Afghanistan Opinion: It's Victory Day But Afghans Are Still Voiceless Decades Later (Mull)

Josh Mull, the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. also writes for Rethink Afghanistan:

Happy Mujahideen Victory Day! This is the national holiday when Afghans celebrate their victory over the communists in the 1980's. We remember the Mujahideen of course, they're the folks to whom we gave all that CIA training and Stinger missiles so they could kill Soviets. We all at least saw the film version of Charlie Wilson's War, right?

Afghanistan: How Many Soldiers Does it Take to Screw in a Light Bulb? (Mull)

The basic historical narrative is that the Soviet superpower bad guys  (who incidentally invaded in the name of democracy and development) are defeated by the heroic good-guyAmericans, who saved the hapless, incoherent hillbillies, the Afghans, by giving them lots of weapons. Yay for freedom fighters!


The danger, our story warns, is that we abandoned Afghanistan after Mujahideen Victory Day, causing America to become the victims. Blowback! Poor, foolish America should have interfered more with Afghanistan I suppose. But we're ignoring the Afghan version of history and completely missing the point of Mujahideen Victory Day.


Let's take a look at their celebration, via Pajhwok Afghan News [subscription]:

[Deputy President Qasim Fahim] urged Afghan citizens to join together to find a solution to the problems faced by the country.

He said there were some people, both inside and outside the country, who were trying to destabilise Afghanistan.

A strong army, a vigilant fight against corruption and smuggling and respect for good government and the rule of law were some ways in which Afghanistan could retain its strength. Corruption, he said, was the fifth pillar of terrorism.

Fahim delivered a warning to unnamed countries who he said were meddling in Afghanistan's affairs, saying they would find themselves mired in similar problems if they did not leave.

Oh yeah, he's got our number all right. We are definitely "meddling," which is a nice way of saying occupation. And boy are we ever having similar problems! Indeed our meddling mires us in corruption, what with the billions lost to waste, fraud, and abuse by war profiteers. And rule of law is sure out the window since the President can now lock you up forever because he calls you a terrorist or just assassinate you. But notice that the Afghans don't think of the holiday as a time to pine for American intervention: Mujahideen Victory Day is about throwing off any foreign occupation, be it Soviet or American.

And the dirty secret here is that nobody abandoned Afghanistan. We like to take Afghanistan's decades of war and blame it on the Afghans being xenophobic, or "tribal," or some other backhanded way of saying they're all backwards idiots. If only they would just let us manipulate them, they'd have peace. But the history of Afghanistan's "war-torn" decades is a history of nothing but foreign meddling. Take a look at these snippets from the Washington Post:

Already, efforts to jockey for future control of Afghanistan have been seen among Pakistan, India, Iran and even Russia. [...]

Karzai and most Afghans fear that if Washington waits too long to decide about talking to the Taliban, control will fall to the ISI as happened in the 1980s and 1990s -- when Washington abandoned Afghanistan to Russia and Pakistan but the ISI played favorites and was unable to end the civil war among Afghan factions.[...]

Pakistan's maneuvers have prompted India to try reactivating its 1990s alliance with Iran, Russia and Central Asia, which supported the former Northern Alliance in a civil war against the Pakistan-backed Taliban regime.

See all the meddling? Iran, India, Pakistan, Russia, all of "Central Asia" apparently, plus all of our meddling. Everybody had a hand in it. And check out that bias: "ISI played favorites and was unable to end the civil war". Gee whiz, I wonder why they were "unable" to end it when, a few sentences later, we see that a lot of other folks seemed to have been around as well.

Afghans don't need more of us, they need more of themselves. Everyone but Afghans has a say in their affairs. Remember the outrage over President Hamid Karzai appointing Afghans (scandalous!) instead of foreigners to the election commission? Guess how many foreigners regulate the elections in Montana? Zero.

Now, don't misconstrue this as a defense of Karzai's fraud, it's simply illustrative of our rejection of Afghans at every step of the process. We whine about abandoning the women of Afghanistan, instead of letting them do it themselves. We complain that Afghan electricity isn't sufficiently dependent on our puppet in Kabul, instead of helping them develop their own energy capacity. And rather than allow Afghans to develop their own security, we support child molesters and drug addicts who ravage the population.

