In Afghanistan Speech, Obama Offers Token Troop Withdrawals While Maintaining the "War on Terror" Mindset
President Obama passed up an opportunity to recognize our democracy and respect the views of the vast majority of the American people with regards to the Afghanistan War.
President Obama’s speech yesterday violated one of his most important campaign promises: to “end the mind-set that leads to war.”
To the contrary, his announcement of a token shift of 10,000 soldiers leaving by the end of 2011, and maybe another 23,000 in another year, makes clear that his claim yesterday that “the tide of war is receding” remains untrue. The enormous current deployment of 250,000 U.S. and allied military forces (100,000 U.S. troops, 50,000 NATO troops and 100,000 Pentagon-paid contractors) in Afghanistan continues, and reflects not an end to but an embrace of the mind-set of war, even with this small shift of soldiers. This was an opportunity for President Obama to recognize our democracy, to acknowledge and — dare I suggest — respect the views of the vast majority of the American people. 64 percent of the people in our country believe the war is not worth fighting. When this war began in October 2001, only about 12 percent of people in the U.S. did not support it. So a 64 percent opposition means a lot of folks have come to that realization now, after years of escalating Afghan civilian and U.S. military casualties, years of a collapsing economy, and yes, years of hard-fought antiwar organizing.
The American people are way ahead of the government on this one — Congress, the White House, the Pentagon, all of them. A few members of Congress — those in the Progressive and Out of Afghanistan Caucuses — are starting to get it. Rep. Barbara Lee of California has introduced an amendment to the pending $560 billion Pentagon authorization bill (that one doesn’t even include the costs of the actual wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and beyond) that would prohibit any money being spent on the war in Afghanistan except for the cost of a quick and safe withdrawal of all the troops. The U.S. Conference of Mayors just passed their first antiwar resolution since the height of the Viet Nam War in 1971, calling for a quick end to the war in Afghanistan and for the war dollars to be brought home to rebuild U.S. cities. The mayors get it, unemployed people across this country get it, many of the troops being forced into their third, fourth, or fifth deployments get it. And that’s why the president’s speech tonight focused — however inadequately — on how many troops are being pulled out, not how many more are being sent in.
But it’s not good enough. What President Obama announced yesterday is not a strategy. There still is no clear definition of a “military victory” in this endless war. In the first weeks after his inauguration, the new commander-in-chief announced he was sending 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and “then” he would decide on a strategy. Talk about backwards reasoning!
That 21,000 was followed, after months of discussion, by another 33,000 that made up the official “surge.” (It was first going to be 30,000, but you know how it goes.) The first 21,000 apparently weren’t to be counted at all. So in his first year in office, President Obama escalated the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan from a little more than 30,000 to almost 100,000 troops (along with the 100,000 mercenaries) — tripling the troop numbers. With a token pull-back of 10,000 troops over the next six months, and maybe another 23,000 by the end of 2012 (presumably timed for maximum pre-election publicity) that still will leave almost 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for years ahead — almost twice the number there when he took office. Not to mention the 100,000 Pentagon-paid contractors and 50,000 NATO soldiers who apparently aren’t going anywhere. And this for the first president to call an existing war “stupid” and to call for “an end to the mindset that leads to war.”
But that claimed goal of really figuring out a strategy, after sending the first 21,000 troops? That never really happened. Over the next year or so there were lots of discussions and debates, some classified, some leaked, some public, about counter-insurgency vs. counter-terrorism, of “boots on the ground vs. small teams of special forces, and more. But a clear strategy has yet to be identified. A clear goal remains unknown. If the goal was to weaken al-Qaeda, as we were so often told, isn’t the killing of the top guy and the reduction of its forces to about 50 al-Qaeda members in the entire country of Afghanistan good enough to claim victory? When he announced the official 30,000-troop surge in December 2009, Obama did claim that he would begin to withdraw those troops (and only those, apparently) in 18 months. But that wasn’t a strategy either. So now that the 18 months have passed, we’re left with still no strategy, still no definition of victory, only a huge hemorrhaging of U.S. dollars and Afghan civilian blood.
The cost of the war in Afghanistan so far — just Afghanistan, not counting Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, etc. — is already almost half a trillion dollars. If you want exact figures, according to the National Priorities Project it’s $426 billion. That’s not counting the hundreds of billions more it will take over the next generation to care for the U.S. soldiers who have come home so grievously wounded in mind and body. It costs about $1 million per soldier per year to fight the war in Afghanistan today. For that same amount of money, the U.S. government could bring that soldier home and hire her and 19 more for a year at a good, green middle-class job.
