Fortunes of war

It is simply not the case that the Taliban, or Afghanistan, attacked the US on 9/11. A terror group, probably Al Qaeda, did. Since the US made, as usual, every effort to avoid trying to deal with the problem in a non-military manner, I am baffled as to why you would say that “[i]t’s hard to see what alternatives were available”.

How about, for example, showing some actual proof for the involvement of Al Qaeda and then pressuring the Taliban (and their Pakistani sponsors) to shut down their operation?

It is also wrong to simply group the resistance in Afghanistan under the rubric “Taliban”. There seem to be various different groups of people, mostly Pashtu, who aren’t happy about foreign military occupation, regular massacres of civilians, and the reinstatement of the same corrupt warlords whose rule brought the Taliban to success in the first place.

Like the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to the Serbs in 1914, the American ultimatum to the Afghans was carefully crafted to make it impossible for them to comply. We wanted a war. I wasn’t particularly upset about this routine piece of diplomatic dishonesty at the time since I couldn’t see how any American government could resist the political pressure to lash out. What makes it hard to see a way out now, however, is not the karmic consequences of the original invasion, but the way in which we have become committed to imposing Western values on the Afghans. Like the Russians before us, for example, we’re in favor of women’s rights and the Afghans hate that.

<blockquote<We asked the Taliban to hand over Osama. They wouldn’t.

Well, that’s not necessarily true. The Taleban’s offer to hand over Bin Laden is just one more war story that has been buried because it does not fit the script.

The Taleban’s behaviour before the war was intolerable, of course, and the international community was obliged to do something to help ordinary Afghans. Prof Q says “Afghanistan was not a war of choice” but in fact there might have been other more diplomatic ways to achieve change. We will probably never know.

I find it impossible to think about Afghanistan today without thinking about what might have been… Perhaps that’s a good thing, because we Westerners cannot look to the future of Afghanistan without looking at how things went so wrong, acknowledging our own mistakes, and (dare we hope?) holding the prime architects of those mistakes accountable.

It’s nice to imagine where we might be today if the money wasted on war in Iraq had instead been spent on Afghan schools, roads and other manifestations of Western “soft power”. Such a massive show of altruism might have won the hearts and minds of people across the Middle East, bringing calls for widespread democratic change.

Ironically, this is exactly what the architects of the Iraq War claim to have desired. But like the Bible says, “by their fruits shall ye know them.” It seems increasingly obvious that their real objective – in both Afghanistan and Iraq – was control of oil by Western corporations.

This gives away the big lie about “our” concern for the suffering people of Afghanistan. Perhaps ordinary voters in NATO countries like Australia, the UK, Canada and the USA did care about the brutal suffering of Afghans under the Taliban, but our governments obviously did not. They used popular support for the war as a pretext for realising their own geo-political ambitions, and the ordinary citizens of Afghanistan (and Iraq) have suffered miserably as a result.

With the Cold War now being reignited in Georgia, we Westerners need to go back and look at the tattered remains of the “American Dream”, and the vaunted promises of freedom which were posited for decades in contrast to Communist oppression. Was that all just a PR stunt? It seems that such promises have amounted to very little since the walls came down in 1989/90.

Again, I would suggest that the reason for this is not that we ordinary citizens of the West do not hold such visions of freedom and equality dear to our hearts, but that our supposedly representative governments – beholden as they are to corporate interests, including the giant US military industrial complex – do not truly share that vision.

As long as this is the case, there is little we can do for the peasants in Afghanistan, Sudan, Burma, Mozambique or anywhere else. We need to put our own house in order before we can go out and help others. And that process surely starts with some long-overdue accountability.

NB: Sorry, my first para above was in response to Anderson’s claim that “We asked the Taliban to hand over Osama. They wouldn’t.” My blockquotes did not work. Also, I cross posted this comment from Prof Q’s blog, which seems to be crashing repeatedly (as it often does).

What others said – it’s just rewriting history to say the Taliban weren’t prepared to deal. Just because the mullahs were/are ugly doesn’t mean they were stupid.

They had risen to power on a wave of genuine popularity because of their promises to bring stability. Now that they no longer needed them for support against the warlords why would they not take the opportunity to get rid of foreign adventurers like Osama who were a chronic threat to that stability? All they asked for was a face-saver to cover their breach of the Pushtu code of hospitality, and maybe some covert military help to dislodge them. But the Yanks instead preferred to “throw some shitty little country up against a wall” to relieve hurt feelings.

