Part 7 (1/2)

So the next time a Flight 253 occurs and the Republicans go postal, the media morphs into its 24/7 national security disaster mode, the pundits register red on the terror-news scale, the president defends himself by reaffirming that he is doing just what the Bush administration would have done, the homeland security lobbyists begin calling for yet more funds for yet more machinery, and nothing much happens, remember those drunken drivers, arsonists, and tobacco merchants, even that single dust devil and say: Hold onto your underpants, this is not a national emergency.

SIX.

Obama's War.

How Safe Do You Want to Be?

Almost like clockwork, the reports float up to us from thousands of miles away, as if from another universe. Every couple of days they seem to arrive from Afghan villages that few Americans will ever see without weapon in hand. Every few days, they appear from a world almost beyond our imagining, and always they concern death-so many lives snuffed out so regularly for years now. Unfortunately, those news stories are so unimportant in our world that they seldom make it onto, no less off of, the inside pages of our papers. They're so repet.i.tive that, once you've started reading them, you could write them in your sleep from thousands of miles away.

Like obituaries, they follow a simple pattern. Often the news initially arrives buried in summary war reports based on U.S. military (or NATO) announcements of small triumphs-so many ”insurgents,” or ”terrorists,” or ”foreign militants,” or ”anti-Afghan forces” killed in an air strike or a raid on a house or a village. And these days, often remarkably quickly, even in the same piece, come the challenges. Some local official or provincial governor or police chief in the area insists that those dead ”terrorists” or ”militants” were actually so many women, children, old men, innocent civilians, members of a wedding party or a funeral. (A recent study of the death-dealing weapons of the Iraq war, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, indicates that air strikes are notoriously good at taking out civilians. Eighty-five percent of the deaths from air strikes in Iraq were, the study estimated, women and children, and of all methods, including suicide and car bombs, airpower ”killed the most civilians per event.”) Then come the standard-issue denials from U.S. military officials or coalition spokespeople: those killed were insurgents, and the intelligence information on which the strike or raid had been based was accurate. In these years, American spokespeople have generally retreated from their initial claims only step by begrudging step. Admittedly, there's been some change in the a.s.sertion/repeated denial/investigation pattern inst.i.tuted by American forces. Now, a.s.sertion and denial are sometimes followed relatively quickly by acknowledgment, apology, and payment. Now, when the irrefutable meets the unchallengeable, American spokespeople tend to own up to it. This new tactic has been a response to rising Afghan outrage over the repeated killing of civilians in U.S. raids and air strikes. But like the denials and the investigations, this, too, is intended to make everything go away, while our war itself-those missiles loosed, those doors kicked down in the middle of the night-continues.

Consider just one incident that went almost uncovered in the U.S. media. According to an Agence France-Presse account, in a raid in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, the U.S. military first reported a small success: four ”armed militants” killed. It took next to no time, however, for those four militants to morph into the family of an Afghan National Army artillery commander named Awal Khan. As it happened, Khan himself was on duty in another province at the time. According to the report, the tally of the slain, some of whom may have gone to the roof of their house to defend themselves against armed men they evidently believed to be robbers or bandits, included Awal Khan's ”schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, who worked for a government department. Another daughter was wounded.” The report continues, ”After the shooting, the pregnant wife of Khan's cousin, who lived next door, went outside her home and was shot five times in the abdomen.” She survived, but her fetus, ”hit by bullets,” didn't. Khan's wife worked at a school supported by the international aid organization CARE, which issued a statement strongly condemning the raid and demanding that ”international military forces operating in Afghanistan are held accountable for their actions and avoid all attacks on innocent civilians in the country.”

In accordance with its new policy, the United States issued an apology:Further inquiries into the Coalition and [Afghan National Security Forces] ANSF operation in Khost earlier today suggest that the people killed and wounded were not enemy combatants as previously reported.... Coalition and Afghan forces do not believe that this family was involved with militant activities and that they were defending their home against an unknown threat.... ”We deeply regret the tragic loss of life in this precious family. Words alone cannot begin to express our regret and sympathy and we will ensure the surviving family members are properly cared for,” said Brig. Gen. Michael A. Ryan, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan.

A U.S. military spokesman added, ”There will undoubtedly be some financial a.s.sistance and other types of a.s.sistance [to the survivors].”

But the family quite reasonably wanted more than a press-release apology. The grieving husband, father, and brother said, ”I want the coalition leaders to expose those behind this and punish them,” adding, ”[T]he Afghan government should resign if it could not protect its people.” Afghan president Hamid Karzai, as he has done many times during past incidents, repeatedly demanded an explanation for the deaths and asked that such raids and air strikes be drastically curtailed.

What Your Safety Is Worth.

