Ending the US War in Afghanistan

By Phyllis Bennis

Source: DemocracyNow!

Monday, March 08, 2010

The recent civilian casualties demonstrate, for any who doubted it,  that this is a war against a vast population of Afghanistan, and the only way to stop killing civilians is to stop the killing. That means to stop all offensive actions and withdraw the troops.

AMY GOODMAN: In Afghanistan, the number of civilian casualties continues to rise. On Tuesday, at least eight people died after a bomb exploded in the southern provincial capital of Lashkar Gah amidst a major US-led offensive in the area. Local authorities said all those killed in the attack were civilians.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s government has condemned a NATO air strike on a convoy on Sunday that killed twenty-seven civilians, including four women and a child. NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal went on Afghan television to apologize for the attack, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates pledged a thorough investigation but blamed the Taliban for using, quote, “civilians for cover.”

ROBERT GATES: The thing to remember is that we’re at war. We are doing everything possible. General McChrystal is doing everything humanly possible to avoid civilian casualties. But it is also a fact that the Taliban mingle with civilians, they use them for cover, which obviously complicates any decision process by a commander on the ground in knowing whether he’s dealing with the Taliban or innocent civilians, or a combination of the two. I’m not defending it at all. I’m just saying that these kinds of things, in many respects, are inherent in a war. It’s what makes war so ugly.

AMY GOODMAN: Last year was the deadliest of the war for civilians and foreign troops. And while there is no reliable count of the number of Afghans killed, the number of US soldiers killed in the war has reached a thousand, this according to the independent website icasualties.org.

Meanwhile, the Afghanistan war has also surpassed the American Revolutionary War in duration to become the second-longest war in American history, at eight years, four months and sixteen days.

President Obama has twice escalated the war since taking office, first by pledging 17,000 troops a year ago, then an additional 30,000 troops in December.

Well, our next guest argues the war in Afghanistan, quote, “simply isn’t going to work. It won’t bring security to Afghans. It won’t turn Afghanistan into a democracy. And it won’t make us safer.” That’s Phyllis Bennis. She’s a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and author, most recently, of Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer. She joins us from Washington, DC.

Phyllis, welcome to Democracy Now! The latest news, the bombing of this minibus convoy that killed twenty-seven people, civilians, that now General McChrystal has made a videotaped apology for, talk about this.

PHYLLIS BENNIS: Well, in a certain way, what Secretary of Defense Gates said this morning is true: this is what happens in war; this is why war is “so ugly,” he said. He could have said and should have said, this is especially why an occupation war in another country, where you don’t know the players, you don’t know the culture, you don’t have good intelligence, and you’re participating in a civil war in someone else’s land, is inevitably going to reach these kinds of terrible results.

There are already reports, as you mentioned, Amy, eight more people at least, civilians, killed today. The number of Afghan civilians is at least fifty just this week, just in the period of this new offensive in Marjah in southern Afghanistan. And I think that what we’re seeing is a very serious demonstration, for any who doubted it, that this is a war against a vast population of Afghanistan. The claims that we’re—our new strategy is different, that our new strategy is not to kill civilians—the only way to stop killing civilians is to stop the killing. That means to stop all offensive actions, to stop and withdraw the troops, pull back the drones. This is the only way that there’s going to be an end to civilian casualties.

The notion that it’s the Taliban’s fault because they are among civilians, well, the problem is the Taliban come from those communities, they are those civilians. Many of the Taliban fighters who have, in the words of many US and strategy officials, talk about how the Taliban faded away with this new offensive in Marjah. They faded away because they live there. They’ve gone back to their families, back to their farms. And they will rise to fight again, presumably, if their interests are at stake, whether those interests are economic, whether they are issues of loyalty and connection to their communities.

