Afghan flees death by foot, air and flimsy boat
By TANALEE SMITH (AP) – 41 minutes ago
ADELAIDE, Australia — Two years ago, Ali Khosh Razaee bought his freedom. The price he paid was his brother.
The brothers had fled Afghanistan for their lives, and a welder in neighboring Pakistan offered them a loan of $7,000 to be smuggled far from the region. The catch: To guarantee repayment — plus $2,000 interest — one of them had to stay behind to work with the man.
Muhammad volunteered.
"I didn't want to leave him but ..." Razaee trails off, his gaze far away. "We decided to save one of us. The threat was higher against me than my brother."
As violence in Afghanistan is rising, so is the exodus of refugees streaming out of the country. Razaee was among 18,500 Afghans who sought asylum in another country in 2008, fleeing war and persecution based on religion or politics, according to the United Nations. That's up 85 percent from the year before.
The danger is even greater for Hazaras like the Razaees, who belong to a Shiite Muslim minority that makes up 9 percent of Afghans. The Taliban, who are Sunni Muslim, have sought out and massacred thousands of Hazaras in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. So the Hazaras attempt to make their way to a third country, sometimes putting their trust in smugglers who promise to take them "somewhere safe."
"We have no choice," Razaee says. "Everything in our lives has been dangerous. At least we trust the smugglers more than we could trust the Taliban."
As the 27-year-old speaks, he looks down and picks at the carpet with his rough farmer's hands. He often wipes his fingertips across his forehead, as if trying to dismiss a painful memory. He fidgets slightly in his Western clothes, pulling on the zipper of an Adidas faux-leather jacket.
His left eye, injured in a Taliban beating, is bloodshot and unfocused.
___
Razaee used to farm wheat, barley and corn in the small central Afghan village of Abdi to feed his wife and six children.
But Razaee's father and uncle had both fought in a mountain insurgency against the Taliban. Razaee sent his family to live with his in-laws in another village. He knew trouble was coming.
In late 2007, it came. Ten thugs stormed his home, tied him up and forced him to march with his father and uncle to a town an hour away. There, the men beat them for hours with a thick, knotted rope and then left.
Razaee's father, bound hand and foot, managed to boost his son out the window. Razaee skirted the roads and ran back to his village to find his brother. They hid in the mountains.
A week later, his father's body was found.
Razaee brought his brother, mother, wife and children to a more distant town, where they lived in hiding. But they soon decided Afghanistan was not safe.
In September 2008, the brothers left their homeland, using $1,000 borrowed from Razaee's father-in-law. The only thing Razaee carried with him was a photo of his three youngest children.
The trek from central Afghanistan to the Pakistan border took five days and five nights. After bribing their way into Pakistan, the brothers crammed into a truck with 20 other people for a 12-hour ride to Quetta, on bumpy backroads to avoid checkpoints.
Razaee found a smuggler, who gave him a fake passport. The smugglers are easy to find - they are the friends of the money lender or the relatives of the pawn shop owner.
Razaee was put on a plane in Quetta and told he would be met when the flight landed.
He had never flown on a plane before. He had no idea where he was going.
___
On the plane, Razaee could not eat. He barely slept, fearful that he would miss his smuggling connection or that his false documents would be discovered.
"They told us to keep our heads down, don't be noticed," Razaee says. "If there were other refugees like me on the flight, I didn't know about it. I didn't understand any of it and didn't speak to anyone the entire time."
After at least 10 hours of flying and a stopover, he ended up in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. An Indonesian man who spoke his language, Dari, guided him through immigration into a waiting car. The dense buildings and heavy traffic gave way to green foliage. He wondered if this was it, the end of his journey.
Instead, Razaee spent the next three or four weeks living in a reed hut in the jungle with eight other Afghan men. He remembers humidity, mosquitoes — lots of mosquitoes — and a diet of instant noodles that still makes his nose crinkle in distaste. The other men told him they had been waiting for weeks.
"It was a desperate situation," he says. "I didn't know what would happen next. I didn't know if my family were safe. I didn't know where I was or if I would ever leave this hut."
The men were guarded day and night and not allowed outside. At night they could see lights in the distance through the trees. All they could do was sit on the floor of the hut and wait.
His dead father, his wife and children, his enslaved brother — it was too much to think about. So Razaee spent much of his time sleeping.
"When you're happy, you talk. None of us were happy, so ...," Razaee recalls. "We felt so hopeless. We were hopeless in Afghanistan, but we were with our families. Now we didn't even know where we were or where they were."
Finally, three months after he had left Afghanistan, Razaee boarded a small fishing boat. He was terrified. Three Indonesian crew members, 21 Afghans, nine Arabs and four Sri Lankans crowded on board, squeezed so tight they could only sit or stand. Razaee could not swim.
"We thought we wouldn't be alive much longer," he says. "This was the end of our lives."
There was barely enough food, but most were too sick to eat anyway. The boat rocked on stormy seas, and water swirled around them because of crashing waves and a leak in the hull. The healthier men took turns to bail with a bucket.
It was cold and rainy. There was no land in sight. Razaee was vomiting and feverish.
It was 10 days before an Australian Navy ship intercepted the boat, 110 miles off the northern Australian city of Darwin, on Dec. 16, 2008.
Razaee lay dazed, cold and starving on the floor of the boat.
He had never heard of Australia before he landed on Christmas Island. He was shocked when shown on a map how far he had come.
___
Afghan refugees have ended up all over the world.
