15 April 2012
Afghanistan Lies
By Gwynne Dyer
In the midst of the Taliban attacks in central Kabul on Sunday, a journalist called the British embassy for a comment. “I really don’t know why they are doing this,” said the exasperated diplomat who answered the phone. “We’ll be out of here in two years’ time. All they have to do is wait.”
The official line is that by two years from now, when US and NATO forces leave Afghanistan, the regime they installed will be able to stay in power without foreign support. The British diplomat clearly didn’t believe that, and neither do most other foreign observers.
However, General John Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance Force, predictably said that he was “enormously proud” of the response of the Afghan security forces, and various other senior commanders said that it showed that all the foreign training was paying off. You have to admire their cheek: multiple simultaneous attacks in Kabul and three other Afghan cities prove that the Western strategy is working.
The Taliban’s attacks in the Afghan capital on Sunday targeted the national parliament, NATO’s headquarters, and the German, British, Japanese and Russian embassies. About a hundred people were killed or wounded, and the fighting lasted for eighteen hours. There was a similar attack in the centre of the Afghan capital only last September. If this were the Vietnam war, we would now have reached about 1971.
The US government has already declared its intention to withdraw from Afghanistan in two years’ time, just as it did in Vietnam back in 1971. Richard Nixon wanted his second-term presidential election out of the way before he pulled the plug, just as Barack Obama does now.
The Taliban are obviously winning the war in Afghanistan now, just as North Vietnam’s troops were winning in South Vietnam then. The American strategy at that time was satirised as “declare a victory and leave,” and it hasn’t changed one whit in forty years. Neither have the lies that cover it up.
The US puppet government in South Vietnam only survived for two years after US forces left in 1973. The puppet government in Kabul may not even last that long after the last American troops leave Afghanistan in 2014. But no Western general will admit that the war is lost, even though their denial means that more of their soldiers must die pointlessly.
“It’s like I see in slow motion men dying for nothing and I can’t stop it,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Davis, a US Army officer who spent two tours in Afghanistan. He returned home last year consumed by outrage at the yawning gulf between the promises of success routinely issued by American senior commanders and the real situation on the ground.
To be fair, none of those generals was asked whether invading Afghanistan was a good idea. That was decided ten years ago, when most of them were just colonels. But if they read the intelligence reports, they know that they cannot win this war. If they go on making upbeat predictions anyway, they are responsible for the lives that are wasted.
“It is consuming me from inside,” explained Lt-Col Davis, and he wrote two reports on the situation in Afghanistan, one classified and one for public consumption. The unclassified one began: “Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and the American people as regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognisable.”
Col Davis gave his first interview to the New York Times in early February, and sent copies of the classified version to selected senators and representatives in Congress. But no member of Congress is going to touch the issue in an election year, for fear of being labelled “unpatriotic”. So American, British and other Western soldiers will continue to die, as will thousands of Afghans, in order to postpone the inevitable outcome for a few more years.
It’s not necessarily even an outcome that threatens American security, for there was always a big difference between the Taliban and their ungrateful guests, al-Qaeda. The Taliban were and are big local players in the Afghan political game, but they never showed any interest in attacking the United States. Al-Qaeda were pan-Islamist revolutionaries, mostly Arabs and Pakistanis, who abused their hosts’ hospitality by doing exactly that.
It was never necessary to invade Afghanistan at all. Senior Taliban commanders were furious that al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks had exposed them to the threat of invasion, and came close to evicting Osama bin Laden at the Kandahar jirga (tribal parliament) in October, 2001. Wait a little longer, spread a few million dollars around in bribes, and the United States could probably have had a victory over al-Qaeda without a war in Afghanistan.
It’s much too late for that now, but al-Qaeda survives more as an ideology than as an organisation, and most Afghans (including the Taliban) remain profoundly uninterested in affairs beyond their own borders. Whatever political system emerges in Afghanistan after the foreigners go home, it is unlikely to want to attack the United States. Pity about all the people who will be killed between now and then.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 7 and 12. (“The US…pointlessly”; and “It’s not…that”)
24 March 2012
Symmetry of Slaughter
By Gwynne Dyer
After Mohamed Merah died in a hail of French police bullets last Thursday, people who had known him talked about “a polite and courteous boy” who liked “cars, bikes, sports and girls.” His friends had trouble believing that he had murdered seven people, including three children, in a ten-day killing spree in the city of Toulouse, and none of them believed his claim to be a member of al-Qaeda. “Three weeks ago he was in a nightclub,” one said.
