SYNDICATED COLUMN: Too Illegit to Quit
We Can't Make Afghans Accept Karzai Now
Eight years. We've been in Afghanistan longer than any other war in American history. The party of the president who invaded Afghanistan has been repudiated at the polls. Yet we still haven't altered the flawed strategy that allowed uneducated tribesmen with outdated weapons to defeat us year after year.
We haven't learned a thing.
You can see the myopia in our leaders' talking points. "Our goal [in Afghanistan] is to disrupt, dismantle, defeat Al Qaeda and its extremist allies," secretary of state Hillary Clinton told ABC News' "Nightline." "But not every Taliban is Al Qaeda. There are people who are Taliban, who are fighting because they get paid to fight. They have no other way of making a living."
So few words. So much stupidity. Where to start? Here: Al Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan in 2001 was negligible. Al Qaeda was a Pakistani phenomenon. Still is.
You're welcome, have another: Not only is every Taliban not Al Qaeda, there's no such thing as a Taliban, as in: "That guy is a Taliban." Members of the Taliban are called Talibs. You invade a country, send in 100,000 troops, presume to decide what form of government it should have and who should rule it—yet you still don't know something as basic as what the members of the nation's majority political movement are called? Still wondering why "they" hate us?
Last and not least, actually, while it's true that the neo-Taliban (as South Asian experts call them) sometimes pay stipends to their fighters, it's one hell of a stretch—not to mention reflective of an utter misunderstanding of the situation—to depict them as a bunch of greedy and/or desperate entrepreneurs trying to scrape together a few afghanis to make ends meet. (Afghanis are the national currency. Afghans are the people of Afghanistan. Neither the president nor news reporters know this.)
The neo-Taliban are merely the most recent reflection of a historical truth: Afghans set their political differences aside when it's time to kill invaders. Nothing the U.S. can or will do can or will change what we are: a hostile occupation force. Nothing the U.S. can say will change why the Afghans think we're there: to kill them and steal their land.
Eight years. Look, we were never going to win. No one does empire like the British, but the Afghans beat them like a drum. Next-door neighbor Russia knew all about the Afghans and their culture; they lost too. There was no way we were going to outperform the English and the Russians. Still, even if America's political class doesn't read history, you'd think they might catch a clue about crushing the hopes and aspirations of ornery brown people over the course of eight years of occupation. At least by osmosis.
Of said clues, Number One If-You-Forget-Everything-Else-I-Tell-You-Remember-This-One Clue goes as follows: Hamid Karzai, appointed as a U.S. puppet in 2001, has never been considered the legitimate president of Afghanistan by the people who count—Afghans. We've done a lot to piss off the Afghans—slaughtering wedding parties, dropping depleted-uranium bombs on civilians, encouraging opium poppy cultivation—but the biggest single reason every single American soldier who died in Afghanistan has died for nothing is that they died fighting for Hamid Karzai.
Karzai's Afghanistan is a disaster. The average Afghan has received zero assistance from the U.S.-led coalition, has seen zero improvement in his or her life, and has seen no reconstruction whatsoever. Most Afghans never even see American aid workers, who never leave their compounds in Kabul. $13 billion has been allocated for aid to Afghanistan—but there is no evidence that a single cent has ever been spent. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says the overall effort in Afghanistan "has been a nightmare; vast amounts have been wasted."
"The [Afghan] judiciary is so weak," reports the Times, "that Afghans increasingly turn to a shadow Taliban court system because, a senior military official said, 'a lot of the rural people see the Taliban justice as at least something.'" Which is how the Taliban came to power in 1995-96. There was chaos. They brought order.
Di. Sas. Ter.
But President Obama doesn't understand a thing.
"Administration officials describe Mr. Obama as impatient with the civilian progress so far," reports The New York Times. "The president is not satisfied on any of this," a senior administration official tells the paper.
Mr. President: The Afghan war was lost the day the U.S. invaded. It was doomed to disaster the day it installed an illegitimate stooge. Not only is he a puppet, he is a puppet on a shoestring budget—so he can't try to buy the kind of public support that other Afghan politicians have earned with bravery on the battlefield.