More than 2 million live in neighboring Pakistan, which sees them as a burden and a security threat. About a million live in Iran, which earlier this year was accused of deporting Afghan refugees. Others have fled as far as they can go, to the United States, Canada, Europe, Brazil, Indonesia, even New Zealand.
Australia accepts 13,500 refugees every year from all over the world. But Australia does not have the resources to help them all, and those who pay smugglers and enter illegally are in less need than many others, argues Sharman Stone, a spokeswoman for Australia's opposition Liberal party.
"It's a shocking human dilemma for us and for every country that is currently receiving unlawful or unauthorized arrivals," Stone says. "It's an international dilemma."
More than 95 percent of Australia's refugees come by plane. But in the last year alone, 15 boats from Indonesia carrying 850 people were intercepted in Australian waters.
About 1,500 people are registered as refugees in Indonesia, according to the U.N. Another 1,500 are believed to be living there unregistered, in camps or crowded cities, waiting for smugglers to load them onto boats headed for Australia.
"The idea that there is some orderly queue of refugees waiting for a safe haven ... there is no such thing," says Ian Rintoul, spokesman for Australia's Refugee Action Coalition. "There are people in Indonesia who have been waiting up to nine years for refugee status. It's notoriously slow, if even possible. It's no wonder that some take the option of trying to get here by boat."
Australia has beefed up its spending on border protection, adding AU$65 million ($52 million) for more ships, aircraft and people to patrol the waters. Refugees are taken to a 1,000-bed detention center on Christmas Island, a remote Indian Ocean territory closer to Indonesia than Australia.
Former Prime Minister John Howard tried to crack down on refugees by forcing them to reapply every five years to stay in Australia and barring their families from joining them. But last year, new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd relaxed a mandatory detention policy for asylum seekers and allowed full residency visas for refugees.
Some say Rudd's policies have brought the boats back. But the government tracks the increase in refugees to increasing violence in places like Iraq, Iran, Sri Lanka and, of course, Afghanistan. In 2008, 54 Afghans applied for asylum in Australia or New Zealand.
Rafaee was one of the lucky ones.
Doctors treated him at Christmas Island. He was allowed a phone call to Pakistan, where he found his wife, mother and children had resettled. Australia approved his asylum application.
In late March he was flown to Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, where a local Afghan family took him in. He lives in a warm, comfortable house, with enough food to eat, free English classes and a government stipend. He is looking for work in a warehouse or as a driver.
But he cannot stop worrying about his wife and children, 6,000 miles away. Every week, he visits the migration lawyers to complete the application for his family to come to Australia.
"I don't sleep at night," he admits, staring down at the photo of his children on the floor in front of him.
He does not know if he will ever be able to pay the debt to free his 20-year-old brother.
"I think there is a 95 percent risk of losing my brother in Pakistan," he says.
The $9,000 debt was due June 30. He could not pay.
Since then, another $2,000 has been added to the balance.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Two.
All wars have anthems for doomed youth. Afghanistan is no exception. At a memorial service yesterday, senior officers paid tribute to the eight British soldiers who died in the worst day of attrition since the Falklands.
Of the three youngest, William Aldridge had a gift for friendship, Joseph Murphy was a fine artist and James Backhouse, who wanted to be a fitness instructor, could run faster than the wind. Like his two comrades, he was 18 years old. Like them, he was, according to his superiors' eulogies, prepared to kill and to be killed.
Helmand province is not the Somme, but Wilfred Owen's lament for squandered life has seemed, back in the UK, to echo down the years. "What candles may be held to speed them all?/Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes/Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes."
Owen blamed the state for sacrificing the young. Now, once again, government is deemed culpable as every parent sees, in the faces of the juvenile dead, an image of his or her own child. "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?" Owen asked.
Almost a century later, there is no shortage of funeral hymns. Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, says Gordon Brown has "catastrophically" under-equipped the Armed Forces. For the Lib Dems, Nick Clegg challenges the PM to show the sacrifices of lives "have not been in vain". The Army demands extra troops and more equipment.
With the Taliban getting smarter and 15 British troops dead so far this month, Afghanistan is a dimestore war. In four decades, the defence budget has fallen from 6.5 per cent of GDP to 3 per cent, while Tony Blair's imperial ambitions committed troops to four major conflicts, of which Iraq was inexcusable and Afghanistan, on the current showing, unwinnable.
Mr Brown's critics imply that he is trying to fight a Prada war at Lidl prices. Although he disputes this, defence spending is undeniably out of kilter with reality. The PM's likely concession on Trident – cutting back on warheads and perhaps reducing the new fleet – is a feeble compromise that will not free up significant sums for the frontline. Nor is it likely that taxes will rise to boost defence.
But even if a war chest were to be found, there is little clarity about what we're fighting for: the end of brutal and repressive Taliban mandates or, as Mr Brown says, to stop terror being exported to the UK. With al-Qaeda moving sinously across the globe, the second goal looks hopeless.
The real question is whether the Afghan war can ever be won by military means alone, and the answer, as David Miliband has always recognised, is No. In stirring up trouble for the Government, the generals and the Tories risk peddling a delusion. Yes, extra helicopters may save some lives (though by no means all), but the truth about Afghanistan risks being obscured by political opportunism. Even vast injections of money, hardware and manpower would not, by themselves, subdue the Taliban or procure victory.
A political solution is the only guarantee of success, yet that objective is barely spoken of. In the US and the UK, next month's presidential election attracts almost no mention. Since the temporary increase in British troops is specifically to provide cover for the ballot, this silence is suspicious, if not downright sinister.
