Kemstone's Journal

I’ve had some trouble figuring out how to approach this story. With over 90,000 previously classified documents from the war in Afghanistan having been posted on WikiLeaks, an online state-independent organization dedicated to fighting power through truth, most of the media coverage thus far has been either about WikiLeaks itself or about how there is nothing contained in these documents that we didn’t already know. I’ll touch briefly on what I see as the three main elements to the story—what it says about the wars, how the media has covered it, and the larger implications of the existence of an organization like WikiLeaks in terms of humanity’s future.

The War

I confess I haven’t read all 90,000 documents, so I can’t offer too much analysis of what they actually contain. What I do know from reading articles about the documents is that they contain details that basically confirm everything critics of the war have been saying for years—that it looks to be going very badly, that Pakistan’s interests aren’t exactly aligned with ours and they may be working against us in some cases, and that far too many innocent civilians have been killed by the U.S. military either through recklessness, carelessness, or honest errors of judgment.

Those of us who have been critical of the war from the very beginning can point to this and say it supports the arguments we’ve been making. Most importantly, these documents should highlight the fact that what we’re doing in Afghanistan (and Iraq as well) is not ‘warfare’ in the sense that most Americans still think of the term—two opposing armies meeting on the battlefield with the intention of doing as much damage to the other side as possible—but is more of an occupation. When you’re looking for historical precedents, this is far more like the British occupation of [insert name of third-world country here] than it is like either of the two World Wars.

Ironically, we may have Rush Limbaugh to thank for helping us drive this point home. His completely outrageous misunderstanding of the nature of this war, deliberate or otherwise, perfectly exemplifies the problem with the war hawks’ thinking:

“The documents cover some known aspects of the troubled nine-year conflict. US Special Operations Forces have targeted militants without trial.” Afghans have been killed by accident. Why, that is unheard of. That is unheard of, in any war, anywhere in the history of the world, that civilians have been killed by accident?

That’s unheard of! Do you realize what this says about us? How guilty, how rotten-to-the-core can this country be? Innocent Afghan citizens killed by accident! In the old days it used to be on purpose (i.e., Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden). In the old days the definition of winning a war was killing people and breaking things. In the old days, there was no such thing as a “surgical strike.” In the old days, you purposely killed innocent civilians. That’s what war was all about. That’s how you won it! But now all of a sudden these big WikiLeaks documents say that Afghans have been killed by accident. Whoa, the incompetence of the US military!

By completely missing the point, Rush has actually confirmed the point we’re making. This is not WWII, in which victory can be secured by carpet-bombing cities and devastating the enemy to the point where his will to fight is broken—in this kind of conflict ‘winning’ involves actually helping the civilians, providing them security and infrastructure in order to win their hearts and minds so that they would rather support their government and fight the Taliban instead of joining the Taliban to fight their government. If people like Rush Limbaugh—who seem to relish the idea of indiscriminate destruction—want that kind of war, they need to rethink their support of this one.

If we decided to do a Dresden-style carpet-bombing of Kabul, it would be like kicking the ball through our own goal-posts a thousand times over. Every last able-bodied Afghan civilian would take up arms against us, and the rest of the Muslim world would join them. The war would be over. The victory would belong to the Taliban, to Al Qaeda, and to every other militant or insurgent group that we’re supposedly waging ‘war’ against.

The fact is, ‘war’ as we know it seems to be coming to an end. This piece by Andrew Bacevich lays out this case perfectly, and it’s the biggest lesson that we could potentially learn from these leaked documents if our nation were to actually have a serious discussion about it.

The Media

Unfortunately we’re not going to have a serious discussion about the nature of war in the 21st century any time soon, thanks to the nature of the American mainstream media in the 21st century. The reaction to this leak has been every bit as pitiful as one would expect, and the media’s extreme deference to the established power-structure has seldom been more apparent. It’s as if every corporation within the military-industrial complex got together to feed their talking points not just to the White House but directly to the media organizations themselves.