All of this, however, is little more than a shadow play against which the ongoing war continues to be relentlessly prosecuted. In Afghanistan, and increasingly in Pakistan, civilian deaths are inseparable from this war. Though they may be referred to as ”collateral damage,” increasingly in all wars, and certainly in counterinsurgency campaigns involving air power, the killing of civilians lies at the heart of the matter, while the killing of soldiers might be thought of as the true collateral activity.

Pretending that these ”mistakes” will cease or be ameliorated as long as the war is being prosecuted is little short of folly. After all, ”mistake” after ”mistake” continues to be made. The first Afghan wedding party was obliterated in late December 2001, when an American air strike killed up to 110 Afghan revelers with only 2 survivors. At least 4 more have been blown away since then. And count on it, there will be others.

A UN survey tallied up 2,118 civilians killed in Afghanistan in 2008, a striking rise over the previous year's figure, of which 828 were ascribed to U.S., NATO, and Afghan Army actions rather than to suicide bombers or Taliban guerrillas. Given the difficulty of counting the dead in wartime, any figures like these are likely to be significant undercounts.

By now, we've filled up endless ”towers” with dead Afghan civilians. And that's clearly not going to change, apologies or not, especially when U.S. forces are ”surging” into the southern and eastern parts of the country, while the CIA's drone war on the Pakistani border expands.

And how exactly do we explain this ever-rising pile of civilian dead to ourselves? It's being done, so we've been told, for our safety and security here in the United States. The former vice president has made clear that among the great achievements of the Bush administration was the prevention of a second 9/11. And President Obama continues to play the 9/11 card heavily. As he reportedly put it, he is not ”'naive about how dangerous this world is' and...wakes up every day and goes to bed every night thinking and worrying 'about how to keep the American people safe.'”

Personally, I always thought that we could have locked our plane doors and gone home long ago. We were never in mortal danger from al-Qaeda in the backlands of Afghanistan, despite the perfervid imagination of the previous administration and the riotous fears of so many Americans. The rag-tag group that attacked us in September 2001 was then capable of committing acts of terror on a spectacular scale (two U.S. emba.s.sy buildings in Africa, a destroyer in a Yemeni harbor, and of course those towers in New York and the Pentagon), but only every couple of years. In other words, al-Qaeda was capable of stunning this country and of killing Americans, but was never a threat to the nation itself.

All this, of course, was compounded by the fact that the Bush administration couldn't have cared less about al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks, that the ”Defense Department” imagined its job to be ”power projection” abroad, not protecting American sh.o.r.es (or air s.p.a.ce), and that our intelligence agencies were in chaos. So those towers came down and rather than simply going after the group that had acted against us, we invaded Afghanistan (”no safe havens for terrorists”) and began plans for ”regime change” in Iraq and beyond. In the process, the Bush administration went to extreme efforts to fetis.h.i.+ze our own safety and security, and simultaneously turned ”security” into a lucrative endeavor.

Of course, elsewhere people have lived through remarkable paroxysms of violence and terror without the sort of fuss and fear this nation exhibited, or the money-making that went with it. If you want to be reminded of just how fetis.h.i.+stic our focus on our own safety was, consider a 2005 news article written for a Florida newspaper, ”Weeki Wachee Mermaids in Terrorists' Cross Hairs?” It began:Who on earth would ever want to harm the Weeki Wachee mermaids?

It staggers the imagination.

Still, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has named Weeki Wachee Springs as the potential terror target of Hernando County, according to a theme park official.

The Weeki Wachee staff is teaming up with the Hernando County Sheriff's Office to ”harden the target” by keeping the mermaid theater and the rest of the park safe from a potential terror attack, said marketing and promotion manager John Athanason....

Terror-prevention plans for Weeki Wachee may include adding surveillance cameras, installing lights in the parking lot and securing areas in the roadside attraction where there may be ”security breaches,” he said.

But Athanason is also realistic. He said Walt Disney World is a bigger attraction and is likely to receive more counterterrorism funds.

This was how, in deepest Florida, distant Utah, or on the Texas border, all places about as likely to be hit by an al-Qaeda attack as by a meteor, Americans were obsessing about keeping everything near and dear to them safe and secure. At the same time, of course, the Bush administration was breaking the bank at the Pentagon and in its Global War on Terror, while preparing the way for an America that would be plunged into startling economic insecurity.

Let's for a moment a.s.sume, however, that our safety really was, and remains, at stake in a war halfway across the planet. If so, let me ask you a question: What's your ”safety” really worth? Are you truly willing to trade the lives of Awal Khan's family for a blanket guarantee of your safety, and not just his family, but all those Afghan one-year-olds, all those wedding parties that are-yes, they really are-going to be blown away in the years to come for you?

