The legendary Texas congressman talks about his secret 1980s Afghan war (and its blowback), the Obama campaign and being better-looking than Tom Hanks.
Universal Pictures
Left, Tom Hanks as Charlie Wilson, right, the real Charlie Wilson.
If “Charlie Wilson’s War” (brand-new on DVD) is an entertaining mishmash, oddly less than the sum of its remarkable parts, the story it has to tell is one of the most fascinating, improbable and haunting yarns in recent world history. It sounded like a perfect combo: “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols team up to tell the story of former Texas congressman Wilson, a legendary boozer and womanizer who secretly directed billions of taxpayer dollars to the 1980s Afghan mujahedin insurgency against the Soviet Union — a war that shaped the world we live in, for good and for ill.
But the relative failure of “Charlie Wilson’s War” at the box office wasn’t just a matter of the public’s lack of interest in topical or political material (although that probably played a role). Sorkin’s script has to pack an immense amount of historical background into less than 100 minutes; it leaves out much of the complexity and internal paradox of the Afghan war, and often feels clunky and expository. Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are awkwardly cast as Wilson and Joanne Herring, the evangelical Christian Texas socialite (and Wilson’s occasional paramour) who first got the randy congressman interested in the Afghans’ David-vs.-Goliath struggle against Soviet invaders.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is predictably great as renegade CIA agent Gust Avrakotos, who arranged the secret arms deals (an unholy partnership between Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) that preserved American deniability by putting Soviet weapons in the Afghan rebels’ hands. Once the Afghans had arms and training that enabled them to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships by the dozens, the tide of the war — and the tide of 20th century history — shifted radically. In 1989 the Red Army left Afghanistan, and two years later the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist, the Berlin Wall had been pulled down and the Cold War was over.
Both Avrakotos and Wilson grasped that driving the Russians out of Afghanistan, while a monumental achievement, was not sufficient; without help in building a civil society, that nation would once again fall into chaos, with unpredictable consequences. But they weren’t able to do much, and nobody else paid attention. Much of the money and power generated during the Afghan war flowed to Islamic extremists who were just as much anti-American as anti-Soviet. Caught up in Cold War triumphalism, the United States moved on, and at least to some degree the rise of the Taliban, the arrival of al-Qaida and everything that followed were the “blowback” from that failure.
With Nichols’ uneven but entertaining film just out on DVD from Universal Home Video, the real Charlie Wilson got on the horn with me from his home in Lufkin, Texas, to talk about it. A Democrat from a conservative east Texas district, Wilson was known in Congress as a social liberal, a Cold War hawk, a tremendously skilled backroom dealmaker — and a hardcore partyer who never said no to women, whiskey or, you know, other things like that. His wild living and strange foreign-policy partnerships — he was friendly with former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, and lobbied for the Pakistani government after leaving the House in 1996 — have made him, to say the least, a controversial figure within his own party. But he still describes himself as a liberal Democrat, and at 74 with a new heart (after a transplant last fall), he sounds almost as feisty as ever. Modesty, however, is not his strong suit.
You know, ordinarily I’d ask someone in your position how it felt to see yourself on the big screen, played by a movie star. But I’ve seen pictures of you as a younger man, and I think you were a better-looking guy than Tom Hanks.
Well, I think that’s the case, yeah. My wife certainly agrees with that. We’ve mentioned that to Tom, and he’s sort of ambiguous about it. He won’t commit himself either way.
It’s pretty tough to boil all this amazing history down to a film that runs not much over an hour and a half. What should people know about this story that didn’t make it into the movie?
Well, please understand that I’m not critical of the priorities of the movie. But I would love to have seen more of the inside wrestling-around in Congress, the things we had to do and the degrees we had to go to, to get around the rules. I’d like to see the public more educated about that.
Right. The movie focuses a lot on your personal excesses, which are certainly entertaining. But you were also known as one of the most skilled operators in the corridors of Capitol Hill.
That’s right, and I’d like to have seen more of that. But I understand why they couldn’t do that. The key ingredients are all there. The initial outrage at the lack of interest at the CIA [in the plight of the Afghans], the beginning of the weaponization of the mujahedin, and then the way it snowballed and became a major thing. The shooting down of all those Soviet helicopters, and then the Soviets pulling out. It was major stuff.
