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Topic: U.S. condemns video of captured soldier as violation of international law. (Read 851 times) |
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Blunderov
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U.S. condemns video of captured soldier as violation of international law.
« on: 2009-07-19 11:34:09 » |
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http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/19/captured-soldier-video/
U.S. condemns video of captured soldier as violation of international law.
In a newly-released video, an American soldier who is being held captive by the Taliban in Afghanistan says he’s “scared I won’t be able to go home.” Two U.S. defense officials confirmed that the man in the video posted Saturday on the Internet is the captured soldier, but the Defense Department has not released his name. Local Taliban commanders had previously threatened to kill the soldier. Asked by his interrogators to give a message to the American people, the captive soldier said:
“To my fellow Americans who have loved ones over here, who know what it’s like to miss them, you have the power to make our government bring them home,” he said. “Please, please bring us home so that we can be back where we belong and not over here, wasting our time and our lives and our precious life that we could be using back in our own country. Please bring us home. It is America and American people who have that power.”
Watch it:
A U.S. military spokeswoman in Afghanistan, Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, said the Taliban was using their captive for propaganda. “They are exploiting the soldier in violation of international law,” she said. U.S. military spokesman Colonel Greg Julian added, “We condemn the use of this video and the public humiliation of prisoners. It is against international law.”
[Blunderov] And there was me thinking that because the Taliban are 'illegal enemy combatants' that 'international law' and the 'Geneva Conventions' in particular do not apply to them. Consequently ISTM that the the Taliban are entitled to do anything they please with the unfortunate minion of American Imperialism just as the Americans have concluded that they can do anything they please with the Taliban - be it at Guantanemo Bay or in downtown Kabul. Or am I missing something here?
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Hermit
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Re:U.S. condemns video of captured soldier as violation of international law.
« Reply #1 on: 2009-07-19 13:46:01 » |
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You are not missing a thing. US Staff officers repeatedly predicted exactly this situation before the Cheney-Bush administration threw International law and ethical behaviour out of the window while overthrowing a perfectly legitimate and much less brutish than many of our current indispensable allies, government. Unfortunately Obama missed his narrow window to rectify the situation.
:-(
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MoEnzyme
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Re:U.S. condemns video of captured soldier as violation of international law.
« Reply #2 on: 2009-07-19 16:18:58 » |
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Quote from: Blunderov on 2009-07-19 11:34:09 | Consequently ISTM that the the Taliban are entitled to do anything they please with the unfortunate minion of American Imperialism just as the Americans have concluded that they can do anything they please with the Taliban - be it at Guantanemo Bay or in downtown Kabul. Or am I missing something here? |
You might be missing the point that nobody is really entitled to behave this way regardless of cultural context . . . comparative or otherwise.
PS - perhaps if they gave him the choice of wearing a burqa for the video, it might be different? I dunno. 
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Blunderov
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Re:U.S. condemns video of captured soldier as violation of international law.
« Reply #3 on: 2009-07-19 18:31:45 » |
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Quote from: Blunderov on 2009-07-19 11:34:09
You might be missing the point that nobody is really entitled to behave this way regardless of cultural context . . . comparative or otherwise.
PS - perhaps if they gave him the choice of wearing a burqa for the video, it might be different? I dunno.
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[Blunderov] Fair enough. I agree. But legally speaking? Far as I can tell with regard to the Geneva Conventions, all bets are off. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo et al have repeatedly said so. But actually, if I recall, there is a provision that no parties may agree to suspend the terms of the Convention however mutual their feelings of unrestrained animosity may be. I know!  Let's have us a commission of inquiry. That'll clear it up.
But with a burqa now? Possibilities there! The Taliban could dress US PoWs in burgas and force them to propagandize all they want as long as no actual identities are disclosed. The alliteration with Abu Graib is quite charming (if that's the word I want). Captured US soldiers dressed in burgas, speaking in high, squeaky voices and photographed in compromising postures with culturally unclean objects such as copies of 'Das Kapital' and 'The UN Report on Climate Change'.
