Eleven months ago, a former Marine turned foreign service officer quit his post in Afghanistan. The prescience of his resignation letter grows with each passing day.
Since I last wrote, here, about the futility of the war in Afghanistan eight months ago there’ve been at least a couple major developments. Both of which involved unforeseen acts of journalism.
The first was Michael Hastings’ July Rolling Stone article, “The Runaway General,” about General Stanley McChrystal, then the top U.S. general in Afghanistan. Most people know about Hastings’ article because of the statements in it by McChrystal and his entourage disparaging President Obama and, more so, Vice President Biden and other members of the Obama foreign policy team. Those statements resulted in Obama relieving McChrystal of his command. Predictably, this direct and
Matthew Hoh
rather immediate consequence of Hastings’ work overshadowed, by far, the rest of a powerfully disturbing article about how badly the military campaign is going and how the selling of the conflict has degenerated into a political con game. It may seem too simple to conclude from Hastings’ article that Biden’s well-known skepticism and warnings about the Afghanistan campaign are coming true. But no, it’s not too simple; that’s exactly it.
The second important act of journalism occurred in the last week of July when the website WikiLeaks began to publish and circulate to certain news organizations tens of thousands of classified documents covering six years of the American experience in Afghanistan. The leaked documents defy any notion that the war is going well or that Afghan civil society, fueled by billions of U.S. tax dollars, is making any headway in terms of resolving the roots of the conflict.
These two events are important milestones. They shout hard truths. And yet the maddening reality is that even with American public opinion markedly turning against the war, both Obama and the Republican leadership are deaf to such events. Each have their own perverse reasons for not removing the fingers in their ears. Obama’s not listening because he feels politically obliged to show “strength” and support the military. Republicans turn their backs because they believe they own the copyright on a simple and politically formidable version of American patriotism that is wrapped in the barbed wire of militarism.
This fall [2009] will mark the eighth year of U.S. combat, governance and development operations within Afghanistan. Next fall, the United States’ occupation will equal in length the Soviet Union’s own physical involvement in Afghanistan. Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people.–from Matthew Hoh’s resignation letter last September
It’s tragic that the puppet theater of American party politics has no room in its script for the intrusions of ground truths. It’s also crazy-making that the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost over $100 billion a year (on top of the Defense Department’s regular budget allocations) and the Republican hawks are not only okay with this, but don’t want to raise taxes to fund it. Instead they want to pile up easy political points by criticizing the Obama Administration for runaway budget deficits.
Beneath the headlines that Hastings’ article provoked are the absurdly open secrets about why the Afghanistan war is such a hoax. For starters, the military strategy only makes sense within the context of a wholesale and successful overhaul of a corrupt Afghan government.
So what’s our ability to leverage that? Not that much it turns out. From this morning’s New York Times, here’s how Dexter Filkins reports on this issue based on his interview yesterday with McChrystal’s successor, General David Petraeus:
Mr. Karzai has promised over the years to root out corruption but has largely failed to do so. He has refused requests from American officials to remove his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, as chairman of the provincial council in Kandahar Province despite widespread reports of corruption. Last week, the president tried to assert control over two American-backed Afghan anticorruption units that are investigating Afghan officials.
General Petraeus declined to discuss the status of Ahmed Wali Karzai, and he praised President Karzai’s efforts to attack corruption. In any case, he suggested, American leverage over Mr. Karzai is limited. “President Karzai is the elected leader of a sovereign country,” he said. “That is how the people see him by and large; he is therefore — and has to be, for sure — our partner.”
The military strategy that McChrystal and Petraeus are devoted to in Afghanistan is “counterinsurgency” or “COIN.” COIN is not only very troop intensive, it relies on close-quarter relationship building with the civilian population. By definition, for counterinsurgency to be effective it can only make the most limited use of the major asset of the American military, which is the use of overwhelming and superior killing technology.
