Jack A. Smith : Afghanistan's Karzai Lets Cat Out of the Bag

Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Photo by Massoud Hossaini / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images.

But then, again...
Afghan War may end by 2024

Washington evidently was taken aback by Karzai’s unexpected public revelations that made it clear President Obama is anxious, not hesitant, to keep American troops in Afghanistan.

By Jack A. Smith / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2013

Hamid Karzai has let the Pentagon’s cat out of the bag -- to the displeasure of the Obama Administration. The Afghan president revealed inside information about President Obama’s war plans after all U.S. “combat troops” completely withdraw in 17 months at the end of 2014.

As was known in recent years, the Obama Administration actually plans to keep troops in Afghanistan after the “withdrawal,” at least to 2024. They won’t be “combat troops,” so Obama didn’t actually mislead the American people. Instead they are to be Special Forces troops, who certainly engage in combat but are identified by a different military designation, as well as U.S. Army trainers for the Afghan military, CIA contingents, drone operators, and various other personnel.

The White House has kept other details secret, such as troop numbers and basing arrangements, until it is certain a final Strategic Partnership Declaration is worked out with the Kabul government. When that occurs, the White House expects to make the announcement itself at a time of its choosing, sculpting the information to convey the impression that another 10 years of fighting is not actually war but an act of compassion for a besieged ally who begs for help.

On May 9, however, during a speech at Kabul University, President Karzai decided to update the world on the progress he was making in his secret talks with the U.S., evidently without Washington’s knowledge.

“We are in very serious and delicate negotiations with America," Karzai said. "America has got its demands, Afghanistan too has its own demands, and its own interests... They want nine bases across Afghanistan. We agree to give them the bases.

"Our conditions are that the U.S. intensify efforts in the peace process [i.e., talks with the Taliban], strengthen Afghanistan's security forces, provide concrete support to the economy -- power, roads and dams -- and provide assistance in governance. If these are met, we are ready to sign the security pact."

Washington evidently was taken aback by Karzai’s unexpected public revelations that made it clear President Obama is anxious, not hesitant, to keep American troops in Afghanistan. Few analysts thought there would be as many as nine bases. Neither the White House nor State Department confirmed requesting them but both emphasized that any bases in question were not intended to be permanent, as though that’s the principal factor.

If American engagement lasts until 2024 it will mean the U.S. has been involved in Afghan wars for most of the previous 46 years. It began in 1978 when Washington (and Saudi Arabia) started to finance the right wing Islamist mujahedeen uprising against a left wing pro-Soviet government in Kabul. The left regime was finally defeated in 1992 and the Taliban emerged as the dominant force among several other fighting groups in the mid-90s.

The CIA remained active in Afghanistan and was joined by the rest of the U.S. war machine weeks after the September 11, 2000, terror attacks in Washington and New York. The objective was to overthrow the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda, which also emerged from the Washington-financed wars. The U.S. swiftly took control of Kabul and al-Qaeda fled to Pakistan. Since then, the American foreign legion has been fought to a stalemate by a much smaller poorly equipped guerrilla force, which is where the situation remains today.


Negotiations with the Taliban

The U.S. has engaged in secret talks with the Taliban off and on for a couple of years. The hope is that the Taliban will agree to stop fighting and subordinate itself to the Kabul government in return for money, and a certain amount of administrative and political power within the national and certain provincial governments.

The Taliban will agree to nothing at this stage but an immediate and total withdrawal of U.S. military forces and the closure of bases. The White House evidently thinks that a combination of U.S.-trained Afghan forces plus the remaining Americans might bring their opponents to the bargaining table. The nine bases also provide the U.S. with a strong bargaining chip to relinquish at the right time.

Washington has additional reasons for remaining in Afghanistan, as we wrote in the May 31, 2011, issue of the Activist Newsletter -- and little has changed:

The U.S. has no desire to completely withdraw from its only foothold in Central Asia, militarily positioned close to what are perceived to be its two main enemies with nuclear weapons (China, Russia), and two volatile nuclear powers backed by the U.S. but not completely under its control by any means (Pakistan, India). Also, this fortuitous geography is flanking the extraordinary oil and natural gas wealth of the Caspian Basin and energy-endowed former Soviet Muslim republics such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Lastly, Iran -- a possible future imperial prize -- is situated directly across Afghanistan’s western border.

The U.S. wants to keep troops nearby for any contingency. Washington’s foothold in Central Asia is a potential geopolitical treasure, particularly as Obama, like Bush before him, seeks to prevent Beijing and Moscow from extending their influence in what is actually their own back yard, not America’s.

Soon after this was written the Obama Administration revealed its “pivot” to Asia. Remaining in Central Asia is now part of what we have called America’s “ring of fire” around China, singeing North Korea as well.

Karzai occasionally makes strong public statements that criticize the U.S. They seem mainly intended to bolster his position by showing the Afghan people he is not Uncle Sam’s total puppet, but he’s to be praised for these statements.

For example, he often complains openly when the U.S. commits war crimes in his country, which have been numerous. He has demanded the U.S. discontinue night raids on homes. In late February, according to the Guardian, he ordered “U.S. Special Forces to leave one of Afghanistan’s most restive provinces, Maidan Wardak, after receiving reports from local officials claiming that the elite units had been involved in the torture and disappearance of Afghan civilians.”

He recently charged that Washington was allowing the Taliban to increase its violence to make it necessary for him to approve the U.S. demand to remain until 2024.


The issue of Karzai

The issue of Karzai.

Washington named Karzai acting president soon after the Bush Administration’s aggressive invasion 12 years ago. His job was to serve the interests of the United States while governing Afghanistan.

Karzai was elected president with decisive U.S. backing two years later. The Obama Administration maneuvered to oust him in the 2009 election, charging him with gross corruption, but its candidate withdrew just before the voting. Karzai legally cannot run for another term, but intends to continue playing a powerful role if he can pull it off.

Karzai is shrewd and realizes America’s intentions are far more corrupt than his own because he only wants money, power, and a somewhat better deal for Afghanistan, while the hypocritical U.S. wants everything there is to grab for its own geopolitical interests.

He has long been on the CIA’s generous payroll and also distributes payoffs to various warlords, some of whom are closer to the CIA than to the government. A week before the 2001 invasion the CIA was inside the country smuggling money to the warlords to join the impending war on the Taliban.

The White House dislikes the Afghan leader but he’s all they have at the moment. They desperately need him now, particularly until signing a final agreement on having U.S. troops remain until 2024. President Obama well remembers his humiliation when Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki rejected demands to keep troops in Iraq after the “withdrawal” date, December 30, 2011.

Obama pressured Maliki for years to permit up to 30,000 U.S. troops in Iraq after the “combat troops” pulled out. In mid-October 2011 the Iraqi leader finally accepted 3,000 to 5,000 troops in a training-only capacity. The Iraqis then insisted that they remain largely confined to their bases, and refused Washington’s demand to grant legal immunity to the soldiers when they entered the larger society.

