American Way of War

by Tom Engelhardt

  Secretary of Defense Robert Gates jumped onto the drone band-wagon early. He has long been pressing the air force to invest less in expensive manned aircraft—he’s called the F-35, still in development, the last manned fighter aircraft—but more in the robotic kind.

  Coming back to earth for a moment, what drones do is put wings on the Bush-era Guantánamo principle that Washington has an inalienable right to act as a global judge, jury, and executioner, and in doing so remain beyond the reach of any court or law. Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, has suggested that the U.S. drone attacks might constitute war crimes under international law: “[T]he CIA is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.” But that will matter little. When it comes to drones, you don’t have to be a prophet to predict the future, since we’ve already experienced it with previous wonder weapons.

  Militarily speaking, in fact, we might as well be in the film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray’s character is forced to live out the same twenty-four hours again and again, with all the grimness of that idea and none of the charm of that actor. We’ve repeatedly seen advanced weapons systems, like the atomic bomb, or mind-boggling technologies of war hailed for opening near-utopian paths to victory and future peace. Take “the electronic battlefield” in Vietnam, which was supposed to be an antidote to brute and ineffective American airpower. That high-tech, advanced battlefield of invisible sensors was to bring an end to the impunity of guerrillas and infiltrating enemy armies. No longer capable of going anywhere undetected, they would have nowhere to hide.

  In the 1980s, we had President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, quickly dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics, a label that he accepted with amusement. “If you will pardon my stealing a film line—the Force is with us,” he said in his usual genial way. His dream, as he told the American people, was to create an “impermeable” anti-missile shield over the United States—“like a roof protects a family from rain”—that would end the possibility of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union and so create peace in our time, or, if you were of a more critical turn of mind, offer the possibility of a freebie nuclear assault on the Soviets. In the Gulf War, “smart bombs” and smart missiles were praised as the military saviors of the moment. They were to give war the kind of “precision” that would lower civilian deaths to the vanishing point and, as the neocons of the Bush administration would claim in the next decade, free the U.S. military to “decapitate” any regime we loathed. All this would be possible without so much as touching the civilian population, which would, of course, then welcome us as liberators. And later, there was “netcentric warfare,” that Rumsfeldian high-tech favorite. Its promise was that advanced information-sharing technology would create an uplinked force so savvy about changing battlefield realities and so crushing that a mere demo or two would cow any “rogue” nation or insurgency into submission.

  Of course, you know the results of this sort of magical thinking about wonder weapons (or technologies) and their properties just as well as I do. The atomic bomb ended nothing, but led to an almost half-century-long nuclear superpower standoff, to nuclear proliferation, and so to the possibility that, someday, even terrorists might possess such weapons. The electronic battlefield was incapable of staving off defeat in Vietnam. That impermeable anti-missile shield never came even faintly close to making it into our skies, and yet has continued to fuel the global arms race. Those “smart bombs” of the First Gulf War proved remarkably dumb, while the fifty “decapitation” strikes the Bush administration launched against Saddam Hussein’s regime on the first day of the 2003 invasion of Iraq took out not a single Iraqi leader but killed “dozens” of civilians. And the history of the netcentric military in Iraq is well known. Its “success” sent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld into retirement and ignominy.

  In the same way, robot drones as assassination machines will prove to be just another weapons system rather than a panacea for American warriors. To date, in fact, there is at least as much evidence in Pakistan and Afghanistan that the drones are helping to spread war as that they are staunching it.

  Yet, the above summary is, at best, only half the story. None of these wonder weapons or technologies succeeded in their moment, or as advertised, but that fact stopped none of them. From the atomic bomb came a whole nuclear landscape that included the Strategic Air Command, weapons labs, production plants, missile silos, corporate interests, and an enormous world-destroying arsenal (as well as proliferating versions of the same, large and small, across the planet). Nor did the electronic battlefield go away. Quite the contrary, it came home and entered our everyday world in the form of sensors, cameras, surveillance equipment, and the like, now implanted from our borders to our cities. While it’s true that Reagan’s impermeable shield was the purest of nuclear fantasies, it fueled a decades-long binge of way-out research, space warfare plans and commands, and boondoggles of all sorts, including the staggeringly expensive, still not operational anti-missile system that the Bush and now Obama administrations have struggled to base somewhere in Europe. Similarly, ever newer generations of smart bombs and ever brighter missiles have been, and are being, developed ad infinitum.

  Rarely do wonder weapons or wonder technologies disappoint enough to disappear. Each of these is, in fact, now surrounded by its own miniversion of the military-industrial complex, with its own set of corporate players, special lobbyists in Washington, specific interests, and congressional boosters. Each has installed a typical revolving door that the relevant Pentagon officials and officers can spin through once their military careers are in order. This is no less true for that wonder weapon of our moment, the robot drone. In fact, you can already see the military-industrial-drone-robotics complex in formation.

