It seems, from an inside dopester story by Bill Gertz in the Washington Times, cited here by William Lind last week, that in the White House sessions formulating Obama’s Afghan policy Vice President Joe Biden, and Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg, argued for a minimal strategy of “stabilizing” Afghanistan. Against them Richard C. Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy for the region, U.S. Central Command leader Gen. David H. Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton successfully sold Obama on a major nation-building program, bringing Afghanistan out of feudal poverty and backwardness into the healthful air of a stable and prosperous economy, respectful of women and the polling booth.
Maybe Biden forgot to point out to his boss that this was the Afghanistan model espoused by the leftist Noor Taraki in the late 1970s, setting off US alarm bells which duly led to Taraki’s murder and the CIA’s huge covert and successful intervention in support of the drug barons and warlords, whose feudal offspring are now America’s actual or prospective allies in the war on the Taliban.
As Obama proudly flourished his alliterative triad (“to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat all-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan”) , I listened with the same dismayed frisson as I did more than four decades ago to Kennedy’s similarly childish rhetoric of intervention, whose dark underbelly was the murder of the Diem brothers, and the birth of the Phoenix assassination program of “Viet Cong infrastructure”.
Obama’s brisk sentences commit thousands of fresh US troops to overwhelm the Taliban, oblivious of the judgment of sensible observers that it’s precisely the presence of foreign troops that prompts Pashtuns to support the Taliban and join their ranks. More brisk sentences summoned Pakistan to the crusade against terror, as if Pakistan’s intelligence establishment does not work hand in glove with the Taliban and protects al-Qaida leaders.
The march of folly is under way. Bush and Cheney’s “war on terror” is now married to Clintonian blueprints for nation building and social engineering, a wedding officiated over by General Petraeus, whose mythical surge in Iraq was hailed last year by Obama as having “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams”. The fantasy of America’s healing kiss smolders and flares in Obama’s heart just as it did in Kennedy’s. Ray McGovern quotes Gen. Douglas McArthur as telling Kennedy in 1961: “Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined.” True then, true now.
For a little vignette of the follies of US intervention, let me quote from a recent eyewitness report by Philip Smucker of a US patrol in eastern Afghanistan, published in the McClatchy papers on April 2:
It took the 10th Mountain soldiers nearly two hours to make a descent that usually takes Afghans 20 minutes. Each Combat Company soldier carried between 80 and 130 pounds on his back. Inexperienced Afghan soldiers, unsure of the route, caused further delays, losing their way and threatening to gun down an unarmed shepherd.
Up to 130lbs on your back, in the Hindu Kush! Shades of S.L.A. Marshall’s studies of U.S.Marines on D-Day drowning in a couple of feet of water, pinioned under the weight of their vastly overloaded knapsacks. No wonder the Pentagon prefers to fire off Predators or bomb wedding parties from a safe height. (Posted by Bulatlat)
Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com
banat na banat na ang imperyo ng kano sa mga digmaan na di niya kaya ipanalo s iraq at afghanistan pabor ito sa lahat ng mga pwersa ng mapagpalaya sa mundo na paigtingin at lalong pang palalimin ang pakikibaka.