The Endless War: 15 Years and Counting in Afghanistan

[fatman17]

OCTOBER 12, 2016

The Endless War: 15 Years and Counting in Afghanistan

by HOWARD LISNOFF



To hear Sonali Kolhatkar, the founding director of the U.S.-based solidarity organization Afghan Women’s Mission, is much like being wakened from a nightmare, only to realize that there is much truth in the demons of the night.

Kolhatkar recently appeared on TheReal News Network in the segment “Afghanistan War at 15th Year Without End in Sight,” (October 7, 2016). She recounts the human and monetary costs of the war and the conclusion that the war will be conducted as business as usual (my words) following the presidential inauguration in 2017. The latter is a premise that is impossible to deny.

About one third of Afghanistan is now in Taliban hands after a decade and a half of fighting. One of the so-called hallmarks of the Bush-Cheney administration—the improvement of the lives of women in Afghanistan—remains a pipe dream, with only an infinitesimally small number of women in Afghanistan, who have money, who are able to achieve their educational or job goals, and these goals are only achievable in Kabul.

More than $850 billion has been spent by the U.S. in Afghanistan, and of that sum, $110 billion has gone to reconstruction of that country, about as much as went toward the Marshal Plan’s rebuilding of Europe following World War II. Over 91,000 Afghans have died as a result of war, with about 2,300 American dead. Honor killings against women go on. An Afghan warlord, Goberdine Gulbuddin a.k.a. “The butcher of Kabul,” who has fought on nearly every side of the war since the Soviet invasion of the 1980s, has been given amnesty and is able to live without fear despite a curriculum vitae of endless mayhem.

First the U.S. fights the Taliban and then it negotiates with them. It is an endless cycle of violence. The European Union has committed $3.7 billion to the war for the next four years while pledging to send tens of thousands of Afghan refugees back to this war-torn nation in clear violation of the right to seek sanctuary from the ravages of war. The right to sanctuary for refugees is codified in various international treaties.

Republicans and Democrats don’t differ on the war in Afghanistan after 15 years. In 2008, Barack Obama called Afghanistan “The right battlefield,” in an attempt to contrast it with another failed state, Iraq, which he must have believed at the time was the wrong battlefield. As of June 2016, 8,400 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan despite Obama’s commitment to end the war by 2016. The war has almost universal bipartisan support in Congress. Never will the concept of blowback enter into the “debate” about war and the absence of peace. It’s as if ISIS and the Taliban and al- Qaeda sprang from nowhere. It’s as if the West had no designs for fossil fuels in the Middle East for a century. Fossil fuels coupled with global power politics created the perfect storm of endless violence. It is the state of the permanent war economy.

Barack Obama, who was seen in somewhat positive eyes by the peace movement in the U.S. during his first campaign for the presidency, got a Monopoly “get out of jail free card” on Afghanistan and was able to wage warfare there for his entire presidency. The prospects for that policy to continue are a sure bet with a weak antiwar movement and the horror of September 11, 2001 an ever-present reality in the U.S. Even revelations of Saudi government involvement in the actions of terrorists leading up to September 11, 2001, does not seems to lessen the resolve to continue fighting an endless war.

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Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer.

 

[fatman17]

OCTOBER 12, 2016

Delusions of “Worthy Wars”

by NICOLAS J S DAVIES


Fifteen years ago, on October 19th 2001, Donald Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Whiteman AFB in Missouri, as they prepared to fly halfway across the world to wreak misdirected vengeance on the people of Afghanistan and begin the longest war in U.S. history. Rumsfeld told the bomber crews, “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.”

15 years later, our wars have changed the way millions of people live and killed about 2 million peoplewho had nothing to do with the crimes of September 11th. The most basic principle of justice, that only the guilty should be punished for a crime, was quickly lost and buried in America’s rush to war. September 11th became the pretext, some would say a cynical pretext, for a massive expansion of U.S. militarism.

President Bush’s military spending set a post-WWII record, an average of$635 billion per year in 2016 dollars, compared with an average of $470 billion per year throughout the Cold War. Now President Obama has done what would have seemed impossible in 2008, outspending Bush by an average of $20 billion per year. Bush’s unilateral military build-up and its continuation by Obama are unprecedented, and have paradoxically shattered the pattern of U.S. military spending established during 50 years of the Cold War, when it was justified, rightly or wrongly, by a serious military competition with the U.S.S.R.

When we compare our military spending to that of other countries, we are outspending the sum of the next 9 military powers in the world (most of which are U.S. allies in any case), and we are single-handedly spending more than 180 less militarized countries combined.

