Lesson for Today

Military leaders in the field should not go drinking with reporters from Rolling Stone, much less bring their asshole aides along to the party.

In the meanwhile, on the ground, the casualties keep mounting, the Karzai family continues to enrich itself at the expense of the American taxpayer, and Al Qaeda is blithely training its operatives in Yemen, Somalia, and probably other places around the world that most Americans never knew existed.

We can't police the world anymore — we can't afford it, and it just doesn't work.

Out in the "stans"

I'm a little more pissed than usual today. Either pardon my profanity, or stop reading now.

First, a note on Kyrgyzstan — apparently, the autocratic asshole we've been supporting in order to keep our airbase (serving Afghanistan) open has been forced out of power. The new autocratic asshole now taking over is making nice with the Russians, so it's likely to cost us a good deal more (in bribes) to keep the base open.

When you consider that there is no real strategic purpose for "winning" in Afghanistan, it's all a goddamned waste. I was willing to give McChrystal a chance a couple of months ago, but he's blown it. We're still killing as many (or more) civilians as ever, the locals continue to hate our guts, and even our official asshole buddy Hamid Karzai is shitting on us (and probably is, as Peter Galbraith suggested, strung out on the dope that is Afghanistan's primary export.)

I've written to my Congressdork and both Senaturds, urging them to reject further financing for the war in Afghanistan. They'll ignore me, of course. Fuck all three of them. None will ever get another cent in campaign contributions from me. (I'll let you all know the contents of the form letters they send me within the next month or so. They always reply, inevitably with bullshit.)

Let's just pay the warlords more than Al Qaeda can to buy their cooperation, and get out of there. If there's one thing we know about Afghan "leaders," it's that they can be bought.

Special. Very special.

According to today's Times, General Stanley McChrystal has taken control of Special Operations forces in Afghanistan. To those of us who assumed that the commander for the region already had control of those forces, it came as a bit of a surprise. Who was in charge before he decided to take over? Donald Rumsfeld?

Special Forces, you see, appear to have been responsible for an outlandish share of the civilian casualties McChrystal says he hopes to avoid. It seems those Green Berets and Navy Seals and such like have been trained to be very efficient — albeit not especially discriminating — killers. Men, women, children, chickens, goats, insurgents, non-insurgents, armed, not armed, who the fuck cares? They're just more towelheads — or, in the terminology of an earlier war — just gooks.

Barack Obama, who hopes to be the first American president to win a war since Harry Truman, does not seem to understand that not even the best military leaders can control the military personality, the military ethic, and the military quest for advancement by spilling blood. I think it possible that McChrystal understands, though. Maybe, if we elected him president, he would get us out of Afghanistan.

Where the fuck is Eisenhower when you need him?

In the meanwhile, nobody seemed to pay attention to the content of Patrick Kennedy's rant the other day, when he attacked the press for its failure to cover Dennis Kucinich's attempt to get us out of Afghanistan in 30 days. Sadly, all they heard was the noise.

Had it not been for the noise, of course, they would have heard nothing.

Hooray for Dennis!

Arguably, Dennis Kucinich is America's least corrupt politician. No plutocrat ever benefits from the actions Kucinich takes in the House, so it's pretty obvious he hasn't been bought.

His bill to end American involvement in Afghanistan, as everyone expected, went down to resounding defeat in the House yesterday, and Afghan corruption king Hamid Kharzai's tongue kiss with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (as documented on the front page of the New York Times) does not seem to have changed the numbers at all.

I'm still anxiously awaiting McChrystal's "government in a box" for Marja — not yet installed in the newly "liberated" town. When Karzai showed up there a couple of days ago, he was not exactly greeted with enthusiasm, and easily could have been run out of town on a rail had he not been in the company of U.S. Marines. One certainty, however, is that nobody in Marja wants the unabashedly corrupt and brutal Afghan police around, no matter how "well" they've lately been trained by American contractors.

Call me a cynic — everyone does — but I'm still inclined to believe that the main reason we remain in Afghanistan is because the usual war contractors continue to rake in vast profits, and use those profits to elect compliant politicians who will keep the profits flowing. Afghanistan's corruption is blatant and shameless. Our system is more subtle, but no less corrupt.

McChrystal and Marja

If General Stanley A. McChrystal actually makes a success of the Marja invasion — which is to say, actually keeping it rather than just conquering it — I might become a convert to the Obama plan for Afghanistan. One thing McChrystal already is doing which I find quite encouraging is redefining Afghans for the troops.