  As the Obama administration ups the ante on drone use in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it will be ensuring not the end of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but the long life of robot war within our ever more militarized society. And by the time this set of robotic dreams fails to pan out, it won’t matter. Yet another minisector of the military-industrial complex will be etched into the American grain.

  Whatever the short-term gains from introducing drone warfare in these last years, we are now locked into the 24/7 assassination trade, with our own set of non-suicide bombers on the job into eternity. This may pass for sanity in Washington, but it’s surely helping to pave the road to hell. If this is the latest game in town, it won’t remain mainly an American one for long. Just wait until the first Iranian drone takes out the first Baluchi guerrilla supported by American funds somewhere in Pakistan. Then let’s see what we think about the right of any nation to summarily execute its enemies—and anyone else in the vicinity—by drone.

  The Afghan Speech Obama Should (But Won’t) Give

  [Note: This was written in November 2009, more than a month before President Obama addressed the nation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on the Afghan War.]

  It’s common knowledge that a president—but above all a Democratic president—who tried to de-escalate a war like the one now expanding in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, and withdraw American troops, would be so much domestic political dead meat. This everyday bit of engrained Washington wisdom is, in fact, based on not a shred of evidence in the historical record. We do know something about what could happen to a president who escalates a counterinsurgency war: Lyndon Johnson comes to mind for expanding his inherited war in Vietnam out of fear that he would be labeled the president who “lost” that country to the Communists. And then there was Vice President Hubert Humphrey, incapable of rejecting Johnson’s war policy, who lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, a candidate pushing a fraudulent “peace with honor” formula for downsizing the war.

  Still, we have no evidence about how American voters would deal with a president who didn’t take the Johnson approach to a losing war. We do know that the
re would be those on the right, and quite a few warfightin’ liberals as well, who would go nuclear over any presidentially approved withdrawal from Afghanistan. And we know that a media storm would certainly follow. But when it comes to how voters would react, especially at a moment when unhappiness with the Afghan War (as well as the president’s handling of it) is on the rise, there is no evidence.

  While we don’t know what exactly is going through Obama’s mind, or just when or in what form he will address us, we do know something about what his conclusions are likely to be; we do know that he’s not going to recommend a “minus option.” We have long been assured that any proposals for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan were never “on the table.”

  In any case, we—the rest of us—have had all the disadvantages of essentially being in on the president’s councils these last months, and none of the advantages of offering our own advice. Personally, I prefer not to leave the process to speechwriters and advisers.

  What follows, then, is my version of the president’s Afghan announcement. I’ve imagined it as a challenging prime-time address to the American people, doing what no American president has yet done.

  The White House

  Office of the Press Secretary

  A New Way Forward:

  The President’s Address to the American People

  on Afghan Strategy

  Oval Office

  For Immediate Release—December 2, 2009

  8:01 P.M. EDT

  My fellow Americans,

  On March 28, I outlined what I called a “comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” It was ambitious. It was also an attempt to fulfill a campaign promise that was heartfelt. I believed—and still believe—that, in invading Iraq, a war this administration is now ending, we took our eye off Afghanistan. Our well-being and safety, as well as that of the Afghan people, suffered for it.

  I suggested then that the situation in Afghanistan was already “perilous.” I announced that we would be sending seventeen thousand more American soldiers into that war zone, as well as four thousand trainers and advisers whose job would be to increase the size of the Afghan security forces so that they could someday take the lead in securing their own country. There could be no more serious decision for an American president.

  Eight months have passed since that day. This evening, after a comprehensive policy review of our options in that region that has involved commanders in the field, the joint chiefs of staff, National Security Adviser James Jones, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, top intelligence and State Department officials and key ambassadors, Special Representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, and experts from inside and outside this administration, I have a very different kind of announcement to make.

  I plan to speak to you tonight with the frankness Americans deserve from their president. I have recently noted a number of pundits who suggest that my task here should be to reassure you about Afghanistan. I don’t agree. What you need is the unvarnished truth just as it’s been given to me. We all need to face a tough situation, as Americans have done so many times in the past, with our eyes wide open. It doesn’t pay for a president or a people to fake it or, for that matter, to kick the can of a difficult decision down the road, especially when the lives of American troops are at stake.

  During the presidential campaign I called Afghanistan “the right war.” Let me say this: with the full information resources of the American presidency at my fingertips, I no longer believe that to be the case. I know a president isn’t supposed to say such things, but he, too, should have the flexibility to change his mind. In fact, more than most people, it’s important that he do so based on the best information available. No false pride or political calculation should keep him from that.