The appalling regime of Hamid Karzai is western leaders' grubby little secret. Mr Karzai, who boasts of being Washington's (and thus Britain's) man, presides over the fifth most corrupt government in the world. As well as turning a blind eye to last year's alleged loss, through abuse, of two thirds of his country's annual revenue amounting to $1.6 billion, Mr Karzai has failed the vulnerable and the trusting.
Naturally, Western leaders cannot impose an alternative placeman to sort out his narco-state. But, in a field of around 40 challengers, two credible candidates stand out. One, Abdullah Abdullah, is the former foreign secretary; the other, Ashraf Ghani, is the one-time finance minister and former chancellor of Kabul University.
Although Dr Ghani, once tipped to become UN Secretary General, has the only coherent agenda and a well-orchestrated e-campaign, the odds are greatly against him, and other contenders, because the election commission is stacked with Mr Karzai's henchmen.
Disgracefully, neither Washington nor London has publicly demanded a level playing field or complained that the election for which British soldiers are dying is effectively rigged. Meanwhile, Dr Ghani, who has no official protection, is making a swift transition from Washington technocrat to politician. His billboards in Mr Karzai's home town of Kandahar have been vandalized with acid and removed; supporters in Britain say he is putting his life at risk.
Until a few days ago, it looked impossible that Dr Ghani would ever institute his 10-year framework enshrining the rule of law, good governance and co-operation with local groups and the international community. But suddenly, Washington is growing nervous. As chilly signals about Mr Karzai reach Kabul, the president is hiding in his palace, declining to appear on the campaign trail or debate on television with his rivals.
Educated voters, informed by independent TV and radio, are disgusted by his pardon of drug-dealers and his ties to militia leaders. The UN and the Afghan human rights commission have logged many complaints about state interference in the election amid a dawning hope that Mr Karzai may not win outright in the first ballot. If he fails on August 20, then his network of powerful allies may collapse, leaving either of his main rivals a chance of victory.
Should Mr Karzai cling to power, which is still much the likeliest outcome, then it is just conceivable that the US "surge" will be enough to broker a deal with the Taliban. More probably, corruption will continue and insurgents will gloat at the prospect of a long war whose history will be written in British blood.
Our government must urgently address national security and the misfit between yesterday's under-funded defence strategy and today's myriad dangers. As Professor Paul Rogers, of Bradford University, says, the colonial era ended in 1947 with the partition of India. Mr Blair failed to notice the shift, and Mr Brown is left to pick up the pieces.
The omens could hardly be grimmer. Not only are the military objectives hazy, but a campaign costing $20 billion a month has no political direction. Voters here, as in Afghanistan, deserve the truth. We are pouring blood and money into a black hole, and the flow will not be staunched unless a political solution is found.
Until then, 18 year-olds with the fresh faces of your sons, or mine, will fight and fall. They do not require passing-bells, or candles; only good equipment and the guarantee that they are the brave architects of a better future. No civilised nation should ask its soldiers, young or old, to die for less.
All wars have anthems for doomed youth. Afghanistan is no exception. At a memorial service yesterday, senior officers paid tribute to the eight British soldiers who died in the worst day of attrition since the Falklands.
Of the three youngest, William Aldridge had a gift for friendship, Joseph Murphy was a fine artist and James Backhouse, who wanted to be a fitness instructor, could run faster than the wind. Like his two comrades, he was 18 years old. Like them, he was, according to his superiors' eulogies, prepared to kill and to be killed.
Helmand province is not the Somme, but Wilfred Owen's lament for squandered life has seemed, back in the UK, to echo down the years. "What candles may be held to speed them all?/Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes/Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes."
Owen blamed the state for sacrificing the young. Now, once again, government is deemed culpable as every parent sees, in the faces of the juvenile dead, an image of his or her own child. "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?" Owen asked.
Almost a century later, there is no shortage of funeral hymns. Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, says Gordon Brown has "catastrophically" under-equipped the Armed Forces. For the Lib Dems, Nick Clegg challenges the PM to show the sacrifices of lives "have not been in vain". The Army demands extra troops and more equipment.
With the Taliban getting smarter and 15 British troops dead so far this month, Afghanistan is a dimestore war. In four decades, the defence budget has fallen from 6.5 per cent of GDP to 3 per cent, while Tony Blair's imperial ambitions committed troops to four major conflicts, of which Iraq was inexcusable and Afghanistan, on the current showing, unwinnable.
Mr Brown's critics imply that he is trying to fight a Prada war at Lidl prices. Although he disputes this, defence spending is undeniably out of kilter with reality. The PM's likely concession on Trident – cutting back on warheads and perhaps reducing the new fleet – is a feeble compromise that will not free up significant sums for the frontline. Nor is it likely that taxes will rise to boost defence.
But even if a war chest were to be found, there is little clarity about what we're fighting for: the end of brutal and repressive Taliban mandates or, as Mr Brown says, to stop terror being exported to the UK. With al-Qaeda moving sinously across the globe, the second goal looks hopeless.
The real question is whether the Afghan war can ever be won by military means alone, and the answer, as David Miliband has always recognised, is No. In stirring up trouble for the Government, the generals and the Tories risk peddling a delusion. Yes, extra helicopters may save some lives (though by no means all), but the truth about Afghanistan risks being obscured by political opportunism. Even vast injections of money, hardware and manpower would not, by themselves, subdue the Taliban or procure victory.
A political solution is the only guarantee of success, yet that objective is barely spoken of. In the US and the UK, next month's presidential election attracts almost no mention. Since the temporary increase in British troops is specifically to provide cover for the ballot, this silence is suspicious, if not downright sinister.
