06 December 20
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RSN: Mort Rosenblum | Abandoning Afghanistan
Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
Rosenblum writes: "Nineteen years and only Allah knows how many lives later - perhaps 500,000 - that still stands. And now Donald Trump has chosen to cut and run, leaving Joe Biden with an ungodly mess in a collapsed state of hapless victims ruled by violent factions that see America as a bitter enemy."
UCSON — “With satellite dishes snipped from tin cans, Afghans can sit back in the Middle Ages and keep tabs on the 21st century,” I wrote from Kabul in an Associated Press dispatch two months after 9/11. “Their bad luck is that this optical miracle works only one way.”
A teacher named Shahla Paryan had made the point as she poured me tea in her book-lined parlor. “I’m afraid the world just doesn’t understand us,” she said. “It is wrong to believe we are the same as those horrible people who brought terrorism to America. It is very wrong.”
Nineteen years and only Allah knows how many lives later – perhaps 500,000 – that still stands. And now Donald Trump has chosen to cut and run, leaving Joe Biden with an ungodly mess in a collapsed state of hapless victims ruled by violent factions that see America as a bitter enemy.
Trump is leaving behind only 2,500 troops, easy targets for a Taliban that America only ended up strengthening after its longest conflict in its history. With tragic irony, that is nearly the same number of men and women, U.S. armed forces volunteers, who died in vain since 2001.
Shahla was a university graduate who taught young girls to read, as much a part of Afghanistan as the more familiar women in body-bag burqas that evoke most Westerners’ stereotypes. She saw Osama bin Laden as a plague that was no more welcome than locusts or cholera.
She was grateful to Americans for the hope of badly needed change, but she feared they would abandon Afghanistan as they did after the Soviets were driven out in 1989. “This is our great opportunity,” she said. “We cannot miss it.”
During those first heady days, reporters moved freely. An old man in the main market fitted me with a Chitrali pakol, that ubiquitous flat-topped cap, to the amusement of bystanders. In small shops, I scrounged up the makings of an Italian pasta feast for the AP bureau.
I was assigned to do big-picture stories, part of a team directed by Kathy Gannon, whose solid reporting over the years earned her almost total access to press-shy Afghan leaders of all factions. But, as is so often the case, the story was in small-picture vignettes.
One morning, prowling Kabul backstreets, I found a man collapsed in grief next to a gaping hole on the dirt road near his house. His daughter had been playing hopscotch there when an errant bomb landed from an American plane.
Back then, victims like that anguished father accepted Allah’s will. They understood why invaders from half a world away pursued Saudi terrorists who had struck at the heart of America. That didn’t last long.
U.S. forces tracked Bin Laden into Tora Bora, a mountainous cave complex near the Khyber Pass. Then their orders changed. George W. Bush diverted his attention to Iraq. The Americans handed over the operation to Afghan troops, who let him escape into Pakistan’s Tribal Areas.
American troops stayed on, turning their attention to the Taliban, which was fighting warlords for power. Mullah Omar, the Talib leader in Kandahar to the south, had given sanctuary to Bin Laden and his men. But the Taliban then posed no direct threat to the United States.
Rather than focus on basic essentials – schools, a government capable of stemming corruption, an effective police force, courts, agricultural production – Washington waged war. Military costs have since surpassed $2 trillion, little of that for development aid.
Bagram Airfield mushroomed into a giant base, where leaked documents later revealed suspected terrorists were tortured and beaten. Prisoners were shipped to Guantanamo, sometimes on dubious evidence from neighbors with personal vendettas.
As the quagmire deepened, reporters covered the war well until interest back home waned. Many newcomers on short visits missed the dominant and duplicitous role of Pakistan.
War is far easier to start than finish. Generals see lights at the end of tunnels; one more “surge” should do it. Societies fall apart as enmities deepen. Powerbrokers and profiteers amass fortunes. Mission creep leads to occupation. Corrupt leaders stymie plans to create workable democracy. Troops lose gained ground for lack of local government.
This is hardly new. Think of the Uncle Remus story, The Tar-Baby, in 1881. Br’er Rabbit fashions a doll of tar and turpentine to entrap Br’er Fox, who punches it repeatedly, getting steadily more entangled.
Earlier, a French general famously asked Napoleon how he would get out of an impossible battlefield situation. “I wouldn’t have gotten into it,” the little emperor replied.
Vietnam is the classic example. John F. Kennedy began with discreet “advisers” to help the South fend off the North. In 1964, I interviewed a returned pilot at Davis-Monthan Air Base in Tucson. He said his role was to advise Vietnamese crews when to drop bombs.
I asked if he spoke Vietnamese. He didn’t. Nor did the crews speak English. So, I asked? With a sheepish grin, he said that he simply cut out the middleman. Eleven years later, Gerald Ford had to declare victory and bail, leaving the communists to implant their own of style of capitalism.
