Afghanistan war: The Soviet lesson not learned
From Rethink Afghanistan:
December 26th, 2009
Posts filed under 'Afghanistan'
Anthopologists oppose counterinsurgency use of knowledge
TIME covers the controversy in anthropology around the military’s use of social scientists in its Human Terrain Systems program. Unlike the situation in psychology, where the American Psychological Association is totally in bed with the military-intelligence establishment, anthropologists have taken an ethical stand. Interestingly, the authors of the American Anthropological Association report condemning the HTS program includes several anthropologists who work with the military. [The AAA has links to additional press accounts of this issue on their web page announcing the report's release.]:
Social Science vs. The Pentagon: Should Anthropologists Go to War?
By Christopher Shay
Anthropologists have traditionally had a pretty wonkish reputation, earnestly taking field notes while interviewing a tribal chief, or lecturing in some college classroom about the intricacies of indigenous clan-systems. If the Pentagon has its way, though, more anthropologists will exchange their tweed for military fatigues and leave the halls of academe for the frontlines. For the last two years, the U.S. military has embedded anthropologists and other social scientists with American troops in order to improve the army’s cultural IQ. But last week, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) released a report coming out strongly against the program, saying that both in concept and application, it “can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.”
Since 2007, the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System has been placing social scientists in every army combat brigade, regiment and Marine Corps regimental combat team. There are now more than 500 people employed by HTS, a number that is increasing rapidly. On the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, their job is to gather information and provide commanders with a greater understanding of the local population, reducing the need for lethal force by helping the army determine the needs of the community, according to Steve Fondacaro the project manager at HTS. Secretary of State Robert Gates has publicly praised the project, and one army colonel told Congress that one Human Terrain team reduced violent clashes encountered by his brigade in Afghanistan by 60-70%. As President Barack Obama revamps his Afghanistan strategy, getting ready to send 30,000 more soldiers, HTS is poised to become a major part of America’s war, helping troops navigate in a foreign land. “We’re pleased to find ourselves fully aligned with the goals [of the Obama administration],” says Fondacaro.
But if the military’s program is to continue its expansion in Afghanistan with the nation’s top scholars, it may be facing an uphill battle. The AAA says the program violates its code of ethics — a sort of Hippocratic Oath in which anthropologists vow to do no harm. Two years ago, the AAA condemned the HTS program, but this month’s 72-page report goes into much greater detail about the potential for the military to misuse information that social scientists gather; some anthropologists involved in the report say it’s already happening. David Price, a professor of anthropology at St. Martins University in Washington and one of the co-authors of the AAA report, says the army appears to be using the anthropological information to better target the enemy, which, if true, would be a gross violation of the anthropological code. One Human Terrain anthropologist told the Dallas Morning News that she wasn’t worried if the information she provided was used to kill or capture an insurgent. “The reality is there are people out there who are looking for bad guys to kill,” she said. “I’d rather they did not operate in a vacuum.” Price and other critics see this as proof that the anthropologists don’t have full control over the information they gather and that commanders can use it to kill. “The real fault with Human Terrain is that it doesn’t even try to protect the people being studied,” says Price. “I don’t think it’s accidental that [the Pentagon] didn’t come up with ethical guidelines.”
HTS adamantly denies that its program is designed to help the army improve its targeting, saying on its website that the role of the program “is neither to directly assist in lethal targeting of insurgents nor the collection of actionable military intelligence.” But Ben Wintersteen, who recently finished the nearly five-month HTS training program and has a masters in anthropology, says oversight is lacking. Once on the battlefield, “there’s definitely an intense pressure on the brigade staff to encourage anthropologists to give up the subject,” Wintersteen says. “There’s no way to know when people are violating ethical guidelines on the field.”
