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Barack’s Big Night

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Ted Rall

Obama’s acceptance speech, like all good speeches, started slowly out of the gate. The second third was a barn burner, going after McCain and Bush the way he should have from the start. The last was a well-intentioned misfire, trying to address critics (like me) who chide him for a lack of specifics. He enumerated his platform planks, but they were so tepid, so woefully short of what we need on a range of important issues, that they fell flat. Nice try, anyway.

There was one galling moment, though. Obama said:

For — for while — while Senator McCain was turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, I stood up and opposed this war, knowing that it would distract us from the real threats that we face.

When John McCain said we could just muddle through in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights.

You know, John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell, but he won’t even follow him to the cave where he lives.

First of all, Obama didn’t actually oppose the Iraq War. He voted to fund it. Over and over and over. All he did was talk about how the war was a bad idea, before voting to waste more money and lives on it.

Second, “the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11” weren’t in Afghanistan. They were dead, or in Pakistan. Some of their financiers were in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, too. Obama’s desire to seem tough because he’s willing to kill Muslims in Afghanistan is as misguided as Bush’s Iraq misadventure.

Third, I’m betting Osama lives in a nice house.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Muddle is the Message

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Ted Rall

Obama on the Ropes

Democrats are fired up about Obama. Belying Will Rogers’ adage that as a Democrat he didn’t belong to any organized political party, this year finds the DNC uncharacteristically well funded and startlingly organized. Running against an incumbent likely to go down as this country’s worst leader in history, Democrats couldn’t ask for a more favorable political climate. “Watergate is the last time things were so overwhelmingly tilted against the Republicans,” Duke University political scientist David Rohde tells the Bloomberg wire service.

McCain ought to be a pushover. At a time when Americans are tired of Iraq as well as the “good war” against Afghanistan, the GOP standard bearer’s narrative is military: career Navy, POW, wants to send more young men and women to Iraq.

Yet the latest Gallup poll (conducted August 22-24) has Obama neck and neck with McCain, with 45 percent each, with a two percent margin of error. CNN (August 21-23) yields identical results, a 47-47 tie with a 3.5 percent margin of error. What’s up?

This year’s presidential race, as I’ve been saying for months, is Barack Obama’s to lose. And though he hasn’t committed any major gaffes–no joy rides in any tanks or senior moments when asked how many houses he owns–he hasn’t taken the swings he needs to wallop this thing out of the park.

Obama leaves nothing to chance, coolly hugging every twist and turn of the campaign trail with pre-2000 Rovian efficiency. His campaign’s professionalism is a welcome departure from the witless incompetence that has characterized the last eight years of federal governance. But it comes at a price–the same joylessness of inevitability that killed Hillary in the primaries.

Joe Biden is yet another sacrifice to the gods of pragmatism, a chance to boldly seize the moment squandered. Memo to future campaign managers: don’t con millions of saps into telling you their cellphone numbers so they can get a personalized spam telling them about your VP pick an hour after it’s announced on TV. Even better, don’t make a big deal about your VP unless your VP is a big deal.

In 1996 Bob Dole enjoyed a nine-point bump in the polls after announcing Jack Kemp as his running mate. Bush and Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 picked up between three and five percentage points after naming their veeps. The Biden bump was zero. Amazing but true–Joe Lieberman was a bigger asset than Biden. In Biden’s defense, big announcements don’t get much news traction when they break on a Saturday in late August.

Maybe Biden can deliver Delaware.

Obama and his advisers, probably still a little amazed that they got this far with what would normally have been a test candidacy designed to lay the groundwork for a later race, have apparently forgotten how their guy first broke out. Back in December, before the Iowa caucus, Obama was the guy who reminded Americans of a time when politicians knew how to talk and inspire them. He was young at a time when old guys like Dick Cheney were screwing up the world. He was optimistic when voters’ confidence was all but non-existent.

Remember hope? Audacity? Change? Platitudes all, and wonderful marketing for a country that was anything but post-partisan, much less post-political.

Audacity has been in short supply since Obama collected his 2118th delegate on June 3rd. Pandering to racist whites who think black guys are a bunch of child-abandoning layabouts, he delivered a speech slagging them as deadbeat dads. He flip-flopped on domestic spying, voting to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that illegally let the NSA listen to your phone calls. He even changed his mind about offshore oil drilling, which will crap up beaches while prices at the pump remain exactly the same.

There’s nothing wrong with Joe Biden. He’s a safe pick–experienced and smart, he offers foreign policy cred to make up for Obama’s short resume. Biden will be a good attack dog, assuming the campaign decides to use him as such. But he’s an uninspired and uninspiring choice.

Personally, I’m glad Obama didn’t pick Hillary. She would have overshadowed him. John Edwards, my pick for president in the primaries and for veep after he dropped out, has been hobbled by the revelation that he had an affair (with the apparent consent of his wife, but whatever). But either Clinton or Edwards would have been a better choice than Joe Biden. They’re different, they’re controversial, they’re…a change. Unlike Biden, people would have talked about them.

Obama’s politics are neither complex nor internally inconsistent. They are opportunist. Whatever works with voters is good. “His philosophy is ambition,” Cooper Union historian Fred Siegel told the New York Times. “I see him as having a rhetoric rather than a philosophy.”

Obama’s campaign relies on imagery, not ideology. He has fans, not supporters. He won the Democratic nomination by acting like a rock star, not a politician. Turning to traditional politics (as he did by picking Biden) will expose his weaknesses on a playing field on which he has little experience–and could cost him the presidency.

(C) 2008 TED RALL, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Early Warning

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Ted Rall

Stay tuned…I’m rolling out my first ever animated cartoon in a week or two.

Biden? Zzzzzzzzz

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Ted Rall

This isn’t as bad as 2000, when someone told me on a bus in Kyrgyzstan that Al Gore had picked Lieberman, the world’s least telegenic politician and America’s least Democratic Democrat, as his running mate. But Barack Obama’s pick for VP is a disappointment.

Following the Clintonian policy of deliberately squandering every opportunity, the Obama campaign seems to know their choice is a disaster. Why else break the news so that it would emerge on a Saturday in late August, one of the deadest news days of the year?

The big question is why. Of course, we know Obama felt he needed some foreign policy cred. But others could have provided that. The trouble with Biden is, well, he ain’t change we can believe in, is he? He’s the same old, same old–and, as a fellow senator, redundant at that.

John Edwards would have been a better a choice. So would Hillary. At least people would be talking about them.

I’m boning up on my McCain caricature. Looks like I’ll need it.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: 13 Days in August

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Ted Rall

The Polish Missile Crisis: Bush’s Last War?

The Cold War is over,” Condi Rice said last week. This may be true. She and her lame duck boss seem to be starting up a hot one instead.

Imagine Russian or Chinese military bases in Tijuana or Ciudad Juárez, across the Mexican border from El Paso. Add some more in Toronto and Vancouver. Now imagine that Russia managed to persuade Canada and Mexico to join it in some weird new Eastern bloc military alliance whose purpose was to “contain” the U.S., and then placed a battery of long-range missiles in one or both countries. How long would it take before we went to war?

Of course, you don’t need an imagination. The U.S. didn’t tolerate Soviet missiles in Cuba, and is still trying to overthrow its government.

Given America’s refusal to accept an unfriendly regime in its neighborhood–remember Grenada?–you’d think it would know enough to stay out of Russia’s hair. You’d be wrong.

Driven by its twin original sins of greed and arrogance, the United States began nibbling at Russia’s edges soon after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Clinton Administration wooed oil-rich ex-Soviet states such as Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. It’s as if Florida were to declare independence, and crawled into bed with Iran.

Efforts to de-Russify the old Soviet sphere of influence accelerated under Bush, who used 9/11 and the “war on terror” as a pretext to establish permanent military bases in the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Bush’s CIA even funded a coup d’état in Kyrgyzstan, which overthrew Central Asia’s only democratically elected president.

Central Asia, under Russia’s sphere of influence for more than 150 years, began playing host to CIA “black sites” and other U.S. torture facilities.

The U.S. invited ex-Soviet bloc states–the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Baltic states–to join NATO, the Cold War-era anti-Russian military alliance. Recently, it even encouraged the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia to apply for membership, emboldening Georgia in its recent conflict with Russia.

Now the Bush Administration has convinced Poland to base ten RIM-161 Standard Interceptor Missiles (SM-3) along Russia’s western border.

Republics that were once part of or fell under the influence of the Soviet Union are sovereign states. They are legally and morally permitted to form alliances with any other nation they choose, including the U.S. Still, you have to wonder: Don’t these guys own a map? Doesn’t it make more sense to suck up to the superpower next door than the one an ocean away?

From our perspective: Why would the U.S. think provoking Russia by encroaching on its traditional sphere of influence is a good idea?

For Russia, using newfound oil wealth to rebuild its military, the Polish-American missile deal is the line in the sand. Annual defense budget increases of 20 percent or more, which should bring at least half of its hardware up to modern standards by 2015, have transformed the dying dog of Yeltsin-era “shock economics” back into a growling bear.

“Poland, by deploying [U.S. missiles] is exposing itself to a [nuclear] strike–100 percent,” says top Russian general Anatoly Nogovitsyn. The Russian government stood by his threat.

The U.S. claims the Russians have nothing to fear. “It [the missile system] is not aimed in any way at Russia,” says Condi. Indeed, interceptor missiles are designed to shoot down other missiles, not launch attacks. But the Russians don’t want to see their ability to strike first–a right also reserved by the U.S.–degraded by an anti-missile system. They also worry about the slippery slope: what new weapons will the U.S. place in Eastern Europe later on?

Russia’s concerns are no different than ours would be if they were the ones arming Canada against us. But Condi’s reassurances are too cute by half.

Shortly before signing the missile deal with Poland, she commented: “This will help us to deal with the new threats of the 21st century, of long-range missile threats from countries like Iran or from North Korea.” Sounds reasonable–except for geography.

Nearly 2000 miles separates Iran and Poland. North Korea is nearly 5000 miles away from Poland. But Iran’s longest-range missile, the Shahab-3, can only go 1200 miles–about the same as North Korea’s equivalent. When you factor in the fact that America’s Poland-based SM-3s only travel about 300 miles, it is mathematically impossible for them to intercept anything launched by Iran or North Korea.

The U.S. is occupying two of the largest nations bordering Iran–Afghanistan and Iraq. Wouldn’t building a missile shield there make a zillion times more sense? As for North Korea, well, we have a base in Okinawa, not to mention 25,000 troops in South Korea.

