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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Harry Targ : Military Spending and our National Priorities

Breakdown of projected government spending for fiscal yer 2013. To see how these figures were determined, go here.
Poor are paying the price:
Military spending and
our natioal priorities

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 18, 2012

"From Forrestal’s day to the present, semi-warriors have viewed democratic politics as problematic. Debate means delay. To engage in give-and-take or compromise is to forfeit clarity and suggests a lack of conviction. The effective management of national security requires specialized knowledge, a capacity for clear-eyed analysis and above all an unflinching willingness to make decisions, whatever the cost.

With the advent of the semi-war, therefore, national security policy became the preserve of experts, few in number, almost always unelected, habitually operating in secret, persuading themselves that to exclude the public from such matters was to serve the public interest. After all, the people had no demonstrable 'need to know.' In a time of perpetual crisis, the anointed role of the citizen was to be pliant, deferential and afraid.” -- Andrew Bacevich, reviewing a biography of James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, in The Nation.

Andrew Bacevich reminds us that a permanent war economy has been part of the political and economic landscape of the United States at least since the end of World War II.

The War Resisters League pie chart of total government spending for fiscal year 2013 indicates that 47 percent of all government spending deals with current and past military costs. Despite lower government estimates that mask true military spending, by adding the Social Security Trust Fund to total spending and regarding past military spending -- particularly veteran’s benefits -- as non-military, it is clear that roughly 50 cents of every dollar goes to war, war preparation, covert operations, and military contractors.

In addition, “war support” contractors such as KBR have made billions of dollars in the twenty-first century from military spending. Top producers of military hardware Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing earned 11, 8, and 5 billion dollars in contracts in 2010 alone. Ostensibly non-military corporations such as BP, FedEx, Dell, Kraft, and Pepsi received hundreds of millions of dollars in defense contracts in 2010.

Virtually every big corporation is to some degree on the Department of Defense payroll.

A recent data-based report, “Don’t Bank on the Bomb,” prepared by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), identified “more than 300 banks, insurance companies, pension funds and asset managers from 30 countries that invest significantly in 20 major nuclear weapons producers.”

The report examined in detail financial connections to 20 major nuclear weapons companies. These 20 included U.S. producers of nuclear weapons components such as Bechtel, Boeing, GenCorp, General Dynamics, Honeywell, and Northrop Grumman.

U.S. financial institutions investing in the nuclear weapons producers included Abrams Bison Investments, AIG, American National Insurance Company, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, JP Morgan Chase, New York Life, and Prudential Financial.

Because of the economic crisis which began in 2007, debate about military spending has increased. In 2010 Congressmen Barney Frank and Ron Paul initiated a study addressing needed cuts. The report prepared for them in 2010, “Debt, Deficits, and Defense,” called for across the board reductions in spending-procurement, research and development, personnel, operations and maintenance, and infrastructure -- of $960 billion over the next decade. The report noted that over the last decade 65 percent of federal discretionary spending went to the military.

President Obama last January proposed more modest spending cuts of $480 billion over the next decade (reductions in projected increases, not existing funding). He coupled the announcement about future spending with a firm statement that the world must realize that the United States remains committed to maintaining its military superiority.

The President indicated that spending reductions in the future will be tied to greater use of “special operations,” drones, and shifting existent forces from Europe to Asia.

The magnitude of military spending represents what Bacevich referred to as the permanent war economy articulated and defended by the “semi-warriors” dominating U.S. foreign policy in each administration since World War II.

These semi-warriors gained influence after the Truman Administration accepted recommendations in National Security Document Number 68 (1950), which recommended that defense spending should always have priority over all other government spending. NSC 5412, approved by President Eisenhower, gave legitimacy to covert operations around the world allowing any president to “plausibly deny” any connections with such operations.

Subsequently virtually each president proclaimed a doctrine -- Eisenhower for the Middle East, Carter for the Persian Gulf, Reagan to rollback “the evil empire,” Clinton for “humanitarian interventions” and Bush for “preemptory attacks” -- justifying more and more military spending.