The following day, in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, US Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales was charged with murdering seventeen Afghans, including nine children, in a lone night-time attack on sleeping civilians in two villages near Kandahar two weeks ago. “I can’t believe it was him,” said Kasie Holland, his next-door neighbour in Lake Tapps, Washington. “There were no signs. It’s really sad. I don’t want to believe that he did it.”
There are startling parallels in these cases, right down to the fact that Mohamed Merah held a little girl by the hair as he shot her in the head, and that Robert Bales allegedly pulled little girls from their beds by their hair to shoot them. And there is, of course, the underlying symmetry of the motives: both men were responding, in confused ways, to the “war on terror” that former US president George W. Bush launched after the 9/11 attacks.
In Bales’s case, the trigger may have been a fourth deployment to a combat zone after three one-year deployments in Iraq since 2003, during which he suffered concussion and lost part of a foot. He also had money problems, but it was Afghans he shot, not bankers. In his mind it was Afghans, Muslims, whatever, who were causing his problems.
Both men had had run-ins with the law: Bales for assault in 2002, Merah for stealing a woman’s handbag in 2007. But Merah spent two years in prison for the mugging, and while there, as is often the case with teenage Muslim thugs, he was converted to the extremist Islamic ideology called Salafism.
Mohamed Merah videotaped his attacks, so we know that just before he shot his first victim, an unarmed French paratrooper, Merah told him: “You kill my brothers, I kill you.” He was an unemployed small-time criminal with delusions of grandeur, and he wanted to “bring the French state to its knees” in retaliation for French participation in America’s war in Afghanistan. His claim to belong to al-Qaeda, however, was probably just a private fantasy.
Predictably, Marina Le Pen, leader of the extreme right National Front, called on French voters to “fight…against these politico-religious fundamentalists who are killing our Christian children, our Christian young men.” (She is running in next month’s presidential election, after all.) The incumbent right-wing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, says much the same thing, but less bluntly.
Yet two of the three French paratroopers Merah killed were Muslims. The other dead soldier, a Christian of West Indian origin, just had the bad luck to be in the street with two Muslim comrades when Merah found them. (He was deliberately targeting French Muslim soldiers as traitors to his cause.)
Merah was hunting another Muslim soldier when he found himself outside a Jewish school and seized the chance to murder a young rabbi, his 5- and 3-year-old sons, and 8-year-old Myriam Monsonego. It was a monstrous act, but in his disordered mind he believed that he was taking revenge for the Muslims who had been killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It’s no excuse, but it is an explanation. And the more relevant fact is that only one out of perhaps two million young Muslim French males has committed such an atrocity. What happened is appalling, but it is statistically insignificant. It should also be politically insignificant, but that may be too much to ask in the midst of a presidential election campaign.
The United States is also heading for a presidential election this year, but the only role that the war in Afghanistan has in the campaign is ritual accusations by Republican candidates that President Obama is “soft on terror.” (On the contrary, he has become the willing prisoner of the Washington foreign policy consensus that still defends the profoundly misconceived Afghan adventure.)
As for the Bales atrocity, it is already being written off by the American media and public as a meaningless aberration that tells us nothing about US foreign policy or national character. Not so. It tells us that the character of American soldiers is no better or stronger than anybody else’s, and it is a reminder that ten years occupying a foreign country will make any army hated from without and rotten within.
The army will become even more demoralised and undisciplined if it is a professional force that rotates the same soldiers through repeated combat tours with no visible success on the horizon. Recent instances of American soldiers urinating on dead Taliban fighters and burning Qurans are symptoms of the same malaise that finally drove Bales around the bend. Obama should not wait until 2014. It’s time to go home.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5 and 11. (“Mohamed…Salafism”; and “The United…adventure”)
4 September 2011
The Strategy of 9/11
By Gwynne Dyer
Writing recently in the Washington Post, Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser at the Rand Corporation think tank, claimed that the 9/11 attacks ten years ago were not a strategic success for al-Qaeda. He’s right. Osama bin Laden’s strategy did fail, in the end – but not for the reason that Jenkins thinks.
