Trans Afghanistan Pipeline

It appears that no one seems to remember, if they ever knew, that Afghanistan was not really about 9-11 or fighting terrorists (except the many the US has created by its invasion and occupation), but was about pipelines.

President Obama declared in August 2009:

“But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.”

Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.

Never mind that the “plotting to attack America” in 2001 was devised in Germany and Spain and the United States more than in Afghanistan. Why hasn’t the United States bombed those countries?

Indeed, what actually was needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does “an even larger safe haven” mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

The only “necessity” that drew the United States to Afghanistan was the desire to establish a military presence in this land that is next door to the Caspian Sea region of Central Asia — which reportedly contains the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world — and build oil and gas pipelines from that region running through Afghanistan.

Image Courtesy: lawanddisorderradio.org

Afghanistan is well situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of south Asia, pipelines that can bypass those not-yet Washington clients, Iran and Russia. If only the Taliban would not attack the lines. Here’s Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, in 2007: “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south.”

Since the 1980s all kinds of pipelines have been planned for the area, only to be delayed or canceled by one military, financial or political problem or another. For example, the so-called TAPI pipeline (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) had strong support from Washington, which was eager to block a competing pipeline that would bring gas to Pakistan and India from Iran. TAPI goes back to the late 1990s, when the Taliban government held talks with the California-based oil company Unocal Corporation.

Uncooperative Taliban

These talks were conducted with the full knowledge of the Clinton administration, and were undeterred by the extreme repression of Taliban society. Taliban officials even made trips to the United States for discussions.  Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific on February 12, 1998, Unocal representative John Maresca discussed the importance of the pipeline project and the increasing difficulties in dealing with the Taliban:

The region’s total oil reserves may well reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels … From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, leaders, and our company.

When those talks stalled in July, 2001 the Bush administration threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the government did not go along with American demands. The talks finally broke down for good the following month, a month before 9-11.

The United States has been serious indeed about the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf oil and gas areas. Through one war or another beginning with the Gulf War of 1990-1, the US has managed to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.

The war against the Taliban can’t be “won” short of killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States may well try again to negotiate some form of pipeline security with the Taliban, then get out, and declare “victory”. Barack Obama can surely deliver an eloquent victory speech from his teleprompter. It might even include the words “freedom” and “democracy”, but certainly not “pipeline”.

William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report

Leon Panetta, with President Barack Obama

California Democratic Party Veterans Caucus and Progressive Caucus Chairs Praise Today’s Announcement By Obama Administration That U.S. To Leave Afghanistan

The chairs of the Veterans Caucus and Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party today – in a joint statement – praised the Obama Administration’s announcement that the U.S. would end combat operations in the war in Afghanistan in 2013.

Karen Bernal

Noting that nearly 2,000 Americans have been killed and 13,000 wounded in the decade-long battle, along with tens of thousands of Afghans, the party leaders said the U.S. should turn to humanitarian and developmental aid in the region. Polls show about two-third of Americans want the U.S. out of Afghanistan now or in the very near future.

Rick Reyes, the Veterans Caucus Chair and a U.S. Marine veteran in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and Karen Bernal, the Progressive Caucus chair, said:

“It’s great news to hear the first clear Administration statement in support of ending ‘combat operations’ before 2014. There is a genuine belief by many within the military and the government that it’s time to admit what we have long said, the US war in Afghanistan simply cannot achieve the goals it claims to be aiming for.

Rick Reyes

“We need to do all we can to ensure our men and women in uniform don’t stay a single day longer than absolutely necessary in Afghanistan. We achieved our original goals upon entering Afghanistan; we killed Bin Laden, decimated Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and given the Afghan people the opportunity of having a democratic government, if they so choose.”

The California Democratic Party approved a resolution last year, co-authored by Reyes and Bernal, calling for an end to the war and the redirection of the nearly $1 billion each week used in the war – the Afghanistan war total is more than a half trillion dollars.

Reyes and Bernal said that $1 billion a week can be used to help the U.S. and particularly the State of California, which are in an economic crisis without money to fund domestic needs.

The community was run by drug lord Christopher (Dudus) Coke, a self-proclaimed “president” wanted in the U.S. for drug and firearms trafficking.

When he would not surrender to authorities, the Army’s Jamaican Defense Force(J.D.F) and the Jamaican Constabulary Force (J.C.F.) breached the barricades Coke’s men had erected and gunfire erupted. Resistance was light and the defenders melted away. Unarmed residents who had not taken the opportunity to leave Tivoli by bus prior to the gunplay were not so lucky.

“No fewer than (73 civilians) were killed (as well as one soldier)” in the operation to get Coke, and three other community residents are missing, writes Mattathias Schwartz in last December 12th’s “The New Yorker.” .

Although Jamaican authorities say many of those slain were armed gunmen allied with Coke, they recovered just six guns during the assault and to this day “the Jamaican government has refused to make public what it knows about how the men and (three) women of Tivoli Gardens died,” Schwartz writes.

So has the U.S. government, even though a Lockheed P-3 Orion surveillance plane with an identifying DHS seal on its tail was flying above Kingston relaying live video of Tivoli to Jamaican forces on the ground, Schwartz notes. “The video could corroborate, or refute, allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents, and could help identify the alleged killers,” “The New Yorker” article suggests.

