The United States of Fear

by Tom Engelhardt

  In 2006, according to the New York Times, “a joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department . . . found that the American-trained police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, and that managers of the $1.1 billion training program cannot say how many officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other equipment issued to police units have gone.” At best, stated the report, fewer than half of the officially announced number of police were “trained and equipped to carry out their police functions.”

  In 2008, by which time $16.5 billion had been spent on army and police training programs, the GAO chimed in again, indicating that only two of 105 army units were “assessed as being fully capable of conducting their primary mission,” while “no police unit is fully capable.” In 2009, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction reported that “only 24 of 559 Afghan police units are considered ready to operate without international help.”

  Such reports, as well as repeated (and repetitive) news investigations and stories on the subject, invariably are accompanied by a litany of complaints about corruption, indiscipline, illiteracy, drug use, staggering desertion rates, Taliban infiltration, ghost soldiers, and a host of other problems. In 2009, however, the solution remained as expectable as the problems: “The report called for more U.S. trainers and more money.”

  In June 2010, a U.S. government audit, again from the Special Inspector General, reported that “the standards used to appraise the Afghan forces since 2005 were woefully inadequate, inflating their abilities.” The usual litany of training woes followed. Yet, according to Reuters, President Obama was asking for another $14.2 billion for the training project “for this year and next.” And on July 22, 2010, the Wall Street Journal’s Julian Barnes reported that war commander General David Petraeus was planning to “retool” U.S. strategy to include “a greater focus on how Afghanistan’s security forces are being trained.”

  When it comes to U.S. training programs then, you might conclude that Afghanistan has proved to be the land where time stood still—and so, evidently, has the Washington national security establishment’s collective brain. For Washington, there seems to be no learning curve in Afghanistan, not when it comes to “training” Afghans anyway.

  And here is the oddest thing of all, though no one even bothers to mention it in this context: the Taliban haven’t had tens of billions of dollars in foreign training funds; they haven’t had years of advice from the best U.S. and NATO advisers money can buy; they haven’t had private contractors like DynCorp teaching them how to fight and police, and strangely enough, they seem to have no problem fighting. They are not undermanned, infiltrated by followers of Hamid Karzai, or particularly corrupt. They may be illiterate and may not be fluent in English, but they are ready, in up-to platoon-sized units, to attack heavily fortified U.S. military bases, Afghan prisons, a police headquarters, and the like with hardly a foreign mentor in sight.

  It appears then, as a modern miracle in reverse that the United States has proven incapable of training a competent Afghan force in a country where arms are the norm, fighting has for decades seldom stopped, and the locals are known for their martial traditions. Similarly, it’s abidingly curious that the United States has so far failed to train a modest-sized air force, even flying refurbished Italian light transport planes from the 1980s and those Russian helicopters, when the Soviet Union, the last imperial power to try this, proved up to creating an Afghan force able to pilot aircraft ranging from helicopters to fighter planes.

  2. Non-Exit strategies: Now, let’s wade a little deeper into the strangeness of what Whitlock reported by taking up the question of when we’re actually planning to leave Afghanistan. Consider this passage from the Whitlock piece: “U.S. military officials have estimated that the Afghan air force won’t be able to operate independently until 2016, five years after President Obama has said he intends to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But [U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael R.] Boera said that date could slip by at least two years if Congress forces the Afghans to fly U.S. choppers.” In other words, while Americans argue over what the president’s drawdown date really means, and while Afghan president Hamid Karzai suggests that Afghan forces will take over the country’s security duties by 2014, Whitlock’s anonymous “U.S. military officials” are clearly operating on a different clock, on, in fact, Pentagon time, and so are planning for a 2016–2018 target date for that force simply to “operate independently” (which by no means indicates “without U.S. support”).

  If you were of a conspiratorial mind-set, you might almost think that the Pentagon preferred not to create an effective Afghan air force and instead wanted to remain the substitute Afghan air force forever and a day—as has also been the case in Iraq, a country that once had the world’s sixth largest air force and now, after years of U.S. mentoring, has next to nothing.

  3. Who Are the Russians Now?: Okay, let’s move even deeper into American strangeness with a passage that makes up most of the twentieth and twenty-first paragraphs of Whitlock’s twenty-five-paragraph piece: “In addition,” he reports, “the U.S. Special Operations Command would like to buy a few Mi-17s of its own, so that special forces carrying out clandestine missions could cloak the fact that they are American. ‘We would like to have some to blend in and do things,’ said a senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the clandestine program.” No explanation follows on just how—or where—those Russian helicopters will help “cloak” American Special Operations missions, or what they are to “blend” into, or the “things” they are to do. There’s no further discussion of the subject at all. In other words, the special op urge to Russianize its air transport has officially been reported, and as far as I know, not a single congressional representative has made a fuss over it, no mainstream pundit has written a curious or angry editorial challenging its appropriateness, and no reporter has followed up.

