Foreign Policy In Focus

Nothing is sadder than dying at the hands of those you're sworn to protect.

In an article for the Los Angeles Times, David Zucchino writes about the incident at Kabul International Airport in April 2011 when an Afghan Air Force colonel killed nine Americans.

The nine killings remain the single deadliest incident among insider attacks that have targeted U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. … Although insider attacks in Afghanistan are persistent — at least 80 attacks and 122 coalition deaths since 2007 — no single incident seems to have registered on the public consciousness in the United States. Few family members of those killed have spoken out.

Until now.

Widows of two of the dead officers [and] retired Air Force Lt. Col. Sally Stenton, a former civilian police investigator who was a legal officer assigned to the airport the day of the attack … have pored over a redacted Air Force report, the Central Command report and a separate Air Force chronology.

They contend that the shooter, Afghan Air Force Col. Ahmed Gul

… had help from fellow Afghan officers. … They point out that 14 Afghans were in the control room when Gul opened fire. None were killed or seriously wounded.

The U.S. Air Force investigation quoted Afghans as saying they fled or took cover when Gul opened fire. The reports, the three women said, indicated the Afghans did not attempt to rescue or treat the wounded advisors.

Furthermore

The three women contend that the [U.S.] Air Force failed to uncover Gul's radicalization in Pakistan and Kabul — and the vows he made to kill Americans.

Such killings make a senseless war such as Afghanistan that much more so. Questioning the U.S. Air Force may help to make sense out of it, at least it attaches a semblance of honor to the deaths.

Meanwhile, those who lost soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq seek to make sense of their deaths by clinging to the belief that their loved ones died while defending the United States. But many of them know that the Iraq War was unjust and, even if they believe Afghanistan War was warranted, that it has passed its sell-by date. Nothing is more painful than acknowledging the truth of John Kerry's refrain, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die" in a war.

Should loved ones also eventually acknowledge the fruitlessness and injustice of those wars, some solace still remains. First, soldiers in any war fight, in large part, to protect (and avenge) their squad mates. Second, those who die are, in effect, occupational casualties. However quotidian it may seem, just like work itself, dying on the job has its own inherent dignity.

“Now we can see [success in Vietnam] clearly, like the light at the end of a tunnel.”
-- Gen. Henri Navarre, commander French forces in Vietnam, May 20, 1953

“A new phase is starting…we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view…there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”
-- Gen. William Westmoreland, commander U.S. forces in Vietnam, November 1967

“Yesterday’s attack [in Kabul] was a fleeting event; it came and it went. The insurgents are on the defensive.” The performance of Afghan security forces should tell Afghans “they can sleep well at night.”
-- Gen. John Allen, North Atlantic Treaty Commander in Afghanistan, Sept. 14, 2011

Dear Lord, what is about generals that seem to make them so particularly immune to history’s lessons?

Gen. Navarre had a sure-fire plan to draw the Vietnamese insurgents into a great battle that would end the war. Worked like a charm. On May 7, 1954 the French army surrendered at Dien Bien Phu.

In November 1967, Gen. Westmoreland was making the rounds in Washington, talking up “body counts” and “pacification,” and how the U.S would have this little matter in Vietnam wrapped up pretty quickly. Ten weeks later, on Jan.31, 1968, the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive that put the U.S. Embassy in Saigon under siege, seized the city of Hue, and shattered the myth that the U.S. was winning the war in Vietnam.

And now Gen. Allen says the attack on Kabul indicates the Taliban are on their last legs.

For NATO this year has been the deadliest in the decade-old war, and the Kabul assault suggests that the Taliban are hardly on the ropes. As Matthew Green of the Financial Times put it, “The attack was among the most sophisticated insurgents have launched on the capital and exposed the inability of Afghan forces to guarantee security even in the most heavily defended districts.”

A “fleeting event”? I suppose that depends on how one defines “fleeting.” Seven Taliban pinned down NATO and Afghan security forces for 20 hours, scattering Embassy officials, and pretty much paralyzing a major part of the capital. It was the 26th major attack on Kabul since 2008, assaults that have killed 225 people.

What generals don’t get (it tends to be above their pay grade) is that wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan— wars of occupation—are political, not military affairs. The U.S. military continues to claim that the Tet offensive was a huge military victory because it killed lots of insurgents, and the U.S. took back all the cities it lost. But Tet was less a military offensive than a political undertaking aimed at derailing the myth that the U.S. was “winning” the war in Vietnam. And that is exactly what Tet did. Regardless of what the generals thought, the American people concluded that they had been lied to, and that the war could not be won.

During the Paris peace talks to end the war in Southeast Asia, an American colonel confronted his North Vietnamese counterpart and told him that the U.S. had won every battle in the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese officer nodded, “Yes, that is true, but also irrelevant.” I doubt the American officer got the point.

General Allen’s line about “the insurgents are on the defensive” can now join former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s dismissal of the growing Iraqi insurgency as nothing but Saddam Hussein “dead-enders.”

As for Kabul residents being able to “sleep well at night” because of the performance of the Afghan security forces:

“The nature and scale of today’s attacks clearly proves that the terrorists received assistance and guidance from some security officials within the government who are their sympathizers,” Naim Hamidzai, chair of the Afghan parliament’s Internal Security Committee, told the New York Times. “Otherwise it would be impossible for the planners and masterminds of the attack to stage such a sophisticated and complex attack, in this extremely well guarded location without the complicity of insiders.”

The Afghan Army saw its desertion rate more than double in the first six months of this year. Between January and June, some 24,590 soldiers deserted, compared with 11,423 who left in the same period in 2010. The Afghan army is supposed to reach 195,000 by October 2012.