Investigators dispatched by Jamaica’s Prime Minister Bruce Golding were told by Tivoli women “of police shooting unarmed young men inside their homes, or dragging them out into the street and killing them,” Schwartz writes.

A DHS official confirmed to reporter Schwartz his agency had aircraft flying above Kingston and that “all scenes were continuously reported” and information turned over to Jamaican authorities. A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration(DEA) spokesperson said, “We were absolutely not involved on the ground in any of the operations.” A statement given to Schwartz by the U.S. State Department and DEA stressed U.S. law-enforcement officers at the American Embassy had not made “operational decisions” during the incursion.

But Schwartz writes, “The U.S. knew there was a risk of violence against civilians during the operation” as human-rights activists have long been collecting stories of J.C.F. excesses, “including officers indiscriminately firing on teen-age girls or crowded buses.”

In 2010, Jamaican police killed 320 civilians apart from those slain in the Tivoli attack, a figure 40 times as great as the New York P.D. which covers a population three times as large, and a UN report has noted “the propensity for extrajudicial killings by the J.C.F.”

Once the police gained control of Tivoli, “unarmed men of fighting age were interrogated on the spot, and more than a thousand were sent to detention centers, from which they were released a few days later,” Schwartz wrote, but “dozens allegedly (were) shot to death in custody.” Others, whose protestations of innocence were not believed, were shot to death on the spot in Tivoli by the police.

Meanwhile, Coke was nowhere to be found. Nearly a month after what Schwartz called “A Massacre in Jamaica,” Coke was caught by police at a roadblock and has been held since at the Metropolitan Correction
Center in Lower Manhattan. He has pleaded guilty to racketeering and faces up to 23 years in prison, Schwartz writes.

But several scores of civilians are buried in Jamaica’s May Pen Cemetery in consequence of a deadly attack by Jamaican forces in which, for all its denials, the U.S. played a significant role and was perhaps more closely involved than it has let on.

Sherwood Ross

Demonstrators in Cairo

Despite George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s efforts to topple foreign dictators and use military power to forcefully impose democracy from without, democracy usually works better if it bubbles up from below by popular desire.

In Iraq, even before U.S. forces had withdrawn, Shi’ite President Nouri al-Maliki was taking the country back toward dictatorship. Now that American forces are gone, with attempts to arrest the Sunni vice president and the detention of other prominent Sunnis, Maliki is accelerating the process. Meanwhile, the radical Sunni group al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia is stepping up attacks on Shi’ites, hoping to re-ignite the sectarian civil war of 2006 and 2007. With Iraq’s long history of rival ethno-sectarian groups in conflict, Sunni dictators, and no culture of political compromise needed for democracy, the prospects for an imposed democracy taking root were never great.

In Afghanistan, the situation is even worse, because opposition to the U.S.-installed government—by the Taliban—is even stronger, and that government is seen by most Afghans as corrupt and ineffective. Although three attempts by the British and one by the Soviets to bend notoriously independent and ferocious Afghans to an external will failed, the irrepressible arrogance of American foreign policymakers led them to think that the outcome would be different when the United States tried to install democracy there 10 years ago.

Although winning the “hearts and minds” of the local population is the most important objective in any counterinsurgency war, the U.S.-led coalition is so unpopular that even Afghans getting most of the largesse—the Afghan security forces—hate coalition forces so much that the former are killing the latter in record numbers for allies in modern military history. The U.S. military continues to tout gains against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, but the most dangerous insurgency has always been in eastern Afghanistan. Besides, the pattern in many counterinsurgency wars is that the weaker guerrillas give ground when the stronger occupying force is on the offensive. The guerrillas bide their time until the occupier moves elsewhere, then they filter back and wait for the eventual departure of the occupier from the country. Because the United States has willingly obliged the Taliban by announcing that it will turn over security to the Afghan government and withdraw forces in 2014, the Taliban has no incentive to meaningfully negotiate a peace agreement. Like the North Vietnamese, the Taliban has merely “gotten smart” and is pretending to make moves toward negotiations while continuing to outwait the Americans. In the future, the Taliban will likely have a role in governing some or all of Afghanistan.

And it seems that the situation in post-Gadhafi Libya is beginning to unravel. There, an indigenous uprising prompted the West to bomb for successful regime change. But local protesters recently stormed the Benghazi office of the governing National Transitional Council (NTC) while the chief of that rickety government was inside, local militias in the city of Bani Walid revolted against a pro-government militia and are now governing the town, and the weak NTC forces have been unable to disarm factional militias around the country. Like Iraq, Libya has many armed factions and no tradition of democracy. Libya could easily lapse into tribal warfare.

On the other hand, the indigenous democratic revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt seem to be progressing. Tunisia recently had successful elections, and Egypt seated its new parliament and will hold a presidential election in June. In Tunisia, Islamists won the recent election but have paired with more liberal parties to form a coalition government.

