From: Zeyhilel@aol.com
Date: Thu Sep 03 2009 - 03:22:19 EDT
_http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090901_obamas_meaningless_war/_
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090901_obamas_meaningless_war/)
Obama’s Meaningless War
Posted on Sep 1, 2009
By Robert Scheer
True, he doesn't seem a bit like Lyndon Johnson, but the way he’s headed
on Afghanistan, Barack Obama is threatened with a quagmire that could bog
down his presidency. LBJ also had a progressive agenda in mind, beginning
with his war on poverty, but it was soon overwhelmed by the cost and
divisiveness engendered by a meaningless, and seemingly endless, war in Vietnam.
Meaningless is the right term for the Afghanistan war, too, because our
bloody attempt
to conquer this foreign land has nothing to do with its stated purpose of
enhancing our national security. Just as the government of Vietnam was
never a puppet of Communist
China or the Soviet Union, the Taliban is not a surrogate for al-Qaida.
Involved in both instances was an American intrusion into a civil war whose
passions and parameters we
never fully grasped and could not control militarily. The Vietnamese
Communists were not
an extension of an inevitably hostile, unified international communist
enemy, as evidenced
by the fact that Communist Vietnam and Communist China are both our close
trading
partners today. Nor should the Taliban be considered simply an extension
of a Mideast-
based al-Qaida movement, whose operatives the U.S. recruited in the first
place to go to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. Those recruits included
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attack, and
financier Osama bin Laden, who met in Afghanistan as part of a force that Ronald
Reagan glorified as “freedom fighters.” As
blowback from that bizarre, mismanaged CIA intervention, the Taliban came
to power and formed a temporary alliance with the better-financed foreign
Arab fighters still on the
scene.
There is no serious evidence that the Taliban instigated the 9/11 attacks
or even knew
about them in advance. Taliban members were not agents of al-Qaida; on the
contrary,
the only three governments that financed and diplomatically recognized the
Taliban—
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan—all were targets of
bin Laden’s group.
To insist that the Taliban be vanquished militarily as a prerequisite for
thwarting al-Qaida
is a denial of the international fluidity of that terrorist movement.
Al-Qaida, according to
U.S. intelligence sources, has operated effectively in countries as
disparate as Somalia, Indonesia, England and Pakistan, to name just a few. What
is required to stymie such a movement is effective police and intelligence
work, as opposed to deploying vast conventional military forces in the hope
of finding, or creating, a conventional war to win. This last wan hope is
what the effort in Afghanistan—in the last two months at its most costly
point in terms of American deaths—is all about: marshaling massive firepower to
fight shadows.
The Taliban is a traditional guerrilla force that can easily elude
conventional armies. Once again the generals on the ground are insisting that a
desperate situation can be turned around if only more troops are committed,
as Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal did in a report leaked this week. Even with
U.S. forces being increased to 68,000 as part of an 110,000-strong allied
army, the general states, “The situation in Afghanistan is serious. …” In the
same sentence he goes on to say “but success is achievable.”
Fortunately, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is given to some somber doubts
on this point, arguing that the size of the U.S. force breeds its own
discontents: “I have expressed some concerns in the past about the size of the
American footprint, the size of the foreign military footprint in
Afghanistan,” he said. “And, clearly, I want to address those issues. And we will
have to look at the availability of forces, we’ll have to look at costs.” I
write the word fortunately because just such wisdom on the part of Robert
McNamara, another defense secretary, during the buildup to Vietnam would
have led him to oppose rather than abet
what he ruefully admitted decades after the fact was a disastrous waste of
life and
treasure: 59,000 Americans dead, along with 3.4 million Indochinese,
mostly innocent civilians. I was reporting from Vietnam when that buildup began,
and then as now there
was an optimism not supported by the facts on the ground. Then as now
there were references to elections and supporting local politicians to win the
hearts and minds of
people we were bombing. Then as now the local leaders on our side turned
out to be hopelessly corrupt, a condition easily exploited by those we term
the enemy.
Those who favor an escalation of the Afghanistan war ought to own up to
its likely
costs. If 110,000 troops have failed, will we need the half million
committed at one
point to Vietnam, which had a far less intractable terrain? And can you
have that
increase in forces without re-instituting the draft?
It is time for Democrats to remember that it was their party that brought
America its
most disastrous overseas adventure and to act forthrightly to pull their
chosen
president back from the abyss before it is too late. <><><>