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Why did nation-building fail in Afghanistan? The answer lies close to home.

America’s post-9/11 conflicts have been wars of corruption, a point surprisingly seldom made in the mainstream media. Keep in mind that George W. Bush’s administration was a monster of privatization. It had its own set of crony corporations, including Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, and various oil companies, as well as a set of mercenary rent-a-gun outfits like Blackwater, DynCorp, and Triple Canopy that came into their own in this period.  It took the plunge into Iraq in March 2003, sweeping those corporations and an increasingly privatized military in with it.  In the process, Iraq would become an example not of the free market system, but of a particularly venal form of crony capitalism (or, as Naomi Klein has labeled it, “disaster capitalism”).

Add in another factor: in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began pouring money into the Pentagon, into, that is, an organization whose budget has never been able to pass an audit.  There was so staggeringly much money to throw around then — and hubris to spare as well.  Among the first acts of L. Paul Bremer III, the new American proconsul in Baghdad, was the disbanding of Saddam Hussein’s army (creating an unemployed potential insurgent class) and the closing down of a whole range of state enterprises along with the privatization of the economy (creating their unemployed foot soldiers).  All of this, in turn, paved the way for a bonanza of “reconstruction” contracts granted, of course, to the administration’s favorite corporations to rebuild the country.  There were slush funds aplenty; money went missing without anyone blinking; and American occupation officials reportedly “systematically looted” Iraqi funds.

In April 2003, when American troops entered Baghdad, it was already aflame and being looted by its own citizens.  As it turned out, the petty looters soon enough went home — and then the real looting of the country began.  The occupiers, thanks to the U.N., fully controlled Iraq’s finances and no one at the U.N. or elsewhere had the slightest ability to exercise any real supervision over what the occupation regime did or how it spent Iraq’s money.  Via a document labeled “Order 17,” Bremer granted every foreigner connected to the occupation enterprise the full freedom of the land, not to be interfered with in any way by Iraqis or any Iraqi political or legal institution.  He gave them all, that is, an official get-out-of-jail-free card.

Who could be surprised, then, that the massive corporate attempt to rebuild Iraq would result in a plague of overbilling, remarkable amounts of shoddy or useless work, and a blown $60 billion “reconstruction” effort that would leave the country with massive unemployment and without reliable electricity, water, or sewage systems?  Could there be a sadder story of how war making and corruption were being wedded on a gigantic scale in an already fading new century?  As it turned out, the answer to that question was: yes.

Iraqi corruption was no anomaly of war, as TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro makes clear today.  Just consider the way Washington turned the “liberation” of Afghanistan into another field day for corruption. Tom

The Great Afghan Corruption Scam 
How Operation Enduring Freedom Mutated into Operation Enduring Corruption 
By Dilip Hiro

Washington has vociferously denounced Afghan corruption as a major obstacle to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. This has been widely reported. Only one crucial element is missing from this routine censure: a credible explanation of why American nation-building failed there. No wonder. To do so, the U.S. would have to denounce itself.

Corruption in Afghanistan today is acute and permeates all sectors of society. In recent years, anecdotal evidence on the subject has been superseded by the studies of researchers, surveys by NGOs, and periodic reports by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). There is also the Corruption Perceptions Index of the Berlin-based Transparency International (TI). Last year, it bracketed Afghanistan with two other countries as the most corrupt on Earth.

None of these documents, however, refers to the single most important fact when it comes to corruption: that it’s Washington-based.  It is, in fact, rooted in the massive build-up of U.S. forces there from 2005 onward, the accompanying expansion of American forward operating bases, camps, and combat outposts from 29 in 2005 to nearly 400 five years later, and above all, the tsunami of cash that went with all of this.

Last month, when an Afghan court sentenced Sher Khan Farnood and Khalil Ullah Ferozi, the chairman and chief executive of the Kabul Bank, for looting its deposits in a gigantic Ponzi scheme, the event received some media attention. Typically, however, the critical role of the Americans in the bank’s murky past was missing in action.

Founded as a private company in 2004, the Kabul Bank was promptly hailed by American officials in Afghanistan as a linchpin in the country’s emerging free market economic order. In 2005, action followed words. The Pentagon, paymaster for the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), signed a contract with the bank to disperse the salaries of ANSF soldiers and policemen.

With that, the fledgling financial institution acquired an impressive cash flow. Moreover, such blatant American support generated confidence among better-off Afghans. Soon enough, they were lining up to deposit their money. Starting in 2006, the surging inflow of cash encouraged Farnood and Ferozi to begin skimming off depositors’ funds as unsecured loans to themselves through fake front companies. Thus was born the world’s largest banking scam (when calculated as a percentage of the country’s gross domestic product) with the U.S. Embassy in Kabul acting as its midwife.

