Victories Old and New
— Before executing the International Red Cross worker, the Taliban gunmen made a satellite telephone call to their superior for instructions: Kill him?
Kill him, the order came back, and Ricardo Munguia, whose body was found with 20 bullet wounds last month, became the first foreign aid worker to die in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s ouster from power 18 months ago.
The manner of his death suggests the Taliban is not only determined to remain a force in this country, but is reorganizing and reviving its command structure.
There is little to stop them. The soldiers and police who were supposed to be the bedrock of a stable postwar Afghanistan have gone unpaid for months and are drifting away.
At a time when the United States is promising a reconstructed democratic postwar Iraq, many Afghans are remembering hearing similar promises not long ago.
Instead, what they see is thieving warlords, murder on the roads, and a resurgence of Taliban vigilantism.
“It’s like I am seeing the same movie twice and no one is trying to fix the problem,” said Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghanistan’s president and his representative in southern Kandahar. “What was promised to Afghans with the collapse of the Taliban was a new life of hope and change. But what was delivered? Nothing. Everyone is back in business.”
Karzai said reconstruction has been painfully slow — a canal repaired, a piece of city road paved, a small school rebuilt.
“There have been no significant changes for people,” he said. “People are tired of seeing small, small projects. I don’t know what to say to people anymore.”
When the Taliban ruled they forcibly conscripted young men. “Today I can say ‘we don’t take your sons away by force to fight at the front line,”’ Karzai remarked. “But that’s about all I can say.”
But progress also is a question of perspective. Capt. Trish Morris, spokeswoman for the Coalition Joint Civil-Military Operations Task Force, said civil affairs teams have spent up to $13 million on projects affecting the daily lives of Afghans.
“That may not sound like a lot of money, but that’s hundreds of schools and clinics and bridges and wells all over Afghanistan,” Morris said in Kabul.
“That may not sound like a lot of money, but that’s hundreds of schools and clinics and bridges and wells all over Afghanistan,” Morris said in Kabul.
“Some might say not a lot is being done,” but the U.S. government, the United Nations and the private aid agencies “are all working very hard,” Morris said. “It’s just going to take some time, because 23 years of war has destroyed a lot of things.”
From safe havens in neighboring Pakistan, aided by militant Muslim groups there, the Taliban launched their revival to coincide with the war in Iraq and capitalize on Muslim anger over the U.S. invasion, say Afghan officials.
Karzai said the Taliban are allied with rebel commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, supported by Pakistan and financed by militant Arabs.
The attacks have targeted foreigners and the threats have been directed toward Afghans working for international organizations.
I don’t want to hear another word about how the US is on a humanitarian mission to bring peace and freedom to the world. Even the neocons, who supposedly really truly believe in spreading the American love, are obviously full of shit. If they really cared about the people in the countries we are “liberating” this would not be happening in Afghanistan.
We’ve spent the huge sum of 13 million dollars to help the lives of average Afghan people. Meanwhile, the Taliban are still around terrorizing the population, Pakistan is more radicalized than it was before 9/11 and is blatantly harboring Taliban and al Qaeda. Afghans are again living under the rule of fractious warlords and remain in deep, deep poverty. In other words, the Afghan campaign succeeded in sending the terrorists to another sympathetic country that happens to have nuclear weapons while leaving the people of Afghanistan living in anarchy. Victory.
Clearly, the Afghanistan campaign was just a way of letting off some of that post 9/11 steam, and letting Rummy experiment with his newfangled military doctrine, while we laid the groundwork for Iraq. And they knew nobody would care. The minute they sent Ashleigh Banfield home to cover the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping we knew the “story” had ended. Whatever happens now is a “new” story, unrelated to the story of how the Americans gloriously liberated the Afghans from the Taliban and destroyed the foundation of al Qaeda.
No matter that anti-American terrorism has been only slightly and temporarily thwarted.
