Obama told reporters Monday that he had emphasised to Karzai in a phone call to congratulate him on his re-election that there would have to be “a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption” and that “the proof is not going to be in words, it’s going to be in deeds”.

The New York Times reported the day after the Obama-Karzai conversation that the Obama administration wants Karzai to prosecute certain high-profile figures who are known to be involved in corruption. The story referred to the president’s brother, Kandahar warlord Ahmed Wali Karzai, former defence minister Muhammad Qasim Fahim and Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.

And on Wednesday, Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Karzai must “take concrete steps to eliminate corruption”, adding it means “you have to rid yourself of those who are corrupt, you have to actually arrest and prosecute them”.

The new public rhetoric and press stories have given the impression that the Obama administration is now pursuing far-reaching reform of Afghanistan’s system of governance. But the sudden intensification of administration pressure on the issue of corruption is aimed less at far-reaching reform of the system than at avoiding a significant worsening of the problem in the wake of Karzai’s fraudulent re-election.

In return for their pledges to guarantee huge majorities for Karzai in the Aug. 20 election, the Afghan president had to make promises to a number of power brokers or warlords in the provinces. Some of those were promised key ministries in the next government, according to Gilles Dorronsoro, a specialist on Afghanistan at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The main concern in Kabul and Washington in the wake of Karzai’s reelection is how many of the warlords to whom Karzai is indebted will be rewarded with ministries when the new cabinet is announced,

“Everybody who supported Karzai now expects their payback,” said Dorronsoro, who spent the entire month of August in Afghanistan.

It is understood that the Obama administration’s pressure on Karzai over the corruption issue is aimed in large part at heading off the nomination of some of the most incompetent and corrupt warlords to key ministries, and that Karzai is aware of this U.S. concern.

It now seems very likely, however, that some lucrative ministries will be given to warlord allies of Karzai.

Dorronsoro believes the administration’s influence on Karzai’s new government is going to be constrained by Karzai’s dependence on provincial and sub-provincial warlords who control the actual levers of power outside Kabul. The U.S. pressure on Karzai “can only work on a few ministries and a few issues”, he told IPS.

It is understood here that administration officials are well aware of the political constraints on Karzai imposed by the power of warlords in the provinces. They understand that reforming the governance system of Afghanistan cannot be achieved simply by leaning on Karzai.

“There is no Afghan government in the way there is an American government,” counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen observed on a panel at the U.S. Institute of Peace last August. “There are only a series of fiefdoms.”

Kilcullen cited those warlord fiefdoms, and the lack of law and order that accompanies them, as the main driver of popular support for the Taliban insurgency.

The power of the warlords, which U.S. policy abetted by providing them with cash, arms and legitimacy in the wake of the overthrow of the Taliban regime, poses serious obstacles to any U.S. initiative aimed at reducing corruption.

Although U.S. commander Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal warned that U.S. ties with regional power brokers have alienated much of the Afghan population from foreign troops, U.S. and NATO military contingents remain heavily dependent on them for provision of perimetre security for their fixed bases and to protect supply convoys, as IPS reported last week.

Even the idea of prosecuting the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai over his role in the drug trade is likely to generate disagreement within the administration, because the CIA’s operations directorate continues to use his paramilitary organisation for intelligence and counterinsurgency operations.

There is no evidence that the administration is moving toward a more aggressive posture toward the warlords in general. Instead, the problem is viewed as one in which U.S. interests in supporting the central government must be balanced with its interests in cooperation with provincial and sub-provincial power holders, IPS has learned.

National security officials tend to believe, for example, that the way to handle the problem of abuses by the militia personnel and police affiliated with individual warlords is not to take on the warlords but to do more to train national police.

Despite the flurry of activity on the corruption issue, the administration still hasn’t decided what approach it should adopt to promote governance and anti-corruption reforms. Several different options are said to be still under discussion.

One of the approaches being proposed by some officials is to get Karzai to agree to a detailed plan of action which would involve both the United States and other states heavily involved in Afghanistan, as reported by McClatchy Monday.

The report referred to the plan as the “Afghanistan Compact” and said the administration had been working with the Karzai government and other allied governments “for months”, according to McClatchy.

But an intelligence official told McClathchy he was doubtful about such a compact, because it would require Karzai to renege on promises he had made to his warlord allies.

A previous “Compact on Afghanistan”, which was agreed to by the Karzai government and 50 other states at a conference in London on Feb. 1, 2006, has been an embarrassing failure.

That document included benchmarks for progress in bringing about the rule of law, human rights, public administration reform and “anti-corruption”, among other areas, by the end of 2010. In those politically sensitive areas, however, the Karzai regime not only did not deliver on the 2006 pledges but has even retrogressed on many of the targets.

Some officials are suggesting that the administration avoid using the term “compact” altogether, because of the well-known fate of the previous effort.

One of the problems associated with trying to get Karzai to do anything about governance and corruption, IPS has learned, is that it has taken months in the past to work out any agreement with Karzai on any politically sensitive issue. There is now a sense in the administration, however, that it may not have that much time to have an impact on Karzai’s behaviour.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

— Voltaire

Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.

Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that it can drop bombs on that sad land whenever it appears to serve the empire’s needs. But a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves “Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution,” and remembering just enough of their country’s more civilized past, has filed suit before the nation’s High Court to make the federal government stop American drone attacks on countless innocent civilians. The group declared that a Pakistan Army spokesman claimed to have the capability to shoot down the drones, but the government had made a policy decision not to.¹

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, behaves like the world is one big lawless Somalia and the United States is the chief warlord. On October 20 the president again displayed his deep love of peace by honoring some 80 veterans of Vietnam at the White House, after earlier awarding their regiment a Presidential Unit Citation for its “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry.”² War correspondent Michael Herr has honored Vietnam soldiers in his own way: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.”³

What would it take for the Obamaniacs to lose any of the stars in their eyes for their dear Nobel Laureate? Perhaps if the president announced that he was donating his prize money to build a monument to the First — “Oh What a Lovely” — World War? The memorial could bear the inscription: “Let us remember that Rudyard Kipling coaxed his young son John into enlisting in this war. John died his first day in combat. Kipling later penned these words:

    “If any question why we died,
    Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

“The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature.” — James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798.

A wise measure, indeed, but one American president after another has dragged the nation into bloody war without the approval of Congress, the American people, international law, or world opinion. Millions marched against the war in Iraq before it began. Millions more voted for Barack Obama in the belief that he shared their repugnance for America’s Wars Without End. They had no good reason to believe this — Obama’s campaign was filled with repeated warlike threats against Iran and Afghanistan — but they wanted to believe it.

If machismo explains war, if men love war and fighting so much, why do we have to compel them with conscription on pain of imprisonment? Why do the powers-that-be have to wage advertising campaigns to seduce young people to enlist in the military? Why do young men go to extreme lengths to be declared exempt for physical or medical reasons? Why do they flee into exile to avoid the draft? Why do they desert the military in large numbers in the midst of war? Why don’t Sweden or Switzerland or Costa Rica have wars? Surely there are many macho men in those countries.

“Join the Army, visit far away places, meet interesting people, and kill them.”

War licenses men to take part in what would otherwise be described as psychopathic behavior.

“Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.” — Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H

“In the struggle of Good against Evil, it’s always the people who get killed.” — Eduardo Galeano

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a Taliban leader declared that “God is on our side, and if the world’s people try to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us.”⁴

“I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.” — George W. Bush, 2004, during the war in Iraq.⁵

“I believe that Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him. That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis.” — Barack Obama.⁶

Why don’t church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from abortion clinics?

God, war, the World Bank, the IMF, free trade agreements, NATO, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, “anti-war” candidates, and Nobel Peace Prizes can be seen as simply different instruments for the advancement of US imperialism.

Tom Lehrer, the marvelous political songwriter of the 1950s and 60s, once observed: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Perhaps each generation has to learn anew what a farce that prize has become, or always was. Its recipients include quite a few individuals who had as much commitment to a peaceful world as the Bush administration had to truth. One example currently in the news: Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres which won the prize in 1998. Kouchner, now France’s foreign secretary, has long been urging military action against Iran. Last week he called upon Iran to make a nuclear deal acceptable to the Western powers or else there’s no telling what horror Israel might inflict upon the Iranians. Israel “will not tolerate an Iranian bomb,” he said. “We know that, all of us.”⁷ There is a word for such a veiled threat — “extortion”, something normally associated with the likes of a Chicago mobster of the 1930s … “Do like I say and no one gets hurt.” Or as Al Capone once said: “Kind words and a machine gun will get you more than kind words alone.”

The continuing desperate quest to find something good to say about US foreign policy

Not the crazy, hateful right wing, not racist or disrupting public meetings, not demanding birth certificates … but the respectable right, holding high positions in academia and in every administration, Republican or Democrat, members of the highly esteemed Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s Joshua Kurlantzick, a “Fellow for Southeast Asia” at CFR, writing in the equally esteemed and respectable Washington Post about how — despite all the scare talk — it wouldn’t be so bad if Afghanistan actually turned into another Vietnam because “Vietnam and the United States have become close partners in Southeast Asia, exchanging official visits, building an important trading and strategic relationship and fostering goodwill between governments, businesses and people on both sides. … America did not win the war there, but over time it has won the peace. … American war veterans publicly made peace with their old adversaries … A program [to exchange graduate students and professors] could ensure that the next generation of Afghan leaders sees an image of the United States beyond that of the war.”⁸ And so on.

On second thought, this is not so much right-wing jingoism as it is … uh … y’know … What’s the word? … Ah yes, “pointless.” Just what is the point? Germany and Israel are on excellent terms … therefore, what point can we make about the Holocaust?

As to America not winning the war in Vietnam, that’s worse than pointless. It’s wrong. Most people believe that the United States lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, the US in fact achieved its primary purpose: it left Vietnam a basket case, preventing the rise of what might have been a good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model; for the same reason the United States has been at war with Cuba for 50 years, making sure that the Cuban alternative model doesn’t look as good as it would if left in peace.

And in all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the millions of Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical care, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology. That’s exactly what the Afghans — their land and/or their bodies permeated with depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bombs, and a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals — have to look forward to in Kurlantzick’s Brave New World. “If the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan eventually resembles the one we now have with Vietnam, we should be overjoyed,” he writes. God Bless America.

One further thought about Afghanistan: The suggestion that the United States could, and should, solve its (self-created) dilemma by simply getting out of that god-forsaken place is dismissed out of hand by the American government and media; even some leftist critics of US policy are reluctant to embrace so bold a step — Who knows what horror may result? But when the Soviet Union was in the process of quitting Afghanistan (during the period of May 1988-February 1989) who in the West insisted that they remain? For any reason. No matter what the consequences of their withdrawal. The reason the Russians could easier leave than the Americans can now is that the Russians were not there for imperialist reasons, such as oil and gas pipelines. Similar to why the US can’t leave Iraq.

Washington’s eternal “Cuba problem” — the one they can’t admit to

“Here we go again. I suppose old habits die hard,” said US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, on October 28 before the General Assembly voted on the annual resolution to end the US embargo against Cuba. “The hostile language we have just heard from the Foreign Minister of Cuba,” she continued, “seems straight out of the Cold War era and is not conducive to constructive progress.” Her 949-word statement contained not a word about the embargo; not very conducive to a constructive solution to the unstated “Cuba problem,” the one about Cuba inspiring the Third World, the fear that the socialist virus would spread.

Since the early days of the Cuban Revolution assorted anti-communists and capitalist true-believers around the world have been relentless in publicizing the failures, real and alleged, of life in Cuba; each perceived shortcoming is attributed to the perceived shortcomings of socialism — It’s simply a system that can’t work, we are told, given the nature of human beings, particularly in this modern, competitive, globalized, consumer-oriented world.

In response to such criticisms, defenders of Cuban society have regularly pointed out how the numerous draconian sanctions imposed by the United States since 1960 have produced many and varied scarcities and sufferings and are largely responsible for most of the problems pointed out by the critics. The critics, in turn, say that this is just an excuse, one given by Cuban apologists for every failure of their socialist system. However, it would be very difficult for the critics to prove their point. The United States would have to drop all sanctions and then we’d have to wait long enough for Cuban society to make up for lost time and recover what it was deprived of, and demonstrate what its system can do when not under constant assault by the most powerful force on earth.

In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the first 39 years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. In the ten years since, these figures have of course all increased. The sanctions, in numerous ways large and small, make acquiring many kinds of products and services from around the world much more difficult and expensive, often impossible; frequently, they are things indispensable to Cuban medicine, transportation or industry; simply transferring money internationally has become a major problem for the Cubans, with banks being heavily punished by the United States for dealing with Havana; or the sanctions mean that Americans and Cubans can’t attend professional conferences in each other’s country.

These examples are but a small sample of the excruciating pain inflicted by Washington upon the body, soul and economy of the Cuban people.

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah.” We don’t hear much of that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the General Assembly on the resolution, which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone:

How it began, from State Department documents: Within a few months of the Cuban revolution of January 1959, the Eisenhower administration decided “to adjust all our actions in such a way as to accelerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which would bring about a change in the Cuban Government, resulting in a new government favorable to U.S. interests.”⁹

On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”¹⁰ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo.

1. The Nation (Pakistan English-language daily newspaper), October 10, 2009.
2. Washington Post, October 20, 2009.
3. Michael Herr, Dispatches (1991), p.71.
4. New York Daily News, September 19, 2001.
5. Washington Post, July 20, 2004, p.15, citing the New Era (Lancaster, PA), from a private meeting of Bush with Amish families on July 9. The White House denied that Bush had said it. (Those Amish folks do lie a lot you know.)
6. Washington Post, August 17, 2008.
7. Daily Telegraph (UK), October 26, 2009.
8. Washington Post, October 25, 2009.
9. Department of State, “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba” (1991), p.742.
10. Ibid., p.885

Al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and the Taliban’s Mullah Muhammad Omar — Washington’s principal enemy leaders in the Afghan war — are not only alive, free and still taunting the White House after all these years, but appear to believe they now have the upper hand in Afghanistan.

Bin-Laden’s purpose has always been to draw the United States ever deeper into armed conflict with Islamic society in order to degrade America’s image, undermine its economy, and gain recruits. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan played directly into al-Qaeda’s hands, as will Washington’s effort to widen the Afghan conflict, especially as it stabs into Pakistan and alienates its masses of people in the process.

So far the two wars launched by President George W. Bush have cost the U.S. the antagonism of much of the Muslim world, serious erosions of its own democracy and reputation, and over a trillion dollars. Even if the wars end soon, says Nobel Prize economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, the overall expenditure — including everything from long term care for severely injured troops to interest on the war debt — will exceed $3 trillion, enough to end world poverty and hunger.

Speaking about Afghanistan this summer, President Barack Obama declared: “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.” Many war opponents argue that it is indeed a war of choice, and that international police work would have been far more successful and just.

We’ll discuss this later in the article, along with the fact that the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, and for that matter the Sept. 11, 2001, tragedy, need not have occurred had Washington taken less warlike actions in the key year of 1978, as well as 2001 and 2003. The fact that the U.S. has intervened deeply and for long periods over the past 31 years in a civil war in poverty-stricken, virtually pre-industrial Afghanistan, is probably not understood by many Americans.

