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Doings of LORD of Hosts of Prostitutes: Obama's Nobel Prize Peace
Plan in Afghanistan
The Nine Surges of Obama’s War
How to Escalate in Afghanistan
by
Tom Engelhardt,
December 11, 2009
http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2009/12/10/the-nine-surges-of-obamas-war/
In his Afghan
"surge" speech
at West Point last week, President Obama offered
Americans some specifics to back up his new "way
forward in Afghanistan." He spoke of the "additional
30,000 U.S. troops" he was sending into that country
over the next six months. He brought up the "roughly
$30 billion" it would cost us to get them there and
support them for a year. And finally, he spoke of
beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those
were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in
terms of time, longer than many in the Democratic
Party would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don’t
faintly cover just how fully the president has
committed us to an expanding war and just how wide
it is likely to become.
Despite the seeming specificity of the speech, it
gave little sense of just how big and how expensive
this surge will be. In fact, what is being
portrayed in the media as the surge of November 2009
is but a modest part of an ongoing expansion of the
U.S. war effort in many areas. Looked at another
way, the media’s focus on the president’s speech as
the crucial moment of decision, and on those 30,000 new
troops as the crucial piece of information, has
distorted what’s actually underway.
In reality, the U.S. military, along with its
civilian and intelligence counterparts, has been in
an almost constant
state of surge
since the last days of the Bush administration.
Unfortunately, while information on this is
available, and often well reported, it’s scattered
in innumerable news stories on specific aspects of
the war. You have to be a media jockey to catch it
all, no less put it together.
What follows, then, is my own attempt to make sense
of the nine fronts on which the U.S. has been
surging, and continues to do so, as 2009 ends.
Think of this as an effort to widen our view of
Obama’s widening war.
Obama’s Nine Surges
1. The Troop Surge: Let’s start with those "30,000" new troops the president
announced. First of all, they represent Obama’s
surge, phase 2. As the president pointed out in his
speech, there were "just over 32,000 Americans
serving in Afghanistan" when he took office in
January 2009. In March, Obama
announced
that he was ordering in 21,000 additional troops.
Last week, when he spoke, there were already
approximately 68,000 to 70,000 U.S. troops in
Afghanistan. If you add the 32,000 already there in
January and the 21,700 actually dispatched after the
March announcement, however, you only get 53,700,
leaving another 15,000 or so to be accounted for.
According to
Karen DeYoung of the
Washington Post,
11,000 of those were "authorized in the waning days
of the Bush administration and deployed this year,"
bringing the figure to between 64,000 and 65,000.
In other words, the earliest stage of the present
Afghan "surge" was already underway when Obama
arrived.
It also looks like at least a few thousand more
troops managed to slip through the door in recent
months without notice or comment. Similarly, with
the 30,000 figure announced a week ago, DeYoung
reports that the president quietly granted Secretary
of Defense Robert Gates the right to "increase the
number by 10 percent, or 3,000 troops, without
additional White House approval or announcement."
That already potentially brings the most recent
surge numbers to 33,000, and an unnamed "senior
military official" told De Young "that the final
number could go as high as 35,000 to allow for
additional support personnel such as engineers,
medevac units and route-clearance teams, which comb
roads for bombs."
Now, add in the 7,500 troops and trainers that
administration officials reportedly strong-armed
various European countries into offering. More than
1,500 of
these are already in Afghanistan and simply not
being withdrawn as previously announced. The cost
of sending some of the others, like the
900-plus troops
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has promised,
will undoubtedly be absorbed by Washington.
Nonetheless, add most of them in and, miraculously,
you’ve surged up to, or beyond, Afghan War commander
General Stanley McChrystal’s basic request for at
least 40,000 troops to pursue a counterinsurgency
war in that country.
2. The Contractor Surge: Given our heavily corporatized and
privatized
military, it makes no sense simply to talk about
troop numbers in Afghanistan as if they were
increasing in a void. You also need to know about
the private contractors who have taken over so many
former military duties, from KP and driving supply
convoys to providing security on large bases.
There’s no way of even knowing who is responsible
for the surge of (largely Pentagon-funded) private
contractors in Afghanistan. Did their numbers play
any part in the president’s three months of
deliberations? Does he have any control over how
many contractors are put on the U.S. government
payroll there? We don’t know.
