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27 April 2010 By Tom Engelhardt Yes, We
Could... Get Out!
Yes, we could. No kidding. We really could withdraw
our massive armies, now close to 200,000 troops
combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and that’s not
even counting our similarly large stealth army of
private contractors, which helps keep the true size of
our double occupations in the shadows). We could
undoubtedly withdraw them all reasonably quickly and
reasonably painlessly.
Not that you would know it from listening to the
debates in Washington or catching the mainstream news.
There, withdrawal, when discussed at all, seems like
an undertaking beyond the waking imagination. In Iraq
alone, all those bases to dismantle and millions of
pieces of equipment to send home in a draw-down
operation worthy of years of intensive effort, the
sort of thing that makes the desperate British
evacuation from Dunkirk in World War II look like a
Sunday stroll in the park. And that’s only the
technical side of the matter.
Then there’s the conviction that anything but a
withdrawal that would make molasses in January look
like the hare of Aesopian fable -- at least two years
in Iraq, five to ten in Afghanistan -- would endanger
the planet itself, or at least its most important
country: us. Without our eternally steadying hand, the
Iraqis and Afghans, it’s taken for granted, would be
lost. Without the help of U.S. forces, for example,
would the Maliki government ever have been able to
announce the death of the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq?
Not likely, whereas the U.S. has knocked off its
leadership twice, first in 2006, and again, evidently,
last week.
Of course, before our troops entered Baghdad in
2003 and the American occupation of that country
began, there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq. But that’s a
distant past not worth bringing up. And forget as well
the fact that our invasions and wars have proven
thunderously destructive, bringing chaos, misery, and
death in their wake, and turning, for instance, the
health care system of Iraq, once considered an
advanced country in the Arab world, into a disaster
zone(that -- it goes without saying -- only we
Americans are now equipped to properly fix).
Similarly, while regularly knocking off Afghan
civilians at checkpoints on their roads and in their
homes, at their celebrations and at work, we ignore
the fact that our invasion and occupation opened the
way for the transformation of Afghanistan into the
first all-drug-crop agricultural nation and so the
planet's premier narco-nation. It’s not just that the
country now has an almost total monopoly on growing
opium poppies (hence heroin), but according to the
latest U.N. report, it’s now cornering the hashish
market as well. That’s diversification for you.
It’s a record to stand on and, evidently, to stay
on, even to expand on. We’re like the famed guest who
came to dinner, broke a leg, wouldn’t leave, and
promptly took over the lives of the entire household.
Only in our case, we arrived, broke someone else’s
leg, and then insisted we had to stay and break many
more legs, lest the world become a far more terrible
place.
It’s known and accepted in Washington that, if we
were to leave Afghanistan precipitously, the Taliban
would take over, al-Qaeda would be back big time in no
time, and then more of our giant buildings would
obviously bite the dust. And yet, the longer we’ve
stayed and the more we’ve surged, the more resurgent
the Taliban has become, the more territory this
minority insurgency has spread into. If we stay long
enough, we may, in fact, create the majority
insurgency we claim to fear.
It’s common wisdom in the U.S. that, before we pull
our military out, Afghanistan, like Iraq, must be
secured as a stable enough ally, as well as at least a
fragile junior democracy, which consigns real
departure to some distant horizon. And that sense of
time may help explain the desire of U.S. officials to
hinder Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s attempts to
negotiate with the Taliban and other rebel factions
now. Washington, it seems, favors a “reconciliation
process” that will last years and only begin after the
U.S. military seizes the high ground on the
battlefield.
The reality that dare not speak its name in
Washington is this: no matter what might happen in an
Afghanistan that lacked us -- whether (as in the
1990s) the various factions there leaped for each
other’s throats, or the Taliban established
significant control, though (as in the 1990s) not over
the whole country -- the stakes for Americans would be
minor in nature. Not that anyone of significance here
would say such a thing.
Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans
really have in one of the most impoverished lands on
the planet, about as distant from us as could be
imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously?
Yet, as if to defy commonsense, we’ve been fighting
there -- by proxy and directly -- on and off for 30
years now with no end in sight.
Most Americans evidently remain convinced that
“safe haven” there was the key to al-Qaeda’s success,
and that Afghanistan was the only place in which that
organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even
though perfectly real planning also took place in
Hamburg, Germany, which we neither bombed nor invaded.
In a future in which our surging armies actually
succeeded in controlling Afghanistan and denying it to
al-Qaeda, what about Somalia, Yemen, or, for that
matter, England? It’s now conveniently forgotten that
the first, nearly successful attempt to take down one
of the World Trade Center towers in 1993 was planned
in the wilds of New Jersey. Had the Bush
administration been paying the slightest attention on
September 10, 2001, or had reasonable precautions been
taken, including locking the doors of airplane
cockpits, 9/11 and so the invasion of Afghanistan
would have been relegated to the far-fetched plot of
some Tom Clancy novel.
