It appears that President Obama has reached a point where he would rather watch the Taliban eat Hamid Karzai’s liver than listen to one more lecture from Karzai. I agree. If we can’t find a better leader than Karzai, we should just get out.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I’m not sure that we know anything new today that we didn’t know two years ago or even four years ago. I like the zero option because this will take the issue of ending the GWOT off of the table for someone like Rand Paul in 2016.
I wish it would happen, but there’s no way Aqua Buddha gets the nomination.
The moment he gets close to winning Iowa the establishment media and wall street superpacs will carpet bomb him.
You’ve gotten very Hannibal Lectorish today. New vegan diet?
The “zero option” is shock therapy for Karzai, who doesn’t want war and doesn’t want negotiated settlements and has threatened to join the Taliban.
Plus for a lot of Americans at this point, when you say “Zero option!”, they say “Bring it on.” The war is over.
Load up the planes tomorrow. Start the airlift out.
The “zero option” is shock therapy for Karzai
It certainly helped focus Prime Minister Malaki’s attention on the need for a political settlement with his domestic opponents in Iraq.
“…with some fava beans and a nice Chianti?”
If a 13 year old war does in fact end with the US going “We quit! We quit! Fuck all y’all, we’re getting the hell out of here!” that would have to be scored an unequivocal loss, right? Thousands of Americans have ended up dying over there. God only knows how many hundreds of billions got spent?
And considering the security situation in Iraq actually deteriorated all over again after the removal of American forces, there’s a lot of reasons to be less than thrilled about the prospect. Politicians boasting about bringing the troops home would ring rather hollow.
It wouldn’t be an unequivocal loss because bin Laden was killed and most of Al Qaeda has been taken down.
I could care less about the internal fighting of another country (Iraq/Afghanistan), which is why I don’t want any US troops in Syria, and neither does anyone who isn’t a neo-con.
So yes, ending the shipment of caskets from Iraq and Afghanistan to Dover over wars that should never have been fought in the first place is an accomplishment to be proud off.
War is politics by other means. Sports-mad Americans keep forgetting this at the beginning and at the end of wars.
So what national interest is served by staying, losing more good soldiers, and only delaying the inevitable because the political sorting out has to be done by the Afghan people themselves. And our forward deployment into their country makes that sorting out just the harder for them to do.
So you are concerned about another Dolchstoßlegende, like the one that was created to keep Vietnam fever alive.
I don’t know how to deal with that domestic political delusion, but it is likely not by continuing to pour money and lives into Afghanistan for another couple of decades.
What are the national interests, and not the domestic politics (that since WWII has been biased toward endless war), that should keep us in Afghanistan and that couldn’t be served less expensively through other tactics?
I read his comment differently than you did.
I didn’t.
The United States has the responsibility to withdraw as soon as possible in the furtherance of our national interests. We’ve irresponsibly overstayed and overcommitted as is.
But this would be a very sad end to a broken process.
Unlike leftists and isolationists, I would have been thrilled to see the US spend its money wisely and build good governance and police that part of the world effectively and judiciously, even if that meant that my sourest predictions weren’t confirmed.
Instead Afghans will probably rip the copper from the walls and pass the guns around, and there will be one government in Kabul and another defacto one in Kandahar, and some women will be safe but some most certainly will not, and it will all be rather dismal. The last year of this war didn’t need to be spent with our governments sparring against one another in the press while the Taliban and Pakistani intelligence watch the clock tick down.
“Our national interests” have a habit of never being explicitly stated.
Afghanistan has the resources to build its own good governance and police, but they must have a political settlement before that happens.
The sparring of the US and Afghan governments has to do with Karzai trying to distance himself politically from the US in hopes that he will be a compromise leader. He also seeks to preserve the criminal organization that he has put in place. The US issues have to do with covering the war crimes that were perpetrated in the prisons and by the CIA; the US was immunity for US personnel from prosecution by the Afghan government. Karzai likely wants a few prosecutions, show trials even, to distance himself from the US. The conflict was inevitable. Even before the jockeying of fronline states like India and Pakistan and Iran.
I also would have been thrilled. However, the fact that this never happens is why I have become more opposed to our foreign adventures as time has gone on than I otherwise might have been.
I would have been thrilled to see aliens come down from spaceships and announce that humans had won the Galactic Powerball Lottery and were now being given an again-pristine planet and universal peace and prosperity. It’s about as likely.
World War II was a long, long time ago. A lot of new young voters today have grandparents who weren’t alive when it ended. There are dozens of examples of US military intervention (over or covert) since then, but not one example of the vision you cite. Even South Korea was a dictatorship for decades. And it’s also been a long, long time since anything to do with the US military could be plausibly put in the same sentence as “spending money wisely,” given the bloat and corporate welfare that has come to define our military budget.
All that is to say that those were never realistic expectations for Afghanistan, or any other US military intervention, even setting aside Afghanistan’s specific history and conditions. The only question was, how big was the clusterfuck going to be for Afghans?
The moment the US allied itself with a bunch of thugs and warlords whose ’90s rule was so bad the Afghans preferred the Taliban, this end result was baked in. The Bush cabal’s inherent corruption, combined with being distracted by the shinier prize in Iraq, just made it all that much worse. But those are simply variations on what’s become a very familiar story. The vision sold at the start by war propagandists is never, ever what actually happens, especially for the people caught in the crossfire.
I came late to this realization, after reviewing the difficulties with even the minimal intervention in Libya. Which is why I keep advocating a major national security reset, likely greater in magnitude than the review in the Truman administration and much more difficult because it would require dramatic downsizing and changing from a forward base deployment strategy.