How It All Happened

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American Anniversaries from Hell 

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
By Tom Engelhardt

An Apache helicopter in Iraq. July 12th is the 6th anniversary of the "collateral murder" massacre leaked by Bradley Manning to Wikileaks.

It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.  Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad — the “mission accomplished” debacle of 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre — were at least noted in passing in our world.  In my hometown paper, the New York Times, the Iraq anniversary was memorialized with a lead op-ed by a former advisor to General David Petraeus who, amid the rubble, went in search of all-American “silver linings.”

Still, in our post-9/11 world, there are so many other anniversaries from hell whose silver linings don’t get noticed.  Take this April.  It will be the ninth anniversary of the widespread release of the now infamous photos of torture, abuse, and humiliation from Abu Ghraib.  In case you’ve forgotten, that was Saddam Hussein’s old prison where the U.S. military taught the fallen Iraqi dictator a trick or two about the destruction of human beings.  Shouldn’t there be an anniversary of some note there?  I mean, how many cultures have turned dog collars (and the dogs that go with them), thumbs-up signs over dead bodies, and a mockery of the crucified Christ into screensavers?

Or to pick another not-to-be-missed anniversary that, strangely enough, goes uncelebrated here, consider the passage of the USA Patriot Act, that ten-letter acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”?  This October 26th will be the 11th anniversary of the hurried congressional vote on that 363-page (essentially unread) document filled with right-wing hobbyhorses and a range of provisions meant to curtail American liberties in the name of keeping us safe from terror.  “Small government” Republicans and “big government” Democrats rushed to support it back then.  It passed in the Senate in record time by 98-1, with only Russ Feingold in opposition, and in the House by 357-66 — and so began the process of taking the oppressive powers of the American state into a new dimension. It would signal the launch of a world of ever-expanding American surveillance and secrecy (and it would be renewed by the Obama administration at its leisure in 2011).

Or what about celebrating the 12th anniversary of Congress’s Authorization for Use of Military Force, the joint resolution that a panicked and cowed body passed on September 14, 2001?  It wasn’t a declaration of war — there was no one to declare war on — but an open-ended grant to the president of the unfettered power to use “all necessary and appropriate force” in what would become a never-ending (and still expanding) “Global War on Terror.”

Or how about the 11th anniversary on January 11th – like so many such moments, it passed unnoted — of the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, that jewel in the crown of George W. Bush’s offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, with its indefinite detention of the innocent and the guilty without charges, its hunger strikes, and abuses, and above all its remarkable ability to embed itself in our world and never go away?  Given that, on much of the rest of the planet, Guantanamo is now an icon of the post-9/11 American way of life, on a par with Mickey Mouse and the Golden Arches, shouldn’t its anniversary be noted?

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Ann Jones examines our culture of masculine violence at home and abroad.

Recently, American newscasts have uncharacteristically devoted lots of time to African stories.  Okay, one African story anyway.  No, not French intervention in Mali.  Nor the election in Kenya.  Nor even the food crisis in Lesotho.  (Yes, there is a food crisis in Lesotho.)  Instead, the focus has been on the tragic death of a white South African model at the hands of her white Paralympic sprinter boyfriend.  Accounts of the killing vary, but what no one disputes is that Oscar “Blade Runner” Pistorius gunned down Reeva Steenkamp while she was locked in a bathroom stall in his home on February 14th.

In a front-page feature, the New York Times reported that on the day before Steenkamp died, she was preparing to give a speech “on a subject that she had known first hand and that is endemic in South Africa: violence against women.”  The article, however, proceeded to focus mainly on what the Times termed “Mr. Pistorius’s less savory behavior” over the years, not the fact that South Africa is among the most lethal countries on the planet for women.  It has “10 femicides per 100,000 female population,” according to a 2011 “Global Burden of Armed Violence” report by the Swiss-based organization Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development.

South Africa, of course, has no monopoly on violence against women on that continent.  For example, a recent working paper by the Small Arms Survey, “Battering, Rape, and Lethal Violence: A Baseline of Information on Physical Threats against Women in Nairobi,” found that nearly “one-half of Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence.” The paper adds that “[e]xtreme and even fatal acts of violence — targeting poor women in particular — are common enough to be considered unremarkable, a non-issue for the media, the political class, the police, and by extension, the Kenyan state.”

And the situation is similarly grim in much of the rest of the world.  According to the “Global Burden of Armed Violence” report, “roughly 66,000 women are violently killed around the world each year, accounting for around 17% of all intentional homicides.”  Its analysis of data from 111 countries and territories finds that home is where the violence is and “the perpetrator is the current or former partner in just under half of the cases.”  Additionally, the findings suggest that violence against women, perhaps not surprisingly, follows overall rates of societal violence, since “countries featuring high homicide rates in the male population also typically experience high femicide rates.”  The report also finds that “one in every ten of all reported violent deaths around the world occurs in so-called conflict settings or during terrorist activities.”