Private contractors certainly went unmentioned in
his speech and, amid the flurry of headlines about
troops going to Afghanistan, they remain almost
unmentioned in the mainstream media. In major
pieces on the president’s tortuous "deliberations"
with his key military and civilian advisors at the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
and the
Los Angeles Times,
all produced from copious
officially inspired
leaks, there wasn’t a single mention of private
contractors, and yet their numbers have been surging
for months.
A
modest-sized article
by August Cole in the
Wall Street Journal
the day after the president’s speech gave us the
basics, but you had to be looking. Headlined "U.S.
Adding Contractors at Fast Pace," the piece barely
peeked above the fold on page 7 of the paper.
According to Cole: "The Defense Department’s latest
census shows that the number of contractors
increased about 40% between the end of June and the
end of September, for a total of 104,101. That
compares with 113,731 in Iraq, down 5% in the same
period… Most of the contractors in Afghanistan are
locals, accounting for 78,430 of the total…" In
other words, there are already more private
contractors on the payroll in Afghanistan than there
will be U.S. troops when the latest surge is
complete.
Though many of these contractors are local Afghans
hired by outfits like DynCorp International and
Fluor Corp., TPM Muckracker
managed to get
a further breakdown of these figures from the
Pentagon and found that there were 16,400 "third
country nationals" among the contractors, and 9,300
Americans. This is a formidable crew, and its
numbers are evidently still surging, as are the
Pentagon contracts doled out to private outfits that
go with them. Cole, for instance, writes of the
contract that Dyncorp and Fluor share to support
U.S. forces in Afghanistan "which could be worth as
much as $7.5 billion to each company in the coming
years."
3. The Militia Surge:
U.S. Special Forces are now carrying out
pilot programs
for a mini-surge in support of local Afghan militias
that are, at least theoretically, anti-Taliban. The
idea is evidently to create a movement along the
lines of Iraq’s Sunni Awakening Movement that, many
believe, ensured the "success" of George W. Bush’s
2007 surge in that country. For now,
as far as we know,
U.S. support takes the form of offers of ammunition,
food, and possibly some Kalashnikov rifles, but in
the future we’ll be ponying up more arms and,
undoubtedly, significant amounts of money.
This is, after all, to be a national program, the
Community Defense initiative, which,
according to
Jim Michaels of
USA Today, will "funnel millions of
dollars in foreign aid to villages that organize
‘neighborhood watch’-like programs to help with
security." Think of this as a "bribe" surge. Such
programs are bound to turn out to be essentially
money-based and designed to buy "friendship."
4. The Civilian Surge: Yes, Virginia, there is a "civilian surge"
underway in
Afghanistan, involving increases in the number of
"diplomats and experts in agriculture, education,
health and rule of law sent to Kabul and to
provincial reconstruction teams across the
country." The State Department now claims to be "on
track" to triple the U.S. civilian component in
Afghanistan from
320 officials
in January 2009 to 974 by "the
early weeks
of next year." (Of course, that, in turn, means
another mini-surge in private contractors: more
security guards to protect civilian employees of the
U.S. government.) A similar civilian surge is
evidently underway in neighboring Pakistan, just the
thing to go with a
surge of civilian aid
and a plan for a humongous new,
nearly billion-dollar
embassy compound to be built in Islamabad.
5. The CIA and Special Forces Surge: And speaking of Pakistan, Noah Shachtman of
Wired’s
Danger Room blog
had it right
recently when, considering the CIA’s "covert" (but
openly discussed) drone war in the Pakistani tribal
borderlands, he wrote: "The most important
escalation of the war might be the one the President
didn’t mention at West Point." In fact, the CIA’s
drone attacks there have been escalating in numbers
since the Obama administration came into office.
Now, it seems, paralleling the civilian surge in the
Af/Pak theater of operations, there is to be a CIA
one as well. While little information on this is
available, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the
New York Times
report that
in recent months the CIA has delivered a plan to the
White House "for widening the campaign of strikes
against militants by drone aircraft in Pakistan,
sending additional spies there and securing a White
House commitment to bulk up the C.I.A.’s budget for
operations inside the country."
