Crawling from the Wreckage Read online

  So Obama gets the presidency—and then what? He will probably be able to depend on solid Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress but he will inherit a ravaged economy and two lost wars, so he has little room for expensive domestic reforms or dramatic initiatives abroad. Also, he will not be able to cut bloated U.S. military spending, so there is no early “peace bonus” waiting for him on the fiscal front.

  Like Bill Clinton before him, Obama will ultimately have the job of repairing the huge budget deficit bequeathed to him by his Republican predecessor, but the only step he can take in the short run is to roll back the huge Bush tax cuts for the rich. So what else can the Democrats do in the meantime that doesn’t cost too much?

  Obama has said very little about this during his campaign (and Hillary Clinton, haunted by her failure to reform health care in her husband’s first term as president, has said even less). But the fact that one-sixth of the American population has no access to high-quality medical care is an astonishing failure in a rich democracy, and Obama has travelled enough to see it for the scandal that it is. He may be unconvincing as a gun-loving, truck-driving, fast-food-addicted son of toil, but he is the candidate of the American poor, even if many of the white poor don’t recognize him as such. No single reform would do as much to improve the lives of poor Americans as a fully comprehensive health-care system that is free at the point of delivery. Obama has given us few clues about his intentions but my money says that this will be his first priority in domestic affairs. He might even succeed.

  Well, I got that right. I just never imagined that it would take up a full year of congressional time, while everything else had to wait. Neither did he. But I’m a much happier camper now. Let nobody tell you that the United States doesn’t matter anymore.

  2.

  AFGHANISTAN: VIETNAM FOR SLOW LEARNERS

  As expected, I found lots of pieces on Afghanistan when I surveyed the five years’ worth of articles for this book. But there weren’t many I could use, because they all said essentially the same few things. You can do endless colour pieces full of human stories: as a private soldier wrote home from another war half a century ago, “Men are never so loving or so lovable as they are in action.” But that doesn’t change from one war or one army to the next, and it doesn’t change the fact that the war will kill or maim many of those soldiers in the end, so we owe it to them to talk about the politics and strategy of the conflict they find themselves in. Unfortunately, there just isn’t a lot to say about the war in Afghanistan at the political and strategic level, except that it is unwinnable and unnecessary.

  July 10, 2006

  SAME WAR, DIFFERENT PLAYERS

  1839, 1878, 1979, 2001: four foreign invasions of Afghanistan in less than two hundred years. The first two were British, and unashamedly imperialist. The third was Soviet, and the invaders said they were there to defend socialism and help Afghanistan become a modern, prosperous state. The last was American, and the invaders said they were there to bring democracy and help Afghanistan become a modern, prosperous state. But all four invasions were doomed to fail (although the last one still has some time to run).

  When Britain deployed 3,300 troops to Helmand province early last month, then defence secretary John Reid said: “We hope we will leave Afghanistan without firing a single shot.” But six British soldiers have been killed in combat since then, and the new defence secretary, Des Browne, announced on Monday that the British force is being increased by another nine hundred soldiers to cope with “unexpected” resistance.

  The story is the same across southern Afghanistan. The Canadian army has lost six soldiers killed in action in Kandahar province since late April, and may soon face the same choice between reinforcing its troops or pulling them back.

  A country that has been invaded four times in less than two centuries is bound to know a couple of things about dealing with foreign conquerors, and the first thing Afghans have learned is never to trust foreigners, no matter how pure they say their intentions are. There are probably no people in the world more xenophobic than the Afghans, and they have earned the right to be so. If there was ever a window of opportunity for the current crop of invaders to convince Afghans that this time is different it closed some time ago.

  The other thing Afghans know is how to deal with invaders. Invaders will always be richer and better armed, so let them occupy the country. Don’t try to hold the cities; instead, fade back into the mountains. Take a couple of years to regroup and set up your supply lines (this time around, mostly across the border from Pakistan), and then start the guerrilla war in earnest. Ambush, harass and bleed the foreigners for as long as it takes. Eventually they will cut their losses and go home.

  It has worked every time, and it will work again. Des Browne remarked plaintively last week that “the very act of [British] deployment into the south has energized opposition.” But the reality is that the rural areas of Helmand province, like most of the Pashto-speaking provinces of the south and southeast, have been under the effective control of the resistance for several years. The arrival of foreign troops in these areas simply gives the insurgents more targets to attack.

  The endgame is beginning, even in Kabul. Hamid Karzai, the West’s chosen leader for Afghanistan, is now starting to make deals with the forces that will hold his life in their hands once the foreigners leave: the warlords and drug barons. In April, he dropped many candidates who had been approved by the “coalition” powers from a list of new provincial police chiefs, and replaced their names with those of known gangsters and criminals who work for the local warlords. He will also have to talk to the Taliban before long.

  The “Taliban” that Western troops are now fighting in Afghanistan is more inclusive than the narrow band of fanatics who imposed order on the country in 1996, after seven years of civil war. The current Afghan resistance movement includes farmers trying to protect their poppy fields, nationalists furious at the foreign presence and young men who just want to show that they are as brave as previous generations of Afghans. In other words, the Afghan fighters have the usual grab bag of motives that fuels any national resistance movement.

