[How long, oh lord, how long category: A remarkable and hardly commented upon piece, U.S. troops may be in Iraq for 10 years, appeared in USA Today on the 18th. In it, reporter Tom Squitieri writes:
“Two top U.S. defense officials signaled Congress on Wednesday that U.S. forces might remain in Iraq for as long as a decade and that permanent facilities need to be built to house them there. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave no explicit estimates for the time U.S. forces would stay in Iraq, but they did not dispute members of Congress who said the deployment could last a decade or more. The comments were among the most explicit acknowledgements yet from the Bush administration that the U.S. presence in Iraq will be long, arduous, costly and a strain on the military.
“Wolfowitz did not dispute an estimate by Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., that the military would need an annual budget of $54 billion – $1.5 billion a month for Afghanistan, $3 billion a month for Iraq.”
From the description, you would almost think we were the victims here — having to shoulder “the burden” for another decade. There’s no sense of agency in such words, which is, of course, a blessing for our men in the Pentagon. After all, if responsibility is thrust upon you and you’re a man, you do what you gotta do. But since we began building permanent military bases, as far as I can tell, almost before the war was over, one would have to imagine that the urge to be in Iraq forever, to be permanently planted in the heart of the heart of the Middle East, long preceded this moment. We are the agents of our own burden, of course. It just doesn’t fully seem that way yet (and I emphasize that yet).
And then, from the other side of things, there’s the Democratic opposition in Congress, brave as ever. Senator Joe Biden, for instance, bravely cut our stay in half yesterday, suggesting, according to Reuters (U.S. Senators Say Five Years in Iraq Is Realistic),
“‘They all know they are going to be here, military and civilian alike, for at least three to five years'” said the Delaware senator. ‘This is a gigantic undertaking,’ he added.
“Senate Foreign Relations Committee members Richard Lugar of Indiana and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, both Republicans, and Biden — all on a visit to Iraq — said they expected a long-term commitment of U.S. troops.”
“Wolfowitz did not dispute an estimate by Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., that the military would need an annual budget of $54 billion – $1.5 billion a month for Afghanistan, $3 billion a month for Iraq.”
From the description, you would almost think we were the victims here — having to shoulder “the burden” for another decade. There’s no sense of agency in such words, which is, of course, a blessing for our men in the Pentagon. After all, if responsibility is thrust upon you and you’re a man, you do what you gotta do. But since we began building permanent military bases, as far as I can tell, almost before the war was over, one would have to imagine that the urge to be in Iraq forever, to be permanently planted in the heart of the heart of the Middle East, long preceded this moment. We are the agents of our own burden, of course. It just doesn’t fully seem that way yet (and I emphasize that yet).
And then, from the other side of things, there’s the Democratic opposition in Congress, brave as ever. Senator Joe Biden, for instance, bravely cut our stay in half yesterday, suggesting, according to Reuters (U.S. Senators Say Five Years in Iraq Is Realistic),
“‘They all know they are going to be here, military and civilian alike, for at least three to five years'” said the Delaware senator. ‘This is a gigantic undertaking,’ he added.
“Senate Foreign Relations Committee members Richard Lugar of Indiana and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, both Republicans, and Biden — all on a visit to Iraq — said they expected a long-term commitment of U.S. troops.”
So there we are. A million official types said this sort of thing ever so regretfully about Vietnam. After all, we were there and everyone knew we couldn’t “cut and run” (as ol’ Lyndon Johnson put the matter). That famous currency that no one ever actually sees, American “credibility” was at stake. Now, once again, almost everyone in official Washington agrees that we must take up this burden, however regretfully (or not) — it has after all been thrust upon us.
And then, of course, there’s that nasty “quagmire” or, as Jim Lobe of Inter Press News Service calls it amusingly, “quackmire.” Lobe sums up both sides of the problem — ours and our rulers — well in a piece that’s just appeared in the Asia Times. The “quagmire” (on the image itself expect more next week from these dispatches) is a fearful prospect to the men who dream of being a permanent military presence in Iraq, because from it at some future moment could come the first calls from revitalized antiwar opposition for “withdrawal” from Iraq. (Sound familiar or am I only dreaming?)
