Is the CIA deliberately funding Al Qaeda?

On March 14, The New York Times published an article entitled, "C.I.A. Cash Ended Up in Coffers of Al Qaeda," detailing how the government of Afghanistan used "a secret fund that the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled" to help pay a $5 million ransom to Al Qaeda, which had kidnapped an Afghan diplomat. Responding to the headline, those who suggest the US government is deliberately funding Al Qaeda in order to create an enemy whose existence it can then cite to justify intervention chortled at the Times' use of the passive voice. "Oh, come on," the marginalized conspiracy theorists groaned, "it just 'ended up' in their hands, now did it?"

The New York Times often runs terrible headlines, but I would suggest that those who believe this article, based on documents that were reportedly recovered in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, provides evidence for their theory that the United States is funding Al Qaeda on purpose, are quite mistaken
And the see-through-the-spectacle analysis they apply to Washington? It could also be applied to one of its long-time foes, were their analysis coherent and consistent. Reading past the headline, one discovers that while the Afghan government did indeed take $1 million from that secret fund to pay off an Al Qaeda ransom, "$4 million more [was] provided from other countries." Pakistan "contributed nearly half the ransom," the paper notes, while the remainder that didn't come from the CIA "came from Iran and Persian Gulf states, which had also contributed to the Afghan president’s secret fund."

Are we to believe the Islamic Republic of Iran is deliberately funding Al Qaeda as well? Not only did it help pay the ransom, it contributed to the same secret slush fund as the CIA. That money just "ended up" in the hands of a group whose existence Tehran has cited to justify intervening in both Syria and Iraq? Yes, actually: I don't believe the evidence that's not the case is any stronger with respect to Iran than it is with respect to the United States.

If Washington (or Tehran) wanted to fund Al Qaeda, it wouldn't need to go the indirect route of dropping bags of cash outside Hamid Karzai's office in Kabul in the hope that some of it would in turn, on occasion, be used to pay off 20 percent of a ransom: It could just end its policy of not paying the ransoms itself. Many have called for it do just that and it would be far from alone in doing so.

"Paying Ransoms, Europe Bankrolls Qaeda Terror," The New York Times reported last July, noting that Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland have all paid ransoms directly to Al Qaeda and its affiliates: $165 million since 2008, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, and $66 million in 2013 alone. "Only a handful of countries have resisted paying," the Times observed, "led by the United States and Britain." If the U.S. empire really does have a deliberate policy of funding Al Qaeda, this stance is perplexing: Here is a clear and convenient opportunity to hand over millions of dollars to extremists, openly, in a way that much of the public would find morally defensible, and it's not . . . because? I'm sure someone has a theory -- I just doubt it's any good.

'The Army is full of a bunch of scumbags'

From Harper's magazine, here's a revealing Facebook chat between Christopher Winfield (C.W.) and his son, Adam (A.W.), after the latter witnessed members of his Army platoon in Afghanistan stage the murder of an innocent Afghan civilian:

A.W.: Did you not understand what I just told you what people did in my platoon?

C.W.: Murder.

A.W.: Yeah, an innocent dude. They planned and went through with it. I knew about it. Didn’t believe they were going to do it. Then it happened. Pretty much the whole platoon knows about it. It’s OK with all of them pretty much. Except me. I want to do something about it. The only problem is I don’t feel safe here telling anyone. The guy who did it is the golden boy in the company who can never do anything wrong and it’s my word against theirs.

C.W.: Was it an Afghan they killed?

A.W.: Yes. Some innocent guy about my age just farming. They made it look like the guy threw a grenade at them and mowed him down. I was on the Stryker and wasn’t on the ground when it took place. But I know they did it because they told me. Everyone pretty much knows it was staged. If I say anything it’s my word against everyone. There’s no one in this platoon that agrees this was wrong. They all don’t care.

#####

A.W.: I was going to keep my mouth shut but they fucked with the wrong guy this time. I’ve about had it with this Army. Last night I was so mad I almost quit altogether and told them I refuse to go on missions with them but they would really get me in trouble then.

C.W.: Four months left. You will make it through. We will work on this problem too.

A.W.: Well, if you talk to anyone on my behalf I have proof that they are planning another one in the form of an AK-47 they want to drop on a guy.

C.W.: How many are involved?

A.W.: Well, it was two guys who did it, actually killed the dude. But the whole platoon knew about it for the most part. I think our platoon leader doesn’t know and maybe like two dudes. Everyone just wants to kill people at any cost. They don’t care. The Army is full of a bunch of scumbags I realized.

Just a few bad apples is all. And remember: if you don't think "our" troops are "the good guys," you're a very naughty liberal.

The American way

The Obama administration insists that Raymond Davis, a 36-year-old special forces veteran accused of killing two Pakistani men, is a U.S. consulate official -- and thus legally entitled to murder with impunity (oh, the perks of gang membership!). The Guardian, however, is reporting that he is "beyond a shadow of a doubt" a member of the CIA, in the words of a Pakistani intelligence officer, and thus fair game for a prosecution.

And while Davis -- no relation -- claims he was acting in strict self-defense, Pakistani officials dispute that, saying one of the men was apparently shot in the back as he tried to flee the scene, his body found 30 feet away from his motorbike.

"It went way beyond what we define as self-defence. It was not commensurate with the threat," a senior police official involved in the case told the Guardian.

Hmm. "Way beyond what we define as self-defense." "Not commensurate with the threat." I'm confused: is the dude talking about Raymond Davis or the war on terror?

(via Steve Hynd)

Can we really blame Republicans for the wars?

Michael Moore has a list of five things he says Democrats should do to avoid a disaster at the polls in November. His first recommendation? That the Democratic Party run ads reminding voters "Who the Hell Put Us in the Misery We're In":

People need to be reminded over and over that it was the REPUBLICANS who concocted and led the unnecessary invasion of two countries, putting us in our longest war ever, wars that will eventually cost us over $3 trillion.

I know readers of this blog probably don't need me to detail all that is wrong with that sentence but, fuck it, I'll try to anyway. First, it was Democrat Bill Clinton who signed into law a bill that made regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy, and it was the Clinton administration, by continually bombing Iraq and maintaining a deadly sanctions regime throughout the 1990s ostensibly due to an ongoing, scary (and conveniently swarthy) threat of a madman with weapons of mass destruction, that helped make the 2003 invasion politically possible.

Second, Democrats were critical to selling the Iraq war in the wake of 9/11, with the likes of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry -- and the top candidates for the party's 2004 and 2008 presidential nomination -- taking to the Senate floor with tales of ties to al-Qaeda and WMDs to justify an aggressive war against a country that was not threatening the United States. And the authorization to use force in Iraq was approved by more than half the Democrats in the Senate and more than 80 of those in the House. Sure, more dissented than in the Republican ranks -- just not many in meaningful leadership positions and none with greater political ambitions.

Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan was overwhelmingly supported by the Democratic Party; Congress authorized the use of force by a vote of 420-1 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate. And during the 2008 election campaign, and before that in 2006, Democrats across the country campaigned on a platform that labeled Afghanistan the Good, Forgotten War, with Harry Reid, Barack Obama, et. al denouncing the Bush administration for not sending enough young Americans to kill and be killed there.

There's also this small quibble I have with the "blame REPUBLICANS for the wars" strategy: as "our longest war ever" drags on with no end in sight, draining taxpayers of tens of billions of dollars every year, the Democratic Party controls the House, the Senate and the presidency. The Democrats, it can be fairly said, control the government of the United States of America -- the same government that not only continues to occupy two Middle Eastern countries, but has further expanded the war on terror in Yemen and Pakistan, killing hundreds of civilians with Predator drones and cluster bombs.

Democrats can go ahead and blame the GOP all they want for starting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I suspect some voters will rightly respond: "well okay then, Bush should've been impeached and John Boehner is totally a dick, but who's dropping the bombs now?"

Petraeus declares Afghan war strategy 'fundamentally sound'

NATO troops and civilians, particularly women and children, are dying in ever-increasing numbers as a result of the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan, but General-Scholar-Saint David Petraeus -- doing what he does best: public relations -- is confident of Victory, according to a recent interview he gave to The Washington Post:

In his first six weeks as the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus has seen insurgent attacks on coalition forces spike to record levels, violence metastasize to previously stable areas, and the country's president undercut anti-corruption units backed by Washington.

But after burrowing into operations here and traveling to the far reaches of this country, Petraeus has concluded that the U.S. strategy to win the nearly nine-year-old war is "fundamentally sound."

Petraeus' assessment might reassure the editors of the Post and other supporters of the war among the media elite, but it brings to mind a previous, equally bold profession of confidence that was almost immediately regretted: Sen. John McCain's (R-AZ) assertion on the campaign trail in August 2008 that, despite all evidence to the contrary, "the fundamentals of our economy are strong."

I get the feeling this will not end well.

Lack of self-awareness watch

Emboldened by the fact that U.S. troops have gone a whole four months without being caught digging bullets out of the bodies of Afghan women they murdered, Admiral Michael Mullen, the top ranking U.S. military official, took to the airwaves Sunday to denounce Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for releasing more than 90,000 documents chronicling the failing war effort in Afghanistan:

"Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family."

Worth noting: A little over a year after Mullen was appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October 2007, U.S. warplanes "bombed a wedding party, killing 37 people, including 23 children and 10 women," as USA Today recounts. Meanwhile, more than 740 U.S. troops have died in that time. So who is it again that has the blood of some young solider or Afghan family on their hands?

(h/t John Caruso)

Beltway liberalism in 24 words

"From a Keynesian standpoint, I believe that with the economy depressed it’s better to spend the money in Afghanistan than not to spend it."

-- Matt Yglesias, Center for American Progress

The above excerpt comes from a post noting the inconsistency of self-styled deficit hawks complaining about the relative pittance spent on social programs and its contribution to the national debt even as they vote in lockstep to drop another $37 billion on a failing nation-building exercise in Afghanistan. And as far as the point goes, it's a good one: there has long been a glaringly obvious inconsistency in conservatives railing against totalitarian "Big Government" while pledging undying allegiance to growing a military-industrial complex that sucks away more and more of their tax money while helping chisel away at the remainder of their civil liberties.

But there's something wrong -- something sick, really -- with Ygelsias' war-as-stimulus argument that strikes me as far more offensive than the fact that some fiscal conservatives are hypocrites when it comes to the National Security State. If you believe the war in Afghanistan is vital to protecting America, well, go ahead and make your case. Explain why pushing the couple dozen or so members of al-Qaeda allegedly still in the country over to Pakistan, while creating new enemies with each errant air strike, actually makes us safer.

What you shouldn't do in a debate over war, at least if you want to maintain your status as a Non-Despicable Person, is argue that bombing and occupying a foreign nation makes good economic sense. Even if it were true as an academic point, it's grotesquely out of place in a discussion of matters of life and death. War, if it can ever be justified -- and I have my doubts -- can only be so on the grounds that it is absolutely necessary to protecting human life: there is no other choice, it's a last resort. Yet Yglesias discusses the continuation of a major, bloody armed conflict as if it were just another jobs program; perhaps not the most effective one to his mind, but hey, it's better that the federal government spend money on a pointless war than do nothing at all (like actually save money by ending said pointless war). Read the line again: "I believe that with the economy depressed it’s better to spend the money in Afghanistan than not to spend it." Sorry, but someone truly familiar with all the horrors of war, someone who could actually empathize with an Afghan mother or father losing their child to an American smart bomb -- or a child watching their parents die in a botched night raid by U.S. marines -- could never write that.

On Twitter I brashly argued that Yglesias' statement demonstrated that he was in fact a "truly awful human being" -- an assertion I regret because I don't actually think Matt Yglesias is"awful" in the sense that he would, say, shoot an Afghan child in the head if he thought it'd boost U.S. Treasury bonds. As I've argued before, Yglesias and other war supporters likely wouldn't dare countenance violence in their personal lives, and are probably perfectly nice people who spend their weekends doing perfectly normal, nice people things. And these very people who wouldn't think of kicking a dog much less killing a person are capable of cooly endorsing monstrously awful actions overseas, the distance -- and their safety behind a MacBook screen in a DC think tank -- removing them from the ugly reality of the killing be carried out in their name. War to the Beltway wonk essentially becomes just another intellectual exercise, something to be endlessly debated, a game of dueling white papers and comment threads, and not so much a matter of life and death, of newlyweds killed and children's limbs blown off by some guy pulling a 9-to-5 in a Nevada control room. No, wars and the merits of launching new ones become something you debate on BloggingHeads.TV before getting drunk at the local hipster bar's trivia night.

Yet despite the self-evident horribleness of defending war spending on the basis that not spending the money on a military occupation would harm your 401k, Yglesias acted surprised anyone could be offended by his post when challenged on it. "Is Paul Krugman also awful for raising this point," he asked me, "or is economic illiteracy necessary for goodness?"

But of course the issue isn't who knows more about economics. The issue is the fact that economics is irrelevant to the question of whether the U.S. ought to be in Afghanistan, and that it is deeply disturbing to frame a war supplemental as if it were a less-than-ideal second stimulus package -- and to bolster your argument by pointing to the fact that the illegal Iraq war, too, was ultimately good for your bank account. Invading Norway might stimulate certain sectors of the economy and perhaps even bring the unemployment rate comfortably below double-digits for a time, but does anyone outside of a Weekly Standard editorial meeting think that's a morally defensible argument for dropping some bombs?

In a back-and-forth debate on Twitter, though, Yglesias stuck to his argument. "I think you don't understand how stimulus works. See the Krugman item," he told me, adding that he didn't see why "a factual dispute make[s] me 'immoral.'"

The Krugman item, as it happens, doesn't really help Yglesias' case as much he thinks. Yes the esteemed Nobel Laureate argues that "war is, in general, expansionary for the economy," but he's not so cynical as to argue that countries should therefore prolong military quagmires to promote such an expansion, which is Yglesias' implicit argument. And there is still a major flaw in Krugman's analysis: he doesn't even begin to consider the potential downsides to creating entrenched economic interests whose well-being depends on there being a perpetual state of war, nor the economic impact on the people in Iraq and elsewhere who are being bombed. We are all cosmopolitans now, right? So if we're going to weigh the economic impacts of war, one would think a good liberal would not be so parochial as to focus just on one party -- their party -- in a conflict.

It's also unclear to me how spending loads of money on missiles and Predator drones actually benefits society as a whole, rather than just a select few politically connected military contractors; sure, it might boost GDP temporarily, but only because the government is borrowing money from China -- itself an act of dubious morality given the Chinese government's human rights record -- to build a bunch of weapons that serve no purpose other than killing people. So I sound like Cindy Sheehan: it's true.

As for the confusion as to how taking one side in a "factual dispute" could make someone "immoral", well, again: I don't consider it so much a dispute over facts because my fundamental criticism is not that Yglesias is wrong that spending another $37 billion on the war in Afghanistan will benefit the U.S. economy, but that it doesn't matter, and that by acting as if it does he is displaying a rather unfortunate and ugly nationalistic bias. True or not, I don't see why anyone with a functioning conscience should care if the Afghan war boosts consumer demand for iPhones and DVD players at home, and it's frankly a bit disconcerting that he can't understand why some would consider his an immoral (amoral?) line of argument. All this doesn't make Yglesias an awful person, per se, but it does certainly demonstrate an awful callousness on his part toward those who will undoubtedly die as a result of his and George Bush's brand of economic stimulus.

(h/t toombzie)

UPDATE: IOZ weighs in.

War by the numbers

I’m not a big math guy, having spent my college years interpreting 17th century sonnets and writing about radical left-wing, decentralist movements in Latin America -- you know, the kind of experience that has well prepared me for a career as a bookstore clerk and I can only hope, some (very hard) years down the line, street-corner preacher of conspiracy and prophesier of doom. When it comes to looking at U.S. foreign policy, though, numbers can be a very useful thing.

Consider the sheer enormity of the fact the the U.S. government this year "will spend more on Afghanistan than any other country in the world spends on defense, with the exception of China," according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Congress has already appropriated this year alone more than $100 billion for the war, a figure Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation notes is 10 times the size of Afghanistan's gross domestic product (GDP). If divided on a per capita basis, each Afghan could receive $3,708 in U.S. taxpayer largesse -- equivalent to more than four years their average wages, and a damn sure better way to win Afghan loyalty than the General Petraeus-embraced, parachuting-sociologist effort to win hearts and minds by killing 2.5 percent less innocent men, women and children than under a killing-as-usual scenario.

More numbers: according to CIA Director Leon Panetta, there is in the area of 50 to 100 members of al-Qaeda. In neighboring Pakistan, there may be "more than 300" members, according to Michael Leiter, director of the U.S. government's National Counterterrorism Center. Yet nearly 100,000 U.S. troops are deployed in the region, along with another 20,000 NATO troops -- meaning their's 240 or so Western soldiers for every one alleged member of al-Qaeda.

The most important figure, though, and the most morally significant to my mind, has to do with the number of those killed in the name of terrorism versus those killed by the self-styled war on terrorism.

In the 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, just under 3,000 people were murdered by members of al-Qaeda. The response to those attacks? Using an extremely conservative estimate, 100,000 Iraqi civilians died as a direct result of the U.S.-led 2003 invasion, equivalent to nearly three dozen 9/11s. In Afghanistan, tens of thousands of civilians have died since 2002, many attributable to the Taliban/insurgency, yes, but all as a direct result of events set in motion by American intervention (from the late 1980s-onward), including more than 4,000 civilians killed -- that's another 9/11 -- from January 2009 to March 2010 alone.

It's understandable that one might have greater sentimental attachments to those one knows, or one's fellow countrymen; it's natural to mourn a close friend or family member who dies more than someone you didn't know who lived on the other side of the globe. But what about when it's your fellow countrymen -- your friends and family, perhaps -- killing those innocent but distant strangers? Even if the killing's ostensibly launched in response to a real evil -- the attacks on September 11, 2001 -- I'd suggest that when dozens of innocents must die for each precious life of an American you hope to safeguard, the moral righteousness of that response is fatally undermined. Forget nationality: none of us choose what country we are born in, so why should the conscientious, moral human being value one life more than another because of nothing more than the accident of birth? As I said, a sentimental attachment to one's countrymen is understandable, but that doesn't mean it's morally defensible.

The Obama administration, like its predecessors, does not value the life of an innocent foreigner to the extent they do that of a possible voting-and-donating U.S. citizen, not that it has much respect for the lives of the latter either. Indeed, if President Obama or his liberal cheerleaders in Washington actually cared a whit about the lives of those unfortunate enough to be born in not-America, if they really sought to "stop U.S.-caused civilian casualties" in Afghanistan, as liberal journalist Spencer Ackerman writes, then they would embrace that great peacenik refrain: "stop the war."

No need for any white papers or bipartisan, blue-ribbon commissions: just get the hell out.

