American Way of War

by Tom Engelhardt

  I put together these descriptions from American reports on the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, written in the midst of the Cold War, and on the second battle for Grozny ten years after the Cold War ended, because both seemed to have certain eerie similarities to events in Iraq after Baghdad fell to American troops in March 2003, though obviously neither presents an exact analogy. Both earlier moments of reportage do, however, highlight certain limitations in our press coverage of the war in Iraq (and also Afghanistan).

  After all, in the case of Afghanistan in the 1980s, there was also a fractured and fractious rebellion against an invading imperial superpower intent on controlling the country and setting up its own regime in the capital. The anti-Soviet rebellion was (like the present one in Iraq) conducted in part by Islamic rebels, many of whom were extremist Sunni jihadists (and some of whose names, from Osama bin Laden to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, remain significant today). The Afghan guerrilla war was backed by that other superpower, the United States, for a decade through its spy agency, the CIA, which promoted methods that, in the Iraq context, would be called “terrorism.”

  In the case of the Russian assault on Grozny, the capital of the breakaway region of Chechnya, you also have an imperial power, if no longer exactly a superpower, intent on wresting a city—and a “safe haven”—from a fractious, largely Islamist insurgency and ready to make an example of a major city to do so. The Russian rubblizing of Grozny may have been more extreme than the American destruction of Falluja (or so it seems), but the events remain comparable. In the case of Grozny, the U.S. government did not actively back the rebels as they had in Afghanistan, but the Bush administration, made up of former Cold Warriors who had imbibed the idea of “rolling back” the Soviet Union in their younger years, was certainly sympathetic to the rebels.

  What, then, are some of the key differences I noticed in reading through examples of this reportage and comparing it to the products of our present embedded state? Let me list four differences—and suggest a question: To what degree are American reporters as a group destined to follow, with only modest variation, the paths opened for them by our government’s positions on its wars of choice?

  Language: Those in rebellion in Iraq today are, according to our military, “anti-Iraqi forces” (a phrase that, in quotes, often makes it into news pieces and is just about never commented upon by reporters). Other terms, most of them also first issuing from the mouths of U.S. officials, have been “dead-enders,” “bitter enders,” “Baathist remnants,” “terrorists,” and most regularly (and neutrally), “insurgents” who are fighting in an “insurgency”—but rarely “guerrillas.”

  The Afghans in the 1980s, on the other hand, were almost invariably in “rebellion” and so “rebels” as headlines at the time made clear (“Officials Say U.S. Plans to Double Supply of Arms to Afghan Rebels,” New York Times). They were part of a “resistance movement” and as their representatives could write op-eds for our papers, the Washington Post, for instance, had no hesitation about headlining Matthew D. Erulkar’s op-ed of January 13, 1987, “Why America Should Recognize the Afghan Resistance” or identifying its author as working “for the Afghan resistance.”

  But the phrase “Afghan resistance” or “the resistance” was no less likely to appear in news pieces, as in an October 22, 1983, report by Post reporter William Branigin, “Feuding Guerrilla Groups Rely on Uneasy Pakistan.” Nor, as in James Rupert’s “Dreams of Martyrdom Draw Islamic Arabs to Join Afghan Rebels” (Washington Post, July 21, 1986), was there any problem calling an Islamic “fundamentalist party” that was part of the “Afghan Jihad” a “resistance party.” President Ronald Reagan at the time regularly referred to fundamentalist Afghans and their Arab supporters as “freedom fighters” (while the CIA, through the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, shuttled vast sums of money and stores of weaponry to the most extreme of the Afghan jihadist parties). “Freedom fighter” was commonly used in the press, sometimes interchangeably with “the Afghan resistance,” as in a March 12, 1981, piece by Post columnist Joseph Kraft, “The Afghan Chaos” (“Six different organizations claiming to represent Afghan freedom fighters”).