That was the deal-breaker. Washington routinely demands legal exemption for its foreign legions as a matter of imperial hubris, and would not compromise. The day after the deal collapsed, Obama issued a public statement intended to completely conceal his failure. "Today,” he said, “I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year."


The deal with Kabul

Several important issues in the Washington-Kabul post-2014 negotiations seem to have been decided, including a U.S. payment of at least $10 billion a year to train and pay for some 400,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers. Among the remaining issues are two of considerable importance -- troop strength and legal immunity for American personal (both for soldiers and tens of thousands of U.S. “contractors” who will remain in the country).

Reports circulated in the last few months that between 3,000 and 20,000 U.S. troops, mainly Special Forces, CIA contingents, drone operators and contractors of various kinds, will remain after 2014. The main air cover is expected to come from Navy aircraft carriers probably stationed in the Arabian Sea or Indian Ocean. Drones are expected to play a major role in battle as well as surveillance. Last year there were some 400 drone attacks in Afghanistan and that number is expected to continue increasing.

The New York Times reported January 3 that

Gen. John R. Allen, the senior American commander in Afghanistan, has submitted military options to the Pentagon that would keep 6,000 to 20,000 American troops in Afghanistan after 2014... With 6,000 troops, defense officials said, the American mission would largely be a counterterrorism fight of Special Operations commandos who would hunt down insurgents. There would be limited logistical support and training for Afghan security forces. With 10,000 troops, the United States would expand training of Afghan security forces. With 20,000 troops, the Obama administration would add some conventional Army forces to patrol in limited areas.

The May 11 New York Times reported that

The Obama administration has yet to decide how large a force it would like to keep in Afghanistan, but administration officials have signaled that it is unlikely to total more than 10,000 service members. They said it was more important now to hash out a range of issues, like whether American troops would continue to have legal immunity in Afghanistan after next year, than to talk about the specifics of where troops would be based.

The big remaining issue is immunity for U.S. personnel. Our guess is that, unlike in Iraq -- where conditions are far different -- Washington will find a way around the issue. It is difficult to see how the Kabul government of Karzai or his successor in next year’s elections can survive for long without substantial American financial support for a prolonged period.


The world as battleground

American forces are engaged in Obama’s drone wars in western Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and soon Africa. Regime change in Libya would not have occurred had the Obama Administration refused to participate. President Obama has been fanning the flames of regime change in Syria for nearly two years, and now he’s about to up the ante.

He’s strangling Iran with unjust sanctions and keeps warning that war is possible. He calls Hezbollah, the Shia self-defense organization in Lebanon, a terrorist organization, as he does Hamas in Gaza, the victim of overwhelming Israeli hatred and violence. And now Obama in moving more military power to East Asia to confront China.

If George W. Bush was in the White House today, a huge American peace movement would be out on the streets demanding an end to America’s endless immoral wars. But now a Democrat officiates in the Oval Office, his Nobel Peace Prize wisely hidden in a dark closet lest his militarist propensities provoke an unseemly contrast.

Obama’s many wars are but extensions of Bush’s wars plus killer drones, but the great majority of Americans either seem to have forgotten or simply don’t care about the wars, even though their tax money will amount to $80 billion for Afghanistan in fiscal 2014. Meanwhile, Pentagon generals anticipate various new wars of one kind or another well into the future. The battle against al-Qaeda is expected to last 20 more years. The world has become America’s battlefield.

Afghanistan? Didn’t we have a war there once? Oh, that’s right, it ended when we got rid of Bush, didn’t it?

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian -- for decades the nation's preeminent leftist newsweekly -- that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter. Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : 'Cruel Harvest' in Afghanistan

Drugs, war and occupation:
'Cruel Harvest' in Afghanistan

Cruel Harvest does not claim that the U.S. is in Afghanistan because of the drug trade, either to end it or to profit from it. The text does explain that Washington has used drug profits to fund its covert and not-so-covert military and intelligence operations.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / February 26, 2013

Cruel Harvest: U.S. Intervention in the Afghan Drug Trade by Julien Mercille (2012: Pluto Press); Paperback; 192 pp; $29.00)

The United States invaded Afghanistan over 11 years ago. Men and women who were seven and eight years old are now enlisting in the military. Some of them will end up walking the streets and trails of that faraway land before their enlistments are up. Even if the Obama administration keeps its pledge to withdraw 34,000 U.S. troops in the next year or so, there will still be rotations and special forces in and out of Afghanistan for years if Washington's plans are not derailed.

Likewise, the Afghan opium trade will continue. Regarding that trade, questions often arise concerning its relationship to the battle on the ground and the groups fighting that battle. As those who watched the Soviet military disintegrate in Afghanistan during the 1980s will remember, news stories occasionally appeared in the U.S. media that mentioned the growing rates of drug addiction and use among Soviet conscripts. These mentions usually occurred in relation to the U.S. desire to "make Afghanistan the Soviets' Vietnam.." After all, the rampant drug use among American conscripts during its war in Vietnam was well documented.

Despite apparent Pentagon efforts to hide the fact, some U.S. soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan certainly take advantage of the opium and marijuana products produced in Afghanistan. However, the Pentagon seems more concerned with prescription drug and steroid abuse by its troops. However this doesn't mean there is no U.S. interest in the Afghan drug trade

Julien Mercille, author of Cruel Harvest: U.S Intervention in the Afghan Drug Trade, points out that the United States goverment meets its own definition of a narco-terrorist organization. This definition (provided by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) during testimony before Congress) describes such organizations as those groups which are “complicit in the activities of drug trafficking to further premeditated, politically motivated violence to influence a government or group of people.”

If this is narco-terrorism, than not only is the U.S. government involved; it can be reasonably argued that it almost invented the practice. To prove his point, Mercille reviews the complicity of the Central Intelligence Agency and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, in the drug trade since World War II. Drawing on the work of Alfred McCoy (The Politics of Heroin) and others, he adds the intrigue in Afghanistan to that history.

In looking at McCoy’s work, Mercille acknowledges and accepts the volume and depth of the research he brings to the subject. At the same time, he rejects McCoy’s assumption that, even though the CIA was trafficking in drugs, other agencies in the U.S. government were fighting the drug trade. Other researchers on this apparent interagency conflict include Douglas Valentine, whose books The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack chronicle in concise detail the corruption, conflicts and lies of the DEA and its predecessor the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

Despite the incredible research and writing involved in these books, it seems safe to assume that their readers know only a small portion of the story they tell, due to the nature of the topic and the secrecy and subterfuge of the agencies involved.

Cruel Harvest takes a sharp look at the history of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan since the 1970s. It provides a background to U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and the surrounding region while examining the growth of CENTCOM, the Pentagon command in that part of the world. Mercille exposes the lies told by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and CIA man Bill Casey about Soviet intentions for the country and emphasizes that it's the occupation that fuels the current insurgency, not the drug trade.

