From: "Wahome, Kimamo" <WAHOMEK@uwec.edu> Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 21:21:39 -0500 Subject: Obama's Waterloo Message-ID: <E3F0E607B3CF71418CE725F002B5F6047A4F0BB650@CHERRYPEPSI.uwec.edu>
Published on Monday, May 11, 2009 by TruthDig.com<http://www.truthdig.com/r
eport/item/20090511_becoming_what_we_seek_to_destroy/>
Becoming What We Seek to Destroy
by Chris Hedges
The bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men,
their corpses blown into bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs d
ropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the western province of Farah, ill
ustrates the futility of the Afghan war. We are not delivering democracy or
liberation or development. We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms
of industrial slaughter. And because we have employed the blunt and horribl
e instrument of war in a land we know little about and are incapable of rea
ding, we embody the barbarism we claim to be seeking to defeat.
We are morally no different from the psychopaths within the Taliban, who Af
ghans remember we empowered, funded and armed during the 10-year war with t
he Soviet Union. Acid thrown a girl's face or beheadings? Death delivered f
rom the air or fields of shiny cluster bombs? This is the language of war.
It is what we speak. It is what those we fight speak.
Afghan survivors carted some two dozen corpses from their villages to the p
rovincial capital in trucks this week to publicly denounce the carnage. Som
e 2,000 angry Afghans in the streets of the capital chanted "Death to Ameri
ca!" But the grief, fear and finally rage of the bereaved do not touch thos
e who use high-minded virtues to justify slaughter. The death of innocents,
they assure us, is the tragic cost of war. It is regrettable, but it happe
ns. It is the price that must be paid. And so, guided by a president who on
ce again has no experience of war and defers to the bull-necked generals an
d militarists whose careers, power and profits depend on expanded war, we a
re transformed into monsters.
There will soon be 21,000 additional U.S. soldiers and Marines in Afghanist
an in time for the expected surge in summer fighting. There will be more cl
ashes, more airstrikes, more deaths and more despair and anger from those f
orced to bury their parents, sisters, brothers and children. The grim repor
t of the killings in the airstrike, issued by the International Committee o
f the Red Cross, which stated that bombs hit civilian houses and noted that
an ICRC counterpart in the Red Crescent was among the dead, will become fa
miliar reading in the weeks and months ahead.
We are the best recruiting weapon the Taliban possesses. We have enabled it
to rise from the ashes seven years ago to openly control over half the cou
ntry and carry out daylight attacks in the capital Kabul. And the war we wa
ge is being exported like a virus to Pakistan in the form of drones that bo
mb Pakistani villages and increased clashes between the inept Pakistani mil
itary and a restive internal insurgency.
I spoke in New York City a few days ago with Dr. Juliette Fournot, who live
d with her parents in Afghanistan as a teenager, speaks Dari and led teams
of French doctors and nurses from Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors
Without Borders, into Afghanistan during the war with the Soviets. She part
icipated in the opening of clandestine cross-border medical operations miss
ions between 1980 and 1982 and became head of the French humanitarian missi
on in Afghanistan in 1983. Dr. Fournot established logistical bases in Pesh
awar and Quetta and organized the dozen cross-border and clandestine perman
ent missions in the resistance-held areas of Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Badakhs
han, Paktia, Ghazni and Hazaradjat, through which more than 500 internation
al aid workers rotated.
She is one of the featured characters in a remarkable book called "The Phot
ographer,<https://www.amazon.com/dp/1596433752?tag=commondreams-20&camp
=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=1596433752&adid=0J632CMCC
WHD6ER6FD7V&>" produced by photojournalist Didier Lefèvre and graphic nov
elist Emmanuel Guibert. The book tells the story of a three-month mission i
n 1986 into Afghanistan led by Dr. Fournot. It is an unflinching look at th
e cost of war, what bombs, shells and bullets do to human souls and bodies.
It exposes, in a way the rhetoric of our politicians and generals do not,
the blind destructive fury of war. The French humanitarian group withdrew f
rom Afghanistan in July 2004 after five of its aid workers were assassinate
d in a clearly marked vehicle.
"The American ground troops are midterm in a history that started roughly i
n 1984 and 1985 when the State Department decided to assist the Mujahedeen,
the resistance fighters, through various programs and military aid. USAID,
the humanitarian arm serving political and military purposes, was the seed
for having a different kind of interaction with the Afghans," she told me.
"The Afghans were very grateful to receive arms and military equipment fro
m the Americans."
"But the way USAID distributed its humanitarian assistance was very debatab
le," she went on. "It still puzzles me. They gave most of it to the Islamic
groups such as the Hezb-e Islami of [Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar. And I think it
is possibly because they were more interested in the future stability of Pa
kistan rather than saving Afghanistan. Afghanistan was probably a good grou
nd to hit and drain the blood from the Soviet Union. I did not see a plan t
o rebuild or bring peace to Afghanistan. It seemed that Afghanistan was a t
ool to weaken the Soviet Union. It was mostly left to the Pakistani intelli
gence services to decide what would be best and how to do it and how by doi
ng so they could strengthen themselves."