The Obama administration, through speeches and actions, has constructed what might be called “the Obama Doctrine.”

First, as the last remaining superpower and the beacon of hope for the world, the United States once again reserves the right and responsibility to intervene militarily to enhance human rights around the world.

Second, U.S. humanitarian military interventions will be carried out from time to time with our friends.

Third, new technologies such as drones will allow these interventions to occur without “boots on the ground.” They will be cheaper in financial and human cost (mostly for American troops).

Finally, assassinations and covert killings have made it clear that the Obama Doctrine overrides recognized judicial proceedings and the sanctity of human life.

Since the establishment of the permanent war economy in the 1940s millions of proclaimed “enemies” have been killed and seriously injured, mostly in the Global South. Permanent physical and psychological damage has been done to U.S soldiers, predominantly poor and minorities as they too are victims of war.

In addition, military spending has distorted national priorities and invested U.S. financial resources in expenditures that do not create as many jobs as investments in construction, education, or healthcare. And the permanent war economy has created a culture that celebrates violence, objectifies killing, dehumanizes enemies, and exalts super-patriotism through television, music, video games, and educational institutions.

These issues need to be more vigorously related to those raised by the grassroots campaigns that have sprung up to defend worker’s and women’s rights, oppose growing income and wealth inequality, and defend working people’s homes from foreclosures.

A long time ago -- in reference to the massive U.S. war in Southeast Asia and desperate needs of workers at home -- Dr. Martin Luther King described the fundamental connections that peace activists and all progressives must pursue: “I speak of the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”

[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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Tom Hayden : An Expanding War in Pakistan

Creeping deeper into war: image of U.S. aerial drone from AP.
Droning on...
An expanding war in Pakistan

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / September 28, 2011

Slowly but surely, the United States is creeping deeper and deeper into a disastrous war in Pakistan. The peace movement and its political and media allies need to be ready. There is a growing community of activists and journalists already protesting and documenting the aerial drone wars over Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya.[1]

But the debate about drones cannot be isolated from the context of their use in the Long War as a substitute for American ground troops and in response to peace pressure from the American public.

Important as these perspectives may be, the peace movement may lose the debate if drones are seen in purely moral or economic terms or as a loss of democratic transparency. The fact is, however, that the use of drones will endanger American lives and security as they inevitably provoke violent counterattacks, such as those of December 25, 2009 (Detroit Metro Airport), February 2010 (guilty pleas in New York subway bombing plot), and May 1, 2010 (Times Square).

The U.S. already has a secret contingency plan to strike at 150 sites, nearly all in Pakistan, if another incident occurs that is traceable to any Pakistani source.[2]

The drones do not make America safer. They inevitably provoke blowback. They are not a way of waging war cheaply. They require massive investments in client states and “nation-building” on the ground. They kill people, but no victories are won from the air.

Obama has been warned about the drone strategy many times, even by his Afghanistan adviser Bruce Riedel, who privately told him in 2009:

Predator drone strikes only work because CIA paramilitary teams have an ultra-secret presence on the ground in Pakistan. Without the local informants these teams develop, there would not be good signals intelligence so that the drones know where to target. This was a risky enterprise that might collapse overnight. So don’t rely on drones... They look like a cheap way out, but they’re not.[3]

Pakistan is on fire, writes Imtiaz Gul.[4] Between 2002-2009, suicide strikes in Pakistan rose from one to 90 per year, along with 500 bombings and ambushes in that single year.

Critics of the drone strategy include David Kilcullen, the top counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq, the Long War Journal, and the New America Foundation. These are not peaceniks, but skeptics of counterterrorism from the air. According to the Long War Journal:

• 256 of 266 drone strikes against Taliban and al Qaeda targets, which began in 2004, have been, since January 2008, showing the increased reliance on the secret air war;
• Since 2006, there have been 2,090 “leaders," “operatives” from the Taliban, AQ and “allied extremist groups” killed, and 138 “civilians.” The CIA insists that no civilians have been killed by drones since 2008, a claim that no independent observers, including those in the mainstream media, believe. (New York Times)
• The vast majority of the drone strikes have been in North and South Waziristan, with 89 percent inflicted on North Waziristan in 2010, the period when peace talks with the Taliban were embraced by most of the international community;
• In 2010, there was a massive shift in strikes against tribal areas administered by Taliban leader Hafiz Gul Bahadar. Nearly all the attacks since 2008 have been against areas represented by four Taliban leaders/factions: in addition to Bahadar, the Haqqanis, the Mehsuds, and Mullah Nazir. Bahadar and the Haqqanis are based in North Waziristan.
• The number of Taliban/al Qaeda leaders killed in these areas in 2004-2011 has been insignificant militarily: 10 in the Haqqani network, seven in the Bahadar network, seven in the Mehsud network, one in the Hekmatyar network, etc.

The Long War Journal account concludes:

The Pakistani government considers Nazir, the Haqqanis, Bahadar, and Hekmatyar to be "good Taliban" as they do not carry out attacks against the Pakistani state. All of these Taliban factions shelter al Qaeda and various other terror groups.

The inescapable conclusion is that Bahadar, Nazir, the Haqqanis, and Hekmatyar -- warlords all -- are fighting against U.S. forces in their traditional regions of influence in Afghanistan, and would lessen or cease fighting if the United States followed a timetable for withdrawal from those areas.

Supporters of a Pakistani religious party, Jamaat-e- Islami, join a rally against the U.S. drone strikes in Pakistani tribal areas in Peshawar, Pakistan, April 23, 2011. Photo by Mohammad Sajjad / AP.
Does that mean the Taliban or its multiple factions and warlord allies will take over Kabul if the U.S. withdraws? Not necessarily, unless the fragile, corrupt, and dysfunctional Karzai regime simply implodes. But according to an insightful analysis in the Asian Times by Brian Downing, it is more likely that Afghanistan will be “carved up” by regional powers with vested interests.

In his scenario, “the regional powers, especially Pakistan, will use their influence with the Taliban to convince them to limit their ambitions to the south and east and accept a settlement with President Hamid Karzai at the helm in Kabul.” This is the opposite of the current U.S. military agenda. (April 27, 2011)

Second, Iran and Turkey are likely to weigh in to “press reluctant Afghan [allies] to accept the settlement.”

Third, the regional powers -- Pakistan, China, Iran and Turkey -- “will help to form a rentier state to govern the country,” as has happened often in Afghanistan’s history. A rentier state generally is defined as one supported by external funding and inputs far more than internally-generated revenues. Afghanistan currently has little economy beyond its illegal heroin production -- resulting in 90,000 European overdose deaths per year -- and the military investments of the U.S. and NATO.

Fourth, the same regional powers will cooperate and sometimes compete in developing Afghanistan resources, which include mineral resources and pipelines from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea.

Geopolitically, Pakistan and China share a common interest in limiting the presence of India in Afghanistan. A majority-Hindu India is America’s chief ally in Afghanistan, having backed the Northern Alliance interests during the past decade. Pakistan is in a state of “cold peace” with India, while China already operates a copper mine, and is building railroads along with a naval base on the Arabian Sea.

Iran, which has a long and porous border with Afghanistan, has close ties with the Northern Alliance forces (Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, etc.) and “loathes the Taliban, which massacred thousands of Shiites, killed several Iranian diplomats in Mazar-I-Sharif in 1998, and contributes mightily to [Iran’s] drug problem.” Iran, which originally helped the U.S. oust the Taliban, now would agree to “a settlement that restrained the Taliban, opened economic opportunities, and expelled the U.S.”

Like China, Iran’s Persian past casts a cultural legacy across Central Asia.

Where does all this leave the United States and NATO? Quite simply, in the dilemma of both spreading and fighting a contagion of Islamic resistance at the same time. Facing military stalemates -- at best -- in Iraq and Afghanistan, while teetering towards escalation in Pakistan and beyond. A budget crisis which includes no spending for another war. And a White House worried about who will be blamed for the likely quagmires.

Deescalation, an exit strategy, is the only way out of the rabbit hole.

