Coming 2014

The U.S. announced victory in the war against Afghanistan at the end of 2001. Since then, the deadline has repeatedly been pushed back. Now Obama is moving back the end date from 2011 to 2014.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Obama Was Bad From The Start

President’s Right-Wing Policies Revealed Years Ago

We used to love Obama. Now we don’t. What a difference two years makes!

But not really. We may have changed. But Obama hasn’t. It was obvious from the beginning that Mr. Hopey Changey was devoid of character, deploying a toxic blend of liberal rhetoric and right-wing realpolitik. We were in denial.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane.

Obama made a name for himself by speaking out against the Iraq war. “I am certain that I would have voted to oppose this war,” he said in 2007. Meanwhile, in the U.S. Senate, he voted to fund it. Repeatedly. Aye. Aye. Aye. Never voted no. Tens of billions of dollars down the rat hole. Thousands of dead U.S. troops. Hundreds of thousands of murdered Iraqis.

Asked to explain his hypocrisy on Iraq, Obama replied: “I have been very clear even as a candidate that, once we were in [office], that we were going to have some responsibility to make [the Iraq war] work as best we could, and more importantly that our troops had the best resources they needed to get home safely,” Obama explained. “So I don’t think there is any contradiction there.”

Who are you going to believe? Me or my lying voting record?

That was back in 2007. We knew Obama was a weasel. We knew before the first presidential primary.

After he won, we learned he was at least as much of a right-winger as Bush.

Within days of his November 2008 election victory Obama backed away from his campaign pledge to close Guantánamo and restore due process to kidnapped and tortured Muslim detainees. Instead, he announced, he would create extralegal “national security courts.” Even Bush didn’t dare stray that far from the rule of law.

Obama didn’t appoint a single liberal to his cabinet. Against good sense and common ndecency, in the midst of the worst financial crisis since 1929, he hired pro-business hacks Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geitner to lead his economic team. Fighting proposals to create jobs programs, they expanded Bush’s bank bailouts instead.

Obama asked Bush’s defense secretary to stay on because, you know, he was doing such an awesome job with the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. I suppose it could have been worse: Obama’s first choice to run the CIA was John Brennan, a pro-torture Bushist.

As Inauguration Day approached the hits kept coming.

Obama claimed to be against the Iraq War. “Unlike Senator John McCain,” Obama wrote in June 2008, “I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president.”

By December, however, the Weasel-Elect had re-revealed his pro-war stripes. “Even though the [U.S.] agreement with the Iraq government calls for all American combat troops to be out of the cities by the end of June [2009],” reported the Times on December 22nd, military planners are “now quietly acknowledging that many will stay behind as renamed ‘trainers’ and ‘adviser’ in what are effectively combat roles. In other words, they will still be engaged in combat, just called something else.”

When Obama announced his choice to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, it was yet another unpleasant surprise: Rick Warren, the right-wing, gay-bashing pastor of the Saddleback megachurch. Gay leaders were annoyed. And did nothing.

The indignities continued a day or two after the new prez moved into 1600 Penn.

Liberals hoped for accountability. Obama had promised it. Once in the Oval Office, however, Obama said America needed “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” He ordered his Justice Department not to investigate Bush Administration war crimes. No one would be prosecuted—not even the military psychos who anally raped Afghan children at Gitmo with flashlights. Obama traveled to CIA HQ to tell the spooks to keep on torturin’: “I don’t want [CIA agents] to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering up.”

So it went.

Obama expanded Bush’s domestic spying program. He sent 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan. He allowed torture to continue in CIA prisons and signed an executive order granting him the right to assassinate anyone, including a U.S. citizen, on his say-so alone.

Six days into the Obama presidency, I’d seen enough.

“Give the man a chance?” I asked on January 26, 2009. “Not me. I’ve sized up him, his advisors and their plans, and already found them sorely wanting. It won’t take long, as Obama’s failures prove the foolishness of Americans’ blind trust in him. Obama isn’t our FDR. He’s our Mikhail Gorbachev: likeable, intelligent, well-meaning, and ultimately doomed by his insistence on being reasonable during unreasonable times.”

I was mistaken. Two years is too long for people to figure out what Obama is all about.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Afghan War Lies

Support for Occupation Relies on Lies and Spin

There’s an exception. It is a limited set of circumstances. If the armies of another nation invade your country, there is no need to resort to lies to sell war. The battle is already joined. The threat is palpable. Anyone with a smidgen of patriotism and/or the instinct of self-preservation will rush to enlist.