  Similarly, the Chechens in Grozny in 2000 were normally referred to in U.S. news accounts as “rebels”: “separatist rebels,” “rebel ambushes,” “a rebel counterattack,” and so on. (“Rebel,” as anyone knows who remembers American rock ’n’ roll or movies of the 1950s and 1960s, is a positive term in our lexicon.) Official Russian terms for the Chechen rebels, who were fighting grimly like any group of outgunned urban guerrillas in a manner similar to the Sunni guerrillas in Iraq today—“bandits” or “armed criminals in camouflage and masks”—were quoted, but then (as “anti-Iraqi forces” and other Bush administration terms are not) put in context or contrasted with Chechen versions of reality.

  In a typical piece from CNN, you could find the following quote: “‘The [Russians] aren’t killing any bandits,’ one refugee said after reaching Ingushetia. ‘They’re killing old men, women and children. And they keep on bombing—day and night.’” In a Daniel Williams piece in the Washington Post, the Russian government’s announcements about the fighting in Grozny have become a “daily chant,” a phrase that certainly suggests how the reporter feels about their accuracy.

  Here’s a quote from a discussion in a Washington Post editorial of an Associated Press photo of the destruction in Grozny. The photo was described elsewhere as “a pastel from hell” and was evidently of a sort we’ve seen far too little of in our press from either Falluja or the Old City of Najaf:Russian leaders announced with pride Sunday that their armed forces had captured Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, five months into their war to subdue that rebellious province. Reports from the battle zone suggested that the Russians had not so much liberated the city as destroyed it…. Grozny resembles nothing so much as Stalingrad, reduced to rubble by Hitler’s troops before the Red Army inflicted a key defeat that Russian schoolchildren still celebrate.… All in all, this is not likely to be a victory that Russian schoolchildren will celebrate generations hence.

  Similar writing certainly certainly wasn’t found on American editorial pages when it came to the “razing” of Falluja, nor were those strong adjectives like “brutal,” once wielded in the Grozny accounts, much to be found either.

  Testimony: Perhaps the most striking difference between news stories about the Afghan revolt, the destruction of Grozny, and the destruction of Falluja may be that in the cases of the first two, American reporters were willing, even eager, to seek out refugee accounts, even if the refugees were supporters of the rebels or rebels themselves. Such testimony was, for instance, regularly offered as evidence of what was happening in Grozny and more generally in Chechnya (even when the accounts couldn’t necessarily be individually confirmed). So the Post’s Daniel Williams, for instance, in “Brutal Retreat from Grozny Led to a Killing Field” (February 12, 2000) begins by following Heda Yusupova, mother of two “and a cook for a group of Chechen rebels” as she flees the city: “[She] froze in her tracks when she heard the first land mine explode. It was night, and she and a long file of rebels were making a dangerous retreat from Grozny, the Chechen capital, during the final hours of a brutal Russian advance. Another explosion. Her children, ages 9 and 10, screamed.” It’s a piece that certainly puts the Russian assault on Grozny in a striking perspective.

  Post reporter Sharon LaFraniere wrote a piece on June 29, 2000, bluntly entitled “Chechen Refugees Describe Atrocities by Russian Troops,” in which she reported on “atrocities” in what the Russians labeled a “pro-bandit village”: “‘I have never imagined such tortures, such cruelty,’ [the villager] said, sitting at a small table in the dim room that has housed her family here for nearly three years. ‘There were a lot of men who were left only half alive.’” And when Russian operations against individual Chechens were described, it was possible to see them through Chechen eyes: “Three times last month, Algayeva said, Russian soldiers broke in
, threatening to shoot the school’s guard. They smashed doors, locks and desks. The last time, May 20, they took sugar, plates and a brass bell that was rung at school ceremonies.”

  As in a February 29, 2000, Boston Globe piece (“Chechen Horror”), it was also possible for newspapers to discuss editorially both “the suffering of the Chechens” and the way “the United States and the rest of the international community can no longer ignore their humanitarian obligation to alleviate—and end—[that suffering].”