  As just another little factoid of no great import buried deep in an article focused on other matters, undoubtedly no one has given it a thought. But it’s worth stopping a moment and considering just how odd this tiny bit of news-that-won’t-ever-rise-to-the-level-of-news actually is. One way to do this is to play the sort of opposites game that never quite works on this still one-way planet of ours.

  Just imagine a similar news item coming out of another country.

  Hot off the wires from Tehran: Iranian special forces teams are scouring the planet for old American Chinook helicopters so they can be well “cloaked” in planned future forays into Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province.

  That might be a little hard to imagine right now, but I guarantee you one thing: had some foreign news source reported such a plan, or had Craig Whitlock somehow uncovered it and included it in a piece—no matter how obscurely nestled—there would have been pandemonium in Washington. Congress would have held hearings. Pundits would have opined on the infamy of Iranian operatives masking themselves in our choppers. The company or companies that sold the helicopters would have been investigated. And you can imagine what Fox News commentators would have had to say.

  When we do such things, however, and a country like Pakistan reacts with what’s usually described as “anti-Americanism,” we wonder at the nationalistic hair-trigger they’re on. We comment on their over-emotionalism, we highlight their touchy “sensibilities,” and our reporters and pundits then write empathetically about the difficulties American military and civilian officials have dealing with such edgy natives. In July 2010, for instance, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were expanding their role in the Pakistani tribal borderlands by more regularly “venturing out with Pakistani forces on aid projects, deepening the American role in the effort to defeat Islamist militants in Pakistani territory that has been off limits to U.S. ground troops.” The Pakistani government has not been eager to have American boots visibly on the ground in t
hese areas, and so Journal reporter Julian Barnes wrote, “Because of Pakistan’s sensitivities, the U.S. role has developed slowly.”

  Imagine how sensitive they might prove to be if those same forces began to land Russian helicopters in Pakistan as a way to “cloak” their operations and blend in? Or just what sort of hair-trigger the natives of Montana might be on if Pakistani special operations types were roaming Glacier National Park and landing old American helicopters outside Butte. Then consider the sensitivities of Pakistanis on learning that the head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service turned out to be a man of “impeccable credentials” (so said then-CIA director Leon Panetta). Among those credentials were his stint as the CIA station chief in Pakistan until sometime in 2009, his involvement in the exceedingly unpopular drone war in that country’s tribal borderlands, and the way, as Panetta put it a tad vaguely, he “guided complex operations under some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable.”

  Here’s the truth of the matter, as Whitlock’s piece makes clear: we carry on in the most bizarre ways in far-off lands and think nothing of it. Historically, it has undoubtedly been the nature of imperial powers to consider every strange thing they do more or less the norm. For a waning imperial power, however, such an attitude has its own dangers. If we can’t imagine the surpassing strangeness of our arrangements for making war in lands thousands of miles from the United States, then we can’t begin to imagine how the world sees us, which means that we’re blind to our own madness.

  Forever War

  Sometimes it’s the little things in the big stories that catch your eye. On September 27, 2010, the Washington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward’s latest book Obama’s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the commander in chief into the smallest of Afghan corners. As an illustration, the Post included a graphic the military offered President Obama at a key November 2009 meeting called to review war policy. It caught in a nutshell the favored “solution” to the Afghan War of those in charge of fighting it—Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus, then Centcom commander, General Stanley McChrystal, then Afghan War commander, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others. Labeled “Alternative Mission in Afghanistan,” it’s a classic of visual wish fulfillment. Atop it is a soaring green line that was meant to represent the growing strength of the notoriously underwhelming “Afghan Forces,” military and police, as they moved toward a theoretical goal of 400,000—an unlikely “end state” given present desertion rates. Underneath that green trajectory of putative success was a modest, herky-jerky blue curving line, representing the 40,000 U.S. troops Gates, Petraeus, Mullen, and company were pressuring the president to surge into Afghanistan.

  The eye-catching detail, however, was the date on the chart. Sometime between 2013 and 2016, according to a hesitant dotted white line (that left plenty of room for error), those U.S. surge forces would be drawn down radically enough to dip somewhere below the 68,000 level. In other words, two to five years from that September, if all went as planned—a radical unlikelihood, given the Afghan War so far—the United States might be back to the force levels of early 2009, before the president’s second surge was launched.

  And when would those troops dwindle to near zero? 2019? 2025? The chart makers were far too politic to include anything beyond January 1, 2016, so we have no way of knowing what they were thinking. But look at that chart and ask yourself: Is there any doubt that our high command, civilian and military, was dreaming of and most forcefully recommending to the president a forever war, one which the Office of Management and Budget estimated would cost almost $900 billion?

  Of course, as we now know, the military “lost” this battle. Instead of the 40,000 troops they desired, they “only” got 30,000 from a frustrated president, plus a few thousand support troops the Secretary of Defense was allowed to slip in, and some special operations forces that no one was putting much effort into counting, and don’t forget those extra troops wrung out of NATO as well as small allies who, for a price, couldn’t say no—all of which added up to a figure suspiciously close to the 10,000 the president had officially denied his war commanders.