The Afghan army has also been unable to recruit Pashtuns from southern Afghanistan, the heart of the insurgency. According to a recent study by the New York Times, Pashtuns from Kandahar, Helmand, Oruzgan, Zabul, Paktika, and Ghazni make up 17 percent of the population but only 1.5 percent of the army. In short, the Afghan Army in the south is essentially a northern army of occupation, which explains why no one in the southern provinces will join the army, and virtually no Taliban have switched allegiances to the government.

To shore up security, the U.S. has been recruiting and arming militias that, according to a recent Human Rights study, have killed, raped and stolen from local villagers. U.S. Special Forces recruit the militia members, who then shift their loyalties to local warlords. This should hardly come as a surprise. The Soviets tried exactly this tactic during their occupation, which ended up fueling the growth of the warlords and led to the devastating 1992-96 civil war.

Of course General Allen might have had something else in mind when he talked about getting a good night’s sleep.

According to the United Nations, this year will be a bumper crop for opium. Prices for dry opium increased 306 percent this year, from $69 a kilo to $281 a kilo. As Jean-Luc Lemahieu, an official of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, told the New York Times, “This is not business as usual. There is no crop that can compete with those prices.”

Smoke enough opium you can sleep through anything.

For the last 10 years we have bombed, shot, incarcerated, and water-boarded a lot of people in Afghanistan. We have allowed opium to become the country’s major source of income, and we are currently bringing back the warlords and their armies. Afghanistan is a far more dangerous place today than it was a decade ago, and the only tunnels are the ones in which the Taliban store their weapons and supplies.

It seems time to resuscitate a line from another decade and another war: “Out now!”

More of Conn Hallinan's work can be found at Dispatches From the Edge.

How does our presence in Afghanistan harm it as well as the United States? Let us count the ways. On second thought, they're too numerous to catalog. We'll just cite some of the lesser-known examples instead.

For instance, last Sunday in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote of having tea in Kabul with a woman named "Soora Stoda, who runs a logistics company serving the American military. [She] despises the Taliban and shudders as she remembers her terror as a seventh grader when the Taliban stormed her secret school for girls. . . . Yet Ms. Stoda, like all contractors, has to pay off the Taliban directly or indirectly to work in insecure areas. [For instance, last year] she had a $200,000 contract to transport laptop computers to the American military in Kandahar. The Taliban seized the shipment, and she says she had to pay $150,000 to get it released."

Kristof concludes:

With the money they milk from the United States, the Taliban hire more fighters. One security expert here did the math for me. A single American soldier in Helmand Province, he estimated, causes enough money to leak to the Taliban to recruit another 10 fighters trying to kill that American. 

No one writes more powerfully about how such Americans are killed and maimed in Afghanistan than Brian Mockenhaupt in his November Atlantic piece The Last Patrol. Along with wrenching readers' guts as U.S. soldiers fall in action, he makes us feel other afflictions to which they're subject. Of the squad he covered, he writes:

They moved east through a long, dense orchard south of the compound . . . the temperature now well over 100 degrees. Already some of the new soldiers, unconditioned to the heat, terrain, and weight of their gear, were falling behind. . . . A new soldier, underhydrated and overheated, passed out. Then another. . . . The two soldiers were unconscious—one had stopped breathing—and if their temperatures rose much more, their brains would bake. [Then] a third heat casualty. The soldier lay on the ground and moaned, his muscles racked by heat cramps. . . . Soon after, a fourth 101st soldier collapsed. . . . But the situation at the compound wasn't much better. Two soldiers brought another man, barely conscious from heatstroke, into the dirt-floored room being used as an aid station. . . . Two more 101st soldiers were brought in, dazed and dehydrated.

Even the experienced soldiers suffered.

Pfc. Larry Nichols pitched a grenade to McDaniel, who was so exhausted from running that he had trouble pulling the pin. . . . The group stumbled across the road and into the next orchard. . . . Luke took point. Jackson, his muscles weak from dehydration, nearly collapsed. McDaniel vomited and kept running.

Why are we putting our young people through this again? Oh yeah, to institute, among other things, democracy in Afghanistan to fortify it against the incursions of Islamic insurents. Afghans are not exactly thrilled with the Taliban, but, beside abject fear of them -- and even if civilian casualties caused by U.S. and NATO forces didn't turn them against us -- their priorities and values prevent them from aligning themselves with us.

Craig S. Barnes was an attorney as well as a mediator who once negotiated nuclear issues with Russia's Academy of Sciences and facilitated talks in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Theses days he hosts a radio show called Our Times on KSFR in New Mexico. What follows is from a transcript of the podcast of a speech he gave.

Late in September . . . I was in Chicago for four days participating in a seminar for nearly 60 Afghan Fulbright students who have been brought here to study in the United States. . . . . The Fulbrighters were asked to form groups of five or six and select values of their home culture from a stack of cards upon each of which was written a value. [Both young men and] women offered the following five: religion and spirituality, developing relationships, tradition, extended family, and reputation. Nothing was said by them about advancement, education, speed, prosperity or independence.

Then the groups were asked to identify the bottom five of the values that had been on the cards. They selected: equality, individual rights, law and order, privacy, self as individuals.

The leader of the workshop then provided us a typed page of values drawn from research about Americans. Among those top American values were: equality, privacy, individual rights, law and order, freedom. 

Barnes's conclusion may be an understatement, but it certainly bears repeating: "The conflict in Afghanistan today is therefore in some sense defined by these two poles."

In other words, two ships passing in the night. Democracy is an abstraction to most Afghans, elections a curiousity.