Memorial Day Thoughts On National Defense

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

We can best honor those who have given their lives for this nation in combat by making sure our military might is proportional to what America needs.

The United States spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany put together.

With the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the cost of fighting wars is projected to drop – but the “base” defense budget (the annual cost of paying troops and buying planes, ships, and tanks – not including the costs of actually fighting wars) is scheduled to rise. The base budget is already about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation.

One big reason: It’s almost impossible to terminate large defense contracts. Defense contractors have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their plants and facilities in politically important congressional districts. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and others have made spending on national defense into America’s biggest jobs program.

So we keep spending billions on Cold War weapons systems like nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and manned combat fighters that pump up the bottom lines of defense contractors but have nothing to do with 21st-century combat.

For example, the Pentagon says it wants to buy fewer F-35 joint strike fighter planes than had been planned – the single-engine fighter has been plagued by cost overruns and technical glitches – but the contractors and their friends on Capitol Hill promise a fight.

The absence of a budget deal on Capitol Hill is supposed to trigger an automatic across-the-board ten-year cut in the defense budget of nearly $500 billion, starting January.

But Republicans have vowed to restore the cuts. The House Republican budget cuts everything else — yet brings defense spending back up. Mitt Romney’s proposed budget does the same.

Yet even if the scheduled cuts occur, the Pentagon is still projected to spend over $2.7 trillion over the next ten years.

At the very least, hundreds of billions could be saved without jeopardizing the nation’s security by ending weapons systems designed for an age of conventional warfare. We should shrink the F-35 fleet of stealth fighters. Cut the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons, ballistic missile submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. And take a cleaver to the Navy and Air Force budgets. (Most of the action is with the Army, Marines and Special Forces.) 

At a time when Medicare, Medicaid, and non-defense discretionary spending (including most programs for the poor, as well as infrastructure and basic R&D) are in serious jeopardy, Obama and the Democrats should be calling for even more defense cuts.

A reasonable and rational defense budget would be a fitting memorial to those who have given their lives so we may remain free. 

How To Forget On Memorial Day

Crosses of Lafayette

Whistling Past the Graveyard of Empires

By Tom Engelhardt, cross-posted from TomDispatch

It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two -- those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin; means of death (“small arms fire,” “improvised explosive device,” “the result of gunshot wounds inflicted by an individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform,” or sometimes something vaguer like “while conducting combat operations,” “supporting Operation Enduring Freedom,” or simply no explanation at all); and the unit the dead soldier belonged to.  They are seldom 100 words, even with the usual opening line: “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Sometimes they include more than one death.

They are essentially bureaucratic notices designed to draw little attention to themselves.  Yet cumulatively, in their hundreds over the last decade, they represent a grim archive of America’s still ongoing, already largely forgotten second Afghan War, and I’ve read them obsessively for years.

Into the Memory Hole

May is the official month of remembrance when it comes to our war dead, ending as it does on the long Memorial Day weekend when Americans typically take to the road and kill themselves and each other in far greater numbers than will die in Afghanistan.  It’s a weekend for which the police tend to predict rising fatalities and news reports tend to celebrate any declines in deaths on our roads and highways.

Quiz Americans and a surprising number undoubtedly won’t have thought about the “memorial” in Memorial Day at all -- especially now that it’s largely a marker of the start of summer and an excuse for cookouts.

How many today are aware that, as Decoration Day, it began in 1865 in a nation still torn by grief over the loss of -- we now know -- up to 750,000 dead in the first modern war, a wrenching civil catastrophe in a then-smaller and still under-populated country?  How many know that the first Decoration Day was held in 1865 with 10,000 freed slaves and some Union soldiers parading on a Charleston, South Carolina, race track previously frequented by planters and transformed in wartime into a grim outdoor prison?  The former slaves were honoring Union prisoners who had died there and been hastily buried in unmarked graves, but as historian Kenneth Jackson has written, they were also offering “a declaration of the meaning of the war and of their own freedom.”

Those ceremonies migrated north in 1866, became official at national cemeteries in 1868, and grew into ever more elaborate civic remembrances over the years.  Even the South, which had previously marked its grief separately, began to take part after World War I as the ceremonies were extended to the remembrance of all American war dead.  Only in 1968, in the midst of another deeply unpopular war, did Congress make it official as Memorial Day, creating the now traditional long holiday weekend.

And yet, when it comes to the major war the United States is still fighting, now in its 11th year, the word remembrance is surely inappropriate, as is the “Memorial” in Memorial Day.  It’s not just that the dead of the Afghan War have largely been tossed down the memory hole of history (even if they do get official attention on Memorial Day itself).  Even the fact that Americans are still dying in Afghanistan seems largely to have been forgotten, along with the war itself.

As the endlessly plummeting opinion polls indicate, the Afghan War is one Americans would clearly prefer to forget -- yesterday, not tomorrow.  It was, in fact, regularly classified as “the forgotten war” almost from the moment that the Bush administration turned its attention to the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and so declared its urge to create a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.  Despite the massive “surge” of troops, special operations forces, CIA agents, and civilian personnel sent to Afghanistan by President Obama in 2009-2010, and the ending of the military part of the Iraq debacle in 2011, the Afghan War has never made it out of the grave of forgetfulness to which it was so early consigned.


Count on one thing: there will be no Afghan version of Maya Lin, no Afghan Wall on the National Mall.  Unlike the Vietnam conflict, tens of thousands of books won’t be pouring out for decades to come arguing passionately about the conflict.  There may not even be a “who lost Afghanistan” debate in its aftermath.

Few Afghan veterans are likely to return from the war to infuse with new energy an antiwar movement that remains small indeed, nor will they worry about being “spit upon.”  There will be little controversy.  They -- their traumas and their wounds -- will, like so many bureaucratic notices, disappear into the American ether, leaving behind only an emptiness and misery, here and in Afghanistan, as perhaps befits a bankrupting, never-ending imperial war on the global frontiers.

Whistling Past the Graveyard of Empires

If nothing else, the path to American amnesia is worth recalling on this Memorial Day.

Though few here remember it that way, the invasion of Afghanistan was launched on a cult of the dead.  These were the dead civilians from the Twin Towers in New York City.  It was to their memory that the only “Wall” of this era -- the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan -- has been built.  Theirs are the biographies that are still remembered in annual rites nationwide.  They are, and remain, the dead of the Afghan War, even though they died before it began.

On the other hand, from the moment the invasion of Afghanistan was launched, how to deal with the actual American war dead was always considered a problematic matter.  The Bush administration and the military high command, with the Vietnam War still etched in their collective memories, feared those uniformed bodies coming home (as they feared and banished the “body count” of enemy dead in the field).  They remembered the return of the “body bags” of the Vietnam era as a kind of nightmare, stoking a fierce antiwar movement, which they were determined not to see repeated.

As a result, in the early years of the Afghan and then Iraq wars, the Bush administration took relatively draconian steps to cut the media off from any images of the returning war dead.  They strictly enforced a Pentagon ban, in existence since the first Gulf War, on media coverage and images of the coffins arriving from the war fronts at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.  At the same time, much publicity was given to the way President Bush met privately and emotionally -- theoretically beyond the view of the media -- with the families of the dead.