Meanwhile, Condi is trying to recruit more former Soviet republics for NATO. “We are going to help rebuild Georgia into a strong Georgian state,” Rice told Fox News. “The Russians will have failed in their effort to undermine Georgia. And we will be looking at what we can do with the states around that region as well.”

Are the Bushies trying to create a “national emergency” pretext for canceling the presidential election? Are they crazy Christians lusting for the end times? Or are they just nuts? No one knows their motives. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that, after lying us into two losing wars, Cheney & Co. are using their closing months to try to provoke the mother of them all.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hope For Audacity

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Ted Rall

Why Obama Is in Trouble

Unless something happens, John McCain will win.

Of course, “unless something happens” is the biggest qualifier in the world, more than adequate to CYA me should Obama prevail. It’s politics. There are almost three months. Odds are something will happen.

Still, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Obama’s electoral handicaps–his racial identification and short resume–should have easily been eclipsed by Bush’s–er, McCain’s well-stocked aviary of albatrosses. McCain was and remains short of money. His campaign organization is a mess. Republican bosses are unenthusiastic, both about his prospects and about the direction he would take his party should he win. He has aligned himself with the most unpopular aspect of the wildly unpopular outgoing administration, the Iraq War. At a time when economically insecure voters are staring down the barrel of a recession-cum-depression, McCain promises more of the same–no help is on the way. And he’s old. Sooo painfully I-don’t-use-the-Internet old.

What is it that has the politerati betting on a McCain Administration? Historical precedent. During most presidential election years, Republicans tend to surge in the last few months of the campaign. For a Democrat to win in November, he must have a comfortable lead in the polls at this stage in the game.

The classic example is 1976, Jimmy Carter led incumbent Gerald Ford by 33 percentage points. Ford was hobbled by Watergate, a recession, and his pardon of Nixon, as well as his dismal performance in the debates, where he claimed that the Soviet Union wasn’t dominating eastern Europe. Nevertheless, Ford closed the lead, losing to Carter by just two points. This follows the pattern, albeit by a wider margin than in most elections.

In recent years, the countervailing example is the 1992 contest between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, the incumbent. After the Democratic National Convention in August, Clinton was only ahead of Bush by a few points. Clinton won, but only because independent Ross Perot, a businessman with libertarian leanings, attracted so many votes from registered Republicans.

Perot ran again in 1996, but was less of a factor. So the old pattern reasserted itself. Clinton led Bob Dole by roughly 20 percent in mid-August, but won by eight. Republicans always close the gap.

It happened again in 2000. In mid-August, Al Gore had an eight-point lead ahead of George W. Bush. Gore won the popular vote by 0.6 percent.

If you’re a Democrat, being ahead isn’t enough. In 2004 John Kerry was ahead in mid-August–but by just two points. Bush was an incumbent with potentially grave weaknesses–he hadn’t found Osama or Iraq’s supposed WMDs, and he was already losing the war–yet the pattern reasserted itself. Bush gained four points, prevailing in the popular vote by 2.4 percent. (I won’t comment on the electoral vote, aside from mentioning that it was stolen in the key state of Ohio.)

If Barack Obama ends up beating John McCain, he will have done so with the smallest August lead for a Democrat in memory–three points, within the statistical margin of error for tracking polls. A columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times argues that’s good news: “Out of the gate,” writes Carol Marin, “the thoroughbred who leads too early and by too great a margin is more often than not the vulnerable one, the one in danger of losing it all to the horse who strategically holds back, waits, and then thunders in the final furlongs to finish first.” Nice metaphor, but presidential campaigns aren’t horse races. They’re boxing matches. The last man standing wins.

If the election were held today, Obama would win. But it won’t be, so he might not. Republicans fight harder than Democrats, so Republicans land more punches. Democrats, at least Democrats of the wimpy post-LBJ variety–need to start ahead in order to eek out a victory.

Unless Obama starts swinging soon, he’s done for. Insiders are tut-tutting over Ohio, an important swing state this year. Given the decade-long recession and voter anger there–not to mention a significant African-American population–Obama ought to be kicking McCain six ways to Sunday. But the two candidates are neck and neck in fundraising. “For McCain to even be competitive is surprising to me,” says Chris Duncan, chairman of the political science department at the University of Dayton. “I don’t think it’s that he’s doing better than expected. I think it’s that Obama is doing worse than he would expect.”

Vincent Hutchings of the University of Michigan wonders if the Obama campaign is counting too much on young voters. “Is he generating enough enthusiasm to excite people who lack a formal education and are disproportionately young, and not likely to vote?” he asks.

As I argued in my 2004 polemic “Wake Up! You’re Liberal: How We Can Take America Back From the Right,” American voters feel besieged. At home, they see prices rising while their salaries get gnawed away by inflation. From a foreign affairs standpoint, they see a world full of terrorists and hostile rivals–Iran, North Korea, Russia, China–out to get them. As a psychologist would say, the fact that there isn’t much truth to this perception doesn’t make it less real.

Americans want their presidents to be a National Daddy–an ornery cuss willing to err on the side of kicking some innocent schlub’s ass to protect them.