The appalling regime of Hamid Karzai is western leaders' grubby little secret. Mr Karzai, who boasts of being Washington's (and thus Britain's) man, presides over the fifth most corrupt government in the world. As well as turning a blind eye to last year's alleged loss, through abuse, of two thirds of his country's annual revenue amounting to $1.6 billion, Mr Karzai has failed the vulnerable and the trusting.
Naturally, Western leaders cannot impose an alternative placeman to sort out his narco-state. But, in a field of around 40 challengers, two credible candidates stand out. One, Abdullah Abdullah, is the former foreign secretary; the other, Ashraf Ghani, is the one-time finance minister and former chancellor of Kabul University.
Although Dr Ghani, once tipped to become UN Secretary General, has the only coherent agenda and a well-orchestrated e-campaign, the odds are greatly against him, and other contenders, because the election commission is stacked with Mr Karzai's henchmen.
Disgracefully, neither Washington nor London has publicly demanded a level playing field or complained that the election for which British soldiers are dying is effectively rigged. Meanwhile, Dr Ghani, who has no official protection, is making a swift transition from Washington technocrat to politician. His billboards in Mr Karzai's home town of Kandahar have been vandalized with acid and removed; supporters in Britain say he is putting his life at risk.
Until a few days ago, it looked impossible that Dr Ghani would ever institute his 10-year framework enshrining the rule of law, good governance and co-operation with local groups and the international community. But suddenly, Washington is growing nervous. As chilly signals about Mr Karzai reach Kabul, the president is hiding in his palace, declining to appear on the campaign trail or debate on television with his rivals.
Educated voters, informed by independent TV and radio, are disgusted by his pardon of drug-dealers and his ties to militia leaders. The UN and the Afghan human rights commission have logged many complaints about state interference in the election amid a dawning hope that Mr Karzai may not win outright in the first ballot. If he fails on August 20, then his network of powerful allies may collapse, leaving either of his main rivals a chance of victory.
Should Mr Karzai cling to power, which is still much the likeliest outcome, then it is just conceivable that the US "surge" will be enough to broker a deal with the Taliban. More probably, corruption will continue and insurgents will gloat at the prospect of a long war whose history will be written in British blood.
Our government must urgently address national security and the misfit between yesterday's under-funded defence strategy and today's myriad dangers. As Professor Paul Rogers, of Bradford University, says, the colonial era ended in 1947 with the partition of India. Mr Blair failed to notice the shift, and Mr Brown is left to pick up the pieces.
The omens could hardly be grimmer. Not only are the military objectives hazy, but a campaign costing $20 billion a month has no political direction. Voters here, as in Afghanistan, deserve the truth. We are pouring blood and money into a black hole, and the flow will not be staunched unless a political solution is found.
Until then, 18 year-olds with the fresh faces of your sons, or mine, will fight and fall. They do not require passing-bells, or candles; only good equipment and the guarantee that they are the brave architects of a better future. No civilised nation should ask its soldiers, young or old, to die for less.
Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire
By Chalmers Johnson*
And Ten Steps to Take to Do So
However ambitious President Barack Obama's domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.
According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there -- 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.
These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible.
We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past -- including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)
Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us.
1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism
Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that "[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet." A few weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington DC, the president again insisted, "Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world." And in a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that "[w]e will maintain America's military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen."
What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.
According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes:
"America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today's world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony."
There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:
"Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to sustain them… He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases."
In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.
Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves.
Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, "Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are very safe." According to press reports, the students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.
In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush's imperial adventures -- if they ever can or will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.
Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger, not smaller, than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.
2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us
One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan's modern history -- to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was then called the North-West Frontier Territories -- the area along either side of the artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain's foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.
Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective control over the area. As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 425): "Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla warfare after resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when no comers were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax Britannica into their mountain homeland." An estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess no loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or Afghanistan.
The region known today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan is administered directly by Islamabad, which -- just as British imperial officials did -- has divided the territory into seven agencies, each with its own "political agent" who wields much the same powers as his colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, the part of FATA known as Waziristan and the home of Pashtun tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.
According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, experienced Afghan hands and coauthors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story (City Lights, 2009, p. 317):
"If Washington's bureaucrats don't remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. The British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world's sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United States."
In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan. The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, gloated: "We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers" (Fitzgerald and Gould, p. 65). His view prevailed.
The U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our killing of noncombatants is a result of "collateral damage," or human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal accuracy from computers at military bases in the Arizona and Nevada deserts among other places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are alienating precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy.
When in May 2009, General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the commander in Afghanistan, he ordered new limits on air attacks, including those carried out by the CIA, except when needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the incompetence of our chain of command, only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried out a drone attack against a funeral procession that killed at least 80 people, the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil so far. There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the mainstream American press or on the network television news. (At the time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the sexual adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop star Michael Jackson.)
Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been plagued by inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both countries, ideological preconceptions about which parties we should support and which ones we should oppose, and myopic understandings of what we could possibly hope to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for example, charge that, contrary to our own intelligence service's focus on Afghanistan, "Pakistan has always been the problem." They add:
"Pakistan's army and its Inter-Services Intelligence branch... from 1973 on, has played the key role in funding and directing first the mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the 1980s]… and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan's army that controls its nuclear weapons, constrains the development of democratic institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO soldiers protecting the Afghan government." (p. 322-324)
The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by devout Muslims who fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of their own agenda, though not necessarily to advance an Islamic jihad. Their purposes have always included: keeping Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian influence, providing a training and recruiting ground for mujahideen guerrillas to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan and India), containing Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of Pakistan), and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates, and the United States to pay and train "freedom fighters" throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan's consistent policy has been to support the clandestine policies of the Inter-Services Intelligence and thwart the influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.