“This is not news” was the headline from nearly every front. “Nothing to see here. No big revelations. This is only stuff we already know.” Jason Linkins and Ben Craw at the Huffington Post did a superb job of mashing together the reaction to the leaks from the White House and the media, which are barely distinguishable:

To be [extremely] fair to the White House and the media, this is a legitimate point. What has been revealed by the documents are merely the details behind the broader facts that we already knew if we’d been paying any attention.

But the best points are made right at the end of the clip, as Jon Stewart says “I’m not reacting to the newness of it, I’m reacting to the fucked-uppedness of it,” and Dennis Kucinich wonders why—if we already knew all of this—we haven’t been debating it for the last six years. This may not be new, but it’s fucked up stuff that calls for debate and frankly should have been debated every step of the way.

But these leaks don’t fit the proper time-table for the White House and the media. This is supposed to be election season, when everyone is talking about the economy and the impact it will have on the upcoming mid-terms. Afghanistan is not supposed to be among the election issues this year. The debate is supposed to happen next year when we approach the July 2011 deadline that Obama said would be when we begin our withdrawal.

But if things really are going as badly as the documents suggest, there’s no excuse not to have the debate right frickin now. This has been the single deadliest month of combat in Afghanistan since the war began. If we know the war is un-winnable, why let our soldiers continue to die for a lost cause? The sad truth is, our brave men and women overseas aren’t dying for national security or even for Afghan liberation anymore—they are dying for politics.

The Future

This is why organizations like WikiLeaks have such tremendous potential for the future of humanity on this planet. I’ve written extensively about the current precipice on which we stand, from which we can either sit idly by as civilization collapses and the human species faces extinction, or wake up and do what needs to be done to tear down the existing power structures and put something in their place that will allow for a peaceful, sustainable existence worldwide.

One of the biggest tools of the powerful is secrecy. The less the masses know about what the power-elites are doing, the less chance there is that we’ll be able to stop them. Certainly, as long as no one is held accountable, they won’t be afraid to make decisions that benefit the few at the expense of the many.

Case-in-point—we’re just now learning about what was said in behind-closed-door meetings regarding the escalation of the Vietnam War 40 years ago. Because the transcripts of these meetings were classified and everyone in the room knew they would remain classified for the next four decades, they didn’t have to worry about making mistakes or doing the right thing. They needed only do what they wanted to do or what it was in their best short-term political or financial interests to do—by the time anyone found out they’d either be dead or too old to bother prosecuting. Currently, the White House can make any decisions it wants with impunity because they don’t have to worry about being held accountable for another forty years.

WikiLeaks has the potential to change that. Had the person who leaked these documents online gone to an actual mainstream news organization, it’s likely the editors would have sat on the story. By putting it on WikiLeaks, they guaranteed that the story would get out there. WikiLeaks itself can’t be prosecuted for leaking the documents because it doesn’t exist within the jurisdiction of a particular country.

As Janine R. Wedel and Linda Keenan write, WikiLeaks can serve as a counter-weapon to the “Shadow Elite” who direct the course of world events. The people who benefit from the existing power structures, who profit from war and by sucking money from the middle class, can only get away with it as long as nobody is paying attention. If somebody at the highest echelons of power suddenly develops a conscience, WikiLeaks will be waiting.

Yes, there is the potential for some innocents to be harmed if leaks are made irresponsibly, but it’s a small price to pay for a much greater good.

I keep saying that the internet is the best chance we have to come together as a species and really change the way the world works from the ground up. So far we haven’t even come close to realizing that potential, but sites like WikiLeaks could go a long way towards bringing us to that goal. It can be one of the most powerful tools we have to fight back against the powerful, and I hope its influence continues to grow.

At the very least, it can help make up for what the mainstream media is missing, and force us to examine facts that would not have otherwise been reported. The facts about the war in Afghanistan almost all lead to the conclusion that our nation is doomed unless it starts withdrawing, so the more facts that come to light the more pressure there will be to do so. Neither the White House nor the leadership of either political party wants to deal with that pressure right now, but that’s too bad. The lives of our soldiers, the security of the Afghan people, the health of our economy, and the long-term interests of the human race depend on keeping that pressure as high as possible for as long as it takes.

Just a quick comment today on the upcoming repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. On last Friday’s episode of Countdown, author and strong gay-rights activist Dan Savage made an argument for repeal that I hadn’t considered before but which I think could actually get through to some hardcore conservatives no matter how homophobic they are.

If a soldier has to keep a secret from his fellow soldiers and commanding officers, that presents a security risk. If an outsider knows that secret, he or she can use it as leverage against the soldier. For instance, if a soldier beats up an Afghan civilian without provocation, that solider faces court-martial if anyone finds out. Witnesses to the event could use it against him, threatening to go to his commanding officer unless he looks the other way while they sell weapons to terrorists or something.

Being gay shouldn’t be something that anyone can hold against a soldier. By forcing gay soldiers to keep this a secret, the United States Army is handing over power to anyone—friend or enemy—who discovers that the soldier is gay. It may be unlikely but it’s not impossible that a gay soldier might let national security be compromised in order to protect his secret and keep his job.

It’s looking inevitable that repeal will happen this year, but there’s no harm in keeping pressure on Obama right now. As commander-in-chief he could, with a stroke of a pen, end implementation of the policy immediately and issue an order that no gay personnel are to be fired until the policy is repealed or the next president overrides his order. He almost certainly won’t do that because, as we all know, he has Foxnewsophobia and is too scared of Glenn Beck to do anything that might piss off conservatives. But every day that goes by in which gay soldiers have to be afraid of someone outing them is a day in which national security is a bit more compromised than it needs to be.

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The argument for American troops remaining in Afghanistan is essentially that Afghanistan needs our help. Without a strong U.S. military presence there, the Taliban will retake control, impose brutal Sharia law on all the citizens, and life for the Afghan people will be much worse than if we stay.

If that was all there was to it, I’d be saying we should stay. If we had the capability to really make Afghanistan a better country through our military presence, then I’d be the first to advocate intervening in their affairs. Not only that, but I’d also call for us to intervene in Somalia, Darfur, and everywhere else where people are suffering at the hands of brutal, corrupt, or nonexistent governments.

I’m not opposed to the idea of American Interventionism—I simply recognize that there is no “America” anymore, at least not in the sense that most people believe.

In the prophetic 1976 film Network, Paddy Chayefsky spells it out brilliantly in the pivotal scene in which network chairman Arthur Jensen explains to Howard Beale, his news-anchor-turned-crusader-for-America, how the world really works:

For those who still believe that America can and should spread its ideals throughout the world and bring peace and democracy to all, I would emphasize these words:

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels.

…

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

There is “America” and there is America. “America” is the land of the free, home of the brave, champion of human rights and individual liberty, and crusader for the rights of man worldwide. America, on the other hand, is a governmental structure which has made itself extremely well-suited to Big Business interests. Multi-national corporations can do extremely well by putting America to good use. Tax-loopholes, virtually no regulation, and the strongest military the world has ever seen.

The only flaw in Arthur Jensen’s speech is this:

And our children will live, Mr Beale, to see that perfect world in which there is no war nor famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit. In which all men will hold a share of stock.

In all fairness to Chayefsky, this is what the corporate titans who really control the world probably tell themselves to justify their actions—that when all the world is a business there will be no need for war. But they ignore one important thing: war is great business.

Military and defense contractors, oil companies, drug-lords, corrupt government officials, and a slew of multi-national corporations all stand to make loads of money through continued American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is their bidding that our troops are doing there. American interventionism is actually corporate interventionism conducted through America.

But what if “America” actually existed? What if, as a nation, we collectively decided to intervene in countries that needed our help? What if instead of deploying armies of soldiers equipped with guns and bombs, we deployed armies of doctors equipped with medical supplies?

