An unremarkable paragraph in a piece in my hometown paper recently caught my eye. It was headlined “White House Believes Karzai Will Be Re-elected,” but in mid-report Helene Cooper and Mark Landler of the New York Times turned to Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s “redeployment option.” Here’s the humdrum paragraph in question: “The redeployment option calls for moving troops from sparsely populated and lawless areas of the countryside to urban areas, including Kandahar and Kabul. Many rural areas ‘would be better left to Predators,’ said an administration official, referring to drone aircraft.”

In other words, the United States may now be represented in the Afghan countryside, as it already is in the tribal areas on the Pakistani side of the border, mainly by Predators and their even more powerful cousins, Reapers, unmanned aerial vehicles with names straight out of a sci-fi film about implacable aliens. If you happen to be an Afghan villager in some underpopulated part of that country where the U.S. has set up small bases — two of which were almost overrun recently — they will be gone and “America” will instead be soaring overhead. We’re talking about planes without human beings in them tirelessly scanning the ground with their cameras for up to 22 hours at a stretch. Launched from Afghanistan but flown by pilots thousands of miles away in the American West, they are armed with two to four Hellfire missiles or the equivalent in 500-pound bombs.

To see Earth from the heavens, that’s the classic viewpoint of the superior being or god with the ultimate power of life and death. Zeus, that Greek god of gods, used lightning bolts to strike down humans who offended him. We use missiles and bombs. Zeus had the knowledge of a god. We have “intelligence,” often fallible (or score-settling). His weapon of choice destroyed one individual. Ours take out anyone in the vicinity.

He made his decisions from Mount Olympus; we make ours from places like Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas, and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. Those about whom we make life-and-death decisions, as they scurry below or carry on as best they can, have — like any beings faced with the gods — no recourse or appeal. Seen on screens, they are, to us, distant, grainy figures, hardly larger than ants. This is what implacable means.

Soothing the Children

And none of this strikes us as strange. Quite the opposite, it represents reasonable policy. Comments like the one quoted above are now commonplace. In the Washington Post, for instance, Rajiv Chandrasekaran recently recorded the thoughts of an anonymous U.S. officer in Afghanistan: “If more forces are not forthcoming to mount counterinsurgency operations in those parts of the province, he concluded, the overall U.S. effort to stabilize Kandahar — and by extension, the rest of Afghanistan — will fail. ‘We might as well pack our bags and go home… and just keep a few Predators flying overhead to whack the al-Qaeda guys who return.'”

We know as well that, in the Washington debate over what to do next in the Afghan War, Vice President Joe Biden has come down on the side of “counterterrorism.” He wants to put more emphasis on those drones and on special operations forces, while focusing more on Pakistan (though without dropping U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan). At the same time, the Pentagon has just created an Afghan Hands program and a Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordination Cell, two units focused on improving military performance in the Af-Pak theater of operations over the next three to five years. All of this represents the norm for military and civilian leaders who, whatever their differences, believe wars that go on for endless years thousands of miles from home are the sine qua non of American safety.

And none of this seems less than reasonable to us, especially given the much publicized “success” of the drone assassination program in taking out Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership figures. What does strike us as strange, though, is that the locals, whether in Pakistan or Afghanistan, find all this upsetting. A recent U.S. poll in Pakistan typically reported “that 76 percent of the respondents were opposed to Pakistan partnering with the United States on missile attacks against extremists by American drone aircraft.”

Then again, we take it for granted that the people of such backward lands are strange, touchy types. Not like us. In George Packer’s recent New Yorker profile of Richard Holbrooke, the president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, there were some classic lines reflecting this.

Packer describes Holbrooke on a flying visit to Afghanistan this way: “He seemed less like a visiting emissary than like a proconsul inspecting a vast operation over which he commanded much of the authority.” When that same proconsul makes it out of impoverished, shattered Afghanistan (where the U.S. Embassy, at one point, had to deny he had engaged in a “shouting match” with Afghan President Hamid Karzai) and into Pakistan, a fractious, disturbed, unnerved country of genuine significance, he packs the proconsul away and, according to Packer, becomes Washington’s cajoler-in-chief. As Packer writes, “In moments when I overheard him talking to Pakistani leaders, he took the solicitous tone of someone reassuring an unstable friend. ‘It’s like dealing with psychologically abused children,’ a member of his staff said. ‘You don’t focus on the screaming and the violence — you just hug them tighter.'”

So, if Afghan and Pakistani peasants in the mountainous tribal borderlands are so many ants or rabbits, Pakistani leaders are “children.” It matters little that Holbrooke has a reputation himself as an egotist and a screamer who demands his way. (Among diplomats back in the 1990s when he was negotiating in the former Yugoslavia, one joke went: What’s the most dangerous place in the Balkans? The answer: Between Dick Holbrooke and a camera.)

Packard reports Holbrooke’s disappointment over the amount of aid Congress is ponying up for Pakistan ($7.5 billion) and, to add to his set of frustrations, there’s this: “Because of Pakistan’s sensitivity about its sovereignty, he had been unable to persuade its military to allow American helicopters to bring aid to the refugees,” who had been driven from the Swat Valley by the Taliban and a Pakistani military offensive.

Let’s think about that for a moment, especially since it’s a commonplace of American reporting from the region and so reflects official thinking on the subject. Karen DeYoung and Pamela Constable, for instance, write in a Washington Post piece: “Pakistanis, who are extremely sensitive about national sovereignty, oppose allowing foreign troops on their soil and have protested U.S. missile attacks launched from unmanned aircraft against suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda targets inside Pakistan.” In fact, let’s reverse the situation.

Imagine that, after the next Katrina, Pakistani military helicopters based on a Pakistani aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Mexico are preparing to deliver supplies to New Orleans. Of course, you also have to imagine, minimally, that the Pakistanis are in the process of building a three-quarters of a billion dollar fortress of an embassy in Washington D.C. (to be guarded by armed Pakistani private contractors), that Pakistani drones are regularly cruising the Sierra Nevada mountains, launching missiles at residences in small towns below, that the Pakistanis are offering billions of dollars in desperately needed aid to a hamstrung American government and military in return for not complaining too much about whatever they might want to do in the United States, that top Pakistani military and civilian officials are constantly shuttling through Washington demanding “cooperation,” and finally that Pakistani reporters covering all this regularly point to an “extreme American sensitivity about national sovereignty,” as illustrated by a bizarre unwillingness to accept Pakistani aid delivered in Pakistani military helicopters. Then again, you know those Americans: combustible as spoiled kids.

Such reversals are, of course, inconceivable and so, nearly impossible to imagine. Today, were a Pakistani military helicopter to approach the U.S. coast with anything on board and refuse to turn back, it would undoubtedly be shot down. So much for American touchiness.

But here’s a question that comes to mind: Why is it that Americans like Holbrooke seem to feel so at home so far away from home? Why, for instance, do U.S. military spokespeople so regularly refer to our indigenous enemies in Iraq as “anti-Iraqi forces,” and in Afghanistan as “anti-Afghan forces”? Why does our military in Iraq speak of the neighboring Iranians as “foreign forces” without ever including our own military in that category?

Resistant as Washington may be to the thought, the obvious has recently been crossing some influential minds. Amid the debate over war options — more troops, more training of the Afghan military and police, more drone attacks in Pakistan, or some mix-and-match version of all of the above, but certainly not a withdrawal from the country — it has become more common to express concern that deploying up to 40,000 more U.S. troops might create too big an American “footprint.” As Peter Baker and Thom Shanker of the New York Times wrote in a profile of Robert Gates, the secretary of defense “has repeatedly declared his concern that more troops would make Americans look increasingly like occupiers.”

After almost eight years of war, only now does the danger that we might “look increasingly like occupiers” rise to the surface. Since “occupier” is a role Americans just can’t imagine occupying, let’s consider a fantasy alternative instead, one perhaps easier to imagine: What if it turns out that we are the Martians?

Crushing the Rabbits

The first Martian invasion of this planet — they landed near the town of Woking in England and, before they were done, laid waste to London — took place in 1898, thanks to the Tasmanians, and if you don’t think that’s worth considering more than a century later, think again. In fact, General McChrystal, President Obama, Proconsul Holbrooke, as you’re doing your reassessments of the Afghan War, do I have a book for you.

I was perhaps 12 years old when I first read it — under the covers by flashlight long after I was supposed to be asleep — and it scared the hell out of me. Even now, when alien invasion plots are a dime a dozen, I have a hunch that it could do the same for you. I’m talking, of course, about H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. If you remember, that other Wells, Orson, successfully redid it in a 1938 radio version in which the fictional Martians landed in New Jersey, and many perfectly real New Yorkers were reportedly unnerved. (The 2005 Steven Spielberg movie version, the second film made from Wells’s classic, had all the expectable modern pyrotechnics, but none of the punch of the book.)

Back in the era when Wells wrote his book, invasion novels were already commonplace in England, with the part of the implacable, inhuman invader normally played by the Germans. Wells, on the other hand, almost single-handedly created the alien invader genre, arming his brainy monsters from the dying planet Mars with poison gas and a laser-like heat ray, and then supplying them with giant walking tripods (think elevated tanks without treads) — all prefiguring the weaponry of the world wars to come (and even of wars beyond our own).

However, nothing in the book — not the weaponry, not even the destruction — is more terrifying than the attitude of the Martians (“intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic”), for this is one of the great role-reversal novels of all time. They are implacable exactly because they see the English as we would see rabbits, or as English colonists in Australia did indeed see the Tasmanians, a people they all but exterminated with hardly a twinge of regret. In fact, that’s where The War of the Worlds evidently began. It seems that Wells’s brother Frank brought up the extermination of the Tasmanians one day and so launched the idea for a book still in print 111 years later. Evidently, the question that came to Wells’s mind was this: What if someone arrived in England with the same view of the superior English that the English had had of the Tasmanians, and the sort of advanced weaponry and technology capable of turning that attitude into a grim reality?

As his unnamed central character comments in the first pages of the novel: “The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

The Martians (actually transmogrified Englishmen) advance through the English countryside and into London, frying everything in sight in a version of what, in the next century, would come to be known as total war — that is, war visited not just on the warriors, but on the civilian population. At the same time, they harvest humans and feed off their blood. In the coming century, there would indeed be Martians aplenty on this planet, more than ready to feed off the blood of its inhabitants.

General McChrystal, President Obama, Proconsul Holbrooke, The War of the Worlds, old as it is, offers a rare example of how to imagine us from the point of view of them. I urge you to study it with the intensity you now apply to counterinsurgency and counterterrorism strategies. After all, in our own way, we could be considered the Martians of the twenty-first century and (how typical!) we don’t even know it.

Unlike Wells’s Martians, who arrived on this planet without a propaganda department or a care in the world about English “hearts and minds,” we landed in Afghanistan talking a people-friendly game, and we’ve never stopped, even if much of the palaver has been for home consumption. And yet during the first eight years of our Afghan War, as General McChrystal recently admitted in his 66-page report to the secretary of defense, we could hardly have exhibited a more profound ignorance of the Afghan world, or a more Martian lack of interest in finding out about it, even as we were blowing Afghans away.

Now, the Pentagon is attempting to correct that by setting up a new intelligence unit “to provide military and civilian officials in Afghanistan with detailed analysis of the country’s tribal, political and religious dynamics.” As Robert Dreyfuss of the Nation’s Dreyfuss Report, points out, however, this unit will be based at a center in Tampa, Florida; we will, that is, now study the Afghans as anthropologists might once have studied the Trobriand Islanders. Then we will process that information thousands of miles away, just as our “pilots” do.

Perhaps it’s time to study ourselves instead. What if, from an Afghan point of view, we really are Wells’s Martians? Then, it’s not a matter of counterinsurgency versus counterterror, or more American troops versus more American-trained Afghan ones, or even nation-building versus stabilization. What if — and this is an un-American thought — there is no American solution to Afghanistan? What if no alternative, or combination of alternatives, will work? What if the only thing Martians can effectively do is destroy — or leave? (Remember, even Wells’s aliens finally and involuntary chose to abandon their occupation of England. They died, thanks to bacteria to which they had no immunity.)

What if the Afghans will never see those Predators — our equivalent of the Martian “tripods” and death rays combined — as their protectors? After all, our drones represent the technologically advanced, the alien, and the death-dealing along with, as Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis wrote recently, the whole panoply of our “B-1 heavy bombers, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, Apache and AC-130 gunships, heavy artillery, tanks, radars, killer drones, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, rockets, and space surveillance.” Even our propaganda, dropped from the air (as if from another universe), can kill. Recently, an Afghan girl died after being hit by a box of propaganda leaflets, released from a British plane, that “failed to come apart.” Her heart and mind may be stilled, but rest assured, those of her parents, her relatives, and others who knew her, undoubtedly aren’t.

Here’s a little exchange, as reported at a New York Times blog from an alien “encounter” in another land. A U.S. Army major, Guy Parmeter, had it near Samara in Iraq’s Salahuddin province in 2004 (“[I]t made me think: how are we perceived, who are we to them?”):

Maj. Guy Parmeter: “Seen any foreign fighters?”

Iraqi farmer: “Yes, you.”

Sometimes it takes 66 pages to report on a war. Sometimes a century old novel can do the trick. Sometimes you can write tomes about the “mistakes” made in, and the “tragedy” of, an American counterinsurgency war in a distant land. Sometimes a simple “yes, you” will do.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

[Note on sources and resources: I thought I might mention several websites that I read avidly and rely on in writing pieces like this one, starting with Robert Dreyfuss’s invaluable work at his Dreyfuss Report blog at the Nation magazine. On Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq, it should not be missed. In addition, there are my long-term favorites: Antiwar.com (and Jason Ditz’s regular news summaries there); Juan Cole’s Informed Comment website — always a must read, but lately he’s been producing remarkable columns day after day; and the War in Context, another website I simply couldn’t do without. I also find Noah Shachtman’s http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/Danger Room blog at Wired magazine of special interest on military matters. On the Afghan War, check out Robert Greenwald’s Rethink Afghanistan (and his striking new film of the same name), as well as the Af-Pak Channel and its “daily brief” newsletter. Finally, a small bow to Michael Maddox who, in a letter to the New York Times, brought Major Parmeter’s exchange to my attention.]

War of the Worlds

Front and center in the debate over the Afghan War these days are General Stanley “Stan” McChrystal, Afghan war commander, whose “classified, pre-decisional” and devastating report — almost eight years and at least $220 billion later, the war is a complete disaster — was conveniently, not to say suspiciously, leaked to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post by we-know-not-who at a particularly embarrassing moment for Barack Obama; Admiral Michael “Mike” Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has been increasingly vocal about a “deteriorating” war and the need for more American boots on the ground; and the president himself, who blitzed every TV show in sight last Sunday and Monday for his health reform program, but spent significant time expressing doubts about sending more American troops to Afghanistan. (“I’m not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan… or sending a message that America is here for the duration.”)

On the other hand, here’s someone you haven’t seen front and center for a while: General David Petraeus. He was, of course, George W. Bush’s pick to lead the president’s last-ditch effort in Iraq. He was the poster boy for Bush’s military policies in his last two years. He was the highly praised architect and symbol of “the surge.” He appeared repeatedly, his chest a mass of medals and ribbons, for heavily publicized, widely televised congressional testimony, complete with charts and graphs, that was meant, at least in part, for the American public. He was the man who, to use an image from that period which has recently resurfaced, managed to synchronize the American and Baghdad “clocks,” pacifying for a time both the home and war fronts.

He never met a journalist, as far as we can tell, he didn’t want to woo. (And he clearly won over the influential Tom Ricks, then of the Washington Post, who wrote The Gamble, a bestselling paean to him and his sub-commanders.) From the look of it, he’s the most political general to come down the pike since, in 1951 in the midst of the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur said his goodbyes to Congress after being cashiered by President Truman for insubordination — for, in effect, wanting to run his own war and the foreign policy that went with it. It was Petraeus who brought Vietnam-era counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) back from the crypt, overseeing the writing of a new Army counterinsurgency manual that would make it central to both the ongoing wars and what are already being referred to as the “next” ones.

Before he left office, Bush advanced his favorite general to the head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees the former president’s Global War on Terror across the energy heartlands of the planet from Egypt to Pakistan. The command is, of course, especially focused on Bush’s two full-scale wars: the Iraq War, now being pursued under Petraeus’s former subordinate, General Ray Odierno, and the Afghan War, for which Petraeus seems to have personally handpicked a new commanding general, Stan McChrystal. From the military’s dark side world of special ops and targeted assassinations, McChrystal had operated in Iraq and was also part of an Army promotion board headed by Petraeus that advanced the careers of officers committed to counterinsurgency. To install McChrystal in May, Obama abruptly sacked the then-Afghan war commander, General David McKiernan, in what was then considered, with some exaggeration, a new MacArthur moment.

On taking over, McChrystal, who had previously been a counterterrorism guy (and isn’t about to give that up, either), swore fealty to counterinsurgency doctrine (that is, to Petraeus) by proclaiming that the American goal in Afghanistan must not be primarily to hunt down and kill Taliban insurgents, but to “protect the population.” He also turned to a “team” of civilian experts, largely gathered from Washington think-tanks, a number of whom had been involved in planning out Petraeus’s Iraq surge of 2007, to make an assessment of the state of the war and what needed to be done. Think of them as the Surgettes.

As in many official reassessments, the cast of characters essentially guaranteed the results before a single meeting was held. Based on past history and opinions, this team could only provide one Petraeus-approved answer to the war: more — more troops, up to 40,000-45,000 of them, and other resources for an American counterinsurgency operation without end.

Hence, even if McChrystal’s name is on it, the report slipped to Bob Woodward which just sandbagged the president has a distinctly Petraeusian shape to it. In a piece linked to Woodward’s bombshell in the Washington Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung wrote of unnamed officials in Washington who claimed “the military has been trying to push Obama into a corner.” The language in the coverage elsewhere has been similar.

There is, wrote DeYoung a day later, now a “rupture” between the military “pushing for an early decision to send more troops” and civilian policymakers “increasingly doubtful of an escalating nation-building effort.” Nancy Youssef of McClatchy News wrote about how “mixed signals” from Washington were causing “increasing ire from U.S. commanders in Afghanistan”; a group of McClatchy reporters talked of military advocates of escalation feeling “frustration” over “White House dithering.” David Sanger of the New York Times described “a split between an American military that says it needs more troops now and an American president clearly reluctant to leap into that abyss.” “Impatient” is about the calmest word you’ll see for the attitude of the military top command right now.

Buyer’s Remorse, the Afghan War, and the President

In the midst of all this, between Admiral Mullen and General McChrystal is, it seems, a missing man. The most photogenic general in our recent history, the man who created the doctrine and oversees the war, the man who is now shaping the U.S. Army (and its future plans and career patterns), is somehow, at this crucial moment, out of the Washington spotlight. This last week General Petraeus was, in fact, in England, giving a speech and writing an article for the (London) Times laying out his basic “protect the population” version of counterinsurgency and praising our British allies by quoting one of their great imperial plunderers. (“If Cecil Rhodes was correct in his wonderful observation that ‘being an Englishman is the greatest prize in the lottery of life,’ and I’m inclined to think that he was, then the second greatest prize in the lottery of life must be to be a friend of an Englishman, and based on that, the more than 230,000 men and women in uniform who work with your country’s finest day by day are very lucky indeed, as am I.”)

Only at mid-week, with Washington aboil, did he arrive in the capital for a counterinsurgency conference at the National Press Club and quietly “endorse” “General McChrystal’s assessment.” Whatever the look of things, however, it’s unlikely that Petraeus is actually on the sidelines at this moment of heightened tension. He is undoubtedly still The Man.

So much is, of course, happening just beyond the sightlines of those of us who are mere citizens of this country, which is why inference and guesswork are, unfortunately, the order of the day. Read any account in a major newspaper right now and it’s guaranteed to be chock-a-block full of senior officials and top military officers who are never “authorized to speak,” but nonetheless yak away from behind a scrim of anonymity. Petraeus may or may not be one of them, but the odds are reasonable that this is still a Petraeus Moment.

If so, Obama has only himself to blame. He took up Afghanistan (“the right war”) in the presidential campaign as proof that, despite wanting to end the war in Iraq, he was tough. (Why is it that a Democratic candidate needs a war or threat of war to trash-talk about in order to prove his “strength,” when doing so is obviously a sign of weakness?)

Once in office, Obama compounded the damage by doubling down his bet on the war. In March, he introduced a “comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan” in his first significant public statement on the subject, which had expansion written all over it. He also agreed to send in 21,000 more troops (which, by the way, Petraeus reportedly convinced him to do). In August, in another sign of weakness masquerading as strength, before an unenthusiastic audience at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, he unnecessarily declared: “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.” All of this he will now pay for at the hands of Petraeus, or if not him, then a coterie of military men behind the latest push for a new kind of Afghan War.

As it happens, this was never Obama’s “war of necessity.” It was always Petraeus’s. And the new report from McChrystal and the Surgettes is undoubtedly Petraeus’s progeny as well. It seems, in fact, cleverly put together to catch a cautious president, who wasn’t cautious enough about his war of choice, in a potentially devastating trap. The military insistence on quick action on a troop decision sets up a devastating choice for the president: “Failure to provide adequate resources also risks a longer conflict, greater casualties, higher overall costs, and ultimately, a critical loss of political support. Any of these risks, in turn, are likely to result in mission failure.” Go against your chosen general and the failure that follows is yours alone. (Unnamed figures supposedly close to McChrystal are already launching test balloons, passed on by others, suggesting that the general might resign in protest if the president doesn’t deliver — a possibility he has denied even considering.) On the other hand, offer him somewhere between 15,000 and 45,000 more American troops as well as other resources, and the failure that follows will still be yours.

