Pouring Gas on the Afghanistan Bonfire
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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080825_hedges_afghanistan_worsening/
Posted on Aug 25, 2008
By Chris Hedges
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind forward with their terrible
human toll, even as the press and many Americans play who gets thrown
off the island with Barack Obama. Coalition forces carried out an
airstrike that killed up to 95 Afghan civilians in western Afghanistan
on Friday, 50 of them children, President Hamid Karzai said. And the
mounting bombing raids and widespread detentions of Afghans are
rapidly turning Afghanistan into the mirror image of Iraq. But these
very real events, which will have devastating consequences over the
next few months and years, are largely ignored by us. We prefer to
waste our time on the trivia and gossip that swallow up air time and
do nothing to advance our understanding of either the campaign or the
wars fought in our name.
As the conflict in Afghanistan has intensified, so has the
indiscriminate use of airstrikes, including Friday’s, which took place
in the Azizabad area of Shindand district in Herat province. The
airstrike was carried out after Afghan and coalition soldiers were
ambushed by insurgents while on a patrol targeting a known Taliban
commander in Herat, the U.S. military said. Hundreds of Afghans,
shouting anti-U.S. slogans, staged angry street protests on Saturday
in Azizabad to protest the killings, and President Hamid Karzai
condemned the airstrike.
The United Nations estimates that 255 of the almost 700 civilian
deaths in fighting in Afghanistan this year have been caused by Afghan
and international troops. The number of civilians killed in fighting
between insurgents and security forces in Afghanistan has soared by
two-thirds in the first half of this year.
Ghulam Azrat, the director of the middle school in Azizabad, said he
collected 60 bodies after the bombing.
“We put the bodies in the main mosque,’’ he told the Associated Press
by phone, sometimes pausing to collect himself as he wept. “Most of
these dead bodies were children and women. It took all morning to
collect them.”
Azrat said villagers on Saturday threw stones at Afghan soldiers who
arrived and tried to give out food and clothes. He said the soldiers
fired into the crowd and wounded eight people, including one child.
“The people were very angry,” he said. “They told the soldiers, ‘We
don’t need your food, we don’t need your clothes. We want our
children. We want our relatives. Can you give [them] to us? You
cannot, so go away.’ ”
We are in trouble in Afghanistan. Sending more soldiers and Marines to
fight the Taliban is only dumping gasoline on the bonfire. The Taliban
assaults, funded largely by the expanded opium trade, are increasingly
sophisticated and well coordinated. And the Taliban is exacting a
rising toll on coalition troops. Soldiers and Marines are now dying at
a faster rate in Afghanistan than Iraq. In an Aug. 18 attack, only 30
miles from the capital, Kabul, the French army lost 10 and had 21
wounded. The next day, hundreds of militants, aided by six suicide
bombers, attacked one of the largest U.S. bases in the country. A week
before that, insurgents killed three foreign aid workers and their
Afghan driver, prompting international aid missions to talk about
withdrawing from a country where they already have very limited
access.
Barack Obama, like John McCain, speaks about Afghanistan in words that
look as if they were penned by the Bush White House. Obama may call
for withdrawing some U.S. troops from Iraq, but he does not want to
send them all home. He wants to send them to Afghanistan, or to what
he obliquely terms “the right battlefield.” Obama said he would deploy
an additional 10,000 troops to Afghanistan once he took office.
The seven-year war in Afghanistan has not gone well. An additional
3,200 Marines were deployed there in January. Karzai’s puppet
government in Kabul controls little territory outside the capital. And
our attempt to buy off tribes with money and even weapons has
collapsed, with most tribal groups slipping back into the arms of the
Taliban insurgents.
Do the cheerleaders for an expanded war in Afghanistan know any
history? Have they studied what happened to the Soviets, who lost
15,000 Red Army soldiers between 1979 and 1988, or even the British in
the 19th century? Do they remember why we went into Afghanistan? It
was, we were told, to hunt down Osama bin Laden, who is now apparently
in Pakistan. Has anyone asked what our end goal is in Afghanistan? Is
it nation-building? Or is this simply the forever war on terror?
Al-Qaida, which we have also inadvertently resurrected, is alive and
well. It still finds plenty of recruits. It still runs training
facilities. It still caries out attacks in London, Madrid, Iraq and
now Afghanistan, which did not experience suicide bombings until
December 2005. Al-Qaida has moved on. But we remain stuck, confused
and lashing about wildly like a wounded and lumbering beast.
We do not have the power or the knowledge, nor do we have the right
under international law, to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan. We are vainly
trying to transplant to these countries a modern system of politics
invented in Europe. This system is characterized by, among other
things, the division of the Earth into independent secular states
based on national citizenship. The belief in a secular civil
government is to most Afghans and Iraqis an alien creed. It will never
work.
We have blundered into nations we know little about. We are caught
between bitter rivalries among competing ethnic and religious groups.
We have embarked on an occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan that is as
damaging to our souls as it is to our prestige and power and security.
And we believe, falsely, that because we have the capacity to wage war
we have the right to wage war.
We divert ourselves in our dotage and decline with images and slogans
that perpetuate fantasies about our own invulnerability, our own
might, our own goodness. We are preoccupied by national trivia games
that pass for news, even as the wolf pants at our door. These
illusions blind us. We cannot see ourselves as others see us. We do
not know who we are.
“We had fed the heart on fantasies,” William Butler Yeats wrote, “the
heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”
We are propelled forward not by logic or compassion or understanding
but by fear. We have created and live in a world where violence is the
primary form of communication. We have become the company we keep.
Much of the world—certainly the Muslim world, one-fifth of the world’s
population, most of whom are not Arab—sees us through the prism of
Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. We are igniting the dispossessed, the
majority of humanity who live on less than two dollars a day. And
whoever takes the White House next January seems hellbent on fueling
our self-immolation.