Have you noticed, by the way, that there’s always
some obstacle in the path of withdrawal? Right now, in
Iraq, it’s the aftermath of the March 7th election,
hailed as proof that we brought democracy to the
Middle East and so, whatever our missteps, did the
right thing. As it happens, the election, as many
predicted at the time, has led to a potentially
explosive gridlock and has yet to come close to
resulting in a new governing coalition. With violence
on the rise, we’re told, the planned drawdown of
American troops to the 50,000 level by August is
imperiled. Already, the process, despite repeated
assurances, seems to be proceeding slowly.
And yet, the thought that an American withdrawal
should be held hostage to events among Iraqis all
these years later, seems curious. There’s always some
reason to hesitate -- and it never has to do with us.
Withdrawal would undoubtedly be far less of a
brain-twister if Washington simply committed itself
wholeheartedly to getting out, and if it stopped
convincing itself that the presence of the US military
in distant lands was essential to a better world (and,
of course, to a controlling position on planet Earth).
The annals of history are well stocked with
countries which invaded and occupied other lands and
then left, often ingloriously and under intense
pressure. But they did it.
It’s worth remembering that, in 1975, when the
South Vietnamese Army collapsed and we essentially
fled the country, we abandoned staggering amounts of
equipment there. Helicopters were pushed over the
sides of aircraft carriers to make space; barrels of
money were burned at the US Embassy in Saigon;
military bases as large as anything we’ve built in
Iraq or Afghanistan fell into North Vietnamese hands;
and South Vietnamese allies were deserted in the panic
of the moment. Nonetheless, when there was no choice,
we got out. Not elegantly, not nicely, not
thoughtfully, not helpfully, but out.
Keep in mind that, then too, disaster was predicted
for the planet, should we withdraw precipitously --
including rolling communist takeovers of country after
country, the loss of “credibility” for the American
superpower, and a murderous bloodbath in Vietnam
itself. All were not only predicted by Washington’s
Cassandras, but endlessly cited in the war years as
reasons not to leave. And yet here was the shock that
somehow never registered among all the so-called
lessons of Vietnam: nothing of that sort happened
afterwards.
Today, Vietnam is a reasonably prosperous land with
friendly relations with its former enemy, the United
States. After Vietnam, no other “dominos” fell and
there was no bloodbath in that country. Of course, it
could have been different -- and elsewhere, sometimes,
it has been. But even when local skies darken, the
world doesn't end.
And here’s the truth of the matter: the world won’t
end, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in the
United States, if we end our wars and withdraw. The
sky won’t fall, even if the U.S. gets out reasonably
quickly, even if subsequently blood is spilled and
things don’t go well in either country.
We got our troops there remarkably quickly. We’re
quite capable of removing them at a similar pace. We
could, that is, leave. There are, undoubtedly, better
and worse ways of doing this, ways that would further
penalize the societies we’ve invaded, and ways that
might be of some use to them, but either way we could
go.
- A brief history of American withdrawal
Of course, there’s a small problem here. All
evidence indicates that Washington doesn’t want to
withdraw -- not really, not from either region. It has
no interest in divesting itself of the global control-
and-influence business, or of the military-power
racket. That’s hardly surprising since we’re talking
about a great imperial power and control (or at least
imagined control) over the planet’s strategic oil
lands.
And then there’s another factor to consider: habit.
Over the decades, Washington has gotten used to
staying. The U.S. has long been big on arriving, but
not much for departure. After all, 65 years later,
striking numbers of American forces are still
garrisoning the two major defeated nations of World
War II, Germany and Japan. We still have about three
dozen military bases on the modest-sized Japanese
island of Okinawa, and are at this very moment
fighting tooth and nail, diplomatically speaking, not
to be forced to abandon one of them. The Korean War
was suspended in an armistice 57 years ago and, again,
striking numbers of American troops still garrison
South Korea.
Similarly, to skip a few decades, after the Serbian
air campaign of the late 1990s, the U.S. built-up the
enormous Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo with its seven-mile
perimeter, and we’re still there. After Gulf War I,
the US either built or built up military bases and
other facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman,
and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, as well as the
British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
And it’s never stopped building up its facilities
throughout the Gulf region. In this sense, leaving
Iraq, to the extent we do, is not quite as significant
a matter as sometimes imagined, strategically
speaking. It’s not as if the US military were taking
off for Dubuque.
