In 2002, then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama gave a speech before an anti-war crowd in Chicago that was protesting the escalation to War against Iraq. This speech would become a seminal moment in his political future - establishing the anti-war credentials that many would argue was the most significant factor in his presidential primary victory over Hillary Clinton six years later. In that speech, he said:
That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
Now let me be clear — I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a
brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.
He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the
United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.
I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.
At a time when 24-hour news networks were busy ratcheting up American fears about a nation half-way around the world - Cheney soundbites about mushroom clouds, Bush quotes about weapons of mass destruction - Mr. Obama's speech gave voice to the suspicions and concerns of millions of Americans, myself included, who felt unease, anger, and sadness at the fact that our country was about to embark upon an unnecessary excursion to inflict death and destruction on a nation and a people already suffering tremendously at the hands of a brutal dictator. And just as importantly, Mr. Obama no doubt understood that by engaging in a "dumb war", our Commander in Chief was violating the sacred trust that servicemen and servicewomen inherently place in the hands of their commanders - the vow to not be placed in harm's way unless completely necessary for the security of the nation.
For years, speeches like this one gave me and other anti-Iraq War opponents the strength and morale to continue to speak out in the face of what, at the time, was overwhelming public and media support for the war. We KNEW that we were right - that there were no WMD, that there was no Iraq al-Qaeda link, that Iraq posed no threat to US security. We just had to remain steadfast, for we knew that the facts and the truth were on our side. We had seen Hans Blix's reports, had read about Cheney's attempt to taint the CIA's intel, outed the Niger uranium forgeries. Although we weren't there in the White House, getting direct briefings from the CIA, and although most Americans chose to believe the spoon-fed Bush Administration PR "intel", there had always been enough information available for each and everyone of us to make an informed decision.
So perhaps because of my questioning, distrustful nature (particularly when it comes to politics) I simply cannot trust at face value the words or rationales of any politician or President when it comes to a decision as important as sending Americans overseas to fight another people. Not even the man who earned his anti-war credentials at that 2002 Chicago protest. Put simply, President Obama's rationale for his escalation of the War in Afghanistan is as much subject to factual scrutiny as those of any other President. And, put simply, that rationale does not hold water.
In his speech last night before the cadets at West Point, the President attempted to lay out his rationale for the escalation of the Afghanistan war in two sections of his speech:
Afghanistan is not lost, but for several years it has moved backwards. There is no imminent threat of the government being overthrown, but the Taliban has gained momentum. Al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same numbers as before 9/11, but they retain their safe-havens along the border.
The people and governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan are endangered. And the stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them.
In short, the President claims that he is escalating the war because:
- The Taliban is gaining momentum;
- al-Qaeda retains its safe haven near the border; and
- Pakistan's government and its nuclear weapons are threatened.
With the hope of fostering a civil dialogue in which we all dissect, analyze, refute or support each of these points, please allow me to present my viewpoint on these rationales individually.
The Taliban is gaining momentum
First of all, let's be clear: the Taliban poses no imminent threat to Afghanistan. The President admits as much in his speech when he says, "There is no imminent threat of the government being overthrown". Here, the President echoes his National Secuirty Adviser Jim Jones, who, just this October said:
"I don’t foresee the return of the Taliban. And I want to be very clear: Afghanistan in not in danger—is not in imminent danger—of falling... It would be unwise to rush to a final judgment here."
Politico
Even if one feels that the we can't withdraw from Afghanistan, the question remains, in this climate, where the Taliban poses no threat, why the need to escalate? The mission has never been to kill every single Taliban member or supporter in Afghanistan. Such a task is impossible to accomplish, considering the fact that, particularly among the Pashtun populations in the South, the Taliban is seen fairly sympathetically by an increasing number of Afghans. Even the administration has reportedly been coming to grips with this reality:
the administration has begun to define [the Afghan Taliban] as an indigenous group that aspires to reclaim territory and rule the country but does not express ambitions of attacking the United States...The officials argued that while Al Qaeda was a foreign body, the Taliban could not be wholly removed from Afghanistan because they were too ingrained in the country. Moreover, the forces often described as Taliban are actually an amalgamation of militants that includes local warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Haqqani network or others driven by local grievances rather than jihadist ideology.