Just take a look at this movie showing in Afghanistan, keeping in mind that this is only one anecdote, from an American no less:

Last weekend, at the university where I teach, the new documentary film Addicted in Afghanistan by director Jawed Taiman, a British-Afghan, was shown. At point, one of the young boys in the family of opium and heroin addicts the film follows shouts to the camera that his addiction was produced by the U.S.-led occupation. The overwhelmingly student audience erupted into applause. I later heard that some shocked faculty members walked out in disgust with students. One, an American, reportedly said the incident has her reconsidering whether she will return after this semester.

I was stunned that my colleagues were surprised. Our students are not going to speak up in a well-lit classroom in an “American university” and tell their instructor what they honestly think about the United States. Some of the older students lived under Taliban rule. All of the students were directly impacted by the chaos of civil war and the latest bloody foreign occupation. Every Afghan understands that what you say in public can earn your execution.

But in the anonymity of a darkened gymnasium, with abundant peer support, they can exercise their frustration, disappointment, anger or disgust in a collective manner that affords both plausible deniability and little likelihood of reprisals. Popular resistance always finds, or creates, opportunities to express itself.

That's how battered and beat down by foreign interference they are. They can only express themselves anonymously in the dark. They're completely voiceless in the fate of their own country. Then there's that Pajhwok article I noted. They have to hide their exclusively Afghan voices behind loads of ads and a paywall just to keep the lights on.

But there's good news here. You are not behind a paywall, your voice is not confined to the darkness. Listen to what Representative James McGovern said on a recent conference call about Afghanistan:

I have to tell you as a former staffer and as a member of Congress-- pressure works, grassroots pressure works. It really makes a difference here," he said. "And when many people do it it's a movement. And what we need to create here in a very short period of time is a movement to try to change course on Afghanistan.

I was on that call, and I can tell you he very strongly emphasized that point over and over again. Pressure works. Calling your member of congress works. Writing your member of Congress works. Hell, even shutting down their office works. They have to listen to you, they desperately need you to tell them what to do. Unlike the Afghans, your voice still counts for a lot, and you can demand that the US stop interfering in Afghanistan, primarily by ending our bloody and expensive military occupation. Tell them the Afghans need to solve their own problems, they don't need us there manipulating them.

It's super easy, too. Take Peace Action West, for example. They've got a form all ready for you to tell congress to end the war, you just have to fill out your personal details. Click "send" and, poof, it goes straight to your specific members of congress. There are dozens more organizations out there just like that one, too. And of course it's always effective to just straight up call them at their office and speak your mind. And you won't be alone in doing this. Contact your representative, then join us on Rethink Afghanistan’s Facebook page and collaborate with the tens of thousands of others around the country working to bring this war to an end.

Afghanistan: How Many Soldiers Does it Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?

Josh Mull is the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. He also writes for Rethink Afghanistan:

As the US gears up for its inevitably bloody assault on Kandahar, the plans have hit a bit of a snag. There's a dispute raging between the military and civilian sides of our war effort over, believe it or not, development aid. The Washington Post reports:

Convinced that expanding the electricity supply will build popular support for the Afghan government and sap the Taliban's influence, some officers want to spend $200 million over the next few months to buy more generators and millions of gallons of diesel fuel. Although they acknowledge that the project will be costly and inefficient, they say President Obama's pledge to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011 has increased pressure to demonstrate rapid results in their counterinsurgency efforts, even if it means embracing less-than-ideal solutions to provide basic public services....

Afghanistan: Turning a Blind Eye to Corruption? (Sengupta)

U.S. diplomats and reconstruction specialists, who do not face the same looming drawdown, have opposed the military's plan because of concerns that the Afghan government will not be able to afford the fuel to sustain the generators. Mindful of several troubled development programs over the past eight years, they want the United States to focus on initiatives that Afghans can maintain over the long term.

The dispute is easy to understand. The military wants an immediate impact, while the State Department wants a long-term solution. Because the army has to leave, they need quick solutions or, though it is left unsaid, "we will fail in Afghanistan".

We know that this is not true. Even after July 2011 there will still be combat troops in Afghanistan, just the "special" ones that do the most killing. But framing the aid dispute around the military's needs completely misses the point that the military should n0t even be involved in Afghanistan. The State Department is right: if we care at all about our objectives in Afghanistan, governance, development, human rights, then we need sustainable solutions. And who knows more about that, the civilians or the military?

In the Post article, an anonymous military source crystallizes the debate:

"This is not about development -- it's about counterinsurgency," said a U.S military official at the NATO headquarters in Kandahar, advocating rapid action to help Afghan officials boost the power supply. "If we don't give them more fuel, we'll lose a very narrow window of opportunity."

It's not about development, it's about counterinsurgency (COIN if you're a cool kid).  This is supposedly a fancy new military doctrine for winning the hearts and minds of civilians, including things like $200 million worth of generators.

But COIN isn't new, it's a buzzword for occupation. It even accounts for installing and coercing a puppet government (host nation) and undermining domestic and foreign discourse with propaganda (strategic communication). In other words, it is the exact same cycle of overthrowing foreign governments we've been doing for decades. That's the best thing our military has to offer when it comes to succeeding in Afghanistan: an insidious and illegal foreign occupation.

Why? Because they're the military. They've got aptly-named Predator drones and Hellfire missiles and other tools explicitly designed for hunting down and obliterating human beings. Despite the commercials you see of them rescuing disaster victims and handing out food, they're really what Ted Koppel said during the Iraq invasion, "an awesome, synchronized killing machine". Now, you want something "awesome" like that when Russia's Putin comes knocking on Sarah Palin's door, or whatever military threats might fall upon us.

But in Afghanistan, that's not what we need. At least, those aren't the objectives laid out by the President:

Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.

To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan. We must deny al Qaeda a safe-haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's Security Forces and government, so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future.

OK, so the big target is denial of an Afghanistan for al-Qa'eda. That's been done for like a year now. We don't want the Taliban to overthrow the government? Done, the Taliban are negotiating with the government.

But finally, "strengthening the capacity" of the government to "lead responsibility," that one we haven't done. The government is corrupt and broken. That's where all that talk about development, governance, and human rights comes in, which brings us back to the aid dispute above. The civilian side of our efforts wants to continue repairing a dam that could provide a stable power source indefinitely, instead of handing out expensive generators that require fuel local Afghans couldn't possibly afford without welfare from President Tony Montana in Kabul (who can't afford it either by the way). And our diplomats and development agencies actually know what they're talking about.

Let's look at Bangladesh. Like Afghanistan, they have similar energy problems, as my friend Bob Morris writes:

Imagine a city of 13 million with continual blackouts

That’s Dhaka, Bangladesh now. Uncontrolled growth is a primary reason that blackouts now occur every few hours, something which usually shuts down the water supply too. And here I get cranky when the Internet goes down for ten minutes. If you’re reading this on a laptop in a developed country, you are in the global elite.

So, what do we do about it? Send in 100,000 troops to shoot and bomb the hell out of them? Nope, just stuff like this:

USAID aims to:

• 
  
  Strengthen energy institutions, particularly the Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission, the Rural Electrification Board and the rural electric cooperatives known as the Palli Biddut Samities or PBSs;


• 
  
  Help develop appropriate market structure and associated rules to ensure a competitive market for efficient market operations and increased consumer benefits


• 
  
  Promote balanced public discussion on reform of Bangladesh's energy sector; and


• 
  
  Improve the legal, regulatory, and investment environment to promote private investment and development of the energy sector.[...]

Complementing these activities is USAID's South Asia Regional Initiative for Energy (SARI/Energy) program. The program promotes energy security in South Asia by facilitating more efficient regional energy resource utilization, increasing transparent and profitable energy practices, mitigating the environmental impacts of energy production, and increasing regional access to clean energy. SARI/Energy focuses on:

1. 
   
   Cross border energy trade


2. 
   
   Energy market formation


3. 
   
   Regional clean energy development

That's a lot of jargon, but essentially it's the same sort of solution that we need in Afghanistan. In fact, it's exactly what the State Department is asking for in the aid dispute with the military:

Instead of buying fuel, Eikenberry and other embassy personnel want the electric utility in Kandahar to do a better job of collecting fees and to use the money to buy fuel for the generators it already has, which would increase supply but not eliminate the shortage. USAID is offering help through its Afghanistan Clean Energy Program, a $100 million effort to promote "green" power in the war zone. The agency plans to install solar-powered streetlights in the city this year.

Rather than unsustainable bribes, help the local population solve their own energy crisis.

