unless they could show that their communications had been monitored. A dissenting judge pointed out that the court's decision was inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent and would effectively render the program unreviewable by the courts.
On Wednesday, the ACLU will once again appear in federal court, this time in a separate lawsuit charging that the new FAA statute is unconstitutional. The ACLU is right. While the FAA prohibits the agency from intentionally "targeting" people within the U.S., it places virtually no restrictions on the targeting of people outside the U.S. even if those targets are communicating with U.S. citizens and residents. The law essentially allows the agency virtually unfettered access to the international communications of innocent Americans in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Also troublesome is the fact that the FAA emasculates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the one independent check and balance between the agency and the American public. Originally established as a response to the discovery by Congress in the mid-1970s that the NSA had been illegally eavesdropping domestically for decades, the FISA court required the government to show that there was probable cause to believe that its surveillance target was an agent of a foreign government or terrorist group in order to obtain a necessary warrant. But the new law does away with this requirement, and now the NSA does not even have to identify the targets of its surveillance at all as long as it is targeting people outside the U.S., leaving the agency free, for example, to target human rights activists or media organizations overseas, even if they are communicating with family or editors back in the U.S. As former NSA "voice interceptor" Adrienne Kinne told me in my book, "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America," the agency targeted both groups during the Bush administration, including eavesdropping on intimate bedroom conversations.
Further removing the FISA court from any meaningful role, the new law even gags the judges, prohibiting them from asking the government who, what, where or why it is launching any particular surveillance program.
Finally, the FAA fails to place any meaningful limitations on the NSA's retention of phone calls, e-mail and other communications that it collects -- necessitating the colossal data storage mausoleums it is now building. The agency need only show that it has "reasonably designed" procedures to minimize information retention, which must give way to the NSA's need "to obtain, produce, and disseminate foreign intelligence information." And because "foreign intelligence" is very broadly defined, this allows the NSA to conduct immense data mining operations within those centers.
Among the most striking discoveries to come out of the Inspectors General report was that, despite the enormous expansion of the NSA's capabilities, including turning its giant ear inward for the first time in three decades, no one could point to any significant counterterrorism success. Instead, it warned that while the agency had little difficulty collecting vast amounts of data, the trouble was analyzing it all. It was a problem akin to Jorge Luis Borges' "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word understood. In this "labyrinth of letters," Borges wrote, "there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences." In addition to the civil liberties and constitutional defects in the new surveillance law, another compelling argument against it is that it only increases the amount of "senseless cacophonies" in America's Library of Babel.
© 2009 Salon.com
James Bamford is the author of three books on the National Security Agency, including his latest, "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America," which has just been released in paperback.
by James Bamford
This summer, on a remote stretch of desert in central Utah, the National Security Agency will begin work on a massive, 1 million-square-foot data warehouse. Costing more than $1.5 billion, the highly secret facility is designed to house upward of trillions of intercepted phone calls, e-mail messages, Internet searches and other communications intercepted by the agency as part of its expansive eavesdropping operations. The NSA is also completing work on another data warehouse, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.
The need for such extraordinary data storage capacity stems in part from the Bush administration's decision to open the NSA's surveillance floodgates following the 9/11 attacks. According to a recently released Inspectors General report, some of the NSA's operations -- such as spying on American citizens without warrants -- were so questionable, if not illegal, that they nearly caused the resignations of the most senior officials of both the FBI and the Justice Department.
Last July, many of those surveillance techniques were codified into law as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FAA). In fact, according to the Inspectors General report, "this legislation gave the government even broader authority to intercept international communications" than the warrantless surveillance operations had. Yet despite this increased power, congressional oversight committees have recently discovered that the agency has been over-collecting on the domestic communications of Americans, thus even exceeding the excessive reach granted them by the FAA.
I am an author and journalist specializing in national security issues and terrorism, and often communicate with parties in the Middle East as part of my work. Because of concerns that my communications might have been monitored, in early 2006, shortly after NSA's warrantless surveillance program was revealed by the New York Times, I became a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the NSA that argued that the program was illegal and should be shut down. We prevailed in federal district court, with Judge Anna Diggs Taylor finding that President Bush had violated both the law and the Constitution, but lost on the government's appeal when the court ruled the plaintiffs could not prove that they were personally victims of the secret eavesdropping program. In a decision worthy of Lewis Carroll, the appeals court held both that the government could refuse to confirm or deny whether it had monitored plaintiffs' communications and that plaintiffs could not challenge the constitutionality of the program unless they could show that their communications had been monitored. A dissenting judge pointed out that the court's decision was inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent and would effectively render the program unreviewable by the courts.