That's the stuff to give the troops. That'll make them fight like Tigers. Tigers I tell you!
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Hermit
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Re:U.S. condemns video of captured soldier as violation of international law.
« Reply #4 on: 2009-07-19 19:16:32 » |
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[MoEnzyme] You might be missing the point that nobody is really entitled to behave this way regardless of cultural context . . . comparative or otherwise.
[Hermit] The Taliban have been placed in the same position as, e.g. the French Resistance fighting against the Axis powers in Vichy France, by the Americans and are fighting for their vision of their country against an unpopular and incompetent puppet government supported by foreign troops and mercenaries, whose only virtues are that it is a little less marginalized by the world and a little less hated by Afghans than the Taliban. The US has, as the Nazis did in France, declared the Taliban resistance to be "terrorists", denied them access to legal structures, e.g. the Red Cross, as well as all the other protections of war, and the US is shooting them down in cold blood, and engaging in mass reprisals against Afghans of all persuasions far worse than the Nazis generally engaged in; for all that the US use of bombs and missiles against villages from which they operate makes it less personal. And after WW II, the allies hanged and jailed axis leaders as well as the rank and file, for engaging in such activities even when they acted under orders.
[Hermit] Now when the Taliban responds in like manner, it is not "justified" by tu quoque, it is merely as "unavoidable" as the Cheney-Bush administration was, for the identical reasons. There is simply no legal recourse to prevent it. Worse, there is no legal structure that could be applied while the US continues her present course. Even if the US changed tactics and increased its effectiveness to the point where they could take some Taliban prisoners, and put them on trial in a kangaroo court even more blatant than the Obama administration's ongoing three card Monte military commissions in Guantanamo, no sentence could be imposed that is worse than what the US is already doing to Afghans in general or the Taliban resistance fighters in particular; and absolutely no justice, equity or dignity is to be found in the situation at all. In other words, the poor terrified apology for a human that the Taliban paraded for the world to gape at, just as the US paraded Saddam Hussein before television cameras after his illegal overthrow and capture and just before his judicial murder after a mockery of a trial, is a self-inflicted sad reality; which will only become sadder as the US is forced to negotiate power sharing or to beat a retreat from a war that, having no attainable goals, will never achieve anything except, as predicted here and now perceived all too clearly by anybody with half-a-clue, to increase the misery of Afghanistan and contribute to the collapse of US capabilities, International standing and economy.
[Hermit] What a masochistic triple play for Obama to have adopted as his own.
[Blunderov] <snip> if I recall, there is a provision that no parties may agree to suspend the terms of the Convention however mutual their feelings of unrestrained animosity may be. <snap>
[Hermit] You have an excellent memory. The trouble is that the US has deliberately destroyed this safeguard by preventing any of the normal rules of war from being applied in this conflict. If they did, given Obama's adoption of the Bush Policies in all but name, the USA would be up a pole without a pot to piss in, so you can anticipate that any change in the status quo will be vigorously opposed. Also, Afghanistan (and apparently Pakistan where the US is using terrorism to fight an undeclared war against part of the population with the purchased connivance of another part of the population who hope to extend their power over the formerly autonomous tribal areas where government was constitutionally barred from interfering with the tribal authorities.) is simply too unimportant in the human scale of things, too significant in the strategic scale, too useful as a non-Russian controlled pipe-line route, and perhaps a situation offering too many benefits to the previously and presently marginalized, to be worth interfering with and perhaps drawing the ire of the American Imperial Juggernaut on its "god-sent" task of self immolation.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Tas6
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Re:U.S. condemns video of captured soldier as violation of international law.