Still, Wintersteen, who is waiting to be sent to Iraq through HTS, says the AAA’s decision to attack the program will ultimately put more lives in danger by undermining the organization’s ability to provide guidance and dissuading top talent from joining. So far, HTS has struggled to bring in topflight social scientists with regional knowledge. “It hurts HTS and the people downrange like the American soldiers and the locals who depend on the rational analysis that anthropology brings,” Wintersteen says. In his training class of about 50 people, there were only about 13 social scientists, five with Ph.Ds — many of the others came from a military background. Because of the AAA, “there are a lot of highly motivated, ethical, critical anthropologists who are being discouraged from helping the program.” HTS project manager Fondacaro admits that finding recruits with regional expertise is “very rare,” but, he argues, HTS is creating a population of social scientists with firsthand experience in Iraq and Afghanistan where none existed before.
HTS is not the first time anthropologists have become involved with war efforts. Before the First World War, the field techniques of the discipline were used by the British to administrate and subdue the different cultural groups at the edges of its empire. Later in World War II, anthropologist Ruth Benedict played a key role in President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to allow the Japanese Emperor’s reign to continue as part of Japan’s surrender to the U.S. According to Price, who has written a book on the use of anthropology during World War II, the majority of American anthropologists were actively involved the Allied war effort. One British anthropologist, Edmund Leach, even led a team of ruthless Kachin fighers — the indigenous group he was studying in Burma — against the nation’s Japanese occupiers.
But the relationship between the military and anthropology soured during the ’60s and early ’70s. In 1964, the U.S. army recruited scholars for Project Camelot, a program whose goals included helping the U.S. army “assist friendly governments in dealing with active insurgency problems” such as in Chile, the project’s test case. The project never moved out of Chile, however; in 1965, once the public got wind of it, Project Camelot was canceled. Later, in 1970, documents stolen from a U.S. anthropologist’s office implicated a number of social scientists in clandestine counterinsurgency efforts in Thailand. These two scandals created an uproar at the AAA, and many anthropologists grew wary of military funded programs. Over the last 30 years, according to an article by Montgomery McFate, the senior social scientist at HTS and a trained anthropologist, “the discipline has become hermetically sealed within its Ivory Tower.”
AAA policy is not against anthropologists helping the military — a few of the co-authors of the AAA report, in fact, work closely with the military. But McFate’s larger point stands: For the last few decades, anthropologists have had little influence in military or foreign policy circles. As American troops adopt a counterinsurgency strategy, cultural knowledge has become a foremost Pentagon concern. They know historically the record for winning a short-term counterinsurgency is not good, so they’ve once again sought out cultural expertise. The discipline’s checkered history, however, has made many anthropologists sensitive to the parallels between HTS and the colonial era. “Anthropology was used in much the same way to help colonial militaries and colonial occupation,” says David Vine, an anthropology professor at American University.
Of course, this hasn’t stopped the military from asking for their help. “What’s been missing is the insight and the experiences that social scientists bring to these kinds of conflicts,” Fondacaro says. The traditional army, he says, is good at treating “the symptoms of insurgency” — fighting armed violent groups or reducing the number of IEDs, for instance — but “what HTS is focused on is the disease. There’s a reason why the population tolerates and sometimes actively supports groups that advocate violence.” That, says Fondacaro, is what HTS is trying to diagnose and ultimately cure.
When it comes down to it, the AAA has no sanctioning power, and the decision whether or not to join HTS comes down to the individual. For now at least, the Pentagon wants to leverage the cultural insights of academics to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but whether HTS has brought more top scholars into the military fold or only widened the schism between academia and the military remains unclear. James Der Derian, a professor of political science at Brown University who recently finished a documentary on HTS, and whose friend and colleague Michael Bhatia was killed in Afghanistan, one of three HTS social scientists to die on duty, says “the emphasis in previous wars has been more about how you defeat the enemy by controlling territory,” but now, “the center of gravity shifted to a psychological territory.” HTS is a clear indication that the Pentagon has realized in order to win the wars of the 21st century, cultural knowledge will need to be integrated into combat operations. And how do we do that exactly? Says Der Derian: “We’re still trying to figure that out.”
December 13th, 2009
George McGovern: “Come home, America.”
