By Ralph Nader
Nader.org
Misusing professional cadets at West Point as a political prop, President Barack Obama delivered his speech on the Afghanistan war forcefully but with fearful undertones. He chose to escalate this undeclared war with at least 30,000 more soldiers plus an even larger number of corporate contractors.
He chose the path the military-industrial complex wanted. The “military” planners, whatever their earlier doubts about the quagmire, once in, want to prevail. The “industrial” barons because their sales and profits rise with larger military budgets.
A majority of Americans are opposed or skeptical about getting deeper into a bloody, costly fight in the mountains of central Asia while facing recession, unemployment, foreclosures, debt and deficits at home. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), after hearing Mr. Obama’s speech said, “Why is it that war is a priority but the basic needs of people in this country are not?”
Let’s say needs like waking up to do something about 60,000 fatalities a year in our country related to workplace diseases and trauma. Or 250 fatalities a day due to hospital induced infections, or 100,000 fatalities a year due to hospital malpractice, or 45,000 fatalities a year due to the absence of health insurance to pay for treatment, or, or, or, even before we get into the economic poverty and deprivation. Any Obama national speeches on these casualties?
Back to the West Point teleprompter speech. If this is the product of a robust internal Administration debate, the result was the same cookie-cutter, Vietnam approach of throwing more soldiers at a poorly analyzed situation. In September, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen told an American Legion Convention, “I’ve seen the public opinion polls saying that a majority of Americans don’t support the effort at all. I say, good. Let’s have the debate, let’s have that discussion.”
Where? Not in Congress. There were only rubberstamps and grumbles; certainly nothing like the Fulbright Senate hearings on the Vietnam War.
Where else? Not in the influential commercial media. Forget jingoistic television and radio other than the satire of Jon Stewart plus an occasional non-commercial Bill Moyers show or rare public radio commentary. Not in the op-ed pages of The New York Times and the Washington Post.
A FAIR study published in the organization’s monthly newsletter EXTRA reports that of all opinion columns in The New York Times and the Washington Post over the first 10 months of 2009, thirty-six out of forty-three columns on the Afghanistan War in the Times supported the war while sixty-one of the sixty-seven Post columns supported a continued war.
So what would a rigorous public and internal administration debate have highlighted? First, the more occupation forces there are, the more they fuel the insurgency against the occupation, especially since so many more civilians than fighters lose their lives. Witness the wedding parties, villagers, and innocent bystanders blown up by the U.S. military’s superior weaponry.
Second, there was a remarkable absence in Obama’s speech about the tribal conflicts and the diversity of motivations of those he lumped under the name of “Taliban.” Some are protecting their valleys, others are in the drug trade, others want to drive out the occupiers, others are struggling for supremacy between the Pashtuns on one side and the Tajiks and Uzbeks on the other (roughly the south against the north). The latter has been the substance of a continuing civil war for many years.
Third, how can Obama’s plan begin to work, requiring a stable, functioning Afghan government—which now is largely a collection of illicit businesses milking the graft, which grows larger in proportion to what the American taxpayers have to spend there—and the disorganized, untrained Afghan army—mainly composed of Tajiks and Uzbeks loathed by the Pashtuns.
Fourth, destroying or capturing al Qaeda attackers in Afghanistan ignores Obama’s own intelligence estimates. Many observers believe al Qaeda has gone to Pakistan or elsewhere. The New York Times reports that “quietly, Mr. Obama has authorized an expansion of the war in Pakistan as well—if only he can get a weak, divided, suspicious Pakistani government to agree to the terms.”
Hello! Congress did not authorize a war in Pakistan, so does Obama, like Bush, just decree what the Constitution requires to be authorized by the legislative branch? Can we expect another speech at the Air Force Academy on the Pakistan war?
Fifth, as is known, al Qaeda is a transnational movement. Highly mobile, when it is squeezed. As Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, the former CIA officer operating in Pakistan, said: “There is no direct impact on stopping terrorists around the world because we are or are not in Afghanistan.” He argues that safe havens can be moved to different countries, as has indeed happened since 9/11.