Now I know what you're thinking, Bangladesh is not Afghanistan. If we pulled out the military and just left the civilians and aid workers, they'd all get killed by the Taliban, right? Wrong. Bangladesh has many of the same problems: corrupt government officials, extremist infiltration in the military, even jihadi terrorist groups with lots of scary dashes and apostrophes:

Meanwhile, intelligence agencies in Bangladesh have sent a report to the Prime Minister on the existing militant groups in the country. According to the report, at least 12 militant outfits are active in Bangladesh, which have foreign funding links and relations with local political parties. The 12 militant outfits are, Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh [JMB], Harkatul Jihad al Islami [Huji], Hizb Ut Towhid, Ulama Anjuman al Bainat, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Islamic Democratic Party [IDP], Islami Samaj, Touhid Trust, Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh [JMJB], Shahadat-E-Al Hikma Party Bangladesh, Tamira Ad-Din Bangladesh [Hizb-E-Abu Omar] and Allah'r Dal [Hezbollah]. The report however did not mention names of other militant outfits such as Zadid Al-Qaeda, Khatmey Nabuat Movement and Khatmey Nabuat Andolan.

It may be mentioned here that, members of Khatmey Nabuat Movement and Khatmey Nabuat Andolan have been staging massive repression on Ahmedia religious minority group in Bangladesh. Moreover, Mufti Noor Hussain Noonari, leader of Khatmey Nabuat Andolan led dozens of Islamists in destroying a sculpture, which was erected by the City Corporation in front of the Zia International Airport. Members of law enforcing agencies were helplessly witnessing the destructions of State properties by the unruly Islamists in broad day light. Later another group of Islamists attempted to destroy the sculpture in front of the National Flag Carrier's head office. They also threatened to destroy the National Monument, which was erected in memory of the martyrs of the independence war of Bangladesh as well as another monument erected in the memory of Bangla Language Movement. It is learnt that, Mufti Noorani is continuing to give instigations behind such illegal activities.

Yep, that place sounds crazy dangerous, yet our civilians have been able to provide electricity to some 40 million people at a rate of 2,000 new connections per day. That's just one piece of the program; there's still all the other stuff about "market formation" and improving the regulatory environment. And ta da! No Special Forces or Hellfire missiles. Our civilian aid workers and diplomats are highly skilled at operating safely and effectively in failed states, war zones, all kinds of unsafe places, and they don't need military firepower to do it.

It's the military presence that makes it unsafe for aid agencies. The civilians become co-conspirators in foreign domination, and with the military pretending to be interested in construction and development, they become completely indistinguishable from the occupying army. That's why they become targets. We have to completely remove the military from the equation in order for our civilian efforts to work, and thus achieve our objectives in Afghanistan.

And we have to remove the military quickly, because unlike our civilian workers, the military is not only making the situation unsafe in Afghanistan, but they're even unsafe at home. Are you sitting down? Check this out:

Troubling new data show there are an average of 950 suicide attempts each month by veterans who are receiving some type of treatment from the Veterans Affairs Department.

Seven percent of the attempts are successful, and 11 percent of those who don’t succeed on the first attempt try again within nine months.

Holy shit! Excuse my language but that is a staggering statistic. Almost a thousand soldiers try to kill themselves every single month, and that's just the price of doing business. If they manage not to get blown up by an IED, shot by friendly fire, or electrocuted in the shower, then they still have deadly severe post-traumatic stress disorder to deal with. Even if they're over there COINing it up, the environment our occupation creates is so hellish, the atrocities so outrageous, that afterward it completely shatters our soldiers' will to live.

I can't seem to find the same statistics for IREX or USAID. I guess there's not a lot of diplomats commiting suicide because of all the schools and clinics they built.

How many soldiers do we need working in Afghanistan? Zero! We've got to get every last one out of there, or not only will the sickening death toll continue to rise, but we'll never get anywhere near completing our objectives in Afghanistan.

Of course, not everyone agrees with the President's ideas about creating a stable Afghanistan. Intervention in any shape or form is controversial, and we're welcome to have a philosophical debate about Neoliberal Globalization and "Soft Imperialism" and all that fun stuff, but we're nowhere near that point yet. Right now the debate is over this:

Afghan protesters torched NATO supply vehicles in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, hours after allegations emerged that U.S. and Afghan troops had killed three civilians, including two brothers, in their home.

