Hersh writes: "It's now evident, fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks, that
Obama's foreign policy has maintained many of the core elements of the
global war on terror initiated by his predecessor - assassinations, drone
attacks, heavy reliance on special forces, covert operations, and, in the
case of Afghanistan, the continued use of American ground forces in combat.
And, as in the years of Bush and Cheney, there has been no progress, let
alone victory, in the fight against terrorism."
President Barack Obama. (photo: Getty Images)
Point of No Return: Obama's Legacy in the Middle East
By Seymour Hersh, Harper's Magazine
07 May 16
Its now evident, fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks, that Obamas foreign
policy has maintained many of the core elements of the global war on terror
initiated by his predecessorassassinations, drone attacks, heavy reliance
on special forces, covert operations, and, in the case of Afghanistan, the
continued use of American ground forces in combat. And, as in the years of
Bush and Cheney, there has been no progress, let alone victory, in the fight
against terrorism. The Islamic State has succeeded Al Qaeda as the United
States most feared terrorist enemy, one that now reaches deep into Africa
and sends shockwaves into Western Europe and America. Obama still views
Russia, a nation with the same international terrorist enemies as
Washington, as an evil empire that must be confronted rather than as an
ally. Since 9/11 I have had access to some of the thinking inside the White
House on the war on terror. I learned early in the Obama presidency that he
was prepared to walk away from first principles. His first public act as
president took place on January 22, 2009, two days after his inauguration,
when he announced that he was returning the nation to the moral high
ground by signing an executive order calling for the closing, as soon as
practical, of Guantánamo. As of this writing, that has yet to happen, and
more than ninety prisoners continue to fester there, with no due process and
no accountability, to Americas shame.
Obama had described Afghanistan as the right war during his campaign and
talked about the need for more troops on the ground there. Many of his
supporters were not listening, or chose not to hear. I was told that within
three weeks of taking office he informed his senior advisers at a secret
National Security Council meeting of his plan to send an additional 17,000
American troops to join the more than 30,000 already stationed there. This
outcome was not the product of an interagency staff decision, but a
unilateral action taken by Obama and retired Marine Corps general James
Jones, the national security adviser at the time. Obama and Jones were said
to believe that the focus of American foreign policy needed to be on
Pakistan, a nuclear power supporting and harboring the Taliban troops that
had become the main opponent in Afghanistan after Al Qaedas retreat. There
was much hubris andas usual in new administrationsnot much consideration
of what had gone before. Furthermore, I was told by someone in a position to
know that Jones had explained at one meeting, in essence, that Afghanistan
is not in our national security interest, but we dont want to betray the
good men who went there before. We will not abandon Afghanistan, but we will
not let it get worse.
Obama would spend much of his first year discussing what to do about
Afghanistan. The debate was not about whether to expand the war there but
how many troops to commit to what would become Americas longest and least
successful war. The president, who would spend the rest of his time in
office cracking down on press leaks and internal dissent, stood aside as a
group of American generals staged what amounted to a public debate over the
number of troops needed to win the Afghan war. At one point, a highly
classified internal request from Army general Stanley McChrystal, an expert
on special operations and commander of U.S. forces in the Afghan war, was
leaked to the Washington Post within a week of its delivery to the White
House, with no significant protest or sanction from Obama. McChrystal had
asked permission to deploy as many as 80,000 more troops.
Obama eventually committed a first tranche of 30,000 additional American
soldiers. It was a decision marketed as a compromise between a reluctant
president and a gung-ho Pentagon. There was at least one senior member of
Congress who had reason to suspect that Obama, despite his resentment of the
militarys public posturing, had wanted these higher troop numbers all
along.
By 2009, David Obey, a Democratic lawmaker from Wisconsin, was chairman of
the powerful House Appropriations Committee, one of two committees
responsible for funding all government programs, including secret military
and intelligence activities. Elected to Congress in 1969, at the height of
the antiVietnam War protests, Obey was an outspoken liberal. He had dared
to take on George Bush and Dick Cheney over aspects of their war on terror
thatas Obey and others in Congress believedwere not being shared with, and
perhaps were not even financed by, Congress, as stipulated by the
Constitution. Obey got nowhere with his protests, but his efforts in early
2005including a little-noted speech on the House floor and the solicitation
of a rush of unfulfilled promises from the Bush White House to provide
greater communicationwere remarkable simply for having taken place. He told
me at the time that disquieting actions had been taken in secret and
Congress [had] failed in its oversight abilities.
