Wars past and present

Tom Nichols made an observation on Twitter that I found thought provoking:

... Biden‘s approval never recovers after the pullout from Afghanistan. Bush, Obama and Trump didn’t pull out of Afghanistan because everyone knew that the American people were going to punish whoever did what they were demanding be done.

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I think that's right. I speak from the somewhat rare perspective of having been certain before the US invaded Afghanistan that this was going to be a clusterfuck. There was a response to 9/11 that need not have been so disastrous; we could have gone in, grabbed (or more likely just killed) the intellectual authors and enablers of that attack -- and left it to Afghans sort themselves out. There was no reason to think the results would have been pretty for Afghan women or Afghan civil society such as it existed, but nothing was gained and much lost by our long occupation.

Biden did the right thing by finally cutting our losses. The withdrawal could, and should, have been handled better, ensuring protection to the many Afghans who had bought into our project so much more deeply than we ever did. But getting out was right. And it is worth appreciating that Biden dared to walk into an anticipated minefield.

• • •

On the topic of wars ... I want to recommend Joe Cirincione's takedown of RFK Jr. who seems to be stooging for Russia, Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson on the margins of the Democratic Party (GOPers love the guy). Cirincione has terrific qualifications to speak on war and justice, having toiled for nuclear disarmament for years as the head of Ploughshares Fund. He remains an anti-imperialist:

Kennedy denies the agency of smaller nations. He and others assume a Great Power logic, that only the big nations matter. Rep. Jamie Raskin calls this the “colonialist reflex.” ...

 ... Kennedy is repeating an integral part of Putin’s effort to discredit Ukraine’s government as illegitimate and to erase the idea of an independent Ukrainian nation. For Putin (and Kennedy), the only way Ukraine could have a government that he did not support is if it was “hand-picked” by the United States - or in this case, by a single assistant secretary of state.

Nor was the new government “unelected.” It was elected by the Ukrainian parliament and then changed leadership peacefully and democratically in numerous popular elections since.

This war is about Ukraine, not us. Read it all. 

War makes human flotsam

A poignant story in the Washington Post tells of young Afghans who, as part of the chaotic collapse of the U.S. military adventure in their country, find themselves in an Adriatic Sea beach resort on the coast of Albania. It's a beautiful and friendly haven ... but what next?

SHËNGJIN, Albania — The 21-year-old university student did not realize it at the time, but he got on the wrong plane out of Afghanistan. 

... For the student, his siblings and hundreds like them who were taken to Albania, a country they had never heard of — and to a beach resort, no less — it has become the strangest of limbos. 

For nearly a year, they have lived in a sprawling beach hotel in Shëngjin, a resort town with a long, wide swath of sand on Albania’s north coast, a little over an hour’s drive from the capital, Tirana. 

“The food is good, and the room is good,” said the student, whose brother had worked for the Americans, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relatives in Afghanistan from possible retaliation by the Taliban. “But we are in a psychological prison because we don’t know what will happen.”

They are more likely to be able to migrate to Canada than to the United States which is being inexplicably stingy with visas for Afghans whose lives we tore to shreds.

• • •

The Adriatic coastline is rugged and beautiful.

This story of exiled Afghans puts me in mind of my uncle's remarkable trajectory out of a Serbian farming village located within the Hapsburg Empire, by way of a desperate season as a child soldier in the Serbian Army during the Great War (World War I, 1914-1918) to England, then the U.S., finally landing in Buffalo, New York. The Austrians shot his father, simply for being a Serb, on the outbreak of war. He swam a river under fire and joined up with other Serbs. The ragtag Serbian army, beset by typhus and outgunned by invading Bulgarians, trekked over rugged passes in winter to the Adriatic Coast.

And suddenly, Stevan Idjidovic's life took another wild turn. The Brits hadn't been particularly useful allies to Serbia, but they offered to take a small number of young Serbian men to Oxford to be trained up as proper English gentlemen. My uncle was one of the lucky ones, suddenly transported from an Adriatic beach to imperial luxury. From photos of that time, you get the sense that the Balkan transplants may have been looked upon as belonging to a category not-unlike Indian subjects receiving their finishing in the imperial center.

Stevan thrived and hustled his way to America, to meeting my aunt, and to landing in Buffalo in the 1930s. He wrote a little book about his war, The Snows of Serbia. 

I wrote a lengthy summary which you might enjoy if Stevan's tale piques your interest.

Home coming ...

What happens to the men and women we send to meaningless wars that end badly? The question hung over the country in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam war. Civilians were all too happy to forget. Broken veterans were designated patients -- the surviving crazy, not heroes emerging from brutal suffering. All that was left was the performative patriotism of the POW-MIA myth and a military that knew it would have to become professional and never again depend on draftees to fight.

Now we're living in the aftermath of our terrible, meaningless War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond. Elliot Ackerman is writer, a former Marine Corps Special Operations Team Leader, and one of the most thoughtful chroniclers of the long morass. He discusses our ignominious exit from Afghanistan and the implications of the divide between civilians and the military in a wide ranging podcast with Charlie Sykes of the Bulwark.  It's absolutely worth listening to in full.

Sykes asked whether we need fear that some part of a disgruntled military might be drawn into our domestic political struggles. 

Ackerman looks at the country that sent him and his comrades to war and worries:

I'm really not trying to be alarmist, but we have such high levels of dysfunction domestically, and every time we kind of set up these scenarios where we're asking our military to play a role in domestic politics, we're really tempting the fates.

The analogy I use is that these contested elections remind me of a drunk driver.

A drunk driver will go to the bar, right, and they will get completely hammered drunk, and they'll drive home.