Yeah, who needs evidence? I mean, just because the US routinely blames “Islamic militants” for any act of terrorism (re: Oklahoma City bombing, Anthrax) doesn’t mean they can’t be taken at their word!

Evidence was necessary, if only to allow the Taliban to point to it as an excuse for violating the laws of hospitality. But I see that you insist on being an apologist for imperialism and mass murder. Good for you!

That should be: “I’m working…”

I didn’t support the Afghan invasion either. I understand some people thought it was “necessary” but it just seemed to me it was doomed to go the way of all other invasions of Afghanistan – kill a lot of Afghans, throw a whole lot more back to the stone age, and after a couple of years we all have to leave (if, unlike the famous British expedition, we are lucky).

I understand though that the US and Pakistan have to rein in their proxies when they get out of hand. You get the foreign policy you voted for, I suppose. It’s just a shame the rest of the world went along with it.

Good on you, abb1 – the Soviets DID build dams, schools, roads, etc. Afghanistan still uses a lot of that legacy. And unlike the current occupiers who sit in their bases, the Soviets did actually control the country. Small skirmishes notwithstanding, you could actually work, live and walk in the cities being a foreigner. That was the main difference between then and now – current forces are not interested in helping these people. All the talk about winning hearts and minds is just that – talk for internal US consumption.

Most obviously, war is inherently unpredictable and dangerous[….]

I will add an obvious point, but one that is not very regularly discussed: war is conducted in the way the military forces are organized. So, knowing the way the US and NATO military forces were organized, launching a war, any war for any reason, in Afghanistan (or Iraq or Serbia or wherever) was bound to involve high-altitude bombing of the sort that kills hundreds of civilians. So for instance last Friday’s bombing of 90 civilians, including 60 children (see for instance http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/world/asia/27herat.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss) is not a regrettable and unpredictable incident, it is the inevitable outcome of the way operations are conducted. Consequently, I opposed the war in Afghanistan, because I didn’t see why fighting against terrorists who have managed to kill a few thousands people makes it right to engage in operations that will kill thousands of innocent bystanders.

Or to take an analogy, if you spot a serial killer waiting in line at a supermarket, that doesn’t give you the right to lash out at him with an AK47. So if you have nothing else that an AK47 on you, you let him go or you try to get to him with your bare hands. It hurts, but that’s the moral thing to do.

It’s hard to see what other alternatives were available

Is it really? How about dealing with terrorism coming from a poor country in the same way indigenous terrorism is dealt with? The US found perfectly adequate alternatives to bombing Oklahoma after the Oklahoma city bombing.

Suppose we had tried them at it. Couldn’t we have still invaded after they showed us they wouldn’t?

The US harbors this guy who blew up a Cuban airliner in 1976 and is implicated in many other terrorist acts. He escaped from a Venezuelan jail and the US refuses to extradite him.

What should the Venezuelan government do?

novakant is on the money here. I led demonstrations against the war on Afghanistan, and nothing that’s happened since has led me to doubt that I was right to do so. I only wish I’d done more to try and stop it.

How long would it have delayed the invasion to actually give them our evidence?

One of the criticisms of the invasion, actually, is that we spent too long preparing & thus allowed bin Laden to prepare his escape. How long did it take us to get troops on the ground? Six weeks?

Of course I agree with many of the reservations about the war. High-altitude bombing is stupid and murderous. There was absolutely no reason to minimize American casualties at the risk of the mission, given the huge public support for the war in the U.S. And, god knows, fighting in Afghanistan is one of the worst things that an army can do.

Still, given the evident disinclination of the Taliban to hand over bin Laden & Zarqawi (and readers of The Looming Tower or Ghost Wars will know that this disinclination long predated 9/11, as Toby correctly observes above), taking out the Taliban was pretty much the only plausible option that wouldn’t have amounted to a huge “Kick Me Again, I Like It” sign taped to the collective American backside.

All the more reason of course not to waste resources on a stupid and unnecessary war in Iraq. Afghanistan was biting off quite enough.

I’d like to point out that the original premise that the war in Iraq is now successful is incorrect, if ‘success’ is defined as anything other than ‘successful propaganda/looting campaign for the GOP’. The level of civilian violence is still incredibly high. IIRC, it’s down to 2005 levels, which were considered double-plus ungood back in 2005 (or denied). The government is a bunch of Iranian-backed theokleptocrats whose basis is mass murder, torture, ethnic cleansing and massive corruption. The ‘Sunni Awakening’ is running into the problem that the government of Iraq is largely a Shiite machine, which doesn’t want much Sunni participation. This new government has been purchased at the cost of 1 million Iraqi lives, and a few million refugees.