But it can't be that simple, for what role would that leave for Serious Liberalism and all those catered roundtable discussions at Washington think tanks with panelists laying out high-minded plans for Saving Afghanistan From The Natives? Not much. Ackerman, who supports the Afghan war just as he did the invasion of Iraq, writes that if the goal is not to stop murdering people but to "erode the influence of al-Qaeda’s allies in Afghanistan while reducing civilian casualties to the 'absolute minimum'," quoting all-around awesome dude David Petraeus, then it's of the utmost importance not to immediately halt the evil that is bombing and shooting innocent people, but to get right "the balance between fighting insurgents and protecting civilians."

Now, most supporters of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in their personal lives, are probably no more violent than the most committed peace activist; they probably play with their dogs and go "aww" when they see cute little animals too. But when someone comes to think of war in the cost/benefit terms of the Pentagon bureaucracy, even the meekest among us can support great evil in the abstract, the killing taking place safely abroad and providing endless folly for quasi-intellectual debates about counter-insurgency strategies. Accepting the premise that the there can be an appropriate "balance" between killing civilians -- that is, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, newlyweds and schoolchildren -- and whoever it is we're defining as the "insurgents" these days, I'd argue reflects a pretty screwy moral philosophy, endorsing as it does the killing of poor foreigners now based on the possibility, the hypothetical, that some of those impoverished survivors, the families of the Afghans we kill, might some day seek vengeance and kill us; a dozen dead Afghan civilians now to stave off the possible death of one person with an American passport, not counting those foolish enough to oppose U.S. policy and board a peace flotilla.

Some would argue (ahem) that there can be no "balance" when it comes to protecting civilians; you don't kill them, and if you do, you should be considered a murderer and punished accordingly. It's an obvious crime only compounded by the fact the Afghan war is not in the least bit necessary to protect the national security of the United fucking States.

But then that's the difference between modern liberalism and radicalism: the former will rationalize murder if it's backed by the leading technocratic intellectuals of the day and carried out by the State under the auspices of some modern day White Man's Burden, while the latter, valuing human life equally regardless of nationality and not making moral distinctions based on a murderer's uniform, will condemn -- not condone -- violence whether it's perpetrated by governments or non-State actors. You can probably see why they're not part of the panel discussions.

(Cross-posted at AlterNet)

Is Richard Holbrooke illiterate or does he just not care?

(Holbrooke (left): "I would love to find out who killed your other child, but who has the time?")

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. official helping oversee the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was asked at a State Department briefing Monday to respond to a report in USA Today that the killing of Afghan civilians has "more than doubled this year," despite American assurances that the protection of the Afghan people is a renewed priority.

"I saw the article in USA Today and a few others," Holbrooke told reporters. But "I haven't had a chance to do a personal drill-down on the details of those statistics, how much of that's caused by the Taliban, how much of it is caused by the effects of the military operations."

Given his efforts at obfuscation, perhaps Holbrooke didn't make it to the second paragraph of the story, where he would have learned that "NATO troops accidentally killed 72 civilians in the first three months of 2010, up from 29 in the same period in 2009, according to figures the International Security Assistance Force gave USA TODAY."

To be fair, though, the article's headline was rather ambiguous: "NATO strikes killing more Afghan civilians".

While pretending not to know who's to blame for Afghan deaths, Holbrooke did acknowledge that "war is hell" and that "civilian casualties are a part of all recent wars." He also noted that "civilian casualties increase as overall operations increase in intensity, and therefore it's not surprising this would happen." And he's right: soldiers are professional killers, not sociologists, so it makes sense that the more there are in a given area, the more killing -- of civilians and enemy alike -- there is likely to take place there.

If avoiding civilian deaths was as much a priority as General Stanley McChrystal and other American officials are fond of suggesting, the Obama administration would be removing troops from Afghanistan, not sending more. But then even good progressives know that protecting the life of an Afghan is much less important than safeguarding the U.S. "national interest" and the lives of red-blooded Americans (i.e. people that matter). But what would an actual humanitarian say?

The Afghan war summed up in a quote

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat."

-- General Stanley McChrystal, New York Times, "Tighter Rules Fail to Stem Deaths of Innocent Afghans at Checkpoints"

'Murtha's personal efforts on behalf of the Afghan Resistance'

Washington is mourning the passing of Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman John Murtha today, with everyone from President Obama on down issuing somber remarks praising his long legislative career. Notably, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who in the '80s headed the CIA when the Reagan administration was funneling arms and money to the Afghan mujahideen (folks who later would join the Taliban, and some guy named Osama bin Laden) as they fought the Evil Empire -- the other one -- dedicates much of his statement to praising "Murtha's personal efforts on behalf of the Afghan resistance fighting the Soviets - efforts that helped bring about the end of the Cold War."

And helped bring about 9/11. But it would be uncouth, I understand, to say so at a time like this. And why not take the opportunity of a man's passing to try and further embed a convenient mythical narrative in the national psyche?

History, as told by the U.S. government

"We think we have a strategy that will create the space and time for the Afghans to stand up their own security forces and take responsibility.  But we're not going to be, you know, walking away from Afghanistan again.  We, we did that before, it didn't turn out very well.  So we will stay involved, we will stay supportive, and I think that's exactly the right approach."

-- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Meet the Press, December 6, 2009

Advocates for a “strong” foreign policy of U.S. empire, beyond suffering the ills of projection and overcompensation, possess a remarkable capacity for ignoring inconvenient aspects of history. That is, while those of the bomb-them-‘till-their-free school of thought can point to a long list of countries and conflicts where they argue an American intervention could have prevented massive loss of life -- Rwanda, Darfur, etc. -- they are remarkably unconcerned with any of the negative consequences befalling a policy of constant war (such as the establishment of permanent and sizable constituency directly benefitting from empire and armed conflict that might agitate for wars not always on the basis of Samantha Power’s superior moral sensibilities) or the demonstrated failings of past U.S. interventions (Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Iran, Iraq...). Conveniently, these are often the same people ordering the bombs to be dropped in the first place.

So when Hillary Clinton, alluding to the presence of al Qaeda in Afghanistan before 9/11, suggests that was a result of the U.S. “walking away” from the region, she’s conveniently gliding over more than a decade of American arms and funding that went to groups we now collectively label “the Taliban” -- and a few folks, like Osama bin Laden, that would later on make a name for themselves turning their fire against their former patrons -- as one would expect from a person in her position. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who as a high-ranking CIA official helped direct funding to the Afghan mujahideen beginning in 1979, has made the same self-serving claim, arguing the the hypothetical actions the U.S. did not take in Afghanistan are more responsible for its present state that the demonstrable, having-actually-occurred actions successive American administrations did take. For those who gain power and prestige from the maintenance of a global American empire -- people like Gates and Clinton, and the countless hangers-on at Washington think tanks and within the State and Defense bureaucracies -- it serves one’s interests well to contrast make-believe accounts of interventions that could be with the less than holy interventions of the real world.

Preferring a fairy tale straight out of Hollywood, Gates and Clinton neglect to mention the very real blowback that came about as result, not of some policy of backwards isolationism, but imperial Cold War proxy fighting aimed at undermining the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan by arming and funding -- via the always reliable Pakistani intelligence service, financial backing courtesy of our theocratic friends in Saudi Arabia -- many of those we now call the Taliban and al Qaeda (who, mind you, are not the same thing). Rather than a failure to build more schools and playgrounds following the Soviet exit, it was a proactive U.S. policy aimed at strengthening the mujahideen with money and arms that ultimately led to their being strengthened. One needn't possess a PhD in international affairs to grasp that cause and effect. The staggering number of Muslims the U.S. government has killed since the late 1980s has only further strengthened those groups by fueling opposition to the United States, often labeled "anti-Americanism" by the media as if it were some sort of irrational religious phenomenon and not a perfectly understandable reaction to American policy in the Middle East.

As becomes more obvious the more you observe those in power, it simply pays to be blissfully unaware -- or to appear that way -- if one wishes to rise to the top of the hierarchy. Consider Gates’ comments rejecting there being any historical comparison between the Soviet and American occupations of Afghanistan:

"First of all, the Soviets were trying to impose an alien culture and, and political system on, on Afghanistan.  But more importantly, they were there terrorizing the Afghans. They killed a million Afghans.  They made refugees out of five million Afghans.  They were isolated internationally.  All of those factors are different for, for us, completely different.  We have the sanction of the U.N. We have the sanction of NATO.  We have the invitation of the Afghan government itself.  We have 42 military partners in Afghanistan."

Boiled down, Gates' defense of the U.S.-led war is this: we’ve got more friends, which I doubt would pass good old St. Augustine’s litmus test. And spoken by a man who oversees another U.S. war that has created five million refugees and, by some accounts, led to the deaths of more than one million people -- to say nothing of the very real death and destruction U.S. policy has wrought on Afghanistan in the last decade alone that Gates so blithely elides -- the remarks are offensively asinine. Again, though, that’s just par for the course, to be expected.

And given the historical illiteracy of much of the major media's celebrity journalists, why should Gates be bothered with repeating uncomfortable truths that don't help the preferred U.S. narrative? It's not like he will ever be challenged on his history, certainly not by the likes of NBC's David Gregory, whose idea of a tough question is asking Gates -- no joke -- "Is failure an option in Afghanistan?" Well, David, no it isn't, I suppose. Practicing real journalism isn't one either, from the looks of it.

Trust-busting in Afghanistan

In March, President Obama’s top antitrust official announced that “that the administration would restore an aggressive enforcement policy against corporations that use their market dominance to elbow out competitors or to keep them from gaining market share,” according to The New York Times.

At the time, I remember wondering how this stated new policy was consistent with Obama’s support for the bailout of insolvent Wall Street financial institutions -- the greatest single transfer of wealth in U.S. history -- considering that letting companies like AIG fail would actually have been a step toward a more competitive financial services industry that rewarded firms based on performance, not political influence. But alas, it’s now clear the likes of Goldman Sachs, Obama’s top corporate campaign contributor, were never to be the target of the new trust-busting administration.