The former Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate is not afraid to criticize this President’s folly:
A sharp turn toward another Vietnam
By George McGovern
As a U.S. senator during the 1960s, I agonized over the badly mistaken war in Vietnam. After doing all I could to save our troops and the Vietnamese people from a senseless conflict, I finally took my case to the public in my presidential campaign in 1972. Speaking across the nation, I told audiences that the only upside of the tragedy in Vietnam was that its enormous cost in lives and dollars would keep any future administration from going down that road again.
I was wrong. Today, I am astounded at the Obama administration’s decision to escalate the equally mistaken war in Afghanistan, and as I listen to our talented young president explain why he is adding 30,000 troops — beyond the 21,000 he had added already — I can only think: another Vietnam. I hope I am incorrect, but history tells me otherwise.
Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon all believed that the best way to save the government in Saigon and defeat Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Cong insurgents was to send in U.S. troops. But the insurgency only grew stronger, even after we had more than 500,000 troops fighting and dying in Vietnam.
We have had tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan for several years, and we have employed an even larger number of mercenaries (or “contractors,” as they’re called these days). As in Vietnam, the insurgent forces are stronger than ever, and the Afghan government is as corrupt as the one we backed in Saigon.
Why do we send young Americans to risk life and limb on behalf of such worthless regimes? The administration says we need to fight al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. But the major al-Qaeda forces are in Pakistan.
The insurgency in Afghanistan is led by the Taliban. Its target is its own government, not our government. Its only quarrel with us is that its members see us using our troops and other resources to prop up a government they despise. Adding more U.S. forces will fuel the Taliban further.
Starting in 1979, the Soviets tried to control events in Afghanistan for nearly a decade. They lost 15,000 troops, and an even larger number of soldiers were crippled or wounded. Their treasury was exhausted, and the Soviet Union collapsed. A similar fate has befallen other powers that have tried to work their will on Afghanistan’s collection of mountain warlords and tribes.
We have the best officers and combat troops in the world, but they are weary after nearly a decade of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why waste these fine soldiers any longer?
Even if we had a good case for a war in Afghanistan, we simply cannot afford to wage it. With a $12 trillion debt and a serious economic recession, this is not a time for unnecessary wars abroad. We should bring our soldiers home before any more of them are killed or wounded — and before our national debt explodes.
In 1964, Johnson asked several senators who were not running for reelection that year if we would campaign for him. He assured those of us who were opposed to the war in Vietnam that he had no plans to expand the U.S. presence. Johnson won the election in a landslide, telling voters he sought no wider war. “We are not about to send American boys nine or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” he assured during his campaign.
But once elected, Johnson began to pour in more troops until American forces reached exceeded 500,000. All told, more than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, and many more were crippled in mind and body. This is to say nothing of the nearly 2 million Vietnamese who died under U.S. bombardment.
Johnson had a brilliant record in domestic affairs, but Vietnam choked his dream of a Great Society. The war had become unbearable to so many Americans — civilian and military — that the landslide victor of 1964 did not seek reelection four years later.
Obama has the capacity to be a great president; I just hope that Afghanistan will not tarnish his message of change. After half a century of Cold War and hot wars, it is time to rebuild our great and troubled land. By closing down the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can divert the vast sums being spent there to revitalizing our own nation.
In 1972, I called on my fellow citizens to “Come home, America.” Today, I commend these words to our new president.
**********
George McGovern, a former senator from South Dakota and a decorated World War II combat veteran, was the Democratic nominee for president in 1972.
December 12th, 2009
Every Afghan airstrike kills the same number of “insurgents”
Anyone who paid close attention to the Iraq war knows that it was not just the Bush administration that routinely lied about the war. For virtually all claims made by the US military on contentious matters later turned out to be false.
In either case, fraud or gross error, we should draw the same implications. If the military is presenting false information regarding how many were killed, there is no reason we should believe other aspects of their report, such as who was killed. Were they “insurgents?” Civilians? Goats? We have no idea until and unless there is independent verification.
