by Chris Hedges
The gathering, held in the Rayburn Building, was a sober reminder of the insignificance of the left. No other Congress members were present, and only a smattering of young staff members attended. Most of the audience of about seventy were peace activists who, as is usual at such events, were joined by a motley collection of conspiracy theorists who insisted that 9/11 was an inside job, or that Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a 2002 plane crash, had been assassinated. Scahill provided a litany of statistics that illustrated how corporations have taken over our internal security and intelligence apparatus. They not only run our economy and manage our systems of communication. They not only own the two major political parties. They have built a private military. And they have become unassailable.
Scahill, who has done most of the groundbreaking investigative reporting on the conduct of private contractors in Iraq, including that of the security firm Blackwater (renamed, after a firestorm of bad publicity and public outrage at its methods, Xe), laid out that afternoon how the management of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was steadily transferred by the Pentagon to unaccountable private contractors. He lamented the lack of support in Congress for a bill put forward by Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. House Resolution 4102, known as the Stop Outsourcing Security (SOS) Act, would “responsibly phase out the use of private security contractors for functions that should be reserved for U.S. military forces and government personnel.”
“It is one of the sober realities of the time we are living in that you can put forward a bill that says something as simple as ‘we should not outsource national security functions to private contractors’ and you only get twenty members of Congress to support the bill,” Scahill said:
The unfortunate reality is that Representative Schakowsky knows that the war industry is bipartisan. They give on both sides. For a while there, it seemed contractor was the new Israel. You could not find a member of Congress to speak out against them because so many members of Congress are beholden to corporate funding to keep their House or Senate seats. I also think Obama’s election has wiped that out, as it has with many things, because the White House will dispatch emissaries to read the riot act to members of Congress who don’t toe the party line.22
The privatization of government functions has at once empowered corporate dominance and weakened the traditional role of government. There are eighteen military and civilian intelligence agencies, and seventy percent of their combined budgets is outsourced to corporations, who use the experience and expertise gained on these projects to provide similar services to other corporations, as well as foreign governments. The Pentagon has privatized sixty-nine percent of its workforce. Scahill pointed out the overwhelming privatization of the Afghanistan war effort. As of this writing, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors and sixty-eight thousand troops, almost 1.5 corporate employees for every member of the military. The State Department in Afghanistan has hired an additional fourteen thousand private contractors.
“Within a matter of months, and certainly within a year, the United States will have upwards of 220,000 to 250,000 U.S. government-funded personnel occupying Afghanistan, a far cry from the 70,000 U.S. soldiers that those Americans who pay attention understand the United States has in Afghanistan,” Scahill said. “This is a country where the president’s national security adviser, General James Jones, said there are less than one hundred al-Qaida operatives who have no ability to strike at the United States. That was the stated rationale and reasoning for being in Afghanistan. It was to hunt down those responsible for 9/11.”
Josh Stieber spoke at the end of the event. Stieber was deployed with the army to Iraq from February 2007 to April 2008. He was in Bravo Company 2-16 Infantry, which was involved in the July 2007 Apache helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians depicted on a controversial video released in April 2010 by WikiLeaks, an organization that publishes anonymous submissions of and commentary on sensitive government and corporate documents. Stieber, who left the army as a conscientious objector, has issued a public apology to the Iraqi people.
“This was not by any means the exception,” he said of the video, which showed helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down civilians, including a Reuters photographer and children, in a Baghdad street:
It is inevitable given the situation we were going through. We were going through a lot of combat at the time. A roadside bomb would go off or a sniper would fire a shot, and you had no idea where it was coming from. There was a constant paranoia, a constant being on edge. If you put people in a situation like that where there are plenty of civilians, that kind of thing was going to happen and did happen and will continue to happen as long as our nation does not challenge these things. Now that this video has become public, it is our responsibility as a people and a country to recognize that this is what war looks like on a day-to-day basis.23
The voices of sanity, the voices of reason, of those who have a moral core, those like Kucinich or Scahill or Stieber, have little chance now to be heard. The liberal class, which failed to grasp the dark intentions of the corporate state and its servants in the Democratic Party, bears some responsibility.
Support for war has allied the liberals with venal warlords in Afghanistan who are as opposed to the rights of women and basic democratic freedoms, and as heavily involved in opium trafficking, as the Taliban. The supposed moral lines between the liberal class and our adversaries are fictional. The uplifting narratives used to justify the war in Afghanistan are pathetic attempts by the liberal class to redeem acts of senseless brutality. War cannot be waged to instill any virtue, including democracy or the liberation of women. War always empowers those who have a penchant for violence and access to weapons. War turns the moral order upside down and abolishes all discussions of human rights. War banishes the just and the decent to the margins of society. The power of modern weapons means inevitable civilian deaths or “collateral damage.” An aerial drone is our version of an improvised explosive device. An iron fragmentation bomb is our answer to a suicide bomb. A burst from a belt-fed light machine gun causes the same terror and bloodshed among civilians no matter who pulls the trigger.