If you have the time, I’d strongly recommending watching this clip from the Young Turks’ “Rethink Reviews” segment in which documentary-film critic Jonathan Kim discusses the film “Living in Emergency” (about Doctors Without Borders) with Cenk Uygur (discussion begins at 4:49):

Doctors Without Borders is a non-governmental organization that does exactly the kind of intervention I wish America would do—sending doctors into impoverished nations and war-zones to offer humanitarian assistance to the people who need it most.

For those of you without the time or patience to sit through the whole clip, here is what Doctors With Borders did in 2006 alone:

• Held more than 9 million out-patient consultations
• Hospitalized half a million patients
• Delivered 99,000 babies
• Treated 1.8 million people for malaria
• Treated 150,000 malnourished children
• Provided 100,000 people with HIV and AIDS retro-virus therapy
• Vaccinated 1.8 million people against meningitis
• Conducted 64,000 surgeries

They did this with a team of 20,000-26,000 doctors and nurses who work for free, either out of the goodness of their hearts or to pad their resumes. Either way, they do an amazing amount of good with an amazingly small amount of resources.

Here are the statistics that will blow your mind:

• In 2006, the United States spend about $2 billion per week in Iraq.
• Doctors Without Borders runs with a budget of about $400 million per year.
• For the price of a week in Iraq, we could have either funded Doctors Without Borders for five years, or quintupled the size of Doctors Without Borders and ran it for one year.

• It’s estimated that there are at most 100 Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, and we have about 100,000 soldiers there at a cost of about $1 million per soldier per year.
• This means we have about 1,000 troops per Al Qaeda member, which means we are spending $1 billion per Al Qaeda member.
• This amount of money would fund Doctors Without Borders for 2.5 years.
• National priorities: We can either chase one Al Qaeda member in Afghanistan for a year or fund Doctors Without Borders for two and a half years.

• This fiscal year, we’re spending $167 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan. This amount of money would fund Doctors Without Borders for 417.5 years.

Do I even need to spell it out? If the idea behind American Interventionism is to improve the lot of humanity on a global scale, there are far better ways of doing it than dropping bombs on civilians. If the main argument for staying in Afghanistan is that we’re helping the Afghan people, it is undeniable that the money could be spent in much wiser ways to help much more people. Not necessarily by funding Doctors Without Borders, but by modeling our overseas interventions as humanitarian rather than military campaigns.

Obviously, security is important and we need to have soldiers to protect the doctors we deploy as well as to support the national governments of countries threatened by violent insurgency. But right now the focus is far more on the cost of weapons than the cost of medical supplies.

The entire justification for the Global War on Terror is to fight the enemy overseas to keep America safe at home. But by making this an almost purely military endeavor, we’re only boosting the perception that America is an Empire and we’re occupying these foreign countries out of our own selfish interests. As such, more terrorists are recruited and we lose the support of allies who were otherwise willing to help us in the fight against violent extremism.

But if we spent the same amount of money on medicine and infrastructure as we do on weapons, the perception would be completely different. Our international image would be unassailable, and we’d once again be looked up to by the rest of the world with respect and admiration. What Muslim kid is going to strap on a bomb and blow himself up to fight the country that built his school or cured his father of a terminal illness? Terrorist organizations would find themselves obsolete within a matter of years.

Unfortunately, this is never going to happen, precisely because “America” as it was once understood no longer exists. We may be the most powerful nation-state on earth, but we’re not the most powerful entity. The multi-national corporations have all the power, and it’s in their best interests to keep the engines of war churning, to keep third-world nations impoverished, and to keep the peoples of the world divided, distrustful, and hateful of each other.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today.

You can’t meddle with the primal forces of nature.

Occasionally you come across something you hadn’t considered before and it really makes you look at things differently. Here I’d been living in Europe for two years and marveling at how much better their social programs are in comparison with America, never considering that America might be to thank.

Last week, Barney Frank and Ron Paul wrote a joint statement for the Huffington Post which received a lot of attention. They called for a reduction in America’s defense spending, pointing to the fact that the $693 billion Pentagon budget is greater than all other discretionary spending programs combined, and that even if you exclude the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, defense spending still constitutes 42% of total spending. Why?

Immediately after World War II, with much of the world devastated and the Soviet Union becoming increasingly aggressive, America took on the responsibility of protecting virtually every country that asked for it. Sixty-five years later, we continue to play that role long after there is any justification for it, and currently American military spending makes up approximately 44% of all such expenditures worldwide. The nations of Western Europe now collectively have greater resources at their command than we do, yet they continue to depend overwhelmingly on American taxpayers to provide for their defense. According to a recent article in the New York Times, “Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism. Europeans have benefited from low military spending, protected by NATO and the American nuclear umbrella.”

This is an interesting question—if the United States wasn’t paying for the defense of all these countries, how would life here change? Would they have to make up the difference and we’d suddenly see reductions in vacation time, later retirement ages and so on—or would they just choose not to spend much on defending themselves seeing as how there’s no longer a conventional military force that threatens them? Presumably the choice would ultimately be left to the voters, and I’d be terribly interested to see which side they came down on.

Because we know which side Americans come down on. This initiative by Frank and Paul is doomed to failure, because while there is no conventional military force threatening us, we sure as hell act like there is. Americans, thanks to ruling trifecta of corporations, politicians, and the media, are scared shitless and any talk of a reduction in defense spending sounds like an invitation to be invaded by the Red Army. Never mind that we’d be cutting our defense of other countries—this is too much nuance for the typical conservative voter.

But the argument is at least worth a try. Ask a conservative hawk why we have to spend money on other countries and cut spending on ourselves? Why should our retirement age go up so Europeans’ retirement age can go down? Why should our vacations be shorter so theirs can be longer?

When Obama announced his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan (or ‘surge’ if you prefer), he also said we would begin drawing down troop levels in July 2011, a move that most people see as more political than practical.

First off, the president said from the beginning that July 2011 was only when forces would begin to be brought home – which means he could conceivably bring back just a few thousand troops and still technically meet the deadline.

But more importantly, the White House and military have made clear the deadline can simply be changed depending on conditions on the ground. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said Thursday that if the strategy doesn’t look like it’s working at the end of the year, the military may recommend that the timeline be altered.

True, he may have been trying to placate both sides by giving the right their escalation and the left their timetable for withdrawal, but there’s a very practical benefit to having a deadline that hasn’t been getting much focus.

Rachel Maddow is in Afghanistan this week, and one of the things she keeps mentioning is the importance of the July 2011 deadline. It gives the Afghans a sense of urgency by sending them a message that our commitment is not open-ended. The U.S. Army is not going to be around to provide security forever, so if they don’t want the Taliban to take control they’d better step up their security efforts now.

John McCain doesn’t seem to understand this, or at least he’s pretending not to:

Leaving aside the fact that the withdrawal date is obviously not ‘firm’, just the idea of such a date supports rather than undermines the strategy. What would happen if we didn’t set a date? What if McCain were president and went with a strategy of announcing that the United States would remain in Afghanistan for as long as it takes—even a million years if necessary?

Our Afghan allies would have no sense of urgency to build up their army, police force, and infrastructure on their own. They’d simply get used to relying on the U.S. for everything.

And our enemies, who McCain thinks are now just waiting in their caves until July 2011, would have a much easier time recruiting if the announced policy of the U.S. was basically to occupy their land indefinitely. In fact, they already think that is our policy, and with good reason. Most of them are fighting us because we’re occupying them. I’m speculating, but I’d bet that none of them actually believe the U.S. has any intention of ever withdrawing. If they thought we really wanted to leave and give them their country back, there would be no reason for them to fight us now. But they are fighting us now, so we might as well announce a withdrawal date.

I’d like nothing more than for our mission to succeed and for Afghanistan to be able to govern and protect itself free from the threat of a Taliban takeover. I’m just not convinced that after 9 years, we’re capable of doing that job, and I’m not willing to go another 90.

Use this argument on anyone who still insists on “staying the course” in Afghanistan:

Hypothetical situation: It’s the year 2101 and the United States government has long since crumbled under the weight of its own corruption. Most authority is local, with most cities and towns controlled by Evangelical Christian Militias who aim to impose their own strict interpretation of Biblical Law across the entire country.

Meanwhile, China is the world’s sole super-power and is exterting its influence around the globe. Because they are seen as anti-Christian, the Evangelical Militia groups despise China and would like nothing more than to see it crumble. So they commit an act of terrorism which draws China into a war with the United States.

The Chinese army rolls in, takes out a big chunk of the Militia’s leadership, and sets up a new federal government with China’s full support.

But most Americans never see this government as legitimate, and the remnants of the Christian Militias rise and grow stronger as even non-Christians join them in their struggle to expel the foreign occupiers. On top of that, the latest presidential election is discovered to have been fraudulent, and the president himself is known to have ties to underground drug cartels. Yet the Chinese insist on continuing to back him up militarily.

The Chinese army won’t leave until the Evangelicals are defeated and the U.S. government is capable of supporting itself and preventing any Militias from ever rising again. Yet the Evangelical Militias remain very popular in many parts of the country and the Chinese are almost universally hated because their soldiers don’t speak English, have no understanding of American culture, and frequently kill innocent civilians through carelessness.

The question: Is it possible for China to succeed in its mission? Could it succeed after only one year? Ten years? A hundred years? Or is this the kind of task that is simply impossible to accomplish, like landing safely on the moon by shooting yourself from a cannon?

Obviously, in this analogy China is the United States. The United States is Afghanistan. The corrupt government is the Karzai regime. And the Evangelical Militias are the Taliban.

The United States is as likely to be able to succeed in Afghanistan–by our own definition of “success”–as China would be likely to be able to stabilize a corrupt U.S. government and completely root out right-wing Evangelicals.

So let’s get. the fuck. out of there.

[Full disclosure: I got this idea while watching Cenk Uygur and Jonathan Kim discuss the film "Restrepo" on last Friday's episode of The Young Yurks]

I’ve been reading a lot more conservative articles recently thanks to Twitter, where I don’t just follow other liberals but people like John Boehner and Sarah Palin as well. When a conservative Tweets a link to a conservative article, I like to check it out.

There’s been a lot more talk in conservative media this week about Iran than there has been in the liberal media. I’m not sure why that is, but these articles are giving the impression that we are currently teetering on the brink of some kind of armed conflict with Iran, possibly all-out war:

Just last Friday an armada of more than 12 U.S. and Israeli warships passed through the Suez canal amid extreme security provided by Egypt. The ships are headed for the Red Sea and from there to the Persian Gulf. Another four U.S. warships will be making their way to the region to join the Strike Group. The Americans have also conducted joint air and naval strike practices with France and the U.K. under the command of American forces, while Germany is sending warships to the area, also under the command of American forces.

This is from an article in Forbes entitled “There Will Be War“. I can’t help but wonder if the authors are saying that because they’re predicting it or because they want it. No doubt it’s what the neocons want: War on Terror, Part III. More money for the military industrial complex and private contractors, and more of an excuse to cut domestic spending back home: “Sorry, but we can’t keep paying unemployment benefits and bring democracy to Iran.”

There seems to be a consensus that the best way to bring a war-wary public around to their side is to frame it in terms of helping the Iranian people overthrow their government. They’re using the Green Revolution and the overwhelming support it had from Americans from across the political spectrum to their advantage. As though what the Green Revolution needs is the full public support of the American president.