NYTimes
Does the United States really want to put American troops in harm's way for the purpose of quelling age-old tribal disputes in a country that poses no threat to the United States? Though we might be tempted to eradicate an immoral group that uses brutality and oppression against their own citizens to achieve their political/religious goals, we must remember that regime change and/or nation-building has never been the mission for Afghanistan. That mission was to disrupt al-Qaeda from being able to harm us again. To that end, many within the administration feel that the Taliban no longer seek to ally themselves with al-Qaeda's goals for international terror:
[Officials] suggest that the Taliban have no interest in letting Al Qaeda back into Afghanistan because that was what cost them power when they were toppled by American-backed Afghan rebels in 2001.
NYTimes
This view is bolstered by evidence of recent statements by Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, which seek to emphasize the Taliban's mission as a strictly national movement that doesn't seek to reach outside of its borders:
Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban and al-Qa’ida’s senior leaders have been issuing some very mixed messages of late, and the online jihadi community is in an uproar, with some calling these developments "the beginning of the end of relations" between the two movements. Beginning with a statement from Mullah Omar in September, the Afghan Taliban’s Quetta-based leadership has been emphasizing the "nationalist" character of their movement, and has sent several communications to Afghanistan’s neighbors expressing an intent to establish positive international relations.
Even President Obama himself told the New York Times that he believed that now was a good opportunity to take diplomatic advantage of rifts between the Taliban and the more radical al-Qaeda elements:
"If you talk to General Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq,"
NY Times
By escalating the war, are we throwing away a golden opportunity to moderate the Taliban, and widen the schism between it and al-Qaeda?
Another significant note to point out here is that the President claimed in his speech last night that the Taliban is "gaining momentum", despite the fact that he sent an additional 17,000 troops in February. So if we believe his claim that the Taliban is "gaining momentum", one has to wonder whether sending more troops is the proper response to this momentum? Instead, perhaps it is the continual presence of American troops in Afghanistan that is the reason why the Taliban are able to increase their power? The Taliban themselves sure seem to think so:
"We had and have no plan of harming countries of the world, including those in Europe ... our goal is the independence of the country and the building of an Islamic state," the Taliban said in a statement on the group's website www.shahamat.org.
"Still, if you (NATO and U.S. troops) want to colonize the country of proud and pious Afghans under the baseless pretext of a war on terror, then you should know that our patience will only increase and that we are ready for a long war."
Reuters
To me, that sounds like a vicious cycle whose result is endless war.
al-Qaeda retains its safe haven near the border
We're all familiar by now of the grainy videos, displayed over and over by the 24 hr. news networks in the run up to the two ME wars, of scrawny, rag-tag mujaheddin performing army drills and practicing rocket launcher attacks in the desert as an approving Osama bin Laden looks on. Where are those videos now? The answer appears to be simple: these types of organized training bases no longer exist. In fact, according to White House NSA Jim Jones, there are less than 100 al-Qaeda al-Qaeda left in the entire country! al-Qaeda has been effectively contained and their capabilities to operate inside of Afghanistan have been wholly disrupted. Are we really proposing to send 30,000 troops, bringing the total number of troops in the area to 150,000 soldiers, to track down 100 people?!? That's 1,500 soldiers for every al-Qaeda member remaining in Afghanistan. The folly of such an exercise should be plainly evident.
We must remember that with resources such as the Internet, international terrorism has no borders, and has no need for any sort of hierarchical structure. Moreover, al-Qaeda is not so much a formal terrorist organization as it is a loose network of independent Islamic militants who plan their own terror plots, but look to this informational network for financing and assistance. The modern "War on Terror"is not and has never been a conventional war that you can just throw an army at. It is, instead, an intelligence mission that requires constant policing of terror activity all over the world followed by more police-like special forces intervention. Some would argue that by treating it as a conventional war, we are wasting resources that could be used towards bolstering our intelligence capabilities. And we must never forget that when we try to flesh out terrorists from among a civilian population using conventional warfare, we always risk subverting our own cause by bringing unintended suffering and perceived oppression to that population.
"Both wars have made the Middle East and the world much more dangerous for Americans and for any American presence overseas. It's creating much greater hostility towards the US and creating a whole lot more people that would be happy to kill Americans or join in some kind of terrorist operation." Graham Fuller, former Station Chief in Kabul for the CIA.