Colonel Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes our hopeless project in South Asia this way: "Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India."
Obama's mid-2009 "surge" of troops into southern Afghanistan and particularly into Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly reminiscent of General William Westmoreland's continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and his promises that if we would ratchet up the violence just a little more and tolerate a few more casualties, we would certainly break the will of the Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the nature of the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.
Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union's, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.
3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases
In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He continued:
"New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults -- 2,923 -- and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them."
The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.
That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we covet.
The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and predatory troops. "The military's record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it's atrocious," writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called "Status of Forces Agreements" (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local authorities.
This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.
In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret "understanding" as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of "national importance to Japan." The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.
Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged.
Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the "culture of unpunished sexual assaults" and the "shockingly low numbers of courts martial" for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are negligible.
It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. As a result a group of female veterans in 2006 created the Service Women's Action Network (SWAN). Its agenda is to spread the word that "no woman should join the military."
I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army, and bring the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.
10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire
Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:
1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.
2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the "opportunity costs" that go with them -- the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can't or won't.
3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the 1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See, for instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors [Pantheon, 1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.
4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters -- along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth -- that follow our military enclaves around the world.
5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.
6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world's largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army's infamous military academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 136-40.)
7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.
8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater:The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]). Ending empire would make this possible.
9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.
10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.
Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities. The two most important recent examples are the British and Soviet empires. If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.
* Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999).
[Note on further reading on the matter of sexual violence in and around our overseas bases and rapes in the military: On the response to the 1995 Okinawa rape, see Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, chapter 2. On related subjects, see David McNeil, "Justice for Some. Crime, Victims, and the US-Japan SOFA," Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 8-1-09, March 15, 2009; "Bilateral Secret Agreement Is Preventing U.S. Servicemen Committing Crimes in Japan from Being Prosecuted," Japan Press Weekly, May 23, 2009; Dieter Fleck, ed., The Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces, Oxford University Press, 2001; Minoru Matsutani, "'53 Secret Japan-US Deal Waived GI Prosecutions," Japan Times, October 24, 2008; "Crime Without Punishment in Japan," the Economist, December 10, 2008; "Japan: Declassified Document Reveals Agreement to Relinquish Jurisdiction Over U.S. Forces," Akahata, October 30, 2008; "Government's Decision First Case in Japan," Ryukyu Shimpo, May 20, 2008; Dahr Jamail, "Culture of Unpunished Sexual Assault in Military," Antiwar.com, May 1, 2009; and Helen Benedict, "The Plight of Women Soldiers," the Nation, May 5, 2009.]
Copyright 2009 Chalmers Johnson
Source: http://www.tomdispatch.com
By Chalmers Johnson*
And Ten Steps to Take to Do So
However ambitious President Barack Obama's domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.
According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there -- 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.
These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible.
We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past -- including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)
Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us.
1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism
Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that "[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet." A few weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington DC, the president again insisted, "Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world." And in a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that "[w]e will maintain America's military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen."
What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.
According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes:
"America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today's world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony."
There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:
"Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to sustain them… He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases."
In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.
Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves.
Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, "Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are very safe." According to press reports, the students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.
In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush's imperial adventures -- if they ever can or will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.
Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger, not smaller, than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.
2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us
One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan's modern history -- to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was then called the North-West Frontier Territories -- the area along either side of the artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain's foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.
Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective control over the area. As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 425): "Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla warfare after resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when no comers were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax Britannica into their mountain homeland." An estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess no loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or Afghanistan.
The region known today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan is administered directly by Islamabad, which -- just as British imperial officials did -- has divided the territory into seven agencies, each with its own "political agent" who wields much the same powers as his colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, the part of FATA known as Waziristan and the home of Pashtun tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.
According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, experienced Afghan hands and coauthors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story (City Lights, 2009, p. 317):
"If Washington's bureaucrats don't remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. The British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world's sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United States."
In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan. The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, gloated: "We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers" (Fitzgerald and Gould, p. 65). His view prevailed.
The U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our killing of noncombatants is a result of "collateral damage," or human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal accuracy from computers at military bases in the Arizona and Nevada deserts among other places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are alienating precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy.
When in May 2009, General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the commander in Afghanistan, he ordered new limits on air attacks, including those carried out by the CIA, except when needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the incompetence of our chain of command, only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried out a drone attack against a funeral procession that killed at least 80 people, the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil so far. There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the mainstream American press or on the network television news. (At the time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the sexual adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop star Michael Jackson.)
Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been plagued by inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both countries, ideological preconceptions about which parties we should support and which ones we should oppose, and myopic understandings of what we could possibly hope to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for example, charge that, contrary to our own intelligence service's focus on Afghanistan, "Pakistan has always been the problem." They add:
"Pakistan's army and its Inter-Services Intelligence branch... from 1973 on, has played the key role in funding and directing first the mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the 1980s]… and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan's army that controls its nuclear weapons, constrains the development of democratic institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO soldiers protecting the Afghan government." (p. 322-324)
The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by devout Muslims who fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of their own agenda, though not necessarily to advance an Islamic jihad. Their purposes have always included: keeping Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian influence, providing a training and recruiting ground for mujahideen guerrillas to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan and India), containing Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of Pakistan), and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates, and the United States to pay and train "freedom fighters" throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan's consistent policy has been to support the clandestine policies of the Inter-Services Intelligence and thwart the influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.
Colonel Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes our hopeless project in South Asia this way: "Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India."