« Reply #5 on: 2009-07-20 07:54:40 » |
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I have a question, have any of you been in actual combat? or faced an enemy in a life or death situation? or been in the military? I am not trying to be insulting in the least, just an observation on my personal analysis of this thread. Personally I feel that the Iraq war has been handled wrongly but not from the general perspective. If we are to fight then it should be as a war not us being super-police. Trust me if we really wanted the taliban taken out all we have to do is actually go after them instead of the oil fields. If what we really wanted is the oil then okay, lets do this thing but stop wasting time on other so-called objectives. As warriors we have failed in this conflict to take out the taliban because we haven't "knocked the bottom out," as my hero Mussashi has said. Personally I feel we either need to complete a conquest or get the fuck out! Dilly dallying around is neither productive nor honorable.
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Re:U.S. condemns video of captured soldier as violation of international law.
« Reply #6 on: 2009-07-20 11:22:21 » |
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[Tas6] I have a question, have any of you been in actual combat?
[Hermit] The male Hermit was a senior staff officer with extensive combat, COINOPS and relief experience. The female Hermit hasn't but doesn't think she has to commit murder in order to know that it isn't a good idea.
[Tas6] or faced an enemy in a life or death situation?
[Hermit] As above.
[Tas6] or been in the military?
[Hermit] Both Hermits (In the USSR all medical graduates were automatically inducted in the equivalent of the Medical Corps).
[Tas6] I am not trying to be insulting in the least, just an observation on my personal analysis of this thread.
[Hermit] None taken, but you may be making a logical error.
[Tas6] Personally I feel that the Iraq war has been handled wrongly but not from the general perspective. If we are to fight then it should be as a war not us being super-police.
[Hermit] If you can't identify an enemy then you can't fight a war with them. If you are the one breaking the law, then you are not a policeman. Here is how I commented on Iraq in 2007. I see no reason to change my opinion.
Quote from: Hermit on 2007-07-19 09:27:46
[Church of Virus BBS, General, Serious Business, The President of The United States.,Reply #13 on: 2007-07-19, Hermit] |
Bass, "we" are in Iraq and Afghanistan illegally, because even really, really good false pretexts remain illegitimate, and in any legal system, including Lex Talionis, the fruits of illegitimacy are also illegitimate. "Our" presence in these places inflames the environment (and the region), as well as providing legitimacy to the fight against "us". At this point intelligence indicates that practically all the opposition in Afghanistan (including all the "insurgents" from 3 months to 80 years old we are murdering in airstrikes) are Pushtun and affiliated tribes, and in Iraq, only about 1/20 of the "insurgents" (who are really the patriotic resistance in their eyes) are foreigners, and 12 of these are from Saudi Arabia, 4 from Yemen and the other 4 Syrian and Iranian. Yet we only hear of Iran or Syria. Are we going to attack Saudi Arabia and Yemen next, or does our dependence on them mean that they get a clean pass? The complete absence of effective reporting (only partially because the environment is too dangerous for reporters), combined with the idiocies of the congress and senate critters and the anti-Islamic malevolence and Israeli agenda in the Whitehouse are highly likely to lead us into further illegal wars of aggression in the near future. Is this a good thing?
Lets say you break into a house to steal the house owner's belongings (it doesn't have to be oil). Halfway through you see the owner coming home. Do you run out of the back door and hope nobody catches you, or do you set up an ambush in the hope of murdering them? The idiocy of remaining in a situation where nobody can win anything (except a deferral of the war crimes trials perhaps), but where thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of others are killed every month, and militants, American and Islamic are taught how to fight more nastily and hate more thoroughly is exactly equivalent to the latter case.