It’s a basic lose-lose proposition and, as journalist Eric Schmitt wrote in a New York Times assessment of the situation, “it will be very hard to say no to General McChrystal.” No wonder the president and some of his men are dragging their feet and looking elsewhere. As one typically anonymous “defense analyst” quoted in the Los Angeles Times said, the administration is suffering “buyer’s remorse for this war… They never really thought about what was required, and now they have sticker shock.”

Admittedly, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 51% of Americans are against sending in more troops. (Who knows how they would react to a president who went on TV to announce that he had genuinely reconsidered?) Official Washington is another matter. For General Petraeus, who claims to have no political ambitions but is periodically mentioned as the Eisenhower of 2012, how potentially peachy to launch your campaign against the president who lost you the war.

A Petraeus Moment?

In the present context, the media language being used to describe this military-civilian conflict of wills — frustration, impatience, split, rupture, ire — may fall short of capturing the import of a moment which has been brewing, institutionally speaking, for a long time. There have been increasing numbers of generals’ “revolts” of various sorts in our recent past. Of course, George W. Bush was insistent on turning planning over to his generals (though only when he liked them), something Barack Obama criticized him for during the election campaign. (“The job of the commander in chief is to listen to the best counsel available and to listen even to people you don’t agree with and then ultimately you make the final decision and you take responsibility for those actions.”)

Now, it looks as if we are about to have a civilian-military encounter of the first order in which Obama will indeed need to take responsibility for difficult actions (or the lack thereof). If a genuine clash heats up, expect more discussion of “MacArthur moments,” but this will not be Truman versus MacArthur redux, and not just because Petraeus seems to be a subtler political player than MacArthur ever was.

Over the nearly six decades that separate us from Truman’s great moment, the Pentagon has become a far more overwhelming institution. In Afghanistan, as in Washington, it has swallowed up much of what once was intelligence, as it is swallowing up much of what once was diplomacy. It is linked to one of the two businesses, the Pentagon-subsidized weapons industry, which has proven an American success story even in the worst of economic times (the other remains Hollywood). It now holds a far different position in a society that seems to feed on war.

It’s one thing for the leaders of a country to say that war should be left to the generals when suddenly embroiled in conflict, quite another when that country is eternally in a state of war. In such a case, if you turn crucial war decisions over to the military, you functionally turn foreign policy over to them as well. All of this is made more complicated, because the cast of “civilians” theoretically pitted against the military right now includes Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general who is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Douglas Lute, a lieutenant general who is the president’s special advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan (dubbed the “war czar” when he held the same position in the Bush administration), and James Jones, a retired Marine Corps general, who is national security advisor, not to speak of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The question is: will an already heavily militarized foreign policy geared to endless global war be surrendered to the generals? Depending on what Obama does, the answer to that question may not be fully, or even largely, clarified this time around. He may quietly give way, or they may, or compromises may be reached behind the scenes. After all, careers and political futures are at stake.

But consider us warned. This is a question that is not likely to go away and that may determine what this country becomes.

We know what a MacArthur moment was; we may find out soon enough what a Petraeus moment is.

How to Trap a President in a Losing War

“War is peace” was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue in “Newspeak,” the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some 60 years later, a quarter-century after Orwell’s imagined future bit the dust, the phrase is, in a number of ways, eerily applicable to the United States.

Last week, for instance, a New York Times front-page story by Eric Schmitt and David Sanger was headlined “Obama Is Facing Doubts in Party on Afghanistan, Troop Buildup at Issue.” It offered a modern version of journalistic Newspeak.

“Doubts,” of course, imply dissent, and in fact just the week before there had been a major break in Washington’s ranks, though not among Democrats. The conservative columnist George Will wrote a piece offering blunt advice to the Obama administration, summed up in its headline: “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.” In our age of political and audience fragmentation and polarization, think of this as the Afghan version of Vietnam’s Cronkite moment.

The Times report on those Democratic doubts, on the other hand, represented a more typical Washington moment. Ignored, for instance, was Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold’s end-of-August call for the president to develop an Afghan withdrawal timetable. The focus of the piece was instead an upcoming speech by Michigan Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He was, Schmitt and Sanger reported, planning to push back against well-placed leaks (in the Times, among other places) indicating that war commander General Stanley McChrystal was urging the president to commit 15,000 to 45,000 more American troops to the Afghan War.

Here, according to the two reporters, was the gist of Levin’s message about what everyone agrees is a “deteriorating” U.S. position: “[H]e was against sending more American combat troops to Afghanistan until the United States speeded up the training and equipping of more Afghan security forces.”

Think of this as the line in the sand within the Democratic Party, and be assured that the debates within the halls of power over McChrystal’s troop requests and Levin’s proposal are likely to be fierce this fall. Thought about for a moment, however, both positions can be summed up with the same word: More.

The essence of this “debate” comes down to: More of them versus more of us (and keep in mind that more of them — an expanded training program for the Afghan National Army — actually means more of “us” in the form of extra trainers and advisors). In other words, however contentious the disputes in Washington, however dismally the public now views the war, however much the president’s war coalition might threaten to crack open, the only choices will be between more and more.

No alternatives are likely to get a real hearing. Few alternative policy proposals even exist because alternatives that don’t fit with “more” have ceased to be part of Washington’s war culture. No serious thought, effort, or investment goes into them. Clearly referring to Will’s column, one of the unnamed “senior officials” who swarm through our major newspapers made the administration’s position clear, saying sardonically, according to the Washington Post, “I don’t anticipate that the briefing books for the [administration] principals on these debates over the next weeks and months will be filled with submissions from opinion columnists… I do anticipate they will be filled with vigorous discussion… of how successful we’ve been to date.”

State of War

Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it’s hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment. Similarly, we’ve become used to the idea that, when various forms of force (or threats of force) don’t work, our response, as in Afghanistan, is to recalibrate and apply some alternate version of the same under a new or rebranded name — the hot one now being “counterinsurgency” or COIN — in a marginally different manner. When it comes to war, as well as preparations for war, more is now generally the order of the day.

This wasn’t always the case. The early Republic that the most hawkish conservatives love to cite was a land whose leaders looked with suspicion on the very idea of a standing army. They would have viewed our hundreds of global garrisons, our vast network of spies, agents, Special Forces teams, surveillance operatives, interrogators, rent-a-guns, and mercenary corporations, as well as our staggering Pentagon budget and the constant future-war gaming and planning that accompanies it, with genuine horror.

The question is: What kind of country do we actually live in when the so-called U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) lists 16 intelligence services ranging from Air Force Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency to the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency? What could “intelligence” mean once spread over 16 sizeable, bureaucratic, often competing outfits with a cumulative 2009 budget estimated at more than $55 billion (a startling percentage of which is controlled by the Pentagon)? What exactly is so intelligent about all that? And why does no one think it even mildly strange or in any way out of the ordinary?

What does it mean when the most military-obsessed administration in our history, which, year after year, submitted ever more bloated Pentagon budgets to Congress, is succeeded by one headed by a president who ran, at least partially, on an antiwar platform, and who has now submitted an even larger Pentagon budget? What does this tell you about Washington and about the viability of non-militarized alternatives to the path George W. Bush took? What does it mean when the new administration, surveying nearly eight years and two wars’ worth of disasters, decides to expand the U.S. Armed Forces rather than shrink the U.S. global mission?

What kind of a world do we inhabit when, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7% and an underemployment rate of 16.8%, the American taxpayer is financing the building of a three-story, exceedingly permanent-looking $17 million troop barracks at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan? This, in turn, is part of a taxpayer-funded $220 million upgrade of the base that includes new “water treatment plants, headquarters buildings, fuel farms, and power generating plants.” And what about the U.S. air base built at Balad, north of Baghdad, that now has 15 bus routes, two fire stations, two water treatment plants, two sewage treatment plants, two power plants, a water bottling plant, and the requisite set of fast-food outlets, PXes, and so on, as well as air traffic levels sometimes compared to those at Chicago’s O’Hare International?

What kind of American world are we living in when a plan to withdraw most U.S. troops from Iraq involves the removal of more than 1.5 million pieces of equipment? Or in which the possibility of withdrawal leads the Pentagon to issue nearly billion-dollar contracts (new ones!) to increase the number of private security contractors in that country?

What do you make of a world in which the U.S. has robot assassins in the skies over its war zones, 24/7, and the “pilots” who control them from thousands of miles away are ready on a moment’s notice to launch missiles — “Hellfire” missiles at that — into Pashtun peasant villages in the wild, mountainous borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan? What does it mean when American pilots can be at war “in” Afghanistan, 9 to 5, by remote control, while their bodies remain at a base outside Las Vegas and then can head home past a sign that warns them to drive carefully because this is “the most dangerous part of your day”?

What does it mean when, for our security and future safety, the Pentagon funds the wildest ideas imaginable for developing high-tech weapons systems, many of which sound as if they came straight out of the pages of sci-fi novels? Take, for example, Boeing’s advanced coordinated system of hand-held drones, robots, sensors, and other battlefield surveillance equipment slated for seven Army brigades within the next two years at a cost of $2 billion and for the full Army by 2025; or the Next Generation Bomber, an advanced “platform” slated for 2018; or a truly futuristic bomber, “a suborbital semi-spacecraft able to move at hypersonic speed along the edge of the atmosphere,” for 2035? What does it mean about our world when those people in our government peering deepest into a blue-skies future are planning ways to send armed “platforms” up into those skies and kill more than a quarter century from now?

And do you ever wonder about this: If such weaponry is being endlessly developed for our safety and security, and that of our children and grandchildren, why is it that one of our most successful businesses involves the sale of the same weaponry to other countries? Few Americans are comfortable thinking about this, which may explain why global-arms-trade pieces don’t tend to make it onto the front pages of our newspapers. Recently, the Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker, for instance, wrote a piece on the subject which appeared inside the paper on a quiet Labor Day. “Despite Slump, U.S. Role as Top Arms Supplier Grows” was the headline. Perhaps Shanker, too, felt uncomfortable with his subject, because he included the following generic description: “In the highly competitive global arms market, nations vie for both profit and political influence through weapons sales, in particular to developing nations…” The figures he cited from a new congressional study of that “highly competitive” market told a different story: The U.S., with $37.8 billion in arms sales (up $12.4 billion from 2007), controlled 68.4% of the global arms market in 2008. Highly competitively speaking, Italy came “a distant second” with $3.7 billion. In sales to “developing nations,” the U.S. inked $29.6 billion in weapons agreements or 70.1% of the market. Russia was a vanishingly distant second at $3.3 billion or 7.8% of the market. In other words, with 70% of the market, the U.S. actually has what, in any other field, would qualify as a monopoly position — in this case, in things that go boom in the night. With the American car industry in a ditch, it seems that this (along with Hollywood films that go boom in the night) is what we now do best, as befits a war, if not warrior, state. Is that an American accomplishment you’re comfortable with?

On the day I’m writing this piece, “Names of the Dead,” a feature which appears almost daily in my hometown newspaper, records the death of an Army private from DeKalb, Illinois, in Afghanistan. Among the spare facts offered: he was 20 years old, which means he was probably born not long before the First Gulf War was launched in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. If you include that war, which never really ended — low-level U.S. military actions against Saddam Hussein’s regime continued until the invasion of 2003 — as well as U.S. actions in the former Yugoslavia and Somalia, not to speak of the steady warfare underway since November 2001, in his short life, there was hardly a moment in which the U.S. wasn’t engaged in military operations somewhere on the planet (invariably thousands of miles from home). If that private left a one-year-old baby behind in the States, and you believe the statements of various military officials, that child could pass her tenth birthday before the war in which her father died comes to an end. Given the record of these last years, and the present military talk about being better prepared for “the next war,” she could reach 2025, the age when she, too, might join the military without ever spending a warless day. Is that the future you had in mind?

Consider this: War is now the American way, even if peace is what most Americans experience while their proxies fight in distant lands. Any serious alternative to war, which means our “security,” is increasingly inconceivable. In Orwellian terms then, war is indeed peace in the United States and peace, war.

American Newspeak

Newspeak, as Orwell imagined it, was an ever more constricted form of English that would, sooner or later, make “all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended,” he wrote in an appendix to his novel, “that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable.”

When it comes to war (and peace), we live in a world of American Newspeak in which alternatives to a state of war are not only ever more unacceptable, but ever harder to imagine. If war is now our permanent situation, in good Orwellian fashion it has also been sundered from a set of words that once accompanied it.

It lacks, for instance, “victory.” After all, when was the last time the U.S. actually won a war (unless you include our “victories” over small countries incapable of defending themselves like the tiny Caribbean Island of Grenada in 1983 or powerless Panama in 1989)? The smashing “victory” over Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War only led to a stop-and-start conflict now almost two decades old that has proved a catastrophe. Keep heading backward through the Vietnam and Korean Wars and the last time the U.S. military was truly victorious was in 1945.

But achieving victory no longer seems to matter. War American-style is now conceptually unending, as are preparations for it. When George W. Bush proclaimed a Global War on Terror (aka World War IV), conceived as a “generational struggle” like the Cold War, he caught a certain American reality. In a sense, the ongoing war system can’t absorb victory. Any such endpoint might indeed prove to be a kind of defeat.

No longer has war anything to do with the taking of territory either, or even with direct conquest. War is increasingly a state of being, not a process with a beginning, an end, and an actual geography.

Similarly drained of its traditional meaning has been the word “security” — though it has moved from a state of being (secure) to an eternal, immensely profitable process whose endpoint is unachievable. If we ever decided we were either secure enough, or more willing to live without the unreachable idea of total security, the American way of war and the national security state would lose much of their meaning. In other words, in our world, security is insecurity.

As for “peace,” war’s companion and theoretical opposite, though still used in official speeches, it, too, has been emptied of meaning and all but discredited. Appropriately enough, diplomacy, that part of government which classically would have been associated with peace, or at least with the pursuit of the goals of war by other means, has been dwarfed by, subordinated to, or even subsumed by the Pentagon. In recent years, the U.S. military with its vast funds has taken over, or encroached upon, a range of activities that once would have been left to an underfunded State Department, especially humanitarian aid operations, foreign aid, and what’s now called nation-building. (On this subject, check out Stephen Glain’s recent essay, “The American Leviathan” in the Nation magazine.)

Diplomacy itself has been militarized and, like our country, is now hidden behind massive fortifications, and has been placed under Lord-of-the-Flies-style guard. The State Department’s embassies are now bunkers and military-style headquarters for the prosecution of war policies; its officials, when enough of them can be found, are now sent out into the provinces in war zones to do “civilian” things.

And peace itself? Simply put, there’s no money in it. Of the nearly trillion dollars the U.S. invests in war and war-related activities, nothing goes to peace. No money, no effort, no thought. The very idea that there might be peaceful alternatives to endless war is so discredited that it’s left to utopians, bleeding hearts, and feathered doves. As in Orwell’s Newspeak, while “peace” remains with us, it’s largely been shorn of its possibilities. No longer the opposite of war, it’s just a rhetorical flourish embedded, like one of our reporters, in Warspeak.

What a world might be like in which we began not just to withdraw our troops from one war to fight another, but to seriously scale down the American global mission, close those hundreds of bases — recently, there were almost 300 of them, macro to micro, in Iraq alone — and bring our military home is beyond imagining. To discuss such obviously absurd possibilities makes you an apostate to America’s true religion and addiction, which is force. However much it might seem that most of us are peaceably watching our TV sets or computer screens or iPhones, we Americans are also — always — marching as to war. We may not all bother to attend the church of our new religion, but we all tithe. We all partake. In this sense, we live peaceably in a state of war.

Is America Hooked on War?

Here may be the single strangest fact of our American world: that at least three administrations — Ronald Reagan’s, George W. Bush’s, and now Barack Obama’s — drew the U.S. “defense” perimeter at the Hindu Kush; that is, in the rugged, mountainous lands of Afghanistan. Put another way, while Americans argue feverishly and angrily over what kind of money, if any, to put into health care, or decaying infrastructure, or other key places of need, until recently just about no one in the mainstream raised a peep about the fact that, for nearly eight years (not to say much of the last three decades), we’ve been pouring billions of dollars, American military know-how, and American lives into a black hole in Afghanistan that is, at least in significant part, of our own creation.

Imagine for a moment, as you read this post, what might have happened if Americans had decided to sink the same sort of money — $228 billion and rising fast — the same “civilian surges,” the same planning, thought, and effort (but not the same staggering ineffectiveness) into reclaiming New Orleans or Detroit, or into planning an American future here at home. Imagine, for a moment, when you read about the multi-millions going into further construction at Bagram Air Base, or to the mercenary company that provides “Lord of the Flies” hire-a-gun guards for American diplomats in massive super-embassies, or about the half-a-billion dollars sunk into a corrupt and fraudulent Afghan election, what a similar investment in our own country might have meant.

Ask yourself: Wouldn’t the U.S. have been safer and more secure if all the money, effort, and planning had gone towards “nation-building” in America? Or do you really think we’re safer now, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7%, an underemployment rate of 16.8%, and a record 25.5% teen unemployment rate, with soaring health-care costs, with vast infrastructural weaknesses and failures, and in debt up to our eyeballs, while tens of thousands of troops and massive infusions of cash are mustered ostensibly to fight a terrorist outfit that may number in the low hundreds or at most thousands, that, by all accounts, isn’t now even based in Afghanistan, and that has shown itself perfectly capable of settling into broken states like Somalia or well functioning cities like Hamburg.

Measuring Success

Sometime later this month, the Obama administration will present Congress with “metrics” for… well, since this isn’t the Bush era, we can’t say “victory.” In the style of special envoy to the region Richard Holbrooke, let’s call it “success.” Holbrooke recently offered this definition of that word, evidently based on the standards the Supreme Court used to define pornography: “We’ll know it when we see it.”

According to Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, the Obama administration is reportedly rushing to “preempt Congress with its own metrics.” It’s producing a document called a Strategic Implementation Plan, which, DeYoung writes, “will include separate ‘indicators’ of progress under nine broad ‘objectives’ to be measured quarterly… Some of the about 50 indicators will apply to U.S. performance, but most will measure Afghan and Pakistani efforts.” These are to include supposedly measurable categories like numbers of newly trained Afghan army recruits and the timeliness of the delivery of promised U.S. resources.

The administration is evidently now “tweaking” its metrics. But let’s admit it: metrics in war almost invariably turn out to occupy treacherous terrain. Think of it as quagmire territory, in part because numbers, however accurate (and they often aren’t), can lie — or rather, can tell the story you would like them to tell.

The Vietnam War was a classic metrics war. Sometimes it seemed that Americans in Vietnam did nothing but invent new ways of measuring success. There were, for instance, the eighteen indices of the Hamlet Evaluation System, each meant to calibrate the “progress” of “pacification” in South Vietnam’s 2,300 villages and almost 13,000 hamlets, focusing largely on “rural security” and “development.” Then there were the many indices of the Measurement of Progress system, its monthly reports, produced in slide form, including “strength trends of the opposing forces, efforts of friendly forces in sorties… enemy base areas neutralized,” and so on. For visiting congressional delegations, the commander of U.S. forces, Gen. William Westmoreland, had his “attrition charts,” multicolored bar graphs illustrating various “trends” in death and destruction. Commanders in the field had their own sophisticated ways to codify “kill ratios,” while on the ground, where the actual counting had to be done in dangerous circumstances, all of this translated far more crudely into the MGR, or, as the grunts sometimes said, the “Mere Gook Rule” — “If it’s dead and it’s Vietnamese, it’s VC [Vietcong].” In other words, when pressure came down for the “body count,” any body would do.

The problem was that none of the official metrics managed to measure what mattered most in Vietnam. History may not simply repeat itself, but there’s good reason to look askance at whatever set of metrics the Obama administration manages to devise. After all, as in the Vietnam years, Obama’s people, too, will be mustering numbers in search of “success”; they, too, will be measuring “progress.” And those numbers — like the Vietnam era body counts — will have to come up from below (with all the attendant pressures). By the time they reach Washington, they are likely to have the best possible patina on them.

With the delivery of those new metrics to Congress seemingly imminent, I thought I might offer my own set of Afghan metrics for the worst year of the present war. Think of this as basic math for Americans. (All figures cited below are linked to their sources. If a figure has no link, just click on the nearest previous link.)

Costs

Annual funding for U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, 2002: $20.8 billion.

Annual funding for U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, 2009: $60.2 billion.

Total funds for U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, 2002-2009: $228.2 billion.

War-fighting funds requested by the Obama administration for 2010: $68 billion (a figure which will, for the first time since 2003, exceed funds requested for Iraq).

Funds recently requested by U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry for non-military spending in Afghanistan, 2010: $2.5 billion.

Funds spent since 2001 on Afghan “reconstruction”: $38 billion (“more than half of it on training and equipping Afghan security forces”).

Percentage of U.S. funding in Afghanistan that has gone for military purposes: Nearly 90%.

Estimated U.S. funds needed to support and upgrade Afghan forces for the next decade: $4 billion a year (“with a like sum for development”) according to former Assistant Secretary of Defense Bing West. (According to the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon, “It’s a reasonable guess that for 20 years, we essentially will have to fund half the Afghan budget.”)

Afghan gross national product: $23 billion (“the size of Boise” Idaho’s, writes columnist George Will) — about $3 billion of it from opium production.

Annual budget of the Afghan government: $600 million.

Maintenance cost for the force of 450,000 Afghan soldiers and police U.S. generals dream of creating: approximately 500% of the Afghan budget.

Amount spent on police “mentoring and training” since 2001: $10 billion.

Percentage of the more than 400 Afghan National Police units “still incapable of running their operations independently”: 75% (2008 figures).

Cost of the latest upgrade of Bagram Air Base (an old Soviet base that has become the largest American base in Afghanistan): $220 million.

Cost of a single recent Pentagon contract to DynCorp International Inc. and Fluor Corporation “to build and support U.S. military bases throughout Afghanistan”: up to $15 billion.

War-Fighting

Number of American troops killed in Afghanistan, 2001: 12.

Number of American troops killed in Afghanistan, 2009 (through September 7th): 186

Total number of coalition (NATO and American) deaths in 2009 thus far: 311, making this the deadliest year for those forces since the war began.

Number of Lithuanian troops killed in Afghanistan: 1

Two worst months of the Afghan War in terms of coalition deaths: July (71) and August (74) 2009.

U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, 2002: 5,200.

Expected U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, December 2009: 68,000.

Percentage rise in Taliban attacks on coalition forces using Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in 2009 (compared to the same period in 2008): 114%.

Rise in Coalition deaths from IED attacks in July 2009 (compared to July 2008): six-fold.

Percentage increase in overall Taliban attacks in the first five months of 2009 (compared to the same period in 2008): 59%.

Number of U.S. regional command centers in Afghanistan: 4 (at Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Bagram).

Number of U.S. prisons and holding centers: approximately 36 “overcrowded and often violent sites” with 15,000 detainees.

Number of U.S. bases: at least 74 in northern Afghanistan alone, with more being built. (The total number of U.S. bases in Afghanistan seems not to be available.)

Estimated cost per troop of maintaining U.S. forces in Afghanistan when compared to Iraq: 30% higher.

Number of gallons of fuel per day used by the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan: 800,000.

Cost of a single gallon of gas delivered to the Afghan war zone on long, cumbersome, and dangerously embattled supply lines: Up to $100.

Number of gallons of fuel used to keep Marine tents cool in the Afghan summer and warm in winter: 448,000 gallons.

Number of troops from Georgia (not the U.S. state, but the country) being prepared by U.S. Marine trainers to be dispatched to Afghanistan to fight in spring 2010: 750.

Number of Colombian commandos to be sent to Afghanistan: Unknown, but Colombian commandos, trained by U.S. Special Forces and financed by the U.S. government, are reportedly to be dispatched there to fight alongside U.S. troops. (Note that both Georgia and Colombia are dependent on U.S. aid and support. Note also that neither the Georgians nor the Colombians would assumedly be bound by the sort of restrictive fighting rules that limit the actions of some NATO forces in Afghanistan.)

Percentage of American spy planes and unmanned aerial vehicles now devoted to Afghanistan: 66% (33% are in Iraq).

Number of American bombs dropped in Afghanistan in the first six months of 2009: 2,011 (a fall of 24% from the previous year, thanks evidently to a directive from U.S. commanding general in Afghanistan, Stanley A. McChrystal, limiting air attacks when civilians might be present).

Number of Afghan civilian deaths recorded by the U.N. January-July 2009: 1,013, a rise of 24% from the same period in 2008. (Unfortunately, Afghan deaths are generally covered sparingly, on an incident by incident basis, as in the deaths of an Afghan family traveling to a wedding party in August, assumedly due to a Taliban-planted IED, or the recent controversial U.S. bombing of two stolen oil tankers in Kunduz Province in which many civilians seem to have died. Anything like the total number of Afghans killed in these years remains unknown, but what numbers we have are undoubtedly undercounts.)

Escalation

Number of additional troops General McChrystal is expected to recommend that President Obama send to Afghanistan in the coming months: 21,000 to 45,000, according to the McClatchy Newspapers; 10,000 to 15,000 (“described as a high-risk option”), 25,000 (“a medium-risk option”), 45,000 (“a low-risk option”), according to the New York Times; fewer than 10,000, according to the Associated Press.

Number of support troops Defense Department officials are planning to replace with “trigger-pullers” (combat troops) in the coming months, effectively an escalation in place: 6,000-14,000. (“The changes will not offset the potential need for additional troops in the future, but could reduce the size of any request… officials said.”)

Number of additional NATO forces General McChrystal will reportedly ask for: 20,000.

Optimal number of additional Afghan National Army (ANA) troops to be trained by 2012, according to reports on General McChrystal’s draft plan: 162,000. (According to Naval Postgraduate School professor Thomas H. Johnson and retired Foreign Service officer M. Chris Mason,”[T]he U.S. military touts 91,000 ANA soldiers as ‘trained and equipped,’ knowing full well that barely 39,000 are still in the ranks and present for duty.”)

Public Opinion

Percentage of Americans opposed to the war in Afghanistan: 57%, according to the latest CNN poll, an 11% rise since April. Only 42% now support the war.

Percentage of Republicans who support the war: 70%, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Percentage of Americans who approve of President’s Obama’s handling of the war: 48%, according to the latest CBS poll, a drop of 8 points since April. (Support for increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan is now at just 25%, down 14% from April.)

Percentage of British who feel their forces should be withdrawn from Afghanistan: 59%.

Percentage of Germans opposed to that country’s 4,000 troop commitment to Afghanistan: More than 70%.

The Presidential Election

Estimated cost of staging the 2009 Afghan presidential election: $500 million.

Number of complaints of voting irregularities: More than 2,500 and still climbing, 691 of them described as “serious charges.”

Number of members of the “Independent Election Commission” not appointed by Afghan President (and presidential candidate) Hamid Karzai: 0.

Cost of blank voting-registration cards in Ghazni Province in May 2009: $200 for 200 blank registration cards.

Cost of such a card purchased by “an undercover Afghan journalist working for the BBC” this fall: $8.

Number of voter registration cards (not including fakes) reportedly distributed countrywide: 17 million or almost twice the estimated number of eligible voters.

Number of ballots cast at the Hajji Janat Gul High School polling place, half an hour from the center of Kabul: 600.

Number of votes recorded for Karzai at that polling station: 996. (Number of votes for other candidates: 5.)

Number of ballots marked for Karzai and shipped to Kabul from 45 polling sites in Shorabak District in Southern Afghanistan that were shut down by local officials connected to Karzai before voting could begin: 23,900.

Number of fake polling sites set up by backers of Karzai where no one voted but hundreds of thousands of votes were recorded: as many as 800, according to the New York Times. (Another 800 actual polling sites were taken over by Karzai supporters “to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr. Karzai.”)

Number of ballots in Karzai’s home province, Kandahar, where an estimated 25,000 Afghans actually voted, submitted to be counted: approximately 350,000.

Private Contractors

Number of military contractors hired by the Pentagon in Afghanistan by the end of June 2009: Almost 74,000, nearly two-thirds of them local hires, a 9% rise over the previous three months.

Percentage of the Pentagon’s force in Afghanistan made up of contractors in March 2009: 57%.

Ranking for the percentage of contractors used by the Pentagon in Afghanistan: highest in any conflict in U.S. history.

Diplomats and the Civilian Surge

Cost of new “crash” program to expand the U.S. “diplomatic presence” in Afghanistan and Pakistan: $1 billion. ($736 million of which is slated for the construction of a massive new embassy/regional headquarters in Islamabad, Pakistan.)

Number of additional U.S. government personnel reportedly slated to be sent to Pakistan to augment the 750 civilians already there: almost 1,000.

Expected number of U.S. government civilians to be posted at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan by the end of 2009: 976. (There were 562 at the end of 2008 and there are now reportedly more than 1,000 diplomats, staff, and Afghan nationals already working there.)

Estimated total number of civilians to be assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul as part of a proposed ongoing “civilian surge” by 2011: 1,350 (800 to be posted in Kabul, 550 outside the capital).

Cost of the State Department’s five-year contract with Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) to provide security for U.S. diplomats in Afghanistan: $210 million.

Cost of the State Department’s contract with ArmorGroup North America, a subsidiary of U.S.-based Wackenhutt Services Inc., to guard the U.S. Embassy in Kabul: $189 million.

Number of private guards provided by ArmorGroup North America: 450, based at Camp Sullivan, several miles from the embassy compound where they reportedly engaged in Lord of the Flies-style behavior.

The Metrics of Success

Defense Secretary Robert Gates on success in Afghanistan: It will take “a few years” to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Admiral “Mike” Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Meet the Press: “I believe we’ve got to start to turn this thing around from a security standpoint in the next 12 to 18 months.” (He would not directly answer the “how long” question.)

Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on the Afghan War: “None of the civilian officials or military officers interviewed in Afghanistan and elsewhere expected substantial progress in the short term. They talked in terms of years two, five and 10… Military officials believe the Afghanistan mission can only succeed if troops are there far longer — anywhere from five years to 12 years.”

Military experts cited by Walter Pincus of the Washington Post warn: “[T]he United States is taking on security and political commitments that will last at least a decade and a cost that will probably eclipse that of the Iraq war.”

Anthony H. Cordesman, a member of a “team” put together by U.S. commanding general in Afghanistan Stanley A. McChrystal to assess war strategy, and a national security expert for the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “told reporters recently that even with military gains in the next 12 to 18 months, it would take years to reduce sharply the threat from the Taliban and other insurgent forces.”

Robert Dreyfuss of the Nation summarizing the opinions of a panel of experts on the Afghan War, including Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran and adviser to four presidents, who chaired President Obama’s Afghan task force, two McChrystal task force members, Kim Kagan and Cordesman, and the Brooking Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon: “(1) A significant escalation of the war will be necessary to avoid utter defeat. (2) Even if tens of thousands of troops are added to the US occupation, it won’t be possible to determine if the US/NATO effort is succeeding until eighteen months later. (3) Even if the United States turns the tide in Afghanistan, no significant drawdown of US forces will take place until five years have passed.” (Riedel commented: “Anyone who thinks that in 12 to 18 months we’re going to be anywhere close to victory is living in a fantasy.”)

New chief of staff of the British Army, General Sir David Richards: “The Army’s role will evolve, but the whole process might take as long as 30 to 40 years.” (After much criticism, he retracted the statement.)

New NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen: NATO’s mission in Afghanistan will last “as long as it takes” to ensure that the country is secure.

Afghanistan by the Numbers

Cost of a Kalashnikov rifle in Afghanistan today: $400–600.

Cost of a Kalakov (the Afghan name for a new model of Kalashnikov): $1,100. (For a $150 surcharge, you can have it delivered to southern Afghanistan.)

Cost of a kilo of heroin in Afghanistan: $2,500. (Cost of that same kilo in Moscow: an estimated $100,000.)

Cost in police bribes of getting contraband into or out of Afghanistan: “$20 on each weapon, $100 for a kilo of heroin and $1,000 for each thousand kilos of hashish.”

Afghanistan’s ranking among the globe’s “weakest states,” according to the Brookings Institution: second weakest. (It is also regularly referred to as the world’s fourth poorest country.)

Unemployment rate in Afghanistan, according to the CIA World Factbook: 40% (2008 figures).

Monthly wage for Afghan National Police: $110 (less than $4 per day).

Daily wage Taliban reputedly pays its fighters: $4–8. (Often the only “job” available.)

How long it may take to get a case through a government court (with bribes): 4-5 years.

How long it may take to get a case through a Taliban court (without bribes): 1 day.

Number of registered Afghan refugees still in Iran and Pakistan: 3 million.

Number of al-Qaeda base camps estimated to be in Afghanistan today: 0. (All reputable experts seem agreed on this.)

The Next War

The price tag the Obama administration’s budget team reportedly put on U.S. future wars almost every year through 2019: More than $100 billion a year.

The cost of equipping seven Army brigades with a Boeing advanced coordinated system of hand-held drones, robots, sensors, and other battlefield surveillance equipment over the next two years: $2 billion.

Date when all 73 Army active and reserve brigades will be equipped with the system: 2025.

What Can’t Be Measured

Here’s a conundrum to be considered and filed away under the rubric “impossible to measure” as you leave the world of Afghan War metrics: The U.S. continues to struggle to train Afghan police and soldiers who will actually turn out and fight with discipline (see above). In the meantime, as a recent Washington Post piece by Karen DeYoung indicated, the Taliban regularly turn out fighters who are reportedly using ever more sophisticated and tenacious fire-and-maneuver techniques against the overwhelming firepower of U.S. and NATO forces. (“To many of the Americans, it appeared as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the U.S. Army’s Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments.”)

Both groups are, of course, Afghans. It might be worth considering why “their” Afghans are the fierce fighters of history books and legend and ours, despite billions of dollars and massive training efforts, are not. This puzzling situation had its parallel in Vietnam decades ago when American military advisors regularly claimed they would give up a division of U.S.-trained South Vietnamese forces for a single battalion of “VC.”

Here’s something to carry away with you: Life is invariably hard when you set up your massive embassies, your regional command centers, your election advisors, your private security guards, your military trainers and advisors, your diplomats and civilian enablers and then try to come up with a formula for motivating the locals to do your bidding.

[Note: Thanks for help in researching this piece goes, first and foremost, to Nick Turse — with a small bow to Frida Berrigan as well. Crucial websites, if you want to keep up-to-date on Afghanistan, include Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, which has recently focused an ever more laser-like beam of analysis on events in that country, the invaluable Antiwar.com (especially Jason Ditz’s daily summaries), the War in Context (not to be missed more generally on “the Greater Middle East”); Rethink Afghanistan, and Foreign Policy’s the Af/Pak Channel. If you want to download a “cost of war” counter to your computer, check out the National Priorities Project website.]

Afghanistan by the Numbers

The Bush administration invaded Iraq in March 2003 with a force of approximately 130,000 troops. Top White House and Pentagon officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were convinced that, by August, those troops, welcomed with open arms by the oppressed Iraqis, would be drawn down to 30,000-40,000 and housed in newly built, permanent military bases largely away from the country’s urban areas. This was to be part of what now is called a “strategic partnership” in the Middle East.

Almost five and a half years later, the United States still has approximately 130,000 troops in Iraq. Top administration officials are now talking about “modestly accelerated” rates of troop withdrawal, if all goes well. By August 2010, the Obama administration expects to have only 30,000-50,000 troops housed mainly on American mega-bases largely away from urban areas, part of a special American/Iraqi strategic partnership in the region.

This passes for progress in Iraq.

A History of the Bicycle in Iraq

In imagistic terms, the Bush administration biked into Iraq. Back in its salad days, when all was green and upbeat, its top officials loved the idea that they were training the eager Iraqi kid in how to ride the bike of democracy. President George W. Bush liked to talk about the moment when we might take the “training wheels” off the Iraqi bike and let the little fella ride into the democratic sunset on his own. His Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, ran with an allied image — the difficult moment when a parent has to decide whether to take that steadying hand off the bike seat and let the tyke pedal on his own. “[Y]ou’re running down the street,” as he put it in 2004, “holding onto the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you’re just barely touching it.”

Some years later, after kid and parent had made it around one of those “corners” they were always turning — on the way to various “tipping points” in the Iraq War — and found themselves instead at the “precipice,” after Rumsfeld had, in fact, been asked to resign by his president, he wrote a final memo, the last of his famed “snowflakes,” to the White House, on “new options” in Iraq. In it, he suggested: “Begin modest withdrawals of U.S. and Coalition forces (start ‘taking our hand off the bicycle seat’), so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country.”

His tenure could qualify as the longest biking lesson in history and still, it seemed, the Iraqis couldn’t do without that hand on the seat. Even when his president followed him two years later, their imagery of choice remained behind. This March, for instance, the chief American military spokesman in Iraq, Major General David G. Perkins, discussing a possible draw-down of American forces, said: “We need to take our hands off the handlebars, or the training wheels, at some point.”

And then, two weeks ago, Colonel Timothy R. Reese, an American adviser to the Iraqi military’s Baghdad command, created a front-page New York Times stir when a memorandum he had written was leaked. In a distinctly imagistic mode, he began: “As the old saying goes, ‘Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.’ Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose.”

While the official Obama-era target for an American withdrawal remains (as it was in the last months of the Bush era) the end of 2011, Reese urged that all U.S. forces be pulled out on an expedited schedule by August 2010 — the moment by which, according to present plans, only American “combat brigades” are to be removed. Resurrecting a Vietnam-era suggestion of Vermont Republican Senator George Aiken (ignored then, as it will be now), he headlined his memo: “It’s Time for the US to Declare Victory and Go Home.”

And there, in the midst of a generally scathing assessment of the deficiencies of the Iraqi military (and the Iraqi government), was that bicycle again:

“The SA [Bush-era Security Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq] outlines a series of gradual steps towards military withdrawal, analogous to a father teaching his kid to ride a bike without training wheels… We now have an Iraqi government that has gained its balance and thinks it knows how to ride the bike in the race. And in fact they probably do know how to ride, at least well enough for the road they are on against their current competitors. Our hand on the back of the seat is holding them back and causing resentment. We need to let go before we both tumble to the ground.”

It just goes to show. Under the pressure of war, images that won’t go away, like people, have the capacity to change. The Iraqi child with the training wheels is now, according to Reese, old enough to enter an actual bike race.

Who exactly will bike out of Iraq under the Obama withdrawal plan, however, still remains to be defined. After all, at the end of his memo, the most urgent call for withdrawal from Iraq yet to emerge from the higher levels of the U.S. military, Colonel Reese offers his version of a full-scale American withdrawal. “During the withdrawal period,” he writes, “the USG [United States government] and GOI [government of Iraq] should develop a new strategic framework agreement that would include some lasting military presence at 1-3 large training bases, airbases, or key headquarters locations. But it should not include the presence of any combat forces save those for force protection needs or the occasional exercise.”

And keep in mind: his proposal has, with rare exceptions, been rejected out of hand by all and sundry, in and out of the military high command and in Washington.

In other words, even the most Xtreme American biker of this moment still imagines us in Iraq forever and a day.

A History of Experts on Iraq

Once upon a time, the playing field, the stadium, and sports events were regularly compared to war, even considered suitable preparation for actual battle. Ever since the First Gulf War, this has been reversed. Now, war — or at least its coverage — is based on sports.

Just as, sooner or later, the smoothest players and savviest coaches depart the “field of battle” for the press box and the TV spotlight, for pre-game, game, and post-game commentary, so the commanders of the last war now leave the battlefield for the TV booth and offer us their expertise on the next war. As former Houston Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy has had to discuss the decisions of his brother Stan, coach of the Orlando Magic, in ESPN playoff commentary, so the commanders of our previous wars cover next wars and their commanders, possibly even officers once under their own command.

We now live with the ESPN version of war, including slo-mo replays, and the logos, interactive charts, and fabulous graphics of the sports world. And once anointed as experts, our John Maddens of war, like their sports counterparts, never go away. Back in April 2008, for instance, New York Times journalist David Barstow wrote a front-page exposé focused on the many retired military officers who had been hired as media consultants for the Iraq War. As a group, they made up, he suggested, a “kind of media Trojan horse,” because most of them were marching to a carefully organized Pentagon campaign of disinformation on the war. In addition, most of them had ties, not acknowledged on the air, “to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess.”

Barstow’s piece concluded:

“To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as ‘military analysts’ whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.”

Barstow named names and made connections. Those names included, for example, retired Air Force general and Fox News senior military analyst Thomas G. McInerney, retired Army general and NBC/MSNBC military analyst Montgomery Meigs, retired Army general and NBC/MSNBC military analyst Barry R. McCaffrey, and retired Marine Colonel and Fox News military analyst William V. Cowan. After the exposé appeared, they seem to have just carried right on with their media duties.

Some of the print media has similarly adhered to the principle of once-an-expert-always-an-expert. For instance, on the fifth anniversary of Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, the New York Times decided to ask a range of “experts on military and foreign affairs” to look back on that fiasco — and then rounded up the usual suspects. Of the nine experts it came up with, six were intimately involved in that catastrophe either as drumbeaters for the invasion, instigators of it, or facilitators of the occupation that followed — Kenneth Pollack, Danielle Pletka, and Frederick Kagan (enthusiasts all), Richard Perle (aka “the prince of darkness”), L. Paul Bremer (the administration’s first viceroy in Baghdad), and General Paul D. Eaton (who trained Iraqi troops in the early years of the occupation).

Notably absent was anyone who had seriously opposed the invasion. The closest was Anne-Marie Slaughter, a “liberal hawk” who wrote a supportive New York Times op-ed on March 18, 2003, two days before the invasion began, headlined, “Good Reasons for Going Around the U.N.”

The Times anniversary spread appeared in March 2008. Jump ahead a year-plus and the Times once again launched what undoubtedly was a mighty search for experts who might consider Colonel Reese’s suggestion that we take our hand off that Iraqi bike — and came up with a typical crew of seven:

One, retired Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, is president of the Center for a New American Security, and was an advisor to General David Petraeus, former top U.S. commander in Iraq, now Centcom commander overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A second, Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, was also an advisor to Petraeus and most recently on the “team” that advised General Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan under Petraeus, in his recent review of Afghan War strategy. A third, Anthony Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was on the same McChrystal team. A fourth, Thomas Ricks, former Washington Post military reporter and now senior fellow at Nagl’s Center, is the author of the bestselling book The Gamble, a highly complimentary account of Petraeus’s role in Iraq in which Nagl is, of course, a figure. (Ricks, by the way, has long made it clear that he believes we will be in that country for years to come.) A fifth, Kori Schake, now at the Hoover Institution, was a former national security adviser on defense issues to President George W. Bush. A sixth, Jonathan Morgenstein, is a senior national security policy fellow at Third Way, another Washington think tank, and just recently returned from Iraq where “he was a military transition team adviser to the Iraqi Army.”