Last time around, in 2004, John Kerry repeatedly turned the other jowl as Bush and his proxies pounded him with the now-notorious Swift Boat ads. Of course, whether Kerry’s Vietnam service rose to the level of heroism was debatable. What wasn’t was that Bush weaseled out of going at all. But Kerry never responded. If the guy won’t fight for himself, voters asked themselves, how will he fight for me?

Obama has already traveled too far down the Path of the Kerry, repeatedly voting for funding a war his entire candidacy is predicated upon opposing, not to mention government spying on U.S. citizens and, most recently, the embarrassingly cheesy spectacle of endorsing offshore oil drilling. I mean, really: Do any right-wing conservatives believe he really means any of this stuff?

If he is to make history by salvaging his campaign from its current neck-and-neck status with McCain, Obama will have to rally the Democrats’ liberal base by throwing them some red meat: immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, socialized medicine and a sweeping credit crisis bailout plan (all interest rates legally reset to prime) would be a start. He’ll also need to beat up McCain (fairly) for agreeing with Bush about just about everything–and pledge to hold the Bushies responsible for their crimes.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Ted Rall Cover Story on Afghanistan

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Ted Rall

For seven years, I’ve been telling you that the war against Afghanistan is every bit as illegal and immoral–and probably less winnable–than the war against Iraq. Now, slowly, people are starting to notice.

Given that I’ve been almost alone as an American opposing the Afghan war, the CityBeat chain of Southern California alternative newsweeklies asked me to take a look at the situation as it stands now. The result is a lengthy cover story in this week’s CityBeat newspapers.

You can find it in Los Angeles CityBeat as well as San Diego CityBeat.

The Bad War: Afghanistan Seven Years Later

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Ted Rall

NATO came to Nurat on July 11th. There were seventy soldiers, 45 of them members of the American troop complement that has occupied Afghanistan since the fall of 2001 and 25 members of Hamid Karzai’s ragtag national army. Because the air isn’t thick enough at that altitude for helicopters to operate reliably, the men had to drag most of their gear up to their new outpost in a high valley on the border of Kunar and Nuristan provinces. There they built their small combat outpost, one of a string of such spartan facilities along the country’s remote eastern frontier with Pakistan’s Tribal Areas.

Residents of the Weygal Valley did not greet them warmly. U.S. forces attached to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), sometimes deploying unmanned Predator planes, had been blowing up local civilians with seemingly reckless abandon. Seventeen Afghans, including doctors, were killed nearby a week before the establishment of the mini base at Nurat. In a country where American attacks on wedding parties are so routine that they have become a cliché, the deaths of 47 people in Nangahar province two days later—including the bride—prompted 150 tribal leaders from Weygal to travel to Kabul to lodge a complaint with President Karzai. Karzai repeatedly postponed the meeting, and they eventually left in disgust. It was July 11th.

Two days later, in the early morning of the 13th, hundreds of Taliban fighters routed the NATO force at Nurat. Nine Americans were killed; 15 more and four Afghans were wounded. The base has since been abandoned. The village is under Taliban control—a state of affairs that the locals, disgusted with NATO’s indiscriminate use of air power, seem to prefer.

The incident at Nurat is but the most recent example of the U.S. military being forced to evacuate a base it had built. Routs have become so commonplace in Afghanistan that official spokespeople have even come up with a new word for the loss of a facility: “disestablished.”

Disestablished—or perhaps more succinctly, “unestablished”—serves as a succinct description of the situation in post-Taliban Afghanistan. The basic components of a viable nation-state—security, infrastructure, cohesive central control—remain unestablished more than six years after the fall of Kandahar to forces of the Northern Alliance, an ad hoc group of warlords armed and funded by Russia, Iran and neighboring states during the Taliban era of the late 1990s, and later found a deeper-pocketed patron in the U.S. after 9/11. “Nation building lite,” the term State Department officials used to brag about the United States’ shoestring commitment to the Karzai regime now looks more like malign neglect.

“It is disappointing,” the Democratic National Committee said in a statement on July 24th, “that John McCain doesn’t recognize that the war in Afghanistan was not only the first major conflict after 9/11, and is in fact a major front in the fight against terrorism. No wonder John McCain doesn’t understand why the American people are looking for new leadership that will bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end so we can direct the resources we need to getting the job done in Afghanistan.”

The truth, as usual, is more complicated. There were two major jihadi training camps in Afghanistan during the late 1990s, but both were closed before 9/11. Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants lived near Kandahar during the late 1990s, but had left by 9/11. On 9/11, Al Qaeda, the training camps and bin Laden were all in Pakistan—the latter in a Pakistani military hospital. The Taliban government would have collapsed without arms and money from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.

Before 2000, Afghanistan was indeed a “major front in the fight against terrorism.” But the U.S. didn’t invade then. When it did go in, and throughout the subsequent occupation, the best moral justification for the war in Afghanistan became: getting warmer.

The “good war”—the war that Barack Obama and other Democrats say we should be fighting, the war represented in countless political memes as “the ball” that Bush “took his eye off” when he became distracted by the war in Iraq, the war which Obama promises to dispatch 10,000 more troops in a new “surge”—has never looked less winnable. (“I don’t think there is any doubt that we were distracted [by the invasion of Iraq] from our efforts to hunt down Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” Obama told CBS News in one of his typical recent iterations.)