Ask yourself what "we" are doing there. What do you think is going to be "finished" by staying there (except for any lingering respect for the USA)? We have already wasted and committed to wasting over 2 trillion dollars without taking reparations into account (and a war crimes trial would undoubtedly award in excess of a trillion dollars in reparations for what we have "achieved" to date), and increased global "terrorism" and the number of "terrorists" intending to cause the US and UK damage by several hundred percent. I think we have also guaranteed the collapse of the Military dictatorship in Pakistan, which wouldn't be a bad thing only it is bound to be replaced by something far worse - which will of course be nuclear armed; as well as having contributed (along with the EU's blatantly bigoted exclusion of Turkey) to the downfall of the century old secular government of Turkey and its replacement with a radical Islamic government. As a final own goal, we have practically guaranteed that Israel is going to get into an all but unwinnable fight where we cannot intervene - and where the result will be the release by the Israelis of real "WMDs" (being nuclear and biological weapons, both of which Israel has in abundance). Finally we have effectively handed control of our Middle East foreign policy to Israel, irrespective of who is in the Whitehouse, because if Israel threatens to attack a third party, the US then is in the predicament that it needs to preemptively target the same party lest Israel trigger total chaos and $500/barrel oil with a consequent collapse of the International monetary system and western economies.
All this together with the undoubted lies of commission and omission used by the administration to get us into the wars they wanted - and the utter malfeasance demonstrated by Congress in their failure to resist them, combine to condemn us in the eyes of the world. This, combined with the scrapping of the US constitution in all but form in the face of a minor threat, may well result in the recognition of the fact that the Republic is no more (and perhaps hasn't been for a very long time.) What it ought to result in is an International Court putting our leaders on trial for waging wars of aggression and war crimes. While I no longer approve of capital punishment, the only appropriate alternative would be to sentence them to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole - hopefully in somewhere more humane than the prisons where we have been torturing people from around the globe including, from growing evidence, American citizens.
Do you really think that more murders and the continuing sacrifice of American servicemen and mercenaries (we now have more mercenaries in Iraq than soldiers) however misguided they are (e.g. surveys indicate that over 70% of American servicemen continue to believe the Administrations lie that Iraq was involved in Q'aeda's 9/11 attacks despite the findings of every credible investigation that this is a blatant lie fabricated by the Whitehouse as part of massaging the facts to justify their invasion).
Finally, Saddam Hussein was "evil" to his neighbors only while the US supported him. Unfortunately the full extent of our perfidy has probably been buried along with him (in other words, a major reason for invading Iraq - to murder Saddam Hussein and his inner circle to stop their mouths - has been achieved). No matter how much you think he deserved replacing, he killed far fewer Iraqis, and alleviated, rather than exacerbated their poverty. If he is to be condemned for his ability to pump oil, make electricity, feed people and maintain stability in a secular state where women had equality and children (according to UNESCO) were better off and had a better future than in any other Middle Eastern country (except Jewish children in Israel), then what does that say about us? No matter how much you might imagine that he "deserved" replacing, nobody gave you the right to do that? Or do you think that the Islamic states now have the "right" to replace Bush & Co? Can you simply not see your hypocrisy or do you just not care?
[Tas6] Trust me if we really wanted the taliban taken out all we have to do is actually go after them instead of the oil fields. If what we really wanted is the oil then okay, lets do this thing but stop wasting time on other so-called objectives.
[Hermit] Aside from the point that there are no oilfields worth mentioning in Afghanistan, there are no legitimate grounds to "Take-out the Taliban." Even if we pretend that there are, there is no way to "take-out the Taliban." While the Taliban started out as a US sponsored "anti-communist" movement, and became a poorly constituted, subsequently illegally overthrown government, it has since its defeat and dismantling transformed into its component pieces: religious affiliations; a mindset; a tribe; and, most significantly, a resistance movement. The Taliban are no longer, if they ever were, an identifiable group that can be "taken out" even had we the capacity or the competence (which we don't), even if you would consider converting much of Afghanistan and the previously autonomous tribal areas of Pakistan, as well as their contents, to glass, as "taking out the Taliban;" as others who still identify with them (religiously and tribally) would survive. Even so, this is probably what it would take to reduce the effectiveness of "the Taliban," as the US appears to have confused the Pushtun and all those opposed to a proselytizing US presence in Afghanistan as being "the Taliban."
[Tas6] As warriors we have failed in this conflict to take out the taliban because we haven't "knocked the bottom out," as my hero Mussashi has said.