Although the Egyptian parliament is dominated by Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that has a plurality in the legislative body, has gone “mainstream” and is cooperating with the military council’s timetable for transition to civilian rule. Although bumps on the road may arise and both of these countries may not have completely Western-style liberal democracies, their prospects for being long-term democracies look much brighter than in the three countries in which outside force was used to remove oppressive regimes.

Ivan Eland
The Independent Institute 

Photograph: Mohamed Omar/EPA

Air Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Clark

The Pakistani military leadership’s response to the U.S. report on its helicopter attack on two Pakistani border posts Nov. 26 assailed the credibility of the investigation by Air Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Clark and expressed doubt that the attack could have been “accidental”.

The long-expected rejoinder, made public Monday, charged that 28 of its soldiers at two border bases were killed one by one long after the U.S. military had been told about the attack on a Pakistani base.

The Pakistani critique questions the claims that the U.S. did not know about the Pakistani border posts, that the combined U.S.-Afghan Special Forces unit believed it was under attack from insurgents when it called in air strikes against the two border posts, and that a series of miscommunications prevented higher echelons from stopping the attacks on the border posts.

Revelations in the Clark report – as well as what it omits – support the Pakistani contention that the U.S. investigation covered up what actually occurred before and during the attack. Information in the report suggests that the planners of the Special Forces operation the night of Nov. 25-26 may have known about the two Pakistani border posts that were attacked while feigning ignorance to the commander who had to approve the operation.

It also portrays a military organisation that was not really interested in stopping the attack on the border posts even after it had been told that Pakistani military positions were under fire.

The Pakistani analysis does not repeat the assertion made by Gen. Ashfaq Nadeem, the director general for operations, in the aftermath of the attack that the coordinates of the two Pakistani border posts had been given to the U.S. military well before the incident of Nov. 25-26.

The analysis leaves no doubt, however, that the Pakistani military believed the United States was well aware of the two posts. It said each of the posts had five or six bunkers built above ground on the top of a ridge and clearly visible from Maya village about 1.5 kilometres away.

The Pakistani critique asserts that two or three U.S. aircraft had been operating in the area daily, and that U.S. intelligence had questioned Pakistani officials in the past even about changes in weaponry in its border posts.

The Pakistani military document highlights the revelation in the Clark report that Maj. Gen. James Laster, the commander of the “battlespace” in which Operation SAYAQA was to take place, had demanded that the planners of the operation “confirm the location of Pakistan’s border checkpoints”.

The most recent map of Pakistani border positions available at the time, according to the Clark report, was dated February 2011. The obvious intent of the demand by Gen. Laster was that the planners find out if there were any new border checkpoints that needed to be added to update the map.

The Clark report reveals that “pre-mission intelligence analysis” had indicated “possible border posts North and South of the Operation SAYAQA target areas….”

That intelligence was obviously relevant to Gen. Laster’s order, but those border posts did not show up on the map produced Nov. 23. The planners had decided not to check on those “possible border posts” by asking a Pakistani border liaison officer or investigating unilaterally.

The Clark report tiptoes carefully around the implications of that fact, saying the operation’s planners “did not identify any known border posts in the area of Operational SAYAQA”.

The point of requiring confirmation of a new map would presumably have been to go beyond border posts that were on the available map.

Air crews planning for the operation also knew about the “possible border posts”, according to the report, but didn’t include them in their “pre-mission planning packages”, because “they were data points outside the Operation SAYAQA area.”

U.S. investigators showed no apparent curiosity about what appears to have been the deliberate exclusion of the two new border posts from the map given to Gen. Laster.

The Pakistani critique charges that it is “not possible” that the failure to check on the Pakistani posts was “an innocent omission”.

A second point made by the Pakistani military is that the U.S. attack on its “Volcano” base by U.S. helicopter gunships continued for “as long as one hour and 24 minutes” after the U.S. side had been informed of the attack on its post.

Despite the fact that U.S. and ISAF officials had already been informed about the assault on the Pakistani bases “at multiple levels by the Pakistan side”, the Pakistani analysis charges, “every soldier in and around the posts…was individually targeted.”

The Clark report’s account of U.S. responses to being informed by Pakistani officials that their bases were under attack does nothing to allay Pakistani suspicions about the claim that the attack was unintentional.

It confirms the earlier Pakistani claim that its border liaison officer at the ISAF Regional Command East (RC-E) had informed the U.S. officers in charge of “deconfliction” with Pakistani positions on the border minutes after the attack had begun at 23:40 hours that Pakistani Frontier Force soldiers were being “engaged” by U.S.- coalition forces coming from Afghanistan.

The exchange over the news from the Pakistani officer was testy. Gen. Clark recalled in his press briefing on the report Dec. 22 that the Pakistani liaison officer had been asked where the border posts were located, and had not given the coordinates, but had responded, “Well, you know where it is because you’re shooting at them.”

Clark suggested that there was “confusion” about where the attack was taking place, but there was only one place where U.S. forces were firing at positions inside Pakistan that night, and RC-E’s border confliction cell could have easily identified that place quickly enough with one or two calls.

Neither the text of the report nor the detailed timeline in an annex show any effort to contact the Special Forces Task Force or Task Force BRONCO, which had approved the operation, about the report that they were attacking Pakistani border posts. The report offers no explanation for the absence of any action on that report, saying only that it “could not be immediately confirmed”.

