By Travis Pillow
By now the fallout from Obama’s Afghanistan speech is starting to settle. But I haven’t. I still don’t know what our president is thinking, sending tens of thousands more Americans to kill untold Afghanis. I’m not sure what for, and neither is Karl Rove. But he likes what he sees – which is yet another reason I don’t.
Al Qaeda continues to harbor safe havens along the Pakistani border, our President declared. These must be destroyed. And how? Will these several thousand fighters finally allow our side to sweep from cave to cave, purging the terrorists from every crag and crevice, until the last America-hater is hanging from the ceiling of Bagram? His “clearly defined strategy” was murky on the details.
“The Taliban is gaining momentum,” he warned. This must be stopped. And the Afghani government must be strengthened, and purged of corruption. That same corruption our own forces rely on for protection in what remains a stateless country, as the Nation reported last month:
Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.
In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. “It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts–hundreds of millions of dollars–consists of payments to insurgents.
The corruption is impenetrable, and even if the new troops allow us to protect our own instead of making extortion payments to our enemies, what then?
Obama mentions one truly frightening prospect: the collapse of Pakistan, and the yardsale of its nuclear arsenal. Nothing really defines Pakistan as a place, apart from a corrupt, feeble government that is basically ignored by many of its tribal peoples, including the Pashtuns – in whose lands the Taliban have assembled their strongholds. Robert Kaplan spelled it out in “The Revenge of Geography,” a treatise that tells the story of the twenty-first century before it even unfolds:
Indeed, the border going westward comes in three stages: the Indus; the unruly crags and canyons that push upward to the shaved wastes of Central Asia, home to the Pashtun tribes; and, finally, the granite, snow-mantled massifs of the Hindu Kush, transecting Afghanistan itself. Because these geographic impediments are not contiguous with legal borders, and because barely any of India’s neighbors are functional states, the current political organization of the subcontinent should not be taken for granted. You see this acutely as you walk up to and around any of these land borders, the weakest of which, in my experience, are the official ones—a mere collection of tables where cranky bureaucrats inspect your luggage. Especially in the west, the only border that lives up to the name is the Hindu Kush, making me think that in our own lifetimes the whole semblance of order in Pakistan and southeastern Afghanistan could unravel, and return, in effect, to vague elements of greater India.
Afghanistan will never be a stable nation-state, for the same reason Pakistan never has been. We can’t change the facts of geography. We can only hope to change the facts of human events – like the existence of nuclear arsenals, or most importantly, this war we’re fighting. We have a new president, a new strategy, a new shipment of young people ready to kill and die for nothing. But we carry the hubris that has destroyed every empire. I think it’s high time we drop it.
I encourage everyone who wants to see a peaceful Afghanistan to put their names next to mine on the Campaign for Peace and Democracy’s statement against the war, and to check out other groups that are working to bring this pointless bloodshed to an end.
Tags: Afghanistan