In an editorial, Leon Wieseltier at the Washington Post writes:

Real realism consists of the recognition that nuclear peace and social peace in Iran will be reliably achieved only with the advent of democracy, and that since June 12, 2009, the advent of Iranian democracy is not an idle wish. Morally and strategically — this is one of those perplexities in which they go serendipitously together — President Obama’s refusal to strongly support the Iranian resistance against the Iranian tyranny is not prudent, it is perverse.

May I remind you that the American government is not too popular among the Iranian people? They’re still a little sore from all that Shah business 30 years ago, and the last thing either side needs if for America to be on their side.

Nothing will undermine the Green Revolution faster than strong supportive rhetoric from the American president. And if we give the neocons what they want and actually send troops there to help the Greens overthrow Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, it won’t be long before the Greens turn against us. Our track record of helping Middle Eastern countries to set up democratic governments isn’t exactly perfect. In the past ten years, we’re essentially 0 for 2. As much as I hope the Green Revolution succeeds, America does not need to get involved and make it 0 for 3.

What is it about Afghanistan that destroys every empire that tries to hold it? The Soviets, the British…all the way back to the time of Alexander the Great—empires have been destroyed by attempting to invade and occupy this desert.

The only reason the United States is in Afghanistan is because of the attacks on September 11, 2001. Al Qaeda wanted to draw America into a long and costly war that couldn’t be won, slowly draining our economy until we could simply no longer afford an empire. The way things are going, it’s looking like 9/11 will go down in history as the most successful terrorist attack of all time. Thanks to Bush’s knee-jerk reaction to the crisis and the inability of the neoconservatives surrounding him to come up with any response other than a military one, the perpetrators of the attack ended up getting exactly what they wanted.

Thanks to an explosive article in Rolling Stone this week in which General Stanley McChrystal shot himself in the foot with a few quotes undermining the civilian command, the media has once again shined the spotlight on Afghanistan. But in typical TV-news fashion, the focus has been almost exclusively on the personal drama between McChrystal and Obama, and almost no attention has been paid to the underlying issue of whether or not our strategy in Afghanistan can actually succeed.

It’s a shame that the bulk of this article, which is actually an extremely well-crafted look at the broader Afghanistan issue, has been ignored while all of the focus has been on the few sections in which McChrystal makes his controversial comments. So I’ll try and pick up the slack by commenting on a few passages speak to the larger story of what’s really going on there.

First of all, you have to understand the nature of our strategy. Proposed by McChrystal himself, the COIN (COunter-INsurgency) strategy would seem on the surface to actually have a chance of working:

COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation’s government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps.

Rather than just killing the “bad guys”, our soldiers would be there to help the civilians, win their hearts and minds, and get them to help us defeat Al Qaeda.

The problem, of course, is that we’re not really fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, for the most part, has moved to Pakistan, and in Afghanistan we’re mostly fighting insurgents who are opposed to U.S. military presence and the Karzai government. The Karzai government itself is notoriously corrupt and likely stole the last election. If this is the government we’re supposed to be defending, it’s no wonder so many Afghanis are against us. It would be as though we sent American troops to quash the Green Revolution in Iran last year after Ahmadinejad stole that election. By propping up Karzai, we’re basically propping up Afghanistan’s Ahmadinejad.

It’s a vicious cycle. Our presence there is a result of the violence, while the violence is a result of our presence there.

“The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people,” says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. “The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.”

Another problem with COIN is the lack of any clear picture of what victory would look like:

Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it’s going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. “It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win,” says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. “This is going to end in an argument.”

Case-in-point: Did we “win” the war in Iraq? Some say yes. Others laugh hysterically at those who say yes. The best case scenario is that the same will eventually go for Afghanistan, many years from now when our country is so broke that today’s economy will seem like the good old days.

Finally, COIN is terribly unpopular among the soldiers themselves:

Being told to hold their fire, soldiers complain, puts them in greater danger. “Bottom line?” says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers’ lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing.”

