Tag Archives: Afghan war

Political Rants

An unhealthy dose of imperial fetishism

As I’ve mentioned more times than I should have, I have had very low expectations for the Biden foreign policy since the beginning. By “the beginning”, I mean well before his election, when you couldn’t find foreign policy positions on his campaign web site for love or money. Biden’s fifty-year track record on foreign affairs is not a particularly good one. I remember him saying he was “ashamed” of Reagan’s “constructive engagement” policy towards apartheid South Africa back in the 1980s. Um …. that’s about it.

These past two weeks have done little to change my mind on this. The drone assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al Qaeda leader, prompted a lot of fist-pumping on the part of mainstream Democrats and some never-Trump Republicans. A similar amount of jingoism accompanied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, as well. I’m not certain what the expected takeaway is for either of these decisions, but it the point was to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the current Democratic leadership is well vested into America’s imperial enterprise, they certainly succeeded.

A child of bad policy

Ayman al-Zawahiri was a terrible person, there’s no question. I think, though, as we are the one global super-power, it’s probably a good idea to consider how our policy may have contributed to his no-goodness. Al-Zawahiri started down the road to al Qaeda when he was imprisoned by the Mubarak regime, where he and his fellow prisoners from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood were tortured, killed, and otherwise abused. Egypt, I will remind you, has long been a major recipient of U.S. aid, far beyond what nearly every other nation has received from us. If Egypt’s notoriously brutal prison system contributed to al-Zawahiri’s radicalism (which it most certainly did), we bear considerable responsibility for that.

Secondly, there likely wouldn’t have been an al-Qaeda for him to join up with if it hadn’t been for (1) the Afghan CIA operation during the 1980s, and (2) the first gulf war in 1990-91, when U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia for the first time, remaining there long after Iraq was driven from Kuwait. Again, these were policy choices, not forces of nature. Without multiple interventions in the middle east and southwest Asia, America might not have been such a big, attractive target for these people. Can’t be sure, but …. might have been worth a try.

Worst of the worst?

Then there’s the question of how many lives were lost at the hands of al-Zawahiri. I would argue far too many. As Rachel Maddow pointed out on her show last week, he had a long history of planning terrorist actions, including being one of the masterminds of the September 11 attacks, the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and so on. So, thousands of live lost. Not a nice person, right?

Now, there should be some reckoning as to how that record stacks up to the record of his pursuers. All killing is intrinsically bad, so I’m not suggesting that the rapacious policies of the United States somehow lessen the severity and the cravenness of al-Zawahiri’s attacks. But if it’s bad when he does it, then it’s bad when others do it as well, right? And if others do a lot more killing than he did, well … that makes them particularly bad, right?

Let’s just stick to the wars that followed 9/11. How many people died as a result of our actions? Was it less or more than the number of al-Zawahiri’s victims? In all honesty, America’s victims through this period run in the high six-figures to perhaps seven figures. Several countries were destroyed essentially beyond recovery. Fist pump, anyone?

Unfair comparisons

Okay, I know …. it’s really not fair to compare nation states like the U.S. to non-state actors like al Qaeda or individuals like al-Zawahiri. Nation states have international obligations, responsibilities, and should at least formally be accountable to their populations. Terror networks are kind of a law unto themselves, though international law does bear on them. But honestly …. shouldn’t we expect more out of our own government then that they should be responsible for hundreds or even thousands of times the number of deaths caused by our most ruthless enemies?

Seems like kind of a low bar.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Begging for an invitation to the Hague

Well, the U.S. military finally conceded that the drone strike in Kabul was a “tragic” mistake that killed ten civilians. The dead include a contractor with a non-profit and seven children, who piled into the targeted car when their daddy/uncle pulled into the driveway. In other words, we killed them for being happy and enjoying themselves.

How is it that people like these victims look to our military like some kind of threat? The drone warriors and their superiors apparently thought the drinking water they were loading into their car was some kind of explosive. Just like Amadou Diallo’s wallet became a gun in the eyes of the NYPD Street Crimes Unit, the shooters saw this family’s actions as deserving of annihilation.

Where no one can see

As many know, U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan have been going on for many years, principally out of view of the mostly Kabul-based international press. Anand Gopal’s amazing article in the New Yorker – The Other Afghan Women – reports that the ominous buzzing of drones was an almost constant feature of rural life in Afghanistan. The toll from the retail death-dealing by these unmanned weapon systems is one of the untold stories of our twenty-year war in that unfortunate country.

