Wesley Clark spouts nonsense about Vietnam

Retired General Wesley Clark is a respected former commander of NATO; nonetheless he is writing downright ignorant things about U.S. war in Vietnam as he cautions the Obama administration on its war in Afghanistan. This paragraph is simply nonsense:

The similarities to Vietnam are ominous. There, too, an insurgency was led and supported from outside the borders of the state in which our troops were fighting. There, too, sanctuaries across international borders stymied U.S. military efforts. There, too, broader political-strategic considerations weighed against military expansion of the conflict and forecast further struggles in the region.

The United States may have thought North Vietnam was a foreign country "invading" South Vietnam -- the Vietnamese never did. The vast majority of them thought they lived in one country arbitrarily divided by foreign invaders.

Like the nationalist Vietnamese, many Pashtun Afghans and Pakistanis apparently have no truck with the "border" bequeathed to them by the departing colonial empire. Taliban "sanctuaries" in Pakistan probably look like where Uncle Mohammed lives in his family compound to many Afghans. The area got by, insofar as it did, when central governments in both countries left people alone and didn't attempt to impose an outside hegemony. If local governments couldn't prevail in these mountains, how likely is it that a foreign power 15000 miles around the world can establish control?

"Broader political-strategic considerations" perhaps should have "weighed against military expansion" in Vietnam -- but once a series U.S. leaders got in further and further over their heads in a hopeless morass, U.S. troops and bombers managed to devastate and destabilize all the countries of the area. It took those countries -- Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam -- a generation to get back on anything like an even keel. We're drifting in that direction once again -- in the middle of a region dominated by two hostile nuclear powers.

Escalating in Afghanistan is simply foolish -- and for General Clark to be misrepresenting the U.S. experience in Vietnam won't help.

Junketing around the empire

Congressman Jared Polis, D-CO (he's the gay guy from Boulder and environs, newly elected in 2008) has just been to Iraq and Afghanistan on a CODEL. That's a Congressional delegation. He's got sharp things to say about the two countries -- but more interesting is his candid description of what it is like to travel on one of these trips.

Polis writes in the Huffington Post:

We visited two cities in Afghanistan, Kabul the capital and Kandahar in the south near the Pakistani border. What a mess. What another world. No one can make sense of Afghanistan because it doesn't really make sense.

We hardly glimpsed the real Afghanistan. Through the bullet-proof windows of our van, we saw a few children playing, women in Burkhas, and men going about their daily business as we drove from the airport to the Embassy, but our briefings were all in military bases or government buildings. ...

On this trip to Afghanistan, unfortunately not a single bite of Afghan food passed our lips. We stayed on the military bases and embassy compound, ate in cafeterias, and the only Afghani we even met with was the Minister of the Interior.

Thus, despite traveling thousands of miles and visiting the country itself, my context and understanding of Afghanistan is pretty much the same as the average American's--based on the same information that the Obama administration and US military have given us in making their decisions.

Two questions:

• Why are we footing the bill for Congresscritters to learn hardly anything but what their military and state department handlers want them to?

• Do most of those Congresscritters know they are learning so little?

Rep. Polis is to be applauded for his candor. ***He was also pretty candid about what he learned during the Iraq phase of this trip.

In the afternoon in Baghdad, we went to the Iraqi Parliament and met with two female members. Both covered their heads and wouldn't shake the hands of men. ...

The two members of parliament were the only Iraqis we formally met with; this visit was skewed toward visiting with our own military and learning about our mission and successes and failures from the American perspective. The few times we talked to Iraqis on their own, they told us only what they want American officials to hear. I learned more about the situation in Iraq on my previous visit [before Polis' election], in November 2007, when I met with Iraqi refugees in Jordan who spoke much more freely about their observations and opinions.

This guy is an incisive obsever. Can he stay that way in Congress?

Afghanistan: a luxury Obama can't afford

The coffin bearing Air Force Staff Sgt. Philip Myers, who was killed in Afghanistan on April 4, arrived at Dover Air Force Base on Sunday night. Sgt. Myers' family gave consent for this photo by Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times.

(This post is my contribution to the Get Afghanistan Right blogging project.)

