War Without Purpose
By Chris Hedges
July 20, 2009 "Truthdig" -- Al-Qaida could not care less what we do in
Afghanistan. We can bomb Afghan villages, hunt the Taliban in Helmand
province, build a 100,000-strong client Afghan army, stand by passively as
Afghan warlords execute hundreds, maybe thousands, of Taliban prisoners,
build huge, elaborate military bases and send drones to drop bombs on
Pakistan. It will make no difference. The war will not halt the attacks of
Islamic radicals. Terrorist and insurgent groups are not conventional
forces. They do not play by the rules of warfare our commanders have drilled
into them in war colleges and service academies. And these underground
groups are protean, changing shape and color as they drift from one failed
state to the next, plan a terrorist attack and then fade back into the
shadows. We are fighting with the wrong tools. We are fighting the wrong
people. We are on the wrong side of history. And we will be defeated in
Afghanistan as we will be in Iraq.
The cost of the Afghanistan war is rising. Tens of thousands of Afghan
civilians have been killed or wounded. July has been the deadliest month in
the war for NATO combatants, with at least 50 troops, including 26
Americans, killed. Roadside bomb attacks on coalition forces are swelling
the number of wounded and killed. In June, the tally of incidents involving
roadside bombs, also called improvised explosive devices (IEDs), hit 736, a
record for the fourth straight month; the number had risen from 361 in March
to 407 in April and to 465 in May. The decision by President Barack Obama to
send 21,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan has increased our presence
to 57,000 American troops. The total is expected to rise to at least 68,000
by the end of 2009. It will only mean more death, expanded fighting and
greater futility.
We have stumbled into a confusing mix of armed groups that include criminal
gangs, drug traffickers, Pashtun and Tajik militias, kidnapping rings, death
squads and mercenaries. We are embroiled in a civil war. The Pashtuns, who
make up most of the Taliban and are the traditional rulers of Afghanistan,
are battling the Tajiks and Uzbeks, who make up the Northern Alliance,
which, with foreign help, won the civil war in 2001. The old Northern
Alliance now dominates the corrupt and incompetent government. It is deeply
hated. And it will fall with us.
We are losing the war in Afghanistan. When we invaded the country eight
years ago the Taliban controlled about 75 percent of Afghanistan. Today its
reach has crept back to about half the country. The Taliban runs the poppy
trade, which brings in an annual income of about $300 million a year. It
brazenly carries out attacks in Kabul, the capital, and foreigners, fearing
kidnapping, rarely walk the streets of most Afghan cities. It is
life-threatening to go into the countryside, where 80 percent of all
Afghanis live, unless escorted by NATO troops. And intrepid reporters can
interview Taliban officials in downtown coffee shops in Kabul. Osama bin
Laden has, to the amusement of much of the rest of the world, become the
Where's Waldo of the Middle East. Take away the bullets and the bombs and
you have a Gilbert and Sullivan farce.
No one seems to be able to articulate why we are in Afghanistan. Is it to
hunt down bin Laden and al-Qaida? Is it to consolidate progress? Have we
declared war on the Taliban? Are we building democracy? Are we fighting
terrorists there so we do not have to fight them here? Are we "liberating"
the women of Afghanistan? The absurdity of the questions, used as
thought-terminating clichés, exposes the absurdity of the war. The confusion
of purpose mirrors the confusion on the ground. We don't know what we are
doing.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. and NATO-led troops in
Afghanistan, announced recently that coalition forces must make a "cultural
shift" in Afghanistan. He said they should move away from their normal
combat orientation and toward protecting civilians. He understands that
airstrikes, which have killed hundreds of civilians, are a potent recruiting
tool for the Taliban. The goal is lofty but the reality of war defies its
implementation. NATO forces will always call in close air support when they
are under attack. This is what troops under fire do. They do not have the
luxury of canvassing the local population first. They ask questions later.
The May 4 aerial attack on Farah province, which killed dozens of civilians,
violated standing orders about airstrikes. So did the air assault in
Kandahar province last week in which four civilians were killed and 13 were
wounded. The NATO strike targeted a village in the Shawalikot district.
Wounded villagers at a hospital in the provincial capital told AP that
attack helicopters started bombarding their homes at about 10:30 p.m.
Wednesday. One man said his 3-year-old granddaughter was killed. Combat
creates its own rules, and civilians are almost always the losers.