On Wednesday, the ACLU will once again appear in federal court, this time in a separate lawsuit charging that the new FAA statute is unconstitutional. The ACLU is right. While the FAA prohibits the agency from intentionally "targeting" people within the U.S., it places virtually no restrictions on the targeting of people outside the U.S. even if those targets are communicating with U.S. citizens and residents. The law essentially allows the agency virtually unfettered access to the international communications of innocent Americans in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Also troublesome is the fact that the FAA emasculates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the one independent check and balance between the agency and the American public. Originally established as a response to the discovery by Congress in the mid-1970s that the NSA had been illegally eavesdropping domestically for decades, the FISA court required the government to show that there was probable cause to believe that its surveillance target was an agent of a foreign government or terrorist group in order to obtain a necessary warrant. But the new law does away with this requirement, and now the NSA does not even have to identify the targets of its surveillance at all as long as it is targeting people outside the U.S., leaving the agency free, for example, to target human rights activists or media organizations overseas, even if they are communicating with family or editors back in the U.S. As former NSA "voice interceptor" Adrienne Kinne told me in my book, "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America," the agency targeted both groups during the Bush administration, including eavesdropping on intimate bedroom conversations.
Further removing the FISA court from any meaningful role, the new law even gags the judges, prohibiting them from asking the government who, what, where or why it is launching any particular surveillance program.
Finally, the FAA fails to place any meaningful limitations on the NSA's retention of phone calls, e-mail and other communications that it collects -- necessitating the colossal data storage mausoleums it is now building. The agency need only show that it has "reasonably designed" procedures to minimize information retention, which must give way to the NSA's need "to obtain, produce, and disseminate foreign intelligence information." And because "foreign intelligence" is very broadly defined, this allows the NSA to conduct immense data mining operations within those centers.
Among the most striking discoveries to come out of the Inspectors General report was that, despite the enormous expansion of the NSA's capabilities, including turning its giant ear inward for the first time in three decades, no one could point to any significant counterterrorism success. Instead, it warned that while the agency had little difficulty collecting vast amounts of data, the trouble was analyzing it all. It was a problem akin to Jorge Luis Borges' "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word understood. In this "labyrinth of letters," Borges wrote, "there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences." In addition to the civil liberties and constitutional defects in the new surveillance law, another compelling argument against it is that it only increases the amount of "senseless cacophonies" in America's Library of Babel.
© 2009 Salon.com
James Bamford is the author of three books on the National Security Agency, including his latest, "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America," which has just been released in paperback.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Saving Private Bergdahl
By DAVE LINDORFF
Let me say from the outset that I have the greatest sympathy for 23-year-old Bowe R. Bergdahl, the US soldier in Afghanistan who was captured and is being held by Taliban forces, and for his family, who must be going through a living hell worrying about what is going to happen to him.
But I’m willing to bet you that all of them are wishing, right now, that the US had not decided back in 2001 to begin a campaign of torture and murder against the Taliban fighters that it was capturing in Afghanistan, and against others that it has rounded up in the so-called War on Terror.
I sure know that if my son were ever so unfortunate as to be suckered into joining the US military and was then dispatched to fight and kill people in some far-off land where the US had no reason to be in the first place, and if he were to be captured, I would want to know that my own country had been living up to the letter of the law in respecting every clause of the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of captives.
The sad truth, however, is that neither the Bush/Cheney administration, which simply tossed out the Geneva Conventions in 2001 and said its provisions, despite being signed into law by the US, did not apply to the war in Afghanistan, which was the first assault in what they conceived as a borderless and endless War on Terror, nor the Obama administration, which has refused to grant full Geneva Convention rights to the captives it holds in places like Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, or at Guantanamo Bay, or to prosecute those who tortured and ordered torture in the prior administration, has followed the law.