This is the inevitable result of this kind of a war, the escalation that we have seen during President Obama’s first year. And yes, there is no question, this is President Obama’s war. He claimed it as his own, even during the campaign. The fact that we have now reached a thousand US casualties, and we don’t know—as you mentioned, we don’t know significantly accurate totals of the vast number of Afghan civilians who have died in this war. We know that it has been escalating. There are now—by the time that President Obama’s most recent escalation is finished, which is supposed to be in the next several months, there will be over 100,000 US and allied troops occupying Afghanistan. And there are already over 104,000 US paid mercenaries in Afghanistan in this war.

So the war has escalated enormously in this period, and there’s going to be a great deal of work to do to bring that war to an end. That’s very much why David Wildman and I wrote this book on how to end the US war.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how, Phyllis? How do you end the war? What’s the exit strategy?

PHYLLIS BENNIS: The exit strategy has to start by ending the killing. There has to be a unilateral ceasefire that can set the stage hopefully for a reciprocal ceasefire from all the various parties that are at war here. It has to include—this isn’t a situation where we can simply say, “Oh, let’s pull out the troops, and then we’re done.” Pulling out the troops, ending the drone attacks, ending these attacks that so consistently are killing civilians, is only step one. It’s only step one. We need to reengage with Afghanistan in an entirely different way than has been made possible. We need to look at serious development assistance.

We hear that the Marjah offensive that is now underway, that the US says is so important—it’s become important because there are so many thousands of US troops engaged in it now—that it’s important as a showpiece. It’s important—and they admit this—it’s important for the political goals, not the military goals, the political goals of bringing into Marjah what the US officials are now calling a government in a box, a government standing on the sidelines ready to come in and govern, and new aid workers ready to come in to provide all the services that have been missing.

Well, the problem is that all those aid workers are Americans, and the so-called government in a box is a government created under US control in Kabul made up largely, unfortunately, of different tribal and ethnic and linguistic groups than the people who actually live in that area. It’s likely to be seen as a foreign government, not quite like the US directly, but not part of the local community, which has always been the basis of how Afghanistan operates.

And until the United States is ready to operate on that kind a local level in conjunction with local leaders, women and men, Islamist and more secular people, which it certainly has not been prepared to do, the real need is for negotiations. The US cannot be in charge of those negotiations, but it has to stop preventing those negotiations. The Taliban will have to be involved in those negotiations, because they represent a component of the population and a component of the power. And if you’re serious about ending warfare, negotiations have to bring everybody to the table. We’re not going to be able to stand back and say, “Well, I don’t like what they stand for.”

It’s true, I don’t like what the Taliban stands for. They have been terrible in their ruling periods to the people of Afghanistan, particularly, but not only, to the women. But if we look at who the US is backing, these warlords that are suddenly our guys, they’re no better. If we look at the history of who began the terrible—what has now become commonplace in some terrible parts of Afghanistan, where women face the danger of having acid thrown in their faces if they dare to go to school, that didn’t begin with the Taliban. That began with a great supporter of the United States, one of President Reagan’s favorites, a warlord of the time, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, when he was a seventeen-year-old student and decided on his own, back in the late 1970s at the University of Kabul, he didn’t like women going to school. He invented that tactic.

So we have to look at what is really going to make the situation better. For me, looking at the situation of Afghan women, which is such a terrible situation for that population, what we’re looking at is that after eight, almost nine, years of US military occupation, the women of Afghanistan face the highest level of maternal mortality, meaning that more Afghan women die in childbirth than anywhere else in the world. And just a month or so ago, Amy, UNICEF, the UN’s children’s fund, announced that, in their new assessment, Afghanistan was now the worst place in the world for a child to be born. It beat out Sierra Leone. The worst place for a child to be born, after almost nine years of US occupation and a thousand US troops dead, and how many thousand are terribly injured?