And, probably the first time they do that, like, they make it home, and they do it and they make it home the second time, the third time.

And then on the fourth or fifth time, they get hammered drunk and try to drive home.

That's when they wrap their car around a telephone pole.

 When I look at our contested elections, it's like we're doing the equivalent as a nation of going to the bar getting just hammered drunk, and we try to drive home.

We've done it twice now, and we have sort of managed to make it home, but one of these days, if we keep doing this, we are going to wrap our proverbial car around a telephone pole.

Soldiers who have seen their buddies killed for no purpose have historically been very dangerous to democracy. The German military rolled over for Hitler in part because they'd clung for a couple of decades to their Big Lie that civilians had betrayed their valiant fight in what we call World War I.

General Douglas MacArthur was called home by President Truman for resisting civilian leadership in the faltering Korean war

This country has had generals with right leaning political aspirations come home before.

Might our soldiers respond to the futile waste that was the War on Terror by being attracted to fascism?

Under Donald Trump, the professional military resisted being used for the lawless purposes of the aspiring Orange King. But the military does seem to produce some nutcases, of whom General Michael Flynn is the prize specimen.

Ackerman thinks and talks knowledgeably about all this.

When you are in a hole, stop digging

The inept cruelty which has characterized U.S. involvement with Afghanistan doesn't end.

A group of victims of the 9/11 attacks have written to President Biden: Afghan Central Bank Funds Belong to Afghans

President Biden: We all lost loved ones on September 11th and call upon you to return the Afghan Central Bank funds to the Afghan people. This is their money, not ours.

Their argument may not seem obvious, but certainly deserves consideration.  Robert Wright and Andrew Day explain.

In February, Biden signed an executive order freezing $7 billion in assets owned by Afghanistan’s central bank. The order reserved half that amount for 9/11 victims’ relatives who had successfully sued the Taliban for damages years ago. But this week 80 other relatives of 9/11 victims urged reconsideration of the policy. In a letter to Biden they wrote, “Ninety-five percent of Afghans are impoverished, and nearly nine million are at risk of starvation…this money is theirs, not ours.”

These families argue the impounded assets never belonged to the Taliban.

This money does not belong to the Taliban. This money comes from Afghanistan’s central bank, and as such, it belongs to the Afghan people. Victims of terrorism, including 9/11 victims, are entitled to their day in court. But they are not entitled to money that lawfully belongs to the Afghan people.

Our government has never been much concerned with the rightful claims of ordinary Afghans, but Biden should not be compounding the evils left by this misbegotten imperial adventure.

Shards from the Embattled Republic

An occasional list of links to thought provoking commentary on the condition our condition is in. 

In the wake of the Dobbs decision which allowed states to ban abortion, Jessica Valenti is observing Republican legislators: "We are dying and they are laughing. How the fuck do you have a conversation about that?"

Sarah Chayes, former NPR journalist and later aid organizer among Kandahar Afghans during American's war:
"So. Ayman al-Zawahiri is killed at last. Ayman al-Zawahiri, mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, successor to Usama bin Laden at the helm of a limping version of the organization we chose to consider an existential threat 20 years ago, launching two ill-conceived wars that left millions of people worse off than they’d been before, tens of thousands of service-members injured, confused and embittered, and a handful of defense contractors immeasurably richer. ... A closure, of sorts, I suppose."

Race and class in the city by the Bay: “To be Black in San Francisco is to be very lonely.” 

Peter Beinart of Jewish Currents and CUNY looks at how race diversity plays among Republican leaders: "The GOP is capable of racial and ethnic inclusion. Jindal and Haley were popular with grassroots Republicans, and so were Ben Carson and Marco Rubio. Mayra Flores, a Mexican American woman elected earlier this year from South Texas, is the congressional GOP’s newest star. But it’s almost always a shared conservative Christianity that allows white Republicans to embrace Black, Hispanic, or Asian candidates. Which means conservative Christianity, which can foster racial and ethnic inclusion can foster religious exclusion at the same time."

Diana Butler Bass, a theologian who writes for and to Christians: "Christians must stand up, speak up, and do good right now. Civil war isn’t funny. We can’t let it happen. We don’t need purity. We need decency. And peaceable community."

Via writer Steven Beschloss, two powerful visions of purpose:  

Liz Cheney: “This is not a game. Every one of us must be committed to the eternal defense of this miraculous experiment called America and at the heart of our democratic process—our elections. They are the foundational principle of our Constitution. Two years ago, I won this primary with 73 percent of the vote. I could easily have done the same again. The path was clear, but it would have required that I go along with President Trump's lie about the 2020 election. It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic. That was a path I could not and would not take…"

Joe Biden: “I swore an oath of office to you and to God to faithfully execute the duties of this sacred office. To me, the critical duty—the critical duty of the presidency is to defend what is best about America. And that’s not hyperbole. Defend what’s best about America. To pursue justice, to ensure fairness, and to deliver results that create possibilities—possibilities that all of us—all of us can live a life of consequence and prosperity in a nation that’s safe and secure. That’s the job. Fulfilling that pledge to you guides me every single hour of every single day in this job.”

New York Times columnist and resident explorer of U.S. history Jamelle Bouie is skeptical of third parties in this country. "The biggest problem with the Forward Party, however, is that its leaders — like so many failed reformers — seem to think that you can take the conflict out of politics. 'On every issue facing this nation,' they write, 'we can find a reasonable approach most Americans agree on.' "

Historian of Russia and Ukraine Timothy Snyder sees Russia's imperial invasion flailing: "Russia has reached the stage in the war in which it is fighting because not to fight would be embarrassing.  It has reached this stage quickly. ... Our job is incomparably easier than the Ukrainians'.  The Ukrainians have to demonstrate resolution of every kind.  All we have to do to see things as they are, show some patience, and support the democracy that is under attack -- with the right attitude, and the right weapons.  The outcome of the war might well depend upon our capacity to do that."

