[Peace-discuss] Obama's AfPak war

[C. G. Estabrook]

[On yesterday's Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman interviewed Nir Rosen, whom Noam 
Chomsky calls "one of the most astute and knowledgeable correspondents in the 
region." Rosen says that Obama "needs to prove, as a Democrat, that he too can 
kill brown people." --CGE]


AMY GOODMAN: ...increasing the number of US troops in Afghanistan is an issue 
both Senator Obama and Senator McCain agree on. I want to turn to excerpts from 
last month’s presidential debate at the University of Mississippi.

       SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I think we need more troops. I’ve been saying that for 
over a year now. And I think that we have to do it as quickly as possible, 
because it’s been acknowledged by the commanders on the ground the situation is 
getting worse, not better.

       SEN. JOHN McCAIN: And, yes, Senator Obama calls for more troops, but what 
he doesn’t understand, it’s got to be a new strategy, the same strategy that he 
condemned in Iraq, that’s going to have to be employed in Afghanistan.


AMY GOODMAN: Investigative journalist Nir Rosen has just returned from 
Afghanistan, where he was with the Taliban, traveled far from capital city of 
Kabul, “Afghanistan’s version of the Green Zone.” He doesn’t think the US or 
NATO forces are winning in Afghanistan. His latest article for Rolling Stone, 
coming out October 30th, is called “How We Lost the War We Won: A Journey into 
Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan.” Nir Rosen joins us in the firehouse studio.

Welcome, Nir.

NIR ROSEN: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you were, in a sense, embedded with the Taliban for a few days 
in Afghanistan. Where were you, and what was it like?

NIR ROSEN: Well, two Taliban commanders from Ghazni Province picked me up in 
Kabul and drove me down south to Ghazni, which is about 100-120 miles south of 
Kabul. You leave Kabul, you go through the province of Vardak, and then you get 
to Ghazni. And the fact that two Taliban commanders could pick me up in Kabul 
and drive me down in itself says something.

But as soon as we left Kabul Province and we were in Vardak, we were basically 
in a war zone. The famous Kabul to Kandahar highway, which was a hallmark of the 
coalition success of reconstruction in Afghanistan, is utterly destroyed. 
Craters have just torn the road to pieces all the way down. These are craters 
resulting from car—from IEDs, from roadside bombs, targeting supply vehicles, 
logistical supply trucks that provide supplies for the Americans and the 
British. And just the trucks are littering both sides of the highway all the way 
down. Within about thirty minutes of leaving Kabul, we were in the middle of a 
war zone, and Taliban were fighting the Americans. And we had to wait a few 
hundred meters away with a few hundred other people for the fighting to stop. A 
little bit further down the road, there was more fighting.

And then, once we got to the province of Ghazni, we were basically in 
Taliban-controlled territory. They have checkpoints there during the day, where 
they stop cars and take people out, kill them if they want to. They conduct 
daytime patrols in their villages with rocket-propelled grenades on their backs, 
with fairly large groups, some six to eight, ten people with machine guns. They 
conduct trials, adjudicating disputes between farmers, etc. They execute spies. 
They arrested a young man when I was there for being seen walking with a girl. I 
mean, they feel extremely confident and comfortable even in the day, as if there 
were no Americans in the country.

And this kind of control and comfort among the Taliban extends really all the 
way to Kabul’s backyard. And there are brazen attacks increasingly inside Kabul 
Province and around it, letters of intimidation distributed just seven miles 
outside of Kabul. They are creeping closer and closer to Kabul. Now, they can 
never actually take the capital city, as long as the Americans or the 
international forces are there, but in a way, they don’t have to. They control 
the countryside. They’ve managed to create a power vacuum. The government no 
longer exists in much of the country. People no longer trust the government. 
People fear the police at least as much as they fear the Taliban. It just seems 
irreversible, this trend of the Taliban take over.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “how we lost the war we won”?

NIR ROSEN: Well, it wasn’t my title. But this was obviously a battle that was 
very quickly over initially in November 2001. I mean, the Taliban were quickly 
dispatched. But they weren’t exactly hunted and destroyed, nor was their senior 
leadership. They fled to Pakistan and eventually reestablished themselves. It’s 
just shocking that this could have actually been a fairly easy country to deal 
with. The destruction, the misery, the despair was so utter that you didn’t have 
the same initial hostility to foreign forces that you might have seen in Iraq. 
With a little bit more of attention with—if they hadn’t focused on the war in 
Iraq, if they had focused more reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, if they 
had not allowed the warlords to take over from an early period, then perhaps 
Afghanistan could have been a relative success.