  Nor should we assume that the regime that eventually emerges in Kabul after the foreigners have gone home will resemble the old Taliban, a Pakistani-backed and almost entirely Pashto-speaking organization. The foreign invasion overthrew the long domination of the Pashto-speakers in Afghanistan (about 40 percent of the population), and it is most unlikely that Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Turkmen will accept that domination again. Their own warlords will have to have a share of the power, too, and even Karzai might find a role.

  Post-occupation Afghanistan will certainly live under strict Islamic law, but there is no reason to believe that it would export Islamist revolution of the al-Qaeda brand. Even the old Taliban regime never did that; it gave hospitality to Osama bin Laden and his gang, but it almost certainly had no knowledge of his plans for 9/11, and on other issues it was often open to Western pressure. In early 2001, for example, the former Taliban regime shut down the whole heroin industry in Afghanistan, simply by shooting enough poppy farmers to frighten the rest into obedience.

  Afghanistan will not be left to its own devices until after the people who ordered the invasion leave office: presumably next year for Tony Blair, and January 2009 for George W. Bush. There is time for lots of killing yet, but Afghanistan stands a reasonable chance of sorting itself out once the Western armies leave.

  I would stand by everything in that article, except that it’s clearly going to take more time for the Western armies to pull out of Afghanistan.

  October 5, 2007

  A WAR WON AND LOST

  This week is the sixth anniversary of the start of U.S. air strikes against al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. It was a very clever politico-military operation, and by December 2001 all of Afghanistan was under the control of the United States and its local allies for a total cost of twelve American dead.

  In
the days just after 9/11, George Tenet, the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief, came up with a bold proposal. Why invade Afghanistan with a large American army, deploying massive firepower that kills large numbers of locals and alienates the population? Why give Osama bin Laden the long anti-American guerrilla war that he was undoubtedly counting on?

  Instead, Tenet proposed sending teams of CIA agents and special forces into the country to win the support of the various ethnic militias, loosely linked as the Northern Alliance, that still dominated Afghanistan’s northern regions. Although the Taliban had controlled most of the country since 1996, they had never decisively won the civil war. So why not intervene in that war, shower the opponents of the Taliban with money and weapons, and tip the balance against the regime?

  It worked like a charm. Pakistan, whose intelligence services had originally created the Taliban, withdrew its support. The Northern Alliance’s forces advanced, the US Air Force bombed wherever they met resistance, the regime fled Kabul, and most of the Taliban troops melted back into their villages. The government of a country of twenty-seven million people was taken down for a death toll that probably did not exceed four thousand on all sides.

  By mid-December 2001, the United States effectively controlled Afghanistan through its local allies, all drawn from the northern minority groups: the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara. There had not been the mass killing of innocent bystanders that would inevitably have accompanied a conventional U.S. invasion, so there was no guerrilla war. The traditional ruling group and biggest minority, the Pashtuns, who had put their money on the Taliban and lost, would have to be brought back into the game somehow, but the usual Afghan deal-making should take care of that.

  Washington had the wit to make Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from a clan that had never had much to do with the Taliban, its puppet president in Kabul, but it didn’t follow the same logic in its broader policy towards the Pashtuns. It froze out all the prominent Pashtun political and religious leaders who had had dealings with the Taliban—which was, of course, almost all of them.

  The Taliban had been the government of Afghanistan for almost five years, and were at the time the political vehicle of the Pashtun ascendancy in the country. If you were a traditional Pashtun leader, how could you not have had dealings with them? An amnesty that turned a blind eye to the past, plus pressure by the United States on its recent allies to grant the Pashtuns a fair share of the national pie, would have created a regime in Kabul to which Pashtuns could give their loyalty, even if they were less dominant at the centre than usual. But that never happened.

  The United States confused the Taliban with al-Qaeda and would not talk to Pashtun leaders who had been linked to the Taliban. Six years after the invasion that wasn’t, the Pashtuns are still largely frozen out. That is why the Taliban are coming back.

  Afghanistan has generally been run by regional and tribal warlords with little central control: nothing new there. But now it is also a country where the biggest minority has been largely excluded from power by foreign invaders who sided with the smaller minorities, and then blocked the process of accommodation by which the various Afghan ethnic groups normally make power-sharing deals.

  The current fighting in the south, the Pashtun heartland, which is causing a steady dribble of American, British and Canadian casualties, will continue until these Western countries pull out. (Most other NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] members sent their troops to various parts of northern Afghanistan, where non-Pashtun warlords rule non-Pashtun populations and nobody wants to attack the foreigners.) When the foreigners have finally pulled out of the south, the Afghans will make the traditional inter-ethnic deals and something like peace will return.

  Will Karzai still be the president after that? Yes, if he can convince the Pashtuns that he is open to such a deal once the foreigners leave.

  Will the Taliban come back to power? No, only to a share of power, and only to the extent that they can still command the loyalty of the Pashtuns. Their hold on Pashtun loyalties may dwindle once they are no longer leading a resistance movement against foreign occupation.

