Consider what the twenty-year-old brother of two of the dead boys from the Kunar helicopter attack told the Wall Street Journal in a phone interview: “The only option I have is to pick up a Kalashnikov, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade], or a suicide vest to fight.”
Whatever the Taliban may be, they remain part of Afghan society. They are there on the ground. They kill and they commit barbarities, but they suffer, too. In our version of air “war,” however, the killing and the dying are perfectly and precisely, even surgically, separated. We kill, they die. It’s that simple. Sometimes the ones we target to die do so, sometimes others stand in their stead. But no matter. We then deny, argue, investigate, apologize, and continue. We are, in that sense, implacable.
And one more thing: since we are incapable of thinking of ourselves as predators, no less emotionless Terminators, it becomes impossible for us to see that our air “war” on terror is, in reality, a machine for creating what we then call “terrorists.” It is part of an American Global War for Terror. In other words, although air power has long been held up as part of the solution to terrorism, and though the American military now regularly boasts about the enemy body counts it produces, and the precision with which it does so, all of that, even when accurate, is also a kind of delusion.
So count on this: there will be no more Top Guns. No knights of the air. No dogfights and sky-jousts. No valor. Just one-sided slaughter and targeted assassinations. That is where air power has ended up. Live with it.
Chapter 4
Obama’s Flailing Wars
Obama’s Af-Pak Flip-Flop
On stage, it would be farce. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s bound to play out as tragedy.
In March 2010 Barack Obama flew into Afghanistan for six hours, essentially to read the riot act to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, whom his ambassador had only months before termed “not an adequate strategic partner.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs admiral Mike Mullen followed within a day to deliver his own “stern message.” While still on Air Force One, National Security Adviser James Jones offered reporters a version of the tough talk Obama was bringing with him. Karzai would later see one of Jones’s comments and find it insulting. Brought to his attention as well would be a newspaper article that quoted an anonymous senior U.S. military official as saying of his half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a reputedly corrupt power broker in the southern city of Kandahar: “I’d like him out of there. . . . But there’s nothing that we can do unless we can link him to the insurgency, then we can put him on the [target list] and capture and kill him.” This was tough talk indeed. (As it turned out, in July 2011 Ahmed Wali Karzai was assassinated at his home in Kandahar by a former bodyguard.)
At the time, the media repeatedly pointed out that President Obama, unlike his predecessor, had consciously developed a standoffish relationship with Karzai. Meanwhile, both named and anonymous officials regularly castigated the Afghan president in the press for stealing an election and running a hopelessly corrupt, inefficient government that had little power outside Kabul, the capital. A previously planned Karzai visit to Washington was put on hold to emphasize the toughness of the new approach.
The administration was clearly intent on fighting a better version of the Afghan War with a new commander, a new plan of action, and a tamed Afghan president, a client head of state who would finally accept his lesser place in the greater scheme of things. A little blunt talk, some necessary threats, and the big stick of American power and money were sure to do the trick.
Meanwhile, across the border in Pakistan, the administration was in an all-carrots mood when it came to the local military and civilian leadership—billions of dollars of carrots, in fact. Our top military and civilian officials had all but taken up residence in Islamabad. By March 2010, for instance, Admiral Mullen had already visited the country fifteen times and U.S. dollars (and promises of more) were flowing in. Meanwhile, U.S. Special Operations forces were arriving in the country’s wild borderlands to train the Pakistani Frontier Corps and the skies were filling with CIA-directed unmanned aerial vehicles pounding those same borderlands, where the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other insurgent groups involved in the Afghan War were located. In Pakistan, it was said, a crucial “strategic relationship” was being carefully cultivated.
Skip ahead to mid-May 2010 and somehow, like so many stealthy insurgents, the carrots and sticks had crossed the poorly marked, porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan heading in opposite directions. On May 12, Karzai was in Washington being given “the red carpet treatment” as part of what was termed an Obama administration “charm offensive” and a “four-day love fest.” The president set aside a rare stretch of hours to entertain Karzai and the planeload of ministers he brought with him.
At a joint news conference, Obama insisted that “perceived tensions” between the two men had been “overstated.” Specific orders went out from the White House to curb public criticism of the Afghan president and give him “more public respect” as “the chief U.S. partner in the war effort.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured Karzai of Washington’s long-term “commitment” to his country, as did Obama and then war commander General Stanley McChrystal. Praise was the order of the day.
John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, interrupted a financial reform debate to invite Karzai onto the Senate floor (an honor not bestowed on a head of state since 1967), where he was mobbed by senators eager to shake his hand. He was once again our man in Kabul. It was a stunning turnaround: a president almost without power in his own country had somehow tamed the commander in chief of the globe’s lone superpower.
