UK Guardian film-maker and photographer Sean Smith has just spent five weeks in Afghanistan, first with a US helicopter ambulance crew, and then with the US marines. This video summarizes what he saw. The diary of his trip can be found here.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was interviewed for the entire show of Democracy Now! today. I've chosen a few key passages to highlight which, to me at least, present the most important counter-arguments to the White House and Versailles media narratives that try to minimize, dismiss and stigmatize what the documents reveal and Wikileaks' actions in releasing them. The clarity and straight-forward logic of Wikileaks' position stands in stark contrast to everything Versailles, including the increasingly contorted and self-contradictory Obama Administration:
The Most Important Revelations
It's not the individual facts, so much as it is the broad panaroma of them all, which in turn enables us to grasp the individual facts much more realistically by understanding the broader context in which they occur:
AMY GOODMAN [Introducing a pre-recorded clip]: I began by asking Julian Assange what he thought of the most important revelations in the 91,000 documents he published on Sunday, the biggest leak in US history.
JULIAN ASSANGE: So, everyone's asking for a specific revelation that is the most important-you know, a massacre of 500 people at one point in time. But, to me, what is most important is the vast sweep of abuses that have occurred during the past six years, the vast sweep of sort of the everyday squalor and carnage of war. If we add all that up, we see that in fact most civilian casualties occur in incidences where one, two, ten or twenty people are killed. And they really numerically dominate the list of events, so it's, of course, hard for us to imagine that. It's so much material. But that is the way to really understand this war, is by seeing that there is one sort of kill after another every day going on and on and on in all sorts of different circumstances.
War Crimes
There is evidence that warrants investigation. This should be taken very seriously:
AMY GOODMAN: You have said you feel there is evidence of war crimes here. Can you talk about that? And specifically, what are the examples that you feel are the most important?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah. Yeah, well, these reports can be quite terse, so I wouldn't want to prejudge the issue and say for sure that a war crime has committed-been committed. But some are deeply suspicious, and there are examples which have been not mentioned in the Western press but, as we've discovered, have been mentioned elsewhere that are almost surely war crimes.
As an example, in the material, there's a Polish My Lai. Polish troops were hit by an IED and the next day went to the closest village, which I guess they felt had supported the IED attack, and shelled the village. Similarly, we see something like Task Force 373, a special forces assassination squad so secretive that it changes its military code name every six months, working its way down the JPEL, Joint Priority Effects List, kill or capture list, usually a kill list. And we have seen events where it has performed secret missile strikes on a house, from within close proximity, and ended up killing at least seven children, and a number of other incidences. The report itself about that says at the beginning that the information about 373 being involved in that event, together with the use of the HIMARS missile system, this ground-to-ground missile attack, is to be kept secret even from other people in the coalition of forces which equal ISAF, I-S-A-F.
Pentagon Starts Criminal Investigation of Leaks--NOT War Crimes
It's no longer news that the Obama Administration--like the Bush Administration before it--sees leaks as bad, and war crimes as... well, just not that important:
After so many months of frustration in the elusive quest for bipartisanship, Barack Obama has finally succeeded in his Grail Quest! That's right folks, bi-partisanship! 148 Democrats and 160 Republicans in the House! Woopee!
Except, of course, for the substance: More money for an Afghanistan War supplemental (which Obama promised not to do any more), with all the domestic spending previously used to entice Democrats stripped out of the bill. HuffPo's Ryan Grimm does a very good job of hitting all the contradictions and disconnects involved (including Arne Duncan's fury at the prospect of more funding for teachers interfering with his Race-To-The-Top war on teachers--which Grimm doesn't explain, but Open Lefters will understand):
Back in early 2008, Glenn Greenwald put together a little list of Versailles bipartisanship on parade. I've referenced that list a number of times since then, starting with a diary the very same week, "Bipartisanship Vs. Reality: The Stimulus Package" (this was pint-sized Bush stimulus I was writing about). A shortened snippet of Glenn's piece, with my reformatted version of Glenn's list reads as follows:
"bipartisanship" is already rampant in Washington, not rare. And, in almost every significant case, what "bipartisanship" means in Washington is that enough Democrats join with all of the Republicans to endorse and enact into law Republican policies, with which most Democratic voters disagree. That's how so-called "bipartisanship" manifests in almost every case....