[Hermit] The US undoubtedly must possess a few warriors, but as in most modern wars, they have not been conspicuous. Instead unopposed air superiority has allowed us to slaughter many people of whom a few were perhaps effective opponents in these illegal wars of choice, and the ability to deliver superior firepower has allowed us to temporarily occupy areas at will, although at the cost of the US economy. I am fairly sure Mussashi would have used the Iraq and Afghan wars as classic examples of how not to wage war.
[Tas6] Personally I feel we either need to complete a conquest or get the fuck out!
[Hermit] There never was anything to conquer, and so we never got close to starting it never mind completing it. Given that these were clearly illegal wars of choice and MOOSEMUSS* can't even be defined here, never mind implemented, getting the fuck out would be a good idea.
[Tas6] Dilly dallying around is neither productive nor honorable.
[Hermit] Nothing done to date in these illegal wars of choice springs to mind as having been productive or honorable, and given that we are now too poor to pay reparations (which might be honorable), I don't see how anything we could do now could be productive or honorable. Fucking off would, however, be sensible.
*Mass, Objective, Offensive, Security, Economy of Force, Maneuver, Unity of Command, Surprise, Simplicity
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:U.S. condemns video of captured soldier as violation of international law.
« Reply #7 on: 2009-07-23 05:34:25 » |
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Quote from: Hermit on 2009-07-20 11:22:21
[Hermit] There never was anything to conquer, and so we never got close to starting it never mind completing it. |
[Blunderov] Afghanistan. Graveyard of armies. And Civilians. I've quoted it before I know...
"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust"
~T.S. Eliot - The Wasteland
http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html
(Taken out of context but Eliot is sufficiently oblique to perhaps excuse this liberty. A handful of dust. Indeed.)
http://www.opednews.com/articles/War-Without-Purpose-by-Chris-Hedges-090722-380.html
July 22, 2009 at 11:07:22
War Without Purpose
by Chris Hedges Page 1 of 1 page(s)
www.opednews.com
Posted on Jul 20, 2009
Al-Qaida could not care less what we do in Afghanistan. We can bomb Afghan villages, hunt the Taliban in Helmand province, build a 100,000-strong client Afghan army, stand by passively as Afghan warlords execute hundreds, maybe thousands, of Taliban prisoners, build huge, elaborate military bases and send drones to drop bombs on Pakistan. It will make no difference. The war will not halt the attacks of Islamic radicals.- Terrorist and insurgent groups are not conventional forces. They do not play by the rules of warfare our commanders have drilled into them in war colleges and service academies. And these underground groups are protean, changing shape and color as they drift from one failed state to the next, plan a terrorist attack and then fade back into the shadows. We are fighting with the wrong tools. We are fighting the wrong people. We are on the wrong side of history. And we will be defeated in Afghanistan as we will be in Iraq.
The cost of the Afghanistan war is rising. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed or wounded. July has been the deadliest month in the war for NATO combatants, with at least 50 troops, including 26 Americans, killed. Roadside bomb attacks on coalition forces are swelling the number of wounded and killed. In June, the tally of incidents involving roadside bombs, also called improvised explosive devices (IEDs), hit 736, a record for the fourth straight month; the number had risen from 361 in March to 407 in April and to 465 in May. The decision by President Barack Obama to send 21,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan has increased our presence to 57,000 American troops. The total is expected to rise to at least 68,000 by the end of 2009. It will only mean more death, expanded fighting and greater futility.
We have stumbled into a confusing mix of armed groups that include criminal gangs, drug traffickers, Pashtun and Tajik militias, kidnapping rings, death squads and mercenaries. We are embroiled in a civil war. The Pashtuns, who make up most of the Taliban and are the traditional rulers of Afghanistan, are battling the Tajiks and Uzbeks, who make up the Northern Alliance, which, with foreign help, won the civil war in 2001. The old Northern Alliance now dominates the corrupt and incompetent government. It is deeply hated. And it will fall with us.