In addition, Scott Shane of the
Times
reports:
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"The White House has authorized an expansion of the
C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal
areas, officials said…, to parallel the president’s
decision… to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
American officials are talking with Pakistan about
the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the
first time — a controversial move since it is
outside the tribal areas — because that is where
Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide."
The Pakistani southern border province of
Baluchistan is a
hornet’s nest
with its own sets of separatists and religious
extremists, as well as a (possibly
U.S.-funded) rebel movement aimed at the
Baluchi minority areas of Iran. The Pakistani
government is powerfully opposed to drone strikes in
the area of the heavily populated provincial capital
of Quetta where, Washington insists, the Afghan
Taliban leadership largely resides. If such strikes
do begin, they could prove the most destabilizing
aspect of the widening of the war that the present
surge represents.
In addition,
thanks to the
Nation magazine’s Jeremy Scahill, we now know that, from a
secret base in Karachi, Pakistan, the U.S. Army’s
Joint Special Operations Command, in conjunction
with the private security contractor Xe (formerly
Blackwater), operates "a secret program in which
they plan targeted assassinations of suspected
Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, ’snatch and grabs’
of high-value targets and other sensitive action
inside and outside Pakistan." Since so many U.S.
activities in Pakistan involve secretive,
undoubtedly black-budget operations, we may only
have the faintest outlines of what the "surge" there
means.
6. The Base-Building Surge: Like the surge in contractors and in drone
attacks, the surge in base-building in Afghanistan
significantly preceded Obama’s latest troop-surge
announcement. A
recent
NBC Nightly News
report on the ever-expanding U.S. base at
Kandahar Airfield, which it aptly termed a "boom
town," shows just how ongoing this part of the
overall surge is, and at what a staggering level.
As
in Iraq from 2003 on,
billions of dollars are being sunk into bases, the
largest of which — especially the old Soviet site,
Bagram Air Base, with more than $200 million in
construction projects and upgrades underway at the
moment — are beginning to look like ever more
permanent fixtures on the landscape.
In addition, as Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com has
reported,
forward observation bases and smaller combat
outposts have been sprouting all over southern
Afghanistan. "Forget for a moment the ‘debates’ in
Washington over Afghan War policy," he wrote in
early November, "and, if you just focus on the
construction activity and the flow of money into
Afghanistan, what you see is a war that, from the
point of view of the Pentagon, isn’t going to end
any time soon. In fact, the U.S. military’s building
boom in that country suggests that, in the ninth
year of the Afghan War, the Pentagon has plans for a
far longer-term, if not near-permanent, garrisoning
of the country, no matter what course Washington may
decide upon."
7. The Training Surge: In some ways, the greatest prospective surge may prove to
be in the training of the Afghan national army and
police. Despite years of American and NATO "mentoring,"
both are in
notoriously poor shape.
The Afghan army is riddled with desertions —
25% of those trained
in the last year are now gone — and the Afghan
police are reportedly a hapless, ill-paid, corrupt,
drug-addicted lot. Nonetheless, Washington (with
the help of NATO reinforcements) is planning to
bring an army whose numbers officially stand at
approximately
94,000 (but
may actually be as low as
40-odd thousand)
to 134,000 reasonably well-trained troops by next
fall and 240,000 a year later. Similarly, the Obama
administration hopes to
take the police numbers
from an official 93,000 to 160,000.
8. The Cost Surge: This is a difficult subject to pin down in part because the
Pentagon is, in cost-accounting terms, one of the
least transparent organizations around. What can be
said for certain is that Obama’s $30 billion figure
won’t faintly hold when it comes to the real surge.
There is no way that figure will cover anything like
all the troops, bases, contractors, and the rest.
Just take the plan to train an Afghan security force
of approximately 400,000 in the coming years. We’ve
already spent more than
$15 billion
on the training of the Afghan Army and more than
$10 billion
has gone into police training — staggering figures
for a far smaller combined force with poor results.
Imagine, then, what a massive bulking up of the
country’s security forces will actually cost. In
congressional testimony, Centcom commander General
David Petraeus
suggested a
possible price tag of $10 billion a year. And if
such a program works (which seems unlikely), try to
imagine how one of the poorest countries on the
planet will support a 400,000-man force. Afghan
President Hamid Karzai has
just suggested
that it will take at least 15-20 years before the
country can actually pay for such a force itself.