It’s probably hard to look at that history from a detached perspective because you were so intimately involved with it. But if you hadn’t been there, would somebody else have done something similar? Or to ask the question another way, would some other factor have brought the Soviet Union to its Waterloo moment?
That’s a good question, and I think the answer’s no. I think this deal was the sun and the moon and the stars lined up just right. It was a once-in-a-lifetime, a once-in-a-million-lifetimes thing. The Congress was in a mood to go after the Soviets, and it just happened. It would be very hard to happen again. You don’t have many wars where you have a clear right and wrong, and nobody can argue the other side. In the wars in Central America, the contra wars, the arguments were endless as to where the real merits were. But in this one there was no argument. It was the good guys against the bad guys, period.
And that sense transcended the usual Democrat-Republican partisan divisions of Washington.
Absolutely. Without that it could never have happened. If you’d had somebody out leaking to the press, somebody trying to gain partisan advantage, it would have all fallen apart.
Looking back on this, do you still feel it’s appropriate for such a major foreign-policy decision to be made in secret, without the public even knowing about it?
Well, some foreign policy things are best done in private. It would have been very hard to explain to a reporter why he wasn’t getting this over the AP wires.
So what’s the public role? Is it our job just to elect the people with the right principles, and then trust them to do these jobs properly?
I think it is, in a case like this. I don’t think the public really has a possible role in intricate foreign-policy decisions and executions like this one.
To look at more recent history, we were led into war in Iraq by the administration and the foreign policy establishment …
It wasn’t the foreign policy establishment. It was the president and the National Security Council and, mostly, the vice president. It wasn’t the State Department.
If you had been in Congress in 2002 and 2003, how would you have voted on the Iraq war?
I would have voted against it. I wouldn’t have been convinced.
Even based on what you knew at that point? You thought the WMD argument was pretty thin?
Very thin, and totally unproven. Somebody would have had to show me some evidence, and there was no evidence on the weapons of mass destruction, other than Saddam Hussein’s defiance. And you don’t invade other countries because they’re defiant. Otherwise we’d have troops on the way to Zimbabwe right now. [Laughter.]
Given the amazing success of this covert operation in Afghanistan, why doesn’t it happen more often? Why didn’t Congress do something quietly about Rwanda or Darfur?
You’ve got to have somebody that’s passionate and reckless, who really pushes it and is willing to take chances. We had that in Afghanistan and we haven’t had it since. In Afghanistan, there was a lot of luck involved, a lot of things fell into place. It would have been hard to do if it had been a civil war. But with a Soviet invasion, that straightened out all the moral arguments.
We were able to do all these things because for the first three years of this, the press was overwhelmed by the excitement of Central America. We were moving millions and millions of dollars through Afghanistan, while the president and Congress were fighting over $5 million in Central America, and the press was riveted by that. I never understood that.
You’ve probably been asked this question hundreds of times since 2001, but I’ll ask it again. To what extent were later events in Afghanistan — the rise of the Taliban, the arrival of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, and everything that followed that — the unintended consequences of your secret war in the ’80s?
People will always argue about that, and there’s no empirical answer. I think the telling thing was that Muslims looked back at this and saw that they had taken down one superpower, in the Soviet Union. It made them think that maybe they could take down another one. That was the contribution of the Afghan war to 9/11.
In the film we see you arguing that the United States had a moral responsibility to rebuild Afghanistan after the Soviets left. Do we still have that unfulfilled responsibility?
Absolutely. We still owe it and we have to fulfill it. I think we probably will, but we’ll mess around with it, not do it as directly as we should and not do it in as timely a way as we should. I think we should be in there right now. We were trying before the Iraq war started, but then Iraq pulled away both military resources and civilian reconstruction resources.
Lastly, our readers need to know who you’re supporting in the Democratic campaign for president.
I voted for Obama in the Texas primary.
Really? Could he win in your old district?
Well, if the campaign’s right, and if John McCain — who is a friend of mine — just marches in lockstep with the Bush policies, then I think he might. But we can’t depend on Texas to deliver this election for the Democrats. [Laughter.]
Our non-withdrawal from Afghanistan
Despite the alleged 2014 end date, the military has ramped up its construction of long-term bases
A helicopter lands near U.S. soldiers at the Forward Operating Base Bostic in Kunar, Afghanistan (Credit: Reuters/Erik de Castro)
In late December, the lot was just a big blank: a few burgundy metal shipping containers sitting in an expanse of crushed eggshell-colored gravel inside a razor-wire-topped fence. The American military in Afghanistan doesn’t want to talk about it, but one day soon, it will be a new hub for the American drone war in the Greater Middle East.