So we have to ask: what purpose or interests does this serve, and what dangers does it represent? Clearly it has not enabled the U.S. to win any wars. The only wars we have won since WWII were over the tiny neocolonial outposts of Grenada, Panama, Kuwait and Kosovo. Hillary Clinton derided those operations as “splendid little wars” in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2000, as she urged its members to support more ambitious uses of U.S. military force. Clinton got what she asked for, but she seems to have learned nothing from the catastrophic results.

Justifying mass murder

The danger of investing so much of our country’s wealth in military forces and weapons of war is that it gives our leaders the illusion that they can use war to advance our national interests or solve international problems. As an American general once observed, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.”

Instead of making good on the “peace dividend” Americans hoped for at the end of the Cold War, U.S. leaders were seduced by the mirage of a “unipolar” world in which the threat and use of U.S. military force would be the final arbiter of international affairs. The late Senator Edward Kennedy was ignored when he condemned these ambitions as “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other country can or should accept.”

In pursuit of this mirage, we have used force in violation of the UN Charter against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and now Syria. Our military and civilian leaders have systematically violated the laws of war, ordering U.S. troops tokill civilians, torture prisoners, “dead-check” or kill wounded enemy combatants, and to misidentify murdered civilians as combatants killed in action, deliberately undermining the distinction between combatants and civilians that is the basis of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

President Obama’s doctrine of covert and proxy war has expanded U.S. Special Forces operations from 60 countries when he took office to 150 countries today: training allied forces to torture and kill their own people in countries like Saudi Arabia and Colombia; conducting joint operations with local forces from Iraq to the Philippines; and operating in secret under CIA command across Africa, and supporting forces linked to Al-Qaeda in Libya and Syria.

Meanwhile the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy and other U.S. agencies have supported shadowy forces working to destabilize and overthrow foreign governments in Honduras, Ukraine, Venezuela and now even nuclear-armed Russia, where the results of an attempt at U.S.-backed regime change would be supremely uncontrollable and dangerous.

Under President Obama, U.S. special forces night raids in Afghanistan exploded from 20 raids per month when he took office to over 1,000 a month two years later, a Phoenix Program on steroids with an ever-expanding target list based only on drone surveillance and phone numbers harvested from captured cell-phones. Real human intelligence on the identities of victims is explicitly excluded from U.S. special forces’ vaunted “network analysis.” Senior officers have admitted to theWashington Post that at least half these raids target the wrong person or house, killing thousands of innocent people.

Meanwhile, President Obama’s expansion of special forces operations has not led to any reduction in U.S. air strikes. He is responsible for over 80,000 bomb and missile strikes on 7 countries, compared with about 70,000 against 5 countries by President Bush.

The future – war or peace

The world faces huge problems that must be addressed and resolved in the next few decades. We have depleted many of the natural resources that our present way of life has been built on, and now climate change is turning our use of fossil fuels into a slow form of mass suicide. The question facing us is this: will the allocation of increasingly scarce resources and the necessary transformations of the 21st century be directed by international cooperation for the benefit of all and the survival of human civilization? Or will our world be torn apart by a desperate scramble for dwindling supplies of precious resources as the most powerful countries use military force to try and grab what they can at the expense of everybody else?

Our country’s current war policy offers only one answer to that question. We must find a different one – and an effective political strategy to impose it on our deluded leaders while there is still time.

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Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq and of the chapter on “Obama At War” in Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.

More articles by:NICOLAS J S DAVIES

 

[VCheng]

The question facing us is this: will the allocation of increasingly scarce resources and the necessary transformations of the 21st century be directed by international cooperation for the benefit of all and the survival of human civilization? Or will our world be torn apart by a desperate scramble for dwindling supplies of precious resources as the most powerful countries use military force to try and grab what they can at the expense of everybody else?

It will be a combination of the two: groups of countries will band together for mutual benefit wherever possible and work out issues by co-operation. Those who cannot get with the program will be cast aside. Just like all of human history.

 

[Joe Shearer]

It will be a combination of the two: groups of countries will band together for mutual benefit wherever possible and work out issues by co-operation. Those who cannot get with the program will be cast aside. Just like all of human history.

From the south Asian point of view, the worst aspect of this endless war is the gravitational attraction that it exercises. We already had Afghanistan possessing three neighbours, surrounding it on all three sides, which were posited on the exercise of coercion as a basis for existence. One side has been freed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its replacement by Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan; unfortunately, that illusion was shattered by the radicalisation of these countries and the steady infiltration of Islamic terrorists from Uzbekistan, to a lesser extent, from the others. Iran interferes at will, but in a low-key fashion, that does not bring her into direct confrontation with US forces.

