Top Ten Ways the US is Turning Afghanistan into Iraq
1. Exaggerating the threat. An Afghan army foot patrol was attacked by guerrillas in Helmand Province on Wednesday, according to AP. US and Afghan soldiers responded, engaging in a firefight. Then the US military called in an air strike on the Taliban, killing 20 of them. On Tuesday, a similar airstrike had taken out 30 guerrillas.
It is this sort of thing that makes me wonder why the Taliban (or whoever these guys in Helmand were) are considered such a big threat that the full might of NATO is needed to deal with them. They have no air force, no artillery, no tanks. They are just small bands, apparently operating in platoons, who, whenever they mass in large enough numbers to stand and fight, can just be turned into red mist from the air.
2. The US has actually only managed to install a fundamentalist government in Afghanistan, which is rolling back rights of women and prosecuting blasphemy cases. In a play for the Shiite vote (22% or so of the population), President Hamid Karzai put through civilly legislated Shiite personal status law, which affects Shiite women in that country. The wife will need the husband's permission to go out of the house, and can't refuse a demand for sex. (Since the 1990s there has been a movement in 50 or more countries to abandon the idea that spouses cannot rape one another, though admittedly this idea is new and was rejected in US law until recently).
No one seems to have noted that the Shiite regime in Baghdad is more or less doing the same thing. In Iraq, the US switched out the secular Baath Party for Shiite fundamentalist parties. Everyone keeps saying the US improved the status of women in both countries. Actually, in Iraq the US invasion set women back about 30 years. In Afghanistan, the socialist government of the 1980s, for all its brutality in other spheres, did implement policies substantially improving women's rights, including aiming at universal education, making a place for them in the professions, and so forth. There were socialist Afghan women soldiers fighting the Muslim fundamentalist guerrillas that Reagan called "freedom fighters" and to whom he gave billions to turn the country into a conservative theocracy. I can never get American audiences to concede that Afghan women had it way better in the 1980s, and that it has been downhill ever since, mainly because of US favoritism toward patriarchal and anti-progressive forces.
3. The US is building a mass of hardened bases costing over $1 bn. in Afghanistan. That's about the annual budget of the Afghanistan government.
4. It begins. The US is creating local militias in Wardak called the Afghan Public Protection Force. You wonder how long it will be before the Karzai government is engaged in firefights with them (cf. Fadl in Baghdad earlier this week).
5. Now thousands of private security contractors (i.e. mercenaries) will be hired in Afghanistan. But they won't be Americans for the most part. Children, can you say "Hessians"?
I don't understand the concept of paying someone $200,000 a year to guard armed GIs being paid a fraction of that. Wouldn't it be better to expand the size of the army if you need more troops? Wouldn't it be more efficient to have one line of command? Aren't these essentially high-priced MPs?
6. The secretary of defense is predicting that the US military will be in Afghanistan indefinitely and will only achieve limited goals there. (!)
I ask myself, "why?"
7. An attempt by officials in the Obama administration to replace Guantanamo with Bagram in Afghanistan has been shot down by a Federal judge. The government actually argued that the three men (2 Yemenis and a Tunisian) did not have habaeus corpus rights because they are in a war zone.
Why are they in a war zone? Because the US government transported them there!
8. The president is corralling a coalition of the reluctant for troop contributions in Afghanistan.
9. While militaries spend tens of billions on fighting disgruntled Pashtun tribesmen, a fifth of pregnant women or women with newborns are malnourished in Afghanistan. In Iraq, as well, public health crises took a back seat while hundreds of billions were spent on weapons and warfare.
10. A new Friedman unit. It was always the "next six months" that would be "crucial" for Iraq. It is now "this year" that is crucial for Afghanistan. By the math of Friedman units, does this mean the Afghanistan occupation will last twice as long as the Iraq one?
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 4/03/2009 12:03:00 AM
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27 Comments:
Professor Cole have the Americans been duped to elect yet another Bush?
President Obama used very well various propaganda tools, especially the online one to reach wider / younger audiences but I have yet to see a qualitative difference between him and the former President. At least that's the image from outside.