Rather, as Scott Horton at the Huffington Post reports, the U.S. government is focusing its attention on the true threat to America’s market system: “Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager with a grade school education.” According to Horton:

Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by "at least eight" heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company's U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe . . . .

According to papers filed by his lawyers, Azar was threatened, subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and induced to sign a confession. Azar claims he was hooded, stripped naked (while being photographed) and subjected to a "body cavity search."

On a ride to the infamous Bagram air base in Afghanistan -- site of the torture-homicides involving U.S. interrogators exposed in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side -- Azar contends that a federal agent pulled a photograph of Azar's wife and four children from his wallet. Confess that you were bribing the contract officer, the agent allegedly said, or you may "never see them again." Azar told his lawyers he interpreted that as a threat to do physical harm to his family.

You will be relieved to know that Azar -- who “has the unlikely distinction of being the first target of a rendition carried out on the Obama watch” -- remains in federal custody.

(via Brian Doherty)

Paging Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart is a funny and intelligent guy, but ever since his weepy America-has-finally-fulfilled-its-promise performance upon the election of Barack Obama, he hasn’t been quite the same -- epitomized by his disappointingly pathetic apology for the perfectly sensible (thus politically unpopular) statement that President Harry “Hiroshima” Truman was a war criminal.

While interviewing Newsmax.com writer Ronald Kessler earlier this week, Stewart -- though brilliant and scathing when he’s on -- had another cringe-worthy outing, apparently forgetting that Barack Obama is not the nice guy with a great smile he once interviewed, but the commander-in-chief, the head of a global empire -- a guy who okayed the deaths-sans-trials for over a dozen Pakistanis within days of taking office.

Responding to Kessler’s comment that “Obama [smokes] on a regular basis, despite his claims that he gave it up,” Stewart appeared to forget these uncomfortable facts (a shockingly prevalent phenomenon among Obama boosters), telling Kessler:

Stewart: Now that seems okay with me. I’ll take that.

Kessler: You’re a smoker?

Stewart: I was a smoker for 20 years. And I prefer that to... bombing countries. I’ll take a smoker.

Well Jon, with Barack Obama you get both a president that smokes and a president that bombs sovereign countries without so much as a declaration of war. Since taking office, Obama has overseen hundreds of Pakistani deaths from attacks that he's signed off on, in addition to the hundreds of Afghan civilians who have died to further the U.S. goal of -- wait, we’re still waiting for a blue ribbon commission to get back to us on what that is.

To refresh your memory, here’s a woefully incomplete list of just some of our peace president’s overseas contingency operations:

January 23, 2009:

Barack Obama gave the go-ahead for his first military action yesterday, missile strikes against suspected militants in Pakistan which killed at least 18 people.

May 6, 2009:

US-led air strikes have killed dozens of Afghan people, the Red Cross said today as the Pentagon launched a joint investigation into what appeared one of the deadliest incidents and heaviest civilian losses so far at the hands of coalition forces.

Rohul Amin, the governor of Farah province in west Afghanistan, where the bombing took place during a battle on Monday and Tuesday, said he feared 100 civilians had been killed.

June 23, 2009:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An airstrike believed to have been carried out by a United States drone killed at least 60 people at a funeral in South Waziristan on Tuesday, residents of the area and local news reports said.

August 1, 2009:

The widening war in Afghanistan between Taliban militants and American-allied Afghan forces is taking an increasingly heavy toll on civilians, with 1,013 killed in the first six months of 2009, up from 818 during the same period in 2008, according to a United Nations report released Friday.

Explosions and suicide attacks carried out by anti-government forces, including the Taliban, caused a majority of the civilian deaths, killing 595 during the period, the report said. Of the 310 deaths attributed to pro-government forces, about two-thirds were caused by American airstrikes.

August 5, 2009:

A US air strike has killed a wife of the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, delivering a message to the notorious militant commander that western and Pakistani pursuers are closing in on him.

Two missiles from an unmanned drone plane struck a house near Makeen in South Waziristan, a Mehsud stronghold near the Afghan border, last night, killing at least two people and wounding several others.

Unfortunately, like many of his fellow American liberals, it would appear Jon Stewart values soothing rhetoric about human rights (and torture bad!) over actual policy.

Deja Vu

With President Obama committed to nearly doubling the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, promising to draw down as the Afghan security force stands up, its hard not to get a sense that America’s transformative new leader is merely copying his discredited predecessor’s “surge” strategy used in Iraq. That Obama praised said escalation of the Iraq war as having succeeded “beyond our wildest dreams” does not allay these fears.