And yet, banned or not, for a period the war dead proliferated.  In those early years of Washington’s two increasingly catastrophic wars on the Eurasian mainland, newspapers regularly produced full-page or double-page “walls of heroes” with tiny images of the faces of the American dead, while their names were repeatedly read in somber tones on television.  In a similar fashion, the antiwar movement toured the country with little “cemeteries” or displays of combat boots representing the war dead.

The Pentagon ban ended with the arrival of the Obama administration.  In October 2009, six months after the Pentagon rescinded it, in an obvious rebuke to his predecessor, President Obama traveled to Dover Air Base.  There, inside a plane bringing the bodies of the dead home, he reportedly prayed over the coffins and was later photographed offering a salute as one of them was carried off the plane. But by the time the arrival of the dead could be covered, few seemed to care.

The Bush administration, it turns out, needn’t have worried.  In an America largely detached from war, the Iraq War would end without fanfare or anyone here visibly giving much of a damn.  Similarly, the Afghan War would continue to limp from one disaster to the next, from an American “kill team” murdering Afghan civilians “for sport” to troops urinating on Afghan corpses (and videotaping the event), or mugging for the camera with enemy body parts, or an American sergeant running amok, or the burning of Korans, or the raising of an SS banner.  And, of course, ever more regularly, ever more unnervingly, Afghan “allies” would turn their guns on American and NATO troops and blow them away.  It's a phenomenon almost unheard of in such wars, but so common in Afghanistan these days that it's gotten its own label: “green-on-blue violence.”

This has been the road to oblivion and it’s paved with forgotten bodies.  Forgetfulness, of course, comes at a price, which includes the escalating long-term costs of paying for the American war-wounded and war-traumatized.  On this Memorial Day, there will undoubtedly be much cant in the form of tributes to “our heroes” and then, Tuesday morning, when the mangled cars have been towed away, the barbeque grills cleaned, and the “heroes” set aside, the forgetting will continue.  If the Obama administration has its way and American special operations forces, trainers, and advisors in reduced but still significant numbers remain in Afghanistan until perhaps 2024, we have more than another decade of forgetting ahead of us in a tragedy that will, by then, be beyond all comprehension.

Afghanistan has often enough been called “the graveyard of empires.”  Americans have made it a habit to whistle past that graveyard, looking the other way -- a form of obliviousness much aided by the fact that the American war dead conveniently come from the less well known or forgotten places in our country.  They are so much easier to ignore thanks to that.

Except in their hometowns, how easy the war dead are to forget in an era when corporations go to war but Americans largely don’t.  So far, 1,980 American military personnel (and significant but largely unacknowledged numbers of private contractors) have died in Afghanistan, as have 1,028 NATO and allied troops, and (despite U.N. efforts to count them) unknown but staggering numbers of Afghans.

So far in the month of May, 22 American dead have been listed in those Pentagon announcements.  If you want a little memorial to a war that shouldn’t be, check out their hometowns and you'll experience a kind of modern graveyard poetry.  Consider it an elegy to the dead of second- or third-tier cities, suburbs, and small towns whose names are resonant exactly because they are part of your country, but seldom or never heard by you.

Here, then, on this Memorial Day, are not the names of the May dead, but of their hometowns, announcement by announcement, placed at the graveside of a war that we can’t bear to remember and that simply won’t go away.  If it’s the undead of wars, the deaths from it remain a quiet crime against American humanity:

Spencerport, New York
Wichita, Kansas
Warren, Arkansas
West Chester, Ohio
Alameda, California
Charlotte, North Carolina
Stow, Ohio
Clarksville, Tennessee
Chico, California
Jeffersonville, Kentucky
Yuma, Arizona
Normangee, Texas
Round Rock, Texas
Rolla, Missouri
Lucerne Valley, California
Las Cruses, New Mexico
Fort Wayne, Indiana
Overland Park, Kansas
Wheaton, Illinois
Lawton, Oklahoma
Prince George, Virginia
Terre Haute, Indiana.

As long as the hometowns pile up, no one should rest in peace.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books)

Quagmire Accomplished

 One Year After Bin Laden's Death, Bring The Troops Home Now

By Kevin Martin and Michael Eisenscher, cross-posted from Common Dreams

Today marks one year since the death of Osama bin Laden. The CIA estimates there are fewer than 100 al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. Since ‘getting Bin Laden’ and defeating al Qaeda were the stated reasons the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, President Barack Obama should use the anniversary to announce the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Instead, his administration has negotiated an agreement with President Hamid Karzai’s government for a U.S. presence in that country until at least 2024, ten years past the supposed date for withdrawal of U.S. combat troops. The U.S. and its NATO allies are supposed to commit to ongoing training of the Afghan military, as well as development aid. Obama swept into Afghanistan in the middle of the night to sign the agreement, but full details of the agreement remain secret.

U.S. troops would also still have a limited combat role, namely Special Forces counter-insurgency operations, according to a draft proposal described by Admiral Bill McRaven, the head of U.S. special operations. A more detailed security plan will surely be discussed at the upcoming NATO Summit in Chicago.

If the agreement covers a ten year period, commits U.S. military forces for training and counter-insurgency (which means inevitable combat), obligates the U.S. to continue providing billions of taxpayer dollars annually in aid (essentially bankrolling the entire Afghan government and military), and posits support for any number of "nation-building" measures, isn't this in fact a treaty, subject to U.S. Senate ratification, rather than an intergovernmental memorandum of agreement?

Karzai apparently feels obligated to take the agreement to his parliament for approval.  Doesn’t Obama have a similar obligation - one imposed by the U.S. Constitution?It’s not clear what the year since the killing of Bin Laden has done to improve U.S. or Afghan security. It’s even less clear what staying for another dozen years will do for either country.

Quite apart from these legal, “process” questions, does anyone think our staying until 2024 is going to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan? We’ve already been there for eleven years – the longest war in our country’s history.  What do we really have to show for it?  We’ve spent almost $523 billion.  Almost 2000 Americans have been killed and another 15,300 wounded.  1000 NATO troops have lost their lives.


Staying through 2024 will be a hard sell to the majority of Americans. According to last week’s Pew Research public opinion poll, only about a third of those polled think U.S. troops should stay in Afghanistan “until the situation there is stabilized” (whatever that means). About two-thirds of Obama supporters, and almost as many swing voters (who make up nearly a quarter of the electorate), want a swift withdrawal of U.S. troops, while Mitt Romney supporters are split just about evenly.

It’s hard to imagine public support increasing for this mission, especially considering the ongoing cost.  Cities and states around the country face budget crises and are severely cutting all manner of public services.  In 2012 alone, states had a combined shortfall of $169.3 billion, which resulted in spending cuts of $135.8 billion and tax increases of $21.4 billion.  That has translated into deep cuts in public services at the very time when tens of millions need them most.  How many more lives and how much more treasure will another 12 years in Afghanistan cost us?