Now the U.S. is trying to retroactively legitimatize the Afghan pseudo-president. But it's a sucker's bet. Leaving even one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan means only one thing: more death.
(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the upcoming graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously." He is also the author of the 2002 graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back.")
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Eight years. We've been in Afghanistan longer than any other war in American history. The party of the president who invaded Afghanistan has been repudiated at the polls. Yet we still haven't altered the flawed strategy that allowed uneducated tribesmen with outdated weapons to defeat us year after year.
We haven't learned a thing.
You can see the myopia in our leaders' talking points. "Our goal [in Afghanistan] is to disrupt, dismantle, defeat Al Qaeda and its extremist allies," secretary of state Hillary Clinton told ABC News' "Nightline." "But not every Taliban is Al Qaeda. There are people who are Taliban, who are fighting because they get paid to fight. They have no other way of making a living."
So few words. So much stupidity. Where to start? Here: Al Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan in 2001 was negligible. Al Qaeda was a Pakistani phenomenon. Still is.
You're welcome, have another: Not only is every Taliban not Al Qaeda, there's no such thing as a Taliban, as in: "That guy is a Taliban." Members of the Taliban are called Talibs. You invade a country, send in 100,000 troops, presume to decide what form of government it should have and who should rule it—yet you still don't know something as basic as what the members of the nation's majority political movement are called? Still wondering why "they" hate us?
Last and not least, actually, while it's true that the neo-Taliban (as South Asian experts call them) sometimes pay stipends to their fighters, it's one hell of a stretch—not to mention reflective of an utter misunderstanding of the situation—to depict them as a bunch of greedy and/or desperate entrepreneurs trying to scrape together a few afghanis to make ends meet. (Afghanis are the national currency. Afghans are the people of Afghanistan. Neither the president nor news reporters know this.)
The neo-Taliban are merely the most recent reflection of a historical truth: Afghans set their political differences aside when it's time to kill invaders. Nothing the U.S. can or will do can or will change what we are: a hostile occupation force. Nothing the U.S. can say will change why the Afghans think we're there: to kill them and steal their land.
Eight years. Look, we were never going to win. No one does empire like the British, but the Afghans beat them like a drum. Next-door neighbor Russia knew all about the Afghans and their culture; they lost too. There was no way we were going to outperform the English and the Russians. Still, even if America's political class doesn't read history, you'd think they might catch a clue about crushing the hopes and aspirations of ornery brown people over the course of eight years of occupation. At least by osmosis.
Of said clues, Number One If-You-Forget-Everything-Else-I-Tell-You-Remember-This-One Clue goes as follows: Hamid Karzai, appointed as a U.S. puppet in 2001, has never been considered the legitimate president of Afghanistan by the people who count—Afghans. We've done a lot to piss off the Afghans—slaughtering wedding parties, dropping depleted-uranium bombs on civilians, encouraging opium poppy cultivation—but the biggest single reason every single American soldier who died in Afghanistan has died for nothing is that they died fighting for Hamid Karzai.
Karzai's Afghanistan is a disaster. The average Afghan has received zero assistance from the U.S.-led coalition, has seen zero improvement in his or her life, and has seen no reconstruction whatsoever. Most Afghans never even see American aid workers, who never leave their compounds in Kabul. $13 billion has been allocated for aid to Afghanistan—but there is no evidence that a single cent has ever been spent. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says the overall effort in Afghanistan "has been a nightmare; vast amounts have been wasted."
"The [Afghan] judiciary is so weak," reports the Times, "that Afghans increasingly turn to a shadow Taliban court system because, a senior military official said, 'a lot of the rural people see the Taliban justice as at least something.'" Which is how the Taliban came to power in 1995-96. There was chaos. They brought order.
Di. Sas. Ter.
But President Obama doesn't understand a thing.
"Administration officials describe Mr. Obama as impatient with the civilian progress so far," reports The New York Times. "The president is not satisfied on any of this," a senior administration official tells the paper.
