American Way of War

by Tom Engelhardt

  Fixing What’s Wrong in Washington… in Afghanistan

  Explain something to me.

  In the first months of 2010, unless you were insensate, you couldn’t help running across someone talking, writing, speaking, or pontificating about how busted government is in the United States. State governments are increasingly broke and getting broker. The federal government, while running up the red ink, is, as just about everyone declares, “paralyzed” and so incapable of acting intelligently on just about anything.

  No less a personage than Vice President Biden assured the co-anchor of the CBS Early Show, “Washington, right now, is broken.” Indiana senator Evan Bayh used the very same word, broken, when he announced that he would not run for reelection and, in response to his decision, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz typically commented, “The system has been largely dysfunctional for nearly two decades, and everybody knows it.” Voters seem to agree. Two words, “polarization” and “gridlock”—or hyperbolic cousins like “paralyzing hyperpartisanship”—dominated the news when the media described that dysfunctionalism. Foreign observers were similarly struck, hence a spate of pieces like the one in the British magazine the Economist headlined, “America’s Democracy, a Study in Paralysis.”

  Washington’s incapacity to govern now evidently seems to ever more Americans at the root of many looming problems. As the New York Times summed up one of them in a recent headline: “Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds Fear of a Debt Crisis.” When President Obama leaves the confines of Washington for the campaign trail, he promptly attacks congressional “gridlock” and the “slash and burn politics” that have left the nation’s capital tied in knots.

  The Republicans, who ran us into this ditch in the Bush years, are now perfectly happy to be the party of “no”—and polls seem to indicate that it may be a fruitful strategy for the 2010 election. Meanwhile, special interests rule Washington and lobbying is king. As if to catch the spirit of this new reality, the president recently offered his vote of support to the sort of Wall Street CEOs who took Americans to the cleaners in the great economic meltdown of 2008 and are once again raking in the millions, while few have faith that change or improvement of any kind is in our future. Good governance, in other words, no longer seems part of the American tool kit and way of life.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars, the U.S. military is promoting “good governance” with all its might. In a major campaign in the modest-sized city of Marja (a place next to no one had heard of) in Taliban-controlled Helmand Province, Afghanistan, it placed a bet on its ability to “restore the credibility” of President Hamid Karzai’s government. In the process, it announced plans to unfurl a functioning city administration where none existed. According to its commanding general, Stanley McChrystal, as soon as the U.S. Army and the marines, along with British troops and Afghan forces, drove the Taliban out of town, he was prepared to roll out an Afghan “government in a box,” including police, courts, and local services.

  The U.S. military was intent, according to the Wall Street Journal, on “delivering a new administration and millions of dollars in aid to a place where government employees didn’t dare set foot a week ago.” Slated to be the future “mayor” of Marja, Haji Zahir, a businessman who spent fifteen years in Germany, was, according to press reports, living on a U.S. Marine base in the province until, one day soon, the American military could install him in an “abandoned government building” or simple “a clump of ruins” in that city.

  He was, we were told, to arrive with four U.S. civilian advisers, two from the State Department and two from the U.S. Agency for International Development, described (in the typically patronizing language of American press reports) as his “mentors.” They were to help him govern, and especially dole out the millions of dollars that the U.S. military has available to “reconstruct” Marja. Road-building projects were to be launched, schools refurbished, and a new clinic built, all to win Pashtun “hearts and minds.” As soon as the fighting abated, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs suggested, the post-military emphasis would be on “economic development,” with an influx of “military and civilian workers” who would “show a better way of life” to the town’s inhabitants.

  So explain something to me: Why does the military of a country convinced it’s becoming ungovernable think itself so capable of making another ungovernable country governable? What’s the military’s skill set here? What lore, what body of political knowledge, are they drawing on? Who do they think they represent, the Philadelphia of 1776 or the Washington of 2010, and if the latter, why should Americans be considered the globe’s leading experts in good government anymore? And while we’re at it, fill me in on one other thing: Just what has convinced American officials in Afghanistan and the nation’s capital that they have the special ability to teach, prod, wheedle, bribe, or force Afghans to embark on good governance in their country if we can’t do it in Washington or Sacramento?

  Explain something else to me: Why are our military and civilian leaders so confident that, after nine years of occupying the world’s leading narco-state, nine years of reconstruction boondoggles and military failure, they suddenly have the key, the formula, to solve the Afghan mess? Why do leading officials suddenly believe they can make Afghan president Hamid Karzai into “a Winston Churchill who can rally his people,” as one unnamed official told Matthew Rosenberg and Peter Spiegel of the Wall Street Journal—and all of this only months after Karzai, returned to office in a wildly fraudulent presidential election, overseeing a government riddled with corruption and drug money, and honeycombed with warlords sporting derelict reputations, was considered a discredited figure in Washington? And why do they think they can turn a man known mockingly as the “mayor” or “president” of Kabul (because his government has so little influence outside the capital) into a political force in southern Afghanistan?

