The United States of Fear

by Tom Engelhardt

  The Stimulus Package in Kabul

  You must have had a moment when you thought to yourself: It really isn’t going to end, is it? Not ever.

  For me, that moment came when the Associated Press covered U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry’s announcement that a $511 million contract had been awarded to Caddell Construction, one of America’s “largest construction and engineering groups,” for a massive expansion of the U.S. embassy in Kabul. According to the ambassador, that embassy is already “the largest . . . in the world with more than 1,100 brave and dedicated civilians . . . from 16 agencies and working next to their military counterparts in 30 provinces,” and yet it seems it’s still not large enough.

  A few other things in his announcement caught my eye. Construction of the new “permanent offices and housing” for embassy personnel is not to be completed until sometime in 2014, and that $511 million is part of a $790 million bill to U.S. taxpayers that will include expansion work on consular facilities in the Afghan cities of Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat.

  If the ambassador’s announcement was meant to fly below the media radar screen in the United States, it was clearly supposed to be noticed in Afghanistan. After all, Eikenberry publicly insisted that the awarding of the contract should be considered “an indication . . . an action, a deed that you can take as a long-term commitment of the United States government to the government of Afghanistan.”

  Jo Comerford and the number-crunchers at the National Priorities Project have placed that $790 million outlay into an American context: “$790 million is more than ten times the money the federal government allotted for the State Energy Program in FY2011. It’s nearly five times the total amount allocated for the National Endowment for the Arts . . . If that sum were applied instead to job creation in the United States, in new hires it would yield more than 22,000 teachers, 15,000 healthcare workers, and employ more than 13,000 in the burgeoning clean energy industry.”

  Still, to understand just why, among a flood of similar war reports, this one got under my skin, you need a bit of backstory.

  Singular Spawn or Forerunner Deluxe?

  One night in May 2007, I was nattering on at the dinner table about reports of a monstrous new U.S. embassy being constructed in Baghdad, so big that it put former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s grandiose Disneyesque palaces to shame. On 104 acres of land in the heart of the Iraqi capital (always referred to in news reports as almost the size of Vatican City), it was slated to cost $590 million. (Predictable cost overruns and delays would, in the end, bring that figure to at least $740 million, while the cost of running the place yearly is estimated at $1.5 billion.) Back then, more than half a billion dollars was impressive enough, even for a compound that was to have its own self-contained electricity-generation, water-purification, and sewage systems in a city lacking most of those things, not to speak of its own antimissile defense systems and twenty all-new blast-resistant buildings including restaurants, a recreation center, and other amenities. It was to be by far the largest, most heavily fortified embassy on the planet with a “diplomatic” staff of a thousand (a number that has only grown since).

  My wife listened to my description of this future colossus, which bore no relation to anything ever previously called an “embassy,” and then, out of the blue, said, “I wonder who the architect is?” Strangely, I hadn’t even considered that such a mega-citadel might actually have an architect. So imagine my surprise on discovering that there was indeed a Kansas architect, BDY (Berger Devine Yaeger), previously responsible for the Sprint Corporation’s world headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas, the Visitation Church in Kansas City, Missouri, and Harrah’s Hotel and Casino in North Kansas City, Missouri. Better yet, BDY was so proud to have been taken on as architect to the wildest imperial dreamers and schemers of our era that it posted sketches at its website of what the future embassy, its “pool house,” its tennis court, PX, retail and shopping areas, and other highlights were going to look like.

  Somewhere between horrified and grimly amused, I wrote a piece at TomDispatch, entitled “The Mother Ship Lands in Baghdad” and, via a link to the BDY drawings, offered readers a little “blast-resistant spin” through Bush’s colossus. From the beginning, I grasped that this wasn’t an embassy in any normal sense and I understood as well something of what it was. Here’s the way I put it at the time: “As an outpost, this vast compound reeks of one thing: imperial impunity. It was never meant to be an embassy from a democracy that had liberated an oppressed land. From the first thought, the first sketch, it was to be the sort of imperial control center suitable for the planet’s sole ‘hyperpower,’ dropped into the middle of the oil heartlands of the globe. It was to be Washington’s dream and Kansas City’s idea of a palace fit for an embattled American proconsul—or a khan.”

  In other words, a U.S. control center at the heart of what Bush administration officials then liked to call “the Greater Middle East.” To my surprise, the piece began racing around the Internet and other sites—TomDispatch did not then have the capacity to post images—started putting up BDY’s crude drawings. The next thing I knew, the State Department had panicked, declared this a “security breach,” and forced BDY to take down its site and remove the drawings. I was amazed, but—and here we come to the failure of my own imagination—I never doubted that BDY’s bizarre imperial mother ship being prepared for landing in Baghdad was the singular spawn of the Bush administration. I saw it as essentially a vanity production sired by a particular set of fantasies about imposing a Pax Americana abroad and a Pax Republicana at home. It never crossed my mind that there would be two such “embassies.”

  So, on this, call me delusional. By May 2009, with Barack Obama in the White House, I knew as much. That was when two McClatchy reporters broke a story about a similar project for a new “embassy” in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, at the projected cost of $736 million.