“We need to tear the mask off of the fundamentalist warlords who after the tragedy of 9/11 replaced the Taliban,” Malalai Joya, who was expelled from the Afghan parliament for denouncing government corruption and the Western occupation, told me24:
They used the mask of democracy to take power. They continue this deception. These warlords are mentally the same as the Taliban. The only change is physical. These warlords during the civil war in Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996 killed sixty-five thousand innocent people. They have committed human rights violations, like the Taliban, against women and many others.
“We believe that this is not war on terror,” she said:
This is war on innocent civilians. Look at the massacres carried out by NATO forces in Afghanistan. Look what they did in May in the Farah Province, where more than 150 civilians were killed, most of them women and children. They used white phosphorus and cluster bombs. There were two hundred civilians on ninth of September killed in the Kunduz Province, again most of them women and children. . . . The United States and NATO eight years ago occupied my country under the banner of woman’s rights and democracy. But they have only pushed us from the frying pan into the fire. They put into power men who are photocopies of the Taliban.
Over the past ten years of occupation, Afghanistan’s boom in the opium trade, used to produce heroin, has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to the Taliban, al-Qaida, local warlords, criminal gangs, kidnappers, private armies, drug traffickers, and many of the senior figures in the government of President Hamid Karzai. The New York Times reported that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President Karzai, was collecting money from the CIA although he is a major player in the illegal opium business. Afghanistan produces ninety-two percent of the world’s opium in a trade worth some $65 billion, the United Nations estimates. This opium feeds some fifteen mil
lion addicts worldwide and kills around one hundred thousand people annually. These fatalities should be added to the lists of war dead.
Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), has said that the drug trade has permitted the Taliban to thrive and expand despite the presence of NATO troops: “The Taliban’s direct involvement in the opium trade allows them to fund a war machine that is becoming technologically more complex and increasingly widespread.”25
The UNODC estimates the Taliban earned $90 million to $160 million a year from taxing the production and smuggling of opium and heroin between 2005 and 2009, as much as double the amount it earned annually while it was in power nearly a decade ago. And Costa described the Afghanistan-Pakistan border as “the world’s largest free-trade zone in anything and everything that is illicit,” an area blighted by drugs, weapons, and illegal immigration. The “perfect storm of drugs and terrorism” may be on the move along drug trafficking routes through Central Asia, he warned. Opium profits are being pumped into militant groups in Central Asia, and “a big part of the region could be engulfed in large-scale terrorism, endangering its massive energy resources.”
“Afghanistan, after eight years of occupation, has become a world center for drugs,” Joya told me:
The drug lords are the only ones with power. How can you expect these people to stop the planting of opium and halt the drug trade? How is it that the Taliban, when they were in power, destroyed the opium production, and a superpower not only cannot destroy the opium production but allows it to increase? And while all this goes on, those who support the war talk to you about women’s rights. We do not have human rights now in most provinces. It is as easy to kill a woman in my country as it is to kill a bird. In some big cities like Kabul, some women have access to jobs and education, but in most of the country the situation for women is hell. Rape, kidnapping, and domestic violence are increasing. These fundamentalists during the so-called free elections made a misogynist law against Shia women in Afghanistan. This law has even been signed by Hamid Karzai. All these crimes are happening under the name of democracy.
Thousands of Afghan civilians have died from insurgent and foreign military violence. And American and NATO forces are responsible for almost half the civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have also died from displacement, starvation, disease, exposure, lack of medical treatment, crime, and lawlessness resulting from the war.
Joya said that NATO, by choosing sides in a battle between two corrupt and brutal opponents, has lost all legitimacy in the country, an opinion echoed by a high-level U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan, Matthew Hoh, who resigned in protest over the war. Hoh wrote in his resignation letter that Karzai’s government is filled with “glaring corruption and unabashed graft.” Karzai, he wrote, is a president “whose confidants and chief advisers comprise drug lords and war crimes villains who mock our own rule of law and counter-narcotics effort.”26
Joya was skeptical about the fate of the touted billions in international aid to Afghanistan:
Where do you think the $36 billion of money poured into the country by the international community have gone? This money went into the pockets of the drug lords and the warlords. There are 18 million people in Afghanistan who live on less than $2 a day while these warlords get rich. The Taliban and warlords together contribute to this fascism while the occupation forces are bombing and killing innocent civilians. When we do not have security, how can we even talk about human rights or women’s rights?