Afghanistan has been indomitable since Alexander the Great bogged down and found another way east. It defeated Genghis Khan and Britain. The Soviet Union was undone by its futile war. Had America picked up the pieces and brokered peace, it might have thrived. Or maybe not.
Rep. Charlie Wilson of Texas tried. He persuaded Congress to supply $1 billion worth of heavy weapons to guerrillas – including Bin Laden – who humbled the Russians. But with no follow-up, rebel warlords turned their guns on each other. Much of Kabul was pounded to rubble.
Dexter Filkins’ masterful book, The Forever War, narrates the passage from 9/11 until 2008 as Bush’s “global war on terror” blasted open a Pandora’s Box in South Asia, the Middle East and far beyond.
A brief excerpt, from a visit in 1998, describes the result of a lost decade:
“One morning I was standing amid the blown-up storefronts and the broken buildings of Jadi Maiwand, the main shopping street before it became a battlefield, and I was trying to take it in when I suddenly had the sensation one sometimes feels in the tropics, believing that a rock is moving, only to discover it is a living thing perfectly camouflaged. They were crawling out to greet me: legless men, armless boys, women in tents. Children without teeth. Hair stringy and matted.
“‘Help us,’ they said.”
Another explains what America and its allies were up against:
“War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends, a tournament where you never knew which team you’d be on when the next games got underway.… War was serious in Afghanistan, but not that serious. It was part of everyday life. It was a job. Only the civilians seemed to lose.”
Bush left Barack Obama a free hand to shape his own policy, as presidents have routinely done in past wars. Beyond simple courtesy, continuity is vital to national security and global stability. Obama took months to hear all arguments before building to a peak of 110,000 troops in 2011.
“Commanders who were knee-deep in the fighting deserved some deference when it came to tactical decisions,” Obama wrote in A Promised Land. And, he noted later, “New presidents couldn’t simply tear up agreements reached by their predecessors.”
Biden urged a change in strategy, not just tactics. He counseled resisting the generals to negotiate a way to disengage from an unwinnable war. He was probably right. The goal was to deny potential terrorists a staging ground, but the conflict created yet more implacable foes.
Obama briefed Trump thoroughly on Afghanistan and, as Bush did, he left the way clear for a new president to chart his own course. In August 2017, when Trump was still listening to seasoned advisers, he read a 3,000-word policy statement at Fort Myers in Virginia.
“The consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable,” Trump said. “A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists would instantly fill … The men and women who serve our nation in combat deserve a plan for victory.”
Today that rings as hollow as Bush’s vow not to rest until he had hunted down the mastermind of 9/ll. Trump is abandoning not only Afghanistan but also Somalia and other global flashpoints. He is backing away from Iraq while goading Iran toward another unwinnable war.
Admiral William McRaven, who directed the raid on Bin Laden in 2011, excoriated Trump’s firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper, among others. Partisan hawks with no experience in conflict endanger U.S. troops and increase the risk of retaliatory terrorism.
He wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “If our promises are meaningless, how will our allies ever trust us? If we can’t have faith in our nation’s principles, why would the men and women of this nation join the military? And if they don’t join, who will protect us?”
Because of a clueless amateur guided by his own selfish instincts who mocks the “suckers’’ and “losers” defending America, Operation Enduring Freedom now echoes a Rudyard Kipling line after routed British troops fled to the Khyber pass: “An’ you’ll die like a fool of a soldier …”
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
06 December 20
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FOCUS: William Saletan | The GOP Is the Party of Civil War
William Saletan, Slate
Saletan writes: "As President Donald Trump heads to Georgia for a campaign rally on Saturday, a menace is spreading across the country: a right-wing insurrection, led by the president and his supporters, to overthrow the 2020 election by intimidation or force."
That threat is becoming a central issue in the Jan. 5 Georgia runoffs that will decide control of the U.S. Senate.
The insurrection has been boiling at pro-Trump rallies in the past few weeks. In Georgia, amid chants of “victory or death,” speakers have vowed to “remove” a new Democratic administration, arguing that it “doesn’t have the military on their side.” At a rally led by Donald Trump Jr., a speaker warned, “We’re getting ready to start shooting.” Last weekend in Michigan, a crowd cheered as a member of the Proud Boys declared, “We don’t want a civil war, but we’re already in one. And we’re in it to win it.” In Florida, rally leaders called the election result a “war on our homeland” and pledged, “We will not allow them to fire a man for doing his job perfect.” In Arizona, a speaker demanded the imprisonment of President-elect Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. “We have to protect [Trump] at any cost,” he said. Another speaker denounced House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, calling for “rebellion” and adding, “I’d love to see half of these people hung by the neck.” The crowd shouted its approval.
Trump has endorsed these rallies and has advocated—and attempted—direct interference in the election. He demanded that states “stop the count.” He tweeted, contrary to some state laws, that “any vote that came in after election day will not be counted.” He said “hundreds of thousands” of votes for Biden should be nullified, or should “count toward us,” because they were tabulated outside the view of partisan Republicans. Through the intervention of Republican legislatures or the Supreme Court—three of whose members he has appointed—he insisted that “the results of the individual swing states must be overturned, and overturned immediately.”