[1] The first American drone strike against Libya was April 23, as reported by Reuters and ABC News.
[2] Woodward, Bob. Obama’s Wars, p. 46.
[3] Woodward, Bob. Obama’s Wars, pp. 206-207.
[4] Gul, Imtiaz, The Most Dangerous Place, 2009.

[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 at Tom Hayden's Peace and Justice Resource Center. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on 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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Lamar W. Hankins : The Latest Plan for Perpetual War

"Perpetual War Machine" by Peter Passuntino / Painting Matters.
The Congress, the President, and
the latest plan for perpetual war

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / May 25, 2011

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy? -- Gandhi

The wise men and women of the U.S. Congress are in the midst of deciding that the perpetual war desired by the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower’s original formulation before it was edited) will soon become the law of the land.

A defense authorization bill recently passed by the House Armed Services Committee includes a provision that recognizes that we are at war “with al Queda, the Taliban, and associated forces” and gives the president war powers until “the termination of hostilities,” which could mean forever.

President Obama and his successors will be permitted to engage in war until the last terrorist is dead. There was a time -- when George W. Bush was president -- that I would have thought giving such power to the president to be among the most foolish acts of our political class. After nearly two and a half years of President Obama, I find that I harbor the same thought.

To be clear, I have seen one report that President Obama has not sought this expanded authority. It may be that he does not believe the extra authority is necessary for him to adequately fight terrorism, perhaps because he has found it easy to ignore the consultation-with-Congress requirements of our current law with respect to the bombing of Libya.

Nevertheless, a few representatives enamored with war-making are pushing to give this new unfettered discretion to the president and his replacements.

After considering the history of more than a hundred plus years since the reign of President Teddy Roosevelt, I can’t imagine a worse idea than giving one person the right to engage in war unimpeded by the wise limitations imposed upon the presidency by our founders.

Modern presidents have failed to honor the Constitutional requirement that the country not engage in war without a declaration of Congress approving war. In fact, we have had war under every president since Franklin Roosevelt, who was the last president to seek and get a declaration of war from Congress.

Of course, these violations of the Constitution are as much the fault of Congress as of the presidents who decided that war was the answer to a problem they faced. One explanation is that defense contractors supply an enormous amount of the money our politicians need to get elected. As long as contractors enjoy endless profits from war, they will keep funding politicians who keep those profits coming.

The primary author of the constitutional check on a president’s war power was James Madison, whose thinking is instructive two and a third centuries later:

Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other... War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force, of the people... No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

And Madison wrote further,

War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war, the public treasuries are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast, ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

From these comments, it is clear that Madison did not anticipate that we would have a huge standing military, always available to be sent throughout the world to protect perceived American interests. He would have been sickened to contemplate 820 U.S. military bases located in 135 countries imposing U.S. hegemony throughout the world.

Congressman John Conyers, in looking at the authorization included in the proposed spending bill, concluded that it “would appear to grant the President near unfettered authority to initiate military action around the world without further congressional approval. Such authority must not be ceded to the President without careful deliberation from Congress.”

Thirty-three members of the President’s own party have requested that the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon, schedule this perpetual war-making authority provision for public hearings so that the American public can be made aware of it and have a chance to discuss it with their representatives.

The provisions which trouble Conyers and others are found in H.R. 968, the Detainee Security Act of 2011, which will likely be considered as part of the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2012. These provisions would give any president the right to use military force anywhere in the world where terrorism suspects are believed to be present, even if no U.S. citizen has been harmed and the U.S. has not been attacked, or is not under the threat of attack.

The president would be empowered by these new provisions to use military force even within the U.S. and against American citizens. These provisions dishonor both the intent of our founders and the actual words of the Constitution, which provide that the Congress shall declare war, not the president. In our system, it is important that 535 representatives decide when and whether we should go to war, not one person, no matter how well-intentioned or how smart he or she may be.

If you are concerned about the Congress giving unchecked authority to the executive branch to use military force worldwide, there is still time to let your representatives know your views before we embark on what may be irremediable perpetual war.