That Obama is escalating his way into Afghanistan and Pakistan ("Af-Pak" to those who view the rest of the world as the U.S.'s imperial playground) much like President Bush may be lost on his more earnest liberal sycophants at the Center for American Progress, but it isn't on Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In an interview earlier this week on ABC's Chris Cuomo, Mullen made a telling mistake. Here's the exchange:

CUOMO: A year from today, do you think that there's a very different situation in Afghanistan than there is today?

MULLEN: I look forward to a very active year. I want to be clear that my expectations are as we add more troops, the violence level in Iraq -- or, sorry, Afghanistan -- is going to go up.

That said, it'll put us in a position to start to turn the tide and provide security for the Afghan people, which is absolutely critical, in addition to training the Afghan forces, which I expect to improve significantly over the next 12 months.

There is at least one way the Afghan surge will be different than its Iraq counterpart: it will receive the uncritical backing of nearly all Democrats in Congress and their supporters in the liberal blogosphere. So there's that.

Doubling down

In addition to Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates' suggestion that the president-elect would be fine with maintaining  40,000-plus troops in Iraq "for decades" (to say nothing of the private contractors), military commanders are now declaring that the erstwhile peace candidate will double the U.S. presence in that other quagmire, Afghanistan:

Dec. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. seeks to send an additional 20,000 to 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in the first half of next year.

“Some 20,000 to 30,000 is the window of overall increase from where we are right now. I don’t have an exact number,” Mullen said at a press conference in Kabul today. “We’re looking to get them here in the spring, but certainly by the beginning of summer at the latest.”

With prominent gay marriage opponent -- and assassination proponent -- Rick Warren conducting the "invocation" at the president-elect's inauguration, one could be forgiven for thinking John McCain won last month's election. 

(The modern practice, beginning with FDR, of having religious leaders conduct an inaugural invocation is disturbing in of itself, at least to those who question the desirability of selling statism -- and the view of head-of-state as quasi-deity -- as the secular religion.)

Robert Fisk on Al Jazeera

In stark contrast to the likes of CNN and Fox News, Al Jazeera actually tends to have substantive coverage of issues that will never be discussed in the mainstream corporate media -- which perhaps explains why the U.S. government is always trying to kill their journalists.

A little over a week ago, Al Jazeera's Riz Kahn interviewed Robert Fisk, a long-time war correspondent who reports for the British newspaper The Independent, on the state of journalism, the Middle East, and the U.S. presidential election. 

Below are a few exchanges I thought were particularly noteworthy, as well as the full video of the interview itself:

On Journalism: I think that the great challenge facing journalists today is that we allow the presidents, and prime ministers and generals, and indeed our journalists, to set the narrative of events instead of challenging authority.

On The Obama/McCain-Endorsed "Good War" In Afghanistan: I call this war Iraqistan now. The idea that, you know we started off by declaring victory in Afghanistan, and then we rush off and declare victory in Iraq, and when we've lost in Iraq we're rushing back to win the war for the second time in Afghanistan, and starting a third one in Pakistan. This is madness, this is preposterous, but we're constantly locked onto the narrative -- and we've got to hate Iran too because supposedly they're going to bomb everybody. I think this is a ridiculous story we're being fed. 

On The Prospect Of "Change" Under McCain Or Obama: The bombs will go on falling as usual. It won't make the slightest difference. U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East is not going to change. The saddest thing is we find lots and lots of Arabs who keep saying to me 'oh, you know Obama, he's the guy we want because he grew up poor.' And of course most Arabs are poor -- they shouldn't be, but they are -- it's not going to make any difference. Obama, McCain -- it's going to be the same policy.

Now, for the tape:

Barack Obama is no MLK

As far as pure theatrics go, Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention was pretty good: 8,000 screaming admirers tingling at every mention of some vague, impending "change", while The Candidate lays out a platitude-filled agenda full of "hope" and "progress", with enough specifics to keep the partisan wonks (and corporate lobbyists) happy. That said, the idea that this speech or Barack Obama are deserving of even being mentioned in the same break as Martin Luther King, to me, is patently offensive.

While Martin Luther King was not without his flaws -- what man is? -- he backed up his beliefs with actual action, rather than just rhetoric, and took positions that were unpopular at the time, unlike Obama's tendency to say whatever pleases the audience before him. And while King's legacy has since been institutionalized and whitewashed (pun intended) to make him out as little more than an opponent of racism, he also in no uncertain terms denounced the imperialistic, murderous policies being pursued by the bipartisan political elite in Vietnam -- standing in stark contrast to Obama's meek criticism of the Iraq war as a strategic -- not a moral -- error, and his pledge to send more men and women off to die in the Afghan quagmire (among other places).

So while Democratic groupies are busy comparing Obama's address to King's "I Have a Dream" speech, consider another speech King gave in 1967 rarely mentioned by the media and political establishment:

I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

-----

[The Vietnamese] watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?

I'll have more on the specifics of Obama's speech later this weekend, but for now, read the rest of MLK's speech and witness what a true opponent of war sounds like.