War Handwavium

Winning Hearts and Minds again

http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/2012/01/our-take-on-marines-urinating-on-taliban/

http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/2011/03/thoughts-on-the-american-kill-squad-photographs/

I kept having to check the date on this article

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html

to make sure it wasn’t published April 1.

The gist of it is that the US government say they discovered about a Trillion dollars worth of mineral deposits in Afghanistan. There is so much valuable minerals there that Afghanistan could turn into the biggest mining center in the world.

On some level, I suppose this shouldn’t be entirely unexpected. Afghanistan is, on one level, just a bunch of rocks, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that some of them are valuable.

What’s worrysome is how the US government seems to be reacting to this find. They seem to be under the impression that money, for lack of a better word, is good, money is right, and that money will solve all your problems, whatever they might be. They act as if winning the lottery is a guaranteed good thing.

And I just thought I’d point out that about a third of all lottery winners declare bankruptcy within five years.

http://www.milwaukeemagazine.com/currentIssue/full_feature_story.asp?NewMessageID=13120

I’d also point out that one country famous for its mineral deposits is South Africa and much of those riches helped keep the unjust apartheid system in place there. The Shah ruled Iran from 1953 to 1979 while his country was one of the biggest oil producers in the world. The Shah’s government was also considered one of the most cruel governments in the world. His secret police snatched people off the street and might torture a person for years without any kind of due process.

Meanwhile power in Afghanistan is currently split between a weak and ineffectual central government that may very well win the award for “Most Corrupt 2001-2011″ on one side, numerous local warlords who make all their money growing opium on another side, and a group of religiously motivated war lords also known as the Taliban on the third side.

Throw a trillion dollar lottery ticket into that totally dysfunctional family and, really, what could possibly go wrong?

There are two main problems associated with the central government in Afghanistan: It is totally corrupt and it is totally useless.

One of the reasons the locals do not support the central government is simply because supporting the central government offers them nothing in return. The government is too poor and ineffectual to provide infrastructure like roads, schools, medical care, what have you. And on top of that, the central government is corrupt, so supporting them means you’ve got to support a corrupt system. So most locals just keep to their own.

A trillion dollar lottery ticket could change at least one part of the dynamic. It could give the central government enough cash that they could start paying for infrastructure throughout the rest of the country. Roads. Schools. Hospitals. Water. What have you.

The problem though is that for that to happen, you’ve got to get rid of the corruption in the central government. If you don’t, what’s more likely to happen is that the locals will see a corrupt central government taking an unfair piece of the pie to enrich themselves, and the locals might just decide to try and take it back.

Before, there really wasn’t anything to fight over. Most warlords simply wanted to maintain whatever power they had, and they funded their military by growing opium.

Now, there’s a huge chunk of money to fight over, and apparently its spread throughought several different regions of Afghanistan, meaning the locals aren’t going to be too happy if they see the central government come in, take all their minerals and keep the money for themselves.

At which point, the warlords might decide there’s something worth fighting over.

I would hope that the US government sees that giving a Trillion dollar lottery ticket to such a dysfunctional family as Afghanistan may only make things much worse.

And since the central government is seen as a puppet of the US, any abuses and misuses committed by the central government over this money will be seen as abuse and misuse by the US.

We can either let a corrupt government abuse its power and take all the wealth for itself while screwing the locals and possibly have an Afghanistan Revolution like the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that overthrew the Shah, or we can clean up our puppet government in Afghanistan and maybe, just maybe, this wealth will transform Afghanistan into a peaceful family.

For those failing to grasp the situation in Afghanistan, sometimes it helps to try to describe it as plainly as possible, and sometimes it helps to describe it metaphorically using something you’re already familiar with.

Plain explanation: The central government in Afghanistan is corrupt. The president stole the last election. His brother may be on CIA payroll while dealing drugs and guns. The central government provides no benefits for those in the tribal regions. And to get anything done in the bureacracy, one has to resort to bribes at every level. The local warlords see no benefit to supporting the central government, and many see it as nothing more than an American puppet, just like it was a Soviet puppet in the 80′s.

Metaphorical explanation: Seperatists and survivalists in America distrust the Federal Government. They view it as corrupt, they view it as wanting to take their power away, they view it as a threat. America now has a number of private militias who are heavily armed and don’t like the federal government.

Clear so far?

In Afghanistan, American forces have occasionally fired on and killed Afghan civilians. American Predator drones have attacked wedding parties, destroyed houses with children in them, and while the generals talk loudly about the al-queda leaders they’ve killed, they don’t talk so loud about the civilians they’ve killed to get to these leaders.

