War on Afghanistan – Wis[s]e Words

Afghanistan: the Warlogs

Published on July 26, 2010

Yesterday The Guardian revealed it had recieved, via Wikileaks a massive collection of US military logfiles which showed the War on Afghanistan going even worse than we already knew about:

A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

The war logs also detail:

[…]

• How a secret “black” unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

Interesting material and I’ve seen people on Twitter refer to it as the Pentagon Papers volume II, but does it change anything significantly about our view of the war? The original Pentagon Papers had an impact because they were the first source to make fully clear the catastrophe the War on Vietnam was and how culpable the US military and government were in covering up the truth. With the current wars on Afghanistan and Iraq this was known or suspected from the start and too much shit has already come out to be too surprised by what’s in those logs.

But it is important as a cache of evidence, for historical purposes if nothing else, to show that once again those who were against the war from the start where right about it, that the reasons we opposed the war have been proven right. Not to brag, but as a warning for the next time our leaders want to sell us a humantarian intervention.

The raw logs are available as a torrent from the Piratebay, or downloadable in spreadsheet (.csv), database (.sql) or Google maps (.kml) format from Cryptogon. It’s only some 15 megabytes big, so easy enough to get.

UPDATE: a better torrent.

Preparation for future wars

Published on March 31, 2008

I’ve talked about the failure of the antiwar movement before, in that it failed to stop the War on Iraq from happening, despite the protests held by tens of millions of people all over the world in the months before the start of the war. One common complaint heard at the time was that the protests came too late, that the troops were already in place, the preperations made and that therefore war was inevitable. I’m not sure this was entirely true; the protests did keep the Netherlands out of the war proper, though sadly not out of the occupation and I can see that if the Stop the War campaign had made different tactical and strategical choices in 2003 it might’ve kept the JUK out as well. There is however a kernel of truth in the idea that anti-war protests usually come too late, when the war is already started or preparations are so advanced stopping is impossible. It doesn’t help that for the most part anti-war movements are created largely adhoc, in response to a threatening war, that they die down in times of “peace”.

When you stop to think about it, it’s absurd that we live in a time when it’s assumed normal that even a country like the Netherlands, with no real enemies nearby is spending millions if not billions of euros each year on defence. Moreover we’re spending it not to defend our own country, but to enable our army to invade and occupy other countries. During the nineties, while our attention was elsewhere, the Dutch army transformed itself from a tank heavy Cold War style “defend the Fulda Gap” army into a lean, mean humanitarian intervention fighting machine, laying the foundations for getting involved first in Yugoslavia, then Kosovo and finally Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s the status quo, in which criticism of defence spending is seldom on a fundamental level, but mainly on issues of cost or choice of spending.

What brought this to mind is the news that the UK ministry of Defence is going ahead with a thirteen billion pound tanker investment, in which it gets over a dozen new tanker/transport planes. These planes are not needed for the defense of the United Kingdom, certainly not in that number. Instead they’ll be invaluable for the next Iraq or Afghanistan… That’s why we need an anti-war movement that doesn’t just mobilise when war is imminent, but that opposes defence spending from the start. If we have an army that’s capable of “humanitarian interventions”, interventions is what we get. We need to take away these tools that enable our armies to start wars. We need to stop the preperations for future wars, not just the current war.

The antiwar movement failed

Published on October 15, 2007

Over at the Socialist Unity blog Andy reviewed the latest Stop the War demo and was less than impressed. this lead to an interesting discussion in the comment thread, though unfortunately centered mostly on tactics rather than strategies, much less on the question I’ve asked there as well: has the antiwar movement failed?

Tactically, if we look at what the antiwar movement has done from September 2001 onwards, it has been impressive: larger and larger demonstrations against the War on Afghanistan and in the runup to the War on Iraq, culminating in the 15 February 2003 demonstrations, with two million in London and tens of millions worldwide marching against the war. Not just demonstrations either: a wide variety of direct action initiatives have been tried by local antiwar groups, ranging the spectrum from letterwriting campaigns to attempts to occupy military bases.

Strategically, the antiwar movement managed to set the debate in a fair few countries, despite the opposition of much of the political and media elites. Even at the height of the warfrenzy, there never was a majority in the UK in favour of war and even in the US the war was never supported by a large majority of the people, if it had a majority at all. The great victory of the antiwar movement was that it managed to put the warmongers on the defensive, by making opposition to the war the default position in the debate, with the supporters of the War on Iraq having to explain themselves. With Afghanistan it was the other way around, but with Iraq the antiwar movement framed the debate.

We must not underestimate this achievement, in a climate in which much of the US electorate at least was whipped into fear by “9/11” and The War Against Terror and despite the US/UK’s media’s tendency to portray protestors as a minority of bearded wierdies. Here in the Netherlands this was the one subject on which the overwhelming majority of people could agree, whether socialists, liberals or conservatives, Pim Fortuyn supporters or not: the war was a bad idea and Holland should stay well out of it.

And yet, Holland didn’t stay out of it, though it did avoid the actual invasion. And neither did the UK, US, Spain, Poland, etc. The antiwar movement did not stop the war, did not stop the occupation, despite two million people marching in London and tens of millions worldwide. In the end it turned out the voters could be ignored, unless you did something really stupid, like pretending an Al Quida attack is the work of ETA say. Bush got his second term, Labour had no problem winning their next election and as far as I know nobody lost their seat for their war support other than Oona King.

So I think it’s fair to say that the antiwar movement did fail, as it did not prevent the war nor raise the (political) cost of the war. Arguably it didn’t even slow down the start of the war. We won the battles, but we lost the war.

The myth of Afghanistan

Published on October 12, 2007

John Quiggin writes:

[…] I can make the point in mitigation that, if the Afghanistan war had not been so shamefully mismanaged, most obviously the diversion of most of the required resources to the Iraq venture, it might well have reached a successful conclusion by now. But even after that mismanagement, I still, reluctantly, support the view that it is better to try and salvage the situation in Afghanistan by committing more resources, rather than pulling out and leaving the Afghans to sort it out themselves. I draw that conclusion because I think there would be even more bloodshed after a withdrawal, and that there’s a reasonable prospect that a democratic government and a largely free society can survive in Afghanistan with our help. And, even after all the mismanagement, I think most Afghans are better off now (or at least no worse off) than they would have been with a continuation of Taliban rule and civil war.

What John writes here seems to be widely believed by disappointed war supporters, but I think it’s a myth. Aghanistan was always a sideshow, a stepping stone on the way to the war that Bush really wanted: Iraq. It would’ve taken another president entirely for Afghanistan to be taken serious the way John wanted it to be. But there’s a deeper fallacy here, which is that if this war had been pursued more seriously, it could’ve been a succes. Again, it’s hard to see this happening with Bush in charge, as the example of Iraq, which has had all the funds and attention Afghanistan has lacked, shows. And let’s not forget the Soviet experience in Afghanistan either; that fiasco can’t be accused of having been underfunded. Enforcing democracy (or socialism) from the barrel of a gun is hard. That’s the lesson I wish more people would learn: that war is hardly the best way to export respect for democracy and human rights.

The other lesson I wish people like John would learn is that “things could be worse” is not a valid reason for staying the course, that hoping that spending more time, more money and more lives in doing the same thing will do the trick this time is not a strategy. We cannot solve the problems of Afghanistan and our presence only makes things worse.

Because until those on the left learn that waging war in the name of democracy and human rights is counterproductive, we will get more Afghanistans and more Iraqs.