(Photo: David Shankbone/flickr)

Dedicated and disciplined nonviolent activists, and in particular military veterans, are being openly invited to join members of Veterans For Peace in a peaceful vigil in New York City that will as likely as not result in their wrongful arrest and prosecution.

The time will be 6 p.m. on October 7, 2012, as the United States and NATO complete the eleventh year of the current occupation of Afghanistan and launch the twelfth.  The crowd at the Republican National Convention cheered for complete immediate withdrawal, but the nominee’s plans don’t include it.  The crowds at rallies for President Obama’s reelection cheer for both the continuation of the war and its supposed status as “ending,” even though the timetable for that “ending” is longer than most past wars, and a massive occupation is supposed to remain after the occupation “ends.”  Veterans For Peace, an organization dedicated to the abolition of war, is hoping to inject a discordant note into this happy discourse — something that the ongoing reports of deaths just don’t seem to manage.

The place will be Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza, 55 Water Street, New York City.  It was there that some of the same veterans gathering this October were arrested last May First.  The memorial is normally open around the clock, but on that day the New York Police Department decided to close it at 10 p.m. in order to evict the Occupy Movement’s nonviolent general assembly.  Eight members of the Veterans Peace Team and two members of Occupy Faith were arrested for refusing to leave.  Since that day, a small metal sign has been posted at the park stating that it closes at 10 p.m.  This October 7^th, the veterans have a permit for sound equipment lasting until 10 p.m., but they intend to remain overnight.

Vietnam vet Paul Appell says, “War veterans, loved ones of the fallen, and certainly those living in war zones do not have the option of closing down their memories at 10 p.m. There is a good reason why suicide is an attractive option for many. It is truly the only sure way of ending the memories. For a memorial to shut down at some convenient time for the city is an insult to all those who do not have the luxury of shutting down their war memories at a specific time. I know that many want us war vets to go out of sight and not bother them, except when we are needed for some parade. Some of us are not going away at 10 p.m. or any other time. If they do not like it, maybe they should have thought of that before they sent us to war.

Tarak Kauff, U.S. Army, 1959-1962, and one of the organizers of VFP’s Veterans Peace Team, says, “We will be there standing together and getting arrested again if necessary for our right to remember the fallen, to oppose and ‘abolish war as an instrument of national policy’ and to affirm our right to do so in a public place of remembrance that has great meaning for all veterans.”

The plan is not for a mass demonstration.  In fact, many are explicitly not invited.  Non-veterans are enthusiastically welcome, including associate members of Veterans For Peace and anyone else dedicated to ending violence in the world.  But “diversity of tactics” is unapologetically rejected.  Anyone inclined toward violence, provocation, or threats, including violence to inanimate objects, is kindly asked on this day, to respect the Memorial, the veterans, and the commitment to nonviolence.  This event will involve hundreds of activists who intend to peacefully vigil all night, and who will not respond to police violence with any violence of their own.

Speakers at the vigil will oppose a single additional day of U.S. warmaking in Afghanistan.  Speakers will include Leah Bolger, Margaret Flowers, Glen Ford, Mike Hastie, Chris Hedges, George Packard, Donna Schaper, Kevin Zeese, and Michael Zweig. Dr. Cornel West has also been invited.  At 9:30 p.m. participants will lay flowers for the fallen.

The purpose of this action, which will succeed whether the police interfere or not, is well expressed by several vets planning to take part.  Mike Ferner, Navy Corpsman 1969-1973, and past president of Veterans For Peace, says, “I’m coming to NYC October 7^th because I need to do more for myself and the world than just get angry at the misery and suffering.  Being with my comrades again and standing up for peace uplifts my spirit.”
Read the rest of this entry →

MAY 20, 2012, MILITARIZED CHICAGO — Next month in Baltimore they’re going to celebrate the War of 1812.  That’s what we do with wars.  We say they’re the last resort.  We say they’re hell.  We say they’re for the purpose of eliminating themselves: we fight wars for peace.  Although we never keep peace for wars.  We claim to wage only wars we have been forced into despite all possible effort to find a better way.  And then we celebrate the wars.  We keep the wars going for their own sake after all the excuses we used to get them started have expired.  The WMDs have not been found.  Osama bin Laden’s been killed.  Al Qaeda is gone from the country where we’re fighting it.  Nobody’s threatening Benghazi anymore.  But the wars must go on!  And then we’ll celebrate them.  And we’ll celebrate the old ones too, the ones that were fought here, the ones that were in their day not quite so heavily painted as last resorts or humanitarian missions.