There are plenty of Americans, both in Congress, and among the US population at large, who have lustily approved of the torture of suspected fighters captured by American forces. All kinds of excuses have been trotted out for this willful violation of US and international law. The Taliban was not a legitimate government, they argue, so their fighters are not really soldiers. Al Qaeda is not a country, so its fighters are not really even enemy combatants, they say. Some go so far as to simply say, “These people are killers, so we America is justified in doing what it wants to them.” They’ll also trot out the excuse of expediency: we were attacked, and if it takes torture (or “enhanced interrogation techniques” to use a popular emphemism for such exquisite tortures as head banging or water-boarding), to find out what they’re planning, then that’s okay.” Vice President Dick Cheney, following the 9-11 attacks, referred to the US having to “turn to the dark side, “ almost unable to hide the gleam in his eye as he announced this.
But once we do that kind of thing, we have, it must be admitted, surrendered any moral authority to demand that our own soldiers, if captured, be treated humanely and in accordance with international law.
So poor Pvt. Bergdahl is now at the mercy of the same Taliban organization whose members have been tortured and killed at the hands of the US and its allies.
Thousands of Taliban were simply killed—either shot or left to die in closed shipping containers, by an Afghan warlord who was America’s key ally in the initial attack on the Taliban and Al Qaeda—an atrocity which was covered up for years by the Bush/Cheney administration, and which President Obama only recently ordered investigated. At Guantanamo, as many as 80 percent of the captives were innocent of terrorism, but were, and in many cases continue to be held because the government either doesn’t want to admit what it did to them, or because it has so abused them that if they weren’t enemies of America, they are now. Some of those captured and brought to the hell-hole of Guantanamo were children as young as 12—a blatant violation of international law. They even had their own camp there—Camp Iguana—just for captured children.
We have to hope that the Taliban will overlook the ongoing crime of America’s mistreatment of war prisoners—mistreatment that in many cases led to death at the hands of American interrogators and prison guards.
If they were smart, the Taliban would treat Pvt. Bergdahl in strict accordance with the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, and would ask the International Red Cross and Red Crescent to broker a prisoner-of-war trade of Pvt. Bergdahl for the prisoners being held at Bagram and Guantanamo.
Such a swap might put the US back on the road of civilized behavior, and might save Pvt. Bergdahl.
The one thing we all have to hope is that the Taliban treat him better than our own country has been treating its captives.
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
Let me say from the outset that I have the greatest sympathy for 23-year-old Bowe R. Bergdahl, the US soldier in Afghanistan who was captured and is being held by Taliban forces, and for his family, who must be going through a living hell worrying about what is going to happen to him.
But I’m willing to bet you that all of them are wishing, right now, that the US had not decided back in 2001 to begin a campaign of torture and murder against the Taliban fighters that it was capturing in Afghanistan, and against others that it has rounded up in the so-called War on Terror.
I sure know that if my son were ever so unfortunate as to be suckered into joining the US military and was then dispatched to fight and kill people in some far-off land where the US had no reason to be in the first place, and if he were to be captured, I would want to know that my own country had been living up to the letter of the law in respecting every clause of the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of captives.
The sad truth, however, is that neither the Bush/Cheney administration, which simply tossed out the Geneva Conventions in 2001 and said its provisions, despite being signed into law by the US, did not apply to the war in Afghanistan, which was the first assault in what they conceived as a borderless and endless War on Terror, nor the Obama administration, which has refused to grant full Geneva Convention rights to the captives it holds in places like Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, or at Guantanamo Bay, or to prosecute those who tortured and ordered torture in the prior administration, has followed the law.
There are plenty of Americans, both in Congress, and among the US population at large, who have lustily approved of the torture of suspected fighters captured by American forces. All kinds of excuses have been trotted out for this willful violation of US and international law. The Taliban was not a legitimate government, they argue, so their fighters are not really soldiers. Al Qaeda is not a country, so its fighters are not really even enemy combatants, they say. Some go so far as to simply say, “These people are killers, so we America is justified in doing what it wants to them.” They’ll also trot out the excuse of expediency: we were attacked, and if it takes torture (or “enhanced interrogation techniques” to use a popular emphemism for such exquisite tortures as head banging or water-boarding), to find out what they’re planning, then that’s okay.” Vice President Dick Cheney, following the 9-11 attacks, referred to the US having to “turn to the dark side, “ almost unable to hide the gleam in his eye as he announced this.