The money that we are paying, aside from the human cost, the 30,000 escalation that’s now underway is costing about a million dollars per soldier. That same million dollars could cover twenty workers in this country for good green jobs, a $50,000 a year job with benefits and a living wage. What’s going to make us safer? A war that’s antagonizing people consistently, that’s creating new terrorists for every time we happen to get the right guy, which seems to be about never these days because we’re getting civilians instead? Or, real jobs to build up our economy and provide real aid for the people of Afghanistan? That’s the set of considerations we have to look at. There’s no silver bullet here. There’s no silver peace tactic. There’s a whole set of things—

AMY GOODMAN: Phyllis Bennis—

PHYLLIS BENNIS: —that we’re going to have to do.

AMY GOODMAN: BBC just reported that Western diplomats have expressed concern about a decree from Afghan President Hamid Karzai granting him total control over a key election body. The move gives him the power to appoint all five members of Afghanistan’s Electoral Complaints Commission. This is the watchdog group that helped expose massive fraud in last year’s presidential election and forced Karzai into a second vote. Your response?

PHYLLIS BENNIS: Well, I think we’re going to see another massive level of corruption. This is a situation in which, under the best of conditions, holding an election under conditions of military occupation means the election cannot be free and fair. Could it be more or less representative of what people believe? Maybe it’s possible. But when one party in a completely divided nation, a nation which does not have a history of focusing its legitimacy on a strong central government, but rather has historically provided legitimacy to local officials, local movements, local shuras or councils, collaborations of villages and tribal leaders, women’s organizations, all of the various social forces, they have had the power and the legitimacy, not what happens in Kabul. The president, Karzai, is known as the mayor of Kabul for the simple reason that he doesn’t have much influence outside of the capital.

AMY GOODMAN: Phyllis Bennis—

PHYLLIS BENNIS: The fact that he’s now claiming even additional power, it means it’s not going to work.

AMY GOODMAN: Final question, the antiwar movement—what do you think—and you end your primer, Ending the US War in Afghanistan, with this—what do you think the antiwar movement needs to do?

PHYLLIS BENNIS: We need to have a very powerful and very different kind of antiwar movement. We need an antiwar movement that links our work with the powerful new movements that are just beginning to rise in response to the economic crisis in this country and around the world. We need to link our work to the people that are working on the demand for jobs, on people that are demanding climate justice, on people that are demanding healthcare, in this country as well as around the world.

The wars in Afghanistan and even Iraq, where it continues, are no longer the public centerpiece of White House strategy the way they were during the Bush years. We are part of something much larger now. We need an antiwar movement that is in fact a component of something much larger, rather than being primarily something that is itself leading that fight back. We’re going to have to mobilize in different ways with different allies. The costs of war are going to be key. And I think that’s going to be one of the most important shifts that we see in this new antiwar movement, that we work as much with people that are fighting for new green jobs as we do fighting against the travesty of civilian deaths in Afghanistan or Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Phyllis Bennis, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Congratulations on your new book with David Wildman called Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer.

PHYLLIS BENNIS: Thanks, Amy.

Threat to Iraq

Withdrawal Plan

By Tom Hayden

Peace & Justice Resource Center

Was it too good to be true? In February at Camp Lejeune, our new President Barack Obama surprised all observers by pledging to withdraw all US troops from Iraq by 2012, in accord with a pact secretly negotiated at the end of the Bush era. Previously, Obama was promising to withdraw all combat troops, leaving a "residual force" dominating Iraq for years.

Obama has restated his commitment to the full withdrawal on several occasions. But heavy pressure is building to make the president drop his commitment.

The most ominous sign of the gathering campaign to make Obama cave in came in an Feb. 24 op-ed piece in the New York Times by Thomas Ricks, the pre-eminent mainstream historian of the war. Given the political gridlock and growing turbulence in Iraq, Ricks says that breaking his campaign promise is the "best course" for Obama to pursue.

(more…)

How To Rebuild

The Peace Movement

From the Bottom Up

By Tom Hayden

Peace and Justice Resource Center

Here at the PJRC we are exploring ways to implement communications with peace activist at local or regional levels, including a series of conference calls. In the meantime, let me share some specific thoughts about building the peace and justice movement from the bottom up.