We are losing the war in Afghanistan. When we invaded the country eight years ago the Taliban controlled about 75 percent of Afghanistan. Today its reach has crept back to about half the country. The Taliban runs the poppy trade, which brings in an annual income of about $300 million a year. It brazenly carries out attacks in Kabul, the capital, and foreigners, fearing kidnapping, rarely walk the streets of most Afghan cities. It is life-threatening to go into the countryside, where 80 percent of all Afghanis live, unless escorted by NATO troops. And intrepid reporters can interview Taliban officials in downtown coffee shops in Kabul. Osama bin Laden has, to the amusement of much of the rest of the world, become the Where's Waldo of the Middle East. Take away the bullets and the bombs and you have a Gilbert and Sullivan farce.
No one seems to be able to articulate why we are in Afghanistan. Is it to hunt down bin Laden and al-Qaida? Is it to consolidate progress? Have we declared war on the Taliban? Are we building democracy? Are we fighting terrorists there so we do not have to fight them here? Are we "liberating" the women of Afghanistan? The absurdity of the questions, used as thought-terminating clichés, exposes the absurdity of the war. The confusion of purpose mirrors the confusion on the ground. We don't know what we are doing.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. and NATO-led troops in Afghanistan, announced recently that coalition forces must make a "cultural shift" in Afghanistan. He said they should move away from their normal combat orientation and toward protecting civilians. He understands that airstrikes, which have killed hundreds of civilians, are a potent recruiting tool for the Taliban. The goal is lofty but the reality of war defies its implementation. NATO forces will always call in close air support when they are under attack. This is what troops under fire do. They do not have the luxury of canvassing the local population first. They ask questions later. The May 4 aerial attack on Farah province, which killed dozens of civilians, violated standing orders about airstrikes. So did the air assault in Kandahar province last week in which four civilians were killed and 13 were wounded. The NATO strike targeted a village in the Shawalikot district. Wounded villagers at a hospital in the provincial capital told AP that attack helicopters started bombarding their homes at about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday. One man said his 3-year-old granddaughter was killed. Combat creates its own rules, and civilians are almost always the losers.
The offensive by NATO forces in Helmand province will follow the usual scenario laid out by military commanders, who know much about weapons systems and conventional armies and little about the nuances of irregular warfare. The Taliban will withdraw, probably to sanctuaries in Pakistan. We will declare the operation a success. Our force presence will be reduced. And the Taliban will creep back into the zones we will have "cleansed." The roadside bombs will continue to exact their deadly toll. Soldiers and Marines, frustrated at trying to fight an elusive and often invisible enemy, will lash out with greater fury at phantoms and continue to increase the numbers of civilian dead. It is a game as old as insurgency itself, and yet each generation of warriors thinks it has finally found the magic key to victory.
We have ensured that Iraq and Afghanistan are failed states. Next on our list appears to be Pakistan. Pakistan, like Iraq and Afghanistan, is also a bizarre construct of Western powers that drew arbitrary and artificial borders, ones the clans and ethnic groups divided by these lines ignore. As Pakistan has unraveled, its army has sought legitimacy in militant Islam. It was the Pakistani military that created the Taliban. The Pakistanis determined how the billions in U.S. aid to the resistance during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was allocated. And nearly all of it went to the most extremist wings of the Afghan resistance movement. The Taliban, in Pakistan's eyes, is not only an effective weapon to defeat foreign invaders, whether Russian or American, but is a bulwark against India. Muslim radicals in Kabul are never going to build an alliance with India against Pakistan. And India, not Afghanistan, is Pakistan's primary concern. Pakistan, no matter how many billions we give to it, will always nurture and protect the Taliban, which it knows is going to inherit Afghanistan. And the government's well-publicized battle with the Taliban in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, rather than a new beginning, is part of a choreographed charade that does nothing to break the unholy alliance.
