Then:
Afghanistan Vs. Soviet Union, 1985
And Now:
Afghanistan vs. USA, 2010
If this is progress, I’d hate to see what a downturn in our war in Afghanistan looks like! Even Karzai wants us out. Obama, dude, give up on Shrubya’s broke-ass policy, let’s get out of there and out of Iraq!
*Update 12/16/10* Obama shines a turd.
*Update 12/16/10 1:28P* Red Cross points out the turd isn’t shiny and in fact stinks.
(Note: I had this title last night, when I read the New York Times article discussed below and started to write a post… then procrastinated until everybody else in the world had posted about it waited to consider other viewpoints. So even though Spencer Ackerman and probably others have riffed on the same obvious gag, I’m not changing it!)
In an apparent burst of nostalgia for the bad old days of the Bush-Cheney administration, when anonymous “senior administration officials” would bluff high-profile journalists for major newspapers into peddling dubious propaganda (somehow puffed up into sounding like a major scoop), the New York Times reported last night:
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
Showing that a Democratic president is now in office it’s no longer the early 2000s, even mainstream journalists have reacted to the NYT “scoop” with skepticism bordering on outright scorn. Meanwhile, among progressive bloggers, the reflexive hue-and-cry has predictably arisen: This is just a pretext to stay in Afghanistan forever to control its mineral wealth, just like we’re staying in Iraq forever to control its oil!
Which might be more persuasive were it not for the fact that we aren’t staying in Iraq forever (even as wrangling over forming a government continues, the withdrawal of U.S. troops is proceeding on schedule, with American influence fading concomitantly), and Iraqi politicians — who, unsurprisingly, covet the benefits of the country’s black gold for themselves — never have gotten around to signing over major oil fields wholesale to U.S. corporations.
Nor do I think Obama wants to stay in Afghanistan forever — certainly not long enough for him to reap the downsides of an endless, unsuccessful war while U.S. megacorporations in future decades garner the benefits. To me, the president’s seemingly contradictory announcement last December of an immediate escalation combined with a hoped-for exit timetable was clearly designed to mimic Dubya’s 2007 “surge” in Iraq… that is, not so much a plan to win the war as an attempt to postpone the inevitable while being able to say we gave it our best shot (and, perhaps, take public-relations advantage of any unexpected lucky breaks, as occurred in Iraq).
In fact, although today’s NYT story is undoubtedly propaganda of some sort, its intent may be the opposite of what everyone is assuming. Instead of providing an excuse for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely, what if it inspires other forces in the region to hasten our exit? Karzai is known to be greedy and dishonest; why would reports of vast mineral wealth encourage him to be a loyal and scrupulous American puppet rather than tempting him further to ditch his former benefactors and cut a deal with the Taliban to split the booty?
Even more intriguing is the Chinese angle acknowledged by the Times:
At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.
Anyone else get a whiff of Br’er Rabbit from that passage? “Oh, no, whatever you do, don’t push us out and entangle yourselves deeper in Afghanistan’s problems — please, anything but that, China!”
Hell, if we could get out of the business of providing armed security for Chinese-owned copper mines and lure the People’s Republic into taking our place, battling the Taliban and miscellaneous warlords for control of all those buried minerals, that would be nearly a best-case scenario at this point. (It would be even more entertaining if the reported mother lodes turned out to be illusory… hasn’t someone written a science-fiction novel or something to that effect?)
That’s my conspiracy theory, and I intend to stick with it.
Several weeks ago I wrote a despairing post about the state of our war in Afghanistan, criticizing Obama for following Shrubya’s tired strategy of fighting a counter-insurgency conflict in Afghanistan while the enemy thrived, unmolested, across the border in Pakistan.
I should probably have posted something about that earlier, but their past claims of ‘victories’ and gains were either gross hyperbole or outright lies. However, I’m actually heartened by Osama Bin Laden’s latest missive blaming Obama for “ordering” President Zardari to attack the guerrillas.
Check out the speech – it strikes me as the typical ‘tough talk’ a leader has to give when his followers are backed into a corner – kinda like that some of the speeches given by the (now dead) head of the Tamil Tigers as his guerrillas were increasingly trapped by Sri Lankan forces. The other comforting thought is that Obama could actually ‘order’ President Zardari to do anything! Don’t you wish that were true? I guess American Liberals aren’t the only people that believe Obama has magical powers!