The demonstration occurred in Logar province after a nighttime joint patrol of U.S. Special Operations forces and Afghan soldiers fatally shot three people and arrested two others. NATO officials said the men were insurgents who had displayed "hostile intent." One of those captured was a low-level Taliban commander who planned suicide bombings, they said.

But after daybreak, more than 100 people gathered on a main road in Logar to protest the killings and the death in a separate incident of an Islamic scholar, according to Afghan officials. Military operations at night are deeply unpopular, and Afghan officials have called for them to stop. The furious crowd blocked traffic and set fire to at least 10 fuel tankers using hand grenades, said the provincial police chief, Ghulam Mustafa Moisini.

"If they were insurgents, why are the people so angry?" asked provincial government spokesman Din Mohammad Darwish.

They're angry for the same reason we are. We've got to get the military out of Afghanistan, for our sake, for the Afghans' sake, and for the sake of our national objectives in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan: Death And The Prices We Pay for Intervention

Stephen Walt ,  writing on Foreign Policy about the recent Wikileaks release on the killing of civilians in Iraq in 2007 by US forces, touches on the idea that massacres like the one in the Wikileaks video are to be expected as part of the price of our interventionist policies:

Notice that I am not suggesting that the personnel involved failed to observe the proper "rules of engagement," or did not genuinely think that the individuals they were attacking were in fact armed. Rather, what bothers me is that they were clearly trying to operate within the rules, and still made a tragic error. It reminds us that this sort of mistake is inevitable in this sort of war, especially when we rely on overwhelming firepower to wage it. When we intervene in other countries, this is what we should expect.

Afghanistan: The Humanity Missing From Our Debate

It's an excellent point, but unfortunately it's too easily dismissed with the old "war is hell" cliche, as in this piece from Bouhammer:

Soldiers cannot get wrapped around every single life they are forced to take by virtue of being in combat. Soldiers (and I use soldiers generally describing all service-members), use dark humor and take it all in stride when they have to take lives. They can’t be effective by getting wrapped around the axle over taking human lives. So what you hear in this video is soldiers being soldiers. Nobody likes killing innocents, especially children and that is evident when the soldiers on the ground immediately start calling for a MEDEVAC to come get the wounded children.

Clearly not everyone sees killing people as an unacceptable price of war, particularly when it's soldiers doing it. Bouhammer simply took Walt's adviceand expected the horrible deaths as a natural result of the policy.

But there is a bit more to the price of war than just the loss of lives. So let's get a little cold-hearted for a moment and just accept that we need to murder these people as part of our strategy. Even if we're OK with that, the price of this strategy is still astronomically expensive.

Let's start just with the cost of transporting supplies to our troops. Not the supplies themselves, just the cost of transporting them. Tom Engelhardt explains:

Believe it or not, according to the Washington Post, the Defense Department has awarded a contract worth up to $360 million to the son of an Afghan cabinet minister to transport U.S. military supplies through some of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan – and his company has no trucks. (He hires subcontractors who evidently pay off the Taliban as part of a large-scale protection racket that allows the supplies through unharmed.) This contract is, in turn, part of a $2.1 billion Host Nation Trucking contract whose recipients may be deeply involved in extortion and smuggling rackets, and over which the Pentagon reportedly exercises little oversight.

That'sthe US taxpayer, paying $2 billion just for trucks run by corrupt warlords and Taliban interlopers who will use them to smuggle  God knows what, possibly drugs or guns used to kill our soldiers. Lovely. But we have to pay that, because in order for our war strategy to work we've got to have soldiers in "some of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan".

That's just for the trucks. How do we get the supplies on to those trucks? Well, they come through an airbase in Kyrgyzstan. The price for that is the usual support for a police state dictator and paying rent with US taxpayers' money. And that price is about to go up:

The news of ongoing unrest in the central Asian republic has been received with concern by Washington. The U.S. embassy in Bishkek said it was "deeply concerned" about "civil disturbances" in the country, in a statement released on Wednesday.

Saying that the situation in Kyrgyzstan was "still very fluid", John Kerry, the chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, expressed "regret for the loss of life" in the country and called on all sides to be "calm and refrain from violence". He called upon Kyrgyz parties to address the "underlying political, economic and social issues" in a "transparent process that brings stability and fundamental rights to all."

The U.S. State Department said that transport operations at the Manas military installation outside Bishkek have been "functioning normally." The U.S. military has used the base over the past several years as a staging post for its operations in Afghanistan. Despite the call for the base’s closure by opposition leaders reportedly in charge now, it remains to be seen whether the new government will take practical steps toward that end.

There are worries in the U.S. that the new opposition-led government may increase the rent for Manas base by renegotiating the terms of its agreement with the U.S., according to Foreign Policy’s Cable blog. Such a renegotiation, Cable said, may offer Russia an opportunity to influence an agreement over the base.

So our pet dictator was ousted in a violent uprising (I won't get into the awful stuff he did to deserve that here), and now the new opposition government is going to be raising the rent, if not evicting us completely. This also apparently gives Russia, who we desperately need in other matters like the Iranian nuclear file, a bargaining chip to play against the US.

But the cost goes beyond rent or trucks or anything you can put a dollar sign on. We're also actively working to subvert European democracies as part of the cost of our war:

A newly leaked CIA report prepared earlier this month analyzes how the U.S. Government can best manipulate public opinion in Germany and France -- in order to ensure that those countries continue to fight in Afghanistan. The Report celebrates the fact that the governments of those two nations continue to fight the war in defiance of overwhelming public opinion which opposes it -- so much for all the recent veneration of "consent of the governed" -- and it notes that this is possible due to lack of interest among their citizenry: "Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters," proclaims the title of one section.

We're paying the CIA to figure out how to screw over the voters of France and Germany, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same chicanery was happening in American politics. We're way past blowing taxpayer funds and into the territory of destroying our own national values. And for what? Who actually stands to benefit from all of these prices that we're paying?

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has slammed Western backers for the second time in a week, accusing the United States of interference, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

In a private meeting with up to 70 Afghan lawmakers Saturday, Karzai also warned that the Taliban insurgency could become a legitimate resistance movement if foreign meddling in Afghan affairs continues, the Journal said, citing participants in the talks.

During the talks, Karzai, whose government is supported by billions of dollars of Western aid and 126,000 foreign troops fighting the Taliban, said he would be compelled to join the insurgency himself if the parliament does not back his bid to take over Afghanistan's electoral watchdog

That's right, we're paying a couple billion to Taliban warlords over here, propping up a police state over there, subverting democracies all over the place, and all for a corrupt mountebank like Karzai who wants to join the Taliban. And remember, I'm just picking examples out of thin air here; the cost of trucks, the Kyrgyz airbase, the CIA memos. These aren't even the total cost of the war which will wind up costing in the trillions.

Let's go back to Walt's piece:

It reminds us that this sort of mistake is inevitable in this sort of war, especially when we rely on overwhelming firepower to wage it. When we intervene in other countries, this is what we should expect.

See, Americans do expect these costs. They understand the cliches that "war is hell" and, indeed, expensive. But Americans do question why they're paying these costs only to prop up criminals like Karzai. Why are we paying billions to Taliban smugglers and police states and anti-democratic intelligence operations just to build a country for a guy who wants to join the Taliban? And he's the best thing we've got over there, we've been there for over 9 years, there is no one else.

Americans aren't opposing the cost of this war because they magically turned into pacifist hippies, they oppose the cost because we're paying for nothing over there. The best case scenario for the current price we're paying is we shell out trillions in deficit money, leave our soldiers to keep dying and killing innocent civilians for the next few years, subvert democracies worldwide, and destroy our own national values. All so Karzai will maybe not join the Taliban. Whatever goals we have in Afghanistan are simply not worth the price we're paying.

Josh Mull also writes for The Seminal and Rethink Afghanistan.

Afghanistan: The Humanity Missing From Our Debate

EA correspondent Josh Mull is also the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation and publishes at Rethink Afghanistan.

Former South Carolina senator Ernest Hollings has written an excellent editorial  calling the US war in Afghanistan "Not Necessary." It's always good to see fiscal conservatives sticking to their beliefs and opposing the incredible cost, but Hollings also stakes his reputation and personal experience in Vietnam against the current conflict:

I was "a hard charger" on the war in Vietnam. In fact, the motion for the last $500 million that went into the Vietnam War was made by me on the Senate Appropriations Committee. I thought the Vietnamese were willing to fight and die for democracy. Some were, but a lot more were willing to give up their lives over ten years for communism. Now I have learned that people want other types of government other than democracy. I've been to Hanoi; visited John McCain's prison, and the people of Vietnam are happy.

Clearly he's not some reckless hippy, he actually supported Vietnam. But he learned the harsh realities of war, the futility and madness of it all.



Unfortunately, there's a downside to Hollings' piece. He seems to justify part of his opposition with the orientalist smear of Afghans as xenophobic:

The one thing we learned in Charlie Wilson's War is that Afghans don't like or trust foreigners. President Karzai in the morning news is campaigning against the UN and all foreigners because he knows this makes him popular with the Afghans.

Yes, apparently the reason our efforts are failing is because the Afghans are just too racist to listen to our ideas. It couldn't possibly be something we're doing, right? It has to be those racist Afghans.

After all, Americans love foreigners! When Hispanic immigrants come to El Norte, our minuteman militias are there at the border to greet them with candy and job brochures. When our factories are shipped overseas, American workers are happy just to be giving those impoverished foreigners a job. And certainly none of us would think to insult the President by calling him a foreigner. Only Afghans hate foreigners, just like in Charlie Wilson's War.

So do I think Hollings is that delusional? No way. His remarks are just indicative of how comfortable we've become, on all sides of the conflict, with thinking of the Afghans as bizarre, alien creatures instead of the human beings they are. Hollings is taking a highly admirable, principled stand against the war, indeed against war itself, but he still manages to smear the Afghans for the failure of our invasion. Why? Because they "don't like or trust foreigner..

Let's go deeper into this alien Afghan fantasy with Michael Yon, who brings us this tale about his visit to an Afghan village:

With the Battle for Kandahar kicking off, and our troops surging in for the counteroffensive, villages previously beyond the periphery of our effective reach are becoming more accessible. Many of them have been Taliban-controlled. We don’t always know whether these isolated, dusty mud-walled places support, provide sanctuary, or are the native home of Taliban fighters. The Afghanistan government remains absent from most Afghan villages. The central government hidden away in Kabul still offers zero. Not juice, justice or security. The Taliban at least offers justice in some areas.

And so Charlie Company, some Afghan police, and Haji Oboyadulah Popal (the governor of Shah Wali Kot district), headed to the hills.

Just like Hollings' piece, we're off to a good start. Yon lays out the facts: The government in Kabul is "hidden away" and "offers zero" while the Taliban does a much better job of providing services to the locals. But that's not the point of Yon's post. He's taking us on a magical mystery tour to meet alien Afghan children.

For the first hour or so, no girls were to be seen, but the boys wanted their photos taken. Many villagers have never had their photos taken. The boys didn’t seem to know what the camera was until they saw their images. Soldiers and Marines sometimes carry Polaroid Cameras to villages. The villagers love to get the shots which often are the only photos they have ever owned.

Finally a lone girl came out. She wandered around for some time and a boy showed her to me, and when I lifted the camera he even shielded her eyes, but a moment too late. This was the first instance I saw anyone care if a young girl was photographed. Even the girl is covering her face. [emphasis added]

Weeeird. The zany Afghan culture seems to forbid strange foreign men taking pictures of little girls. But that's OK, Yon snapped a picture anyway, Americans know it's just nonsense. After all, Americans often approach little girls on the street and photograph them without permission. "Don't worry," they tell the parents, "it's just for my blog on the  Internet that anyone in the world can see." And Americans are super cool with that. But Yon has made another discovery --- fart jokes

There was a meeting going on with Captain Hanlin and the elders and the boys were well-behaved with them, but they were angling for attention.

The boys would have been fun if there were no meeting. We could have started a slingshot competition. But they were getting to be a pain. They magically disappeared and soon were crowded around the mortar team maybe 30 meters away. The crowd of boys began laughing so loudly that the meeting stopped a couple times to see what was up.

The British will designate a soldier to be the comedian during missions. When kids disrupt soldiers, the comedian can distract them away from business. Our folks were borrowing that good idea. I walked over and asked our guys how they had lured the kids away. Why were they laughing so loud? A soldier answered that they didn’t try to entertain the boys. He continued, “I just farted and they went crazy.” So he did it again and so on. The soldier boys with the mortars were getting along famously with the village boys.

Who knew that public corporeal depressurization is a great taboo in Afghanistan, but incredibly entertaining when done by Americans?

