How We Messed Up a Flourishing Gun-barrel Democracy in Afghanistan

Oct 04, 2011

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles."  In its absence you may never know whose grave is it that you are digging.                                 — Sun Tzu

Ten Octobers ago the United States invaded Afghanistan to avenge the 2996 (2605 American and 391 foreign national) victims of the 9/11 attacks. More than 6227 American deaths, 102,361 injuries, 2276 active-duty suicides, and billions of dollars later the report card is one of a dismal failure. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi were killed to establish law and order and protect civil liberties.  In the ten years of chaos even the condition of Afghan women, the cause celebre for the invasion, has deteriorated. A Thomson Reuters Foundation survey identifies Afghanistan as "the worst place for women" in the world. Afghanistan and Iraq have also earned the distinction of the most corrupt countries in the world with Transparency International—shining examples of democracy through the barrel of a gun. 

In Afghanistan the threat of another civil war looms large as the military is segregated along ethnic fault lines and murder and extortion are rampant in the police force. Civilian casualties are consistently on the rise, yet they remain unreported or under-reported; and only a few incidents have raised eyebrows. The latest U.N. report says that: "Violence in Afghanistan is up nearly 40 percent over last year" contradicting earlier U.S. reports on security improvements.  The September 28 McClatchy Newspaper report says that "civilian casualties have risen steadily: up 5 percent in June, July and August from the same months last year." The New York Times had already reported May as "the deadliest month for Afghan civilians" with 368 killed when UN officials reported the killing of eight school children and two adults during a botched assault by coalition forces, followed by the killing of 65 civilians, and another attack that killed nine related boys ages 8 to 14 while collecting firewood.

The latter incident prompted a rare public apology by Gen. Petraeus who added insult to injury by suggesting that, "Some children whose parents say sustained burns in that air strike might have been maimed by their own parents, so as to blame American forces," writes The Wall Street Journal. In the mean time Petraeus continued to fight the frustrating war with an unprecedented scale of violence that according to Salon Media Group included pulverizing entire villages with "nearly 50,000 pounds of ammunition, delivered by some of the military's most aggressive bombers" to save them from the insurgency—that Daniel Ellsberg calls a virtual "replay of the war in Vietnam." The only difference is that Afghanistan's many a My Lai  have been distanced from our humanity by remote control operations. 

We are winning ‘hearts and minds' stained in blood as U.S. Special Operations Forces terrorize the very people we wanted to empower through democracy. Thousands of innocent civilians are swept up in night raids with total disregard for war ethics or cultural sensitivities.  In an ethnically close-knit Afghan society they are detained on suspicion of ‘guilt by association.' A recent Open Society Foundation report indicates that an average of 19 and as many as 40 raids take place in a single night—the equivalent of 80 raids every night in an area like Los Angeles. The report concludes that "deliberately targeting and rounding up civilians who are not suspected of being insurgents merely to exploit possible intelligence value "may constitute an arbitrary deprivation of liberty" and thus "inhumane treatment" in violation of Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions."

When people are insulted with such impunity, they react in kind. Their response may be delayed, but it is never forgotten.  A delayed response gives the U.S. a false sense of security that is shattered by events like the recent 20-hour-long attacks on the U.S. embassy and NATO headquarters in the heart of Kabul. The sarcasm is lost on us when the Pentagon ‘admits' that it "does not fully understand the regenerative capacity of the insurgency," yet it continues the same failed tactic and expects different results. You can't wash blood with blood.

Victory will not be determined by a ‘necessary surge' or a ‘strategic drawdown,' but by how well we understand the anger and frustration of a people burdened by the suffering of 34 years of war.  Many survivors of the trauma, like some of our own soldiers, turn suicidal without ‘stress inoculation training.'  In despair they join the resistance in increasingly larger numbers; an indication that we may be working hard killing today's insurgents, but we are actually working even harder in creating tomorrow's ‘terrorists.' Proof positive that the insurgency is not the cause but the consequence of occupation.

Ten years later the greatest threat to America is not the cause of the war, but its consequences; more precisely the economic woes that Joseph Stiglitz, the economics Nobel laureate estimates to have $1.246 trillion taxpayer direct cost and +$4-6 trillion long-term costs. Replacing boots with helping hands can help national security and economic prosperity in both countries. For a fraction of that cost we can eliminate resistance to our military presence, drain the pool of insurgency recruits, minimize loss of life, and build hospitals and schools for Afghan children—giving them hope instead of despair. When a life is worth living, suicide is not an option.