Jonathan V. Last, Republican anti-Trumper, at the The Bulwark, is tired: 

"Who wants to live like this? Can’t we go back to Republicans trying to pass corporate tax breaks and roll back the regulatory regime while Democrats push to increase social safety-net spending? 

"Bring back the dysfunctional politics of 1980 - 2015! 

"The problem is that exhaustion is part of the authoritarian’s tool kit. They want to exhaust you so that you’ll check out of politics and try to take refuge in other areas of life. And then they take over. 

"Don’t give in to the exhaustion."

 We can't give in to exhaustion. Let's smash the Republican fantasy world in the midterms and beyond. The people of this country can do it.

Beyond shameful

A US federal agency is denying humanitarian parole to Afghan refugees ... and apparently running up a tidy profit on their applications.

A press release on December 7 from Jewish Family and Community Services-East Bay, an agency which has helped hundreds of Afghans resettle in the United States over the last decade, tells the sad story:

This week, the U.S. government began denying humanitarian parole applications and dashing the hopes of thousands of Afghans awaiting rescue.

Since [August], thousands of Afghans in communities across the U.S. have been desperate to rescue their loved ones who were left behind. The only legal channel available to most has been the dim hope of humanitarian parole. After months of inaction on these urgent petitions, this week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began denying them and extinguishing any chance of rescue.

... USCIS finally [has] began processing these cases – only to deny them.

The wave of denial letters received by immigration advocates across the U.S. this week articulate—for the first time—a set of stringent new criteria that will exclude the vast majority of Afghan humanitarian parole applicants from eligibility. According to JFCS East Bay Director of Immigration Legal Services, Kyra S. Lilien, “Redacted copies of these denial letters began popping up on listservs from immigration attorneys across the U.S. this week. No one has reported receiving a ‘request for evidence,’ as is the norm before USCIS denies a case. Instead, we all got these flat denials.”

... USCIS reports that it has received more than 30,000 such applications. At $575 per person, USCIS has likely taken in about $17,250,000 in application fees from these filings, making this process look like a classic “bait and switch” scam.

What does USCIS ask of applicants? “Documentation from a credible third-party source specifically naming the beneficiary and outlining the serious harm they face and the imminence of the harm in the location where the beneficiary is located.”

JFCS likens this to asking for "a notarized statement from their persecutor."

We know the Biden administration is running scared about immigration. They are terrified of taking political hits for admitting brown people to the country. And the Know-Nothing MAGA faction won't let up on the scare stories.

But show a little guts, Joe! 

Biden did demonstrate some courage by pulling out of Afghanistan. The politically easy play would have been to do what both Obama and Trump did: bluster a bit and try to sweep the failed two-decade war out of view.

But there remain human beings, many of whom thought they might have U.S. protection, who've been left behind to be raped, tortured, and slaughtered. And now some bureaucrats will be allowed to deny them for improper paperwork? This is shameful if not criminal.

Simple courtesies

Most of us are not likely to encounter refugees from the shitshow the U.S. has stirred and left behind in Afghanistan. (San Francisco Bay Area residents may be slightly more likely than most to have the opportunity as there is a good-sized Afghan community in the South Bay.)

Sociologist Dr. Iman Ahmad-Sediqe has passed along a useful Twitter list of "micro aggressions" to avoid if you did meet newly arrived Afghans. It struck me that many of these suggestions would be appropriate to meeting anyone newly plopped in these disunited states regardless of their country of origin. The following are lightly edited for length. 

A list of micro aggressions to avoid with newly arrived Afghans: 

This is a delicate period of transition. As an Afghan American, & an academic who has studied the community, I urge you to avoid certain behaviors. These ... can be hurtful for our new neighbors.

1. Don't call them Afghanis. Afghani is the word for the currency in Afghanistan and is utilized as a slur by other communities against Afghans. The appropriate word for someone from Afghanistan is Afghan.

2. Don't ask an Afghan what their tribal background is. This is not showing interest in who they are, but rather displaying your interest in labeling them into a box.

3. Don't assume because they are refugees, that they are uneducated. Many are professionals whose degrees & accomplishments aren’t accepted in the American system, so they have to take up working class jobs in order to care for their families.

4. Just because they may speak with an accent, doesn’t mean they think with one— Some assume an accent means someone is intellectually inferior. On the contrary, these individuals are bilingual & can balance multiple languages. They simply communicate in a way you’re not used to.

5. Don’t ask them what their political views are on America. You don’t ask a neighbor who they’re voting for, it’s same courtesy. They’ve been through a more complex experience than you may be aware of and are focused on feeling a semblance of safety, not on trivial political ?s

6. Don’t ask if they’re Shia or Sunni. Assuming that the media portrayal of sectarian friction applies to them is false. Their personal experiences are much richer than that. Give them space to practice their religion however they feel comfortable. They just want to feel welcome

7. Don’t bring nationalism and racism into a discussion with them. They’re mourning the loss of their homes and social networks. They don’t want to hear about your political opinions. They’re not responsible for the refugee crisis.

8. Don’t assume one individual is representative of every Afghan & every Afghan’s experience. This is an unfair burden to carry, & would be akin to a foreigner meeting one American & assuming he represents the entire country.