Common Dreams
Pakistan and its nuclear weapons are threatened
The final rationale proffered by President Obama as to why we need to send more troops to Afghanistan is so that we can ensure that Pakistan's nuclear weapons are safe from falling into the hands of al-Qaeda. This last assertion is the one that I find the most damaging to Obama Administration credibility on this issue, for it requires a suspension of reality and relies on the imaginary creation of such an unrealistic scenario, that its proffering can only be rivaled by the classic fearmongering assertion from Dick Cheney that we would never know about Iraq's nuclear weapons program until we obtained that evidence in the form of a mushroom cloud.
The idea that a rag-tag group of uneducated, poorly armed fighters will be able to overcome a professional army of over 500,000 is a scenario that has been described by analysts as "cartoonish".
Salon.com blogger Kanuk sums it perfectly:
Imagine if a town of about 5,000 people, none with more than a 4th grade education and no weapons more advanced than AK-47s and a few rocket-propelled grenades were threatening to take over the US Government and its nuclear weapons and impose their morals and values over the entire US population, would anyone take their threat seriously? They might do a bit of damage on their way to Washington, but would they be able to take a single nuclear weapon, let alone the entire arsenal?
Transpose this scenario to Pakistan, and that is exactly what's happening. The Taliban, who are based in tribal areas in northern Pakistan, have a tight control over their small region. Because the Taliban are based in hard to reach mountains, the Pakistani army can't fight them easily (the US and Canadian forces in Afghanistan face a similar problem). Over the last few years, people from this group have occasionally descended from the mountains to commit suicide bombings (or shootings) in nearby cities to show they mean business. However, since they lack modern weapons and logistical support and have no air power, the Taliban are in no way able to come down from these mountains to take on the Pakistani army head-on in pretty much flat terrain. Which means they have no hope of taking over the country or its nuclear arsenal.
Middle East scholar Juan Cole echoes this view:
The NYT's breathless observation that there are Taliban a hundred miles from Islamabad doesn't actually tell us very much, since Islamabad is geographically close to the Pushtun regions without that implying that Pushtuns dominate or could dominate it. It is like saying that Lynchburg, Va., is close to Washington DC and thereby implying that Jerry Falwell's movement is about to take over the latter.
The Pakistani Taliban amount to a few thousand fighters who lack tanks, armored vehicles, and an air force.
The Pakistani military is the world's sixth largest, with 550,000 active duty troops and is well equipped and well-trained. It in the past has acquitted itself well against India, a country ten times Pakistan's size population-wise. It is the backbone of the country, and has excellent command and control, never having suffered an internal mutiny of any significance.
So what is being alleged? That some rural Pushtun tribesmen turned Taliban are about to sweep into Islamabad and overthrow the government of Pakistan? Frankly ridiculous.
Finally, the Christian Science Monitor presents an educational, eye-opening counter to the drama coming out of Washington lately about this issue:
experts note that, even if the current operation by the Pakistani military stalls, or the Taliban return to areas they've been ousted from, the insurgents may not significantly expand their footprint in the country anytime soon. For reasons of geography, ethnicity, military inferiority, and ancient rivalries, they represent neither the immediate threat that is often portrayed nor the inevitable victors that the West fears.
"The Americans have become paranoid about Pakistan," says Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani military general. "They are losing their objectivity, and I think they need a reality check."
One article that I've seen cited quite a few times by war supporters on Dkos is the Seymour Hersh New Yorker piece published November 16, 2009. Yet, after reading that lengthy article, the main thing that I came away with is the notion that Washington's frustration with Pakistan in regards to its nuclear arsenal is NOT that the arsenal is too unsecure, but that it is almost TOO secure - that in the event of a nuclear situation with India, the US military would be stymied in attempts to neutralize usage of the weapons because we simply don't know where they are and/or how to break the significant Pakistani defenses protecting the arsenal. And yet, we are to believe that a group of illiterate, uneducated mountain men with AK-47s mounted on Toyotas are going to get control of this arsenal? Again, cartoonish.
Again, Juan Cole :
The hype about Pakistan is very sinister and mysterious and makes no sense to someone who actually knows the country.
In summary, I simply do not believe that the rationales presented by President Obama can adequately explain the need to place more American soldiers in harm's way. Again, I certainly expect and hope that my argument against escalation will turn into an informed, factual discussion about the points I have raised. Finally, let's remember where the burden of persuasion falls here. It is not the responsibility of citizens to prove why a war is unnecessary. It is the burden of a President to carefully and factually explain to Americans why a war is necessary. The rationales raised by the President last night do not meet that burden. Thanks for reading.