But once we do that kind of thing, we have, it must be admitted, surrendered any moral authority to demand that our own soldiers, if captured, be treated humanely and in accordance with international law.
So poor Pvt. Bergdahl is now at the mercy of the same Taliban organization whose members have been tortured and killed at the hands of the US and its allies.
Thousands of Taliban were simply killed—either shot or left to die in closed shipping containers, by an Afghan warlord who was America’s key ally in the initial attack on the Taliban and Al Qaeda—an atrocity which was covered up for years by the Bush/Cheney administration, and which President Obama only recently ordered investigated. At Guantanamo, as many as 80 percent of the captives were innocent of terrorism, but were, and in many cases continue to be held because the government either doesn’t want to admit what it did to them, or because it has so abused them that if they weren’t enemies of America, they are now. Some of those captured and brought to the hell-hole of Guantanamo were children as young as 12—a blatant violation of international law. They even had their own camp there—Camp Iguana—just for captured children.
We have to hope that the Taliban will overlook the ongoing crime of America’s mistreatment of war prisoners—mistreatment that in many cases led to death at the hands of American interrogators and prison guards.
If they were smart, the Taliban would treat Pvt. Bergdahl in strict accordance with the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, and would ask the International Red Cross and Red Crescent to broker a prisoner-of-war trade of Pvt. Bergdahl for the prisoners being held at Bagram and Guantanamo.
Such a swap might put the US back on the road of civilized behavior, and might save Pvt. Bergdahl.
The one thing we all have to hope is that the Taliban treat him better than our own country has been treating its captives.
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
Making Sense of Cheney's Madness
by Ivan Eland
The seeming irrationality behind the George W. Bush administration’s “against the grain” (and the law) policies on torture, warrantless domestic surveillance, and now notification of Congress about CIA covert operations was not irrational at all.
Most experts say that torture is counterproductive because the subject will tell the interrogator what he or she wants to hear to stop the pain and because many military people say that it merely revs up the opposition, gives them no incentive to surrender, and gives them every incentive to torture U.S. military personnel.
Yet in the face of this mountain of authoritative opinion and the policy’s clear violation of international law and a U.S. criminal statute against torture, the Bush administration gleefully did it anyway.
The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) clearly prohibited surveillance in the United States without a court-approved warrant and explicitly stated that it was the only law governing that practice.
The Bush administration, in the wake of 9/11, made no effort to get a likely willing Congress to change the already flexible law. After all, if surveillance had been urgently needed to stop a terrorist attack, the secret and pro-security court could have issued the warrant after the fact.
But the Bush administration strangely chose to flagrantly violate the law and Fourth Amendment to the Constitution to conduct domestic warrantless searches anyway.
Most recently, it has been revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney told the CIA to violate a law requiring prompt disclosure of even anticipated covert operations.
The red herring that Republicans are now trying to stand by in defense of the uncharacteristically silent Cheney — that the executive branch must guard intelligence sources and methods — could apply to a particular assassination attempt but not the existence of the entire program over a seven-year period.
Amazingly, Vice President Cheney — not even the President — decided to knowingly and affirmatively disregard the law.
Are these merely examples of Cheney’s or Bush’s arrogance? I suppose arrogance plays a part, but to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, no crisis should go unexploited.
Pundits galore, including this one, have railed against the Bush administration for cynically using the tragedy of 9/11 to invade Iraq. But fewer have noticed an even worse legacy of the Bush administration than the Iraqi quagmire.
What could be worse than killing U.S. service people and innocent Iraqis? The unitary theory of the executive, that’s what.
Dick Cheney came into office believing that executive power had been excessively eroded during the Vietnam and Watergate years. Few reputable scholars believe this nonsense.
Most presidential scholars have concluded that the executive branch has grown in power vis-à-vis the other governmental branches since the turn of the 20th century, but really got boosted to an “imperial presidency” during the Cold War from the Truman presidency onward.
This development is a far cry from the legislative-dominated system that the nation’s founders and the Constitution envisioned. The slight rollback of executive power during Vietnam and Watergate was only a momentary pause as the executive juggernaut rolled forth up to the Bush administration.
