Posted by RMS
on October 29, 2009, 7:01 pm
Solomon Hughes. Morning Star
Barack Obama and his advisers are in the middle of a furious, urgent debate about Afghanistan. But they are not asking the question we are all asking.
The White House is not ringing to the tune "should I stay or should I go?"
Obama is not pondering pull-outs, leaving timetables or exit strategies.
Instead, the US government is worrying whether it should follow a counter-insurgency strategy or a counter-terrorist one in Afghanistan.
While the world wonders when the US will end the Afghan adventure, the US is focused on what it abbreviates to "COIN" vs "CT."
The COIN, or counter-insurgency crew, including General Stan McChrystal, thinks there should be an Afghan "surge," armed with guns and butter, dropping bombs and digging wells.
These guys want to win Afghan hearts and minds while putting bullets through the heads and chests of the bad guys.
The counter-insurgents are the men who think there was a good side to the Vietnam war.
A portrait of Obama's Afghan envoy Richard Holbrooke by George Packer in the New Yorker magazine gives a flavour of the Vietnam nostalgics in Team Obama.
There are a lot of reasons to worry about Holbrooke. For example, he was on the board of financial firm AIG from 2001-08, when the company almost ruined the world economy with its crazy deals.
Thanks to Holbrooke's leadership, AIG needed a multibillion-dollar bail-out and the rest of the financial sector suffered massive collateral damage.
But it's his Vietnam experience that should worry us most.
According to Packer, one of the first congratulations telegrams he got for his new Obama appointment came from his Vietnam-era CIA mentor.
Next to his White House desk Holbrooke has a picture of himself standing in the Mekong delta next to Vietnam war architect General Maxwell Taylor.
Holbrooke says: "I lived, slept and ate Vietnam."
And what was Holbrooke living, sleeping and eating?
According to Packer, "in Ba Xuyen, Holbrooke distributed cement, cooking oil and roofing thatch to villagers, built schools, helped train and arm the militias of the local strategic hamlets."
This means he tried to win the Vietnam war by doling out the Mazola and Crisp 'n' Dry while arming vicious killers to run outdoor prison villages.
He did this as an official for the US agency for international development because arming militias is what the US calls aid.
Packer says Holbrooke's mentors were Robert "Blowtorch Bob" Komer, who was "taking control of all the pacification programmes in Vietnam."
Pacification meant Operation Phoenix, which involved shoving Vietnamese into villages surrounded by barbed wire while assassinating "Vietcong."
By Blowtorch Bob's own admission, the programme killed 20,000 Vietnamese. The figure could easily be three times higher.
So Holbrooke wants to use Vietnam "lessons" in Afghanistan.
The most obvious lessons of Vietnam - that the US lost after murdering hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese - is ignored, while words like "pacification" and "counter-insurgency," which used to be bywords for brutality, are rehabilitated.
The counter-terrorists - or CTs - who gather around Vice-President Joe Biden disagree.
They do not believe the US can commit enough ground troops to a full-blown counter-insurgency, so they do favour some withdrawal.
They think the US can leave most of the Taliban alone but that it should concentrate on killing al-Qaida fighters and their "worst" Taliban friends from the air.
They don't want to fight the Taliban "insurgency" with a broad military and social scheme. They just want to kill the "terrorists" with missiles.
Jane Mayer, also writing in the New Yorker, describes the "Predator programme," which is the counter-terrorists' favourite toy.
The Predators are robot planes, flown by remote control from the US to destroy the enemy in the East.
They are "unmanned drones" or, in the quainter British description, "uninhabited combat aircraft."
There are two drone programmes - a fairly secret one run by the US army and a very secret one run by the CIA.
The CIA sends its robot planes into Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2001 the US ambassador rightly condemned Israel's use of "targeted killing," saying: "The United States government is very clearly on record as against targeted assassinations."
Why?
"They are extra-judicial killings and we do not support that."
Well, now they do. Predator drones firing Hellfire missiles, all flown from the safety of a bunker in Virginia, carry out dozens of targeted killings.
The "pilots" in their suburban comfort might be CIA staff - or they might be contractors. The killing might be done by people from a temp agency.
Some of the pilots remotely controlling the craft wear flight suits to get the right feeling.
But dressing up like Tom Cruise in Top Gun does not make these joystick killers into real heroes.
It is real enough for the people they kill - and not just the "bad guys."
The US used a drone to assassinate Pakistan "Taliban" leader Baitullah Mehsud this year.
He may well have organised Benazir Bhutto's assassination. But to kill him the CIA used 16 missile strikes in 14 months, killing up to 300 bystanders.
They died in Pakistan, where the US is not at war, and indeed has no legal jurisdiction - but these killings are extra-judicial, so that doesn't matter.
Mayer adds a chilling detail from the Predator control rooms. The pilots scanning their screens have noticed "human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term."
That slang term is "squirters."
The "counter-terrorist" strategy mean running down the US war in Afghanistan and reducing the number of boots on the ground, so it does reflect the White House responding to anti-war pressure.
But it also involves some escalation, as many Predator missions take place in Pakistan, bringing another country into the war.
So the likely victory of the counter-terrorists in the White House would indicate that the anti-war movement is winning.
But we won't have won until the disgusting remote-controlled killing of squirters is stopped as well.
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/features/Warmongers-or-warmongers-Take-your-pick
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