Social movements always depend on leadership, a commitment by a single individual or small group to continue their work in the face of all odds. Then there’s the question of a strategy for being effective. We always have to measure our capacity against the goals we set.

PEOPLE POWER AGAINST THE PILLARS OF POLICY

The bottom-up strategy which I propose is building the pressure of people power against the pillars of policy that prop up the Long War.

The key pillars for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan include, first, the pillar of public opinion; second, the pillar of budgetary support; and third, the pillar of our military resources. Other pillars include the mainstream media, religious institutions and, of course, the required stability of America’s ally Kabul.

In the end, it’s about public opinion. We have to argue that the American people are not any safer for having fought these wars, and we cannot afford the cost in casualties and tax dollars.

(more…)

No Chance Obama’s War

in Afghanistan Will Succeed

By Sherwood Ross
L.A. Progressive

Dec. 26, 2009 - "There isn’t the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his December 1 speech (at West Point) will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan," writes Thomas Johnson in the current Foreign Policy magazine. And for emphasis, he adds the word "None."

"The U.S. president and his advisors labored for three months and brought forth old wine in bigger bottles,"
Johnson goes on to write, noting, "The speech contained not one single new idea or approach, nor offered any hint of new thinking about a conflict that everyone now agrees the United States is losing."

Author Johnson is no armchair admiral. He is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, a man who has conducted his own on-site investigation in Afghanistan.

(more…)

Photo: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Antiwar Voice in Congress

What will Congressional

Democrats do now?

By Tom Hayden

Dec. 8, 2009 - Congressional Democrats held a closed caucus Dec. 8 to consider their stance on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and what to do about the president’s 30,000 more troops, whose deployment will begin without a Congressional decision or funding. 

The majority Democrats are uncomfortable in being caught between their constituents’ peace sentiments and the president’s deployment of 100,000 American troops.
It’s going to get more uncomfortable.

 
Progressives should be vociferous in opposing the slithering [as opposed to dithering] by which the official deadline for beginning withdrawal keeps being shoved back by several years, if ever, solely under political pressure.
This stretching out of Obama’s withdrawal timetable eliminates the primary feature of the President’s plan that is attractive to most voters, especially Democrats.

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Progressives also must force discussion of the secret CIA war being authorized in Pakistan, where the center of gravity is shifting. See Jane Mayer’s "The Predator War" in The New Yorker.

The CIA’s secret offensive in Pakistan is likely to produce blowback on a historic scale. It’s no secret to the people of Pakistan, who oppose it in recent polls by 67-19 percent. It’s proven an embarrassment to American diplomacy since even Hillary Clinton is barred from acknowledging it’s going on. The reason for all the secrecy is not to protect American troops, but rather to avoid embarrassing Pakistan’s army and government from admitting the violation of their sovereignty - and, perhaps above all, to prevent anti-war sentiment from increasing here at home.

Progressives should nail the costs of Afghanistan should on every Congressional door, if foreheads are impossible. At the present rate of killing, American deaths under Obama will be another 1,100 by the end of 2011, bringing the overall total to nearly 2,000. At the present budgetary cost, the war started by Bush will become a trillion-dollar war under Obama.
Never doubt the ability of the government and media to hide these figures from the distracted public. Apparently the dollar costs were not realized by the president himself until October 25, when his budget office sent a memo at his request. According to the New York Times, our president "seemed in sticker shock [at the news], watching his domestic agenda vanishing in front of him. ‘This is a 10-year trillion-dollar effort and does not match up with our interests’", the president said, before setting the wheels in motion anyway.

Every peace advocate should post the costs of this war from their desktop to the highest billboard. Just go to the National Priorities website.