Congressional support for ending the war rapidly is growing, and will be manifest by upcoming votes in the House of Representatives on the Defense Authorization Bill, as well as in other forms of Congressional communication to the president. Congress is unlikely to cut off funding for the war, but the administration would do well to heed the rising bipartisan tide for ending it sooner rather than later.

The May 20-22 NATO Summit in Chicago provides a great opportunity to devise plans to withdraw all foreign troops while fulfilling non-military humanitarian assistance and support for human and minority  rights, especially for women’s rights in Afghanistan.

As the 15,000 delegates from alliance countries gather for the official confab at McCormick Place, tens of thousands of peace advocates will descend on Chicago to give voice to the demands of the pro-peace majority in the U.S. While there have been, and will continue to be, debates about security, First Amendment rights, and inconvenience to Chicagoans, such atmospherics should not obscure the real issues of U.S./NATO military policy, especially as it relates to the present and future military occupation of Afghanistan.

It’s not clear what the year since the killing of Bin Laden has done to improve U.S. or Afghan security. It’s even less clear what staying for another dozen years will do for either country. The time to bring U.S. forces home is now, not 2014, and certainly not 2024.

Welcome To The 2012 Hunger Games

Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into The Arena

By Rebecca Solnit, cross-posted from TomDispatch

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.

Some of them -- Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land -- were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now.  Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Sacrificing the Young in the Arenas of Capital 

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young-adult novel and top-grossing blockbuster movie, is all about this very moment in so many ways. For those of you hiding out deep in the woods, it’s set in a dystopian future North America, a continent divided into downtrodden, fearful districts ruled by a decadent, luxurious oligarchy in the Capitol. Supposedly to punish the districts for an uprising 74 years ago, but really to provide Roman-style blood and circuses to intimidate and distract, the Capitol requires each district to provide two adolescent Tributes, drawn by lottery each year, to compete in the gladiatorial Hunger Games broadcast across the nation.

That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like -- and yet not exactly like -- high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” website, film, and books aspire to reduce.

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. The Hunger Games reminds us of that.  Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1%, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles, and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1%, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen -- Annie Oakley, Tank Girl, and Robin Hood all rolled into one -- who refuses to be disposed of.

Now, in our world, gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey, and other contact sports that regularly result in brain damage, and sometimes even in death). But while the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia? It has a war or two on, if you hadn’t noticed.

In Iraq, 4,486 mostly young Americans died.  If you want to count Iraqis (which you should indeed want to do), the deaths of babies, children, grandmothers, young men, and others total more than 106,000 by the most conservative count, hundreds of thousands by others. Even the lowest numbers represent enough kill to fill nearly 5,000 years of Hunger Games.

Then, of course, there are thousands more Americans who were so grievously wounded they might have died in previous conflicts, but are now surviving with severe brain damage, multiple missing limbs, or other profound mutilations. And don’t forget the trauma and mental illness that mostly goes unacknowledged and untreated or the far more devastating Iraqi version of the same. And never mind Afghanistan, with its own grim numbers and horrific consequences.

Our wartime carnage has been on a grand scale, but it hasn’t been on television in any meaningful way; it’s generally been semi-hidden by most of the American media and the government, which censored images of returning coffins, corpses, civilian casualties, and anything else uncomfortable (though in our science-fiction era when every phone is potentially a video camera, the leakage has still been colossal). Most of us did a good job of being distracted by other things -- including reality TV, of course.  The US Ambassador and military commander in Afghanistan were furious not that our soldiers struck jokey poses with severed limbs, but that the Los Angeles Times dared to publish them last month. And those whistleblowers who took the effort to reveal the little men behind the throne are facing severe punishment.  Witness one Hunger-Games-style hero, Bradley Manning, the slight young soldier turned alleged leaker, long held in inhumane conditions and now facing a potential life sentence.


The Return of Debt Peonage

In The Hunger Games, kids in poor families take out extra chances in their District lottery -- that is, extra chances to die -- in return for extra food rations; in ours, poor kids enlist in the military to feed their families and maybe escape economic doom. Many are seduced by military recruiters who stalk them in high school with promises as slippery as those the slave trade uses to recruit poor young women for sex work abroad.

And then there’s another form of debt peonage that is far more widespread in our strange and ever-changing land: student loans. The young are constantly told that only a college education can give them a decent future. Then they’re told that, to pay for it, they need to go into debt -- usually into five figures, sometimes well into six. And these debts are, in turn, governed by special laws that don’t allow you to declare bankruptcy -- no matter what.  In other words, they are guaranteed to follow you all your life.

One of my close friends wept when her husband began to earn enough money to pay off her $45,000 loan, structured so that it looked like she would continue to pay interest on it for the rest of her life; not so dissimilar, that is, from the debts sharecroppers and workers in company towns used to incur.

In other words, we’re creating a new generation of debt peonage. And she’s not the worst case by far. Early in the Occupy Wall Street moment, she told me, someone arrived at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan with markers and cardboard on which participants were to write their debt.  What shocked her was how many of the occupiers in their early twenties were already carrying huge debt burdens.

According to the website for Occupy Student Debt, 36,000,000 Americans have student debts.  These have increased more than fivefold since 1999, creating a debt load that’s approaching a trillion dollars, with students borrowing $96 billion more every year to pay for their educations. Two-thirds of college students find themselves in this trap nowadays. As commentator Malcolm Harris put it in N + 1 magazine:

“Since 1978, the price of tuition at U.S. colleges has increased over 900%, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the U.S. economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But… wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.”

About a third are already in default. You can only hope that this bubble will burst in a wildcat strike against student debt, and if we’re lucky, a move to force tuition lower and have a debt jubilee.

The rest of us, the 99%, need to remember that, when it comes to public education, the crisis has everything to do with slashed tax rates -- to the wealthy and corporations in particular -- over the last 30 years. We went into bondage so that they might be free. Getting an education to make your way out of poverty and maybe expand your mind is becoming another way of being trapped forever in poverty. For too many, there’s no way out of the hunger labyrinth.

The Labyrinths of Poverty 

Which brings us to the hungriest in our 2012 real-life version of the Hunger Games: the poor. The wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen is full of hungry people. You know it, and you know why. In this vast, bountiful, food-producing, food-wasting nation, it’s a crisis of distribution, also known as economic inequality, described at last with clarity and force by the Occupy movement.

One of the sad and moving spectacles of camps like Occupy Oakland last year was the way they became de facto soup kitchens as the homeless and hungry came out of the shadows for the chance at a decent meal. Some of the camps had really dedicated chefs who cooked superbly.  They also had rudimentary medical clinics where the poor received the healthcare they couldn’t get anywhere else.

We are in a new era of desperation, when lots of people who were getting by these last several decades aren’t anymore. There are no jobs, or the jobs available pay so abysmally that workers can barely survive on them.

Of course, we do have one arena in which meals are guaranteed, and the population there keeps growing. Six million Americans live there, and it often does get gladiatorial inside. It’s called prison, and we have the highest percentage of prisoners per population in the world, higher than in the USSR gulags under Stalin. Half of them are there for drug offenses, 80% of those for simple possession.