Mostly, this does not happen. It sort of happened in 1941, with Pearl Harbor. But Hawaii, itself recently seized by U.S. marines without the thinnest veneer of legality, was merely a distant possession. It sort of happened in 1848 when Mexican troops crossed the Rio Grande (after being deliberately provoked by the Americans). It definitely happened in 1812. But you see the point: every war the United States has fought, at least since 1945 (really since 1814), has been just for fun.

Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq—the U.S. didn’t have to fight any of them. They were optional. At minimum, they were wars of imperialism. Mostly, they were wars of aggression: undeclared, immoral, violations of international law.

Lies and spin are essential tools of “leaders” who want to convince the public to support wars for fun and profit.

The war against Afghanistan is no exception. I have previously discussed the Big Lies about Afghanistan: 9/11 came out of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda’s training camps were there, bin Laden was there, oil has nothing to do with it, etc. Now let’s talk about the little lies.

Lie #1: The war could have been won.

You know the narrative: the Bush Administration never sent in enough troops, then “took their eye off the ball” by invading Iraq and transferring military resources there from Afghanistan.

The truth: More troops would merely have postponed the inevitable defeat, while costing more Afghan and American lives. Remember General Shinseki, fired for telling Congress that Iraq needed at least 300,000 to 400,000 U.S. troops to establish command and control? Afghanistan is about the same population and area as Iraq, but with much tougher terrain: some of the biggest, baddest mountains on the planet. U.S. forces would have had to permanently station at least 500,000 to 600,000 soldiers there. We didn’t have them. Still don’t.

Sure, we could run up the deficit even higher, hire and train more troops, and pack them off to the Hindu Kush. But Afghan resistance forces would wait us out. Even the U.S. military colossus can’t bleed forever. We would have to pare down. Then we’d be back where we are now: humiliated, defeated, broke, morally bankrupt.

Lie #2: Karzai isn’t perfect, but he’s the best of a bunch of bad alternatives.

The mainstream media began questioning America’s backing of the corrupt, incompetent and unpopular Karzai regime after he brazenly stole the most recent presidential election. But they refuse to call for the end of U.S. aid, or for fair elections. Mainly this is because they don’t know squat about Afghanistan. But there were always better alternatives.

The best option for a nation that pretends to promote democracy would have been to actually promote democracy. Let the Afghan people choose between any candidates they want—yes, including the Taliban—and pledge to work with the winner no matter what. (This is what the U.S. ought to have done after Hamas won the election in Gaza.) The definition of integrity is doing the right thing even when it hurts; that’s also what’s required of the U.S. when it’s playing Captain Democracy.

Moreover, there were always more palatable choices than Karzai. The exiled king, for example, was far more popular in 2001 than the dapper ex-Talib who fled the country after being accused of embezzlement.

Lie #3: We’ve got the right strategy/general now.

Now it’s Petraeus. Every time the White House shuffles the military brass, they claim that this time it’s different. The old strategy that didn’t work in 2004, or 2006, or whatever, is dead. We’ll use more drones. No, fewer drones. Wait, more.

No general, no matter how brilliant, can save a doomed military campaign. Anyway, neither Petraeus nor the other stuffed uniforms who’ve paraded in and out of Bagram in recent years are geniuses. Where are the Eisenhowers and Pattons of 2010? They’re hedge fund managers.

Lie #4: Nation-building wouldn’t have helped.

Bush promised a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. Now Vice President Biden admits what Afghans have known all along: we’re not there to nation-build. We are there to nation break.

Nine years into America’s longest war, it’s painful to contemplate how the billions poured into Afghanistan—much of which has been siphoned off by Halliburton and other contractors, not to mention flown out of the country by the Karzai clan, might have been better spent.

In 2001 Afghans didn’t need much to lay the foundations for a viable nation-state. I asked them. The answers were always the same: they involved infrastructure. Good roads. Electricity. Running water. Government offices. Connect the country’s far-flung provinces to the capital, and Afghans would resume their historical role as traders. Security would necessarily follow commerce.

If we were determined to occupy Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, it ought to have been with construction equipment, not tanks. Even if the Taliban had come to power, it would have been hard for them to talk smack about the U.S. in a nation covered with road signs that read: “Unconditional Gift of the People of the United States to the People of Afghanistan.”

(Ted Rall has recently returned from 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

Thirty to One

General Petraeus has promised to rethink his predecessor’s recent policy of trying to reduce Afghan casualties.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: So Much Stupidity

On Afghanistan, Democrats and Republicans Equally Dumb

As I pack for my return trip to Afghanistan next month, many people are asking me: Why are we losing? What should we do there?