Upon assuming office, President Obama instructed the Pentagon to devise a winning strategy for Afghanistan. Within weeks the White House agreed to a new war plan submitted by Gen. Stanley McChrystal that was supposed to lead to a U.S. victory. In March, Obama expanded the Afghan war when he heeded a Pentagon request and ordered 21,000 more U.S. troops to join the battle.

Several months later, however, McChrystal reported that the situation has deteriorated to the point where the war — ever more clearly displaying its neocolonial aspect — “will likely result in failure” within a year unless his forces increase by a minimum of 45,000 troops and a maximum of 80,000.

Obama has been engaged in “rethinking” war strategy since receiving the general’s verdict several weeks ago. He is expected to soon decide whether to deploy a larger number of additional troops to join 68,000 American fighters already scheduled for Afghanistan and about 50,000 NATO soldiers. This total presumably includes the 13,000 troops Obama also deployed without informing the American people, until the Washington Post broke the story in mid-October.

The White House is investigating two options for continuing the conflict — both of which would intensify the war and spread it more deeply into Pakistan. As briefly summarized by The Economist Oct. 17 they are “manpower-intensive counter-insurgency (COIN), which aims to win over the Afghan population and build a stable government; and counter-terrorism, which seeks to deal narrowly with threats to the West, mainly through air strikes or raids by Special Forces.”

McChrystal, who appears to be supported by top Pentagon brass, backs COIN, which includes a counter-terrorism aspect as well as “winning the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people, an effort that utterly failed when tried in Vietnam, and will fail in Afghanistan. Vice President Joseph Biden and some other administration advisers back the lower intensity counter-terrorism option without greatly expanding the number of troops or engaging in “nation building.”

If McChrystal’s minimum request is accepted it means a combined U.S.-NATO force of over 160,000 troops, not including scores of thousands of “contractors” doing duties previously performed by soldiers until recent years.

Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector who testified before the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, had this to say about McChrystal’s request for more troops in a Truthdig.com article Oct. 29:

McChrystal operates under the illusion that American military power can provide a shield from behind which Afghanistan can remake itself into a viable modern society. He has deluded himself and others into believing that the people of Afghanistan want to be part of such a grand social experiment, and furthermore that they will tolerate the United States being in charge. The reality of Afghan history, culture and society argue otherwise. The Taliban, once a defeated entity in the months following the initial American military incursion into Afghanistan, are resurgent and growing stronger every day. The principle source of the Taliban’s popularity is the resentment of the Afghan people toward the American occupation and the corrupt proxy government of Hamid Karzai. There is nothing an additional 40,000 American troops will be able to do to change that basic equation.

At this stage the U.S, NATO and their Afghan forces enjoy at least a 12-1 advantage in troop strength against the opposing forces, not to mention air power, drone attacks and an enormous technological, logistics and communications advantage. This increases to 20-1 if McChrystal’s minimum kicks in — and that’s evidently still not enough to defeat the insurgency. The latest word from the White House and Pentagon is that the new strategy may devolve to holding Afghanistan’s 10 largest cities and leaving the countryside to fend for itself, except for air strikes.

Our guess is that Obama will view the issue politically, as well as militarily, and being an inveterate centrist will try to merge both positions, increasing the number of troops but fewer than McChrystal desires. No one knows for sure, but he is intentionally creating suspense to magnify the importance of his eventual plan.

The Washington Post reported Oct. 26 that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently conducted theoretical war games to examine “the likely outcome of inserting 44,000 more troops into the country to conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency effort aimed at building a stable Afghan government that can control most of the country. It also examined adding 10,000 to 15,000 more soldiers and Marines as part of an approach that the military has dubbed ‘counterterrorism plus.’”

Complicating the situation, Washington’s hand-picked Afghan leader, President Hamid Karzai, is presiding over a thoroughly corrupt government and an alienated population. His brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is a drug lord and wheeler-dealer extraordinaire, who has been on the CIA’s payroll since the beginning of the war, along with innumerable warlords and disreputable officials. The UN has ascertained that last August’s elections were so fraudulent, mainly by far from Karzai’s side, the a run-off election was set for Nov. 7 between the incumbent and his independent rival, Abdullah Abdullah, M.D., who won 30.5% of the vote.

On Nov. 1, Abdullah — who had long been associated with the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance, for which he was a deputy foreign minister at one time — announced his withdrawal from the second round voting. He attributed his decision to the refusal by the government and election commission to accept his recommendations for changing balloting rules to prevent foul play.

The Obama Administration has been far more critical of Karzai than Bush, and it is said to have preferred a Karzai-Abdullah power-sharing arrangement to Karzai alone. Since Abdullah withdrew without calling for an election boycott or public demonstrations on his own behalf, he may yet end up associated with the new government in some fashion.

Even though the election affair has not transpired precisely the way Washington wished, it will have little impact on White House war plans. President Obama, who heretofore identified Afghanistan as the main danger, not Iraq, now says the danger has spread to Pakistan as well — an unanticipated but logical result of the Bush wars. The tribal areas of Pakistan are the target of increased U.S. air power, missile attacks, pilotless drones, and Special Forces engagements.

The Obama Administration is exerting heavy pressure on the Islamabad government of President Asif Ali Zardari, and investing another $7.5 billion in new aid, to intensify efforts to crush al-Qaeda, the Pakistan Taliban (which was only formed in 2007) and other groups in the mountainous western section of the country. This has created increasing anti-American sentiment among the masses of people in Pakistan who think Zardari is a virtual puppet of Washington. In a public opinion poll last August, some 60% of the Pakistani people view the U.S. as the greatest threat to their country compared to India or al-Qaeda.

In order to prevail in Afghanistan — or in Af-Pak, as the two-front war is described — President Obama evidently is considering a major compromise with the Taliban. Associated Press reported Oct. 9 that “President Obama is prepared to accept some Taliban involvement in Afghanistan’s political future,” both locally and in the central government. In addition the White House and Pentagon will seek to bribe the Taliban to stop attacking U.S. troops, as was done with the Sunni resistance in Iraq, by inducing former opponents to get on Washington’s payroll. The Pentagon is putting aside $1.3 billion to pay Taliban effectives who wish to “reintegrate into Afghan society.”

Most Americans have little understanding of what’s going on in Afghanistan, and no knowledge of the complex events that led up to President Bush’s bombardment and invasion in October 2001, weeks after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. The fact is that today’s war in Afghanistan is one of several disastrous consequences of U.S. interference in Afghanistan starting in 1978.

Land-locked, rugged, Texas-sized with a population of about 29 million, and strategically located where the rich geopolitical resources of the Middle East and Central Asia converge, Afghanistan gained independence from colonial Great Britain in 1919. A monarchy was established in this desperately poor country until overthrown by a military coup in 1973. Another coup took place in April 1978, this time led by left forces and military officers determined to enact reforms to “bring Afghanistan into the 20th century.”

The resulting ruling group, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), set about introducing modernizing reforms, including laws conferring equality upon the country’s oppressed women, and improving the lot of working people and subsistence farmers. The law granting rights to women was observed in Kabul and some big cities, but usually ignored elsewhere in territory controlled by the warlords and Islamic fundamentalists.

The PDPA’s immediate establishment of closer relations with the neighboring Soviet Union set off alarm bells in Washington, which feared Moscow would gain an important pawn in the Cold War geopolitical chess game. Within months President Jimmy Carter and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski decided to subvert the new leftist regime by “secretly” aiding right-wing warlords and ultra-orthodox religious groups who were beginning an armed struggle to overthrow the PDPA government.

The planning was fully operational by mid-1979. Working with the Pakistani intelligence agency over the years, the CIA poured a minimum of $8 billion into the coffers of warlords and fundamentalist fighting groups. By early 1979, CIA operatives started training the mujahedeen (the collective name of the Muslim fighters) at camps it set up in Pakistan, then in Afghanistan itself. The U.S. also supplied them with sophisticated arms (such as Stinger antiaircraft missiles), military advisers, and logistical information for the next decade.

Writing in Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, journalist-author Ahmed Rashid said the training camps “became virtual universities for future Islamic radicalism.” In the words of William Blum in his book, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, “The war had been a rallying point for Muslim zealots from throughout the world…. Thousands of veterans of the war… dispersed to many lands to inflame and train a new generation of terrorists ready to drink the cup of martyrdom.”

Among the recipients of U.S. largess and support in the mid-1980s was Osama bin-Laden and his new group of mostly foreign fighters in Afghanistan that by 1988 was formally titled al-Qaeda. (The name means, “the Base,” a reference to their training camp.) Bin Laden — the scion of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family — also received support from Pakistan and from sources in Saudi Arabia.

By the summer of 1979, the right wing rebel forces were becoming a serious threat to the Kabul regime, which eventually requested that Moscow send troops to defend the regime. One year and nine months after the PDPA took power, the Red Army began arriving in December 1979. (We specify the exact time period because the Western mass media often suggest that deep U.S. involvement began after, not at least a half year or more before, the arrival of Soviet troops, and rarely mention their presence was requested by the Kabul government.

As Brzezinski bragged many years later, Washington’s plan from the beginning was to create conditions that would oblige the Soviet Union to become militarily involved in Afghanistan’s civil war, and suffer the same fate as the U.S. in Vietnam in the earlier 1970s. It worked. In time the Red Army found itself sinking in the quagmire that earned Afghanistan the title “Graveyard of Empires.”

For the next several years following the arrival of Soviet troops, the White House — now occupied by the rightist Reagan administration — continued to build up the rebel forces, many of which had fought each other before the 1978 coup. In time they were joined by up to 40,000 jihadist recruits from over 40 countries in the Muslim world. During the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan began to cynically describe the warlords and fundamentalist armies as “freedom fighters.”

Moscow began to withdraw in 1987 and completed the project by early 1989. The left wing government held on until it was brutally crushed in 1992. The subsequent four years of civil war between the various rebel forces — in which up to 65,000 people were killed in Kabul — resulted in a Taliban victory in 1996. The earlier reforms were quickly abolished, particularly those freeing women, and a draconian form of Islam was imposed throughout the country. The Taliban — which is a national organization as opposed to international al-Qaeda, was formed in 1994 by Mullah Omar and consisted of the most orthodox Afghan jihadists. The name Taliban means “religious students.”

The consequences of the Carter/Reagan intervention in Afghanistan made it possible for 19 Al-Qaeda operatives armed with box cutters to hijack four airliners to attack symbols of U.S. military and financial power in Washington and New York in the late summer of 2001.

The political reasons behind 9/11 included opposition to America’s support for the suppression of the Palestinians; anger over the 1991-2003 U.S.-UN sanctions that caused over a million Muslim deaths in Iraq, half of them children; Washington’s manipulative intervention in Middle East since the end of World War II; and the Pentagon’s stationing of troops in Muslim countries, particularly Saudi Arabia.

Even after the 9/11 tragedy, the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan need never have occurred. It was a result of Bush’s bizarre decision to define the attack as a declaration of war against the United States instead of a gross criminal act by a small non-state organization of perhaps up to 1,000 active adherents only partially based in Afghanistan and largely composed of non-Afghans.

The rational alternative — worldwide police work, sanctions, homeland defense and other stringent measures — would certainly have been more successful against al-Qaeda, and far less costly for the United States, than eight years of fruitless war. Bush spurned this alternative not because war was a “necessity,” as the Obama Administration alleges, but to pursue neoconservative imperialist objectives for obtaining hegemony in the region under Bush’s banner of an endless “global war on terrorism.”

Further, just before the invasion, Taliban leader Omar told the U.S. he would turn over bin-Laden to a third country if Washington didn’t attack Afghanistan, as Bush was about to do. Mullah Omar had one condition: he asked the White House to provide evidence that the al-Qaeda leader was actually guilty. Bush’s response: “There’s no need to negotiate…. There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.”

As the American attack started, CIA teams were already on the ground in Afghanistan, once again paying off their old retainers, the warlords, with thick packages of $100 bills to intensify the civil war against the Taliban in concert with the invading Americans. At least $70 million was distributed in the first months of the war, mostly to the Northern Alliance, the big loser for power in Kabul in the ’90s.

Bush followed the Afghan adventure with a second war of choice in March 2003 — the transparently unjust and illegal invasion of Iraq. It turned into a costly stalemate but 120,000 U.S. troops remain in the country, and the Iraqi people continue to suffer mass privation and pain.

Afghanistan is not Washington’s “good war,” though it is now characterized in that fashion not only by the Republican right wing but by President Obama and many Democrats who were critical of “Bush’s” Iraq war. These are often the same “peace” Democrats who supported their own party’s unjust three-month bombardment of Yugoslavia (Serbia) in 1999. Obama was viewed as a peace candidate in the elections because he was critical of the Iraq war, though he nonetheless always voted as a senator to fund both wars, and made it clear he wanted to fight in Afghanistan.

Now that a Democratic president is directing the war, Bush’s campaign against Afghanistan for regime-change and long-term U.S. occupation has become a new type of “humanitarian intervention.” This has gravely weakened the American antiwar movement, which is largely based on Democratic voters, but may not be permanent. Many Democrats of the Vietnam era eventually turned on President Lyndon Johnson after two or three years to the extent that he could not run for reelection. Then, again, that was during a decade-long period of mass movements for social change in America, as opposed to the conservative reaction that has basically continued for some 30 years.

In our view, as we wrote in 2001 just after the invasion: “If any brutal right-wing regime deserved to be overthrown by its own people, the Taliban is the perfect choice. But for the imperial superpower to arrogate the task to itself, with its planes, missiles, self-interest and hypocrisy, bodes ill for the long-suffering Afghan masses and the region in general. Indeed, this projection of U.S. military power deeper into strategically important Central Asia brings Washington closer to its goal of hegemony over the neighboring Islamic former Soviet republics, now discovered to be awash in oil and gas reserves.”

Afghanistan is now Obama’s war. Speaking to a military audience recently, he sounded rather like his predecessor when he declared that fighting the war was necessary because “those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again.” So far, Obama’s troop buildup has inspired more attacks from the Taliban and other oppositional forces in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the situation can only get worse in proportion to the number of U.S. troops sent to the region.

What is Washington’s actual mission in the Af-Pak war? In a statement May 19, Gen. David Petraeus, who heads the U.S. Central Command, declared that “The mission is to ensure that Afghanistan does not again become a sanctuary for al-Qaeda and other transnational extremists.”

This evidently is why President Obama is widening the war in Afghanistan and western Pakistan. But is this necessary? The White House acknowledges that there are at most 100 members of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan at this point, but indicates that more have been driven across the border to Pakistan, without specifying how many.

Is it up to 500 perhaps? Could it be high as 1,000 adherents to al-Qaeda and other “transnational” extremists? For some reason the Pentagon doesn’t say, though it certainly must have a good estimate. In Afghanistan there are many thousands who are associated with the Taliban and similar groups, but these organizations operate strictly within their own borders, as does the Pakistani Taliban, and in no way have threatened to attack the United States.

Does it really require the killing of many hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, trillions of American dollars, and the fixated attention of our entire society to deny al-Qaeda a possible safe haven where they can plot to attack the United States? Wouldn’t it be better and far less costly to rely upon international police work, high technology surveillance, tight homeland security, sanctions if absolutely needed, and other means short of war, fair and foul, at Washington’s disposal?