  And someone tell me: Just who picked the name Operation Moshtarak for the campaign in Marja? Why am I not convinced that it was an Afghan? Though news accounts say that the word means “togetherness” in Dari, why do I think that a better translation might be “crushing embrace”? What could “togetherness” really mean when, according to the Wall Street Journal, to make the final decision to launch the operation, already long announced, General McChrystal “stepped into his armored car for the short drive…to the presidential palace,” and reportedly roused President Karzai from a nap for “a novel moment.” Karzai agreed, of course, supposedly adding, “No one has ever asked me to decide before.”

  This is a black comedy of “governance.” So is the fact that, from the highest administration officials and military men to those in the field, everyone speaks, evidently without the slightest self-consciousness, about putting an “Afghan face” on the (American) Marja campaign. National Security Adviser James Jones, for instance, spoke of the campaign having “‘a much bigger Afghan face,’ with two Afghans for every one U.S. soldier involved.” And this way of thinking is so common that news reports regularly used the phrase, as in a recent Associated Press story: “Military officials say they are learning from past mistakes. The offensive is designed with an ‘Afghan face.’”

  And here’s something else I’d like explained to me: Why does the U.S. press, at present so fierce about the lack of both “togetherness” and decent governance in Washington, report this sort of thing without comment, even though it reflects the deepest American contempt for putative “allies”? Why, for instance, can those same Wall Street Journal reporters write without blinking: “Western officials also are bringing Afghan cabinet members into strategy discussions, allowing them to select the officials who will run Marjah once it is cleared of Taliban, and pushing them before the cameras to emphasize the participation of Afghan troops in the offensive”? Allow? Push? Is this what we mean by “togetherness”?

  Try to imagine all this in reverse—an Afghan general motoring over to the White House t
o wake up the president and ask whether an operation, already announced and ready to roll, can leave the starting gate? But why go on?

  Just explain this to me: Why are the representatives of Washington, civilian and military, always so tone deaf when it comes to other peoples and other cultures? Why is it so hard for them to imagine what it might be like to be in someone else’s shoes (or boots or sandals)? Why do they always arrive not just convinced that they have identified the right problems and are asking the right questions, but that they, and only they, have the right answers, when at home they seem to have none at all?

  Thinking about this, I wonder what kind of “face” should be put on global governance in Washington?

  FIVE

  The Bush Legacy: What They Did (Wrong)

  Ponzi Scheme Presidency

  From the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, the palace walls of the kings who ruled the Assyrian Empire were decorated with vast stone friezes, filled with enough dead bodies to sate any video-game maker and often depicting—in almost comic-strip style—various bloody royal victories and conquests. At least one of them shows Assyrian soldiers lopping off the heads of defeated enemies and piling them into pyramids for an early version of what, in the VCE (Vietnam Common Era) of the 1960s, Americans came to know as the “body count.” So I learned by wandering through a traveling exhibit of ancient Assyrian art from the British Museum. On the audio tour accompanying the show, one expert pointed out that Assyrian scribes, part of an impressive imperial bureaucracy, carefully counted those heads and recorded the numbers for the greater glory of the king (as, in earlier centuries, Egyptian scribes had recorded counts of severed hands for victorious pharaohs).

  Give credit to art museums. Is there anything stranger than wandering through one and locking eyes with a Rembrandt burgher staring out at you across the centuries? What a reminder of the common humanity we share with the distant past. In a darker sense, it’s no less a reminder of our kinship across time to spot a little pyramid of heads 117 on a frieze, imagine an Assyrian scribe making his count, and—eerily enough—feel at home. What a measure of just how few miles “the march of civilization” (as my parents’ generation once called it) has actually covered.

  Prejudiced Toward War

  If you need an epitaph for the Bush administration, here’s one to test out: They tried. They really tried. But they couldn’t help it. They just had to count.

  In a sense, George W. Bush did the Assyrians proud. With his secret prisons, his outsourced torture chambers, his officially approved kidnap-pings, the murders committed by his interrogators, the massacres committed by his troops and mercenaries, and the shock-and-awe slaughter he ordered from the air, it’s easy enough to imagine what those Assyrian scribes would have counted. True, his White House didn’t have friezes of his victories (one problem being that there were none to glorify). All it had was Saddam Hussein’s captured pistol proudly stored in a small study off the Oval Office.

  Almost three thousand years later, however, Bush’s “scribes,” still traveling with the imperial forces, continued to count the bodies as they piled ever higher in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Pakistani borderlands, and elsewhere. Many of those body counts were duly made public. This record of American “success” was visible to anyone who visited the Pentagon’s website and viewed its upbeat news articles complete with enumerations of “Taliban fighters” (or, in Iraq, “terrorists”), the air force’s news feed listing the number of sorties against “anti-Afghan forces,” or the U.S. Central Command’s stories of killing “Taliban militants.”

