American Way of War (21 page)

The Democrats who don’t dare
: It’s remarkable that the sharpest president we’ve had in a while didn’t dare get up in front of the American people after Flight 253 landed and tell everyone to calm down. He didn’t, in fact, have a single intelligent thing to say about the event. He certainly didn’t remind Americans that, whatever happened to Flight 253, they stood in far more danger heading out of their driveways behind the wheel or pulling into a bar on the way home for a beer or two. Instead, the Obama administration essentially abjectly apologized, insisted it would focus yet more effort and money on making America safe from air terrorism, widened a new front in the Global War on Terror in Yemen (speeding extra money and U.S. advisers that way), and when the din from its critics didn’t end, “pushed back,” as Peter Baker of the
New York Times
wrote, by claiming “that they were handling terror suspects much as the previous administration did.” It’s striking when a Democratic administration finds safety in the claim that it’s acting like a Republican one, that it’s following the path to the imperial presidency already cleared by George W. Bush. Fear does that to you, and the fear of terror has been institutionalized at the top as well as the bottom of society.

Fear has a way of reordering human worlds. That only a relatively small number of determined fanatics with extraordinarily limited access to American soil keep Fear Inc. afloat should, by now, be obvious. What the fear machine produces is the dark underside of the charming Saul Steinberg
New Yorker
cover, “A View of the World from 9th Avenue,” in which Manhattan looms vast as the rest of the planet fades into near nothingness.

When you see the world “from 9th Avenue,” or from an all-al-Qaeda-all-the-time “news” channel, you see it phantasmagorically. It’s out of all realistic shape and proportion, which means you naturally make stupid decisions. You become incapable of sorting out what matters and what doesn’t, what’s primary and what’s secondary. You become, in short, manipulable.

This is our situation today.

People always wonder: What would the impact of a second 9/11-style attack be on this country? Seldom noticed, however, is that all the pinprick terror events blown up to apocalyptic proportions add up to a second, third, fourth, fifth 9/11 when it comes to American consciousness.

So the next time a Flight 253 occurs and the Republicans go postal, the media morphs into its 24/7 national security disaster mode, the pundits register red on the terror-news scale, the president defends himself by reaffirming that he is doing just what the Bush administration would have done, the homeland security lobbyists begin calling for yet more funds for yet more machinery, and nothing much happens, remember those drunken drivers, arsonists, and tobacco merchants, even that single dust devil and say:

Hold onto your underpants, this is
not
a national emergency.

Almost like clockwork, the reports float up to us from thousands of miles away, as if from another universe. Every couple of days they seem to arrive from Afghan villages that few Americans will ever see without weapon in hand. Every few days, they appear from a world almost beyond our imagining, and always they concern death—so many lives snuffed out so regularly for years now. Unfortunately, those news stories are so unimportant in our world that they seldom make it onto, no less off of, the inside pages of our papers. They’re so repetitive that, once you’ve started reading them, you could write them in your sleep from thousands of miles away.

Like obituaries, they follow a simple pattern. Often the news initially arrives buried in summary war reports based on U.S. military (or NATO) announcements of small triumphs—so many “insurgents,” or “terrorists,” or “foreign militants,” or “anti-Afghan forces” killed in an air strike or a raid on a house or a village. And these days, often remarkably quickly, even in the same piece, come the challenges. Some local official or provincial governor or police chief in the area insists that those dead “terrorists” or “militants” were actually so many women, children, old men, innocent civilians, members of a wedding party or a funeral. (A recent study of the death-dealing weapons of the Iraq war, published in the
New England
Journal of Medicine
, indicates that air strikes are notoriously good at taking out civilians. Eighty-five percent of the deaths from air strikes in Iraq were, the study estimated, women and children, and of all methods, including suicide and car bombs, airpower “killed the most civilians per event.”)

Then come the standard-issue denials from U.S. military officials or coalition spokespeople: those killed were insurgents, and the intelligence information on which the strike or raid had been based was accurate. In these years, American spokespeople have generally retreated from their initial claims only step by begrudging step. Admittedly, there’s been some change in the assertion/repeated denial/investigation pattern instituted by American forces. Now, assertion and denial are sometimes followed relatively quickly by acknowledgment, apology, and payment. Now, when the irrefutable meets the unchallengeable, American spokespeople tend to own up to it. This new tactic has been a response to rising Afghan outrage over the repeated killing of civilians in U.S. raids and air strikes. But like the denials and the investigations, this, too, is intended to make everything go away, while our war itself—those missiles loosed, those doors kicked down in the middle of the night—continues.

Consider just one incident that went almost uncovered in the U.S. media. According to an Agence France-Presse account, in a raid in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, the U.S. military first reported a small success: four “armed militants” killed. It took next to no time, however, for those four militants to morph into the family of an Afghan National Army artillery commander named Awal Khan. As it happened, Khan himself was on duty in another province at the time. According to the report, the tally of the slain, some of whom may have gone to the roof of their house to defend themselves against armed men they evidently believed to be robbers or bandits, included Awal Khan’s “schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, who worked for a government department. Another daughter was wounded.” The report continues, “After the shooting, the pregnant wife of Khan’s cousin, who lived next door, went outside her home and was shot five times in the abdomen.” She survived, but her fetus, “hit by bullets,” didn’t. Khan’s wife worked at a school supported by the international aid organization CARE, which issued a statement strongly
condemning the raid and demanding that “international military forces operating in Afghanistan are held accountable for their actions and avoid all attacks on innocent civilians in the country.”

