Afghanistan: Not the Good War
Here is the text of a talk I gave to the University of Iowa Anti-War Committee (UIAC) on Oct 23, 2008:
Afghanistan is supposed to be the good war, the one that iraq is supposed to be a distraction from. the war that liberated Afghanis from the brutal rule of the Taliban. The war to end terror.
Yet, if you look closely, it becomes obvious that this war is in fact every bit as evil and terrible as the war in Iraq. The real objectives are not ending terror or bringing democracy or liberating anyone. The US and NATO are in Afghanistan in order to control a key strategic area.
So what after 7 years of war does Afghanistan’s liberation look like?
A draft report by American intelligence agencies concludes that Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral” and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban’s influence there, according to American officials familiar with the document. “ reports the New York Times. Reports issued by the Central Intelligence Agency for more than two years have chronicled the worsening violence and rampant corruption inside Afghanistan,
According to British general Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith , “it is necessary to lower our expectations. We’re not going to win this war. It’s about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that’s not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army.” In an interview with The Sunday Times, he added his voice to a growing number of people arguing that the conflict in Afghanistan could be resolved only through a political settlement that could include the Taliban.
An even more damaging indictment comes from Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador, who believes that the “American strategy is destined to fail” in Afghanistan,
“The current situation is bad. The security situation is getting worse. So is corruption and the Government has lost all trust. Our public statements should not delude us over the fact that the insurrection, while incapable of winning a military victory, nevertheless has the capacity to make life increasingly difficult, including in the capital.
The presence – especially the military presence – of the coalition is part of the problem, not the solution. The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them. In doing so, they are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis (which, moreover, will probably be dramatic).”
The official unemployment rate in Afghanistan, last calculated in 2005, was 40% percent. According to recent estimates, may be as high as 80% in some parts of the country. 45% of the population is now unable to purchase enough food to guarantee bare minimum health levels, according to the Brookings Institution. The Afghan government claims that drought and famine may lead to deaths of nearly 80% of the population in some provinces. In some parts of the country, people are so hungry they have resorted to eating grass.
Afghanistan has a huge refugee problem. In Kabul, the population has increased from 800,000 to more than four million today, mostly concentrated in slums and shantytowns on the outskirts of the city..
Only ten percent of Afghans have electricity “The main electricity supply is worse now than five years ago, and while the rich can use private generators to power their air conditioners, hot-water heaters, computers and satellite tvs, average Kabulis ‘suffered a summer without fans and face a winter without heaters.” Barnett Rubin, ‘Saving Afghanistan’, Foreign Affairs, January–February 2007.
“Beyond Kabul, things vary dramatically depending on where you go.” Reports one journalist, “ In the parts of the country with the heaviest concentrations of US/NATO troops, Afghans are frequently rounded-up, detained, tortured, bombed, or shot by foreign troops just as in Iraq.”
“In other parts of the country, where the Taliban are strong; girls schools are blown up, civilians are killed in suicide bombings, and journalists, teachers, and elected officials are harassed or murdered. Those areas controlled by warlords are ruled with an iron hand, where extreme interpretations of sharia law rule the day, and women suffer rape and degradation” and “ No matter where you go in Afghanistan, there is utter, grinding poverty.”
The economy is so underdeveloped that opium production accounts for more than half of the country’s gross domestic product. “ The only sector in which Afghanistan has progressed is in drug cultivation and trafficking. “The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government,” the Daily Mail reported July 21, 2007. According to UN estimates, narcotics account for 53 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product, and the poppy fields continue to spread. Some 90 per cent of the world opium supply emanates from Afghanistan
And what about the status of women in Afghanistan who US forces supposedly liberated? Shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan began in October 2001, Laura Bush came on the air declaring “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”
But, according to the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA), by reinstalling the warlords in power in Afghanistan, the US is ultimately replacing one fundamentalist regime with another. RAWA reports :
“The rates of self-immolation and suicide due to domestic violence and poverty, of forced marriages and violence against women are higher than ever. In the first six months of 2008, forty-seven cases of self-immolation among women were reported in a single hospital in the western city of Herat. Reports come every day of gang rapes of young girls, especially in the northern portion of Afghanistan, where pro-US warlords have full power and a free hand. But the rapists are not prosecuted. Last month President Hamid Karzai ordered the release of two men who were sentenced to eighteen years in prison for raping and killing a girl.”
According to Sonali Kolhatkar, in an interview on Democracy Now! “Women are being imprisoned in greater numbers than ever before, for the crime of escaping from home or having, quote-unquote, ’sexual relations’–’illegal sexual relations.’ Most of these women are simply victims of rape.”
Every 28 minutes a woman dies in Afghanistan during childbirth and 54 percent of Afghan children are born stunted.
As Kolhatkar points out, While women have political equality in the constitution, “ If you look at what happens on the ground, politically speaking, women who are in parliament, if they speak up, are completely attacked. “ One example is Malai Joya, a member of parliament who was banned for speaking out against the warlords. She has yet to be reinstated.
So what about the supposed reconstruction and nation building that is supposed to be going on? Anand Gopal observes, “Washington spends about $100 million a day on this war — close to $36 billion a year — but only five cents of every dollar actually goes towards aid. From this paltry sum, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief found that “a staggering 40 percent has returned to donor countries in corporate profits and salaries.”
Simon Jenkins writes in the Guardian, “A reputed 10,000 ngo staff have turned Kabul into the Klondike during the gold rush, building office blocks, driving up rents, cruising about in armoured jeeps and spending stupefying sums of other people’s money, essentially on themselves. They take orders only from some distant agency, but then the same goes for the American Army, NATO the UN, the EU and the supposedly sovereign Afghan government.”