What’s the metaphorical equivalent for this?

I’m starting to think that maybe the best way to describe this is to equate it to the incident at Ruby Ridge in 1992.

The basic version of Ruby Ridge: The federal government charged Randy Weaver with a weapons violation (alleging he had sold an informant an illegal sawed-off shotgun). The courts sent Weaver a letter informing of his court date, but the letter had the wrong date on it, telling Weaver he was supposed to be in court in March, when the real date was February. When Weaver failed to show up in February, the courts issued a warrant for Weaver’s arrest. Weaver believed there was a conspiracy against him and refused to leave his cabin. Marshall’s tried to talk him out but he refused.

By August, Federal marshalls approached the property at night to install cameras to observe the cabin in preparation for a raid. Weaver’s dogs started barking. Kevin Harris (a friend of Weaver) and Weaver’s son, 14 year old Daniel, came out of the cabin with rifles. The marshall’s retreated for a while, but then set up defensive positions. The exact order isn’t clear, but by the time it was over, a dog, a marshall, and Daniel were all dead.

The next day, the Federal government sent in snipers and armored personel carriers, and the rules of engagement were given as shoot-on-sight any adult with a weapon. A federal sniper shot Randy Weaver in the back and then fired a second shot through a closed door, which ended up striking the wife, Vicki Weaver, in the head killing her, and hitting Randy Weaver in the chest. Vicki was holding a baby when she was shot dead.

Within a few days, the rules of engagement were changed and shoot-on-sight was revoked. Civilian negotiators eventually got the Weavers to surrender by August 30.

The Weaver family filed a wrongful death suit. To avoid trial and a possibly higher settlement, the federal government awarded Randy Weaver a $100,000 settlement and his three daughters $1 million each in August 1995. FBI director Louis Freeh disciplined a number of FBI employees and told a senate hearing “law enforcement overreacted at Ruby Ridge”.

So, now it’s been established that the central government is corrupt and goes around murdering people. At least according to the local tribes.

And what happens as a result?

19 April 1995, Timothy McVeigh and a bunch of armed, right-wing extremists bomb the federal building in Oklahoma, killing 168 innocent people. The attack came on the second anniversary of the Waco Seige, but McVeigh also cited Ruby Ridge as a justification for his attack as well.

Now, expand this to a much larger scale, make the central government completely corrupt and ineffective, turn the local armed militias into warlords and their own private armies, and you have something on par with Afghanistan.

The United States is not going to stop right wing extremists in America by creating more Ruby Ridge type incidents or by creating more Waco type incidents.

And the US isn’t going to achieve any kind of real peace in Afghanistan by bombing wedding parties and killing bystanders.

To stamp out the McVeigh’s in America, the government must operate with the most extreme care to make sure they don’t create more innocent deaths and give some paranoid angry nutjob a warped justification to murder more people.

In Afghanistan, America must operate with extreme care to make sure that we don’t kill civilians and create recruiting posters for the Taliban and Al Queda. But more importantly, and more problematically, America must at some point realize that its very presence as a foreign occupying army is a recruiting poster.

So, Obama’s claimed plan for Afghanistan is to raise US troop levels to 100k or more for a couple years and in that time train several hundred thousand Afghans to be part of a centralized military/police force.

There’s only one problem with that. No wait, there are a LOT of problems with that. But the two biggies are this: First, Afghans don’t think of themselves as Afghans. They think of themselves as whatever tribe they belong to, and they view the central government as nothing more than a puppet imposed by a foreign invading army, which, well, it is. They view themselves as Pashtuns or Hazzaras, and they don’t give a damn about “Afghanistan”, because “Afghanistan” isn’t their country, it’s the label that we are trying to force on them.

The second problem with Obama’s plan is that everyone over there gets stoned on hash and opium on a daily basis. Drugs is a major source of income over there, and its a major passtime for a lot of people over there. It’s part of their culture. It’s also pretty much something to be expected in ANY location where people are living on a few dollars a month.

And we expect to train hundreds of thousands of these tribal people to care about a country that doesn’t exist to them and care about that country more than they care about their own tribe? We expect to create an army that serves the central (and very corrupt) government in Afghanistan out of separate tribal members whose daily pastime is to get high?

These guys may be smoking dope, but Obama is smoking crack if he seriously thinks this plan will work.

More likely what is going to happen is Obama will send the 30k troops, we will create an artificial “victory” condition, declare victory, and withdraw our troops.

The only part of the discussion of Afghan policy more awkwardly missing from the calculations that there is no Afghanistan, is that all the men there– yes, all of them– are stoned all day, every day on the strongest hash (much of it opiated) on God’s earth.

