The Afghan War
The Afghan War - A U.S. Peace Movement Perspective
Dr. Joseph Gerson*
Written for Junge Welt in Germany, May 25, 2008
Yesterday the New York Times carried another deeply disturbing
article from the Afghan war. The U.S. Marine Corps, it reported,
decided "not to bring criminal charges against two officers
in command of a unit involved in the shooting deaths of as many
as 19 civilians in northeastern Afghanistan…." Earlier
in the week we read that the prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan,
where U.S. forces have tortured prisoners, is no longer large enough
to accommodate the growing number of Afghan prisoners, and that
more military prisons will be built there. And, to prepare us for
a murderous summer - or possible military actions against Pakistan,
the Pentagon reported that as a result of ceasefire negotiations
between the new government in Islamabad militants in Pakistan's
Northwest Territories, the number of Taliban cross border attacks
had nearly doubled.
War is not about abstractions, but the shattering of human lives
- especially those of women and children, but also those of warriors
on all sides who become the walking wounded among us, and in many
cases harbor deadly resentments, for decades to come.
Many have looked to the U.S. elections as an opening to an era
of greater diplomacy and end the Bush era wars. Much can be achieved
with regime change in Washington - especially domestic policies,
and the era of U.S. military unilateralism is coming to an end.
However, the U.S. will remain at war for years to come, unable to
free itself from its militarist culture and the influences of what
President Eisenhower termed the subversive influences tentacles
of the military-industrial complex. The unfortunate truth is that
Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton share John McCain's commitment to
increasing the size of the U.S. military. And, like McCain, they
refuse to commit to withdrawing all U.S. forces from Iraq before
the end of what would be their first term in office in 2013.
Then there is Afghanistan: On May 21 Senator Obama repeated a
theme that has been a central element of his campaign. After reiterating
his commitment to extricating the U.S. from the Iraq war, reminding
his audience that it was not the war that the U.S. should be fighting,
he stressed that "Afghanistan is the war we must win."
Both Obama and Hillary Clinton have been repeating this mantra -
attacking Bush and McCain from the right - since they began their
campaigns. And Obama has gone further - at least in public - in
threatening U.S. military attacks against Pakistan .than either
Clinton or McCain.
McCain has tied himself to the primacy of, and victory in, the
Iraq war, but he has also long advocated that the U.S. and NATO
must prevail in Afghanistan, arguing that the stakes - including
the future of the NATO alliance - have never been greater. Remarkably,
he has also said that the U.S. needs permanent military bases in
Afghanistan not only to contain Al Qaeda, but to ensure a U.S. military
presence on the "doorsteps" of Iran, and nuclear China,
Pakistan and India.
With the overthrow of the Taliban government by a combination
of high-tech overkill and an alliance with non-Pushtun war lords,
and confronted by the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq, the U.S. peace
movement turned its attention away from Central Asia and has yet
to look back. With our focus on Iraq and increasingly U.S. threats
against Iran, we have lost critical time and opportunities to develop
a widely accepted analysis of the causes and failures of the "War
on Terrorism" and the war in Afghanistan. But, before long,
.the pain, dynamics and lessons of this era's installment of "Great
Game" will confront us with their timeless truth: invading
armies cannot long remain in Afghanistan..
What are U.S. government priorities in Afghanistan, and why did
the Bush Administration spurn the Taliban's 2001 offer to negotiate
over the possible deportation of Al Qaeda leaders? The reasons are
many.
Nearly eight years after the U.S. invasion, not unlike Iraq and
Vietnam forty years ago, preserving U.S. superpower prestige has,
unintentionally, become an important factor. Having committed U.S.
forces to an imperial war, a primary goal now is not to suffer defeat
and the resulting loss of prestige and thus power.
Of still greater concern for the U.S. elite and significant portions
of the U.S. electorate is the perceived need to defeat Al Qaeda
militarily, and to win the misnamed "War on Terrorism.".
Much like the December 7, 1945 surprise attack against Pearl Harbor,
the September 11 terrorist attacks shocked and outraged the U.S.
people who understandably expected visible and proactive government
action to ensure that such attacks against U.S. Americans were never
repeated.
