by Chris Floyd
The Obama administration has decided that blood and iron, not hearts and minds, will be the new focus of the American military adventure in Afghanistan. Top Obama officials – anonymous, natch -- used the front page of the New York Times as a conduit for conveying the imperial will to the rabble this week. The basic strategy, it seems, will be the same one that professional nudnik Glenn Reynolds once proposed for the recalcitrant tribes of the Middle East: "more rubble, less trouble."
As we noted here the other day – drawing on a story in the Independent that the Times is just now catching up with – the Obama team is preparing to throw aside Hamid Karzai, the dapper if hapless Washington-picked Afghan president. The NYT uncritically – not to say hilariously – funnels the Obama line that Karzai is being sidelined "because corruption has become rampant in his government, contributing to a flourishing drug trade and the resurgence of the Taliban."
This is pretty rich, even for Washington, where the comedy of hypocrisy never stops. Leaving aside the staggeringly vast corruption that is the meat and drink, the quintessence, the sine qua non, of the American government, when have our imperial overlords ever been troubled for even a single instant by the corruption – rampant or otherwise – of its various foreign clients? And what was the prime example of this Afghan corruption given by the Obama officials? Karzai's failure to arrest his own half-brother, a powerful local politician, for drug trafficking. Can you even imagine such a thing? A well-connected public official not being prosecuted by the national government for serious crimes? Such a thing could never happen in Washington, could it?
And given the long-running, apparently eternal, thoroughly bipartisan commitment to the ever-ineffectual but highly profitable "war on drugs," it seems a bit churlish -- not to say ignorant -- to blame Karzai for dirt-poor Afghan farmers resorting to such a rich cash crop. As for the gangsters who move the merchandise around the world -- it is the illegality of these substances that makes them so lucrative on the street; legalize them, regularize them, tax them, and they would lose nine-tenths of their allure for the criminal syndicates. But then, what would our civilized governments do without all those juicy, draconian "anti-drug" powers. (For more on all this -- and its connection to Afghanistan -- see "Gainspotting: Terror War Meets Drug War.")
In any case, the drug trade is "flourishing" in Afghanistan because the American-led "regime change" operation there removed a government that had practically eliminated the Afghan drug trade -- the Taliban -- and replaced with it a gaggle of drug-running warlords. Now Washington is shocked -- shocked! -- to find drug-running going on there. Comedy gold, I tell you.
But of course, Washington's displeasure with Karzai has nothing to do with the corruption of his government or the Afghan drug trade. It stems from two main concerns: first, Karzai's increasingly strident protests against the growing number of Afghan civilians being killed in American and NATO operations; and second, the need to find a scapegoat for "the resurgence of the Taliban." Preferably, this scapegoat will be some local stooge, a fall guy to divert attention from the fact that the main reason for this resurgence is Washington's witless, blunderbuss, blood-and-iron approach -- the very same approach that Obama and his anonymous tough-guy leakers are proposing to escalate. And what better fall guy than some loudmouth who keeps going on about how destructive and counterproductive the American approach is?
But do let's be fair to Team Obama, which, as we all know, is motivated solely by the most humane and progressive motives. The NYT story makes clear that if Karzai -- supposedly the independent president of a sovereign nation -- grovels sufficiently to his new masters in Washington, they might keep him on for a bit longer:
Mr. Holbrooke is preparing to travel to the region, and administration officials said he would ask more of Mr. Karzai, particularly on fighting corruption, aides said, as part of what they described as a "more for more" approach.
Mr. Karzai is facing re-election this year, and it is not clear whether Mr. Obama and his aides intend to support his candidacy. The administration will be watching, aides said, to see if Mr. Karzai responds to demands from the United States and its NATO allies.....
These demands include arresting not only his half-brother but various other Afghan officials -- many if not most of them the same warlords, druglords, crimelords and religious extremists brought to power by the Americans themselves.
Meanwhile, our tough new "progressive hawks" are going to downplay all that sissy-mary "development" stuff -- off-loading it onto the effete Europeans -- while they concentrate on killing them a whole shitload of gooks -- sorry, Talibans:
Meanwhile, our tough new "progressive hawks" are going to downplay all that sissy-mary "development" stuff -- off-loading it onto the effete Europeans -- while they concentrate on killing them a whole shitload of gooks -- sorry, Talibans:
They said that the Obama administration...would leave economic development and nation-building increasingly to European allies, so that American forces could focus on the fight against insurgents.
"If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who served under Mr. Bush and is staying on under Mr. Obama, told Congress on Tuesday. He said there was not enough "time, patience or money" to pursue overly ambitious goals in Afghanistan, and he called the war there "our greatest military challenge."
Mr. Gates said last week that previous American goals for Afghanistan had been "too broad and too far into the future," language that differed from Mr. Bush’s policies.
Yes, that's change we can believe in: being even more militaristic than George W. Bush! We look forward to some really, really positive results from this approach.
Then again, I guess we've got to do "whatever it takes" to win this thing -- because this is the "good war," after all, isn't it? The war that all "serious" progressives were quick to say that they wholeheartedly supported, even while voicing their opposition to the invasion of Iraq -- which was "the wrong war at the wrong time." Indeed, their main complaint about the murderous berserking in Iraq was that it "took our eye off the ball" from the "central front in the War on Terror" in Afghanistan. This was the line consistently peddled by Obama (who never once declared, or even hinted, that the Iraq operation was an inherently criminal operation -- a horrendous moral abomination, a sickening mass atrocity -- and not just an inconvenient or ill-timed or badly-conducted endeavour). No, the Afghan War is the war "we had to fight," our progressive hawks all tell us, so we've got to see it through.
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Then again, I guess we've got to do "whatever it takes" to win this thing -- because this is the "good war," after all, isn't it? The war that all "serious" progressives were quick to say that they wholeheartedly supported, even while voicing their opposition to the invasion of Iraq -- which was "the wrong war at the wrong time." Indeed, their main complaint about the murderous berserking in Iraq was that it "took our eye off the ball" from the "central front in the War on Terror" in Afghanistan. This was the line consistently peddled by Obama (who never once declared, or even hinted, that the Iraq operation was an inherently criminal operation -- a horrendous moral abomination, a sickening mass atrocity -- and not just an inconvenient or ill-timed or badly-conducted endeavour). No, the Afghan War is the war "we had to fight," our progressive hawks all tell us, so we've got to see it through.
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