Merceille substantiates the claim made by many in the anti-war camp that the U.S.-NATO intervention in Afghanistan is nothing but an attempt to establish Washington’s dominance in a country where no outside power has done so for any extended period since Alexander the Great.

Claims about freedom, women's rights, and every other excuse provided are proven to be untrue. Even drug prevention is shown to be a sham. After detailing Washington claims that the Taliban are partially funded by opium production, Merceille points out that most of the U.S. allies in Afghanistan, including the Karzai government, are involved in opium and heroin production, as well.

Indeed, the head of the Northern Alliance, Washington’s first ally in the mujahedin phase of the war in the 1970s and 1980s, was (and remains) a well-known drug lord. It becomes clear by the end of this book that Washington is not interested in eradicating drug production and trafficking. It just wants to ensure the people profiting from the business are willing to work in Washington's interest.

Cruel Harvest does not claim that the U.S. is in Afghanistan because of the drug trade, either to end it or to profit from it. The text does explain that Washington has used drug profits to fund its covert and not-so-covert military and intelligence operations. It also points out that, while poppy farmers who pay taxes to the Taliban are targeted, those that align themselves with the U.S.-supported regime rarely are. Furthermore, it makes the point that this practice is intentional.

Mercille’s relatively short work is a useful, extensively cited and fact-laden discussion of the role narcotics production plays in the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Tom Hayden : U.S. Special Forces are Back in Iraq

Special Forces patrol in Iraq, 2005. U.S. Army photo.
U.S. Special Forces Deployed in Iraq, again

The irony is that the U.S. is protecting a pro-Iran Shiite regime in Baghdad against a Sunni-based insurgency while at the same time supporting a Sunni-led movement against the Iran-backed dictatorship in Syria

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / September 26, 2012

Despite the official U.S. military withdrawal last December, American special forces "recently" returned to Iraq on a counterterrorism mission, according to an American general in charge of weapons sales there. The mission was reported by The New York Times, in the 162nd line in the fifteenth paragraph of a story about deepening sectarian divides.

The irony is that the U.S. is protecting a pro-Iran Shiite regime in Baghdad against a Sunni-based insurgency while at the same time supporting a Sunni-led movement against the Iran-backed dictatorship in Syria. The Sunni rebellions are occurring in the vast Sunni region between northwestern Iraq and southern Syria where borders are porous.

During the Iraq War, many Iraqi insurgents from Anbar and Diyala provinces took sanctuary in Sunni areas of Syria. Now they are turning their weapons on two targets, the al-Malaki government in Baghdad and the Assad regime in Damascus.

The U.S. is caught in the contradictions of proxy wars, favoring Iran's ally in Iraq while trying to displace Iran's proxy in Syria.

The lethal complication of the U.S. Iraq policy is a military withdrawal that was propelled by political pressure from public opinion in the U.S. even as the war could not be won on the battlefield. Military "redeployment," as the scenario is described, is a general's nightmare.

In the case of Vietnam, a "decent interval" was supposedly arranged by the Nixon administration to create the appearance of an orderly American withdrawal. During the same "interval," Nixon massively escalated his bombing campaign to no avail. Two years after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, Saigon collapsed.

It is unlikely that the Maliki regime will fall to Sunni insurgents in Iraq, if only because the Sunni population is only about 20 percent of the population. However, the return of U.S. Special Forces is not likely to restore Iraqi stability, and they may become trapped in crossfire as the sectarian tensions deepen.

The real lesson may be for Afghanistan, where another unwinnable, unaffordable war in support of an unpopular regime is stumbling towards 2014, the timeline for the end of U.S. combat. That's the same year in which Hamid Karzai's presidential term ends.

Was anyone in the US/NATO alliance planning a "decent interval" for the Humpty Dumpty in Kabul? The US military "surge" there ended just this week, with 68,000 U.S. troops to be radically reduced in two years.


2. America's last months in Iraq: Michael Gordon's version

The New York Times often relies on its national security correspondent, Michael Gordon, an insider with close ties to military and intelligence professionals, to obtain a quasi-official version of events in the Long War. Gordon's Sept. 23 account of "failed efforts and challenges of America's last months in Iraq" is illuminating but hardly the final word.

To what is already known, Gordon adds that the White House tried to lobby for a widening of the Maliki government to include a role for Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya mainly-Sunni bloc. Those efforts failed. The Americans also hoped that the Baghdad regime would accept up to 16,000 "residual" troops for training, air support and counterterrorism. The proposal was pushed hard by the Pentagon after "an earful" from Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states.

The White House, "looking toward Mr. Obama's re-election campaign, had a lower number in mind." On April 29, the national security adviser, Tom Donilon, asked the defense secretary, Robert Gates, if he could accept "up to" 10,000. Gates said yes but was circumvented by the Joint Chiefs, led by Adm. Mike Mullen, who sent a classified letter to Obama warning that 16,000 were needed.

The secret proposal was endorsed by the U.S. commander in Iraq and the head of Central Command. The letter "arrived with a thud" at the White House, stirring an angry response.

Then on June 2, the president emphasized to Maliki that any new agreement would need ratification by the Iraqi parliament -- a virtual impossibility. The agreement would require "airtight immunities" for any U.S. troops left behind -- another nail in the coffin.

Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta revived the proposal for 10,000.

On Aug. 13, Obama "settled the matter" by rejecting the 10,000 figure and a lower version of 7,000. He offered a token rotating presence of 1,500 U.S. troops at a time, up to 3,000 in all, plus six F-16s. The question Gordon never addresses is whether Obama knew his proposals would be rejected by the Iraqis, allowing him to withdraw while leaving responsibility with the Iraqis.

On a personal note, I have interviewed one American official present in the small White House discussions about those numbers. This former official told me that Donilon proposed the 10,000 figure. Aside from being national security adviser, I asked, did he say he was making an official offer from President Obama, or was he authorized to float the number as part of a continuing discussion? The number, he said, came from Donilon as an offer.

We may never know what was Obama's bottom line. He must have known the Iraqi parliament was a hotbed of sovereignty where a deal with the Americans would take weeks of rancor before failing. He must have known that an offer to discuss 1,500 troops and six jets would be an embarrassing token to leave behind.

On Oct. 21, the president video-conferenced Malaki -- for the first time in four months -- and told him the negotiations were over and all the U.S. troops were coming home.

Gordon's account, published in a book this week, is a critique of Obama's withdrawal, which he says leaves Iraq "less stable domestically and less reliable internationally." He complains of no troops on the ground, no Americans to "patrol the skies," and severe cuts in Iraq's police force.

Gordon never explains why leaving behind a small handful of American troops would have secured American objectives, which he says in hindsight were to create a "stable and representative government," avoid a power vacuum for terrorists, and "sufficient influence" so that Iraq would be an American partner, or at least not an opponent, in the Middle East.