Last year Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee persuaded Congress to create an Iraq-Afghanistan Wars holiday.  It’s on our calendars now along with Loyalty Day (formerly May Day), Veterans Day (formerly Armistice Day), Memorial Day, Yellow Ribbon Day, Patriots Day, Independence Day, Flag Day, Pearl Harbor Day, and of course September 11th, among many others.  Last week there was an Armed Forces Spouses Appreciation Day.  The military holiday calendar is like the Catholic saints’ days now: there’s something every day of the year.

But there’s no celebration of the times we avoided war. We claim to prefer peace to war, but we don’t make heroes of those presidents or Congresses who most avoided war.  In fact, we erase them.  Our history books jump from war to war as if nothing happened in between.  Nobody celebrates 1811, only 1812.  Even the peace movement doesn’t celebrate the past decade’s prevention, thus far, of a war on Iran.

Some might say that once an unavoidable war begins we have to celebrate the brave sacrifices of the soldiers and sailors.  Even if the war was a bad idea, we can’t blame those who participated in it.  They were too ignorant and obedient to do otherwise, but they were brave and loyal.  We weren’t in their shoes.  We had other means to pay for college.  So we are obliged to celebrate their moral failings.  We must value bravery and loyalty above intelligent independent thinking.  And, because they ignorantly and obediently supported the war, we must do so too — even if we honestly don’t.

As if there is not bravery, solidarity, and self-sacrifice to be celebrated in our history of nonviolent protest, labor struggles, women’s struggles, the environmentalist movement, and in resistance to war — in all the efforts that have improved and are improving our lives.  Freedom isn’t free, as the saying goes, but we don’t honor the work that actually achieves it. “War will exist,” President Kennedy privately wrote, “until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today.”  And here’s the hard part of that: the conscientious objector will not be honored and respected as long as the warrior is.  We have to choose. Read the rest of this entry →

By Leah Bolger and David Swanson

We did not choose this war.  This war came to us on 9/11.  We don’t go looking for a fight.  But when we see our homeland violated, when we see our fellow citizens killed, then we understand what we have to do.

Photo by the U.S. Army

These are the words that President Obama used on Tuesday to describe the Afghanistan war, but they would have been more appropriately said by any Afghan citizen.

Coming out of the mouth of the President of the United States, these words are nothing more than nationalistic propaganda — designed to justify an aggressive war of choice launched against a sovereign nation.  Somebody chose this war, and it certainly wasn’t the Afghan people — 92% of whom have never even heard of the events of 9/11.

The Afghan people have responded just as almost any would to an attack.  They have seen their “homeland violated” and their “fellow citizens killed,” and they are reacting in self-defense.  Because they are fighting back, we label them “insurgents” and call them the enemy. Then we label violence caused by the enemy “terrorism,” and somehow use this rhetoric to justify killing innocent people … collateral damage we call it.  This is a vicious cycle that cannot resolve itself, except by the removal of the occupying army.

What do you think the Afghan people call the violence that we impose on them?  How can we as Americans be so callous, so blinded by our own misplaced righteousness, that we can’t see that we are guilty of the very thing that we claim to be fighting?  Perhaps to some extent we do see it.  A majority of people in the United States tell pollsters they want the war ended.  We forget we’re a majority because nobody ever mentions us on television.

Read the rest of this entry →

Scott Camil, a veteran of the second-longest U.S. war in history, that on Vietnam, radically changed a discussion of the longest war in U.S. history, that on Afghanistan, on CNN on Sunday.

CNN’s Don Lemon tried repeatedly to explain troops posing with body parts as an inscrutable result of war, without questioning the justification of that war.  Repeatedly, Lemon instructed viewers not to judge soldiers.

A guest to whom Lemon devoted a great deal of time, Dr. Terry Lyles, followed Lemon’s leads and was praised by Lemon as the best guest he’d heard from on the topic.  Lyles suggested the problem was one of public relations: “We need to do a better job,” he said, “you know, with them psychologically to help them understand that the world is watching.  Be careful about what you do and what you capture while what you’re doing every day is very difficult.”