Which, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, hasn’t stopped the flow of drugs meant to numb the pain we’re so good at creating here.  We should create a measure for Gross National Suffering (GNS) before we even think about the Gross National Happiness they measure in Bhutan.

And once our prisoners get out, they’re a stigmatized caste, uniquely ill-suited to survival in this economy -- speaking of hunger, debt, poverty, being branded for life, and hopelessness. Like universities, prisons are profitable industries, though not for the human beings who are the raw material they process.  In this age, both systems seem increasingly like so many factories.

In the Shadow of 900 Tornados

But if you want to think about all the ways we’re dooming the young, there’s one that puts the others in the shade, a form of destruction that includes not just American youth, or human youth, but all species everywhere, from coral reefs to caribou. That’s climate change, of course.

Our failure to do anything adequate about it has rocketed us into the science-fiction world Bill McKibben so eloquently warned us about in his 2010 book Eaarth. His argument is that we’ve so altered the planet we live on that we might as well have landed on a new one (with an extra “a” in its name), more turbulent and far less hospitable than the beautiful Holocene one we trashed.
There were 160 tornados reported on March 2nd of this year. Remember that, in April of 2011, 900 tornadoes were ripping up interior United States, and this April was similarly volatile.  Remember the unprecedented wildfires, the catastrophic floods, the heat waves, the bizarrely hot North American January and other oddities? That’s science fiction of the scariest sort, and we’re in it. Or on it, on the crazy new planet we’ve made ourselves. Here in the USA sector of Eaarth in the year 2012, 15,000 high-temperature records were broken in March alone, and summer is yet to come. A town in north-central Texas hit 111 degrees -- in April! What turbulent planet is this?

One grain of good news: a lot of us, even in this country, finally seem to be of aware of the strangeness of the planet we’re now on. As the New York Times reported, a new survey “shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer, and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.”
If you want to talk about hunger, talk about the unprecedented flooding that’s turned Pakistan from one of the world’s breadbaskets into a net food-importing nation, with dire consequences for the agricultural poor. Talk about China’s many impending ecological disasters, its degraded soil, contaminated air and water, its many systems ready to collapse. There’s more disruption of food production to come, a lot more, and lots more hunger, too.

Around this point in science fiction books and even history books, a revolution seems necessary. The good news I have for you this May Day is that it’s underway.

Revolution 2012

2011 was the year of strange weather, but it was also the year of global uprisings, and they’re far from over. They erupted in Russia, Israel, Spain, Greece, Britain, much of the Arab-speaking world, parts of Africa, and Chile, among other spots in Latin America (some of which got their revolutions underway earlier in the millennium). Uprisings have blossomed even in what the rest of the hungry world sees as the elite Capitol, the United States, and much of the English-speaking world, from London to New Zealand.

Remember that revolution doesn’t look much like revolution used to. That might be the most retrograde aspect of the very violent Hunger Games trilogy, the way in which the author’s imagination travels along conventional or old-fashioned lines. There, violence is truly the arbitrator of power, along with cunning, whether in the ways the teenagers survive in the gladiatorial arena or the Capitol, or how both sides operate in conflicts between the Districts and the Capitol. In our own world, the state is very good at violence, whether in its wars overseas or in pepper-spraying and clubbing young demonstrators. You’ll notice, however, that neither the Iraqis, nor the Afghanis, nor the Occupiers were subjugated by these means.

Violence is not power, as Jonathan Schell makes strikingly clear in The Unconquerable World, it’s what the state uses when we are not otherwise under control. In addition, when we speak of “nonviolence” as an alternative to violence, we can’t help but underestimate our own power.  That word, unfortunately, sounds like it’s describing an absence, a polite refraining from action, when what’s at stake -- as demonstrators around the world proved last year -- is a force to be reckoned with; so call it “people power” instead.

When we come together as civil society to exercise this power, regimes tremble and history is made. Not instantly and not exactly according to plan, but who ever expected that?

Still, many regimes have been toppled by this power, and the capacity to do so is ours in the present.  As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan point out in their recent Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, since 1900 people-power campaigns have been successful in achieving regime change more than twice as often as violent campaigns.

It’s May Day, a worldwide General Strike has been called, and last week tiny Occupy Norman (Oklahoma) announced that it “had won a major battle”: their city is moving all its money out of Bank of America into a local bank. Last fall’s Move Your Money campaign included city money from the outset and quiet victories like this could begin to reshape our economic landscape. Activism in the streets is so intimidating that next month's G8 Summit scheduled for Chicago will hole up at Camp David instead.

Meanwhile last week, both the Wells Fargo and General Electric shareholders’ meetings were under siege from Occupy activists.  The Wells Fargo meeting and protests took place in San Francisco, and afterward an arrested friend of mine posted this on Facebook: “I forgot to mention that Max gave me the Hunger Games salute in jail today. It was awesome.”

In this way do fiction and reality meld in misery and triumph as, this very day, janitors in California go out on strike, and even Golden Gate Bridge workers will be protesting. May Day actions are planned across the globe.

Still alive and kicking, Occupy is chipping away in a thousand places at the status quo. 350.org, the little organization that defeated the Keystone XL Pipeline (so far), is holding a global Climate Impacts Day on May 5th and plans to take on the petroleum industry in its next round of actions.
Of course, this is only a beginning, and the banking and oil companies, the 1%, and the prison and education rackets are more than capable of pushing back.  So we need one more tool in our arsenal, and that’s a picture of what we want, of what a better world looks like. McKibben’s Eaarth and Deep Economy offer such a picture, as does William Morris’s News from Nowhere, even 120-odd years later, but we won’t get that from The Hunger Games, which, for all its thrilling, subversive, and surly delights, is all dystopia all the way home. We may still get it, however, on our stranger-than-fiction planet.

May Day is a day of liberation -- a day to be seized and celebrated, a day to remember who was shot down on it and who fought for it.  It’s a day to join those who fought and fight for liberation, to imagine what its most delicious and profound possibilities might look like.

So skip work, flip a bird at the Capitol, commit your deepest love and solidarity to the young whose lives are being gambled away, feed the hungry, take a long look at how beautiful our planet still is, find your way into solidarity and people power, and dream big about other futures. Resistance is one of your obligations, but it’s also a pleasure and a way of stealing back hope. 

Rebecca Solnit grew up in California public libraries and is thrilled to be revisiting them all over the state as part of the Cal Humanities California Reads project, which is now featuring five books, including her A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. 

TKO In Afghanistan

Green Zones of the Mind, Guerrillas, and a Technical Knockout in Afghanistan
 
By Nick Turse, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

Gen. William Westmoreland

Recently, after insurgents unleashed sophisticated, synchronized attacks across Afghanistan involving dozens of fighters armed with suicide vests, rocket-propelled grenades, and small arms, as well as car bombs, the Pentagon was quick to emphasize what hadn’t happened.  “I’m not minimizing the seriousness of this, but this was in no way akin to the Tet Offensive,” said George Little, the Pentagon’s top spokesman.  “We are looking at suicide bombers, RPG [rocket propelled grenade], mortar fire, etcetera. This was not a large-scale offensive sweeping into Kabul or other parts of the country.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta weighed in similarly.  “There were,” he insisted, “no tactical gains here. These are isolated attacks that are done for symbolic purposes, and they have not regained any territory.”  Such sentiments were echoed by many in the media, who emphasized that the attacks “didn’t accomplish much” or were “unsuccessful.”