Next year, that empty lot will be a two-story concrete intelligence facility for America’s drone war, brightly lit and filled with powerful computers kept in climate-controlled comfort in a country where most of the population has no access to electricity. It will boast almost 7,000 square feet of offices, briefing and conference rooms, and a large “processing, exploitation and dissemination” operations center — and, of course, it will be built with American tax dollars.
Nor is it an anomaly. Despite all the talk of drawdowns and withdrawals, there has been a years-long building boom in Afghanistan that shows little sign of abating. In early 2010, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had nearly 400 bases in Afghanistan. Today, Lieutenant Lauren Rago of ISAF public affairs tells TomDispatch, the number tops 450.
The hush-hush, high-tech, super-secure facility at the massive air base in Kandahar is just one of many building projects the U.S. military currently has planned or underway in Afghanistan. While some U.S. bases are indeed closing up shop or being transferred to the Afghan government, and there’s talk of combat operations slowing or ending next year, as well as a withdrawal of American combat forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the U.S. military is still preparing for a much longer haul at mega-bases like Kandahar and Bagram airfields. The same is true even of some smaller camps, forward operating bases (FOBs) and combat outposts (COPs) scattered through the country’s backlands. “Bagram is going through a significant transition during the next year to two years,” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Gerdes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Bagram Office recently told Freedom Builder, a Corps of Engineers publication. “We’re transitioning… into a long-term, five-year, 10-year vision for the base.”
Whether the U.S. military will still be in Afghanistan in five or 10 years remains to be seen, but steps are currently being taken to make that possible. U.S. military publications, plans and schematics, contracting documents and other official data examined by TomDispatch catalog hundreds of construction projects worth billions of dollars slated to begin, continue or conclude in 2012.
While many of these efforts are geared toward structures for Afghan forces or civilian institutions, a considerable number involve U.S. facilities, some of the most significant being dedicated to the ascendant forms of American warfare: drone operations and missions by elite special operations units. The available plans for most of these projects suggest durability. “The structures that are going in are concrete and mortar, rather than plywood and tent skins,” says Gerdes. As of last December, his office was involved in 30 Afghan construction projects for U.S. or international coalition partners worth almost $427 million.
The Big Base Build-Up
Recently, the New York Times reported that President Obama is likely to approve a plan to shift much of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan to special operations forces. These elite troops would then conduct kill/capture missions and train local troops well beyond 2014. Recent building efforts in the country bear this out.
A major project at Bagram Air Base, for instance, involves the construction of a special operations forces complex, a clandestine base within a base that will afford America’s black ops troops secrecy and near-absolute autonomy from other U.S. and coalition forces. Begun in 2010, the $29 million project is slated to be completed this May and join roughly 90 locations around the country where troops from Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan have been stationed.
Elsewhere on Bagram, tens of millions of dollars are being spent on projects that are less sexy but no less integral to the war effort, like paving dirt roads and upgrading drainage systems on the mega-base. In January, the U.S. military awarded a $7 million contract to a Turkish construction company to build a 24,000-square-foot command-and-control facility. Plans are also in the works for a new operations center to support tactical fighter jet missions, a new flight-line fire station, as well as more lighting and other improvements to support the American air war.
Last month, Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered that the U.S.-run prison at Bagram be transferred to Afghan control. By the end of January, the U.S. had issued a $36 million contract for the construction, within a year, of a new prison on the base. While details are sparse, plans for the detention center indicate a thoroughly modern, high-security facility complete with guard towers, advanced surveillance systems, administrative facilities and the capacity to house about 2,000 prisoners.
At Kandahar Air Field, that new intelligence facility for the drone war will be joined by a similarly-sized structure devoted to administrative operations and maintenance tasks associated with robotic aerial missions. It will be able to accommodate as many as 180 personnel at a time. With an estimated combined price tag of up to $5 million, both buildings will be integral to Air Force and possibly CIA operations involving both the MQ-1 Predator drone and its more advanced and more heavily-armed progeny, the MQ-9 Reaper.