Twenty minutes before the information had arrived, according to the Clark report, Task Force BRONCO told the Special Operations Task Force in the region it was still waiting to get confirmation from the Border Coordination Center for the area that there were no Pakistani troops near the operation. It added that RC-E was not tracking any PAKMIL border posts on its computerised map of the area.

The Special Operations Task Force then then sent out a message system saying, “PAKMIL has been notified and confirmed no positions in area.”

In yet another suspicious episode, instead of asking the Pakistani liaison to the border coordination commission whether Pakistan had any posts or troops in the area of Operation SAYAQA, RC-E give him a general location that was 14 kilometres away from that area and asked if Pakistan had troops nearby.

The misdirection of the Pakistani liaison officer, which ensured the response that there were no Pakistani troops in the area, is explained in the Clark report as having been caused by a “misconfigured electronic map overlay”.

Asked in his press briefing why the RC-E had refused to provide precise grid coordinates under circumstances in which it was supposed to be determining whether U.S. forces were firing at Pakistani forces, Clark cited “the overarching lack of trust”.

Nearly 40 minutes after the attack on border post “Volcano” began, according to a timeline in the report, the U.S. Liaison officer to Pakistan’s 11th Corps reported to the Special Operations Task Force that U.S. helicopters and a drone had been firing on a Pakistani military post.

But the Task Force waited for at least 10 more minutes, according to the timeline, before informing the Special Forces Unit.

Meanwhile Pakistani troops were being hunted down one by one.

Gareth Porter
IPS News

The first thing worth noting is this treatment of war dead is absolutely against the Geneva Convention. The second thing is we threw out the Geneva Convention when we invaded Afghanistan.

Which leads me to the following conclusion: It’s time to end this war. It’s time to leave.

President Dwight Eisenhower, in his 1963 memoir, noted that in Vietnam “the mass of the population supported the enemy.” This was an insurmountable obstacle (at the time) for the French and an ominous foreshadowing for a full-scale American conflict to come. A war the U.S. would engage in for 20 years through five presidents and an estimated 200,000 dead or wounded American soldiers.

Yet that is where we are with Afghanistan: The population is not on our side. I was recently on a television program with Michael Hastings, a reporter at Rolling Stone on Afghanistan. He said some of the Afghans still think they are fighting the Soviets (a nine year war which ended in 1989).

That is the best indication this war, for us, is unwinnable: We don’t really know who we’re fighting there and they don’t really know who they’re fighting there.

We’d actually have to educate people as to who it is they are trying to kill first…in order to “win their hearts and minds.”

We’ve been in a country called the graveyard of empires for a decade. Last year General David Petraeus announced his COIN or counterinsurgency strategy, integral in Iraq, would be implemented in Afghanistan too. The pillars of a COIN strategy are “security, political and economic.” Or as Petraeus wrote in the field manual “Success in COIN operations requires establishing a legitimate government supported by the people.” Basically, nation building. We have to build a nation that will be stable, legitimate AND support the U.S. How does that happen? More time; more soldiers; more money.

Just one decade is not enough to make little progress in a country whose last successful conqueror was the Mongols…roughly 800 years ago. And whose type of government historically can be best described as tribal.

Front-runner for the Republican nomination Mitt Romney said in his New Hampshire primary victory speech, “He [Obama] doesn’t see the need for overwhelming American military superiority.  I will insist on a military so powerful no one would think of challenging it.”

We have the largest navy in the world (twice as big as the second largest) and we’re in a ten-year-long struggle in a landlocked country.

This is a Romney “let them eat cake moment.” Oh we’re not winning with the biggest military in the history of the planet? The solution is to make it bigger!

Enough. Eisenhower, the last five-star general to be President of the United States, warned Americans upon his leaving office of the “military industrial complex.” Part of this complex is the insistence of “listening to the commanders on the ground.”

The commanders still insist we can win if we just try harder, stay long and commit more troops. But this is in their nature. Asking commanders on the ground if we should continue with a war is like asking a football coach if we should continue to have football games. Of course they say yes, they’re professionals and this is their livelihood. Their opinion should be treated as such.

In 2008, Obama was the recipient of more donations (6:1) from soldiers serving overseas than his opponent, former POW, John McCain. It was specifically because then-Senator Obama spoke of ending the Iraq War.

Iraq is over. Let’s end our involvement in Afghanistan too.

Tina Dupuy
Taking Eternal Vigilance Too Far 

Qalae Wazir, a slum in Kabul, (Photo: Wang Jing/China Daily)

Kabul sprawls like an injured lion. Its population has increased fourfold to 4.5 million over the past ten years. War refugees, fleeing the countryside for the relative safety of the citadel, find themselves in permanent slums (“Kabul Informal Settlements” in the bureaucratic argot). These slums (such as Chamane Babrack, Bagrami, Parwan Du, and Charahi Qambar) sit on hillsides or on the edges of Kabul, bursting with people whose lives have been measurably worsened by the ongoing conflict.