Scott Camil took a different tack, saying: “Well no we don’t know what it’s like to be in combat unless you’ve been in combat, but I think the real question is: you’re nit picking when you’re talking about things like people posing with bodies.  The real question should be why are we at war in the first place? Why are we killing so many people in the first place? The concern over posing with someone that’s dead, it seems to me the fact that that person is dead and that we’re killing people is more important than what happens after they’re dead.”

Camil’s comment was so effective that the next panelist to speak shifted to his topic.  Holly Hughes remarked: “Scott hit the nail on the head because now we’ve opened a dialogue.  What are we talking about now?  Shouldn’t we be more upset that we’re out there killing people? . . . Maybe we need to assess why we’re there in the first place.”

Camil continued: “What I understand is what it’s like to be in a war zone and I understand the behavior in a war zone.  And I would say that, first of all, that war is really an institution made up of criminal behavior.  When we as civilians want to solve our problems, we’re not allowed to murder people and burn their houses down.  I don’t see why war is an acceptable means of conflict resolution.  And furthermore, the majority of people that die are innocent civilians.”

Some fundamental truths are rarely spoken on television.

Watch the video
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2012/04/22/nr-corpses-trophies.cnn

Scott Camil was honorably discharged with 13 medals including 2 purple hearts following 20 months voluntarily spent as a Marine in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967.  He testified at the Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971, and was a founding member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War Inc. He is an active member of Veterans For Peace and serves as the President of Chapter 014 in Gainesville, Florida.

Veterans for Peace was founded in 1985 and has approximately 5,000 members in 150 chapters located in every U.S. state and several countries. It is a 501(c)3 non-profit educational organization recognized as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) by the United Nations, and is the only national veterans’ organization calling for the abolishment of war.

1. When you’re setting a record for the longest modern war, cutting it short just increases the chances of somebody breaking your record some day.

2. When Newt Gingrich, Cal Thomas, and Lindsey Graham turn against a war, keeping it going will really confuse Republicans.

3. If we pull U.S. troops out after they have shot children from helicopters, kicked in doors at night, waved Nazi flags, urinated on corpses, and burned Korans it will look like we’re sorry they did those things.

4. U.S. tax dollars have been funding our troops, and through payments for safe passage on roads have also been the top source of income for the Taliban.  Unilaterally withdrawing that funding from both sides of a war at the same time would be unprecedented and could devastate the booming Afghan economy.

5. The government we’ve installed in Afghanistan is making progress on its torture program and drug running and now supports wife beating.  But it has not yet mandated invasive ultrasounds.  We cannot leave with a job half-finished, not on International Women’s Day.

6. We have an enormous prison full of prisoners in Afghanistan, and closing it down would distract us from our essential concentration on pretending to close Guantanamo.

7. Unless we keep “winning” in Afghanistan it will be very hard to generate enthusiasm for our wars in Syria and Iran.  And with suicide the top killer of our troops, we cannot allow our men and women to be killing themselves in vain.

8. If we ended the war that created the 2001 authorization to use military force, how would we justify our special forces operations in over 100 other countries, the elimination of habeas corpus, or the legalization of murdering U.S. citizens?  Besides, if we stay a few more years we might find an al Qaeda member.

9. A few hundred billion dollars a year is a small price to pay for weapons bases, a gas pipeline, huge profits for generous campaign funders, and a perfect testing ground for weapons that will be absolutely essential in our next pointless war.

10. Terror hasn’t conceded defeat yet.

Even a broken radioactive timebomb is right twice a day.

Here’s Newt:

“And, candidly, if Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, doesn’t feel like apologizing then we should say good bye and good luck, we don’t need to be here risking our lives and wasting our money on somebody who doesn’t care.”

Now, this was preceded by the declaration that one must not apologize for burning Korans.  And Newt’s point is not that the military should be cut or the bombs stop falling on foreign nations.

But he does have a point, and it is the right one: Nothing is being accomplished on the terms of the warmakers themselves by staying in Afghanistan another minute.  Nothing ever was. Nothing ever will be.  Karzai cannot support night raids, bombs, helicopters shooting children, Nazi flags, urination on corpses, or burning Korans.  He cannot and he will not and he should not.