Cheney’s advocacy of the unitary theory, and evidently convincing his self-interested boss to buy into it too, meant that the administration believed that it could use broadly construed commander-in-chief powers — another anathema to the founders — to ignore congressionally passed laws during “wartime.” In dictatorships, we call this “rule by decree.”
So the administration’s willful violation of laws had the more sinister purpose and effect of establishing a “hyper-imperial presidency.” This is the single most important thing that the Bush administration did in office and the worst.
We can already see that in the Obama and probably future administrations, executive self-restraint will be much harder in the face of the temptations of this more powerful inherited office, which will be based on the Bush-era precedents. Fear for the republic.
© 2009 Consortium News
Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute.
The seeming irrationality behind the George W. Bush administration’s “against the grain” (and the law) policies on torture, warrantless domestic surveillance, and now notification of Congress about CIA covert operations was not irrational at all.
Most experts say that torture is counterproductive because the subject will tell the interrogator what he or she wants to hear to stop the pain and because many military people say that it merely revs up the opposition, gives them no incentive to surrender, and gives them every incentive to torture U.S. military personnel.
Yet in the face of this mountain of authoritative opinion and the policy’s clear violation of international law and a U.S. criminal statute against torture, the Bush administration gleefully did it anyway.
The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) clearly prohibited surveillance in the United States without a court-approved warrant and explicitly stated that it was the only law governing that practice.
The Bush administration, in the wake of 9/11, made no effort to get a likely willing Congress to change the already flexible law. After all, if surveillance had been urgently needed to stop a terrorist attack, the secret and pro-security court could have issued the warrant after the fact.
But the Bush administration strangely chose to flagrantly violate the law and Fourth Amendment to the Constitution to conduct domestic warrantless searches anyway.
Most recently, it has been revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney told the CIA to violate a law requiring prompt disclosure of even anticipated covert operations.
The red herring that Republicans are now trying to stand by in defense of the uncharacteristically silent Cheney — that the executive branch must guard intelligence sources and methods — could apply to a particular assassination attempt but not the existence of the entire program over a seven-year period.
Amazingly, Vice President Cheney — not even the President — decided to knowingly and affirmatively disregard the law.
Are these merely examples of Cheney’s or Bush’s arrogance? I suppose arrogance plays a part, but to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, no crisis should go unexploited.
Pundits galore, including this one, have railed against the Bush administration for cynically using the tragedy of 9/11 to invade Iraq. But fewer have noticed an even worse legacy of the Bush administration than the Iraqi quagmire.
What could be worse than killing U.S. service people and innocent Iraqis? The unitary theory of the executive, that’s what.
Dick Cheney came into office believing that executive power had been excessively eroded during the Vietnam and Watergate years. Few reputable scholars believe this nonsense.
Most presidential scholars have concluded that the executive branch has grown in power vis-à-vis the other governmental branches since the turn of the 20th century, but really got boosted to an “imperial presidency” during the Cold War from the Truman presidency onward.
This development is a far cry from the legislative-dominated system that the nation’s founders and the Constitution envisioned. The slight rollback of executive power during Vietnam and Watergate was only a momentary pause as the executive juggernaut rolled forth up to the Bush administration.
Cheney’s advocacy of the unitary theory, and evidently convincing his self-interested boss to buy into it too, meant that the administration believed that it could use broadly construed commander-in-chief powers — another anathema to the founders — to ignore congressionally passed laws during “wartime.” In dictatorships, we call this “rule by decree.”
So the administration’s willful violation of laws had the more sinister purpose and effect of establishing a “hyper-imperial presidency.” This is the single most important thing that the Bush administration did in office and the worst.
We can already see that in the Obama and probably future administrations, executive self-restraint will be much harder in the face of the temptations of this more powerful inherited office, which will be based on the Bush-era precedents. Fear for the republic.
© 2009 Consortium News
Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute.