“Afghanistan—The Right War,” shouted the cover of Time magazine’s July 28th issue.

So many Afghan provinces have fallen under direct Taliban control that NATO has been forced to offer them legal recognition. June 2008 was the single deadliest month for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan since bombs started raining on Kabul in October 2001. The month featured two startling developments: a daring Taliban raid on a prison that freed hundreds of prisoners, many of whom to rejoin their comrades in arms, and the incipient full-scale offensive by thousands of Talibs against the city of Kandahar. Four hundred seventy-six Americans, and tens of thousands of Afghans, have died in the war that began in October 2001. Yet America and its allies will almost certainly lose the war in Afghanistan.

“The Taliban is likely to maintain or even increase the scope and pace of its terrorist attacks and bombings in 2008,” confirms a Pentagon analysis, anticipating a summer offensive that some South Asia experts predict could presage the endgame—the return of Taliban rule nationwide next year.

Last week I received a request for an interview by a news affairs radio program in northern California. “As you are probably aware, it is not easy to find an American voice that advocates a US/NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan,” the producer wrote. “For example, I got an e-mail today from a progressive media group with a list of possible speakers, all of whom highlighted the purported reemergent Taliban/al-Qaeda threat.” I declared Afghanistan unwinnable in 2001 and have since authored three books explaining why. To my knowledge, I remain the only syndicated columnist or editorial cartoonist in America who thinks we should get out of Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

How did I know the Afghan War would go bad? Many factors entered my analysis, but two incidents I witnessed in November 2001 crystallized my pessimistic point of view.

The first was the way Afghans of various political and ethnic affiliations treated one of my fellow journalists, a Russian radio correspondent who had served in the Soviet army that occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s. They loved him! I asked them why. “We love Russian people,” they’d say. “But you killed them mercilessly,” I’d reply. “Of course,” they’d explain. “They were invaders. Invaders must be killed.” What about Americans? “Of course, Americans too,” they’d say, a little sadly. “After we kill them all, however, they are welcome to come back as tourists and friends.”

The second incident took place on a dirt road in Khanabad, where I noticed a group of Afghan Tajiks, including an old guy with a long beard, weeping quietly in the street. A couple of U.S. soldiers had kicked down a door and were inside a house, presumably searching for weapons.

“During Soviet times, under the Taliban, even during the civil war, no one dared break into a man’s home,” the old man told me. “No one. Even if the Taliban came to execute you, they knocked on the door politely and waited for you to come outside.” I knew we weren’t going to win then and there. Word of the Americans’ treatment of Afghan men—flexicuffing them, grinding their faces into the dirt with their boots, placing bags over their heads—spread quickly. Battles were still raging in Kunduz and Kandahar between the U.S.’s allies and Taliban holdouts, but the Americans had already lost the war for hearts and minds.

What went wrong? How did a war marketed as a defensive police action to bring terrorists to justice (and, as an added bonus, liberate millions of oppressed women) lose its moral imperative so quickly? Why did so many Americans—including millions who would later march in the streets to protest the Iraq War—fail to see that it had been lost?

It is impossible for a citizen of the United States of America to understand what it’s like to live in a place without law and order. In the Land of the Free, rogue policemen harass black drivers, sell drugs, even rape suspects with broomsticks. Our president violates basic civil rights, going so far as to sign off on torture. But even in the most dangerous neighborhoods in the most crime-ridden cities in the U.S., law and order exists. If you shoot someone, a witness will almost certainly call the police, who will come as quickly as possible to take you to jail.

This is not true in Afghanistan. When I was there during the late fall of 2001, my Afghan translator expressed amazement at my suggestion that we meet for dinner at 6 p.m. “That’s after dark,” he said. “We will be killed.” I asked him what the odds were of encountering trouble. “No odds,” he replied. “Death is certain.” Like most Afghans, Jovid had never been outside the confines of a walled compound with reinforced bulletproof doors at night.

Unchallenged street violence makes other issues recede in importance. I watched a boy—he couldn’t have been older than 15—level his AK-47 and fire randomly into a group of women walking across a village square in Kunduz province. Bouncing in the back of a shockless Soviet pick-up truck, my eyes met those of my traveling companions—heavily armed Northern Alliance soldiers, Afghan Tajiks, fellow reporters. No one said a word. There was nothing we could do.

In a place where you can shoot people just for fun, where average life expectancy is 43, you don’t care about racial equality or women’s rights or freedom of the press. The environment is a abstraction. All you dream about is the ability to walk down the street.

One of my colleagues, a Swedish cameraman named Ulf Stromberg, made the mistake of opening his door at about four in the morning. Two kids, probably Northern Alliance soldiers, robbed him of his cash and satellite phone, and shot him to death. I went to the new government’s local office in Taloqan to file a report the next day.

“What for?” he asked.

“When things calm down,” I explained, “you could launch an investigation.”

He let out a grim chuckle and waved me toward the door. “Things don’t calm down here.”

Except, of course, under the Taliban. In early 1994 thirty students (“talibs”) of a one-eyed village priest named Muhammed Omar told him that a local warlord’s militiamen had created a checkpoint, not only to shake down drivers but to rape girls. “How could we remain quiet when we could see crimes being committed against women and the poor?” Omar asked Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai. Ordering his charges to grab 16 guns, Mullah Omar’s avengers executed the mujahedeen rapists, creating a vigilante legend that would eventually lead him to supreme power.