The offensive by NATO forces in Helmand province will follow the usual
scenario laid out by military commanders, who know much about weapons
systems and conventional armies and little about the nuances of irregular
warfare. The Taliban will withdraw, probably to sanctuaries in Pakistan. We
will declare the operation a success. Our force presence will be reduced.
And the Taliban will creep back into the zones we will have "cleansed." The
roadside bombs will continue to exact their deadly toll. Soldiers and
Marines, frustrated at trying to fight an elusive and often invisible enemy,
will lash out with greater fury at phantoms and continue to increase the
numbers of civilian dead. It is a game as old as insurgency itself, and yet
each generation of warriors thinks it has finally found the magic key to
victory.
We have ensured that Iraq and Afghanistan are failed states. Next on our
list appears to be Pakistan. Pakistan, like Iraq and Afghanistan, is also a
bizarre construct of Western powers that drew arbitrary and artificial
borders, ones the clans and ethnic groups divided by these lines ignore. As
Pakistan has unraveled, its army has sought legitimacy in militant Islam. It
was the Pakistani military that created the Taliban. The Pakistanis
determined how the billions in U.S. aid to the resistance during the war
against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was allocated. And nearly all
of it went to the most extremist wings of the Afghan resistance movement.
The Taliban, in Pakistan's eyes, is not only an effective weapon to defeat
foreign invaders, whether Russian or American, but is a bulwark against
India. Muslim radicals in Kabul are never going to build an alliance with
India against Pakistan. And India, not Afghanistan, is Pakistan's primary
concern. Pakistan, no matter how many billions we give to it, will always
nurture and protect the Taliban, which it knows is going to inherit
Afghanistan. And the government's well-publicized battle with the Taliban in
the Swat Valley of Pakistan, rather than a new beginning, is part of a
choreographed charade that does nothing to break the unholy alliance.
The only way to defeat terrorist groups is to isolate them within their own
societies. This requires wooing the population away from radicals. It is a
political, economic and cultural war. The terrible algebra of military
occupation and violence is always counterproductive to this kind of battle.
It always creates more insurgents than it kills. It always legitimizes
terrorism. And while we squander resources and lives, the real enemy,
al-Qaida, has moved on to build networks in Indonesia, Pakistan, Somalia,
Sudan and Morocco and depressed Muslim communities such as those in France's
Lyon and London's Brixton area. There is no shortage of backwaters and
broken patches of the Earth where al-Qaida can hide and operate. It does not
need Afghanistan, and neither do we.
By Chris Hedges
July 20, 2009 "Truthdig" -- Al-Qaida could not care less what we do in
Afghanistan. We can bomb Afghan villages, hunt the Taliban in Helmand
province, build a 100,000-strong client Afghan army, stand by passively as
Afghan warlords execute hundreds, maybe thousands, of Taliban prisoners,
build huge, elaborate military bases and send drones to drop bombs on
Pakistan. It will make no difference. The war will not halt the attacks of
Islamic radicals. Terrorist and insurgent groups are not conventional
forces. They do not play by the rules of warfare our commanders have drilled
into them in war colleges and service academies. And these underground
groups are protean, changing shape and color as they drift from one failed
state to the next, plan a terrorist attack and then fade back into the
shadows. We are fighting with the wrong tools. We are fighting the wrong
people. We are on the wrong side of history. And we will be defeated in
Afghanistan as we will be in Iraq.
The cost of the Afghanistan war is rising. Tens of thousands of Afghan
civilians have been killed or wounded. July has been the deadliest month in
the war for NATO combatants, with at least 50 troops, including 26
Americans, killed. Roadside bomb attacks on coalition forces are swelling
the number of wounded and killed. In June, the tally of incidents involving
roadside bombs, also called improvised explosive devices (IEDs), hit 736, a
record for the fourth straight month; the number had risen from 361 in March
to 407 in April and to 465 in May. The decision by President Barack Obama to
send 21,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan has increased our presence
to 57,000 American troops. The total is expected to rise to at least 68,000
by the end of 2009. It will only mean more death, expanded fighting and
greater futility.
We have stumbled into a confusing mix of armed groups that include criminal
gangs, drug traffickers, Pashtun and Tajik militias, kidnapping rings, death
squads and mercenaries. We are embroiled in a civil war. The Pashtuns, who
make up most of the Taliban and are the traditional rulers of Afghanistan,
are battling the Tajiks and Uzbeks, who make up the Northern Alliance,
which, with foreign help, won the civil war in 2001. The old Northern
Alliance now dominates the corrupt and incompetent government. It is deeply
hated. And it will fall with us.
