President Bush finally went to Vietnam this week, after spending his youth trying to avoid going there when that war was going on. Needless to say that this was the source for much humor. Some said that he tried to avoid going this time too but that his father could not get him out of the trip. Others said that he was glad to go since the drubbing his party took at the elections made it awkward for him to have to deal with the new realities in Congress. As Ted Koppel said, Bush joined the Air National Guard to get out of going to Vietnam, but now he is going to Vietnam to get out of being in Washington.

But the curious thing that has been remarked upon is that when Bush was asked what was the lesson of the Vietnam war, he said it was the importance of perseverance. Bush said that what he learned was that “We’ll succeed unless we quit.”

Of course this invites ridicule since it seemed to imply that if the US has stayed on in Vietnam they would have won that war, a rosy view of that war’s history that is only clung to by those who refuse to concede that the US could ever be defeated militarily. The statement also seemed like a diplomatic blunder, to say the least, to tell the people of your host country that you feel that should have devastated their country even more than you did and perhaps should still be bombing them thirty years later.

The lesson that almost everyone else has learned from Vietnam is that one should never get involved in a guerilla war against forces fighting for national liberation.

But perhaps Bush was applying his words to the Vietnamese forces. If so, he was being very perceptive. The North Vietnamese regular army and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front had long realized that all they had to do was persevere and stay fighting. As long as they did not quit, they would succeed because the US would have to leave. And that is exactly what happened.

That is the dynamic of any struggle in which an invading army ends up battling the local population, and it applies to Iraq. All that the Iraqi insurgent forces have to do is to keep fighting. If they do so, they will win even if they never win any single battle, since an invading force cannot maintain its occupation indefinitely in the face of sustained hostility. The famous Tet offensive in 1968 was a military defeat for the Vietnamese but a huge political victory since it dramatically illustrated to the American public that despite having been repeatedly told by their own government that the tide was turning, there was light at the end of the tunnel, and similar clichés about victory in the war being just over the horizon, the Vietnam conflict was still raging, with no end in sight.

One sure sign that things are going badly is when pundits keep looking hopefully over the horizon for good news that never comes. They usually put a time of about six months in the future for when either things will either get better or some decisive decision will have to be taken. It seems like they have decided that six months is just about what the public is willing to tolerate staying with the status quo. The catch is that when the six months is up and no progress has been made, a new six month horizon has to be created. The situation is not unlike parents on a long car journey who repeatedly tell their restless children that they will arrive at their destination in fifteen minutes, in order to keep them quiet.

This ploy has been used so frequently in Iraq by so many people that the six month horizon has even acquired its own name, the Friedman Unit (FU) (coined by Atrios), after that fount of banalities, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, was noticed by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has having repeatedly invoked it starting back in November 2003. So we are now six FUs further into the war and still waiting.

But coming back to Bush’s statement about the lessons of Vietnam, why would Bush be advising the Iraqi insurgents to learn from the Vietnamese people on the value of perseverance in order to defeat the US?

A person whose views I greatly respect once suggested that Mikhail Gorbachev may have deliberately set about undermining the Soviet Union and orchestrating its collapse because early in his life he had felt that that kind of social and economic structure was not sustainable and something new had to be put in its place. But that would not happen until the existing order had been dismantled. So Gorbachev quietly went along with official policies until he attained power in that country. Then he deliberately set about instituting policies from the inside that he knew would lead to the eventual collapse of the system.

Inspired by this idea, I thought that maybe Bush and Cheney, for whatever reasons known only to themselves, deliberately set about destroying the US as a world power militarily and economically and in terms of its ability to influence world opinion. They saw that the best way to do that would be to commit its forces to getting bogged down in an unwinnable and unpopular war that would break the US militarily, destroy its economy by spending huge amounts on both the war and counterterrorism efforts (over $500 billion so far and still rising rapidly), and so alienate world opinion that the US became almost totally isolated on the world’s stage, thus putting an end to any ideas of creating a powerful empire.