Can it plausibly be denied that this would have been the better alternative in 2001, given the disastrous failure of Bush’s wars? In our opinion the answer is of course not, and it’s the better alternative in 2009 as well. What’s to prevent the Obama Administration from accepting this non-military alternative today, now that the neoconservatives are out of power? Two reasons present themselves: politics and international policy.

In terms of politics: Obama and the Democratic Party would rather wage these self-defeating wars than to be accused by the know-nothings of “cutting and running,” of being “weak on defense,” and of “lacking patriotism.” They fear these right-wing attacks will cost them elections in today’s highly conservative America, so instead of fighting back politically they bend the knee further to militarism and war.

In terms of international policy: Since the end of World War II — and particularly after the implosion of the USSR and the socialist camp two decades ago — the U.S. has functioned as the world’s dominating hegemon based on its willingness to use overwhelming military strength to extend its economic and political parameters throughout the world. A large number of Americans have been duped into believing it’s all being done to spread democracy and to keep people safe from the terrorists.

What has this gotten America lately? The U.S. is a declining superpower in deep economic difficulties. The recession, foreclosures and unemployment are crushing tens of millions of American families. Even without a recession, economic inequality is rampant; government social services are primitive; the civil infrastructure is becoming a shambles; the healthcare system remains a wreck, although a relative improvement may be forthcoming; and our political system, where the choices are confined to the right and center, needs an overhaul.

Meanwhile Washington’s wasting a trillion dollars a year on past, present and future wars “to save the world” (the $680 billion Pentagon budget Obama just signed is only part of it).

Antiwar critic Andrew Bacevich, a fairly conservative former Army officer and currently a professor and author of several important books on the military and U.S. policy, wrote an article in Commonweal Aug. 15 that contained a couple of paragraphs that fit in here:

“If the United States today has a saving mission, it is to save itself. Speaking in the midst of another unnecessary war back in 1967, Martin Luther King got it exactly right: ‘Come home, America.’ The prophet of that era urged his countrymen to take on ‘the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.’

“Dr. King’s list of evils may need a bit of tweaking — in our own day, the sins requiring expiation number more than three. Yet in his insistence that we first heal ourselves, King remains today the prophet we ignore at our peril. That Barack Obama should fail to realize this qualifies as not only ironic but inexplicable.”

We profoundly agree with this quote except for “inexplicable.” Obama has a number of attractive qualities, but he is a centrist in a political party of the center/center-right — an improvement over the competing mass party of the right/neocon-right/far-right, but hardly the politician to lead the struggle Bacevich suggests. Just getting him to avoid widening the unnecessary Af-Pak war any further, much less ending it, is daunting enough.

A majority of the American people want an end to the war, including a large majority of Democratic Party voters — and Obama says he is susceptible to public pressure. The problem is that the Democrats, who constitute the base of the U.S. peace constituency, left the movement in droves after their party won the elections. They don’t want to publicly protest Obama’s actions when he is under continual Republican attack on everything but the war.

This could change as the war continues and casualties mount, but it will have to be a major change with millions of people out in the streets demanding peace. Until then, the informal coalition of Republicans who vigorously uphold the war and “peace” Democrats who won’t stand against it will provide the White House with the public support it needs to continue the war indefinitely.

The U.S. decision to support the Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan in 1978 ultimately changed history in ways very costly to the peoples of the region and the United States. We dread to imagine the unintended consequences that will emerge from President Obama’s continuing display of American imperial hubris in the Af-Pak war.

The Monster returns. He’s unconventional, though. Not with the horns and the fangs and all. But with dark circles, the sunken, dimmed eyes, the creased-up face with his advancing years, the silver in his hair. Sun-beaten, sun-worn, threadbare — my definition of the Monster. The definers have hammered the definition on me with authoritative finality. I succumb — like everybody else. I ought to believe he is dangerous. I am supposed to condemn him, get frightened of him, loathe him, spit in his face, and righteously pronounce him horrendously sinful, perverted, hideous, damned, hell-bound, with all the wealth of jingoistic and religious rhetoric at my disposal. I cannot but obey. I join the chorus. Like everybody else.

And I kill me softly. I stifle the human essence, the still small voice that resists. The voice that questions. The militant voice — always politically incorrect. It questions ‘why?’ It does not allow me the comfort of following the crowd and biding my time. It discomforts me with the instinct to seek out the answers for myself. It makes me wonder why I have to buy the definition and believe that the pathetic grey man was a vile monster. It makes me wonder why, after all, he was a monster, perhaps — or so it seems?

I do not judge. I do not allow myself the terrible privilege. I just wonder, and want my right to ask questions. I want my right to feel, to understand. I want my right to be and stay human. And I simply wonder what went wrong…

In 2001, when the United States pounded Afghanistan with their firepower just across the border on a flimsy pretext, my people here in Pakistan were hurt too, because the national boundary running through the northern tribes does not cut across eon-old tribal affiliation. With the Pashtuns on the other side of the Durand Line under occupation, the Pashtuns on this side considered it a tribal obligation and religious duty to assist. That is the ethic running in the blood of the Pathans — the ethic they grow up with, just as their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers had grown up with it. You cannot hope to extort it from the hearts of men. The freedom they prize is a treasure they would not give up for the world. This fierce defence of their freedom is something you simply cannot hope to extricate. Not with all your arsenal, your marines armed to the teeth.

The United States and its ‘non NATO ally’ failed to understand this simple truth. Afghanistan bled, and Pakistani tribesmen, those once-upon-a-time heroic sons of the soil suffered with it. Yet we did not fall to brutalizing each other. The myths, on the other hand — Terrorism, Extremism, Fanaticism, Fundamentalism, Enlightened Moderation — continued to proliferate, and the Great Fiction encroached upon sanities. Yet we did not fall to brutalizing each other.

Till, a couple of years down the line, the Former General imperiously ordered an operation in Waziristan. It came to pass. In the thick of the darkness, in the hush of the night. The country taken by surprise. In clandestine moves, the trigger-happy military men advanced and we waited with bated breath. The usual collateral damage. Men, women, children, masjids, madrassas, schools, earthen huts. With a fell sweep, on orders of a Dictator. We still did not fall to brutalizing each other.

Things took their logical course and the resistance began. A Pashtun resistance. Earlier, aggravated by their country’s alliance with the US and the establishment of American military bases in the north to assist the NATO-sponsored slaughter and occupation in Afghanistan, the Pashtuns had expressed resentment. Their government had refused to budge. Now, they were cannon fodder, officially. And for Somebody Else’s interests.

Faced with a guerrilla resistance in a rugged terrain by ruddy mountain dwellers imbued with the tribesman’s fighting spirit, the khakis were in a quagmire soon enough. To save face, and the little that was left, they sought reconciliation with the irate tribesmen. It materialized, with pledges on both sides — the tribesmen agreeing to put down arms and let go the foreign militants (stationed in Pakistan ‘officially,’ and by Washington’s invitation, since the Soviet-Afghan war); and the Army agreeing to end the operation. We dared to hope.

Till the drone zeroed in on what we call Sovereignty. And on human lives — madrassas, schools, wedding parties, followed by official apologies for ‘misguided missiles’ or ‘intelligence failure.’ Collateral Damage. Full Stop.

In 2006, before the TTP (Tehreek Taliban Pakistan) was ever heard of, right after a successful settlement between the government and the tribal leaders which promised a durable peace in the restive north, American UAV ‘drones’ battered a village searching ‘militants’, leading to several civilian deaths. And so the talks derailed, the guns were picked up again. With blessings from Washington. The TTP raised its head shortly afterwards — a group much more militant and even violent in character than the original Afghan Taliban of yore who do not very proudly profess association with these Pakistani neo-Taliban. The TTP was a child begotten of the vicious cycle of violence and injustice.

The Pakistan govenment’s complicity in the intermittent and incessant drone attacks is poorly disguised by pathetic foreign office spokespeople. First there were the official apologies. Then, the flabbergasted attempts to explain the bloody ‘deal’. And soon enough there were none. Just the raining missiles and the human mincemeat. And handshakes and high-profile visits.

But the victims do not forget their dead. They are not taken in with prettily phrased official apologies which cannot bring their dead back. The hurt festers. It turns poison. It maddens. It dehumanizes. It turns men into suicide bombs. It makes life pointless, worthless. It makes the world a cruel, hateful place. It ignites the sense of honour and incites a burning revenge. And it makes my maddened countrymen, brutalized by unashamed tyrants, fall to brutalizing one another.

And it is as simple as that.

Blending into the chorus, soaking up the definitions, the headlines, the jingoism and the propaganda, the simple fact gets lost somewhere in the morass of our sensibilities. We righteously condemn, we judge, we toss our heads from side to side with disapproval and nod it up and down in assent. Just where and when we are wanted to. And we harden up to this simple fact, failing to understand. Failing to question. Dehumanizing ourselves.

Journalist Hamid Mir recounted his firsthand experience of visiting the injured in a primitive hospital in Waziristan after a US airstrike. A young boy, having lost his limbs, informed that his mother too had died in a similar attack, and that, in her dying moments, she had instructed him to avenge in Islamabad — where the decisions to maim and kill are made — what was done to her in Bajaur. Years later, his elder brother was caught in Islamabad attempting to blow himself up in a high-security area.

It is as simple as that. It is, plainly, human nature distorted brutally out of shape. It is, plainly, the work of our own hands. And it shall come to pass.

A ‘Winter Soldier’ working for the US Army in Iraq decided to quit the job, among several others like him. Addressing a meeting of the Iraq Veterans Against the War, he said: ‘Let me reverse the equation for a while. Let me ask you, that if a foreign force was to land in America on the excuse of democracy or freedom or whatever it may be, would not every patriotic American come out of his house with a shotgun? Would we not resist? What would you do?’ His voice trailed off in the midst of uproarious applause.

It is as simple as that. It is about being able to reverse the equation, and asking oneself ‘what would anyone do?’ It is about overturning the definitions and refusing to buy the propaganda. It is about refusing the official amnesia imposed on us all.

And it is not about Islam. It is not about an ‘Extremist Ideology’ out there to take you over by storm. It is not about monsters and demons. It is not about bloodthirsty suicide bombers with an inbuilt genetic drive to bomb the hell out of you. It is about human beings like you and me. It is about human beings horribly gone wrong. It is about the sinned-against who become sinning in this dreadful mire of poverty, disease, lawlessness, corruption. It is about naked, barbaric injustice and oppression. It is about human beings being made ‘as flies to the wanton boys.’

And it is as simple as that. As simple as Newton’s third law of motion. An equal and opposite reaction. To every action of ours.

So I refuse to sit in judgement. I refuse to self-righteously condemn. I refuse to sing along. And I demand my humanity, my right to think for myself, my right to question, my right to reclaim the Truth. ‘And if anyone of you would punish and lay the axe on the evil tree, let him see to its roots. What judgement would you pronounce on him who slays in the flesh and yet is slain in the spirit? And how persecute you him who is a deceiver and oppressor and yet in himself is aggrieved and outraged?’ (Kahlil Gibran).

I stand the risk of being misunderstood and misjudged. I do not condone the ongoing violent attacks in civilian areas all over Pakistan which victimize innocents. I cannot possibly justify them, nor can any human being in his right mind. But I think I can understand why. I can dare just that much.

And this understanding is important. Because it is through understanding that you reach the heart of the matter, and it is reaching the heart of the matter that you find the solution and begin the healing process. And the heart of the matter is the simple truth about human nature. The heart of the matter is to understand. The heart of the matter is looking to the roots. It is as simple as that.

To begin the healing, we need to set the record straight that this war never was ours, and that the critical transition from ‘theirs’ to ‘ours’ is the triumph of the mighty empire that seeks to export its wars to lands it can buy over with a few billion dollars. We need to face the wrongs we have done. We need to realize that there is no profit in the billions made out of the blood of innocents. We need to realize that violence begets violence. We need to realize that we willed this all, and that ending this vicious cycle of violence is our responsibility, because ‘a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent assent of the whole tree. So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong but with the secret will of you all.’ (Kahlil Gibran).

We need to realize that armies and weaponry can never win this war — just like it never could in Vietnam, or in Iraq, or even in Afghanistan. And we need to realize that it is never too late or too impossible to sit down and talk things out with your own people, no matter how alienated they are. The troops must be withdrawn, the operation must end and we must get talking. These aren’t monsters, these were my countrymen, and it is never too late to get talking — only my enemy would tell me otherwise.

There isn’t another way. The other option is to let this madness go on, making madmen of us all. The other option is the madness turning visible in all the horrors of spiraling violence — bombs going off in the midst of my thriving cities, the gored flesh and the pools of blood, the gripping fear, the haunted, deserted roads. Just like the death and destruction reigning the dirt-streets of some unnamed village in Waziristan. It comes full circle.

Every bomb going off adds to the horrible, crippling Terror that sinks into my bones. The fear and hysteria is of far more import than the death and destruction. When I am frightened to hell, I am easily manipulated, and when I am easily manipulated, I am owned, controlled, made to do what Somebody requires of me. I lose my sovereignty, my identity, my everything. I become the etherized patient spread over the operating table. Somebody Else’s operating table.

And every bomb going off strengthens the case of the Somebody Else who tries to tell us their war is ours, and that we must do their dirty work and shut up with the billions of dollars of aid doled out. Every bomb going off will be quoted in Somebody’s speeches, telling us with triumphalism and authority how terribly important it is for us to stay the course, to keep on this self-destructive path. It will keep us terrorized so Somebody can promise us security with his Blackwaters and Dynacores. It will keep us impoverished so Somebody can win us with promises of aid. It will keep us enslaved so Somebody can convince us only they can truly liberate. And it will keep us repeating the old refrain: ‘Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and War is Peace.’

It is as simple as that.

U.S. and other NATO military contingents operating in the provinces of Afghanistan’s predominantly Pashtun south and east have been hiring private militias controlled by Afghan warlords, according to these sources, to provide security for their forward operating bases and other bases and to guard convoys.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has acknowledged that U.S. and NATO ties with warlords have been a cause of popular Afghan alienation from foreign military forces. But the policy is not likely to be reversed anytime soon, because U.S. and NATO officials still have no alternative to the security services the warlords provide.

A report published by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University in September notes that U.S. and NATO contingents have frequently hired security providers that are covertly owned by warlords who have “ready-made” private militias which compete with state institutions for power.

The report cites examples of major warlords or their relatives or allies who have been contracted for security services in four provinces.

In Uruzgan province, both U.S. and Australian Special Forces have contracted with a private army commanded by Col. Matiullah Khan, called Kandak Amniante Uruzgan, with 2,000 armed men, to provide security services on which their bases there depend. That case was reported in detail in April 2008 by two reporters for The Australian, Mark Dodd and Jeremy Kelly.

Col. Khan’s security force protects NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoys on the main road from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt, where more than 1,000 Australian troops are based at Camp Holland, according to the The Australian in April 2008.

Col. Khan gets 340,000 dollars per month — nearly 4.1 million dollars annually — for getting two convoys from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt safely each month. Khan, now police chief in Uruzgan province, evidently got his private army from his uncle Jan Mohammad Khan, a commander who helped defeat the Taliban in Kandahar in 2001 and was then rewarded by President Karzai by being named governor of Uruzgan in 2002.

The Australian Defence Force claimed to The Australian that Col. Khan is paid by the Afghan Ministry of Interior to provide security on the main highways of Uruzgan province. The Australian military had previously refused to confirm or deny Australian payments to Col. Khan.