The military is keeping information about these drone facilities under extraordinarily tight wraps. They refused to answer questions about whether, for instance, the construction of these new centers for robotic warfare are in any way related to the loss of Shamsi Air Base in neighboring Pakistan as a drone operations center, or if they signal efforts to increase the tempo of drone missions in the years ahead. The International Joint Command’s chief of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) operations, aware that such questions were to be posed, backed out of a planned interview with TomDispatch.
“Unfortunately our ISR chief here in the International Joint Command is going to be unable to address your questions,” Lieutenant Ryan Welsh of ISAF Joint Command Media Outreach explained by email just days before the scheduled interview. He also made it clear that any question involving drone operations in Pakistan was off limits. “The issues that you raise are outside the scope under which the IJC operates, therefore we are unable to facilitate this interview request.”
Whether the construction at Kandahar is designed to free up facilities elsewhere for CIA drone operations across the border in Pakistan or is related only to missions within Afghanistan, it strongly suggests a ramping up of unmanned operations. It is, however, just one facet of the ongoing construction at the air field. This month, a $26 million project to build 11 new structures devoted to tactical vehicle maintenance at Kandahar is scheduled for completion. With two large buildings for upkeep and repairs, one devoted strictly to fixing tires, another to painting vehicles, as well as an industrial-sized car wash, and administrative and storage facilities, the big base’s building boom shows no sign of flickering out.
Construction and Reconstruction
This year, at Herat Air Base in the province of the same name bordering Turkmenistan and Iran, the U.S. is slated to begin a multimillion-dollar project to enhance its special forces’ air operations. Plans are in the works to expand apron space — where aircraft can be parked, serviced and loaded or unloaded — for helicopters and airplanes, as well as to build new taxiways and aircraft shelters.
That project is just one of nearly 130, cumulatively valued at about $1.5 billion, slated to be carried out in Herat, Helmand and Kandahar provinces this year, according to Army Corps of Engineers documents examined by TomDispatch. These also include efforts at Camp Tombstone and Camp Dwyer, both in Helmand Province as well as Kandahar’s FOB Hadrian and FOB Wilson. The U.S. military also recently awarded a contract for more air field apron space at a base in Kunduz, a new secure entrance and new roads for FOB Delaram II, and new utilities and roads at FOB Shank, while the Marines recently built a new chapel at Camp Bastion.
Seven years ago, Forward Operating Base Sweeney, located a mile up in a mountain range in Zabul Province, was a well-outfitted, if remote, American base. After U.S. troops abandoned it, however, the base fell into disrepair. Last month, American troops returned in force and began rebuilding the outpost, constructing everything from new troop housing to a new storage facility. “We built a lot of buildings, we put up a lot of tents, we filled a lot of sandbags, and we increased our force protection significantly,” Captain Joe Mickley, commanding officer of the soldiers taking up residence at the base, told a military reporter.
Decommission and Deconstruction
Hesco barriers are, in essence, big bags of dirt. Up to seven feet tall, made of canvas and heavy gauge wire mesh, they form protective walls around U.S. outposts all over Afghanistan. They’ll take the worst of sniper rounds, rifle-propelled grenades, even mortar shells, but one thing can absolutely wreck them — the Marines’ 9th Engineer Support Battalion.
At the beginning of December, the 9th Engineers were building bases and filling up Hescos in Helmand Province. By the end of the month, they were tearing others down.
Wielding pickaxes, shovels, bolt-cutters, powerful rescue saws and front-end loaders, they have begun “demilitarizing” bases, cutting countless Hescos — which cost $700 or more a pop — into heaps of jagged scrap metal and bulldozing berms in advance of the announced American withdrawal from Afghanistan. At Firebase Saenz, for example, Marines were bathed in a sea of crimson sparks as they sawed their way through the metal mesh and let the dirt spill out, leaving a country already haunted by the ghosts of British and Russian bases with yet another defunct foreign outpost. After Saenz, it was on to another patrol base slated for destruction.
Not all rural outposts are being torn down, however. Some are being handed over to the Afghan Army or police. And new facilities are now being built for the indigenous forces at an increasing rate. “If current projections remain accurate, we will award 18 contracts in February,” Bonnie Perry, the head of contracting for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Afghanistan Engineering District-South, told military reporter Karla Marshall. “Next quarter we expect that awards will remain high, with the largest number of contract awards occurring in May.” One of the projects underway is a large base near Herat, which will include barracks, dining facilities, office space and other amenities for Afghan commandos.
