April 29, 2014
Tomgram:
Anand Gopal, How to Lose a War That Wasn't There
[Note for TomDispatch Readers:
This is really simple. If you only read one book on America’s
war in Afghanistan, it has to be Anand Gopal’s just published No
Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through
Afghan Eyes. It’s an instant classic, a brilliant piece of
reportage, and a stunning exploration of the lives of three Afghans (a
housewife with a remarkable story, a local warlord, and a Taliban
commander) behind whom lurk the Americans (mis)fighting their “war on
terror.” Mother Jones calls it “a brilliant
analysis of our military's dysfunction and a startlingly clear account of
the consequences.” The New York Times describes it as
“devastating,” as well as “essential reading for anyone concerned
about how America got Afghanistan so wrong.” It’s a tale of the
Afghan War that, so many years later, has simply never been told and it
couldn’t be more dramatic. In addition, for a contribution of $100
(or more) to this site -- money we’ll use to help out future Anand Gopals
-- he will sign a personalized copy of his book for you. Check out
our
donation page for the details. Finally, for those of
you in New York City, Gopal is giving a free lecture about his book and
the Afghan War at the Cooper Union tonight at 6:30 pm. Check it out
here.
Tom]
You might think that 12-and-a-half years after it began,
Washington would have learned something useful about its war on terror,
but no such luck. If you remember, back in the distant days just
after 9/11 when that war was launched (or, in a sense, “lost”), the Bush
administration was readying itself to take out not just Osama bin Laden
and his relatively small al-Qaeda outfit but “terror” itself, that
amorphous monster of the twenty-first century. They were planning to
do so in somewhere between 60
and 83
countries and, as they liked to say, “drain
the swamp” globally.
In reality, they launched an overblown
war not so much “on” terror, but “of” terror, one that, in place after
place, from Afghanistan to Somalia, Pakistan to parts
of Africa, destabilized regions and laid the basis for a spreading
jihadist movement. In so many cases, as at Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo, they fulfilled Osama bin Laden’s wildest fantasies, creating
the sort of recruiting posters from hell for future jihadists that
al-Qaeda was itself incapable of.
So many years later, they seem
to be repeating the process in Yemen. They are now escalating a “successful”
drone and special operations war against a group in that impoverished land
that calls itself al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The
drones turn out to be pretty good at knocking
off various figures in that movement, but they are in another sense
like a godsend for it. In what are called “targeted killings,” but
might better be termed (as Paul Woodward has) “speculative
murders,” they repeatedly wipe out civilians,
including women, children, and in one recent case, part of a wedding
party. They are Washington’s calling card of death and as such
they only ensure that more Yemenis will join or support AQAP.
The
process of creating ever more enemies you must then kill started in
Afghanistan in 2001, even if that remains news to most Americans.
Now, TomDispatch
regular Anand Gopal in his new book No
Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through
Afghan Eyes offers a stunning history of how the U.S. fought its
“war on terror” for almost a year in that country against -- quite
literally -- ghosts. In the process, it resuscitated a Taliban
movement that had ceased to exist and then found itself in a conflict it
couldn’t win. It’s a story that’s never been told before, even if
Washington’s second Afghan War makes no sense without it.
For many
Americans, as Henry Ford so famously put it, history is bunk. In
this case, however, history turns out to be everything that matters, and
the rest has proved to be bloody, painful, and costly bunk. If you
don’t believe me, read Gopal’s hidden history of the Afghan War at this
website today and then get your hands on his book. Tom
How the U.S. Created the
Afghan War -- and Then Lost It
The Unreported Story of How the
Haqqani Network Became America's Greatest Enemy
By Anand
Gopal
It was a typical Kabul morning. Malik Ashgar Square was already
bumper-to-bumper with Corolla taxis, green police jeeps, honking
minivans, and angry motorcyclists. There were boys selling phone cards
and men waving wads of cash for exchange, all weaving their way around
the vehicles amid exhaust fumes. At the gate of the Lycée Esteqial, one
of the country’s most prestigious schools, students were kicking around
a soccer ball. At the Ministry of Education, a weathered old
Soviet-style building opposite the school, a line of employees spilled
out onto the street. I was crossing the square, heading for the
ministry, when I saw the suicide attacker.
He had Scandinavian features. Dressed in blue jeans and a white
t-shirt, and carrying a large backpack, he began firing indiscriminately
at the ministry. From my vantage point, about 50 meters away, I couldn’t
quite see his expression, but he did not seem hurried or panicked. I
took cover behind a parked taxi. It wasn’t long before the traffic
police had fled and the square had emptied of vehicles.
Twenty-eight people, mostly civilians, died in attacks at the
Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Justice, and elsewhere across the
city that day in 2009. Afterward, U.S. authorities implicated the
Haqqani Network, a shadowy outfit operating from Pakistan that had
pioneered the use of multiple suicide bombers in headline-grabbing urban
assaults. Unlike other Taliban groups, the Haqqanis’ approach to mayhem
was worldly and sophisticated: they recruited Arabs, Pakistanis, even
Europeans, and they were influenced by the latest in radical Islamist
thought. Their leader, the septuagenarian warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani,
was something like Osama bin Laden and Al Capone rolled into one, as
fiercely ideological as he was ruthlessly pragmatic.
And so many years later, his followers are still fighting. Even
with the U.S. withdrawing the bulk of its troops this year, up to 10,000
Special Operations forces, CIA paramilitaries, and their proxies will
likely stay behind to battle the Haqqanis, the Taliban, and similar
outfits in a war that seemingly has no end. With such entrenched
enemies, the conflict today has an air of inevitability -- but it could
all have gone so differently.
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