The Pashtun-dominated Taliban were brutal and capricious rulers. They were particularly hard on areas dominated by other ethnic groups such as Uzbeks, Tajiks and the Hazara. Fun—music, movies, kites, even keeping pigeons—was banned. Women whose burqas revealed a patch of skin were beaten by the roving thugs of the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice (an idea suggested by the Taliban’s Saudi allies). And they took hammers to artifacts in the national museum. But, if nothing else—mostly, it was nothing else—the Taliban delivered law and order. Justice was sure, swift, extreme, and effective. Violent crime plummeted. For the first time since the Soviet invasion in 1979, it became possible to drive the length of Afghanistan without encountering a single militia checkpoint, much less a robber.

When the Taliban left, anarchy returned.

Pentagon experts estimated that invading and occupying Afghanistan with sufficient troop density to provide street-level law and order would have required between 400,000 and 500,000 soldiers, the same number General Shinseki famously wanted for Iraq. (Afghanistan has about the same population and square mileage as Iraq, but with far more challenging, extremely mountainous terrain.)

Instead, a few thousand CIA operatives and Special Forces units parachuted into northern Afghanistan, doled out millions of dollars in cash to figures who controlled private armies, like Ishmail Khan of Herat, Tajik General Muhammad Atta (not the 9/11 hijacker) and Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, based near Mazar-e-Sharif. U.S. airstrikes “softened” Taliban positions (as of 9/11, only about 300 Al Qaeda fighters were left in all of Afghanistan), allowing America’s newly-purchased allies to walk in. To Western eyes, it was a brilliant strategy. The Taliban melted away into the mountains. The Northern Alliance took power in Kabul. But it set the stage for three catastrophic problems.

First, the Taliban weren’t really defeated. Adhering to the classic guerilla tactics that Afghans had employed in their wars against Great Britain and the USSR, they laid low, waiting to regroup while studying their adversaries. Second, the occupation was so thin that Afghans in much of the country could go weeks or months without catching a glimpse of an American soldier. Throughout the first year of the occupation, with the war against the Taliban deemed “won” by an arrogant and triumphalist Bush Administration, only 8,000 U.S. forces were deployed—the majority holed up at Bagram airbase near Kabul, by far the safest city in the country. I asked a Pentagon spokesperson why they were there rather than quelling the violence in places like Jalalabad and Helmand province, where warlord militiamen were making many Afghans nostalgic for the Taliban. “Because they’re safer there,” she explained. Which brings us to the third disastrous outcome of the American strategy: allowing the warlords to rule each area under their control as medieval fiefs.

Balkanization worked out well for the residents of Herat, where Khan’s access to Turkmenistan’s electrical grid and control of lucrative customs posts at the Turkmen and Iranian borders brought in enough cash to build Afghanistan’s own Wally World, complete with paved streets, uniformed police officers and working traffic signals. General Dostum’s Mazar turned ugly, beginning with his systemic weekend-long massacre of 10,000 Taliban POWs, under the supervision of U.S. Special Forces. Outside the “Mayor of Kabul”‘s limited control, Afghanistan returned to the warlordism, and a low-grade version of the civil war that reduced it to rubble between 1992 and 1996.

Karzai tried to buy off the warlords by offering them cabinet posts, only to lose whatever credibility he might have once enjoyed. “I watched the Taliban stone rapists,” a woman told me. “Now the rapists in the government.”

“In a move that foreshadowed America’s trouble in Iraq,” The New York Times reported in 2007,” [Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld] failed to anticipate the need for more forces after the old government was gone, and blocked an early proposal from Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and Mr. Karzai, the administration’s handpicked president, for a large international force.” Today there are 53,000 forces under NATO and U.S. command fighting in Afghanistan. But even Obama’s proposal for an additional 10,000 wouldn’t get troop strength anywhere near the magic half a million. With the economy in shambles and the military stretched in Iraq and at foreign bases around the world—UC San Diego professor Chalmers Johnson counts more than 500,000 full-time service personnel stationed overseas besides Iraq—we simply can’t afford a full-fledged “flood the field” strategy.

Others complain about the slow—a less charitable reading would be non-existent—pace of construction projects in the world’s poorest country. Only about $3.4 billion a year has been allocated for Afghan reconstruction, less than half of the budget for Iraq—which was in far better shape. Moreover, no one knows what happened to the money. Five years into the occupation, the Times reported that not even a single building had been erected in Afghanistan thanks to U.S. foreign aid.

“The international community has spent many billions of dollars toward the nation’s reconstruction,” writes Nancy Hatch Dupree, director of the American Center at Kabul University. “Yet not much progress can be seen. Poor management and lack of coordination among aid agencies are the major reasons for this dismal record.”

Only one highway had been paved—a road to service a pipeline to carry Kazakh oil and Turkmen gas from Herat to Kandahar. A military advisor said: “I could count on the fingers of one or two hands the number of U.S. government agricultural experts” in Afghanistan, a nation whose economy is 80 percent farming.

“I said from the get-go that we didn’t have enough money and we didn’t have enough soldiers,” said Robert Finn, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003. By 2005 it became statistically more dangerous for a U.S. soldier to serve in Afghanistan than Iraq. “I’m saying the same thing six years later,” said Finn.