Monday, July 20, 2009
War Without Purpose
by Chris Hedges
Al-Qaida could not care less what we do in Afghanistan. We can bomb Afghan villages, hunt the Taliban in Helmand province, build a 100,000-strong client Afghan army, stand by passively as Afghan warlords execute hundreds, maybe thousands, of Taliban prisoners, build huge, elaborate military bases and send drones to drop bombs on Pakistan. It will make no difference. The war will not halt the attacks of Islamic radicals. Terrorist and insurgent groups are not conventional forces. They do not play by the rules of warfare our commanders have drilled into them in war colleges and service academies. And these underground groups are protean, changing shape and color as they drift from one failed state to the next, plan a terrorist attack and then fade back into the shadows. We are fighting with the wrong tools. We are fighting the wrong people. We are on the wrong side of history. And we will be defeated in Afghanistan as we will be in Iraq.
The cost of the Afghanistan war is rising. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed or wounded. July has been the deadliest month in the war for NATO combatants, with at least 50 troops, including 26 Americans, killed. Roadside bomb attacks on coalition forces are swelling the number of wounded and killed. In June, the tally of incidents involving roadside bombs, also called improvised explosive devices (IEDs), hit 736, a record for the fourth straight month; the number had risen from 361 in March to 407 in April and to 465 in May. The decision by President Barack Obama to send 21,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan has increased our presence to 57,000 American troops. The total is expected to rise to at least 68,000 by the end of 2009. It will only mean more death, expanded fighting and greater futility.
We have stumbled into a confusing mix of armed groups that include criminal gangs, drug traffickers, Pashtun and Tajik militias, kidnapping rings, death squads and mercenaries. We are embroiled in a civil war. The Pashtuns, who make up most of the Taliban and are the traditional rulers of Afghanistan, are battling the Tajiks and Uzbeks, who make up the Northern Alliance, which, with foreign help, won the civil war in 2001. The old Northern Alliance now dominates the corrupt and incompetent government. It is deeply hated. And it will fall with us.
We are losing the war in Afghanistan. When we invaded the country eight years ago the Taliban controlled about 75 percent of Afghanistan. Today its reach has crept back to about half the country. The Taliban runs the poppy trade, which brings in an annual income of about $300 million a year. It brazenly carries out attacks in Kabul, the capital, and foreigners, fearing kidnapping, rarely walk the streets of most Afghan cities. It is life-threatening to go into the countryside, where 80 percent of all Afghanis live, unless escorted by NATO troops. And intrepid reporters can interview Taliban officials in downtown coffee shops in Kabul. Osama bin Laden has, to the amusement of much of the rest of the world, become the Where’s Waldo of the Middle East. Take away the bullets and the bombs and you have a Gilbert and Sullivan farce.
No one seems to be able to articulate why we are in Afghanistan. Is it to hunt down bin Laden and al-Qaida? Is it to consolidate progress? Have we declared war on the Taliban? Are we building democracy? Are we fighting terrorists there so we do not have to fight them here? Are we “liberating” the women of Afghanistan? The absurdity of the questions, used as thought-terminating clichés, exposes the absurdity of the war. The confusion of purpose mirrors the confusion on the ground. We don’t know what we are doing.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. and NATO-led troops in Afghanistan, announced recently that coalition forces must make a “cultural shift” in Afghanistan. He said they should move away from their normal combat orientation and toward protecting civilians. He understands that airstrikes, which have killed hundreds of civilians, are a potent recruiting tool for the Taliban. The goal is lofty but the reality of war defies its implementation. NATO forces will always call in close air support when they are under attack. This is what troops under fire do. They do not have the luxury of canvassing the local population first. They ask questions later. The May 4 aerial attack on Farah province, which killed dozens of civilians, violated standing orders about airstrikes. So did the air assault in Kandahar province last week in which four civilians were killed and 13 were wounded. The NATO strike targeted a village in the Shawalikot district. Wounded villagers at a hospital in the provincial capital told AP that attack helicopters started bombarding their homes at about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday. One man said his 3-year-old granddaughter was killed. Combat creates its own rules, and civilians are almost always the losers.