Sixth, the audacity of hope in Obama’s speech was illustrated by his unconvincing date of mid-2011 for beginning the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Afghanistan. The tendered exit strategy, tied to unspecified conditions, was a bone he tossed to his shaky liberal base.
The White House recently said it costs $1 million a year to keep each single soldier in Afghanistan. Take one fifth of that sum and connect with the tribal chiefs to build public facilities in transportation, agriculture, schools, clinics, public health, and safe drinking water.
Thus strengthened, these tribal leaders know how to establish order. This is partly what Ashraf Ghani, the former respected Afghan finance minister and former American anthropology professor, called concrete “justice” as the way to undermine insurgency.
Withdraw the occupation, which now is pouring gasoline on the fire. Bring back the saved four-fifths of that million dollars per soldier to America and provide these and other soldiers with tuition for their education and training.
The principal authority in Afghanistan is tribal. Provide the assistance, based on stage-by-stage performance, and the tribal leaders obtain a stake in stability. Blown apart by so many foreign invaders—British, Soviet, American—and internally riven, the people in the countryside look to tribal security as the best hope for a nation that has not known unity for decades.
Lifting the fog of war allows other wiser policies urged by experienced people to be considered for peace and security.
Rather than expanding a boomeranging war, this alternative has some probability of modest success unlike the sure, mounting loss of American and Afghani lives and resources.
13 responses so far ↓
1 paulie // Dec 3, 2009 at 12:28 pm
2 paulie // Dec 3, 2009 at 12:45 pm
3 Steve Real // Dec 3, 2009 at 12:49 pm
I think your article which I thought was on the edge of pasifism leaves out the basic fact that all the attacks on the West from Spain, to London, to Germany and of course their favorite target New York, all eminate from this region of the world, even Rolf Mowatt-Larssen
has to recognize the unmitigated truth when he see’s it.
And if I recall you didn’t think that the surge in Iraq would work either.
So you have been wrong before…
As far the “industrial miltary complex” was quoted back in the 1950’s when the US spent over ten percent of GDP on defense,
now it’s around 4.5%.
We spent more money, in real terms, on Vietnam in 1969 then
we did in the last 8 years of war.
So I take your economic analysis
as so-so and if John Maynard Keynes is right? The government spending going into WW2 was benefitial to the overall economy. Now I don’t particuilarly buy that argument, but Keynesian economics seems to rule our world.
What I do agree with you
is that we should be focusing on the business of America and stop f-ing around in these third world cess pools.
4 paulie // Dec 3, 2009 at 1:01 pm
all the attacks on the West from Spain, to London, to Germany and of course their favorite target New York, all eminate from this region of the world,
Have there been attacks on neutral countries that mind their own business and don’t poke their nose into the affairs of “this region”?
you didn’t think that the surge in Iraq would work either.
It didn’t. What “worked” in Iraq was a truce declared by one of the major factions. Iraq is still a boiling cauldron, and very likely to explode again.
the US spent over ten percent of GDP on defense, now it’s around 4.5%.
Those numbers are way off, and there’s nothing defensive about it.
We spent more money, in real terms, on Vietnam in 1969 then we did in the last 8 years of war.
Source? Does that count “homeland security”?
The government spending going into WW2 was benefitial to the overall economy.
Only in the same sense that putting millions of people to work digging ditches and filling them back up is beneficial.
As Radley Balko put it, http://www.theagitator.com/2009/12/02/in-which-the-terrorists-win/
In his thorough history of 9/11 The Looming Towers, Lawrence Wright makes a pretty persuasive case that Osama bin Laden’s goal in planning out terrorist attacks throughout the 1990s was to suck the U.S. into a Soviet-style war in Afghanistan. Bin Laden had no delusions about turning the U.S. into a Muslim country. Instead, he wanted to pull America into an expensive, dispiriting, unwinnable war—the sort of war nearly every power that has invaded Afghanistan has had to extract itself from, tail between legs. Wright writes that bin Laden was initially dispirited at the ease with which U.S. forces removed the Taliban from power.