Tell Me How This Ends
No one should be surprised that the U.S. military is building up and tearing down bases at the same time, nor that much of the new construction is going on at mega-bases, while small outposts in the countryside are being abandoned. This is exactly what you would expect of an occupation force looking to scale back its “footprint” and end major combat operations while maintaining an on-going presence in Afghanistan. Given the U.S. military’s projected retreat to its giant bases and an increased reliance on kill/capture black-ops as well as unmanned air missions, it’s also no surprise that its signature projects for 2012 include a new special operations forces compound, clandestine drone facilities and a brand new military prison.
There’s little doubt Bagram Air Base will exist in five or 10 years. Just who will be occupying it is, however, less clear. After all, in Iraq, the Obama administration negotiated for some way to station a significant military force — 10,000 or more troops — there beyond a withdrawal date that had been set in stone for years. While a token number of U.S. troops and a highly militarized State Department contingent remain there, the Iraqi government largely thwarted the American efforts — and now, even the State Department presence is being halved.
It’s less likely this will be the case in Afghanistan, but it remains possible. Still, it’s clear that the military is building in that country as if an enduring American presence were a given. Whatever the outcome, vestiges of the current base-building boom will endure and become part of America’s Afghan legacy.
On Bagram’s grounds stands a distinctive structurecalled the “Crow’s Nest.” It’s an old control tower built by the Soviets to coordinate their military operations in Afghanistan. That foreign force left the country in 1989. The Soviet Union itself departed from the planet less than three years later. The tower remains.
America’s new prison in Bagram will undoubtedly remain, too. Just who the jailers will be and who will be locked inside five years or 10 years from now is, of course, unknown. But given the history — marked by torture and deaths — of the appalling treatment of inmates at Bagram and, more generally, of the brutality toward prisoners by all parties to the conflict over the years, in no scenario are the results likely to be pretty.
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Rate of Americans killed in Afghanistan soars
As President Obama escalated the war, the numbers of soldiers and civilians killed rose dramatically
A U.S. soldier keeps watch at the site of an explosion in Kandahar on January 19. (Credit: Reuters/Ahmad Nadeem)
In the past six months, President Obama has repeatedly declared that “the tide of war is receding.”
And, if one measures by reduction in the aggregate number of troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the president is right. But it’s also true that Obama has presided over a significant escalation in the war in Afghanistan.
One can see that in charts of American troop levels, and also, as a new Congressional Research Service report shows, in the number of American soldiers and Afghans being killed and wounded. Click the chart for the full image:
(The 2012 figure is so low because it’s only a few weeks into the year.)
Those American troop death figures are, of course, dwarfed by the number of Afghan civilians being killed. There were 2,262 civilians killed and 3,032 wounded in the first 11 months of 2011, the report finds. The whole thing, via Secrecy News, is worth a read and can be found here (.pdf).
The headlines out of Afghanistan have been grim for the administration in recent weeks, dominated by stories about Marines urinating on dead bodies, the killing of American troops by their putative Afghan allies, and the prospect of a pullout by France following the deaths of four French soldiers. The war, though, has not yet become much of an issue in presidential politics, at least outside of the GOP debate last year focusing on foreign policy.
Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott
Rethinking the Taliban
Don't confuse them with al-Qaida. It's time to start negotiating our way out of Afghanistan
Ready to talk? (Credit: AP/Ishtiaq Mahsud)
Soon after 9/11, President Bush ensured that al-Qaida and the Taliban were conflated in the American imagination. “If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocence, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves,” he said in his speech announcing strikes against Afghanistan.
Now the United States faces the opposite problem: decoupling the Taliban from what remains of al-Qaida. Vice President Joe Biden was guilty only of being impolitic when he conceded in December that the Taliban per se are not America’s enemies. Thankfully, reports of low-level talks between the Taliban and the U.S. and/or the Afghan government are now as plentiful as heroin poppies. But these preliminary, scattered negotiations are not enough; the United States needs to dialogue with the Taliban to extricate itself from Afghanistan.