CanWest News Service’s Mike Blanchfield and Andrew Mayeda reported in November 2007 that the Canadian military had hired a “General Gulalai” to provide security for an undisclosed forward operating base. Gulalai is a warlord in southern Afghanistan who drove the Taliban out of Kandahar in 2001.

The same reporters revealed that Col. Haji Toorjan, a local warlord allied with Kandahar governor and major warlord Gul Agha Sherzai, was hired to provide security for Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar City, where Canada’s provincial construction team is located.

Blanchfeld and Mayeda found that the Canadian military had given 29 contracts worth 1.14 million dollars to a company identified as “Sherzai”, suggesting strongly that the former governor of Kandahar, who had become governor of Nangarhar province, was the owner.

The Canadian military refused to confirm whether Gul Agha Sherzai is indeed the owner.

In Badakhshan province, Gen. Nazri Mahmed, a warlord who is said to “control a significant portion of the province’s lucrative opium industry”, has the contract to provide security for the German Provincial Reconstruction Team, according to the NYU report.

The report suggests that the U.S. and NATO contingents are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on contracts with Afghan security providers, most of which are local power brokers guilty of human rights abuses.

In addition to Ahmed Wali Karzai, it names Hashmat Karzai, another brother of President Karzai, and Hamid Wardak, the son of Defence Minister Rahim Wardak, as powerful figures who control private security firms that have gotten security contracts without registering with the government.

Two anonymous United Nations sources cited in the report estimate that 1,000 to 1,500 unregistered armed security groups have been “employed, trained, and armed by ISAF” and “Coalition Forces” for security services. As many as 120,000 armed individuals are estimated by the U.N. sources to belong to about 5,000 private militias in Afghanistan.

Most Afghan warlords are widely reviled, mainly because the private armies they continue to control carry out theft and violence against civilians without any accountability.

In his initial assessment last August, Gen. McChrystal referred to “public anger and alienation” toward ISAF, of which he is commander, as a result of the perception that ISAF is “complicit” in “widespread corruption and abuse of power”.

That remark suggests that McChrystal, who had carried out the Special Forces’ policy of relying on Afghan warlords for security in the past, was now expressing concern about its political consequences.

Jake Sherman, a co-author of the NYU report, was a United Nations political officer involved in the effort to disarm warlords from 2003 to 2005. He is sceptical that U.S. policy ties with the warlords will be ended.

“I don’t see how U.S. and other contingents could sustain forward operating bases without paying these guys,” said Sherman in an interview with IPS.

Beyond their continuing dependence on the warlords for security services, Sherman sees another reason for keeping them on the payroll. If the U.S. and NATO military commanders tried to cut their ties with the private militias, Sherman said the warlords “would actually become a security threat”.

Sherman recalled that during his period working for the United Nations in northern Afghanistan, local police were hired to guard a World Food Programme warehouse in Badakhshan. After a rocket attack on the warehouse, an investigation quickly turned up the fact that the police themselves had carried out the attack to pressure the U.N. to hire more guards.

The present U.S. and NATO dependence on warlord armies is rooted in the policy of the George W. Bush administration in the early years after the ouster of the Taliban regime in late 2001.

The Central Intelligence Agency put the commanders of the forces who had defeated the Taliban on the payroll and gave them weapons and communications equipment to help U.S. counterterrorism squads locate any al Qaeda remnants in Afghanistan.

The commanders used the U.S. support to consolidate their political control over different provinces or sub-provincial areas. Human Rights Watch observed in a June 2002 report on the new relationships forged between the United States and the warlords, “While the U.S. government does not view this policy as actively supporting local warlords, the distinction is often lost on Afghan civilians who see coalition forces openly interacting with the warlords.”

Larry Goodson of the National War College, who participated in the 2002 process called the Loya Jirga under which the first post-Taliban Afghan government was established, told IPS he had recommended from the beginning a “de-warlordisation” process, in which “we took nasty, sleazy characters and turn them into less nasty, sleazy bosses.”

But the warlords were kept on the payroll, Goodson recalls, mainly because the troops controlled by the former commanders were seen as “force multipliers”, in a situation where foreign troops were in short supply.

The prisoner had been forced into pink women’s panties, lipstick and a wig; the men then pinned the prisoner to the floor in an effort “to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown.” As he recounts in his memoir, Fixing Hell, Dr. James initially chose not to respond. He “opened [his] thermos, poured a cup of coffee, and watched the episode play out, hoping it would take a better turn and not wanting to interfere without good reason…”

Although he claims to eventually find “good reason” to intervene, the Army colonel never reported the incident or even so much as reprimanded men who had engaged in activities that constituted war crimes.

Sadly, the story of Dr. James’ complicity in prisoner abuse does not end there. The New Orleans native and former LSU psychology professor admits to overseeing the detention, interrogation and health care of three boys, aged twelve to fourteen, who were disappeared to Guantanamo and held without charge or access to counsel or their families. In Fixing Hell and elsewhere, Dr. James proudly proclaims that he was in a position of authority at Guantanamo.

Government records indicate that, as the senior psychologist consulting on interrogations, his decisions affected the policy and operations of interrogations and detention on the base. During his time there, reports of beatings, sexual abuse, religious humiliation and sleep deprivation during interrogations were widespread, and draconian isolation was official policy. Prisoners suffered, and some continue to suffer, devastating physical and psychological harm.

Dr. Trudy Bond, a psychologist under an ethical obligation to report abuse by other psychologists, filed a complaint against Dr. James before the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists in February 2008.

Dr. Bond’s complaint says that Dr. James’ conduct violated Louisiana laws governing his psychology license. As a psychologist and military colonel, he had a duty to avoid harm, to protect confidential information, and to obtain informed consent, as well as to prevent and punish the misconduct of his subordinates.

How did the Louisiana licensing board respond? Rather than investigate, the Board dismissed the complaint, and when asked again, reaffirmed its decision. Dr. Bond has now taken the case to the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal in Baton Rouge.

Dr. James played an influential role in both the policy and day-to-day operations of interrogations and detention in the notorious prison camps built to hold men and boys captured during the U.S. “War on Terror.”

According to his own statements, he was a senior member of interrogation consulting teams that, as documented by government records, were central in designing interrogation plans that exploited psychological and physical weaknesses of individual detainees. In one example cited by the New York Times, a military health professional told interrogators that “the detainee’s medical files showed he had a severe phobia of the dark and suggested ways in which that could be manipulated to induce him to cooperate.”

Had Dr. James chosen to cast himself as a brave, but ultimately ineffective voice against torture, he may have fooled some people into believing him. Instead, he’s presented an utterly implausible portrait: one of a man “chosen” by “the nation” to “fix the hell” of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, a feat he claims to have accomplished so successfully that ever since he was first deployed in January 2003, “where ever [sic] we have had psychologists no abuses have been reported.” This is patently untrue. The real “fact of the matter,” as documented by government records, reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross and eyewitness accounts, is that serious abuses were widespread both during Dr. James’ tenure as senior psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantánamo, and after he left.

One would imagine that such disregard for a law designed to protect the public welfare would greatly concern the body charged with its enforcement. But the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists, which issued James his license, has refused to investigate whether he violated professional misconduct law.

The Board’s conduct should alarm all Louisiana health professionals and their patients. The Board demeans the profession when it fails to seriously address the possibility that a Louisiana licensee was involved in torture. It also strips the Louisiana psychology license of meaning and value. How can patients rely on a license issued and enforced by a body that arbitrarily refuses to look into allegations of grave misconduct?

As the legal battle wears on, the people of Louisiana need to ask the Board’s members what “good reason” they await in order to act. They should demand that the Board of Examiners conduct a thorough investigation of Larry James and, if what he admits is true, revoke his privilege to practice.

In a 63-page paper representing his personal views, but reflecting conversations with other officers who have served in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis argues that it is already too late for U.S. forces to defeat the insurgency.

“Many experts in and from Afghanistan warn that our presence over the past eight years has already hardened a meaningful percentage of the population into viewing the United States as an army of occupation which should be opposed and resisted,” writes Davis.

Providing the additional 40,000 troops that Gen. McChrystal has reportedly requested “is almost certain to further exacerbate” that problem, he warns.

Davis was a liaison officer between the Combined Forces Command – Afghanistan (CFC-A) and the Central Command in 2005, just as the Afghan insurgency was becoming a significant problem for the U.S. military. In that assignment he both consulted with the top U.S. officers and staff of the CFC-A and traveled widely throughout Afghanistan visiting U.S. and NATO combat units.

He also commanded a U.S. military transition team on the Iraqi border with Iran in 2008-09.

In the paper, Davis suggests what he calls a “Go Deep” strategy as an alternative to the recommendation from McChrystal for a larger counterinsurgency effort, which he calls “Go Big”.

The “Go Deep” strategy proposed by Davis would establish an 18-month time frame during which the bulk of U.S. and NATO combat forces would be withdrawn from the country. It would leave U.S. Special Forces and their supporting units, and enough conventional forces in Kabul to train Afghan troops and police and provide protection for U.S. personnel.

The forces that continue to operate in insurgent-dominated areas would wage “an aggressive counterterrorism effort” aimed in part at identifying Taliban and al Qaeda operatives. The strategy would also provide support for improved Afghan governance and training for security forces.

Davis argues that a large and growing U.S. military presence would make it more difficult to achieve this counterterrorism objective. By withdrawing conventional forces from the countryside, he suggests, U.S. strategy would deprive the insurgents of “easily identifiable and lucrative targets against which to launch attacks”.

Typically insurgents attack U.S. positions not for any tactical military objective, Davis writes, but to gain a propaganda victory.

The “Go Deep” strategy outlined in the paper appears to parallel the shift in strategy from counterinsurgency to counterterrorism being proposed by some officials in discussions in the White House in recent weeks.

After reading Davis’s paper, Col. Patrick Lang, formerly the defence intelligence officer for the Middle East, told IPS he regards the “Go Deep” strategy as “a fair representation of the alternative to the one option in General McChrystal’s assessment”.

Lang said he doubts that those advising Obama to shift to a counterterrorism strategy are calling specifically for the withdrawal of most combat troops, but he believes such a withdrawal “is certainly implicit in the argument”.

Davis told IPS he was surprised to hear from one official in a high position in Washington whose reaction to his paper was that what he is proposing in place of the “Go Big” option is still “too big”.

Davis said his views on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan have been shaped both by his personal experiences traveling throughout Afghanistan during his 2005 tour of duty and by conversations with U.S. military officers who have recently returned from Afghanistan.

“Mostly it was guys who’ve been out there in the field,” said Davis. “They have a different view from those who work in the headquarters.”

“I think there’s a whole lot of folks out there who agree with this,” he said.

He was flown out of Iraq for medical treatment in early June after suffering a partial loss of vision, and has been temporarily reassigned to the Defence Intelligence Agency. However, Davis said he was not assigned to work on Afghanistan and did the work on his Afghanistan strategy paper entirely on his own.

Davis said he had received permission from his immediate supervisor at DIA to circulate his personal analysis and recommendations on Afghanistan on the condition that he used only unclassified, open source information.

In the paper, Davis argues that the counterinsurgency strategy recommended by McChrystal would actually require a far larger U.S. force than is now being proposed. Citing figures given by Marine Corps Col. Julian Dale Alford at a conference last month, Davis writes that training 400,000 Afghan army and police alone would take 18 brigades of U.S. troops – as many as 100,000 U.S. troops when the necessary support troops are added.

The objective of expanding the Afghan security forces to 400,000, as declared in McChrystal’s “initial assessment”, poses other major problems as well, according to Davis.

He observes that the costs of such an expansion have been estimated at three to four times more than Afghanistan’s entire Gross Domestic Product. Davis asks what would happen if the economies of the states which have pledged to support those Afghan personnel come under severe pressures and do not continue the support indefinitely.

“It would be irresponsible to increase the size of the military to that level,” he writes, “convincing hundreds of thousands of additional Afghan men to join, giving them field training and weapons, and then at some point suddenly cease funding, throwing tens of thousands out of work.”

The result, he suggests, would be similar to what followed the U.S. failure to reassemble the Iraqi Army after the invasion of March 2003.

Davis also cites “growing anecdotal evidence” that popular anger at the abuses of power by the Afghan National Police has increased support for the insurgency.

He calls for scaling back the increase in Afghan security forces to the original targets of 134,000 Army troops and 80,000 national police. The crucial factor in determining the future of the country, he argues, is not the numbers of security personnel but whether they continue to abuse the population.

If that pattern of behaviour were to change dramatically, Davis says, “the number of Taliban fighters will dwindle to manageable numbers as those presently filling their ranks will no longer be motivated to fight”.

Davis challenges two arguments now being made in support of the counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan based on the Iraq experience: that a troop surge would help establish security and that the U.S. military can reduce insurgency by replicating the “Sons of Iraq” programme of bringing insurgents into militias that oppose their former allies.

The “surge” in Iraq was successful for a variety of reasons peculiar to Iraq and not duplicated in Afghanistan, Davis argues. And the “Sons of Iraq” was primarily the result of the alienation of the Sunni population by al Qaeda, which trumped Sunni opposition to the U.S. presence.

“[T]here is little to suggest,” he writes in reference to the areas where the Taliban has gained power, “that the population as a whole has reached a tipping point whereby they are ready to support the coalition against the Taliban.”

Challenging the argument of supporters of a larger war effort that it is necessary to avoid an increased risk of new terrorist attacks, Davis argues that being “myopically focused” on Afghanistan “at the expense of the rest of the world” increases the likelihood of an attack.

The present level of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, he writes, will “make it more likely that terrorist organizations will take advantage of the opportunity to plan and train elsewhere for the next big attack.”

I’d favor that idea, except for one crucial aspect.

We’re up to our necks in sucking morasses in both places, and nothing even remotely approximating “victory” can legitimately begin to describe what we’ve accomplished (or, more appropriately, not accomplished).

My mother taught me that allegiance to the truth should always take precedence over blind religious faith or unquestioning fealty to nationalistic myths, so I can’t go along.

Let’s bravely acknowledge, instead, that we got our butts whipped, and announce that we’ll be getting our battered behinds back home, pronto!

If we did so, we’d immediately find that the downward pull of the tar pits in which we’re bogged would ease long enough to extricate ourselves. It wouldn’t be a dignified removal, to be sure, but at least we’d avoid getting swallowed entirely — as both the British and Soviets were in imperialism-killing Afghanistan — when their subjective pride was ultimately, lethally trumped by objective reality.

Getting out now, though far from pretty, would be much better than suffering a catastrophically history-shifting defeat along the aforementioned lines, or the abject humiliation that France endured at the hands of Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu.

Everyone understands that Afghanistan, from the U.S. perspective, is speedily going to Hell in an unraveling hand basket.

But so is Iraq.

Do you not think it’s a sign of failure that our forces there have had to be withdrawn to secure bases beyond Iraqi population centers?

A shameful absence of credible media coverage — or any coverage at all — can’t hide the fact that the last nails are presently being driven into the coffin of U.S. ambition in former Mesopotamia.

Attempting to remain in either country, when actual circumstances powerfully don’t allow it, is an open invitation to disastrous folly.

Republicans argue that we should “do whatever it takes to win.”

What, pray tell, might that be?