  The equivalent pieces for Iraq are largely missing, though every now and then—as with an Edward Wong piece in the New York Times on life in resistant Sadr City, Baghdad’s huge Shiite slum—there have been exceptions. Given the dangers Western reporters face in Iraq and the constricting system of “embedding” that generally prevails, when you read of Americans breaking into Iraqi homes, you’re ordinarily going to see the event from the point of view of the troops. Iraqi refugees have not been much valued in our press for their testimony. (There is a deep irony in this, since the Bush administration launched its war citing mainly exile—that is, refugee—testimony.)

  We know, of course, that it’s difficult for U.S. reporters to go in search of such testimony in Iraq, but not impossible. For instance, Dahr Jamail, a determined freelance journalist, managed to interview refugees from Falluja, and their testimony sounds remarkably like the Grozny testimony from major American newspapers in 2000: “The American warplanes came continuously through the night and bombed everywhere in Fallujah! It did not stop even for a moment! If the American forces did not find a target to bomb, they used sound bombs just to terrorize the people and children. The city stayed in fear; I cannot give a picture of how panicked everyone was.”

  For the “suffering of the Iraqis,” you had to turn to the periodic “testimony” of Iraqi bloggers like the pseudonymous Riverbend of Baghdad Burning or perhaps Al Jazeera. The suffering we actually hear most about in our press is American suffering, in part because it’s the American troops with whom our reporters are embedded, with whom they bond, and fighters on battlefields anywhere almost invariably find themselves in grim and suffering circumstances.

  Human rights evidence: The reports from Grozny in particular often made extensive use of the investigations of human rights groups of various sorts (including Russian ones), and reporters then were willing to put the acts of the Russians in Grozny (as in Afghanistan) in the context of “war crimes,” as indeed they were. In Iraq, on the other hand, while pieces on human rights reports about our occupation can sometimes be found deep in our papers, the evidence supplied by human rights groups is seldom deployed by American reporters as an evidentiary part of war pieces.

  “Terrorism”: Finally, it’s interesting to see how, in different reporting contexts and different moments, the term “terrorism” is or is not brought to bear. In Grozny, for instance, the “rebels” used “radio controlled land mines” and assassinated Chechens who worked for the Russians (just as Iraqi insurgents and terrorists explode roadside IEDs and assassinate those who work for the Americans) and yet the Chechens remained “rebels.”

  On this topic, though, Afghanistan in the 1980s is of special interest. There, as Steve Coll tells us in his riveting book Ghost Wars, the CIA organized terror on a major scale in conjunction with the Pakistani ISI, which trained “freedom fighters” in how to mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks on Soviet officers and soldiers in Russian-occupied cities (techniques personally “endorsed,” according to Coll, by CIA director William Casey). The CIA also supplied the Afghan rebels with long-range sniper rifles (meant for assassinations) and delayed-timing devices for plastic explosives. “The rebels fashioned booby-trapped bombs from gooey black contact explosives, supplied to Pakistani intelligence by the CIA, that could be molded into ordinary shapes or poured into innocent utensils.” Kabul cinemas and cultural shows were bombed, and suicide operations mounted using Arab jihadis. “Many tons of C-4 plastic explosives for sabotage operations” were shipped in, and the CIA took to supplying so-called dual-use weapons systems that could be used against military targets, “but also in terror attacks and assassinations.” Much of this was known, at least to some degree at the time (and some of it reported in press accounts), and yet the Afghans remained “freedom fighters” and a resistance movement, even after the Afghan jihad began to slip across the other Pakistani border into Indian Kashmir.

  What changed? What made such people, according to our press, “terrorists”? The answer is, of course, that we became their prime enemy and target. Coll offers this observation:Ten years later the vast training infrastructure that [the Pakistani ISI] built with the enormous budgets endorsed by NSDD-166 [the official American plan for the Afghan jihad]—the specialized camps, the sabotage training manuals, the electronic bomb detonators, and so on—would be referred to routinely in America as “terrorist infrastructure.”