Frankly, I have zero confidence that the military’s drone war didn’t mainly kill civilians, even if unintentionally. The reason why we know what happened in Kabul a few weeks ago is that there were witnesses and members of the media within eyeshot. Most of our strikes occur in extremely remote sections of Afghanistan, where no such accountability is possible.

Brutality is a feature, not a bug

I don’t want to give the impression that the drone campaign is the only problem with our war in Afghanistan, or elsewhere, for that matter. We have routinely killed significant numbers of civilians in rural Afghanistan, typically a handful or one at a time. Our allies in that country have been remarkably brutal, in addition to their obvious corruption.

Gopal writes about the experience of families in the Sagnin Valley in Helmand Province. One woman he focuses on lost 16 members of her family over to the war over the course of the American occupation. Some were killed by warlord militia groups that the U.S. allied itself with, some by U.S. forces, some by Afghan government forces. Sometimes an individual walked too close to a military installation. Others died in night raids.

This is why the official death toll in Afghanistan is very likely way, way too low. I don’t think those official numbers included any of the members of this woman’s family, and her family’s experience was pretty typical, with the average loss of life running around 10-12 per family.

What is accountability?

The general who acknowledged the civilian deaths told his audience that he is fully responsible for this “tragic” mistake. But what does accountability mean in these cases? Will anyone spend time behind bars? Will anyone appear before a war crimes tribunal at the Hague? Will anyone be demoted or discharged for their actions?

It seems unlikely. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push for it. We should attach a political cost to these policies – that’s the only reasonable way to roll them back … or, at least, begin to.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

It ain’t deja vu until it’s over again.

Quite a week in the history of American empire. I listened to the commentary unfold this week as the 40-year war in Afghanistan drew to a close and I was reminded of, well, 40 years ago. Around that time I read a collection of essays by Noam Chomsky unwrapping the reams of commentary that followed the end of another seemingly endless American war, the one in Vietnam. A lot of what he was writing about is just as true today as it was in the mid to late 1970s.

The collection was called Towards a New Cold War and I should probably re-read it. I suspect it would prove a useful guide to the dreck I am hearing on a daily basis from the mainstream media – specifically, in my case, from the panel on Morning Joe. That show is as close to the center of the imperial enterprise as any media property. They should rename it “The Blob Speaks” or something along those lines.

Bungling efforts to do good

One of the narratives that emerged from the disaster that was the Vietnam War was the myth of good intentions. It went something like this: we entered the conflict intending to save the Vietnamese, then things went wrong. Articulate opinion was making this case back in the mid to late seventies, and we are hearing their modern counterparts doing the same today with regard to Afghanistan.

I have seen minor variations on this theme. The most popular one, as far as I can tell, is the argument that we shouldn’t have tried to remake Afghanistan in our own image. In other words, the Afghans are too corrupt, ignorant, backward, etc., to appreciate our way of life, our mode of governance, etc. Our efforts to impose our innate goodness on them amounted to hubris, albeit a very benign variety of that vice. Ungrateful wretches!

Assessing the costs

Another subject of post-Vietnam reflection was the notion that the destruction was mutual. President Carter even framed Vietnam in those terms. As someone who lived through the war years, I must admit that I don’t recall the non-existent Vietnamese air force dropping napalm on my neighborhood or flattening my town with high explosives. Maybe I slept through it.

While I don’t want to minimize the suffering of our Afghanistan War vets – far from it – there’s no question but that Afghans bore the overwhelming brunt of the suffering through this conflict. They died in the hundreds of thousands, their country torn to pieces. We lost a lot of people, spent a lot of money, but have not felt the impacts of this war as much as Afghan families.

We care, damn it!

Then, of course, there’s the virtue signalling. Once the United States was out of Vietnam, we became obsessed with the fate of the people of Indochina. As people fled the destroyed remains of Vietnamese society, our opinion-makers used that as a cudgel against the newly unified government of Vietnam.

While the Morning Joe couch and other commentators now express concern for Afghan refugees, they said very little about Afghans over the past twenty years. The fact is, millions of Afghans have been displaced by this war, both internally and in neighboring countries, particularly Pakistan and Iran, since 2001. Want to help Afghan refugees? Look there first. And while you’re at it, consider helping refugees from our other wars in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, for instance.

I could go on, but I’ll stop there. Suffice to say that I am glad we are ending this useless war. No more posts like the ten-year anniversary piece I did a decade ago, right? Let’s hope not.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.