But Pakistan is involved, and will continue to be involved, in the manner of the businessman who has suffered losses, but believes that injecting more funds and greater energy will somehow overcome the initial difficulties and bring in profits. The impact on Pakistan has not been smothered within Pakistan. It has been transmitted onward to some extent. An infrastructure had been created for the breeding of soldiers. These soldiers were to serve in the armies of the religious right in Afghanistan; they were never to have affected Pakistan herself. That is precisely what happened, however. that relatively effective infrastructure has had an impact on Pakistan herself, and has had an impact on the national policy of that country and on her international policies as well. Her gradual shift from US ally to US ally by day and opponent by night to US critic and enemy-in-the-making opened her mind to the prospects of even greater cooperation with the US arch-rival and hegemon of the coming century, China. It also freed her from US pressure to build bridges with others, and her relationship with her eastern neighbour worsened, with her increasing sense of freedom from constraint to pursue warlike policies on that front.

Even if a miracle were to happen, and Afghanistan were to be become a tranquil, peace-loving Tunisia of the 70s, or Lebanon of the 50s, overnight, the situation would not be much improved. It is not clear if the soldier factories of Pakistan can be shifted to beat ploughshares from swords; whether there is a possibility that their output could become skilled civilian artisans and peaceful members of a placid society. The ongoing effect of this militarisation of society is that first, her neighbour, Pakistan, was not merely militarised but was socially radicalised, and that, second, her neighbour's neighbour, India, is now going through the early phases of radicalisation - what is to follow is not clear, but seems unlikely to be a peaceful phenomenon.

How this dismal decade ahead is to be prevented from a terrible century of strife gradually spreading to Bangladesh and to Myanmar, and on into the already-ravaged landscape of south-east Asia is not clear.

This is the final legacy of unrestrained American military intervention in Afghanistan.

 

[Sine Nomine]

But Pakistan is involved, and will continue to be involved, in the manner of the businessman who has suffered losses, but believes that injecting more funds and greater energy will somehow overcome the initial difficulties and bring in profits. The impact on Pakistan has not been smothered within Pakistan. It has been transmitted onward to some extent. An infrastructure had been created for the breeding of soldiers.

I beg to differ, when it comes to Afghanistan, Pakistan hasn't got many option to exercise. You know all of current Afghan democratically elected warlords are engaged in drug trafficking and everyone maintains a militia of his own. What option we can exercise, we have to look towards every group so hordes are not entering our lands. It is not simple as you think sir, when it comes to Taliban, believe me dynamics of Taliban power projection are different in every part of Afghanistan. The use religion as tool, they use tribal alliances as tool, they use ethnicity as tool.

Please tell us which option we should exercise to deal them, they have pardoned Butcher of Kabul, one day the will pardon Taliban and by totally alienating them tell me where we will be standing that day. Every Afghan Elite has got property and business in Pakistan and Government is doing nothing to stop them, WHY.

Because we want to make everyone happy to avoid hordes. Which you know once sacked our lands only to get gold.

 

[Joe Shearer]

I beg to differ, when it comes to Afghanistan, Pakistan hasn't got many option to exercise. You know all of current Afghan democratically elected warlords are engaged in drug trafficking and everyone maintains a militia of his own. What option we can exercise, we have to look towards every group so hordes are not entering our lands. It is not simple as you think sir, when it comes to Taliban, believe me dynamics of Taliban power projection are different in every part of Afghanistan. The use religion as tool, they use tribal alliances as tool, they use ethnicity as tool.

Please tell us which option we should exercise to deal them, they have pardoned Butcher of Kabul, one day the will pardon Taliban and by totally alienating them tell me where we will be standing that day. Every Afghan Elite has got property and business in Pakistan and Government is doing nothing to stop them, WHY.

Because we want to make everyone happy to avoid hordes. Which you know once sacked our lands only to get gold.

You may well be right.

Clio is a fickle mistress.

 

[Sine Nomine]

You may well be right.

You know history sir,you can't eat opium.

 

[Joe Shearer]

You know history sir,you can't eat opium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_English_Opium-Eater

 

[Sine Nomine]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_English_Opium-Eater

I will not stop anyone eating it but surely if my neighbors will start eating and producing it,one day my kids will do same and next day my next neighbors kid will do same.I will not like peoples using it either in Karachi or Mumbai.