On virtually every major controversial issue -- particularly, though not only, ones involving national security and terrorism -- the Republicans (including their vaunted mythical moderates and mavericks) vote in almost complete lockstep in favor of the President, the Democratic caucus splits, and the Republicans then get their way on every issue thanks to "bipartisan" support. That's what "bipartisanship" in Washington means.
The President has changed. But the pattern remains remarkably constant. And the American people remain deeply at odds with the buy-partisan concensus in Versailles.
On July 5, Robert Cruikshank, aka "Robert in Monterey" aka "eugene", wrote a diary at Dkos, "We Were Right", about the folly of Afghanistan War. It began thus:
Nearly 9 years ago, on a late September afternoon in 2001, I joined maybe 150 other people at Westlake Center in Seattle to protest the looming war in Afghanistan.
It felt like screaming into the wind. Most passersby looked at us as if we had two heads. Others shouted at us, calling us traitors or terrorist-lovers. A few times a pickup truck with a big American flag on a pole mounted in the bed drove by and shouted at us. And this was in a city that, just a year and a half later, saw over 100,000 people march against the Iraq War.
The protest accomplished nothing. We didn't stop the invasion from happening or change many minds at all about the Afghanistan conflict. But as the war grinds on after 9 years, and as it becomes clear that it has been a failure, it's worth re-examining why we were right to protest it....
It was obvious to me that an invasion of Afghanistan would lead to a long-term occupation that would resemble the ill-fated Soviet invasion and occupation of the late 1970s and 1980s, and would needlessly kill Americans and Afghans alike.
Further, it seemed that an invasion of Afghanistan, as opposed to a surgical strike designed to capture bin Laden, would solidify a militaristic response to terrorism and open the door to future military adventures. Even I didn't imagine that Bush really would seek to invade Iraq, not in September 2001, even though it was already being planned - but that was how it played out, with the apparently "successful" invasion of Afghanistan softening the public to the big enchilada, the Iraq War.
Everything Robert wrote was true. But there was more. And the Wikileaks "Afghan War Diary" helps us understand the big picture, not so much by providing radically new information, but simply by documenting what was clearly inevitable at the time to those knowledgeable about the region.
To a very large extent, the most important thing about the diary is that it serves to underscore some basic truths, the denial of which have been central to our entire mindset and strategic framework of assumptions since 9/11. Three things in particular are significant:
After months of hinting, Wikileaks has released a massive archive of classified records about the Afghanistan war, similar in scope and significance to the Pentagon Papers. The UK Guardian has an overview story here, an entire subsection of their website devoted to the records and related stories here, an editorial about their significance and their release here, and a story about the controvery surrounding the release, including Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's response to White House criticsm here. In addition, today Democracy Now! devoted it's entire program to a discussion of the document release and what it reveals, with Daniel Ellsberg, Gareth Porter (Perils of Dominence) and others.
A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.
The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and more than 1,000 US troops.
Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama's "surge" strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.
How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.
How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.
How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.
How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.
The story goes on to note the White House push-back, which is a good deal slicker than Nixon's was:
That's what we're doing -- trying to give them the best chance they've ever had. And they may not take it. And our troops staying there may not make them more likely to take it. To recognize that is not to accept military defeat. Frankly, establishing a government in a foreign country isn't a military objective. It just isn't. Counterinsurgency theory be damned. It's a civilian, development objective, in this case with military support.
A military objective is winning a war. War is destructive, not constructive. We send men into war with guns, not with shields. It is not to accept military defeat to recognize that the 82nd Airborne can do many things but it can't make the governor of Nangarhar Province not corrupt. If we think there is a future in which the Afghan government is real and it runs and controls that country to the exclusion of the Taliban, and it's there because we've made that possible, then there is an American national security interest in us still being there. But if that's not possible. No matter what we do. If no matter HOW MUCH WE WANT for that to happen, we can't make that happen....
If we can't make the outcome we want come to fruition, then we should fund and train and support the Afghan government all we can. But each additional American life sacrificed to a goal we know we won't reach is a moral outrage -- a moral disaster -- that we have a responsibility, in this life during wartime, to stop.
Dollars, yes. Lives? LIVES? No. Not for a romantic wish. Not for something we want but know we won't get. Dollars, OK. Lives, NO. If you believe our actions -- our American actions -- in 2010 can make it more likely that there's a real government in Afghanistan, then asking Americans to die in Afghanistan, is asking them to die for something that is in the national security interests of the United States. Which is what American kids sign up for when they enlist. But if you believe that our actions -- our American actions -- in 2010 canNOT make it more likely that there's a real government in Afghanistan, then asking Americans to die in Afghanistan is wrong. It's over. Development... training... support, OK. But lives? No.