If, in 1979, as the Carter presidency was ending and our Afghan wars were beginning, you had told any group of Americans that we would be ever more disastrously involved in Afghanistan for thirty years, that, even then, no end would be in sight, and that we would twice declare victory (in 1989 after the Soviets withdrew, and again in 2001 when the Afghan capital Kabul was taken from the Taliban) only to discover that disaster followed, they undoubtedly would have thought you mad. Afghanistan? Please. You might as well have said Mars. Now, three decades later, it's possible to see that every step taken from the earliest support for Afghan jihadis in their anti-Soviet war has only made things worse for us, and ever so much worse for the Afghans.

Maybe it's time to put less value on the idea of absolute American safety, since in many ways the Bush administration definition of our safety and security, which did not go into retirement with George and d.i.c.k, is now in the process of breaking us. Even if d.i.c.k Cheney and his minions prevented another 9/11 (and there's no evidence they did), in doing so, look what they brought down around our ears-and all in the name of our safety, and ours alone.

Ask yourself these questions, then, in the dead of night: Do we really want stories like Awal Khan's to float up out of the villages of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and who knows where else for years, even decades, to come? Does that seem right? Is your supposed safety worth that?

General ”Manhunter”

Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So his appointment by President Obama to run the Afghan War seems to signal an administration going for broke. It's heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as ”the big muddy,” doubling down on the bad decisions of his predecessor.

General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon's super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an ”executive a.s.sa.s.sination wing” out of Vice President Cheney's office. Cheney returned the favor by giving McChrystal a ringing endors.e.m.e.nt for position of Afghan War commander: ”I think you'd be hard put to find anyone better than Stan.”

McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush touted him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of ”manhunters” he commanded in Iraq had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: ”If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it.” (Since some of the task force's members were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn't avoided.) In the Bush years, McChrystal was extremely close to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld's effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.

Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command, not to speak of a role in the cover-up of the circ.u.mstances surrounding the death of army ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman. The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak-that is, expanded-war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a ”key advocate...of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.” This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blow-back in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.

All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of ”new thinking and new approaches”-to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's words-that the Obama administration expects General McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the firstborn child of Obama-era Was.h.i.+ngton's growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.

But none of this matters to what remains of mainstream news a.n.a.lysis. The press establishment has had a long-term love affair with McChrystal. Back in 2006, when Bush first touted him, Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him ”a rising star” in the army and one of the ”Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls 'the shadows.'” More recently, in that mix of sports lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that makes armchair war strategizing just so much fun, Was.h.i.+ngton Post columnist David Ignatius claimed that CentCom commander General David Petraeus, who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan, is ”a.s.sembling an all-star team” and that McChrystal himself is ”a rising superstar who, like Petraeus, has helped reinvent the U.S. Army.” Is that all?

When it comes to pure hagiography, however, the prize goes to Elisabeth b.u.miller and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, ”A General Steps from the Shadows,” that painted a picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between Superman and a saint. Among other things, it described the general as ”an ascetic who...usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours' sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod.... [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists.... [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians.” The quotes b.u.miller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less spectacular: ”He's got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect.” ”If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal...I think of no body fat.”

Above all, General McChrystal was praised for being ”more aggressive” than his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. He would, as b.u.miller and Thom Shanker reported in another piece, bring ”a more aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening seven-year war.” The general, we were a.s.sured, liked operations without body fat, but with plenty of punch. And though no one quite said this, given his closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, his mentality was undoubtedly a GWOT one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist Gareth Porter pointed out in a thoughtful Asia Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), ”the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe.”

McChrystal's appointment, then, represented a decision by Was.h.i.+ngton to dispatch the bull directly to the china shop. The Post's Ignatius even compared McChrystal's boss Petraeus and Obama's special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to ”two headstrong bulls in a small paddock.” He then concluded his paean to all of them with this pa.s.sage: ”Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he's marching his presidency into the 'graveyard of empires' anyway.” McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.

Of course, there were now so many bulls in this particular china shop that smas.h.i.+ng was increasingly the name of the game. The early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, resulted in a surprisingly sweeping expansion of the Af-Pak War. President Obama has, in fact, opted for a down-and-dirty war strategy in search of some at least minimalist form of success. For this, McChrystal was the poster boy. Former Afghan commander General David McKiernan believed that, ”as a NATO commander, my mandate stops at the [Afghan] border. So unless there is a clear case of self-protection to fire across the border, we don't consider any operations across the border in the tribal areas.” Not so Stan McChrystal. The idea that the ”responsibilities” of U.S. generals fighting the Afghan War ”ended at the border with Pakistan,” Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt of the Times reported, was now considered part of an ”old mind-set.” McChrystal represented those ”fresh eyes” that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked about in the press conference announcing the general's appointment. As Mazzetti and Schmitt pointed out, ”Among [McChrystal's] last projects as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command was to better coordinate Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency efforts on both sides of the porous border.”

For those old enough to remember, we've been here before. Administrations that start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked in if things don't work out as expected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation after escalation. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever greater force, leading to further expansions of what is already ”Obama's war.”