The only way to defeat terrorist groups is to isolate them within their own societies. This requires wooing the population away from radicals. It is a political, economic and cultural war. The terrible algebra of military occupation and violence is always counterproductive to this kind of battle. It always creates more insurgents than it kills. It always legitimizes terrorism. And while we squander resources and lives, the real enemy, al-Qaida, has moved on to build networks in Indonesia, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Morocco and depressed Muslim communities such as those in France's Lyon and London's Brixton area. There is no shortage of backwaters and broken patches of the Earth where al-Qaida can hide and operate. It does not need Afghanistan, and neither do we.
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
Chris Hedges, currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America.
[Blunderov] The force of conventional arms is not to be underestimated though. Lenin sounds a different note.
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/07/afghanistan-few-pessimistic-notes.html
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Afghanistan - a few pessimistic notes posted by lenin
The war is escalating. The number of troops coming home dead is increasing. The rationalisations for the occupation of Afghanistan are coming apart. We are told that the troops are there at the behest of the democratically elected leader (an interesting procedure - groom the man you want, get him elected, offer him 'protection' he can't refuse, and then say you're there at his invitation). Yet, it has been obvious for some time that Karzai is deeply worried about what the bombings and raids are doing, and the government - even one protected by US power and bought off with US patronage - is constantly criticising the NATO attacks. Karzai has even, to the chagrin of the US, constantly favoured negotiations over escalation - a preference supported by most Afghans even in those polls that are unreliably weighted in favour of the West for reasons that Giustozzi has spelled out. We are told that the war is against 'Al Qaeda' or the 'Taliban' or something. But the experts tend to conclude, as General Sir Richard Dannatt did a few years ago, that: "The people the Americans and British are fighting in Afghanistan are mostly local tribesmen resisting foreign forces." (Dannatt now pretends to believe that the enemy is 'Al Qaeda', while defending the intervention on the grounds that if Britain left it would cause a split with America and potentially rupture the NATO coalition.) The war should be more unpopular than ever. And perhaps it really is.
However, at the beginning of this week, a poll found that British opinion was split more or less fifty-fifty on the war in Afghanistan (though a majority wants the troops out by the end of the year). This could just be a blip, as majorities have consistently opposed the war in previous polls. But if it proved to be part of a trend, it would mean that antiwar sentiment is declining, and we have a problem on our hands. My suspicion is that the popularity of the Obama administration could be behind some of this. The other thing is that, at my meeting at the Stop the War Coalition in Birmingham on Thursday, it was mentioned that army recruitment had increased for the first time in years. Given the efforts by returning soldiers and outfits such as Military Families Against the War to enlighten people as to the bloody realities of the war, this is alarming. Perhaps the recession and higher unemployment is pushing more young people into signing up. Whatever the reason, there's a problem.
One last thing. I note the popularity of comparisons with the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. People cite this as an instance of the kind of 'quagmire' that America might find itself in. The trouble is that when Russia fell in Afghanistan, it was already on its last legs. America is not on its last legs, nor does it have a rival superpower arming the enemy. It really is just facing down a mainly popular grassroots insurgency, and these - if lacking the kind of commitment, centralisation and coordination that successful insurgencies have had - can be either coopted or ruthlessly and fanatically crushed. America has far more firepower than its Russian nemesis had, and it isn't even limited by the prospect of serious accountability - there is no Lancet survey for Afghanistan, and attempts to gauge the impact of bombing have been haphazard and woefully inadequate. The US has also retained, despite the Bush years, a broad Euro-American coalition, which easily has the ability to destroy Afghanistan and the north-western frontier province in Pakistan, where hundreds of thousands of loyal Pakistani troops have been working on the empire's behalf. Further, the resistance this time is nowhere near as united or hegemonic. If the resistance is mainly local tribespeople, the only potential national leadership that has thus emerged is the 'neo-Taliban', but it is doubtful whether they have the capacity to unite across ethnic boundaries. The point is that, as much as we like to say how improbable it is that the US could win, the fact is that their overwhelming power and ability to outsource imperial violence to smaller countries should be enough to do it. It may take years, it may be brutal, it may actually get to genocidal levels of violence, but we shouldn't assume that the US can't win.