  Simulating Ghosts

  Now, with the news in from Kabul, we know that there are going to be three mother ships. All gigantic beyond belief. All (after the usual cost overruns) undoubtedly in the three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar to billion-dollar range. All meant not to house modest numbers of diplomats acting as the face of the United States in a foreign land, but thousands of diplomats, spies, civilian personnel, military officials, agents, and operatives hunkering down long term for war and skullduggery.

  Connect two points and you have a straight line. Connect three points and you have a pattern—in this case, simple and striking. The visionaries and fundamentalists of the Bush years may be gone and visionless managers of the tattered American imperium now directing the show. Nonetheless, they and the U.S. military in the region remain remarkably devoted to the control of the Greater Middle East. Even without a vision, there is still the war momentum and the money to support it.

  While Americans fight bitterly over whether the stimulus package for the domestic economy was too large or too small, few in the United States even notice that the American stimulus package in Kabul, Islamabad, Baghdad, and elsewhere in our embattled Raj is going great guns. Embassies the size of pyramids are still being built, military bases to stagger the imagination continue to be constructed, and nowhere, not even in Iraq, is it clear that Washington is committed to packing up its tents, abandoning its billion-dollar monuments, and coming home.

  In the United States, it’s going to be paralysis and stagnation all the way, but in Peshawar and Mazar-i-sharif, not to speak of the greater Persian Gulf region, we remain the spendthrifts of war, perfectly willing, for instance, to ship fuel across staggering distances and unimaginably long supply lines to Afghanistan at $400 a gallon to further crank up an energy-heavy conflict. At home, it’s peace all the way to the unemployment line, because peace, in our American world, increasingly seems to mean economic disaster. In the Greater Middle East, it’s war to the horizon, all war all the time, and creeping escalation all the way around.

  The folks who started us down t
his precipitous path and over an economic cliff are now in retirement and heading onto the memoir circuit. Our former president is chatting it up with Matt Lauer and Oprah. His vice president is nursing his heart while assumedly writing about “his service in four presidential administrations.” His national security adviser, then secretary of state (for whom Chevron once named a double-hulled oil tanker) is already heading into her second and third memoir. But while they scribble and yak, their policy ghosts haunt us, as does their greatest edifice, that embassy in Baghdad, now being cloned elsewhere. Even without them or the neocons who pounded the drums for them, the U.S. military still pushes doggedly toward 2014 and beyond in Afghanistan, while officials “tweak” their drawdown non-schedules, narrow the president’s non-options, and step in to fund and build yet more command-and-control centers in the Greater Middle East.

  It looks and feels like the never-ending story, and yet, of course, the imperium is visibly fraying, while the burden of distant wars grows ever heavier. Those “embassies” are being built for the long haul, but a decade or two down the line, I wouldn’t want to put my money on what exactly they will represent, or what they could possibly hope to control.

  How to Schedule a War

  “Going, going, gone!” You can almost hear the announcer’s voice throbbing with excitement, only we’re not talking about home runs here, but about the disappearing date on which, for the United States and its military, the Afghan War will officially end.

  Practically speaking, the answer to when it will be over is: just this side of never. If you take the word of our Afghan War commander, the secretary of defense, and top officials of the Obama administration and NATO, we’re not leaving anytime soon. As with any clever time traveler, every date that’s set always contains a verbal escape hatch into the future.

  In my 1950s childhood, there was a cheesy (if thrilling) sci-fi flick, The Incredible Shrinking Man, about a fellow who passed through a radioactive cloud in the Pacific Ocean and soon noticed that his suits were too big for him. Next thing you knew, he was living in a doll house, holding off his pet cat, and fighting an ordinary spider transformed into a monster. Finally, he disappeared entirely, leaving behind only a sonorous voice to tell us that he had entered a universe where “the unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.”

  The date for serious drawdowns of American troops in Afghanistan has followed a similar path toward the vanishing point and is now threatening to disappear “over the horizon” (a place where, we are regularly told, American troops will lurk once they have finally transferred their duties to the Afghan forces they are training). If you remember, back in December 2009, President Obama spoke of July 2011 as a firm date to “begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan,” the moment assumedly when the beginning of the end of the war would come into sight. In July 2010, Afghan president Hamid Karzai spoke of 2014 as the date when Afghan security forces “will be responsible for all military and law enforcement operations throughout our country.” Administration officials, anxious about the effect that the 2011 date was having on an American public grown weary of an unpopular war and on an enemy waiting for us to depart, grabbed Karzai’s date and ran with it (leaving many of his caveats about the war the Americans were fighting, particularly his desire to reduce the American presence, in the dust). Now, 2014 is the new 2011.

  It has, in fact, been widely reported that Obama officials have been working in concert to “play down” the president’s 2011 date, while refocusing attention on 2014. Top administration officials have been little short of voluble on the subject. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (“We’re not getting out. We’re talking about probably a years-long process.”), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs admiral Mike Mullen, attending a security conference in Australia, all “cited 2014 . . . as the key date for handing over the defense of Afghanistan to the Afghans themselves.” The New York Times headlined its report on the change in timing this way: “U.S. Tweaks Message on Troops in Afghanistan.” Quite a tweak. Added Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, “The message shift is effectively a victory for the military, which has long said the July 2011 deadline undermined its mission by making Afghans reluctant to work with troops perceived to be leaving shortly.”