Of course, we then let bin Laden escape. And then came Iraq. We’ve since given bin Laden more than he ever could have thought possible, and more. Two protracted wars. And our war in Afghanistan is looking more and more like the Soviet war bin Laden was hoping to emulate.
We’re now well into our ninth year in Afghanistan. The Soviets pulled out after 10. With Obama’s surge, we’ll be close to 100,000 U.S. troops in the country next year. That’s about the number the Soviets had deployed at the height of their own war. About the only difference between the two wars is that technology has shifted more of our war casualties from the killed column to the maimed. I guess that’s something.
Here’s a question for the politicians who support Obama’s plan, as well as those to the right of him who think it isn’t warmongery enough: What exactly does “victory” in Afghanistan look like? Certainly no one in his right mind thinks the country is going to look like, say, Iowa in 20 years. Same for Iraq. Are we expending what in the end will be a few trillion dollars and likely the lives of 6,ooo-7,000 troops to create another . . . Saudi Arabia? Another Egypt?
We do have a pretty good idea how bin Laden pictured victory. It looks a lot like what we’re seeing now. He wanted a holy war. We gave him two. We’ve compromised our values, rolled back civil liberties, and let our politicians generally scare the crap out of us whenever they want new powers. Oh, and we’ve let the bastard live to gloat about it all.
This war should have been over the moment we disposed of the Taliban. The military doesn’t build liberal societies. They destroy illiberal ones (and they do it very well). I’ll wager we have at least 50,000 troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan by the end of Obama’s first term. In fact, I’ll bet it’s closer to 75,000. Lovely that this was the anti-war candidate.
There’s no easy way out of either of these wars.
Which is a pretty damned good reason to excercise more discretion about when to get into them.
5 Ollie // Dec 3, 2009 at 1:25 pm
“What I do agree with you
is that we should be focusing on the business of America and stop f-ing around in these third world cess pools.”
Good point.
6 Deran // Dec 3, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Nader would be so excellent in the Senate.
7 Don Lake .......... The USSR messed up in Afghanistan also // Dec 3, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Ollie: why, what harm did it do to Alexander, Roma, France, Britain, the USSR ??????? *sarcasm*
8 Independent Green Party // Dec 3, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Thanks.
Enjoyed Nader’s article and the comments.
One point of correction.
On MSNBC’s Keith Obermann (aka Countdown) Show the night before the speech, Obermann discussed many of Nader’s points. Obermann urged the President to get out of the wars, not escalate them.
Both Obermann, and Rachel Maddow have been courageous on the issue of ending the wars. They are a great credit to “mainstream media”.
Now if they would only have Green Party candidates, and Independent Green candidates on their shows….
9 Michael Cavlan // Dec 3, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are BOTH Democrat talking shills.
If they were not, they would BOTH have Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia McKinney, Ralph Nader and the host of other truth speakers on, to rip apart the pro-war, corporate corrupted two party system, on their shows on a regular basis.
They have not and will not.
Because they are BOTH shills for the Democrats. Same goes for Ed Schultz.
10 Ross Levin // Dec 3, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Michael, how many times have you really watched Maddow or Olbermann? I mean, they’re far from perfect and don’t really focus on third parties at all (although Maddow has had Libertarians like Bob Barr and libertarians like Ron Paul on her show), but they are far better and more reality based and less corporate propaganda than most of the stuff on the 24 hour news networks.
Just because they don’t have your heroes on, they’re not bad people. Maddow spends more time talking about mercenaries, war crimes, and other issues that don’t get much press on the networks than any other talking head. For that I give her credit.
11 Robert Milnes // Dec 3, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Ralph could get eleted U.S. Senator from CT using The PLAS.
12 AD // Dec 3, 2009 at 10:13 pm
‘Bama lied. He’s been on probation too long. Time’s up. Let’s reel him and his war-making pals in Congress next year. Starting with Ralph Nader vs. Chris Dodd.
More war after 60+ years of it is NOT “change” or “hope” but failed leadership.
Ralph has some good ideas for alternate strategies in Afghanistan and around the planet. Is anyone listening?
13 Don Lake .......... John Anderson volunteer 1980 // Dec 3, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Could not agree with you more ………..
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