No.
That's the choice. It's not partisan. It's not even passionate. It's rational. Horribly, horribly rational.
Goodnight.
Now, I don't share Maddow's overall perspective on foreign policy. I'm much more of a Mark Twain/William James anti-imperialist than she is. But I was part of the Vietnam Anti-war Movement, and we encompassed a wide diversity of different views, while all agreeing on one thing: The war had to end. Although I always strived for more and deeper agreement, the bottom line was that agreeing on that one point was good enough for me.
Saving lives, and restoring a minimum level of sanity was good enough then, and it's good enough now. What does it mean to be "good enough"? I understood it intuitively then, but there's an actual science to it, I've since learned...
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MADDOW: If the police efforts, the policing effort, security efforts don't combine to create enough space for Afghan government to step up in a way that is working, I don't get the sense there's a plan B. Is there a plan B?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: We'll have more with the American general in charge of southern Afghanistan, Brigadier General Ben Hodges, in just a moment.
When she talked to General Hodges, he tacitly admitted it: No plan B.
But Afghanistan isn't the exception. It's the rule. The lack of a plan B isn't the problem--it's just one aspect of the larger problem of systematically bad thinking that repeatedly leads to bad results.
The very next day, Paul Krugman blogged about the Obama Administration's failure to foresee how bad things would get with unemployment, and their consequent undersizing of the stimulus. Here's a chart he reproduced showing what they thought would happen:
Krugman said, in part:
based on public reporting, like the Ryan Lizza article on Larry Summers - which reads rather differently now that we know how things are really working out, or more accurately not working out - it looks as if top advisers convinced themselves that even in the absence of stimulus the slump would be nasty, brutish, but not too long. That's the assumption embedded in the now infamous Romer-Bernstein chart, above. So all policy needed to do was meliorate the worst, while we waited for the economy to recover spontaneously. From the Lizza article:
Summers did not include Romer's $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was "an insurance package against catastrophic failure."
I don't know why Summers etc. believed this. Even before the severity of the financial crisis was fully apparent, the recent history of recessions suggested that the jobs picture would continue to worsen long after the recession was technically over. And by the winter of 2008-2009, it was obvious that this was the Big One...
In short, there was every reason to think that things could be worse than anticipated. But the problem wasn't simply that they got their estimate wrong. It's how they got it wrong, and even more seriously how they failed to think about what might happen if they turned out to be wrong. "Failure is not an option" they were thinking, just like BushCo, and so they didn't think about it, and thus they blindly plunged into it. No worst-case planning. No Plan B.
A little more detail from Liazza's article (including the passage Krugman quotes) makes this even clearer:
"Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in."...
"It was the president who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well, if he's such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan."
Of course there were heads exploding on the GOP side. What else is new? This is what they signed on for when they decided they had to have a black RNC Chair, no matter what--just another bit of proof that racism makes you stupid. But consider what's happened on the Democratic/progressive side. As Glenn Greenwald points out, there's been far too much aping of Bush/Rovism.
Yes, it's true that we already were in Afghanistan. But it was still Obama's war of choice. It was up to Obama, and he freely chose to make Afghanistan the new focus of the GWOT, rather than calling the whole thing off as the counter-productive delusion--ala fighting fire with gasoline--that it actually is. It is Obama's war of choice, and it is historically idiotic--though by a few more thousand years than Steele seems to realize. So Steele was actually right on two counts.
It was, after all, Obama who proudly proclaimed that he was against "dumb wars", remember? And what could be dumber than going to war in the country where empires go to die? And so when Obama started saying that Iraq was the wrong war, and Afghanistan the right one, plenty of people were justifiably confused. And being confused--plus with John McCain looking to start WWIII with Russia (fergodsakes!)--most folks didn't try to figure things out too hard. Most simply assumed it was campaign window dressing, a defense against being called "weak", a promise easily morphed into something more sensible once he got into office, etc., etc., etc.
Well, of course, it turned out that Obama was even less of a progressive on foreign policy than just about anything else (on civil liberties, call it a tie). So, here to remind folks of what a real progressive alternative might look like, on the flip, I'm republishing a diary I first published at My Left Wing in 2005, and that I republished here on January 4, 2009, as "Crafting A Democratic Plan To Win The War On Terror".