Mr. President: The Afghan war was lost the day the U.S. invaded. It was doomed to disaster the day it installed an illegitimate stooge. Not only is he a puppet, he is a puppet on a shoestring budget—so he can't try to buy the kind of public support that other Afghan politicians have earned with bravery on the battlefield.
Now the U.S. is trying to retroactively legitimatize the Afghan pseudo-president. But it's a sucker's bet. Leaving even one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan means only one thing: more death.
(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the upcoming graphic memoir "The Year of Loving Dangerously." He is also the author of the 2002 graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back.")
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
posted by Ted Rall at
10:41 AM
22 Comments:
Great editorial, one minor question: why do people always make a point of mentioning that the bombs we drop have depleted uranium tips? Would it really make things any better if the bombs had eco-friendly recycled tips or something? Maybe we can get some environmental engineers to whip up some bombs that fertilize the soil and plant flower seeds in the blast craters. "Yes, my four-year-old son was killed by an errant hellfire missile, but on the bright side, the lilies are beautiful."
Your articles on Afganistan are great. Stick to what you are good at and give us more.
Steve--Maybe it gets mentioned a lot because nobody cleans up the Uranium, it gets pulverized and makes the surrounding site toxic and "mildly radioactive." I wouldn't want it in my children's sandbox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium
Thank you ted. Thank you.
Chaos order yes we have all seen this play out millions of times good shot.
Also great how you gave them a single point to chew on.
Steve, depleted uranium is not depleted of radioactivity, it is a by-product of bomb-making. It is hideously (or is that insipidly) poisonous. To all living things before and after use. Ask service members who have to fire shells. Ask people who die of cancer etc here cause of it. It is a disgusting end of the world f%^& everybody destructive act played out by infantile people.
But yes we are not talking about nice vs warfare.
Waste product of uranium which is mostly 238 with some 235. It is the 235 being removed until all is out or so. The left over is called "depleted"
Whatever
Steve B.,
The reason people mention it is because it creates an unnecessary ecological risk.
Ted,
This is exactly why I pretty much am postponing a career in the military. I don't owe a damn thing to Karzai and I'll be damned if I will die for him.
When President Obama was elected I told people wait and see, he could be Johnson or Ford in terms of the war. Looks like he's turning into the former.
Also I am so sick of people saying he inherited this mess (not that you did, but someone will say it I am sure). He knew exactly what he was getting into! If he didn't then he's a class A moron. Yet the complaints of people. As if they didn't think people were going to attack him politically.
Anyways, will the war end eventually? Who knows... The fact that we promote democracy but support a illegitimate and fraudulent leader over a nation we are trying to win "their hearts and minds" is a clear sign we are in it for the long haul.
Karzai (a.k.a. the Mayor of Kabul) is not the legitimate ruler in Afghanistan seems to be in near total news black-out since his first "election." Plus, our guy seems to surround himself with drug lords, like he is the president Columbia (another American quagmire that does not get mentioned by the US corporate media).
Anyone catch Keith Olbermann's Terry Gilliam inspired broadcast of "The Lost Colin Powell Interview'??
Ted, you're such a bad ass graphic-journalist (similar to a photojournalist but not as realistic in your depictions). I know the trips must be a suckfest but your calling and talent are not producing multimedia and doing book signings. Get your boots back on and find more ancient, desolate hell holes where the ethnic population has had the crap beat out of them for three thousand years and now face tyranny in the form of western capitalism. West Africa is call in you as is Columbia, Romania, Myanmar, Nepal, and even Egypt.
J
What do we expect from Karzai?
Look at this official biography of a man of action:
http://www.president.gov.af/Contents/166/Documents/149/bio.html
After completing his graduate degree in political science, he went off to fight the Russian invaders by taking a journalism course in France. He then became the information director for an Afghan political group in Pakistan. After the war, he joined the Afghan foreign ministry.
He should be teaching political science at a college instead of pretending to be a leader of a country.
Nicely written Ted.