  Inflection Points and Aspirational Goals

  Barely had 2014 risen into the headlines before that date, too, began its vanishing act. As a start, it turned out that American planners weren’t talking about just any old day in 2014, but its last one. As Lieutenant General William Caldwell, head of the NATO training program for Afghan security forces, put it while holding a Q&A with a group of bloggers, “They’re talking about December 31st, 2014. It’s the end of December in 2014 . . . that [Afghan] President Karzai has said they want Afghan security forces in the lead.”

  No one, officials rushed to say, was talking about 2014 as a date for all American troops to head for the exits, just combat troops—and maybe not even all of them. Possibly tens of thousands of trainers and other so-called noncombat forces would stay on to help with the “transition process.” This follows the Iraq pattern where fifty thousand American troops remained after the departure of U.S. “combat” forces to great media fanfare.

  In November 2010, behind “closed doors” at a NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal, Afghan War commander Petraeus presented European leaders with a “phased four-year plan” to “wind down American and allied fighting in Afghanistan.” Not surprisingly, it had the end of 2014 in its sights and the president quickly confirmed that “transition” date, even while opening plenty of post-2014 wiggle room. By then, as he described it, “our footprint” would only be “significantly reduced.” (He also claimed that, post-2014, the United States would be maintaining a “counterterrorism capability” in Afghanistan—and Iraq—for which “platforms to . . . execute . . . counterterrorism operations,” assumedly bases, would be needed.) Meanwhile, unnamed “senior U.S. officials” in Lisbon were clearly buttonholing reporters to “cast doubt on whether the United States, the dominant power in the 28-nation alliance, would end its own combat mission before 2015.” As always, the usual qualifying phrases were profusely in evidence.

  The “tweaking”—that is, the further chipping away at 2014 as a hard and fast date for anything—has only continued. Mark Sedwill, NATO’s civilian counterpart to Petraeus, insisted that 2014 was nothing more than “an inflection point” in an ever more drawn-out drawdown process. That process would likely extend to “2015 and beyond,” which, of course, put 2016 officially into play. And keep in mind that this is only for combat troops, not those assigned to “train and support” or keep “a strategic over watch” on Afghan forces. On the eve of NATO’s Lisbon meeting, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell declared 2014 nothing more than an “aspirational goal,” rather than an actual deadline. As the conference began, NATO’s secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted that the alliance would be committed in Afghanistan “as long as it takes.” And British Chief of the Defense Staff General Sir David Richards suggested that, given the difficulty of ever defeating the Taliban (or al-Qaeda) militarily, NATO should be preparing plans to maintain a role for its troops for the next thirty to forty years.

  On Ticking Clocks in Washington and Kabul

  Up to now, only one of General Petraeus’s two campaigns has been under discussion here: the one fought out not in Afghanistan, but in Washington and NATO capitals, over how to schedule a war. Think of it as the war for a free hand in determining how long the Afghan War is to be fought. It has been run from General Petraeus’s headquarters in Kabul, the giant five-sided military headquarters on the Potomac presided over by Secretary of Defense Gates, and various think tanks filled with America’s militarized intelligentsia scattered around Washington—and it has proven to be a classically successful “clear, hold, build” counterinsurgency operation. Pacification in Washington and a number of European capitals has occurred with r
emarkably few casualties. (Former Afghan War commander general Stanley McChrystal, axed by the president for insubordination, has been the exception, not the rule.)

  With the ratification in Lisbon of that 2014 date “and beyond,” the political clocks—an image General Petraeus loves—in Washington, European capitals, and American Kabul are now ticking more or less in unison.

  Two other “clocks” are, however, ticking more like time bombs. If counterinsurgency is a hearts-and-minds campaign, then another target of General Petraeus’s first COIN (counterinsurgency) campaign has been the restive hearts and minds of the American and European publics. In February 2010, the Dutch government fell over popular opposition to Afghanistan and, even as NATO met that weekend in November 2010, thousands of antiwar protestors were marching in London and Lisbon. Europeans generally want out and their governments know it, but (as has been true since 1945) the continent’s leaders have no idea how to say no to Washington. In the United States, too, the Afghan War grows ever more unpopular, and while it was forgotten during the election season, no politician should count on that phenomenon lasting forever.

  And then, of course, there’s the other ticking bomb, the actual war in Afghanistan. In that campaign, despite a drumbeat of American/NATO publicity about “progress,” the news has been grim. American and NATO casualties have been higher from 2010 to 2011 than at any other moment in the war. The Taliban seems, if anything, more entrenched in more parts of the country; the Afghan public, puzzled and unhappy with foreign troops and contractors traipsing across the land. And President Hamid Karzai, sensing a situation gone truly sour, has been regularly challenging the way General Petraeus is fighting the war in his country. (The nerve!)