What Gordon doesn't say is that those objectives were impossible to achieve in an almost nine-year war that cost the US 4,446 deaths and 32, 227 wounded, a taxpayer bill of $807 billion in direct costs, and left Iraq itself a ravaged wasteland.

This is an expanded version of an article that appears in The Nation.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : The War on Afghanistan is Our Biggest Fantasy

Image from Reuters.
The war on Afghanistan:
Our longest war and biggest fantasy

Obama's announcement sounded eerily like the policy of 'Vietnamization' which President Nixon put in place in 1969.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / May 9, 2012

On May Day 2012 President Obama made a secret trip to Afghanistan and spoke to the nation and the troops on the ground about past, present, and future policy. What the speech revealed was a replication of a 10-year fantasy narrative about why we went to war on Afghanistan, what our goals were, and what the future holds in the region for the United States and, most important, the Afghan people.

The President announced he was signing an agreement between the two countries which will define “a new kind of relationship” in which Afghans will assume primary responsibility for their security and “we build an equal partnership between two sovereign states.” The future of this relationship will be bright as “the war ends, and a new chapter begins.”

The announcement sounded eerily like the policy of “Vietnamization” which President Nixon put in place in 1969; handing over ground action to the South Vietnamese government while the United States escalated the bombing of targets in North and South Vietnam and invaded neighboring Cambodia. The South Vietnamese government and military were incapable of assuming “primary responsibility” and in the end were overthrown by powerful forces in the countryside.

The President explained that President Bush correctly launched a war on Afghanistan in October 2001, because the country allowed terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden an al Qaeda “safe-haven” for terrorist planning and attacks, ultimately leading to the tragedy of 9/11. While Bin Laden escaped to Pakistan, the U.S. continued fighting the Taliban who have “waged a brutal insurgency.”

Subsequently, he claimed, using the dehumanized language of violence-prone discourse, the U.S. military has “taken out over 20 of their top leaders” including bin Laden himself. But the war continues. While the United States downsizes its troop commitments policy will include:

• a transition of the war to our Afghan military allies. Importantly, Obama proclaimed that at the NATO summit this month in Chicago, “our coalition will set a goal for Afghan forces to be in the lead for combat operations across the country next year.” However, “international troops will continue to train, advise and assist Afghans, and fight alongside them when needed.”
• training of Afghan Security Forces, leading to an Afghan force of 352,000 troops which NATO will support to create “a strong and sustainable long-term Afghan force.”
• increasing US/NATO/Afghan cooperation “including shared commitments to combat terrorism and strengthen democratic institutions.” President Obama declared that these commitments, in the short run involving counter-terrorism and continued training, do not include the building of permanent U.S. bases.
• pursuing a negotiated peace with the Taliban if they break with al Qaeda, renouncing violence and to “abide by Afghan laws.”
• working towards stability in South Asia, including partnering with neighboring Pakistan. The President assured viewers that “America has no designs beyond an end to al Qaeda safe-havens and respect for Afghan sovereignty.” In short, the central goal of United States policy is to destroy al Qaeda, in the short run to stabilize Afghanistan, and “to finish the job we started in Afghanistan…”

The speech reflects the classic pattern of U.S. military globalization coupled with tortured ahistorical fantasy narratives that have characterized policy since the end of World War II.

The President rationalized a 10-year war on a nation in which terrorists resided because Afghan leaders refused to hand over alleged perpetrators without some evidence of the connection between them and 9/11.

Also, the initial narrative, reflected in the President’s speech last week, conflated the al Qaeda terrorists with the so-called Taliban. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s with support from the United States. Some of these Afghan government officials had been recipients of military aid in the 1980s when they fought against the regime in Kabul that was allied with the former Soviet Union.

Neither Bush nor Obama has ever explained to the public who our enemy is. Has al Qaeda been clearly defined? What political, ethnic, and regional constituencies do the Taliban come from? Do we know much about the political forces in Afghanistan the Karzai regime represents?

Is the president correct to suggest that the United States and the Karzai government are winning the hearts and minds of the people outside Kabul, despite consistently negative reports to the contrary in the media?

Along with not telling us who the enemy is and why they are the enemy, neither Bush nor Obama has described how many of them there are, where they are located, how they are connected in a presumed worldwide network, and, most basically, how we know that a worldwide network of terrorists really exists.

Recently released documents from the bin Laden compound suggest that while he wanted to promote terrorist attacks on the United States there was a communications disconnect between the alleged worldwide terrorist leader and various related organizations around the world.

Mother Jones reported on its website on May 4 devastating statistics concerning the U.S war on Afghanistan since 2001. These included costs for military operations since 2001 of $443.3 billion; an estimated cost per soldier in country in 2011 of $694,000; 1,507 U.S. soldiers killed in action and 15,560 wounded. Also U.S military spending has doubled since 2000.

And between 2004-2112 there have been 296 drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan; 17 percent of those killed were not affiliated with targeted enemies. And the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2011 totaled 12,793.

Former Senator J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was interviewed in the Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds about why he turned against the war in Vietnam in 1965. His friend, President Lyndon Johnson, dramatically escalated U.S. military action in Vietnam, with Congressional approval, after the Gulf of Tonkin incident allegedly occurred.

Johnson claimed that the North Vietnamese engaged in unprovoked attacks on two U.S. naval vessels in international waters on August 2 and 4, 1964. Johnson used these claims to get Congressional approval of military escalation in Vietnam.

Fulbright said in the documentary that, “We always hesitate in public to use the dirty word lie, but a lie is a lie. It is a misrepresentation of fact. It is supposed to be a criminal act if it’s done under oath. Mr. Johnson didn’t say it under oath. He just said it. We don’t usually have the president under oath.”

The war on Afghanistan since October 2001 has been a lie and U.S troops, the Afghan people, and all those who could have been served by a more just allocation of our national treasure have been victims of this lie.

There are many reasons to support President Obama’s reelection. However, the peace movement must increase its attack on U.S. policy toward Afghanistan, as the U.S. continues to repeat the mistakes of the past.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : 'Truth, Lies and Afghanistan'

Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis. Image from Eideard.
'Truth, Lies and Afghanistan':
Lt. Colonel Davis reveals futility
and folly of our war in Afghanistan

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / April 16, 2012

How quickly Americans lose interest in war when so few families are affected by its consequences. The wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan have done little more than acquaint much of the public with the geography of the Middle East.

Now, a rare truth-teller who works at the Pentagon has filed an extensive report, one year in the making, telling the military brass, the Congress, and the President just how dishonest the Pentagon and its civilian leadership have been about the war in Afghanistan.

Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis has risked his career -- in just two and a half years he will be eligible to retire -- to tell our government and the American people the truth about the futility and folly of continuing to risk the lives of our men and women in uniform serving in Afghanistan. He reports his concerns, as well, that continuing the war will kill countless innocents. This is a country that has known virtually perpetual war for more than 40 years, and been the locus of periodic war since the days of Alexander the Great nearly two and a half millennia ago.