Then what about the country that generates so many of these conflict settings?  And what about the men of its home front?

TomDispatch regular Ann Jones takes up these and other important questions in her latest provocative piece on violence, both in our war zones and back home.  And she’s just the woman to do it.  For the last several decades, Jones has been on the frontlines of both — reporting on abused women and children from the U.S. to the Congo and covering America’s festering war in Afghanistan, including spending time with American troops on the Afghan/Pakistan border.  As the U.S. wages semi-covert conflicts in the wilds of Yemen and Pakistan, Jones sheds light on another covert war hidden in plain sight.  Whatever you choose to call it — “wife torture” or “domestic violence” or a “war on women” — Jones raises uncomfortable questions you’re unlikely to hear on the nightly news, no matter how much Oscar Pistorius coverage you watch. Nick Turse

Men Who Kick Down Doors
Tyrants at Home and Abroad
By Ann Jones

Picture this.  A man, armored in tattoos, bursts into a living room not his own.  He confronts an enemy. He barks orders. He throws that enemy into a chair. Then against a wall.  He plants himself in the middle of the room, feet widespread, fists clenched, muscles straining, face contorted in a scream of rage.  The tendons in his neck are taut with the intensity of his terrifying performance.  He chases the enemy to the next room, stopping escape with a quick grab and thrust and body block that pins the enemy, bent back, against a counter. He shouts more orders: his enemy can go with him to the basement for a “private talk,” or be beaten to a pulp right here. Then he wraps his fingers around the neck of his enemy and begins to choke her.

No, that invader isn’t an American soldier leading a night raid on an Afghan village, nor is the enemy an anonymous Afghan householder.  This combat warrior is just a guy in Ohio named Shane. He’s doing what so many men find exhilarating: disciplining his girlfriend with a heavy dose of the violence we render harmless by calling it “domestic.”

It’s easy to figure out from a few basic facts that Shane is a skilled predator.  Why else does a 31-year-old man lavish attention on a pretty 19-year-old with two children (ages four and two, the latter an equally pretty and potentially targeted little female)?  And what more vulnerable girlfriend could he find than this one, named Maggie: a neglected young woman, still a teenager, who for two years had been raising her kids on her own while her husband fought a war in Afghanistan?  That war had broken the family apart, leaving Maggie with no financial support and more alone than ever.

But the way Shane assaulted Maggie, he might just as well have been a night-raiding soldier terrorizing an Afghan civilian family in pursuit of some dangerous Talib, real or imagined.  For all we know, Maggie’s estranged husband/soldier might have acted in the same way in some Afghan living room and not only been paid but also honored for it.  The basic behavior is quite alike: an overwhelming display of superior force. The tactics: shock and awe.  The goal: to control the behavior, the very life, of the designated target.  The mind set: a sense of entitlement when it comes to determining the fate of a subhuman creature.  The dark side: the fear and brutal rage of a scared loser who inflicts his miserable self on others.

Since 9/11, the further militarization of our already militarized culture has reached new levels.  Official America, as embodied in our political system and national security state, now seems to be thoroughly masculine, paranoid, quarrelsome, secretive, greedy, aggressive, and violent.  Readers familiar with “domestic violence” will recognize those traits as equally descriptive of the average American wife beater: scared but angry and aggressive, and feeling absolutely entitled to control something, whether it’s just a woman, or a small wretched country like Afghanistan.

Connecting the Dots

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Another dispatch from Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves, about the forgotten victims of war.

Here’s how I met Nick Turse.  I have a friend who’s a professor of public health and one day in 2003 he asked me if I’d be willing to spend a little time with one of his graduate students who was doing some curious work on the Vietnam War.  This student had read my book The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War era that had a significant Vietnam component, and was eager to get together with me.  One morning a week or two later, at the local diner near my apartment, I met this scraggly kid lugging a giant army surplus rucksack stuffed to the brim with god-knew-what.  And it was true.  Though born the year the Vietnam War ended, he did indeed know an inordinate amount about that conflict and had, he told me, stumbled upon a trove of forgotten files at the National Archives from a secret Vietnam-era Pentagon working group investigating U.S. war crimes.  Those files, he added, were both sobering and startlingly extensive and they had been carefully buried at war’s end.  It was the subject of his dissertation.

I must admit I only half paid attention.  Not long after, he started sending me little TomDispatch-like emails he was circulating to friends.  At first, I barely glanced at them, but — whatever “it” is — he had it and that included an incredible eye for strange war toys, odd military research, and bizarre Pentagon weapons programs.  After a while, I found myself compulsively reading those idiosyncratic emails of his.  Finally, I picked up the phone and suggested he turn one of them into a TD piece — and so he did.  On October 16, 2003, I published “Zap, Zap, You’re Dead,” an article on militarized video games, and our collaboration has never ended.

A couple of years later, I got him to turn his Pentagon research into The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives for the American Empire Project series I co-run with Steve Fraser.  In the meantime, that dissertation of his, compounded by years of further research in Vietnam and here, was slowly being transformed into what became Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Over that period, both as his editor and a friend, I’ve witnessed his obsessional journey, a genuine odyssey, through a nightmarish landscape of war and crime long buried, like those Pentagon files, in the memories of American veterans and Vietnamese peasants.  He spent years tracking down and interviewing those who had committed war crimes, those who tried to expose them, and those who suffered from them.  At the same time, he was working to grasp the nature of the American way of war in Vietnam that had made all this possible.

I knew something about what had already been written on that war here (though nobody could begin to read the 30,000 books that have poured out since that disaster of a conflict ended), and I had no doubt that his would be unique.  I knew something else as well: that Americans had, since 1973, been remarkably uninterested in the war crimes their troops had committed there and so I expected one of the great books on that war to disappear more or less without a trace, no matter when it came out.

Most of the time, being wrong is, at best, an uncomfortable experience.  Every now and then, though, it’s a wonder.  So it’s been with his book.  Instead of instantly heading down the tubes, it landed on the New York Times extended bestseller list, is being widely reviewed, and is now in its fifth printing.  Nick has appeared on shows ranging from Fresh Air and Democracy Now! to Moyers & Company.  Letters filled with terrifying memories from Vietnam vets, who have lived all these decades with their private nightmares, have been pouring in, offering powerful confirmation of what he’s written and enough new material for him to write volume two, if he ever wants.

Undoubtedly, this is an odd way to introduce his post for today, a sobering look at what we’re never told about war, but I wanted TomDispatch readers to know just how proud I am of Nick for not stopping, not caring what the future might hold, and especially for keeping faith with those, American and Vietnamese, who suffered grievously. Tom

Who Did You Rape in the War, Daddy?
A Question for Veterans that Needs Answering
By Nick Turse

On August 31, 1969, a rape was committed in Vietnam.  Maybe numerous rapes were committed there that day, but this was a rare one involving American GIs that actually made its way into the military justice system.

And that wasn’t the only thing that set it apart.

War is obscene.  I mean that in every sense of the word.  Some veterans will tell you that you can’t know war if you haven’t served in one, if you haven’t seen combat.  These are often the same guys who won’t tell you the truths that they know about war and who never think to blame themselves in any way for our collective ignorance.

The truth is, you actually can know a lot about war without fighting in one.  It just isn’t the sort of knowledge that’s easy to come by.

The main problem with most of those books is the complete lack of Vietnamese voices.  The Vietnam War killed more than 58,000 Americans.  That’s a lot of people and a lot of heartache.  It deserves attention.  But it killed several million Vietnamese and severely affected — and I mean severely — the lives of many millions more.  That deserves a whole lot more focus.

Missing in Action (From Our Histories)   

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All outcomes for the US 'drawdown' in Afghanistan seem bleak.

The euphemisms will come fast and furious.  Our soldiers will be greeted as “heroes” who, as in Iraq, left with their “heads held high,” and if in 2014 or 2015 or even 2019, the last of them, as also in Iraq, slip away in the dark of night after lying to their Afghan “allies” about their plans, few here will notice.

This will be the nature of the great Afghan drawdown. The words “retreat,” “loss,” “defeat,” “disaster,” and their siblings and cousins won’t be allowed on the premises.  But make no mistake, the country that, only years ago, liked to call itself the globe’s “sole superpower” or even “hyperpower,” whose leaders dreamed of a Pax Americana across the Greater Middle East, if not the rest of the globe is… not to put too fine a point on it, packing its bags, throwing in the towel, quietly admitting — in actions, if not in words — to mission unaccomplished, and heading if not exactly home, at least boot by boot off the Eurasian landmass.

Washington has, in a word, had enough. Too much, in fact.  It’s lost its appetite for invasions and occupations of Eurasia, though special operations raids, drone wars, and cyberwars still look deceptively cheap and easy as a means to control… well, whatever.  As a result, the Afghan drawdown of 2013-2014, that implicit acknowledgement of yet another lost war, should set the curtain falling on the American Century as we’ve known it.  It should be recognized as a landmark, the moment in history when the sun truly began to set on a great empire.  Here in the United States, though, one thing is just about guaranteed: not many are going to be paying the slightest attention.

No one even thinks to ask the question: In the mighty battle lost, who exactly beat us?  Where exactly is the triumphant enemy?  Perhaps we should be relieved that the question is not being raised, because it’s a hard one to answer.  Could it really have been the scattered jihadis of al-Qaeda and its wannabes?  Or the various modestly armed Sunni and Shiite minority insurgencies in Iraq, or their Pashtun equivalents in Afghanistan with their suicide bombers and low-tech roadside bombs?  Or was it something more basic, something having to do with a planet no longer amenable to imperial expeditions?  Did the local and global body politic simply and mysteriously spit us out as the distasteful thing we had become?  Or is it even possible, as Pogo once suggested, that in those distant, unwelcoming lands, we met the enemy and he was us?  Did we in some bizarre fashion fight ourselves and lose?  After all, last year, more American servicemen died from suicide than on the battlefield in Afghanistan; and a startling number of Americans were killed in “green on blue” or “insider” attacks by Afghan “allies” rather than by that fragmented movement we still call the Taliban.

Whoever or whatever was responsible, our Afghan disaster was remarkably foreseeable.  In fact, anyone who, from 2006 on, read Ann Jones’s Afghan reports at TomDispatch wouldn’t have had a doubt about the outcome of the war. Her first piece, after all, was prophetically entitled “Why It’s Not Working in Afghanistan.” (“The answer is a threefold failure: no peace, no democracy, and no reconstruction.”)  From Western private-contractors-cum-looters making a figurative killing off the “reconstruction” of the country to an Afghan army that was largely a figment of the American imagination to up-armored U.S. soldiers on well-guarded bases whose high-tech equipment and comforts of home blinded them to the nature of the enemy, hers has long been a tale of impending failure.  Now, that war seems headed for its predictable end, not for the Afghans who, as Jones indicates in her latest sweeping report from Kabul, may face terrible years ahead, but for the U.S.  After more than 11 years, the war that is often labeled the longest in American history is slowly winding down and that’s no small thing.

So leave the mystery of who beat us to the historians, but mark the moment. It’s historic. Tom

Counting Down to 2014 in Afghanistan 
Three Lousy Options: Pick One 
By Ann Jones

Kabul, Afghanistan — Compromise, conflict, or collapse: ask an Afghan what to expect in 2014 and you’re likely to get a scenario that falls under one of those three headings. 2014, of course, is the year of the double whammy in Afghanistan: the next presidential election coupled with the departure of most American and other foreign forces. Many Afghans fear a turn for the worse, while others are no less afraid that everything will stay the same.  Some even think things will get better when the occupying forces leave.  Most predict a more conservative climate, but everyone is quick to say that it’s anybody’s guess.

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[Editor's Note: The Firedoglake Book Salon will host Nick Turse for a discussion of Kill Anything That Moves on January 19. -MyFDL Editor]

Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse, a new look at the cost of Vietnam in civilian lives

In late December 2001, not long after Washington’s second Afghan War began, there was that wedding celebration in eastern Afghanistan in which 110 of 112 villagers were reportedly killed by American B-52 and B-1B bombers using precision guided weapons.  Then there were the more than 40 Iraqi wedding celebrants (27 from one extended family, including 14 children) who died when U.S. planes struck their party at a village near the Syrian border back in May 2004, and the Afghan bridal party of 70 to 90 who were taken out by a U.S. airstrike on a road near the Pakistani border in July 2008.  (The bride and 46 of those accompanying her died, according to an Afghan inquiry, including 39 women and children.)  Added to this list should be the 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women, and children, ranging in age from 3 to 76, murdered by U.S. Marines in November 2005 in the long-forgotten Haditha massacre. And the 14-year-old girl whom American soldiers gang-raped and murdered along with her family in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, the next year.  And then there was the headline-grabbing case of those 16 civilians, nine of them children, 11 from one family, reportedly slaughtered (and some of their corpses burned) by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales in two southern Afghan villages in the course of a single night in March 2012.

Let’s not forget either the 12 Iraqis, including two Reuters employees, shot dead (and two children badly wounded) on a Baghdad street in July 2007 by the laughing crew of an Apache helicopter, as revealed in an infamous video released by WikiLeaks.  There were also the 60 children (and up to 30 adults) who died in the Afghan village of Azizabad on an August night in 2008 while attending a memorial service for a tribal leader who had been, villagers reported, anti-Taliban.  That, too, was thanks to air strikes. There were also those three (or more) Afghan civilians hunted down “for sport” in the summer of 2010 by a self-appointed U.S. “kill team” who were collecting trophy body parts.  And there were the 10 boys, including two sets of brothers, collecting wood for their families in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province early in 2011, who were attacked by U.S. helicopters.  Only one wounded boy survived.  Or most recently, the 11 Yemeni civilians, including women and children, in a Toyota truck killed by a U.S. airstrike and initially labeled “al-Qaeda militants.”

Such a list, of course, only scratches the surface of a reality that we in the United States have hardly noticed and so have to expend no effort whatsoever to ignore.  Unlike for the victims of 9/11 or more recently of Newtown, there will be no memorials, no teddy bears, no special rites, no solemn ceremonies.  Nothing.  The distant dead of our wars have largely paid the price in silence and anonymity for what the U.S. intelligence community likes to call the last superpower’s duty of being a “global security provider” — and which elsewhere often looks more like inflicting mayhem on local populations.

In addition, the particular form of “security” we’ve brought to such areas via the U.S. military continues even after we leave.  U.S. troops are gone from Iraq, for example, but the violence our invasion and occupation set loose has never ended. Iraq Body Count has just issued its report on rising deaths from violence in that country in 2012, both among the Iraqi police (922) and civilians (4,471). It concludes: “In sum the latest evidence suggests that the country remains in a state of low-level war little changed since early 2009, with a ‘background’ level of everyday armed violence punctuated by occasional larger-scale attacks designed to kill many people at once.” We bear genuine responsibility for this, but no longer care a whit.

It’s good that one American did care and has spent the last decade preparing to help us remember what kind of “security” our wars have long brought to such distant regions.  Nick Turse’s new book, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, paints a memorable portrait of the war that, unlike Iraq and undoubtedly someday Afghanistan, we can’t seem to forget.  Today, from his groundbreaking work on civilian suffering, he suggests the one way the “Vietnam analogy” really does apply to Iraq and Afghanistan. Tom  

“So Many People Died”
The American System of Suffering, 1965-2014
By Nick Turse

Pham To looked great for 78 years old.  (At least, that’s about how old he thought he was.)  His hair was thin, gray, and receding at the temples, but his eyes were lively and his physique robust — all the more remarkable given what he had lived through.  I listened intently, as I had so many times before to so many similar stories, but it was still beyond my ability to comprehend.  It’s probably beyond yours, too.

Pham To told me that the planes began their bombing runs in 1965 and that periodic artillery shelling started about the same time.  Nobody will ever know just how many civilians were killed in the years after that.  “The number is uncountable,” he said one spring day a few years ago in a village in the mountains of rural central Vietnam.  “So many people died.”

And it only got worse.  Chemical defoliants came next, ravaging the land.  Helicopter machine gunners began firing on locals.  By 1969, bombing and shelling were day-and-night occurrences.  Many villagers fled.  Some headed further into the mountains, trading the terror of imminent death for a daily struggle of hardscrabble privation; others were forced into squalid refugee resettlement areas.  Those who remained in the village suffered more when the troops came through.  Homes were burned as a matter of course.  People were kicked and beaten.  Men were shot when they ran in fear.  Women were raped.  One morning, a massacre by American soldiers wiped out 21 fellow villagers.  This was the Vietnam War for Pham To, as for so many rural Vietnamese.

One, Two… Many Vietnams?

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Photo: Imtiaz Ahmed / Flickr

In 1948, George Orwell published his classic dystopian novel 1984, flipping the numbers in the publication year to speed us into a future that is now, of course, 28 years in our past.  In that book, he imagined a three-superpower world of regularly shifting alliances in which war was a constant but its specific nature eternally forgotten.  As he wrote, “To trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one.”

Of course, predicting the future is a perilous thing.  Instead of three squabbling superpowers ruling the globe, we have one (in visible decline), and yet there are some eerie real-world parallels to Orwell’s fiction.  By 1984, for instance, the U.S. and the Saudis were funneling huge sums of money and vast quantities of weaponry through Pakistan’s intelligence outfit, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorat, to support the most fundamentalist and extreme of the Afghan mujahedeen who were then fighting that other superpower, the Soviet Union, in their country.  These included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (about as extreme as they came) and, as Anand Gopal has pointed out at TomDispatch, Jalaluddin Haqqani who received “millions of dollars, anti-aircraft missiles, and even tanks.”  He was, at the time, so beloved by Washington officials “that former congressman Charlie Wilson once called him ‘goodness personified.’”  Hekmatyar and Haqqani were among those President Ronald Reagan — shades of Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” — dubbed “freedom fighters.”

Jump forward nearly two decades, and the Haqqani network is perhaps Washington’s greatest bugaboo in the present Afghan War, a group regularly denounced by the Obama administration for its attacks on U.S. troops; while Hekmatyar and his group Hizb-i-Islami, like the Haqqani’s, are allied with the Taliban.  And let’s not forget one more “freedom fighter,” a rich young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, who, in 1984, founded the “Services Office” in Peshawar, Pakistan, to recruit, support, and fund those “freedom fighters,” and in 1988, formed a group called al-Qaeda (“The Base”) to further his vision.

The Soviets, of course, left Afghanistan in 1989 in defeat.  For Washington, the freedom fighters, soon to be at each others’ throats in a horrific civil war that left yet more dead Afghans in its wake, became the forgettables.  And in a sense, they are still forgotten.  These days, how often does anyone remember that a number of our present foes, the evil terrorists who must be destroyed, were our former pals and heroes.  (Or that some of the warlords in or allied with the present Afghan government of Hamid Karzai were both mujahedeen and monsters of that civil war era.)  Week in, week out, you can read the latest reports from the Afghan War filled with what should be a remarkably familiar cast of characters, and never find a single word about this past.  All of this has gone down the memory hole no less easily than did the history of Eastasia, Oceania, and Eurasia in Winston Smith’s Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain).

If this is commonplace history, isn’t it Orwellian, 11 years into our second Afghan War in three decades, how seldom it’s ever mentioned?  And given today’s post, toss this into the hopper: there’s an even stranger part of the story that Orwell didn’t imagine, and it concerns neighboring Pakistan, a country that seems eternally to be both ally and enemy (frenemy?), so much so that it’s almost impossible to sort out Washington’s two Pakistans.  That’s why TomDispatch called on Dilip Hiro, South Asia expert and author most recently of Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia, to do the job for us and make some sense of one of the stranger relationships on the face of the Earth.  (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Hiro discusses the embattled Pakistan-U.S. relationship, click here or download it to your iPod here.)  Tom

The Alliance from Hell
How the U.S. and Pakistan Became the Dysfunctional Nuclear Family of International Relations
By Dilip Hiro

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Afghan police officer (United States Marine Corps / Flickr)

One of the jokes of our era is the Republican Party’s claim that it favors “small government.”  An accurate description might go more like this: the present-day Republican Party (libertarians excepted) has never seen an oppressive power of the national security state it didn’t want to bolster or grow.  And it loves big government — the bigger the better — as long as we’re talking about the military-industrial complex.  Mitt Romney, for instance, is eager to build ever more naval vessels, increase the size of U.S. ground forces, and up by an extra $2 trillion or more over the next decade the Pentagon’s already staggering budget.  As the Bush administration proved and the Obama administration emphasized, stimulus packages, including massive infrastructural projects, are fine and dandy when pursued in Baghdad (biggest embassy on Earth) or Afghanistan (most bases ever).  Consider it an irony, that even undocumented aliens are a Republican “go,” if they happen to be part of the semi-slave labor force that helps to build and service American bases in war zones abroad. 

And lest anyone claim that we’re now a can’t-do nation with a can’t-do government, it’s simply not true.  Increasingly true, however, is that governmental “doing” only happens these days when the U.S. military is doing it.  This is, of course, the definition of a militarizing society.  And yet, let’s face it, the Pentagon’s ability to create infrastructure remains impressive — and something Americans know remarkably little about.

Take today’s piece by TomDispatch Associate Editor Nick Turse: to build untold hundreds of bases, some humongous, in a poverty-stricken, landlocked country (with few building resources of its own) thousands of miles from ours is little short of stunning.  In fact, thought of a certain way, the whole American way of war has the same quality.  Take the largest base built in Iraq, the ill-named Camp Victory with a 27-mile perimeter.  Housing 40,000 military personnel and 20,000 contractors, it had, among the usual brand-name fast-food restaurants, Internet cafes, and PXes, “a reverse osmosis water plant that could generate 1.85 million gallons a day, an ice plant, a 50-megawatt power generating station, stadium-sized chow halls, and a laundromat with 3,000 machines able to do 36,000 loads a day.”

Since any style of warfare emerges from the society that spawns it, we shouldn’t be surprised that we carry our particular version of a consumer society to war with us.  Think, for instance, of the final withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, when the U.S. military shipped out much of what we had brought in with us.  That turned out to be an estimated three million objects, ranging from tanks and laptop computers to toilets and tables (with at least another four million objects turned over to the Iraqis, “including 89,000 air conditioners worth $18.5 million”). 

Now, as if to remind us of the profligate nature of the American way of war, comes the news that to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, the U.S. military may have to send in extra troops to sort through the more than $60 billion worth of equipment and materiel that needs to leave with them.  Think of it not as an urge but a surge to depart, and a part of the general madness of war, American-style, in these last years.  Those extra troops will, by the way, be sending out at least 200,000 shipping containers and vehicles.

Big government?  It couldn’t get bigger.  Can-do, you bet.  Successful?  Not for a second.  Maybe the next time Washington wants to build the biggest embassy on Earth and hundreds of bases, large and small, it should do so here and create a few of the fantasy 12 million jobs Mitt Romney is promising Americans.  Tom 

Afghanistan’s Base Bonanza
Total Tops Iraq at That War’s Height
By Nick Turse

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Photo: U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Michael L. Casteel / Flickr

In the wake of several deaths among its contingent of troops in a previously peaceful province in Afghanistan, New Zealand (like France and South Korea) is now expediting the departure of its 140 soldiers.  That’s not exactly headline-making news here in the U.S.  If you’re an American, you probably didn’t even know that New Zealand was playing a small part in our Afghan War.  In fact, you may hardly have known about the part Americans are playing in a war that, over the last decade-plus, has repeatedly been labeled “the forgotten war.”