Even granting the need to spin the assaults as failures, the official American reaction to the coordinated attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital, as well as at Jalalabad airbase, and in Paktika and Logar Provinces, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of guerrilla warfare and, in particular, of the type being waged by the Haqqani network, a crime syndicate transformed by the conflict into a leading insurgent group.  Here’s the “lede” that should have run in every newspaper in America: More than 40 years after the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, even after reviving counterinsurgency doctrine (only to see it crash-and-burn in short order), the U.S. military still doesn’t get it.

Think of this as a remarkably unblemished record of “failure to understand” stretching from the 1960s to 2012, and undoubtedly beyond.



The Lessons of Tet

When Vietnamese revolutionary forces launched the 1968 Tet Offensive, attacking Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, as well as four other major cities, 35 of 44 provincial capitals, 64 district seats, and 50 other hamlets nationwide, they were hoping to spark a general uprising.  What they did instead was spotlight the fact that months of optimistic talk by American officials about tremendous strategic gains and a foreseeable victory had been farcical in the extreme.

Tet made the top U.S. commander, General William Westmoreland, infamous for having claimed just months earlier that an end to America’s war was on the horizon.  As he stood before TV cameras on the battle-scarred grounds of the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon -- after a small team of Vietcong sappers breached its walls and shot it out with surprised U.S. forces -- pronouncing the offensive a failure, he appeared to Americans at home totally out of touch, if not delusional.

Since that moment, it should have been clear that tactical success, even success in any usual sense, is never the be-all or end-all of insurgent warfare.  Guerrillas the world over grasped what had happened in Vietnam.  They took its lessons to heart, and even took them a step further.  They understood, for instance, that you don’t need to lose 58,000 fighters, as the Vietnamese did at Tet, to win important psychological victories.  You need only highlight your enemy’s vulnerabilities, its helplessness to stop you.

The Haqqanis certainly got it, and so just over a week ago sacrificed 57,961 fewer fighters to make a similar point.  Striking a psychological blow while losing only 39 guerrillas, they are distinctly living in the twenty-first century in global war-making terms.  On the other hand, whether its top civilian and military commanders realize it or not, the Pentagon is still stuck in Saigon, 1968.

Case in point: Secretary of Defense Panetta belittled the Haqqani fighters for not taking “territory.”  It’s a claim that, in its cluelessness, is positively Westmorelandish.

What territory, after all, could a relatively weak and lightly armed force like the Haqqani militants have been out to “regain” by attacking Kabul’s heavily defended diplomatic quarter?  The German Embassy?  And then what would they have done?  À la U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine, launch an oil-spot strategy, spreading out slowly from there to secure the American Embassy, the British Embassy, and NATO headquarters?  While Panetta at least granted that the attacks were geared toward symbolic effect, he remained strangely focused on their “tactical” significance.

As was the case in Vietnam, the U.S. military in Afghanistan regularly attempts to prove it’s winning via metrics like the number of enemies captured and body counts from “night raids.”  No less frequently, its spokespeople create rules and measures for its enemies in an effort to prove they’re not succeeding. This Westmoreland-ian mindset was evident last week in those statements that the Haqqanis didn’t accomplish much of anything because they didn’t take territory, sweep into Kabul en masse, or carry out a sufficiently “large-scale offensive” -- as if the Pentagon were the war’s ringside judge (as well as one of the fighters) and the conflict could be won on points like a boxing match.

In the Vietnam years, Westmoreland and other top U.S. officials were forever seeking an elusive “crossover point” -- the moment when their Vietnamese foes would be losing more fighters than they could replace and so (they were convinced) would have to capitulate.  That crossover point was the Pentagon’s El Dorado and to achieve it, the U.S. military fought a war of attrition, just as in recent years the Pentagon has been trying to capture and kill its way to victory in Afghanistan through night raids and conventional offensives.

More than a decade after its own forces swept into Kabul, however, what began as a rag-tag, remnant insurgency has grown stronger and continues to vex the most heavily armed, most technologically advanced, best-funded military on the planet.  All of America’s “tactical gains” and captured territory, especially in the Taliban heartland of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, however, haven’t led to anything close to victory, and one after another its highly publicized light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel offensives, like the much-hyped 2010 Marjah campaign, have faded away and been forgotten.

Afghan and American “Green Zones”

As the Haqqanis meant to underscore with their coordinated attacks, America’s trillion-dollar military and the hundreds of thousands of allied local security forces are still incapable of fully securing a small “green zone” in the heart of the Afghan capital, no less the rest of the country.

The conflict in Afghanistan began with its American commander declaring, “We don’t do body counts,” but a quick glance at recent U.S. military press releases touting supposed “high-value kills” or large numbers of dead insurgents indicates otherwise.  As in Vietnam, the U.S. is once again waging a war of attrition, even as America’s Afghan enemies employ their own very different attrition strategy.  Instead of slugging it out toe-to-toe in large suicidal offensives, they’ve planned a savvy, conservative campaign meant to save fighters and resources while sending an unmistakable message to the Afghan population, and simultaneously exposing the futility of the conflict to the American public.

The attrition of U.S. support for the war is unmistakable.  As late as 2009, according to a poll by ABC News and the Washington Post, 56% of Americans believed the Afghan War was still worth fighting.  Just days before the Haqqanis’ coordinated attacks, that number had sunk to 35%.  Over the same span, the number of Americans convinced that the war is not worth fighting jumped from 41% to 60%.  Whatever the Pentagon’s spin, the latest Haqqani offensive is likely to contribute to these trends, and Pentagon press releases about enemy dead are powerless to reverse them.

In the era of an all-voluntary military, of the “warrior corporation” and its warzone mercenaries, breaching the “green zone” of American public opinion matters less than in the Vietnam era, but it still makes a difference.  The Haqqanis and their Taliban allies may be taking no territory, but in this guerrilla war it turns out that the territory that really matters, on all sides of the battle lines, is the territory inside people’s heads -- and there the Pentagon is losing.

On April 12th, the same day that the ABC News/Washington Post poll was released, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel James Routt flew his last combat mission in Afghanistan.  It was a noteworthy flight.  After all, Routt began his career flying B-52 bombers at the end of the Vietnam War, and was even involved in support efforts for Operation Linebacker II, President Richard Nixon’s infamous “Christmas bombing” of North Vietnam.

Just a few years after those raids, Nixon was a disgraced ex-president and America’s Vietnamese enemies had won the war.  Decades later, the U.S. stands on the brink of another, more devastating defeat at the hands of far lesser foes, a minority insurgency with weaker allies (and no great power backers).  It’s an enemy that has fought far fewer battles and lost far fewer fighters, despite facing off against a far more sophisticated American war machine.