We could send to their deaths or terrible maimings just-graduated high school seniors from nearly every town in the USA for endlessly bloody years — at gargantuan monetary cost — and still have just a few blocks of downtown Kabul, or Baghdad, the only safe locations around. Only during broad daylight at that.

Meanwhile, popular antagonism inspired by our heavy-handed occupations would generate fiercely anti-American recruits quicker and more numerously than rain and sunshine give rise to dandelions in springtime.

In other words, we’d just be driving straight toward the ultimate American debacle.

Let’s change the vehicle’s direction, and hold the pedal to the metal as we retreat to rationality and reason.

Our country can save itself from eventual societal disintegration only by completely abandoning its insufferably arrogant, bullying, world-cop attempt to make the rest of humanity over in our corrupt image, by force of indiscriminately discharged arms.

We can’t kill our way to getting others to accept our political, economic, religious, and cultural “values,” which increasing numbers of folks even here at home are rejecting because they’re seen as being hopelessly flawed, if not completely depraved.

Face it. Hardly anyone actually wants to be “just like us.”

And they sure aren’t going to change their minds if we continue to kick down residential doors at midnight or blow up wedding parties with Predator drones, under the cruel assumption that they’re al Qaida gatherings.

We’ve lost. We’ve lost big time.

But nowhere near as massively, tragically, and irreparably as we will if we don’t read the writing on the wall and completely sink beneath that tar, as our purpose suffocates entirely, under the weight of our unrelieved hubris and stupidity.

It’s getting to the point that it’s hard to tell who is the biggest opponent of Obama’s plans to bring peace to AfPak: the Taliban, the Pakistani government, or the Nobel committee. Oh yes, or virtually the entire world beyond the Washington beltway.

As the world marked the eighth anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October, the Taliban were stronger than ever – their forces have increased nearly fourfold since 2006. “We fought against the British invaders for 80 years,” Mullah Mohammad Omar reminded the world on the Taliban’s website. “If you want to colonise the country of proud and pious Afghans under the baseless pretext of a war on terror, then you should know that our patience will only increase and that we are ready for a long war.” A statement from the leadership insists, “We had and have no plan of harming countries of the world, including those in Europe. Our goal is the independence of the country and the building of an Islamic state.” They call for the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops as the only solution.

So far, there is no hint that Obama is even considering this no-brainer. On the contrary, the war is now being fought on two fronts, with the US and Britain starting an extensive training programme for Pakistan ’s Frontier Corps (FC) in Baluchistan, the new battleground.

It is part of the Obama administration’s massive military aid package to AfPak – Pakistan will get $2.8 billion over the next five years in addition to $7.5 billion in civilian aid, but only if it satisfies US benchmarks by making progress in “anti-terrorism and border control”. The Pakistani government and army are furious, not to mention the 60 per cent of Pakistanis who see the US as the greatest threat to Pakistan – with good cause. In the past few months, US forces have stepped up their aerial bombardments of villages in the northern tribal areas. According to the Pakistani press, of the 60 cross-border US drone strikes between January 2006 and April 2009, only 10 were able to hit their targets, killing 14 Al-Qaeda leaders and 687 civilians. Even official US policy (to kill no more than 29 civilians for every “high-value” person) is being violated. At least 23 Al-Qaeda leaders should have been killed, nine more than the actual 14. This assassination campaign is a more ruthless version of Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, and can only spur the Taliban and Al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts.

True, Taliban control of the Pakistan frontier province SWAT was brought to a brutal end during the past six months by the Pakistani army, though civilian corpses continue to be dumped, with accusations of revenge and official terror labelled at the army. And the almost complete lack of reconstruction aid by the Pakistan government – with winter approaching – means the Taliban will probably regain SWAT. Local opposition to the war against both Afghanistan and Pakistan’s frontier region, especially Baluchistan, continues to grow, with the long-simmering Baluchi campaign for independence gaining new life daily.

Obama’s war plans have reached a critical stage. In an arrogant gamble, much like General MacArthur’s challenge to president Harry Truman in 1951 over the Korean war, General Stanley McChrystal recently demanded publicly that Obama provide 60,000 more troops for Afghanistan, boldly stating the war would be lost without them. Faced with a similarly outspoken MacArthur, Truman just as publicly fired him.

McChrystal is said to have offered the Commander in Chief several alternatives “including a maximum injection of 60,000 extra troops”, 40,000 and a small increase. Common in military planning is to discuss three different scenarios in order to illustrate why the middle option is preferable, though this is usually done privately. But the Obama administration faces growing hurdles within his Democratic Party if he decides to go with even the middle option.

Obama’s review of AfPak is now centring on preventing Al-Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan – a narrower objective that could require fewer, if any, new American troops. Obama-Biden no longer see the primary mission in Afghanistan as completely defeating the Taliban or preventing its involvement in the country’s future, a policy strongly opposed by Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Gates-Clinton have a point: once the Taliban are acknowledged as legitimate players who are of no strategic danger to the US, then the horror of the past eight years becomes excruciatingly clear. The defeat of the whole criminal project becomes inevitable and will be just as devastating for the US as the Soviet defeat was for the USSR.

But the Gates-McChrystal super-surge is just about impossible in any case. The Institute for the Study of War reported recently that the US military has only limited troops ready for deployment, meaning that forces might not reach the warzone until the summer of 2010. There are only three Army and Marine brigades – 11,000-15,000 troops – capable of deploying to Afghanistan this year. Troops are plagued by a severe lack of helicopters and all-terrain vehicles.

Whatever Obama decides – 60,000, 40,000 or 2 – the troops will have little time after they arrive to turn things around. Even super-loyal Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper just reaffirmed that Canadian troops will under no circumstances stay in Afghanistan after 2011. Any plans for the indefinite occupation of Afghanistan as touted by some NATO and US officials are fantasy; Canada’s retreat will be part of a flood. Canadian government support for the war, like that of its bigger brothers the US and Britain, has all along been motivated by Afghanistan’s untapped resource potential. The TAPI gas pipeline – so named for its 1680 kilometre path from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and eventually India – is slated to be constructed starting next year on the very soil that Canadian and US troops now occupy in southern Afghanistan.

Harper’s best-case scenario is for the pipeline to go ahead with Canadian participation and for a miracle to occur – the Taliban’s sudden and unexpected defeat, allowing Canadian troops to come home, the pipeline and other resource deals signed, and assuring him of a Conservative majority in the next election.“ Canada has the potential to beat rivals because it has such an uncheckered history in that part of the world,” argues Rob Sobhani, president of Caspian Energy Consulting. “People like Canadians, Canadians are apolitical.” Even if the miracle doesn’t happen and the pipeline deal collapses, Harper realises his political goose is cooked unless the troops come home, so he is forced to wash his bloody hands of this betrayal of Canada’s traditional international role of peacekeeper.

Obama needn’t rely on the Taliban as advisers on how to end the war. Deputy-general of the China Council for National Security Policy Studies Li Qinggong reflected official Chinese thinking on 28 September in Xinhua: The United States should first put an end to “the anti-terror war” and “end its military action. The war has neither brought the Islamic nation peace and security as the Bush administration originally promised, nor brought any tangible benefits to the US itself. On the contrary, the legitimacy of the US military action has been under increasing doubt.” Obama should take advantage of international opinion to withdraw troops immediately. This is no doubt also the hope of the Nobel committee that put its own credibility on the line by awarding him the Peace Prize. The UN Security Council permanent members should “draft a roadmap and timetable”, including deployment of an international peacekeeping mission.

The delicious irony of the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (and Iraq) is that it is China, the US ’s real international rival, that has benefited most. Chinese investments (and workers) have been pouring in to both US warzones. The main effect of George W Bush’s two wars and Obama’s AfPak has been to promote Chinese business interests, leaving the US bankrupt and its army in tatters.

But two former senior intelligence analysts who have long followed the issue of al Qaeda’s involvement in Afghanistan question the alleged new intelligence assessments. They say that the Taliban leadership still blames Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda for their loss of power after 9/11 and that the Taliban-al Qaeda cooperation is much narrower today than it was during the period of Taliban rule.

The nature of the relationship between al Qaeda and the Taliban has been a central issue in the White House discussions on Afghanistan strategy that began last month, according to both White House spokesman Robert Gibbs and National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones.

One of the arguments for an alternative to the present counterinsurgency strategy by officials, including aides to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, is that the Taliban wouldn’t allow al Qaeda to reestablish bases inside Afghanistan, The Wall Street Journal reported Oct. 5. The reasoning behind the argument, according to the report, is that the Taliban realises that its previous alliance with al Qaeda had caused it to lose power after the Sep. 11 attacks.

Officials in national security organs that are committed to the counterinsurgency strategy have now pushed back against the officials who they see as undermining the war policy.

McClatchy newspapers reported Sunday that officials have cited what they call “recent U.S. intelligence assessments” that the Taliban and other Afghan insurgent groups have “much closer ties to al Qaida now than they did before 9/11″ and would allow al Qaeda to re-establish bases in Afghanistan if they were to prevail.

McClatchy reporters said 15 mid-level or senior intelligence, military and diplomatic officials they interviewed had agreed with the alleged intelligence assessments.

But John McCreary, formerly a senior analyst at the Defence Intelligence Agency, wrote last week on NightWatch, an online news analysis service, that the history of Taliban-al Qaeda relations suggests a very different conclusion. After being ousted from power in 2001, he wrote, the Taliban “openly derided the Arabs of al Qaida and blamed them for the Taliban’s misfortunes”.

The Taliban leaders “vowed never to allow the foreigners – especially the haughty, insensitive Arabs – back into Afghanistan,” wrote McCreary. “In December 2001, [Mullah Mohammad] Omar was ridiculed in public by his own commanders for inviting the ‘Arabs’ and other foreigners, which led to their flight to Pakistan.”

McCreary concluded, “The premise that Afghanistan would become an al Qaida safe haven under any future government is alarmist and bespeaks a lack of understanding of the Pashtuns on this issue and a superficial knowledge of recent Afghan history.”

The Central Intelligence Agency’s former national intelligence officer for the Middle East, Paul Pillar, expressed doubt that the Taliban’s relations with al Qaeda are tighter now than before the Taliban regime was ousted.

“I don’t see how you can say that,” Pillar told IPS. “If you look at the pre-9/11 relationship between the Taliban and al Qaeda, in many ways it was far more extensive.”

In the civil war between the Taliban regime and its Northern Alliance foes from 1996 through 2001, Pillar observed, “bin Laden’s Arabs and money” represented a far bigger role in supporting the Taliban than the one al Qaeda is playing now.

“You can say that there are more groups which have relationships with al Qaeda now, but I don’t see any as close as that which existed before 9/11,” said Pillar.

The role played by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in the Taliban’s struggle against its rival the Northern Alliance from 1996 to 2001 has been documented by journalist Roy Gutman, now foreign editor of McClatchy newspapers, and other sources.

As early as 1997, 300 Arab troops trained by bin Laden troops were fighting alongside the Taliban on the front line north of Kabul, according to Gutman’s book, How We Missed the Story, published in 2008. Later, they were reported to have taken over large sections of that front line.

Bin Laden’s military and financial support became an even more important crutch for the Taliban regime in its final years in power. Gutman says the Taliban’s mid-summer 1998 offensive in northern Pakistan was largely financed by bin Laden.

In the last stage of the conflict, Gutman writes, al Qaeda troops consisted of 1,500 to 2,500 Arabs and Central Asian “Frontline fighters,” and Ahmed Shah Massoud, the commander of the Northern Alliance forces seeking to overthrow the Taliban, regarded them as his toughest and most committed opponents.

Gutman quotes Massoud telling CIA operative Gary Schroen, “Every time I fight the Taliban, the glue that holds them together is the Arab units.”

Osama bin Laden also financed Taliban military equipment and operations, according to Gutman’s account. A summer 1998 Taliban offensive was fought with hundreds of new Japanese pickup trucks — Massoud claimed a total of 1,200 vehicles — bought with bin Laden’s money.

Today, however, al Qaeda is cash-strapped and has very few foreign fighters in Afghanistan, whereas the Taliban appear to be well-financed.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s expert on terrorist financing, David Cohen, said al Qaeda is “in its weakest financial position in several years” and “its influence is waning”, the BBC reported Tuesday.

Gen. Jones told CNN interviewer John King Oct. 4 the presence of al Qaeda in Afghanistan today is “minimal,” adding the “maximum estimate” is 100 foreign fighters. One official critical of the White House position quoted in the McClatchy story suggested the number might be as high as 200 or 250.

Both figures appears to be consistent with the estimate by Western officials of a total of only 100 to 300 foreign fighters in Afghanistan cited in the New York Times Oct. 30, 2007.

Of that total, however, only “small numbers” were Arabs and Chechens, Uzbeks or other Central Asians, who are known to have links with al Qaeda, Seth Jones of the Rand Corporation told Voice of America the following month.

The bulk of the foreign fighters in Afghanistan are Pashtuns from across the border in Pakistan. Those Pashtun fighters are recruited from religious schools in Pakistan, but there is no evidence that they are affiliated with al Qaeda.

Just this month, U.S. intelligence has increased its estimate of Taliban armed insurgents to 17,000, compared with 10,000 in late 2007. Even if all foreign fighters were considered as al Qaeda, therefore, 250 of them would represent only 1.5 percent of the estimated total.

If one explores this idea in the context of recent history both on Wall Street and in Washington’s current overseas adventures, it become clearer why very few folks in Imperial Washington — though not in the rest of the country — want to get out of Iraq or Afghanistan. The projection of military power overseas becomes compensation for the shrinking economic power of Wall Street. Liberal and right-wing believers whose stock in the church of capital has fallen can still feel good about themselves as long as their mission continues overseas against the Muslim and peasant hordes. As for the heretics within, let the loudmouth preachers of right wing radio condemn those citizens to the mercies of the angry white men and Sarah Palin — their Joan of Arc. Once the heretics have been burned at the stake of right wing rhetoric, the armies of the right will end their Tea Parties, pick up their weapons and take back the White House, installing a white person back in the Presidential bedrooms. Once done, that black man who’s in those bedrooms right now would no longer be a threat, having been emasculated just like a Scottsboro Boy.

So, while Mr. Obama (that black man) ponders whether or not he should continue the US projection of power into Afghanistan begun by his predecessor, Texan George Bush, or pull out, one wonders if Obama is part of the hunting party on par with the plantation’s generals or is he just the guy who must retrieve and dress the kill?

If he accepts General McChrystal’s call for more troops and the consequent increase in bloodshed, does Obama then become a trusted equal to the generals or the Pentagon’s Stepin’ Fetchit? If he rejects this and future calls to escalate this fruitless war, will he be sent back into the kitchen to wait for the bell telling him to bring out the next course or will it represent a defeat for the current crop of General Custers?

Then again, there’s the Biden option. This proposal would repackage the war in Afghanistan under its original wrapping as part of the “war on terror.” This repackaging would require a bit of convoluted convincing since national security adviser Ret. General James Jones told the media that “fewer than 100 Al-Qaida (the bogeymen of Islamic terror) are operating in Afghanistan.” Of course, the hawks in DC counter this statement with the argument that it is precisely because there are US troops in Afghanistan that Al Qaida’s strength has diminished. However, the fault in this line of reasoning can be found in the supposition of its supporters that the Taliban must be defeated to keep Al Qaida on the run. Why? Because at the same time that Al Qaida’s activities in Afghanistan have diminished, the strength of Taliban and other resistance forces have grown. In other words, even though Al Qaida forces have almost ended operations in Afghanistan, the resistance to western occupation has grown.

