American Way of War (30 page)

5.
The CIA and special forces surge
: Noah Shachtman of
Wired
’s Danger Room blog had it right when he wrote: “The most important escalation of the war might be the one the President didn’t mention at West Point,” referring to the CIA’s “covert” (but openly discussed) drone war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. In fact, the CIA’s drone attacks there have been escalating in numbers since the Obama administration came into office. Now, it seems, paralleling the civilian surge in the Af-Pak theater of operations, there is to be a CIA one as well. While little information on this is available, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the
New York Times
report that the CIA has delivered a plan to the White House “for widening the campaign of strikes against militants by drone aircraft in Pakistan, sending additional spies there and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the CIA’s budget for operations inside the country.” In addition, Scott Shane of the
Times
reports, “The White House has authorized an expansion of the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said…to parallel the president’s decision… to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time—a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas—because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.”

The Pakistani southern border province of Baluchistan is a complex tinderbox of a region with its own sets of separatists and religious extremists, as well as a (possibly U.S.-funded) rebel movement aimed at the Baluchi minority areas of Iran. The Pakistani government is powerfully opposed to drone strikes in the area of the heavily populated provincial capital Quetta where, Washington insists, the Afghan Taliban leadership largely resides. If such strikes do begin, they could prove the most destabilizing aspect of the widening of the war that the present surge represents.

In addition, thanks to the
Nation
magazine’s Jeremy Scahill, we know that, from a secret base in Karachi, Pakistan, the U.S. Army’s Joint Special
Operations Command, in conjunction with the private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater), operates “a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, ‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan.” Since so many U.S. activities in Pakistan involve secretive, undoubtedly black-budget operations, we may only have the faintest outlines of what the “surge” there means.

6.
The base-building surge
: Like the surge in contractors and in drone attacks, the surge in base building in Afghanistan significantly preceded Obama’s latest troop-surge announcement, but he has continued it. A December 5, 2009, NBC
Nightly News
report on the ever-expanding U.S. base at Kandahar Airfield, which it aptly termed a “boom town,” shows just how ongoing this part of the overall surge is, and at what a staggering level. As in Iraq from 2003 on, billions of dollars are being sunk into bases, the largest of which—especially the old Soviet site, Bagram Air Base, with more than $200 million in construction projects and upgrades under way—are beginning to look like ever more permanent fixtures on the landscape.

As Nick Turse of
TomDispatch.com
has reported, forward operating bases and smaller combat outposts have been sprouting all over southern Afghanistan. “Forget for a moment the ‘debates’ in Washington over Afghan War policy,” he wrote, “and, if you just focus on the construction activity and the flow of money into Afghanistan, what you see is a war that, from the point of view of the Pentagon, isn’t going to end any time soon. In fact, the U.S. military’s building boom in that country suggests that, in the ninth year of the Afghan War, the Pentagon has plans for a far longer-term, if not near-permanent, garrisoning of the country, no matter what course Washington may decide upon.”

7.
The training surge
: In some ways, the greatest prospective surge may prove to be in the training of the Afghan National Army and police. Despite years of U.S. and NATO “mentoring,” both are in notoriously poor shape. The Afghan army is riddled with desertions, running at a rate of at least 25 percent of those trained annually, and the Afghan police are reportedly a hapless, ill-paid, corrupt, drug-addicted lot. Nonetheless, Washington (with the help of NATO reinforcements) is planning to bring
an army whose numbers officially stand at approximately 94,000 (but may actually be as low as 40-odd thousand) to 134,000 reasonably well-trained troops by fall 2010 and 240,000 a year later. Similarly, the Obama administration hopes to take the police numbers from an official 93,000 to 160,000.

8.
The cost surge
: This is a difficult subject to pin down in part because the Pentagon is, in cost-accounting terms, one of the least transparent organizations around. What can be said for certain is that Obama’s $30 billion figure won’t faintly hold when it comes to the real surge. There is no way that figure will cover anything like all the troops, bases, contractors, and the rest. Just take the plan to train an Afghan security force of approximately 400,000 in the coming years. We’ve already spent more than $15 billion on the training of the Afghan army, and another $7 billion has gone into police training, staggering figures for a far smaller combined force with poor results. Imagine, then, what a massive bulking up of the country’s security forces will actually cost. In congressional testimony, Centcom commander General David Petraeus suggested a possible price tag of $10 billion a year. And if such a program works, which seems unlikely, try to imagine how one of the poorest countries on the planet will support a 400,000-person force. Afghan president Hamid Karzai has suggested that it will take at least fifteen to twenty years before the country can actually pay for such a force itself. In translation, what we have here is undoubtedly a version of Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule (“You break it, you own it”). In this case, you build it, you own it. If we create such security forces, they will be, financially speaking, ours into the foreseeable future. And this is even without adding in those local militias we’re planning to invest “millions” in.

9.
The endlessly receding horizon surge
: By all accounts, the president tried to put some kind of limit on his most recent Afghan surge, not wanting “an open-ended commitment.” With that in mind, he evidently insisted on a plan in which some of the surge troops would start to come home in July 2011. This was presented in the media as a case of giving something to everyone (the Republican opposition, his field commanders, and his own antiwar Democratic Party base). In fact, he gave his commanders and the Republican opposition a very real surge in numbers. In
this regard, a
Washington Post
headline said it all: “McChrystal’s Afghanistan Plan Stays Mainly Intact.” On the other hand, what he gave his base was only the vaguest of drawdown promises. Moreover, within hours of the speech, even that commitment was being watered down by the first top officials to speak on the subject. Soon enough, as the right wing began to blaze away about the mistake of announcing a withdrawal date “to the enemy,” there was little short of a stampede of high officials eager to make that promise ever less meaningful. In what Mark Mazzetti of the
Times
called a “flurry of coordinated television interviews,” the top civilian and military officials of the administration marched onto the Sunday morning talk shows “in lockstep” to reassure the Right (and they were reassured) by playing “down the significance of the July 2011 target date.” The United States was, Secretary of Defense Gates and others indicated, going to be in the region in strength for years to come. (“July 2011 was just the beginning, not the end, of a lengthy process. That date, [national security adviser] General [James] Jones said, is a ‘ramp’ rather than a ‘cliff.’”)

