He's a professor of Middle Eastern Studies so he has a lot of information.
However, he was absolutely wrong in his opinion about what would be good for
Libya.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of R. E. Driscoll Sr
Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2017 7:08 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Trump Flip-Flops on Afghanistan, Opts for
Years-Long Quagmire
Miriam:
I think Mr. Cole should run for president in 2000.
Richard
Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 22, 2017, at 4:22 PM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
newspapers.
U.S. Special Operations personnel prepare to board a UH-60 Black Hawk
helicopter during a mission in Kunar province, Afghanistan. (photo: U.S.
Department of Defense)
Trump Flip-Flops on Afghanistan, Opts for Years-Long Quagmire
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
22 August 17
The 16-years-long Afghanistan War has bedeviled Washington
decision-makers since the US invasion of fall, 2001, which came in
response to the attacks of September 11.
In his speech on Monday night, Trump was primarily attempting to
manipulate American domestic politics. He was trying to look
presidential and play the patriotism card after he called Neo-Nazis
and KKK members in Charlottesville very fine people. Almost nothing he
said about Afghanistan and South Asia made any sense, and of course
Trump does not know anything about any of those subjects. His military
advisers only know these subjects through the lens of military action,
which isn't very helpful if the problems are cultural.
It is a low-risk strategy. I don't find the American public interested
in AFghanistan in the least. The US media does not much cover that war
and announcements of US troop deaths are carried on page 17 of the
So Trump can shift the focus to foreign policy without risking a backlash.Pakistan or Iran.
Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis once said it is fun to shoot Taliban.
He is in for a lot of fun.
Trump depicted the radical groups in Afghanistan as dangerous to the
United States. This assertion is probably incorrect. It is true that,
as Trump said, the 9/11 attacks were planned out by Usama Bin Laden,
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad and other al-Qaeda leaders
in Afghanistan. But they were also planned out in Hamburg, where
al-Qaeda had the good fortune to recruit some high-powered engineers.
They were not planned out by the Taliban, whose leaders probably did
not even know about the plans to attack the United States. In the
aftermath Taliban angrily denounced Bin Laden as having provoked a
foreign occupation of their country.
That al-Qaeda had training bases in Afghanistan was important to their
movement, but those bases wouldn't have been much use if the American
airlines did not have shoddy security precautions against hijackings.
Jet planes are enormous bombs and it was only a matter of time before
someone figured out how to use them as such. Likewise, mistrust
between the CIA and the FBI caused two of the hijackers, who had been
under surveillance at an al-Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur but then
entered the US and settled in San Diego, to fall between the cracks.
And, of course, al-Qaeda would not have existed at all if Ronald
Reagan had not encouraged a private army of Muslim fundamentalists and
tribal forces to attack the Communist government of Afghanistan in the
1980s. And that government wouldn't have been there, in all
likelihood, if Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union had not invaded and
occupied the country, which began its long-term destabilization.
In short, the US probably does not need to stay in Afghanistan to
ensure that America is not attacked from that country again. The
obverse is that being in Afghanistan does not protect the US from
attacks hatched elsewhere, including possibly in Europe itself. The
main point is that the US needed better security at point of use in
dangerous systems such as the airline industry.
Still, for ISIL or al-Qaeda to reestablish training camps in
Afghanistan would be a highly negative development. Such camps would
be difficult to discover and bomb from the air, if the US withdrew,
since it would need to fly missions against them from aircraft carrier
battle groups in the Gulf, and would need overflight permission from
arid.
As for why the Taliban in particular have made a comeback and may
control a third of the country, there are some basic reasons for this,
some of them explained by Sarah Chayes, who knows more about the real
Afghanistan than the entire US government.
First, Afghanistan is desperately poor. It is one of the 25 poorest
countries in the world. Despite the fake news sometimes put out from
DC think tanks, it has virtually no natural resources of any value.
Its population is still largely agricultural but much of the country is
This poverty contributes to a weak government that does not raisepart not personally corrupt.
enough in taxes to mount a proper government. If it weren't for
foreign aid, Afghanistan could not afford to pay its tens of thousands
of troops and police. Low salaries and salary arrears encourage
corruption. Dire poverty does not necessarily turn a country into a
failed state. Senegal does better than Afghanistan. But it is a strike
against the country and hard to overcome.