Then there’s the question of Pakistan. In recent weeks, US officials have begun to suggest the existence of a Taliban formation in the Baluchistan province of Pakistan. Furthermore, US Ambassador Anne W. Patterson and a junior US diplomat — Deputy Head of Mission Gerald Feierstein in Pakistan — have threatened US air strikes on the city of Quetta where this grouping — called the Quetta shira by western media — are supposed to be quartered. These threats have been met by calls for the expulsion of these diplomats in at least one Pakistani media outlets. If US troop numbers are increased in Afghanistan, the staging of a ground invasion into Waziristan or Baluchistan or air strikes not carried out by drones launched in Nevada becomes that much easier. If changing the situation in Pakistan is a dominant reason for the current debate over mission and troop numbers in Afghanistan and the battle in Afghanistan is considered just part of that equation, then there is little doubt that US troops will remain in that country for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, the likelihood of their numbers increasing becomes even greater. On Monday Obama said withdrawal from Afghanistan wasn’t an option. Bearing in mind Lao Tzu’s observation that he who rejoices in victory delights in killing, this writer awaits.

The American agenda for Pakistan is not a state-secret. Rather, it is only thinly disguised as perpetually fighting the “insurgents” in a lifetime of war, the World War IV. Whereas, in reality, both the “insurgency”, and the “counter-insurgency”, are entirely designed and fabricated in the USA as part of the evolving tactics of Hegelian Dialectics. They are enacted on the ground by various two-bit errand boys and expert trigger pullers. The already well-known existence of black-ops assassination squads in Pakistan/Afghanistan, known to the local peoples for years as the real prime-movers behind the heinous local terrorist acts, belatedly confirmed by NYT, WP, and NYT, in August 2009. See these two December 2008 reports on the Mumbai terrorist Act as reportedly orchestrated by Ali Baba from his perch in the Hindu Kush. The arrival of the black-ops in the region is not recent, albeit the public disclosures might be.

Starting in the immediate aftermath of 911, and perhaps even earlier, Pakistan may well have become the largest deployment region for the CIA in modern times, both covert (unknown to Pakistani government and secretly working to destabilize Pakistan), and overt (with Pakistani military’s aiding and abetting, in full view of the world, ostensibly fighting the “insurgents”, “Bin Laden”, “Al-Qaaeda”, but in the process mainly “tickling” its own innocent civilians in many a barbaric way).

And since Jundallah got launched to destabilize Iran, Baluchistan along with the Pak-Afghan regions have been awash with black-ops, and obviously of course, also with officially recognized US soldiers manning American military bases on Pakistani soil. But these soldiers of freedom were rarely spotted in the streets of major cities before. The below video report of September 08, 2009, portends of ominous whirlwinds imminently engulfing Pakistan:

The multimodal approaches to destabilizing, and consequently balkanizing Pakistan are so transparent that today, many a retired con-fession artist are getting in on the act to claim the flag of patriotism. Going for hajj after having eaten 900 mice is the favorite pastime of Pakistani praetorian guards. I am only waiting for any sitting Pakistani General to rise to that occasion, if it’s not already too late! But I am afraid it probably is – see here, here, here, and here. The decapitation of Pakistan by Pakistan’s finest. The shameful and criminal dislocation of up to 2.4 million civilians in May of this year was rightly described as “an exodus that is beyond biblical.”

Just as from the USSR’s point of view in yesteryear, the “insurgency” against them in Afghanistan was foreign inculcated, entirely fabricated in the USA (as we know today but held as a closely guarded secret then), which thus forced the Soviets to apply counter-insurgency measures, and subsequently, an outright invasion of Afghanistan (read Brzezinski’s own statements in Saving Pakistan cited below, and watch Brzezinski speak in the video clip devilishly crafting the “insurgency” for the Russians on the Pak-Afghan border); the so called “insurgency” in Pakistan is also calculatingly fabricated, ab initio, in the USA through covert intervention and black-ops. Subsequently, with sufficient “tickling,” and by astutely harvesting all the natural cracks and lacunae of the people, the “insurgency” acquires a life of its own. That latter stage is Machiavellianly projected in the news media, by the native informants, and the Mighty Wurlitzer, as justification for barbaric counter-insurgency operations, thus creating a self-sustaining destabilization.

The innocent Pakistan military, not too well-versed in political science or Hegelian Dialectics based Machiavellian state-craft (I presume), is similarly being compelled to take real counter-insurgency measures like the Soviets. Aided and abetted of course by high ranking traitors from within their own ranks, and by their foreign paymasters’ militaries (NATO, Blackwater now renamed Xe, and other un-named foreign divisions operating within Pakistan which I call “Jundallah-plusplus” to distinguish them from “Jundallah” which is apparently targeting Iran from Pakistani soil). The simple fact that Pakistan is supplying all the drinking water (bottled by Nestle), and full logistics channel for war-making supplies to NATO in Afghanistan is telling in and of itself. With the US, Pakistan is co-equally responsible for destroying the Afghan society, the Afghan people, and there is no less spilled-blood of innocent Afghani Muslims upon Pakistan’s hands over the past 30 years than upon the United States’ hands.

The Pakistani military helped destroy Afghanistan, and they are now helping to destroy Pakistan. No Pakistani civilian I know, including myself, ever authorized the Pakistani military to destroy Afghanistan, or aid the United States in its own hegemonic plans on the Grand Chessboard. Do you know anyone? So from where did they get their mandate? I would rather have clean drinking water in my tap, damn it! What good are the bloody nukes when they become the raison d’être for our very destruction in this manner without ever firing a single missile at the drones that are killing our own peoples?

It gives me no pleasure to repeatedly rehearse this footnote to history. What is not already obvious to the Pakistanis? It must surely still occur to many a reasonable military man serving with genuine zeal and honor in the real pivot of power in Pakistan that the end is drawing near. What are they doing idly watching the battle of their lives from the sidelines – when they are not shooting or displacing their own peoples that is? As quoted from a Dawn newspaper column, “THIS article poses two questions: on the day after US/Nato forces invade and occupy some of Balochistan and Waziristan, what will we say we should have done, and why aren’t we doing it now? Is this far-fetched? … One hopes that a small group of patriotic officers in Pakistan are also asking themselves what can be done, and why aren’t we doing it now.”

On the second anniversary of Blackwater’s massacre of Iraqis in Baghdad’s Al-Nusur Square, CBS on September 17 asked in a detailed report: “Why Is Obama Still Using Blackwater?” The answer could obviously be found in exhausting the U.S. “volunteer” military manpower stretched out to the maximum to sustain the two U.S.–led wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.

This military manpower debacle leaves Obama with either one of three options: More privatization of both wars and consequently more “blackwaters”, “nationalization” of both wars through “Iraqization” and “Afghanization”, which nonetheless could not disengage the U.S. neither militarily nor financially from both theaters neither in the short term nor in the foreseeable future, or resorting to conscription to sustain a war that has so far proved unwinnable both on Iraq and on Afghanistan after nine years and seven years respectively.

However all three options seem unfeasible. Conscription as the last resort is absolutely an option that would immediately be dismissed because unless it is dictated by a clear-cut threat to national security it will not be accepted as an indispensible measure of self defense, let alone conscribing Americans for a war on Iraq that has been unpopular with them since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, or for the war on Afghanistan that is increasingly becoming unpopular among them, according to the latest CNN Poll of Polls (58% against), and is gradually eroding Obama’s popularity, which dropped to 50% from 57% in July (Wall Street Journal and NBC News poll on September 23).

The other two options, namely privatization or nationalization of both wars, are evidently contradictory. While Iraqis or Afghanis may swallow a delayed withdrawal of foreign military troops until they can develop their own defense forces, they will in no way accept a mercenary alternative to such troops in the meantime, nor would they perceive collaborators who were brought into both countries by the invading armies themselves as turned “nationalists” overnight.

Obama’s strategy as was announced on the inauguration of his administration was to exit U.S. combatants from Iraq and move these same combating resources to Afghanistan to solve his military manpower problem, but exit from Iraq is proving untenable and the war on Afghanistan is proving unsustainable without immediate commitment of substantially more troops.

Obama has now to choose between two failures, either a failure in Iraq or a failure in Afghanistan, because a “successful outcome” in the latter theater “is going to require a major U.S. reinforcement,” but “fast redeployment in Afghanistan hurts us in Iraq. It comes at a price … at the cost of the risk of failure in another theater (i.e. Iraq),” according to Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow with the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) for defense policy on March 2.

Obama is now obviously stuck between what he described as the U.S “war of choice” on Iraq and the U.S. “war of necessity” on Afghanistan, which practically has become His “war of hard choice” – according to Richard Haas, the CFR president in a recent article. Both wars however are still insistently sustained by Obama whose exit strategy from both is still blurred in Iraqi and Afghani eyes as much as in U.S. eyes.

Viewed from the battle grounds of the U.S. global wars on terrorism or otherwise, which ironically are only fought in the Middle East, Obama’s strategies seem indecisive and confused. On Iraq, he pledged in his UN speech to “ending the war” and “to remove all American troops by the end of 2011,” but “responsibly,” until the Iraqis “transition to full responsibility for their future,” which practically translates to a long term strategic commitment.

Meanwhile on Afghanistan he is still wavering and meandering not to rush to a sizeable reinforcement to avoid what Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in country, warned against in a confidential report, recently leaked: “Resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it … The overall effort is deteriorating. We run the risk of strategic defeat.” But Obama will not yet surge troops there until he has “the right strategy” and will not send “young men and women into battle, without having absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be.”

Nine months in office, Obama is still wondering: “Are we doing the right thing?” “Are we pursuing the right strategy?” If Obama has yet to decide on a strategy on Afghanistan, in hindsight, one might ask: why did he send there seventeen thousand additional troops earlier this year!

For too long now the Middle East has been paying in blood for U.S. experimental and contradictory foreign policies, which ostensibly seek peace where war is the only option to make the Israeli occupying power, for instance, succumb to a just and lasting peace in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and launch war where peace is only attainable through an end to U.S.-led wars as the cases are in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, Obama at the UN on Wednesday seemed poised to promise the Middle East more of the same when he pledged he “will never apologize” for defending the interests “of my nation,” and yet lamented “anti-Americanism,” which is exacerbated by sustaining such counterproductive policies.

Unsaid, of course, is that guests do not come barging onto one’s house with their guns blazing, bombs dropping, and with the intention of arresting or killing the residents who do not want the guests there. Also unsaid is that as long as Washington and its ISAF are in Afghanistan they will be considered occupiers for the simple reason that they are occupying the country. In other words, the ISAF troops obey only those local laws they deem fit to obey and only when they feel it to be to their advantage to do so; they come and go at will, taking over villages and homes when it serves their needs; and their commanders in Washington decide who will lead the Afghan government. Those are some of the basic facts of Washington and ISAF’s presence in Afghanistan. They can not be explained away via a public relations campaign aimed at changing the Afghan people’s perception of the occupiers’ presence.

There is a sentence in the report that is laughably ironic and represents the fantastical foundation on which the report is built. That sentence reads: “We must never confuse the situation as it stands with the one we desire.” Yet, this is exactly what the paper does. Its primary impetus is one that targets the Afghan population’s perception of the foreign military presence in their land. It calls the US and NATO occupation of Afghanistan different from the previous Soviet occupation, as if the 2001 invasion and the subsequent eight years of Washington’s war had not killed thousands of Afghans, thereby stoking the resentment of the local population and consequently increase support for the resistance. In its comments about the insurgents’ strategies, McChrystal’s report states that the insurgents “wage a “silent war” of fear, intimidation, and persuasion throughout the year-not just during the warmer weather “fighting season” — to gain control over the population. As any student of counterinsurgency knows, these tactics are used by both sides in a war such as that being fought in Afghanistan. The failure to acknowledge this gives lie to the aforementioned statement that we must not confuse the reality of the situation with the reality we desire.

Throughout the paper, there is an undertone that suggests that the primary problem with the war is that the Afghan people are perceiving it the wrong way. Consequently, the need to change that perception is referred to over and over. Yet, as mentioned before, it is difficult to change the reality of the war when one lives with it daily, like the Afghans do. It seems to me that the paper’s authors actually believe that it is the population of the ISAF nations whose perception of the war and occupation needs to be changed, not the Afghan population’s. The Afghans’ perception is purely secondary, since Washington will do what it wants in that country no matter what the Afghan population thinks. However, if the US people began demanding a withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, the battle to escalate the Afghan war would become that much harder McChrystal and all those who stand to gain from it.

To its credit, the McChrystal paper describes the resistance to the occupiers as being composed of more than the Afghan Taliban. Indeed, three major groups are named and briefly described. In addition, the reader is presented with the Pentagon’s understanding of the various group’s goals and strategies. According to the paper, these strategies involve playing different tribes off each other, employing radical mullahs to encourage Afghans to support the campaign against occupation and capitalizing on vast unemployment by empowering the young and disenfranchised through cash payments, weapons, and prestige. If one examines the strategies of the US occupiers in Iraq, it is quite clear that Washington mirrored these same strategies, playing tribes off one another, selecting certain religious leaders to recruit support, and arming and employing Iraqi men to serve as militias. Similar strategies are underway in Afghanistan, including the development of militias working for the US-sponsored regime in Kabul.

In short, the strategy outlined in the McChrystal paper is just another remake of standard counterinsurgency strategies. Despite its newspeak regarding the need to change strategies and its occasionally dire tone in terms of the threat to Washington’s success in the country, its true conclusion is that in order for Washington to win its war is by increasing troops, stepping up covert and black ops, and changing the perception of the war on the homefront while trying to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.

Same joke as last week, I am NOT talking about the lynch mob-like crowd scene on the National Mall that was literally choreographed by and for Fox “News” last week on Sept. 12, but the current, equally valid, environmental protesters being pre-harassed by the Pittsburgh PD in advance of this Thursday’s G20 Summit.

Quick reminder: This week economically devastated working class Pittsburgh hosts this year’s annual “G20 Summit.” Leaders of the world will dine on fine foods, couch their agendas in terms that sound magnanimous, size up the new American president, and, if possible, discern the best way to be on America’s best side. Let’s face it, even though China and India are doing blockbuster business in the way of catching up, the US is still the driving economy of the planet. For now.

The G20 Summit is the US’s turn to hang with the best of the rest. The G20 are the countries with the 19 biggest economies in the world plus the European Union en bloc. Long ago and far away, the group used to be a much more exclusive “G6,” also the even luckier sounding “G7,”and, after some entourage adjustment, the more sporty “G8.” Full disclosure: in an earlier feverish bid for inclusiveness back in ’99 they shot all the way up to the sonorous “The G33,” but backed off down to awkward sounding “G22,” which didn’t quite have the ring to it, so two more nations were jettisoned, and there you have it.

Working together, these nations’ economies control about 85% of all the money in the entire world. And their meetings have long attracted world class protests, but not in Rustbelt Pittsburgh, thus the crackdown. Racist posturing, propagandist pandering and mounds of trash on the National Mall to denigrate the president in as vulgar terms as possible = good clean fun for loyal Americans. Groups of environmentalist protesters staging street theater to try to draw attention to the catastrophe unfolding as we ignore Global Warming = clearly anti-American who thus need to be surveilled, and have their vans unlawfully searched and seized.