The most interesting tidbit of news that came out of the NATO meeting in Strasbourg didn't come from Barack Obama. It is this unsourced admission quoted in the New York Times:

"No one will say this publicly, but the true fact is that we are all talking about our exit strategy from Afghanistan," a senior European diplomat said Saturday. "We are getting out. It may take a couple of years, but we are all looking to get out." He spoke on the condition of anonymity under diplomatic rules.

Europe is done with Afghanistan, while Obama is committing over 20,000 new troops for a total of 68,000. It seems reasonable to ask: why is the U.S. escalating rather than joining the exodus? Those of us who insist that further U.S. war-making in Afghanistan is a waste of Afghan and U.S. lives need to understand why as we work to build a peace movement.

Barack Obama does have an answer to that question. In the same article from Strasbourg, he is quoted saying:

"We want to do everything we can to encourage and promote rule of law, human rights, the education of women and girls in Afghanistan, economic development, infrastructure development," he said. "But I also want people to understand that the first reason we are there is to root out Al Qaeda ..."

I've argued previously that we should listen to this President, because he very carefully uses his words to win and exercise power. But that doesn't mean we have to treat his utterances as incontestable. I assume by this statement he's reiterating an undeniable political fact: no U.S. president can afford to allow a major terrorist attack of foreign origin to occur on his watch. George W. used up the only free pass any U.S. ruler is going to get on a terrorist attack.

But going beyond the words -- where's the argument that making war in Afghanistan is going "root out Al Qaeda"? The president's own intelligence agencies say Bin Laden and Co. are almost certainly in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. They also say that the more U.S. troops, the more civilian casualties, spurring more angry Afghan adherents to a fundamentalist, tribal Islam who are ripe for recruitment for terrorism. Obama has not made the case that his actions will achieve his stated ends.

So if the explanation for why the U.S. must fight on in Afghanistan is paper thin, it's probably worth going back over all the purported "reasons" that form the background inertia for continuing this war. The list is depressing.

• From the get-go, Afghanistan was about revenge. Somebody killed 3000 people in New York and Washington and robbed us of our absolute assurance of safety from foreign attack. Somebody had to pay. Afghans lost.

• The Taliban were a brutally illegitimate bunch; nobody, including most Afghans, was going to mourn our making them the sacrifice to take the edge off our hurt.

• The U.S. has an expensive, permanently far flung military that claims to be ready for any task. When what you have got is a hammer, you are liable to treat any problem as a nail and bang away. Never mind that the threat from non-state terrorists could and should have been dealt with by international law enforcement, not shock and awe bombing of Afghanistan's already deep rubble.

• Wars that don't cause many U.S. casualties are popular with military contractors -- and don't think that Congresscritters who need campaign contributions and jobs in their districts don't remember that.

• Some oil companies had (and maybe have) fantasies of controlling Central Asian oil and gas pipelines. Afghanistan makes a good base to advance their interests -- otherwise China or India might get the energy supplies.

• Finally, Democrats have to prove they are tough guys (that includes our women politicians). The Republicans have successfully made "Democrat" equal "wimp" in the public psyche; winning Democrats prove they are butch. Wars are very butch. And generals cooperate with civilian authorities when they get to have (winning) wars.

So the U.S. war in Afghanistan is an ugly mess. Is there any hope the U.S. will ever find the "exit strategy" President Obama said he wanted only a week ago?

I think yes -- people who want peace should be hopeful indeed. This President is a pragmatist. He's got a massive number of genuine, pressing problems on his plate. As it become mores evident that the Afghanistan adventure is simply a human and economic waste, he's not going to clench his war in a death grip. Why U.S. forces might discover that they can have an "exit strategy" -- their commander can order them to leave.

The project for the peace movement is to drive into the popular consciousness the complete futility of the Afghan war and similar wars of empire. By doing so, we're helping a pragmatic president survive and govern. The country has real problems: terrorism, yes, but that just needs law enforcement. The true quagmires are a domestic economy that no longer produces employment or commodities for survival, a reeling international economy of which we are the dysfunctional leader, and a planet that is burning up. Nasty little far away wars are no longer an acceptable luxury for this country, not to mention their victims.