We are losing the war in Afghanistan. When we invaded the country eight
years ago the Taliban controlled about 75 percent of Afghanistan. Today its
reach has crept back to about half the country. The Taliban runs the poppy
trade, which brings in an annual income of about $300 million a year. It
brazenly carries out attacks in Kabul, the capital, and foreigners, fearing
kidnapping, rarely walk the streets of most Afghan cities. It is
life-threatening to go into the countryside, where 80 percent of all
Afghanis live, unless escorted by NATO troops. And intrepid reporters can
interview Taliban officials in downtown coffee shops in Kabul. Osama bin
Laden has, to the amusement of much of the rest of the world, become the
Where's Waldo of the Middle East. Take away the bullets and the bombs and
you have a Gilbert and Sullivan farce.
No one seems to be able to articulate why we are in Afghanistan. Is it to
hunt down bin Laden and al-Qaida? Is it to consolidate progress? Have we
declared war on the Taliban? Are we building democracy? Are we fighting
terrorists there so we do not have to fight them here? Are we "liberating"
the women of Afghanistan? The absurdity of the questions, used as
thought-terminating clichés, exposes the absurdity of the war. The confusion
of purpose mirrors the confusion on the ground. We don't know what we are
doing.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. and NATO-led troops in
Afghanistan, announced recently that coalition forces must make a "cultural
shift" in Afghanistan. He said they should move away from their normal
combat orientation and toward protecting civilians. He understands that
airstrikes, which have killed hundreds of civilians, are a potent recruiting
tool for the Taliban. The goal is lofty but the reality of war defies its
implementation. NATO forces will always call in close air support when they
are under attack. This is what troops under fire do. They do not have the
luxury of canvassing the local population first. They ask questions later.
The May 4 aerial attack on Farah province, which killed dozens of civilians,
violated standing orders about airstrikes. So did the air assault in
Kandahar province last week in which four civilians were killed and 13 were
wounded. The NATO strike targeted a village in the Shawalikot district.
Wounded villagers at a hospital in the provincial capital told AP that
attack helicopters started bombarding their homes at about 10:30 p.m.
Wednesday. One man said his 3-year-old granddaughter was killed. Combat
creates its own rules, and civilians are almost always the losers.
The offensive by NATO forces in Helmand province will follow the usual
scenario laid out by military commanders, who know much about weapons
systems and conventional armies and little about the nuances of irregular
warfare. The Taliban will withdraw, probably to sanctuaries in Pakistan. We
will declare the operation a success. Our force presence will be reduced.
And the Taliban will creep back into the zones we will have "cleansed." The
roadside bombs will continue to exact their deadly toll. Soldiers and
Marines, frustrated at trying to fight an elusive and often invisible enemy,
will lash out with greater fury at phantoms and continue to increase the
numbers of civilian dead. It is a game as old as insurgency itself, and yet
each generation of warriors thinks it has finally found the magic key to
victory.
We have ensured that Iraq and Afghanistan are failed states. Next on our
list appears to be Pakistan. Pakistan, like Iraq and Afghanistan, is also a
bizarre construct of Western powers that drew arbitrary and artificial
borders, ones the clans and ethnic groups divided by these lines ignore. As
Pakistan has unraveled, its army has sought legitimacy in militant Islam. It
was the Pakistani military that created the Taliban. The Pakistanis
determined how the billions in U.S. aid to the resistance during the war
against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was allocated. And nearly all
of it went to the most extremist wings of the Afghan resistance movement.
The Taliban, in Pakistan's eyes, is not only an effective weapon to defeat
foreign invaders, whether Russian or American, but is a bulwark against
India. Muslim radicals in Kabul are never going to build an alliance with
India against Pakistan. And India, not Afghanistan, is Pakistan's primary
concern. Pakistan, no matter how many billions we give to it, will always
nurture and protect the Taliban, which it knows is going to inherit
Afghanistan. And the government's well-publicized battle with the Taliban in
the Swat Valley of Pakistan, rather than a new beginning, is part of a
choreographed charade that does nothing to break the unholy alliance.
The only way to defeat terrorist groups is to isolate them within their own
societies. This requires wooing the population away from radicals. It is a
political, economic and cultural war. The terrible algebra of military
occupation and violence is always counterproductive to this kind of battle.
