Page 2 of 2 Ten steps to liquidate US bases
By Chalmers Johnson
Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been plagued
by inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both countries, ideological
preconceptions about which parties we should support and which ones we should
oppose, and myopic understandings of what we could possibly hope to achieve.
Fitzgerald and Gould, for example, charge that, contrary to our own
intelligence service's focus on Afghanistan, "Pakistan has always been the
problem." They add:
Pakistan's army and its Inter-Services Intelligence
branch ... from 1973 on, has played the key role in funding and directing first
the mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the 1980s] ... and then the
Taliban. It is Pakistan's army that controls its nuclear weapons, constrains
the development of democratic institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide
attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO [North Atlantic Treaty
Organization] soldiers protecting the Afghan government. (pg 322-324)
The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by
devout Muslims who fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of
their own agenda, though not necessarily to advance an Islamic jihad. Their
purposes have always included: keeping Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian
influence, providing a training and recruiting ground for mujahideen guerrillas
to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan and India),
containing Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of
Pakistan), and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Persian
Gulf emirates, and the United States to pay and train "freedom fighters"
throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan's consistent policy has been to support
the clandestine policies of the Inter-Services Intelligence and thwart the
influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.
Colonel Douglas MacGregor, US Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for
Defense Information in Washington, summarizes our hopeless project in South
Asia this way: "Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to
make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are
unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India."
Obama's mid-2009 "surge" of troops into southern Afghanistan and particularly
into Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly
reminiscent of General William Westmoreland's continuous requests in Vietnam
for more troops and his promises that if we would ratchet up the violence just
a little more and tolerate a few more casualties, we would certainly break the
will of the Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the nature of
the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.
Twenty years after the forces of the red army withdrew from Afghanistan in
disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, General Boris Gromov,
issued his own prediction: disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of
new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union's, which
lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we
are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never
understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.
3. We need to end the secret shame
of the empire of bases
In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and other
forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the US armed
forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight
as much as possible, is diminishing." He continued:
New data released
by the Pentagon showed an almost 9% increase in the number of sexual assaults -
2,923 - and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in
Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is
that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to
serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against
rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them.
The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases
located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them
like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls
by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture,
ever since our soldiers, marines and airmen permanently occupied it some 64
years ago.
That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the
end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape and attempted murder of a
12-year-old schoolgirl by two marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has
been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably
contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush
administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose
raw materials we covet.
The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers
or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often
racially biased and predatory troops. "The military's record of prosecuting
rapists is not just lousy, it's atrocious," writes Herbert. In territories
occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department
make strenuous efforts to enact so-called Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs)
that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops
who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to
spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local
authorities.
This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a
long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the
aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at
Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and US
authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the
victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police.
Meanwhile, the US discharged the suspect from the navy but allowed him to
escape Japanese law by returning him to the US, where he lives today.
In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered
that almost 50 years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American
governments signed a secret "understanding" as part of their SOFA in which
Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of "national
importance to Japan". The US argued strenuously for this codicil because it
feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per
year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.
Since that time, the US has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada,
Ireland, Italy and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting
Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout
the world, with predictable results.
In Japan, of 3,184 US military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and
2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a
strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military
personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in US
custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to
spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged.
Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the
Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket
Books, 2007), speaks of the "culture of unpunished sexual assaults" and the
"shockingly low numbers of courts martial" for rapes and other forms of sexual
attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women
Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009
Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military
are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the
perpetrator are negligible.
It is fair to say that the US military has created a worldwide sexual
playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the
consequences of their behavior. As a result a group of female veterans in 2006
created the Service Women's Action Network. Its agenda is to spread the word
that "no woman should join the military".
I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our
standing army, and bring the troops home from countries where they do not
understand their environments and have been taught to think of the inhabitants
as inferior to themselves.
Ten steps toward liquidating the empire
Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are
10 key places to begin:
1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases
planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any
responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.
2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases
and so of the "opportunity costs" that go with them - the things we might
otherwise do with our talents and resources but can't or won't.
3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of
torture. In the 1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in
Brazil and Chile and underwrote regimes of torture that prefigured our own
treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See, for instance, A J
Langguth, Hidden Terrors - Pantheon, 1979 - on how the US spread torture
methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a
real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.
4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents,
civilian employees of the Department of Defense and hucksters - along with
their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools,
clubs, golf courses and so forth - that follow our military enclaves around the
world.
5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex
that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific
research and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by
serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.
6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world's
largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World
militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups and service as proxies
for our imperialism. A prime candidate for immediate closure is the so-called
School of the Americas, the US Army's infamous military academy at Fort
Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson, The
Sorrows of Empire, Metropolitan Books, 2004, pp 136-40.)
7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the
Reserve Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote
militarism in our schools.
8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by
radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military
companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and
the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise
of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Nation Books, 2007).
Ending empire would make this possible.
9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much
more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they
undergo.
10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate
reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign
policy objectives.
Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in
order to remain independent, self-governing polities. The two most important
recent examples are the British and Soviet empires. If we do not learn from
their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.
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