It’s much too early to determine if this is a true sea change in the battle – who knows how many Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors donned burkhas and slipped out among the civilian refugees? And don’t forget that Pakistan is only one of the countries bordering Afghanistan suitable for a base for the guerrillas, and that is a horribly corrupt country at that.
But it’s definitely cause for optimism – let’s hope this reduces some of the strain on President Karzai and the NATO forces in Afghanistan!
*Update 6/4/09* A friend of mine just got back from a couple of weeks in Karachi – he tells me things are really messy there right now – lots of internal divisions between groups such as the Muhajirs and the Pashtuns are boiling up to the surface resulting in pitched street fighting.
I did some further reflection on the ‘same tired strategy’ issue, and I think the crux of the problem is ‘same tired premise.’ Although Obama renamed the ‘War on Terror’ to the Global Contingency Operation, nothing has essentially changed.
After the USSR imploded, the reactionaries were left with gays, aborted fetuses, illegal aliens and Libruhls as The Enemy. Unfortunately (for them), you can’t justify ridiculous levels of defense spending to fight that enemy, so their corporate masters in the defense contractor sector were unsatisfied.
9/11 gave Shrubya & Cheney all they needed to create a new bugbear to replace Raygun’s defunct ‘Evil Empire’ – a “global conspiracy” of Islamic terrorists, dedicated to destroying Pax America through the use of terror. They fanned the flames of fear mercilessly through ‘doomsday’ speeches, Threat Level warnings and airport strip searches.
The reality-based community’s arguments that these threats required greater intelligence and coordinated international police actions were laughed at and shrugged off by the Repugs who for a time completely dominated the MSM.
In the case of Afghanistan, the original goal, was to catch Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive,’ neutralize the threat of the other architects of 9/11 and their sympathizers, the Taliban, then install and nurture a Western-friendly government and do some nation building to eliminate the terrorist ‘breeding ground.’ Of course Osama and the Taliban had plenty of time to escape into the ‘failed statelet’ of Western Pakistan, which continually threatens to distabilize the installed Karzai government, forcing us to remain and even escalate our presence just to stay in place.
Osama accepted this status quo and just did his first escalation – I guarantee there will be more. The original premise – that we are in a life-or-death struggle with a global, violent fundamentalist Islam – remains. The follow-on reactionary addition to the premise is that this threat can and should be dealt with via military means, and that by doing so, we can make America ‘safe from Terrorism.’
Current reactionary talking points revolve around Dem rule making America ‘less safe,’ for anything from (re)outlawing torture and closing Gitmo, to cutting boondoggle projects from the defense budget.
Obama needs to attack this premise head-on, or it will continue to drive him down the doomed policy path we are currently on.
Here are the reality-based premises that he needs to push forward to counter the reactionary bullshit.
First, the government can’t make us completely safe from terror. It’s impossible. It’s a cheap and easy tactic easily employed by malcontents. Suspending civil liberties and employing harsh tactics internally just create more and nastier malcontents.
Terrorists come in many flavors. Notice how the reactionaries freaked out over the government’s report on the danger of our own home-grown, reactionary terrorists. No mystery there – they want us to ignore the Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and the Anthrax Mailer behind the curtain and focus on the Islamic Fundamentalist bugbear. This is a critical point – even if we were somehow able to magically lock down all of the Islamic world, we still wouldn’t be safe from terror!
I won’t belabor the third point, that massive occupations of jihadi-prone foreigners punctuated by kid-killing blind airstrikes creates more terrorists – that point has been beaten to death over the last 8 years.
This leads me back to the premise specifically underpinning the current Afghanistan policy – if we pull out, the Karzai government will fall at the hands of the Taliban, leading to failed state and becoming another breeding ground/homebase for terrorists. Here is the crux of the problem – the Al Qaeda home base has shifted to W. Pakistan, a failed statelet, and neither Shrubya or Obama hase the inclination to take the war there. Ergo – stalement.
How is that different from just letting Afghanistan fall again? It’s just a slightly bigger breeding ground. And going back to the War on Terror – isn’t the supposed Islamic Fundamentalist terror threat supposed to be global? There are no end of Islamic ‘failed states’ out that, or near-failed states, that could harbor another head of the terrorist hydra – admittedly not as well financed as the Pashtun poppy-growers, but not without access to other funding sources.