I am being facetious, I think, but I am not sure because this administration has effectively put an end to irony and satire by exceeding anyone’s imaginings of irrationality. But if that actually had been their plan, Bush and Cheney have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

POST SCRIPT 1: Spreading the word

Australian John Safran, ticked off by Mormon missionaries waking him up early on a Saturday morning to proselytize, decided to get his revenge by traveling all the way across the globe to Salt Lake City and going door-to-door to proselytize for atheism and Darwin.

POST SCRIPT 2: What should be done?

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has the solution to the Iraq problem.

The focus of attention to casualties in Iraq has been mainly on US soldiers, with sporadic attention given to Iraqi deaths. The few times when the latter got in the news was when the Lancet came out last month saying that there was a 95% probability that the number of increased deaths due to the war lay between 400,000 and 900,000. Despite the fact that the study followed well-established methods, its numbers were dismissed as being too high, people preferring to think that the actual figure was around the much lower 50,000,

The Iraqi minister of health dropped a bombshell last week when he said that he estimated the number of Iraqi casualties as around 150,000, three times the figure that the US government had quoted earlier, although he admitted it was very rough estimate. [Read more…]

On October 3, 2006, the excellent PBS series Frontline broadcast a program with the above name. It examined the complexities of the politics of Pakistan’s northwest frontier provinces, which shares a 500-miles open border with Afghanistan, and explains why it has been a place where the Taliban could regroup and gain strength once again, threatening to cause the defeat of the US in Afghanistan.

(You can view the program here. This must-see one-hour program is split into seven parts. Be warned that part 1 contains some graphic and disturbing images of the victims of the brutal summary justice that the Taliban are notorious for.)

The program describes the complex web of shifting alliances and intrigue that characterize the region and why it is going to be so hard to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, even granting the assumption that going in militarily was a good idea. These rugged and difficult-to-reach regions of Pakistan are really quasi-independent entities over which the central Pakistani government has little or no influence, let alone control. The people living there also have long-standing ethnic and even familial ties with the Taliban and are unlikely to surrender them to either the US or the Pakistan government.

This gives the Taliban a safe haven from which to organize, train fresh cadres, and launch attacks against the NATO forces in Afghanistan. And yet if the US goes after them into Pakistan (as they have done on occasion with air strikes at the very least) they are violating Pakistani sovereignty and thus creating major political problems for their ally, Pakistani President Musharraf, who has had to repeatedly assure his own restive public that US forces will not be allowed to operate within Pakistan.

Furthermore, the program points out that the Pakistan intelligence agency ISI (their equivalent of the CIA) also has long standing ties with the Taliban, having supported and groomed them in their fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and are possibly undermining Musharraf’s attempts at reigning in the Taliban.

All this has led to a no-win situation for both the US and Musharraf. The latter has tried to deflect local opposition by trying to forge treaties with the tribal leaders in those regions, but this has raised the hackles of the US who feel that this will result in giving the Taliban an even freer hand to operate.

The BBC says that the number of casualties in Afghanistan has increased four-fold this year, another sign of the worsening situation there.

Monday, November 13, 2006 was the fifth anniversary of the routing of the Taliban that sent them fleeing from Kabul. The London Times has an article describing what has happened during that time, reporting on how “triumph and hope have given way to despair and disappointment.”

Meanwhile, the Times’s Christina Lamb describes the deteriorating security situation in that country where that which was once unthinkable, that the Taliban would return to power, is now seen as a real possibility. Once again, it is the war in Iraq that has been the cause.

If there is one factor most responsible for the Taliban resurgence it is the war in Iraq, which distracted the attention of London and Washington at a critical time. While US marines were toppling statues of Saddam Hussein and then finding themselves fighting a bloody insurgency, the Taliban regrouped and retrained in Pakistan.

The seemingly easy victory by the US and its allies in Afghanistan, like that of the initial Soviet Union military deployment in 1979, was deceptive. The Soviet Union then lost 15,000 troops in the subsequent decade and the British suffered similar losses in the 19th century. Lamb quotes the prescient warning of Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British governor of North West Frontier Province: “Unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over.”

