Today it was reported that a top aide of President Hamid Karzai, Mohammed Zia Salehi, already under investigation for corruption, has actually been on the CIA payroll for years.
According to the NYTimes:
Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.
This is the just the latest evidence that what officials say we are doing in Afghanistan and what we actually are doing in Afghanistan are two very different things.
Supporting corruption is one thing. But funding your so-called enemies is the very height of hypocrisy. And at the end of the day, American taxpayers are funding opposing sides of this war.
In 2009, The Nation magazine reported that the US military and its immense, unmanaged web of private contractors are funding the Taliban insurgency. This summer, the US Congress confirmed in a report titled WARLORD Inc. [.pdf] that US taxpayers are funneling millions of dollars weekly to Afghan warlords and the Taliban. Some estimates have these protection payments exceeding annual revenue from the opium trade, understood to be the Taliban’s largest source of income at about $300 million annually.
Why does the US fund both sides of a war that Obama says is absolutely necessary for US security? What is the goal of this war again? To defeat Al-Qaeda, who according to the director of the CIA has “less than 50” adherents left in Afghanistan? To kill the Taliban until they either love us or are all dead? To defend the women? To quench the thirst of the expanding military-industrial complex and enrich private firms that feed off taxpayer money? To maintain a destabilized Central Asia in order to satisfy other US geopolitical interests?
Some of these questions have answers, while some raise more questions. Publicly, elite Democrats and Republicans keep insisting—in contrast to public opinion—that we need to fight over there to protect ourselves over here. That our physical security is on the line, that another 9-11 needs to be prevented by defeating Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. In fact, Al-Qaeda, which is a highly decentralized organization, has abandoned Afghanistan and has shown it’s capable of plotting crimes from anywhere, including Europe. The best proven historical defense against terrorism is law enforcement, according to the Pentagon-linked Rand Corporation. Engaging in combat in Muslim societies, the 2008 report concludes, will only increase terrorism.
So why are we still in Afghanistan again?
Are we there to kill every last Taliban? Eradicate the society they control? Minimize their power (a military might which currently exists thanks to US support carried out when they were considered friends and it was the Soviets who threatened our dominance)?
The opportunistic and hypocritical argument that we are in Afghanistan to protect the women usually makes for an effective PR ploy, and has been used whenever public support is necessary. Manufacturing consent in the US and Europe with irrational, emotional arguments is important if the US military, associated contractors, and NATO forces are going to continue to occupy the country militarily and support an Afghan government that excludes women from parliament and one that legalized rape in 2009.
So what other imperatives might there be in Afghanistan besides the defeat of the corrupted, misogynist Muslims who not very long ago were considered our friends, and who we are still funding?
Profit-seeking is certainly one underdiscussed factor. War-profiteering on the part of contractors, often former and future government officials, has exploded since 9-11 But how much does the profit-motive actually impact decision-making on Afghanistan at the highest levels of government?
Real reasons for the war seem complex (maybe part of the reason why the PR is oversimplified and incoherent), but probably the great understated motive on the part of US officials is to maintain global "full spectrum" dominance of other states, which according to former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski must include dominance of Central Asia, a highly unstable and landlocked region populated by many powerful forces. George Friedman, founder of STRATFOR, argues in his most recent book, The Next 100 Years, that the post 9-11 military response in Iraq and Afghanistan,
was never to achieve something—whatever the political rhetoric might have said—but to prevent something. The United States wanted to prevent stability in areas where another power might emerge. Its goal was not to stabilize, but to destabilize. And that explains how the United States responded to the Islamic earthquake—it wanted to prevent a large, powerful Islamic state from emerging.
Rhetoric aside, the United States has no overriding interest in peace in Eurasia. The United States also has no interest in winning a war outright. As with Vietnam or Korea, the purpose of these conflicts is simply to block a power or destabilize the region, not to impose order. In due course, even outright American defeat is acceptable…
One thing the United States has indisputably done since 2001 is to create chaos in the Islamic world, generating animosity towards America—and perhaps terrorists who will attack it in the future. But the regional earthquake is not coalescing into a regional superpower. In fact, the region is more fragmented then ever…[emphasis added]
Other analysts focus on the control of energy resources and playing the political chess game with India, Pakistan, Russia, and China. According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, it’s complicated, but it’s not about fighting terrorism:
There has been consistent pro-war propaganda in the corporate media, like the recent Petraeus media blitz, or the horrific image of the mutilated lady on the cover of Time (not incidentally, the author of the cover story has a husband who is a contractor in Iraq and thus stands to profit from the continuation of war). There seems to be much less serious criticism of the war on TV and in the press than there are rationalizations for continuing war by pundits or government officials, if there’s any coverage at all. Even so, most Americans are not convinced that the killing needs to go on; US public opinion shifted in 2009 and continues to be strongly anti-war.
Meanwhile, NATO forces continue to kill innocent Afghan civilians on a regular basis. In one improvement, US and NATO forces now sometimes apologize for these killings.
The number of American soldiers killed in the 18 months under Obama has now exceeded the number of American soldiers killed in the 7+ years under Bush:
The situation is worsening.
The way to end this war is by putting pressure on elected officials to stop the madness. Because we live on the other side of the world, it’s pretty easy to avoid the reality of the situation we are responsible for, the wreaking of havoc in one of the poorest countries on the planet. If public outrage reaches critical mass, Obama and war planners will have little choice but to get out. But right now, people don't seem to care all that much.
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