  Will Osama bin Laden return and recreate a “nest of terrorists” in Afghanistan? Very unlikely. The Afghans paid too high a price for their hospitality the first time round.

  By the time I wrote the next article, in 2009, there was something new in the equation: Barack Obama was the president of the United States, and there were deeply worrisome signs that he was buying into the Washington orthodoxy about the war in Afghanistan. His appointment of a new general and the latter’s declaration of a “new” strategy in Afghanistan seemed to indicate that Obama had drunk the Kool-Aid.

  May 11, 2009

  CHANGING GENERALS IN MIDSTREAM

  There is always a high turnover of generals in wartime. Some get replaced because they turn out to be no good at the job, but many others are changed because they have failed at a task that was beyond anybody’s ability to accomplish.

  They are fired, in other words, because the alternative would be to blame the person who gave them the impossible task in the first place. That certainly seems to be the case with General David McKiernan, the American commander in Afghanistan, who was appointed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates less than a year ago, when President Bush was still in power.

  The specific event that caused McKiernan’s dismissal may have been his recent admission that there is a “stalemate” in Afghanistan. But his removal was probably inevitable anyway because Gates, who was retained from the Bush administration by President Obama, needed somebody to blame for the fact that the military situation in Afghanistan is now worse than ever. What’s needed is “fresh thinking, fresh eyes on the problem,” said Secretary Gates, explaining why he was appointing General Stanley McChrystal to the job instead. So what should General McChrystal’s fresh eyes see?

  He could start by understanding that the United States is not just fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is fighting the entire Pashtun nation, some thirty million people, two-thirds of whom live across the border in Pakistan. That border has never really existed for the Pashtuns, who move freely across it in peace and in war.

  It is warlords from the other Afghan ethnic groups, the Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek, who have controlled the Afghan government ever since the U.S. take-over. “The political, religious and economic mafia are all Northern Alliance people,” says Daoud Sultanzoy, a member of parliament from Ghazni province, exaggerating only slightly. “Nobody outside the Northern Alliance is in the government.” Except, of course, President Hamid Karzai, the token Pashtun, who is mockingly known as “the mayor of Kabul.”

  This is not a war about ideology, even if all the American and Taliban commanders insist that it is. The Pashtuns are fighting to regain at least a major share of power in Afghanistan, while the U.S. and other foreign troops are for all practical purposes allied to the other ethnic groups. That is why all the fighting is in the Pashtun-majority provinces.

  Hamid Karzai has ensured his re-election as president in August by bribing or bullying his most serious challenger into withdrawing from the race. And his second term will be a reprise of his first: the same ethnic imbalance; the same rampant corruption and warlordism; the same toadying to the foreigners who provide the cash flow; and the same outbursts of nationalist resentment when U.S. air strikes kill too many innocent civilians.

  On top of everything else, the U.S. still insists on eradicating the poppy-growing that provides over half of the country’s national income. Opium use is obviously a problem in Afghanistan—as one observer said, “If you applied a drug test to the Afghan army, three-quarters of them would be kicked out”—but burning farmers’ fields leaves them no alternative source of cash income except fighting for the Taliban, who pay $200 CAD a month.

  The final thing McChrystal should understand is that “winning” or “losing” in Afghanistan makes almost no difference to U.S. security. The Taliban are not “outriders for al-Qaeda,” in the lazy formula use
d by State Department special envoy Richard Holbrooke. They are an Afghan phenomenon with almost exclusively Afghan goals, and even if the Taliban should win absolute power after the U.S. leaves (which is unlikely), there is no reason to believe that they would send terrorists to attack the United States. Indeed, Osama bin Laden probably didn’t even let the Taliban’s leaders know in advance about his plans for the 9/11 attacks.

  This war is not only unwinnable but unnecessary, and if Stanley McChrystal understood all these things he wouldn’t have taken the job. But he did take it, so he doesn’t understand.

  Then we had an election so spectacularly corrupt that Karzai’s Western supporters insisted on a rerun. Afghans were less shocked, since they already understood the name of the game. And in the end, there was no rerun.

  August 13, 2009

  “ELECTION” IN AFGHANISTAN

  “They have the watches, but we have the time,” say the Taliban commanders in Afghanistan, and it’s perfectly true. The election on August 20 is not going to change that.

  The foreign forces, U.S., Canadian and European, are well-trained, well-equipped troops who can inflict casualties on amateur Taliban fighters at a ratio of at least ten-to-one, but the Taliban have an endless flow of fresh fighters, and much popular support among the Pashtuns of the south and southeast. Not to mention all the time in the world.

  Now we are asked to believe that an election will restore confidence in the Afghan government. It is nonsense: this election has no more relevance than the ones that the United States staged in Vietnam. Colonel David Haight, commanding the Third Brigade Combat Team of the U.S. Tenth Mountain Division in Logar and Wardak provinces near Kabul, was helpfully indiscreet about it in a recent interview. “I think that apathy is going to turn into some anger when the administration doesn’t change, and I don’t think that anybody believes that Karzai is going to lose,” Haight told an embedded reporter from the Guardian. “There is going to be frustration from people who realize there is not going to be a change. The bottom line is they are going to be thinking: ‘Four more years of this crap?’ ”