[Peace-discuss] From Palestine to Pakistan

[C. G. Estabrook]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re here in the new Printing Press studios and joining us in New 
York is independent journalist and fellow at the New York University Center on 
Law and Security, Nir Rosen. He has covered Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. His 
latest articles cover the current state of the U.S. occupations in both 
countries, Iraq and Afghanistan. They appear in the Boston Review.

Your thoughts after the West Point address of President Obama announcing the 
surge of 30,000 troops? Though that is not it, because his General Stanley 
McChrystal wanted 40,000, he is pushing for NATO to supply the rest and they are 
saying it will be in the range of 5000. Of course we do not know the military 
contractors that will accompany all of these soldiers.

NIR ROSEN: Well, it is really no surprise. Even if Obama hadn’t wanted to 
escalate the troops, he is under so much political pressure that he would have 
had to, but I would have at least liked to hear the words Kashmir and Palestine.

If we are talking about Al Qaeda and the whole reason for why we are in 
Afghanistan allegedly is this threat from Al Qaeda which has been severely 
exaggerated, then at least understand their motives. Their chief motives are the 
Indian occupation of Kashmir, the Israeli and American backed occupation of 
Palestine. These are the motives. If your goal is to weaken Al Qaeda, understand 
their motives, address their grievances. This is not some James Bond villain the 
wants to attack the U.S. for no reason. These people who have grievances, the 
same grievances that have been troubling people around the world for decades. 
They were once explained using a secular Marxist nationalist discourse, today it 
has become a more religious discourse; but the grievances have remained the same.

So why, if your goal is to weaken Al Qaeda, are you attacking the Taliban? The 
Taliban being a local movement with a very limited and unsophisticated ideology. 
Al Qaeda exists to much larger extent in Pakistan yet there are no American 
troops in Pakistan, so why do you need such a huge military footprint in 
Afghanistan were there is no Al Qaeda really if they are coming in from Pakistan?

In Pakistan you do not have this American presence and yet you have been 
relatively successful. There been no attacks on America thanks to intelligence, 
interdiction, heightened security. Al Qaeda isn’t really a threat. You have a 
couple of hundred relatively unsophisticated guys. They used their A team on 
September 11 and it was tragic, but it wasn’t that significant and didn’t really 
affect the U.S.

What affected the US was the American response internally and abroad. Al Qaeda 
isn’t really a big deal, but even if you think it’s a big deal, even if you 
think this is a huge threat that really deserves so much of our resources, 
understand their grievances and address them. If you remove Palestine and 
Kashmir, you’d have way less people in the world who support Al Qaeda, who want 
to join it.

Instead, what we are doing is increasing the occupation of a Muslim country. 
Although Obama mentioned the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, he mentioned Al 
Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, what about the American occupation of 
Afghanistan? What about all the innocent people who being killed there today 
thanks to American counter-insurgency, counter terrorism operations only further 
increasing ethnic tensions? You are going to have a civil war in Afghanistan 
between Tajiks and Pashtuns at some point. It is going more and more in that 
direction.

AMY GOODMAN:What about President Obama talking about building up the Afghan 
forces in order for the U.S. troops to step down in, what, about a year and 
one-half, June, July 2011?

NIR ROSEN: Nobody familiar with the Afghan security forces really expects this 
to happen. Having spent time with them—I don’t even know if it is a good thing. 
I mean, the McChrystal report or assessment identified the Afghan police as one 
of the main problems in the country, so you're going to double them?

Basically the Afghan police are the recruiters for the Taliban. They oppress the 
population. They are mostly on drugs. They are incompetent. Some of them are 
very brave and they are being killed in large numbers, but your going to double 
this corrupt and oppressive force? That is truly not going to win you any 
support among the local population.

The Afghan army, meanwhile, which we have spent billions on, was a failure. We 
saw in the Helmand operation in July, they just decided not to show up. I was in 
Helmand and the Americans and Brits were surprised and complaining the Afghan 
army didn’t feel like taking part. They perceive themselves more as a force 
designed for external threats, not for internal purposes. So that’s a complete 
waste. And they also just don’t have the ability. They are also dominated by 
Tajiks and Uzbeks and they are fighting Pashtuns. You are going to see this 
force break down along ethnic lines. We see the increase or return of ethnic 
based militias throughout the country.