9. Don’t expect them to immediately feel comfortable with you or trust you. The emotional toll they are experiencing is intense. Building relationships for them will take time....

12. Do NOT expect a personal thanks from them. Their homes were destroyed, their lives at risk, and their families torn apart. Providing humanitarian aid should not be done expecting a thanks. They don’t owe you anything.

13. Do NOT preach your religious perspectives to them (regardless of what religion you’re from). This is awkward & uncomfortable, even if you are from the same religion. If it’s a social taboo to discuss religion with guests, the same applies here…

13. (Continued)…They are preoccupied with feelings of loss, PTSD, & worries of resettlement. Give them the grace of space to not get into heavy topics or feel imposed upon.

15. Don’t feel a need to give them a personal crash course on America. Let them ask you questions. If there’s something you notice that would be helpful for them to know, approach someone who they are comfortable with to discuss it with them one on one in private…

15. (Continued)… Do not humiliate an adult by correcting their behaviors publicly. There are cultural norms they’re learning.

What other tips might readers have to offer for welcoming newcomers ... any newcomers?

Afghan refugees do need community support. Jewish Community and Family Services - East Bay has been on the job resettling displaced Afghans for years and offers a good window on their needs.

Last U.S. plane flies away ...

It seems only right that we should get our news report of the U.S. departure from Afghanistan by way of a Pakistani English language channel, broadcasting from Kabul. Celebratory gunfire can be heard behind the reporter.

I'm glad the U.S. occupation -- that insult to Afghan humanity and sovereignty -- is over. I can say I never thought this was a right war; as I've argued many times, the right response to the attacks of 9/11 was to apprehend the intellectual authors of the crime and turn them over to the International Criminal Court. But empires don't do that ... instead we tried to remake the world according to U.S. druthers.

When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, only Congresswoman Barbara Lee and about 7 percent of us objected. But by 2004, many had forgotten the U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan -- and stopped much caring so long as we didn't have family members serving there. Obama used disgust with the Iraq war to get elected in 2008 -- and boxed himself in to be run over by eager generals because he had labeled Afghanistan, in contrast to Iraq, "the good war." Nothing came of that except more dead people, mostly Afghans.

Foreign policy establishment war hawks, FoxNews personalities, and most Republicans have crawled out of their hidey holes to bash Biden for ending this moral and military abomination. Aside from some security wonks, they'd be cheering if their guy had done the deed -- if you think our exit was a mess, think what Trump would have made of it.

Against the media grain, there has lately been a great deal of interesting punditry arising from the U.S. imperial disasters in Afghanistan and beyond. Ezra Klein, who like most up-and-coming journalists of his generation once thought well of the Afghanistan adventure, is reflective. The best of this cohort have learned ...

“Look at the countries in which the war on terror has been waged,” Ben Rhodes, who served as a top foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama, told me. “Afghanistan. Iraq. Yemen. Somalia. Libya. Every one of those countries is worse off today in some fashion. The evidentiary basis for the idea that American military intervention leads inexorably to improved material circumstances is simply not there.” 

... This is the deep lacuna in America’s foreign policy conversation: The American foreign policy establishment obsesses over the harms caused by our absence or withdrawal. But there’s no similar culpability for the harms we commit or that our presence creates. We are much quicker to blame ourselves for what we don’t do than what we do. 

My heart breaks for the suffering we will leave behind in Afghanistan. But we do not know how to fix Afghanistan. We failed in that effort so completely that we ended up strengthening the Taliban. We should do all we can to bring American citizens and allies home. But if we truly care about educating girls worldwide, we know how to build schools and finance education. If we truly care about protecting those who fear tyranny, we know how to issue visas and admit refugees. If we truly care about the suffering of others, there is so much we could do. 

Only 1 percent of the residents of poor countries are vaccinated against the coronavirus. We could change that. More than 400,000 people die from malaria each year. We could change that, too.

Paul Waldman pleads for historical perspective. Broadly speaking, U.S. citizens are blithely oblivious to the harm we inflict on other peoples. We are mostly ignorant of war's horrors, unless we or our families have recently escaped one.

But millions of us think that we’ve really helped the people of Cuba, and if we just keep that embargo on for another few decades everything will work out. They think that Iraqis and Afghans appreciate all we’ve done for them. They think that anywhere there’s a dictatorship, people are saying, “What we need is an American invasion.” They think that if a drone strike killed their child, they’d say, “That was regrettable, but they were trying to do the right thing.” 

In many ways, we’re still in thrall to the (simplified) story of World War II, that we saved the world and helped it rebuild. But that war ended 76 years ago, and what has happened since shouldn’t give us any faith that tomorrow we can repeat what we did in 1945. The sooner we come to terms with that, the better off we — and the rest of the world — will be. 

David Rothkopf, a former Clinton-era official gone rogue on the foreign policy front, has been taking a lot of heat for arguing against the consensus that Afghanistan is a policy disaster.

Biden Deserves Credit, Not Blame, for Afghanistan
If anything, Americans should feel proud of what the U.S. government and military have accomplished in these past two weeks. President Biden deserves credit, not blame. Unlike his three immediate predecessors in the Oval Office, all of whom also came to see the futility of the Afghan operation, Biden alone had the political courage to fully end America’s involvement. 

... The very last chapter of America’s benighted stay in Afghanistan should be seen as one of accomplishment on the part of the military and its civilian leadership. Once again the courage and unique capabilities of the U.S. armed services have been made clear.  And, in a stark change from recent years, an American leader has done the hard thing, the right thing: set aside politics and put both America’s interests and values first.

I will continue to chalk Afghanistan up on the positive side of Joe Biden's ledger.