Obama's mid-2009 "surge" of troops into southern Afghanistan and particularly into Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly reminiscent of General William Westmoreland's continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and his promises that if we would ratchet up the violence just a little more and tolerate a few more casualties, we would certainly break the will of the Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the nature of the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.
Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union's, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.
3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases
In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He continued:
"New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults -- 2,923 -- and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them."
The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.
That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we covet.
The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and predatory troops. "The military's record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it's atrocious," writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called "Status of Forces Agreements" (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local authorities.
This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.
In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret "understanding" as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of "national importance to Japan." The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.
Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged.
Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the "culture of unpunished sexual assaults" and the "shockingly low numbers of courts martial" for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are negligible.
It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. As a result a group of female veterans in 2006 created the Service Women's Action Network (SWAN). Its agenda is to spread the word that "no woman should join the military."
I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army, and bring the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.
10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire
Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:
1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.
2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the "opportunity costs" that go with them -- the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can't or won't.
3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the 1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See, for instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors [Pantheon, 1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.
4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters -- along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth -- that follow our military enclaves around the world.
5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.
6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world's largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army's infamous military academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 136-40.)
7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.
8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater:The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]). Ending empire would make this possible.
9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.
10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.
Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities. The two most important recent examples are the British and Soviet empires. If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.
* Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999).
[Note on further reading on the matter of sexual violence in and around our overseas bases and rapes in the military: On the response to the 1995 Okinawa rape, see Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, chapter 2. On related subjects, see David McNeil, "Justice for Some. Crime, Victims, and the US-Japan SOFA," Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 8-1-09, March 15, 2009; "Bilateral Secret Agreement Is Preventing U.S. Servicemen Committing Crimes in Japan from Being Prosecuted," Japan Press Weekly, May 23, 2009; Dieter Fleck, ed., The Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces, Oxford University Press, 2001; Minoru Matsutani, "'53 Secret Japan-US Deal Waived GI Prosecutions," Japan Times, October 24, 2008; "Crime Without Punishment in Japan," the Economist, December 10, 2008; "Japan: Declassified Document Reveals Agreement to Relinquish Jurisdiction Over U.S. Forces," Akahata, October 30, 2008; "Government's Decision First Case in Japan," Ryukyu Shimpo, May 20, 2008; Dahr Jamail, "Culture of Unpunished Sexual Assault in Military," Antiwar.com, May 1, 2009; and Helen Benedict, "The Plight of Women Soldiers," the Nation, May 5, 2009.]
Copyright 2009 Chalmers Johnson
Source: http://www.tomdispatch.com
After eight years of bloodshed, support for the war is haemorrhaging even in “patriotic” circles. Voices calling for an end to the British involvement in Afghanistan are growing and becoming louder.
Wootton Bassett, a small English town in Wiltshire with a long tradition of saluting fallen soldiers, has become the public face of national mourning for British troops killed in Afghanistan. Last week, hundreds of journalists and scores of TV crews from around the world descended on this quiet market town to record the return of the 80th bodybag as the British toll rose dramatically after one of the “bloodiest” phases of the eight-year war. Wootton Bassett apart, the human cost of the war in Afghanistan is being felt in cities and towns across Britain with military funerals becoming an almost daily ritual. Not surprisingly, the national mood has started to turn ugly with Prime Minister Gordon Brown under mounting pressure to defend the British “mission” amid fears that it is in danger of being bogged down in a Vietnam-like disaster.
In order to get a full measure of how much the mood has changed, it is important to remember that — unlike Iraq —the invasion of Afghanistan had widespread support initially. While Iraq sparked a wave of protests culminating in the famous million-strong London march of February 2003, there was hardly any peep over Afghanistan. It was generally regarded as a “good war,” portrayed as a mission to drive out a fundamentalist repressive regime, liberate oppressed women, and restore democracy and rule of law.
But after eight years of bloodshed (more British soldiers have died in Afghanistan than in Iraq) the support for the war is haemorrhaging even in “patriotic” circles. Voices calling for an end to the British involvement in Afghanistan are growing and becoming louder. According to an ITV poll, taken after the deaths of eight soldiers in a 24-hour period, 59 per cent want the British forces withdrawn.
On a recent episode of BBC’s Question Time, Foreign Office minister Chris Bryant was booed as he attempted to justify the war. People wanted to know, “Why the hell are we there?” as one panellist put it; and how did the British forces hope to “win” an asymmetrical guerrilla war of attrition in which the “enemy” was the master of his terrain and had all the time in the world? One questioner argued that the Taliban represented an ideology and you couldn’t fight an ideology with guns and drones. And then there were lessons to be learnt from history: no foreign power had ever “won” in Afghanistan. Had we forgotten the famous Afghan war cry: “You may have the watch, we’ve the time?” One angry young woman said the whole Afghan adventure was based on a “lie.”
“We were told that it was meant to protect the people but thousands of innocent civilians have been killed; we were told it was to promote democracy and good governance but we’ve actually ended up propping up one of the most corrupt regimes in the world,” she said.
In pro-war circles, the view is that the government has botched up a “good” war, not being clear about its goals. The former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis and supporter of the war says, “Everything has gone wrong” since the overthrow of the Taleban regime. He believes it is the “right war fought in the wrong way...poorly planned, badly executed...calculated only to stir up resentment with little beneficial outcome.”
His boss David Cameron has been involved in angry exchanges with the Prime Minister accusing his government of a lack of commitment to the war effort.
The Left is equally critical. Lord Paddy Ashdown, former Lib Dem leader who was once tipped as the U.N. representative to Afghanistan, says the British mission suffers from a “military error of major proportion.”
