A 9/11 Reality Check
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: Sept. 9, 2009
What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small
nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan as well? How many
millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation? Would we
still be a free society, or would Dick Cheney have attained the power of a
demented king, having moved on from snooping on our phone calls and outing
honest CIA agents to destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law?
As assaults on a society go, the 9/11 attacks, which left 3,000 dead and are
sure to be described in this anniversary week as being among the greatest of
historical outrages, were something less than that, given the world's
experience with the ravages of war. The countless Russians and the 6 million
Jews killed by those so finely educated Germans come to mind. The 3.4
million Vietnamese, mostly rice farmers, whom Robert McNamara admitted to
having helped kill with his carpet-bombing of their country, are a forgotten
footnote. Yet we who have never experienced such carnage on our home front
all too easily poke out tens of thousands of eyes for each lost one of our
own.
Surely two planes crashing into office buildings and another hitting the
Pentagon doesn't compare to the leveling of every major city in Japan with
conventional bombing, capped off by the mass murder of hundreds of thousands
more at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking of eyes lost, mark the words of
Hiroshima's mayor two years ago: "That fateful summer, 8:15 AM. The roar of
a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then
suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast-silence-hell on Earth. The eyes of
young girls watching the parachute were melted."
We assumed that the Japanese people would readily forgive us and, having
been raised in the spirit of total obedience to their emperor, they
accommodated our occupation quite well, even injecting industrial-grade
silicon into their women's breasts to satisfy the erotic appetites of our
soldiers.
Americans who blithely claim the moral high ground with every pledge of
allegiance to a flag that, because it is American, is assumed to have never
been sullied by imperial greed or moral contradiction expect no less than
instant and full forgiveness for our "mistakes." Only last month, four
decades after he led the massacre of 500 villagers in My Lai, Vietnam, did
former Army Lt. William Calley express "regret" for his crimes. He served no
time in prison for the point-blank shooting of toddlers, thanks to the
commutation of his sentence by Richard Nixon, who might have been
anticipating his own need for a presidential pardon.
In blind and wrathful retaliation for 9/11 we wreaked havoc on Iraq, a
nation that our then-president knew had not attacked us, and we continue to
slaughter peasants in Afghanistan who aren't able to find Manhattan on a
map.
We, a people whose nation has never suffered a long and widespread
occupation, easily gave vent to our most barbaric impulses, assuming the
absolute right to arrest and torture anyone anywhere in the world without
revealing his identity, let alone respecting a single one of those God-given
rights that we claim for ourselves alone. And even when we identify the few
we hold responsible for the attacks on our soil, we refuse them public and
fair trials even after years of torturing them.
But we do have a saving grace for our experiment in democracy-although
unfortunately it did not exist in the Supreme Court or Congress as a barrier
to an imperial vice presidency. It is the power of the lone whistle-blower
of conscience, occasionally given voice in what remains of our free press
and which can influence presidential elections, as happened quite
dramatically this last time around. There are those like Joe Wilson, who
exposed presidential fraud masquerading as national security concern over
bogus Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, and more recently the
truth-telling of Ali H. Soufan, a former FBI agent and lead interrogator of
terrorists.
In Sunday's New York Times, Soufan, who was involved in obtaining much
reliable information from prisoners before they were tortured, observed that
the recently released memos cited by Cheney to back his argument that
torture was efficient actually "fail to show that the techniques stopped
even a single imminent threat of terrorism."
So, Cheney is again proved wrong, but if there had been a larger attack on
9/11, I doubt whether many free souls would be around now to tell him so.
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06kristof.html?ref=opinion
The Afghanistan Abyss
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Op-Ed: September 5, 2009
President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops
to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That
would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former
intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to
warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.
The group's concern - dead right, in my view - is that sending more American
troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize
local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels.
"Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in
the Pashtun areas is the problem," the group said in a statement to me. "The
more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the
opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition
and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct.
"The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many
fine American troops with no positive outcome," the statement said.
The group includes Howard Hart, a former Central Intelligence Agency station
chief in Pakistan; David Miller, a former ambassador and National Security
Council official; William J. Olson, a counterinsurgency scholar at the
National Defense University; and another C.I.A. veteran who does not want
his name published but who spent 12 years in the region, was station chief
in Kabul at the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and later
headed the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.
"We share a concern that the country is driving over a cliff," Mr. Miller
said.
Mr. Hart, who helped organize the anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s,
cautions that Americans just don't understand the toughness, determination
and fighting skills of the Pashtun tribes. He adds that if the U.S.
escalates the war, the result will be radicalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan
and further instability there - possibly even the collapse of Pakistan.
These experts are not people who crave publicity; I had to persuade them to
go public with their concerns. And their views are widely shared among
others who also know Afghanistan well.
"We've bitten off more than we can chew; we're setting ourselves up for
failure," said Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat who teaches at
Harvard when he is not running a large aid program in Afghanistan. Mr.
Stewart describes the American military strategy in Afghanistan as
"nonsense."
I'm writing about these concerns because I share them. I'm also troubled
because officials in Washington seem to make decisions based on a simplistic
caricature of the Taliban that doesn't match what I've found in my reporting
trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Among the Pashtuns, the population is not neatly divisible into "Taliban" or
"non-Taliban." Rather, the Pashtuns are torn by complex aspirations and
fears.
Many Pashtuns I've interviewed are appalled by the Taliban's periodic
brutality and think they are too extreme; they think they're a little nuts.
But these Pashtuns also admire the Taliban's personal honesty and religious
piety, a contrast to the corruption of so many officials around President
Hamid Karzai.
Some Taliban are hard-core ideologues, but many join the fight because
friends or elders suggest it, because they are avenging the deaths of
relatives in previous fighting, because it's a way to earn money, or because
they want to expel the infidels from their land - particularly because the
foreigners haven't brought the roads, bridges and irrigation projects that
had been anticipated.
Frankly, if a bunch of foreign Muslim troops in turbans showed up in my
hometown in rural Oregon, searching our homes without bringing any obvious
benefit, then we might all take to the hills with our deer rifles as well.
In fairness, the American military has hugely improved its sensitivity, and
some commanders in the field have been superb in building trust with
Afghans. That works. But all commanders can't be superb, and over all, our
increased presence makes Pashtuns more likely to see us as alien occupiers.
That may be why the troop increase this year hasn't calmed things. Instead,
2009 is already the bloodiest year for American troops in Afghanistan - with
four months left to go.
The solution is neither to pull out of Afghanistan nor to double down.
Rather, we need to continue our presence with a lighter military footprint,
limited to training the Afghan forces and helping them hold major cities,
and ensuring that Al Qaeda does not regroup. We must also invest more in
education and agriculture development, for that is a way over time to peel
Pashtuns away from the Taliban.
This would be a muddled, imperfect strategy with frustratingly modest goals,
but it would be sustainable politically and militarily. And it does not
require heavy investments of American and Afghan blood.
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