This war has lasted for over 10 years, yet many Americans seem to have lost focus about what took us there. We were trying to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his al Queda supporters who were then living in Afghanistan. But they all left shortly after the bombing started, and we committed more than 100,000 troops to the deadly affair.

After that, the mission morphed into occupation and regime change, then to the promotion of democracy, followed by training Afghans to control their own country with military power through counterinsurgency.

The Afghanistan War began after the terrorism of September 11, 2001, with congressional approval, opposed only by one congressional official, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA).

The faulty foundation of this American debacle has been explained by law professor Marjorie Cohn (Thomas Jefferson School of Law), a specialist in international law:

[T]he U.N. Charter provides that all member states must settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After the 9/11 attacks, the council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan.

Resolutions 1368 and 1373 condemned the Sept. 11 attacks and ordered the freezing of assets (of those who commit terrorist acts); the criminalizing of terrorist activity; the prevention of the commission of and support for terrorist attacks; and the taking of necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist activity, including the sharing of information. In addition, it urged ratification and enforcement of the international conventions against terrorism.

Professor Cohn explains further that

the invasion of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under article 51 of the United Nations charter (to which we subscribe) because the attacks on Sept. 11 were criminal attacks, not "armed attacks" by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.

Had there been an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after September 11, President Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his bombing campaign against Afghanistan.

Professor Cohn cites a classic principle of self-defense found in international law and affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the UN General Assembly: the necessity for self-defense must be "instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation."

This principle was not in play in our attack on Afghanistan.

In the fall of 2001, President Bush explained his reason for attacking Afghanistan: the Afghan rulers, the Taliban, were harboring Osama bin Laden and training terrorists. Most Americans seem to have forgotten that the Taliban offered to negotiate with the United States, but Bush did not want to reveal the specifics about why he thought Osama bin Laden and al Queda were responsible for the attacks, an assumption that few have quarreled with.

He preferred to attack rather than talk, even for a few days. And Afghan citizens and American and allied fighters have paid the price with their lives ever since -- about 40,000 civilian deaths; nearly 3,000 military coalition deaths.

American taxpayers are on the hook for over half a trillion dollars (and counting) that has been borrowed to carry out the changing missions of the Afghan war. Together, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are approaching $1.5 trillion on the American credit card. So much for fiscal responsibility!

Now, in the midst of all this fiscal and human carnage, Lt. Colonel Davis spent a year during 2010 and 2011 on special assignment from the Pentagon to assess the war, especially to find out what our troops on the ground need and get that assistance to them. This assignment came after he had completed four tours of duty since 9/11 -- two in Iraq and two in Afghanistan.

What he reported demonstrates the deceit inherent in governments gone mad with war as the solution to international problems. Davis had hoped to find evidence to support the assessments made by our military leaders in Afghanistan, but his report -- “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan” -- arrived at this conclusion:

Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regard to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable.

His report was produced in two versions. The main difference is that the classified version is starker in its details than the unclassified one, but they tell the same story.

Davis traveled over 9,000 miles in Afghanistan during 12 months to complete his assignment. He spoke to American military personnel at every level. He went on mounted patrols, dismounted patrols, and coalition patrols in every part of the country where the current counter-insurgency is occurring.

He explained in an interview on Democracy Now! how a counter-insurgency has to be managed if it is to succeed:

[I]f you’re going to go into one and to try to win it, there are several things that have to happen, and all of them have to happen to one degree or another. Number one is that the host nation government has to be at least minimally capable, within cultural norms. The local security forces have to be minimally capable to be able to handle the security environment that exists, whatever that happens to be.

The people of the country have to be supportive of the host nation military forces and government. And the enemy forces, the insurgent force, has to be at least knocked down enough to where they can eventually be handled by the local forces alone. All of those things have to happen to one degree or another. And as I’ll argue, virtually none of them are the case in Afghanistan.

To drive his point home about the inadequacy of the Afghan security forces, he found everywhere he went that Afghan forces would engage the enemy only if attacked directly by them, but would not go outside their compounds or checkpoints to chase them, attack them, or harass them.

The insurgents have virtual free rein in Afghanistan anywhere coalition troops are not working or Afghan security forces are not stationed. And what American troops are doing he calls tactical activity -- “We went on patrols, we went on attack missions, etc., but never enough to actually turn the tide militarily. And we now see graphically that’s exactly what didn’t happen.”

Lt. Colonel Davis’s assessment of our Afghan war is blunt:

[W]hen you’re given a mission that cannot -- cannot -- succeed militarily, then what is the purpose of the mission? I mean, why are we even doing this, if the United States is not benefited? ... But we have to be incredibly careful about giving those soldiers and those leaders missions to ask them to put people’s lives at risk, to risk their own lives, when the United States is not going to be benefited militarily or any other way. That’s a problem.

When asked why he is willing to risk his military career to speak the truth as he discovered it in Afghanistan, Davis explains:

[T]here are thousands of Americans [fighting in Afghanistan] who are alive, full of body, full of hope, full of dreams, want to accomplish many things, have families, etc., who, known but to God, are marked for either death or wounding or having their limbs blown off or their genitals blown off in between now and this so-called end of fighting season 2013.

And if you can’t tell me that they’re going to gain some benefit for my country, I just morally cannot keep quiet. ... I mean, the Army is built on what’s called the Army Seven Values, and it’s so important that we constantly reinforce those -- you know, honor, integrity, moral courage, you know, those kinds of things that need to animate everything that you do.

And one of the things we’re taught is that, you know, if you see something that’s wrong, you’ve got to have the moral courage to do something about it. And in my view, this fell right into that category. So, you know, loyalty is one of those values, and I believe that I -- my loyalty to the soldiers in the service who are still alive and who are still not wounded, but... will lose their lives or will lose their limbs or... suffer casualties and wounds in between now and then, I just owed it to them to do whatever I could to try to bring light to this, so that we can avoid that, if at all possible.

Author Chris Hedges has written about a “myth of candor” that envelopes all wars:

There is no more candor in Iraq or Afghanistan than there was in Vietnam, but in the age of live satellite feeds the military has perfected the appearance of candor. What we are fed is the myth of war. For the myth of war, the myth of glory and honor sells newspapers and boosts ratings, real war reporting does not.

Lt. Colonel Davis has exploded that myth of candor, and given us truth. No American can now say that he or she didn’t know.

This column is dedicated to the memory of my friend, the late Margret Hofmann, who as a teenager survived the horror of the allied bombing of Dresden before immigrating to the U.S. and becoming a life-long opponent of war. She died this past February.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Susan Van Haitsma : 'Viva la Vida' in Austin

CodePink at Viva la Vida. Photo by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.
Viva la Vida...
and remember the dead

By Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog / October 28, 2011

See gallery of photos by Susan Van Haitsma, Below.

AUSTIN -- One of Austin’s most colorful events of the year is the Dia de los Muertos festival organized by the good folks at Austin’s Mexic-Arte Museum. For 28 years, the museum has hosted events to mark this indigenous occasion.