As Hastings and others have pointed out, there is an enormous gulf between what COIN experts regard as the necessary troop levels to apply COIN to Afghanistan, and the 100,000 troops we have there now, even after Obama agreed to send an additional 30,000 troops. (McChrystal had sought 40,000 extra.) Basically, COIN strategy proposes 20 to 25 counterinsurgent soldiers for every 1,000 residents. Even after Obama’s additional 30,000 troops, and even including (if you choose) Afghan troops, the troop to resident ratio is still far less than that required to theoretically execute the strategy. And this would be true even if the Kharzi regime were an honest and reliable partner in the effort, which it isn’t.
In his article, Hastings quotes from a cable leaked last January from Karl Eikenberry our ambassador to Afghanistan in which Eikenberry dismissed Karzai as a worthy partner in nation-building and predicted that without changing course: “We will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extract ourselves.”
Hastings also quotes retired Colonel Douglas McGregor, a West Point contemporary of General McChrystal:
“The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people. The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.”
But, on we go with it, now with General Petraeus in charge, because no one wants to drink the political hemlock of admitting that our goals in Afghanistan, even though well-intended, are not just unrealistic, but disastrously foolish.
Following 9/11/01, public support for the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda was high because it was from the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan that Al Qaeda was training its terrorists. Moreover, the cruelties of the Taliban, including its primitive abuse and suppression of women, were (and are) repugnant. So there’s certainly good reason to have hoped that the U.S. intervention would lead to a new government that, on its own, could effectively suppress if not defeat the Taliban.
But the realities of Afghanistan are not nearly so simple.
In writing about the Wiki-Leaks documents in the August 9th edition of the New Yorker, Amy Davidson shares one of the most sickening dispatches. It comes from what happened in Balkh Province, in northern Afghanistan last September. During a search and clear mission a Afghani police commander was reported to have raped a 16-year-old girl. When the girl complained, the commander ordered his body guard to shoot the girl. When the body guard refused, the commander shot the body guard.
“There had been reports,” Davidson writes, “some in this magazine, of targeted killings. And we knew that the Afghan security forces were a disaster, even after we had spent twenty-seven billion dollars to train them. But knowing specifically what happened to a sixteen-year-old girl and to the man who stood up to her rapist–and knowing that her attacker may have been in a position to do so because he was backed by our troops and our money–is different.”
And that’s the message that both Obama and the Republican boosters of this deepening quagmire don’t want you to hear.
In December I made reference to Matthew Hoh’s resignation letter that, poignantly, was written the same month as the episode Davidson writes about from Balkh Province. Hoh, a former Marine, as the U.S. State Department’s Senior Civilian Representative in Zabul Province. It’s worth another read, and here I’ll quote an extended excerpt:
“This fall [2009] will mark the eighth year of U.S. combat, governance and development operations within Afghanistan. Next fall, the United States’ occupation will equal in length the Soviet Union’s own physical involvement in Afghanistan. Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people.
If the history of Afghanistan is one great stage play, the United States is no more than a supporting actor, among several previously, in a tragedy that not only pits tribes, valleys, clans, villages, and families against one another, but, from at least the end of King Zahir Shah’s reign, has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency. The Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups, is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and NATO presence and operations in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police unites that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified. In both RC East and South, I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.
The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency. In a like manner our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from its people. The Afghan government’s failings, particularly when weighed against the sacrifice of American lives and dollars, appears legion and metastatic.
*Glaring corruption and unabashed graft;
*A President whose confidants and chief advisors comprise drug lords and war crime villains, who mock our own rule of law and counternarcotics efforts;
*A system of provincial and district leaders constituted of local power brokers, opportunists, and strongmen allied to the United States solely for, and limited by, the value of our USAID and CERP contracts and whose own political and economic interests stand nothing to gain from any positive or genuine attempts at reconciliation; and
*The recent election process dominated by fraud and discredited by low voter turnout, which has created an enormous victory for our enemy who now claims a popular boycott and will call into question worldwide our government’s military, economic and diplomatic support for an invalid and illegitimate Afghan government.
Our support for this kind of government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency’s true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement South Vietnam; an unpopular and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our Nation’s own internal peace, against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology.
I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from out young men and women in Afghanistan.
You can download the full text of Hoh’s resignation letter here.
–Tim Connor
No comments yet.