Al Qaida might be less powerful in Iraq, but only in relation to how powerful they became as a result of the invasion. And if they can’t recruit a new generation of terrorists out of genuine anger at what the US has done, they wouldn’t have gotten to where they are.

Meanwhile, the US has p*ssed away vast amounts of wealth, in dollars, respect of the world, and Constitutional respect.

And the scum who did this have almost all prospered. They’re still around, counting their gains, and dreaming of their next chance.

One of the criticisms of the invasion, actually, is that we spent too long preparing & thus allowed bin Laden to prepare his escape. How long did it take us to get troops on the ground? Six weeks?

We’d have been better off if bin Ladin had escaped before we attacked, so we could chase him somewhere else.

I’m not clear how much of the intial evidence was classified.

That is a minor side issue. But suppose we asked the Taliban to ask bin Ladin whether he did it. If he denied doing the crime that would be a propaganda victory for us. More likely he wouldn’t deny it. The last poll I saw on the topic, a near-majority of pakistanis believed he didn’t do it, I think that was last year or maybe the year before. We have interviews where he bragged about it, that could have been faked. If Taliban had published his confession/brag there would have been no doubt.

We invaded when we did because the Bush administration wanted war with afghanistan. They started out mostly funding the Northern Alliance because they didn’t want to repeat the russian experience. Now we’re repeating the russian strategy anyway, but we’re trying to do it with minimal resources.

But suppose we asked the Taliban to ask bin Ladin whether he did it.

Y’know, if the Taliban themselves weren’t already *very* interested in finding out whether their Saudi friend and guest had just attacked New York City and the Pentagon, then I don’t think our suggestion was going to influence them much. Do you?

Assuming that America is always wrong is not much more clever than assuming that it’s always right.

taking out the Taliban was pretty much the only plausible option that wouldn’t have amounted to a huge “Kick Me Again, I Like It” sign taped to the collective American backside.

So once again, we see that from the point of view of many, the war was about appearing “tough”. I blame too much TV.

It is, by the way, completely irrelevant what the Taliban did or didn’t do when taking this or that city. Clearly, the US ruling class doesn’t give a shit about humanitarian concerns; this is demonstrated both by their own actions and their embrace of murderous scum like Mr. Dostum (who, iirc, faked switching sides to the Taliban only to then attack them and have thousands of prisoners killed).

We don’t have to “assume” that the Western powers were wrong to invade Afghanistan. We know they were.

So we judge the merits of a decision for war, not by whether it was a good idea at the time, but by whether it’s ultimately successful?

Very good. All we have to do is predict the future.

It was certainly predictable that extirpating the Taliban would be a long hard slog, but we certainly could’ve done better against al-Qaeda, as John Kerry tried to remind folks in 2004.

“The precondition? That evidence be produced as to his guilt.”

No. The precondition was that evidence to Sharia-as-interpreted-by-the-Taliban standards be produced as to his guilt which included rules that the word of non-Muslims not be counted against the word of Muslims.

And that isn’t the same as “they just wanted to know the truth” claim that you implying, at all.

I’m sorry christian, but the circumstances regarding war in Afghanistan and Iraq are different in important ways. We can argue about what the proper course of action to take in Afghanistan would have been, but at the end of the day you have to live with the government that you have. The Bush admin had access to the evidence. They were the ones talking to the Taliban. They had to make the judgement call, based on far greater evidence and exposure than you’re ever going to get in retrospect, on whether the Taliban was dealing with them in good faith or not. But I don’t think you can really argue to the American public they shouldn’t go to war because the man they just elected president is monumentally incompetent. It’s just not an argument you can expect to have taken seriously, even if true. Even aside from that, I’m really not sure how you think the Taliban could have been dealing with the US in good faith on the matter.

The fact of the matter is that if you’re harboring a well known terrorist and a terrorist attack is launched on another country your own terrorist is ideologically opposed to, I think it’s pretty absurd to argue that you have a moral defense against being attacked if you don’t take accusations against that terrorist pretty seriously. Maybe you think the Taliban did take those accusations seriously. Is that the claim you want to rest your argument on? Let’s try to be clear about this, if possible.

mpowell@39: An amazing comment. What can you mean by “having to live with the government you have”? Even if it’s the most secretive and dishonest government in your country’s history? Or by “the Bush administration had the evidence”? Are you suggesting that there was ever the slightest reason to believe that they would deal honestly with the evidence? The antiwar argument was not at all that Bush was monumentally incompetent, but rather that the administration was utterly dishonest and utterly contemptuous of international law. And also, of course, as remarked above, that large-scale American military action would probably kill thousands of innocent people.