The Viva la Vida festival was held on Saturday, October 22, and included a beautiful and very lively procession from Saltillo Plaza in East Austin to the downtown museum at 5th and Congress. All ages were invited to paint and costume ourselves in skeleton regalia or in whatever ways we wished to commemorate our departed friends and ancestors while celebrating life in the moment.

Music, dance, art, food -- the gifts of life -- were shared between the living and the dead, lifting the thin veil, helping us to remember.

For the past few years, several of us CodePink Austin folks have participated in the procession and have created altars for the museum’s community altars exhibit. This year, because October marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the U.S. assault and occupation of Afghanistan, we dedicated our altar to the women and children in Afghanistan who have died as a consequence of the war.

For the procession, we also costumed ourselves with a peace/anti-war theme. As the procession made its way down Sixth Street toward the museum, crowds lined the route. Jim and Heidi Turpin, walking together as a dead U.S. soldier and dead Afghan woman, were an especially poignant sight, drawing much applause, a few frowns, and many photographs.

Mexic-Arte’s community altars exhibit, along with a concurrent show about the history of Dia de los Muertos, runs through November 13 at 419 Congress Avenue, Austin, Texas.

[Susan Van Haitsma is active in Austin with Sustainable Options for Youth and CodePink. She also blogs at makingpeace. Find more articles by Susan Van Haitsma on The Rag Blog.]














Viva la vida in Austin, Saturday, Oct. 22, 2011. Photos by Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog.
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Tom Hayden : 9/11 Blind

Illustration by Don Button / Newsreview.com
9/11 blind

We’re 10 years past the twin towers attack and still fighting wars in its name. When will we open our eyes?

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / September 11, 2011

The numbers we almost never see: A total of 6,197 Americans were killed, as of mid-August, in the wars fought avenging 9/11, a day when 2,996 Americans died. The total wounded has been 45,338. The active-duty military-suicide rate for the last decade is at a record high of 2,276.

After witnessing the first jetliner crash into the Twin Towers on that Sept. 11 morning, the wife and 7-year-old daughter of a friend of mine fled to their nearby Manhattan loft and ran to the roof to look around. From there, they saw the second plane explode in a rolling ball of flaming fuel across the rooftops. It felt like the heat of a fiery furnace.

Not long after, the girl was struck with blindness. She rarely left her room. Her parents worked with therapists for months, trying various techniques including touch and visualization, before the young girl finally recovered her sight.

“The interesting new development,” my friend reports, “is that she no longer remembers very much, which she told me when I asked her if she would be willing to speak with you.”

That’s what happened to America itself 10 years ago this Sunday on 9/11, though it might be charged that many of us were blinded by privilege and hubris long before.

But 9/11 produced a spasm of blind rage arising from a preexisting blindness to the way much of the world sees us. That in turn led to the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan again, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia -- in all, a dozen “shadow wars,” according to The New York Times. In Bob Woodward’s crucial book, Obama’s Wars, there were already secret and lethal counterterrorism operations active in more than 60 countries as of 2009.

From Pentagon think tanks came a new military doctrine of the “Long War,” a counterinsurgency vision arising from the failed Phoenix program of the Vietnam era, projecting U.S. open combat and secret wars over a span of 50 to 80 years, or 20 future presidential terms.

The taxpayer costs of this Long War, also shadowy, would be in the many trillions of dollars and paid for not from current budgets, but by generations born after the 2000 election of George W. Bush. The deficit spending on the Long War would invisibly force the budgetary crisis now squeezing our states, cities, and most Americans.

Besides the future being mortgaged in this way, civil liberties were thought to require a shrinking proper to a state of permanent and secretive war, and so the Patriot Act was promulgated. All this happened after 9/11 through democratic default and denial. Who knows what future might have followed if Al Gore, with a half-million popular-vote margin over George Bush, had prevailed in the U.S. Supreme Court instead of losing by the vote of a single justice?

In any event, only a single member of Congress -- Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland -- voted against Bush’s initial Sept. 14, 2001, request for emergency powers (war authorization) to deal with the aftermath of the attacks. Only a single senator -- Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis. -- voted against the Patriot Act.

Were we not blinded by what happened on 9/11? Are we still? Let’s look at the numbers we almost never see.


Fog of war

As to American casualties, the figure now is beyond twice those who died in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., on 9/11. The casualties are rarely totaled, but they are broken down into three categories by the Pentagon and Congressional Research Service.

There is Operation Enduring Freedom, which includes Afghanistan and Pakistan but, in keeping with the Long War definition, also covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Second, there is Operation Iraqi Freedom and its successor, Operation New Dawn, the name adopted after September 2010 for the 47,000 U.S. advisers, trainers and counterterrorism units still in Iraq. The scope of these latter operations includes Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

These territories include not only Muslim majorities but also, according to former Centcom Commander Tommy Franks, 68 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and the passageway for 43 percent of petroleum exports, another American geo-interest that was heavily denied in official explanations. (See Michael Klare’s Blood and Oil and Antonia Juhasz’s The Bush Agenda for more on this.)

A combined 6,197 Americans were killed in these wars as of Aug. 16, 2011, in the name of avenging 9/11, a day when 2,996 Americans died. The total American wounded has been 45,338, and is rising at a rapid rate. The total number rushed by Medivac out of these violent zones was 56,432. That’s a total of 107,996 Americans. And the active-duty military-suicide rate for the decade is at a record high of 2,276, not counting veterans or those who have tried unsuccessfully to take their own lives.


Sticker shock of war

Among the most bizarre symptoms of the blindness is the tendency of most deficit hawks to become big spenders on Iraq and Afghanistan, at least until lately. The direct costs of the war, which is to say those unfunded costs in each year’s budget, now come to $1.23 trillion, or $444.6 billion for Afghanistan and $791.4 billion for Iraq, according to the National Priorities Project.

But that’s another sleight-of-hand, when one considers the so-called indirect costs like long-term veterans’ care. Leading economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes recently testified to Congress that their previous estimate of $4-6 trillion in ultimate costs was conservative. The president himself expressed “sticker shock,” according to Woodward’s book, when presented with cost projections during his internal review of 2009.

The Long War casts a shadow not only over our economy and future budgets, but our unborn children’s future as well. This is no accident, but the result of deliberate lies, obfuscations, and scandalous accounting techniques. We are victims of an information warfare strategy waged deliberately by the Pentagon.

As Gen. Stanley McChrystal said much too candidly in February 2010, "This is not a physical war of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants.” David Kilcullen, once the top counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, defines “international information operations as part of counterinsurgency.”

Quoted in Counterinsurgency in 2010, Kilcullen said this military officer’s goal is to achieve a “unity of perception management measures targeting the increasingly influential spectators’ gallery of the international community.”