Yeah, crazy, not only is flatulence a "great taboo" to Afghans, but also their young males seem to find it humorous. That's nothing like American boys, who we know mostly prefer the early Woody Allen catalog and the letters of Oscar Wilde when it comes to comedy, never fart jokes. And a taboo? Americans are constantly farting on each other, to big applause and sincere appreciation. It's just good manners, like saying "please" and "thank you".

Of course, I don't think either Yon or Hollings intended to portray the Afghans in this light, as xenophobic murderers preventing our democracy or as fascinating creatures from an alien culture. We are simply too quick to gloss over the fact that we're dealing with people, human beings who deserve dignity, respect, and our consideration. When we dismiss their humanity, even unintentionally, it's actually us who suffers. We lose our humanity. Look at this post from Spencer Ackerman:

To get obscure for a second, there’s been a sense in this country for a decade about air strikes on terrorists and insurgent groups that equate them with weakness. Think about the number of times you’ve read permutations about “lobbing cruise missiles” at terrorist training camps or some such. There’s an understandable reason for that: air strikes are what you do when you can’t get close to a target on the ground. So imagine my surprise a couple years ago when I read al-Qaeda theoretician Abu Mus’ab al-Suri’s almost-mystical bewilderment with U.S. air power. (Seriously, read this book.) Having never been on the receiving end of a cruise missile or a predator missile or a JDAM, it can be easy to lose perspective about the destructive capability of those weapons, and the way they can focus the mind of an enemy. It’s fair to say al-Suri really was shocked and awed. He just wasn’t defeated by air strikes. Maybe that distinction is what’s led some of us perhaps to overcorrect our view of airpower in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency....

I do not know if any of that is happening. I just know that it makes some sense to believe that it could based on past observable behavior. The drone strikes themselves should probably not be viewed just as lethal occurrences, but as events that facilitate reactions in both an enemy cohort and a civilian population caught up in the mix. Any strike that occurs only occurs because an intelligence network allowed it to occur. And that’s the unheralded aspect — and the real determinant factor — of what the CIA’s drone program really is.

According to Ackerman, air strikes should be reconsidered because they scare the hell out of people, and we should try to judge the drone program in that light. Think about that for a moment. He says we should rethink our blasting away at "an enemy cohort and a civilian population" with "a cruise missile or a predator missile or a JDAM" because it effectively "shocked and awed" them, although admittedly it doesn't actually defeat them.

Good point! Now if only there was one simple term we could apply to this strategy of using violence to coerce and frighten a population into accepting your political agenda. Hmm.

Oh right. Terrorism.

Have I exposed Ackerman's secret desire to promote terrorism? Nope. Just like Hollings and Yon, Ackerman inadvertently forgot that he was talking about real Afghan human beings. Human beings who, just like us, enjoy fart jokes and hate corrupt government and don't like it when foreigners terrorize them with bombs. If you forget that, it's easy to think that the CIA using terrorism against xenophobes thousands of miles away is a good idea.

Now these are all pretty harmless examples of seemingly good-intentioned people de-humanizing the Afghans. But as over the top as I've been in my characterizations of them, these ideas that they unintentionally proliferate do have real, deadly consequences. My colleague at Rethink Afghanistan, Derrick Crowe, spent his Easter Sunday putting together this report:

Remember that survivors of the raid said that the special operations forces denied the wounded medical treatment and prevented survivors from going to get medical help for an extended period of time, during which one of the women and one of the men who were mortally wounded died.

That means special operations forces were busy digging bullets out of walls and/or people to cover their asses while the innocent people they shot were bleeding to death.

Those men and pregnant women our soldiers were carving bullets out of, those are the Afghans who "don't like or don't trust" foreigners, those are the Afghan boys who just like to have their picture taken, and they're the ones who are "shocked and awed" by our bloody bombing campaigns.

That's what we get when we deal with them on these orientalist terms. Our military carried out a nauseatingly gruesome massacre of Afghan civilians, covered it up, and then smeared the journalist who tried to report it. And why not? Afghans aren't people, they're an alien culture who hates foreigners, and we've got to use our awesome shock and awe strategy to defeat them, right? Nonsense.

Respect for Afghans is sorely lacking on all sides of the Afghanistan debate. It's 2010, nine years into the war, and we're still talking about Afghanistan in these orientalist terms. Yet it confuses and bewilders us when stories of war crimes and cover-ups like Derrick's seem to go unnoticed. We know why nobody wants to hear about the massacre. We don't want to think about them as human. This has to change now.