“We made the two classic mistakes of over-ambitious targets and under-resources to achieve them,” he said recently calling for more troops to recover the “tactical and strategic opportunities” that he thought had been lost because of poor management.
Nick Clegg, the current Lib Dem leader, has gone a step further and demanded a wholesale review of the government’s approach, saying British lives are being “thrown away” because of wrong policies, especially the “failure” to provide adequate equipment to the troops. “I am concerned that we are simply not giving our troops the means to do their difficult job. We must not will the ends without being prepared to will the means,” he said in a newspaper interview.
In the charged debate over Afghanistan, Mr. Brown is looking as isolated as did appear his predecessor Tony Blair over Iraq. Doubts about the purpose of the war and the government’s approach to it are not confined to ordinary people and the Opposition. The army, also, is in a rebellious mood with top generals embroiled in an unprecedented war of words with the government over their concern that a lack of resources is putting the lives of soldiers at risk. The government has been accused of penny-pinching in meeting the needs of the troops who want safer armoured vehicles and more helicopters.
The shortage of helicopters has become a huge issue with Mr Brown facing accusations of “dereliction of duty” over the way he is handling the war. There was the bizarre spectacle of General Sir Richard Dannatt, chief of the general staff, flying in an American helicopter in what was seen as an attempt to embarrass the government and shame it into accepting the army’s case for more helicopters. Asked why he flew in an American helicopter, Gen Dannatt pointedly said: “Self-evidently...if I moved in an American helicopter it’s because I haven’t got a British helicopter.”
Some in the Prime Minister’s inner circle said the General was “playing politics” but much to Mr. Brown’s embarrassment General Dannatt’s views were echoed by Parliament’s cross-party Defence Select Committee. In a stinging report, it said the helicopter shortage was undermining British operations and exposing the troops to avoidable risk.
“We are concerned that operational commanders in the field today are unable to undertake potentially valuable operations because of the lack of helicopters for transportation around the theatre of operations. We are also concerned that operational commanders find they have to use ground transport, when helicopter lift would be preferred, both for the outcome and for the protection of our forces,” committee chairman James Arbuthnot commented.
The army also wants more “boots on the ground” in a mini British version of the American “surge,” arguing that additional troops are essential in order to hold on to the areas seized from the Taliban fighters. Mr. Brown was grilled by MPs over reports that Gen. Dannatt had demanded 2,000 extra troops but they failed to get a direct or satisfactory answer from the Prime Minister, who insisted that the government was doing everything to support “our brave and courageous armed forces.”
There is a widespread perception, especially among families of the soldiers, that the government is “betraying” the troops by trying to fight the war on the cheap. Caroline Munday, whose 21-year-old son James was killed in Afghanistan, made an emotional appeal to the government to “stop feathering its own nest and provide our guys with the best equipment they deserve.”
Meanwhile, ironically, by far the seniormost Labour figure to attack the government on the issue is none other than the man who ran the Defence Ministry until a few weeks ago — John Hutton. His statement that ministers should not behave like “armchair generals” and instead listen to “advice from the military” has surprised observers who point out that as Defence Secretary he ignored the very same demands he is now opportunistically backing.
So much for the politics of Afghanistan war. But the big question (as television anchors are fond of saying) is: Will more troops and equipment really help and make the war more “winnable?” Those who know Afghanistan say the assumption that Britain and its allies can win the war by simply pouring more men and machine into Afghanistan are making the same mistake the “Soviet” generals did. According to Victor Sebestyen, a Hungarian-born British military historian, there are “uncanny” parallels between the “Soviet” experience and the situation now facing Britain and its allies.
“The Soviet forces were in the seventh year of their nine-year-war in Afghanistan and had lost about 12,000 men. (Marshal Sergei) Akhromeyev (commander of Soviet armed forces) was summoned to explain why a force of 109,000 troops from the world’s second super power appeared to be humiliated year after year, by a band of terrorists. Akhromeyev ….insisted the army needed more resources — including additional helicopters….….words that sound uncannily resonant today,” he wrote in The Sunday Times recalling how despite the best resources Moscow finally lost the war.
Is Britain heading in the same direction?
Wootton Bassett, a small English town in Wiltshire with a long tradition of saluting fallen soldiers, has become the public face of national mourning for British troops killed in Afghanistan. Last week, hundreds of journalists and scores of TV crews from around the world descended on this quiet market town to record the return of the 80th bodybag as the British toll rose dramatically after one of the “bloodiest” phases of the eight-year war. Wootton Bassett apart, the human cost of the war in Afghanistan is being felt in cities and towns across Britain with military funerals becoming an almost daily ritual. Not surprisingly, the national mood has started to turn ugly with Prime Minister Gordon Brown under mounting pressure to defend the British “mission” amid fears that it is in danger of being bogged down in a Vietnam-like disaster.
In order to get a full measure of how much the mood has changed, it is important to remember that — unlike Iraq —the invasion of Afghanistan had widespread support initially. While Iraq sparked a wave of protests culminating in the famous million-strong London march of February 2003, there was hardly any peep over Afghanistan. It was generally regarded as a “good war,” portrayed as a mission to drive out a fundamentalist repressive regime, liberate oppressed women, and restore democracy and rule of law.
But after eight years of bloodshed (more British soldiers have died in Afghanistan than in Iraq) the support for the war is haemorrhaging even in “patriotic” circles. Voices calling for an end to the British involvement in Afghanistan are growing and becoming louder. According to an ITV poll, taken after the deaths of eight soldiers in a 24-hour period, 59 per cent want the British forces withdrawn.