The saddest moment for me while watching the Frontline program was the story of Hayat Ullah Khan. He was a young Pakistani reporter hired as a stringer by Frontline and given a video camera to use. He stumbled on a scoop when visiting his village in December 4, 2005 after an explosion in which a high-level al Qaeda operative Abu Hamza Rabia (rumored to be #3 in that organization) was killed.

The Pakistan government claimed that the explosion that killed Rabia was due to a bomb going off while he was working with explosives. But Khan captured photographs of bomb fragments that clearly confirmed that it had been fired by the US, presumably by a Predator drone. This photographic proof that the US was attacking inside Pakistani territory appeared all over the world and embarrassed the Pakistani government because of the violations of its sovereignty, leading to protests against the government.

Khan confessed to his mother that he feared reprisals for his reporting and sure enough, five days later, while riding in a taxi with his brother, he was abducted by people suspected of being government operatives. He was missing for six months before his body was found in a ditch, He had been shot five times and was handcuffed with government-issue handcuffs.

During Khan’s absence, the Frontline reporter Martin Smith questioned Pakistani president Musharraf about his whereabouts, saying that they had reports that the government was holding him. While Musharraf denied having any knowledge of the case or even the. name of Hayat Ullah Khan, it quickly became clear that he did know of the case. There seems little doubt that Khan was murdered by agents of the Pakistani government.

In its fight against terrorism, the US has thrown in its lot with lying, murderous dictators like Musharraf. It is not something to be proud of.

Although I have never visited Afghanistan (and don’t recall ever having met a single Afghan in my whole life), I feel a deep sense of sympathy for the Afghan people, ever since I saw the riveting 2003 documentary Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror by veteran Australian journalist John Pilger. Pilger has covered war zones for many decades going back to Vietnam and Cambodia and describes Afghanistan as a country “more devastated than anything I have seen since Pol Pot’s Cambodia.”

Perhaps more than any other nation, the Afghan people have been long-suffering victims, caught between foreign powers interfering in their affairs, brutal tribal warlords, and cruel and repressive religious extremists like the Taliban. I wonder if they will ever know peace.

Waiting for the ‘October Surprise’ has become a standard ritual of the American election season, and this year was no exception. As usual, nervous Democrats anxiously wondered what sort of manufactured event and tricks the Bush administration, weighed down by its abysmal approval ratings, would unleash in the week or two prior to November 7 that might sway voters and reverse the deteriorating fortunes of the Republican party. Would they announce the capture of Osama bin Laden? Would they launch an attack on Iran? Would they announce a dramatic change in strategy in Iraq?

When none of these things happened and the only news of significance to emerge in the waning days of the election campaign was the break up of Britney Spears’ marriage, and the Republicans ended up getting a drubbing at the polls, people began to wonder if alleged political genius Karl Rove’s well of tricks had simply run dry.

However there is reason to think that there actually was an attempt at creating an October surprise, but that it went horribly wrong, and that was the missile strike that killed 80 people by destroying a madrassa in the Bajaur region of northwest Pakistan on October 30. There is strong evidence to suggest that the strike was an attempt by the US at killing the number 2 man of al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri.

The Pakistan military immediately claimed responsibility, saying that they were the ones who had ordered and executed that strike because the madrassa “was no longer being used for imparting religious lessons and was instead in use as a military training camp”, presumably to train people to go across the border into Afghanistan and fight the US and NATO forces there.

The claim that the school housed militants was immediately disputed by residents of the area, who said that the dead were students from the surrounding area, many of them young children. The Pakistan government has sealed off the area and prohibited journalists from entering, thus preventing independent verification of the competing claims. However, news reports said that “A group of lawyers from Peshawar who visited the site last week said they saw no evidence of training or weapons. What they did see was disturbing enough: a tense, angry crowd that surrounded their vehicles, shouting for holy war against the Pakistani and U.S. governments, less than a week after local leaders had been ready to sign a peace pact with the government.”