The UN’s High Commission on Refugees and the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation squabble over definitions: which family has been displaced by war, and who is an economic migrant. These distinctions mean little to the 5.7 million people who have been displaced by the insecurity occasioned by the ten-year war. A friend who works in one of the UN agencies in Kabul tells me that matters have reached a crisis point. He has used the term “crisis” four times over the past few years.

The idea of Afghanistan as “crisis” has a lineage that stretches back at least to 1818. The British thrived on the idea of Afghanistan as ungovernable, since it gave them license to meddle in its internal affairs under the pretense of establishing governance. The Afghans would have none of it, and even at the high-point of British power, in the 1850s, the Marquess of Dalhousie had to admit that relations between Afghans and the British were as “sullen quiescence on either side, without offence but without goodwill or intercourse.” Intrigue between the powers meant that the Afghans could be disregarded, as they were from the 1810s into the present.

Dalhousie’s senior, Lord Ellenborough wrote in his diary in 1829, “I feel confident that we shall have to fight the Russians on the Indus, and I have long had a presentiment that I should meet them there, and gain a great battle. All dreams, but I have had them a long time.” That dream became reality a hundred and fifty years later. The U. S. and the English rushed into action in 1979 when the Soviets invaded, beginning a secret war that created Bin Laden and foisted the Taliban upon the desperate Afghans (the National Archives in Britain released some files this week that reveal details of this secret war). The idea of Afghan anarchy was sufficient for the West to either intervene with force or to disregard the well-being of the people.

That disregard has become catastrophic in itself. The UN reports that most of the 7.3 million Afghans who now rely on emergency food assistance will not be able to access it (largely because pledges to the World Food Program have declined as a consequence of the world credit crisis). Food riots are to be expected in the short term.

Withdrawal

Over the past two years, the issue of civilian casualties had bedeviled the relationship between the U. S.-led coalition and the Karzai government. Pressure from tribal elders as much as from the beleaguered human rights community in Afghanistan made it impossible for Karzai to any longer ignore the harsh techniques of warfare used by the technologically superior U. S.-NATO forces.

Aerial attacks (some by drones) had wreaked havoc among the population, with civilian casualties (poorly recorded in the best circumstances) on the uptick. The focus of attention became the “night raids,” used routinely by the Coalition to pick up suspected insurgents. Over ten months last year, the “night raids” themselves accounted for the deaths of 1,500 civilians. Reporting that number the United Nations notes, “U. S. night raids are by far the largest cause of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.”

President Karzai has refused to sign the Strategic Partnership document with the United States until the NATO forces stop using “night raids.” “NATO-led ISAF forces have killed Afghan civilians for no reason,” said Karzai’s office. The pressure on Karzai not to bend on this issue is one of the main levers to eject NATO-U. S. troops from the region. A similar problem with extra-territorial protection of U. S. troops led to their ejection from Iraq. The United States prefers to depart hastily from Afghanistan as well rather than allow its armed forces to be accountable to an occupied people, or even to international law.

Rules for withdrawal were set in the 19^th century. The British discovered early enough that technological superiority would surround them with dead bodies but not political victories. Their withdrawals took place through manipulation of the internal political dynamics in Afghanistan, using people like Dost Muhammed when it suited them, and tossing them aside when it no longer did. The Soviets opened up negotiations with the mujahidin before they departed as well (documented in Artemy Kalinovsky’s new book A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan). They hastened across the Amu Darya, abandoning the country into a catastrophic civil war (1992-1996) that killed more people than during the Soviet invasion itself. It was out of this chaos that the Taliban emerged as a kind of demented stability.

Over the course of the past year, the United States and the Afghan government have tried to cut a deal with the Taliban. Burnt by the United States after Mullah Omar’s representatives reached out in the days after September 11, the Taliban have been suspicious of any opening. Tayeb Agha, Mullah Omar’s spokesperson for the past decade, was key to the current discussions, and would have brought that healthy suspicion from the past to the forefront.

In late December, the Afghan Peace Council’s international advisor, Mohammad Ismail Qasimyar, announced that six or seven Taliban members and their families had departed South Asia for the emirate of Qatar. There they were going to set up a liaison office, a “post-box” to open direct discussion with the United States, mediated through the increasingly important regime of Qatar.

It is to be seen what will come out of these negotiations: at a minimum the Taliban want Afghans imprisoned in Guantanamo to be released into Afghanistan as well as the departure of the foreign forces, while the U. S. and NATO are eager for the creation of “conflict-free” zones in the country. The gap between the two is going to take considerable confidence to bridge.

Politics

The use of Qatar is significant. It indicates that the United States, and perhaps the Taliban as well, want to sideline the government of Pakistan from these negotiations (there is a suggestion from some who know that the assassination of the Afghan grandee Burhanuddin Rabbani last year might have been carried out with the collusion of Pakistani intelligence). All signs indicate that this withdrawal will simply be a repeat of the Soviet withdrawal in 1988-89 and the British withdrawal a century before that. It will abjure the region, and play one favorite against another, leaving the country to the mercy of a bloodbath.

Over the past decade, the United States and NATO have worked with almost deliberate intent against a regional solution. The creation of the idea of “Af-Pak” turned out to be a dangerous illusion. It seems, in retrospect, a convenient way to allow drones to attack civilian areas in northern Pakistan rather than to consider Afghanistan’s future in terms of its neighborhood.