Afghanistan: for those for whom it is not over

No doubts here: Joe Biden was to right to take the political hit (if any) for ending our Afghanistan war. The major media have been giving lots of space to tired old war horses like Condoleeza Rice and Leon Panetta to whine -- but most people in the U.S. are done with this.

Of course Afghanistan's war is not over for many Afghans. The bracing Vietnamese-American essayist and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen brings his life experience to this moment:

I was 4 years old when Saigon fell, so I do not remember any of it. I count myself lucky, since many Vietnamese who survived the end of that war were greatly traumatized by it. ... For [many Afghan] civilians, the war hasn’t ended, and won’t end for many years. ... 

... History is happening again, and again as tragedy and farce. The wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan happened as a result of American hubris, and in both cases Americans mostly focused on the political costs of war for them. But in each case, the Vietnamese (and Laotians, Cambodians and Hmong) and then the Afghans have paid the much greater toll in human suffering. In April 1975, the United States recognized its moral responsibility and evacuated about 130,000 Vietnamese people, and then accepted hundreds of thousands more from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in subsequent decades. This is what must happen now, and anything short of such a vision of responsibility and hospitality will compound the American failure in Afghanistan. 

... Tens of thousands of Afghans believed in the American promise of ushering in freedom, democracy and an open, tolerant society. And now, they’re stuck. For Afghans, the war hasn’t ended simply because we, the United States, declared it to be over. The nightmare doesn’t end for Afghans after the last American leaves. Our obligation to help Afghans in mortal danger extends beyond the present moment and well into the years ahead. ...

A friend, who also escaped from Vietnam in 1975, watches and feels impotent pain:

What is happening in Afghanistan resonates with me deeply. 1975 - that was when I left Saigon amid chaotic scenes at the airport, when my British father had minutes to get us out, keys left in the car on the airport tarmac... I was a mere baby at the time, but I do not underestimate the impact this whole scene is [having] "again". It saddens me a lot to see this. ... What happens now in Afghanistan is anyone's guess. I am saddened by the situation, for the Afghan people, for the women. They have been abandoned.

San Francisco-based Afghan-American writer Tamim Ansary has written several books trying to explain his country of origin to his adopted one. In 2014 he offered this in Games without Rules describing what he considers the Afghan predicament:

... the country experienced a series of incursions emanating out of Europe, which gave rise to a maelstrom of conflicting currents. Within the country, the multitudes whose cohesion derived only from traditional tribal and Islamic values expected their rulers to honor and defend those values with their lives and to otherwise leave them alone. Afghan rulers could not simply comply, however, for looking outward they always saw two or more well-equipped Western goliaths facing off against each other, with hapless Afghanistan situated between them on their line of scrimmage. ... 

Trying to negotiate between the local and global forces, between the inner and outer worlds, put Afghan rulers in a double bind. Anyone who wanted to rule this country had to secure the sponsorship of the strongest foreigners impinging on the country at that moment; yet no Afghan could rule this country for long without the allegiance of the country's deepest traditional forces. … The same thing is happening again now. ...

Internal contradictions fester and lead to a

... burgeoning chaos that saps [the invaders'] resources, leaving little time or strength for carrying out the original intentions of the intervention, whatever those were. The problem is not that Afghans unite and then cannot be conquered; the problem is that Afghans fragment and then cannot be governed. The great powers have a stake in making Afghanistan more governable, but the only people who can achieve this happy result are Afghans -- because it depends on the resolution of contradictions within Afghan culture.

Ansary concludes:

Afghanistan is not really impossible to conquer. It's just that all the successful conquerors are now called "Afghans."

• • •

Today I find myself feeling slightly at sea, unmoored. No wonder. I've realized that I've been agitating, organizing, demonstrating, and praying for the end of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan for more than a quarter of my life.   I don't remember feeling quite this way in April 1975 when we were chased out of Southeast Asia; at that time I'd been a semi-adult skeptic and then opponent of the Vietnam war for ten years. Its duration had seemed forever, but I was young and soon found other demons to joust with.

As it happens, I'm reading about the fall of Saigon in Elizabeth Becker's You Don't Belong Here about three women journalists who broke into war reporting in the U.S. Indochina wars. It's a heck of a companion story to the current moment. It takes me back into that other war which formed the shameful backdrop of my youth.

• • •

If people in this country want to help the Afghans whose war is not over, I urge support for the International Rescue Committee which has worked in the country for 30 hard years.

That's over -- for now

 

Joe Biden did the right thing in Afghanistan.

“I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”

This morning I got into it on an open thread and wrote this:

Afghanistan has been a shit show from day one. Now we're seeing some of it. We were wrong (practically, morally, and legally) to respond to 9/11 by failing to apply international criminal law to evil actors and thinking we had to use our hammer (the military).

Biden is having to carry the burden of making visible what has been implicit since 2002 at the latest. We had no business trying to remake that country. Ugly scenes -- but remember that the people of the US long ago gave up caring so long as their kids weren't among the casualties. 

Like Joe Biden, I'm sticking to my stance on this one. Since the beginning of this blog in 2005, I've probably written 50 posts about this aimless, fruitless campaign. I've reported on dozens of reporters' books. I've written about opium; I've written about women and education; and I've written about apparently boundless stupidity in Washington and a succession of military commands. This never worked and it was never going anywhere good.

Many more Afghans will suffer. Many already have. That reality comes as a physical injury to the Afghans and a moral injury to those of our forces who tried. 

But it's over.

Paul Waldman warns we can't be expected to have learned our lesson.

Just as before, there will be an effort to unlearn Afghanistan’s lessons so its mistakes can be repeated.