While Routt is hanging up his bomber jacket and walking away from another American defeat in Asia, the Pentagon continues its efforts to conjure up, if not victory then something other than failure, out of a mélange of money, dead bodies, and rosy press releases.  The Haqqanis and their allies, on the other hand, having evidently learned the lessons of the Vietnam War, will undoubtedly continue their carefully controlled war of attrition, while Washington pursues the losing variant it’s been clinging to for years.

The Pentagon might have swapped the Vietnam Syndrome for an Afghan one, but its playbook remains mired in the Vietnam era.  It seems intent on proving that channeling William Westmoreland is the least effective way imaginable to win a war on the Eurasian mainland.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com.  An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. This article is the latest article in his new series on the changing face of American empire, which is being underwritten by Lannan Foundation.

Panetta, Polls, And The Afghan Quagmire

By Matthew Rothschild, cross-posted from Progressive.org

It’s disgusting to watch Defense Secretary Leon Panetta trying to justify the ongoing war in Afghanistan long after it’s proven unwinnable and now after the public has decisively moved against it.

A recent poll showed that 69 percent of the American people are against the war.

But Panetta doesn’t care. “We cannot fight wars by polls,” he said. “If we do that, we’re in deep trouble.”

But it’s the people who are supposed to decide whether we wage war or not. That’s why our Constitution requires Congress, the elected officials closest to the people, to make this fateful decision, not the President, nor the Secretary of Defense, nor the brass.

And the lesson of Vietnam, the lesson of Iraq, is that when the American public clearly doesn’t support the way anymore, the war can’t be won.

The pathetic and inexcusable thing is that Panetta must know that himself. The generals must know it. And Obama must know it.

But like Robert McNamara, and General Westmoreland, and Lyndon Johnson before them, they keep fighting the war because they are unwilling, for political reasons, to come clean to the American public that hired them.

It’s shameful that they keep sending our soldiers to fight and die in a useless cause.

And a government that continues to wage war without the support of its people forfeits the right to call itself a democracy.

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine, which is one of the leading voices for peace and social justice in this country.  He is the host of "Progressive Radio," a syndicated half-hour weekly interview program, and does a two-minute daily radio commentary, entitled "Progressive Point of View," which is also syndicated around the country.  Rothschild is the author of You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression (New Press, 2007)

Quote Of The Day

"The frictionlessness and invisibility of modern warfare for the American public represents a drift off the course set for us by the Constitution. It has made wars easier to start but, perhaps more important for us now, has also made them harder to stop. It has almost normalized the condition of America being at war. But even an inured public has a limit, and maybe 4,000 days is it."

Rachel Maddow, 4,000 Days of War in Afghanistan

Afghanistan: The New Endgame

The alarming pace of events in Afghanistan is forcing United States and NATO strategists to adjust their strategy and timetable to end the war. But they cannot acknowledge the flaw at the heart of their efforts.

By Paul Rogers, cross-posted from openDemocracy

A number of recent columns in this series has reflected on the interplay of military and political dynamics in the "greater middle east", from Iran to Afghanistan. to Syria. Several have examined the possibility that a process of crisis escalation involving "accidents, incidents or mavericks" - a combination summarised in the acronym "AIM" - would trigger war over Iran (see "America, Israel, Iran: mediation vs war", 16 February 2012).

A subsequent column assessing the conflict in Afghanistan concluded that United States policy there is unlikely to change much even if Mitt Romney defeats Barack Obama in the presidential election in November 2012 (see "Afghanistan: the endgame drama", 1 March 2012). But in Afghanistan as in Iran, the AIM effect may now be having an impact in a way that has implications for the future of western military power.

A political retreat 

The argument for continuity in Afghanistan draws on evidence that President Obama has decided on a timetable ^↑ for withdrawal of American troops there, hoping both that Afghan government forces can assume responsibility for security and that any Taliban role in a post-withdrawal government would be very limited. Romney's election rhetoric (and that of any plausible Republican rival) might scorn Obama's approach as "defeatism" or worse, but the next US president would follow a similar course - precisely because the western ^↑ predicament in Afghanistan is now becoming unsustainable.

The response to such acts ^↑ by American soldiers as urinating on dead Afghans and burning ^↑ copies of the Qur'an (both of which led to widespread fury and retaliatory attacks ^↑ on American targets) strengthen ^↑ the case that strategic reality in Afghanistan is becoming inexorable.

The massacre of sixteen Afghan civilians on 11 March by (it seems) a lone American soldier ^↑  confirms in bleak fashion that the "AIM" concept can shed light on the Afghan endgame as much as it does the twisting Iranian crisis. This might yet be attributed to a "maverick", but it is certainly also an "incident" in the tripartite schema - and its sheer horror, especially the killing of children, makes it one of special extremity that also betrays a deep problem within the US military.

But in combination with the earlier outrages, the massacre may come ^↑ to acquire importance as a rare example of an AIM element that will - by clarifying options on both sides - have the effect of ratcheting a conflict down rather than up. Its impact is already significant. In Afghanistan it has intensified antagonism ^↑ to the foreign military presence, as evidenced ^↑ on 15 March both in the Taliban's statement that it is suspending ^↑ preliminary talks with the US and in the demand of Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, that American forces retreat to their bases from villages and patrols.


In the US it has reinforced political pressure in favour of a speedy withdrawal. The multiple signs include the weak response to John McCain's call ^↑ for a reassertion of a "victory over the Taliban" approach. It is very doubtful that either Romney or Rick Santorum will pursue ^↑ this line to excess in the next months' campaigning.

More broadly, the impact of the desecrations that have fueled ^↑ so much Afghan anger is less to alter existing US policy choices than to consolidate those already taken by both George W Bush and Barack Obama.

A plan for failure

Indeed, the context of the last four years is relevant. George W Bush was planning for a military "surge" in Afghanistan in 2008, and John McCain would have implemented the same policy had he defeated Barack Obama - that is, injecting at least 30,000 troops with the intention of destroying the Taliban insurgency.

After many months of review, Obama in 2010 too chose the surge option - but with the singular aim of ending an unwinnable war on tolerable terms, from a position of strength. Two years on, there is little evidence of this working; Taliban groups retain their control of swathes of the country ^↑ and influence many more, all the while largely avoiding open combat that would expose them to attack.

Now, sources in Washington and London reveal that a clear line ^↑ of approach with a set timetable is being planned. The latter is not immutable; another mass-casualty attack or unexpected developments in Pakistan could alter it. But the heart of the new, three-pronged strategy is set:

* Withdraw all the "surge" forces by the end of 2012, but keep the remaining 60,000-plus American troops in Afghanistan until the latter part of 2013 - when the withdrawal accelerates
* Maximise efforts to train ^↑ the Afghan National Army (ANA ^↑ )
* Exit almost all forces by the end of 2014 - though leaving special-force units, drones and some other troops to control any resurgence of transnational paramilitarism.

This approach entails maintaining combat operations through the next two summers, 2012 and 2013 (periods euphemistically known as "fighting seasons" when they might more appropriately be called "dying seasons"). It is being championed within ^↑ Nato on the grounds that efforts during these two seasons will sufficiently weaken the Taliban to give the ANA some chance of maintaining security. In consequence, the degree of negotiated compromise with the Taliban will recede in importance.