This year alone, U.S. taxpayers will pay about $122 billion for those U.S. soldiers to kill and die in Afghanistan. That money could instead provide health care to more than 62 million children here at home. Or provide 2.4 million new green jobs for a year. If we just look at Wisconsin, where the state budget deficit sparked this year’s first massive mobilization for jobs and against wars and cutbacks, the state deficit totaled about $1.8 billion. That’s a lot of money. But this year alone, the taxpayers of Wisconsin paid almost exactly that same amount — $1.7 billion to be exact — as their share of the war in Afghanistan. That’s why ending the wars is the most important single thing we can do to rebuild our economy and provide jobs for people across this country.
The costs of war wouldn’t be such a major consideration if this were a war for justice, instead of for vengeance, or if this were a war really liberating an oppressed people. But the reality is sadly different. While of course stability in identified and discrete areas can be imposed by “surging” huge numbers of U.S. troops, it (stability) is bound to last only as long as those troops remain. Whether they leave tomorrow or in five years, when they leave those people who live in Afghanistan will remain. And we need to remember the words of Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was asked last year by an irritated senator just how, without tanks or planes, the Taliban was winning. “It’s their country, senator,” Mullen answered. He was right. We’re not rebuilding the country, we’re just scaffolding a corrupt government and creating a huge military we call the Afghan “National” Army despite the lack of any real national center for that army to be loyal to.
There is no strategy for Afghanistan. The “fighting season” is simply a dying season, and there is always another one next year. The debate between counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism is simply a debate over how many troops will be sent and how many people will die. When the White House and the Pentagon speak of the COIN strategy, they might have a better definition than counter-insurgency — they may mean it as Congressional Indoctrination for war spending. The goal is to win the hearts and minds of the Congressional Appropriation Committees — not the Afghan people.
Afghan civilians are paying the highest price. Many in the U.S. like to think we are continuing the war in Afghanistan in the interest of Afghan women, by keeping the Taliban out of power. But the reality is the vast majority of women who die prematurely in Afghanistan don’t die because they’re killed by the Taliban; they die in childbirth. Afghanistan remains the second worst place in the world for a woman to give birth and hope to live; it’s the very worst place for a child to be born and expect to live towards his or her first or fifth birthday. After ten years of U.S. military occupation, ten years of a war waged in the name of Afghan women, the maternal and child mortality rates remain exactly where they were in 2000, when the Taliban governed the country.
According to the United Nations, 2010 saw the highest level of civilian casualties since they began keeping records. And the casualties are rising, not falling; May 2011 has seen the highest levels yet. Some argue that we shouldn’t take that as a reason to end the war, since “only” 25 percent of the casualties are directly caused by U.S./NATO troops. But aside from the morality of that question (do we really want to claim that causing 25 percent of massive civilian casualties is somehow okay?), we have to look at the realities on the ground. Of the casualties linked to anti-U.S. or anti-Afghan government forces, 75 percent are caused by IEDs, the improvised explosive devices that have also devastated so many coalition soldiers’ lives. Those IEDs are found almost entirely on roads frequented by U.S. and NATO troops — they are the real target, and the civilians pay the price.
There is an old Afghan proverb that says “when two bulls fight, it is the shrubs and plants that suffer.” That remains true today.
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Rehm : A thoughtful compromise, Phyllis Bennis?
Bennis : No. I think this is real triangulation. I think that what we're looking at is not even counterinsurgency. If we want to look at the acronym COIN, I think it could better be used to describe congressional indoctrination for war spending. This is about winning the hearts and minds of the Appropriations Committees. President Obama, on this issue, has already lost the hearts and minds of the American people who say 64 percent of Americans now say the war is not worth fighting.
And to say that we are going to have -- of the 100,000 troops, plus 50,000 NATO troops, plus 100,000 or so DOD-paid contractors or mercenaries in Afghanistan for an indefinite period, that we're supposed to be satisfied by a token withdrawal of 5- or 10,000 out of that 250,000 is almost insulting as something that is designed to respond to the demands of American people that the money -- the war money be brought home.
Rehm : David Ignatius, talk about the supposed ongoing negotiations with the Taliban in the midst of this drawdown
Ignatius : It's one of the most interesting aspects of what's going on in Afghanistan. I think the president will speak about the diplomatic surge that Secretary of State Clinton called for last February, and he will, in general terms, say that it's making progress. You know, he'll say we need to make much more effort in this area. I think that will be part of the speech. How's it going?