Thanks to the Pentagon, this time under President Obama, we are again reminded that Truth is the first casualty of war. What I find saddest is that the media even find government claims of this type, given the extensive track record of lies and obfuscations. Surely any media doing its job would routinely remind its readers that government spokespersons exist to spin and dissemble, not to inform.
December 11th, 2009
Robert Fisk on Obama, the Middle East, and Afghanistan
December 11th, 2009
Lawrence Wilkerson on strategic interests in Afghanistan
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (Ret.) has an interesting perspective on the varied strategic interests involved in the Afghan conflict:
December 5th, 2009
Engelhardt on the Commanded-in-Chief
Tom Engelhardt, in a long and very perceptive article, describes Obama’s speech as a capitulation to a General’s revolt, and ackowledgment that he is willing to be the Commanded rather than the Commander:
Think of this as Barack Obama’s anti-MacArthur moment. In April 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, President Harry Truman relieved Douglas MacArthur of command of American forces. He did so because the general, a far grander public figure than either McChrystal or Centcom commander Petraeus (and with dreams of his own about a possible presidential run), had publicly disagreed with, and interfered with, Truman’s plans to “limit” the war after the Chinese intervened.
Obama, too, has faced what Robert Dreyfuss in Rolling Stone calls a “generals’ revolt” — amid fears that his Republican opposition would line up behind the insubordinate field commanders and make hay in the 2010 and 2012 election campaigns. Obama, too, has faced a general, Petraeus, who might well have presidential ambitions, and who has played a far subtler game than MacArthur ever did. After more than two months of what right-wing critics termed “dithering” and supporters called “thorough deliberations,” Obama dealt with the problem quite differently. He essentially agreed to subordinate himself to the publicly stated wishes of his field commanders.
In the article Engelhardt reminds us of just who Obama has chosen to surround himself with as advisers. Was there ever such a collection of incompetents in one city? Oh yes, during the Bush administration.
Why did he listen to them? And under such circumstances, why should we take the results seriously?
Stop for a moment and consider the cast of characters who offered the president the full range of advice available in Washington — all of which, as far as we can tell, from Joe Biden’s “counterterrorism-plus” strategy to McChrystal’s COIN and beyond, was escalatory in nature. These are, of course, the wise men (and woman) of our era. But just a cursory glance at their collective record should at least make you wonder:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now said to be the official with the best ties to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and so the one in charge of “coaxing” him into a round of reasonable nation-building, of making “a new compact” with the Afghan people by “improving governance and cracking down on corruption”; and yet, in the early 1990s, in her single significant nation-building experience at home, she botched the possibility of getting a universal health-care bill through Congress. She also had the “wisdom” to vote in 2003 to authorize the invasion of Iraq.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, reputedly deeply trusted by the president and in charge of planning out our military future in Afghanistan, was in the 1980s a supposed expert on the Soviet Union as well as deputy CIA director and later deputy to National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. Yet, in those years, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that the Soviets were done for even as that empire was disappearing from the face of the Earth. In the words of former National Security Council official Roger Morris, Gates “waged a final battle against the Soviets, denying at every turn that the old enemy was actually dying.” As former CIA official Melvin Goodman has put the matter: “Gates was wrong about every key intelligence question of the 1980s… A Kremlinologist by training, Gates was one of the last American hardliners to comprehend the changes taking place in the Soviet Union. He was wrong about Mikhail Gorbachev, wrong about the importance of reform, wrong about Moscow’s pursuit of arms control and détente with the United States. He was wrong about the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan…”
Vice-President Joe Biden, recently described as potentially “the second-most-powerful vice president in history” as well as “the president’s all-purpose adviser and sage” on foreign policy, was during the Bush years a believer in nation-building in Afghanistan, voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, and later promoted the idea — like Caesar re: Gaul — of dividing that country into three parts (without, of course, bothering to ask the Iraqis), while leaving 25,000-30,000 American troops based there in perpetuity, while “these regions build up their state police forces.”