The offensive by NATO forces in Helmand province will follow the usual scenario laid out by military commanders, who know much about weapons systems and conventional armies and little about the nuances of irregular warfare. The Taliban will withdraw, probably to sanctuaries in Pakistan. We will declare the operation a success. Our force presence will be reduced. And the Taliban will creep back into the zones we will have “cleansed.” The roadside bombs will continue to exact their deadly toll. Soldiers and Marines, frustrated at trying to fight an elusive and often invisible enemy, will lash out with greater fury at phantoms and continue to increase the numbers of civilian dead. It is a game as old as insurgency itself, and yet each generation of warriors thinks it has finally found the magic key to victory.
We have ensured that Iraq and Afghanistan are failed states. Next on our list appears to be Pakistan. Pakistan, like Iraq and Afghanistan, is also a bizarre construct of Western powers that drew arbitrary and artificial borders, ones the clans and ethnic groups divided by these lines ignore. As Pakistan has unraveled, its army has sought legitimacy in militant Islam. It was the Pakistani military that created the Taliban. The Pakistanis determined how the billions in U.S. aid to the resistance during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was allocated. And nearly all of it went to the most extremist wings of the Afghan resistance movement. The Taliban, in Pakistan’s eyes, is not only an effective weapon to defeat foreign invaders, whether Russian or American, but is a bulwark against India. Muslim radicals in Kabul are never going to build an alliance with India against Pakistan. And India, not Afghanistan, is Pakistan’s primary concern. Pakistan, no matter how many billions we give to it, will always nurture and protect the Taliban, which it knows is going to inherit Afghanistan. And the government’s well-publicized battle with the Taliban in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, rather than a new beginning, is part of a choreographed charade that does nothing to break the unholy alliance.
The only way to defeat terrorist groups is to isolate them within their own societies. This requires wooing the population away from radicals. It is a political, economic and cultural war. The terrible algebra of military occupation and violence is always counterproductive to this kind of battle. It always creates more insurgents than it kills. It always legitimizes terrorism. And while we squander resources and lives, the real enemy, al-Qaida, has moved on to build networks in Indonesia, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Morocco and depressed Muslim communities such as those in France’s Lyon and London’s Brixton area. There is no shortage of backwaters and broken patches of the Earth where al-Qaida can hide and operate. It does not need Afghanistan, and neither do we.
© 2009 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.
Al-Qaida could not care less what we do in Afghanistan. We can bomb Afghan villages, hunt the Taliban in Helmand province, build a 100,000-strong client Afghan army, stand by passively as Afghan warlords execute hundreds, maybe thousands, of Taliban prisoners, build huge, elaborate military bases and send drones to drop bombs on Pakistan. It will make no difference. The war will not halt the attacks of Islamic radicals. Terrorist and insurgent groups are not conventional forces. They do not play by the rules of warfare our commanders have drilled into them in war colleges and service academies. And these underground groups are protean, changing shape and color as they drift from one failed state to the next, plan a terrorist attack and then fade back into the shadows. We are fighting with the wrong tools. We are fighting the wrong people. We are on the wrong side of history. And we will be defeated in Afghanistan as we will be in Iraq.
The cost of the Afghanistan war is rising. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed or wounded. July has been the deadliest month in the war for NATO combatants, with at least 50 troops, including 26 Americans, killed. Roadside bomb attacks on coalition forces are swelling the number of wounded and killed. In June, the tally of incidents involving roadside bombs, also called improvised explosive devices (IEDs), hit 736, a record for the fourth straight month; the number had risen from 361 in March to 407 in April and to 465 in May. The decision by President Barack Obama to send 21,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan has increased our presence to 57,000 American troops. The total is expected to rise to at least 68,000 by the end of 2009. It will only mean more death, expanded fighting and greater futility.
We have stumbled into a confusing mix of armed groups that include criminal gangs, drug traffickers, Pashtun and Tajik militias, kidnapping rings, death squads and mercenaries. We are embroiled in a civil war. The Pashtuns, who make up most of the Taliban and are the traditional rulers of Afghanistan, are battling the Tajiks and Uzbeks, who make up the Northern Alliance, which, with foreign help, won the civil war in 2001. The old Northern Alliance now dominates the corrupt and incompetent government. It is deeply hated. And it will fall with us.