We should be so lucky. Afghanistan will never be Iraq. I can't believe clear and hold will work in Afghanistan. What is our military going to hold? Mountain passes, poppy fields and farmers? Good Luck.
Juan- I respect your opinions and research, but I think you're off on one aspect of operations in Afghanistan. The only people willing to travel to and engage locals in the difficult and channelized terrain of the south and east of the country are Coalition infantrymen. Your average infantry lieutenant, a 22-24 year old college graduate, is the one identifying the needs of these people and evaluating the security situation in any particular region (along with Special Operations Forces). Doing this in vehicles on narrow roads with IED threats takes nerve and a certain amount of fatalism; helicopters face RPG threats; dismounted patrols face ambushes; small bases face massed attacks (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/world/asia/15afghan.html). Until there is security, NGOs/aid organizations will not travel to these areas, and there will not be significant changes in the economic or social outlook of the most deserving Afghan citizens. In general, you have 300 soldiers securing areas the size of three New England states, and without significant Afghan Security Force assistance, that is simply not enough to prevent the Taliban from intimidating and beating villagers once coalition and Afghan soldiers leave.
I would add that like Iraq, there is no real legal basis for the US and NATO to be there, nor any for the drone war waged against Pakistan. Venezuelan president Chavez's observation that the US is still behaving "like an Empire" and that there's essentially no change since Bush's departure seems 100% accurate--the previous crimes go unpunished while fresh crimes are committed daily.
The best thing about the US Empire going bankrupt is that it will no longer be able to make war on the world, although the wars it's waging while it's going bankrupt are bad enough, and crimes of the highest order.
I've always distrusted argument by analogy. Remember all those bumper stickers that said "El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam!"? Not it isn't. El Salvador is Spanish for "The Savior." Afghanistan will never turn into Iraq no matter how much the US invades it, any more than Iraq was about to turn into Japan just because the US occupation of Japan after WWII was the neocons' favorite analogy.
JC writes: " ... will only achieve limited goals there. (!) I ask myself, 'why?' "
Here's a sincere request: help us to understand what a possible rationale for US presence in Afghanistan might be. The whole thing seems to have been conducted without a sense of goals, of desired end-state, from day one. And the continuing discussion seems equally devoid of even elementary strategic vision (putting aside the fantastical fringes).
The temptation is to believe that we are there because we were there, and we got stuck there because of Rumsfeld's crackpot military theories. But someone, somewhere must have a more dignified view of the matter. What could that be?
Why is US/Nato calling in air strikes in Afghanistan? Ask the Russians. It's called force protection. Even the "native" Afghan forces are outsiders, and will be a poor match for locals fighting a guerilla war on foot.
When they break out the anti-aircraft weapons this will get much more interesting and bloody.
I don't understand the concept of paying someone $200,000 a year to guard armed GIs being paid a fraction of that. Wouldn't it be better to ...
Yes, almost any alternative would be 'better'. In order to understand the logic of mercenaries it's necessary to re-state the math from a top-down rather than your bottom-up perspective.
Mercenaries are 'made available' to the government by the equivalent of a (well-connected) labor-hire corporation in batches of, say, 100 - at a premium of between 50% and 100% of the salary paid to the individual mercenary.
So, taking 50% as a guide, taxpayers cough up $300,000 p.a. for a $200,000 mercenary and the labor hire corp pockets $100,000 p.a. 100 x 100,000 = $10 million p.a. (minus "gifts" & "disbursements") and nobody in the loop cares whether we 'win' or 'lose' the 'war' just so long as the casualties remain low enough to keep adverse public opinion at bay AND the people in charge can make it last as long as po$$ible.
Whilst Juan Cole is trenchant in his analysis, he still, I fear, adheres to the European Enlightenment idea that there is such a thing as a Universal Norm to which all civilisations should adhere. On things such as the treatment of women, for instance, he still holds dear the notion of a western cultural-moral superiority which privileges western concepts of what it means to be civilised.
If the world is ever to be at peace we must not only tolerate 'the other' we must also accept them on their own terms.