Of course, negotiating with the Taliban is unseemly. For one thing, the group is a horrible combination of medieval and modern Islamist brutality. Its marriage of totalitarianism and an extreme interpretation of Islam has made the Taliban among the most notorious human rights abusers in the world. And, of course, it has killed scores of Americans and Afghan civilians. For another thing, the United States and its allies have declared their commitment to improving the welfare of the people of Afghanistan. “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies,” Bush declared in that same October 2001 speech. Peacemaking with the Taliban will mean abandoning Afghanistan at least in part to the Taliban. Americans can eventually leave the Taliban behind; the Afghans who oppose them cannot.
Nonetheless, it has become clear to most experts that the Taliban and the United States must meet at the negotiating table. After a decade of fighting, the Taliban has demonstrated both its resilience and its deep support in the Pashtun community. “It is manifestly obvious that the Taliban can’t be defeated,” says Anatol Lieven, author of “Pakistan: A Hard Country.” Extending a policy of refusing to talk with the group only consigns Afghanistan to a state of permanent war, he says. That war has devastated Afghans and cost the lives of more than 1,000 American soldiers.
It is unclear how much power the Taliban would have in a post-American Afghanistan. The Taliban has not made its positions clear, although it has relinquished its refusal to talk until all foreign troops have left Afghanistan. Lieven believes “there is no chance of the Taliban conquering the whole of Afghanistan” once the coalition leaves; he believes not even the Pashtun cities will be re-Talibanized. The Taliban’s role in Kabul would be limited. “The best thing for Afghans — and for the Americans — is a peace settlement with a limited Taliban role,” Lieven says.
Not everyone is as sure about the Taliban’s limited abilities. John R. Schmidt, a Pakistan expert formerly with the State Department, says he worries about the re-Talibanization of Afghanistan. “Remember that before 9/11 the Taliban had brought 90 percent of the country under its control,” he says. Still, even Schmidt agrees that talks must take place between the U.S. and the Taliban. “Nobody thinks the Taliban can be defeated” in a reasonable time frame, he says. “If we don’t talk, we preclude the possibility of a political settlement.”
The latest news is that the Taliban are getting more serious about negotiating, setting up an office in the Gulf state of Qatar. At this point, the position of the Americans is unacceptable to them: keeping bases as well as American soldiers in Afghanistan. Lieven suggests those positions be modified to focus on a) the complete exclusion of al-Qaida members; b) the Taliban’s recognition of the Afghan constitution, or at least its renegotiation; and c) a crackdown on the heroin trade. These compromises would maintain essential American interests while being more palpable to the Taliban.
Perhaps, then, the most important question is when an American government will be willing to be honest with the American people and tell them the Taliban are here to stay in Afghanistan. Only then can Afghanistan look forward to a measure of peace and stability. With the Taliban a permanent presence, however, nobody should have any illusions about how pretty the peace will be.
Afghanistan: “The tide of war is receding”
The reporter who cost Gen. McChrystal his job talks about al-Qaida myths, Karzai's weirdness, and endless war
Afghan President Hamid Karzai (Credit: Reuters/Ahmad Masood)
Glenn Greenwald wrote recently about how reporter Michael Hastings’ new book on Afghanistan exposes some of the pathologies of national security journalism as it is commonly practiced today. But the new book, “The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan,” also contains lots of interesting reporting on the recent history of the war, particularly the period between 2009 and 2010 when Gen. Stanley McChrystal was in charge. McChrystal, of course, resigned in June 2010 after the publication of a Rolling Stone article by Hastings that contained sundry damaging material, including quotes from McChrystal aides mocking the White House.
I spoke to Hastings about the American relationship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the effort to arm Afghan militias around the country, and recent reports of negotiations with the Taliban.
There’s a section in the book where you quote a German expert questioning McChrystal on why a 45-minute talk he gave on Afghanistan mentioned al-Qaida only once. From all the time you spent with the military brass, what’s your sense of how they conceive of what this war is about?
That’s the big lie: that what we’re doing in Afghanistan makes us safer from al-Qaida. That’s the rub. Besides that McChrystal talk in which he didn’t discuss al-Qaida, there are a couple other telling moments. After Sen. Lindsey Graham was briefed on the strategy that McChrsytal wanted, he was terrified that they weren’t mentioning al-Qaida enough. He encouraged them to mention it more and keep hammering away on it. Then when Petraeus took over the war in summer 2010, military sources told me that in his morning briefings no one would ever mention al-Qaida, or at least very rarely. There’s a famous number that Gen. Jones, the former national security adviser to Obama, put out, which is that there are less than 100 al-Qaida members in Afghanistan.