... We’re so convinced of our own benevolent intentions that we can’t wrap our heads around the idea that people in the rest of the world see us not as a force of altruism and liberation but as a global hegemon imposing its will and maintaining its control, so often indifferent to the death and dislocation it causes. They do not trust our motives, they do not share our confidence, and they often view our own history with a clearer eye than we do.

... One day — and it won’t be too long — another president will come along and tell us that morality and national security demand that we launch yet another invasion to add to our long list.

“By god,” he’ll say, “we’ve kicked the Afghanistan syndrome once and for all.”

The photo is from a protest in Pakistan in 2001.

Afghanistan on my mind

I suppose I should write about the U.S. departure from Afghanistan. I must have written some 100 posts in some way about that imperial adventure. The topic leaves me sad and weary and glad to see it go.

Early on, I harbored some slight hope that, with Osama bin Laden chased into Pakistan along with his Taliban hosts, the U.S. could declare victory and leave the Afghans to sort themselves out. This would be hard on Afghan women (and on the hopes of modernizing Afghans like San Francisco's Tamim Ansary) but there never seemed any prospect our incursion could do much good.

The war led to some insightful books. I think particularly of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan and Sarah Chayes' Thieves of State. Those should endure, though they may seem obscure today.

The Afghanistan war provoked many heated and smart conversations among the U.S. troops who had to die and fight in it. Here's a sample, yanked from military correspondent Thomas Rick's blog.

But mostly, the war became no more than intra-Afghan death and dying, with some Pakistani and U.S. and E.U. interlopers swept into the chaotic carnage. Serious observers understood this by the beginning of Obama's presidency in 2009, but somehow U.S. military and politicians couldn't let go their clusterfuck in someone else's country.

My belief was always that our invasion should never have happened: al-Qaeda was a problem for the International Criminal Court for whom we could have provided some muscle. But that's not how my country -- that in those days was confidently the world's superpower -- chose to play its hand.

So, after 20 years of futility, we're getting out. Let's hope we can stay out and not revive this shit show. 

Motivated reasoning

It turns out our spooks (the so-called "intelligence community") aren't so sure after all that the story which many of us passed on last year about Russia offering bounties for kills of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was really true.

So says Charlie Savage, a reliable security issues reporter on the forever wars: 

... the administration stopped short of inflicting sanctions on any Russian officials over the suspected bounties, making clear that the available evidence about what happened — primarily what Afghan detainees told interrogators — continues to fall short of definitively proving the C.I.A.’s assessment that Russia likely paid money to reward attacks.

The intelligence community, a senior administration official told reporters, “assesses with low to moderate confidence that Russian intelligence officers sought to encourage Taliban attacks against U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan in 2019, and perhaps earlier, including through financial incentives and compensation.”

Naturally Joe Biden, many Democrats, and partisans like me were easily convinced by the idea. Trump had some kind of suck-up relationship with Putin. He had never been known to show any care for anyone's well-being but his own. Plus, for those of us who'd made an effort to understand the Afghanistan morass, it didn't seem far-fetched to wonder whether Russia might simply be replicating a tactic our own CIA had used while egging on jihadist fighters against Russian occupation in the 1980s.

It was all too neat and too convincing. 

Jeff Schogol who reports for military readers explains:

As the Democratic presidential candidate, Biden repeatedly hammered Trump for not taking action about the intelligence on the bounties, accusing Trump of failing in his responsibilities as commander in chief.

... But defense officials consistently told lawmakers and others that the Russian bounty reports could not be corroborated. In December, Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr. head of U.S. Central Command, said in an interview that intelligence officials had been unable to prove the information about the alleged bounties.

“I relentlessly query my intelligence people on this,” McKenzie told Katie Bo Williams, who was a Defense One reporter at the time. “We just don’t see it — but it’s not because we’re not looking at it. We’re looking at it very hard.”

Now it appears the Biden administration doesn’t see it either.

I'm not happy to have joined the bandwagon on this one -- or any one. 

Updates: refugees and security panics

So President Biden has quickly listened to the howls of his constituents and turned around since last Friday, promising to increase the cap on refugee admissions. That little democratic pressure exercise went well; let's keep the pressure on to assist refugees and add pressure for humane solutions to what will be an ever-swelling migration crisis.

Meanwhile, perhaps we need to create another immigration allotment for persons -- outside the refugee and asylum categories -- who should be entitled to relatively easy entry to the U.S.: people who can no longer live in their own societies and countries because of U.S. military adventures.

Cycling rally in Kabul, Afghanistan, 2018, Wikipedia

Michael Walzer  offers a suggestion prompted by our impending departure from Afghanistan:

When we leave, we must bring with us to the U.S. all the men and women, and their families, who are vulnerable to persecution, imprisonment, or death because of our invasion—directly, because they collaborated with us, but also indirectly, because they agitated for democracy, organized unions, or established schools for girls under our cover. It doesn’t matter whether or not we intended to provide this cover, though I think many Americans who went to Afghanistan wanted to do exactly that. This is an absolute moral obligation.

Probably a large number of the men and women at risk will want to stay where they are and continue their political struggle; we should make sure they have the resources we can provide. But any people who want to leave, whatever their numbers, should be taken along with our troops and diplomats. We should be preparing to welcome them when they arrive and help them settle in the U.S.

• • •

In the early days of the post 9/11 panic, federal spooks and law enforcement, having been caught with their pants down by the jihadi attacks on New York and the Pentagon, ran wild and dangerous. In addition to instituting security theater at airports, they went on an entrapment binge, rounding up barely assimilated, often half-witted, young immigrant Muslims in what they called terror plots. The feds got credit for protecting us; the pathetic terrorists went to jail for long terms.