Jenkins argues that Osama bin Laden believed the US was a paper tiger because it had no stomach for casualties. Kill enough Americans, and the United States would pull out of the Middle East, leaving the field free for al-Qaeda’s project of overthrowing all the secular Arab regimes and imposing Islamist rule on everybody.
In bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa declaring war on America, Jenkins pointed out, he claimed that the US would flee the region if attacked seriously. Indeed, bin Laden gave the rapid US military withdrawal from Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and the equally rapid retreat of American forces from Somalia in 1993 after 18 US soldiers were killed in Mogadishu, as examples of American cowardice.
Other al-Qaeda commanders disagreed, Jenkins says, warning that the 9/11 attacks would enrage the United States and “focus its fury on the terrorist group and its allies, but bin Laden pushed ahead. When the United States did (invade Afghanistan), bin Laden switched gears, claiming that he had intended all along to provoke the United States into waging a war that would galvanise all of Islam against it.”
Jenkins is quite explicitly saying that bin Laden never realised that the United States would respond violently when his organisation murdered thousands of Americans. He would have been dismayed when the US invaded Afghanistan and destroyed his training camps. And therefore, the think-tank expert concludes, the United States did not fall into a trap that bin Laden had deliberately laid for it when it invaded Afghanistan.
Well, that’s one point of view. Here’s another. Bin Laden was fully aware that the United States would invade Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks, and he wanted it to do so. He believed that the US would then get mired in a long and bloody guerilla war in Afghanistan, a replay of the war against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s in which bin Laden himself had first risen to prominence.
Military commanders are always planning to re-fight the last war; terrorist commanders are no different. Bin Laden hoped that a protracted guerilla war in Afghanistan, with American troops killing lots of Muslims, would indeed “galvanise all of Islam” against the United States.
So why didn’t he say that beforehand? Why did he claim that the United States would flee screaming at the first atrocity, if he really expected it to invade Afghanistan? Because revolutionaries who resort to terrorism always talk freely about their goals, but they NEVER publicly discuss their strategy for achieving them. They can’t, because the strategy is so profoundly callous and cynical.
Terrorists generally have rational political goals – usually a revolution of some kind. In bin Laden’s case, he wanted Islamist revolutions across the Muslim world, but he had been notably unsuccessful in whipping up popular support for such revolutions. So how could he build that support? Well, how about luring the United States into invading a Muslim country?
Revolutionary groups often resort to terrorism if they think they lack popular support. Their aim is to trick their much more powerful opponent (usually a government) into doing terrible things that will alienate the population and drive it into their arms: it’s the political equivalent of jiu-jitsu.
They are trying to bring horror and death down on the population by triggering a government crack-down or a foreign occupation, in the hope that it will radicalise people and turn them into supporters of the terrorists’ political project. But the people they seek to manipulate must believe that it was the oppressors or the foreign occupiers, not the terrorists, who pulled the trigger. That’s why bin Laden lied about his strategy.
He probably didn’t even warn his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan that he was planning 9/11, because they would not have welcomed the prospect of being driven from power and having to fight another ten-year guerilla war against another invading superpower.
Bin Laden’s strategy was not original with him: he had been fighting as a guerilla and a terrorist leader for fifteen years by the time of 9/11, and people of this sort have ALWAYS read all the standard texts on their chosen trade. The notion of using the opponent’s strength against him absolutely permeates the “how to” books on guerilla war and terrorism, from Mao to Marighella.
So bin Laden dug a trap, and the United States fell into it. In that sense his strategy succeeded, and the guerilla war that ensued in Afghanistan did much to turn Arab and Muslim popular opinion against America. (The invasion of Iraq did even more damage to America’s reputation, but that really wasn’t about terrorism at all.)