A lot of environmentalists hope to set the stage at the Summit for the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. It’ll be the first time in a long time that the rest of the world could possibly look to an American president in hopes of leadership in dealing with the pollutions that are poisoning the planet. Previously the Bush presidency played the bad boy and had scorned calls for stricter regulations on carbon emissions. At one point, in typical Bush fashion, he even mocked the assembled body and laughingly called himself, “the world’s polluter.”

Much of the world is wondering, with the rightwing holding Obama to the ropes, will there be hope for any environmental progress? The cultural warfare we’re engaged in as a nation over health care is just the warm-up for the battle we’ll see the Right put up when America tries to adjust our self-destructive addiction to pollution. Already the rightwing/Big Oil cabals are engineering the next set of protests Tea Party type Americans will be suckered into. Already they are working to challenge the president in so many ways that he can’t accomplish much beyond working to defend himself. As Yogi Berra once said, it’s déjà vu all over again.

Just as had happened in 1993 when Clinton came to power, like they had successfully done to Carter over a decade earlier, the right wing organized an all-out assault on the democratic president’s agenda in health care and energy. In Clinton’s case the onslaught took down both his plans for universal health care and energy consumption tax to regulate us off of fossil fuels.

The rest of the world has been waiting for us to join in the effort to keep the planet from choking itself to death. But they could be waiting a long time more if the Right has anything to do with it and it looks like they do. Just as the rest of the civilized world realized long ago that, as Tory MP Tony Benn so delightfully phrased in the Michael Moore movie, Sicko, “If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people.” It’s such a basic principle of human, one could even say Christian dignity, and still, look how not-far health care reform has gotten since the Right kicked up the noise machine. Here’s what’s next.

Oil corporations have already practiced staging Astroturf fake energy protests, in Houston no less, where oil company workers were shipped in for the protests, paid their company wages for being there and actual protesting citizens were kept out; and then the event was billed as a spontaneous citizens’ uprising at the American Petroleum Institute’s Energy Citizen event.

And as phony as that is, I just imagine Glen Beck will soon be leading the charge for a December 7th Club or something like that to ‘drop the bomb’ on Obama’s energy policies. And the rest of the world will keep watching while America continues to over-pollute, over-consume, underfund our education, over-fill our prisons, over-export war and weapons, undercut our own health care and overly congratulate ourselves for our freedom.

Meanwhile, while we weren’t looking, we’re losing another war. As of Monday, Sept. 21, 2009, TV news anchors and commentators talk about Afghanistan as if America’s chances are already over. The Taliban have virtually regained control of the country and if we want the control back, it’s going to take four times the manpower and four decades to do it. The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, had heartily concurred in the call for more troops. You remember Karzai, the former Unocal employee we installed in power within months of Sept. 11th 2001? The guy who recently claimed a reelection victory in an election widely recalled as a fraud. That Karzai. Well, Karzai still has that all that Unocal pipeline project to protect; so you can bet when it comes to getting an army to fight off Taliban, he would much rather borrow ours than create his own.

Currently the best estimates say that if we had the political will to send in 600,000 troops and to have generations of them stay there for 40, count ‘em, 40 years, then we might make some headway. Sounds like a mighty big amount of political will. But these days, most Americans barely have the political will to get out of bed in the morning, unless, of course, they’re being fueled on hatred of all things Obama. So, here’s the silver lining in all this:

That Afghanistan War is likely to go down the tubes too, once the Right Realize they can hate him for that as well. Iraq was Bush’s war to lose, and lose it he did, but Obama is likely to have Afghanistan taken away from him. When right-wingers can claim to be patriotic by calling for an end to “the Awful President’s Illegal War,” then you’ll know peace will soon be at hand.

The version of the classified McChrystal assessment published on the Washington Post website Monday has many redactions, indicating that it had been prepared especially for the purpose of leaking it the press.

What may be even more important about McChrystal’s assessment, however, is that it presents a highly discouraging picture of the situation in Afghanistan – and that the Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Afghanistan to which he had agreed just three weeks earlier was even more pessimistic than his “initial assessment”.

The integrated campaign plan, signed by McChrystal and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry on Aug. 10, said that popular rejection of the Afghan government in the Pashtun region of the country is already so pronounced that “key groups” are supporting the Taliban as the only available alternative to a government they regard as abusive.

The integrated campaign plan is marked “Sensitive but Unclassified”, and has not been released to the public, but a copy has been obtained by IPS.

Both documents acknowledge fundamental socio-political realities that raise serious questions about the feasibility of the counterinsurgency programme that McChrystal outlines in his assessment, but McChrystal’s assessment altered or softened some central conclusions of the integrated campaign plan.

The most important difference between the two documents is their conclusion about how much popular support the insurgents have already gained. The McChrystal assessment suggests that the insurgents have been unable to obtain uncoerced popular support.

“Major insurgent groups use violence, coercion and intimidation against civilians to control the population,” the assessment says. It concludes that “popular enthusiasm” for the Taliban and other insurgent groups “appears limited, as does their ability to spread beyond the Pashtun areas”.

Pashtuns are by far the largest ethnic group in the country, with 40 to 45 percent of the population, and predominate across most of Afghanistan’s territory, from the far west across the entire south to the east.

While denying popular support for the insurgency, however, McChrystal admits that some factors, such as “a natural aversion to foreign intervention” and tribal and ethnic identities that are reinforced by “historical grievances” have resulted in “elements of the population tolerating the insurgency and calling to push out foreigners”.

The integrated campaign plan goes further, suggesting that the Taliban have gotten support because they are seen as the only feasible alternative to an abusive government. It notes that most Afghans reject the “Taliban ideology”, but concludes, “Key groups have become nostalgic for the security and justice Taliban rule provided.”

The two documents use different terms to describe the political failure of the Afghan government and its consequences. The McChrystal assessment refers to a popular “crisis of confidence” in the government. But the integrated campaign plan calls it a “crisis of legitimacy” and says the insurgents have “derived some legitimacy by appealing to ideological affinities and fears of ‘foreign occupation’ as well as in quick provision of local justice.”

The two documents also differ on what progress can be expected in carrying out an ambitious agenda for change outlined in the integrated campaign plan.

McChrystal’s assessment simply presents the broad strategy and the objectives that must be achieved in regard to providing security, increasing Afghan government security forces and reform of governance. It does not consider the risks or likelihood of failure in regard to any these objective.

The integrated campaign plan, however, does consider risks and the possibility of failure. It makes the identification of corrupt local officials and punishing them or changing their behaviour a priority objective, for example.

But it also warns that the Afghan government and its warlord allies in the provinces, who have no real interest in changing the status quo, may well be able to frustrate such efforts at reform. The plan even suggests Karzai might “replace several effective government officials with ineffective or corrupt individuals”.

It raises the possibility that “dashed hopes” about reducing Afghan government corruption could create a “backlash” against the ISAF.

Another risk anticipated by the plan is that the Afghan elections of Aug. 20 would be “widely viewed as unfair” and would lead to “a political crisis and/or increased perception of GIRoA [Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan] illegitimacy”. Reporting during the month since the election suggests that such an expectation was quite realistic.

Although it clearly pulls its punches on some key issues, the McChrystal assessment nevertheless contains some remarkably candid language for an official document – let alone one clearly intended to justify the escalation of the war.

McChrystal acknowledges the problem of warlords – referring to them as “local and regional power brokers” – who have autonomy from the government and in some cases hold positions in the Afghan National Security Forces, particularly the Afghan National Police.

He also refers to the fact that ISAF has “relationships” with the warlords, these “individuals”, meaning that foreign military contingents have many contracts with them to provide security services and rely heavily on them for intelligence.

Those relationships, McChyrstal observes, “can be problematic”. For one thing, he observes, the Afghan public perceives the ISAF as “complicit” in official Afghan abuses of power.

This degree of realism about the fundamental socio-political conditions bearing on the success or failure of a counterinsurgency war found in both the McChrystal assessment and the integrated campaign plan is highly unusual, if not unparalleled, in U.S. military policymaking. In this case, it apparently helped precipitate a crisis in U.S. Afghan policy.

Along with the blatantly fraudulent election run by President Hamid Karzai’s regime and the sharp downturn in domestic U.S. political support for the war in Afghanistan, the fundamental obstacles to success discussed candidly in the two documents were part of the context of Obama’s scepticism about McChrystal’s troop request.

Thus they contributed to his decision to engage in what one senior administration official has called “a very, very serious review of all options”, according to the report by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung in the Washington Post Monday.

Despite assurances to the contrary in Washington and a major policy speech in London, one need not quibble with the obvious fact that the situation is deteriorating beyond repair in Afghanistan. Although international media is more concerned with what that means politically for United States President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, little attention is given to the browbeaten and war-weary people of that country.

One should know that public support for the war has greatly diminished, when conservative commentators like The Washington Post columnist George Will write: “US forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy. America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, air strikes and small, potent Special Forces units.”

Okay, so his narrative is still ultimately violent, but the fact remains that the war mood is changing. After all, Will’s September 1 article was entitled, “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.”

Dan Senor and Peter Wehner responded with a peculiar diatribe in the New York Times, accusing Will of allowing his party allegiance to influence his views on the war. The two authors, senior fellows at major US think tanks, offered a bloody rationale wrapped in deceptive wording. They argued that historically Democrats opposed Republican wars and Republicans have done the same, and that must change. It was implied that pretty much every major war in recent decades was a war that served US national security interests; therefore, “Republicans should resist the reflex that all opposition parties have, which is to oppose the stands of a president of the other party because he is a member of the other party.” In other words, yes to war, whether by Democrats or Republicans.

The intellectual wrangling, of course, is not happening in a vacuum; it almost never does. Indeed, there is much politicking going on; intense deliberation in Washington, political debates in London; defensive French statements, and more. It seems that the war in Afghanistan is reaching a decisive point, militarily in Afghanistan itself, and politically in major Western capitals.

But why the sudden hoopla over Afghanistan? For after all, the bloody war has been grinding on for eight long years.

The Taliban and various groups opposing the Kabul government and their Western benefactors are gaining ground, not just in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan. Daring Taliban attacks are now taking place in the north as well, long seen as peaceful, thus requiring little attention. On August 26, a roadside bomb hit the car of the chief of the provincial Justice Department in the northern Kunduz province, killing him, and sending shock waves through Kabul. The bloody message was meant to echo as a political one: no one is safe, nowhere is safe. Another attack was reported in the province of Laghman, in the east, where 22 people, mostly civilians were killed. Among the dead were four Afghan officials including the deputy chief of the National Directorate of Security, Abdullah Laghmani. The irony is too obvious to state.

In Washington, London and Paris politicians wish us to believe that they are not unnerved by all of this. They exaggerated the significance of the recent Afghani elections, attempting to once again underscore that the “crucial” elections placed Afghanistan on a crossroads. Crossroads? What does that even mean, in any practical terms? George Will, although selective in his logic, was honest enough to mention that President Hamid Karzai’s “vice-presidential running mate is a drug trafficker.” Even US officials admit that the government they’ve created following the war is corrupt, to say the least.

Richard Holbrooke, among other foreign envoys “responsible for Afghanistan”, told reporters in Paris on September 2 that US officials have no preference among the candidates, nor are they particularly interested in runoff elections, but they wished to see a government that appoints “more efficient, less corrupt ministers”. It behooves those “responsible for Afghanistan” to remember that inefficiency and corruption were the outcome of the very policies they have so eagerly adopted in the country. No sympathy for Karzai here, but it’s unfair to point the finger at a feeble leader whenever a Western strategy fumbles, as it has repeatedly.

Speaking of strategies, what is the plan ahead? French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner promised that foreign troops will stay put in Afghanistan unless the country’s security was ensured, reported Xinhua. In practical terms, this means never, for how could security ever visit that region as long as the strategy is hostage to two equally destructive narratives — the Senor/Wehner troop surges vs Will’s “offshore” strategy?

Hubris aside, Washington and London are facing some difficult political and military decisions ahead. Top officials in both capitals are using grim and somber language. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, responding to a call by the top US general in Afghanistan for a fresh approach to the conflict, is considering yet another troop increase as part of Obama’s new Afghan strategy.

The sense of urgency was invited by the detailed report of the newly appointed General Stanley McChrystal, who maintains that “success” was still possible, but a change of strategy is needed. The report resulted in intense deliberation in Washington, highlighted by grim press conferences involving the Pentagon’s heavyweights, including Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, over what to do about “Obama’s war.”

Speaking at the Pentagon, Gates equivocated: “I don’t believe that the war is slipping through the administration’s fingers. I absolutely do not think it is time to get out of Afghanistan (but there remains) limited time for us to show that this approach is working.”

The details of the new Obama strategy are still not very clear, but the commitment to the war is still unquestionable, as expressed in a “major” September 4th speech by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. “When the security of our country is at stake we cannot walk away,” said Brown, according to the BBC.

As Brown was solemnly speaking about British security, NATO air strikes on a pair of fuel tankers killed up to 90 people, according to Afghan authorities.

Indeed, the situation in Afghanistan requires a fresh approach, although not the one George Will had in mind.

The phrase from Tacitus comes to mind with only a slight modification. “They make desolation,” he wrote, “and call it peace.” In Afghanistan, they make desolation and call it freedom. Enduring freedom. This is the lesson the Afghans must learn. When you are the occupied, the native, the wog, you are subject to the occupier’s definitions. He will kill your wives and children and call it pacification. He will choose your leaders, tell you to vote and call it democracy. He will kick in the doors to your home, arrest you and your sons, and call you insurgents. Of course, it is this very practice which turns many of your men into said insurgents.

If the leaders he chooses for you oppose the more murderous of the occupier’s actions, that leader will be subverted. Some, like Mr. Diem in Vietnam and Patrick Lumumba in the Congo, will be murdered outright. Others, like those that came before al-Maliki in Iraq, will merely disappear from the scene, often with a newly expanded bank account. Mr. Karzai of Afghanistan may or may not make it through the show election he is currently fixing. If he does, Washington will install a newly-created executive in Kabul whose role will be to undermine any attempts by Mr. Karzai to actually rule in the interests of his nation as he sees it instead of how Washington prefers. If he doesn’t win, he will retire somewhere where deposed friends of Washington go.

The citizenry on the US homefront are quiet. Allowing themselves to be fooled by the myth of a new day, the old order continues. Now they wait for the new strategy to unfold. A strategy that is no newer than the last war to be sure and probably as old as the first, but the citizens’ historical memory is intentionally short. If the civilized nations of the world can finally pacify the restless occupied, then the world can truly move to the next new frontier. A new frontier with energy capturing and transporting facilities located wherever the corporate executives of the frontier believe them to be useful and defensible by the cavalry. If the citizenry at home continue to receive the fuel necessary for their lifestyle, those dead and maimed children have even less meaning in their lives. It is, after all, the price they pay so we can (in the words of an earlier president), “recreate however we want.”

Recreating has become a challenge for may citizens who wonder where their money went while they cheer the wars that provide the answer. One trillion plus for the wars and occupations and children live in shelters in the land of plenty. Still, the believers in their vote for change refuse to see the change for what it is. Nothing changed here, only the family in the Great White House. While the right wing leads its unthinking nincompoops towards fascism, the rest of the mainstream political populace refuses to examine the cause of their problems–modern day capitalism–and continues to bet their lives on it despite the ever-diminishing returns.