Second, its high rates of population growth often outstrip economic
growth, so that per capita income is actually declining.
Trump's determination not to do nation-building differs little from
the actual US policy of the past 16 years, which is to put much more
money into bombs than into the country's economic development. Since
lack of development is a big driver of the failed state and of
guerrilla violence, giving it up won't be helpful.
Third, as noted above, its government is extremely corrupt. Officials
prey on people, steal land and other resources from them, and
generally act like a plague on the land. Warlord rule is common, i.e.
rule by what are essentially violent mobsters. This extreme corruption
drives some of the population into the arms of the Taliban, who are
fanatical puritans and who do lay levies on people, but are for the most
to the annoyance of the rural and tribal Pushtuns.
Fourth, Afghanistan has some deep ethnic divides. Some 40% of the
population is Pushtun. They speak Pashto and practice a relatively
strict form of Sunni Islam. They are the potential constituency for
the Taliban. Another 22% or so is Hazara Shiites, who speak Dari
Persian and have the same form of Islam as neighboring Iran. Ten
percent are Uzbeks, who speak a Turkic language and practice Sunni
Islam, though many of them are secular-minded as a result of the
influence of neighboring Uzbekistan. Most of the rest are some form of
Tajik, Sunni Muslims who speak Dari Persian. Tajiks are
disproportionately urban and literate and often fill government offices,
links to Tehran.
As Sarah Chayes has pointed out, deep ethnic divides and hatred
exacerbate public reaction against corruption. If a Tajik governor of
a province is stealing from Pushtuns, the latter may well turn to the
Taliban for protection.
The Western Pushtuns have never bought into the US-established
government in Kabul, which has all along had a strong element of the
Northern Alliance (Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks) who had fought the
Taliban in the 1990s. Last I knew, 2% of the army is from Helmand and
Qandahar provinces, Pushtun strongholds.
Sixth, outside powers also play on the ethnic divides. Many Tajik
politicians have strong relationships with India. Most Pushtun are
pro-Pakistani. Pakistan is regularly accused of promoting the Taliban
and Muslim fundamentalism as a way of asserting Pakistani influence
and countering Indian inroads. Pakistani generals consider Afghanistan
their "strategic depth" with regard to India. (I don't think they
understand the concept properly; you want your strategic depth
between you and the enemy, not behind you.) Hazaras have not been as
close to Iran as you might imagine, but some of their leaders do have
forever.
The ordinary troops of the army are reluctant to risk their lives
fighting for a corrupt government. There are high desertion rates and
high rates of drug use in the army. While in some battles some units
have fought bravely, despite its training, size and equipment it is
regularly successfully challenged by smaller bands of Taliban.
If Trump had pulled the US out of Afghanistan, as he threatened to
during the campaign, my guess is that Kabul would have fallen to the
Taliban within a year. The US no longer does much active war-fighting
in this country, but special forces and US fighter jets can intervene
to stop a Taliban offensive.
The country, in short, is in a stalemate, and the best the US can
likely do is to be like the little boy who stuck his finger in the
dike to stop a flood. You kind of have to keep your finger in the dike
in a lake.
Trump's demand that India invest in Afghanistan was overly dramatic.
India already invests in Afghanistan. But I don't know what he
expects. It is a desperately poor country with few natural resources.
Although the Indian middle class has greatly expanded, much of India
is still mired in rural poverty and those villagers are a much bigger
constituency for the BJP government than are the villagers of Afghanistan.
Trump's slam of Pakistan as giving safe haven to terrorists and
extremists is the sort of thing it is better to say privately. You say
it publicly, Pakistan's urban elites are likely to tell Washington to jump
They consider Afghan fundamentalists as a vector of their soft powerbase.
in a neighboring country. Already, Pakistan is being deeply embedded
in China's economic expansion westward, and Islamabad could easily
turn to Beijing as its major foreign patron. And, by the way, the
Pakistani military has fought some hard campaigns against extremists
inside the country, and lost many troops to these battles.
In the end, Trump just kicked the can down the road. The fawning over
him by some tele-journalists for doing so (and seeming decisive and
"presidential") was truly disgusting. If Afghanistan's curses are
corruption, fanatical identity politics and a hatred of globalization,
its more problematic organizations resemble most of all . . . Trump's
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