just when i thought i couldn't be any more disappointed with the Village (0.00 / 0)

"I think around town there is new thinking: 'Well, what do we actually want to achieve?'

i'm not in DC anymore, but this sounds about right. "new" thinking, uh huh. wow, you'd think some people would've been asking questions like "what do we want to acheive" i dunno, mebbe before the invasion? or perhaps even once the invasion was over and we were trying to set up a government there, or at some point over the last five or so years, or...

the Nir Rosen piece in Rolling Stone, iirc, told me everything i already knew from other sources actually doing reporting and leaving Kabul and otherwise looking at a map of the place. like iraq, there is no "winning" there, and even if there had been a chance to "win" afghanistan to some purpose or cause, that chance is long past. if i were in charge, i'd be looking at massive aid programs, education, empowering women, microloans...you know, all that DFH stuff which costs less than war and doesn't enrich Halliburton. but obviously i know nothing about "winning" a region of the world via conflict that has never in the history of mankind been successfully occupied and controlled by outside forces. i'm glad the smart people in charge do, you betcha!

---

by: chicago dyke @ Tue Dec 09, 2008 at 07:31:43 AM CST

Someone who does know (0.00 / 0)

Barnett Rubin:
* "Some additional troops in Afghanistan could protect local populations while the police and the administration develop. They also might enable U.S. and NATO forces to reduce or eliminate their reliance on the use of air strikes, which cause civilian casualties that recruit fighters and supporters to the insurgency."
* "Securing Afghanistan and its region will require an international presence for many years, but only a regional diplomatic initiative that creates a consensus to place stabilizing Afghanistan ahead of other objectives could make a long-term international deployment possible."
* "Both U.S. presidential candidates are committed to sending more troops to Afghanistan, but this would be insufficient to reverse the collapse of security there. A major diplomatic initiative involving all the regional stakeholders in problem-solving talks and setting out road maps for local stabilization efforts is more important."
* "The goal of the next U.S. president must be to put aside the past, Washington's keenness for "victory" as the solution to all problems, and the United States' reluctance to involve competitors, opponents, or enemies in diplomacy. A successful initiative will require exploratory talks and an evolving road map."
I opposed the invasion of Afghanistan from the get-go. It's not obvious to me that we gained anything in terms of security by invading that country. Indeed Bin Laden and the Taliban just went underground and we became mired in a costly endeavor with no end in sight. Through international cooperation, which we had the opportunity to leverage after 9/11, we could have organized a diplomatic "stand-off" with the Taiban-led government that could have potentially led to a negotiated extradition of Bin Laden and his cohorts.

---

by: jeffbinnc @ Tue Dec 09, 2008 at 07:36:05 AM CST

Two quick points (0.00 / 0)

First, the biggest potential flashpoints between the left and Obama are probably Afghanistan and the economy. It may well be that the very public neutering of the left and its exclusion from council and from having a prominent official voice is because Obama wants greater freedom of action on these matters. If you publicly marginalize and exclude the left, redefine it so Hildebrand, and Clinton, and Daschle represent the "acceptable" left then you eliminate much criticism that might be otherwise taken seriously. (Obama has made much of his desire to listen to be in touch plugged in keep his blackberry. This while he tells the left through the tool Hildebrand to shut the fuck up)
Second, any attempt at THIS time (things might have been different seven years ago and with a different bunch in power) to expand military operations is not "odd" as Bowers quaintly puts it. It is a prescription for disaster. The indiscriminate use of American power has made the Taliban the major force in Afghanistan. Either we begin again with less allied support (there is only so much even Allies are willing to do and following America's neocons off another cliff has little appeal) and against much greater hostility from the Afghan populace which has seen little or no benefit from ousting the Taliban and great downside and misery or we make soft power the goal, sign some sort of deal with the Taliban which gives them unfortunately a great deal of power (they know the real balance of power has shifted and won't agree to anything less) and we try to enforce it from afar as much as possible. It's not good, but we don't have good choices.

---

by: VLaszlo @ Tue Dec 09, 2008 at 08:37:18 AM CST

time to get the hell out (4.00 / 2)

Nobody conque--  I mean stabilizes Afghanistan.  The Indians tried.  They call the mountains there the Hindu Kush.  That means "Hindu killers".  The Brits tried.  The only piece of Rudyard Kipling I really remember is the verse in "Solider of the Queen" where he says

when you're wounded and left
on Afghanistan's plains
and the women come out
to cut up what remains
just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains
and go to your God like a soldier
a soldier of the queen.

The Russians tried.  And now we are trying.  How's that going?  Not so well.  We (and NATO) have seventy thousand uniformed troops and a number of mercs that our betters refuse to disclose in-country.  The mercs and uniforms cannot possibly be less than a hundred thousand.  And now our "experts" and the president-elect want to jack this number ten or fifteen or twenty percent.  

There is no future for conq -- I mean stabilizing other people who don't want to be stabilized by outsiders.  It's a business we really should get the hell out of.

But of course, As Chris Bowers said in an earlier post, the left viewpoint is simply unrealistic, off the page, off the whole table and never mentioned, though occasionally and dismissively reacted to.  

There is an inconvenient fact about Afghanistan --- a parallel with Vietnam and Central America that ought to be chilling for all the wrong reasons.  The dope.

When the US military and the clandestine services ran rampant through Southeast Asia for twenty years between Dien Bien Phu and the fall of Saigon, they discovered a convenient and reliable off the books revenue stream for their bloody-handed local puppets and allies, a revenue stream that Congress could not cut.  During our wars in Southeast Asia, the Golden Triangle, through the efforts of South Vietnamese and Laotian generals using US resources to ship and refine the stuff, became the world's biggest supplier of heroin, and the source for all you could get here.