My sources tell me that the U.S. was able to arrange secret meetings with a Taliban representative who has a history of being very close to Mohammed Omar, the head of the Taliban, and held a series of meetings with him under the mediation of the Germans and the Qataris. Since those meetings were publicized about a month ago, that emissary appears to have withdrawn. The publicity was not to his liking. The expectation is that he'll come back.
And, in general, most of the people that I've talked to say that this channel seemed to offer some real possibility, that this was someone unlike other emissaries that we've contacted who had real street credent in the Taliban. And as -- a final thing I'd say, is that the U.S. reading is that one condition for a deal with the Taliban, that they renounce al-Qaida is probably resolved by the death of bin Laden.
Because Mullah Omar's and most of the Taliban commanders' promise of loyalty was specific and personal to bin Laden, not to Zawahiri, the Egyptian who is now the (word?), the leader of al-Qaida. So, in a sense, that puts that issue behind. There's a lot of other really hard issues, but this is something to keep your eye on.
Rehm: General, do the negotiations that David has talked about allow the president, at this moment, following the death of bin Laden, to begin this drawdown?
Barno : Well, I think so. And I think the key the president recognizes is that there's a great deal of psychology behind this announcement and that that's going to affect not only a domestic audience here at home, but it's going to have a big effect in the region. When he made his December 2009 speech at West Point, the single line take-away from that entire speech in the region -- and I've traveled out there extensively. I was in Pakistan for a week in January.
The message after the December '09 speech was, the Americans are leaving, and they're leaving in July 2011. And the administration spent the next 18 months trying to roll that back. And they had, I think, a degree of success with that. Last November, at the NATO Lisbon Conference, there was a timeline laid out, that all the NATO nations and the Afghan government agreed to transition lead security responsibility in Afghanistan to the Afghans by the end 2014.
Ignatius : Well, we're spending an awful lot of money in Afghanistan -- $120 billion this year -- and for a country that is in serious fiscal trouble -- they're going to look for cuts in the defense budget, and I know the White House would love to cut as much as it thinks it responsibly could from the Afghanistan part of that. This is a hideously expensive war to wage. It's just so hard to get stuff there. It's so remote. The conditions in the winter, they're nightmarish if you've ever been there.
We just -- we need the money, and we want these troops home, but not to give up the gains that he thinks have been made over the past year-and-a-half.
Rhem : And, Phyllis Bennis, what about those gains? Do you have some concerns that reducing the number of troops by the end of the year could, in fact, reverse the progress that's been made?
Bennis : I think, Diane, that many of the gains that are claimed are inherently temporary. They're only going to last as long as the U.S. troops are there. And if the U.S. troops leave now, some of that will change. If they leave five years from now, it will change then. So the question is what is to be gained. You know, we have to look very carefully. I would say one thing in response to something David just said about the surge of 30,000.
Well, I think that the facts of what Dave just said is true, but I also think we need to keep in mind two things. One is the United Nations, for years, has acknowledged that in the poorest countries, the more money of their very tiny budgets that is spent on the military and police, the lower the rates of survival of the population in terms of human development index questions, issues of maternal mortality, which has stayed exactly as it was when the Taliban was in control after nine, 10 years of U.S. occupation.
We are creating a huge military in our image. That's true. Whether that has anything to do with what the people of Afghanistan want and need -- this is not a country like Iraq with a history of strong national leadership. It's a country that, historically, barely held together nationally, and where identities are bound up with village, with region, with tribe and not with national identity.
Rehm : Phyllis, what is it you would wish to hear the president say tonight?
Bennis : I would wish President Obama to say, we have been in Afghanistan for 10 years. We went there to officially wipe out the al-Qaida forces there. All of the intelligence people have said that even before the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan that there were only between 50 and 100 members of al-Qaida in Afghanistan. That work is done. If he wants to declare it as a victory, fine.
But the answer should be, we cannot afford to spend the money, and the people of Afghanistan cannot afford the continued dying to continue this war. I am now announcing that we are bringing home not only the 30,000 of the surge, but we are bringing home all 100,000 U.S. troops that are in Afghanistan. We are ending the process of paying the 100,000 additional contractors that are there, and we are ending this war, beginning tonight.
Rhem : And, David Ignatius, what would be, in your view, the result if Phyllis' desire were satisfied?
Ignatius : The risk -- I won't say the result because these things are hard to predict. But the risk would be that you would create a vacuum in Pakistan in which the different ethnic groups would turn to their regional patrons for support. The Pashtuns would turn to the ISI, the Pakistani military. The Tajiks would turn to the Indians, primarily. In the west, around Herat, the Iranians, who have a lot of influence, would become a dominant power.
You'd have a situation that I would liken to Lebanon, where the country just gets pulled apart, and you have a civil war and kind of permanent instability in a key strategic area.
