The U.S. War in
Afghanistan
The U.S. War in Afghanistan: Goals, Future, and Alternatives
International Afghanistan Congress
Hanover, Germany
June 7-8, 2008
Joseph Gerson
I want to begin by thanking Reiner Braun and the other organizers
of this conference for the opportunity to be a part of this important
conference, and to be learning from my European and Afghan friends.
I have been asked to give a brief and sober report about perspectives
from the U.S. peace movement, and I will do my best to fulfill this
expectation.
Recent Developments:
First, let me review some recent developments, some of which you
may not have heard or read about.
This past November, the U.S. National Security Council concluded
that U.S. goals for the Afghanistan War were not being met, and
that despite battlefield victories, the overall situation in Afghanistan
was deteriorating. That report highlighted the “Taliban’s
unchallenged expansion into new territory”, the increasing
cultivation of opium poppies, and President Karzai’s weakness.” More
recently, Director of. National Intelligence McConnell described
the situation as “deteriorating”, and he warned that “Taliban
forces expanded their operations into previously peaceful areas
of the west and around Kabul.” [1]
Three thousand more U.S. Marines have been deployed to southern
Afghanistan.
The U.S. Marine Corps decided last week not to bring criminal charges
against the commanding officers of a unit responsible for the shooting
deaths of up to nineteen civilians in northeastern Afghanistan
NATO Sec. Gen. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, warned that Afghanistan is
a test of NATO’s resolve, saying that “It is Europe’s
Iraq.” Friends, I don’t think any of you want to be
fighting a European Iraq war.
Since the new government came to power in Afghanistan, the number
of Taliban raids launched from Pakistan has doubled. As the New
York Times reported, “Pakistani officials are making it increasingly
clear that they have no interest in stopping cross-border attacks…into
Afghanistan, prompting a new level of frustration from Americans
who see the infiltration as a crucial strategic priority in the
war in Afghanistan.” Worse, from Barack Obama to the Washington
Post and the right-wing Heritage Foundation, there are calls to “Try
Pakistan First”, meaning to go to war in and against Pakistan
[2]
It turns out 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. Sixty million
dollars has been allocated to build additional U.S. military prison
in Pakistan.
U.S. Elections:
Then there is the U.S. presidential campaign, which has been underway
for at least two years.
Many look to the U.S. elections as an opening to an era of greater
diplomacy and end the Bush era wars. Regardless of whether Obama
or McCain win, the coming regime change in the U.S. will have only
limited foreign policy impacts. Certainly, even as McCain – who
could actually win this election – tilts back toward the neoconservatives,
the era of U.S. military unilateralism is coming to an end. With
the failures of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the U.S. elite has
recognized that it cannot go it alone, and wants to turn back toward
the exercise of hegemony through greater reliance on its military
and political alliances. But the truth is that what President Eisenhower
described as the subversive influences tentacles of the military-industrial
complex remains quite powerful.
Throughout the primary campaign season, Obama, Clinton and McCain
all committed themselves to increasing the size of the U.S. military.
McCain said that U.S. troops could remain in Iraq for one hundred
years, and – not much better - both Obama and Clinton refused
to pledge that they would withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq before
the end of what would be their first term in office in 2013.
In Afghanistan, we are witnessing the latest installment of 19th
century’s Great Game – this time related to oil. On
May 21 Obama repeated what has been a central theme of his campaign,
hitting Bush and McCain from the right: He repeated that Iraq is
not the war that the U.S. should be fighting, and he stressed that “Afghanistan
is the war we must win.” A year ago he said that “When
I am president, we will wage the war that has to be won, with a
comprehensive strategy…Getting out of Iraq and onto the right
battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” [3] As I noted earlier,
Obama has repeatedly threatened U.S. military attacks against Pakistan
.
John McCain is tied to the primacy of, and victory in, the Iraq
war, but he has long advocated that the U.S. and NATO must prevail
in Afghanistan, that the stakes
– including the future of the NATO alliance – “have
never been greater: “ He has argued that “the fundamental
character of NATO – is tested by the alliance’s most
important endeavor today: stabilizing and reconstructing Afghanistan….our
alliance is now intimately bound” he said, “with the
outcome in Afghanistan, and our success or failure there will impact
not only the security of each of our member states, but also the
credibility and effectiveness of NATO itself…If NATO does
not prevail in Afghanistan, it is difficult to imagine the alliance
undertaking another ‘hard security’ operation – in
or out of area – and its credibility would suffer a grievous
blow.” McCain has also been clear 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. [4]
The Goals of Bush’s Afghan War
As we most wars and major foreign policy initiatives, the Bush
Administration had multiple goals when it launched its war to topple
the Taliban. In the first place, as the insider accounts inform
us, in the wake of the 9-11 bombings Bush was intent on “kicking
someone’s ass” and he didn’t care if doing so
violated international law. Domestically he needed to demonstrate
that he was taking action against the perpetrators of the shocking
attacks, and internationally he and his cohorts wanted to demonstrate
that the Pentagon doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance”
(the ability to dominate any nation, anywhere in the world, at any
level of power, at any time) was still in force, and that no one
should even think about messing with the United States.
But there was more. As we could read in the New York Times, “There
[was] talk of a new American empire, a world that presents the global
superpower with a unique opportunity to exploit a victory in Afghanistan…to
force decisions in every capital…and to rethink the principles
around which nations cooperate.” Even earlier, in May 2001,
Vice President Cheney was quoted in The New Yorker as saying that
the U.S. was about to impose “the arrangement for the 21st
century” to ensure that the U.S. remained the world’s
dominant military, economic and political power. The 9-11 attacks
provided the political cover to attempt to fulfill this vision of
colonizing time as well as space.
Essential to the arrangement, of course, was control of oil. With
the collapse of the Soviet Union, the vast oil reserves of the Caspian
Sea/Central Asia region became up for grabs, and the U.S. elite
and oil companies were anxious to grab as much as they could. Oil
is a strategic military resource, as well as being essential to
modern industrial civilization. When George Bush the Elder was forced
out of the White House, his Secretary of State James Baker, Condoleezza
Rice and others went to work to broker deals to obtain privileged
access to these oil reserves for U.S. based oil companies. Even
as Governor of Texas, in association with his friend Ken Lay of
ENRON, George W. Bush did his part to secure access to oil and gas
in Uzbekistan.
Among the first, albeit failed, Bush Administration initiatives
after the fall of the Taliban was to try to secure a pipeline to
bring oil and gas from Turkestan, through Afghanistan to Pakistani
ports. The war also provided an opportunity to create U.S. military
bases in Central Asia – much as it has in the Middle East
– to secure privileged access to the regions resources. Thus,
in its war for “Enduring Freedom”, it created a military
base in Uzbekistan, a dictatorship where people are quite literally
boiled alive. [5] Basing access agreements were concluded with Kyrgyzstan,
Kazakhstan, and of course, Afghanistan.
Another goal, which as in Vietnam has developed over time, is
to preserve U.S. prestige. Losing the war in Afghanistan will further
undermine U.S. power and influence across Central Asia, in the Middle
East, and globally.
Alternatives:
There were, of course, alternatives to the war in Afghanistan
from the beginning. The consensus position which quickly developed
in the U.S. peace movement had four elements:
• That the 9-11 attacks were outrageous, indiscriminate crimes
whose perpetrators must be brought to justice. As a poster that
we distributed across New England in September and October 2001
said, we called for “Justice Not War”
• That “War is not the answer”
• That we must defend our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties and
the immigrant communities that we knew would come under attack
• That we must address the root causes of the attacks, which included the
presence of U.S. military bases near the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina,
the rights of the Palestinians, and the long history of military interventions
and subversion to maintain U.S. hegemony over Middle East oil.
In a conference that we organized in December 2001, Noam Chomsky
outlined a number of alternatives that were not pursued. [6] He
noted that the U.S. had refused Security Council authorization,
and that building on the Clinton/NATO precedent in the Kosovo/Serbia
War, the Bush Administration acted unilaterally in violation of
international law. (In fact, on September 11, in a war council,
Bush said that he wanted to “kick some ass” and didn’t’ care
about international law. The Bush Administration wanted war and
contemptuously dismissed the tentative offers made by the Taliban
to consider extradition of Bin Laden and his associates. As Noam
observed, we’ll never know how real this possibility was,
because it was never tried.
Here in Europe, the Vatican called for proportionate responses
to the crimes.
The military historian Michael Howard urged that what was needed
was “patient operations of police and intelligences forces,” “a
police operation conducted under the auspices of the U.N. on behalf
of the international community as a whole, against a criminal conspiracy…”
Afghan opposition leader Abdul Haq wanted to “create a revolt
within the Taliban”, but the U.S. bombings negated this possibility.
RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan,
urged that the
“Taliban be overthrown by the uprising of the Afghan nation” not
by “a vast aggression on our country” that “will
shed the blood of numerous women, men, children, young and old of
our country.”
And, later, after topping Taliban, there was a consensus on a panel
held at Harvard University’s J.F. Kennedy School of Government
that at least 30,000 U.N. Peacekeepers would be needed to restore
stability – but this option was never pursued
The Role of Military Bases
As you may know, the United States maintains a global network
of something more than 735 military bases and installations around
the world. This is an imperial infrastructure that is unrivaled
in human history, even during the Roman Empire. These bases serve
as jumping off points for invasions, serve the U.S. Air Force and
Navy, and make U.S. first-strike nuclear war possible. U.S. bases
in Britain can listen in on every telephone call that you make or
read every e-mail that you send. And it is no accident that the
greatest concentrations of U.S. military bases are in Germany and
Japan. These were imposed not only to contain the Soviet Union,
but to contain and profoundly influence your governments and political
life.
Back in 1776, when Britain maintained military forces in North
America, one of the reasons given in the U.S. Declaration of Independence
for declaring independence from Britain and even going to war was
that King George had “kept among us” in times of peace “Standing
Armies” which committed unacceptable “abuses and usurpations.”
Friends, the “abuses and usurpations” committed by U.S.
foreign military bases today far exceed those of Britain two centuries
ago. They include rape and sexual harassment, environmental damage
with military toxics, live fire and other military accidents, the
terror of low altitude and night landing exercises, support for
dictators – like Karimov in Uzbekistan who is supported by
both the U.S. and Germany, and of course the undermining of national
sovereignty and complicity in wars of aggression and preparations
for nuclear war.
Here in Germany, U.S. bases in Ramstein, Spanddahhelm, Schweinfurt,
Weisbaden and other communities have all played critical roles in
making the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq possible. Friends,
you will never be truly free until all U.S. troops and bases leave
Germany.
U.S. Peace Movement and the Future
The truth is that once the Taliban government was overthrown in
2001, it became clear that the Bush Administration had still larger
ambitions: the invasion of Iraq. Like the U.S. people as a whole,
the U.S. peace movement turned its attention away from Central Asia
and toward the Middle East. But, with Obama having reiterated that
Afghanistan is the “war we must win”, the U.S. peace
movement will soon be forced to turn attention, resources and campaigning
back to Afghanistan and the need to develop non-military alternatives
to addressing non-state terrorism.
As we urged in the fall of 2001, we will need to remember that
the Taliban is not Al Qaeda, and that we should be relying on law – domestic
and international, on intelligence, diplomacy and wisdom to resist
and contain terrorism. As we learned during the Cold War, when U.S.
presidents talked with Khrushchev and Mao, or when Tony Blair opened
negotiations with the IRA, peace is negotiated between enemies,
not friends, and this – one way or another - includes the
Taliban which is only marginally different than the war lords the
U.S. has been supporting, and just as unlikely to disappear.
I want to remind you how important European peace movements have
been for those of us in the United States. You have inspired and
sometimes embarrassing us into do what has needed to be done. During
the Vietnam War and then again during the reckless nuclear arms
race of late 1970s and 80s, your moral vision and actions helped
to empower us to challenge and transform deadly U.S. actions and
policies. You can do this again. With your coming unified September
20 out of Afghanistan demonstration here in Germany, the European
60 Years of NATO is enough actions next spring, and other actions
and initiatives, you can help us to finally bring U.S. – as
well as European - troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq.
What will follow may not be entirely pretty, but let me close
with a few words from Mahatma Gandhi. In the last days of the British
Raj in India, Lord Mountbatten warned Gandhi that if the British
left, chaos would follow. Gandhi’s reply was
“Yes, but it will be our chaos.” History tells us that
we cannot export democracy with bombs and bullets, that nations
and cultures must exercise their own self-determination, and that
the colonial era ended with Vietnam if not earlier.
Together, Give Peace a Chance. All Troops Out of Afghanistan.
Dr. Joseph Gerson is Director of Programs of the American Friends
Service Committee in New England.
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