So the U.S. military leadership is conceiving of this primarily as a fight against the Taliban?
Yes. Counterinsurgency is allegedly concerned with setting up a stable government in Afghanistan. It’s nation building. It’s not fighting terrorists.
On that point, you go into some colorful details about the American relationship with President Hamid Karzai. What did you find in your reporting?
Well, we’ve had U.S. officials come out and say that Karzai uses drugs, and that he is possibly manic depressive. The American ambassador to Afghanistan put that out there. We also know that Karzai had no interest in counterinsurgency. And McChrystal’s people referred to Karzai as “the man in the funny hat” and they called his hat “the Gray Wolf’s vagina.” This is the level of respect that Team McChrystal was showing to our great Afghan friend and ally. Our strategy is based on having this strong, credible partner, but at the same time Karzai is being undermined by everything American officials working with him say. So how does that work? It doesn’t.
It became very explicit that what McChrystal was trying to do was to make Karzai a real commander in chief. But the idea that the mission of the United States military is to transform an Afghan politician into some kind of Winston Churchill-like figure is laughable.
The Afghan Local Police program has been getting a lot of attention as a key part of what the U.S. is doing now. Can you first explain what this program is?
The military describes it as like a neighborhood watch program for Afghanistan. Of course, it’s a neighborhood watch program where our Special Forces gives everyone in the neighborhood an AK-47. The idea is that the each local community will set up their own small militia; the rationale is that these local groups of armed men will be able to defeat the Taliban in a decentralized way. Many Afghans fear that it’s just giving guns and training to warlords. Of course, funneling millions of dollars of weapons into the hands of people that want to be local militia commanders is not necessarily a recipe for stability – certainly not in the short term. In the long term, it could lead to stability, or it could lead to a more intensive civil war.
You delve into the case of Abdul Razzik. Can you explain who he is and what he represents in terms of what the U.S. is doing?
Razzik is a young Afghan commander who has become our up and coming warlord star in southern Afghanistan. The Americans were for a while split on him because he does have various credible human rights complaints against him and he does have connections to the drug trade. But at the end of the day, the calculation that was made was that Razzik picks up the phone. That means, when the military wants something done, Razzik is a can-do guy. He is not afraid to knock heads or detain the Taliban and torture them. So any concerns or lip service toward human rights quickly become trumped by trying to get some local stability.
There’s talk now, including from Hillary Clinton, about some kind of negotiations – or the possibility of negotiations — with the Taliban. There have been many rounds of these sorts of reports. What do you make of this talk based on your experience in Afghanistan?
I think negotiations are the only way out and we’ve known this for years. Who are the players in these negotiations? The ISI and Pakistan, the Taliban, Karzai, and these other warlords all have to get on the same page. So the question is, what is the United States’ role? We’ve struggled to figure it out. One of the reasons is that so few of our resources have been devoted to a diplomatic solution, despite the lip service to the line that “There’s no way to kill your way out of this fight.” This will be a lengthy process, and the scandal is that we’re really only now starting it seriously.
At the end of the book you say that you think the bin Laden killing marks the beginning of the end of the war. But Gen. John Allen, the head of the war now, recently said that U.S. troops could be in the country beyond 2014. What’s your assessment about where this is going?
It’s amazing to see Gen. Allen and the Pentagon try to hold on and keep this war going on as long as they can. I’ve gotten flack for this, but I believe President Obama when he says the tide of war is receding. I think that’s a very significant statement. I certainly don’t see us reescalating in Afghanistan. The question is, how long will it take for them to wind the war down? One thing to keep in mind is that the government there is going to be so addicted to the American tax dollars and training, they’re not going to be able to kick us out like the Iraqis did. There’s also the focus on counterterrorism operations in Pakistan. So I think we’re going to see a robust Special Forces and training presence in Afghanistan for years to come.
But as long as there are not 200 or 300 or 400 American soldiers dying every year and we’re spending $20 billion per year instead of $120 billion per year, experience seems to show that the American public will tolerate that kind of long-term presence.
Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott
The scandal that isn’t on the video
Is it worse to desecrate a few corpses than to mass produce a lot of them?