It is very important to remember that the neocons do not take the threat of Islamic fundamentalism seriously. They never have, even to the extent that they have gone completely off the deep end trying to prove that the 1994 world trade center bombing was actually the work of Saddam. The first thing the claque did after 9/11 was send James “WWIV” Woolsey to Europe to root out the “evidence” that Saddam was behind it. In the rigid neocon worldview, the only true immediate enemy is a totalitarian rogue state run by a militaristic dictator (theocratic or secular.) The long term enemy is any state or group of states who would threaten American military dominance. The only danger from terrorism is the extent to which one of the rogue states gives it access to WMD. Any threat that falls outside of that paradigm is made to fit, whether it does or not.
(This is another reason why the military didn’t “war game” guerilla tactics and was surprised by the paramilitary presence in southern Iraq. The Republican Guard, supposed crack troops using traditional forms of warfare would put up the biggest fight. Isn’t that how Stalinist dictatorships behave?)
It has occurred to me in the last few weeks that one of the reasons these people are so stuck on this problem is because their lives were built around fighting communism and they truly believe that Reagan’s large military buildup and bellicose threats were the instruments that ended the Soviet Union. They never believed in containment. Indeed, even after the Berlin Wall fell, Wolfowitz was planning for a large force based in Lithuania in order to be prepared for what he still considered the inevitable military confrontation with Russia.
It stands to reason that if you believe that threats and a massive military build up were responsible for the defeat of our rival superpower (and created a “reverse domino effect” of democracy throughout Eastern Europe) then you might believe that the same effect could happen in the Middle East. That is, if you see the entire world in stark manichean terms of “strong” vs. “weak” and view all of human behavior through the prism of your own experience and expectations.
One of the more interesting elements about this is that al Qaeda also believe that they defeated the Soviet Union when the Mujahadeen “forced” the Red Army to retreat from Afghanistan. Their arrogant assumptions of victory in Holy Jihad largely stem from the fact that they believe that action caused the USSR to break up. In their view, they took one superpower down and have one to go.
So, both the neocons and al Qaeda believe they single handedly ended the cold war and defeated the mighty Soviet Empire, but neither of them take the other seriously in the least. The Islamic fundamentalists think the US is soft, not because its military is not formidable but because its people are irreligious and cowardly. Therefore, they strike at our most vulnerable spot, the civilian population — which in turn gives the neocons the green light to dispense with international law and initiate its plans for American Empire. The neocons believe that a show of force will intimidate everyone, including terrorists, so attacking a secular totalitarian state in the middle east is necessary in its own right and will have the salutary effect of cowing whatever rag tag terrorist organizations exist out there.
Because neither understand the other or ever really engage the other, they end up reinforcing rather than defeating each other’s goals.
Each in their own way create the conditions for the other to pursue their separate ends. The neocons inflame the radical elements of the middle east thereby providing a valuable recruiting tool for terrorists and al Qaeda provide a useful excuse for the neocons to pursue their long standing goal of global military dominance. The result is an escalation of violence with little hope of “victory” because the violence of each is aimed at those who do not actually threaten them.
Both al Qaeda and Neoconservatism are built upon illusions about their own power based upon a willful misreading of their place in recent history. Their desire to be right about this delusional interpretation of recent events has made both of them dangerously ambitious.
Beware of “movements” that believe their own propaganda.
Addendum:
In response to some readers who think I’ve donned a tin foil “no blood for oil” hat, I don’t suggest that an advance into Syria would be solely because of a pipeline to Haifa. There are many factors at work in these calculations. One of them, though, is most certainly the presence of vast amounts of oil in the region and a pipeline into the Mediterranean is certainly a benefit to both Israel and the US. In addition, I do not doubt for a second that contracts for building and rebuilding are relevant to the Bush administration both from a fund raising and a policy standpoint. They are as much carrots and sticks as any military operation as we are seeing in the refusal to allow anyone but the US and British to “share in the victory.”
The problem with initiating this pipeline is that it will require a recognition of Israel by both Iraq and Syria. This is, in my opinion, a very worthy goal. But, if it is imposed by a pair of puppet governments without a Palestinian state in place, the United States will be occupying the middle east forever. Richard Perle is already out there telling anyone who’ll listen that his Chalabi based dream of an Iraqi government has expressed its willingness to recognize Israel. This is such an obtuse comment at this particular time that I find it hard to believe that it could actually happen. But, with this crowd you just never know. There seem to be no limits.