What raises suspicions about the Pakistan military’s version of this incident is the timing of the strike. In September 2006, the Pakistan government, incurring deep US displeasure, had entered into a peace deal with the pro-Taliban militant leaders of North Waziristan (one of Pakistan’s northwest frontier provinces that borders Afghanistan) and was in the process of negotiating other deals with tribal leaders of other border regions. This rugged mountainous region is hard to monitor, is friendly to the Taliban, and the Pakistan government has historically had little control over it, with its own troops being periodically attacked and hundreds of people dying in the periodic skirmishes.

A news report said “Intriguingly, the attack was launch [sic] on the very day when the pro-Taliban tribal militants led by Maulana Faqir Mohammad and the deceased Maulana Liaquat were scheduled to sign a peace agreement with the Pakistan government.” Maulana Liaquat ran the madrassa (seminary) that was destroyed and was a leader of the banned pro-Taliban organization called Tanzim Nifaz Shariat-i-Mohammadi (TNSM). He was killed in the attack. “The TNSM Bajaur leader Maulana Faqir Mohammad, wanted for allegedly sheltering al-Qaeda and Taliban linked foreign militants, survived the attack as he wasn’t at the seminary at the time of the attack. He had attended a meeting at the seminary in the afternoon and left.”

This raises the puzzling question of why the Pakistani government would arrange to make a peace deal and then turn around and bomb the very people with whom it had made the deal, on the very day that the deal was to be signed. It did not make sense and the people of the region quickly dismissed the idea that Pakistani forces had been responsible for the attack. They said that the madrassa was destroyed by missiles fired from US Predator drones. They cited witness who said they heard the drones circling overhead and said that Pakistan President Musharraf was trying to hide the fact that the US had attacked targets within Pakistan. As a result, there has been a violent reaction against the Pakistani government, with demonstrations and rallies and a suicide bomber who killed 42 Pakistani government troops on November 8.

But why would the US embarrass their ally so publicly? One possible argument is that they wanted to scuttle any peace deals between the Pakistani government and pro-Taliban tribal leaders. But killing 80 seminary students seems an extreme step to take to achieve that goal, even if you suspect that some of them might be militants in training.

The more likely reason is that the US had received intelligence that Ayman al Zawahiri may have been at the seminary, either hiding there or talking to the students.

This would not be the first time that the US had tried and failed to kill him in that region, where Zawahiri is supposed to have relatives. On January 14, 2006, the US had launched similar Predator drone missiles at the village of Damadola in the same region. That attack ended up killing 18 people including women and children, but no Zawahiri. Two weeks later, Zawahiri released a video taunting the US for their failed attempts at finding him.

It was outrage over the January deaths in Damadola that forced Musharraf to publicly declare that the US would not be allowed to launch any more attacks within Pakistani territory, which may have been why the Pakistan authorities were forced to claim responsibility for the recent madrassa attack.

It seems quite plausible that the October 30, 2006 missile attack was an attempt at an October surprise, a gamble that hoped to net the death of Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command and the main strategist of al Qaeda. This would have allowed Bush to claim that he was achieving success in the war on terror, and put terrorism front and center in the minds of voters just days before the election.

If so, it failed in that goal. What is has done instead, apart from leading to more deaths of innocent people, is undermine and weaken the main ally that the US has in that region, Pakistani President Musharraf, an October surprise just for him that he neither wanted or needed.

Of all the people that are mentioned in the Vanity Fair article that are seeking to escape responsibility for their role in urging the Iraq war, none sinks lower than that Michael Ledeen.

Jonah Goldberg alerted us to the fact that Ledeen was an “entertaining speaker” but he did not tell us the half of it. In the Vanity Fair interview Ledeen turns out to be real yukmeister when he argues that the influence of the neoconservatives paled in comparison to a much more powerful bloc: “Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.” So according to Ledeen, it is women, those lovesick, lovelorn women surrounding George Bush and assiduously competing for his affections, who are to blame for the Iraq mess! Bush was too enraptured by the sirens around him to listen to those who were giving him good advice. Who would have suspected that the whole Iraq war was a soap opera, the result of romantic intrigues within the White House?
[Read more…]