The Democratic narrative, picked up by Barack Obama in his presidential bid, has 51 percent of Americans still convinced that that the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting. A recent ABC News-Washington Post poll finds that 44 percent of the public thinks things are going well there—down from 70 percent in 2002, but still significantly more than the views of journalists, military experts and scholars who follow Afghanistan and Central Asia carefully. Their conventional wisdom is that forced withdrawal is imminent, anywhere from two to five years away—leading to surprising attempts to issue blame.

“Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai is not doing as much as he should to build an effective administration,” The Economist argued recently. “And George Bush is not doing as much as he could to twist Mr Karzai’s arm.” Karzai has faults, but they pale next to his weaknesses—direct control of about 10 percent of his nation’s territory, an empty treasury and a powerful, comparatively well-funded neighbor—Pakistan—that arms and funds the resurgent Taliban. If Afghanistan falls out of the U.S. orbit, it won’t be Karzai’s fault.

In the final analysis, the outcome of the current effort to tame the Hindu Kush may come down to the possibility that colonialism is dead. Throughout the 20th century, no nation has ever successfully occupied another one. It may have taken time, not to mention bloodshed, for citizens of a nation-state to force out invaders. In the end, however, occupying armies have always been forced to withdraw.

© 2008 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: It’s the Torture, Stupid

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Ted Rall

Restoring Human Rights Must Be Next Prez’s Top Priority

Both major presidential candidates have promised to roll back the Bush Administration’s torture archipelago. Both say they’ll close Guantánamo, abolish legalized torture, and respect the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. Obama also pledges to eliminate “extraordinary rendition,” in which the CIA kidnaps people and flies them to other countries to be tortured, and says he will investigate Bush Administration officials for possible prosecution for war crimes.

If followed by other meaningful changes in behavior–withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq and foreswearing preemptive warfare–restoring the rule of law and respecting the rights of “enemy combatants” can start America’s long, slow climb back to moral parity in the community of nations. But there are worrisome signs that Barack Obama and John McCain’s commitment to moral renewal is less than rock-solid.

McCain, who claimed to have been tortured as a POW in North Vietnam, says a lot of the right things. “We do not torture people,” he said in a 2007 Republican debate. “It’s not about the terrorists; it’s about us. It’s about what kind of country we are.” He used his Vietnam experience against fellow Republicans, bullying Congress into passing a law banning torture against detainees held by the military.

Bush signed McCain’s bill in late 2005, saying it “is to make it clear to the world that this government does not torture and that we adhere to the international convention of torture, whether it be here at home or abroad.”

Days later, however, Bush issued a secret “signing statement” declaring that he would ignore the Detainee Treatment Act. NYU law professor David Golove, an expert on executive power, said: “The signing statement is saying ‘I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it’s important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me.”

McCain, who says as president he would veto a bill rather than issue a signing statement negating its contents, was no doubt angry about Bush’s perfidy. But, fearful of alienating Bush and the GOP leadership as he geared up for his ’08 presidential campaign, he remained silent.

In February of this year, McCain backtracked still further from his anti-torture position, voting against legislation that would have blocked the CIA from subjecting inmates in its secret prisons to waterboarding, hooding, putting duct tape across their eyes, stripping them naked, rape, beatings, burning, subjecting them to hypothermia, mock executions, and other “harsh interrogation techniques.”

“The CIA should have the ability to use additional techniques,” he argued. He refused to explain why the CIA ought to be allowed to torture while the DOD should adhere to international standards of civilized behavior.

The U.S. continues to torture.

Unlike McCain, Obama remains a critic of officially sanctioned torture. “We’ll reject torture–without exception or equivocation,” Obama says. He would also end “the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law.”

The trouble is, Obama isn’t laying the groundwork for stopping torture or closing Guantánamo or other U.S. gulags in his stump speeches. He talks a lot about energy policy, healthcare, jobs and the economy–and withdrawing troops from Iraq so they join the war against Afghanistan instead. If he becomes president, people will expect him to do those things. Without a sustained focus on human rights issues, however, any moves he makes will seem to come out of the blue–and face stronger pushback from Republicans anxious to bash him as weak on national security.

Why doesn’t Obama emphasize Bush’s war crimes? Maybe he’s trying to play the Great Uniter, or maybe he knows that many Americans don’t give a rat’s ass about the pain inflicted against people they’ll never meet in places they’ve never heard of. Who knows? All we know for sure is that, day after day, Obama fails to talk about what is arguably the worst crime of the corrupt Bush Administration.

Of course, renouncing torture isn’t enough. Those who authorized it must be held to account. However, it doesn’t seem likely that they will.

Asked in April whether he would prosecute Bush Administration officials for authorizing torture, Obama delivered his now-familiar duck-and-cover: say the right thing, then weasel out of it. “If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” he said.

But not for at least four years: “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of the Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems to solve.”

Memo to Barack: This isn’t about prosecuting Republicans. It’s about prosecuting torturers.

“Prosecution of any officials, if it were to occur, would probably not occur during Obama’s first term,” Slate reports, citing Obama campaign insiders. “Instead, we may well see a Congressionally empowered commission that would seek testimony from witnesses in search of the truth about what occurred. Though some witnesses might be offered immunity in exchange for testimony, the question of whether anybody would be prosecuted would be deferred to a later date–meaning Obama’s second term, if such is forthcoming.”