We’ve been told there is no alternative for so long that those who suggest that there might be are excluded from the conversation. Their opinion is not only unimportant, it is a non-opinion because it doesn’t fit into the box designed by capital. So, like those who are dying in the non-wars of capital, those who oppose them are non-existent. Is there a solution to this enforced irrelevance? Yes, but it doesn’t lie in being polite. Indeed, it doesn’t exist within the rules of the game. Are those of us who oppose capital and its wars willing to take the risk required to turn the aforementioned box upside down and thereby empty the world of capital’s illusions? Or will we settle for standing outside it and wishing it away?

The choice is clear: health care or warfare; the Common Good or Common Destruction.

Two key developments in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will likely take place this month. Congress will more than likely pass the Defense Appropriations Bill for Fiscal Year 2010 (which begins on October 1) and General McChrystal will likely request that additional troops be deployed to Afghanistan. The Defense Appropriations Bill contains about $130 billion to wage the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan through September 30, 2010. General McChrystal is expected to request that 15,000 to 45,000 additional U.S. troops be deployed to Afghanistan—bringing overall U.S. troops levels in Afghanistan to 84,000 to 114,000.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes and out of the public eye, the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force are preparing their respective budget requests for FY 2011 (which begins October 1, 2010 and runs through September 30, 2011).

The publication Inside the Pentagon reports:

“Now, as the Pentagon weighs the FY-11 base budget and OCO requests submitted by the services on August 14, it is finding the services’ FY-11 OCO requests are larger than expected. Instead of a ‘substantial’ decrease tied to the draw down in Iraq, the OCO total is ‘roughly flat’ compared with FY-10, a Pentagon official said, noting it is only a bit under the FY-10 level.”

In other words, the military services seem to be seeking $120 to $130 billion in war funds for 2011, during a time period when ostensibly the U.S. will be reducing troop levels in Iraq and at a time when much is made about the $100 billion per year projected cost for providing substantive (though not perfect) health care reform. “OCO” is the new term of art for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the abbreviation for Overseas Contingency Operations.

These initial requests likely will be modified to some extent as they wind their way through the Department of Defense and the White House. However, the size of these requests indicate the importance of current organizing efforts to end funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and occupations.

Regrettably, though, it gets worse, as the U.S. will, without substantive troop reductions, likely continue to expend anywhere from $70 billion to $100 billion per year to continue on-going military operations in Afghanistan in 2012 and beyond.

The decidedly non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a report in August that projects average monthly troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan through FY 2012 (i.e., through September 30, 2012). It then draws upon the work of the Congressional Budget Office to project future war costs. What emerges is a never ending war with never ending costs unless pressure can be brought to bear upon President Obama and Congress to reverse course in Afghanistan and to maintain the course of troop withdrawal in Iraq.

The Congressional Research Service bases its analysis upon average monthly troop levels over the course of a year rather than numbers of troops on the ground in any given month. For example, if 100,000 troops are deployed to a country for the first 6 months of 2010 but then are reduced to 50,000 troops for the final 6 months of 2010, the average monthly troop level in 2010 is 75,000 troops. Using the monthly average over the course of a year evens out the increases and decreases in troop levels as troops are deployed into and redeployed out of a country.

The CRS projects average monthly troop strength in Iraq with the implementation of President Obama’s troop drawdown. In 2010 it projects average monthly troop strength at 88,300, with the number of troops deployed to Iraq falling to 45,000 troops by August 30, 2010 (reflecting the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces–and, for the moment, leaves aside the question of whether combat forces are truly removed from Iraq or are simply renamed and “retasked”). In 2011 monthly average troop strength falls to 42,750 troops (reaching complete withdrawal of all but a small residual force of about 4000 troops by December 31, 2011).

While arguably the troop withdrawals should occur on a more rapid timetable, pressure must be maintained upon Obama to ensure that he does not allow any slippage to occur in his own proposed timetable. The U.S. could, possibly, maintain a high level of troops in Iraq even after a supposed “withdrawal” of combat troops if remaining troops were to be retasked to other missions and redesignated. Also, a new agreement could be reached with Iraq to maintain a larger U.S. military presence in Iraq beyond the end of 2011.

Second, pressure must be exerted to prevent any expansion of the U.S. military force in Afghanistan and then to reverse troop levels in that country. Approximately 69,000 troops are currently deployed to Afghanistan. McChrystal will likely seek an additional 15,000 to 45,000 troops. President Obama will most likely decide about troop levels in Afghanistan by the end of this year.

And this is where the wave of substantive (though imperfect) health care reform comes crashing upon the shoals of warfare. Keep $100 billion in mind—the projected cost for each year of health care reform—as you read the following based upon reports from the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

In January 2009, the CBO projected the costs of maintaining troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It updated these projections in August 2009. Caution is in order about drawing too firm a conclusion of war costs based upon these projections. However, the projections do give a very strong indicator of the likely lower end costs of continuing these wars.

The CBO projects that the cost to maintain 112,500 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in FY 2012 will be $95 billion. The CBO in January projected that it will cost $70 billion to maintain 75,000 troops in Iraq and / or Afghanistan from FY 2013 onward (though it lowered this projection to $55 billion for FY 2014 onward in its August 2009 report, without an explanation for the lower figure). Now use these cost projections of CBO with the troop projections of the Congressional Research Service and you get the following prescription for never ending warfare.

The CRS projects that average monthly troop levels in FY 2011 will be 106,200. Looking at the $95 billion cost projection of the CBO (for 112,500 troops), one would think that the war costs in FY 2011 will be in the range of $90 to $100 billion. Yet, as indicated at the start of this article the military services are apparently seeking funding somewhere in the range of $130 billion for FY 2011 (or slightly lower). Either way—whether it’s in the range of the $95 billion or so projected by CBO or the perhaps nearly $130 billion in the military services’ initial budget requests—that’s more than adequate funding to pay for substantive health care reform in 2011.

The financial hemorrhaging will continue for as long as the U.S. maintains military troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let’s assume the CRS projections are correct and the U.S. withdraws all but 4000 troops from Iraq by December 31, 2011 and that the U.S. maintains troop levels in Afghanistan at their current level, without any increase of the sort that General McChrystal may propose.

The long term cost of the Afghanistan war will then likely be in the range of $55 to $70 billion per year (with average monthly troop levels of 4000 in Iraq and 67,500 in Afghanistan according to the CRS projections). This is based upon the CBO projection that maintaining a deployment of 75,000 troops will cost somewhere between $55 billion and $70 billion per year from 2013 onward (on a slightly more optimistic note, the CBO projects that it will cost somewhere in the range of $25 billion to $32 billion per year if U.S. troops levels are reduced to 30,000).

All of this leaves out any discussion of reframing the size of the U.S. military following a decade of great expansion. In June 2001, the U.S. maintained about 26,000 troops in the region. In December 2008 the Department of Defense’s Defense Manpower Data Center’s “Location Report” stated that 294,000 troops were stationed in the region and assigned to the military operations in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Of these, 181,000 troops were deployed inside either Iraq or Afghanistan (according to the DoD’s “Boots on the Ground Report” for December 2008) President Obama has yet to address his plans for the redeployment of the 100,000 plus troops stationed in the region as the troop drawdown in Iraq commences.

At this moment of critical decision-making we should utilize all legal and extralegal (i.e., nonviolent civil disobedience) methods and techniques to send the strongest possible message to President Obama and Congress that it is time to completely end the U.S. military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On October 5, nonviolent civil disobedience/civil resistance will take place at the White House. Organized by such groups as the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, Witness Against Torture, War Resisters League and Atlantic Life Community, this effort is an opening salvo in a renewed and revitalized effort to completely end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as to bring the U.S. into full compliance with international law as regards torture and mistreatment of those being held by the U.S. in the erstwhile “war on terrorism”. See the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance website with additional information available on the website of the War Resisters League.

The longer term Peaceable Assembly Campaign is an umbrella effort being coordinated by Voices for Creative Nonviolence in an effort to draw the connections between the continuing pursuit by the U.S. and its allies of on-going Common Destruction in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Occupied Palestinian Territories on the one hand and the lack of funding for the Common Good—schools, health care, full employment and living wage policies, the public infrastructure, refugee services—on the other hand. The Peaceable Assembly Campaign seeks as well to draw the connections between the ongoing militarization of the United States and the critical necessity to commit our country to a new environmentalism that, amongst other things, makes the strong commitment to a renewable energy policy that is safe for the environment.

The Peaceable Assembly Campaign begins, this fall, with the development of local campaign committees to advance campaign objectives and to lobby Congress regarding these objectives.

In January 2009, the PAC will focus upon President Obama. From January 19 to February 2 we will maintain a daily vigil—which will include daily acts of civil disobedience–at the White House seeking an end to funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This time period is critical for a final attempt to influence President Obama before he submits his budget request for 2011 to Congress. January 19 marks the start of President Obama’s second year in office with February 2 being the date by which he is supposed to submit his 2011 budget to Congress, a budget that will include funding for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

After February 2, the Peaceable Assembly Campaign will once again emphasize legal and extralegal lobbying work to achieve its objectives. The extralegal lobbying work will consist of nonviolent civil disobedience at the offices of Representatives and Senators who do not agree with the objectives of the campaign—and especially who do not commit to cutting off funding for warfare with a concomitant redirection of funds to serve the Common Good. This phase of the campaign is timed to the legislative calendar during which Congress will be developing and enacting the Defense Appropriations Bill for 2011—a bill which will likely include funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than likely the House and Senate will act upon the Defense Appropriations Bill for 2011 by the end of July 2010. The Peaceable Assembly Campaign can be reached by email (pac@vcnv.org), by phone (773-878-3815) or on the web.

These next several weeks and months are critical in redirecting our country away from Common Destruction and towards the Common Good. Decisions will be made by President Obama and Congress which could send hopes for health care, education, living wage jobs, a new environmental policy crashing upon the shoals of never ending war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must insert ourselves into this decision-making process. We cannot afford to not utilize legal and extralegal (civil disobedience) lobbying, tactics and strategies to bring about an end to the Common Destruction being waged globally in our name.

Commander of U.S. and “international” forces Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has pledged since assuming his post in June to cut back on the air strikes that have so alienated Afghan public opinion and to make “safeguarding the lives of Afghan civilians” his priority. There had been too many mistakes under his predecessor Gen. McKiernan, such as the attack that killed 47 people walking to a wedding July 6, 2008. The Afghan president, sounding less and less like a U.S. puppet, and parliament had become increasingly vocal in their opposition to the bombing and unacceptable civilian death toll. Some change of tactics was necessary as a concession to Afghan nationalism and mounting impatience with the occupation.

This incident, coming at a time of serious friction between Washington and the Karzai regime, obviously worries the U.S. commander. Gen. McChrystal called Karzai Friday night promising to conduct an investigation. He visited the bombing site, met with wounded civilians at the local hospital, and made a statement on TV and radio declaring that “nothing is more important than the safety and protection of the Afghan people. I take this possible loss of life or injury to innocent Afghans very seriously.” He promised them too an investigation.

But as a Los Angeles Times piece on the Kunduz incident notes, “It is not uncommon for such incidents to end with disagreement between Afghan and Western officials about the scope and nature of civilian casualties.” What will this investigation conclude, and will it satisfy the Afghan public?

Here are fatality figures from the incident posited by different sources that I have seen to date:

Friday, Sept. 4: Kunduz MP Moin Marastial announced, “We don’t know how many people died exactly because the bodies of Taliban and locals were taken away after midnight, but it is definitely more than 120 people in the area.” He was referring to the video feed that had been analyzed by the US Air Force as showing 120 people around the tankers just before the strike.

Kim Sengupta in Kabul reporting from Kabul for the London Independent reported “95 people, dozens of them civilians” had been killed in the strike.

Kunduz provincial governor Engineer Mohammad Omar stated that there were an “estimated 90 dead,” of whom 45 were Taliban fighters including local commander Mullah Abdul Rahman. But he also said “most” of the dead were militants, judging by the number of charred pieces of Kalashnikov rifles found at the site.

Kunduz provincial police chief stated 65 Taliban fighters had been killed in the strike.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told al-Jazeera that as many as 90 civilians, who had come out to take fuel from the trucks, had been killed.

Saturday, Sept. 5: Kunduz local government spokesman Mohammad Yawar inexplicably revised the total figure downward, stating more than 70 people had been killed.

Gov. Omar fixed the total figure at 72, stating there were only 30 insurgents, including the Taliban commander Rahman and four Chechens. But he suggested the others were “probably fighters or relatives.”

Yawar stated that at least 45 of the 70 he now calculated as total killed had been militants.

Sept. 6: Gov. Omar told German press that there were only 54 dead, only 6 of them civilians.

AP reported that German forces claimed 57 Taliban had been killed in the Kunduz bombing attack.

Washington Post revealed that a NATO fact-finding team had visited the site Saturday and concluded “that about 125 people were killed in the bombing, at least two dozen of whom — but perhaps many more — were not insurgents.”

Human rights group Afghan Rights Monitor announced, on the basis of interviews with 15 villagers, that that only a dozen gunmen died and 60-70 villagers had been killed. It indicated that they may have been Taliban supporters (which might allow the authorities to conflate them “insurgents” in justifying their incineration). “Even if all the victims were supporters of the Taliban,” stated the organization’s director Ahmad Sami Yawar, “the fact that most of them were unarmed and were not engaged in any combat activity does not warrant their mass killing.”

So who to believe? It certainly looks as though local officials have scurried to produce a minimal civilian death count. (How did Gov. Omar get from 45 to 6 civilian dead in a few days?) The fact that the bodies have been buried expeditiously in accordance with Muslim law may make it easier to do that. And if, as Gov. Omar as noted, the area is “under Taliban control” and local people likely supportive or cooperative, it may be possible to blur the line between legitimate Taliban target and any local adult male, especially if he’s sporting a Kalashnikov. (There are more of these than men in Afghanistan.)

A Taliban spokesman declares that the group escaped any losses, and that all the dead are non-combatants, a claim as implausible as that of one Asmatullah at Kunduz Hospital who told AFP, “All the dead were Taliban.”

Today’s Washington Post gives some insight into the mentality of local officials in Kunduz. Greeting the McChrystal party when they came to investigate the air strike incident, a key local official who declined to be named declared, “I don’t agree with the rumor that there were a lot of civilian casualties. Who goes out at 2 in the morning for fuel? These were bad people, and this was a good operation.”

In other words, the boy on the donkey who rides out to siphon gas and gets incinerated as a result deserves it.

Kunduz provincial council chairman Ahmadullah Wardak told McChrystal that NATO forces in the area need to be acting “more strongly” and bombing more. “If we do three more operations like was done the other night, stability will come to Kunduz,” he told the general. “If people do not want to live in peace and harmony, that’s not our fault. We’ve been too nice to the thugs.”

Given that mentality, one might expect a whitewash as McChrystal undertakes his promised investigation of this incident. On the other hand there are forces within Afghanistan, including around Karzai who has his own contradictions with Washington, who may wish to use this episode to embarrass their patrons even as the latter accuse them of corruption.