The Specter of Defeat Haunts Lisbon

By Eric Margolis

U.S. President Barack Obama smiles during a news conference at the NATO Summit in Lisbon November 20, 2010.     REUTERS/Paul Hanna

According to the US government, 41.8 million Americans now receive food stamps. Meanwhile, Washington is spending $7 billion monthly on its nine-year old occupation of Afghanistan, not to mention billions more on trying to build an obedient Afghan army and to pay of Pakistani politicians and general.

Last weekend, the US and its NATO allies met in Lisbon to try to hammer out a contradictory strategy that will keep western troops in Afghanistan indefinitely while assuaging public opinion in North America and Europe that wants the war to end. Most observers failed to note the historical irony that in the 1960s and 70s, Portugal had waged a long, debilitating colonial war to preserve its crumbling African empire that ended up nearly bankrupting the mother nation and ending for good its imperial pretensions.

All the platitudes, doubletalk, synthetic optimism and fudging at the NATO summit could not conceal the fact that for all their soldiers, fighter aircraft, heavy bombers, tanks, helicopter gunships, armies of mercenaries, and wizardly electronic gear, the western powers are being slowly beaten by a bunch of lightly-armed Afghan farmers and mountain tribesmen.

President Barack Obama again painfully showed he is not fully in charge of US foreign policy. His pledge to begin withdrawing some US troops from Afghanistan next July has been scornfully contradicted by US generals and resurgent Congressional Republicans.

Claims by other NATO nations that they will pull out by 2014 must also be taken with much salt. As in Obamas bait and switch in Iraq, the US and its reluctant allies are likely to simply rebrand their combat forces “trainers” and keep them in Kabul propping up the US-installed regime of Hamid Karzai. Remove NATOs garrison and Taliban would be in Kabul in days.

Obama came fresh to Lisbon from groveling before Israels Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, pleaded with Israel for a token three-month freeze on settlement building in exchange for a huge bribe from Washington of advanced US F-35 stealth warplanes, promises of UN vetoes, and raising to $1 billion US arms stockpiled for Israels use.

Israel will likely accept Obamas huge bribe, but with even more sweeteners, and not before rubbing his face in the dirt to show who really calls the shots in US Mideast policy. George H.W. Bush, the last president to tangle with Israel, came out far the worse for the experience and was not re-elected.

Obama appears to want out of the Afghan War, but lacks the courage to implement withdrawal. His final gamble of sending 30,000 more troops into the war has so far failed to produce the hoped-for decisive victory. But powerful pro-war groups, including the Pentagon, the arms industry and rightwing Republicans, are thwarting his attempts to wind down the war.

Those American, Canadian and European politicians who eagerly backed the Afghan War now fear admitting the conflict was a huge waste of lives and treasure. Their political careers hang in the balance.

As a group of Republican congressmen told me in a private meeting in Washington, they dared not oppose the Afghan War lest their political opponents accuse them of treason, betraying the troops, and appeasing terrorism. Having demonized Taliban, who were former US allies, it is now impossible for official Washington to deal with the movement in a rational manner and achieve a sensible negotiated settlement to the conflict.

Rep. Ron Paul is one of the few politicians in Washington who has the courage to tell Americans the hard truth.

While the US heads deeper into war and debt, its dragooned European allies are fed up with what was supposed to have been a limited “police action” to eliminate al-Qaida bases.

Instead, Europe got a full-scale war against Afghanistans Pashtun tribes raising uneasy memories of its 19th-century colonial “pacifications.” This is Britains fifth invasion of Afghanistan.

Frances influential new defense minister, Alain Juppé, openly described the Afghan conflict a “trap” for NATO and demanded an exit strategy.

It took the great Charles DeGaulle to pull a reluctant France out of its ugly Algerian War. America awaits similar courageous leadership to end the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, we get groins searches and dangerous x-rays at US airports.

In a moment of unusual candor, British Defense Chief Gen. Sir David Richards, warned, “NATO now needs to plan for a 30 or 40 year role.” In short, permanent occupation. Its worth recalling that US forces have been implanted in South Korea and Japan since the end of World War II.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai is demanding the US scale back military operations, including night raids and death squads, that inflict heavy civilian casualties. Washington counters that Karzai is mentally unstable.

Americas rational for invading Afghanistan was to destroy al-Qaida. But CIA chief Leon Panetta recently admitted there were no more than 50 al-Qaida operatives left in Afghanistan. The rest no more than few hundred – fled to Pakistan years ago.

So what are 110,000 US troops and 40,000 NATO troops doing in Afghanistan? Certainly not nation-building. Most reports show Afghanistan is in worse poverty and distress than before the US invasion.
While the delegates at Lisbon exchanged toasts and spoke of rebuilding Afghanistan, giant US Army bulldozers, demolition teams and artillery were busy leveling wide swathes of Afghan homes around the Pashtun stronghold, Kandahar. In 2006, US Marines conducted a similar ruthless campaign to crush the rebellious Iraqi city of Falluja, razing a third of it and using white phosphorous shells.

The US is using the same punitive tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq as Israel employs on the occupied West Bank: targeted assassinations, death squads, demolishing buildings or whole neighborhoods. Now, the US is sending heavy tanks to Afghanistan to crush resistance. A proud moment for our republic that recalls Soviet tanks in Budapest in 1956.

The US military establishment is determined the mighty US armed forces must not be defeated by Afghan tribesmen. Defeat in Afghanistan would bring demands for major cuts in the bloated US military, which consumes 50% of world military spending, and ending major arms systems.

Failure in Afghanistan would also threaten the entire NATO alliance.

Europe is slowly re-emerging as a world power, however fitfully and painfully. NATO has been the primary tool of US geopolitical control of Western Europe since the late 1940s. The post-war US-Japan Security Treaty plays a similar role by allowing the US to militarily dominate North Asia.

If the US loses the Afghan War, its reluctant allies would call into question the reason for the alliance. Europe would hasten building an integrated military independent of US control.

Taliban and its allies are not about to defeat the US and its allies on the battlefield, but they already control half of Afghanistan and intend to inflict the death of a thousand cuts on the financially strapped western powers until public opinion demands an end to this pointless conflict.

That is why Afghanistan so unnerves Washingtons right wingers. The defeat of Soviet armies in Afghanistan in 1989 began the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Could the same fate be in store for the American Raj?

[Eric Margolis is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World.]

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