In An Iraqi ‘quackmire’ in the making, Lobe, after reviewing our ever messier situation in Iraq, writes in part:
“So how could they have gotten the nation into this position? One probability is that they, like many policymakers, tend to believe their own propaganda which they and their supporters have been spouting since even before the dust of the World Trade Center towers settled over Lower Manhattan. Hints of a second, not unrelated reason may be found in recent, plain-speaking comments on the enormous budget deficits the administration is running up, even as it continues its drive to cut taxes. “The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum,” declared the Financial Times last month. Despite the radical trajectory on which they have taken US foreign policy since September 11, the complacency, especially among Democrats, has been truly remarkable, and much of the “opposition” still isn’t reading, or at least absorbing, what the foreign policy ideologues behind Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz write or say, for that matter.
“‘This fourth World War, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us,” [former CIA director and neocon] Woolsey said in the third week of the war'”
(By the way, at the Inter Press News Service site there is now an invaluable archive of Lobe’s writings on the neocons.) ]
Today, Pakistani ruler General Pervez Musharraf arrives in Washington for consultations with the Bush administration. If ever there were a region to which some image like — to bring back the good old days of Cold War paranoia — “dominos” or perhaps “house of cards” might be attached, South and Central Asia might be it.
Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away, two great superpowers vied for primacy in the region. Though we now know with startling clarity that — aside from having the military might to destroy the world many times over (which Russia still retains) — the USSR, the other superpower, was by far the weaker. Still, back when, one thing the Soviet Union did was shield Central Asia from US penetration by creating a grouplet of autocratically run SSRs there. With independence they remained a grouplet of autocratically run SSRs (their former Communist bosses still in power). But they entered the embrace of the only superpower left. If you want to know something about the five “Stans” of Central Asia and that embrace, check out an interesting run-down on them at the openDemocracy website, Malika Kenjaboeva’s The US and global democracy: the test case of Central Asia, which concludes:
“Yet the overall prospects for the vast majority of the 56 million people in the five states of Central Asia – the ‘Stans’ – are currently bleak. All, not just Uzbekistan, are suffering from a combination of corruption, authoritarian political rule, and social crisis – in which the United States’s ‘war on terror’ plays a baleful and regressive role.”
Here’s Kenjaboeva’s brief description of one of the Stans and of the direction of US policy in the area:
“In its political absolutism and personality cult, Turkmenistan is reminiscent of North Korea under Kim Jong-II. President Saparmurat Niyazov likes to be called ‘Turkmenbashi’ or “father of all Turkmen” and is not only a brutal dictator but a rabid lunatic. [But of course, unlike Kim Jong-Il, he’s our lunatic.] either out of inertia or deliberate policy, the US is moving from indifference to embrace. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, are deemed essential allies in the US ‘war on terror’. As with other countries far from the US homeland, they interest the US administration because of their natural resources (mainly oil) and their geo-strategic position in the vicinity of Afghanistan, Russia, Iran, and China.”
Back in the 1950s and 60s, Afghanistan, to the south of the Stans, was the focus of another kind of conflict — as each “model” of development tried to show that it was the model to be followed. The result was that aid money poured in from the USSR and the US to build dams and the highways that no longer exist, and in the American case, actual American-style suburban communities near Kandahar. Who would believe it? But then that was back when people actually believed in the concept of “nation-building,” which is a joke now that (see below) Afghanistan is in catastrophic ruins — the result of imperial overstretch on the Soviet part and minimally imperial stretch on ours — and nation-building in Iraq is starting to look more and more like it’s going to resemble a case of Argentina after the IMF struck but with oil. (And if you want to get a small sense of what might be in store for those Iraqis who haven’t already lost everything, then take a look at Larry Rohter’s piece in the New York Times today, The Homes of Argentines Are at Risk in I.M.F. Talks)
As his president did on the war in Iraq, so Don Rumsfeld, recently landed in Kabul rather as if it were an aircraft carrier, declared the era of reconstruction there to have begun. These guys are in such a rush to have their victories. But Jim Lobe (again) reports in “Afghanistan: U.S. Risks Losing the Peace, Says Key Group”:
“Just as the United States is struggling to deal with major post-war headaches in Iraq, its efforts to pacify Afghanistan appear to be unraveling, according to a new report by a key group of experts sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Asia Society. Entitled ‘Afghanistan: Are We Losing the Peace?’ the 24-page document–authored by, among others, three retired senior government policy-makers specializing in South Asian affairs–answers that question very much in the affirmative, and argues that Washington must do far more, and urgently, to save the situation.