I think what the Administration is up to is different than the suggestions here. In a sense the critics may be fighting the last anti-war war, if you know what I mean.
What would make a modicum of sense? (I am not endorsing it.)
Trying to mobilize militias and build armies to control the country is a secondary objective upon which the major objective does not depend. It would be nice to have a stable US client state but the difficulties of this in Afgh are pretty obvious. The 'graveyard of empires' and all that.
The major objective I believe is to prevent further attacks by Al Queda. Another priority is to keep Pakistan at no worse than a low boil.
The purpose of U.S. & allied forces in Afgh is to keep AQ tied down in Afgh and Pakistan, indefinitely, to minimize their ability to conduct operations elsewhere. When possible their leaders and any unfortunates in the vicinity will be blown up by US drones. The US campaign in effect is a (well-resourced) guerrilla operation. From impregnable strong points US forces can go anywhere and do anything they want, for as long as they want. Insofar as they can mobilize locals to help, that's icing on the cake. Ditto if some level of cooperation can be struck with Iran.
It's not a campaign of conquest; there is nothing there worth taking. (The pipeline stuff was always a pipe-dream.) The emerging US client-cum-superpower in the region IMO is India. Who needs Afghanistan.
There are all sorts of ways to criticize this in its own terms.
For effective criticism, we should be aiming at the correct target.
-- Miracle Max
Brilliant essay, with tragedy on tragedy these years in Iraq and Somalia and Afghanistan and Pakistan and more to come.
Ken is SO sure that "Coalition infantrymen" are someones who belong to Afghanistan, and "Taliban" are not. Hate to disappoint him, but "Coalition infantrymen" are foreighn invaders, so-called "Afghan Security Force" are their puppets, and "Taliban" are Afghans themselves. He could not see it thus, but there is his problem.
I am NOT for Taliban, but it is the Afganistan matter, not USA' s one. USA did enough 30 years ago to turn the place into living hell, I suppose it is a high time to USA to leave the peoples here alone.
Ken said that "this is simply not enough to prevent the Taliban from intimidating and beating villagers once coalition and Afghan soldiers leave."
So are we now going to guarantee that the coalition and its local narco-terrorist thug warlord allies will not be beating and intimidation villagers? That would be nice.
"I don't understand the concept of paying someone $200,000 a year to guard armed GIs being paid a fraction of that."
You're paying to keep the official count of US military deaths low, since that's what the US press focuses on.
A very interesting discussion which might benefit from a military view. Of course I am only a retired AF guy and not Army infantry, but I have been a student of irregular warfare for a while.
Classic Clauswitzian warfare is to destroy the enemy ability to wage war and/or to occupy their territory. Guerilla warfare has a much more difficult goal - to keep the violence down to where the rest of the world doesn't need to take note.
Right now it seems that the NATO/American goal is to reduce the level of violence so that people would be safer in Afghanistan than they are in major American or European cities.
The goal is not counter insurgency, that would imply that the central government has some influence in the rural areas - which it does not.
The goal is not to prevent the enemy from attacking our country - we have already occupied their territory and control the means of production in that geographic area. So they could attack from another country if they chose to. Wd don't have the will to prevent the insurgents from ambushing local convoys, we would need to cut them off from their safe suppliers in Pakistan.
What the purpose of additional troops is - remains to be explained. We have sufficient people there to protect "the government" which extends to the suburbs of Kabul. No one can attack Europe or America from the rest of Afghanistan since we could disrupt their training from afar.
Additional troops cannot prevent the rural villagers from being beaten up by their local warlords - but we want to make sure that they are beaten up and intimidated only by NATO allies?
We don't have to worry about the Taliban getting effective anti-aircraft since we were the ones that gave them their only effective anti-aircraft systems!
About the civilian security forces - they are only there to keep the number of American and European dead down. A dead contractor (even if they are from the US) does not count.
Charles Phillips
USAF Retired
"I don't understand the concept of paying someone $200,000 a year to guard armed GIs being paid a fraction of that. Wouldn't it be better to expand the size of the army if you need more troops? Wouldn't it be more efficient to have one line of command? Aren't these essentially high-priced MPs?"