In translation, what we have here is undoubtedly a
version of Colin Powell’s
Pottery Barn rule
("You break it, you own it"); in this case, you
build it, you own it. If we create such security
forces, they will be, financially speaking, ours
into the foreseeable future. (And this is even
without adding in those local militias we’re
planning to invest "millions" in.)
9. The Anti-Withdrawal Surge: Think of this as a surge in time. By all accounts, the
president tried to put some kind of limit on his
most recent Afghan surge,
not wanting
"an open-ended commitment." With that in mind, he
evidently insisted on a plan, emphasized in his
speech, in which some of the surge troops would
start to come home in July 2011, about 18 months
from now. This was presented in the media as a case
of giving something to everyone (the Republican
opposition, his field commanders, and his own
antiwar Democratic Party base). In fact, he gave
his commanders and the Republican opposition a very
real surge in numbers. In this regard, a
Washington Post headline
says it all:
"McChrystal’s Afghanistan Plan Stays Mainly
Intact." On the other hand, what he gave his base
was only the vaguest of promises ("…and allow us to
begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan
in July of 2011"). Moreover, within hours of the
speech, even that commitment was being watered down
by the first top officials to speak on the subject.
Soon enough, as the right-wing began to blaze away
on the mistake of announcing a withdrawal date "to
the enemy," there was little short of a stampede of
high officials eager to make that promise ever less
meaningful.
In what Mark Mazzetti of the
Times
called a "flurry
of coordinated television interviews," the top
civilian and military officials of the
administration marched onto the Sunday morning talk
shows "in lockstep" to reassure the right (and they
were
reassured) by
playing "down the significance of the July 2011
target date." The United States was, Secretary of
Defense Gates and others indicated, going to be in
the region in strength for
years to come.
("…July 2011 was just the beginning, not the end, of
a lengthy process. That date, [National Security
Advisor] General [James] Jones said, is a ‘ramp’
rather than a ‘cliff.’")
How Wide the Widening War?
When it came to the
spreading Taliban
insurgency in Afghanistan, the president
in his speech spoke of his surge goal this way: "We
must reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the
ability to overthrow the government." This seems a
modest enough target, even if the means of reaching
it are proving immodest indeed. After all, we’re
talking about a minority Pashtun insurgency —
Pashtuns make up only about 42% of Afghanistan’s
population — and the insurgents are a relatively
lightly armed, rag-tag force. Against them and a
miniscule number
of al-Qaeda operatives, the Pentagon has launched a
remarkable, unbelievably costly build-up of forces
over vast distances, along fragile, extended supply
lines, and in a country poorer than almost any other
on the planet. The State Department has, to the best
of its abilities, followed suit, as has the CIA
across the border in Pakistan.
All of this has been underway for close to a year,
with at least another six months to go. This is the
reality that the president and his top officials
didn’t bother to explain to the American people in
that speech last week, or on those Sunday talk shows,
or in congressional testimony, and yet it’s a
reality we should grasp as we consider our future
and the Afghan War we, after all, are paying for.
And yet, confoundingly, as the U.S. has bulked up in
Afghanistan, the war has only grown fiercer both
within the country and in parts of Pakistan.
Sometimes bulking-up can mean not reversing but
increasing the other side’s momentum. We face what
looks to be a widening war in the region. Already,
the Obama administration has been issuing
ever stronger warnings
to the Pakistani government and military to shape up
in the fight against the Taliban, otherwise
threatening not only drone strikes in Baluchistan,
but cross-border raids by Special Operations types,
and even possibly "hot pursuit" by U.S. forces into
Pakistan. This is a dangerous game indeed.
As Andrew Bacevich, author of
The Limits of Power,
wrote
recently,
"Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars in
distant countries does more to inflame than to
extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent
anti-Western jihadism." Whatever the Obama
administration does in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
however, the American ability to mount a sustained
operation of this size in one of the most difficult
places on the planet, when it can’t even mount a
reasonable jobs program at home, remains a strange
wonder of the world.
Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt
Read more by Tom Engelhardt
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