AMY GOODMAN: Tonight is the final debate between the major party presidential 
candidates, Obama and McCain. One thing they do agree on is there should be a 
surge in Afghanistan. What do you think that means?

NIR ROSEN: Well, there’s a silly myth that still exists more and more, even 
among the media, that there was a surge in Iraq, increase in Americans troops, 
brought peace to Iraq. The major—as a seminal event that changed things in Iraq 
was a cleansing of Sunnis from Baghdad. Just—you have two ways of winning a 
counterinsurgency: hearts and minds, which rarely succeeds, or you can follow 
the Russian approach in Chechnya, get rid of the population. The Shias did that. 
They got rid of many of the Sunnis of Baghdad and elsewhere, really forcing them 
to the negotiating table and forcing them to cooperate with the Americans. The 
surge didn’t succeed in Iraq.

And an increase in troops in Afghanistan will only be more counterproductive. 
You’re going to kill more civilians. You’re going to have more engagements with 
the so-called enemy. You’re going to call in more air support. More civilians 
will be killed as a result of that.

And it’s unfortunate that—Obama, of course, one of his major platforms is to 
withdraw from Iraq. That’s the bad war; he needs the good war. So Afghanistan 
now is the good war. He needs to prove, as a Democrat, that he too can kill 
brown people. I think that’s what it comes down to, that we’re not weak; we can 
kill foreigners, too. All you’ll do, if you increase the troops in Afghanistan, 
is alienate more of the population. Eventually—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, he’s saying that’s where the war on terror should be waged.

NIR ROSEN: Well, even if you turned Afghanistan into Sweden, just made it some 
kind of peaceful paradise, you still have Pakistan. Pakistan, in a way, is the 
reason we went to war in Iraq. It has nuclear weapons, weapons of mass 
destruction, it has al-Qaeda. And it has a huge support base for the Taliban and 
an endless supply of young Pashtun men and Punjabis and others, who will go into 
Afghanistan to fight. So it doesn’t matter what happens in Afghanistan, as long 
as Pakistan exists as it does.

So you need to rethink your entire approach and perhaps even look at the 
underlying causes. Why are Muslims, some of them at least, angry at the US? Just 
continuing to kill people obviously won’t work. You’re going to need a 
revolution of your entire foreign policy, and this is unlikely to occur. But if 
you wanted to fight the war on terror, then you would have to address the 
underlying causes. And in the end, al-Qaeda isn’t such a big threat. It’s tragic 
that they killed 3,000 people on September 11. They haven’t had any major 
successes before or after, and it’s not—that’s a relative pinprick for a 
superpower like the US. It doesn’t really threaten the American status or the 
world order. I think we need a little bit of proportion when it comes to how we 
view al-Qaeda.

AMY GOODMAN: So what do you think needs to happen in Afghanistan?

NIR ROSEN: I think that international troops should withdraw, or certainly 
change their approach in terms of pursuing the Taliban. I think negotiations 
with the Taliban are the only hope of any kind of peaceful solution.

And what I saw when I was with Taliban commanders is that they are far more 
pragmatic than they were in the ’90s. Their attitudes towards women’s 
education—haven’t exactly become feminists, but they accept that women should be 
able to work and go to school. They accept that they should be able—that they 
should negotiate with the Afghan army and security forces when the foreigners 
leave. Many of them weren’t calling for Mullah Omar to come back. They 
disapproved of suicide bombings, a lot of the guys I was with. These guys were 
watching TV, even Indian soap operas, which the Taliban would have been very 
upset about in the past.

AMY GOODMAN: Nir, you’re saying something most people aren’t, that there’s less 
violence in Iraq, not because of the surge, but because of ethnic cleansing. Do 
you see the same thing happening in Afghanistan?

NIR ROSEN: Well, it’s a very different situation. Iraq was a civil war. And 
Afghanistan can be pushed toward civil war. The Taliban is becoming more and 
more, in some ways, a representative of Pashtun nationalism. And if they proceed 
with the elections, which they’re trying to have in Afghanistan, I think you may 
see the country going in that direction of civil war, because you just cannot 
have election registration or actual elections taking place in Pashtun areas. 
People who go to register will be killed. People who go to vote will be killed, 
meaning Pashtuns won’t be able to vote, just as Sunnis couldn’t vote in Iraq. 
And that caused a civil war eventually, Sunni alienation in Iraq. If the 
Pashtun, as a much larger group in Afghanistan, aren’t able to feel 
enfranchised, they too—I think you’ll see some kind of clash between Tajiks and 
Pashtuns.

AMY GOODMAN: Nir Rosen, I want to thank you for being with us.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/15/how_we_lost_the_war_we