We are losing the war in Afghanistan. When we invaded the country eight years ago the Taliban controlled about 75 percent of Afghanistan. Today its reach has crept back to about half the country. The Taliban runs the poppy trade, which brings in an annual income of about $300 million a year. It brazenly carries out attacks in Kabul, the capital, and foreigners, fearing kidnapping, rarely walk the streets of most Afghan cities. It is life-threatening to go into the countryside, where 80 percent of all Afghanis live, unless escorted by NATO troops. And intrepid reporters can interview Taliban officials in downtown coffee shops in Kabul. Osama bin Laden has, to the amusement of much of the rest of the world, become the Where’s Waldo of the Middle East. Take away the bullets and the bombs and you have a Gilbert and Sullivan farce.
No one seems to be able to articulate why we are in Afghanistan. Is it to hunt down bin Laden and al-Qaida? Is it to consolidate progress? Have we declared war on the Taliban? Are we building democracy? Are we fighting terrorists there so we do not have to fight them here? Are we “liberating” the women of Afghanistan? The absurdity of the questions, used as thought-terminating clichés, exposes the absurdity of the war. The confusion of purpose mirrors the confusion on the ground. We don’t know what we are doing.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. and NATO-led troops in Afghanistan, announced recently that coalition forces must make a “cultural shift” in Afghanistan. He said they should move away from their normal combat orientation and toward protecting civilians. He understands that airstrikes, which have killed hundreds of civilians, are a potent recruiting tool for the Taliban. The goal is lofty but the reality of war defies its implementation. NATO forces will always call in close air support when they are under attack. This is what troops under fire do. They do not have the luxury of canvassing the local population first. They ask questions later. The May 4 aerial attack on Farah province, which killed dozens of civilians, violated standing orders about airstrikes. So did the air assault in Kandahar province last week in which four civilians were killed and 13 were wounded. The NATO strike targeted a village in the Shawalikot district. Wounded villagers at a hospital in the provincial capital told AP that attack helicopters started bombarding their homes at about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday. One man said his 3-year-old granddaughter was killed. Combat creates its own rules, and civilians are almost always the losers.
The offensive by NATO forces in Helmand province will follow the usual scenario laid out by military commanders, who know much about weapons systems and conventional armies and little about the nuances of irregular warfare. The Taliban will withdraw, probably to sanctuaries in Pakistan. We will declare the operation a success. Our force presence will be reduced. And the Taliban will creep back into the zones we will have “cleansed.” The roadside bombs will continue to exact their deadly toll. Soldiers and Marines, frustrated at trying to fight an elusive and often invisible enemy, will lash out with greater fury at phantoms and continue to increase the numbers of civilian dead. It is a game as old as insurgency itself, and yet each generation of warriors thinks it has finally found the magic key to victory.
We have ensured that Iraq and Afghanistan are failed states. Next on our list appears to be Pakistan. Pakistan, like Iraq and Afghanistan, is also a bizarre construct of Western powers that drew arbitrary and artificial borders, ones the clans and ethnic groups divided by these lines ignore. As Pakistan has unraveled, its army has sought legitimacy in militant Islam. It was the Pakistani military that created the Taliban. The Pakistanis determined how the billions in U.S. aid to the resistance during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was allocated. And nearly all of it went to the most extremist wings of the Afghan resistance movement. The Taliban, in Pakistan’s eyes, is not only an effective weapon to defeat foreign invaders, whether Russian or American, but is a bulwark against India. Muslim radicals in Kabul are never going to build an alliance with India against Pakistan. And India, not Afghanistan, is Pakistan’s primary concern. Pakistan, no matter how many billions we give to it, will always nurture and protect the Taliban, which it knows is going to inherit Afghanistan. And the government’s well-publicized battle with the Taliban in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, rather than a new beginning, is part of a choreographed charade that does nothing to break the unholy alliance.
The only way to defeat terrorist groups is to isolate them within their own societies. This requires wooing the population away from radicals. It is a political, economic and cultural war. The terrible algebra of military occupation and violence is always counterproductive to this kind of battle. It always creates more insurgents than it kills. It always legitimizes terrorism. And while we squander resources and lives, the real enemy, al-Qaida, has moved on to build networks in Indonesia, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Morocco and depressed Muslim communities such as those in France’s Lyon and London’s Brixton area. There is no shortage of backwaters and broken patches of the Earth where al-Qaida can hide and operate. It does not need Afghanistan, and neither do we.
© 2009 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.
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