A history of American withdrawal would prove a
brief book indeed. Other than Vietnam, the U.S.
military withdrew from the Philippines under the
pressure of “people power” (and a local volcano) in
the early 1990s, and from Saudi Arabia, in part under
the pressure of Osama bin Laden. In both countries,
however, it has retained or regained a foothold in
recent years. President Ronald Reagan pulled American
troops out of Lebanon after a devastating 1983 suicide
truck bombing of a Marines barracks there, and the
president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, functionally
expelled the U.S. from Manta Air Base in 2008 when he
refused to renew its lease. ("We'll renew the base on
one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami --
an Ecuadorian base," he said slyly.) And there were a
few places like the island of Grenada, invaded in
1983, that simply mattered too little to Washington to
stay.
Unfortunately, whatever the administration, the
urge to stay has seemed a constant. It’s evidently
written into Washington’s DNA and embedded deep in
domestic politics where sure-to-come "cut and run"
charges and blame for "losing" Iraq or Afghanistan
would cow any administration. Not surprisingly, when
you look behind the main news stories in both Iraq and
Afghanistan, you can see signs of the urge to stay
everywhere.
In Iraq, while President Obama has committed
himself to the withdrawal of American troops by the
end of 2011, plenty of wiggle room remains. Already,
the New York Times reports, General Ray Odierno,
commander of U.S. forces in that country, is lobbying
Washington to establish “an Office of Military
Cooperation within the American Embassy in Baghdad to
sustain the relationship after... Dec. 31, 2011.” (“We
have to stay committed to this past 2011,” Odierno is
quoted as saying. “I believe the administration knows
that. I believe that they have to do that in order to
see this through to the end. It’s important to
recognize that just because US soldiers leave, Iraq is
not finished.”)
If you want a true gauge of American withdrawal,
keep your eye on the mega-bases the Pentagon has built
in Iraq since 2003, especially gigantic Balad Air Base
(since the Iraqis will not, by the end of 2011, have a
real air force of their own), and perhaps Camp
Victory, the vast, ill-named U.S. base and command
center abutting Baghdad International Airport on the
outskirts of the capital. Keep an eye as well on the
104-acre US embassy built along the Tigris River in
downtown Baghdad. At present, it’s the largest
“embassy” on the planet and represents something new
in “diplomacy,” being essentially a
military-base-cum-command-and-control-center for the
region. It is clearly going nowhere, withdrawal or
not.
In fact, recent reports indicate that in the near
future “embassy” personnel, including police trainers,
military officials connected to that Office of
Coordination, spies, U.S. advisors attached to various
Iraqi ministries, and the like, may be more than
doubled from the present staggering staff level of
1,400 to 3,000 or above. (The embassy, by the way, has
requested $1,875 billion for its operations in fiscal
year 2011, and that was assuming a staffing level of
only 1,400.) Realistically, as long as such an embassy
remains at Ground Zero Iraq, we will not have
withdrawn from that country.
Similarly, we have a giant U.S. embassy in Kabul
(being expanded) and another mega-embassy being built
in the Pakistani capital Islamabad. These are not,
rest assured, signs of departure. Nor is the fact that
in Afghanistan and Pakistan, everything war-connected
seems to be surging, even if in ways often not noticed
here. President Obama’s surge decision has been
described largely in terms of those 30,000-odd extra
troops he’s sending in, not in terms of the shadow
army of 30,000 or more extra private contractors
taking on various military roles (and dying off the
books in striking numbers); nor the extra contingent
of CIA types and the escalating drone war they are
overseeing in the Pakistani tribal borderlands; nor
the quiet doubling of Special Operations units
assigned to hunt down the Taliban leadership; nor the
extra State department officials for the “civilian
surge”; nor, for instance, the special $10 million
“pool” of funds that up to 120 U.S. Special Operations
forces, already in those borderlands training the
paramilitary Pakistani Frontier Corps, may soon have
available to spend “winning hearts and minds.”
Perhaps it’s historically accurate to say that
great powers generally leave home, head elsewhere
armed to the teeth, and then experience the urge to
stay. With our trillion-dollar-plus wars and yearly
trillion-dollar-plus national-security budget, there’s
a lot at stake in staying, and undoubtedly in fighting
two, three, many Afghanistans (and Iraqs) in the years
to come.
Sooner or later, we will leave both Iraq and
Afghanistan. It’s too late in the history of this
planet to occupy them forever and a day. Better
sooner.
-- Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of
the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author
of
The End of Victory Culture, a history
of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel,
The Last Days of Publishing. His
latest book,
The American Way of War (Haymarket
Books), will be published in June.
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