The United States and its allies were quick to go into damage control mode to try to contain the political and diplomatic fallout from a video posted on YouTube apparently showing US Marines urinating on the mangled corpses of dead Afghans,
A Pentagon spokesman, Captain John Kirby, told CNN: “Regardless of the circumstances or who is in the video, this is egregious, disgusting behavior. It’s hideous. It turned my stomach.” Afghan President Hamid Karzai agreed. “This act by American soldiers is simply inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms.”.
It ought to go without saying that urinating on corpses, whether of Taliban fighters or Afghan civilians (or any one else for that matter), is disrespectful and degrading and ought to be condemned. What is interesting, and somewhat unsettling, about the outpouring of sentiment following this new scandal, however, is that it raises more questions than it answers.
Isn’t it odd, for example, that there seems to be more concern about urinating on these bodies than there is about the actual killing that transformed them from living human beings to splayed-out corpses in the first place? Is it really possible that peeing on dead bodies is seen as horrific, but killing people is perfectly acceptable? Isn’t something missing from this picture?
This seems an especially pressing question given that much of the US military (and related CIA) effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan so often seems to involve simply killing—or, to use the rather more circumspect military term, “degrading”—as many militants as possible, not necessarily in actual combat operations, but by twos and threes and tens and dozens, in bombings and air raids and drone attacks, as they sleep or drive or eat or pray or brush their teeth. Day after day we read reports of 8 militants being killed here, 5 being killed there , and 6 somewhere else. It is as though the earth keeps vomiting forth “militants,” who then simply need to be mown down like so much vermin in a “war” reduced to its lowest common denominator—killing for the sake of killing, without any kind of strategic aim or vision or logic, much less a sense of when it might end.
Sure, every now and then someone (very rightly) raises a question about how many civilians are being killed in air raids or drone attacks in Afghanistan or Pakistan; not that it makes any difference. There is even the occasional report about the “vast drone/killing operation” being conducted by the Obama Administration, and a few people, including Glenn Greenwald, have been warning of the menace that an unchecked, unregulated, program of extrajudicial executions means, or ought to mean, to Americans and others alike.
But, these exceptions aside, the routine, hum-drum slaughter of “militants” slips by far too readily without sufficient questioning, without enough people pausing to ask who these people are, what they want, what threat they really pose to the US with their AK-47s and RPGs, what plan, if any, there is to do something to stop their seemingly autochthonous emergence (by addressing its causes, for example) rather than merely mowing them down by the dozen after they emerge–or whether the plan really is simply to go on killing as long as there is a supply of living bodies to soak up our ordnance. After all, President Obama has deliberately chosen to kill rather than capture people because he knows that pictures like those that emerged from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are bad news—but that there will be few pictures and fewer questions about the endless slaughter of anonymous militants in the dusty backwaters of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
For all the furor, the current scandal proves that point all too grimly, precisely because the scandal consists in the urination rather than the killing itself.
Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos called the act of urinating on the corpses “wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history.” A NATO spokesman added, “This disrespectful act is inexplicable and not in keeping with the high moral standards we expect of coalition forces.”
But what does it mean to speak of a “warrior ethos” and “high moral standards” in a war when most of the killing is being done by remote control—and not in the heat, intensity and sweaty, adrenaline-driven fear of battle (which the very concept of a “warrior ethos” is supposed to describe), but rather clinically, in air-conditioned comfort, from the safe distance of 20,000 feet—or, rather, 10,000 miles?
It is all too easy to look at the young Marines urinating on the corpses in that video and condemn them (rightly) for their callous brutality. It is far more difficult, however, to put their adolescent action back in its fuller and more meaningful context and ask ourselves what it means that we hardly seem to attach more value to a human life than they do, and that we have come to accept the “reaping” of human lives—for it is not without reason that one of the biggest drones is called Reaper—as a matter to be dismissed with a careless flick of the morning newspaper or click of the mouse.
Page 1 of 117 in Afghanistan
The Fictional Obama 
"Why would I put that there?" 
Our Beginning in Ft. Riley Kansas 
Do we still need Black History Month? 
Trench warfare rages over Keystone pipeline 
An offensive advocate for LGBT rights 
Why Ron Paul is still relevant 
The deep roots of the war on contraception 
Our stubborn faith in aphrodisiacs 
Did the war on drugs kill Whitney Houston? 
Why everyone is still writing off Santorum 
The hysterical American decline 
Occupy Valentine’s Day 