“Many Afghanis side with the Taliban,” Joya said.
They do not support the Taliban, but they are fed up with these warlords and this injustice, and they go with the Taliban to take revenge. I do not agree with them, but I understand them. Most of my people are against the Taliban and the warlords, which is why millions did not take part in this tragic drama of an election.
Joya, who changes houses in Kabul frequently because of death threats, decried the support for the Karzai administration:
The U.S. wastes taxpayers’ money and the blood of their soldiers by supporting such a Mafia-corrupt system of Hamid Karzai. They chained my country to the center of drugs. If Obama was really honest he would support the democratic-minded people of my country. We have a lot [of those people]. But he does not support the democratic-minded people of my country. He is going to start war in Pakistan by attacking in the border area of Pakistan. More civilians have been killed in the Obama period than even during the criminal Bush.
“My people are sandwiched between two powerful enemies,” she lamented:
The occupation forces from the sky bomb and kill innocent civilians. On the ground, Taliban and these warlords deliver fascism. As NATO kills more civilians, the resistance to the foreign troops increases. If the U.S. government and NATO do not leave voluntarily, my people will give to them the same lesson they gave to Russia and to the English who three times tried to occupy Afghanistan. It is easier for us to fight against one enemy rather than two.
Success in Afghanistan depends on the ability to create an indigenous army that will battle the Taliban, provide security and stability for Afghan civilians, and remain loyal to the puppet Karzai government. A similar task eluded the Red Army, although the Soviets spent a decade attempting to pacify the country. It eluded the British a century earlier. And the United States, too, will fail.
U.S. military advisers who work with the Afghan National Army, or ANA, speak of poorly trained and unmotivated Afghan soldiers with little stomach for military discipline and even less for fighting. The advisers describe many ANA units as filled with brigands who terrorize local populations, engaging in extortion, intimidation, rape, theft, and open collusion with the Taliban. They contend that the ANA is riddled with Taliban sympathizers. And when U.S. and ANA soldiers fight together against Taliban insurgents, the U.S, advisers say the ANA soldiers prove to be fickle and unreliable combatants.
Military commanders in Afghanistan, rather than pump out statistics about enemy body counts, measure progress by the size of the ANA. The bigger the ANA, the better we are supposedly doing. The pressure on trainers to increase ANA numbers means that training and vetting of incoming Afghan recruits are nearly nonexistent.
The process of induction for Afghan soldiers begins at the Kabul Military Training Center. American instructors routinely complain of shortages of school supplies such as whiteboards, markers, and paper. They often have to go to markets and pay for these supplies on their own or do without. Instructors are pressured to pass all recruits, and they graduate many who have been absent for a third to half the training time. Most are inducted into the ANA without having mastered rudimentary military skills.
“I served the first half of my tour at the Kabul Military Training Center (KMTC), where I was part of a small team working closely with the ANA to set up the country’s first officer basic course for newly commissioned Afghan lieutenants,” a U.S. Army first lieutenant told me. He asked not to be identified by name. “During the second half of my tour, I left Kabul’s military schoolhouse and was reassigned to an embedded tactical training team, or ETT team, to help stand up a new Afghan logistics battalion in Herat.
“Afghan soldiers leave the KMTC grossly unqualified,” said this lieutenant, who remains on active duty. “American mentors do what they can to try and fix these problems, but their efforts are blocked by pressure from higher, both in Afghan and American chains of command, to pump out as many soldiers as fast as possible.”
Afghan soldiers are sent from the KMTC directly to active-duty ANA units. The units always have American trainers, known as a “mentoring team,” attached to them. The rapid increase in ANA soldiers has outstripped the ability of the American military to provide trained mentoring teams. The teams, normally composed of members of the Army Special Forces, are now formed by groups of American soldiers, plucked more or less at random, from units all over Afghanistan.
“This is how my enti
re team was selected during the middle of my tour: a random group of people from all over Kabul—air force, navy, army, active-duty, and national guard—pulled from their previous assignments, thrown together and expected to do a job that none of us were trained in any meaningful way to do,” the officer said:
We are expected, by virtue of time in grade, and membership in the U.S. military, to be able to train a foreign force in military operations, an extremely irresponsible policy that is ethnocentric at its core and which assumes some sort of natural superiority in which an untrained American soldier has everything to teach the Afghans, but nothing to learn.