I say we pull the US military out altogether and force the corporate interests to pay their own mercenaries to protect their pipelineistan dreams.
At 2:51 PM, Will Shetterly said...
"I don't understand the concept of paying someone $200,000 a year to guard armed GIs being paid a fraction of that."
You're paying to keep the official count of US military deaths low, since that's what the US press focuses on.
The US press is going bye-bye because of corp. greed and then shut down so if your not connected will you loose as we all do in the US and every were as this takes hold.
I hate the fact that GIs that don't belong there are paid nothing and then come home to no job/medical another sad day in the US. Then what about every one we effect, Sad.
jo6pac
Overall I agree with your points Dr. Cole, however on the cost of security contractors you are WAY off. Many of them are third country nationals hired by the defense contractors. They hail from places as diverse as Peru, Uganda, and Tibet, and are paid quite poorly. The Peruvians make around $50 a day, while the Ugandans and Tibetans make even less. These are great salaries for their home countries, and they have few expenses, so they are pretty enthusiastic about these jobs even though they're getting stiffed on a global payscale level.
Especially for tasks like guarding a base or a compound, it is MUCH cheaper for the military to hire one of these firms than to use their own troops. For convoy missions and things like that there is usually a mix of westerners (expensive) and those from these other cheaper countries.
Hi Juan, this is a fantastic top ten list. I think that you bring about some very striking similarities between the two current conflicts. I really hope that this administration can handle the situation better, only time will tell. You are welcome to post your list on my site http://www.toptentopten.com/ which I hope to be the home to the largest collection of top ten lists. Hopefully we can help to drive traffic to your site. The coolest feature is that users can vote on the rank of your list items.
Anon: "Especially for tasks like guarding a base or a compound, it is MUCH cheaper for the military to hire one of these firms than to use their..."
Might be true if there was no middleman: fifty bucks an hour straight to the employee, though I didn't think PFC's, or even tech sgts make $50 an hour; perhaps my thinking is old fashioned given the inflation we don't have. But that's not the way it works. The contractor/kickback/sub/sub/sub stack makes the final bill not 50 but $300, or maybe $3000. How can I be so sure? Because no one knows, especially the military. Everyone including the GAO says there is no possible way the military can keep track of what it spends because it is at least as fiscally inept as it thinks it is militarily powerful. And for bales of billions of dollars to remain cheerfully unaccounted for year after year while sprinklings of thousand dollar bundles for education or health or food is argued against ad nauseum by (mostly) Republicans, well I have to think that the military doesn't want those figures known, and congress is too limp wristed to object, finding it easier to increase sin taxes or accost the inadequacies of the young, the old, the unfortunate, or the whatever than to bite into a healthy looking but rotten to the core military industrial revenue stream. So forget the $50 bargain. It isn't there. Think instead about slicing off some significant arteries supplying the cubic flow of dollars to the most grossly outsized military on the face of the earth and redirecting them toward better investments. There is no apparent proof such a military is helping things, and quite a lot of info that it is harming the interest of the US, despite the good intentions of most of its participants.
AF guy, I take issue with "Guerilla warfare has a much more difficult goal - to keep the violence down to where the rest of the world doesn't need to take note."
Guerilla warfare is simply assymetrical, and depending on the goal of the people involved, the strategy might be as you say to hide and eat away at the guts of the occupier, or it might instead be to make a big splash (beheading or Giap come to mind) and to repeatedly advertise to the public of the occupying power the never ending cost and never improving situation. Never underestimate the power of advertising. It seems the original American colonies knew things the 50 "modern" states have forgotten.
A couple of notes about security contractors - the actual guard makes a LOT less than he costs, most of the costs is paid (in American wages) to the management chain. So we do pay a lot to protect NATO soldiers, far more than the equivalent NATO soldier would make.
And you would NOT find a company that would pay security contractors any amount of money. The resources in Afghanistan are heroin and stuff like that, hardly what an oil company could sell in other countries. Afghanistan has little that interests the rest of the world - right now. What few agricultural products they have, must be transported on roads built at great cost. Afghanistan, for instance, has not usable oil.