Meanwhile, Clinton, who had shepherded the Afghan president on a walk through a “private enclave” in Georgetown and hosted a “glittering reception” for him, appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes to flay Pakistan. In the wake of an inept failed car bombing in New York City’s Times Square, she had this stern message to send to the Pakistani leadership: “We want more, we expect more. . . . We’ve made it very clear that if, heaven forbid, an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences.” Such consequences would evidently include a halt to the flow of U.S. aid to a country in economically disastrous shape. So much for the carrots.
According to the Washington Post, General McChrystal delivered a “similar message” to the chief of staff of the Pakistani army. To back up Clinton’s public threats and McChrystal’s private ones, hordes of anonymous American military and civilian officials were ready to pepper reporters with leaks about the tough love that might now be in store for Pakistan. The same Post story, for instance, spoke of “some officials . . . weighing in favor of a far more muscular and unilateral U.S. policy. It would include a geographically expanded use of drone missile attacks in Pakistan and pressure for a stronger U.S. military presence there.”
According to similar accounts, “more pointed” messages were heading for key Pakistanis and “new and stiff warnings” were being issued. Americans were said to be pushing for expanded special operations training programs in the Pakistani tribal areas, while insisting that the Pakistani military launch a major campaign in North Waziristan, the heartland of various resistance groups including possibly al-Qaeda. “The element of threat” was now in the air, according to Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani ambassador, while in press reports you could hear rumblings about an “internal debate” in Washington that might result in more American “boots on the ground.”
Helpless Escalation
In other words, in the space of two months the Obama administration had flip-flopped when it came to who exactly was to be pressured and who reassured. A typically anonymous “former U.S. official who advises the administration on Afghan policy” caught the moment well in a comment to the Wall Street Journal. “This whole bending over backwards to show Karzai the red carpet,” he told journalist Peter Spiegel, “is a result of not having had a concerted strategy for h
ow to grapple with him.”
On a larger scale, the flip-flop seemed to reflect tactical and strategic incoherence—and not just in relation to Karzai. To all appearances, when it comes to the administration’s two South Asian wars, one open, one more hidden, Obama and his top officials were flailing around. For all the policy reviews and shuttling officials, the surging troops, extra private contractors, and new bases, Obama’s wars were worsening. Lacking was any coherent regional policy or semblance of real strategy—counterinsurgency being only a method of fighting and a set of tactics for doing so. In place of strategic coherence there was just one knee-jerk response: escalation. As unexpected events gripped the Obama administration by the throat, its officials increasingly acted as if further escalation were their only choice, their fated choice.
This response was eerily familiar. It permeated Washington’s mentality in the Vietnam War years. In fact, one of the strangest aspects of that war was the way America’s leaders—including President Lyndon Johnson—felt increasingly helpless and hopeless even as they committed themselves to further steps up the ladder of escalation.
We don’t know what the main actors in Obama’s war have been feeling. We don’t have their private documents or their secret taped conversations. Nonetheless, it should ring a bell when, as wars devolve, the only response Washington can imagine is further escalation.
Pragmatism Goes to War
One thing can be said about the Bush administration: it had a grand strategic vision to go with its wars. Its top officials were convinced that the American military, a force they saw as unparalleled on planet Earth, would be capable of unilaterally shock-and-awing America’s enemies in the oil heartlands of the planet. Its two wars would bring not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Iran and Syria to their knees, leaving Washington to impose a Pax Americana on the Middle East and Central Asia (in the process of which groups like Hamas and Hezbollah would be subdued and anti-American jihadism ended).
They couldn’t, of course, have been more wrong, something quite apparent to the Obama team. Now, however, we have a crew in Washington that seems to have no vision, great or small, when it comes to American foreign or imperial policy, and that seems, in fact, to lack any sense of strategy at all. What they have is a set of increasingly discredited tactics and an approach that might pass for good old American see-what-works “pragmatism.”
The vision may be long gone, but the wars live on with their own inexorable momentum. Add into the mix American domestic politics, which could discourage any president from changing course and de-escalating a war, and you have what looks like a fatal—and fatally expensive—brew.
We’ve moved from Bush’s visionary disasters to Obama’s flailing wars, while the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq continue to pay the price. If only we could close the curtain on this strange mix of farce and tragedy, but evidently we’re still stuck in act four of a five-act nightmare.
The Question Mark Over Afghanistan
All of this leaves the massive American investment of its most precious resources, including lives, in Afghanistan an ongoing mystery that is never addressed. Somewhere in that country’s vast stretches of poppy fields or in the halls of Washington’s national security bureaucracy, lurks a great unasked question. It’s a question asked almost half a century ago regarding the war in Vietnam, the lost war to which David Petraeus turned in 2006 to produce the army counterinsurgency manual that became the basis for his surge strategy.