In the long run, however, bin Laden’s strategy failed, simply because his project was unacceptable and implausible to most Muslims. And the most decisive rejection of his strategy is the fact that the oppressive old Arab regimes are now being overthrown, for the most part nonviolently, by revolutionaries who want democracy and freedom, not Islamist rule.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 7, 11 and 12. (“Military…States”; and “They…superpower”)
20 June 2011
Leaving Afghanistan
By Gwynne Dyer
It’s beyond satire. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, telling the New York Times what he had learned during his long tenure under Presidents Bush and Obama, explained that “I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice.” Gosh, Bob, does that mean you wouldn’t invade Iraq next time?
Afghanistan, by contrast, was a “war of necessity” in Gates’s terms: official Washington believed that further bad things like 9/11 might happen to the United States if US troops didn’t go to Afghanistan to root out the al-Qaida terrorists (mostly Arabs) who had been given bases there by the country’s Taliban leadership. It wasn’t a very subtle strategy, but it was certainly driven by perceived US national interest.
Which was the point being made by President Hamid Karzai, the man whom the United States put in power after the 2001 invasion: “[The Americans] are here for their own purposes, for their own goals, and they’re using our soil for that.”
Well, of course. The only other possible explanation for their presence would be that Washington had sent half a million young Americans to Afghanistan over the past ten years in some quixotic quest to raise the Afghan standard of living and the status of Afghan women. That’s ridiculous. Obviously, the motive was perceived US national interest.
So how to explain the furiously emotional response of Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador to Afghanistan? Speaking at Herat University, he raged: “When Americans…hear themselves described as occupiers, told that they are only here to advance their own interest…they are filled with confusion and grow weary of our effort here.”
“Mothers and fathers of fallen soldiers, spouses of soldiers who have lost arms and legs – they ask themselves about the meaning of their loved one’s sacrifice. When I hear some of your leaders call us occupiers, I cannot look these mourning parents, spouses and children in the eye and give them a comforting reply.”
Karl, they won’t be very comforted if you tell them that their loved ones died for Afghanistan. Tell them that they died defending America. Except, of course, that it may not have been a very useful way of defending America.
All the al-Qaeda camps were quickly smashed after 9/11, and by the end of 2001 Osama bin Laden had escaped across the border into Pakistan, where he remained until his death last month. Most of the surviving al-Qaeda cadres also fled to Pakistan, and US intelligence says that there are only a couple of hundred left in Afghanistan.
So why have American troops been in Afghanistan for almost ten years? To keep the Taliban from power, they say, but it’s unlikely that the Taliban leadership ever knew about al-Qaeda’s plans for 9/11. Why would they support an action that was bound to provoke a US invasion and drive them from power? Why would bin Laden risk letting them know about the attack in advance? The US has probably been barking up the wrong tree for a long time.
Now the Taliban are back in force, and the war is all but lost. The US may think it is about “terrorism” and al-Qaeda, but for Afghans it is just a continuation of the civil war that had already been raging for almost a decade before the US invasion. The Taliban, almost entirely drawn from the Pashtun ethnic group, captured Kabul in 1996, but they never managed to conquer the other, smaller ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan.
The United States stumbled into this civil war under the delusion that it was fighting Islamist terrorists, but in fact it has simply ended up on the side of the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. That’s who mans the “Afghan National Army” that the Western powers have been trying to build up with so little success: only three percent of its soldiers are Pashtuns, although Pashtuns account for 42 percent of the population.
So long as the US forces remain, the Taliban can plausibly claim that they are fighting a jihad against the infidels, but once the Americans leave the war will probably return to its basic ethnic character. That means that the Pashtuns are just as unlikely to conquer the north after the US departure as they were before the invasion.
In the end, some deal that shares out the spoils among the various ethnic groups will be done: that is the Afghan political style. The Taliban will get a big share, but they won’t sweep the board. The American interlude will gradually fade from Afghan consciousness, and the Afghan experience will vanish from American memory a good deal faster.
But in the meantime, President Barack Obama has promised to start withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan next month, and that will be very tricky. Few Americans know much about Afghan realities, and they have been fed a steady diet of patriotic misinformation about the place for a decade.
If the US ambassador to Kabul can get so emotional about a plain statement of fact, imagine how the folks at home will respond when US troops leave Afghanistan without a “victory”. Obama will be lucky to pull this off without a serious backlash.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6, 7 and 8. (“Mothers…Afghanistan”)
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.