General Stanley McChrystal, our war commander in Afghanistan and now the poster boy for counterinsurgency warfare, had his skills honed purely in the field of counterterrorism. He was a Special Ops guy. The man who is now to “protect” the Afghan people previously won his spurs as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq and Afghanistan. He ran the “manhunters” – essentially, that is, he was the leader of a team of assassins and evidently part of what reporter Seymour Hersh has termed an “executive assassination wing” of that command, possibly taking orders directly from Vice President Dick Cheney. His skills involved guns to the head, not protective boots on the ground.
General David Petraeus, the general leading everything, who has been practically deified in the U.S. media, is perhaps the savviest and most accomplished of this crew. He surged into Iraq in 2007 and, with the help of fortuitous indigenous developments, staunched the worst of the bleeding, leaving behind a big question mark. His greatest skill, however, has been in fostering the career of David Petraeus. He is undoubtedly an advisor with an agenda and in his wake come a whole crew of military and think-tank experts, with almost unblemished records of being wrong in the Bush years, whom the surge in Iraq recredentialized.
Karl Eikenberry, our ambassador to Kabul, in his previous career in the U.S. military served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and as the commander of Combined Forces Command Afghanistan was the general responsible for building up the Afghan army and “reforming” that country’s police force. On both counts, we know how effective that attempt proved.
And when it comes to key figures with well-padded Washington CVs like Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or James Jones, present national security advisor and former commandant of the Marine Corps, as well as the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, a close friend of Senator John McCain, and a former revolving-door board member of Chevron and Boeing, remind me just what sticks in your mind about their accomplishments?
So, when you think about Barack Obama’s Afghan decisions, imagine first that the man considered the smartest, most thoughtful president of our era chose to surround himself with these people. He chose, that is, not fresh air, or fresh thought in the field of foreign and war policy, but the airless precincts where the combined wisdom of Washington and the Pentagon now exists, and the remarkable lack of accomplishment that goes with it. In short, these are people whose credentials largely consist of not having been right about much over the years.
Admittedly, this administration has called in practically every Afghan expert in sight. Everyone involved could now undoubtedly expound on relatively abstruse questions of Afghan tribal politics, locate Paktia Province on a map in a flash, and tell you just which of Hamid Karzai’s ministers are under investigation for corruption.
Unfortunately, the most essential problem isn’t in Afghanistan; it’s here in the United States, in Washington, where knowledge is slim, egos large, and national security wisdom is deeply imprinted on a system bleeding money and breaking down. The president campaigned on the slogan, “Change we can believe in.” He then chose as advisors — in the economic sphere as well, where a similar record of gross error, narrow and unimaginative thinking, and over-identification with the powerful could easily be compiled — a crew who had never seen a significant change, or an out-of-the-ordinary thought it could live with — and still can’t.
Read the whole article.
December 3rd, 2009
Bacevich: Obama’s folly
Andrew Bacevich, former Army Colonel, wrote in the LA Times about:
Obama’s folly
Rather than trying to salvage Bush’s policy in Afghanistan, the president should show real courage and just pull the plug.By Andrew J. Bacevich
Which is the greater folly: To fancy that war offers an easy solution to vexing problems, or, knowing otherwise, to opt for war anyway?
In the wake of 9/11, American statecraft emphasized the first approach: President George W. Bush embarked on a “global war” to eliminate violent jihadism. President Obama now seems intent on pursuing the second approach: Through military escalation in Afghanistan, he seeks to “finish the job” that Bush began there, then all but abandoned.
Through war, Bush set out to transform the greater Middle East. Despite immense expenditures of blood and treasure, that effort failed. In choosing Obama rather than John McCain to succeed Bush, the American people acknowledged that failure as definitive. Obama’s election was to mark a new beginning, an opportunity to “reset” America’s approach to the world.
The president’s chosen course of action for Afghanistan suggests he may well squander that opportunity. Rather than renouncing Bush’s legacy, Obama apparently aims to salvage something of value. In Afghanistan, he will expend yet more blood and more treasure hoping to attenuate or at least paper over the wreckage left over from the Bush era.
