Waist deep in the Big (Afghan) Muddy?

The Associated Press is running a story it says is based on multiple sources familiar with the Afghanistan War plan Obama is scheduled to announce Friday. According to those sources, Obama is concerned about the rapid deterioration of the NATO position there and plans to increase the number of troops even beyond the 17,000 he recently decided to add.

I hope they have more in mind that just straight escalation. But it's sounding a lot like that. The story does quote the Secretary of State:

"It is an integrated military-civilian strategy," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters in Monterrey, Mexico. "We are convinced that the most critical underpinning of any success we hope to achieve, along with the people and government of Afghanistan, will be looking at where civilian trainers, aid workers, technical assistance of all kinds can be best utilized."

The problem is that after a year or so in Iraq, everyone learned they had to make at least a rhetorical nod to the idea of a combined civilian-military strategy. It's also a way for our infallible generals to claim they did everything right but those blankety-blank politicians back home screwed things up.

Former diplomat William Polk (a direct descendant of President James K. Polk) spoke to the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) on Afghanistan this week. The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel reports on his presentation:

"I look in vain for a place where we have succeeded militarily against guerilla warfare," he said. "… I think the more people we put in there, the more people are going to get shot at." He said Afghans who help Americans will be viewed in the same way as Loyalists during the American Revolutionary War -- they were despised even more than the British.

Even more powerful, however, were the lessons Polk drew from his experiences with Vietnam. "Always the idea was with a few more troops and a little more time we will solve the problem," he said. "… We were so sure that we knew how to do everything in Vietnam." He said the extent to which we didn't know what we were doing was made abundantly clear when a Marine Corps Colonel informed Polk that one could purchase a tank in the marketplace in downtown Saigon.

"The government that we were trying to promote was so corrupt that they were selling their opponents all the arms to kill us with," Polk said. He noted the corruption today in the Karzai government -- its involvement in the drug trade, for example -- and the consequent willingness of more and more Afghans to once again accept the Taliban as an alternative that "doesn't steal." ...

"We have to recognize that we have inherited an incredibly fragile, fragile position to try to build on…." Polk said. "We have to try to find ways to make that transitional period [of withdrawal] as smooth as we possibly can. But we have to be very straightforward in recognizing it's not going to be easy, and it's not going to be simple. And we're not going to end up with the kind of [government] that we'd like to have theoretically."

The CPC's Web site has Chapter 11 of Polk's book Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq (2007) available at its Web site, "The Afghan Resistance to the British and the Russians". This is a part of his description of the Soviet war in Afghanistan:

Most of the native opponents of the Russians were Muslim fundamentalists. Some were Sunni Muslims and others were Shiis. While all fought in the name of Islam, they fought separately by village or tribe. They were joined by foreign volunteers from Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and other Muslim areas. Of these volunteers, the best known is Osama bin Ladin, who came from Saudi Arabia. While the fundamentalists took American help and welcomed foreign aid 'workers and particularly doctors - and occasional journalists in the hope of creating favorable comment in the Western press - they made no secret of the fact that they hated with almost equal fervor both the Russians and the Americans. The Americans, in Afghan eyes, were just a new generation of Englishmen, intent on dominating their country and destroying their way of life. ...

Unlike most of the insurgencies I have studied, the Afghan insurgency was motivated neither by nationalism nor by ideology. It defined itself in terms of its enemy. The enemy was not so much Communism as Russia, and not only Russia alone but all foreigners. The Afghans accepted outside help but did so reluctantly and without affection for the donors. Xenophobia must be considered to have been a major motivation. Insofar as it was refined into something like an ideology, it was defined by Islam. But it was not religion, per se, that seems to have most motivated people: it was the Afghan "way," the social code that was encapsulated in Islam that Afghans felt was being attacked and that they determined to protect. As a Hezb-i Islami commander told the English visitor Peregrine Hodson, "It is true that Afghanis is a poor country, but the most precious thing we have is our faith; without it we have nothing. We are fighting to protect our religion." [my emphasis]

The special situation in the world just after the 9/11 attacks may, may have presented an opportunity for foreign forces to accomplish a lot more than they have since then. But that opportunity, if it ever existed, is long past.

Polk also observes of the Russians' treatment of captured fighters, "Prisoners were summarily shot since the Russians claimed that they were illegal enemy combatants not covered by the Geneva Conventions." The mujaheddin followed a similar practice with Russian prisoners.

Tags: afghanistan war, william polk

We'd all better think about what Cheney's Long War means

Anti-Communist German poster, 1918: Bolschewismus bringt Krieg, Arbeitslosigkeit und Hungersnot (Bolschevism brings war, unemployment and starvation)

It won't surprise me if we start seeing posters and advertisements of this type, only with Terrorism now substituted for Bolschevism. Because that's basically the program of the Bush Doctrine, to define The Terrorists as an implacable enemy requiring a Long War, a permanent national-security State and - of course! - humongous military budgets and weapons contracts.

(Speaking of "Long War", David Neiwert's recent speculation about the virility issues of old men who dream up wars is worth a look, Leering old men Orcinus blog 07/28/07.)

Here's white supremacist sympathizer Trent Lott, acting likely any old John Birch Society kook, Lott: Get Out of D.C. While You Still Can by Spencer Ackerman TPM Muckraker 08/02/07:

It turns out the Capitol Police have bolstered security around the U.S. Capitol after a recent al-Qaeda communique threatened an attack on Washington. Lott, according to Roll Call (sub.req.), responded with characteristic gravitas. In light of the heightened threat, Congress can either amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] or all of us can run screaming into the inferno.

Here in the real world, Congress has been suggesting updates in FISA for years. The administration opposed updating it, because Cheney preferred to do everything illegally. Now, all of a sudden, they're in a big rush to get it amended right away.

The administration's proposal would give our esteemed and trusted Attorney General, Abu Gonzales, vast discretion in deciding on wiretaps in place of the super-secret FISA court. Rush, rush, rush, or The Terrorists will git us!!

Ole Trent says that without that FISA change giving more authority to our man Abu, "the disaster could be on our doorstep." (And, Lord knows, the administration post-disaster response capabilities aren't quite the best.)

Ackerman contiunes:

Further demonstrating his counterterrorism sagacity, when asked if people should leave Washington, D.C., during the month of August, Lott replied that "I think it would be good to leave town in August, and it would probably be good to stay out until September the 12th." By contrast, a former Capitol Hill chief had the temerity to note that, according to U.S. intelligence analysis he'd been privvy to, "Americans tend to be much more oriented toward anniversaries and the jihadists seem to be less so. I've seen over the years where we concentrate on dates and the analysts say, 'Don’t get wrapped up in dates because our terrorist jihadist enemies bide their time.'"

The authoritarian Republican Party is committed to ruling by fear. Until the voters stop it by making clear that unless the Reps change, they're going to rapidly dwindle to little more than a Southern white people's party, they are unlikely to change anytime in the foreseeable future.

William Polk reminds us of part of what the Long War that this fear is supposed to justify will mean - already means - for the United States, in a guest appearance at Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog, Polk on Insurgency & American History 08/02/07:

What about “the war on terror” beyond Iraq? Little public attention is paid to Afghanistan or – so far – to Somalia and the Philippines. Another campaign is in the advanced positioning stage against Iran. Others are being discussed for various parts of Africa and at least one for Latin America. The men who designed the current Bush administration foreign policy, the neoconservatives, have called the combination of these campaigns “the long war” and have predicted – indeed proposed – that they will last half a century. Going down this path will result in thousands of American dead and tens of thousands crippled, will severely strain American democratic institutions at home and further erode America’s reputation abroad. The monetary costs have been estimated at 15 trillion dollars.

Is this just a nightmare? In the spring of 2006, before he left office, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved three plans to fight the “long war” beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. One, the “Special Operations Command (SOC),” is now composed of 53,000 men and operates on a budget in 2007 of $8 billion. It has already dispatched teams of Special Forces to some 20 American embassies in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. These teams operate separately from the embassies and are not subject to control by the senior civilian American representatives, the ambassadors, as they engage in covert warfare not only against groups regarded as terrorist but even against states. Although these SOC teams could bring America into war with any number of countries, they are treated by the Bush administration as not subject to Congressional oversight or decision.

Tags: global war on terror, iraq war, trent lott, war on terror, william polk

Getting out of disaster and avoiding new ones

William Polk, co-author with George McGovern of Out of Iraq (2006), made a presentation on 01/12/07 to the House Progressive Caucus and the Out of Iraq Caucus. The whole short paper is worth reading. It's mainly about getting out of the Iraq War.

But he also raises a good question that, with all the other bad decisions and misdeeds of the Cheney-Bush administration, hasn't been asked often enough or prominently enough. He talks about the neocon nightmare goal of the Long War, essentially a recreation in even more retrograde form of the National Security State of the Cold War:

Is this just a fantasy? As an old Chinese proverb puts it, “every journey of ten thousand miles begins with a single step.” Iraq was the first and Mr. Bush warns us that he would like to take more steps. In fact, he took another step in Somalia.

Somalia presents a curious story. It is even harder to make the case that it poses a threat to America than did Iraq. What most of us know about Somalia is from the movie "Black Hawk Down." In that literally explosive film, you will remember that our brave young men went in to beat the bad guys, the vicious warlords who were looting, raping and killing their own people. The film opens with a gruesome scene of the warlords doing these horrible things. The UN had a peacekeeping force there, but we didn’t want it to do the job. So we mounted our own action [starting in 1992]. Our troops opened up with all our massive firepower. But then a curious thing happened: the whole population rose against our soldiers. We cut and ran, taunted by the very people we thought we were there to save. And then after we left what happened? The Somalis created their own movement to run the bad guys out of town. It was not the sort of movement of which we approve, a bunch of religious fundamentalists. They succeeded where we failed because they were, after all, Somalis, but now we have brought back the warlords, the very people we went into Somalia to suppress. (my emphasis)

The Republicans have spent so much energy blaming Bill Clinton (with some real-world justification in this case) for the Somalia debacle of 1993 that it's easy to forget that it was Old Man Bush that made the initial commitment.

Just as our current President Bush imitated Poppy in going to war with Iraq but making an enormous mess of it, he's also introduced a new American intervention in Somalia. Why? Can we afford to believe the official story that bombing a couple of villages is really a targeted strike on high-levels "Al Qaida" bad guys? Did following a policy of backing Ethiopia in an intervention to restore warlord rule really make sense?

These are the sort of question the Congress, the press and most of all the public need to learn to ask again, and in a much more urgent way than we have become accustomed to doing. A Sunni jihadist group carries out a spectacular attack in the US on 9/11/01. And a little over six years later, we're intervening in Somalia to restore warlord rule? Is this kind of "regime change" really the best way to protect American territory from attacks from committed Salafist terrorists?

Two articles by Bipasha Ray in Defense Analysis Bulletin #3 (Project for Defense Alternatives) 03/07/07, "US Aid to Somali Warlords" and "Destabilizing the Horn of Africa?", provide a number of links and brief summaries of several articles on the US role in Somalia, including a long article on the more general issue of warlordism with particular reference to Afghanistan and Somalia, Warlordism in Comparative Perspective by Kimberly Marten International Security Winter 2006/07.

As I said, William Polk's paper is mainly about the Iraq War and it's well worth reading. But Polk, a direct descendant of President James Polk, also adds some historical touches I liked. For example, since he's addressing two groups that call themselves "caucuses", he starts out talking about the origin of the word and relates that:

... the curious word "caucus" is deeply rooted in the American experience. One of the first practices that Captain John Smith observed when he met the Algonquians in 1607 was the way they got together to decide matters of high policy. As close as he could come to their pronunciation, their meetings was a caw-cawassough. The leaders of the Indians made no decisions without first holding a caw-cawassough or caucus. The practice was carried forward in later American history. It was in the "Caucus Club" of the Boston town meeting that Samuel Adams shaped American opinion in the years leading up to our Revolution.

He also makes a comparison of one aspect of the current situation to conditions in the Vietnam War, a comparison that actually makes good sense (unlike so many of the historical references and analogies we hear):

In government affairs, the siren song is compromise. Compromise always sounds practical. Sometimes it even sounds statesmanlike. And usually it also protects reputations whereas taking clear action may seem precipitous. Waiting to see what happens can rarely be faulted. So asking for more time seems sensible. A few thousand more troops, another 50 or so billion dollars.

That is what we did in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive. We "stayed the course" and refused to "cut and run." During those four years of waiting to see what would happen, an additional 21,000 young Americans lost their lives, that is almost as many as during the previous six years, scores of thousands of Vietnamese were killed and tens of billions of dollars were wasted. Then at the end we really did cut and run.

Today, we predict that if we do as President Bush asks, we will be saying to one another in a few months time – when another thousand or so American servicemen and women have been killed, five or ten thousand more are grievously wounded and end up in Veterans hospitals and we have wasted another 50 billion dollars – why didn’t we just face reality in January.

Tags: iraq, iraq war, somalia, william polk

Review of Out of Iraq by George McGovern and William Polk

Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now (2006) by George McGovern and William Polk

This book by former Senator George McGovern and historian/diplomat William Polk (who negotiated a cease-fire between Israel and Egypt in 1970) is a broadside. That is, it's a pamphlet (142 pages including index) addressing an issue of the moment and encouraging a desired action. The action in this case is getting the US out of the Iraq War.

At a time when peace plans and exit proposals are sprouting like mushrooms in a cow pasture, McGovern and Polk offer a serious and wide-ranging proposal. They stress that the historical course of insurgencies like those in Iraq indicates that after the foreign forces leave, the internal conflict will intensify. But they argue that "staying the course" has been steadily intensifying the conflict, which cannot be resolved by US troops. "We are as powerless to prevent the turmoil that will happen when we withdraw as we have been to stop the insurgency". That's harsher than many Democratic war critics would like to be. But it's long past time that people need to talk pragmatically about the grim realities of the situation.


Two of their suggestions are directed to the Shi'a-dominated Iraqi government: seeking temporary assistance from other Muslim countries in policing Iraq, and relying on a national police force but not to create a national army. This latter suggestion is a unique one (at least I've never heard it before), and the only one not clear to me. It's hard to see how an Iraqi government could simply forgo having an army. They argue that historically, "Iraqi armies have been a source not of defense but of disruption". Still, it's hard to picture Iraq becoming the Costa Rica of the Middle East any time soon.

For the US, they propose a phased withdrawal of US combat troops on a definite timetable to begin on December 31, 2006, and be completed by June 30, 2007; release of all prisoners of war; establish and fund a national "reconstruction corps" for Iraq; immediately cease work on building US military bases; withdraw all American presence from the Green Zone by the end of 2007; get the mercenaries ("security details") out of Iraq as quickly as possible; begin a cleanup of landmines and unexploded ordnance; develop an honest accounting of the Iraqi funds spent by Jerry Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA); "make reparations to Iraqi civilians for loss of lives and property" caused by the US; provide financial and other assistance through international institutions to civil society organizations; and, turn prosecution and custody of officials from Saddam's regime now under arrest for crimes over to the Iraqis.

In the weeks since this book was published, conditions in Iraq have deteriorated even more, so that all-round acceptance of these proposals is highly unlikely. Even if the Bush adminsitration were willing to try. But the real value of the McGovern-Polk proposal is that it would establish a US withdrawal schedule at an early date, and it focuses attention on the nature of the current prospects in the Iraq War. The US is not going to create the model Arab democracy that the delusional neoconservatives dreamed about. At this point, being able to make an orderly withdrawal and beginning to ameliorate the hatred towards America this war has generated in the Muslim world seem like nearly utopian goals. Jerry Brown's signature slogan from the 1970s, "lower your expectations", would apply well to this situation.

The programatic proposals just summarized are contained in one of the book's six chapters. This book pleasantly surprised me in that quality of its compact discussion of the war's history to date. It's easily the best brief summary I've seen. Their discussion of the appalling failures of our so-called "press corps" in its coverage of the war and the prewar buildup includes this observation:

Believing that they were not getting the whole story or often not even the truth, increasing numbers of Americans have done what anti-Soviet Russians did before the fall of the USSR: they have turned to informal means of communication. The Russians used mimeograph machines to circulate information among themselves in what they called samizdat; we turn to Internet blogs, to hear what the mainstream press is not reporting. There are now hundreds, perhaps thousands of these websites, originating on both sides of the Atlantic and even in Iraq.

Unable to control the media or the Internet, the Bush administration has manufactured news events to get its message across. On October 13, 2005, for example, President Bush went before television cameras to ask a supposedly randomly selected group of soldiers what they thought of the way the war in Iraq was going. But the sample was not random, and the soldiers' answers were rehearsed: the participants had been carefully selected, and a Pentagon official was observed coaching them before the show. (my emphasis)

Their frank and sensible discussion of the repercussions of war atrocities and the torture policy carried out by American soldiers will displease anyone who wants to hear only heroic tales and feel-good military press releases. As they show, the torture policy in particular represents a very serious breakdown of military discipline and a major failure of command, things that are essential to keeping the violence required in combat focused on legitimate targets and methods. That breakdown is already having far-reaching consequences on the Army and American's standing in the world. As McGovern and Polk emphasize, "The history of guerrilla warfare demonstrates this dehumanizing tendency among peoples of all religions and cultures". When the national leadership actually encourages such a tendency as the Cheney-Bush administration had done with the torture policy, the effects are even more corrosive.

And they remind us that along with the tranformation of Iraq into a violent, chaotic failed state, the war is also helping to undermine the Constitution here at home:

George Orwell was unduly pessimistic: his bleak vision of the future did not happen as fast as he thought it might - that is, in 1984 - but it could well happen in our lifetime.

Getting out of Iraq is the first and most urgent step in avoiding the treacherous, downward spiral toward such a hideous future. Getting out with dignity and making every effort to do so in a way that will leave behind us the best possible climate for rebuilding, re-growth, and peace ... is the right thing to do. Absent a reversal of American policies, which must begin with a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, the America we have inherited from our Founding Fathers will continue to be in grave, perhaps even mortal, danger.

Among the "lessons of Iraq" on which they touch briefly, they include the folly of the Bush Doctrine's blind faith in military force to impose America's will on other countries and the powerful encouragement it gives to countries who may become targets of "regime change" to seek their own nuclear weapons.

They conclude:

Finally, all war is unpredictable and horrible. Our wise old statesman Benjamin Franklin once said, "There never was a good war." But among wars, guerrilla wars are the worst; at best they are unwinnable, lasting as in Ireland for centuries and in Algeria for a century and a half. Chechens suffered massacre, deportation, rape, and massive destruction at the hands of the Russians for nearly four centuries, and now incorporated into Russia, Chechnya still is not "pacified." Aware of this history, the American neoconservative advisers to our government plan for (and indeed advocate) perpetual war. If they get their wish, then the final lesson of Iraq will emerge from the "fog of war." It is that insurgency and counterinsurgency brutalize whole societies, even those of the victors. This was true of the British in Kenya, French in Algeria, Americans in the Philippines, Russians in Chechnya, and Chinese in Tibet. Hegel may be right — we may not learn [from history]; but certainly, we would be wise to heed the warning of Santayana not to "blot" the lessons of this costly adventure out of our minds. It has been our most expensive school. (my emphasis)

Tags: george mcgovern, iraq war, out of iraq, out of iraq a practical plan, william polk