This is a great comedown from the complete victory envisaged in late 2001, or even the successes confidently expected when Nato forces moved ^↑ into Afghanistan in very large numbers in 2006. Yet it is easy to see why from a Nato military perspective, the strategy is regarded ^↑ as the best practical way forward.

But it has a very deep flaw at its centre. The notion that two more "dying seasons" will greatly degrade the Taliban and other armed opposition groups is countered by all the experience of recent years, when the dominant pattern sees the Taliban and other groups melt away undefeated to bide their time when Nato ^↑ forces move in to "take over" an area. Many of the more thoughtful military planners are aware that this is the reality, though it cannot be admitted in polite circles.

The signs are that the 2012-14 period in Afghanistan will be messy, and potentially very difficult for the country. There is now a bottom line, however. This almost certainly will end up being a fourteen-year war that leaves in its wake huge loss ^↑ of life and very many thousands of injuries, will have consumed trillions of dollars of resources, all to reach an outcome that for Nato is utterly different to expectations.

That will not be acknowledged because to do so would undermine the validity of the whole alliance ^↑ ; and because it will not be acknowledged, many of the crucial lessons will be not be learned. That in turn makes it more than likely that Nato will stumble on through further crises, all the while avoiding the core question of whether it should even continue to exist.

Quote Of The Day

"There is, quite obviously, a desperate need to believe that when an American engages in acts of violence of this type (meaning: as a deviation from formal American policy), there must be some underlying mental or emotional cause that makes it sensible, something other than an act of pure hatred or Evil. When a Muslim engages in acts of violence against Americans, there is an equally desperate need to believe the opposite: that this is yet another manifestation of inscrutable hatred and Evil, and any discussion of any other causes must be prohibited and ignored."

Glenn Greenwald, Discussing the Motives of the Afghan Shooter

Quote Of The Day

"Why is it that when an American soldier slaughters people, he’s considered possibly mentally ill and suffering from PTSD, but when an Afghan villager who suffered through three decades of unimaginable violence, perhaps losing family members and friends, commits an act of horrific violence he’s considered a terrorist?"

Robert Dreyfuss, Sergeant Massacre, The Nation

Time For A Plan "B" For Afghanistan?

This piece was written before the report that a U.S. sergeant "methodically killed at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural stretch of southern Afghanistan."  

Dead Americans, Dead Goats, and Half a Million Gunmen on the Loose

By Ann Jones, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

The Afghan sport of Buzkashi

Recent weeks have brought yet another sad chance to watch badly laid plans in Afghanistan go haywire.  In three separate incidents, allies, most from the Afghan National Army (ANA), allegedly murdered six Americans -- two of them officers in the high-security sanctum of Kabul’s Interior Ministry.  Marine General John R. Allen, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, even briefly withdrew NATO advisors and trainers from all government ministries for their own protection.

Until that moment, the Afghan National Army was the crown jewel of the Obama administration’s strategy for drawing down forces in Afghanistan (without really leaving).  Trained in their hundreds of thousands over the past 11 years by a horde of dodgy private security contractors, as well as U.S. and NATO troops, the Afghan National Army is supposed to replace coalition forces any day now and defend its own country.

This policy has been the apex of Washington’s Plan A for some time now.  There is no Plan B.

But what to make of the murders in the Ministry?  An AP article headlined “Acts of Afghan Betrayal Are Poisoning U.S. War Plan” detected “a trend of Afghan treachery.”  This “poisoning” is, however, nothing new.  Military lingo has already long defined assaults on American and NATO soldiers by members of the Afghan National Security Force (a combination of the ANA and the Afghan National Police) as “green on blue incidents.” Since the military started recording them in May 2007, 76 NATO soldiers have been killed and an undisclosed number wounded in 46 recorded “deliberate attacks.”

These figures suggest more than a recent “trend of Afghan treachery” (though Afghans are increasingly blamed for everything that goes wrong in their country).  Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who perversely called the latest green on blue incidents signs of Taliban “weakness,” told the press: “I’ve made clear and I will continue to make clear that, regardless of what the enemy tries to do to us, we are not going to alter our strategy in Afghanistan.”

This is, of course, the definition of paralysis in Afghanistan, so much easier in the short term than reexamining Plan A.  In other words, as the American exercise in Afghanistan rolls ever closer to the full belly-up position, Plan A remains rigidly in place, and signals that, from Secretary Panetta and General Allen on down, Americans still don’t seem to get what’s going on.


Beware an Afghan Army 

Many people who know Afghanistan well, however, have warned from the beginning against this plan to train up an armed force.  I’m among the naysayers, and I’ll tell you why.

First, consider what the plan proposes. The number of Afghan soldiers and police to be trained varies widely from one report to the next, but the last estimate I received directly from the Kabul Military Training Center called for 240,000 soldiers and 160,000 police (who, incidentally, are also called “soldiers” and trained in a similar manner).  That brings the total proposed Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) to approximately four times the number of current coalition troops in the country.

It costs the U.S. $12 billion annually to train the army alone and the estimated cost of maintaining it beyond 2014 is $4 billion per year, of which the Afghan government says it can pay no more than 12%.  Clearly, Afghanistan does not need and cannot sustain such a security force.  Instead, the United States will be stuck with the bill, hoping for help from NATO allies -- until the force falls apart.  How then did this security force become the centerpiece of the Obama plan?  And given its obvious absurdity, why is it written in stone?

Second, take just a moment to do something Washington has long been adverse to -- review a little basic Afghan history as it applies to Plan A.  Start with the simplest of all facts: in the country’s modern history, no Afghan national army has ever saved a government, or even tried.  More often, such an army has either sat on its hands during a coup d’état or actually helped to overthrow the incumbent ruler.

Go back nearly a century to the reign of King Amanullah (1919-1929), a modernizing ruler who wrote a constitution, established a national assembly, founded girls' schools, taxed polygamous husbands, and banned conservative mullahs from the country because they might be “bad and evil persons” spreading treacherous foreign propaganda. In 1928, he returned to Afghanistan with his Queen Suraya, who wore European dresses and no veil, from a round of visits to European rulers, bringing guns for his army (though his soldiers would be billed for them) and announced a new agenda of revolutionary reforms. He got a revolution instead, and here’s the important point: his newly weaponized army lifted not a finger to save him.

Amanullah’s successor, an ex-bandit known as Bacha-i Saqqa, lasted only eight months in office before his successor, Nadir Shah, had him hanged, again without intervention from the Afghan army.  Nadir Shah in turn reigned from 1929 to 1933, and although he, like Barack Obama, tried to build up the national army, that force of 40,000 men couldn’t help him when he was assassinated by a schoolboy at a high school graduation ceremony.

From 1933 to 1973, Nadir Shah’s son, Zahir Shah, presided over gradual social progress. He introduced a new constitution, free elections, a parliament, civil rights, women’s rights, and universal suffrage.   During his long peaceful reign, his professional spit-and-polish army served him very well on ceremonial occasions. (This is the same popular king who, after the Taliban fell, offered to return and reunite the country; Bush turned him down.)