One other mistake, I think, in the American approach is focusing on the south. A 
constant focus on the south as if there are no problems anywhere else in the 
country. This focus on the south allowed the center to fall apart. So you have 
Logar and Wardak, two provinces which are adjacent to Kabul that fell in the 
last year to Taliban control thanks to the American obsession with the south.

You have Kunduz and other parts of the north falling to the Taliban thanks to 
this American obsession with the south, and now this new obsession with 
population centers. This was also the Soviet mistake. The Taliban aren’t present 
in population centers. It is a rural insurgency. They are not in the cities so 
much. They are in the villages, thousands and thousands of tiny little villages 
that are impossible to secure. This is not Baghdad which is easy to control, 
build walls around neighborhoods. You have thousands of remote villages, there 
is no way to get to them. You can control the cities if you want. The Taliban 
will spread like ink spots. This is a counter insurgency theory. The Americans 
think that they will spread like ink spots. In fact, I think the Taliban will 
spread like ink spots, like oil spots throughout the rural areas as the 
Americans focus on the cities were you don’t really have a Taliban presence and 
the Taliban don’t really care about the cities as much anyway.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting. You talk about the Taliban growing presence and 
in the rest of the media it’s all about the U.S. soldiers winning the hearts and 
minds and with more troops they will be able to do that working on 
reconstruction, but this other view of U.S. occupation causing more recruits to 
the Taliban or even Al Qaeda. I wanted to go back though, to nearly three years 
ago, January 10, 2007. President Bush was announcing the surge in Iraq.

     GEORGE W. BUSH: America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry 
out their campaign to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the 
people of Baghdad. This will require increasing American force levels, so I have 
committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq. The vast majority 
of them, five brigades, will be deployed to Baghdad. These trips will work 
alongside Iraqi units and be embedded in their formations. Our troops will have 
a well-defined mission, to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help 
them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left 
behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.

AMY GOODMAN:That was President Bush. Now let me play for you an excerpt of what 
President Obama had to say last night at West Point.

     PRESIDENT OBAMA: Today, after extraordinary costs, we are bringing Iraq war 
to a responsible end. We will remove our combat brigades from Iraq by the end of 
next summer and all of our troops of the end of 2011. We’re doing so as a 
testament to the character of the men and women in uniform. [APPLAUSE] Thanks to 
their courage, grit and perseverance, we have given Iraqis a chance to shape 
their future and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people.

AMY GOODMAN:Yes, President Obama last night. Nir Rosen, your response, the surge 
in Iraq to the surge in Afghanistan?

NIR ROSEN: The conflict in Iraq was entirely different from the conflict in 
Afghanistan. Iraq was a civil war. The increase in American troops after the 
Shias have basically won the civil war and crushed the Sunnis was important. The 
increase of American troops was a factor in the reduction of violence, but let’s 
not exaggerate the reduction in violence. You still have much more Iraqi 
civilians dying today than you do Afghan civilians. Iraq is still a hell hole. 
The civil war indeed is over, but you have an incredibly corrupt government, 
weak, oppressive and this so-called success in Iraq which we’re using as a model 
for Afghanistan, success that included the deaths of hundreds of thousands of 
Iraqis, the displacement of millions of Iraqis, the devastation of a country, 
the spread throughout the region of sectarianism and instability – so Iraq 
should hardly be a model for anything and certainly not for population security 
for peace and stability because Iraq is still a much more dangerous place than 
Afghanistan is.

But again, the surge in Iraq followed the civil war in Iraq. It was not the 
counterinsurgencies so much, it was almost a peace keeping mission. The 
Americans which have been an occupying force were suddenly perceived by many 
Iraqis to be the least of all evils because of the Sunni – Shia fighting. And 
the Sunnis were basically crushed very brutally by a very harsh Shia counter 
insurgency force that was government and the militias. In Afghanistan what this 
would require would be that the much larger—Sunnis in Iraq are 20 percent, the 
Taliban is a Pashtun based insurgency, Pashtuns are about 40 percent, so you 
would need the Tajiks to completely crush the Pashtun population and expel them 
in large numbers and then perhaps the Americans could come in and look like the 
heroes. But that is not going to happen. There are much more Pashtuns, again it 
is a rural based insurgency so you are never going to get to them. You will, I 
think, have a civil war. Things seem to be going in that direction. But I think 
the similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan are very few.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama also praised the United States as a country that 
has not sought world domination or occupation.