In 2005, there was almost a 70 percent approval rating of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, because Afghans thought maybe things would get better if the foreign troops were present and they could be a buffer to the fundamentalist forces. In 2007, just a year ago, that approval rating was down to 40 percent.
What happened.? Afghanstan experienced its own troop surge that began in early 2007. Anand Gopal describes the development of this surge :
“Then, a growing insurgency was causing visible problems for U.S. and NATO forces in certain pockets in the southern parts of the country, long a Taliban stronghold. In response, military planners dramatically beefed up the international presence, raising the number of troops over the following 18 months by 20,000, a 45% jump.
During this period, however, the violence also jumped — by 50%. This shouldn’t be surprising. More troops meant more targets for Taliban fighters and suicide bombers. In response, the international forces retaliated with massive aerial bombing campaigns and large-scale house raids. The number of civilians killed in the process skyrocketed. In the fifteen months of this surge, more civilians have been killed than in the previous four years combined.”
The number of civilians killed or harmed by air raids also increased dramatically. According to a Recent Human Rights Watch Report :
“In 2007, Afghan civilian deaths were nearly three times higher: In 2007, more Afghan civilians were killed by airstrikes than by US and NATO ground fire. In the first seven months of 2008, the latest period for which data is available, at least 119 Afghan civilians were killed in 12 airstrikes.
There has been a massive and unprecedented surge in the use of airpower in Afghanistan in 2008. In response to increased insurgent activity, twice as many tons of bombs were dropped in 2007 than in 2006. In 2008, the pace has increased: in the months of June and July alone the US dropped approximately as much as it did in all of 2006.
Airstrikes have caused significant destruction of civilian property, and have also forced civilians to flee and vacate villages, adding to the internally displaced population of Afghanistan. In every case investigated by Human Rights Watch where airstrikes hit villages, many civilians left the village because of damage to their homes but also because of fear of further strikes. People from neighboring villages also sometimes fled in fear of future strikes on their villages. They have also had significant political impact, outraging public opinion in Afghanistan and undermining public confidence in both the Afghan government and its international backers.”
All this contributes to support for insurgency. “While Bush and Karzai blame Pakistan the occupation itself has been the main recruiting sergeant. If a second-generation Taliban is now growing and creating new alliances it is not because its sectarian religious practices have become popular, but because it is the only available umbrella for national liberation.”
The Us and NATO are planning to be in Afghanistan for the long haul.
In a recent article in Foreign Affairs , Richard Holbrooke former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, insists “as the war enters its eighth year, Americans should be told the truth: it will last a long time–longer than the United States’ longest war to date, the 14-year conflict (1961-75) in Vietnam.”
“Stabilizing Afghanistan will need an international commitment lasting a generation, the general who has just spent more than a year commanding U.S. forces there said on Tuesday [29 April 2008]. Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez, commander of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division,
As Tariq Ali notes : “The basing agreement signed by the us with its appointee in Kabul in May 2005 gives the Pentagon the right to maintain a massive military presence in Afghanistan in perpetuity, potentially including nuclear missiles. That Washington is not seeking permanent bases in this fraught and inhospitable terrain simply for the sake of ‘democratization and good governance’ was made clear by nato’s Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at the Brookings Institution in February this year: a permanent nato presence in a country that borders the ex-Soviet republics, China, Iran and Pakistan was too good to miss.”
So why is Afghanistan so important? Afghanistan provides the US with access to the Caspian region in central Asia known to hold significant reserves of oil and natural gas. Following its bombing of Afghanistan in 2001–02, the United States wound up with military bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Yemen, and Djibouti Countries like Georgia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan become important as a means of building energy pipelines that bypass Russia and Iran.
More strategically, Afghanistan has become a central theatre for reconstituting, and extending, the West’s power-political grip on the world order. While oil itself is attractive for U.S. business interests, the larger prize for Washington is an ability to dominate the region militarily and politically. As Asia Times writer Pepe Escobar commented: “Oil and gas are not the U.S.’s ultimate aim. It’s about control… If the U.S. controls the energy resources of its rivals–Europe, Japan, China and other nations aspiring to be more independent–they win.
Sometimes, they even spell this out explicitly. An essay in the NATO Review, for example, sounds more like a threat than a call for security and peace: “In the 21st century, NATO must become an alliance founded on the Euro-Atlantic area, designed to project systemic stability beyond its borders…There can be no systemic security without Asian security, and there will be no Asian security without a strong role for the West therein.”
As an editorial in Socialist Worker argues “The “humanitarian-security” case made by the U.S. establishment needs to be rejected–just as the case for the occupation of Iraq has been rejected as a pack of lies to justify Washington’s drive to control oil resources and project its power throughout the Middle East.”
Both presidential candidates have argued for shift troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to beef up the US presence there. But U.S. meddling—political, financial, and most importantly, military—has never been a benefit for ordinary Afghans. There is no reason to believe that it can or will be in the future.
It was the US that created the warlords and supported the Taliban in the first place The US armed and trained religious fundamentalists to fight the Soviet Union in afghanistan. Bin Laden used to be on the CIA payroll. The more extreme a faction, the more the US supported them.
During the 1990s, Uncle Sam tried do deals with the Taliban in order to establish an pipeline that would bypass Iran. Taliban was supported in order to promote the necessary stability in the region. As one U.S. diplomat put it in 1997, “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the oil consortium], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”
Eric Ruder points out, “Those forces in the antiwar movement that don’t include opposition to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan are at risk of being made irrelevant by the dedication of increasing amounts of U.S. military firepower and personnel to the “good war
Failure to do so will mean that the further the occupation of Iraq fades in the media and from American political discussion, the more difficult it will get to mobilize sufficient numbers to compel the U.S. to exit both Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Which is why we must reject the ideas of Afghanistan as the good war and redouble our efforts to get the US out.