The Pakistanis, Dr. Fournot said, developed a close relationship with Saudi
Arabia. The Saudis, like the Americans, flooded the country with money and
also exported conservative and often radical Wahhabi clerics. The American
s, aware of the relationship with the Saudis as well as Pakistan's secret p
rogram to build nuclear weapons, looked the other way. Washington sowed, un
wittingly, the seeds of destruction in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It trained
, armed and empowered the militants who now kill them.
The relationship, she said, bewildered most Afghans, who did not look favor
ably upon this radical form of Islam. Most Afghans, she said, wondered why
American aid went almost exclusively to the Islamic radicals and not to mor
e moderate and secular resistance movements.
"The population wondered why they did not have more credibility with the Am
ericans," she said. "They could not understand why the aid was stopped in P
akistan and distributed to political parties that had limited reach in Afgh
anistan. These parties stockpiled arms and started fighting each other. Wha
t the people got in the provinces was miniscule and irrelevant. And how did
the people see all this? They had great hopes in the beginning and gradual
ly became disappointed, bitter and then felt betrayed. This laid the ground
work for the current suspicion, distrust and disappointment with the U.S. a
nd NATO."
Dr. Fournot sees the American project in Afghanistan as mirroring that of t
he doomed Soviet occupation that began in December 1979. A beleaguered Afgh
an population, brutalized by chaos and violence, desperately hoped for stab
ility and peace. The Soviets, like the Americans, spoke of equality, econom
ic prosperity, development, education, women's rights and political freedom
. But within two years, the ugly face of Soviet domination had unmasked the
flowery rhetoric. The Afghans launched their insurgency to drive the Sovie
ts out of the country.
Dr. Fournot fears that years of war have shattered the concept of nationhoo
d. "There is so much personal and mental destruction," she said. "Over 70 p
ercent of the population has never known anything else but war. Kids do not
go to school. War is normality. It gives that adrenaline rush that provide
s a momentary sense of high, and that is what they live on. And how can you
build a nation on that?"
The Pashtuns, she noted, have built an alliance with the Taliban to restore
Pashtun power that was lost in the 2001 invasion. The border between Pakis
tan and Afghanistan is, to the Pashtuns, a meaningless demarcation that was
drawn by imperial powers through the middle of their tribal lands. There a
re 13 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan and another 28 million in Pakistan. T
he Pashtuns are fighting forces in Islamabad and Kabul they see as seeking
to wrest from them their honor and autonomy. They see little difference bet
ween the Pakistani military, American troops and the Afghan army.
Islamabad, while it may battle Taliban forces in Swat or the provinces, doe
s not regard the Taliban as a mortal enemy. The enemy is and has always bee
n India. The balance of power with India requires the Pakistani authorities
to ensure that any Afghan government is allied with it. This means it cann
ot push the Pashtuns in the Northwest Frontier Province or in Afghanistan t
oo far. It must keep its channels open. The cat-and-mouse game between the
Pakistani authorities and the Pashtuns, which drives Washington to fury, wi
ll never end. Islamabad needs the Pashtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan more
than the Pashtuns need them.
The U.S. fuels the bonfires of war. The more troops we send to Afghanistan,
the more drones we send on bombing runs over Pakistan, the more airstrikes
we carry out, the worse the unraveling will become. We have killed twice a
s many civilians as the Taliban this year and that number is sure to rise i
n the coming months.
"I find this term 'collateral damage' dehumanizing," Dr. Fournot said, "as
if it is a necessity. People are sacrificed on the altar of an idea. Air po
wer is blind. I know this from having been caught in numerous bombings."
We are faced with two stark choices. We can withdraw and open negotiations
with the Taliban or continue to expand the war until we are driven out. The
corrupt and unpopular regimes of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and Asif Ali
Zardari are impotent allies. The longer they remain tethered to the United
States, the weaker they become. And the weaker they become, the louder beco
me the calls for intervention in Pakistan. During the war in Vietnam, we in
vaded Cambodia to bring stability to the region and cut off rebel sanctuari
es and supply routes. This tactic only empowered the Khmer Rouge. We seem p
oised, in much the same way, to do the same for radical Islamists in Afghan
istan and Pakistan.
"If the Americans step up the war in Afghanistan, they will be sucked into
Pakistan," Dr. Fournot warned. "Pakistan is a time bomb waiting to explode.
You have a huge population, 170 million people. There is nuclear power. Pa
kistan is much more dangerous than Afghanistan. War always has its own logi
c. Once you set foot in war, you do not control it. It sucks you in."
© 2009 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com<http://www.truthdig.c
om>. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two d
ecades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of
many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning<http://www.amaz
on.com/gp/product/1400034639?ie=UTF8&tag=commondreams-20&linkCode=xm2
&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1400034639>, What Every Person Should Know Abou
t War<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743255127?ie=UTF8&tag=commondre
ams-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0743255127>, and American
Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.<http://www.amazon.com
/dp/0743284437?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim> His most recent book, Em
pire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle<http://w
ww.amazon.com/gp/product/1568584377?ie=UTF8&tag=commondreams-20&linkCod
e=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1568584377>, will be out in July, but is
available for pre-order.