War and peace
Why are we in Afghanistan? Justifications for the war have long been a moveable feast, with the US and its allies providing an ever-changing list of reasons why the occupation must continue.
In the last week, however, we surely arrived at the nadir. For now we fight so as to overcome peace.
That is, a report in the Washington Post explained that the campaign to capture the town of Marja was driven not so much by any particular military objective but rather to convince sceptics to support the Afghan surge. A spectacular victory, it was thought, might persuade a doubtful public that the tide was turning, that they should give war a chance.
Then, a few days ago, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates launched an extraordinary attack on anti-war sentiment in Europe.
"The demilitarisation of Europe -- where large swathes of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it -- has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st," he said.
This new European peaceability could, he explained, embolden future enemies.
"…NATO is not now, nor should it ever be, a talk-shop or a Renaissance weekend on steroids. It is a military alliance with real-world obligations that have life-or-death consequences."
Given the context for Gates' remarks - the likely Dutch withdrawal from Afghanistan - the nature of those real world obligations was clear. The Europeans should beef-up their contribution, so as to convince the world of their willingness to fight.
The war in Afghanistan, in other words, is now less about Afghanistan and more about war.
That shouldn't be a surprise.
One of the key goals of the Afghan invasion was always to provide, in the wake of the 9/11 atrocities, a flashy demonstration of American military power.
That's why, in 2001, the US showed little interest in trying to insert a wedge between the parochial, tribal Taliban and the internationalist ideologues of Al Qaeda, despite the various offers to negotiate bin Laden's handover. The 9/11 attacks might have been planned and carried out by Egyptians and Saudis but policing operations against Al Qaeda there would not have sent the same strategic message. Afghanistan offered, by contrast, a theatre for a spectacular conventional war, and therefore an assertion of US might.
Or, at least, that was the idea. As it happened, the very poverty of Afghanistan contributed to the hardline neo-con determination to attack Iraq: according to the memoirs of counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, as early as 2001 Donald Rumsfeld was complaining that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which…had better targets.
With the ground war in Afghanistan underway, various other justifications came to the fore. From a fight against Al Qaeda, the conflict became, in quick succession, a struggle to liberate Afghanistan, a war for women's liberation and a war against drug production. The rise of the photogenic, well-spoken Hamid Karzai allowed the neo-conservatives to absorb Afghanistan into a narrative of free markets and democracies spreading throughout the region. As late as 2006, George Bush was lauding Karzai during a meeting as an apostle of democracy. "[The Afghan people] are inspiring others," the President explained, "and the inspiration will cause others to demand their freedom."
Since then, President Karzai has presided over one rigged election and is now laying the groundwork for another. That is, last week, he announced changes to Afghan electoral law to allow him to personally select the members of the electoral monitoring commission, thus removing any independent oversight from the forthcoming campaign.
As for women and poppy cultivation, Karzai supported an extraordinary law legalising rape in marriage and preventing women from leaving their homes without a man, and he's proved to have close ties with the drug lords (indeed, his brother is widely alleged to be one). Perhaps not surprisingly, the current Afghan government, a patchwork of tribal warlords from the Northern Alliance, has proved on most matters very similar to the previous Afghan government, a patchwork of tribal warlords from the Taliban.
That's why the most commonly heard defences for the NATO war are now quite different. We must stay and fight, the argument goes, to ensure that Afghanistan doesn't become a training ground for terrorists. In Britain, the 'we fight them there so we don't have to fight them here' chorus grew after the 7/7 subway bomb attacks; in Australia, it was the Bali bombings that produced the same effect.
Again, though, it's not a terribly convincing case. Most security experts now recognise that Al Qaeda has a greater presence in Pakistan than Afghanistan, while the 'underpants bombing' attempt last Christmas highlighted the obvious fact that there's no shortage of other countries where would-be terrorists could undergo training. In any case, the 7/7 bombers were British; militants in Indonesia are far more influenced by events in their own country than the nature of the regime in Afghanistan.
Most fundamentally, these days Al Qaeda exists less as a disciplined army of super villains than as a name and a vague set of slogans that local jihadists can adopt to their own purposes.
In fact, the hollowness of the security argument becomes apparent as soon as you think specifically about the withdrawal of the Dutch. Is it at all plausible that the impoverished Pashtun tribesmen fighting for the Talban will somehow now flock to Amsterdam to fight the Dutch at home? Does anyone think that ordinary people in the Netherlands will actually be more at risk if their troops aren't fighting in Afghanistan? Given that, to date, some fifteen Dutch soldiers have been killed in action, is it not much more likely that pulling out will lead to a dramatic reduction in Dutch deaths?
Indeed, the most severe consequences are likely to come from an entirely different quarter, as Robert Gates' speech implied. If the Dutch make good on their threat, there will be diplomatic repercussions from a US determined to stamp out any enthusiasm for peace
Precisely because the US entered into Afghanistan to demonstrate its power, it cannot now easily get out, since anything less than a spectacular victory would seem an admission of weakness. For that reason, it cannot countenance its allies withdrawing either, since cracks in the coalition cause political problems and place strain on US capacity.
So that's where we're at.
The war has become its own justification, with military operations launched so as to win support for future military operations, and a popular aversion to military force specifically seen as a bad thing. Robert Gates went so far as to denounce the NATO member states for spending insufficient resources on defence: even in crisis wracked Europe, it still should be guns before butter.
'For what can war but endless war still breed?'
Thus the Afghan conflict necessarily raises John Milton's famous query. And there's another, less rhetorical, question that follows. How much longer will we put up with this?
Zie: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2833877.htm?site=adelaide
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