It always creates more insurgents than it kills. It always legitimizes
terrorism. And while we squander resources and lives, the real enemy,
al-Qaida, has moved on to build networks in Indonesia, Pakistan, Somalia,
Sudan and Morocco and depressed Muslim communities such as those in France's
Lyon and London's Brixton area. There is no shortage of backwaters and
broken patches of the Earth where al-Qaida can hide and operate. It does not
need Afghanistan, and neither do we.
Subject: [PDLA] See Mimi Kennedy's New Anti-War Film - In the Loop - Opens Fri., July 24 at the Landmark Theater in West LA
IN THE LOOP
A New Anti-War Film
Starring James Gandolfini & Mimi Kennedy
Opens Friday, July 24th
THE LANDMARK THEATRE
10850 West Pico Blvd., Los Angeles 90064
10850 West Pico Blvd., Los Angeles 90064
It's opening weekend for In The Loop--a great anti-war film that has been compared to Dr. Strangelove in depicting war as madness. Pre-publicity and reviews have been sensational.
IN THE LOOP is a smart comedy and Sundance Film Festival hit from the acclaimed team behind the award-winning BBC TV comedy series ALAN PARTRIDGE and THE THICK OF IT. The film is drawing instant comparisons to some of the great political and absurdist comedies such as DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, WAG THE DOG, THANK YOU FOR SMOKING and MONTY PYTHON.
With razor-sharp, truly laugh-out-loud dialogue the film pokes fun at the absurdity and ineptitude of our highest leaders. With everyone looking out for number one, and the fate of the free world at stake (but apparently incidental), the hilarious ensemble cast of characters bumbles its way through Machiavellian political dealings, across continents, and toward comic resolutions that are unforeseeable.
With razor-sharp, truly laugh-out-loud dialogue the film pokes fun at the absurdity and ineptitude of our highest leaders. With everyone looking out for number one, and the fate of the free world at stake (but apparently incidental), the hilarious ensemble cast of characters bumbles its way through Machiavellian political dealings, across continents, and toward comic resolutions that are unforeseeable.
ACCLAIM
"NOT TO BE MISSED! THE GENUINE GOODS. A great performance by James Gandolfini."
Stephen Rebello, Playboy
"FAST AND FURIOUSLY FUNNY. YOU WILL LAUGH LOUD AND OFTEN. Proves that smart and funny can exist in the same movie, even in summer."
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
"SCATHINGLY FUNNY...A SMART SOPHISTICATED COMEDY."
Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
"FEATURES SOME OF THE MOST CREATIVE OBSCENITIES WE'VE EVER HEARD."
Dave Itzkoff, The New York Times
"A VICIOUSLY FUNNY POLITICAL SATIRE."
Stephen Holden, The New York Times
"WE DEFY YOU NOT TO QUOTE IT AD INFINITUM."
David Fear, Time Out New York
"THE SMARTEST COMEDY THAT I'VE YET SEEN IN 2009. The language is amongst the most skillful and creative use of vulgarity that I've seen in a sustained storyline that also managed to be smart whilst being crude."
Harry Knowles, Ain't It Cool News
"PROFANELY FUNNY."
David Fear, Time Out New York
"HILARIOUS. An acidly funny satire about politics and pomposity. The zing and sting of the film's dialogue harks back to screwball comedy, but the frequent flourishes of profanity throughout suggest its own genre: screw-you-ball."
Melissa Anderson, The Village Voice
"HILARIOUS, BRILLIANTLY SCATHING SATIRE."
Ben Kenigsberg, Time Out Chicago
"SCABROUSLY FUNNY."
Dennis Harvey, SF Bay Gaurdian
Mimi Kennedy
Mimi is an actress and activist. She was a charter member of Artists United to Win Without War, and a leading supporter of Dennis Kucinich's antiwar presidential campaign in 2004. She has worked on human rights, environmental and labor issues, and studied nonviolent social action with Rev. James Lawson. Perhaps best known for her role as Dharma's mom on TV's "Dharma and Greg," Kennedy has appeared widely on TV, the stage, and in movies such as "Erin Brockovich" and "Pump Up The Volume." Currently she stars on screen in the political tragi-comedy "In the Loop." She has also appeared on Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect." Her mid-life memoir was titled, "Taken to the Stage: The Education of an Actress."
IN THE LOOP
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