What we have seen is that either (1) the US national security apparatus is a hammer in search of nails that winds up identifying as enemies folks who weren’t at that time enemies or (2) the US military posture is so big-footed that it creates the hostility and enemies that intends to defuse. In either case, there needs to be a fundamental reset or we are in continuous and sometimes dangerously escalating war without end.
You wrote: “The only question was, how big was the clusterfuck going to be for Afghans? The moment the US allied itself with a bunch of thugs and warlords whose ’90s rule was so bad the Afghans preferred the Taliban, this end result was baked in.”
But there was a moment in time, before the alliance with thugs, where much was actually possible, and much wished for by a strong majority of Afghans. My brother is an old afghan hand, many friends from pre-Soviet invasion days, and he tells me that is really was possible to significantly heal that country, that they wanted the US to do just that. But you are probably right that W poisoned the well so badly that by the time Obama came into office it was all over.
It would only be a loss if the Taliban took over.
Wait a minute here!!!
As Tonto famously said to The Lone Ranger when under attack by Native American forces, “Who ‘we,’ white man?”
I mean…are “we” not the last bastion of free democracy? The protectors of the rights of the people, etc., etc., etc.???
Oh.
Not in the Islamic world we’re not?
Not when it might be bad for business?
Blood for oil business?
Oh.
Sorry.
Nevermind.
Yore freind…
Emily Litella
P.S. Wake the fuck up.
AG
I thought “we” was a more honest assessment of the situation than that usually provided by our news media. Would he be in charge without US intervention?
You are quite correct, CG. It is a more honest assessment of the situation.
But the situation itself is not honest.
The media are not honest.
Why?
Because the corporate-owned Permanent Government is not honest, and the media are the bought and sold mouthpieces of that Permanent Government. The single major politician of the last…oh, I don’t know, say 20 years…who has effectively spoken up about this rampant set of dishonesties and the ongoing decay of the entire system because it is totally based on them is Ron Paul. Noam Chomsky has been speaking about this for over 50 years. I know this because I heard him speak about them when I was living in Cambridge long ago and far away. That’s his real gig. Semiotics/Linguistics.
From Wikipedia:
“…every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication.”
Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography is titled “The Story of My Experiments with Truth.”
Now there’s a strange foursome, eh? Ron Paul, Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco and Mahatma Gandhi. But it works. Study the signs…study the amount of “truth” that exists in any given society’s communications once all the bullshit is boiled away…and you will find that given society’s real place in the world. More “truth” equals greater success and vice-versa. Why did Nazi Germany and Communist Russia fail? Because there were competing systems that allowed more “truth” to filter down into their populations’ minds. No system is totally truthful. I suppose there is a Goldilocks mean between the extremes of total truth-telling and total lying. After all, survival on any level is something of a poker game, and you must lie in poker to survive. However, too much poker lying…bluffing…can also cause failure. As above, so below. The U.S. has reached way past that “Juuuust right” Goldilocks mean in a negative direction over the past 50 years. It has become the United States of Omertica. The United States of Advertising Instead of Product. The United States of the Big Lie. The United States of Total Surveillance. And it…the real “we” of which we are speaking here…is going to pay for it. That’s what happens. Big bluffers always go broke eventually.
Watch.
Or…do something about it.
Do what?
Do not support the bullshitters.
Duh.
Station WTFU once again signing off. Gotta go tell the musical truth this afternoon. We all do whatever we can. Will it be enough? Maybe; maybe not. So it goes.
Later…
AG
There’s always the Diem option.
That went well.
Depends on the objective. If it was to find a better puppet for another dozen years of war, it was swell.
.
Still a good read – McNamara, Faulty Analysis and Rand Corporation
Are you suggesting a coup?
If we can’t find a better leader than Karzai,we should just get outWe’ll never leave. Not so long as there’s oil there. Just like we never left Iraq. And how we’re still in Libya.
It is oil, isn’t it?
I prefer it when things are simple.
Pipeline…
Wait a minute, Iran and Pakistan are building around a competing pipeline around Afghanistan with Chinese financing.
Er, minerals.
Wait a minute, Karzai gave that contract to Japan.
Time to invade Iran, isn’t it? Or do we wait until the pipeline is built?
Off-topic: You may be interested in this: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/07/governments-spy-on-their-citizens-for-control-and-power/
A population three times that of Iraq says that option ain’t happening.
I’m watching for the walk-back after the new guy gets tagged as a “reformer”.
I find this interesting.
Where are the international cables and major switching centers?
Very good question.
NO BLOOD FOR POMEGRANATES!
Afghanistan seems to have a habit of knocking off their best leaders and allowing the deranged to rule.
Quite possibly true, but in the case of Karzai, Afghanistan has had no say in the matter. He’s our creation, all the way, up to and including the US buying off his serious competitors in the Afghan “elections.”
Funny how the US has been totally willing to overlook the endemic corruption, flourishing drug trade, and terrible human rights situation for women and religious minorities under Karzai, but when he tries to preserve his own skin post-inevitable-withdrawal by being publicly critical of US excesses – “lectures” that actually harm nobody, given that most of his countrymen already agree – some people are suddenly willing to see his liver eaten.
We are in Afghanistan to prevent it from becoming, once again, a home base for al Qaeda.
The best way to do that would be to bring an effective and friendly central government to power. Let’s call that Plan A.
On the off chance Plan A doesn’t work, there’s always the Biden Plan.