The United States brought too much global baggage to Afghanistan. Chinese economic clout entered the country in the extraction and trade sectors, but the Chinese were never brought in as political actors. Iran has considerable influence in western Afghanistan, but the U. S. antipathy to Iran (partly drawn through Washington’s confluence with Israel) made it impossible to allow Tehran to play a central role in Afghanistan’s stabilization.

India’s close relationship with the backbone of the educated middle class and hence the State bureaucracy (including Karzai, who studied in India) would have made its role crucial. Instead, the Bush administration forged a nuclear deal with India that angered the Pakistanis; the quid pro quo for the nuclear deal was for India to vote against Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2005. Relations between Pakistan and India soured, and that between Iran and India entered their lowest point. The potential for any regional dialogue was compromised by the itch of the Great Power.

The United States wanted the Afghanistan endeavor to be a joint venture between the G7-NATO and the Afghans, with the Pakistanis and the Central Asian states playing the doormat. The Bonn meeting (December 2001) and the Tokyo meeting (January 2002) set the parameters: NATO would provide the guns, and the G7 would open their wallets. It was a deliberate snub to the regional powers. Russia, China and the Central Asian states had already been involved in a campaign against the Taliban in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

The Bush administration disregarded the SCO, and took the G7-NATO route. Last year, Obama tried to open up dialogue with the SCO, but in a ham-handed way: the U. S. wanted to have a directive role in the SCO, bringing in Turkey, India and Pakistan as well as offering its leadership over the SCO. The SCO was loath to become another Organization of American States or an Asian offshoot of NATO. Despite Hillary Clinton’s trips to Dushanbe and the U. S. Congress’ removal of sanctions against Uzbekistan, it seems unlikely that any rapprochement with the SCO is on the cards.

The habits of imperialism forestall a genuine dialogue with and about Afghanistan. The United States will exit Afghanistan in the next few years. None of its promises of health and well-being, democracy and women’s rights will be realized. These failures cannot be placed on the culture of Afghanistan, for the country had been far along the road to its own kind of modernity by the 1960s. Fingers of blame for the catastrophe of Afghanistan in its most recent phase must point directly to the capitals of the G7, with the longest finger vibrating toward Washington, DC.

Vijay Prashad
Counterpoint

Republished with the author’s permission.

The American anti-war movement has been a laughable failure.

The reasons are twofold: First, the American liberal has a penchant for picking the wrong champions.

Recently, on Ed Schultz’s radio show, a caller criticized the new bill that legalizes the military’s detaining U.S. citizens  indefinitely without charge. The host merely said that this was something Obama has to fight, as if Obama had expressed any interest in fighting it. Liberals reject the evidence of their senses.

The guest on Schultz’s show actually said that the Iraq War helped America. If I wanted to hear opinions like that, I’d tune in to Fox.

Liberals love Rachel Maddow, Schultz’s colleague on MSNBC, but in the years I’ve listened to her I don’t really recall hearing her utter many left-wing sentiments, if any. She even once said that she considered joining the U.S. military―presumably so she could also participate in atrocities―but didn’t because of the ban on gay soldiers.

Once a colleague of mine, a liberal Democrat, was looking for someone to speak about Iraq.  I pointed out that, while it sounded immodest, I would be happy to speak: The Stop the War Coalition in England had invited me to speak at a demonstration in London that drew 100,000 people.  At the time I was a Science Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security.  My colleague instead wanted someone at the Naval Postgraduate School, who indeed was a scholar studying Iraq, but was not anti-war.

On MSNBC or in The Nation Magazine we see the pro-Obama Melissa Harris-Perry or the ex-Republican Cenk Uygur. Van Jones just can’t stop apologizing to Republicans.

The second reason the American anti-war movement failed is that it neglected to groom future leaders.  Around 2005, CSPAN cameras caught me asking  Noam Chomsky at Boston’s Trinity Church if he had any successors.  His glib reply was that anyone can speak: when he first started, he had an audience of four people.

Anyone can speak, but not anyone gets listened to. Besides, why leave it up to chance?  Chomsky could pick his successors. Right now there is no professor at MIT, or at any of the elite universities, who shares Chomsky’s views. Even Clay Carson at Stanford, who has done research related to the Black Panther Party, does not himself support the goals of the Black Panther Party.

The aversion to anointing successors, which goes back to Martin Luther King, is almost a madness of the left, like the aversion of an OCD man to touching door handles.  Bob Moses, a leader of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, now runs the Algebra Project: teaching African-American kids algebra is, says Moses, the civil-rights struggle of this century.  I knew Moses’ daughter in college, I have a doctorate in math, which only five African-Americans get each year, and I am among only a half-a-dozen research mathematicians in America, black or white, who care about K-12 education, so you would think Moses would want to work with me; but he didn’t.

About the best we have is Glenn Greenwald, but I have not seen him on BBC World Television or in the pages of the New York Times (I’ve been on or in both twice). Instead, we still see Amy Goodman lamenting the loss of octogenarian Howard Zinn on a television network only a few thousand people watch.