The short answer is simple: Afghan resistance forces live there. We don’t. Sooner or later, U.S. troops will depart. All the Afghan resistance has to do is wear us down and wait us out. As I have pointed out before, no nation has successfully invaded and occupied any other nation since the 19th century. All occupations ultimately fail.

For those who prefer their punditry longwinded, here’s a longer answer.

Even taking historical precedent into account, America’s post-9/11 occupation of Afghanistan—its longest war ever—has been notably disastrous. Wonder why? Everything you need to know was contained in this week’s war of words between the chairmen of the two major political parties.

The Afghan War kerfuffle that revealed the boundless stupidity of our national political leadership began on July 1st. Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele told GOP donors in Connecticut that the war in Afghanistan could not be won and should never have been fought: “If [Obama is] such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that’s the one thing you don’t do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right? Because everyone who’s tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed,” Steele said.

Steele’s main point is beyond dispute. There’s a reason Afghanistan is known as “the graveyard of empires,” as opposed to as, say, the “number one producer of tasty, nutritious pomegranates.”

Steele’s all too typical ahistoricity is in the details. Which he gets wrong.

Would-be conquerors have had trouble with Afghanistan not for over 1,000 years, but for 2,000 years. Alexander the Great sent supplies through the Khyber Pass in 327 BCE in an attempt to subjugate the Konar Valley. Characteristically, the locals waged a ferocious resistance. The Macedonian conqueror, nearly killed by an Afghan arrow, beat a retreat to the Indus River and withdrew.

But it’s Steele’s “land war” qualifier that really gets me. According to the GOP chairman, the British Army might have spared itself total annihilation in 1842 if it had conducted an air war instead. Using what—hot air balloons?

Then things got really weird.

“This was a war of Obama’s choosing,” Steele said.

Huh?
True, Obama made the Afghan war his own by sending in more troops. But Bush started this mess. Doesn’t Steele remember that? Or—this thought is even more frightening—does he really think WE forgot?

“This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in,” he continued. This surely comes as welcome news to the tens of thousands of Afghans killed by tens of thousands of American bombs. Chin up. Imagine how many more would have died if the U.S. had “actively prosecuted” this fiasco!

Not to be outdone in the moronitude department,

Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse retorted that “we are there because we were attacked by terrorists on 9-11.”

Um…We were attacked by Saudis and Egyptians. Who were trained and funded by Pakistanis. None of the major figures linked to 9/11—including Osama bin Laden—were in Afghanistan on 9/11. (Bin Laden was in a Pakistani military hospital in Islamabad.) By 9/11, both Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan had been closed. Al Qaeda’s operations were based entirely in Pakistan.

Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11.

Nothing.

None of the Afghans I interviewed in November and December of 2001 had even heard of 9/11. None had heard of Al Qaeda. Other journalists reported the same thing.

As far as I can tell, we attacked Afghanistan for fun. To disrupt Iran and India. To test weapons that would be used against Iraq. To test the resolve of the American antiwar movement. And to build an oil and gas pipeline between Central and South Asia.

Not because of 9/11.

Woodhouse continued: “It’s simply unconscionable that Michael Steele would undermine the morale of our troops when what they need is our support and encouragement. Michael Steele would do well to remember that we are not in Afghanistan by our own choosing, that we were attacked and that his words have consequences.”

Dubya—is that you?

Can we even tell which party is which anymore?

No wonder we’re losing. The parties have forgotten what they stand for—and they never learned the history of the countries they invade.

(Ted Rall’s “The Anti-American Manifesto” will be published in September. He will return to Afghanistan in August.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Great Disruptor

Why the U.S. Can’t Talk to the Taliban

Like all Afghans, Hamid Karzai knows history. Which is why he’s talking to the neo-Taliban. The postmodern heirs to the Islamist government Bush deposed in 2001, the generation of madrassah graduates who replaced the mujahadeen vets of the anti-Soviet jihad are gaining strength. Obama, preparing for his 2012 reelection campaign by distancing himself from an unpopular war, plans to start pulling out U.S. troops next year.

Men like Karzai, puppets of foreign occupiers, rarely die peaceful deaths in Afghanistan. Mohammad Najibullah, the former Soviet-appointed head of the secret police who became president under the occupation, was extracted from a U.N. compound where he had taken refuge when Kabul fell in 1996. The Taliban dragged him from the back of a jeep, disemboweled him, cut off his penis and forced him to eat it before hanging him from a lamppost.

Cutting a power-sharing deal with the Taliban may not be possible. But Karzai has to try.