Rather than define the 9-11 attacks as outrageous and indiscriminate
crimes to be addressed through U.S. and international law, by police
and intelligence agencies, and by diplomatic means, with enamored
of military ruthlessness, the Bush Administration quickly moved
to demonstrate its terrorizing military power in order to silence
all who might challenge U.S. global hegemony. The Bush Administration's
response to the terrorist attacks provided the political cover needed
to hide the campaign to impose what Vice President Cheney had earlier
described "the arrangement for the 21st century" to
ensure that the U.S. remained the world's dominant economic, military
and political power for generations to come.
If nothing else, they were successful in terrorizing the U.S.
political class and millions of U.S. Americans. To this day, the
U.S. national security elite - Republicans and Democrats alike -
agree that Washington's first foreign and military policy priority
must be preventing a nuclear attack by non-state terrorists. The
more imminent threat to U.S. and global security from the "blowback"
and unintended consequences resulting from U.S. imperial wars and
occupations, from its first strike nuclear policies, and its from
its threatened "obliteration" of Iran, China and North
Korea are rarely mentioned. But, it is worth bearing in mind that
if the massive U.S. military bases near Mecca and Medina, the holiest
sites of Islam in Saudi Arabia, were among the articulated abuses
and usurpations that contributed to the 9-11 attacks, the Iraq and
Afghan wars, will generate anger at the U.S. and its allies for
generations to come. Over an above the death tolls of hundreds of
thousands of innocent people, five million people have been refugeed
by the continuing Iraq war. In Afghanistan, President Karzai remains
the "Mayor of Kabul." Hearts and minds are not being won
by U.S. and NATO warriors or their war lord allies. And a pillar
of the war to bring "democracy"
to Afghanistan is the U.S.-German airbase in Uzbekistan, a country
where torture - including being boiled alive - remains a common
practice to ensure the continued rule of its dictator.
What does the Afghanistan war have to do with "the arrangement
for the 21st century"?
For a century, oil has been seen as the world's geostrategic "Prize."
In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Caspian Sea basin
and Central Asia oil reserves were seen as targets of opportunity
by Western political, military and economic establishments. Thus,
in the wake of George Bush the Elder's election defeat in 2000,
James Baker, Condoleezza Rice and their colleagues went to work
for the major oil companies to win access to these enormous riches.
With its war to oust the Taliban, the second Bush government sought
to finally win the construction of an oil pipeline that would
bring Turkmenistan's oil to the West. The creation of military
bases in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgystan, to fight the war,
and ultimately in Afghanistan itself, the U.S. would reinforce
the U.S. campaign to gain privileged access to the region's oil.
Simultaneously, it would also move toward completion of the military
encirclement of both Iran and China.
After being moribund for most of the 1990s, the U.S. peace movement
revived in response the 9-11 attacks and the anticipated U.S. military
responses. With the Bush Administration reinforcing people's fears,
fanning the flames of war, and creating something akin to fascism
in which people feared to speak their thoughts to friends and neighbors,
and with hundreds of people - primarily immigrants - arrested and
held incommunicado immediately following the terrorist attacks,
thousands of people across the country joined silent vigils, demonstrations
and conferences under slogans including
"No More Victims Anywhere" and "Justice Not War."
We implored our elected officials to address the attacks as a crime,
not an act of war. Initially, only Representative Barbara Lee had
the courage to vote against war, saying that "we must be careful
not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy
nor a focused target. We cannot repeat past mistakes….let us
not become the evil that we deplore." Would that others in
Congress who harbored their doubts had her courage!
Seven years later, Washington's demands that Germany and other
NATO allies send still more of their troops to the war in Afghanistan
are little known in the U.S., as is the Germany resistance movement.
Just as democracy cannot be imposed by one nation and culture on
another, justice and peace will not be built on the savaging of
innocent lives and by forging alliances with drug dealing war lords
and torturing tyrants. After the U.S. presidential election - if
not before - the U.S. peace movement will again face the challenge
of providing alternatives to the misnamed "War on Terrorism" and
to the futile war in Afghanistan. When that time comes, lessons
from the German debate and struggle will be invaluable to us.
* Joseph Gerson is Director of Programs
of the American Friends Service in New England and author of The
Sun Never Sets...Confronting the Network of U.S. Foreign Military Bases and Empire
and the Bomb: How the United States Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World. He can be contacted
at: JGerson@afsc.org, or c/o AFSC, 2161
Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Ma. 02140, USA. Web page: www.afsc.org/pes.
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