July 28, 2010

Phyllis Bennis on Wikileaks' Afghan War Diary

July 27, 2010: "... taken as a whole, the documents provide a collective arsenal of evidence of a brutal war that never did have a chance to 'succeed' - and evidence of what a government, through two administrations, was determined to keep secret from its own people and the rest of the world."

"As I wrote in the Huffington Post, Wikileaks' Afgan War Diary is the most important history yet of key parts of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. These are reports of troops and commanders in the field to other military officials - this is where they tell the truth. It's significant that the Obama administration has not tried to claim the reports are inaccurate. What they are trying to do is to have it both ways: claiming that disclosure of the reports somehow endangers U.S. troops, but at the same time disparaging the documents as showing nothing we didn't already know. 

These reports, of events already past, are hardly likely to endanger the troops in Afghanistan - the people and insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan don't need Pentagon documents to know what U.S./NATO forces are actually doing in their countries.

The documents probably will have a significant impact on the U.S./NATO war: They'll likely stoke even greater global anger around the world, as evidence filters out to those far from Afghanistan and Pakistan who didn't already know what the U.S./NATO occupation looks like. That will certainly mean rising anger towards U.S. policies and unfortunately, toward Americans as a whole. But more importantly, it will spur enormous antiwar activity in places like Europe, Canada, Australia, and Turkey. And that means greater pressure on those governments still providing troops for Washington's war in Afghanistan. And most important of all, they will mean greater pressure than ever on the Obama administration to end the war and especially on Congress to vote NO on today's supplemental war-funding bill.

There is no evidence yet of a new smoking gun among the individual documents. But taken as a whole, the documents provide a collective arsenal of evidence of a brutal war that never did have a chance to "succeed" - and evidence of what a government, through two administrations, was determined to keep secret from its own people and the rest of the world.

The documents chronicle escalating Special Forces operations, drone attacks, and more. They describe activities like those of Task Force 373, a death squad that goes after named individuals on a kill-or-capture list. No trial, of course. Who knows how much of the intelligence that lands someone on that list is rooted in a neighborhood feud or tribal power struggle?

Gen. McChrystal's and now Gen. Petraeus's "nation-building" efforts are failing. In places like Marja, last spring's poster-city of a new U.S.-backed "government in a box," the handpicked mayor in a box, who spent most of the last 15 years living in Germany, is so unpopular that he has to be ferried into town on military helicopters for occasional meetings, and then quickly whisked away. The much-heralded spring 2010 offensive in Kandahar is apparently on permanent delay. 

I haven't read even a fraction yet of the 92,000 reports covering 250,000 pages. But the overviews provided by the international journalists who are certainly consistent with the view that the "counterinsurgency" approach is already giving way to an old-fashioned Bush-style counter-terrorism war. That would mean that claims of protecting Afghan civilians as most important would fade, in favor of acknowledging that the military's role is simply to kill whoever they decide are the bad guys. So if the war becomes more of an air war, and drones are called in to do more of the dirty work so U.S. troops aren't at risk, and more Afghan or Pakistani civilians are killed as a result - well, that's just part of the cost of war.

The documents include evidence of far more civilian deaths than were ever reported in the press. Many of them were probably never even mentioned - or asked about - in the virtually nonexistent congressional oversight of these years. They detail massive levels of corruption, extortion, and constant violence inflicted on Afghan civilians by the U.S.-backed, U.S.-trained, and U.S.-funded militias, known as the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police.

And they demonstrate, again, the continuing links between Pakistan's top military intelligence agency, the ISI, and the top leadership of the Taliban - despite claims by Secretary of State Clinton and others in the Obama administration that Pakistan is a reliable U.S. ally that just needs to work a little harder on going after terrorists. The Obama administration's answer to the documents simply repeats their efforts to blur the very distinct organizations known as the Afghan Taliban (mostly based in Pakistan but operating in Afghanistan) and the Pakistani Taliban (who target the Pakistani government, and against whom that government has indeed acted) into a generic presence in Pakistan known as "the terrorists" or "the Taliban." Pointing to Islamabad's actions against the Pakistani Taliban says nothing about their officials' ties with and apparent support for the Afghan Taliban.

The Wikileaks Papers provide a treasure trove of new evidence of what we already knew:  This war has already failed. Every death, of Afghan civilian and soldier, is needless.  Every dollar spent on military actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan is wasted. The cost of this occupation and this war - in Afghan blood, in U.S. and NATO military blood, in the billions of dollars needed for jobs at home and real reconstruction in Afghanistan and elsewhere - is too high. We need to stop the funding for escalation now, bring the troops and contractors home, support Afghan and regional/UN diplomacy, and begin the long effort of making good on our huge debt to the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Maybe, just maybe, this 21st century Pentagon Papers - the 2.0 version: Afghanistan - will provide the spark of antiwar outrage to make that happen.

Bigwigs Gather in Kabul...For What?

Last week I wrote an article on the meeting held in Afghanistan to discuss the war, and I think it's still useful after the Wikileaks, ahem, leak. Please read and comment if you can. Here's an excerpt:

[Last] week the State Department bragged about the really important conference on the U.S./NATO war in Afghanistan held in Kabul, hosted by the Afghan president and including dozens of international political leaders. So why was it relegated to page 10 of the New York Times and the equivalent in most of the mainstream media?

The answer is actually pretty simple: It just wasn't that important. Most of the decisions Hillary Clinton was so proud of were old news: The Afghan government will fight corruption and build up the Afghan National Army (ANA) better! The U.S. and other NATO countries will train the ANA! The U.S. will help the Afghan government fight corruption! Why should anyone think these plans will work any better this time around?

You can read the rest on Huffington Post or the IPS Blog.

Thanks,
Phyllis

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and co-author with David Wildman of the new Ending the U.S. War in Afghanistan: A Primer.