I don’t really agree with this sentiment because I think soldiers should hold their fire as much as possible, and all-too-often make excuses to shoot first and ask questions later, but if the soldiers actually carrying out the strategy are opposed to that strategy, chances of success are significantly lower.

When all is said and done, the simple question is whether or not we have a real chance of succeeding in Afghanistan. We’re just so busy wrestling with the question of what “success in Afghanistan” could actually mean that it’s impossible to make an accurate assessment of our chances. But the final paragraph of the Rolling Stone article paints a pretty grim picture:

After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse….So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word “victory” when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.

And now, thanks to that very article, Stanley McChrystal is no longer in charge. Obama tapped David Petraeus to carry out the COIN strategy, and as much respect as I and most Americans have for Petraeus (who was doing the right thing in Iraq long before the rest of the military caught on), a hopeless strategy is a hopeless strategy no matter who is in charge.

But I’ll end on a slightly optimistic note regarding General Petraeus. This may be our best opportunity to actually start pulling out of the grave before we’ve dug ourselves in too deep. Obama and the slew of Washington-insiders who surround him have bought into the conventional wisdom that ending the war would be political suicide. He’d be accused of weakness and of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Petraeus, on the other hand, is extremely popular particularly among conservatives. If he were to summon the testicular fortitude to tell the American people like it is—to say to Obama, “I’m sorry but this war can’t be won”—it would give the president exactly the cover he needs to pull out. Right-wing attacks would be blunted before they could even begin, as Obama could make it clear that he was only doing what General Petraeus recommended.

But if Petraeus behaves like a typical general and insists on continuing to fight at all costs, I’m afraid we’re going to be there for a long, long time. The grave we’re digging just keeps getting deeper, and unless someone in a position of power summons the courage to toss political expedience aside and do what’s necessary, it won’t be long before the American Empire finds itself buried beside all who came and failed before us.

Now that I’m blogging with greater frequency, I have to make predictions about the near future. My prediction that Obama wasn’t going to fire McChrystal, as it turns out, was wrong.

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Let this be a precedent–I’ll admit when I’m wrong, and I was wrong on this. I’d thought that Obama saw the Rolling Stone article as a mere nuisance, that he didn’t have the appetite for making any kind of major change to his approach in Afghanistan, and he’d only recalled McChrystal for the sake of public perception.

There is, however, another theory floating around that’s worth considering: McChrystal deliberately made those remarks in order to get himself relieved because he saw the writing on the wall–that the war in Afghanistan is a lost cause–and he wanted to get out now before the loss could be blamed on him.

Looks like it’s all on you now, Petraeus.

Well, not Afghanistan per se, but at least something to do with Afghanistan:

(CNN) — Gen. Stanley McChrystal, America’s top military commander in Afghanistan, has been recalled to Washington amid his controversial remarks about colleagues in a Rolling Stone article, officials said.

Apparently he cracked a little joke about Biden and said some less-than-flattering things about Obama. Now he’s been recalled to Washington, presumably to make his proper apologies for the sake of public perception.

Am I the only one who doesn’t give a shit? What would it take for CNN or any other major news organization to actually publish stories that have to do with what we’re actually doing in Afghanistan? You know–what our strategy is, how we’re going about implementing it, whether or not we’re succeeding, what to do if we’re not…that sort of thing.

Instead we only hear about Afghanistan when a general faints or cracks a joke in Rolling Stone. Here’s an idea: don’t just recall McChrystal to Washington–fire his ass completely. Put someone in who might be willing to tell it like it is, who has the guts to tell the president and the American people that this war can’t be won and it’s become nothing more than an endless drain on our economy as soldiers continue to lose their lives, Afghani civilians continue to be terrorized, President Karzai continues to run his corrupt, horribly unpopular government with our support, and Osama bin Laden continues to breathe the free air in fucking Pakistan.

Seriously, what the hell are we still doing there?

UPDATE: The whole article for Rolling Stone is up now, and it’s the best article I’ve read on the Afghanistan issue in months. This is how the rest of the media should be doing it.