– from Down With Tyranny.

Something else to keep in mind about Afghanistan:

we call them Afghans, and they don’t even call themselves Afghans. They’re Tajiks or they’re Pashtuns, or they’re Hazzaras or someone else. The things that hold them together are simply the things that we try to create artificially.

–Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL)

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2009/10/alan-grayson-explains-best-policy-for.html

Via digby:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/everybody-must-get-stoned-by-digby.html

Matthew Hoh is the first known US official to resign over the strategy of the Afghanistan conflict.

Year: troop levels in Afghanistan (year: troop levels in Vietnam)

2001: 1,300 (1959: 760)

2002: ? (1960: 900)

2003: 10,000 (1961: 3,025)

2004: 17,000 (1962: 11,300)

2005: 20,000 (1963: 16,300)

2007: 26,000 (1964: 23,300)

2008: 31,000 (1965: 184,300)

2009: 82,000 (1966: 385,300) (Obama sent 20,000 in the summer and approved 30,000 in December)

General McChrystal’s 2009 report estimates Afghanistan will need 500,000 troops over the next 5 years.

2010: ? (1967: 485,600)

2011: ? (1968: 536,100)

2012: ? (1969: 475,200)

2013: ? (1970: 334,600)

2014: ? (1971: 156,800)

McCrystal’s 2009 report estimates that troop withdrawal will occur around this time.

2015: ? (1972: 24,200)

2016: ? (1973: 50)

Anyone else see a pattern???

http://www.warhw.com/2009/08/10/us-troop-levels-in-afghanistan-by-year/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-andrews/classified-mcchrystal-rep_b_298528.html

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/U.S._Troop_levels_in_Vietnam_War

P.T. Barnum said there’s a sucker born every minute. He proved it by putting a sign up at his carnival that said “See the Great Egress” and then took money from people as they exited (egressed) from his show.

Obama is about to give a speech outlining his plan for Afghanistan. He’s giving the speech at the U.S. Military Academy, suggesting that he might be giving General Patraeus most or all of the troops he requested.

But the question is whether or not Obama has any kind of strategy for victory, and a strategy for exiting Afghanistan, or if he views a troop increase as a political delaying action to put off the serious decisions until after elections, or maybe it’s a “tough” approach to take some heat off health care reform until HRC gets through and is signed into law. Even after Obama’s Tuesday speech, we may still not know what’s really going on in his head.

The current approach appears to be heading towards the idea of (1) increasing troops to put pressure on the Taliban. This increased pressure will then (2) nudge Taliban who are not die-hard loyalists to Al-Queda to consider switching sided if we pay them money. If successful, the sudden drop in Taliban can be declared a “victory” at which point the US can “withdraw with honor”, meaning Obama won’t have his own Vietnam hanging around his neck by 2010.

But that’s a bit of American-made nonsense, really. If the Taliban are really fighting for money, then even if we withdraw, we will have to keep paying them money indefinitely, even after we withdraw, lest Afghanistan become a terrorist haven again. And the only people who believe it are people who believe “they hate us for our freedom”.

Most Afghans are fighting American troops for the same reason Afghans fought the Soviets in the 80′s: Because they don’t like foreigners invading and occupying their land.

i.e. Wolverines!

What may transpire is that we pay off the Taliban to stop fighting us long enough to declare “victory”, then we withdraw most American troops. Once we withdraw our troops, most Afghans will cease to have a reason to join an insurgency, because there won’t be any foreign invaders to fight.

The hawks who think they hate us for our freedom will think they stopped hating us because we beat them until they loved us. But what really happened is we will have paid them to stop fighting us long enough to declare “victory” and once we withdraw, they won’t have any reason to fight us, and we won’t have to keep paying them.

We’ll have to see how the speech goes. And after that, we’ll have to see how reality goes.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091130/wl_time/08599194336200

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1914224,00.html?xid=feed-yahoo-full-world-related

The American military base in Bagram Afghanistan has a prison that some call Guantanamo’s evil twin. While America is busy making the motions about shutting down the prison in Guantanamo, it’s expanding the prison in Bagram. And people who have been held in Bagram say they were tortured. Meanwhile the US military refuses even to release a list of names of the prisoners it is holding there, let alone allow them lawyers or due process.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/11/20091115114337109563.html

Good article that gives a glimpse of just how corrupt the central government (the government the US supports) really is.

http://www.salon.com/news/afghanistan/index.html?story=/news/feature/2009/11/17/afghanistan_corruption