Obey stunned his colleagues in 2010 by announcing his retirement. He and I
had talked on and off during the Bush yearshe would listen but say little.
Six or so months after he left the Congress he was more forthcoming. He told
me of a presidential meeting he and a few other congressional leaders had
attended at the White House in March 2009. The issue was Afghanistan, and
Obama wanted them to know he was going to make a significant troop
commitment to the war there. He said he was being told by a lot of people
that he ought to expand the war and then asked all of us, one by one, what
we thought. The only word of caution came from [Vice President] Joe Biden,
who raised a question about the cost. When it came to me, I said, Mr.
President, you could have the best policy in the world but you need to have
the tools to carry it outand the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan
are pretty lousy tools. If you did a surge in Afghanistan you will have to
face the fact that it would crowd out large portions of your domestic
programexcept perhaps health care. (A later in-house estimate put the
cost of the war, if forty thousand additional troops were committed, at $1
trillion over the next ten years, as much as the presidents health care
proposal.)
At the end of the meeting, according to Obey, he had a private chat with the
president and asked him whether he had ever spent time listening to the
broadcasts of President Lyndon Johnsons telephone conversations, in
particular his discussions about expanding Americas commitment to the war
in South Vietnam. Johnson had taped more than nine thousand of his telephone
calls while in office. They created a sensation in Washington upon their
public release in 2003just as President Bush was expanding Americas war in
Iraq. Obama said he had. I then asked Obama if he recalled listening to the
conversation with Richard Russell when they both talked about how upping the
American effort in Vietnam wouldnt help, Obey said. My point was that
Johnson and Russell were making a decision to go ahead when they were
telling themselves privately that it would not work.
Senator Russell was a segregationist and archconservative from Georgia, the
chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and a longtime Johnson confidant.
The conversation in question took place in May 1964, fourteen months before
Johnson would make a major commitment of American troops to the war. It
remains one of the most riveting and instructive of the presidential
recordings. Both men agreed that any American escalation would lead to a
major war with China, with untold consequences. Ill tell you, Russell
told Johnson, itll be the most expensive adventure this country ever went
into. Johnson answered, It just makes the chills run up my back. . . . I
havent the nerve to do it, but I dont see any other way out of it.
Obey then asked a third question: Whos your George Ball? Ball, a
high-ranking member of the State Department in the Kennedy years, was
renowned as the only senior official in the government to argue again and
againat great personal costagainst Kennedys decision to escalate the
American presence in South Vietnam. Obama did not answer. Either the
president chose not to answer, or he didnt have one, Obey told me. But I
didnt hear anyone tell the president that he ought to put on the brakes in
Afghanistan.
In a review of my interviews about Obamas early decision to raise the ante
in Afghanistan, one fact stood out: Obamas faith in the world of special
operations and in Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in
Afghanistan who worked closely with Dick Cheney from 2003 to 2008 as head of
the Joint Special Operations Command. JSOCs forces include elite Navy SEALs
and the Armys Delta Force, and they have won fame in countless books and
movies since 9/11 for their nighttime operations against the Taliban in
Afghanistan and the jihadists in Iraq. It was a JSOC SEAL team that killed
bin Laden at his redoubt in Pakistan in early 2011. There is no ambivalence
about the skills and determination of those special operators who took part
in Obamas renewed nighttime war against the Taliban in 2009 and thereafter.
But, as I was told at the time, there is another side to the elite units.
Youve got really good guys who are strongly motivated, and individual
initiative is the game, a former senior military official said. But JSOCs
individualism also breeds a group of childish men who take advantage of
their operational freedom to act immaturely. Were special and the rules
dont apply. This is why the regular army has always tried to limit the
size of the special forces. McChrystal was not paid to be thoughtful. He was
paid to let his troops do what they want with all the toys to play with they
want.