This new “war of perceptions,” relying on naked media manipulation such as the treatment of media commentators as “message amplifiers” but also high-technology information warfare, only highlights the vast importance of the ongoing WikiLeaks whistle-blowing campaign against the global secrecy establishment.

Consider just what we have learned about Iraq and Afghanistan because of WikiLeaks: tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Iraq never before disclosed; instructions to U.S. troops not to investigate torture when conducted by U.S. allies; the existence of Task Force 373, carrying out night raids in Afghanistan; the CIA’s secret army of 3,000 mercenaries; private parties by DynCorp featuring trafficked boys as entertainment; and an Afghan vice president carrying $52 million in a suitcase.

The efforts of the White House to prosecute Julian Assange and persecute Pfc. Bradley Manning in military prison should be of deep concern to anyone believing in the public’s right to know.

The news that this is not a physical war but mainly one of perceptions will not be received well among American military families or Afghan children, which is why a responsible citizen must rebel first and foremost against The Official Story. That simple act of resistance necessarily leads to study as part of critical practice, which is as essential to the recovery of a democratic self and democratic society.

Read, for example, this early martial line of Rudyard Kipling, the English poet of the white man’s burden: “When you’re left wounded on Afghanistan’s plains and the women come out to cut up what remains/ just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains/And go to your God like a soldier.” Years later, after Kipling’s beloved son was killed in World War I and his remains never recovered, the poet wrote: “If any question why we died / Tell them because our fathers lied.”

The Long War: Injured soldier in Afghanistan. Photo by Bob Strong / Reuters.

A hope for peace

The military occupation of our minds will continue until many more Americans become familiar with the strategies and doctrines in play during the Long War. Not enough Americans in the peace movement are literate about counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and the debates about “the clash of civilizations” -- i.e., the West versus the Muslim world.

The writings of Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and retired Army lieutenant colonel whose own son was killed in Iraq in 2007, is one place to begin. Bacevich, a professor at Boston University, has written The New American Militarism and edited The Long War, both worth absorbing.

For the military point of view, there is the 2007 Army-Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual developed by Gen. Petraeus, with its stunning resurrection of the Phoenix model from Vietnam, in which thousands of Vietnamese were tortured or killed before media outcry and Senate hearings shut it down.

Not enough is being written about how to end the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, but experts with much to say are the University of Michigan’s Scott Atran (Talking to the Enemy) and former UK envoy Sherard Cowper Coles (Cables from Kabul). Also there is my own 2007 book, Ending the War in Iraq, which sketches a strategy of grass-roots pressure against the pillars of the policy (the pillars necessary for the war are public opinion, trillions of dollars, thousands of available troops, and global alliances; as those fall, the war must be resolved by diplomacy).

The more we know about the Long War doctrine, the more we understand the need for a long peace movement. The pillars of the peace movement, in my experience and reading, are the networks of local progressives in hundreds of communities across the United States. Most of them are citizen volunteers, always immersed in the crises of the moment, nowadays the economic recession and unemployment. Look at them from the bottom up, and not the top down, and you will see:

• the people who marched in the hundreds of thousands during the Iraq War;
• those who became the enthusiastic consumer base for Michael Moore’s documentaries and the Dixie Chicks’ anti-Bush lyrics;
• the first to support Howard Dean when he opposed the Iraq war, and the stalwarts who formed the anti-war base for Barack Obama;
• the online legions of MoveOn who raised millions of dollars and turned out thousands of focused bloggers;
• the voters who dumped a Republican Congress in 2006 on the Iraq issue, when the party experts said it was impossible;
• the millions who elected Obama president by an historic flood of voluntary enthusiasm and get-out-the-vote drives;
• the majorities who still oppose the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and want military spending reversed.

This peace bloc deserves more. It won’t happen overnight, but gradually we are wearing down the pillars of the war. In February of this year, Rep. Barbara Lee passed a unanimous resolution at the Democratic National Committee calling for a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan and transfer of funds to job creation. The White House approved of the resolution.

Then 205 House members, including a majority of Democrats, voted for a resolution that almost passed calling for the same rapid withdrawal. Even the AFL-CIO executive board, despite a long history of militarism, adopted a policy opposing Afghanistan.

The president himself is quoted in Obama’s Wars as opposing his military advisors, demanding an exit strategy, and musing that he “can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.” In the end, the president decided to withdraw 33,000 American troops from Afghanistan by next summer, and continue “steady” withdrawals of the rest (68,000) from combat roles by 2014.


Mind the gap

Obama’s withdrawal decision upset the military but also most peace advocates he presumably wanted to win back. The differences revealed a serious gap in the inside-outside strategy applied by many progressives.

After a week of hard debate over the president’s plan, for example, Sen. John Kerry invited Tim Carpenter, leader of the heavily grass-roots Progressive Democrats of America, into his office for a chat. Kerry had slowly reversed his pro-war position on Afghanistan, and said he thought Carpenter would be pleased with the then-secret Obama decision on troop withdrawals.

From Kerry’s insider view, the number 33,000 was a very heavy lift, supported mainly by Vice President Joe Biden but not the national security mandarins. From Carpenter’s point of view, 33,000 would seem a disappointing too little, too late. While it was definite progress toward a phased withdrawal, bridging the differences between the Democratic liberal establishment and the idealistic progressive networks will remain an ordeal through the 2012 elections.

These elections present an historic opportunity to awaken from the blindness inflicted by 9/11. Diminishing the U.S. combat role by escalating the drone wars and Special Operations could repeat the failure of Richard Nixon in Vietnam. Continued spending on the Long War could repeat the disaster of Lyndon Johnson. A gradual winding down may not reap the budget benefits or political reward Obama needs in time.

With peace voters making a critical difference in numerous electoral battlegrounds, however, Obama might speed up the “ebbing,” plausibly announce a peace dividend in the trillions of dollars, and transfer those funds to energy conservation and America’s state and local crises. His answer to the deficit crisis will have to include a sharp reduction in war funding, and his answer to the Tea Party Republicans will have to be a Peace Party.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. This article was also published by the Sacramento News & Review and at Tom Hayden's Peace and Justice Resource Center. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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FILM / Ed Felien : Harry Potter Through the Eyes of an Afghan Child

Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows, Part Two.
Harry Potter through the
eyes of an Afghan child

Understanding the lesson of Harry Potter is essential to understanding the cultural values that underpin our need for the vindication of war.

By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / August 8, 2011

SPOILER ALERT: Read this only if you already know how Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows, Part Two and the war in Afghanistan end.

A large part of the charm of Harry Potter is nostalgia for the simple naiveté of childhood. We are willing to believe in supernatural powers because up to the age of four or five we believed we were the center of the universe. We believed we had magical powers. If we didn’t like something we would cry, and Mommy and Daddy would change it.

The pull of this nostalgia in the Harry Potter series is intensified by encapsulating the fantasy in the context of a 1930’s English boarding school. Hogwarts could easily pass for the “playing fields of Eton,” a familiar and archetypical educational experience.

Would any of this make sense to an Afghan child?

