Thanks to WikiLeaker, Afghan War Will End Soon

MUMBAI–“An appalling irresponsible act.” That’s how General James Nattis, fresh at the helm of U.S. Central Command, characterizes the release of more than 76,000 classified Pentagon reports released by the website WikiLeaks.

You may recall that the Pentagon, headquarters of the Department of Defense, is the same outfit that loaded $24 billion in $100 bills onto shrinkwrapped pallets and loaded the cash onto C-130 transport planes bound for Iraq–guarded by enlisted men who earn $20,000 a year. Not one of those Benjamins has ever heard from since. Which, given that the money was supposed to be paid to corrupt tribal sheikhs, is just as well. Don’t be surprised if you see contractors installing one of those great a new Gunnite pool at the house belonging to your recently discharged veteran neighbor.

So anyway, when a Pentagon biggie calls someone irresponsible, take them seriously. These guys know from irresponsibility.

Speaking of behavior that falls short of the highest ethical standards (and is highly amusing), the involuntarily declassified material contains some real gems. My current fave–there will, no doubt, be others, for I am fickle and the material is vast–comes from an August 2007 report that explains some of the ways Pakistan uses the billions in U.S. taxdollars Bush and Obama send it.

Based in Waziristan in Pakistan’s western Tribal Areas, the Haqqani network is a neo-Taliban-affiliated Islamist organization led by Sirajuddin Haqqani and his father Jalaluddin Haqqani. Officially, the Haqqanis are American targets because they harbor members of Al Qaeda and are involved in weapons smuggling across the Afghan border. Unofficially–on the ground, as they say–things are different.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (its equivalent of our CIA), is supposed to help the U.S. arrest and/or kill the Haqqanis. That’s why the U.S. pays the ISI. Instead, the ISI pays the Haqqanis. With U.S. money.

Which is why, when you lose your house to foreclosure, the only help you get from Obama is a feigned expression of vague concern.

Anyway, the ISI hires the Haqqanis to carry out interesting projects. For example, Pakistan used your money to hire Haqqani assassins to kill Indian road engineers and workers in Nimruz province, in western Afghanistan. Going rate: $15,000 to $30,000 each.

Hey, the Haqqanis still have their houses. No doubt with Gunnite pools.

The coolest and weirdest ISI-Haqqani business deal concerns 1,000 motorcycles. The ISI shipped the bikes to the Haqqanis for use in suicide bomb attacks in Khost and Logar provinces. Let’s hope they at least had the decency to buy cool, American-made Harleys so that some of our dough makes its way back here. Besides, who wants to spend the afterlife tooling around on a moped?

So, back to the issue of irresponsible behavior. U.S. government, meet kettle.

It has been pointed out that the WikiLeaks documents don’t reveal much that is new. We already knew that Pakistan was our frenemy. We knew that drone planes kill more wedding guests than terrorists. We didn’t want to admit it, but we already kind of knew we were losing. The starred headline involves the likelihood that the Taliban have surface-to-air missiles.

But the Wikileaks leaks are nevertheless a game-changer. They confirm what those few of us who opposed this war from the start have been saying all along. They prove that the military sees things the same way we do. So that’s the end of the debate. The war is an atrocity and a mistake. Everyone agrees.

Public support for the war was already waning. Just 43 percent of the public still backs “the good war.” The leaks mark the beginning of the end of one of a stupid country’s countless stupid misadventures. I don’t see what else might have accomplished the same thing so quickly.

Thanks to the leaker, thousands of lives will be saved in Afghanistan. Hundreds of U.S. soldiers will live out normal lives. Billions of dollars will stop pouring into the pockets of the Pakistanis. If that’s irresponsible, well, call me a fan of irresponsibility.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

THE IDIOCRACY FACTOR

How U.S. Ignorance Helped Doom the Afghan War

Americans’ lack of knowledge about Afghanistan is virtually limitless. Which matters, because the U.S. is at war there. And which explains why the American military is losing its longest war.

During my 2001 trip, where I covered the Taliban defeat at the Battle of Kunduz for the Village Voice and KFI radio, I met a British reporter who offered an amusing prescription for American military action. “If the average American cannot identify three cities in a country,” he suggested, “the U.S. should not invade it.”

