The three fallacies that have driven the war in Afghanistan
- From: PakistanPal <pakistanpal@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:31:14 -0700 (PDT)
Johann Hari
Case for escalating the war is based on premises that turn to dust on
inspection
51 per cent of Americans polled by the Washington Post say the war in
Afghanistan is 'not worth fighting'
Is Barack Obama about to drive his Presidency into a bloody ditch
strewn with corpses? The President is expected any day now to announce
his decision about the future of the war in Afghanistan. He knows US
and British troops have now been stationed in the hell-mouth of
Helmand longer than the First and Second World Wars combined - yet the
mutterings from the marble halls of Washington DC suggest he may order
a troop escalation.
Obama has to decide now whether to side with the American people and
the Afghan people calling for a rapid reduction in US force, or with a
small military clique demanding a ramping-up of the conflict. The
populations of both countries are in close agreement. The latest
Washington Post poll shows that 51 per cent of Americans say the war
is "not worth fighting" and that ending the foreign occupation will
"reduce terrorism". Only 27 per cent disagree. At the other end of the
gun-barrel, 77 per cent of Afghans in the latest BBC poll say the on-
going US air strikes are "unacceptable", and the US troops should only
remain if they are going to provide reconstruction assistance rather
than bombs.
But there is another side: General Stanley McCrystal says that if he
is given another 40,000 troops - on top of the current increase which
has pushed military levels above anything in the Bush years - he will
"finally win" by "breaking the back" of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.
How should Obama - and us, the watching world - figure out who is
right? We have to start from a hard-headed acknowledgement. Every
option from here entails a risk - to Afghan civilians, and to
Americans and Europeans. It is not possible to achieve absolute
safety. We can only try to figure out what would bring the least risk,
and pursue it.
There is obviously a huge risk in sending an extra 40,000 machine-gun
wielding troops into a country they don't understand to "clear" huge
areas of insurgent fighters who look exactly like the civilian
population, and establish "control" of places that have never been
controlled by a central government at any point in their history.
Every military counter-insurgency strategy hits up against the
probability that it will, in time, create more enemies than it kills.
So you blow up a suspected Taliban site and kill two of their
commanders - but you also kill 98 women and children, whose families
are from that day determined to kill your men and drive them out of
their country. Those aren't hypothetical numbers. They come from Lt.
Col. David Kilcullen, who was General Petraeus' counter-insurgency
advisor in Iraq. He says that US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan
border have killed 14 al-Qa'ida leaders, at the expense of more than
700 civilian lives. He says: "That's a hit rate of 2 per cent on 98
per cent collateral. It's not moral." It explains the apparent paradox
that broke the US in Vietnam: the more "bad guys" you kill, the more
you have to kill.
There is an even bigger danger than this. General Petraeus's strategy
is to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan. When he succeeds, they run
to Pakistan - where the nuclear bombs are.
To justify these risks, the proponents of the escalation need highly
persuasive arguments to show how their strategy slashed other risks so
dramatically that it outweighed these dangers. It's not inconceivable
- but I found that in fact the case they give for escalating the war,
or for continuing the occupation, is based on three premises that turn
to Afghan dust on inspection.
Argument One: We need to deprive al-Qa'ida of military bases in
Afghanistan, or they will use them to plot attacks against us, and we
will face 9/11 redux. In fact, virtually all the jihadi attacks
against Western countries have been planned in those Western countries
themselves, and required extremely limited technological capabilities
or training. The 9/11 atrocities were planned in Hamburg and Florida
by 19 Saudis who only needed to know how to use box-cutters and to
crash a plane. The 7/7 suicide-murders were planned in Yorkshire by
young British men who learned how to make bombs off the internet. Only
last week, a jihadi was arrested for plotting to blow up a skyscraper
in that notorious jihadi base, Dallas, Texas. And on, and on.
In reality, there are almost no al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan.
That's not my view: it's that of General Jim Jones, the US National
Security Advisor. He said last week there were 100 al-Qa'ida fighters
in Afghanistan. That's worth repeating: there are 100 al-Qa'ida
fighters in Afghanistan. Nor is that a sign that the war is working.
The Taliban or warlords friendly to them already control 40 per cent
of Afghanistan now, today. They can build all the "training camps"
they want there - but they have only found a hundred fundamentalist
thugs to staff them.
Even if - and this is highly unlikely - you could plug every hole in
the Afghan state's authority and therefore make it possible to shut
down every camp, there are a dozen other failed states they can
scuttle off to the next day and pitch some more tents. Again, that's
not my view. Leon Panetta, head of the CIA, says: "As we disrupt [al-
Qa'ida], they will seek other safe havens. Somalia and Yemen are
potential al-Qa'ida bases in the future." The US can't occupy every
failed state in the world for decades - so why desperately try to plug
one hole in a bath full of leaks, when the water will only seep out
anyway?
There are plenty of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan - but they are a
different matter to al-Qa'ida. The latest leaked US intelligence
reports say, according to the Boston Globe, that 90 per cent of them
are "a tribal, localised insurgency" who "see themselves as opposing
the US because it is an occupying power". They have "no goals" beyond
Afghanistan's borders.
Argument Two: By staying, we are significantly improving Afghan human
rights, especially for women. This, for me, is the meatiest argument -
and the most depressing. The Taliban are indeed one of the vilest
forces in the world, imprisoning women in their homes and torturing
them for the "crimes" of showing their faces, expressing their
sexuality, or being raped. They keep trying to murder my friend
Malalai Joya for the "crime" of being elected to parliament on a
platform of treating women like human beings not cattle.
But as she told me last month: "Your governments have replaced the
fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime
of warlords." Outside Kabul, vicious Taliban who enforce sharia law
have merely been replaced by vicious warlords who enforce sharia law.
"The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for
women," she said. Any Afghan president - Karzai, or his opponents -
will only ever in practice be the mayor of Kabul. Beyond is a sea of
warlordism, as evil to women as Mullah Omar. That is not a difference
worth fighting and dying for.
Argument Three: If we withdraw, it will be a great victory for al-
Qa'ida. Re-energised, they will surge out across the world. In fact,
in November 2004, Osama bin Laden bragged to his followers: "All that
we have to do is to send two mujahedeen [jihadi fighters] to the
furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-
Qa'ida" in order to make generals race there, and we cause America to
suffer human, economic and political losses - without their achieving
anything of note!" These wars will, he said, boost al-Qa'ida
recruitment across the world, and in time "bankrupt America". They
walked right into his trap.
Yes, there is real risk in going - but it is dwarfed by the risk of
staying. A bloody escalation in the war is more likely to fuel
jihadism than thwart it. If Obama is serious about undermining this
vile fanatical movement, it would be much wiser to take the hundreds
of billions he is currently squandering on chasing after a hundred
fighters in the Afghan mountains and redeploy it. Spend it instead on
beefing up policing and intelligence, and on building a network of
schools across Pakistan and other flash-points in the Muslim world, so
parents there have an alternative to the fanatical madrassahs that
churn out bin Laden-fodder. The American people will be far safer if
the world sees them building schools for Muslim kids instead of
dropping bombs on them.
He can explain - with his tongue dipped in amazing eloquence - that
trying to defeat al-Qa'ida with hundreds of thousands of occupying
troops and Predator jets is like trying to treat cancer with a
blowtorch. Now, that really would deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.
j.hari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Article Source :
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-three-fallacies-that-have-driven-the-war-in-afghanistan-1806191.html
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