If you’re going to get out, and you’re just wasting more blood and treasure first, then get the hell out.  Even if Newt Gingrich agrees with you.

Feints and baby steps in the direction of eventually ending a massive crime are not enough. Hoping to meet a distant deadline for ending a war that cannot be justified for a single day is not enough. A new misunderstanding should not be piled on top of other fictional accomplishments (the closing of Guantanamo, the complete withdrawal from Iraq, universal health coverage, etc.). But if we don’t understand that we are beginning to move things in the right direction many among us will lose heart and others will miscalculate.

This is what the Associated Press had to say on Thursday morning as we prepared to march on the White House and the Treasury to demand a serious effort from Obama in France to bring the G20 (and the Congress) to back a financial transaction tax, and as planning continued to protest the ever-less-popular Obama’s expected authorization of a disastrous tar sands pipeline:

“A senior U.S. official says the Obama administration is considering shifting the U.S. military role in Afghanistan from primarily combat to mainly advisory and training duties as early as next year. If this approach is adopted it would mean a reduction in American combat duties in Afghanistan sooner than the administration had planned. But it would not mean an early end to the war. The U.S. and its NATO partners agreed a year ago that coalition forces would complete their combat mission by the end of 2014. Advising and training Afghan forces would gradually become a more dominant part of the mission, particularly after the U.S. completes the withdrawal of 33,000 ‘surge’ troops by September 2012. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made.”

The Wall Street Journal ran into some similar criminal but respectable leakers of “national security” information, who will no doubt be joining Bradley Manning this afternoon:

“The Obama administration is exploring a shift in the military’s mission in Afghanistan to an advisory role as soon as next year, senior officials told The Wall Street Journal, a move that would scale back U.S. combat duties well ahead of their scheduled conclusion at the end of 2014. Such a move would have broad implications for the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. It could begin a phase-out of the current troop-intensive approach, which focuses on protecting the Afghan population, in favor of a greater focus on targeted counterterrorism operations, as well as training the Afghan military. A transition to a training mission could also allow for a faster drawdown of U.S. forces in the country, though officials said discussions about troop levels have yet to move forward. The revised approach has been discussed in recent high-level meetings involving top defense and administration officials, according to people involved in the deliberations. No decisions have been made, officials said, and policy makers could consider other options that would adjust the mission in other ways, officials said. Officials said agreement on a formal shift to an advisory role could come as early as a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting in May—in the heat of the U.S. presidential election campaign. Some officials have drawn comparisons to President Barack Obama’s 2009 decision to switch to an ‘advise and assist’ role in Iraq and to declare a formal end to U.S. combat operations there. In Iraq, after mid-2009, troops were largely confined to their bases. Security conditions in Afghanistan are different, however, and will likely require U.S. troops, particularly Special Operations forces, to continue to accompany their Afghan counterparts into battle after the U.S. takes an advisory role. Defense officials said the U.S. still would be directly involved in many combat operations, though increasingly with Afghan forces in the lead.”

On the radio Thursday morning I heard another (or one of the same) “officials” explain that in “places like Kabul and Helmand Province” the U.S. military had been unable to identify anyone who should be a “target.”

That’s never stopped them from kicking in doors before.

The first point to understand here is that, however real this change turns out to be, the explanations for it are sheer hogwash. This war has been a disaster on its own terms for over a decade now. There’s been talk of shifting to a “training” role for most of the past decade. It was possible to discover last month or last year or several years ago that some provinces were more violent than others, that the occupation was fueling the violence and proving counter-productive, and that pay-offs to the Taliban meant U.S. dollars were funding both sides of a continuing catastrophe. U.S. troops could have all been locked up in their bases until flown home at any point in the past decade. Why leak this proposal now?

It’s not because Afghans are fighting back. That’s not new. It’s not because the financial cost is stratospheric. That’s not new, and it funds important presidential campaign “contributors.” It’s not because the Pentagon and NATO no longer want a permanent presence and weapons bases in Afghanistan, not to mention a pipeline. All of that, as far as we know, hasn’t changed or been abandoned. What has changed is that people in the United States, and in Europe as well, are in the streets, the squares, and the parks. On a daily basis marches through DC streets are shouting “How do you fix the deficit? End the wars, tax the rich!” The media coverage has changed. If the polling on support for the Afghanistan war continues its current downward trend, before long this war will be as unpopular as Congress. But it is the passion and the action that has changed in this moment, not the polling.