It's time to re-examine that binge. Rozina Ali offers a piercing, sympathetic account of the characters and imaginary terror "plots" that came out of that time.

... sweeping legislation and policy changes cleared the way for the authorities to surveil whole communities, monitoring even those who had no connection to terrorism. Prosecutors were now able to build cases from invasive intelligence-gathering tactics that would have been restricted earlier. The U.S. attorney general allowed law enforcement to deploy informants from the earliest stages of a terrorism investigation, contravening the established practice of waiting until there was reasonable indication of criminal activity; the Justice Department further relaxed restrictions in later years, permitting such use of informants even when assessing a potential case. In trials, the government presented evidence gathered by paid civilian informants who latched onto low-income, vulnerable and mentally challenged individuals, urged them toward a plot and, in several cases, even offered money and supplies to carry out bombings. 

... Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the government has imprisoned some 800 people on charges related to international terrorism, according to the Intercept database. But these numbers obscure a complicated reality. Many of these people were not found to have committed any acts of violence. Still, the government managed to achieve a high rate of conviction. Those accused of terrorism often pleaded guilty, usually because they were offered leniency in exchange for information, or because they knew they would almost certainly receive a longer sentence if they went to trial and were convicted. ...

Very much worth reading the whole story ...

In California, one federal judge has already tossed the case against Hamid Hayat of Lodi, a particularly egregious example of law enforcement inventing a threat that wasn't there. 

But hundreds of people remain locked up in federal prisons for thinly sourced accusations. Okay -- we were scared stupid for a season. But can we take a deep breath and look at freeing these people?

Graveyard of empires indeed ...

And so, finally, President Joe says U.S. troops are to leave Afghanistan, our long war that never found an achievable purpose. 

The easy, obvious and probably inevitable legacy of America’s two-decade-long war in Afghanistan is the recognition that there are limits to U.S. military power, especially when it comes to altering the culture and internal politics of other countries.

... On Wednesday, Biden is expected to announce that he will withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11. The decision will also bring to a close U.S. involvement in a conflict that has spanned four presidents.

... the rise of China, the danger posed by the coronavirus pandemic, the threat posed by global warming and the collapse of the Islamic State have all made terrorism seem like less of a pressing threat.  (Washington Post, April 14, 2021)

Biden seems to have held, and still adhere to, what was the closest to a sane view among our imperial leaders after 9/11: focus on giving organized international Islamist terrorism a bloody nose, and then disengage. That would have saved a lot of lives, especially among people in the unfortunate places where George W and Dick the Snarling Veep saw a chance to play faux heroic cowboy.

Of course, it would have been better to catch and offer up the perps of the 9/11 atrocity to international courts. In 2001, the world would have cooperated and cheered. But empires which have not felt their foundations leach away aren't law abiding.

• • •

U.S. foreign policy elites still don't get it.

Just yesterday on Deep State Radio, I heard the often sharp historian of international relations Kori Schake explain that we shouldn't be disturbed that the US spends 12 times as much on the military as any other nation because: 

"in using military force, you never want to cut close to the margin, because you want to win by a lot because that's how you prevent people from challenging you ..."

What shooting war does Schake think the U.S. empire has won in the last seventy-five years?

I wish we didn't have to have this insanity beat out of us -- and so do the peoples of the world. In the end, we get tired of the bleeding.

The futile war

Not for the first time, but for the umpteenth time since 2001, headlines like this are proliferating.

We Must Accept that Afghanistan is Lost

Or, from a newsletter targeted at military and vets:

The proverbial ‘fall of Saigon’ is fast approaching in Afghanistan: Upbeat talk of Afghan forces being “better than we thought they were” may soon be put to the test.

Over ten years ago, I posted this iconic photo of the last U.S. personnel evacuating Saigon in 1975. It seemed appropriate to how our Afghanistan war was going then. Could the most militarily powerful country on the globe really be driven out? Apparently yes, then. It still seems on point. Time to get the hell out of Afghanistan! No good is being served.

Whatever we thought we could do in that faraway country, it is not now and never happening. Once we made the place inhospitable to Osama bin Laden, we never even truly figured out our objectives -- and more Afghans, and allied soldiers, and U.S. troops died -- for what end?

World Beyond War has a new campaign addressed to the governments which can make this stop:

The governments of Albania, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, UK, and US all still have troops in Afghanistan and need to remove them.

These troops range in number from Slovenia’s 6 to the United States’ 2,500. Most countries have fewer that 100. Apart from the United States, only Germany has over 1,000. Only five other countries have more than 300.

Governments that used to have troops in this war but have removed them include New Zealand, France, Jordan, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Ireland.

We plan to deliver a big THANK-YOU to every government that removes all of its troops from Afghanistan, along with the names and comments of every signer of this petition.

We also plan to deliver a demand to remove all troops to every government that has not done so....

If you sign petitions, you probably need to sign this one -- and to get across to the Biden administration that the human cost of blundering on is too great to justify taking a small political hit for losing something we never had.

No chance of working

The Washington Post has surfaced a trove of US government documents which show that both military and civilian operatives in Afghanistan have known for years that the "mission" was FUBAR -- deadly, ill-considered, usually pointless.

As is so often the case about this country's wars of empire, it was possible to know at the time though mainstream and alternative media, even from half the circumference of the planet away, much of what is now "revealed" here.