And I have to say we've been through that before. You know, we once before put a lot of money and effort into Afghanistan to get the Soviets out, and then we walked away in the '80s and '90s. And what we ended up with was a complete mess.
But it was also a mess that was deadly for the United States. The plots to take down the twin towers on Sep. 11 began not just in Afghanistan, but began in that vacuum. So, I think, people are afraid of repeating that history. And there's a desire to withdraw in a way that doesn't just preserve the gains the way we talked about earlier, but does the best job we can to protect our own interests, you know, not being a vacuum there.
Specifically, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, went to Kabul in May and stated a formula for what India would like to see as diplomatic outcome that was word-for-word identical to what the Pakistani Prime Minister Gillani had said when he was in Kabul the month before and is word-for-word identical to what the United States favors, which is an Afghan-led solution.
Rehm : And then the pieces are put in separately, are they not, Gen. Barno?
Barno : Well, they are, but this takes us back to the first year of the administration, 2009. And President Bush, before he left, got a recommendation from commanders in Afghanistan to increase those troop numbers. He asked President Obama, as I recall, to ratify that, which he did. But then there was this nine-month period of time with Gen. McChrystal making his assessment in a very long deliberation inside the administration.
So the president announced what's called the surge today, that 30,000 in December of 2009. Now, of course, it was added onto the forces that were already there. So that's where that number comes from.
Ignatius : Well, there has been a lot of U.S. spending on economic development in Afghanistan. I have to say a lot of it has been wasted. And if I were to note the biggest frustration I feel, as somebody who visits that country often, it's that the Afghan government, which is our partner nominally, is so corrupt. Our mission there has been, in part, about building governance so that they'll be a more stable and prosperous Afghanistan going forward. And I hate to say it, but what we've created, in part, is a new kleptocracy.
Barno : Well, I think one of the mistakes we sometimes make -- and this comes out often in the media -- is that we look at Afghanistan as the island of Afghanistan, as a country set in the middle of an ocean without any connections, without any other influence, without any other impact on the neighbors around it. In reality, this is a very important, very dangerous part of the world for the United States.
It's not just about Afghanistan. Their next-door neighbor to the east is the second largest Islamic country in the world, Pakistan, with 180 million people. By mid-century, they'll have 300 million Pakistanis. Next to them is India with 1.2 billion.
Both those countries have over 100 nuclear weapons.
Rehm : So what is the effect of Secretary Gates' departure, Gen. Barno?
Barno : Well, I think there's going to be a lot more continuity than there will be disruption in that. We saw yesterday that soon-to-be Secretary Panetta was confirmed with 100-to-0 vote in the Senate. That's very impressive. That's a tremendous vote of confidence in him. And I think he will carry on, substantially, the Gates legacy. They're very close friends. They have interesting backgrounds that both bring unique skills to the table.
Panetta, formerly head of OMB, Office of Management and Budget, is going to have to bring that knife from his OMB days into the Pentagon and try and shape that into a more efficient organization. Part of that will be wrapped around this drawdown, this responsible transition coming up here in Afghanistan.
Ignatius : The strategy that the president endorsed in December 2009 called for clearing the Taliban strongholds in the south, which had been resistant to all previous efforts since 2001, Kandahar and Helmand provinces. They haven't been entirely cleared, but there are areas that were very insecure before, basically, with no-go zones that -- where the Taliban have been pushed out. Lashkar Gah, the regional capital of Helmand province, is thought now to be secure enough that it can be transferred to Afghan control.
I wouldn't have thought that possible a year ago. I'm less impressed than some about the gains that have been made, but it'd be wrong for me to say there haven't been gains. Journalists that I respect a great deal, among them Carlotta Gall of The New York Times, who have sources in the Taliban, have consistently reported over the last year that in the south, in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, the Taliban really have been rocked.
They're not wiped off the map. But places that -- where there are strongholds, they don't hold anymore, and they're feeling some pain. So if the question is, have we accomplished anything? Do we have an idea of what we're doing? The answer is yes. Again, I temper that by saying I think the gains are less than some (unintelligible).
Bennis : I think we have to be clear that what we are leaving behind is not a country that is on its way to some peaceful, better future. I agree that if we left, it's not going to be Switzerland overnight. But we have to be clear what we have not done. The vast majority of women who died prematurely in Afghanistan don't die because they're killed by the Taliban. They die in childbirth.
And the position of Afghanistan as the worst place for a child to live, to grow up and the second worst place in the world for a woman to live through childbirth is Afghanistan exactly as it was when the Taliban was in power.