The American anti-war movement failed to promote the truly left-wing voices in America and it failed to develop new ones. It failed to stop the war in Iraq and it failed to end the war in Afghanistan.  It is “anti-war” the same way that a fly is anti-swatter.

It has been a risible failure.

Jonathan David Farley

Jonathan David Farley is a mathematician and associate of The Warren Group, advisors for the Democratic Party’s 2010 nominee for U.S. Senate in South Carolina.

The United States is in the midst of a mini-oil boom, which has reversed, at least temporarily, the country’s increasing dependence on foreign sources of oil. Oil extracted from shale deposits in North Dakota, Montana, and Texas has reversed years of decreasing American oil production, leading to increased domestic extraction and thus reducing dependence on overseas oil from 60 percent of U.S. consumption in 2005 to a little less than half now.

Add to this the exports from Canada of oil from tar sands for refining in U.S. refineries (some of which will come through the future Keystone pipeline), and the United States will be, for the first time since 1949, a net exporter of petroleum products, such as jet fuel, gasoline, diesel fuel, and heating oil.

Shouldn’t the two parties pat themselves on the back? After all, under their stewardship, aren’t we reducing dependence on the terrorist nations and dictatorships of the Persian Gulf? Not really. Dependence on foreign oil is not the problem that conventional wisdom makes it out to be. As a corollary, all the wars we have fought over oil—for example, two with Iraq and the threat of such with Iran—have been largely unnecessary and immensely expensive.

Of the less than half of U.S. petroleum consumed that is imported, about half of that comes from the Western Hemisphere. Only about 18 percent of imports originate from the Persian Gulf.

But it would not matter much if the United States produced 100 percent of what it consumed or whether it all came from the Persian Gulf, because the price at the pump is determined by the worldwide oil market. If more oil is put on market from anywhere around the globe, the price will go down; similarly, if oil production is cut anywhere in the world and not offset by increases elsewhere, the price will go up.

Thus, this American mini-boom will not likely make much of a difference in what the U.S. consumer pays for gasoline, diesel fuel, or heating oil.

But at least we don’t have to buy as much oil or petroleum products from Persian Gulf autocracies or terrorist-sponsoring nations, right? Maybe so, but it doesn’t reduce our imports from those nations that much. Also, if the United States is now a net exporter of petroleum products, shouldn’t we stanch this flow and buy from the Persian Gulf even less? No.

Even if nations such as Iran and Saudi Arabia didn’t sell to the United States (come to think of it, the U.S. hasn’t bought oil from Iran in decades), they would simply sell to other, more than willing buyers. The rapidly growing countries in the developing world—such as China and India—care a lot less about the political nature of the countries supplying their oil than do the United States and Europe. So embargoes, boycotts, and efforts at becoming oil-independent have little effect. Supplies just reorder around obstacles in the world market.

But didn’t world oil production peak in 2006, as the International Energy Agency concluded probably occurred? Doesn’t this condemn the world to fighting more future wars over dwindling petroleum resources?

No. First of all, “experts” have been repeatedly predicting the depletion of the world’s oil reserves since the late 1800s, but it never seems to happen. New technologies and periodic higher prices make previously uneconomic deposits viable—such as the tar sands and shale oil that have recently become economic—thus sustaining world production.

Second, academic research has indicated that conflicts are much more likely over allocation of money received from abundant natural resources (for example, fighting in Nigeria over who gets proceeds from oil exports) than conflict over scarce resources that can be priced in a market. That is, it is cheaper to pay the market price than to go to war.

So if that is true—and it has been true since the classical economists discovered in the late 1700s that empire didn’t pay—then why has the U.S. military, over the years, essentially become an oil-protection force? Could it be that the U.S. is not aggressively employing military power to ensure that it has oil supplies—as the Imperial Japanese did before and during World War II—but is instead using the threat of armed force to keep a thumb on the oil lifelines of other nations (for example, China)?

Ivan Eland
The Independent Institute 

President Barack Obama greets veterans on the USS Carl Vinson. (White House Photo by Pete Souza)

This past week, precious few of us noticed that the last 500 American soldiers drove themselves across desert sands and out of Iraq, fulfilling President Barack Obama’s promise to end our engagement there by year’s end.

Now, I have a few bones to pick with the President. For one, the man who carried so many of my hopes for a better America after the dismal Bush-Cheney years would have made his way to Madison last winter to stand with the Wisconsinites protesting the union-busting efforts of a far-right governor and a Tea Party-dominated legislature.

For another, he would have stood with the Occupy folks in one city after another around the country and, earlier, kept single-payer healthcare “on the table” until the opposition blasted it off with dynamite.

And right along, he would have fought harder to keep people in their homes and back at work, any work, than he did safeguarding the pocketbooks of Wall Street plutocrats.

By the same token, the President Sharon and I endorsed all through the 2008 campaign also would have ended the Iraq War we had opposed so early and so fervently.

And so, we need to come to a full stop right there, because President Obama has ended the Iraq War—as cleanly and gracefully as anyone could reasonably expect. Even as LA Progressive pages sling arrows his way—pushing him from the Left, as some say we’re supposed to do—we must also applaud the skill, doggedness, and vision it took for him to bring that war to a close.