Still, maybe it’s time to take notice.  Maybe the flight of those Kiwis should be thought of as a small omen, even if they are departing as decorously, quietly, and flightlessly as possible.  Because here’s the thing: once the November election is over, “expedited departure” could well become an American term and the U.S., as it slips ignominiously out of Afghanistan, could turn out to be the New Zealand of superpowers.

You undoubtedly know the phrase: the best laid plans of mice and men.  It couldn’t be more apt when it comes to the American project in Afghanistan.  Washington’s plans have indeed been carefully drawn up.  By the end of 2014, U.S. “combat troops” are to be withdrawn, but left behind on the giant bases the Pentagon has built will be thousands of U.S. trainers and advisers, as well as special operations forces to go after al-Qaeda remnants (and other “militants”), and undoubtedly the air power to back them all up.

Their job will officially be to continue to “stand up” the humongous security force that no Afghan government in that thoroughly impoverished country will ever be able to pay for.  Thanks to a 10-year Strategic Partnership Agreement that President Obama flew to Kabul to seal with Afghan President Hamid Karzai as May began, there they are to remain until 2020 or beyond.

In other words, it being Afghanistan, we need a translator.  The American “withdrawal” regularly mentioned in the media doesn’t really mean “withdrawal.”  On paper at least, for years to come the U.S. will partially occupy a country that has a history of loathing foreigners who won’t leave (and making them pay for it).

Tea Boys and Old Men

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Imagine for a moment that almost once a week for the last six months somebody somewhere in this country had burst, well-armed, into a movie theater showing a superhero film and fired into the audience. That would get your attention, wouldn’t it? James Holmes times 21?  It would dominate the news.  We would certainly be consulting experts, trying to make sense of the pattern, groping for explanations. And what if the same thing had also happened almost once every two weeks in 2011? Imagine the shock, imagine the reaction here.

Afghan police officer (United States Marine Corps / Flickr)

Well, the equivalent has happened in Afghanistan (minus, of course, the superhero movies).  It even has a name: green-on-blue violence. In 2012 — and twice last week — Afghan soldiers, policemen, or security guards, largely in units being trained or mentored by the U.S. or its NATO allies, have turned their guns on those mentors, the people who are funding, supporting, and teaching them, and pulled the trigger.

It’s already happened at least 21 times in this half-year, resulting in 30 American and European deaths, a 50% jump from 2011, when similar acts occurred at least 21 times with 35 coalition deaths. (The “at least” is there because, in May, the Associated Press reported that, while U.S. and NATO spokespeople were releasing the news of deaths from such acts, green-on-blue incidents that resulted in no fatalities, even if there were wounded, were sometimes not reported at all.)

Take July. There have already been at least four such attacks.  The first, on July 1st, reportedly involved a member of the Afghan National Civil Order Police, a specially trained outfit, shooting down three British soldiers at a checkpoint in Helmand Province, deep in the Taliban heartland of the country. The shooter was captured. Two days later, a man in “an Afghan army uniform” turned his machine gun on American troops just outside a NATO base in Wardak Province, east of the Afghan capital Kabul, wounding five before fleeing.  (In initial reports, the shooter in all such incidents is invariably described as a man “in an Army/police uniform” as if he might be a Taliban infiltrator, and he almost invariably turns out to be an actual Afghan policeman or soldier.)

Then, on July 22nd, a security guard gunned down three police trainers — two former U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and a former United Kingdom Revenue and Customs Officer (while another retired Border Protection agent and an Afghan interpreter were wounded). This happened at a police training facility near Herat in Afghanistan’s generally peaceful northwest near the Iranian border.  The next day, a soldier on a military base in Faryab Province in the north of the country turned his gun on a group of American soldiers also evidently working as police trainers, wounding two of them before being killed by return fire.

Note that these July attacks were geographically diverse: one in the Taliban south, one east of the capital in an area that has seen a rise in Taliban attacks, and two in areas that aren’t normally considered insurgent hotbeds.  Similar attacks have been going for years, a number of them far more high profile, including the deaths of an American lieutenant colonel and major, each shot in the back of the head inside the heavily guarded Afghan Interior Ministry in Kabul; the killing of four French soldiers (and the wounding of 16) by an Afghan non-commissioned officer after an argument; the first killing of an American special forces operative by a U.S.-trained Afghan commando during a joint night raid; an elaborate attack organized by two Afghan soldiers and a civilian teacher at a joint outpost that killed two Americans, wounded two more, and disabled an armored vehicle; and the 2011 shooting of nine trainers (eight American officers and a contractor) in a restricted section of Kabul International Airport by an Afghan air force pilot.

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