Typically, when an army invades a country, the inhabitants automatically become "the other." Military training encourages such thinking, which makes it possible for soldiers to kill efficiently without excessive guilt. McChrystal is making a concerted effort to teach his troops to discriminate between enemy fighters and civilians, minimizing civilian casualties. His effort to help the troops understand that "the population is the prize" is almost completely novel in the history of warfare. Will it work? We'll see.

I'll also be interested to see McChrystal's "government in a box, ready to roll in" when hostilities subside. If he truly has managed to locate enough non-corrupt Afghan administrators and policemen to run Marja without alienating and antagonizing the locals, that would be another genuinely novel accomplishment. Will he be able to come up with more, to govern the other towns in the Helmand River Valley that will need to be pacified? What will keep them honest, right there in the midst of Afghanistan's most important opium growing region, once NATO forces have moved on?

Frankly, I'm not especially hopeful — but I suppose there's no choice but to give McChrystal a chance.

The Peace Prize??!!

Everybody knows the Nobel Peace Prize has been politicized for quite a while now. Every once in a while, the political aspect seems to coincide with a genuine contribution to peace, like when it was awarded to Muhammad Yunis in 2006, or Médecins Sans Frontières in 1999. Nobody can deny that Begin and Sadat deserved the 1978 prize for negotiating the only lasting peace agreement in the Middle East that any of us can recall, and that Jimmy Carter's role in that agreement plus the work of the Carter Center in succeeding years qualified him for the 2002 prize. Speaking of lifetime achievement, Martti Ahtisaari, the 2008 laureate also was no slouch.

When Al Gore won the prize in 2007, mostly for a PowerPoint presentation, it was pretty silly — but, at least, he'd done something. So what did Barack Obama do?

So far, nothing. Maybe the committee was hoping awarding him the Nobel would encourage him to continue resisting McChrystal and refrain from escalating the war in Afghanistan. If so, I suspect they'll be disappointed. Our President, in all likelihood, will continue in his wishy-washy, distinctly non-heroic pattern of splitting the difference.

More likely, though, Obama was awarded the prize for one simple reason: he's not George W. Bush.

Hey, Norwegians! I'm not George W. Bush either! Where's my million-and-a-half bucks?

Obama and the Generals

It is heartening to see Obama taking some time before responding to McChrystal's request for another 40,000 troops for Afghanistan. The Biden proposal apparently has been altered a bit, to my disappointment, in that troop reductions seem to be out of the picture at the moment; but it seems we truly are lucky not to have President McCain, who seems to believe that anything a general asks for should be delivered immediately.

My guess is that the real holdup is the lack of a viable Afghanistani partner due to Karzai's almost laughably transparent manipulation of the election results. Can Obama hang in there and do little or nothing until that mess is straightened out? Maybe.

His first order of business, though, must be pulling back the undermanned, isolated outposts in the south to cut back the alarming increase in American fatalities. The Taliban — or whoever is organizing the attacks on those outposts — is demonstrating considerable military skill and determination, with well planned assaults rather than spontaneous raids.

As for McChrystal and the generals, Obama must bear in mind that they are military men who automatically think of military solutions for every problem — and as the Soviets learned some years back, a military solution might not be a solution at all.

Hypocrite. Coward. President.

If I seem to be writing less frequently lately, it's because my anger and outrage are devolving into the usual depression. I never expected all that much of Obama, but I suppose all that financial industry money spent on his campaign affected even a habitual cynic like me, so I swallowed hard and hoped.

Hope. Bullshit.

Let's forget my usual economic complaints for the moment. This week, I heard promises about greater regulation of derivatives, more anti-trust suits, and action to limit predation by credit card. I'm not listening to promises anymore. I'll wait and see what, if anything, actually happens.

Onward and downward: where the hell is Dwight D. Eisenhower (or some reasonable facsimile) when you need him? It's looking more and more like Obama is being cowed by Pentagon bullies, with participation by CIA, NSA, and probably a dozen other agencies whose goddamned initials are top secret. Why has McChrystal replaced McKiernan? Beats me, unless it's that McCrystal is okay with an invasion of Pakistan from Afghanistan, and McKiernan isn't. And what will that consummate bully, Benjamin Netanyahu, bully our president into doing when they meet this week?

Take some action against the torturers? Um, no, 'fraid not. Come to think of it, we can't even release any more embarassing photos. Abolish the military tribunals? Uh, sorry, but that might force us to release some people whose "confessions" were extracted by the aforementioned torture. "Don't ask, don't tell?" Don't ask.

Last week, Dick Durbin observed that the financial industry, despite its setbacks, still had the strongest lobby in Washington -- but what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex still has to be in the running. So, how many of the useless, overpriced "defense" contracts that now appear to be on the chopping block actually will be chopped? If experience is any guide, most of those turkeys will still be alive and well for next Thanksgiving, and for the one after that as well.