Congress is also coming face-to-face with the possibility of being forced into some minor cuts to the world’s largest military budget. Weapons makers are extremely serious about imposing any such cuts on troops rather than on our brave weapons. This brings us to the danger of de-escalations. If large U.S. troop deployments to hot occupations are scaled back, but U.S. bases continue to be built around the world, mercenaries continue to be hired, missile “defense” stations continue to be deployed, drones continue to slaughter without “risk to [U.S.] human life,” our success will be far from complete. Transforming war is not the same as ending it. Robotic warfare will not reduce the risk of long-term blowback, will not eliminate punishing economic costs and environmental damage, will not lessen the pressure on our civil liberties at home, and will not mean an end to the direct immoral and illegal killing of members of the non-U.S. 95% of humanity.

The proper course at this moment is not to declare an end to our activism, and certainly not to utterly destroy our activism by pledging our allegiance to a politician or a political party. What we must do now is renew our public pressure, organizing, educating, and occupying, invigorated by the fact that the White House itself is unable to hide the fact that we are becoming a force able to push back against the war machine. This is a time, just as November 2008 should have been, to redouble our investment in mobilizing nonviolent pressure for peace and justice.

The Declaration of the Occupation of New York City has just been amended to include a powerful denunciation of wars and military spending. We must continue to connect foreign and domestic issues, continue to build awareness that there is only one pot of money being misspent on militarism instead of on human needs, and continue to put our bodies in the way.

"Rep Barbara Lee on Prop 8 election night" by Steve Rhodes on flickr

Congresswoman Barbara Lee, like Jeanette Rankin before her, bravely stood alone in Congress against a vote for war, the vote in 2001 for the so-called Authorization to Use Military Force, a Constitutionally dubious passing of the war decision buck to President Bush and his successors.  A majority of Americans now believes that the Afghanistan War that followed that authorization never should have been begun and should, in fact, be ended.  So, the Congresswoman, along with initial cosponsors Jones, Woolsey, Grijalva, Conyers, and Honda, is offering us a second chance, a chance to get our response to 9-11 right, to restore war powers to the Congress, and to impose the will of the people on that body.

Congresswoman Lee has sent her colleagues this letter, which we should each send them ourselves by email, fax, phone, carrier pigeon, and by nailing it to their cathedral doors:

“Dear Colleague: Read the rest of this entry →

Comparing the brain sizes of migratory birds and U.S. presidents may not help explain this one.  Birds have been avoiding Afghanistan for some years now.  Afghans with higher educations have been leaving for decades.  War profiteers, and occupation profiteers, and “reconstruction” profiteers seem to know their way out.  But imperial rulers, whether British or Soviet or U.S., seem utterly incapable of withdrawing other people’s kids from Afghan wars until no other option remains.

Speaking with Afghans via Skype over the weekend, I heard their top concern as avoiding a “strategic partnership agreement” that includes permanent U.S. military bases.  This concern seems not to diminish in the slightest if the bases are called “enduring” or “stable” or anything other than permanent that means permanent.  The top concern of the Pentagon, and of the President who works for it, and of the Congress that does what the President tells it, is clearly the exact opposite: establishing permanent bases.  Americans fantasizing that President Obama has said everyone will be gone in 2014 need to go back and read the transcripts of his speeches.

The desire of the majority of U.S. citizens, on the other hand, seems to be to end the “war.”  If the occupation could last forever, but involve less financial cost and less cost in U.S. lives, even if Afghans continued to die and hostility continued to build, I’m not sure my country wouldn’t favor that.  We’re against particular wars when the patriotic pomp wears off, but are we against the ever-growing and ever-weakening empire of bases we fund without comment smack in the middle of a manufactured spending “crisis”?

I’ve long been a huge fan of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” but only recently did I read Chris Harman’s “A People’s History of the World.”  Harman starts with what we can discern of prehistory before describing the first civilizations.  Long before he gets to what we call the year zero, and then building ever more through the end of the book, a pattern emerges not entirely unlike that in Paul Kennedy’s “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.”  As civilizations in various ages, on every continent, develop, they often grow top-heavy.  They stop investing in what made them grow.  They stop caring for their infrastructure and for the mass of their people.  They start dumping more and more of their resources into an extremely wealthy minority and into wars.  This is not some sort of natural cycle.  Some cultures do it right away, some not for millennia.  Some start to do it and pull back.  Some slide slowly into it.  But eventually, if you wait long enough, everybody seems to get there.  Whether increased awareness of this pattern can help prevent it remains to be seen.

Empires’ path to the graveyard may be examined particularly well in the graveyard of empires, Afghanistan.  Edward Girardet has been reporting from Afghanistan since 1979, and has just published an account of that entire period, called “Killing the Cranes: A Reporter’s Journey Through Three Decades of War in Afghanistan.”  I highly recommend it.  Girardet’s focus is on Afghanistan, a nation whose fate was dramatically worsened by the Soviet invasion, again dramatically worsened by the Soviet withdrawal and what followed, and yet again devastated by the U.S. occupation.  Afghanistan just cannot seem to catch a break.  But the flip side of this story is the damage that the USSR and US have done to themselves in the process.

Girardet’s story of national tragedy begins pre-Soviet invasion, with Kabul an international city, its people fashionably dressed in western clothes, rock music blaring out of cafes.  One could have imagined the 1980s as a time of tourism rather than what it was, a time of genocide.  The Soviets deliberately made conditions unlivable in Afghanistan, so that its fourteen to fifteen million people would leave, die, or obey.  Sayed Abdullah, the Khalqi commander of Kabul’s Pul-e-Charki prison, announced in a party speech: “A million Afghans are all that should remain alive — a million communists.  That’s all we need.”  Girardet witnessed and reported on the exodus to Pakistan, the accompanying atrocities, and the growth of Afghans’ armed resistance.  On April 20, 1979, the communists executed over 1,000 men and boys at Kerala.  Girardet’s narrative constantly jumps back and forth in time (for example, to point out that many members of the Afghan government both in the 1980s and now were/are well known supporters of the resistance), but he fails to mention or suggest any comparison between Kerala and the Dasht-i-Leili massacre of 2001.

Back in 1979, “Western interest in media reports from Afghanistan reemerged during the Soviet-Afghan war,” Girardet writes, “only when the United States seriously upped the ante by supporting the mujahedeen in what became known as Operation Cyclone.  Well over three billion U.S. dollars (some put the figure as high as eighteen billion) of military aid was supplied, including the Stinger anti-aircraft missile.  Highly favorable coverage of how successful the United States was in helping the mujahedeen was orchestrated by Washington.  In one case, the CIA invited the publishers of Newsweek and Time for lunch.  The next week embarrassingly similar stories lauding the U.S. role appeared in the two magazines.”

Girardet describes his encounters and conversations with numerous key figures.  In one incident he is nearly lynched by a crowd in Pakistan that has mistaken him for Salman Rushdie.  In another tense scene, he and Osama bin Laden are arguing with each other, standing at some distance in the mountains, as groups of supporters gather behind each of them.  But before bin Laden and other Arabs arrive on the scene, two leaders loom largest in Girardet’s account: Ahmad Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.  Girardet describes them:

“Massoud was Tajik, and Hekmatyar Pushtun.  Massoud was a shrewd and persevering guerrilla commander whose heroes were Charles de Gaulle, General Giap, Che Guevara, and John F. Kennedy, and who had proven himself in battle.  Hekmatyar was a calculating, deceitful politician whose inspiration was Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, but who had started out as a communist.”

Massoud also befriended Girardet, while Hekmatyar tried to kill him.  Massoud appears in this book heroic, noble, and larger than life.  He makes it a priority to avoid civilian deaths.  He welcomes foreigners.  His word is solid, his followers love him, and he risks his own life to try to achieve peace.  The United States fails to seriously support him.  Al Qaeda kills him two days before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Hekmatyar, who is still alive, was funded by but hated the West (the United States gave him at least a half a billion dollars), sacrificed the lives of others recklessly, attacked Afghan rivals as much as Soviet occupiers, and looked out primarily for his own selfish interests.  Girardet suggests that the Pentagon may have preferred Hekmatyar largely because he spoke English.  Massoud, who spoke Dari, Pushto, Urdu, Arabic, and French, was clearly a savage barbarian who could not communicate in a civilized language.  Another theory Girardet cites is that the United States did not want the Afghan resistance to be too effective and end the war too quickly.

Girardet does not hold back about his feelings for these two men.  He recounts admirable actions by Massoud, and the time when Hekmatyar ordered Girardet killed.  The reporter immediately went to Hekmatyar’s house to confront him.  Massoud deployed several men to guard Girardet.

So, this story is very personal, but the author also employs Massoud and Hekmatyar, the lion and the hyena, as representations of all that was best and is worst about Afghan culture.  The arrival of cable television in the 1990s and early 2000s, he writes, ended the function of travelers as bearers of news.  But the arrival of foreign fighters most deeply damaged codes of hospitality and honor, introducing suicide killings and vicious religious hatred to Afghanistan, and eroding the idea of a unified Afghan nation.  The drug trade and prostitution have taken their toll as well.  The United States turned a blind eye to Saudi trafficking in human beings.  Added to these influences, the brutality of the U.S. occupation, with its disappearances and torture, has fueled horrific violence, just as earlier missteps fueled the attacks of 9-11.

Girardet faults Afghans for where they have gone wrong, as well as faulting the Saudis and the Chinese, but be reserves the most blame for Americans and Pakistanis: “By 2000, Massoud was trying to persuade the West to understand that without Pakistani support, there was no way the Taliban could continue.”  But in April and May 2001, Pakistan was sending 30 trucks a day across the border.  “On Vice President Cheney’s orders, the U.S. government also provided the Taliban with a grant worth forty-three million dollars.  While U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft later relentlessly pursued the ‘American Talib’ John Walker Lindh, a twenty-year-old Californian, as its scapegoat for consorting with the enemy, no action was ever taken against those within the Bush administration who supported the Taliban financially or with other means — including American intelligence ‘observers’ operating with the ISI.”

In 2001, Massoud made his first trip to Europe.  He warned both publicly and in private meetings with U.S. officials that al Qaeda was preparing a significant strike against the West, and that Pakistan must be pressured to end its support for the Taliban.  “The Taliban would not last a year without Pakistan’s support,” he said.

Also, four months prior to 9-11, Girardet recounts how ABC News was informed that al Qaeda was planning to hijack aircraft to attack the West.  “ABC never used this information because of pressure brought by a ‘certain intelligence agency,’ presumably the CIA which wanted the runner [the informant] returned [to Afghanistan].”

In recent years, rather than trying to improve on its understanding of Afghanistan and avoid deadly mistakes in the future, the U.S. government has put resources into trying to silence people like Girardet, including hiring the Rendon Group to draft a press release for the Afghan Ministry of the Interior accusing him of financial crimes.  A better use of U.S. resources would be paying someone to read “Killing the Cranes.”

Girardet’s book should be read for the fascinating accounts of his reporting adventures — as good as or better than “The Photographer” by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre, and Frederic Lemercier — but also for the richness of the understanding he conveys of how Afghan culture has been changed by these decades of war, and in particular by the foreign jihadists imported to oppose the Russians.  Girardet writes with some authority when he arrives at a similar conclusion to that of just about everybody not in the pay of the Pentagon:

“Not unlike their Red Army counterparts during the 1980s, the Americans and their military allies are increasingly perceived by ordinary Afghans as an unwelcome foreign occupying force.  Their behavior and lack of cultural awareness often emerge as affronts to Afghan customs and their sense of independence. . . .  The growing resentment of Afghans toward the Western presence is not because Afghans necessarily prefer the Taliban and other insurgents, but because they have always resented outsiders, particularly those who insist on imposing themselves.  Even more disconcerting, many Afghans no longer differentiate between soldiers and aid workers.  Western policies have largely undermined the recovery process by usurping the traditional humanitarian role through the deployment of military Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and the deployment of foreign mercenaries and private contractors with little or no understanding of the country.  Afghans also legitimately question the purpose of the United States spending one hundred million dollars a day on its military effort given that such funds might be better spent on recovery itself.”