Given that the average American doesn’t know their state capital, much less three cities in, say, Canada, this would transform us into a pacifist society overnight.

More appalling than Joe and Jane Sixpack’s ignorance about Afghanistan is the doltishness of the official media. If print and broadcast journalists get the facts wrong, how can the public (or the military) be expected to do better? To cite one tiny example, U.S. newspapers routinely refer to the citizens of Afghanistan as “Afghanis.” Afghanis are the national currency; the people are Afghans. Dammit.

On a broader level, the Afghan war document trove leaked by WikiLeaks has prompted many to ask: Why didn’t the media question the war against Afghanistan before now?

Mostly, U.S. state media didn’t want to know anything that questioned the Bush-Obama Administration’s official line: 9/11 came out of Afghanistan, we have to prevent Al Qaeda from turning the country into a land of terrorist jungle gyms, and oh, yeah, we should do something about opium and burqas too.

People like Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist who wrote “Taliban,” tried repeatedly to get the world to pay attention to a different take. Pakistan, not Afghanistan, was the real danger in the region. In Afghanistan, Karzai government was underfunded and overcorrupt and widely considered illegitimate. The U.S. sent in troops to shoot and bomb when they ought to have delivered construction equipment to build the infrastructure necessary to form a coherent state and viable Afghan economy.

Rashid wrote books. Wonks bought them and read them, but the political leadership ignored them. I wrote books. Ditto. But it didn’t make a difference. It is shocking and disgusting that President Obama listened to people who knew nothing about Afghanistan while ignoring those who do.

Countless personal experiences confirmed my impression that reporters “parachuted in” to cover wars for brief assignments could never deliver the nuanced, detailed, accurate coverage necessary for American leaders and the public to make informed decisions.

In ’01 CBS’ correspondents sent to cover the invasion flew straight to Pakistan, only to get stuck there because the Khyber Pass was closed. (Anyone familiar with the region knew that.) I had a brief discussion with the network about my plan to go in via Tajikistan. A producer told me I would never make it. “The mountain passes are already snowed over,” he said confidently, looking out his window at Manhattan traffic. “There’s six feet of snow there.” I made it. No snow. Not a single flake.

This reminds me of D-Day. Civil affairs detachments that accompanied the first wave of troops at Omaha Beach brought tons of food to feed French civilians, whom the Allied military believed to be starving. Though hunger was indeed widespread in occupied France, warehouses in Normandy were bursting with food; Allied bombing raids had cut the train lines that carried Norman produce to the rest of France. “Plenty of food,” officers wired Eisenhower. “Send shoes.”

French feet hadn’t seen new shoes for four years.

In 2001 the Village Voice committed to me only after their first attempt to get a reporter “in country” failed. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up: the poor guy got himself embedded with the Navy. He spent the war on the deck of a ship floating in the Indian Ocean taking photos of cruise missile launches. What part of “landlocked nation” did he miss?

I’m leaving for South Asia on August 1 and expect to be in Afghanistan for a month, beginning on or about August 13. Accompanied by fellow cartoonists Matt Bors and Steven L. Cloud, I’m going to take advantage of new satellite technology to upload a new kind of daily war correspondency to my blog (rall.com/) and a half-dozen newspapers: a recounting of the day’s events in comic form. I’ll be going to the most remote parts of the country—the north and western villages and towns that see few if any visits by Western reporters. Why? Because they see few if any visits by Western reporters.

Pitching papers on this project has proven that little has changed since 2010: editors and producers are still clueless. Among some of the more priceless responses I’ve gotten:

“Do they take American Express there?” (No credit cards. Cash only.)

“How about if you call us and pitch us if you see something interesting?” (No phones.)

“Do you speak Pashto?” (No, but neither do Afghans in the north or west.)

“You’d be safer if you were embedded.” (U.S. troops are the main target. Embedded reporters get hurt more often than independents. And of course it’s impossible to be objective, or speak freely with locals, when you’re traveling with soldiers.)

But nothing speaks louder than the lack of interest in this project by the vast majority of media outlets. They’ll keep talking about Afghanistan—but they won’t put up the bucks to find out what’s really going on.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL