Obama’s War

The esteemed historian and novelist on how there is only one path for the United States in Afghanistan: withdrawal.

The following talk was given on April 19 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the London Review of Books.

Afghanistan now is at a critical stage. And now I’m very glad to say that the London Review of Books, whose thirtieth anniversary we are commemorating, has over the years published myself and others on this subject, taking essentially a critical stance to this war because, as many of you will recall, it became fashionable all over the world, not just in the United States, to think of Iraq and Afghanistan as two very different wars. Which of course, on one level, they are. But I mean different moral values were placed on these wars by good, thinking people. The Iraq war was a bad war, which should never have happened; that is the view of large numbers of people in the United States today, and always was the view of an overwhelming majority of Europeans.

The Afghan war, on the other hand, was meant to be the good war. This was a war where people who attacked the United States on September 11th were based. And therefore they had to be sorted out; the government which gave them refuge had to be toppled and this could only be done militarily. I will just say as a small footnote here that the official 9/11 inquiry said that the Afghan government never formally refused to hand over these people; they just demanded to see the evidence, and said if the evidence was convincing of their involvement they would hand them over. I just say that because the commission of enquiry made a point of noting that.

Now, some of us argued at the time, myself included—of course, no one supported this crazed attack on the United States—what the motive of actually sending in an army to conquer Afghanistan was. If, as the former President said, the main aim was to sort out al Qaeda, sort out Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, “dead or alive” in his unforgettable words—and, you know, if they were dead, that was that, if they were alive they would presumably be brought to the United States to stand trial for having ordered this attack… And I remember saying in an argument with one of the former president’s leading supporters at the Washington Post, Charles Krauthamer—in a debate that took place on Canadian television—that if this was the case, then it was a failure. Because this was a small terrorist organization which wasn’t going to hang around in Afghanistan for the United States Army to come capture it, but would flee and look for refuge in other parts of the world, most likely in the border badlands of Pakistan, but presumably elsewhere. So that would fail, and it did fail, because if you announce you’re invading a country to capture A, B, and C, A, B, and C don’t stay there. They move on.

So the country was captured without a struggle, in reality. Worth remembering that. There was no real struggle by any segment of Afghan society to resist the U.S./NATO occupation. Why? Because the key player in this war was Pakistan, which had armed the Taliban, which had sent the Taliban to take power and end a period of civil war. And there were large numbers of Pakistani soldiers, Pakistani Air Force, Pakistani military, Pakistani intelligence people, people in Afghanistan who essentially told the Taliban leaders, “Now is not the time to fight. Shave your beards and come back to Pakistan, or go. But do not resist, because you will all be killed.” From their point of view, it was very sane advice. And, more astonishingly, the Taliban leadership, which was divided, actually accepted that advice. So Kabul fell without a struggle. And for the first two years the resistance to the United States and its NATO allies was limited, episodic, and localized. What made it national? What made it national was the decision by the United States to impose a regime on Afghanistan. One of its CIA assets, Hamid Karzai, was propelled into power. More on him later since he has become a controversial figure as of late, supposedly fighting with the United States. But let’s just go through the chronology.

They imposed this regime and gave it a U.S. bodyguard. I think DynCorp supplied the bodyguard because Karzai said at that point that he didn’t trust any Afghans to protect him, give him personal protection. And of course, that was astute, because they probably would have bumped him off. He then established together with his brother a government of cronies and a very tiny, narrow circle of supporters, largely within Kabul and a tiny part of Kabul, and their aim in Afghanistan was that the only way forward was to enrich ourselves. And in a country with the most appalling levels of poverty in the entire world, these people used the money that was being sent to them for reconstruction, money that was being sent to them both via NGOs and via states, after the Bonn conference, spent this money and they did enrich themselves. It’s no secret. All of the intelligence reports coming into the United States from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency spell this out very clearly, the bits that have been leaked. And I assume the bits that haven’t been leaked are even more severe in their judgments, because when a country is at war, it needs good intelligence. And, to be fair, they had been getting good intelligence, that this regime they implanted in Afghanistan is a total disaster story.