  On the other hand, history, as we know, doesn’t repeat itself and—unlike the Assyrians—the Bush administration would have preferred not to count, or at least not to make its body counts public. One of its small but tellingly unsuccessful struggles, a sign of the depth of its failure on its own terms, was to avoid the release of those counts. This aversion to the body count made some sense. After all, since the 1950s, body counting for the U.S. military has invariably signaled not impending victory, but disaster, and even defeat.

  One of the strangest things about the American empire has been this: Between 1945 and George W. Bush’s second term, the U.S. economy, American corporations, and the dollar have held remarkable sway over much of the rest of the world. New York City has been the planet’s financial capital and Washington its war capital. (Moscow, even at the height of the cold war, always came in a provincial second.) In the same period, the U.S. military effectively garrisoned much of the globe from the Horn of Africa to Greenland, from South Korea to Qatar, while its navy controlled the seven seas, its air force dominated the global skies, its nuclear command stood ready to unleash the powers of planetary death, and its space command watched the heavens. In the wake of the cold war, its various military commands (including Northcom, set up by the Bush administration in 2002, and Africom, set up in 2007) divided the greater part of the planet into what were essentially military satrapies. And yet, the U.S. military, post-1945, simply could not win the wars that mattered.

  Because the neocons of the Bush administration brushed aside this counterintuitive fact, they believed themselves faced with an unparalleled opportunity triggered by the attacks of 9/11. With the highest-tech military on the planet, funded at levels no other set of nations could cumulatively match, the United States, they were convinced, was uniquely situated to give the phrase “sole superpower” historically unprecedented meaning. Even the Assyrians at their height, the Romans in their Pax Romana centuries, the British in the endless decades when the sun could never set on their empire, would prove amateurs by comparison.

  In this sense, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and the various neocons in the administration were fundamentalist idolaters—and what they worshipped was the staggering power of the U.S. military. They were believers in a church whose main tenet was the efficacy of force above all else. Though few of them had the slightest military experience, they gave real meaning to the word “bellicose.” They were prejudiced toward war. With awesome military power at their command, they were convinced that they could go it alone as the dominating force on the planet. As with true believers everywhere, they had only contempt for those they couldn’t convert to their worldview. That contempt made “unilateralism” their strategy of choice, and a global Pax Americana their goal (along with, of course, a Pax Republicana at home).

  The Return of the Body Count

  It was in this context that they were not about to count the enemy dead. In their wars, as these fervent, inside-the-Beltway utopians saw it, there would be no need to do so. With the “shock and awe” forces at their command, they would refocus American attention on the real metric of victory, the taking of territory and of enemy capitals. At the same time, they were preparing to disarm the only enemy that truly scared them, the American people, by making none of the mistakes of the Vietnam era, including—as the president later admitted—counting bodies.

  Of course, both the Pax Americana and the Pax Republicana would prove will-o’-the-wisps. As it turned out, the Bush administration, blind to the actual world it faced, disastrously miscalculated the nature of American power—especially military power—and what it was capable of doing. And yet, had they taken a clear-eyed look at what U.S. military power actually achieved in action since 1945, they might have been sobered. In the major wars (and even some minor actions) the military fought in those decades, it had been massively destructive but never victorious, nor even particularly successful. In many ways, in the classic phrase of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong, it had been a “paper tiger.”

  Yes, it had “won” largely meaningless victories—in Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983; against the toothless Panamanian regime of Manuel Noriega in Operation Just Cause in 1989; in Operation Desert Storm, largely an air campaign against Saddam Hussein’s helpless military in 1990 (in a war t
hat settled nothing); in NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force, an air war against the essentially defenseless Serbian military in 1995. On the other hand, in Korea in the early 1950s and in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from the 1960s into the early 1970s, it had committed its forces all but atomically, and yet had met nothing but stalemate, disaster, and defeat against enemies who, on paper at least, should not have been able to stand up to American power, while also, in more minor operations, running afoul of Iran in 1980 and Somalia in 1993.

  It was in the context of defeat and then frustration in Korea that the counting of enemy bodies began. Once Chinese Communist armies had entered that war in massive numbers in late 1950, and inflicted a terrible series of defeats on American forces without being able to sweep them off the peninsula, that conflict settled into a “meat grinder” of a stalemate in which the hope of taking significant territory faded. Yet some measure of success was needed as public frustration mounted in the United States. In this way began the infamous body count of enemy dead.

  The body count reappeared quite early in the Vietnam War, again as a shorthand way of measuring success in a conflict in which the taking of territory was almost meaningless, the countryside a hostile place, the enemy hard to distinguish from the general population, and our own in-country allies weak and largely unable to strengthen themselves. Those tallies of dead bodies, announced daily by military spokesmen to increasingly dubious reporters in Saigon, were the public face of American “success” in the Vietnam era. Each body was to be further evidence of what General William Westmoreland called “the light at the end of the tunnel.” When those dead bodies and any sense of success began to part ways, however, when, in the terminology of the times, a “credibility gap” opened between the metrics of victory and reality, the body count morphed into a symbol of barbarism as well as of defeat, helping to stoke an antiwar movement.