My Two Cents: Obam-bam has not actually made a decision; my guess is that he's looking at the Afghan/Pakistan situation from every angle possible. Not to sound cliched, but the appropriate phrase would be that he's looking at all the options. Hopefully your article will convey what the preffered option should be.
More seriously though; Al Qaida.
Whats your idea on their intentions? Have they succeeded? Are they aiming for other targets?
Where is Zawahiri, their ideological and administrative chief, and central strategiser?
Do you think its South or North Waziristan? Kurram Agency? The Central Baloch Desert? The Pak-Iran Border? Or Could he and Bin Ladin be in some quiet slum in urban Punjab or Sindh?
Please do quantify Al Qaida Ted; it would be edifying to learn what you assess.
The reason people mention it is because it creates an unnecessary ecological risk.
And the reason it is used is that it increases the profits of weapon manufactures. They get to turn a liability into something they can sell.
One thing everyone forgets is that the military-industrial complex wins no matter what happens. But they win more the longer this senseless war continues.
Dear Obama: Pull the fuck out of Afghanistan now. There's nothing to be gained. We could use that money to fund single-payer health care.
(I know. I'm dreaming. Fuck, I'd even take tax cuts for the wealthy--even that would be better than paying for depleted uranium munitions.)
Actually, the reason they use DU is because it is more massive than steel. If you have ever seen what a DU sabot round can do, it is more than just a little disturbing. They go through tanks, concrete, steel beams, just about anything but sand (and lots of it). From a "trying to kill tanks" point of view, they make sense. As usual, however, engineers and generals tend to look at only one problem at a time and forget to note the other problems that are created by the elegant cheep solution to the problem they are solving. You see it everywhere you turn. 6 lane one-way streets in downtowns sure make the traffic flow quickly, but pedestrians and bicycles get clobbered (and pollution goes way up). I work in a local government in Redevelopment (where we clean up the messes made by old economies and old city planners/engineers), and I firmly believe that both engineers and military men require adult supervision. I am not naive enough to think that we don't need a military, but they have one tool in their tool box and that tool kills people now and for years to come. One of my favorite old adages... "If the only tool in your tool box is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
Ted, years ago I went to a meeting with Chevron Texico about getting them to support some "non-car" infrastructure with a regional business/government cooperation entity. I swear to god Karzi was not only there, but that he lived in Richmond, CA and had for a number of years. How could one ever expect a "leader" to be considered legitimate when they have such a monstrous conflict of interests. Wait... Forgot about our own legislature. I guess when your whole country forgets what a conflict of interest and a bribe is, you are less likely to tell another country what makes sense.
I will try to come by and meet you tomorrow. When and where?
Back when Ted was showing how to many Americans were projecting their hopes and dreams on Obama, I saved part of an article that discussed Afghanistan and noted not only what each canditate say, but how the question was asked.
We shouldn't be surprised by Obama's current stance:
"Both men once again bravely declared they would not allow another Holocaust to happen. Both pledged constancy to Israel. Both men said that an Iran with nuclear weapons was unacceptable. Brokaw could have asked them for their reactions to outgoing Israeli prime minister Olmert's stunning disclosure in an interview with the Hebrew-language newspaper Yediot Aharonot that he thinks Israel is on a totally misguided course, should " actually withdraw from almost all the territories, if not from all the territories", agree to the division of Jerusalem and give Syria back the Golan Heights.
Brokaw didn't, though he did raise the recent British assessments from Kabul saying the West's war is lost. This elicited scant reaction from Obama who continued to pledge higher US troops levels in Afghanistan plus forays into Pakistan, whatever the opinion of Pakistan's government might be. Will anyone ask the Democratic candidate how he feels about stoking up a replication of the Iraq disaster, with a possible war between nuclear Pakistan and nuclear India as lagniappe? The dawn of an Obama administration is now scheduled, on the candidate's pledges, to see escalation of a doomed and pointless war in Afghanistan and perhaps also termination of Karzai, now square in Uncle Sam's sights as a failure and probably scheduled for assassination. There's the heritage of JFK and Vietnam for you. It's back to 1963. - Alexander Cockburn"
Afghanistan isn't a "lost cause" - any more than Vietnam was. The point is to destroy a country and its people, to funnel cash to mercenaries and arms merchants, to test weapons and battle tactics on live subjects, to justify a "global and domestic war on terror", and to maintain a permanent US military-surveillance presence in central Asia - next to Iran, Russia, India, and China. The US wants to be a player - or at least a veto - over energy infrastructure like gas/oil lines in the region (cue Unocal after 9/11). Afghanistan is only a "failure" if (and ONLY if) you believe politicians' and corpmedia's ANNOUNCED objectives (i.e., "the war on drugs" in Colombia). I don't believe there is a real "war on terror" or "war on drugs" - and neither does anyone in Washington, Langley, Arlington, or midtown Manhattan - home of the corpmedia mastadons.