  At the time of its construction, however, it served a jihadist army that operated openly on the battlefield, attempted to seize and hold territory, and exercised sovereignty over civilian populations

  —in Soviet Afghanistan, that is.

  In the Afghan anti-Soviet war, the CIA looked favorably indeed upon the recruitment of thousands of Arab jihadists and eagerly supported a particularly unsavory and murderous Afghan extremist warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who refused at the time to travel to Washington and shake the hand of our “infidel” president, Ronald Reagan. (Today, Hekmatyar fights U.S. troops in Afghanistan.) As it turned out, the “freedom fighters” fell on each other’s throats even as Kabul was being taken, and then, within years, some of them turned on their former American patrons with murderous intent. No figure tells the story better, I think, than this one: “In 1971 there had been only nine hundred madrassas [Islamic schools] in all of Pakistan. By the summer of 1988 there were about 8,000 official religious schools and an estimated 25,000 unregistered ones, many of them clustered along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier and funded by wealthy patrons from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.”

  The Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya were indeed brutes and committed war crimes of almost every imaginable sort. The language of the American press, watching the invading army of a former superpower turn the capital city of a small border state into utter rubble, was appropriate indeed, given what was going on. In both Afghanistan and in Iraq, on the other hand, where the American government is actively involved, reporters generally—and yes, there are always exceptions—have followed the government’s lead with the terminology—“freedom fighter” versus “terrorist”—falling into place as befit the moment, even though many of the acts being described remained the same.

  The press is always seen as a weapon of war by officials, and so it has been seen by the Pentagon and official Washington. Reporters and editors obviously feel that and the pressures that flow from it in all sorts of complex ways. Whether consciously or not, it’s striking how such perceptions shade and limit even individual stories, alter small language choices, and the nature of what passes for evidence as well as news.

  The Imperial Unconscious

  Sometimes, it’s the everyday things, the ones that fly below the radar, that matter.

  Here is an excerpt from a news story about Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s testimony on the Afghan War before the Senate Armed Services Committee in January 2009: “U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be ‘modest, realistic,’ and ‘above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war,’ Gates said. ‘The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.’”

  Now, in our world, a statement like this seems so obvious, so reasonable as to be beyond comment. And yet, stop a moment and think about this part of it: “there must be an Afghan face on this war.” U.S. military and civilian officials used an equivalent phrase in 2005 and 2006, when things were going really wrong in Iraq. It
was then commonplace—and no less unremarked upon—for them to urgently suggest that an “Iraqi face” be put on events there.

  The phrase is revelatory—and oddly blunt. As an image, there’s really only one way to understand it (not that anyone here stops to do so). After all, what does it mean to “put a face” on something that assumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to mean putting an Afghan mask over what we know to be the actual “face” of the Afghan War—ours—a foreign face that men like Gates recognize, quite correctly, is not the one most Afghans want to see. It’s hardly surprising that the secretary of defense would pick up such a phrase, part of Washington’s everyday arsenal of words and images when it comes to geopolitics, power, and war. And yet, make no mistake, this is Empire-speak, American-style. It’s the language (behind which lies a deeper structure of argument and thought) that is essential to Washington’s vision of itself as a planet-straddling Goliath. It is part of the flotsam and jetsam that regularly bubbles up from the American imperial unconscious.

  Of course, words create realities even though such language, in all its strangeness, essentially passes unnoticed here. Largely uncommented upon, it helps normalize American practices in the world, comfortably shielding us from certain global realities. It also has the potential to blind us to those realities, which can be dangerous indeed. So let’s consider just a few entries in what might be thought of as The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak.

  War hidden in plain sight: There has recently been much reporting on, and even some debate about, the efficacy of the Obama administration’s decision to increase the intensity of CIA missile attacks from drone aircraft in what Washington, in a newly coined neologism reflecting a widening war, calls “Af-Pak”—the Pashtun tribal borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The pace of such attacks has risen since Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, as have casualties from the missile strikes, as well as popular outrage in Pakistan over the attacks.