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2020-02-28 Afghanistan
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A Tale Of Two Skepticisms: Fighting And Talking With The Taliban During The Obama Years
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Long, so just excerpting a few paragraphs.
[WarOnTheRocks] When I saw the Washington Post reports on the so-called Afghanistan papers, claiming that "senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan ... making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable," it took me back to a conversation I had with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the May 2012 NATO Summit in Chicago.
Lying, warmongering pieces of shit. Hang all of them in front of the US Capitol for treason.
The Post based its coverage on interviews conducted by the office of the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction with serving and former officials of the U.S. government, including me. From April 2009 to October 2013, I served as senior adviser to the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. I had been hired by that position’s first incumbent, the late Richard Holbrooke, who died from a torn aorta that erupted during a Dec. 10, 2010, meeting in Clinton’s office. That was less than two years after he was sworn in and less than two weeks after the first diplomatic contact between the United States and the Taliban since 9/11, at a safe house outside of Munich. Opening that channel had been my principal task. In May 2012, as adviser to Holbrooke’s successor, Marc Grossman, I attended the NATO summit, where, according to the Chicago Tribune, "the main agenda item was the future of Afghanistan." In his opening address, President Barack Obama called for a "transformational decade of peace."
Continued from Page 4
The Taliban had suspended talks with the United States two months earlier, on March 15, 2012, and I had lost the occasional direct access to Clinton that I had through Holbrooke. Holbrooke not only reported to Clinton, he was also her personal friend. He would take me to meetings with her on the seventh floor of the State Department building, sometimes with a retinue of other "senior advisers" ‐ we all reported directly to Holbrooke ‐ and sometimes, for the most sensitive discussions about opening the channel to the Taliban, alone.
This was the 7th floor that ran US foreign policy independent of the elected government, and represented no interest but its own. They were why our policies were so fucked up for so long.
Secretary Clinton and "the White House" knew of our meeting, Holbrooke said, and he asked for a "no fault discussion." The discussion was framed around the March 2009 Riedel report, known formally as the "White Paper of the Interagency Policy Group’s Report on U.S. Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan." That report defined the United States’ "core goal" as "to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan." The primary recommendation for achieving that goal was "executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan." That in turn required using U.S. forces to secure Afghanistan against a return of al Qaeda as the United States bolstered the legitimacy of the Afghan government and expanded the size and capability of the Afghan security forces. The work in Afghanistan was backed up by efforts to reorient Pakistan away from support for the Taliban. This strategy was necessary, the report argued, because "Mullah Omar and the Taliban’s hard core that have aligned themselves with al Qaeda are not reconcilable and we cannot make a deal that includes them."
Justification for war without end, what a surprise.
Like other U.S. policy documents on Afghanistan, the Riedel report said not a word about the history, politics, economy, society, or culture of Afghanistan. It was organized exclusively around U.S. objectives. I had learned not to raise this concern. When I had done so previously, Holbrooke told me, "You know why you will never succeed in government? You are too concerned with substance. Government is all about process." That Saturday Holbrooke asked me not to say anything until he gave the go-ahead.
Wonderful 7th floor thinking. Bloodless Mandarins with no grasp on reality, doing nothing but maneuvering for intra-agency advancement.
A "robust U.S. presence," Talbott argued, was at the "heart of the political question" in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. As Keane remarked, "You can’t get them to change unless you convince them they cannot win." That would require about 400,000 Afghan troops and police by 2013. Even if we and the military make an overwhelming case along these lines for more military resources, Holbrooke asked, can the U.S. political system bear it? "The American public," Podesta said, "does not understand the linkage between the strategy and the mission."
Damn straight we don't. Because it's not in our interest.
Holbrooke gave me the nod. "The American public is right," I said. The strategy would not succeed and was not needed, because there was another way to stabilize and secure Afghanistan ‐ through a political settlement. Keane argued that the goal didn’t have to be the "ultimate defeat" of the Taliban, but bringing the violence down to a level that the Afghan security forces could deal with on their own. Even that, however, Gelb emphasized, required Obama to articulate the goal and carry out his pledge to "fully resource" the war. I cautioned that it was not possible to "fully resource" an unachievable objective.
A rare voice of reason.
The demonization of adversaries ‐ going "in search of monsters to destroy," as John Quincy Adams put it ‐ makes coercion and violence the inevitable choice. The depiction of the Taliban as a component of a "terrorist syndicate" or "jihadist Frankenstein" ‐ as Obama-era Afghanistan strategists did ‐ is a perfect example of context-free demonization. Organizations and movements use terrorism in pursuit of political objectives that arise from historical contexts. The alternative to demonization is not relativism, but realism. Understanding the history and context that gave rise to the Taliban does not justify their behavior, but it helps to understand why they act as they do and what might impel them to change.
A month before the 2009 meeting at which Riedel depicted the Taliban as characters from a Gothic novel, a Saudi contact summoned me to Dubai to tell me that an emissary of Mullah Omar was waiting in Jeddah to talk to the United States. But the one-dimensional analysis that dominated the government’s Afghanistan thinking meant that Holbrooke hesitated even to report that contact, as it fit with no existing policy and contradicted the intelligence community consensus that the Taliban had no interest in negotiation.
1. Deal with reality? Or 2. Admit you were wrong and lose prestige within the State Department? Choices, choices.
The cost of this bias for coercion and against negotiation is measured not just in poor national security decision-making but in human lives, most of them not American. Afghanistan has bled from wars not of its own making for over 40 years. An open-ended U.S. military presence without a settlement, or continuing a war with no clear objective or prospect of success, would waste resources and sacrifice innocent lives to fears and misconceptions. War is sometimes a necessity, but it can also become an addiction. It is time to break the habit.
Amen. Time to get the hell out of there. 
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Posted by Herb McCoy 2020-02-28 00:00||
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