U.S. Special Forces Soldier assigned to Special Operations Task Force – South sets up his security position during a patrol Feb. 25, 2011 in Panjwai District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Photo: ISAF Media.
Those are the words that I found forming in my mind as I stared at the awful photographs from a massacre in Afghanistan, little dead children's hands poking out of colorful blankets in the flat bed of a truck.
Just leave.
And apparently 54% of Americans feel the same way -- they would like US troops to leave Afghanistan faster than by 2014, the scheduled deadline. (The massacre has been dubbed by Wikipedia as the Panjwai shooting spree which gives it a curiously -- and ghastly -- festive title, although it is the worst massacre in the history of the whole US war in Afghanistan.)
Yeah, we get it that pulling out troops prematurely could undermine the Karzai government abruptly and expose particularly those in the capital more greatly and lead to mass chaos in the provinces where the Taliban isn't defeated. But...isn't it chaos in a lot of places already?
The sense of things spinning out of control comes from at least three major incidents all revealing how demoralized and nihilistic (or simply negligent) the US troops are -- the soldiers urinating and joking over dead Afghans, the burning of the Korans, and now the killing by apparently one deranged and traumatized soldier of 16 villagers, 9 of them children -- a village Canada was making a supposedly model security place.
The enemy couldn't think up better three ways of assuring maximum publicity and making the US look utterly cruel and cynical and stupid and rageful -- and yet it was our own troops' fault, from everything we know.
That's why it doesn't feel quite right when Obama apologizes -- and says "this is not typical of the excellent troops". Sure, most of the troops are likely excellent but then...why do these things keep happening? Is it really the time to look to quickly praise our own in the same breath as an apology, with something like this? You get the feeling some military official prompted the president to put it that way -- to avoid further demoralization of the people fighting the war.
Nobody ever uses that word that I ever see -- demoralization -- but isn't that the way to describe what's happened? We have been there 10 years, longer than the Soviets. To be sure, they lost 15,000 people, and killed one million Afghan civilians (that part is so often forgotten in telling the Soviet story). We've lost about 2700 of our own and coalition troops, and not killed anything remotely like this number of civilians; in fact, the Taliban kills 75 percent or more of the civilians, and does so frequently with suicide bombs. (There isn't an official estimate of civilians killed in the last 10 years but there are tens of thousands.)
The Taliban is back in a lot of places, or never left; we gave up trying to burn and stop the opium fields and even fell to guarding them in order to give farmers at least some livelihood so they wouldn't side more with the Taliban; we've presided over various flawed elections and legislative reform procedures that haven't brought anything endurable. Every once in awhile there will be a story about the opening of a women's Internet cafe or something. How long will they last?
There was some talk of trying the soldiers who burnt the Koran in Afghanistan, and the soldier who committed the massacre -- but that won't happen now (the murderer has been removed). An army investigation says the Koran destruction was negligence and not mockery. We'll likely find out that post-traumatic stress syndrome or drugs or alcohol or insane revenge was to blame for the massacre -- already the experts are describing this as a "lone loon" -- like the shooter of Congresswoman Giffords. Remember when everybody thought that shooting wasn't the work of a deranged man, but because of right-wing bloggers and conservative talk-show hosts and Sarah Palin's targets and we all needed to work on our civility?
War is obviously a setting more condusive to such atrocities, and there seems to be a chain of them related to the base where this soldier was trained in Washington. Actually, some of the crimes by soldiers described there happen at other bases -- has anyone really aggregated all the cases from the military and analyzed them? Certainly one trend is clear: suicides are way up.
And again, that comes back to the question of demoralization. America isn't supposed to lose wars, being the indispensable superpower, but it has before (Vietnam) and should get out of Afghanistan as it is not a just war (which would end war itself) nor bringing anyone any kind of benefits (except for masses of contractors).
The fact is, we couldn't defeat a force that is inhuman, and inhuman particularly to women. We hear so much about "the Republicans' war on women" (an exaggerated fancy) that we forget what a real war on women looks like, as Shirin Abadi reminds us, invoking the situation in Iran and Egypt. But of course not just women; these were people who wouldn't let kids fly kites. I'll never forget the eve of 9/11, in August 2001, when UN workers were describing Afghan children as blue -- from cold and hunger -- and the Taliban as not permitting aid workers to use satellite phones to coordinate deliveries.
There was one OCHA worker who was giving a briefing back then on the awful state of affairs in Afghanistan, and he described attempting to meet and talk with the Taliban to, as he put it, "get their...." And then he paused, searching, in a kind of state of exhaustion (he had just come back from there) for some word. He settled on this: "get their...thinking on this."
"Get their thinking on this" -- a kind of business jargon for a boardroom, something you might ask the ad people to tell you about a campaign. He was trying to be, well, charitable. To try to conceive that there was some kind of "thinking" behind the idea that would find it expedient or necessary to shut off people communicating by sat phone about children suffering from cold and hunger. Who were blue.
Sure, I get it that "the Taliban" is a very baggy concept that includes farmers just minding their business and young teenagers pressed into service as messengers and spies and warlords who are respected for maintaining order -- and whatever.
But I do have to ask -- since Joshua Foust is everywhere on CNN and Al Jazeera as the expert of the hour -- what the hell a political framework would look like with these people, the Taliban? The people who kill 75 percent of the civilians, who grew opium and keep the region and the world addicted, who keep women in sacks -- and so on. Really? Politics? With the Taliban?
Of course, Foust thinks everyone's doing it all wrong (and as they do seem to be, it's easy for him to get a hearing now), and says this:
Put simply, the U.S. never put in place the strategic and political framework to make much headway in Afghanistan. Despite the renewed push for negotiations with the Taliban, there is no political strategy for the country. There is no end state for the war, either -- right now, the plan is to drawdown to about 20,000 troops or so -- similar to troop levels in 2008 -- and stay that way for the indefinite future. That's not a strategy, and it's not a plan.
Because there is no political strategy for the war -- nothing that takes Afghan and Taliban politics into consideration -- the U.S. has no concept of how to manage or react to the political consequences of incidents like Sunday's rampage. That's why the military was clueless in responding to last month's Quran burnings, or to January's Marine urination scandal, or to the "kill team" in Kandahar last year.
Well, that all sounds clever, and it sounds very white-papery and think-tanky to talk about "political frameworks" -- but again -- what sort of "Taliban politics" would you really want to be taking into consideration?
I mean, I suppose you could switch gears and begin paying homage to Taliban warlords and flatter and give them gifts and treat them as worthy equals -- or no, as betters -- like Western officials shamelessly do with, say, President Berdymukhamedov, the autocrat of Turkmenistan, when they queue up for audiences in the palace to see if they can get a drilling permit or even permission for an educational program, or send their doctors or architects or lawyers to play-pretend civil society with him. And...how's that working out? I don't think a single one of these Central Asian potentates have ever been won over by Westerners dropping their scruples and principles -- and minds -- at the doors of the marbled offices.
Taliban politics? Gosh, what's that like, insect politics? I really will have to read Foust's book and try to figure out what that could possibly mean, and if it was so workable, why the other smarties in the DOD or JCOS couldn't have arrived at this "framework" without the tender ministrations of Registan.
The fact is, the US is now in talks of some sort with the Taliban, and I haven't read that they are so terrific. Obviously, urinating on dead Afghans, burning Korans, and now killing children aren't exactly conducive to building political frameworks, such as they may be. Coldly, Foust, along with other IR specialists, tell us this shooting spree "won't be a game-changer" or won't affect the schedule of the pull-out. We're told it's mainly a right-wing (therefore isolationist or non-engaged) notion to urge that the US pull out of the war (like the extremity of Ron Paul, who wants no US troops anywhere).
Curiously, just when you would want the New York Times to investigate more about the criminality around US army bases and how it is exported abroad, or to find out what some of the Karzai administration or secular Afghans think about all this, for some reason they are interviewing the mullahs, and telling us we are all out of touch (just like we are with Kony -- dubbed "My Little Kony" now by the cynical Jon Stewart) for not realizing that Afghans actually think that the burning of the Koran is a worse crime than the killing of the little children and their parents in a village.
This is said to be due to the fact that religion is a higher cause and the dead people are viewed as martyrs and their deaths able to be expiated through the payment of "blood money," which has already been paid by the Afghan government. Indeed, everybody is congratulating everyone else that they're getting through this grisly incident without more demonstrations.
My God, I can't believe the people in that village are feeling so cheerful about this -- they had real tears in their eyes.
Foust chastises the US for not having an "end state" for the war in sight, as if wars are so controllable, and for not having "a plan" for the training of the Afghan military. Well, that strikes me as fairly silly, as of course the US military has specific training goals and objectives which are impossible to meet (i.e. we all know they can't stop the Taliban). The Karzai government's soldiers themselves can't be trusted and turn on NATO, as they did recently when they got people inside the compound close enough to kill our people despite all their precautions. Even if they love the extra pay and learning opportunities, they don't have the drive that the Taliban has to prevail, and that's simply why they don't prevail.
A framework that in any way ceases the rejection of the totalitarianism of the Taliban strikes me as something the US won't accept and shouldn't accept. A pragmatic damage-control transactional exercise where the US says, look, we'll leave, don't get in our way, and don't kill a lot of people in the capital or we'll be back, maybe that's workable, but not likely. No leader of Afghanistan has ever lasted once the invaders leave, history is filled with those examples.
Here Foust contradicts himself within a space of a few days -- for Slate, which is more thinky and edgy, he explains why pulling out too soon is "a bad idea"; for the more mass audience of CNN, he says despite the consequences for Afghans, the US should just pull out.
Why does this man get so much airtime? It's the stream of factology and the faux-sincere and matter-of-fact tone -- and while he has taken off his glasses to stop their twinkle, somebody forgot to tell him to shut off his wired disco tie.
Over and over again we hear from Foust, Registan authors and other "progressive" and establishment specialists that the US is doing it all wrong, that there's some special cultural way they could have done this, that there's some intricate political process they could have established. Huh? This is the Taliban; what exactly is your....thinking on this?
For Salon, Foust fills in the dots a little more, but it's still a hodge-podge of jargon that boils down to one thing: accept the Taliban world view and don't try to fight it on behalf of those Afghans who don't. As for why the war is in a downward spiral, says Foust:
That’s because there remains no political process at work in Afghanistan than can address the fundamental conflict driving the war: a political contest between the current, corrupt government and the insurgency that rejects that government. The current line about so-called reconciliation – the negotiations process, which demands the Taliban accept the very Afghan constitution they’re fighting to upend – doesn’t account for any of Afghanistan’s politics. It is merely a call to surrender.
So, um, do the opposite then, and have the secular Afghans surrender? Or what's the plan?
Oh! I know somebody who has constantly called for not attempting a military solution in Afghanistan, and having a political solution -- Islam Karimov! Then there are think-tank solutions like "The Doctrine of ExpeditionEconomics" (if you have to look it up on Wikipedia it's probably not going to work in an Afghan village, but Foust of course has a white paper on it -- and it sounds like a Global Amway plan to save the world through entrepreneurship (in places where businesses are a corrupt arm of the state -- great!). Or blaming the government for "poor design" -- when they're under fire from suicide bombers and night attacks from the Taliban -- well, where do you begin with someone who has not fought in a war and thinks there's something acceptable about "Taliban politics"?
But honestly, Faust needs to be pressed hard on what exact principles he is advocating abandoning, how much capitulation he is describing, what demands should be dropped -- in short, just how much a sell-out is being advised here for the sake of "peace"? It strikes me that if we are demoralized and are losing this war anyway, it hardly makes sense to give up our own values and truths -- in fact at least some Afghans will depend on us to uphold them.