Bottom line is that Obama needs to start a serious dialog on the broke-ass reactionary fear-mongering premises, attacking the ‘War on Terror’ head on, not just relabeling it and continuing the policy. And Evil Dick is giving Obama a perfect opportunity to have the dialog. Obama could take the high ground and just debate him directly, tear him to shreds. Or we could actually have that truth commission, but open it up to include all the lying and bullshit perpetuated by Cheney to sell the war as well as investigations into renditions, torture and the Valerie Plame scandal.
Otherwise, expect us to continue down this losing path at the cost of tens of thousands of more Afghani and Iraqi civilian lives, hundreds more of our soldiers and budget-busting costs - and ultimately making this war *the* election question of 2012.
If you thought that by electing Obama we’d get out of the Shrubyian quagmires any sooner, you’d be sadly mistaken. It looks like Obama is following Shrubya’s brokeass ‘strategy,’ i.e. engagements without an exit strategy, no clear goals and a continuing drain of soldiers and cash.
In a move right out of the Shrubya playbook, Obama is replacing one general with another in Afghanistan, saying that it’s time for some ‘fresh thinking.’ Seriously, Mr. President, the only ‘fresh thinking’ we need is from you!! It doesn’t matter whom you put in the hot seat, he/she will continue to muddle along until such time as it becomes clear what they need to achieve in order to get out of the quicksand.
And in the case of Afghanistan, as long as the Taliban live free and untouchable just across the border this war will drag on for as long as we wish to expend the lives. Our ally Pakistan will neutralize the Taliban? Don’t make me laugh, Mr. President, they are already busy getting their asses kicked by the Taliban’s tribal hosts.
And in case you’ve forgotten, Shrubya already tried launching a ‘death from above’ strategy in both quagmires and learned the hard way that for every ‘terrorist’ you kill, you create dozens of pissed-off new terrorists.
If you want to eliminate the Taliban threat to Karzai and ‘new’ Afghanistan, you need to take the war to them…on the ground…where they are. If you can’t or won’t do that, then get us the hell out of there. Fresh thinking, Mr. President, fresh thinking!
(Sarah Palin and Afghan president Hamid Karzai, via Agence France Presse.)
(Barack Obama and Afghan president Hamid Karzai in Kabul on Sunday, via the Associated Press.)
Just felt I had to round out the trilogy — “real” posts will resume at some point…
$80+ billion for the war on Iraq and nothing to rebuild Afghanistan – Dubya is daring history to repeat itself. Before the war, Dubya inadvertently summarized the Gulf War II succinctly: “As I said, this looks like a rerun of a bad movie and I’m not interested in watching it.” He was in fact criticizing Iraq’s cooperation with the U.N. weapons inspectors (which in hindsight, appears to have been nearly complete).
But like any good Hollywood producer, he’s laid the groundwork for a sequel to the Afghan conflict as well. While lavishing more than $80 billion on the Gulf War II, he has apparently reneged on his promise to rebuild Afghanistan. Although the U.S. maintains a military presence in that country, its activities appear to be focused on a futile and expensive cat & mouse game on the Pakistan border as well as protecting “our” bully, Afghani President Karzai (although apparently the privatization-minded Administration has actually outsourced the latter to the corporate mercenaries at DynCorp).
This neglect of the folks we “liberated” in this last war is causing the same sorts of unrest that led to the original emergence of the Taliban from among the numerous thugs and warlords pillaging Afghanistan following the end of the Soviet occupation. In an eery echo of Dubya, Karzai’s brother recently summarized the current situation: “It’s like I am seeing the same movie twice and no one is trying to fix the problem.”
I’m confident that the Oily Men in the White House won’t neglect Iraq completely. My prediction is that U.S. aid, funded at least in part from Iraqi oil revenues, will go into rebuilding Iraq’s petroleum industry. Oil Slick Bush will “pass the buck” for the remaining reconstruction, if any, to its patsy friends in Europe and the U.N. If Afghanistan is any indication, this won’t be a high priority for Dubya. So expect to see these new blockbuster hits:
Afghan War II and Gulf War III!
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