 

[Joe Shearer]

I will not stop anyone eating it but surely if my neighbors will start eating and producing it,one day my kids will do same and next day my next neighbors kid will do same.I will not like peoples using it either in Karachi or Mumbai.

Joke! JOKE! JOKE!

 

[Sine Nomine]

Joke! JOKE! JOKE!

Chinese also thought same in mid of 18 century.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Chinese also thought same in mid of 18 century.

I won't comment again.

 

[Sine Nomine]

I won't comment again.

View attachment 343426

com on man it's last day of my leave.

 

[Joe Shearer]

com on man it's last day of my leave.

OK, I'll comment after your leave finishes! How's that?

I beg to differ, when it comes to Afghanistan, Pakistan hasn't got many option to exercise. You know all of current Afghan democratically elected warlords are engaged in drug trafficking and everyone maintains a militia of his own. What option we can exercise, we have to look towards every group so hordes are not entering our lands. It is not simple as you think sir, when it comes to Taliban, believe me dynamics of Taliban power projection are different in every part of Afghanistan. The use religion as tool, they use tribal alliances as tool, they use ethnicity as tool.

Please tell us which option we should exercise to deal them, they have pardoned Butcher of Kabul, one day the will pardon Taliban and by totally alienating them tell me where we will be standing that day. Every Afghan Elite has got property and business in Pakistan and Government is doing nothing to stop them, WHY.

Because we want to make everyone happy to avoid hordes. Which you know once sacked our lands only to get gold.

Let me re-orient your view of things.

Consider my original argument: that the Americans had created a cancer which spread to Pakistan, which is reaching out to India, and which, if it takes hold in India, will infect the remaining little pockets in south Asia and spread into south east Asia. The logic sounds unlikely, because even a schoolboy debater will jump up in his seat after hearing this and inform us that while the cancer metaphor is attention-gripping, it breaks down on cursory examination. That it is not enough to call it a cancer, it has to be defined, and it has to be shown with some credibility how that described syndrome could spread from nation to nation.

It is not about Pakistan.

It is about the impact of a chaotic situation in a neighbouring country. It is about how that spread to Pakistan; the spreading is the issue, not that it spread to Pakistan. If it had spread to Turkmenistan, it would still have been about the spread, it would not have been about Turkmenistan.

Could we examine the situation and the prognosis based on this?

 

[niaz]

People tell me that things change and I should stop analysing every aspect of life and the society with a historical perspective. Things change & situations change but nature of the masses does not, in my view history always repeats itself but people refuse to learn from it.

The land has always existed but the country as Afghanistan did not. Ancient Iranians considered all lands west of Amu Darya (Oxus River) as Iran and lands East of Amu Darya was called Turaan. Down to the middle ages the area was part of Khorasan. Even the regimes such as the Ghorids paid tribute to the Saljuqi rulers of Iran.

The widespread belief that Afghanis have always beaten the foreigners is a “Myth” originated by the defeat of the British Army in 1839 and later at Maiwand in 1880. Historically, foreign armies from the Alexandrian times have always conquered and ruled the area. The conquerors included the Mauryans, Scythians, Sassanids, Kidrites, Hindu Shahis, Arabs, Saljuqis, Mongols, Timurids, Uzbeks, Indian Mughals, and Safavids etc.

Modern day Afghanistan was a land ruled by independent / semi-independent war lords and potentates until united by Ahmad Shan Abdali in 1751. Regrettably, tribal, ethnic, linguistic & sectarian hatred have deeper roots than the idea of a united nationhood. Primarily because Pashtuns will not accept a Tajik dominated gov’t; Afghanistan suffered from the fight among the Pashtun, Tajik & Uzbek warlords before the Taliban and between Taliban & the Northern Alliance later.

Anyone who has read how Pashtun Taliban butchered the Hazaras and how Hazara treated the Taliban prisoners later, will be appalled to learn how savage human beings can become in hatred of their fellow countrymen!

In my opinion, only two ways the Afghan war can end. Either the world leaves the Afghanistan completely alone and let them fight it out. Eventually a strong man will emerge who will unite the country. This off course would involve lot of bloodshed and cruelty.

Or divide Afghanistan into 3 or 4 regions as a loose Confederation, with may be a single currency and foreign policy but independent in all other respects.

However, with the vested interest of Pakistan, Iran, India, US, China & Russia; none the above is a possibility. Therefore in my humble opinion, it will be a very long time before poor Afghanis can enjoy peace and prosperity.