  And the best information available to me on the situation in Afghanistan is sobering. It doesn’t matter whether you are listening to our war commander, General Stanley McChrystal, who, as press reports have indicated, believes that with approximately eighty thousand more troops—which we essentially don’t have available—there would be a reasonable chance of conducting a successful counterinsurgency war against the Taliban, or our ambassador to that country, Karl Eikenberry, a former general with significant experience there, who believes we shouldn’t send another soldier at present. All agree on the following seven points:1. We have no partner in Afghanistan. The control of the government of Afghan president Hamid Karzai hardly extends beyond the embattled capital of Kabul. He himself has just been returned to office in a presidential election in which voting fraud on an almost unimaginably large scale was the order of the day. His administration is believed to have lost all credibility with the Afghan people.

  2. Afghanistan floats in a culture of corruption. This includes President Karzai’s administration up to its highest levels and also the warlords who control various areas and, like the Taliban insurgency, are to some degree dependent for their financing on opium, which the country produces in staggering quantities. Afghanistan, in fact, is not only a narco-state, but the leading narco-state on the planet.

  3. Despite billions of dollars of American money poured into training the Afghan security forces, the army is notoriously understrength and largely ineffective; the police forces are riddled with corruption and held in contempt by most of the populace.

  4. The Taliban insurgency is spreading and gaining support largely because the Karzai regime has been so thoroughly discredited, the Afghan police and courts are so ineffective and corrupt, and reconstruction funds so badly misspent. Under these circumstances, American and NATO forces increasingly look like an army of occupation, and more of them are only likely to solidify this impression.

  5. Al-Qaeda is no longer a significant factor in Afghanistan. The best intelligence available to me indicates—and again, whatever their disagreements, all my advisers agree on this—that there may be perhaps one hundred al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and another three hundred in neighboring Pakistan. As I said in March, our goal has been to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and on this we have, especially recently, been successful. Osama bin Laden, of course, remains at large, and his terrorist organization is still a danger to us, but not a $100 billion-plus danger.

  6. Our war in Afghanistan has become the military equivalent of a massive bailout of a firm determined to fail. Simply to send another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan would, my advisers estimate, cost $40-$54 billion extra; 80,000 troops, more than $80 billion. Sending more trainers and advisers in an effort to double the size of the Afghan security forces, as many have suggested, would cost another estimated $10 billion a year. These figures are over and above the present projected annual costs of the war—$65 billion—and would ensure that the American people will be spending $100 billion a year or more on this war, probably for years to come. Simply put, this is not money we can afford to squander on a failing war thousands of miles from home.

  7. Our all-volunteer military has for years now shouldered the burden of our two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if we were capable of sending 40,000-80,000 more troops to Afghanistan, they would without question be servicepeople on their second, third, fourth, or even fifth tours of duty. A military, even the best in the world, wears down under this sort of stress and pressure.

  These seven points have been weighing on my mind over the last weeks as we’ve deliberated on the right course to take. Tonight, in response to the realities of Afghanistan as I’ve just described them to you, I’ve put aside all the subjects that ordinarily obsess Washington, especially whether an American president can reverse the direction of a war and still have an electoral future. That’s for the American people, and them alone, to decide.

  Given that, let me say as bluntly as I can that I have decided to send no more troops to Afghanistan. Beyond that, I believe it is in the national interest of the American people that this war, like th
e Iraq War, be drawn down. Over time, our troops and resources will be brought home in an orderly fashion, while we ensure that we provide adequate security for the men and women of our armed forces. Ours will be an administration that will stand or fall, as of today, on this essential position: that we ended, rather than extended, two wars.

  This will, of course, take time. But I have already instructed Ambassador Eikenberry and Special Representative Holbrooke to begin discussions, however indirectly, with the Taliban insurgents for a truce in place. Before year’s end, I plan to call an international conference of interested countries, including key regional partners, to help work out a way to settle this conflict. I will, in addition, soon announce a schedule for the withdrawal of the first American troops from Afghanistan.

  For the counterinsurgency war that we now will not fight, there is already a path laid out. We walked down that well-mined path once in recent American memory and we know where it leads. For ending the war in another way, there is no precedent in our recent history and so no path—only the unknown. But there is hope. Let me try to explain.

  Recently, comparisons between the Vietnam War and our current conflict in Afghanistan have been legion. Let me, however, suggest a major difference between the two. When Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson faced their crises involving sending more troops into Vietnam, they and their advisers had little to rely on in the American record. They, in a sense, faced the darkness of the unknown as they made their choices. The same is not true of us.

  In the White House, for instance, a number of us have been reading a book on how the United States got itself ever more disastrously involved in the Vietnam War. We have history to guide us here. We know what happens in counterinsurgency campaigns. We have the experience of Vietnam as a landmark on the trail behind us. And if that weren’t enough, of course, we have the path to defeat already well cleared by the Russians in their Afghan fiasco of the 1980s, when they had just as many troops in the field as we would have if I had chosen to send those extra forty thousand Americans. That is the known.