This former senior official, who has been involved in war planning since
9/11, was pessimistic at the time about Obamas reliance on special
operations. The intersection between the high-mindedness of Obama and the
ruthlessness of Dick Cheney is so great that there is a vacuum in the
planning. And no one knows what will happen. My own belief is that over time
were going to do the Afghanization of the wartrying, as in Iraq, to
finance and train an Afghan Army capable of standing up to the Talibanand
the same thing will happen to them as happened to our South Vietnamese Army
allies. In the end, the Taliban, disciplined and motivated, will take the
country back.
McChrystal was cashiered in June 2010, after he and his aides were quoted in
Rolling Stone making a series of derogatory remarks about the president and
others in the White House. According to one of McChrystals advisors, he
thought an early face-to-face meeting with the president was inconsequential
and triviallittle more than a 10-minute photo op. By then, there was much
concern about a major aspect of McChrystals approach to the war, which was
to find and kill the Taliban. I was visited that June by a senior official
of the International Committee of the Red Cross whose humanitarian mission
is to monitor, in secret, the conditions of civilians and prisoners of war
in an effort to insure compliance with the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The ICRC
was even granted limited access to the prison at Guatánamo, among other
facilities in the war on terror, with the understanding that its findings
were not to be made public. The official who sought me out did not want to
discuss the prison system in Afghanistan, about which there have been many
public revelations. His issue was the Obama administrations overall conduct
of the war. He had come to Washington in the hope of seeing Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton and other senior State Department officials, but had
been shunted aside. His message was blunt: McChrystals men were killing the
wrong people. Our inspectors are the only visitors from a secular
institution who are tolerated by the Taliban leadership, and you Americans
are killing those who support our activity, he said. You are killing those
Taliban who are not jihadistswho dont want to die and dont give a shit
about bombing Times Square. They have no grudge against America. The
indiscriminate targeting of all who are Taliban, he said, is reaching a
point of no return, and the more radical and extreme elements are picking up
momentum.
At one point, he said, there had been a heated internal debate among the
Taliban leadership about the use of chemical weapons in an attack on Kabul,
the Afghan capital, and the moderates won. The ICRC wouldnt say how it
learned of that debate, but the official added, The guys who prevented that
use have been smoked outassassinated by JSOC operatorsby the Americans.
The moderates are going down.
A longtime consultant to the special operations community depicted the
mindless killing in Afghanistan as a symptom of the weakness in the U.S.
policy for combatting terrorism: Its all about tactics and nobody,
Republican or Democrat, has advanced a strategic vision. The special-ops
guys are simply carrying out orders, like a dog eager to get off the leash
and run in the woodsand not think about where it is going. Weve had an
abject failure of military and political leadership.
The American-led coalition unilaterally declared an end to the Afghan war at
the close of 2014. And, as widely predicted, the Afghan National Army,
supported at an annual cost of billions by the Obama administration,
continues to be riddled with corruption and lacks leadership and motivation.
Obama again decided last year to send over more troops, under the guise of
advisers, and, inevitably, they have been drawn into combat. They kill and
are killed in the name of democracya word that has dwindling appeal and
little relevance for many Afghans.
Did any of the dozens of analyses put forward as the president reviewed the
options in 2009 and in 2015 estimate the number of innocent lives that would
be lost as a consequence of the American surge? Were those presidential
advisers skeptical of the capability and motivation of an upgraded and
modernized Afghan army able to find a place at the White House planning
table? Is there an American soldier who wants to be the last to die in
Afghanistan?