In accordance with its new policy, the United States issued an apology:

A U.S. military spokesman added, “There will undoubtedly be some financial assistance and other types of assistance [to the survivors].”

But the family quite reasonably wanted more than a press-release apology. The grieving husband, father, and brother said, “I want the coalition leaders to expose those behind this and punish them,” adding, “[T]he Afghan government should resign if it could not protect its people.” Afghan president Hamid Karzai, as he has done many times during past incidents, repeatedly demanded an explanation for the deaths and asked that such raids and air strikes be drastically curtailed.

All of this, however, is little more than a shadow play against which the ongoing war continues to be relentlessly prosecuted. In Afghanistan, and increasingly in Pakistan, civilian deaths are inseparable from this war. Though they may be referred to as “collateral damage,” increasingly in all wars, and certainly in counterinsurgency campaigns involving air power, the killing of civilians lies at the heart of the matter, while the killing of soldiers might be thought of as the true collateral activity.

Pretending that these “mistakes” will cease or be ameliorated as long as the war is being prosecuted is little short of folly. After all, “mistake”
after “mistake” continues to be made. The first Afghan wedding party was obliterated in late December 2001, when an American air strike killed up to 110 Afghan revelers with only 2 survivors. At least 4 more have been blown away since then. And count on it, there will be others.

A UN survey tallied up 2,118 civilians killed in Afghanistan in 2008, a striking rise over the previous year’s figure, of which 828 were ascribed to U.S., NATO, and Afghan Army actions rather than to suicide bombers or Taliban guerrillas. Given the difficulty of counting the dead in wartime, any figures like these are likely to be significant undercounts.

By now, we’ve filled up endless “towers” with dead Afghan civilians. And that’s clearly not going to change, apologies or not, especially when U.S. forces are “surging” into the southern and eastern parts of the country, while the CIA’s drone war on the Pakistani border expands.

And how exactly do we explain this ever-rising pile of civilian dead to ourselves? It’s being done, so we’ve been told, for our safety and security here in the United States. The former vice president has made clear that among the great achievements of the Bush administration was the prevention of a second 9/11. And President Obama continues to play the 9/11 card heavily. As he reportedly put it, he is not “‘naive about how dangerous this world is’ and…wakes up every day and goes to bed every night thinking and worrying ‘about how to keep the American people safe.’”

Personally, I always thought that we could have locked our plane doors and gone home long ago. We were never in mortal danger from al-Qaeda in the backlands of Afghanistan, despite the perfervid imagination of the previous administration and the riotous fears of so many Americans. The rag-tag group that attacked us in September 2001 was then capable of committing acts of terror on a spectacular scale (two U.S. embassy buildings in Africa, a destroyer in a Yemeni harbor, and of course those towers in New York and the Pentagon), but only every couple of years. In other words, al-Qaeda was capable of stunning this country and of killing Americans, but was never a threat to the nation itself.

All this, of course, was compounded by the fact that the Bush administration couldn’t have cared less about al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks, that the “Defense Department” imagined its job to be “power
projection” abroad, not protecting American shores (or air space), and that our intelligence agencies were in chaos. So those towers came down and rather than simply going after the group that had acted against us, we invaded Afghanistan (“no safe havens for terrorists”) and began plans for “regime change” in Iraq and beyond. In the process, the Bush administration went to extreme efforts to fetishize our own safety and security, and simultaneously turned “security” into a lucrative endeavor.

Of course, elsewhere people have lived through remarkable paroxysms of violence and terror without the sort of fuss and fear this nation exhibited, or the money-making that went with it. If you want to be reminded of just how fetishistic our focus on our own safety was, consider a 2005 news article written for a Florida newspaper, “Weeki Wachee Mermaids in Terrorists’ Cross Hairs?” It began:

This was how, in deepest Florida, distant Utah, or on the Texas border, all places about as likely to be hit by an al-Qaeda attack as by a meteor, Americans were obsessing about keeping everything near and dear to them safe and secure. At the same time, of course, the Bush administration was breaking the bank at the Pentagon and in its Global War on Terror, while preparing the way for an America that would be plunged into startling economic insecurity.

Let’s for a moment assume, however, that our safety really was, and remains, at stake in a war halfway across the planet. If so, let me ask you a question: What’s your “safety” really worth? Are you truly willing to trade the lives of Awal Khan’s family for a blanket guarantee of your safety, and not just his family, but all those Afghan one-year-olds, all those wedding parties that are—yes, they really are—going to be blown away in the years to come for you?

If, in 1979, as the Carter presidency was ending and our Afghan wars were beginning, you had told any group of Americans that we would be ever more disastrously involved in Afghanistan for thirty years, that, even then, no end would be in sight, and that we would twice declare victory (in 1989 after the Soviets withdrew, and again in 2001 when the Afghan capital Kabul was taken from the Taliban) only to discover that disaster followed, they undoubtedly would have thought you mad. Afghanistan? Please. You might as well have said Mars. Now, three decades later, it’s possible to see that every step taken from the earliest support for Afghan jihadis in their anti-Soviet war has only made things worse for us, and ever so much worse for the Afghans.