Could it have been different? Difficult, given the Afghan personnel involved. But I remember writing, very rapidly after the occupation, that even though I didn’t agree with it—and if it went the way most occupations go, it was going to be a disaster—if by some miracle, the occupying forces in Afghanistan succeeded within the first year of rebuilding the wrecked social infrastructure of the country, had a massive New Deal-type program to build hospitals, to build schools, to provide employment, and to use their military to do this and actually defend this social infrastructure, who knows? I just posed the question mark. But it was too much to expect that to happen. Because we live, or lived certainly at that time, in neoliberal times, in which the intervention of the state is never used for these purposes, because everything in the motherland was being privatized—as we know, I won’t go into that—and likewise in most of Europe. So what they couldn’t do in Europe and the United States, they certainly wouldn’t do in Afghanistan. Some U.S. citizens would have asked, “If you do this for them, why can’t you do it for us at home?”

That is why General Eikenberry, the U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan, warned very seriously against “the surge” of 30,000 extra troops.

So the entire socio-economic structure, backed by NATO armies, was a structure that made a tiny group of people very rich. And this in front of the eyes of the poor, who were swelling the slums outside Kabul, which grew by half a million within the first two years of the occupation. Meanwhile, huge villas were being constructed, and Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, became within the first three to four years the richest man in Kabul. How? By drug smuggling. By arms smuggling. By creaming off money which was coming. He was the family’s banker, given full authority by his brother to do this, and he did. Today he is known as that. Now the money that they have used was partially to enrich themselves. But partially it was to try and buy a tiny social base inside Afghanistan itself. And they have had a bit of luck. They have succeeded in buying a few tribal leaders. They certainly have a larger social base now in Afghanistan than they did in 2001 when Karzai was implanted. In Kabul, it’s not huge. It’s in fact very tiny. But it is larger than he had before. And that is what gives Karzai the sort of strength—I suppose is the word, though there is another word for it as well—to defy the people who put him in power.

It happens, and it has happened in U.S. imperial history before. I mean, those of you who recall the Vietnam War will remember in the last years of that war, tormented years, it became commonplace to read about Ngo Dinh Diem getting too big for his boots, about General Tran (Quang Khoi) getting too big for his boots, the people put in place by the United States actually challenging them on how to conduct the war and being systematically bumped off. That was the traditional way of dealing with puppets that challenged the imperial rulers who put them in place. But the difference between South Vietnam and Afghanistan, of course, is that in South Vietnam the United States could always find someone else to replace them. Ultimately, of course, it didn’t work and the whole system collapsed. In Afghanistan, there were no other candidates. No other candidates who had come from the southern part of Afghanistan where the majority lives, a real majority—up to 50 percent if not more now, the Pashtuns of Afghanistan live there—Karzai is a Pashtun. And to replace him with a leader from the northern tribal alliances, Abdullah Abdullah or some other joker, was not going to work.

And that’s the reason that Peter Galbraith got kicked out of Kabul, not because he was engaged in corrupting the Kurds in relation to oil, but because he’d screwed up by antagonizing Karzai without having any alternative. And that is why General Eikenberry, the U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan, warned very seriously against two things. He warned against “the surge” of 30,000 extra troops. And he warned very sharply against removing Karzai in private. Or so we are told. Because he said, “There is nothing else here, removing him is like handing the place over to the Taliban.” Karzai himself more or less defended that position and actually said, “If you try and get rid of me”—he actually said this to the United States—“if you try and get rid of me, you know, I am going to join the Taliban.” Which wouldn’t be much of a political leap as people would imagine because he was once part of the Taliban. He once worked with them before he was called down to do other work. So he does know them. And the fact is that there are contacts, all of the time, between these different groups in the Pashtun part of Afghanistan. And that would have been a total disaster for NATO and the United States, and Eikenberry was convinced that the extra surge was going to be a disaster. And in the short time he has been proved right.

Tags: afghanistan, death, new left review, pakistan, taliban, tariq ali, usa, verso, war