I don’t claim any great connection to the nation’s seats of power—the closest I ever got was the summer I spent bartending at The Dubliner, a well-used Irish drinking establishment at the bottom of Capitol Hill. But I do believe that Obama must have faced tremendous pressure to prolong the war, to extend it indefinitely, to establish a permanent encampment, from America’s military and its war industry backers—supported by an opposition party that thinks hamstringing a President at every turn in the midst of two misbegotten wars and an economic collapse deeper than any but the oldest among us can recall is something short of treason.

So, let’s pause now to honor President Obama and his administration. Then let’s take a moment to reflect on how best to honor the service of the men and women who fought in Iraq over the past decade.

In Like a Lion

How differently this war has ended from others in living memory. So far, Obama has made one speech “welcoming home” soldiers at Fort Bragg—no crowing or strutting, so understated you might have missed it had you been out that day doing your Christmas shopping. No doubt there’ll be more pomp and circumstance around the war’s end in this campaign season, but for now—dignified, reverential, utterly appropriate has been the order of the day.

Compare that to the nights of “shock and awe” that began this war, as our overwhelming technological might rained down holy hell on a virtually defenseless Baghdad—as if in their grotesque ugliness those nights of murderous destruction somehow counterbalanced the dark horror of the Twin Towers falling.

There was chest-thumping aplenty then, with Bush and Cheney and their minions swaggering before every available camera, edging each other aside to show what a bunch of tough nuts they were. Remember?

But not everyone joined the parade as America rushed to war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. From the start, some of us thought we were rushing into the wrong war in the wrong country for the wrong reasons. My Dad and I were among them.

As combat veterans—he in World War II and me in Vietnam—we came to our skepticism honestly. Early on, even as the bombs and missiles fell on Iraq and Iraqis, I remember talking with my Dad about how the books seemed to have been cooked, the evidence tampered with, to excuse this latest bit of American adventurism. It was just a gut feeling, but a deeply held one.

In an odd way, our wars had brought the two of us back together. In my late teens, I had morphed from a straight-A student, mind your P’s and Q’s kid, into Adolescent Rebellion Incarnate—the whiskey bottle that would rule my life into my 30s firmly in hand, on the road to a decade or more of poor decisions, one of which was to join the Army in 1968, in part to straighten out a life that had gone so badly awry.

Then, the second time I was wounded, as a foot soldier with the 9th Infantry Division patrolling along the Mekong River, I took a piece of shrapnel from a Chinese grenade that lodged in my right calf at precisely the point a piece of German 88-mm shell had lodged itself in my Dad’s leg 24 years earlier, as he prepared to lead his company of combat engineers across a different river into Aachen, Germany.

As with my Dad’s wound, the shrapnel could have pierced my head or my heart, in which case I would have joined the four Vietcong soldiers who died that evening. But it was my leg, so the impact merely knocked me to the ground, cutting the nerve in my lower right leg so I felt little pain and could defend myself until the firefight ended and I could be transported through a series of hospitals to Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver, where my Dad and I first compared our similar wounds.

But long before that firefight, I had begun to lose faith in my country’s ability to tell the truth about what we were doing in Vietnam, a cynicism that grew as I returned to civilian life, saw what was going on with older and wiser eyes, and joined antiwar protests in New York City and back home in Minneapolis.

But I faced a terrible dissonance. On the one hand, I felt I had acquitted myself well in combat, acting honorably, calm and cool, for the most part, and not letting fear and anger make me into something I would hate myself for becoming.

Dad (David E. Price), with his wife Betty, my daughter Nea and wife Sharon.

On the other hand, there was the war—wrong and wrong-headed, foisted upon a believing public by the “Best and the Brightest” then, just as decades later this other war was foisted on an equally credulous populace by decidedly dimmer bulbs.

It was my Dad who helped me separate the two, allowing me to honor my own service and the service of my fellow soldiers—the great many of whom had acted honorably in combat, as I had—while repudiating a war we had no business fighting.

Just so, I can now honor the service of the military men and women who have fought so long in Iraq and are now returning—the great majority of whom who have acted honorably under fire—just as I hold fast to the notion that the Iraq invasion was undertaken for disreputable ends.

Tonight, my Dad rests in a hospital bed in Florida where he retired many years ago. My war wound has never bothered me much and now is just an ugly scar on my calf and parts of my foot I cannot feel, which will only occasionally stiffen and swell.

But my Dad always favored his right leg, damaging his knee and hip as the years passed. Now on his second hip replacement, he recently took a tumble, causing that hip to swell. His doctors don’t want to open up a man his age to remove the clot that has formed there.

Our prayers are with him, of course. We want him to keep right on trucking. At 94, he’s got a lively mind and quick wit. He loves to tell us how he has gone to the gym or played his piano or taken his wife Betty to dinner whenever we call. He keeps up with our magazine, too, occasionally sending us a note about something we have published.

More than anything, as we honor President Obama for the grace and courage to end the Iraq War, I want to have my Dad around because he gave me the greatest gift I can imagine. He taught me how to be a man in this world.

Dick Price
Editor, LA Progressive