     PRESIDENT OBAMA: More than any other nation, the United States of America 
has underwritten global security for over six decades, a time that for all its 
problems has seen walls come down and markets opened, and billions lifted from 
poverty, unparalleled scientific progress in advancing frontiers of human 
liberty. For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world 
domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to 
occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target 
other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we 
have fought for, what we continue to fight for, is a better future for our 
children and grandchildren and we believe that their lives will be better if 
other people’s children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access 
opportunity.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama last night at West Point. Nir Rosen?

NIR ROSEN: Every empire has claimed it’s not an empire, it doesn’t want to 
occupy, it wants to help. Indeed, the American empire has done the same thing. 
The British in Iraq were uttering the same things the Americans in Iraq were 
uttering in their occupation. Why do we have military bases all over the world 
if not an empire seeking to control much of the world? These days imperialism 
works in a different way. Maybe you don’t need direct physical control of every 
place, but you still have the physical force and the threat of violence.

Indeed, I think we are actually a failure as an empire. We actually managed to 
make the Taliban look good. We took the most detested regime in the world, the 
Taliban, removed them in a matter of weeks and here seven or eight years later 
they’re more popular than ever. They’re stronger than ever.

AMY GOODMAN:Among who?

NIR ROSEN: Among the people in Pakistan and many Afghans, at least many 
Pashtuns. When I’ve been in Afghanistan you often hear non-Pashtuns expressing 
hostility to Americans. I have heard many Tajiks say, "Amreeka Dushman Islam”, 
“America is the enemy of Islam.” Nobody really wants the Americans there.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Professor Bacevich, your book is called “The Limits of 
Power, The End of American Exceptionalism”, responding to what Nir Rosen has 
said and President Obama’s last point about why we are in Afghanistan.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Yeah, I mean, I think the president’s sort of capsule 
description of modern U.S. history and our role in the world is extraordinarily 
important and the reason it is important is because that text could of been 
lifted out of a speech by Harry Truman, by John Kennedy, by Lyndon Johnson, by 
Richard Nixon, by Ronald Reagan, or by George W. Bush. This is the preferred 
narrative of American history, the way we prefer to see ourselves and, 
therefore, the narrative that we use to justify all that we do in the world. It 
is really telling and extraordinary that this president, whose background is 
quite different from all those other presidents that I just named, and who came 
to office promising to bring about change, it is extraordinary that he himself 
would embrace that narrative so uncritically. I think that is indicative of the 
extent to which whether there is going to be any change in Washington, it is 
simply going to be changes on the margins and that the Washington consensus, the 
status quo, is firmly in place.

AMY GOODMAN: Comment, Nir Rosen, on what you think, if you were standing at West 
Point last night, what you would have been saying?

NIR ROSEN: I would have mentioned Palestine and Kashmir and the history of 
American support for dictatorships in the Middle East and the Muslim world as 
the cause for this Al Qaeda phenomenon, for this resentment of the U.S. and I 
would have…

AMY GOODMAN:And the actions you announced?

NIR ROSEN: This is impossibly naïve and would require a revolution in the way 
America does business, but stop supporting dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, 
Morocco and elsewhere, stop supporting the Pakistani dictatorships or 
quasi-dictatorship, stop supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Be 
perceived as a fair player in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Stop killing 
Muslims and Muslims will not want to kill you. It is really very easy.

AMY GOODMAN:Nir Rosen, independent journalist, recently back from Afghanistan 
has been covering Afghanistan and Iraq since 2003, a fellow at NYU Center on Law 
and Security and thank you very much to Andrew Bacevich, Professor of History 
and International Relations at BU, a retired colonel and Vietnam war vet, the 
author of “Limits of Power.”

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/2/nir_rosen_we_managed_to_make