  When, on December 1, 2009, Barack Obama addressed the cadets of West Point and, through them, the rest of us to announce the second Afghan surge of his presidency, he was at least able to slip in a date to begin the drawdown of U.S. forces. (“But taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”) Hardly a nanosecond passed before—first “on background” and soon enough in public—administration spokespeople rushed to reassure the rest of Washington that such a transfer would be “conditions based.” Given conditions there since 2001, not exactly a reassuring statement.

  More, Never Less

  Let’s keep two things in mind here: just how narrow the options the president considered were, and just how large the surge he reluctantly launched was. By the end of fall 2009, it was common knowledge in Washington that the administration’s fiercely debated Afghan War “review” never considered a “less” option, only ones involving “more.” Thanks to Woodward, we can put definitive numbers to those options. The least of the “more” options was Vice President Biden’s “counterterrorism-plus” strategy, focused on more trainers for the Afghan military and police plus more drone attacks and Special Forces operations. It involved a surge of 20,000 U.S. troops. According to Woodward, the military commanders, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the secretary of defense more or less instantly ruled this out.

  The military’s chosen option was for those 40,000 troops and an emphasis on counterinsurgency. Between them lay a barely distinguishable 30,000 to 35,000 option. The only other option mentioned during the review process involved a surge of 85,000, and it, too, was ruled out by the military because troops in that quantity simply weren’t available. This, then, was the full “range” of debate in Washington about the Afghan War. No wonder the president, according to Woodward, exclaimed in anger, “So what’s my option? You have given me one option.”

  It’s also important to remember that this round of surgification involved a lot more than those 30,000 troops and various add-ons. Thanks to Woodward’s book, for instance, we now know that, in 2002, the Bush administration allowed the CIA to organize a secret Afghan “paramilitary army,” modeled after the U.S. Special Forces and divided into “counter­terrorist pursuit teams.” Three thousand in all, these irregulars have been operating as proxy fighters and assassins in Afghanistan. And, in the Obama era, they have evidently also been venturing into the Pakistani tribal borderlands where CIA drone attacks are already part of everyday life. U.S. helicopters upped the ante in the first of two such incidents by venturing across the same border to attack retreating Taliban fighters in what U.S. military spokespeople termed “self-defense,” but was known in the Vietnam era as “hot pursuit.”

  In addition, U.S. military commanders, the New York Times reports, have threatened worse. (“As evidence of the growing frustration of American officials, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan . . . issued veiled warnings to top Pakistani commanders that the United States could launch unilateral ground operations in the tribal areas should Pakistan refuse to dismantle the militant networks in North Waziristan, according to American officials.”)

  All of this is part of the unspoken Pentagon doctrine of forever war. And lest you think that the 2016 date for an Afghan drawdown was a one-of-a-kind bit of planning, consider this line from a New York Times report by Michael Gordon and John Burns on Pentagon anxiety over the British government’s desire to cut defense spending by up to 20 percent: “American and British officials said that they did not expect any cutbacks to curtail Britain’s capabilities to fight in Afghanistan over the next five years.” Let that sink in for a momen
t: “over the next five years.” It obviously reflects the thinking of anonymous officials of some significance and, if you do the modest math, you once again find yourself more or less at January 1, 2016. In a just released Rolling Stone interview, even the president can be found saying, vaguely but ominously, of the Afghan War: “[I]t’s going to take us several years to work through this issue.”

  Does this sound like a military getting ready to leave town any time soon?

  And don’t forget the $1.3 billion in funds pending in Congress that Pincus tells us the Pentagon has requested “for multiyear construction of military facilities in Afghanistan.” We’re obviously talking 2012 to 2015 here, too. Or how about the $6.2 billion a year that the Pentagon is projected to spend on the training of Afghan forces from 2012 through 2016? Or what about the Pentagon contract TomDispatch.com’s Nick Turse dug up that was awarded to private contractor SOS International primarily for translators with an estimated completion date of September 2014? Or how about the gigantic embassy-cum-command-center-cum-citadel (modeled on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, at present the largest in the world) which the Obama administration has decided to build in Islamabad, Pakistan?

  And let’s not leave out the army’s incessant planning for the distant future embodied in a recently published report, “Operating Concept, 2016–2028,” overseen by Brigadier General H. R. McMaster, a senior adviser to General Petraeus. It ditches the “Buck Rogers” visions of futuristic war, and instead describes counterinsurgency operations, grimly referred to as “wars of exhaustion,” in one, two, many Afghanistans to the distant horizon.

  Like an alcoholic on a bender, the present Pentagon and military cast of characters can’t stop themselves. Forever war is in their blood, so much so that they’re ready to face down the commander in chief, if necessary, to make it continue. This is really the definition of an addiction—not to victory, but to the state of war itself. Don’t expect them to discipline themselves. They won’t.