However improbable, Obama thereby finds himself following in the footsteps of Richard Nixon. Running for president in 1968, Nixon promised to end the Vietnam War. Once elected, he balked at doing so. Obsessed with projecting an image of toughness and resolve — U.S. credibility was supposedly on the line — Nixon chose to extend and even to expand that war. Apart from driving up the costs that Americans were called on to pay, this accomplished nothing.
If knowing when to cut your losses qualifies as a hallmark of statesmanship, Nixon flunked. Vietnam proved irredeemable.
Obama’s prospects of redeeming Afghanistan appear hardly more promising. Achieving even a semblance of success, however modestly defined, will require an Afghan government that gets its act together, larger and more competent Afghan security forces, thousands of additional reinforcements from allies already heading toward the exits, patience from economically distressed Americans as the administration shovels hundreds of billions of dollars toward Central Asia, and even greater patience from U.S. troops shouldering the burdens of seemingly perpetual war. Above all, success will require convincing Afghans that the tens of thousands of heavily armed strangers in their midst represent Western beneficence rather than foreign occupation.
The president seems to appreciate the odds. The reluctance with which he contemplates the transformation of Afghanistan into “Obama’s war” is palpable. Gone are the days of White House gunslingers barking “Bring ‘em on” and of officials in tailored suits and bright ties vowing to do whatever it takes. The president has made clear his interest in “offramps” and “exit strategies.”
So if the most powerful man in the world wants out, why doesn’t he simply get out? For someone who vows to change the way Washington works, Afghanistan seemingly offers a made-to-order opportunity to make good on that promise. Why is Obama muffing the chance?
What Afghanistan tells us is that rather than changing Washington, Obama has become its captive. The president has succumbed to the twin illusions that have taken the political class by storm in recent months. The first illusion, reflecting a self-serving interpretation of the origins of 9/11, is that events in Afghanistan are crucial to the safety and well-being of the American people. The second illusion, the product of a self-serving interpretation of the Iraq War, is that the U.S. possesses the wisdom and wherewithal to guide Afghanistan out of darkness and into the light.
According to the first illusion, 9/11 occurred because Americans ignored Afghanistan. By implication, fixing the place is essential to preventing the recurrence of terrorist attacks on the U.S. In Washington, the appeal of this explanation is twofold. It distracts attention from the manifest incompetence of the government agencies that failed on 9/11, while also making it unnecessary to consider how U.S. policy toward the Middle East during the several preceding decades contributed to the emergence of violent anti-Western jihadism.
According to the second illusion, the war in Iraq is ending in a great American victory. Forget the fact that the arguments advanced to justify the invasion of March 2003 have all turned out to be bogus: no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction found; no substantive links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda established; no tide of democratic change triggered across the Islamic world. Ignore the persistence of daily violence in Iraq even today.
The “surge” engineered by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus in Iraq enables proponents of that war to change the subject and to argue that the counterinsurgency techniques employed in Iraq can produce similar results in Afghanistan — disregarding the fact that the two places bear about as much resemblance to one another as North Dakota does to Southern California.
So the war launched as a prequel to Iraq now becomes its sequel, with little of substance learned in the interim. To double down in Afghanistan is to ignore the unmistakable lesson of Bush’s thoroughly discredited “global war on terror”: Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars in distant countries does more to inflame than to extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent anti-Western jihadism.
There’s always a temptation when heading in the wrong direction on the wrong highway to press on a bit further. Perhaps down the road a piece some shortcut will appear: Grandma’s house this way.
Yet as any navigationally challenged father who has ever taken his family on a road trip will tell you, to give in to that temptation is to err. When lost, take the first offramp that presents itself and turn around. That Obama — by all accounts a thoughtful and conscientious father — seems unable to grasp this basic rule is disturbing.
Under the guise of cleaning up Bush’s mess, Obama has chosen to continue Bush’s policies. No doubt pulling the plug on an ill-advised enterprise involves risk and uncertainty. It also entails acknowledging mistakes. It requires courage. Yet without these things, talk of change will remain so much hot air.