In 1973, when Zahir Shah went to Italy for medical care, his cousin Daoud Khan -- a general, former Commander of the Central Forces, and Minister of Defense -- abolished the monarchy and assumed power with the aid of young communists in a bloodless coup.  The army was in his pocket, but five years later, in 1978, it fell apart and fought on both sides as the communists overthrew and murdered Daoud.  The fractured army could not prevent the Soviet invasion, nor safeguard any of the presidents in power before they came or after they left.

It’s worth remembering, too, that every one of these shifts in power was followed by a purge of political enemies that sent thousands of Afghans loyal to the jettisoned ruler to prison, death, or another country in the prolonged exodus that has made the Afghan diaspora the largest in the world drawn from a single country.  That diaspora continues today -- 30,000 Afghans fled last year and applied for asylum elsewhere -- and the next purge hasn’t even gotten underway yet.

In short, Afghan history is a sobering antidote to the relentless optimism of the American military.  Modern Afghan history indicates that no Afghan National Army of any size or set of skills has ever warded off a single foreign enemy or done a lick of good for any Afghan ruler.

As for those Afghan guys who whipped the British three times and the Soviet’s Red Army, they were mostly freelancers, attached to the improvised militias of assorted warlords, fighting voluntarily against invaders who had occupied their country.  The Taliban, like the mujahidin of the anti-Soviet struggle before them, seem to fight quite successfully without any significant training, armor, or heavy equipment to speak of, except what some Taliban snatch by signing up from time to time for basic training with the ANA (or buy from ANA soldiers).

The Afghan National Game

Another objection to spending billions on training an Afghan National Army is this: you never know whom they will shoot.  The problem is not the odd rogue soldier or Talib infiltrator.  The problem is that the Afghan moral code is different from ours, though still apparently invisible to our military and political leaders.

Many years ago, an American Foreign Service officer in Afghanistan fell in love with the place and went sort of rogue himself.  Whitney Azoy resigned to become an anthropologist and in 1982 published an enchanting scholarly book about the Afghan sport of buzkashi, in which mounted horsemen vie for possession of a dead goat or calf.

His book became a bible for visiting journalists who soon made a cliché of the game, comparing the dead goat to the country of Afghanistan, torn apart throughout its history by competing foreign powers: England and Russia, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Pakistan. Journalists compared the game to polo, apparently never having seen a game of polo.  Take my word for it: it is not like polo.  Anyway, that’s not the point.

What many missed is the bigger picture: that all the chapandazan (horsemen) ride for a sponsor, who may be the wealthy landowning host of the day’s competition, or perhaps another large landowner living some distance away.  Chapandazan compete not for the calf, but for the favor of the sponsoring khan who will bestow upon the winners the turban cloths that mark their public stature and the money that will support their families. Here’s the point: if a sponsor fails in his obligations -- if he loses the ability and wherewithal to honor, protect, and support his chapandazan -- they will switch to the man who can.

In short, for their own safety and advancement, Afghans back a winner, and if he goes into decline, they ditch him for a rising star.  To spot that winner is the mark of the intelligent survivor.  To stick loyally to a losing cause, as any patriotic American would do, seems to an Afghan downright stupid.

Now, apply this to the ANA as American and NATO troops draw down in 2014.  Any army intended to defend a nation must be loyal to the political leaders governing the country.  Estimates among Afghan experts of how long the ANA would be loyal to Afghan President Hamid Karzai start at two weeks, and remember, 2014 is a presidential election year, with Karzai barred by the constitution from seeking another term.  In other words, Obama’s Plan A calls for urgently building up a national army to defend a government that will not exist before our own combat troops leave the country.

And if that election is riddled with fraud, as the last one was?  Or inconclusive?  Or violently contested?  Has President Obama or Secretary of Defense Panetta or anyone else given any thought to that?

These days, as Afghan men, mostly in army and police uniforms, shoot and kill NATO soldiers on a remarkably regular basis, the American military still publicly writes off the deaths as “isolated incidents.”

But the isolation may be an American one.  The connections among Afghans are evident to anyone who cares to look.  When I was at a forward operating base with the U.S. Army in Kunar province in 2010, for instance, Afghan soldiers were relegated to an old base next door.  Armed American soldiers guarded the gate in between, and ANA leaders were shadowed everywhere by an armed U.S. sergeant who tried unconvincingly to give the impression he was just out for a stroll.  What struck me most was this: while the Americans on their base recoiled under daily Taliban shelling, the Afghan watchman at the nearby ANA post, perhaps privy to some additional information, slept peacefully on a cot on the roof of his office with his teakettle by his side.  The military has long called this a “partnership.”

But now the numbers are adding up to something else entirely. While some commentators speak of Afghan treachery and others detect a Taliban plot to infiltrate the security forces, I suspect something quite different.  Malcolm Gladwell might call it a tipping point.  What we are watching unfold in Afghanistan is the desertion of chapandazan who have already found new khans.

Security Force: An Oxymoron

All along, however, I’ve had a bigger objection to spending tens of billions of dollars training a vast Afghan National Security Force.  And it couldn’t be more basic: armies and war are never good for women, children, or civilians in general.

To redeem the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan and improve the quality of life of its people, we should have invested early, under Afghan guidance, in electricity, clean water, and sanitation. After two decades of almost constant war and civil war, we should have demined the precious fields in this agricultural country and supported Afghan farmers and laborers as they tried to repair crucial bombed-out irrigation systems.  These measures were never jobs for the U.S. military, but they might have won peace and saved soldiers’ lives in the bargain. After all, soldiers have actually died by falling into broken irrigation tunnels and wells, even more by treading on mines.

Note, too, that the expense of training and supporting soldiers to wage war is bad for both sides.  The trillions spent on our own forces and weapons systems is money we might have spent to improve the quality of American lives.  And keep in mind that the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will not peak until mid-century, so expensive is the lifelong aftercare of our own ruined soldiers.
To keep the chapandazan, or the Afghan people and their problematic army, on your side, you have to offer the symbols and substance of normal life.  But being Americans, we think that “national security” means armies and night vision goggles and drones and “strategic partnerships,” even with a reluctant, exhausted, angry, and grief-stricken people.

To the normal world -- that is, the world not in thrall to American militarism -- “national security” means something quite different.  It means all those big and little things that enable people to feel relatively calm and cared for in their daily lives.  That would be food, water, shelter, jobs, health care, schools for the kids, domestic police to keep the peace, and maybe even some firefighters -- all those things we fail to attend to there, or increasingly here.

As things stand today, as International Women’s Day is celebrated around the world, women in Afghanistan contemplate the withdrawal of some American and NATO troops with both relief and fear.  They fear the Taliban.  They fear President Karzai's endorsement of new, Taliban-like (and unconstitutional) "guidelines" for women that would confine them again.  They fear the Afghan National Army, the heroes of Plan A, and the countless thousands of deserters who joined up to get a gun and went home.

Civilians live in dread of the legacy of the Obama strategy: the presence of half a million gunmen on the loose, in search of a sponsoring khan.


Ann Jones is the author most recently of Kabul in Winter (2006) and War Is Not Over When It’s Over (2010), both published by Metropolitan.