The question then was: Why are we in Vietnam? It even became the title of a Norman Mailer novel. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s administration produced a government propaganda film solely in response to that question, which was already threatening to drive down his polling figures and upend his Great Society at home. The film was called Why Viet-Nam. While it had no question mark after the title, the question of whether to add one was actually argued out in the most literal way inside the administration. The film began with the president quoting a letter he had received from a mother “in the Midwest” whose son was stationed in Vietnam. You hear the president, in his homey twang, pick up that woman’s question as if it were his own. “Why Viet-Nam?” he repeats three times as the title appears on the screen, after which, official or not, a question mark seems to hover over every scene, as it did over the war itself.
In a sense, the same question mark appeared both before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it has never been associated with Afghanistan. Because of 9/11, Afghanistan remained for years the (relatively) good (and largely forgotten) war, until visible failure visibly tarnished it.
It’s far past time to ask that question, even as the Obama administration repeats the al-Qaeda mantra of the Bush years almost word for word and lets any explanation go at that. Why are we in Afghanistan? Why is our treasure being wasted there when it’s needed here?
Clueless in Afghanistan—and Washington
Have you ever thought about just how strange this country’s version of normal truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story. It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by with next to no reaction, despite the true weirdness buried in it.
The piece by Craig Whitlock appeared on June 19, 2010, and was headlined, “U.S. Military Criticized for Purchase of Russian Copters for Afghan Air Corps.” Maybe that’s strange enough for you right there. Russian copters? Of course, we all know, at least vaguely, that U.S. spending on its protracted Afghan War and nation-building project is by now in the many hundreds of billions of dollars. And, of course, those dollars have to go somewhere.
Admittedly, these days in parts of the United States, state and city governments are having a hard time finding the money just to pay teachers or the police. The Pentagon, on the other hand, hasn’t hesitated to use at least $25 billion to “train” and “mentor” the Afghan military and police—and after each round of training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money, and train them again. That includes the Afghan National Army Air Corps which, in the Soviet era of the 1980s, had nearly 500 aircraft and a raft of trained pilots. The last of that air force—little used in the Taliban era—was destroyed in the U.S. air assault and invasion of 2001. As a result, the “Afghan air force” (with about fifty helicopters and transport planes) is now something of a misnomer, since it is, in fact, the U.S. Air Force.
Still, there are a few Afghan pilots, mostly in their forties, trained long ago on Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters, and it’s on a refurbished version of these copters, Whitlock tells us, that the Pentagon has already spent $648 million. The Mi-17 was specially built for Afghanistan’s difficult flying environment back when various Islamic jihadists, some of whom we’re now fighting under the rubric of “the Taliban,” were allied with us against the Russians.
Here’s the first paragraph of Whitlock’s article: “The U.S. government is snapping up Russian-made helicopters to form the core of Afghanistan’s fledgling air force, a strategy that is drawing flak from members of Congress who want to force the Afghans to fly American choppers instead.” So various congressional representatives are upset over the lack of a buy-American plan when it comes to the Afghan air force. That’s the story Whitlock sets out to tell, because the Pentagon has been planning to purchase dozens more of the Mi-17s over the next decade, and that, it seems, is what’s worth being upset about when perfectly good American arms manufacturers aren’t getting the contracts.
But let’s consider three aspects of Whitlock’s article that no one is likely to spend an extra moment on, even if they do capture the surpassing strangeness of the American way of war in distant lands—and in Washington.
1. The Little Training Program That Couldn’t: There are some 450 U.S. personnel in Afghanistan training the Afghan air force. Unfortunately, there’s a problem. There may be no “buy American” program for that air force, but there is a “speak American” one. To be an Afghan air force pilot, you must know English—“t
he official language of the cockpit,” Whitlock assures us (even if to fly Russian helicopters). As he points out, however, the trainees, mostly illiterate, take two to five years simply to learn the language. (Imagine a U.S. Air Force in which, just to take off, every pilot needed to know Dari.)
Thanks to this language barrier, the U.S. military can train endlessly and next to nothing is guaranteed to happen. “So far,” reports Whitlock, “only one Afghan pilot has graduated from flight school in the United States, although dozens are in the pipeline. That has forced the air corps to rely on pilots who learned to fly Mi-17s during the days of Soviet and Taliban rule.” In other words, despite the impressive Soviet performance in the 1980s, the training of the Afghan Air Force has been re-imagined by Americans as a Sisyphean undertaking.
And this offers but a hint of how bizarre U.S. training programs for the Afghan military and police have proven to be. In fact, sometimes it seems as if exactly the same scathing report, detailing the same training problems and setbacks, has been recycled yearly without anyone who mattered finding it particularly odd—or being surprised that the response to each successive piece of bad news is to decide to pour yet more money and trainers into the project. For example, in 2005, at a time when Washington had already spent $3.3 billion training and mentoring the Afghan army and police, the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report indicating that “efforts to fully equip the increasing number of [Afghan] combat troops have fallen behind, and efforts to establish sustaining institutions, such as a logistics command, needed to support these troops have not kept pace.” Worse yet, the report fretted, it might take “up to $7.2 billion to complete [the training project] and about $600 million annually to sustain [it].”
The United States of Fear Page 13