Trump didn’t just complain. He fired the director of federal cybersecurity, Christopher Krebs, for refusing to support his lies about election fraud. He hounded the FBI and the Department of Justice—and pressured Attorney General William Barr in a face-to-face meeting—for failing to back him up. “Maybe they’re involved,” Trump said of DOJ and the FBI, in an ambiguous smear on Fox News. On Twitter, he threatened to bar or invalidate Biden’s presidency. “Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous ‘80,000,000 votes’ were not fraudulently or illegally obtained,” Trump wrote. He retweeted a declaration that absent such proof, Biden “cannot be considered ‘president’ ” and should be dismissed as an illegitimate “presidential occupant.”
In Georgia, Trump pressured Gov. Brian Kemp and other Republicans to “take charge,” invoke “emergency powers,” break a consent decree, “get tough” with Democrats, and “call in the Legislature” so Trump could “quickly and easily win the State.” He told Kemp, “Get it done!” When Ducey certified Biden’s victory in Arizona, Trump phoned in to a meeting of Republican legislators to attack the governor. He retweeted allegations that Ducey had run a “corrupt election,” “certified fraudulent election results,” and “betrayed the people of Arizona.”
The president’s legal advocates take the same hard line. On Nov. 19, in a press conference endorsed by Trump and the Republican National Committee, lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani demanded the nullification of hundreds of thousands of ballots. They denounced the FBI and suggested that “three-letter agencies”—apparently a reference to the CIA—were covering up election fraud because the agencies had used similar tricks to manipulate elections in other countries. On Wednesday, Powell repeated her conspiracy theories at a rally in Georgia with fellow pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood. Wood called the FBI “crooked” and urged Trump to fire CIA Director Gina Haspel. He called on the Republican-controlled Georgia Legislature to set aside Biden’s victory and authorize electors who would vote instead for Trump.
At times, Trump has praised, encouraged, or excused violence. On Nov. 5, he accused election workers of provoking Republican observers to “become somewhat violent.” On Nov. 14, he told police to crack down on left-wing assailants in street clashes, calling the culprits “Human Radical Left garbage.” The president instructed police, “Don’t hold back,” and he congratulated his supporters who “aggressively fought back” against “Antifa.” On Thanksgiving Day, after Georgia’s secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, refused Trump’s demands to intervene in the ballot count, the president branded him “an enemy of the people.”
Some conservative activists have joined Trump and his mobs in calling for muscle or violence. On Monday, right-wing radio host Eric Metaxas told Trump in an interview, “I’d be happy to die in this fight.” Joe diGenova, a Trump lawyer who shared the stage with Giuliani and Powell at the Nov. 19 press conference, said Krebs should be “taken out at dawn and shot.” On Tuesday, Wood, Powell, and Michael Flynn—the corrupt retired general who was pardoned by Trump last week—endorsed a statement calling for “limited martial law.” The statement urged Trump to “suspend the Constitution and civilian control of … elections” so that “the military” could administer “a national re-vote.” If Trump failed to get a re-vote, the statement said his supporters would “take matters into our own hands.”
Some zealots are already taking action. They’ve targeted election supervisors in several states, issuing death threats against officials in Vermont, calling for violence against the family of Arizona’s secretary of state, and orchestrating a hunt for a voting machine contractor who is now in hiding. On Monday, Gabriel Sterling, the Republican manager of Georgia’s elections, reported a death threat against an election worker, harassment of the worker’s family, and sexual threats against Raffensperger’s wife. “Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence,” Sterling pleaded, addressing Trump at a televised briefing. “Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed.”
That night, on Twitter, Trump posted a video of Sterling’s plea. He dismissed it. He accused Raffensperger and Kemp of knowing about, and refusing to uncover, “massive voter fraud.” The next day, in a speech recorded at the White House, he denounced both men again. And at Wednesday’s rally in Georgia, Wood and Powell, accompanied by Flynn, joined the attack. Wood accused Sterling of conspiring with China to manipulate the election. He demanded that Kemp and Raffensperger be thrown in jail. “We’re going to slay Goliath, the communists, the liberals,” he vowed. “Joe Biden will never set foot in the Oval Office.”
The Republican Party and its Senate nominees in Georgia, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, could have stood with democracy. They could have accepted Trump’s defeat and asked their supporters to unite behind the new president. Instead, they’ve embraced Trump’s lies and defiance. “We’re going to keep fighting until every illegal vote is thrown out,” Vice President Mike Pence pledged at a rally for Loeffler and Perdue in Georgia on Friday. He urged Republicans to “stand with” Trump in his challenges to the election, and he told the crowd—in a gesture of support for claims of Democratic cheating—“We’re on ’em this time.” This isn’t a party of law and order. It’s a party of civil war.
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