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.
December 3rd, 2009
The end of the Obama administration
Tonight’s Afghanistan escalation speech marks the end of the Obama administration. Instead we are witnessing the birth of the second Lyndon Johnson administration as President Obama joins a long line of American presidents who place imperial war above all other goals.
Yes, he campaigned on a platform of expanded war in Afghanistan. But we hoped, stupidly it seems, that that was just campaign rhetoric. We hoped that, once elected, he would come to his senses and at least not escalate a hopeless and destructive conflict.
But he has proved us wrong. While on most other issues that mattered to us — torture, detainee abuse, civil liberties, civil rights for gays, healthcare reform, the economic well-being of the majority of the population, economic domination by the banks and other hyper-wealthy — he has proved that his campaign promises were primarily rhetoric. But he has proved that when it comes to war and destruction, he is a man of his word.
From this day forward, Barack Obama is and will be the president of war and occupation. The myth of change, and even of intelligent administration, is over. All we are left with is the Audacity of Disgust.
Today I regret voting for Barack H. Obama. It won’t happen again.
2 comments December 1st, 2009
Bush deliberately let Bin Laden escape, says Congressman
A Congressman has stated what many have speculated, that the Bush administration deliberately let bin Laden and other al-Qaeda escape from Tora Bora because of the need to keep a bogey to justify the Iraq invasion. In what passes for acceptable discourse in this country, the idea cannot even be discussed without attacking the one expressing this opinion as crazy:
Rep. Hinchey: Bush ‘intentionally let Bin Laden get away’
By Stephen C. Webster
The Bush administration permitted the world’s most notorious terrorist mastermind to escape because it needed additional justification to invade Iraq, according to a Democratic lawmaker from New York.
Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) leveled the allegation during an interview with MSNBC host David Shuster on Monday afternoon.
“Look what happened with regard to our invasion into Afghanistan, how we apparently intentionally let bin Laden get away,” he said. “How we intentionally did not follow the Taliban and al-Qaeda as they were escaping. That was done by the previous administration because they knew very well that if they would capture al-Qaeda, there would be no justification for an invasion in Iraq.”
“They deliberately let Osama bin Laden get away?” asked an incredulous Shuster. “They deliberately let the head of al-Qaeda get away right after he, right after the 9/11 attacks? You really believe that?”
“Yes, I do,” Hinchey replied. “There’s no question about that. The leader of the military operation in the United States called back our military, called them back from going after the head of al-Qaeda because there was a sense that they didn’t want to capture him.”
“…To suggest that they deliberately let Osama bin Laden get away so they could invade Iraq, that will strike a lot of people as crazy,” Shuster countered.
“I don’t think it will strike a lot of people as crazy,” Hinchey said. “I think it will strike a lot of people as very accurate and all you have to do is look at the facts of that set of circumstances and you can see that’s exactly what happened. When we went in there, when our military went in there, we could have captured them. We could have captured most of the Taliban and we could have captured the al-Qaeda. But we didn’t, and we didn’t because of the need felt by the previous administration and the previous head of the military — that need to attack Iraq, which is completely unjustified.”
Hinchy apparently based his allegations on a recently released Senate report that found then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld rejected calls for reinforcements in December 2001, when the military allegedly had bin Laden trapped in Afghanistan.
“The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the marine corps and the army, was kept on the sidelines,” the report says.
“Instead, the US command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack Bin Laden and on Pakistan’s loosely organized Frontier Corps to seal his escape routes.”
Entitled “Tora Bora revisited: how we failed to get Bin Laden and why it matters today,” the report — commissioned by Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — says Bin Laden expected to die and had even written a will.
“But the Al-Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected.
“Requests were also turned down for US troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan.
“The decision not to deploy American forces to go after Bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, General Tommy Franks,” the report says.
“On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, Bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today.”
This video was broadcast by MSNBC on Monday, Nov. 30, 2009, as snipped by Talking Points Memo.
December 1st, 2009