It is not too early to dwell on Obamas legacy, a deepening concern for any
president as the end of his tenure approaches. It would be easy to say it
will be mixedon the plus side there was the health-care bill and Americas
recovery from the economic shambles left by the Bush administration. He
faced an unbridgeable congressional impasse caused by an increasingly
radical Republican opposition. But Obama, whatever his private thoughts,
still speaks of American exceptionalism and still believes, or acts as if he
does, that the war on terror, a war against an ideology, can be won with
American bombers, drone attacks, and special forces. There is no evidence
yet for that belief.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
President Barack Obama. (photo: Getty Images)
http://harpers.org/blog/2016/05/point-of-no-return/http://harpers.org/blog/2
016/05/point-of-no-return/
Point of No Return: Obama's Legacy in the Middle East
By Seymour Hersh, Harper's Magazine
07 May 16
ts now evident, fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks, that Obamas foreign
policy has maintained many of the core elements of the global war on terror
initiated by his predecessorassassinations, drone attacks, heavy reliance
on special forces, covert operations, and, in the case of Afghanistan, the
continued use of American ground forces in combat. And, as in the years of
Bush and Cheney, there has been no progress, let alone victory, in the fight
against terrorism. The Islamic State has succeeded Al Qaeda as the United
States most feared terrorist enemy, one that now reaches deep into Africa
and sends shockwaves into Western Europe and America. Obama still views
Russia, a nation with the same international terrorist enemies as
Washington, as an evil empire that must be confronted rather than as an
ally. Since 9/11 I have had access to some of the thinking inside the White
House on the war on terror. I learned early in the Obama presidency that he
was prepared to walk away from first principles. His first public act as
president took place on January 22, 2009, two days after his inauguration,
when he announced that he was returning the nation to the moral high
ground by signing an executive order calling for the closing, as soon as
practical, of Guantánamo. As of this writing, that has yet to happen, and
more than ninety prisoners continue to fester there, with no due process and
no accountability, to Americas shame.
Obama had described Afghanistan as the right war during his campaign and
talked about the need for more troops on the ground there. Many of his
supporters were not listening, or chose not to hear. I was told that within
three weeks of taking office he informed his senior advisers at a secret
National Security Council meeting of his plan to send an additional 17,000
American troops to join the more than 30,000 already stationed there. This
outcome was not the product of an interagency staff decision, but a
unilateral action taken by Obama and retired Marine Corps general James
Jones, the national security adviser at the time. Obama and Jones were said
to believe that the focus of American foreign policy needed to be on
Pakistan, a nuclear power supporting and harboring the Taliban troops that
had become the main opponent in Afghanistan after Al Qaedas retreat. There
was much hubris andas usual in new administrationsnot much consideration
of what had gone before. Furthermore, I was told by someone in a position to
know that Jones had explained at one meeting, in essence, that Afghanistan
is not in our national security interest, but we dont want to betray the
good men who went there before. We will not abandon Afghanistan, but we will
not let it get worse.
Obama would spend much of his first year discussing what to do about
Afghanistan. The debate was not about whether to expand the war there but
how many troops to commit to what would become Americas longest and least
successful war. The president, who would spend the rest of his time in
office cracking down on press leaks and internal dissent, stood aside as a
group of American generals staged what amounted to a public debate over the
number of troops needed to win the Afghan war. At one point, a highly
classified internal request from Army general Stanley McChrystal, an expert
on special operations and commander of U.S. forces in the Afghan war, was
leaked to the Washington Post within a week of its delivery to the White
House, with no significant protest or sanction from Obama. McChrystal had
asked permission to deploy as many as 80,000 more troops.
Obama eventually committed a first tranche of 30,000 additional American
soldiers. It was a decision marketed as a compromise between a reluctant
president and a gung-ho Pentagon. There was at least one senior member of
Congress who had reason to suspect that Obama, despite his resentment of the
militarys public posturing, had wanted these higher troop numbers all
along.
By 2009, David Obey, a Democratic lawmaker from Wisconsin, was chairman of
the powerful House Appropriations Committee, one of two committees
responsible for funding all government programs, including secret military
and intelligence activities. Elected to Congress in 1969, at the height of
the antiVietnam War protests, Obey was an outspoken liberal. He had dared
to take on George Bush and Dick Cheney over aspects of their war on terror
thatas Obey and others in Congress believedwere not being shared with, and
perhaps were not even financed by, Congress, as stipulated by the
Constitution. Obey got nowhere with his protests, but his efforts in early
2005including a little-noted speech on the House floor and the solicitation
of a rush of unfulfilled promises from the Bush White House to provide
greater communicationwere remarkable simply for having taken place. He told
me at the time that disquieting actions had been taken in secret and
Congress [had] failed in its oversight abilities.