Perhaps the reference to the English boarding school might seem confusing, but the magical powers of childhood would seem familiar. But, more than that, the life or death struggle between Harry Potter and Voldemort would seem like current events.

Voldemort (literally, from the French, "theft of death") has achieved a kind of immortality by transferring his soul into material objects called horcruxes. If anything happens to his body, then the material objects into which he has poured his soul can reanimate his corpse.

This must be the way the Afghans see the U.S. occupation of their country. If they defeat U.S. troops at one place, the foreign invader springs up even larger somewhere else. Voldemort has set up a stooge to run Hogwarts in the same way the U.S. has set up a CIA stooge, Karzai, to run Afghanistan.

In the final battle Voldemort sends unmanned magic flying discs to bomb and murder the students and faculty in much the same way the U.S. now sends drones against the Afghan, Pakistan, Yemeni, and Somali populations.

The movie begins with Harry, Ron, and Hermione on a quest to destroy the horcruxes. By using disguises and an invisibility cloak they sneak into Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange’s vault at the Wizarding Bank and recover Helga Hufflepuff’s cup. Harry destroys it with the Sword of Godric Gryffindor and then learns another horcrux is hidden in Hogwarts. Ron and Hermione find the Diadem of Ravenclaw and destroy it with the sword.

An Afghan child would immediately recognize and identify with the seemingly impossible pursuit of trying to destroy the material objects that embody the soul of their oppressor. When material objects multiply simply by touching them, how would it be possible to destroy them all?

Yet, they persist. Whether with a Sword of Godric Gryffindor in Harry Potter or an I.E.D. in Afghanistan, they blow up the material objects that have been used as an instrument of their oppression. Their only hope is to exhaust their power and drain their treasury.

By the final battle, there is but one horcrux left to Voldemort, his trained killer python, Nagini. But there is one other horcrux protecting Voldemort of which he is unaware. When he murdered Harry Potter’s parents, he tried unsuccessfully to murder Harry as well, but he only scarred his forehead. In his effort to murder Harry he poured part of his soul into him, and, so, Harry Potter is himself a horcrux for Voldemort. Which means, as long as Harry is alive, Voldemort cannot die. Voldemort does not know this and continues trying to kill him.

After an epic battle that has left many dead and wounded and Hogwarts in ruins reminiscent of the Church of St. Luke in Liverpool after the Blitz in World War II, Voldemort calls for a truce and issues an ultimatum. He will spare the remains of Hogwarts if he can have Harry Potter.

Harry has no choice. The suffering of his friends and the destruction of his school are too much for him, and he alone knows that Voldemort will never die as long as he lives. So he sacrifices himself.

Voldemort issues the killing curse: “Avada Kedavra,” which means instant death for Harry. Harry goes to a limbo-like place that looks like the waiting room in a train station. His deceased headmaster, Dumbledore, is there and explains that Voldemort couldn’t kill him. When he drained the blood out of him he became invulnerable to Voldemort’s curse, and when Voldemort attacked him he drained him of the horcrux that protected Voldemort.

Meanwhile, back at Hogwarts, Voldemort is insisting that all the remaining students and faculty swear allegiance to him. Neville Longbottom tries to rally the students to resist. Voldemort places the Sorting Witch’s hat on Neville’s head and causes it to burst into flames. Neville pulls the Sword of Godric Gryffindor out of the burning hat and slays Nagini, the last remaining horcrux protecting Voldemort.

At this point Harry comes back to life and battles once again with Voldemort. This time they are both mortal, and this time Harry wins and peace is restored.

What would an Afghan child think of this?

Wouldn’t he identify with Harry in his quest to try to destroy the material objects that are destroying his country and killing his friends? Wouldn’t he understand Harry’s sacrifice of himself as the only way to stop the destruction? And wouldn’t the afterlife, the final battle between virtue and evil and the ultimate triumph of goodness seem real to an innocent and religious child?

Understanding the lesson of Harry Potter is essential to understanding the cultural values that underpin our need for the vindication of war and for understanding how every culture uses those values to justify murder and suicide bombers.

Come all ye young rebels, and list while I sing,
For the love of one’s country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part of the patriot game.

-- Dominic Behan

[Ed Felien is publisher and editor of Southside Pride, a South Minneapolis monthly. Read more articles by Ed Felien on The Rag Blog]

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Harry Targ : Salamis, Not Bombs

Send a salami to the troops.
Memorial Day:
'Salamis, not bombs'

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / May 29, 2011

Since I live in North Central Indiana I use every opportunity I can to import bagels from Chicago. In the past I have publicly defined socialism as including “bagels for all” (particularly garlic or onion ones). Also I have written about the political economy of the bagel , arguing on good authority that during periods of intense class struggle workers have used day old bagels as weapons against the ruling class.

On a recent visit to a Chicago area bagel bakery, I came across a big sign in front that puzzled me. The sign said:

Naborhood* Bagel and Delicatessen
Join Naborhood and
the USO Sending
A Salami to the Troops

(*Fictitious name.)

My first reaction was to laugh. This sign sounded pretty funny. But on reflection I began to ask myself what it meant. I began to think of different responses to the question and, after I sent out a picture of the sign, some of my friends offered their views on the subject as well.

One interpretation, the patriotic one, suggests that the delicatessen wishes to mobilize all its customers to support our troops in Afghanistan. From a delicatessen point of view, sending salamis is a way that it could support the troops. Salamis could reflect support for the troops alone or for the troops and the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

Another, perhaps more neutral, interpretation is about selling salamis, using the patriotism in the old neighborhood to make a few extra bucks. Since the salamis they sell are really good, it could entice troops and Afghan peoples to want more salamis. Before you know it, they could be hooked on them. Who knows: bagels could be next. But this view, I think, is unfairly harsh in its evaluation of the motivations of the delicatessen; too economistic.

Finally, it can be argued, and frankly this was my first thought, that the delicatessen saw the U.S. war in Afghanistan as a mistake that had to be ended as soon as possible. The salami, from this perspective, was a metaphor for a “dud,” a smelly, greasy, and heavy food that can lead to ulcers or heartburn. The 10-year war in Afghanistan therefore was a colossal heartburn in the body politic. (One of my friends wrote that Bush and Obama already had sent Afghanistan the salami.)

This intellectual puzzle, I realized, reflects the various ways in which the sign could be interpreted. Perhaps the delicatessen owners wanted to create a mental construct that could be appreciated by every side of the issue.

That is classic American politics. I bet the Democrats and Republicans who are debating resolutions on the war in Afghanistan in Congress right now would love to come up with a metaphor like this. Maybe Congress should pass an appropriations bill, HR 111: The U.S./Afghanistan Military Nourishment and Rehabilitation Act, or the Send Salamis to Afghanistan Act.

This Memorial Day, as we reflect on the pain and suffering that our wars have caused, perhaps we would all agree that sending salamis overseas is preferable to sending drones and bombs.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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