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Hermit
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Re:U.S. condemns video of captured soldier as violation of international law.
« Reply #8 on: 2009-07-23 20:58:05 » |
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I disagree with Lenin.
Afghanistan is already destroyed and has been for years. Destroying it further will be very difficult and immensely expensive to us as, by any measure, the weapons we we are raining down on "them" are very much more expensive than that which we are destroying which is really spread out thin by now. It takes $35,000+ for the GBU-38, $70,000+ for a GBU-31 possibly adding a laser tracker for $46,000+ to either of those, or $750,000+ for each tactical Tomahawk fired. When these weapon systems are used to destroy a $35 tent, a $50 bicycle, a $300 mud palace or even a $12,000 Toyota we are definitely not winning. Even if we kill a few hundred of the 42 million Pushtun, members of the world's largest and fiercest tribe which we have stupidly confused for "the Taliban" at the same time. Which we do. Often. And of course, "they" will keep reminding "us" that a $50 IED can take out a $140,000+ armoured Humvee and some of its crew.
Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is a huge, populous, mountainous country where the people are used to living in bitter poverty and under continuous threat of attack. They don't have manufacturing centres - or cities of note - or even military concentrations. They have villages of mud huts and scattered farms at crazy altitudes connected by donkey trails more often than by roads. We don't have the people or the materiel to operate in this terrain - except on the roads and from the air, far from our few enemies, fewer friends and the mainly apathetic, at least until bombed into hostility, population at large. Of course we can keep killing people just as we do now. We have appropriate weapons and total air dominance. There is absolutely nothing Afghans can do to prevent it and our opponents, and even some of our friends seem to be really good at encouraging us to do this, though whether for private or tactical gain is not always exactly clear. Unfortunately, all that murdering the uninvolved achieves is to make "them" hate "us" more (and it is always possible to teach people to hate more). We can't kill all of them without using concentration camps and biowarfare. Despite the collapse of American ethics in the past decade or so, I'm not sure we are quite ready for this. Or at least, not yet. Perhaps we could ask Israel to assist us?
Looking at the differences between the USA and USSR's attempted colonization of Afghanistan, aside from the fact that the USSR actually held elections where the results were representative and people who disagreed with the occupation were allowed to run for office, the fact that some 80% of our supplies are stolen along the way is an annoyance, not an insurmountable threat. The fact that it takes us 2 train loads of ammunition to kill one opposition effective where the Russians took only one may not be very significant. After all, the USA definitely uses more fireworks than the USSR ever did and the people we station there may be missing them. The fact that the USSR was taking 1000 casualties a week versus our 50 may not be all that significant either. We haven't been there nearly as long, don't have a fraction of the forces deployed and the Afghans don't have a major weapons source supplying them as the USA did in the last war that they won. The fact that we have been forced to switch our supply routes from our friends in Pakistan (which we have utterly destabilized to the point where our conveys don't get through any more), to our even better friends in Moscow may be more significant. After all, given that logistics drive warfare, it may well be that our supply lines being 6,700+ miles long, while the USSR's were a mere few hundred miles long could make some difference, but surely only a few billion dollars a month. More or less.
With a little luck, nobody will even notice us printing that amount in the general economic chaos in which we are floundering. But we are indubitably beginning to look more or less the same as the USSR did in 1992. Today we even have signs posted at he banking counters saying that IOUs from California are not acceptable - even though the banks seemed only to happy to accept the taxpayer's IOUs to prevent their bankruptcy and support their bonus systems not so terribly long ago. It is fascinating to think that when Washington used economic warfare to destroy the USSR and as it uses economic warfare to destroy the USA, both countries were occupied in ill-defined, un-winnable wars in Afghanistan. The US is of course bigger. But then the USA is also engaged in an ill-defined, un-winnable war in Iraq. And has Apartheid Israel as a "friend" to maintain "at any cost".
That is probably enough to sink anyone.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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