But his American overseers are against dialogue. “With regards to reconciliation,” CIA director Leon Panetta told ABC’s “This Week,” “unless [the neo-Taliban is] convinced that the United States is going to win and that they’re going to be defeated, I think it’s very difficult to proceed with a reconciliation that’s going to be meaningful.”

We Americans have heard this line of policy so often that we don’t think to question it. Never negotiate from a position of weakness. First thrash your adversary. Negotiate afterward.

Insisting upon “peace with honor,” Nixon took Kissinger’s advice to bomb the hell out of North Vietnam before the Paris peace talks. There’s a certain logic to this approach, but no common sense. Three years later, the U.S. lost the same as if it had never dropped a single bomb.

John McCain echoed Nixon at a Senate hearing this week: “If the president would say that success in Afghanistan is our only withdrawal plan—whether we reach it before July 2011, or afterward—he would make the war more winnable and hasten the day when our troops can come home with honor, which is what we all want.”

Win. Then withdraw.

Weird.

The best time to talk to your opponent—assuming that he’s willing to take your calls—is when you’re losing. Any concession you gain will be more than you’ll otherwise end up with.

If you’re going to win a war, on the other hand, why talk? When the U.S. is winning, it refuses to negotiate. Certain of victory, it insisted upon the unconditional surrender of Japan and Germany in 1945.

Panetta’s statement provides two insights to those who seek to understand U.S. foreign policy.

On a basic level, it parrots Kissinger: The U.S. knows that it will lose in Afghanistan. Withdrawal is inevitable; indeed, it has been announced. America’s next step is a massively violent final offensive—in order to prove to the neo-Taliban that it could win if it really wanted to. So they’d better cut us some slack: oil, gas and mineral concessions, etc. Of course, this reflects a radical misreading of the neo-Taliban as well as of human nature. They understand the simple truth: they live there, and we don’t. Time is on their side. The oppressor’s greatest weakness is his inability to see things from a different point of view.

Moreover, bomb-first-then-talk is a (partly delusional) lie. If by some miracle the upcoming anti-Afghan offensive were to work, the U.S. would never open talks with the neo-Taliban. Whenever the U.S. thinks it holds the upper hand—Cuba since 1962, Iran since 1980, Iraq before the 2003 invasion—it refuses to engage. Only when something tips the balance in favor of a U.S. adversary—North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, for example—is it willing to chat.

More broadly and interestingly, the Panetta Doctrine helps us resolve the big mystery of U.S. actions abroad after 1945.

The United States hasn’t won a war since World War II. More curiously, it doesn’t seem to want to. When the U.S. invades, it often fails to occupy, much less annex. When it occupies, it does so with fewer soldiers than necessary to control its newly acquired territory. (Note that General Colin Powell, a rare proponent among the military elite of “flooding the zone” with hundreds of thousands of troops to ensure total domination of occupied countries, was quickly replaced as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. His “Powell Doctrine,” though romanticized by some members of the press, is now forgotten.)

The U.S. has been described as an “empire without empire.” It’s clearer to call it the Great Disrupter. It’s fairly safe to conclude that U.S.’s primary foreign policy objective is to disrupt potentially emerging regional rivals. Iran, for example, is the nation that should logically dominate the Middle East politically and economically. It possesses immense wealth, enviable geography, 5,000 years of civilization, modern infrastructure, and a big, highly educated workforce. The U.S. uses sanctions to prevent Iran’s rise to regional superpower.

You didn’t really think we were still holding a grudge over the hostages, did you?

From a geopolitical standpoint, U.S. policymakers are far more concerned about India’s potential role as the leader of South Asia than the threat that North Korea will nuke Seattle. Which is why the Bush Administration sent billions of dollars in military hardware and cash subsidies to the violently anti-Indian government of General Pervez Musharraf after 9/11. Now Musharraf is out and the current Pakistani government has reduced its pressure on India via, for example, its support for Muslim fighters in Kashmir. So Obama continues to finance Pakistan—but not as much.

Naturally, we can’t talk to the neo-Taliban. (Nor can we let Karzai do so.) An Afghanistan that resumes its 1996-to-2001 role as the global capital of Islamist government and Sharia law could represent a new kind of influence—simultaneously religious, political and military—that the U.S. fears as much as Iran, India, or any other country big enough to suck away American market share.

(Ted Rall’s “The Anti-American Manifesto” will be published in September. He will return to Afghanistan in August.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Their Fair Share

How much of the $1 trillion in mineral wealth under their country will Afghans get?

Mix Up

Who can blame the gravekeepers at Arlington? All the victims of our leaders’ lies look the same.

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