Yes, Kurt, DU is effective, but only a profoundly insane system would actually use it.
War-profiteers love this system.
Afghanistan was key in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. If a major power were to supply the insurgents against us the way we did against the Soviets, we're uber-fucked. And even without support from a major power, it's still a lost cause and a drain. Our money into the pockets of a few industrialists.
Alas.
Grumpy,
That is my point. We tend to romanticize the engineers and inventors who find a way to solve a problem. In this case, the problem is how do we kill a tank with a mini-gun round. Answer, DU. What is rarely examined is the consequence of using that particular solution to that particular problem. It is the classic case of an externality (the cost of expending a DU round is neither born by the manufacturer or the user). People in capitalistic societies tend to over produce negative externalities and to underproduce positive externalities. The result? More highways than rails, Agent Orange, DU, and city streets that kill pedestrians and cyclists. My point was and is that engineers need grown-ups with a softer science background to supervise...
We also need to work diligently to cost the price of externalities into products (DU should be prohibitively expensive, as should coal fired power and parks, bicycles and sidewalks should be super cheap. If we can pull that off, we can save capitalism.
"dropping depleted-uranium bombs on civilians, "
Ted I read and already agree with your work before I read it. I've read stuff. I understand the complex interactions that cause one country to invade, kill and destroy another...
well sort of, in a history sort of way...
but depleted uranium "DU" is used in bullets not bombs. works great from a warthog on tanks..problem is they vaporise on contact, mostly, into dust, that is easily breathed in as kids scavenge scrap metal.
DU will make people sick for 40 years.
Kurt, I think saving the PLANET, not capitalism, should be the priority.
Grouchy,
I can't disagree... but I am not sure you can do A without B.
And Joe Blow,
DU is used in some warheads like armor piercing guided missiles. It requires a massive tip to get the explosive past the armor. The ways we invent to kill our brothers around the world sort of make me ill. I was reading a Dennis Prager op/ed the other day when he basically accused people who don't like war of suborning evil... I guess from the super rightie pov, I am evil... who knew.
Kurt:
Is this the paragraph you are referring to in Prager' column?
Those who worry about good and evil know that if America decides that the world's approval is important, evil will increase exponentially. Only an America willing to be disliked, even hated, will consistently support the smaller good guys against the bigger bad guys.
That is one of them Billy Jack. It is a favorite theme of Mr. Prager's. The problem with his analysis is that he never bothers to notice when U.S. policy is evil (like the policy of blowing up weddings from 8k miles away). He always says things like "in no other conflict has one side taken such extreme efforts to avoid civilian casualties," when in fact, this conflict has had a much HIGHER percentage of civilian casualties than any other conflict. And has had so many casualties in large part due to the use of "smart" weapons. This policy is evil by any rational definition of evil, but because Mr. Prager naively believes that the U.S. has some sort of exceptionally altruistic use of military might he believes that it MUST be the guys who live in a tribal region that has been destabilized 5x in the last century by military fiat of the empire du jour who are evil. What he never seems to figure out is that the Taliban were the creation of the hot proxy war that the United States fought with the Soviet Union. Anyway, my point was and is that it is pretty funny that the righties who talk about this conflict in absolutist terms fail absolutely to be introspective and honest... resulting in them being evil. What is that old saw about the "road to hell and the content of its pavement?"
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