When the 'Right War" Goes Wrong by William Pfaff

When the 'Right War" Goes Wrong
William Pfaff

Paris, June 8, 2010 --The Obama Administration has at
last issued its own National Security Strategy, a 52-page document
that takes the place of the strategy statements published by the
George W. Bush administration, beginning in 2002. Those were notable for their
belligerence in proclaiming America’s policy priority to be the
“defeat” of “terrorism” and their assertion of the claim to a right of unilateral pursuit of
American interests. They expressed determination to preempt by war any
threat to the United States when this might be deemed necessary, and
also to prevent the emergence of any rival superpower.

Those Bush documents demonstrated both anger at the wound
inflicted on the United States by al Qaeda, as well as a reassertion of
triumphalism not heard since the defeat in Vietnam. They were
primarily military in tone and preoccupation at a time when the
global American military base system was being developed, with
“regional commands” spanning the globe and individual commanders-in-chief
implicitly charged with keeping the world in order.

America was a nation “at war;” George W. Bush was “a war president,”
but his administration's war came to resemble the one
implanted in their consciousness by the colossal error of the late
Samuel Huntington in asserting that the “next world war” would be a
war of civilizations – actually, his grandiose extrapolation of the
war between Israel and the Arabs. The Israelis were invested with
the honor of embodying western civilization while Arabs, who make up
only a fifth of the world’s Moslems, were conflated with all the
world’s Moslems, most of them actually Asians and Africans.

The new Obama administration document was received by
its critics as one in which an Obamaesque expression of liberal
idealism cloaked the actual militarism of his unaccountable
presidential campaign enthusiasm for “the right war” in Afghanistan,
in contrast to the war in Iraq. The latter seemed winding down, with
its sectarian and regional conflicts left unresolved, by general
concession. To set up a government in Baghdad unifying Shias,
Sunnis, and Kurds, as well as reconciling the American superpower
looming over the region, was a task left for another day, which
might never come.


The “right war” then proved more of a wrong war even than Iraq, more
difficult to “win” than Generals Stanley McChrystal and David
Petraeus, with their “clear and hold” refurbishment of classic anti-
insurrectionist strategy, seemed to expect. They have found that
they could “clear,” since the Taliban were quite willing to make way
temporarily for them to move into a contested area -- but by a steady
reapplication of pressure the Taliban made it impossible for them to
stay.

The American abandonment of its two principal Korangal Valley bases
and their five satellite outposts in April , followed the withdrawal,
for identical reasons, from two other combat bases and their
satellites in eastern Afghanistan in 2007 - 2009, one located in the
Waygal Valley of Kunar Province and the other in the Kamdesh region
of Nuristan Province. All are cases in point of what may reasonably
be expected in the promised Helmland offensive by NATO forces.

In each of these earlier cases NATO troops, usually accompanying
Afghan government troops (nearly always ethnically non-Pushtoon, in
predominantly Pushtoon regions) attempted to rally the residents to
recognize and cooperate with the U.S.-sponsored Hamid Karzai central
government in Kabul – a step in the U.S. policy of establishing
democracy in unlikely places.

In each case they failed, usually not because the people of the area
were Taliban sympathizers but because they did not like foreigners
interfering in their lives, and they called in the Taliban to help
rid them of this intrusion. Since their arrival in the Korangal
Valley until their departure earlier this year, 42 U.S soldiers had
been killed , and “hundreds” wounded, mostly during the 2006-2009
period. General Stanley A. McChrystal is quoted by The New York
Times as having concluded that the attempt to hold these valley
outposts did more to create insurgents than defeat them.

This can scarcely be a surprise. The more recent, and important,
case of American interference with local arrangements in Afghanistan
has, of course, been the so-called peace jirga of traditional leaders
and elders recently called by President Karzai, in which he issued an
appeal for a ceasefire and peace with the Taliban. This has been
ferociously opposed by the American authorities in Afghanistan
because the only condition on which the Taliban would discuss such a
solution is that foreign forces leave the country.

One might think this a reasonable proposal, if the government agreed,
conveniently fulfilling President Barack Obama’s promise to withdraw
all American and NATO forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2011.
However the jirga was condemned by U.S. officials and contemptuously labeled
as a gathering of Mr. Karzai’s dependents and cronies (which may
have been so; but so what?). What followed was the president’s
dismissal of two of his three top security officials (ostensibly
because they had failed to prevent an attack on the jirga, but
according to other reports, because they were considered American
collaborators.)

There is, in short, a struggle going on between the Afghan president
and the American authorities in Afghanistan, in which President
Karzai says that he can bring an end to the war. The Americans
contend that this would mean a surrender to the Taliban – but much
more importantly, that it would end the American role in
Afghanistan, and presumably in Pakistan as well.

Even though Barack Obama, in his introduction to the new National
Security Strategy document, writes that America cannot allow the
burdens of the 21st century to “fall on American shoulders alone,” he
similarly cannot accept that the United States deviate from the
globalist ambitions emphasized in the published strategies of both the
Bush and Obama administrations. In the final year of the Bush
administration Condoleezza Rich defined this as “to change the world,
and in its own image.” President Obama’s new strategy statement is
an elaboration of how this is to succeed.

© Copyright 2010 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights
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This article comes from William PFAFF
http://www.williampfaff.com