Not surprisingly, all six of these experts, with the most modest of caveats, dismissed Reese’s suggestion out of hand (“The pace of progress in Iraq will be slow, but we can’t throw up our hands and walk away…”), agreeing that it was in no one’s interest to expedite an American departure. Only a seventh expert, author and retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor, agreed with Reese.

Consider that a little history of expertise about our recent wars. There’s a corollary. If you’re not anointed an expert, you’re never likely to be. Among those automatically disqualified for expertise on Iraq: just about anyone who bluntly rejected the idea of invading Iraq or predicted any version of the catastrophe that ensued before it happened. Disqualified above all are any of those antiwar types who actually took to the streets of American cities by the hundreds of thousands before the invasion to raise homemade placards to its un-wisdom. They obviously knew nothing. Their very stance indicated a bias that evidently disqualified them on the spot.

Someone — I can’t claim to remember who — once made the point that within any administration you could afford to be a hawk and be wrong, just not a dove and right. When it comes to TV war commentators, that seems to hold true as well.

It would, of course, be possible to imagine the antiwar equivalent of those generals-as-analysts. From the ranks of the last antiwar movement (all still active anti-warriors), you could, for example, choose Tom Hayden, Daniel Ellsberg, and Howard Zinn to offer commentary on our ongoing wars. Only you know as well as I do that that fantasy will never turn into media reality. In our world of expertise, it’s unthinkable.

A History of the Iraqi Air Force

Recently, while Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was visiting Iraq, the top American commander in that country, General Ray Odierno, indicated that the Iraqis would not be able to defend their own airspace for the foreseeable future. Essentially, they have no air force — or rather, at this point they have helicopters, C-130 transports, and some smaller Cesna trainers and the like, but no jet fighters. Despite the fact that a U.S. Air Force “assessment team” is being rushed to Baghdad to look for “some creative solutions” to the problem, it’s clear that the Iraqi air force will remain the U.S. Air Force for some time to come (which undoubtedly means manning the giant U.S. airbase built at Balad as well).

The Iraqis now want American F-16s. Unfortunately, according to New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, General Odierno pointed out a sad truth: “it would be impossible to build and deliver them by the end of 2011, even if the Iraqis were able to afford them.” And don’t forget this: Iraq has no trained pilots to fly them either! Sigh… much work remains on the horizon for the U.S.A.F.

Fortunately, Aviation Week reported in April that the Iraqis have a plan to overcome their problem. It’s a “three-phase, 11-year improvement plan” that will move their air force from T-6 trainers to a few dozen F-16s by “the middle of the next decade” (in case you were wondering just how long the U.S.A.F. is likely to be filling in).

Here, then, is the true tragedy of our moment. We want to leave Iraq. Maybe not as quickly as Colonel Reese would like, but really we do. President Obama has made that clear. Unfortunately, the Iraqis just won’t let us. Imagine! They weren’t even thinking about an air force until recently — and what would a country in the Middle East be if, as Bumiller points out, it had “no way to intercept another jet that invades the country’s airspace.”

Just who might invade Iraqi airspace remains a subject for speculation: The Israelis on their way to bomb Iran? (Not likely the U.S.A.F. would start shooting those planes down.) The Iranians on their way to bomb…? Well, who? After all, the present government in Iraq is essentially an ally of Iran. The Turks? Not really an issue when you think about it. Their planes have been invading Iraqi airspace for a while to attack Kurdish rebels and the U.S.A.F. hasn’t exactly been shooting them down either.

Since it’s so easy to obliterate the past, just for a moment let’s recall the history of the Iraqi air force. Now that Iraq essentially has no air force, who remembers that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq once had a very large and active one — up to 950 planes in the 1980s. In 1990, according to the website GlobalSecurity.org, it still had the sixth largest air force in the world, and plenty of trained pilots to go with it. During the First Gulf War, nearly half of that air force fled to neighboring Iran (on which Iraqi planes had dropped more than their share of bombs and even poison gas in the 1980s). Those planes were never returned. Of the relatively small force that remained, many were destroyed in the First Gulf War and some of the rest, at Saddam’s orders, were buried in the desert as the invasion of 2003 began.

The history that’s really been forgotten, though, is even more recent. Put in a nutshell, the Iraqis don’t have an air force because Washington didn’t want them to. Much attention has been paid to the Bush administration’s lack of planning for the occupation of Iraq, but relatively little to what it did plan. Let’s start with the fact that, in May 2003, L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority in a burst of blind pride disbanded the Iraqi Army. Pentagon plans for rebuilding it called for a future, border-patrolling Iraqi military (lite) of perhaps 40,000 men with minimal armaments and no air force to speak of.

In the Middle East, this had only one meaning: from a series of newly built mega-bases already on Pentagon drawing boards as American troops crossed the Kuwaiti border in 2003, the U.S. Army and Air Force would fill in as the real Iraqi military for eons to come. Under the pressure of a fierce Sunni insurgency, the army part of that plan was soon jettisoned. But “standing up” the Iraqi military — “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down,” was long President Bush’s mantra — has meant just that: two feet on the ground.

Until relatively recently, the Iraqis were functionally not permitted to take to the skies. Now, the lack of that air force will surely come to the fore as an excuse for why any American “withdrawal” will have to have caveats and qualifications — and why, if ours proves to be a non-withdrawal withdrawal, it will be their fault.

A History of Devastation in Iraq

Until the U.S. arrived in Baghdad, things seemed bad enough. There was Saddam Hussein, the megalomanic dictator — he of the endless Disney-esque palaces and giant sculpted hands — with his secret prisons, torture chambers, and helicopter gunships. There were the international sanctions strangling the country. There were the mass graves in the north and the south. There was an oil industry held together by scotch tape and ingenuity. It was a gruesome enough mess.

That was before the invasion to “liberate” the country. Since then hundreds of thousands, possibly a million or more Iraqis have died (depending on whose figures and studies you believe). Saddam’s killing fields have been dwarfed by a fierce set of destructive American military operations as well as insurgencies-cum-civil-wars-cum-terrorist-acts; major cities have been largely or partially destroyed, or ethnically cleansed; millions of Iraqis have been forced from their homes, becoming internal refugees or going into exile; untold numbers of Iraqis have been imprisoned, assassinated, tortured or abused; and the country’s cultural heritage has been ransacked. Basic services — electricity, water, food — were terribly impaired and the economy, in the process of being privatized by the neocon overseers of the occupation, was simply wrecked. Health services were crippled. Oil production, upon which Iraq now depends for up to 90% of its government funds, has only relatively recently surpassed the worst levels of the Saddam era.

Iraq, in other words, has been devastated. The American invasion and the occupation that followed acted like whirlwinds of destruction, unraveling a land already bursting with problems and potential animosities.

What men begin, the gods end. If such a saying doesn’t exist, it should, since the American catastrophe now seems to be morphing into an unparalleled natural disaster as well. In what once was the breadbasket of civilization, Iraqi agriculture, ignored by the occupiers, is withering and the country is desertifying at a frightening pace under the pressure of a several-year-old drought.

So fierce is the process that, according to Liz Sly of the Los Angeles Times, who has written an apocalyptic account of all this, the country received only 20% of its normal rainfall in 2008, and so far in 2009 but half the usual amount. Rivers are drying up, wells are disappearing, and desperate Iraqi farmers are deserting the land for the city (where unemployment rates remain high). Everywhere dust gathers, awaiting the winds which create the monstrous duststorms that carry the precious land of Iraq into the fragile lungs of urban Iraqis. “Now,” writes Sly, “the Agriculture Ministry estimates that 90% of [Iraq’s] land is either desert or suffering from severe desertification, and that the remaining arable land is being eroded at the rate of 5% a year.”

Expecting the worst harvest in a decade and with the wheat crop at 40% of normal, the government has been forced to buy enormous amounts of grain abroad at a time when oil prices, dropping precipitously from 2008 highs, left it with far less money available. However overused the image may be, the Bush administration created the perfect storm in Iraq, a “mission accomplished” version of hell on Earth. And it’s because Iraq is in such desperate shape that, of course, we, as the protectors of its fragile “stability,” can’t leave.

A History of Justifications

When we invaded Iraq, serial justifications were offered. There was the grim dictator to rid the world of. There were his killing fields. (Never again!) There was 9/11 and his “support for terrorism.” (Top Bush administration officials long claimed a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, despite convincing evidence to the contrary.) There was liberation for the Shiites and the ending of what Wolfowitz called “criminal treatment of the Iraqi people.” There was the reestablishment of an American version of order in the region. There were those heavily emphasized, if nonexistent, weapons of mass destruction the dictator supposedly had squirreled away, as well as his (also nonexistent) program to get his hands on a nuclear weapon. (As Wolfowitz put it in May 2003: “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason…”)

Later, when things began to take a turn for the worse and another reason was needed, there was the propagation of democracy (a great guiding principle to which the Bush administration arrived rather late in Iraq and only under pressure from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani). Even later, when things were going far worse, there was the idea that it was far better to fight the terrorists over there than here. And, of course, as the president liked to confide to foreign leaders, there was God Himself commanding him to strike Saddam and so thwart Gog and Magog.

Among the cognoscenti, of course, there were other expectations and justifications, caught best perhaps in the neoconservative quip of 2003, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” After all, the neocons in and around the Bush administration truly did believe that a Pax Americana in what they liked to call “the Greater Middle East” was within their shock-and-awe grasp, and possibly even a global version of the same. As for oil — or what President Bush referred to, on the rare occasion when he mentioned it, as Iraq’s “patrimony” — mum was the word, even though that country had the world’s third largest proven petroleum reserves and sat strategically at the heart of the energy heartlands of the planet.

Now, with those 130,000 troops still there, not to speak of the scads of rent-a-guns and private contractors, with that overstuffed, overstaffed embassy the size of the Vatican built for 1,000 “diplomats,” with that series of major bases (which the Pentagon used to call, charmingly enough, “enduring camps”) still well occupied, with significant numbers of Iraqis and small numbers of Americans dying each month, with millions of Iraqis still internal or external refugees, with the land devastated, and basic services hardly restored, with ethnic tensions still running high, and a government quietly allied to Iran in place in Baghdad backed by a 250,000-man military, with an American withdrawal still officially years off, and “withdrawal” itself a matter of definition, no one even bothers to offer the slightest justification for being in Iraq. After all, why would explanations be necessary when we’re getting ready to leave?

If you don’t believe me, go hunting for an official explanation today. Why are we in Iraq? Because we’re there. Because the Iraqis need us. Because something terrible would happen if we left precipitously. So we still occupy Iraq and no one even asks why.

A History of Withdrawal from Iraq

There is no history of withdrawal from Iraq.

[A History of Imitation, or a Note on Further Reading: They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, whoever they may be. Consider this piece, then, a form of flattery, if not exactly an imitation of the style of that journalist/historian/storyteller par excellence Eduardo Galeano. No one, after all, could really imitate his distinctive style, least of all me. But the form of this post is at least inspired by a recent reading of Galeano’s latest masterpiece, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. A history of the world in a mere 365 pages and hundreds of little, breath-catching vignettes, I consider it a must-read for the universe.]

Biking Out of Iraq

We’ve just passed through the CIA assassination flap, already fading from the news after less than two weeks of media attention. Broken in several major newspapers, here’s how the story goes: the Agency, evidently under Vice President Dick Cheney’s orders, didn’t inform Congress that, to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders, it was trying to develop and deploy global death squads. (Of course, just about no one is going to call them that, but the description fits.) Congress is now in high dudgeon. The CIA didn’t keep that body’s “Gang of Eight” informed. A House investigation is now underway.

We’re told that the CIA — being the president’s private army and part of the executive branch of our government — has committed a heinous dereliction of duty. In fact, not keeping key congressional figures up to date on the developing program could even “be illegal,” according to Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin. (Not that Congress, when informed of Bush administration extreme acts, ever did much of anything anyway.)

This story, however, has a largely unexplored strangeness to it that has only been discussed on the fringes of the mainstream media (or in the press of other countries). After all, during the eight years this CIA assassination program was supposedly in formation, U.S. military special ops death squads were, as far as we can tell, freely roaming the planet conducting (or botching) assassination missions, and the CIA’s own robot assassins, airborne death squads, were also launching operations — sometimes wiping out innocent civilians — from Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan. They continue to run such operations in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands near Afghanistan. So we still await an explanation of just why the CIA spent close to eight years, under Vice Presidential oversight, getting its death squads almost operational, but never — we’re told — off the ground.

If there seems to be something odd about this latest flap, if there’s much that we don’t know yet, we do, at least, know one thing: This particular small splash from the previous administration’s deep dive into crime and folly will have its brief time in the media sun and then be swallowed up by oblivion, just as each of the previous flaps has been.

After all, can you honestly tell me that you think often about the CIA torture flap, the CIA-destruction-of-interrogation-video-tapes flap, the what-did-Congress/Nancy Pelosi-really-know-about-torture-methods flap, the Bush-administration-officials-(like-Condi-Rice)-signed-off-on-torture-methods-in-2002-even-before-the-Justice-Department-justified-them flap, the National-Security-Agency-(it-was-far-more-widespread-than-anyone-imagined)-electronic-surveillance flap, the should-the-NSA’s-telecom-spies-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-engaging-in-illegal-warrantless-wiretapping flap, the should-CIA-torturers-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-using-enhanced-interrogation-techniques flap, the Abu-Ghraib-photos-(round-two)-suppression flap, or various versions of the can-they-close-Guantanamo, will-they-keep-detainees-in-prison-forever flaps, among others that have already disappeared into my own personal oblivion file? Every flap its day, evidently. Each flap another problem (again we’re told) for a president with an ambitious program who is eager to “look forward, not backward.”

Of course, he’s not alone. Given the last eight years of disaster piled on catastrophe, who in our American world would want to look backward? The urge to turn the page in this country is palpable, but — just for a moment — let’s not.

Admittedly, we’re a people who don’t really believe in history — so messy, so discomforting, so old. Even the recent past is regularly wiped away as the media plunge us repeatedly into various overblown crises of the moment, a 24/7 cornucopia of news, non-news, rumor, punditry, gossip, and plain old blabbing, of which each of these flaps has been but a tiny example. In turn, any sense of the larger picture surrounding each one of them is, soon enough, lessened by a media focus on a fairly limited set of questions: Was Congress adequately informed? Should the president have suppressed those photos?

The flaps, in other words, never add up to a single Imax Flap-o-rama of a spectacle. We seldom see the full scope of the legacy that we — not just the Obama administration — have inherited. Though we all know that terrible things happened in recent years, the fact is that, these days, they are seldom to be found in a single place, no less the same paragraph. Connecting the dots, or even simply putting everything in the same vicinity, just hasn’t been part of the definitional role of the media in our era. So let me give it a little shot.

As a start, remind me: What didn’t we do? Let’s review for a moment.

In the name of everything reasonable, and in the face of acts of evil by terrible people, we tortured wantonly and profligately, and some of these torture techniques — known to the previous administration and most of the media as “enhanced interrogation techniques” — were actually demonstrated to an array of top officials, including the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, within the White House. We imprisoned secretly at “black sites” offshore and beyond the reach of the American legal system, holding prisoners without hope of trial or, often, release; we disappeared people; we murdered prisoners; we committed strange acts of extreme abuse and humiliation; we kidnapped terror suspects off the global streets and turned some of them over to some of the worst people who ran the worst dungeons and torture chambers on the planet. Unknown, but not insignificant numbers of those kidnapped, abused, tortured, imprisoned, and/or murdered were actually innocent of any crimes against us. We invaded without pretext, based on a series of lies and the manipulation of Congress and the public. We occupied two countries with no clear intent to depart and built major networks of military bases in both. Our soldiers gunned down unknown numbers of civilians at checkpoints and, in each country, arrested thousands of people, some again innocent of any acts against us, imprisoning them often without trial or sometimes hope of release. Our Air Force repeatedly wiped out wedding parties and funerals in its global war on terror. It killed civilians in significant numbers. In the process of prosecuting two major invasions, wars, and occupations, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have died. In Iraq, we touched off a sectarian struggle of epic proportions that involved the “cleansing” of whole communities and major parts of cities, while unleashing a humanitarian crisis of remarkable size, involving the uprooting of more than four million people who fled into exile or became internal refugees. In these same years, our Special Forces operatives and our drone aircraft carried out — and still carry out — assassinations globally, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, sometimes of innocent civilians. We spied on, and electronically eavesdropped on, our own citizenry and much of the rest of the world, on a massive scale whose dimensions we may not yet faintly know. We pretzled the English language, creating an Orwellian terminology that, among other things, essentially defined “torture” out of existence (or, at the very least, left its definitional status to the torturer).

And don’t think that that’s anything like a full list. Not by a long shot. It’s only what comes to my mind on a first pass through the subject. In addition, even if I could remember everything done in these years, it would represent only what has been made public. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was regularly mocked for saying: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

Actually, he had a point seldom thought about these days. By definition, we know a good deal about the known knowns, and we have a sense of an even darker world of known unknowns. We have no idea, however, what’s missing from a list like the one above, because so much may indeed remain in the unknown-unknowns category or, as with the latest CIA assassination story, a known curiosity whose full shape and depths remain to be grasped. If, however, you think that everything done by Washington or the U.S. military or the CIA in these last years has already been leaked, think again. It’s a reasonable bet that the unknown unknowns the Obama administration inherited would curl your toes.

Nonetheless, what is already known, when thought about in one place, rather than divided up into separate flaps and argued about separately, is horrific enough. War may be hell, as people often say when trying to excuse what we did in these years, but it should be remembered that, in response to the attacks of 9/11, we, as a nation, were the ones who declared “war,” made it a near eternal struggle (the Global War on Terror), and did so much to turn parts of the world into our own private hell. Geopolitics, energy politics, vanity, greed, fear, a misreading of the nature of power in the world, delusions of military and technological omnipotence and omniscience, and so much more drove us along the way.

Perhaps the greatest fantasy of the present moment is that there is a choice here. We can look forward or backward, turn the page on history or not. Don’t believe it. History matters.

Whatever the Obama administration may want to do, or think should be done, if we don’t face the record we created, if we only look forward, if we only round up the usual suspects, if we try to turn that page in history and put a paperweight atop it, we will be haunted by the Bush years until hell freezes over. This was, of course, the lesson — the only one no one ever bothers to call a lesson — of the Vietnam years. Because we were so unwilling to confront what we actually did in Vietnam — and Laos and Cambodia — because we turned the page on it so quickly and never dared take a real look back, we never, in the phrase of George H.W. Bush, “kicked the Vietnam syndrome.” It still haunts us.

However busy we may be, whatever tasks await us here in this country — and they remain monstrously large — we do need to make an honest, clear-headed assessment of what we did (and, in some cases, continue to do), of the horrors we committed in the name of… well, of us and our “safety.” We need to face who we’ve been and just how badly we’ve acted, if we care to become something better.

Now, read that list again, my list of just the known knowns, and ask yourself: Aren’t we the people your mother warned you about?

[TomDispatch thanks go to… Joe Duax of the Nation Institute, who does an exceptional job of keeping this website humming along; Nick Turse, who assists in so many ways, while winning awards in his other life; Tam Turse, site photographer and keen-eyed copyeditor; and Christopher Holmes, who holds down the Tokyo “office” of TomDispatch and keeps these pieces shipshape. A small bow to Andy Kroll for fill-in duties and to Bill Kline, TomDispatch intern, for making the TD Facebook website a livelier place. And a final small bow to Paul Woodward of the always fascinating War in Context website. He was the first person I noticed to use the term “death squads” for the prospective CIA assassination teams.]

Don’t Turn the Page on History

“Being an historian, I am jotting down these notes out of habit; but what I saw and experienced two days ago I am sure no one else as civilized as I am will ever see. I am writing for those who shall come a long time from now.”

So began “The Prophecy,” a mock futuristic fantasy set after some great Cold War cataclysm, which several members of my high school graduating class collaborated on back in 1962. It was, of course, for our yearbook and made fun of the class, A to Z. It was also a classic document of the moment, written by representatives of the first generation of “teenagers” who, crouching under their school desks as the sirens of an atomic-attack drill howled outside, imagined that no one in their world might make it.

“First of all, let me introduce myself,” “I” continued. “I am Thomas M. Engelhardt, world renowned historian of the late twentieth century, should that mean anything to whoever reads this account. After the great invasion, I was maintaining a peaceful, contented existence in the private shelter I had built, and was completing the ninth and final volume of my masterpiece, The Influence of the Civil War on Mexican Art of the Twentieth Century…”

Okay, so they had me pegged. Not only, in those years, did I read whatever post-nuclear pulp fiction I could get my hands on — you know, the kind with landscapes filled with atomic mutants and survivalist communities — but I was a Civil War nut. Past disasters and future catastrophes, and somehow it all made sense.

I was, in fact, a nut for the American past generally, in part, I suspect, because the familial past wasn’t available. My parents, typically enough for second and third generation Americans, were in flight from their own pasts, from all that not-so-distant squalor and unhappiness, or just plain foreign-ness, much the way, once upon a time, so many other Americans had fled small towns for the Big City.

My father rarely spoke of his own life — his parents, his childhood, his years growing up, the Great Depression, and especially his experiences in World War II (and in this he was typical of a generation that did not come home from the grimmest of wars with the idea that they were “the greatest”). My mother acted as if her past were the proverbial blank slate. She told but three stories from her childhood: one in which she broke her nose in a softball game, another in which she jumped out of a second-story window to test whether a sheet would work as a parachute, and a third in which an evil but rich uncle humiliated her loveable but ne’er-do-well inventor of a father.

Perhaps that very past-less-ness left me with a yen for roots, which I then found in the sole place available: American history. Toss in the time an only child had in a room still surprisingly bare of entertainment, and it was hardly surprising that, as early as third grade, I started devouring the biographies — hagiographies actually — of assorted American heroes. They were little books focusing on Kit Carson or Clara Barton with memorably orange covers.

And not so long after, I graduated to the Landmark Books series, back in the days when history was still a series of accepted and acceptable “landmarks”: Ben Franklin of Old Philadelphia, The Pony Express, Gettysburg, The Panama Canal, Custer’s Last Stand. By high school, I was ingesting every book the popular Civil War historian Bruce Catton ever wrote. I was, by then, a proud subscriber to the classy American history magazine, American Heritage, thought of the American past as mine, memorized famous speeches by generals and presidents in my spare time, and so was an all-too-inviting target for a little teenage fun.

Quoits, Anyone?

Tomorrow, I turn 65, an age I simply never imagined for myself back in those youthful years. And the past, I must admit, now lurks somewhat closer to home, as of course does the future, my future. Sometimes these days, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror — the bald head, the mustache that’s gone silvery white, the little bumps and discolorations of every sort, in short, that aging face — I see my long-dead father staring back. Each time, it’s a visceral shock. Like an ambush. Like a sucker punch in the gut. I feel horror — not him, not in my face! — and love, but not acceptance. Not yet anyway.

I can’t begin to tell you how eerie it feels when the past resides not in some book, but like a still-developing snapshot, a blurry subway portrait of the dead, in your own face. It led me recently to pull down from the topmost reaches of my closet some of my old family photos, many of them now beyond meaning, the equivalents of inscriptions in the hieroglyphs of an unknown language. For this part of my private past, there are no witnesses left. Not a one. No one who can fill me in on the dramatis personae.

The oldest of the albums I have, my mother’s, I discovered only after both my parents were dead: two-holed and horizontal, a black cover with the words “Snap Shots” on it, each black page now loose of any binding, edges crumbling as if nibbled by mice.

Only several pages in do I first recognize, in an elfin child’s face, the woman who would become my mother and would die in 1977, so long ago that sometimes I hardly believe she existed.

There she is, though, perhaps six or seven, standing in a garden in a battered brimmed hat, wearing long rubber gloves, a shirt and pants, and looking for all the world like a street urchin from some Charlie Chaplin silent film. The album is, of course, her story — the one she never told me — of her Chicago world just after the turn of the last century. There are young boys with bikes and girls with flowers, girls doing headstands and boys strutting their stuff, friends lined up arm-in-arm, college students in their toques, and adults who, in their formality, look to be from yet another century. All unknown to me, all lost to whatever lies beneath history, beyond memory.

Still, one thing is unmistakable: this is a record book of dreams and memories. There are her recital cards and yearly marks (E for “accuracy,” “rhythm,” “theory and hearing”) from the Caruthers School of Piano; a “senior ticket” to Hyde Park High School’s Junior Prom (which took place at 8 p.m. on March 22 sometime in the early 1920s); there is Camp Wewan-eeta’s brochure, its cover autographed in a now faded hand by camp co-director Eva Radzinski (“Hope we may have the joy of having dear Irma with us again this year”) and just inside is the camp song, the first of whose many verses is,

“I love Wewan-eeta,
Just think what we do.
There is weaving, tennis, quoits,
And we’re good marksmen, too.

Quoits?

Above all, there are the drawings of a girl who, from an early age, dreamed of becoming a commercial artist and, some two decades later, in World War II newspaper ads offering portraits in return for war-bond purchases, would be identified as “New York’s Girl Caricaturist.” There’s her first published sketch, a playbill cover for a high school production of “The Two Vagabonds,” with a tiny “Irma Selz” signature snuck in at page bottom. And there’s her first appearance in a newspaper, the Chicago Daily Tribune, on April 24, 1924, in a comic strip called “Harold Teen,” evidently about a young flapper and her boyfriend.

The middle box of the strip offers possible hairdos for the flapper (“the mop,” “pineapple bob,” “Sandwich Isle shingle,” and “Anita Loos,” among others) with a tagline, “from sketches by Irma Madelon Selz,” who must then have been about 17 years old. Of “Madelon,” which was not her middle name, I know a little something, for even half a century later my mother still found it more beautiful than her actual “Madeline,” and still wished her parents, about whom I know almost nothing, had bestowed it on her.

If you hold such an album — and somewhere in most houses one certainly exists — it is hardly possible not to feel the sadness of loss. This single album is, after all, what’s left of the early part of my mother’s life. It’s a story, wish, fantasy, organized, edited, and summarized almost wordlessly by her, and yet no matter how gently you hold the pages, there is no way to prevent the photos from cracking off into the margins, leaving only bits of dried glue behind, while placed on any surface it promptly sheds a tiny residue of black paper ashes.

One could, of course, simply experience this as a kind of pathos — and so fill the emotional space it creates with nostalgia for a lost world. But in the disintegration of such everyday documents, packed away on the top shelves of closets or in bottom drawers, in boxes or garbage bags, worn attaché cases or old suitcases, attics, basements, or garages, there is also an everyday fierceness that we seldom consider.

It’s the fierceness of death, and of everything that’s lost to us all the time, everything the brain, even a well-functioning one, is incapable of holding. It’s the sense of, I think, borrowed time in this world, on this planet. It’s everything that, like that face inside mine, remains difficult to swallow. But above all, it’s the brief span of our lives, as ephemeral as any set of digital photos.

Racing the Bomb into the World

Thought of another way, however, that familiar face embedded in mine offers the chance for a little whirlwind double bio of the last century-plus. In one merged face, he and I cover a span of history, of change, carnage, and promise so unsettling that it, too, is almost impossible to take in.

The son of a poor immigrant who made good (but just for a while) in America, my father was born in 1907. I have, on my wall, a photo of him at perhaps age two, his older sister, in a white dress, a bow in her hair, sitting beside him on a little bench, her arm proudly around him. She faces the camera with the kind of intentness that went with a slower photographic process. A big white house and trees are behind them. This must be turn-of-the-century Flatbush in New York’s Brooklyn, where they grew up.

Perhaps because the action snapshot had yet to arrive, everything seems remarkably still. My father’s hair is blond. (I, of course, mainly knew him as a stocky, balding man with graying hair.) He wears a little Buster Brownish outfit and long socks as well as what appears to be a halter of bells (in case he wanders off?). Perched on that seat, he looks tiny, fragile, and a bit dazed, something like a porcelain doll, but nothing like my father. Nothing at all. I can find no resemblance to the angry bull of a man who raged through the golden 1950s, as likely unemployed and drinking as anything else. Nor like the prosperous salesman/businessman of the 1970s, nor the stroke-struck elderly gent (with a mustache just like mine) with whom I spent so much time in the early 1980s.

As I said, he was not someone to dwell on the past. But he did once tell me that he could still remember a man with a horse and cart pulling up to his house with blocks of ice for what was then an actual “ice” box. He was 11 when the War to End All Wars ended, and somewhere I have a picture of him from that time in a little uniform. He could remember buying charlottes russe (ladyfingers and Bavarian cream) — which, decades later out of nostalgia, he would pick up for me from a local bakery — off the back of a wagon on a street near Erasmus High in Brooklyn where he went to school and played lacrosse.

He was 22 when the stock market crashed in 1929 and he was working — doing what? I don’t know — for the Swift Meat Packing Company. He was in his mid-twenties when the Nazis rose to power in Germany, and our relatives (some of whom he would later help escape from Austria) began, as Jews, to feel the heat.

In December 1941, at the age of 34, soon after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Corps to fight the Nazis and was sent to India as operations officer for the 1st Air Commando Group, a glider outfit striking behind Japanese lines in Burma. I have a photo of him in full uniform before he left, looking so young and handsome and (a word I wouldn’t normally associate with him) vulnerable, with a not-quite-smile on his face. For the second time in mere decades, a world war was underway, and this time it would be so much more global and so much worse.

And here, as the American wars in Europe and the Pacific were reaching a crescendo, in July 1944, I — the other half of that merged face — entered the picture, almost halfway through his life, only three years after Henry Luce proclaimed his century the American one. “Pops” to the men in his unit in a young man’s war, he was 37 years old, and had by then been reassigned to the Pentagon. His son arrived just in time to celebrate the triumph of American science and technology, the dawning of a new age.

In the race to be born, I beat the atomic bomb into existence by almost a year. It was first tested in the desert at White Sands Proving Ground near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. I was born on July 20, 1944 at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, less than 13 months before an A-bomb would leave the bomb bay of the Enola Gay with “autographs and messages,” some obscene, scribbled on it by American soldiers, “greetings” to those about to die and the last human acts of the pre-atomic age.

In an instant, that new bomb would obliterate Hiroshima. And a few days later, the atomic annihilation of Nagasaki would follow, raising the curtain on the next war even before the War to End All Wars (redux) was officially over (again).

A new war, the third global one, this time fought by only two “superpowers,” would be icier than the last two, restrained, ironically enough, by what was then called “the unthinkable,” the worst that science could conjure up. It was, that is, restrained by the ability of either superpower, after a time, to destroy not just humanity but potentially the planet itself.

By the end of 1945, American troops already occupied one half of the Korean Peninsula, and Russian troops the other. Soon enough, the two nuclear–armed superpowers would be going at it in the only way they could, given the world-destroying weapons they possessed — with bitter fury, but by proxy and “in the shadows,” inscribing their nightmare version of a global war for domination on the bodies of Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Afghans, and others.

Dreams and My Room

So the atomic age was underway, an age of horror, but also of wonder. Already in 1945, with the war still raging, Belmont Radio (“Today, Belmont’s job is to produce high-precision electronic equipment for the Armed Forces…”) was typical in offering a vision of a dazzling war-inspired future as Belmont Television: “You can pull pictures from the air as easily as you ‘tune in’ with your present radio… talking pictures at television’s best.” The image that went with Belmont’s ad showed an impressive wooden cabinet perched atop which was a small screen displaying a cowboy on a bucking bronco.

“[I]n these days of tired bodies and troubled minds, it’s good… to think about… the new kind of a home you will have after victory,” began a 1944 ad from General Electric, while General Motors (“Victory is our business”) swore in ad copy that it would “provide more and better things for more people in the coming years of peace.”

Indeed, for the Third World War, aka the Cold War, the arms race and the race for the good life were to be put on the same 24/7 “war” footing. In the 1950s, all the promised big ticket items, including the “electric refrigerator with ample space for everything, frozen foods included” — it had been but a few decades since that horse and cart with ice had pulled up at my father’s door — and the “new automatic clothes dryer” were to tumble into new American homes. These, not any event in history, would become the agreed upon “landmarks” of this age along with (soon enough) Mickey Mouse, the Golden Arches, and the Swoosh. A military Keynesianism and its consumer doppelganger would now drive the U.S. economy toward desire for the ever larger car and missile, electric range and tank, television console and submarine, all of which would be wedded in single corporate entities, displaying their wares in your bedroom and selling them in the labyrinthine corridors of the Pentagon.

Here was the promise: From the ashes of war, new wonders would emerge — and so they did bountifully (as well, of course, as further ashes). The buying of big-ticket — and then not-so-big-ticket — items and the making of war with the most advanced technology around, that was the dizzying story of my time (until a frazzled planet’s economic system began to melt down in the fall of 2008).

But you wouldn’t have known it from my room in the 1950s. In those years, after all, the “teenager” was just being discovered by the corporation. I was part of the first generation of American children who, if they had jobs, as I did every summer from the age of 14 on, didn’t have to turn their money over to their families, the first to have more than spare change in their pockets and to be able to choose where to spend it.

I was, of course, living in a country where, with the exception of Pearl Harbor, and Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian islands, there had been no fighting, no ashes at all. In 1945, the United States loomed triumphantly untouched over a ruined planet, and with perfect symbolism, two of that country’s secretaries of defense would, in the mid-1950s and again in the early 1960s, be plucked from the presidencies of the great automakers. (“…I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa,” GM President Charles Wilson told senators at his confirmation hearings in 1953.)

The imperial vistas of the 1950s were expansively vast and clean — and in the world of the child, looked at from the toy-stuffed, video-game filled, hand-held, ear-glued techno-universe of the twenty-first century, remarkably, sometimes even horribly, often boringly, empty, like the sightlines Baron Haussman cleared on Paris’s great boulevards to gun down the mob. From the child’s point of view, what’s still striking about that Golden Age of suburban consumerism was the relative bareness of its interiors.

My own room would seem spare indeed today for a “middle class” family, even one like ours living deep in debt and beyond its means. My mother, the artist, painted its walls with sprightly Mother Goose scenes when I was tiny, and later with marching grenadiers, and there was a bed, a chair, at some point a small desk, a lamp, a giant wooden hand-me-down Philco radio, a few games, some books, my precious toy soldiers, a toy six-gun with holster (cowboys were the craze then), and by the end of that decade, a cheap record player for 45s (not that anyone now remembers what they were) — each limited and distinct purchase entering my life with its own special history, its own familial price tag attached.

That Philco was, for me, what we now call “the media,” along with the newspapers which then seemed like the lifeblood of the city, and as in so many American houses, LIFE magazine. New York City was then a riot of daily reportage. After all, it still had at least eight or nine papers, and that already represented a loss in numbers. The very names of some like the Journal American (the New York American and the New York Evening Journal) or the World-Telegram & Sun (the New York World, the Evening Telegram, and the New York Sun) were amalgams of previously independent papers. And — the crucial thing in those childhood years — most of them had comics.

My favorite board game growing up was “Star Reporter.” I still remember the little cards you picked that offered you, the potential star reporter, ordinary stories, but also “disasters” and “catastrophes.” And then, having been assigned your story, with a role of the dice you left the city of “Urbania” to cover it. In my spare time, I dreamed of becoming a reporter — a dream that, these days, looks as outmoded as the desire to be an arctic explorer.

Here is what I grew up reading:

* Cereal boxes (I used to joke that I learned my ABCs off them — otherwise how could I send in the correct number of box tops and get the “atomic rings” and “secret decoders” they offered?)

* comic strips

* comic books (however, like many children in those years, I was forbidden from buying “horror comics”)

* real books (from that radical resource, the library, where, if the librarian let you out of the children’s section, you had access to anything in the adult world without having to invest a penny in it)

* MAD magazine (after the “bad” comics went down in a 1950s childhood version of an auto-da-fé)

* pulp sci-fi (the more mutants the merrier)

* foreign novels (in my later teens)

The first of those works of foreign fiction was Jorge Amado’s Gabriella, Clove and Cinnamon, which I stumbled upon in a tiny neighborhood bookstore. I plunked down my money — no small thing then — not because it was intriguingly foreign and I had a yen to explore, but because each volume in its uniquely designed Avon Books paperback series had rounded corners. I bought it with one mission in mind — to ensure that my classmates and others, noting the strangely shaped book I was carrying around, would conclude that I was a far odder and more interesting character than, in those days, I felt I had any right to be, or was. So painfully straight, I desperately wanted others to think I was, if not “cool,” then at least just a little “crazy” (a category gaining something of a cachet in those days as hip-ness came into style among the young).

No one, of course, ever noticed, but having that paperback in my hands, I naturally read it, which is why — since I kept on buying from the series — I’ve always said that it doesn’t matter how you get to a book, as long as you get there.

This, then, was the way that, from the privacy of my relatively empty world, in the financial capital of the globe’s great, throbbing superpower, I tried to sneak a few peeks, like that wonderful later children’s fictional character, Harriet the Spy, at a mysterious adult world you couldn’t access by clicking a remote to some “reality” show or Oprah.

The Screen and the Foreign Film

Perhaps the most dizzying story of our time is the story of the multiplying screen, which, when I was young, you still visited — a special moment — outside the house at the movies. New Yorker magazine film critic Pauline Kael once wrote a book entitled I Lost It at the Movies. I know just what she meant, but my own title would be the opposite. I found it — life — there. It helped that, in the 1950s, I was living on, cinematically speaking, the single strangest street in the United States. Within five blocks, there were four movie houses, including the RKO where, on any weekend day, you could see Merrill’s Marauders, To Hell and Back, or The Long Grey Line, and regularly experience in all its glory the war my father wouldn’t talk about.

Hollywood was, as it remains, the unchallenged imperial capital of the movie world, and yet the lives it displayed in its products, riveting as they were, seemed somehow to have nothing to do with mine. The other three movie houses — The Paris, The Plaza, and The Fine Arts — were, however, what made that street unique. At a time and in a country in which “foreign films” were essentially impossible to find for thousands of miles in any direction, all three theaters showed them. Subtitles, that was my life. I read at the movies, too.

The manager of The Plaza, who befriended me, used to let me sneak in. The Rose Tattoo, Last Year at Marienbad. I often had no idea what I was seeing — only that it invariably opened a window onto a world that was amazingly alive, and amazingly unlike anything anyone told me this world was, or should be, about. It was at the movies that I learned about Hiroshima as a human catastrophe (Hiroshima Mon Amour), the French War in Algeria (Sundays and Cybele), the fact that Germans (The Bridge), Japanese, and, above all, Red Rusky Commies (Ballad of a Soldier) were actually living, breathing, struggling human beings. Such a small, simple point that, at the time, seemed anything but.

Somehow, those films collectively reassured me that, beyond the empty vistas of childhood that left kids like me wondering when, if ever, our lives would actually begin, lay life itself, even if, in all its bizarre, pretentious, thrilling, moving everydayness, it seemed only to be lived by foreigners. Those movies were my escape. They saved my life. Plenty of other American kids weren’t so lucky.

In those years, of course, the screen entered the house as something inescapable and would, in the decades to come, begin to multiply. If the TV had first landed on the lawn or (in my case) the street, it would have been clear enough that it was an invader. But that purveyor of all things commercial made a soft landing directly in the comfortable living room, only then heading for the bedroom, previously the most private of spaces, which would now be attached to the most public and visual of selling spectacles.

Remembering the exact moment it entered my house — April 1953 — I once wanted to write an essay called “Thank God for Senator McCarthy!” In that spring, my mother was doing political caricatures for the New York Post, then a liberal tabloid, which assigned her to draw the Army-McCarthy Hearings, about to be shown in the afternoons on ABC.

So, we finally got the TV for which I had been begging fruitlessly all the previous year. It was a major moment in my young life and the Senator’s iconic face was — so less-than-reliable memory assures me — the first image I saw on a TV screen in my own house. The truth was I found him unsurprising. With those jowls and that pugnacious, in-your-face face, he looked to me like half the fathers I knew, including my own. Me? I wanted to raise a cheer for the infamous senator, who got me off the TV blacklist. After all, he brought me Disney (“When you wish upon a star…”), and Lucy, and Ed Sullivan.

Soon enough, he was gone, but TV was forever.

Conspiracies Large and Small

As in the original meaning of the word “conspire” — to breathe the same air — we conspire in the realities we breathe in. No wonder we so often can’t see them for what they turn out to be.

Until recently, our world looked so easy, so stable. A two-party world. No one imagined that the world my father and mother lived through, that of the Great Depression, could sneak back on stage for another bow. A year ago, had I told you that a former Clinton-era secretary of labor was going to write a piece headlined “When Will the Economic Recovery Begin? Never.,” you would have laughed.

Now, we know. Our reality, like that of our last president, was distinctly inside the bubble, while the world out there was so much fiercer, so much less tame than we imagined.

Let’s face it. It’s been a dizzying journey, these last hundred years, so much odder than we imagine. We don’t have a picture of it yet. Not really. We’re still waiting for the face of the past — the actual face — to appear in a mirror, or on one of those many screens of our lives, to tell us where we’ve really been, and where we may really be going.

Surprises abound. For 65 years, my face lacked my father, at least when I looked, anyway. Now, entering my 66th year, he’s back to take another bow and that — you’ll have to take my word for it — is fierce.

And here I am, well beyond any point I was capable of imagining when young. That’s fierce too, especially when your life, no matter how you look at it, is so much closer to death than is truly comfortable.

It’s been a dizzying trip so far. Screens are now everywhere you turn — in bars, airports, taxis, on gas pumps, in restaurants, hair salons, your new car, your doctor’s office, in your pocket, in the street, and in your home in multiple ways — and you’re often attached to them, not them to you. People check their screens and then take phone calls at your dinner table. The young, while sitting in restaurants not talking to each other, text friends in distant places.

In the meantime, the newspaper, that lifeline of my childhood, is in the media ER on life support. It’s amazing to think that the print newspaper-reading habit, passed down from parent to child, is now following the typewriter out the door and into oblivion. Meanwhile, for the first time in our world, a new reading habit, the online one, is being passed upward from child to parent.

We grew up imagining the newspaper as primarily a purveyor of the news, and pundits still write about it that way, regularly bemoaning the potential “loss” of a pillar of the American democratic system. But looked at in a fiercer way, everything about the present moment tells us that was never the real story.

It’s clearer now that the newspaper as we knew it was, first and foremost, a purveyor of ads. That, not the news, was what actually mattered, which should be apparent to anyone who bothers, for instance, to glance at the anorexic Sunday New York Times Magazine. Like the Incredible Shrinking Man of 1950s sci-fi, it’s disappearing right before our eyes. Ads fleeing the premises take journalists, bureaus, meaning, the news itself, the paper, everything, with them.

It was a small flap, the recent one at the Washington Post, in which publisher Katharine Weymouth was to host “salons” at her house, offering corporations and lobbyists off-the-record, non-confrontational “access” to Post reporters, Obama administration officials, and Congressional representatives. At $25,000 a pop, corporations could get a seat at these friendly soirées, $250,000 for a package of 11. The stern, tsk-tsking discussions of this attempt to pull a little extra dough into a dying brand have all focused on newspaper “ethics” — the Post’s own ombudsman referred to the to-do as “an ethical lapse of monumental proportions.”

In the meantime, a striking aspect of the brouhaha has gone uncommented upon. Weymouth (or, at least, the sales side of the paper) was offering full-frontal access at only $25,000 per salon. That’s chump change for a big health corporation, or Exxon, or a major lobbyist. It would be like tossing a few coins to a beggar. If her grandmother, Post publisher Katherine Graham, had offered a similar deal — and that, of course, would have been inconceivable in an era when the ads in the pages of the paper were still thick as thieves — imagine the value she might have put on a night of her time and the Post’s influence. Not $25,000, you can be sure of that.

The world reveals itself to us in its own sweet time, just as my father waited all these years after his death on Pearl Harbor Day 1983 to remind me that I’m his child — as indeed I am — and that I was shaped by his world — as indeed I was. A world of war and suffering, of wonder and ashes. It’s also a reminder that our pictures of how life works can develop late indeed.

Who knows when you’ll glance into a mirror and meet a past you hadn’t expected and weren’t ready for. Or a future for that matter. After all, that can happen, too. You’re passing, as usual, through our land of screens and war, driven by ads and companies that were so sure until yesterday that the arms race and the good life could be melded in them forever and a day, when suddenly the planes appear, the skyscrapers begin to tumble, everything that’s ordinary and accepted begins to unravel. As it could. All those screens, all connected, and all the texts that go with them, everything we count on. It could go.

If you care to look, you can see the outlines, the shorelines, of our world changing even as I write this. For the future, “dizzying” might hardly be the word.

Look in the mirror and tell me what you see.

Borrowed Time

It was a blast. I’m talking about my daughter’s wedding. You don’t often see a child of yours quite that happy. I’m no party animal, but I danced my 64-year-old legs off. And I can’t claim that, as I walked my daughter to the ceremony, or ate, or talked with friends, or simply sat back and watched the young and energetic enjoy themselves, I thought about those Afghan wedding celebrations where the “blast” isn’t metaphorical, where the bride, the groom, the partygoers in the midst of revelry die.

In the two weeks since, however, that’s been on my mind — or rather the lack of interest our world shows in dead civilians from a distant imperial war — and all because of a passage I stumbled upon in a striking article by journalist Anand Gopal. In “Uprooting an Afghan Village” in the June issue of the Progressive magazine, he writes about Garloch, an Afghan village he visited in the eastern province of Laghman. After destructive American raids, Gopal tells us, many of its desperate inhabitants simply packed up and left for exile in Afghan or Pakistani refugee camps.

One early dawn in August 2008, writes Gopal, American helicopters first descended on Garloch for a six-hour raid:

“The Americans claim there were gunshots as they left. The villagers deny it. Regardless, American bombers swooped by the village just after the soldiers left and dropped a payload on one house. It belonged to Haiji Qadir, a pole-thin, wizened old man who was hosting more than forty relatives for a wedding party. The bomb split the house in two, killing sixteen, including twelve from Qadir’s family, and wounding scores more… The malek [chief] went to the province’s governor and delivered a stern warning: protect our villagers or we will turn against the Americans.”

That passage caught my eye because, to the best of my knowledge, I’m the only person in the U.S. who has tried to keep track of the wedding parties wiped out, in whole or part, by American military action since the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in November 2001. With Gopal’s report from Garloch, that number, by my count, has reached five (only three of which are well documented in print).

The first occurred in December of that invasion year when a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, wielding precision-guided weapons, managed, according to reports, to wipe out 110 out of 112 revelers in another small Afghan village. At least one Iraqi wedding party near the Syrian border was also eviscerated — by U.S. planes back in 2004. Soon after that slaughter, responding to media inquiries, an American general asked: “How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?” Later, in what passed for an acknowledgment of the incident, another American general said: “Could there have been a celebration of some type going on?… Certainly. Bad guys have celebrations.” Case closed.

Perhaps over the course of an almost eight-year war in Afghanistan, the toll in wedding parties may seem modest: not even one a year! But before we settle for that figure, evidently so low it’s not worth a headline in this country, let’s keep in mind that there’s no reason to believe:

* I’ve seen every article in English that, in passing, happens to mention an Afghan wedding slaughter — the one Gopal notes, for instance, seems to have gotten no other coverage; or

* that other wedding slaughters haven’t been recorded in languages I can’t read; or

* that, in the rural Pashtun backlands, some U.S. attacks on wedding celebrants might not have made it into news reports anywhere.

In fact, no one knows how many weddings — rare celebratory moments in an Afghan world that, for three decades, has had little to celebrate — have been taken out by U.S. planes or raids, or a combination of the two.

Turning the Page on the Past

After the Obama administration took office and the new president doubled down the American bet on the Afghan War, there was a certain amount of anxious chatter in the punditocracy (and even in the military) about Afghanistan being “the graveyard of empires.” Of course, no one in Washington was going to admit that the U.S. is just such an empire, only that we may suffer the fate of empires past.

When it comes to wedding parties, though, there turn out to be some similarities to the empire under the last Afghan gravestone. The Soviet Union was, of course, defeated in Afghanistan by some of the very jihadists the U.S. is now fighting, thanks to generous support from the CIA, the Saudis, and Pakistan’s intelligence services. It withdrew from that country in defeat in 1989, and went over its own cliff in 1991. As it happens, the Russians, too, evidently made it a habit to knock off Afghan wedding parties, though we have no tally of how many or how regularly.

Reviewing a book on the Soviet-Afghan War for the Washington Monthly, Christian Caryl wrote recently:

“One Soviet soldier recalls an instance in 1987 when his unit opened fire on what they took to be a ‘mujaheddin caravan.’ The Russians soon discovered that they had slaughtered a roving wedding party on its way from one village to another — a blunder that soon, all too predictably, inspired a series of revenge attacks on the Red Army troops in the area. This undoubtedly sounds wearily familiar to U.S. and NATO planners (and Afghan government officials) struggling to contain the effects from the ‘collateral damage’ that is often cited today as one of the major sources of the West’s political problems in the country.”

And, by the way, don’t get me started on that gloomy companion rite to the wedding celebration: the funeral. Even I haven’t been counting those, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. and its allies haven’t been knocking off funeral parties in Afghanistan (and recently, via a CIA drone aircraft, in Pakistan as well).

Following almost two weeks in which the U.S. (and global) media went berserk over the death of one man, in which NBC, for instance, devoted all but about five minutes of one of its prime-time half-hour news broadcasts to nothing — and I mean nothing — but the death of Michael Jackson, in which the President of the United States sent a condolence letter to the Jackson family (and was faulted for not having moved more quickly), in which 1.6 million people registered for a chance to get one of 17,500 free tickets to his memorial service… well, why go on? Unless you’ve been competing in isolation in the next round of Survivor, or are somehow without a TV, or possibly any modern means of communication, you simply can’t avoid knowing the rest.

You’d have to make a desperate effort not to know that Michael Jackson (until recently excoriated by the media) had died, and you’d have to make a similarly desperate effort to know that we’ve knocked off one wedding party after another these last years in Afghanistan. One of these deaths — Jackson’s — really has little to do with us; the others are, or should be, our responsibility, part of an endless war the American people have either supported or not stopped from continuing. And yet one is a screaming global headline; the others go unnoticed.

You’d think there might, in fact, be room for a small headline somewhere. Didn’t those brides, grooms, relatives, and revelers deserve at least one modest, collective corner of some front-page or a story on some prime-time news show in return for their needless suffering? You’d think that some president or high official in Washington might have sent a note of condolence to someone, that there might have been a rising tide of criticism about the slow response here in expressing regrets to the families of Afghans who died under our bombs and missiles.

Here’s the truth of it, though: When it comes to Afghan lives — especially if we think, correctly or not, that our safety is involved — it doesn’t matter whether five wedding parties or 50 go down, two funerals or 25. Our media isn’t about to focus real attention on the particular form of barbarity involved — the American air war over Afghanistan which has been a war of and for, not on, terror.

Now, we’re embarked on a new moment — the Obama moment — in Afghanistan. More than seven-and-a-half years into the war, in a truly American fashion, we’re ready to turn the page on the past, to pretend that none of it really happened, to do it “right” this time around. We’re finally going to bring the Afghans over to our side.

We’re ready to light out for the territories and start all over again. American troops are now moving south in force, deep into the Pashtun (and Taliban) areas of Afghanistan, and their commanders — a passel of new generals — are speaking as one from a new script. It’s all about conducting a “holistic counterinsurgency campaign,” as new Afghan commander General Stanley A. McChrystal put it in Congressional testimony recently. It’s all about “hearts and minds”(though that old Vietnam-era phrase has yet to be resuscitated). It’s all about, they say, “protecting civilians” rather than killing Taliban guerrillas; it’s all about shaping, clearing, holding, building, not just landing, kicking in doors, and taking off again; it’s all about new “rules of engagement” in which the air war will be limited, and attacks on the Taliban curbed or called off if it appears that they might endanger civilians (even if that means the guerrillas get away); it’s all about reversing the tide of the war so far, about the fact that civilian casualties caused by air attacks and raids have turned large numbers of Afghans against American and NATO troops.

The commander of the Marines just now heading south, Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, typically said this:

“We need to make sure we understand that the reason we’re here is not necessarily the enemy. The reason we’re here is the people. What won the war in al-Anbar province [Iraq] and what changed the war in al-Anbar was not that the enemy eventually got tired of fighting. It’s that the people chose a side, and they chose us… We’ll surround that house and we’ll wait. And here’s the reason: If you drop that house and there’s one woman, one child, one family in that house — you may have killed 20 Taliban, but by killing that woman or that child in that house, you have lost that community. You are dead to them. You are done.”

The Value of a Life

As it happens, however, the past matters — and keep this in mind (it’s what the wedding-party-obliteration record tells us): To Americans, an Afghan life isn’t worth a red cent, not when the chips are down.

Back in the Vietnam era, General William Westmoreland, interviewed by movie director Peter Davis for his Oscar-winning film Hearts and Minds, famously said: “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.”

In those years, there were many in the U.S., including Davis, who insisted very publicly that a Vietnamese life had the same value as an American one. In the years of the Afghan War, Americans — our media and, by its relative silence, the public as well — turned Westmoreland’s statement into a way of life as well as a way of war. As one perk of that way of life, most Americans have been able to pretend that our war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with us — and Michael Jackson’s death, everything.

So he dies and our world goes mad. An Afghan wedding party, or five of them, are wiped off the face of the Earth and even a shrug is too much effort.

Here’s a question then: Will what we don’t know (or don’t care to know) hurt us? I’m unsure whether the more depressing answer is yes or no. As it happens, I have no answer to that question anyway, only a bit of advice — not for us, but for Afghans: If, as General McChrystal and other top military figures expect, the Afghan War and its cross-border sibling in Pakistan go on for another three or four or five years or more, no matter what script we’re going by, no matter what we say, believe me, we’ll call in the planes. So if I were you, I wouldn’t celebrate another marriage, not in a group, not in public, and I’d bury my dead very, very privately.

If you gather, after all, we will come.

[Note: I documented as fully as I could the previous Afghan wedding slaughters in “The Wedding Crashers: A Short Till-Death-Do-Us-Part History of Bush’s Wars” (July 2008). And here’s a selection of TomDispatch pieces on related subjects, if you’re interested in reading more: “Slaughter, Lies, and Video in Afghanistan” (September 2008), “What Price Slaughter?” (May 2007), “The Billion-Dollar Gravestone” (May 2006), “Catch 2,200: 9 Propositions on the U.S. Air War for Terror” (May 2006), and former U.S. diplomat John Brown’s “Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet” (January 2006). You might also visit filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s website Rethink Afghanistan.]

Will What We Don’t Know (or Care to Know) Hurt Us?

Let’s face it, even Bo is photogenic, charismatic. He’s a camera hound. And as for Barack, Michelle, Sasha, and Malia — keep in mind that we’re now in a first name culture — they all glow on screen.

Before a camera they can do no wrong. And the president himself, well, if you didn’t watch his speech in Cairo, you should have. The guy’s impressive. Truly. He can speak to multiple audiences — Arabs, Jews, Muslims, Christians, as well as a staggering range of Americans — and somehow just about everyone comes away hearing something they like, feeling he’s somehow on their side. And it doesn’t even feel like pandering. It feels like thoughtfulness. It feels like intelligence.

For all I know — and the test of this is still a long, treacherous way off — Barack Obama may turn out to be the best pure politician we’ve seen since at least Ronald Reagan, if not Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He seems to have Roosevelt’s same unreadable ability to listen and make you believe he’s with you (no matter what he’s actually going to do), which is a skill not to be whistled at.

Right now, he and his people are picking off the last Republican moderates via a little party-switching and some well-crafted appointments, and so driving that party and its conservative base absolutely nuts, if not into extreme southern isolation. In this sense, his first Supreme Court pick was little short of a political stroke of brilliance, whatever she turns out to do on the bench. Whether the opposition “wins” (which they won’t) or loses in any attempt to block her nomination, they stand to further alienate a key voting bloc, Hispanics. Now 9% of voters, Hispanics went for Obama in the last election by a staggering 35-point margin. Next time their heft might even bring solidly red-state Texas closer to in-play status in the two-party system. In other words, the president has left his opponents in a situation where they can’t win for losing.

Mix Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan…

All this is little short of amazing, particularly if put into even the most modest historical context.

If, in a Star-Trekkian mode — hand me the “red matter,” Mr. Spock! — you could transport yourself back to early 2003 and tell just about any American what’s coming, you might have found yourself institutionalized. If you had said that the new norm would be a black president with Reagan-like popularity, Kennedy-like charisma, and Roosevelt-like skills in the political arena, leading a majority Democratic Congress in search of universal health care, solutions to global warming, energy conservation, and bullet trains, your listener might, at best, have responded with his or her own joke: “A priest, a rabbi, and a penguin walk into a bar…”

After all, back then, before two “hurricanes” — the invasion of Iraq and Katrina — began the process of turning our American world upside down, the Bush administration seemed to be riding ever higher globally and the Republican Party even higher than that at home. Back then, the neocons were consumed with imperial dreams of shock-and-awe-style eternal global conquest and domination (“Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran”); and the President’s “brain,” Karl Rove, now exiled to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, was convinced that he was nailing down a domestic Pax Republicana for generations to come.

And at that moment, who would have denied that things would turn out just that way? So don’t let anyone tell you that history doesn’t have its surprises. A black guy with the middle name of “Hussein,” a liberal Chicago politician from — in a phrase Republicans then regularly spit out, as if saying “Democratic” was too much effort — the “Democrat Party”? I don’t think so.

And yet, in mid-June 2009, less than five months into the Obama presidency, can you even remember that era before the dawn of time when people were wondering what it would be like for an African-American family to inhabit the White House? Would American voters allow it? Could Americans take it?

You betcha!

Being President

All that said, let’s not forget reality. Barack Obama did not win an election to be president of Goodwill Industries, or the YMCA, or the Ford Foundation. He may be remarkable in many ways, but he is also president of the United States which means that he is head honcho for the globe’s single great garrison state which now, to a significant extent, lives off war and the preparations for future war.

He is today the proprietor of — to speak only of the region extending from North Africa to the Chinese border that the Bush loyalists used to call “the Greater Middle East” — American bases, or facilities, or prepositioned military material (or all of the above) at Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, in Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq (and Iraqi Kurdistan), Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan (where the U.S. military and the CIA share Pakistani military facilities), and a major Air Force facility on the British-controlled Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

Some U.S. bases in these countries are microscopic and solitary, but others like Camp Victory or Balad Air Base, both in Iraq, are gigantic installations in a web of embedded bases. According to an expert on the subject, Chalmers Johnson, the Pentagon’s most recent official count of U.S. “sites” (i.e. bases) abroad is 761, but that does not include “espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude — e.g. in Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan.”

In January when he entered the Oval Office, Barack Obama also inherited the largest embassy on Earth, built in Baghdad by the Bush administration to imperial proportions as a regional command center. It now houses what are politely referred to as 1,000 “diplomats.” Recent news reports indicate that such a project wasn’t just an aberration of the Bush era. Another embassy, just as gigantic, expected to house “a large military and intelligence contingent,” will be constructed by the Obama administration in its new war capital, Islamabad, Pakistan. Once the usual cost overruns are added in, it may turn out be the first billion-dollar embassy. Each of these command centers will, assumedly, anchor the American presence in the Greater Middle East.

Barack Obama is also now the commander-in-chief of 11 aircraft carrier strike groups, which regularly patrol the planet’s sea lanes. He sits atop a U.S. Intelligence Community (yes, that’s what our intelligence crew like to call themselves) of at least 16 squabbling, overlapping agencies, heavily Pentagonized, and often at each other’s throats. They have a cumulative hush-hush budget of perhaps $50 billion or more. (Imagine a power so obsessively consumed by the very idea of “intelligence” that it is willing to support 16 sizeable separate outfits doing such work, and that’s not even counting various smaller offices dedicated to intelligence activities.)

The new president will preside over a country which now ponies up almost half the world’s total military expenditures. His 2010 estimated Pentagon budget will be marginally higher than the last staggering one from the Bush years at $664 billion. (The real figure, once military funds stowed away in places like the Department of Energy are included, is actually significantly larger.)

He now inhabits a Washington in which deep-thinking consists of a pundit like Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution whining that these bloated sums are, in fact, too little to “maintain” U.S. forces (a budgetary increase of 7-8% per year for the next decade would, he claims, be just adequate); in which forward-looking means Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reorienting military spending toward preparations for fighting one, two, many Afghanistans; and in which out-of-the-box, futuristic thinking means letting the blue-skies crew at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) loose on far-out problems like how to turn “programmable matter” into future Transformer-like weapons of war.

While Obama enthusiasts can take pride in the appointment of some out-of-the-box thinkers in domestic areas, including energy, health, and the science of the environment, in two crucial areas his appointments are pure old-line Washington and have been so from the first post-election transitional moments. His key economic players and advisors are largely a crew of former Clintonistas, or Clintonista wannabes or protégés like Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner. They are distinctly inside-the-boxers, some of them responsible for the thinking that, in the 1990s, led directly to this catastrophic economic moment.

As for foreign policy, had the November election results been reversed, Obama’s top team of today could just as easily have been appointed by Senator John McCain. National Security Advisor James Jones was actually a McCain friend, Gates someone he admired, and Hillary Clinton a figure he could well have picked for a top post after a narrow election victory, had he decided to reach out to the Democrats. As a group, Obama’s key foreign policy figures and advisors are traditional players in the national security state and pre-Bush-style Washington guardians of American power, thinking globally in familiar ways.

General Manhunter

And let’s be careful not to put all of this in the passive voice either when it comes to the new president. In both of these areas, he may have felt somewhat unsure of himself and so slotted in the old guard around him as a kind of political protection. Nonetheless, this hasn’t just happened to him. He didn’t just inherit the presidency. He went for it. And he isn’t just sitting atop it. He’s actively using it. He’s wielding power. In foreign policy terms, he’s settling in — and despite his Cairo speech and various hints of change on subjects like relations with Iran, in largely predictable ways.

He may, for example, have declared a sunshine policy when it comes to transparency in government, but in his war policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, his imperial avatar is already plunging deep into the dark, distinctly opaque valley of death. He’s just appointed a general, Stanley A. McChrystal, as his Afghan commander. From 2003-2008, McChrystal ran a special operations outfit in Iraq (and then Afghanistan) so secret that the Pentagon avoided mention of it. In those years, its operatives were torturing, abusing, and killing Iraqis as part of a systematic targeted assassination program on a large scale. It was, for those who remember the Vietnam era, a mini-Phoenix program in which possibly hundreds of enemies were assassinated: al-Qaeda-in-Iraq types, but also Sunni insurgents, and Sadrists (not to speak of others, since informers always settle scores and turn over their own personal enemies as well).

Although he’s now being touted in the press as the man to bring the real deal in counterinsurgency to Afghanistan (and “protect” the Afghan population in the bargain), his actual field is “counter-terrorism.” He spoke the right words to Congress during his recent confirmation hearings, but pay no attention.

The team he’s now assembling in Washington to lead his operations in Afghanistan (and someday maybe Pakistan) tells you what you really need to know. It’s filled with special operations types. The expertise of his chosen key lieutenants is, above all, in special ops work. At the same time, reports Rowan Scarborough at Fox News, an extra 1,000 special operations troops are now being “quietly” dispatched to Afghanistan, bringing the total number there to about 5,000. Keep in mind that it’s been the special operations forces, with their kick-down-the-door night raids and air strikes, who have been involved in the most notorious incidents of civilian slaughter, which continue to enrage Afghans.

Note, by the way, that while the president is surging into Afghanistan 21,000 troops and advisors (as well as those special ops forces), ever more civilian diplomats and advisors, and ever larger infusions of money, there is now to be a command surge as well. General McChrystal, according to a recent New York Times article, has “been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans… [He] is assembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat is unknown in the military today outside Special Operations, but reflects an approach being imported by General McChrystal, who spent five years in charge of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Like the new mega-embassy in Pakistan, this figure — the Spartans, after all, only needed 300 warriors at Thermopylae — tells us a great deal about the top-heavy manner in which the planet’s super-garrison state fights its wars.

So, this is now truly Obama’s war, about to be run by his chosen general, a figure from the dark side. Expect, then, from our sunshine president’s men an ever bloodier secret campaign of so-called counter-terror (though it’s essence is likely to be terror, pure and simple), as befits an imperial power trying to hang on to the Eastern reaches of the Greater Middle East.

The new crew aren’t counterinsurgency warriors, but — a term that has only recently entered our press — “manhunters.” And don’t forget, President Obama is now presiding over an expanding war in which “manhunters” engaging in systematic assassination programs will not only be on the ground but, thanks to the CIA’s escalating program of targeted assassination by robot aircraft, in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands.

For those who care to remember, it was into counter-terrorism and an orgy of manhunting, abuse, and killing that the Vietnam era version of “counterinsurgency” dissolved as well.

Into the Charnel House of History

A neologism coined for the expanding Afghan war has recently come into widespread use: Af-Pak (for Afghanistan-Pakistan Theater of Operations). But the coining of neologisms shouldn’t just be left to those in Washington, so let me suggest one that hints at one possible new world over which our newest president may unexpectedly preside: Ir-Af-Pak. Let it stand, conveniently, for the Iraq-Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan Theater of Operations — a neologism that catches the perilously expansionist and devolutionary possibilities of our moment.

Media organizations in increasingly tight financial straits sense the explosive nature of this expansionist moment and, even as they are fleeing Iraq (and former bureaus in so many other places), like the president, they are doubling down and piling into Afghanistan and Pakistan. But don’t count Iraq pacified yet. It remains an uneasy, dangerous, explosive place as, in fact, does the Greater Middle East. Worse yet, the Af-Pak War may not itself be done expanding. It could still, for instance, seep into one or more of the Central Asian ‘stans, among other places, and already has made it into catastrophic Somalia, while a shaky Yemen could be swept into the grim festivities.

Finally, let’s return to that “dream team” being put together by Obama’s man in Afghanistan. That team of Spartans, according to the New York Times, is being formed with, minimally, a three-year horizon. This in itself is striking. After all, the Afghan War started in November 2001. So when the shortest possible Afghan tour of duty of the 400 is over, it will have been going on for more than 10½ years — and no one dares to predict that, three years from now, the war will actually be at an end.

Looked at another way, the figure cited should probably not be one decade, but three. After all, our Afghan adventure began in 1980, when, in the jihad against the Soviets, we were supporting some of the very same fundamentalist figures now allied with the Taliban and fighting us in Afghanistan — just as, once upon a time, we looked positively upon the Taliban; just as, once, we looked positively upon Saddam Hussein, who was for a while seen as our potential bulwark in the Middle East against the fundamentalist Islamic Republic of Iran. (Remarkably enough, only Iran has, until this moment, retained its position as our regional enemy over these decades.)

What a record, then, of blood and war, of great power politics and imperial hubris, of support for the heinous (including various fundamentalist groups and grim, authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes who remain our allies to this day). What a tale of imperial power frittered away and treasure squandered. Truly, Rudyard Kipling would have been able to do something with this.

As for me, I find myself in awe of these decades of folly. Thirty years in Afghanistan, it staggers the imagination. What tricks does that land play with the minds of imperial Great-Gamers? Maybe it has something to do with those poppies. Who knows? I’m no Kipling, but I am aware that this sorry tale has taken up almost half of my lifetime with no end in sight.

In the meantime, our new president has loosed the manhunters. His manhunters. This is where charisma disappears into the charnel house of history. Watch out.

[Note for readers: Credit where credit’s due: the neologism, “Ir-Af-Pak,” is actually the invention of Jonathan Schell. A small bow of appreciation to him for handing it off to me and another bow to Jim Peck for some inspired suggestions. Thanks as well to Alfred McCoy for helping to bring me up to speed on the meaning of General McChrystal’s Iraq activities. In addition, the filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s website Rethink Afghanistan (also the name of his new film) is starting to post clips about Afghan casualties of the U.S. air war. These will be incorporated into part four of his Afghan War film, being released part by part on-line. Because we see so little of this, these initial clips are sobering and well worth viewing. To do so, click here, here, and here.]

Obama Looses the Manhunters

Graduates of the Bush years, initiates of the Obama era, if you think of a commencement address as a kind of sermon, then every sermon needs its text. Here’s the one I’ve chosen for today, suitably obscure and yet somehow ringing:

“The idea that somehow counterterrorism is a homeland security issue doesn’t make sense when you recognize the fact that terror around the world doesn’t recognize borders. There is no right-hand, left-hand anymore.”

That’s taken directly from the new national security bible of Obama National Security Advisor (and ex-Marine General) James Jones. He said it last week at a press briefing. The occasion was the integration of a Bush-era creation, the Homeland Security Council — which, if you’re like me, you had never heard of until it lost its independence — into the National Security Council, which Jones runs, a move that probably represents yet another consolidation of power inside a historically ever more imperial White House.

After four years in this college, I assume you are students of the word and like all biblical texts, this one must be interpreted. It must be read. So let’s start by thinking of it this way: If we are, in some sense, defined by our enemies, then consider this description of terrorism — even though most acts of terror are undoubtedly committed by locally-minded individuals — as something like a shadow thrown on a wall. The looming figure to which the shadow belongs is not, however, al-Qaeda, but us. We are, after all, in the war-on-terror business. It’s how we’ve defined ourselves these last years.

If you accept Jones’s definition, then you only have to go a modest distance to conclude that we are the other great force on the planet that “doesn’t recognize borders.” Keep in mind that, right now, we’re fighting at least two-and-a-half wars thousands of miles from this sylvan campus, and in your name no less. When it comes to our “national security,” as we define it, borders turn out to matter remarkably little in a pinch, as long, of course, as they’re other people’s borders.

After all, we have established an extensive network of military bases, some gigantic, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and secured the right to treat them essentially as U.S. territory; we have hundreds of such bases, large and small, scattered across the Earth, most not in war zones, a startling number of them built up into impressive “little Americas.” It’s through them that we garrison much of the planet (something you will almost never see commented upon in the mainstream media, obvious though it may be). Our drone aircraft, flown by remote control from bases in the United States, now regularly patrol distant skies, as if borders did not exist, to smite our foes, whatever any locals might think. Typically, as far as we know, our secret warriors continue to fund, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, a Bush-era project, which also knows no borders, aimed at destabilizing the Iranian government.

The Architecture of Meaning

Instead of simply continuing down this superhighway of borderlessness, let’s just consider two sentences buried deep in a recent piece on the inside pages of the New York Times about a roadside explosive device in Iraq that killed three Americans in a vehicle. It’s the sort of thing that Americans tend not to find strange in the least. So as an experiment, try, as I read it aloud, to take in the deep strangeness it represents:

“The Americans were driving along a road used exclusively by the American military and reconstruction teams when a bomb, which local Iraqi security officials described as an improvised explosive device, went off. No Iraqi vehicles, even those of the army and the police, are allowed to use the road where the attack occurred, according to residents.”

Keep in mind that this isn’t a restricted road in Langley, Virginia. It’s a road outside the Iraqi city of Falluja, where we conducted two massive, city-destroying assaults back in 2004; in other words, the road which “no Iraqi vehicles… are allowed to use” is thousands of miles and many borders away from Washington.

And that’s nothing really. If you want to know something about American “impunity” — a fine nineteenth century word that should be more widely used today — when it comes to Iraq’s borders, get your hands on the text of Order 17. That order was issued by our viceroy in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, back in the salad days of the Bush administration, when that era’s neocons thought the world was their oyster (or perhaps their oil well).

Promulgated on the eve of the supposed “return of sovereignty” to Iraq in 2004, Order 17 gave new meaning to the term “Free World.” In intent, it was a perpetual American get-out-of-jail-free card. If I were the president of this college, I would assign Order 17 to be read as part of a campus-wide course on magical imperial realism. Here’s but one passage I’ve summarized from that document:

All foreigners (read: Americans) involved in the occupation project were to be granted “freedom of movement without delay throughout Iraq,” and neither their vessels, vehicles, nor aircraft were to be “subject to registration, licensing or inspection by the [Iraqi] Government.” Nor in traveling would foreign diplomats, soldiers, consultants, or security guards, or any of their vehicles, vessels, or planes be subject to “dues, tolls, or charges, including landing and parking fees,” and so on. And don’t forget that on imports, including “controlled substances,” there were to be no customs fees (or inspections), taxes, or much of anything else; nor was there to be the slightest charge for the use of occupied Iraqi “headquarters, camps, and other premises,” nor for the use of electricity, water, or other utilities.

Or, since actual architecture, like the architecture of language, is revealing, consider our most recent embassy-building practices. An embassy is, almost by definition, the face of our country, of us, abroad. For our embassy in embattled Iraq, the Bush administration ponied up almost three-quarters of a billion dollars (including cost overruns). The result, now opened, is the largest embassy compound on the planet.

It’s about the size of Vatican City, a self-enclosed world with its own elaborate defenses and amenities inside the citadel of Baghdad’s Green Zone. Staffed by approximately 1,000 “diplomats,” it’s the sort of place Cold War Washington might once have dreamed of building in Moscow (not that the Russians would have let them).

Do the Iraqis want such an establishment in their capital? Would you, if it was a foreign “embassy” in your land? Once again, that old-fashioned word “impunity,” which once went so well with words like “freebooter” and “extraterritoriality,” seems apt. We still practice a version of freebooting, we still have our own version of extraterritoriality, and we do it all with impunity.

In our era, the imperial mother ship landed in a country the size of California, but with a fraction of its population, that just happens to have a lot of untapped reserves of hydrocarbons. But that, I’m sure you’re thinking, was the Bush era. You know, the years of over-the-top unilateralism that crashed and burned along with those dreams of a global Pax Americana and a domestic Pax Republicana.

You might think so, but the news — what’s left of it anyway — tells a different story. When it comes to “change you can believe in,” a recent piece by Saeed Shah and Warren P. Stroebel of the McClatchy newspapers caught my eye. They wrote: “The White House has asked Congress for — and seems likely to receive — $736 million to build a new U.S. embassy in Islamabad, along with permanent housing for U.S. government civilians and new office space in the Pakistani capital.”

In other words, the Obama administration is asking Congress to fork over almost the exact price of our monster embassy in Baghdad (after staggering cost overruns). Figure those always predictable overruns into this project, and you may indeed have the first billion-dollar embassy. To use a term the U.S. military once loved, this will result in a large “footprint” on Pakistani soil. It is, to say the least, not normal practice to build and staff such mega-embassies. So if you have a taste for symbolism, this sort of embassy says a lot about how Washington imagines power relations on this planet. Think of these as our ziggurats, our temples (as well as command centers) in foreign climes.

Far stranger than any of these strange specifics is this: none of them seem particularly strange to us. They are news, yes, but not the sort of news that opens eyes, starts discussion, sets Americans — sets you — wondering.

Two Lost Syllables

Now maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. After all, isn’t this just how imperial powers like to operate: as if they owned the planet, or at least had special rights that overruled the locals when it comes to significant hunks of prime real estate?

Which brings us to a word I haven’t said yet, the real subject of my speech today: Empire. It’s the word no one in Washington can say. Its absence from our political discussion is perhaps what makes the United States imperially unique, and yet without it, some crucial part of the real world is missing in action too, some part of what might help us understand ourselves and others.

Words denied mean analyses not offered, things not grasped, surprise not registered, strangeness not taken in, all of which means that terrible mistakes are repeated, wounding ways of acting in the world never seriously reconsidered.

Think of a crucial missing word as a kind of invisible straight jacket. Its absence, oddly enough, chains you to the present, to what’s accepted and acceptable. Just two missing syllables, em-pire, making up a word that’s proved so serviceable for so many centuries. And yet, without it, our American world is a little like the one in the sci-fi movie The Matrix. You remember, it’s the one where human beings imagine themselves moving and acting in a perfectly real land, while their actual bodies are stored somewhere far more grim. One question to ask yourself as you form your processional to leave these grounds that have sheltered you these last years might be: Do you have any idea what world you’re walking into? If essential terms for describing it are missing, can you even know? And no less important, do you want to know?

You’ll notice — and here’s the good news — that I haven’t offered you a shred of career advice, or a hint of optimism so far. And on this suitably gloomy day in this gloomy world of ours, I hope not to.

I also know that, whatever your minds may be on as you prepare to head through your school’s vast gates into a none-too-welcoming world, they aren’t on what I have to say today. That, quite honestly, gives me the freedom to talk about a word you may not have heard in your four years here, not applied to our country anyway.

Think about it. In these last moments of your campus life, don’t you find it a little strange that the United States, your country, has military bases, more than 700 of them, scattered across every continent and that your school offers not a single course on the way we garrison this planet? Don’t you find it just a tad odd that this seemingly salient fact of our national existence hasn’t seemed worth teaching, debating, or discussing?

Let me tell you a little story of mine. In what still passes for my real life, despite my work at TomDispatch, I’m a book editor. A few years back, I edited one by Chalmers Johnson, an experience a little like passing through those great gates at the end of this pathway, but in the other direction, and going back to school. The book was called The Sorrows of Empire. It was quite well reviewed in our major papers (in the long-gone days of 2004 when they still had book review sections), and became a bestseller. Oh, I should add that the book focuses, in great detail, chapter after chapter, region after region, on what Johnson called our global “baseworld.” And yet not until three years later, when Jonathan Freedland, a British journalist, took up Johnson’s work in the New York Review of Books, did a major reviewer, praising it, focus on its central topic, the way we garrison the world. This was, as you might imagine, no small trick and it taught me something about what Americans find it easier not to see, even when it’s staring them in the face.

Graduation 1966

Fortunately, as I say, I can talk about this today without fear that any of you will be affected by it. I’m the proof of that, or rather my younger self, graduating in what seemed a sunnier moment 43 years ago. Whoever spoke to the gathered graduates of the class of 1966 at Yale College is long gone from my memory banks, just as I’ll surely be from yours.

A few days ago, preparing for this moment, I clambered to the top of my closet — no small thing now that I’m almost 65 — and amid the piles of junk and memorabilia I’ve squirreled away extracted a letter-sized envelope of photos marked “college” from a larger folder that, long ago, before I knew the half of it, I labeled “my life.”

So here’s what I can tell you about my own graduation. Unlike you, I commenced, if that’s what it was, on a sunny day, so the photos tell me, and with flags flying. They were part of the processional, the Stars and Stripes and what must be college pennants as well, as we marched enrobed to our ceremony, which I no longer remember. I can’t tell you who spoke or what he — it was surely a he then — spoke about, or what wisdom he offered us, only that he was probably an Authority, with a capital A, and that, although the sixties were just starting for me (the earlier years of that decade, in lived experience, were really part of the 1950s for most of us then), I suspect that I already had a creeping case of the skepticism toward authority for which that period became either famous or infamous, depending on your point of view.

I look jaunty and well prepared indeed (hair slicked down, a more than serviceable smile) for a future in the State Department, or the U.S. Information Agency, or as a prospective member of the cast of season three or four of Mad Men that would never come. I admit that, in the small packet of photos preserved from that day, I find myself, whether in my charcoal suit and tie or my robe and mortar board with tassel, almost unrecognizable. It’s as if I were holding in my hands a piece of amber with some strange ancestral creature preserved inside. Or rather, if we were to jump but four or five years ahead, now also my distant past, you and I would surely agree that I will soon be unrecognizable with hair almost to my shoulders and a little Mao cap perched on my head.

I feel today from this distance as if, in either case, I’m peering down a Star Trekkian wormhole into another universe. A number of the people I was photographed with I no longer recognize and a surprising number of the rest are dead. From a wealthy southwestern family, my friend Clay would die of AIDS a couple of decades later; from a working-class Midwestern city, my former roommate John — not photographed that day because he had delayed graduating a year — would in the twenty-first century put a gun to his head in Las Vegas.

And then there’s my aunt Hilda, smiling remarkably sweetly at the photographer (possibly my father). A public school librarian with the cadences of nineteenth century novels lodged in her head, sometime in the 1980s, not so long before she died, she would begin a letter to my daughter, then perhaps four years old, about her own father, my grandfather, who ran away from home and worked as a “scribe” for a lawyer in Hamburg to earn his passage to the New World:

“Your great grandfather, Moore Engelhardt, a boy of 16, arrived in New York from Europe in March 1888. It was during the famous blizzard, and after a sea voyage of about 30 days. He had no money. He often said that he had a German 50 cent piece in his pocket when he landed. His trip had to be in the cheapest part of the ship — way down below in steerage. Poor boy, I’m sure he was seasick a good deal of the time…”

And then there’s Moore’s wife, Hilda’s mother, my dear, tiny grandmother Celia, who grew up in a New York City slum, and married that poor boy — he was 17 years her senior and they took a steamer up the Hudson River for their honeymoon, as she used to say, “because he had business in Albany the next day.” She was there, too, standing proudly in front of me under an archway, undoubtedly amazed that she, or her grandson, ever got near Yale. And my father and mother, as well, a photo taken with each of them, my father, bullish as ever, one foot forward, my mother chic and petite; both of them, I think it’s fair to say, looking happier, if not prouder, than they undoubtedly felt at that moment — our relationship then being, politely put, on the dicey side — just as in the photos I look so much more at ease and confident than I ever faintly felt.

All of them, except me, are now long dead.

I see cameras flashing everywhere right now, and yet this, of course, is the world that awaits you. This is something so basic, so hard to absorb that, unlike the purposeful killing of whole categories of people, which we call “genocide,” we simply have no word for it, this winnowing of every generation, of everybody, until photos like these have no personal meaning because no one in them is remembered. So there’s another missing word that, in addition to telling you a great deal about the limits of language, should certainly put anyone’s travails of the moment into context and is, in this speech, as close to optimism in tough times as I’m likely to get.

And speaking for a moment of that “poor boy” who was me, who had been raised on a glorious American story of victory in war and triumph in peace, he had only the faintest sense that he was living in the heart of the heart of a national security state whose interests were nothing short of imperial. I mean, he was no fool. He had been an only child — he thought the term was “lonely child” when young — and undoubtedly in desperation, he had ransacked his local library and read widely, even if, like most young readers with no one to guide him, wonderfully indiscriminately. (That is, in fact, the radical joy of libraries, as opposed to bookstores: you can try anything on the shelf without the need for investment.)

And it wasn’t that he hadn’t come up against the dangers of the Cold War either. Like most Americans, he had found himself right at the edge of world’s end on October 22, 1962, the night President Kennedy appeared on radio and television to announce that the Soviet Union and the United States were facing off over nuclear missiles to be emplaced in Cuba, and the world was at the brink of destruction. The Cuban Missile Crisis, it would be called.

He was then 18 years old. Like many Americans at that moment, he thought he might be toast by morning; that his life, which (as far as he could tell) showed no sign of having begun, might well be over. Of course, that world of ashes and cinders never came to be, and as you know he made it to graduation. By then, he had taken his first modest steps toward opposing an American war in Vietnam, signed his first petition, and gone to his first demonstration, ever so hesitantly because he really was a good American boy and these were not things you were then brought up to do, or did thoughtlessly.

He was living in a city, New Haven, where young people wore jackets with CIA emblazoned on the back. (It stood, believe it or not, for the Culinary Institute of America.) And he knew graduate students, returning from far-flung places like Indonesia, where, in 1965, at least 500,000 communists had been slaughtered, who were regularly debriefed by the CIA. But no one he met thought such things out of the ordinary. He knew people who had been garrisoned in Japan, Germany, and elsewhere. There were hints galore of what world we were really living in. But you couldn’t have proved it by him. American Empire? No way, not in those days. It didn’t go with George Washington, the Revolution, the Pony Express, or the Civil War.

It wasn’t an American word. There was, of course, the Soviet Empire. And there had been the British and Roman Empires, which were huge but nothing to brag about, and then there was us, and what we were committed to was, as everyone still said then, the Free World. As at least a partial explanation for what he didn’t grasp, let me point out that the United States was surfing the crest of so much wealth, was so dominant and powerful that, no matter the imperial stupidities and crimes of its agents, overt and covert, committed in its name or not, blowback was slow to come. As with the Iranians, blowback could then take 26 years, not as now months, weeks, or days. It was, in a sense, easier not to notice, though evidently not so much easier given how few seem to notice today.

While he could, then, see flaws in the Manichaean version of our universe that surrounded him, he still considered Vietnam at worst a tragic blunder or error, and he still hoped someday to be an American diplomat or, via the United States Information Agency, to be able to explain to confused foreigners what was best about our country.

If you had claimed that he lived in an imperial garrison state in 1966, he would undoubtedly have sat you down and explained to you, in all seriousness, why that couldn’t be so. Despite President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961, he paid little attention to the military-industrial complex and might not, then, even have known the term.

It has to be said that while, for some, the gift that kept on giving in terms of understanding how our world worked was the Civil Rights movement, for him it was, grimly enough, the war in Vietnam (which, in another sense, might have been thought of as the pit into which you never stopped falling). That never-ending horror would certainly change the course of his life, taking dreams of the State Department or the USIA off the table and, in the end, make the idea that he was living in an imperial state plausible to him. He gained in those years a new language and a new understanding of how the world worked.