Obey stunned his colleagues in 2010 by announcing his retirement. He and I
had talked on and off during the Bush yearshe would listen but say little.
Six or so months after he left the Congress he was more forthcoming. He told
me of a presidential meeting he and a few other congressional leaders had
attended at the White House in March 2009. The issue was Afghanistan, and
Obama wanted them to know he was going to make a significant troop
commitment to the war there. He said he was being told by a lot of people
that he ought to expand the war and then asked all of us, one by one, what
we thought. The only word of caution came from [Vice President] Joe Biden,
who raised a question about the cost. When it came to me, I said, Mr.
President, you could have the best policy in the world but you need to have
the tools to carry it outand the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan
are pretty lousy tools. If you did a surge in Afghanistan you will have to
face the fact that it would crowd out large portions of your domestic
programexcept perhaps health care. (A later in-house estimate put the
cost of the war, if forty thousand additional troops were committed, at $1
trillion over the next ten years, as much as the presidents health care
proposal.)
At the end of the meeting, according to Obey, he had a private chat with the
president and asked him whether he had ever spent time listening to the
broadcasts of President Lyndon Johnsons telephone conversations, in
particular his discussions about expanding Americas commitment to the war
in South Vietnam. Johnson had taped more than nine thousand of his telephone
calls while in office. They created a sensation in Washington upon their
public release in 2003just as President Bush was expanding Americas war in
Iraq. Obama said he had. I then asked Obama if he recalled listening to the
conversation with Richard Russell when they both talked about how upping the
American effort in Vietnam wouldnt help, Obey said. My point was that
Johnson and Russell were making a decision to go ahead when they were
telling themselves privately that it would not work.
Senator Russell was a segregationist and archconservative from Georgia, the
chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and a longtime Johnson confidant.
The conversation in question took place in May 1964, fourteen months before
Johnson would make a major commitment of American troops to the war. It
remains one of the most riveting and instructive of the presidential
recordings. Both men agreed that any American escalation would lead to a
major war with China, with untold consequences. Ill tell you, Russell
told Johnson, itll be the most expensive adventure this country ever went
into. Johnson answered, It just makes the chills run up my back. . . . I
havent the nerve to do it, but I dont see any other way out of it.
Obey then asked a third question: Whos your George Ball? Ball, a
high-ranking member of the State Department in the Kennedy years, was
renowned as the only senior official in the government to argue again and
againat great personal costagainst Kennedys decision to escalate the
American presence in South Vietnam. Obama did not answer. Either the
president chose not to answer, or he didnt have one, Obey told me. But I
didnt hear anyone tell the president that he ought to put on the brakes in
Afghanistan.
In a review of my interviews about Obamas early decision to raise the ante
in Afghanistan, one fact stood out: Obamas faith in the world of special
operations and in Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in
Afghanistan who worked closely with Dick Cheney from 2003 to 2008 as head of
the Joint Special Operations Command. JSOCs forces include elite Navy SEALs
and the Armys Delta Force, and they have won fame in countless books and
movies since 9/11 for their nighttime operations against the Taliban in
Afghanistan and the jihadists in Iraq. It was a JSOC SEAL team that killed
bin Laden at his redoubt in Pakistan in early 2011. There is no ambivalence
about the skills and determination of those special operators who took part
in Obamas renewed nighttime war against the Taliban in 2009 and thereafter.
But, as I was told at the time, there is another side to the elite units.
Youve got really good guys who are strongly motivated, and individual
initiative is the game, a former senior military official said. But JSOCs
individualism also breeds a group of childish men who take advantage of
their operational freedom to act immaturely. Were special and the rules
dont apply. This is why the regular army has always tried to limit the
size of the special forces. McChrystal was not paid to be thoughtful. He was
paid to let his troops do what they want with all the toys to play with they
want.