As for the Congress, every peace advocate should say loudly and clearly that two-thirds of their Democratic and independent constituents are unhappy with these wars, and that unhappiness will become a growing danger to many incumbents in 2010 and 2012. Reject the idea of a war surtax except as a rhetorical gesture. Push for Rep. Barbara Lee’s bill which will prohibit funding for the additional troops. It won’t pass, but is the vehicle for serious hearings and amendments - like forcing a vote on a tougher withdrawal plan. And push for Rep. Jim McGovern’s exit strategy resolution. How can anyone oppose the Pentagon reporting to Congress on an exit strategy, which is all the measure does. Just watch - the hawks will go wild at the thought of plan to exit from a stalemate rather than shedding American blood until the last Taliban surrenders.

Meanwhile, keep studying this Long War because it may be around for a while. A very intelligent analysis of what Obama is trying to do - a gradual strategic repeat from an unsustainable future - comes from a pro-war advocate, Peter Beinart, in the current Time.

Step by step, in the formula of Richard Flacks, is the way of social movements that succeed.
And by the way, order, view, and distribute the Rethink Afghanistan package from Brave New Films as a holiday gesture to your friends.

Tom Hayden
The Peace and Justice Resource Center 

Article originally appeared on tomhayden.com (http://tomhayden.com/).

See website for complete article licensing information.

Obama’s Indecent Interval

Despite the U.S. president’s pleas to the contrary,

the war in Afghanistan looks more like Vietnam than ever.

BY THOMAS H. JOHNSON, M. CHRIS MASON | DECEMBER 10, 2009

As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, truth is ridiculed, then denied, and then “accepted as having been obvious to everyone from the beginning.”

So let’s start with the obvious: There isn’t the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his Dec. 1 speech will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan. None. The U.S. president and his advisors labored for three months and brought forth old wine in bigger bottles. The speech contained not one single new idea or approach, nor offered any hint of new thinking about a conflict that everyone now agrees the United States is losing. Instead, the administration deliberated for 94 days to deliver essentially “more men, more money, try harder.” It sounded ominously similar to Mikhail Gorbachev’s “bloody wound” speech that led to a similar-sized, temporary Soviet troop surge in Afghanistan in 1986.

But the Soviet experience in Afghanistan isn’t what everyone is comparing Obama’s current predicament to; it’s Vietnam. The president knows it, and part of his speech was a rebuttal of those comparisons. It was a valiant effort, but to no avail. Afghanistan is Vietnam all over again.
(more…)

Obama Announces Afghanistan Escalation

By Tom Hayden

December 1, 2009

It’s time to strip the Obama sticker off my car.

Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments. His flip-flopping acceptance of the military coup in Honduras has squandered the trust of Latin America. His Wall Street bailout leaves the poor, the unemployed, minorities, and college students on their own. And now comes the Afghanistan-Pakistan decision to escalate the stalemate, which risks his domestic agenda, his Democratic base, and possibly even his presidency.

The expediency of his decision was transparent. Satisfy the generals by sending 30,000 more troops. Satisfy the public and peace movement with a timeline for beginning withdrawals of those same troops, with no timeline for completing a withdrawal.

Obama’s timeline for the proposed Afghan military surge mirrors exactly the 18-month Petraeus timeline for the surge in Iraq.

We’ll see. To be clear: I’ll support Obama down the road against Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs or any of the pitchfork carriers for the pre-Obama era. But no bumper sticker until the withdrawal strategy is fully carried out.

(more…)

Washington’s Wars

and Occupations:

Month in Review #55

By Max Elbaum

War Times/Tiempo de Guerras

Nov. 30, 2009 - No one can predict the specifics. But Washington’s current course in the Middle East is all but certain to produce one or more disastrous explosions of violence in the coming years.  And way too much blood is going to be uselessly shed even before the next big bang crisis arrives.

For obvious reasons, Afghanistan is the front-page candidate right now for the next explosion. But conditions are also ripe or ripening for a throw-everything-up-in-the-air crisis in the Israel-Palestine conflict; in Pakistan; in the Iran vs. the West/Israel stand-off; and - despite the assumption that "this one is over" - in Iraq.

