What Fareed Zakaria Gets Wrong About Afghanistan: Everything
What Fareed Zakaria Gets Wrong About Afghanistan: Everything
CNN's Fareed Zakaria. (Detroit Regional Chamber / Flickr)(CC BY 2.0)
Since when does a (mostly) respected press pundit sound just like an army
general? Well, for a while now, in fact. Politicians and reporters will
argue viciously about all kinds of issues: immigration, healthcare, race, et
al. There's only one sacred cow that mainstream insiders - both "left" and
right - dare not challenge: the runaway Pentagon budget and America's
forever wars.
So it was, this Sunday morning, lounging in my hotel room in Spokane - I was
in town for the national Veterans for Peace convention - that I happened to
watch CNN's Fareed Zakaria drone on about the supposed risks of
"prematurely" (after 18 years?!?) pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.
Fareed is, indeed, eloquent, and his soothing voice and calm demeanor seem
to lend authority to his show's opening monologue. Yet his argument was
ridiculous. Here he was parading out all the old tired arguments about why
its supposedly too dangerous to end America's military commitment: Al Qaeda
will come back; There'll be another 9/11; Afghan women will suffer under
Taliban rule, and on and on.
I knew I'd heard it all before, but there was something about Fareed's
impromptu lecture that seemed more familiar than usual. Then it hit me - I'd
just read all these talking points. And the author? You guessed it: retired
General (and disgraced former CIA Director) David Petraeus. In a recent Wall
Street Journal op-ed, Petraeus chimed in with his usual scare tactics to
enable all he knows: perpetual war. Zakaria and Petraeus, on the surface the
two men couldn't be any more different. Yet the pundit seemed to have lifted
all his talking points from the general's standard playbook.
This ought to concern us all. Zakaria's apologism and justification to
extend America's longest war demonstrates, rather disturbingly, just how
firmly entrenched the US military-industrial complex and warfare state has
become. No one on the mainstream cable news stations, even on "liberal"
MSNBC, seriously challenges the very logic, and premise, of not only the war
in Afghanistan, but American forever war, writ large.
It seems there are two main reasons for this. One, the alliance between
defense contractors, retired generals, fundraising-crazy politicians, and a
pliant corporate press creates a systemic and vicious cycle of warfare
rationalization. Two, the mainstream media (excluding Fox News) and
political insiders so loathe Donald Trump that they reflexively oppose any
action the president takes, including, in this case, the rather rational
intention to negotiate an end to the Afghan War.
This author, at least, has dedicated (perhaps wasted) tens of thousands of
words describing just why the war in Afghanistan can't be won. Without
re-litigating the case yet again, let's just review all the inconvenient
facts that neither Petraeus nor Zakaria bothered to mention in their
shameless Afghan War apologism. There was no mention of the unsustainable
nature of Afghan Security Force casualties, that the army can't recruit
troops fast enough to replace the tens of thousands killed annually. There
was not a word about how Afghanistan's GDP and paltry budget can't even
cover the costs of its own military and police force and is wholly reliant
on foreign aid. There was no mention of Afghanistan's record opium crop that
fuels the Taliban and warlordism in general; no discussion of how the
Taliban now controls or contests more districts than at any time since the
war began in 2001; not a word about the corruption and legitimacy crisis of
the U.S.-backed government in Kabul. I could go on, but you see what I mean.
All the inconvenient details and context surrounding America's doomed
campaign in Afghanistan are erased in mainstream media and political
circles. Their arguments are simplified to one basic - and easily debunked -
premise, the "safe-haven myth." Simply put, this is the idea that if any
vaguely Arab or Muslim country is unstable or contains ungoverned spaces
(they almost all do by the way) then that territory will harbor terrorists
and lead to a new 9/11-style attack on the US homeland. Forget the fact that
9/11 was planned as much in Germany and the US as in Afghanistan, or that
the US military - even with its bloated budget - can't possibly occupy each
and every unstable state containing Muslims (though it does try!). It's just
logistically impossible and, besides, recent history proves that US military
intervention is often actually counterproductive and tends to fuel
anti-American jihadism.
Nonetheless, you won't hear any of that from the likes of Zakaria, Petraeus,
or just about any other mainstream public voice. It's famously been said
that "tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance." That's certainly the
case when it come to America's imperial adventurism and growing warfare
state. Absent any frank discussion of context about the region or US wars,
absent any mention of discomfiting facts, both pundits and generals can
pretend that history began yesterday and use fear to sell forever war. I
expected as much from Petraeus; I'll admit I'd hoped for better from
Zakaria. How hopelessly naive of me .
This article originally appeared on Antiwar.com.
Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer and regular contributor to
Antiwar.comHis work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The
Hill, Salon, Truthdig, TomDispatch, among other publications. He served
combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later
taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir
and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers,
Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at
@SkepticalVet.