I was struck in particular by what they have surfaced about the drug trade. In 2006 and 2007, I wrote on this blog about the history of drugs in our wars and the rise of opium of production under US occupation. Here's what's now come out:

From the beginning, Washington never really figured out how to incorporate a war on drugs into its war against al-Qaeda. By 2006, U.S. officials feared that narco-traffickers had become stronger than the Afghan government and that money from the drug trade was powering the insurgency.

No single agency or country was in charge of the Afghan drug strategy for the entirety of the war, so the State Department, the DEA, the U.S. military, NATO allies and the Afghan government butted heads constantly.

“It was a dog’s breakfast with no chance of working,” an unnamed former senior British official told government interviewers.

The agencies and allies made things worse by embracing a dysfunctional muddle of programs, according to the interviews.

At first, Afghan poppy farmers were paid by the British to destroy their crops — which only encouraged them to grow more the next season. Later, the U.S. government eradicated poppy fields without compensation — which only infuriated farmers and encouraged them to side with the Taliban.

“It was sad to see so many people behave so stupidly,” one U.S. official told government interviewers.

Afghanistan was never "the good war" as the early Obama administration hopefully asserted. Like Iraq, it was and is misbegotten and lethal to no good end.

There are all too many reasons to impeach Donald Trump

He's a multi-tasking criminal, after all.

Erudite Partner lays out an exhaustive (and exhausting) and lethal catalog in her latest essay. Trump "may yet do more harm than his Republican predecessor."

... we’re threatening to impeach a president, this time for a third-rate attempt to extort minor political gain from the government of a vulnerable country (without even the decency of a cover-up). But we’re ignoring Trump’s highest crime, worse even than the ones mentioned above.

He has promised to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, the 2015 international agreement that was meant to begin a serious international response to the climate crisis now heating the planet. Meanwhile, he’s created an administration that is working in every way imaginable to ensure that yet more greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere. He is, in other words, a threat not just to the American people, or to the rule of law, but to the whole human species.

Read it all.

Eighteen years and counting

On October 7, 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan -- full of rage and ignorant, misbegotten imperial idealism -- in response to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Our unequaled military might would speedily overawe a bunch of primitive tribesmen wearing scruffy beards and funny hats, or so we thought. A week later, U.S. flyers began dropping this psyops leaflet threatening death from the skies -- an image repurposed from our imperial escapades in Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I, and Kosovo.

Image via John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq

Our troops are still fighting in that unhappy country and the killing continues. No, there was not much peace before we came crashing in. But the BBC summarizes the current "unrelenting violence":

An average of 74 men, women and children were killed every day in Afghanistan throughout the month of August, the BBC has found. ...

"The conflict has a devastating impact on civilians," says Fiona Frazer, human rights chief for the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

"United Nations data strongly indicates that more civilians are killed or injured in Afghanistan due to armed conflict than anywhere else on Earth.

"Although the number of recorded civilian casualties are disturbingly high, due to rigorous methods of verification, the published figures almost certainly do not reflect the true scale of harm."

The US and Afghan militaries routinely deny or fail to report civilian casualty figures.

Last month, 32 Afghan pine nut harvesters — sitting around a fire after a day’s labor in the fields — were killed by a U.S. drone strike.

A few days later: 40+ guests at a wedding party — including 12 children — were killed in a raid by U.S. backed Afghan forces.

Last weekend: 5 more civilians were killed in a U.S. airstrike.

These events barely enter our news stream; the war in Afghanistan is just a few weak notes in the background soundtrack of the national cacophony.

There are rumblings in Congress about ending the "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" (AUMF) which legitimates the endless wars of 9/11. The House of Representatives has passed such a measure as part of the pending military budget. Will the Senate go along? Will the President sign a bill with such a provision?

Win Without War lobbies tirelessly toward that end. Somebody has to do it; they deserve our support.
... Speaking of those who need support, U.S. veterans of the endless wars of 9/11 are just about the only group whose unemployment numbers are rising in this full-employment economy. That damage persists, along with the war.

How indeed?

Something is desperately wrong here. From The Pentagon Run-Down with Jeff Schogol:

Gen. Mark Milley warns against withdrawing from Afghanistan after only 18 yearsYou know what they say: If at first you don’t succeed, keep plodding on for two decades with no hope for victory.

That’s the story about the Afghanistan war in a nutshell.

Despite the fact that recruits will soon enter boot camp to train to fight in a war that began before they were born, Army Gen. Mark Milley said it is too soon to pull out of Afghanistan.

... Your friend and humble narrator may be bad at math, but it seems strange to call any withdrawal of U.S. troops from nearly 18 years premature. (Especially when a poll by the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of veterans surveyed said the Afghanistan war has not been worth the sacrifice.)

Schogol offers a clear, short timeline of the U.S. Afghanistan war in case you've forgotten or never knew. Two more U.S. soldiers died as recently as in the last week of June.

As the young John Kerry, recently returned from fighting in Vietnam in 1971, once asked Congress, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Challenging memorial observations

Andrew Bacevich visited the Middle East Conflicts Wall Memorial in the sad, hollowed-out, town of Marseilles, Illinois.

Those whose names are engraved on the wall in Marseilles died in service to their country. Of that there is no doubt. Whether they died to advance the cause of freedom or even the well-being of the United States is another matter entirely. Terms that might more accurately convey why these wars began and why they have persisted include oil, dominion, hubris, the refusal among policymakers to own up to their own stupendous folly, and the collective negligence of oblivious citizens. Some might add to the list an inability to distinguish between our own interests and those of putative allies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel.

L.A. Times

The name of the retired colonel and historian's son is among those on the wall, but that is probably not the first thing he'd want you to think about him. He'd rather you ponder his observation of what his country has become on this Memorial Day.