As peace activists we need to look this painful reality right in the face. And then strategize and act accordingly. That’s the only way to make an effective contribution to minimizing the day-to-day horrors ahead. Likewise, only if we find ways to amass far more clout than we have now can we get in position to make a major difference when future crises expose the futility of "the military option" and create new possibilities for forcing a change in the imperial course.

(more…)

Will We Stay

50 Years in

Afghanistan?

Commentary by Tom Hayden: An Influential Pentagon Strategist

Advocates A Multi-Decade Counterinsurgency Campaign

By Tom Hayden

The Nation

Let us say, hypothetically, that American forces kill or capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, enabling President Obama to declare victory and bring our troops home. Would he? Not according to the Pentagon’s plan for a fifty-year "Long War" of counterinsurgency spanning Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines and beyond. Military intellectuals envision a prolonged cold war against Al Qaeda, with hot wars along the way. It happens that the Long War is over Muslim lands rich with oil, natural gas and planned pipelines. The Pentagon identifies them as hostile terrain where Al Qaeda and its affiliates are hidden.

Among the top experts responsible for this fifty-year war plan, concocted in 2005 in windowless offices in the Pentagon, is Dr. David Kilcullen, a former Australian soldier, an anthropologist, former top adviser to Gen. David Petraeus and current aide to Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Kilcullen is a media favorite, the subject of a long New Yorker profile by George Packer, glowing columns by David Ignatius in the Washington Post and weighty late-night conversations with Charlie Rose.

Kilcullen’s recent book, The Accidental Guerrilla, presents the case for a Long War of fifty or even 100 years’ duration, with chapters on Iraq (a mistake he believes was salvaged by the military surge he promoted in 2007-08), Afghanistan (where he recommends at least a five-to-ten-year campaign), Pakistan (whose tribal areas he sees as the center of the terrorist threat) and even Europe (where, he says, human rights laws create legislative "safe havens" for urban Muslim undergrounds).

(more…)

Six Discussion
Points for UFPJ
2008 Assembly

By Carl Davidson
Keep On Keepin’ On

1. The antiwar movement has won a major victory with the defeat of McCain by Obama; antiwar forces were among the first to launch Obama’s campaign, and now it’s time to consolidate gains. Now it’s time to press the Obama White House early in 2009 for an end to the war and to block wider wars with a broad ‘Yes, We Can!’ mobilization from below.

2. Start by reaching out primarily to the millions of Obama volunteers and Obama voters, especially the younger generation, but also the pro-Obama women, labor organizers, and communities of color.  If you want change from below, this is where the engine is. Let go of any forces who want to hold this back and keep us locked in far narrower circles.

3. Organization building trumps movement-building. Build or create mass democratic grassroots groups bringing together the best local activists from the Obama campaign and other allies. Build or create new coalitions with local partners in labor, campus and community groups.

4. Start local UFPJ-allied blogs to have a public face, and link it to others. Use social networking to enhance face-to-face meetups. Join the new wave of meetups coming out of the Obama movement.

5. Develop, with our allies, a local or area-wide program of deep structural reform and immediate needs for your area, and take it upward and outward through the elected officials and government bodies, all the way to the top. Link this effort to the economy.
Green Jobs over War Jobs, New Schools, Not More Prisons, HealthCare Not Warfare, Peace and Prosperity, Not War, Greed and Crisis.  Green Infrastructure, not Pentagon Waste; Buyout, not Bailout. Show how any decent gains require an end to the war and cutting the defense budget. Here is where will find new partners linking all the key issues connected to the war.

6. Break decisively with the ultraleft mindset, in order to deepen and broaden left-progressive unity.  In order to end the war and achieve other gains, we have to make political alliances with forces among the broad masses, and elected officials, who are to OUR POLITICAL RIGHT. That’s what is seriously demanded of us, not any attempts to drag us leftwards.