On a recent episode of BBC’s Question Time, Foreign Office minister Chris Bryant was booed as he attempted to justify the war. People wanted to know, “Why the hell are we there?” as one panellist put it; and how did the British forces hope to “win” an asymmetrical guerrilla war of attrition in which the “enemy” was the master of his terrain and had all the time in the world? One questioner argued that the Taliban represented an ideology and you couldn’t fight an ideology with guns and drones. And then there were lessons to be learnt from history: no foreign power had ever “won” in Afghanistan. Had we forgotten the famous Afghan war cry: “You may have the watch, we’ve the time?” One angry young woman said the whole Afghan adventure was based on a “lie.”
“We were told that it was meant to protect the people but thousands of innocent civilians have been killed; we were told it was to promote democracy and good governance but we’ve actually ended up propping up one of the most corrupt regimes in the world,” she said.
In pro-war circles, the view is that the government has botched up a “good” war, not being clear about its goals. The former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis and supporter of the war says, “Everything has gone wrong” since the overthrow of the Taleban regime. He believes it is the “right war fought in the wrong way...poorly planned, badly executed...calculated only to stir up resentment with little beneficial outcome.”
His boss David Cameron has been involved in angry exchanges with the Prime Minister accusing his government of a lack of commitment to the war effort.
The Left is equally critical. Lord Paddy Ashdown, former Lib Dem leader who was once tipped as the U.N. representative to Afghanistan, says the British mission suffers from a “military error of major proportion.”
“We made the two classic mistakes of over-ambitious targets and under-resources to achieve them,” he said recently calling for more troops to recover the “tactical and strategic opportunities” that he thought had been lost because of poor management.
Nick Clegg, the current Lib Dem leader, has gone a step further and demanded a wholesale review of the government’s approach, saying British lives are being “thrown away” because of wrong policies, especially the “failure” to provide adequate equipment to the troops. “I am concerned that we are simply not giving our troops the means to do their difficult job. We must not will the ends without being prepared to will the means,” he said in a newspaper interview.
In the charged debate over Afghanistan, Mr. Brown is looking as isolated as did appear his predecessor Tony Blair over Iraq. Doubts about the purpose of the war and the government’s approach to it are not confined to ordinary people and the Opposition. The army, also, is in a rebellious mood with top generals embroiled in an unprecedented war of words with the government over their concern that a lack of resources is putting the lives of soldiers at risk. The government has been accused of penny-pinching in meeting the needs of the troops who want safer armoured vehicles and more helicopters.
The shortage of helicopters has become a huge issue with Mr Brown facing accusations of “dereliction of duty” over the way he is handling the war. There was the bizarre spectacle of General Sir Richard Dannatt, chief of the general staff, flying in an American helicopter in what was seen as an attempt to embarrass the government and shame it into accepting the army’s case for more helicopters. Asked why he flew in an American helicopter, Gen Dannatt pointedly said: “Self-evidently...if I moved in an American helicopter it’s because I haven’t got a British helicopter.”
Some in the Prime Minister’s inner circle said the General was “playing politics” but much to Mr. Brown’s embarrassment General Dannatt’s views were echoed by Parliament’s cross-party Defence Select Committee. In a stinging report, it said the helicopter shortage was undermining British operations and exposing the troops to avoidable risk.
“We are concerned that operational commanders in the field today are unable to undertake potentially valuable operations because of the lack of helicopters for transportation around the theatre of operations. We are also concerned that operational commanders find they have to use ground transport, when helicopter lift would be preferred, both for the outcome and for the protection of our forces,” committee chairman James Arbuthnot commented.
The army also wants more “boots on the ground” in a mini British version of the American “surge,” arguing that additional troops are essential in order to hold on to the areas seized from the Taliban fighters. Mr. Brown was grilled by MPs over reports that Gen. Dannatt had demanded 2,000 extra troops but they failed to get a direct or satisfactory answer from the Prime Minister, who insisted that the government was doing everything to support “our brave and courageous armed forces.”
There is a widespread perception, especially among families of the soldiers, that the government is “betraying” the troops by trying to fight the war on the cheap. Caroline Munday, whose 21-year-old son James was killed in Afghanistan, made an emotional appeal to the government to “stop feathering its own nest and provide our guys with the best equipment they deserve.”
Meanwhile, ironically, by far the seniormost Labour figure to attack the government on the issue is none other than the man who ran the Defence Ministry until a few weeks ago — John Hutton. His statement that ministers should not behave like “armchair generals” and instead listen to “advice from the military” has surprised observers who point out that as Defence Secretary he ignored the very same demands he is now opportunistically backing.
So much for the politics of Afghanistan war. But the big question (as television anchors are fond of saying) is: Will more troops and equipment really help and make the war more “winnable?” Those who know Afghanistan say the assumption that Britain and its allies can win the war by simply pouring more men and machine into Afghanistan are making the same mistake the “Soviet” generals did. According to Victor Sebestyen, a Hungarian-born British military historian, there are “uncanny” parallels between the “Soviet” experience and the situation now facing Britain and its allies.
“The Soviet forces were in the seventh year of their nine-year-war in Afghanistan and had lost about 12,000 men. (Marshal Sergei) Akhromeyev (commander of Soviet armed forces) was summoned to explain why a force of 109,000 troops from the world’s second super power appeared to be humiliated year after year, by a band of terrorists. Akhromeyev ….insisted the army needed more resources — including additional helicopters….….words that sound uncannily resonant today,” he wrote in The Sunday Times recalling how despite the best resources Moscow finally lost the war.
Is Britain heading in the same direction?
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