When it came to the spreading Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the president in his speech spoke of his surge goal this way: “We must reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government.” This seemed a modest enough target, even if the means of reaching it are proving immodest indeed. After all, we’re talking about a relatively lightly armed minority Pashtun insurgency. Against them and a minuscule number of al-Qaeda operatives, the Pentagon has launched an unbelievably costly buildup of forces over vast distances, along fragile, overextended supply lines, and in a country poorer than almost any other on the planet. The State Department has followed suit, as has the CIA across the border in Pakistan. This is the reality the president and his top officials didn’t bother to explain to the American people.

And yet, confoundingly, as the United States bulks up, the war only grows fiercer both within the country and in parts of Pakistan. As Andrew Bacevich, author of
The Limits of Power
, has written, “Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars in distant countries does more to inflame than to extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent anti-Western jihadism.” Whatever the Obama administration does in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, however, give it some credit: the ability to mount a sustained operation of this size in one of the most difficult places on the planet, when it can’t even mount a reasonable jobs program at home, remains a strange wonder of the world.

Back in 2007, when General David Petraeus was the surge commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, he had a penchant for clock imagery. In an interview in April of that year, he typically said: “I’m conscious of a couple of things. One is that the Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock, so we’re obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit and to produce some progress on the ground that can perhaps give hope to those in the coalition countries, in Washington, and perhaps put a little more time on the Washington clock.” And he wasn’t alone. Military spokespeople and others in the Bush administration right up to the president regularly seemed to hear one, two, or sometimes as many as three clocks ticking away ominously and out of sync.

Hearing some discordant ticking myself of late, I decided to retrieve Petraeus’s image from the dustbin of history. So imagine three ticking clocks, all right here in the United States, one set to Washington time, a second to American time, and the third to Pentagon time.

In Washington—with even the
New York Times
agreeing that a “majority” of one hundred is sixty (not fifty-one) and that the Senate’s forty-first vote settles everything—the clock seems to be ticking erratically, if at all. On the other hand, that American clock, if we’re to believe the good citizens of Massachusetts, is ticking away like a bomb. Americans are impatient, angry, and “in revolt” against Washington time. That’s what the media continue to tell us in the wake of the Senate upset in which Republicans won the long-safe Democratic seat opened up by the death of Edward Kennedy. Depending on which account you read, they were outraged by a nearly trillion-dollar health-care reform that was also a giveaway to insurance companies, and annoyed by Democratic candidate Martha Coakley calling Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling a “Yankees fan.” They were anxious about an official Massachusetts unemployment
rate of 9.4 percent (and a higher real one), an economy that has rebounded for bankers but not for regular people, soaring deficits, staggering foreclosure rates, mega-banking bonuses, the Obama administration’s bailout of those same bankers, and its coziness with Wall Street. They were angry and impatient about a lot of things, blind angry you might say, since they were ready to vote back into office the party not in office, even if behind that party’s “new face” were ideas that would take us back to the origins of the present disaster.

It’s worth noting, however, that they weren’t angry about everything—and that the Washington clock, barely moving on a wide range of issues, is still ticking away when it comes to one institution. The good citizens of Massachusetts may be against free rides and bailouts for many types, but not for everybody. I’m speaking, of course, about the Pentagon, for which Congress in 2010 passed a record budget of $626 billion. This happened without real debate, much public notice, or even a touch of anger in Washington or Massachusetts. And keep in mind that the Pentagon’s real budget is undoubtedly closer to a trillion dollars, without even including the full panoply of support for our national security state.

The Tea Party crews don’t rail against Pentagon giveaways, nor do American voters. Unfettered Pentagon budgets pass in the tick-tock of a Washington clock and no one seems fazed when the
Wall Street Journal
reveals that military aides accompanying globe-hopping parties of congressional representatives regularly spend thousands of taxpayer dollars on snacks, drinks, and other “amenities” for them, even while, like some K Street lobbying outfit, promoting their newest weaponry. Think of it, in financial terms, as Pentagon peanuts shelled out for actual peanuts, and no one gives a damn.

It was hardly news—and certainly nothing to get angry about—when the secretary of defense met privately with the nation’s top military-industrial contractors, called for an even “closer partnership,” and pledged to further their mutual interests by working “with the White House to secure steady growth in the Pentagon’s budgets over time.” Nor did it cause a stir among the denizens of inside-the-Beltway Washington or Americans generally when the top ten defense contractors spent more than $27 million
lobbying the federal government, as in the last quarter of 2009, just as plans for the president’s Afghan surge were being prepared.

However, it’s not just the angry citizens of Massachusetts, or those Tea Party organizers, or Republican stalwarts who see no link between our military-industrial outlays, our perpetual wars, and our economic woes. When, for instance, was the last time you saw a bona fide liberal economist and columnist like Paul Krugman include the Pentagon and our wars in the litany of things potentially bringing this country down?