As you read it, one thing should be abundantly clear: Unlike Obama's "plan" (whatever that may be), it's a plan based on ideas, not a self-defeating defensive posture of trying to not look weak. Real toughness lies in standing up for sound and moral ideas, rather than running away and/or pandering. As Greenwald wrote:
Generally, when progressives demand that Democrats be "tougher," what they mean is in defense of progressive policies, not in defense of endless war in Afghanistan. It'd be one thing if the DNC came out this forcefully in attacking Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies, or legal immunity for torture, or cutting Social Security while maintaining bloated defense spending, or a failure to stimulate the economy sufficiently, etc. But here, they're acting "tough" in order to stigmatize war opposition and equate questioning of American wars with cowardice and Troop disrespect. I don't quite think that's what progressives have in mind when they urge the Party to be more aggressive.
What should we be fighting for? My answer from 2005 is on the flip.
[T]he behavior of General McChrystal captured by a reporter with unfettered access to him did not just show indiscipline or insubordination, they called into question the military doctrine that General McChrystal championed....
[The strategy is:] You can't kill your way to victory. Instead, the goal is to secure population centers, set up Afghan governance, set up governance that itself keeps insurgents in check even after the military campaign is over.
....if General McChrystal, if he is the guy responsible for that strategy and preaching that strategy that requires unity of effort between the military and all of these non-military people who are needed to win a war like this, you can't both be that guy and be the guy who's talking smack about all of the non-military people who even you say are essential to your mission. You can't be the guy who says that's necessary and the guy who talks all that smack.
How is it that Rachel Maddow zeroed in on this obvious point, and everyone else pretty much seemed to miss it, the way that Rip Van Winkle missed the Revolutionary War? Maddow's lonely grasp of the central contradiction in the McChrystal affair staring us right in the face shows once again how totally and utterly clueless the entire Versailles establishment really is.
Of course no one can look at the central contradiction here, because if they did, then the entire strategy would have to be abandoned. The DFHs would win. Russ Feingold would win. David Obey would win. Dennis Kucinich would win. The whole 1970s anti-military love-in crowd, as President Obama so contemptuously referred to them--people just like his own mother would win! Ewwww! We can't have that!
Blindness! Of course! That's infinitely preferrable.
First, we need to take note of how meticulously Maddow laid out her case, using McChrystal's own words to describe the doctrine and its logic. Then we need to think a bit about the devastating evidence that the strategy is totally doomed, and was totally doomed from long before the beginning.
So, to begin with, here's an extended excerpt from Maddow's transcript, showing how carefully and methodically she proceeds:
President Obama will give his first State of the Union address on Wednesday night at 9 p.m. Eastern. Brave New Foundation's Rethink Afghanistan campaign wants to make sure this isn't just a time to sit and watch, but a time to get together with our friends and push back against the expanding Afghanistan war.
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
--"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon"
Dylan:
And here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice
--"(Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The) Memphis Blues Again"
Buffy:
"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school."
--"After Life," Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
LBJ was a tragic figure. Barack Obama is a farcical one--and the joke's on you if you still don't realize that after his second mass escalation of the war in Afghanistan. As Robert Mann makes powerfully clear in his 2000 book, A Grand Delusion: America's Descent Into Vietnam, Johnson had been traumatized by the Democrat's sweeping losses as a result of the Korean War. The Democrats had held the Senate majority since FDR became President in 1932, and looked like they would hold it forever until Truman was caught flat-footed by the outbreak of the Korean War. Johnson did incredible work first winning back the majority, then engineering a massive landslide victory in 1958. He was petrified of the prospect of doing that again, and determined not to let it happen.. It was a deeply flawed decision--a tragic one--but at least LBJ had the excuse that it hadn't been tried before and found wanting.
Barack Obama has no such excuse. But he's not just repeating LBJ's mistake of trying to have guns and butter at the same time. He's repeatedly made clear that the butter has to go, no matter what. The only question is when. Unlike the GOP, when Obama talks about cutting budget deficits, we have every reason to believe that he's dead serious. Both Social Security and Medicare are in serious peril under Obama, no matter what happens in Afghanistan.
I am deeply saddened on so many different levels by the President's speech last night, and his Afghanistan policy in general. Steady escalation is not the answer to this godawful complicated mess. It's all well and good to keep making the argument as to why this is not another Vietnam, although it sure does feel that way to a lot of us, but the big question in terms of comparisons is how this is different than Britain or Russia's experience in Afghanistan itself.
I am also deeply anguished as someone who has a much broader agenda than just this war or even foreign policy and national security in general. The money we will spend, and the political capital that will be burnt, by this war are a horrible price to pay- and for what goal? Will this surge defeat Al Queda and the Taliban once and for all? Will they make Afghanistan and Pakistan safe places for the long run? It just doesn't seem very likely.
This is at its core also bad politics on so many different levels. History is very clear on this topic. Two of our last three Democratic Presidents have had their presidencies broken and sunk on the rocks of a terrible relationship with the progressive base: Jimmy Carter over economics, and LBJ over a wrong- headed land war in Asia. With this escalation, and with Geithner and Summers running Obama's economic policy, this President seems like he wants to pick fights with us in both areas. It truly is heart breaking.
There is one of ray of hope in this announcement, and that is the announcement of an actual timeline for an exit. Giving us an exit plan with an actual timeline is extremely important politically, and does give me some comfort. The scary thing is that we know almost for sure that the generals and their allies in congress will start clamoring about a year from now that "conditions on the ground" show that we can't get things done under Obama's timeline, and that he needs to change his plan. The big question at that point is just how much gumption Obama has, whether he will stand up to the significant political pressure that will be raining down on him. But for now, let's absolutely give him credit for getting at least this part of the strategy right. He is calling the surgers' bluff: they say they need these troops for a short term burst of activity to uproot the Taliban's strength once and for all. Obama is giving it to them, but telling them they have only 18 months to prove their case. We must hope, for the country's sake and for his own sake, that when these folks come back to him and say "Whoops, we can't get this taken care of in the short term" (because we all know they will), that Obama stands up to them and says no.
A dear friend of mine is a Marine officer who was recently deployed to Afghanistan, on a week's notice, after 2 tours of duty in Iraq. For him, and for all his brothers and sisters in arms, my anguish and worry about this newest escalation is intense. For him, and all the rest of America's soldiers in Afghanistan, I hope that Obama sticks to his exit strategy. It could not come a moment too soon.
It's my belief that it's no longer in doubt: Barack Obama is not a progressive, even a moderate or cautious one. On virtually every issue imaginable, we've seen nearly a year of bending over backwards to mollify conservative and reactionary forces-with a singular lack of success-while repeatedly rebuffing or attacking progressives, even when all they are doing is trying to support his agenda,
Behind all the various different examples one could point to, I believe that there's a common thread of underlying continuity and accommodation with the Reagan/Bush/Gingrich/Bush era ideology, rather than fundamental change. Put simply, as revealed during the campaign, at a fundamental level Barack Obama believes that Reagan's criticism of the New Deal is true. Which is why he is aligned with conservadems who want to gut Social Security and Medicare. He also believes that Reagan's style of blind, unquestioning, authoritarian patriotism is not just legitimate, but superior to the progressive, democratic-republican alternative that is actually founded on living out the political philosophy on which our nation was founded.
All that is quite a mouthful, but what it comes down to is that Obama does not believe in the critical/prophetic patriotism professed by Martin Luther King, and carried on, however imperfectly, by his own long-time minister Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The incidents used to drive a wedge between the two were actually superficial to their underlying differences. Obama is, above all, a symbol of black assimilation. After centuries of always being on the bottom, trampled underfoot by any recent arrival, with Obama's ascension to the Oval Office, black America could finally say it had arrived , it had been integrated into America's polity at the highest level.
On The Flip: Martin Luther King had never been an apostle of mere integration...
In "Why Not A Progressive Foreign Policy? Part 1: The Military ", I wrote about a better way of combatting terrorism than bringing war to Afghanistan, and continuing to kill innocent civilians--a way much more consistent with the main thrust of Obama's speech in Cairo. In the transition between laying out the problem, and presenting that better way, I wrote:
But before we turn to what that better way is, I just want to take note of former Democracy Now producer Jeremy Scahill on Bill Moyers Journal last night, sketching out some of what's going wrong right now. I'll be looking at what he talked about more closely in a followup diary, which will serve to underscore just how much is at stake if we don't get serious about crafting a progressive alternative. Scahill discusses the continuation of military privatization under Obama, and the dangerous direction it threatens to lead us
It's now time to take a closer look at what's at stake, at what we risk if we do not adopt a more progressive military policy. The future is never certain, of course. But closing our eyes to foreseeable risks only makes it more uncertain, more threatening, more potentially dangerous.
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