Given the perfidy of nearly everyone in an officially responsible position in the post-911 American government, and the extension of that perfidy into justification for the invasion and occupation of Iraq; given the clear and repeated willingness on the part of those officially responsible to lie about anything and everything necessary to accomplish their goals, or the goals of their off-stage managers; given the complicity of legacy media in propagating and maintaining those lies, and the paucity of alternative media with professional standards and enough base coverage to counteract them, how can anyone take a pro-Afghan/anti-Iraq war stand?
How do you confidently know anything about any of it?
This is very frustrating and leads to feelings of intense helplessness, but this is a certainty:
the Western military presence in Afghanistan stinks.
It stinks of oil and heroin.
It stinks of inhuman disregard for the lives of common people.
It stinks of wretched compromise with evil, while evil metastisizes.

Could the possibly be related, without al Qaeda focusing on Iraq, perhaps they are now better able to operate in Kosavo and Afghanistan. Perhaps Iraq contributed greatly to the previous success in Afghanistan.

the political climate would not have tolerated a long negotiating process with the Taliban or tippy toe methods

But they waited almost a month before they started bombing; I have to say – I was surprised. It seems to me that if the climate tolerated a month, it would’ve tolerated any negotiating process. In this situation every passing day weakens the pressure.

the political climate would not have tolerated a long negotiating process with the Taliban or tippy toe methods

Again, what does this even mean? That there would have been riots in the streets if the US didn’t bomb something?

Propaganda was used to “sell” war (most recently, in the case of Iraq); surely, it could have been employed to sell peace.

The antiwar argument was not at all that Bush was monumentally incompetent, but rather that the administration was utterly dishonest and utterly contemptuous of international law.

There were a number of colorable “antiwar arguments” available at the time, many, perhaps all of which were articulated by individuals and institutions at the time. Such arguments did not include claims that the Bush administration was monumentally incompetent, utterly dishonest, or utterly contemptuous of international law. It was far from clear at the time that the Bush administration was any of these things. Its utter dishonesty and contempt for law, including, but not limited to, International Law, has been subsequently established, by its statements and actions, beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan, and subsequently.

Many have criticized the administration for its “monumentally incompeten[cy], (or equivalent formulations) pointing to its military and diplomatic performance in its “war on terror,” and have supported such criticism with forceful arguments. To the extent the problems they refer to are indeed attributable to incompetency, again, this wasn’t known before the invasion of Afghanistan, and would not have been cited in antiwar arguments at that time.

With respect to the administrations alleged incompetence, consider this exchange between Sen Biden and Z. Brzezinsky at a Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing in Feb. 1, 2007.

SEN. BIDEN: [What] do you think …was the objective of the — of this administration [for invading Iraq] initially?

MR. BRZEZINSKI: I have no idea what his initiative objective was because the motives he provided for the action proved to be entirely erroneous, and if they were the real motives, then the whole campaign was based on false assumptions.

SEN. BIDEN: It’s unfair to ask you to be a soothsayer. I apologize.

MR. BRZEZINSKI: Now, if there were hidden motives, I can imagine potentially several. One would be to gain American domination over the region’s oil, to put it very simplistically. Another could be to help maximize Israel’s security by removing a powerful Arab state. Another one could have been to simply get rid of an obnoxious regime with which the United States had accounts to settle going back to ’91 and the alleged assassination attempt against President Bush Sr. There could be a variety of motives. But the official motives were WMDs.

Full text of article

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20070225&articleId=4921

It seems to me that one cannot evaluate competency unless one knows what an actor is trying to do. In my judgement, the administrations stated explanations for its invasion of Afghanistan were never clear or consistent. Furthermore, what the administration said at the time, and subsequently, can’t be taken at face value given its utter untruthfulness, which was not known when the invasion of Afghanistan was being debated.

“Had they” by which I mean our elected officials.

Novakant, yes.

All we needed to get afghanistan out of Taliban’s control was for pakistan’s ISI to stop supporting Taliban. It was pakistan’s material support that let Taliban dominate.

And it’s ominous that even with our material support plus troops on the ground and airstrikes, the Taliban’s enemies haven’t been able to control afghanistan, any more than their fathers did with russian support. It gives me the strong impression that we’re backing losers.

Tom Doyle: It was far from clear at the time that the Bush administration was any of these things.

