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November 25, 2009

Obama to Announce Afghan Escalation Plan Dec. 1st

Administration officials say President Obama will unveil his decision on sending tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan next week. Obama is expected to announce the plan in a prime-time address next Tuesday night. At the White House yesterday, Obama said he intends to “finish the job” in Afghanistan. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Christian Parenti, journalist who has reported extensively from Afghanistan.

AMY GOODMAN: Christian Parenti, you recently returned from Afghanistan. You’ve covered Afghanistan for a long time. This is switching gears, but I want to ask about the leak that came out of the last war council meeting of President Obama, where it is clear he will be calling for expansion of war in Afghanistan and an increase in the number of troops by tens of thousands. I wanted to get your take on this.

CHRISTIAN PARENTI: I think this is utter insanity, along with being morally reprehensible if you think about all of the people that will be killed along the way. I think this is political insanity for the Obama administration. I think the fundamental issue driving Obama in Afghanistan is fear of being called a wimp here in the United States by Republicans. We saw there was a division within the administration with the Eikenberry leak, Ambassador Eikenberry who was the general who ran the war for NATO less than two years ago, saying we should not endorse McChrystal’s escalation, and Vice President Joe Biden suggesting that we essentially, I would see it as, re-brand the wars to counter-insurgency but counter-terrorism and essentially withdraw and save face by bombing people using drones from the air. You can see their elements within the a ministration that realizes this is crazy. Why is it crazy? Because there is no way the U.S. can win, “Get the job done,” as Obama says. What is the job exactly? To rebuild a Afghanistan? The country is one of the most underdeveloped in the world. It is covered with land mines, to pick up on the last guest, and the governments there is so thoroughly fundamentally corrupt, that it is beyond redemption.

The news that broke recently that Hamid Karzai’s younger half-brother, Walid Karzai, former governor of Kandahar, was involved in the drug trade was old news in Afghanistan. Everybody knew that. Not because some secret report had been leaked, but because if you drove past the man’s land outside Kandahar, during the right seasons, you could see that it was covered in poppy. The rest of the Cabinet are similarly heavily involved if not in drug trafficking, but many of them are involved in drug trafficking, taxing the production of opium. Every ministry in the Afghan government is riddled with corruption. Civil servants pay to have their jobs. Every transaction between the citizens and the state is mediated through bribery. And as a result, people are increasingly embittered, no services are provided, the vast majority of aid is stolen.

The most recent example from this week is the ministry of Haj, where the Afghan minister recently was stealing money from the Afghan budget, $70 million, $20 million apparently he took. And shaking down the landlords in Saudi Arabia to channel Afghan pilgrims to their accommodations. So, this is the nature of the government that the Obama administration is going to try and build up. It is utterly impossible, and I think they realize this, but I think what Obama wants to do, because he ran on the getting out of Iraq by winning the good war in Afghanistan, and has performed that myth to the point he cannot back out of it, that he is going to make an effort to show he’s done due diligence and escalate the war, have more American soldiers maimed and killed, kill more Afghan civilians, and degrade the political situation further in that country so instability further ratchets out, further, deeper into Pakistan, deeper into Central Asia and deeper into Iran, and then try and get reelected and after that, claim victory and withdraw. It’s tragic and totally shortsighted.

Its also important to remember the history here. This is the second round of U.S. intervention. The U.S. helped create the problem by supporting the Mujahideen during the 1980’s to oppose the Soviet occupying troops and the Afghan Communist Government that was there. And Gulbuddin Hekmatyar running the party Hezb-e Islami that is allied with the Taliban, was the largest recipient of U.S. aid during those days. The Haqqanis also were U.S.-supported Mujahideen, they’re also part of the Taliban forces, broadly defined. And ironically, many of the people who now run the—for example the national security director to the Afghan police-–are former Communists.

The Communists in many ways in Afghanistan represented the urban classes, who for almost 100 years had been trying to impose the writ of Kabul upon the countryside, and there was a conflict between the urban elites and the rural elites. At first the ideology of the day was constitutional monarchy, then after the coup in 1973, it was republic—nationalist republicanism, then after the communist coup of ‘78, it became communism. Now, with the NATO invasion, its liberal democracy and capitalism. Actually there been elements of the same population, sometimes the same people, pursuing the same essential project.

And the ideological question for many of these folks in Kabul is, does the ideology come with electricity and paved roads? Because if it does, that is what we want. Conversely, out in the countryside, you have the warlords/armed landlords who since the 1920’s have been opposing any kind of modernization. They might approve of a paved road, but they do not want the central state to stop them from taxing traffic on it. They do not want the state to tell them to send their girls to school. They may want wells drilled or other resources, but they don’t want to pay taxes or relinquish any of their control over pay taxes over their tenant farmers and over their local resources. So this is one of the basic farmers that undergirds this war. There’s another conflict which is the conflict between the Pashtun of the south and the ethnic minorities of the north, the Tajiks, the Hazars and others….

AMY GOODMAN: Christian Parenti, we are going to have to leave it there, but we will certainly continue the discussion because President Obama is expected to announce the escalation of war in Afghanistan.

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