Six on History: Afghanistan and Forever War
panaritisp
Welcome back to Six on History.
PS: If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts.
Click here for Detailed Search Help Thanks John Elfrank
1) America Longest War: No Bang, No Whimper, No Victory, BY ANDREW BACEVICH *
"It’s hardly surprising that they have little bandwidth left for reflecting on the war in Afghanistan as it enters what may be its final phase. After all, overlapping with the more violent and costly occupation of Iraq, the conflict in Afghanistan never possessed a clear narrative arc. Lacking dramatic duels or decisive battles, it was the military equivalent of white noise, droning in the background all but unnoticed. Sheer endlessness emerged as its defining characteristic.
The second President Bush launched the Afghan War less than a month after 9/11. Despite what seemed like a promising start, he all but abandoned that effort in his haste to pursue bigger prey, namely Saddam Hussein. In 2009, Barack Obama inherited that by-now-stalemated Afghan conflict and vowed to win and get out. He would do neither. Succeeding Obama in 2017, Donald Trump doubled down on the promise to end the war completely, only to come up short himself.
Now, taking up where Trump left off, Joe Biden has signaled his desire to ring down the curtain on America’s longest-ever armed conflict and so succeed where his three immediate predecessors failed. Doing so won’t be easy. As the war dragged on, it accumulated complications, both within Afghanistan and regionally. The situation remains fraught with potential snags."
Bacevich has been "a persistent, vocal critic of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, calling the conflict a catastrophic failure."[2] In March 2007, he described George W. Bush's endorsement of such "preventive wars" as "immoral, illicit, and imprudent."[2][3] His son, Andrew John Bacevich, also an Army officer, died fighting in the Iraq War in May 2007.[2]
Roshanian scaled back her movements after she found her name on three different lists circulating on Afghan social media, claiming to be of people the Taliban want to kill. On one list, she's number 11.
"They are after people who are well-known, who are against the values of this society, who speak out," she says.
It's not the first time Roshanian has been threatened. She's offended plenty of conservatives in her life in her job as the editor of an Afghan feminist magazine, Nimrokh. It covers topics like sex, virginity, periods, marital affairs — all shocking by Afghan standards. But this time, she says, she's taking the threats more seriously, because "you see journalists and other people are being killed everyday, everywhere, on the streets, in their homes, in the bazaars."
It should have been a time marked by hope. Instead, the United Nations said in a February report that more than 700 people had been murdered in targeted killings in 2020. More than 540 were wounded. The U.N. noted it was a 45% increase in the number of civilian casualties compared to 2019. So far this year, more than 60 people have been the victims of targeted killings, according to an NPR tally of incidents reported by an Afghan violence monitoring site.
"It has been unprecedented," says Shaharzad Akbar, the chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. She says she's never seen anything like the scope of these assassinations, "in terms of how many people have been killed, in a short time period and how it hasn't stopped."
The killed include Faiz Mohammad Fayez, a religious scholar and university professor, gunned down earlier this month as he walked to a mosque for morning prayers. They include the surgeon Dr. Khalil-ur-Rahman Narmgo, who was gunned down in February.
They include prosecutor Mirwais Samadi, shot dead by gunmen while on his way to work; and television presenter Malala Maiwand, killed alongside her driver in December. Three other women from the same station where Maiwand worked were shot dead in March.
Identifying the killers
It's not clear who is behind the carnage. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the murders of five women: Maiwand, her three colleagues and a doctor.
The U.S. and other Western nations blame the Taliban. "The Taliban bears responsibility for the majority of this targeted violence," noted a January statement from the U.S. embassy in Kabul signed by the European Union, NATO's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan and the diplomatic missions for 12 Western countries.
Many Afghans agree, like one feminist who requested anonymity because she recently received a death threat over Facebook. She believes it's because she helped women flee their violent husbands.
In an interview with NPR, she said it's no coincidence that the killings stepped up after Afghan peace talks began.
"The Taliban are demonstrating their power," she says, a way for them to flex their muscle in negotiations, while also silencing those who might disagree with them and their hard-line methods. "They are targeting journalists and civil society — people who can raise their voice. People who can tell the international community what is happening. They want to shut them up."
The Taliban deny responsibility. "This is a false propaganda of the enemy," said a spokesman, who uses the name Zabihullah Mujahid. He blamed Afghan government intelligence officials for the murders.
Roshanian thinks it's more complicated. She believes the death lists being shared on social media are actually worked up by locals: conservatives, Taliban sympathizers, people with grudges.
She thinks they're doxing for the Taliban — revealing the identities of people online in order to entice militants to harm them. "These lists tell the Taliban: these are the people who are making trouble, who are putting new thoughts in women's heads. They identify us so the Taliban can kill us."
Some caution other hands may be at work.
One cleric, Ustadh Abdul Salaam Abed, who survived a bomb blast that struck his vehicle, believes Afghan intelligence officials are also targeting people.
"Intelligence has a direct hand," he says. "There are people in the system who are scared of the nation's voices, scared of the coming peace," he says. He punctuated his conversation with nervous giggles, saying he could hear beeps on the line that he believed were a result of his phone being bugged.
Officials for the Afghan government declined to comment for this story.
Amnesty International recently criticized the government for not moving on the creation of a body that would protect human rights defenders. Other diplomats have said that while the government is investigating these murders, they have done little to communicate with victims' families or the media on the steps they are taking to address the violence.
A mission to intimidate
Akbar, from the human rights commission, says even if the killers are unknown, the intention is clear. "It's a deliberate attempt to kill people or scare them away from the country," she says. "Unfortunately, it has worked."
The killings are already impacting female reporters in particular. Faizi's organization recently published a report noting that more than 300 women — one-fifth of all who work in Afghan media — have quit their jobs as a result of the killings, and because of insecurities surrounding COVID-19.
They include a young reporter who requested anonymity because out of concern attention would trigger a death threat. She fought her family to become a reporter — a profession they said was not honorable for a woman. She found a job, but then the murders began. Fearing for her life, she quit. "Now the world feels dark," she tells NPR. "I am always thinking: what if this is permanent? What if I never work again?"
There's been other secondary victims of these killings, too. Karima Rahimyar, a school teacher and girls education activist, received threats over Facebook. She, defiantly, continues to work. But she pulled her own daughters out of university — until the danger passes, or until they can flee. "I'm scared for my daughters," she says.
Roshanian, the feminist magazine editor, now works from home, but her friends urge her to flee. "They all tell me, 'Fatima, the things you are doing right now for this country is useless. It won't impact anyone.'" She responds: "If you are thinking like this, and I start thinking like you – what will be left here?"
Hadid reported from Islamabad; Ghani from Kabul.
Two decades later, Joe Biden now faces an anguishing choice over whether to withdraw the last U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 1st. The deadline is part of an agreement brokered by the Trump Administration with the Taliban a year ago. Like Gorbachev, Biden clearly wants to go—and has, for more than a decade. In 2010, when he was Vice-President, he promised a pullout. “We’re starting it in July of 2011, and we’re going to be totally out of there—come hell or high water—by 2014,” Biden vowed, on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Last year, in an article in Foreign Affairs, he wrote, “It is past time to end the forever wars.” Recent polls indicate that Americans are largely ambivalent about or uninterested in Afghanistan; twenty to thirty per cent of respondents in recent surveys didn’t even bother to answer about a pullout. The national fury spurred by the trauma of the 9/11 attacks has evaporated.
Yet walking away isn’t so easy. Even after an investment of more than a trillion dollars, the U.S. hasn’t fully achieved the goals of its longest war, either. Navigating a way out—especially securing a comprehensive peace agreement—is proving to be messy and potentially deadly, too. In an interview with ABC News last week, Biden conceded that it may be “tough” to withdraw. He has no good choices; neither does the U.S. military, which has reduced troop levels from fifteen thousand when the U.S.-Taliban pact was signed a year ago to around three thousand today. If American troops withdraw, almost ten thousand nato troops from thirty-six nations and more than twenty-four thousand contractors who support the Afghan state and military are almost certain to leave, too.
On a rainy day in Kabul last week, the military headquarters of U.S. and nato troops in Afghanistan was a spooky place. You have to take a military helicopter from the airport to the nearby compound because driving is unsafe. The complex is surrounded by layers of concrete blast walls topped with barbed wire. Haunting murals adorn the barricades. One features a giant painting of a woman in uniform captioned, in black stencilled letters, “afghan female police a force for good.” Another advertises the Invictus Games, for wounded warriors. More than a hundred thousand Afghans, twenty-three hundred Americans, and hundreds of soldiers from nato countries have died in the twenty-year conflict; another twenty thousand Americans have been injured.
Biden’s decision will be influenced by five factors, according to current and former U.S. officials whom I interviewed in Afghanistan and the United States. The first is whether frantic last-ditch diplomacy will salvage peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban. As the U.S. deadline to withdraw approaches, the Administration is throwing spaghetti at the diplomatic wall to see if anything will stick. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote a blunt letter to the Afghan President, Ashraf Ghani, demanding that he “understand the urgency of my tone,” and calling for his “urgent leadership.” The peace talks, hosted by Qatar, have deadlocked since they started in September of last year as a sequel to the U.S. deal with the Taliban that February. In a new set of proposals, Blinken recommended creating an interim government in which the Taliban and current Afghan leaders share power. It sounded more like an ultimatum than a proposal."