No, it was clear immediately. From Day One, the Bush administration began packing every cabinet department and regulatory agency with industry flacks, limiting access to public records, making procedures less transparent, vetting judicial and other appointees on political grounds, employing signing statements and inventing other ways to enhance Executive Branch power, etc, etc. As Lincoln Chafee has reported, Vice President Cheney met with Republican senators shortly after the election and informed them that the administration’s policy would bear little relation to its public commitments during the campaign. Cheney illegally withheld the transcript of his energy task force meeting, claiming executive privilege. There were innumerable examples during the administration’s first nine months of reckless disregard for truth, transparency, and propriety, if you were paying attention.

We are mostly not qualified to decide whether our invasion damaged Al Qaeda’s terrorism because the information is still entirely secret. The information that has been released may all be lies. The story is still untold about our brave honorable soldiers who refused to fake evidence about iraqi WMDs.

There are claims that AQ did terrorist training in afghanistan, though they could have done that training anywhere and afghanistan was not a good place for it. More believably, there are stories that AQ trained conventional soldiers there, that they turned out infantrymen that were on a par with US Marines. (The story is that they used US Marine manuals but removed the 3/5 of the material that was not useful, cutting down the training time by 60%.) However, they were like US Marines without much artillery or air support, so we beat them fairly easily. If these stories are true, what would AQ have done with conventional infantry? Could they have infiltrated them into saudi arabia and taken over the government? We might have stopped something other than terrorism by invading afghanistan.

For stopping terrorism, dismantling the AQ financial network was probably far more important. But we won’t find out what really happened until the people who did the work feel free to tell us what they did. At the moment we have very little to go by except Bush Administration propaganda which deserves no credibility.

Statements that the Afghan war could be justified on grounds of self-defence presuppose the following:

1: 9/11 was not a spectacular ‘one off’ by Al-Qaeda, but was instead planned to be the beginning of a ‘rolling’ series of terrorist attacks on the US mainland.

2: These attacks were to be organised and run from Afghanistan.

Clearly both these criteria have to be met before a ‘self-defence’ argument will succeed.

But it’s not at all clear to me that even the first is correct. Where is the evidence that OBL or Al-Qaeda planned a follow up to 9/11 (let alone numerous follow ups)? And by evidence I mean serious evidence, with budgets and timetables, not evidence inferred from the idle daydreams of bored jihadis. To the best of my knowledge, all the evidence, on the contrary, is that (as far as the Americans were concerned) after 9/11 Al-Qaeda had ‘shot its bolt’ and were unlikely to be able to plan something of such complexity ever again.

2: Even if this isn’t true: what’s Afghanistan got to do with it? Notoriously, most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis. The ‘nucleus’ for 9/11 was termed the Hamburg Cell. Should ‘we’ be bombing Hamburg?

“We asked the Taliban to hand over Osama. They wouldn’t.”

Luis Posada Carriles? Or any of a whole host of Latin American death squad members and enablers? The guys who mined Nicaraguan harbours? Don’t tell me that the invasion of Afghanistan was anything other than the US throwing some shitty little country against the wall. Unless you would, in principle – given that the practical possibilities are non-existent – support the military obliteration of the US state and the installation of a bunch gangster capitalists and foreign aid skimming warlords as the new rulers.

Oh, sorry, I forgot that the butchers of Latin America formed a significant part of the Bush government and circle of advisors.

“There was little option but to go in an[d] root out the whole nest.”

That’s some lovely dehumanising going on there. Fumigate the place, eh?

slocum — I think John’s parenthetical comment referred to the contributors to CT. I don’t know whether he’s right because I only know my position and one other contributor’s position. The other contributor has John’s position (supported war on Afghanistan, opposed in on Iraq). I opposed it on Iraq, and more-or-less supported it with no enthusiasm whatsoever on Afghanistan (I guess I felt that they had no choice, but also that they were bound to cock it up).

Slocum: But at this late date, the different justifications for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan matter little either for the obligations to the peoples of those countries or the broader implications of success or failure.

Sigh. They matter if you think that to create an international culture of law-abidingness that will restrain governments from criminal aggression is the most important prerequisite for ensuring the continuance of our species. As long as the populations of the United States and other free societies are unaware of just how immoral and illegal their governments’ actions are and are unwilling to restrain them, the danger level will remain critical. That’s why it matters a great deal to convince the American people that their government is not only incompetent but actually criminal. It may also predispose them to support extensive reparations to our government’s victims.

It may also predispose them to support extensive reparations to our government’s victims.

Like another tax rebate?