So NATO maintains a large force there - to protect the large force there.
Charles Phillips
Houston, Texas
The Christian Science Monitor published an article on March 6 about mercenary recruitment in Uganda, noting that 10,000 Ugandans are currently serving in Iraq making about $600 a month apiece. The recruiter is quoted as saying he was looking forward to much bigger opportunities in Afghanistan.
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Here's one firm datapoint in the discussion on what a Mercenary costs.
In April 2007 I sued the US Army to stop them from employing Mercenaries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenary#cite_note-WP-2007-06-02-9
The Army got my case thrown out because they showed that, even if I won the case, I would be unable to perform. I was asking that a large contract for 600+ Mercenaries and 20 non-Mercenaries be split up so I could bid on just the non-Mercenary part.
To beat me, an Army official certified that it would take 3 people to fill each job. That official certified something that was plainly false, but the Court presumes that Government officials always act in good faith, unless I could prove otherwise. I couldn't. I had the money to pay 20 people, but not 60.
Part of the data the Army submitted showed that, in 2007, the Army was paying $314,000 for one US or British citizen Mercenary.
an avid student of falsified Government certifications.
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Let's get real here. As someone who has "fought the good fight" against the bloody insanity of George Bush's trying to inflict non-consensual American statehood on two Islamic countries, I want to ask: what are Obama's options?
To me, he has none; or, at least none that are worth a tinker's damn. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that without our military in Iraq (for starters) to serve as "choir director", there aint gonna be no Kumbayah chorus.
Does Obama leave them there indefinitely, breaking his sorta-kinda promise to get "combat units" out by the promise-expiration shelf-life of the next mid-terms? That will cost us a lot of the congressional gains that we made in the last election.
If he DOES take most of our troops out, I'd bet my car that the **** will hit the fan, and if/when, it does, then we haven't seen anything, as far as the blamegame that the republicans are cranking up, goes.
He's riding the tiger, almost as much as was George Bush. The difference being, of course, that Obama didn't create the miseries of Iraq and Afghanistan. But with every day that passes, it becomes more of HIS problem as to how to get off that tiger.
We need to be talking about the realities of our leaving. And I do believe that we are leaving, because I don't think Obama has a real option to keep us there indefinitely. Too many voters who supported he and the dems because they thought that he could wind this down, will take off. I don't know where they'll go, or what THEIR options will be, but we can't keep on with this bloody Mack Sennet comedy much longer.
2. The US has actually only managed to install a fundamentalist government in Afghanistan, which is rolling back rights of women and prosecuting blasphemy cases. In a play for the Shiite vote (22% or so of the population), President Hamid Karzai put through civilly legislated Shiite personal status law, which affects Shiite women in that country. The wife will need the husband's permission to go out of the house, and can't refuse a demand for sex. (Since the 1990s there has been a movement in 50 or more countries to abandon the idea that spouses cannot rape one another, though admittedly this idea is new and was rejected in US law until recently).
Same thing in Canada. We had a marital rape loophole on the books until 26 years ago. So if they're ten steps back in the jungle on this issue, there's a limit to how smug we can be because we're just five steps out.
Funny I was just thinking yesterday that he is turning Iraq into Afghanistan. In 1989 after the war was over, the US abandoned Afghanistan...leaving a power vacuum into which al Qaeda fell after being removed from Saudi Arabia and the Sudan.
Leaving Iraq right now would be repeating the same mistake.
Don't get sidetracked by the cost of mercenaries - that is one of three reasons they are used:
1. the bill charged to public tax coffers for mercenaries is always much higher then what the mercenaries actually cost the government. The "inner circle" pockets the difference.
2. mercenary death and causualty numbers do not count towards "official loss" tolls. This is priceless for the PR firms that sell the war (mean-stream media)to a servile public.
3. -most important- mercenaries, unlike official soldiers, are not accountable to the laws of the occupied country or the occupying country. This legal loophole allows for military impunity when dealing with a civilian population that is NOT supportive of the foriegn military presence.
This is how our forces can get away with beating and intimidating civilians and then blame it on the taliban.
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