”’Without greater support for the transitional government of President Hamid Karzai, security in Afghanistan will deteriorate further, prospects for economic reconstruction will dim, and Afghanistan will revert to warlord-dominated anarchy,” the task force concluded.”
I’ve included below two pieces — the first from Asia Times on the Iranian role in Afghanistan and the second from the British Independent (via ZNET) on perhaps the greatest triumph of the Afghan war, the return of the poppy fields and opium production plants to the country. Finally, because you can’t consider Afghanistan without considering Pakistan (where, after all, did the Taliban come from?) and you can’t consider Pakistan without considering India, I include an op-ed from the Los Angeles Times by Asian expert Selig Harrison on the American minuet (if you can imagine your basic 800 pound right-wing gorilla doing such a dance) in South Asia.
Read these articles together and you get a sense of the labyrinthine geopolitical situation into which Washington’s power dreamers have moved, military foot (the only foot) first and last. Throw in Iraq, toss in that mess of a road map to its west (on which more in the near future), imagine that all of this is tied together by countries and interests at cross-purposes (to put it politely) with each other and with the United States, imagine that we lack a certain subtlety, consider the possibility of rising resistance in Afghanistan and Iraq just as we try our damnedest to destabilize the Iranian government, throw in an always possible clash between India and Pakistan and maybe six, eight, ten other factors I’m too ignorant to consider and well what can I say, but hold your hats. Tom
Iran muddies Afghanistan’s waters
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
Asia Times
June 22, 2003KARACHI – With the ground situation in Afghanistan expected to deteriorate even further in the coming weeks, Pakistan will once again serve as a back yard for US military and diplomatic initiatives to contain the spreading guerrilla warfare.
At the same time, Iran, which is steadily being pushed against the wall by the United States, still has a few cards left to play in Afghanistan, as well as in Iraq, in an attempt to tie down harassed US forces further in those countries and divert attention from itself.
Very much as in Iraq, there are clear indications that with the help of more than a dozen important Hezb-i-Islami leaders based in Tehran, Iran has established a supply line for the resistance movement in Afghanistan to consolidate in areas where it has yet to establish itself fully.
To read more Shahzad click here
Afghanistan Regains Its Title As World’s Biggest Heroin Dealer
By Andy McSmith and Phil Reeves
The Independent
June 22, 2003Afghanistan is still the source of almost all of the heroin sold in London, even though Britain has poured millions into trying to stamp out the war-wrecked country’s resurgent drugs production business.
Opium poppies are springing up from the plains to the mountains of Afghanistan in far higher quantities than in the final year of the Taliban, which the US and Britain overthrew, while vowing to end the region’s narcotics trade. Opium – from which heroin is extracted – is produced on farms only a few dozen miles from the capital city of Kabul, headquarters to the international effort to end the heroin trade and rebuild the country.
Local Afghans say that bags of heroin are used in lieu of currency in some parts of the lawless countryside where – more than two years after the Taliban was toppled – the US-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai has failed to establish control.
To read more McSmith and Reeves click here
A Delicate U.S. Dance in S. Asia
By Selig S. Harrison
The Los Angeles Times
June 22, 2003WASHINGTON – Since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has engaged in a delicate balancing act in South Asia. It has embraced Pakistan’s military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, as an ally against Al Qaeda. At the same time, it has worked to prevent its Islamabad connection from damaging continuing efforts to improve a potentially more important relationship with democratic India.
Until recently, the administration had succeeded in maintaining good relations with both Islamabad and New Delhi. But three new developments threaten the balance. The U.S. has tilted toward the Pakistani position in its policy toward the conflict in Kashmir; it has expressed discomfort with India’s growing ties with Iran; and it has disappointed New Delhi by maintaining restrictions on the sale of military hardware and industrial high technology to India.
Selig S. Harrison has covered India and Pakistan since 1951 and is the author of five books on South Asia. He is director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy.