Page 2 of 2 Whistling past the Afghan graveyard By Tom Engelhardt
dispelled, even now that the American economy has gone over its own cliff.
Under the rubric of the Global War on Terror, they insisted that the greatest
danger to the planet's "sole superpower" came from a ragtag group of fanatics
backed by the relatively modest money a rich Saudi could get his hands on.
Indeed, while the Bush administration paid no attention whatsoever, bin Laden
had launched a devastating and televisually spectacular set of assaults on
major American landmarks of power - financial, military, and (except for the
crash of Flight 93 in a field in Pennsylvania) political. Keep in mind,
however, that those attacks had been launched as much from Hamburg and Florida
as from the Afghan backlands.
Given the history of the graveyard, Americans should probably have locked their
plane doors, put in some reasonable protections domestically, and taken their
time going after bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was certainly capable of doing real harm
every couple of years, but their strength remained minimal, their "caliphate" a
joke, and Afghanistan - for anyone but Afghans - truly represented the
backlands of the planet. Even now, we could undoubtedly go home and, disastrous
as the situation there (and in Pakistan) has become under our ministrations, do
less harm than we're going to do with our prospective surges in the years to
come.
The irony is that, had they not been so blinded by triumphalism, Bush's people
really wouldn't have needed to know much to avoid catastrophe. This wasn't
atomic science or brain surgery. They needn't have been experts on Central
Asia, or mastered Pashto or Dari, or recalled the history of the anti-Soviet
War that had ended barely a decade earlier, or even read the prophetic November
2001 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, "Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires", by
former CIA station chief in Pakistan Michael Bearden, which concluded: "The
United States must proceed with caution - or end up on the ash heap of Afghan
history."
They could simply have visited a local Barnes & Noble, grabbed a paperback
copy of George MacDonald Fraser's rollicking novel Flashman, and
followed his blackguard of an anti-hero through England's disastrous Afghan War
of 1839-1842 from which only one Englishman returned alive. In addition to a
night's reading pleasure, that would have provided any neo-con national
security manager with all he needed to know when it came to getting in and out
of Afghanistan fast.
Or subsequently, they could have spent a little time with the Russian
ambassador to Kabul, a KGB veteran of the Soviet Union's Afghan catastrophe. He
complained to John Burns of the New York Times last year that neither Americans
nor NATO representatives were willing to listen to him, even though the US had
repeated "all of our mistakes", which he carefully enumerated. "Now," he added,
"they're making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the
copyright."
True, the Obama crew at the White House, the National Security Council, the
State Department, the Pentagon, and in the US military, even holdovers like
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Centcom Commander David Petraeus, are not
the ones who got us into this. Yes, they are more realistic about the world.
Yes, they believe - and say so - that we're, at best, in a stalemate in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, that it's going to be truly tough sledding, that it
probably will take years and years, and that the end result won't be victory.
Yes, they want some "new thinking", some actual negotiations with factions of
the Taliban, some kind of a grand regional bargain, and above all, they want to
"lower expectations".
As Gates summed things up in congressional testimony recently:
This is
going to be a long slog, and frankly, my view is that we need to be very
careful about the nature of the goals we set for ourselves in Afghanistan. ...
If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian
Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of
time, patience and money.
Okay, in Norse mythology, Valhalla
may be the great hall for dead warriors and the Secretary of Defense may have
meant an "Asian Eden", but cut him a little slack: at least he acknowledged
that there were financial limits to the American role in the world. That's a
new note in official Washington, where global military and diplomatic policy
have, until now, existed in splendid isolation from the economic meltdown
sweeping the country and the planet.
Similarly, official Washington is increasingly willing to talk about a
"multi-polar world", rather than the unipolar fantasy planet on which the
first-term Bush presidency dwelled. Its denizens are even ready to imagine a
relatively distant moment when the US will have "reduced dominance", as Global
Trends 2025, a futuristic report produced for the new President by the National
Intelligence Council, put it. Or as Thomas Fingar, the US intelligence
community's "top analyst", suggested of the same moment:
[T]he US will
remain the pre-eminent power, but that American dominance will be much
diminished over this period of time ... [T]he overwhelming dominance that the
United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political,
economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an
accelerating pace with the partial exception of military.
Still,
it's a long way from fretting about finances, while calling for more dollars
for the Pentagon, to imagining that we already might be something less than the
dominant hegemon on this planet, or that the urge to tame the backlands of
Afghanistan, half a world from home, makes no sense at all. Not for us, not for
the Afghans, not for anybody (except maybe al-Qaeda).
For all their differences with Bush's first-term neo-cons, here's what the
Obama team still has in common with them - and it's no small thing: they still
think the US won the Cold War. They still haven't accepted that they can't,
even if in a subtler fashion than the Busheviks, control how this world spins;
they still can't imagine that the United States of America, as an imperial
power, could possibly be heading for the exits.
Whistling past the graveyard
Back in 1979, national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, plotting to draw
the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan, wrote president Jimmy Carter: "We
now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."
In fact, the CIA-backed anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan that lasted through
the 1980s would give the Soviets far worse. After all, while the Vietnam War
was a defeat for the US, it was by no means a bankrupting one.
In 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev vividly described the Afghan War as a
"bleeding wound". Three years later, by which time it had long been obvious
that transfusions were hopeless, the Soviets withdrew. It turned out, however,
that the bleeding still couldn't be staunched, and so the Soviet Union, with
its sclerotic economy collapsing and "people power" rising on its peripheries,
went down the tubes.
Hand it to the Bush administration, in the last seven-plus years the US has
essentially inflicted a version of the Soviets' "Afghanistan" on itself. Now
the Obama team is attempting to remedy this disaster, but what new thinking
there is remains, as far as we can tell, essentially tactical. Whether the new
team's plans are more or less "successful" in Afghanistan and on the Pakistani
border may, in the end, prove somewhat beside the point. The term Pyrrhic
victory, meaning a triumph more costly than a loss, was made for just such
moments.
After all, more than a trillion dollars later, with essentially nothing to show
except an unbroken record of destruction, corruption, and an inability to build
anything of value, the US is only slowly drawing down its 140,000-plus troops
in Iraq to a "mere" 40,000 or so, while surging yet more troops into
Afghanistan to fight a counter-insurgency war, possibly for years to come. At
the same time, the US continues to expand its armed forces and to garrison the
globe, even as it attempts to bail out an economy and banking system evidently
at the edge of collapse. This is a sure-fire formula for further disaster -
unless the new administration took the unlikely decision to downsize the US
global mission in a major way.
Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and
Pakistan the question is no longer whether the US is in command, but whether it
can get out in time. If not, when the moment for a bailout comes, don't expect
the other pressed powers of the planet to do for Washington what it has been
willing to do for the John Thains of our world. The Europeans are already
itching to get out of town. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the
Indians ... who exactly will ride to our rescue?
Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in graveyards. They are,
after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of
The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. He
also edited
The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso,
2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative
history of the mad Bush years.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
