[Peace-discuss] The real threat to the US war

[C. G. Estabrook]

"...states have an internal enemy: their own population, which must be 
controlled when state policy is opposed by the public ... The battle to control 
the internal enemy ... remains highly pertinent — indeed, the future of the war 
in Afghanistan may hinge on it.  '

	Views » August 3, 2010 » Web Only
	The War in Afghanistan: Echoes of Vietnam
	By Noam Chomsky

The War Logs — a six-year archive of classified military documents about the war 
in Afghanistan, released on the Internet by the organization WikiLeaks — 
documents a grim struggle becoming grimmer, from the U.S. perspective. And for 
the Afghans, a mounting horror.

The War Logs, however valuable, may contribute to the unfortunate and prevailing 
doctrine that wars are wrong only if they aren’t successful—rather like the 
Nazis felt after Stalingrad.

Last month came the fiasco of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, forced to retire as 
commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and replaced by his superior, Gen. David 
H. Petraeus.

A plausible consequence is a relaxation of the rules of engagement so that it 
becomes easier to kill civilians, and an extension of the war well into the 
future as Petraeus uses his clout in Congress to achieve this result.

Afghanistan is President Obama’s principal current war. The official goal is to 
protect ourselves from al-Qaida, a virtual organization, with no specific base — 
a “network of networks” and “leaderless resistance,” as it’s been called in the 
professional literature. Now, even more so than before, al-Qaida consists of 
relatively independent factions, loosely associated throughout the world.

The CIA estimates that 50 to 100 al-Qaeda activists may now be in Afghanistan, 
and there is no indication that the Taliban want to repeat the mistake of 
offering sanctuary to al-Qaeda.

By contrast, the Taliban appear to be well-established in their vast forbidding 
landscape, a large part of the Pashtun territories.

In February, in the first exercise of Obama’s new strategy, U.S. Marines 
conquered Marja, a minor district in Helmand province, the main center of the 
insurgency.

There, reported The New York Times’ Richard A. Oppel Jr., “The Marines have 
collided with a Taliban identity so dominant that the movement appears more akin 
to the only political organization in a one-party town, with an influence that 
touches everyone.”

“‘We’ve got to re-evaluate our definition of the word `enemy,’ said Brig. Gen. 
Larry Nicholson, commander of the Marine expeditionary brigade in Helmand 
Province. `Most people here identify themselves as Taliban. We have to readjust 
our thinking so we’re not trying to chase the Taliban out of Marja, we’re trying 
to chase the enemy out.’”

The Marines are facing a problem that has always bedeviled conquerors, one that 
is very familiar to the U.S. from Vietnam. In 1969, Douglas Pike, the leading 
U.S. government scholar on Vietnam, lamented that the enemy—the National 
Liberation Front—was the only “truly mass-based political party in South Vietnam.”

Any effort to compete with that enemy politically would be like a conflict 
between a minnow and a whale, Pike recognized. We therefore had to overcome the 
NLF’s political force by using our comparative advantage, violence—with 
horrifying results.

Others have faced similar problems: for example, the Russians in Afghanistan 
during the 1980s, where they won every battle but lost the war.

Writing of another U.S. invasion—the Philippines in 1898—Bruce Cumings, an Asia 
historian at the University of Chicago, made an observation that applies all too 
aptly to Afghanistan today: “When a sailor sees that his heading is disastrous 
he changes course, but imperial armies sink their boots in quicksand and keep 
marching, if only in a circle, while the politicians plum the phrase book of 
American ideals.”

After the Marja triumph, the U.S.-led forces were expected to assault the major 
city of Kandahar, where, according to a U.S. Army poll in April, the military 
operation is opposed by 95 percent of the population, and 5 out of 6 regard the 
Taliban as “our Afghan brothers”—again, echoes of earlier conquests. The 
Kandahar plans were delayed, part of the background for McChrystal’s leavetaking.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that U.S. authorities are 
concerned that public support for the war in Afghanistan may erode even further.

In May, WikiLeaks released a March CIA memorandum about how to sustain Western 
Europe’s support for the war. The memorandum’s subtitle: “Why Counting on Apathy 
Might Not Be Enough.”

“The Afghanistan mission’s low public salience has allowed French and German 
leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop 
contributions to the International Security Assistance Force,” the memorandum 
states.

“Berlin and Paris currently maintain the third and fourth highest ISAF troop 
levels, despite the opposition of 80 percent of German and French respondents to 
increased ISAF deployments.” It is therefore necessary to “tailor messaging” to 
“forestall or at least contain backlash.”

The CIA memorandum should remind us that states have an internal enemy: their 
own population, which must be controlled when state policy is opposed by the public.

Democratic societies rely not on force but on propaganda, engineering consent by 
“necessary illusion” and “emotionally potent oversimplication,” to quote Obama’s 
favorite philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr.

The battle to control the internal enemy, then, remains highly pertinent — 
indeed, the future of the war in Afghanistan may hinge on it.

© The New York Times Syndicate

http://inthesetimes.com/article/6280/the_war_in_afghanistan_echoes_of_vietnam/