First would come a South African-style “Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” where the truth would come out. But the torturers would get off scot-free.
“The commission would focus strictly on detention, torture and extraordinary rendition, or the practice of spiriting detainees to a third country for abusive interrogations. The panel would focus strictly on these abuses, leaving out any other allegedly illegal activities during the Bush Administration, such as domestic spying,” says Slate. Second–well, there might not be a second. Even if there is, shortsighted Americans’ appetite for justice and accountability will probably have been diluted by the time 2013 rolls around.

Mainline media liberals, in conjunction with Obama supporters, are even going so far as to suggest that Bush issue his torturers with a blanket pardon in exchange for their testimony at Obama’s toothless commission.

Regardless of who wins in November, we will get a president who’s better on torture and other human rights issues than George W. Bush. At least their words sound nice. But real change and moral redemption will only begin if we–Democrats, Republicans and everyone else–demand the next president stands by his pretty promises.

Until they start taking taking torture, Gitmo and human rights seriously, neither Obama nor McCain should be able to appear in public without facing questions and heckling about these issues.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: News Does Not Want To Be Free

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Ted Rall

Three Cures for Ailing Newspapers

“I feel I’m being catapulted into another world, a world I don’t really understand,” Denis Finley told the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Finley, editor of the Virginian-Pilot, isn’t the only newspaper executive who can’t come up with a plan for the future. “Only 5 percent of [newspaper editors and publishers],” finds Pew’s latest analysis of the nation’s 1217 daily newspapers, “said they were very confident of their ability to predict what their newsrooms would look like five years from now.”

Newspapers are in trouble. More people read them than ever, but most of them read them online, for free. Unfortunately online advertising rates are too low to make up for declining print circulation. A reader of The New York Times‘ print edition generates about 170 times as much revenue as someone who surfs NYTimes.com. (This is because print readers spend 47 minutes with the paper. Online browsers visit the paper’s website a mere seven minutes–some of which they might not even be sitting in front of their computers.)

Newspaper executives don’t know what to do. Papers are closing foreign bureaus and laying off thousands of reporters. No matter how many employees they fire, however, they can’t slash or burn their way to profitability–there just isn’t enough budget to cut in a future where income has dropped to 1/170th.

“Newspapers,” writes San Jose State University business professor Joel West, “face two structural problems and have been unable to fix either one.” One is the Web in general, which offers advertisers more, finely targeted access to readers. The other is news on the Web, which is free on sites like Google and Yahoo (which compile AP and other wire service stories), as well as the newspaper websites themselves.

“OK,” argues West, “The New York Times or the big city daily has better news, but how much better? If it’s $20/month (or even $10 or merely requires a login) will readers bother? Most won’t. As with other commodities, better loses to ‘good enough.'”

But it doesn’t have to. If publishers take three audacious but absolutely essential steps, the print newspaper industry can save itself. All three of my suggestions are predicated on the simplest principle of capitalism: scarcity increases demand.

Newspapers have made news free and plentiful, which is why they’re going broke.

First: newspapers should go offline. If the last decade has proven anything, it’s that you can’t charge for a product–in this case, news–that you give away. So stop! All the members of the Newspaper Association of America should shut down their websites. At the very least, papers ought to charge online readers twice as much as for print subscriptions–searchability must be worth something. Want news? Buy a “dead tree” newspaper.

Second, copyright every article in the newspaper.

“The majority of bloggers and Internet addicts, like the endless rows of talking heads on television, do not report,” notes the invaluable Chris Hedges. “They are largely parasites who cling to traditional news outlets…They rarely pick up the phone, much less go out and find a story. Nearly all reporting–I would guess at least 80 percent–is done by newspapers and the wire services. Take that away and we have a huge black hole.” And a lot of unfulfilled demand one can charge for.

Newsgathering requires extensive infrastructure. Beat reporters, freelancers, editors, stringers, fact-checkers, and travel cost a lot of money. (A week in rural Afghanistan costs at least $10,000.) Why shouldn’t newspapers–the main newsgathering organizations in the United States–be compensated for those expenses?

Every newspaper article should enjoy an individual, aggressively enforced, copyright. Radio and TV outlets that currently lift their news reports out of newspapers–without forking over a cent–would have to hire reporters or pay papers a royalty. Paying newspapers for usage, even at a high rate, would probably be cheaper.

Step three on the road back to fiscal viability: cut off the wire services. Nowadays an article written for a local paper can get picked up by a wire service, which sells it for a ridiculously low reprint fee to other papers and websites like Google. At bare minimum, newspapers that originate stories ought to require wires to charge would-be reprinters the thousands of dollars each piece is worth. Better yet, don’t post them in the first place.

There are a couple of problems with my prescription. First, my suggestions only work if every paper follows them. Aside from the cat-herding organizational hurdles, accusations of collusion and price-fixing might bring down the wrath of government officials assigned to enforcing anti-trust laws. Second and perhaps more daunting, the “information wants to be free” mantra, once the cry of wacko libertarians, has become state religion.

“Free” doesn’t mean anything, and it obviously hasn’t worked. But it’s hard to purge a brain of a meme, no matter how moronic.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

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