"None of this should be happening. The New York Times has admitted itself that it was wrong for uncritically parroting the unsubstantiated spook claims which led to the Iraq invasion, as has The Washington Post. There is no reason to believe Taliban fighters would require any bounty to attack an illegitimate occupying force. The Russian government has denied these allegations. The Taliban has denied these allegations. The Trump administration has denied that the president or the vice president had any knowledge of the spook report in question, denouncing the central allegation that liberals who are promoting this story have been fixated on.
Yet this story is being magically transmuted into an established fact, despite its being based on literally zero factual evidence.
Outlets like CNN are running the story with the headline “Russia offered bounties to Afghan militants to kill US troops“, deceitfully presenting this as a verified fact. Such dishonest headlines are joined by UK outlets like The Guardian who informs headline-skimmers that “Russia offered bounty to kill UK soldiers“, and the Murdoch-owned Sky News which went with “Russia paid Taliban fighters to attack British troops in Afghanistan” after “confirming” the story with anonymous British spooks.
Western propagandists are turning this completely empty story into the mainstream consensus, not with facts, not with evidence, and certainly not with journalism, but with sheer brute force of narrative control. And now you’ve got Joe Biden once again attacking Trump for being insufficiently warlike, this time because “he failed to sanction or impose any kind of consequences on Russia for this egregious violation of international law”.
"Then began the Carter-initiated CIA buildup that so worried White House drug expert David Musto. In a replication of what happened following the CIA-backed coup in Iran, the feudal estates were soon back in opium production and the crop-substitution program ended.
Because Pakistan had a nuclear program, the US had a foreign aid ban on the country. This was soon lifted it as the waging of a proxy war in Afghanistan became prime policy. In fairly short order, without any discernible slowdown in its nuclear program, Pakistan became the third largest recipient of US aid worldwide, right behind Israel and Egypt. Arms poured into Karachi from the US and were shipped up to Peshawar by the National Logistics Cell, a military unit controlled by Pakistan’s secret police, the ISI. From Peshawar those guns that weren’t simply sold to any and all customers (the Iranians got 16 Stinger missiles, one of which was used against a US helicopter in the Gulf) were divvied out by the ISI to the Afghan factions.
Though the US press, Dan Rather to the fore, portrayed the mujahedin as a unified force of freedom fighters, the fact (unsurprising to anyone with an inkling of Afghan history) was that the mujahedin consisted of at least seven warring factions, all battling for territory and control of the opium trade. The ISI gave the bulk of the arms – at one count 60 percent – to a particularly fanatical fundamentalist and woman-hater Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who made his public debut at the University of Kabul by killing a leftist student. In 1972 Hekmatyar fled to Pakistan, where he became an agent of the ISI. He urged his followers to throw acid in the faces of women not wearing the veil, kidnapped rival leaders, and built up his CIA-furnished arsenal against the day the Soviets would leave and the war for the mastery of Afghanistan would truly break out.
Using his weapons to get control of the opium fields, Hekmatyar and his men would urge the peasants, at gun point, to increase production. They would collect the raw opium and bring it back to Hekmatyar’s six heroin factories in the town of Koh-i-Soltan
One of Hekmatyar’s chief rivals in the mujahedin, Mullah Nassim, controlled the opium poppy fields in the Helmand Valley, producing 260 tons of opium a year. His brother, Mohammed Rasul, defended this agricultural enterprise by stating, “We must grow and sell opium to fight our holy war against the Russian nonbelievers.” Despite this well-calculated pronouncement, they spent almost all their time fighting their fellow-believers, using the weapons sent them by the CIA to try to win the advantage in these internecine struggles. In 1989 Hekmatyar launched an assault against Nassim, attempting to take control of the Helmand Valley. Nassim fought him off, but a few months later Hekmatyar successfully engineered Nassim’s assassination when he was holding the post of deputy defense minister in the provisional post-Soviet Afghan government. Hekmatyar now controlled opium growing in the Helmand Valley."
Afghanistan is far and away the world’s largest opium producer and has been for the entire period since the US invaded and occupied the country in late 2001. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) 2018 Afghan Opium Survey, Afghan farmers were cultivating about 60,700 hectares of opium poppies in the late 1990s, but around 121,400 hectares a year in the mid-2000s.
As the US occupation dragged on, opium cultivation generally climbed throughout the 2010s, peaking at more than 323,700 hectares in 2017. That equates to about 9 tons of raw opium produced that year, with the heroin produced from it going into the veins of addicts from Lahore to London.
The SIGAR report also noted that although drought had caused poppy cultivation to drop by 20% last year, “it remained at the second-highest level since the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) began monitoring it in 1994.”
So, despite spending nearly $9 billion, the US war on Afghan opium has not only not succeeded but has seen the poppy foe steadily gain ground. And even though drought struck the crop in 2018, opium still exceeded the value of all of Afghanistan’s licit exports combined and accounted for between 6% and 11% of its gross domestic product."