In the 80s Congress forbade Reagan from funding his puppet war in Central America.  Reagan looked around and found a revenue stream that Congress could not cut, really a couple of them.  One was arms for hostages, a deal that Robert Gates has been fingered as being instrumental in.  The other was more dope, this time cocaine from Colombia.  US forces were implicated in protecting those who shipped it through Central America on its way here, and in some cases the actual wholesale dealers in the U.S.  Los Angeles crack dealers where being supplied by people with connections to Reagan's off the books war in Central America.  Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News wrote about it and it cost him his career.  Colombia, the biggest recipient of US military dollars in the hemisphere, still supplies nearly all the cocaine consumed in the US.  

Back to Vietnam, the US involvement in heroin trafficking in Vietnam, and to some extent in Afghanistan are amply set forth in historical context in Dr. Alfred McCoy's two works, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972), and the Politics of Heroin, CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (2005) stand as universally recognized and extraordinarily well-documented pieces of work in the subject.

And our CIA seems to have had a penchant for making drug dealer allies all over the planet.  Bob Gates, just to remind you all, was deputy chief of CIA during the contra wars in Central America, a good deal of which were funded by drug money when Reagan needed a source Congress could not cut for a war that Congress forbade.  So Gates, our current Secretary of War, is a living link to some of this history.

But back to Afghanistan, why are we not talking about US governmental complicity in the drug trade in Afghanistan, and historically in these other places?   Do we have to guess where 90% of the world's supply of heroin has come from the last few years?  The brother of Afghan president Kharzai is the country's and perhaps the world's biggest heroin dealer.

So what is it again that we are protecting, what noble goals are we upholding in Afghanistan?  And how will escalating the war there make us safer over here?

"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other people, then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding..."
Zora Neale Hurston

---

by: bruce.dixon @ Tue Dec 09, 2008 at 08:40:25 AM CST

Good point (4.00 / 1)

by Bob Dallek via Ezra Klein, for those who aren't instinctually opposed to war, militarism empire, and occupation.

War kills reform. Every time we've had a major commitment to a war, it has killed a reform movement. Progressivism was done in by the Spanish-American war. Populism by World War I. FDR said Dr. New Deal has been replaced by Dr. War. The Great Society by the Vietnam War. You cannot have guns and butter. If Obama escalates in Afghanistan, if he draws us into a broader war which takes many lives and much money, it will ruin his chances for reform.

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/b...

---

by: david mizner @ Tue Dec 09, 2008 at 11:14:26 AM CST

First principles (0.00 / 0)

Everybody has a universal right to self-defense, including us. The rub, as Glenn Greenwald reminds, is that every war is sold as a defensive war. I disagree with Michael Moore and others that the Afghanistan war is based on false pretenses to loot resources or serve imperial ends (though the morally challenged among us will certainly attempt to work those goals). We (the US) were the objects of indiscriminate violence by al Qaeda and its fellow travelers, and the Taliban hosted them and gave them training grounds to prepare. We have a right to defend ourselves.

Having said that, the current policy is clearly not working. Even if the Taliban are largely a local group with local concerns, they're still a threat if they'll claim that their "Afghan tradition of hospitality" prevents them from kicking Al Qaeda out. There is historical precedent for rescinding such hospitality. Tribes throughout the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands drove out the "Hindustani fanatics" - the war-loving Wahhabi-inspired predecessors of Al Qaeda - in the 19th century, so they could count this among their historical precedents too if they chose to acknowledge it.

But I really don't have any suggestions to make if the Taliban are going to refuse to prevent movements of international violence from launching attacks from inside their borders. I'd rather we not be there, but if it's the only way to stop the indiscriminate violence against us, then it has to be.

---

by: johnalive @ Tue Dec 09, 2008 at 12:36:00 PM CST

the afghan invasion / occupation is not self-defense (0.00 / 0)

not by any standard.  We are raining bombs and drone-directed fire down on civilians, creating dozens more people with blood grudges against us every day.  We have empowered one bunch of religious fanatics and over another, installed Kharzai as the mayor of Kabul (his presidential write does not run much past the capital city), and turned Afghanistan into the world's leading heroin supplier to "defend" ourselves?

Doesn't pass the smell test.  Smells like empire.

"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other people, then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding..."
Zora Neale Hurston

---

by: bruce.dixon @ Tue Dec 09, 2008 at 13:26:45 PM CST

[ Parent ]

I agree 100 percent (0.00 / 0)

I oppose it all. If I could I would sweep all that away, but the problem would remain of preventing indiscriminate violence directed at you, me and anybody else who is an American or inhabits North America by the relatively small but deadly group of people that the Taliban played host to. What you describe has made that small group of people much larger than what it was. What we are doing there now has become part of the problem.

Examining long-term US policies to discover the source of grievances and then charting a path away from them is a good long-term solution - and obviously, ditching the stupid short-term Bushian policies that you describe of the last 5 years would be awesome - but the problem remains of being targeted by a campaign of violence if it is planned and implemented from Afghan territory.

But let me be clear - I'm not saying this to support the status quo. I just genuinely don't know what to do about the larger situation. And if you're implying that we should just get the hell and out and disappear completely that would be great, but it doesn't deal with the violence-directed-at-you/me issue.

---

by: johnalive @ Tue Dec 09, 2008 at 16:56:10 PM CST

[ Parent ]