This former senior official, who has been involved in war planning since
9/11, was pessimistic at the time about Obamas reliance on special
operations. The intersection between the high-mindedness of Obama and the
ruthlessness of Dick Cheney is so great that there is a vacuum in the
planning. And no one knows what will happen. My own belief is that over time
were going to do the Afghanization of the wartrying, as in Iraq, to
finance and train an Afghan Army capable of standing up to the Talibanand
the same thing will happen to them as happened to our South Vietnamese Army
allies. In the end, the Taliban, disciplined and motivated, will take the
country back.
McChrystal was cashiered in June 2010, after he and his aides were quoted in
Rolling Stone making a series of derogatory remarks about the president and
others in the White House. According to one of McChrystals advisors, he
thought an early face-to-face meeting with the president was inconsequential
and triviallittle more than a 10-minute photo op. By then, there was much
concern about a major aspect of McChrystals approach to the war, which was
to find and kill the Taliban. I was visited that June by a senior official
of the International Committee of the Red Cross whose humanitarian mission
is to monitor, in secret, the conditions of civilians and prisoners of war
in an effort to insure compliance with the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The ICRC
was even granted limited access to the prison at Guatánamo, among other
facilities in the war on terror, with the understanding that its findings
were not to be made public. The official who sought me out did not want to
discuss the prison system in Afghanistan, about which there have been many
public revelations. His issue was the Obama administrations overall conduct
of the war. He had come to Washington in the hope of seeing Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton and other senior State Department officials, but had
been shunted aside. His message was blunt: McChrystals men were killing the
wrong people. Our inspectors are the only visitors from a secular
institution who are tolerated by the Taliban leadership, and you Americans
are killing those who support our activity, he said. You are killing those
Taliban who are not jihadistswho dont want to die and dont give a shit
about bombing Times Square. They have no grudge against America. The
indiscriminate targeting of all who are Taliban, he said, is reaching a
point of no return, and the more radical and extreme elements are picking up
momentum.
At one point, he said, there had been a heated internal debate among the
Taliban leadership about the use of chemical weapons in an attack on Kabul,
the Afghan capital, and the moderates won. The ICRC wouldnt say how it
learned of that debate, but the official added, The guys who prevented that
use have been smoked outassassinated by JSOC operatorsby the Americans.
The moderates are going down.
A longtime consultant to the special operations community depicted the
mindless killing in Afghanistan as a symptom of the weakness in the U.S.
policy for combatting terrorism: Its all about tactics and nobody,
Republican or Democrat, has advanced a strategic vision. The special-ops
guys are simply carrying out orders, like a dog eager to get off the leash
and run in the woodsand not think about where it is going. Weve had an
abject failure of military and political leadership.
The American-led coalition unilaterally declared an end to the Afghan war at
the close of 2014. And, as widely predicted, the Afghan National Army,
supported at an annual cost of billions by the Obama administration,
continues to be riddled with corruption and lacks leadership and motivation.
Obama again decided last year to send over more troops, under the guise of
advisers, and, inevitably, they have been drawn into combat. They kill and
are killed in the name of democracya word that has dwindling appeal and
little relevance for many Afghans.
Did any of the dozens of analyses put forward as the president reviewed the
options in 2009 and in 2015 estimate the number of innocent lives that would
be lost as a consequence of the American surge? Were those presidential
advisers skeptical of the capability and motivation of an upgraded and
modernized Afghan army able to find a place at the White House planning
table? Is there an American soldier who wants to be the last to die in
Afghanistan?
It is not too early to dwell on Obamas legacy, a deepening concern for any
president as the end of his tenure approaches. It would be easy to say it
will be mixedon the plus side there was the health-care bill and Americas
recovery from the economic shambles left by the Bush administration. He
faced an unbridgeable congressional impasse caused by an increasingly
radical Republican opposition. But Obama, whatever his private thoughts,
still speaks of American exceptionalism and still believes, or acts as if he
does, that the war on terror, a war against an ideology, can be won with
American bombers, drone attacks, and special forces. There is no evidence
yet for that belief.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