[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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Harvey Wasserman : Afghanistan and Orwell's Perpetual War

Image from Opinione.
Keeps the wheels of industry turning:
Afghanistan is about perpetual war

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / November 28, 2010

The war in Afghanistan is about perpetual war, not Afghanistan.

It's about preventing democracy in the United States, not bringing it to Southwest Asia.

And it is the tombstone of the Obama Presidency.

To justify the fight, they've rounded up the usual suspects: Terror. Oil. Minerals. Poppies. Democracy.

But George Orwell's 1984 -- now updated with important new books -- illuminates the bigger picture: "continuous warfare" is the key to social control.

It keeps the public frightened and dependent.

And it keeps "the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed."

Better to destroy them in a ritual slaughter like Afghanistan, and wherever is next.

For a truly prosperous society, educated and secure, cannot be ruled by the few. Poverty, ignorance and fear are the three pillars of authoritarian control. Without war, they all disappear.

Thus Afghanistan. Before it: The Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, Central America. After: Whoever else is handy.

Recent books by Howard Zinn and David Swanson have updated Orwell's analysis.

Zinn's The Bomb , testifies to the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the utter senselessness of these "announced nuclear tests." Once an Allied bombardier, Zinn revisited a French town he helped destroy. He found the act, of which he was once proud, had no military meaning whatsoever.

Though he passed away earlier this year, Zinn's People's History of the United States continues to shape our understanding of this nation's true core. In narrating the hidden, bloody past of our compromised democracy, he warns at end that even for the U.S., "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."

David Swanson's new War is a Lie adds to the litany. A tireless campaigner for peace and justice, Swanson was instrumental in tearing away the ridiculous Bush lie that the war in Iraq was about Weapons of Mass Destruction. War is a Lie adds carefully documented, passionately argued reasons why the era of endless slaughter in Southwest Asia is a tool of social control for the military-industrial elite.

Over the years, Norman Solomon's superb books, and his film War Made Easy, have also provided a firm, steady opposition to this fatal addiction.

Nowhere has our military madness become more transparent than in the Obama Administration. The "shellacking" the Democrats took this fall stems directly from Obama's painfully visible failure to bring hope or change to a nation at war since 1941.

For a few infuriating weeks, Obama danced around the decision to escalate in Afghanistan. Rarely has a single human being had a greater chance to change history.

Obama could have stood up to the generals. He could have de-escalated. He could have begun the process of drawing down the military budget, the only way to save our economy.

More than 50% of taxpayer money goes to weaponry. We have troops in more than 100 countries. We spend more on our military than all the rest of the world combined. Throughout history -- Athens, Rome, Persia -- empires have spent themselves to military oblivion. We have now been in Afghanistan longer than the USSR.

With a simple speech, Obama could have begun the Great Reversal. It was a crystal clear moment. The public support was there. It was what he was elected to do.

But like Lyndon Johnson's catastrophic March 1965 decision to escalate the war in Vietnam, Obama went exactly the wrong way. He became the first man in history to accept the Nobel Peace Prize with a pro-war speech. With Bush's Secretary of War by his side, he ceded to the military our nation's most critical decision. He doomed our domestic economy and global ecology by burying us still deeper in the lethal quagmire of perpetual war.

All else is sad detail. When Obama caved on Afghanistan, so did his presidency.

As Orwell, Zinn, Swanson, and Solomon make clear, perpetual war is the carefully engineered route to poverty, ignorance, and dictatorship. Afghanistan is merely the latest installment in this seamless, unseemly tragedy. Its ever-changing justifications are meaningless smokescreens, forever poised to cloud the inevitable transition to the next conflict. The names, places and rhetoric may change, but the impact will not.

Until we find a way to break through to a genuine state of peace -- and we must, and soon -- we have no future.

[Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States, introduced by Howard Zinn, is at www.harveywasserman.com. He edits the www.NukeFree.org web site. For a good time, see Pete Seeger, Dar Williams, David Bernz and the Rivertown Kidz sing "Solartopia!" at www.solartopia.org .

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