Of Graveyards and Empires

Looking out over this crowd today, I find it unbearably strange that, 43 years later, with new and bloody counterinsurgency wars underway in lands once hardly known to most Americans, with our military bases implanted in countless lands, with the Pentagon budget at almost unimaginable levels, with our operatives abroad still involved in assassinations and renditions, “empire” remains MIA and most Americans have no sense — no conscious sense, at least — that they are living in an imperial garrison state.

Let me amend that, actually. Americans love the word “empire.” Just a dip into Google.news.com tells you that. On a given day, you quickly discover that you can play a revamped version of Empire: Total War on your Xbox (it’s set in the 18th century), will someday be able to catch the comedy Soakers, soon to be filmed in Hawaii by the Empire Film Group, and can attend the Empire Ranch Men’s Golf Club Director’s Cup Tournament in California, or await the $12 million facelift of the Empire ballroom at New York City’s Grand Hyatt Hotel in, by the way, the “Empire state.” Meanwhile, Empire Resorts, a struggling gaming company, has just gotten a much needed extension to a line of credit “staving off insolvency”; and the word “empire,” it turns out, goes remarkably well with trendiness (“fashion empire”), medicine (“Empire medical training”), food (“BT Bistro the latest in Trigg’s restaurant empire”), and even the business of sex (“Reports surfaced this week that Hugh Hefner, longtime publisher of Playboy magazine, is considering relinquishing the reins of his bawdy empire…”).

Put “American empire” into the same search engine, on the other hand, and you get Brits, peripheral websites like this one, or maybe Pravda.

Of course, there was one brief Camelot-like moment when the American empire came into its own in Washington. After the Afghan War of 2001 seemed to end in triumph and before the Iraq one headed down the tubes, the neocons of the Bush administration and associated drum-thumping pundits and think-tankers overcame an American aversion to empire (and so, in a sense, to reality) and began proclaiming that we were the biggest, the best, the most dominant power this planet had ever seen, that the Romans and the Brits were but puny precursors.

For me, it was a strange moment when the language of total global domination which, in my childhood, had been the onscreen fare of evil Nazis, imperial Japanese, and Russians, suddenly morphed into an essential part of the American dream, or a distinct Washington bragging point anyway. How brief that was. After a heady year or two, the insurgency in Iraq once again erased “empire” from the American lexicon.

It’s true that an American president can still say, as Barack Obama recently did at the U.S. Naval Academy: “We will maintain America’s military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen.” But global domination? Empire? Banished to the outer realms of some other universe.

In my dictionary, the imperial stands as the polar opposite of both equality and humility. As I see it, either you try to live on a planet with other people, no matter how fractious, difficult, and hostile they (or you) may be, or you try to rule over them, and land your billion-dollar, thousand-diplomat, mother-ship embassies on their turf to show “the flag,” with everything that’s come to mean.

If that’s what’s going on, then some of you better find a language that describes it better. After all, if reality is denied linguistically, it’s that much harder, when blowback occurs, to understand it as such; it’s that much harder to grasp the possible links between fighting endless frontier wars, maintaining a global “presence” (or ensuring Obama’s “military dominance”) and our present insecurity. That you can’t get a job may indeed have something to do with how, and at what cost, we maintain ourselves on the planet, but if you can’t describe reality, you’ll never know that. The connections will escape you.

American officials increasingly talk, ominously or fearfully, about Afghanistan as “the graveyard of empires,” but without ever quite acknowledging that, if they are the “graveyard,” then we must be the “empire.” This is a kind of madness, even if it passes for normalcy in Washington, in the media, and so in our world. And for this madness, sooner or later, a price will be paid.

Speaking Up

As I end, let me complicate things just a bit, even as I propose a project for you, something you can do no matter how this world greets you as you exit that gate. Let me first admit this: it’s just possible that even “empire” doesn’t quite cover whatever we are. After all, where are our colonies? The British could color significant hunks of the global map red and claim the sun never set on their empire. We can say the same only of our garrisons.

It’s certainly time to reattach “American” to “empire,” but that’s probably not adequate. There may, as yet, be no proper words or phrases for what we are, globally speaking. But perhaps someday you’ll come up with them.

You are, I assure you, entering an extreme world at an extreme moment. Don’t leave it solely to them to describe it for you. Don’t just let yourself be used by the language that our world makes so readily available to you.

Back in 1946, in his stirring essay, “Politics and the English Language,” which he would later vividly illustrate in his novel 1984, George Orwell wrote of the problems, but also the satisfactions, of letting them define the limits of what can be spoken. You can, he pointed out, certainly save yourself some trouble “by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”

But he also wrote: “Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Maybe what we need is fewer lies, less wind, and a new, stripped-down, weeded out, more honest vocabulary for our political world, words that don’t fall so far short of the world as it is. “Empire” is but one MIA word. It’s your job to find more of them, and where they don’t exist to invent them. If you want to live in this world and not The Matrix version of it, you need a language that works for you, and you may have to create it. You need, in short, to speak up.

As all the collapsing businesses and the millions of out of work Americans make clear at this moment, you can be constrained from doing many things, but not from defining the world for yourself, and maybe even for some of the rest of us. Not if you want to.

Don’t take my word for it. Take your own… and depart.

From the Edge of the Campus of Life, June 2, 2009

[Note for Readers: Just to be clear, I was invited to no campus to give this commencement speech. I gave it in the campus of my mind. I should also add that I’ve written at length about the strange American world I grew up in — its movies, TV shows, children’s toys, comics, and so much else — in my book, The End of Victory Culture (put out in a new edition, updated last year for the crash-and-burn Bush era). If you want to know more about the deep strangeness of the world I came from, the world you’re inheriting, you might consider picking up a copy and checking it out.]

Missing Word, Missing World

Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So the recent sacking of Afghan commander General David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal’s appointment as the man to run the Afghan War seems to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke. It’s heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as “the big muddy.”

General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an “executive assassination wing” out of Vice President Cheney’s office. (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement: “I think you’d be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.”)

McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush outed him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of “manhunters” he commanded had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.” Since some of the task force’s men were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn’t avoided.

In the Bush years, McChrystal was reputedly extremely close to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld’s effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.

Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command (and a role in the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the death of Army Ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman). The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak — that is, expanded — war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a “key advocate… of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.” This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blowback in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.

All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of “new thinking and new approaches” — to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s words — that the Obama administration expects General McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the first-born child of Obama-era Washington’s growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.

Hagiography

And here’s the good news: We luv the guy. Just luv him to death.

We loved him back in 2006, when Bush first outed him and Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him “a rising star” in the Army and one of the “Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls ‘the shadows.'”

It’s no different today in what’s left of the mainstream news analysis business. In that mix of sports lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that makes armchair war strategizing just so darn much fun, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, for instance, claimed that Centcom commander General David Petraeus, who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan, is “assembling an all-star team” and that McChrystal himself is “a rising superstar who, like Petraeus, has helped reinvent the U.S. Army.” Is that all?

When it came to pure, instant hagiography, however, the prize went to Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, “A General Steps from the Shadows,” that painted a picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between Superman and a saint.

Among other things, it described the general as “an ascetic who… usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours’ sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod… [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists… [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians…” and so on. The quotes Bumiller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less spectacular: “He’s got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect.” “If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal… I think of no body fat.”

From the gush of good cheer about his appointment, you might almost conclude that the general was not human at all, but an advanced android (a good one, of course!) and the “elite” world (of murder and abuse) he emerged from an unbearably sexy one.

Above all, as we’re told here and elsewhere, what’s so good about the new appointment is that General McChrystal is “more aggressive” than his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. He will, as Bumiller and Thom Shanker report in another piece, bring “a more aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening seven-year war.” The general, we’re assured, likes operations without body fat, but with plenty of punch. And though no one quite says this, given his closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, both desperately eager to “take the gloves off” on a planetary scale, his mentality is undoubtedly a global-war-on-terror one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist Gareth Porter pointed out recently in a thoughtful Asia Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), “the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe.”

Think of McChrystal’s appointment, then, as a decision in Washington to dispatch the bull directly to the China shop with the most meager of hopes that the results won’t be smashed Afghans and Pakistanis. The Post’s Ignatius even compares McChrystal’s boss Petraeus and Obama’s special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to “two headstrong bulls in a small paddock.” He then concludes his paean to all of them with this passage — far more ominous than he means it to be:

“Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he’s marching his presidency into the ‘graveyard of empires’ anyway.”

McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.

An Expanding Af-Pak War

Of course, there are now so many bulls in this particular China shop that smashing is increasingly the name of the game. At this point, the early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, have resulted in the expansion of the Af-Pak War in at least six areas, which only presage further expansion in the months to come:

1. Expanding Troop Commitment: In February, President Obama ordered a “surge” of 17,000 extra troops into Afghanistan, increasing U.S. forces there by 50%. (Then-commander McKiernan had called for 30,000 new troops.) In March, another 4,000 American military advisors and trainers were promised. The first of the surge troops, reportedly ill-equipped, are already arriving. In March, it was announced that this troop surge would be accompanied by a “civilian surge” of diplomats, advisors, and the like; in April, it was reported that, because the requisite diplomats and advisors couldn’t be found, the civilian surge would actually be made up largely of military personnel.

In preparation for this influx, there has been massive base and outpost building in the southern parts of that country, including the construction of 443-acre Camp Leatherneck in that region’s “desert of death.” When finished, it will support up to 8,000 U.S. troops, and a raft of helicopters and planes. Its airfield, which is under construction, has been described as the “largest such project in the world in a combat setting.”

2. Expanding CIA Drone War: The CIA is running an escalating secret drone war in the skies over the Pakistani borderlands with Afghanistan, a “targeted” assassination program of the sort that McChrystal specialized in while in Iraq. Since last September, more than three dozen drone attacks — the Los Angeles Times put the number at 55 — have been launched, as opposed to 10 in 2006-2007. The program has reportedly taken out a number of mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but also caused significant civilian casualties, destabilized the Pashtun border areas of Pakistan, and fostered support for the Islamic guerrillas in those regions. As Noah Shachtman wrote recently at his Danger Room website:

“According to the American press, a pair of missiles from the unmanned aircraft killed ‘at least 25 militants.’ In the local media, the dead were simply described as ’29 tribesmen present there.’ That simple difference in description underlies a serious problem in the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. To Americans, the drones over Pakistan are terrorist-killers. In Pakistan, the robotic planes are wiping out neighbors.”

David Kilcullen, a key advisor to Petraeus during the Iraq “surge” months, and counterinsurgency expert Andrew McDonald Exum recently called for a moratorium on these attacks on the New York Times op-ed page. (“Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent — hardly ‘precision.'”) As it happens, however, the Obama administration is deeply committed to its drone war. As CIA Director Leon Panetta put the matter, “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership.”

3. Expanding Air Force Drone War: The U.S. Air Force now seems to be getting into the act as well. There are conflicting reports about just what it is trying to do, but it has evidently brought its own set of Predator and Reaper drones into play in Pakistani skies, in conjunction, it seems, with a somewhat reluctant Pakistani military. Though the outlines of this program are foggy at best, this nonetheless represents an expansion of the war.

4. Expanding Political Interference: Quite a different kind of escalation is also underway. Washington is evidently attempting to insert yet another figure from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era into the Afghan mix. Not so long ago, Zalmay Khalilzad, the neocon former American viceroy in Kabul and then Baghdad, was considering making a run for the Afghan presidency against Hamid Karzai, the leader the Obama administration is desperate to ditch. In March, reports — hotly denied by Holbrooke and others — broke in the British press of a U.S./British plan to “undermine President Karzai of Afghanistan by forcing him to install a powerful chief of staff to run the Government.” Karzai, so the rumors went, would be reduced to “figurehead” status, while a “chief executive with prime ministerial-style powers” not provided for in the Afghan Constitution would essentially take over the running of the weak and corrupt government.

This week, Helene Cooper reported on the front page of the New York Times that Khalilzad would be that man. He “could assume a powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government under a plan he is discussing with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, according to senior American and Afghan officials.” He would then be “the chief executive officer of Afghanistan.”

Cooper’s report is filled with official denials that these negotiations involve Washington in any way. Yet if they succeed, an American citizen, a former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. as well as to Kabul, would end up functionally atop the Karzai government just as the Obama administration is eagerly pursuing a stepped-up war against the Taliban.

Why officials in Washington imagine that Afghans might actually accept such a figure is the mystery of the moment. It’s best to think of this plan as the kinder, gentler, soft-power version of the Kennedy administration’s 1963 decision to sign off on the coup that led to the assassination of South Vietnamese autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem. Then, too, top Washington officials were distressed that a puppet who seemed to be losing support was, like Karzai, also acting in an increasingly independent manner when it came to playing his appointed role in an American drama. That assassination, by the way, only increased instability in South Vietnam, leading to a succession of weak military regimes and paving the way for a further unraveling there. This American expansion of the war would likely have similar consequences.

5. Expanding War in Pakistan: Meanwhile, in Pakistan itself, mayhem has ensued, again in significant part thanks to Washington, whose disastrous Afghan war and escalating drone attacks have helped to destabilize the Pashtun regions of the country. Now, the Pakistani military — pushed and threatened by Washington (with the loss of military aid, among other things) — has smashed full force into the districts of Buner and Swat, which had, in recent months, been largely taken over by the Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas we call “the Pakistani Taliban.”

It’s been a massive show of force by a military configured for smash-mouth war with India, not urban or village warfare with lightly armed guerrillas. The Pakistani military has loosed its jets, helicopter gunships, and artillery on the region (even as the CIA drone strikes continue), killing unknown numbers of civilians and, far more significantly, causing a massive exodus of the local population. In some areas, well more than half the population has fled Taliban depredations and indiscriminate fire from the military. Those that remain in besieged towns and cities, often without electricity, with the dead in the streets, and fast disappearing supplies of food, are clearly in trouble.

With nearly 1.5 million Pakistanis turned into refugees just since the latest offensive began, U.N. officials are suggesting that this could be the worst refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Talk about the destabilization of a country.

In the long run, this may only increase the anger of Pashtuns in the tribal areas of Pakistan at both the Americans and the Pakistani military and government. The rise of Pashtun nationalism and a fight for an “Islamic Pashtunistan” would prove a dangerous development indeed. This latest offensive is what Washington thought it wanted, but undoubtedly the old saw, “Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true,” applies. Already a panicky Washington is planning to rush $110 million in refugee assistance to the country.

6. Expanding Civilian Death Toll and Blowback: As Taliban attacks in Afghanistan rise and that loose guerrilla force (more like a coalition of various Islamist, tribal, warlord, and criminal groups) spreads into new areas, the American air war in Afghanistan continues to take a heavy toll on Afghan civilians, while manufacturing ever more enemies as well as deep resentment and protest in that country. The latest such incident, possibly the worst since the Taliban was defeated in 2001, involves the deaths of up to 147 Afghans in the Bala Baluk district of Farah Province, according to accounts that have come out of the villages attacked. Up to 95 of the dead were under 18, one Afghan lawmaker involved in investigating the incident claims, and up to 65 of them women or girls. These deaths came after Americans were called into an escalating fight between the Taliban and Afghan police and military units, and in turn, called in devastating air strikes by two U.S. jets and a B-1 bomber (which, villagers claim, hit them after the Taliban fighters had left).

Despite American pledges to own up to and apologize more quickly for civilian deaths, the post-carnage events followed a predictable stonewalling pattern, including a begrudging step-by-step retreat in the face of independent claims and reports. The Americans first denied that anything much had happened; then claimed that they had killed mainly Taliban “militants”; then that the Taliban had themselves used grenades to kill most of the civilians (a charge later partially withdrawn as “thinly sourced”); and finally, that the numbers of Afghan dead were “extremely over-exaggerated,” and that the urge for payment from the Afghan government might be partially responsible.

An investigation, as always, was launched that never seems to end, while the Americans wait for the story to fade from view. As of this moment, while still awaiting the results of a “very exhaustive” investigation, American spokesmen nonetheless claim that only 20-30 civilians died along with up to 65 Taliban insurgents. In these years, however, the record tells us that, when weighing the stories offered by surviving villagers and those of American officials, believe the villagers. Put more bluntly, in such situations, we lie, they die.

Two things make this “incident” at Bala Baluk more striking. First of all, according to Jerome Starkey of the British Independent, another Rumsfeld creation, the U.S. Marines Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC), the Marines’ version of JSOC, was centrally involved, as it had been in two other major civilian slaughters, one near Jalalabad in 2007 (committed by a MarSOC unit that dubbed itself “Taskforce Violence”), the second in 2008 at the village of Azizabad in Herat Province. McChrystal’s appointment, reports Starkey, has “prompted speculation that [similar] commando counterinsurgency missions will increase in the battle to beat the Taliban.”

Second, back in Washington, National Security Advisor James Jones and head of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, fretting about civilian casualties in Afghanistan and faced with President Karzai’s repeated pleas to cease air attacks on Afghan villages, nonetheless refused to consider the possibility. Both, in fact, used the same image. As Jones told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “Well, I think he understands that… we have to have the full complement of… our offensive military power when we need it… We can’t fight with one hand tied behind our back…”

In a world in which the U.S. is the military equivalent of the multi-armed Hindu god Shiva, this is one of the truly strange, if long-lasting, American images. It was, for instance, used by President George H. W. Bush on the eve of the first Gulf War. “No hands,” he said, “are going to be tied behind backs. This is not a Vietnam.”

Forgetting the levels of firepower loosed in Vietnam, the image itself is abidingly odd. After all, in everyday speech, the challenge “I could beat you with one hand tied behind my back” is a bravado offer of voluntary restraint and an implicit admission that fighting any other way would make one a bully. So hidden in the image, both when the elder Bush used it and today, is a most un-American acceptance of the United States as a bully nation, about to be restrained by no one, least of all itself.

Apologize or stonewall, one thing remains certain: the air war will continue and so civilians will continue to die. The idea that the U.S. might actually be better off with one “hand” tied behind its back is now so alien to us as to be beyond serious consideration.

The Pressure of an Expanding War

President Obama has opted for a down-and-dirty war strategy in search of some at least minimalist form of success. For this, McChrystal is the poster boy. Former Afghan commander General McKiernan believed that, “as a NATO commander, my mandate stops at the [Afghan] border. So unless there is a clear case of self-protection to fire across the border, we don’t consider any operations across the border in the tribal areas.”

That the “responsibilities” of U.S. generals fighting the Afghan War “ended at the border with Pakistan,” Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt of the Times report, is now considered part of an “old mind-set.” McChrystal represents those “fresh eyes” that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked about in the press conference announcing the general’s appointment. As Mazzetti and Schmitt point out, “Among [McChrystal’s] last projects as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command was to better coordinate Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency efforts on both sides of the porous border.”

For those old enough to remember, we’ve been here before. Administrations that start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked in — psychically, if nothing else — if things don’t work out as expected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation without end. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever greater force, with the goal of, as the Post’s Ignatius puts it, cracking the “Taliban coalition” and bringing elements of it to the bargaining table.

So keep an eye out for whatever goes wrong, as it most certainly will, and then for the pressures on Washington to respond with further expansions of what is already “Obama’s war.” With McChrystal in charge in Afghanistan, for instance, it seems reasonable to assume that the urge to sanction new special forces raids into Pakistan will grow. After all, frustration in Washington is already building, for however much the Pakistani military may be taking on the Taliban in Swat or Buner, don’t expect its military or civilian leaders to be terribly interested in what happens near the Afghan border.

As Tony Karon of the Rootless Cosmopolitan blog puts the matter: “The current military campaign is designed to enforce a limit on the Taliban’s reach within Pakistan, confining it to the movement’s heartland.” And that heartland is the Afghan border region. For one thing, the Pakistani military (and the country’s intelligence services, which essentially brought the Taliban into being long ago) are focused on India. They want a Pashtun ally across the border, Taliban or otherwise, where they fear the Indians are making inroads.

So the frustration of a war in which the enemy has no borders and we do is bound to rise along with the fighting, long predicted to intensify this year. We now have a more aggressive “team” in place. Soon enough, if the fighting in the Afghan south and along the Pakistani border doesn’t go as planned, pressure for the president to send in those other 10,000 troops General McKiernan asked for may rise as well, as could pressure to apply more air power, more drone power, more of almost anything. And yet, as former CIA station chief in Kabul, Graham Fuller, wrote recently, in the region “crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.”

And what if, as the war continues its slow arc of expansion, the “Washington coalition” is the one that cracks first? What then?

Going for Broke

A front-page New York Times headline last week put the matter politely indeed: “In Pakistan, U.S. Courts Leader of Opposition.” And nobody thought it was strange at all.

In fact, it’s the sort of thing you can read just about any time when it comes to American policy in Pakistan or, for that matter, Afghanistan. It’s just the norm on a planet on which it’s assumed that American civilian and military leaders can issue pronunciamentos about what other countries must do; publicly demand various actions of ruling groups; opt for specific leaders, and then, when they disappoint, attempt to replace them; and use what was once called “foreign aid,” now taxpayer dollars largely funneled through the Pentagon, to bribe those who are hard to convince.

Last week as well, in a prime-time news conference, President Obama said of Pakistan: “We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.”

To the extent that this statement was commented on, it was praised here for its restraint and good sense. Yet, thought about a moment, what the president actually said went something like this: When it comes to U.S. respect for Pakistan’s sovereignty, this country has more important fish to fry. A look at the historical record indicates that Washington has, in fact, been frying those “fish” for at least the last four decades without particular regard for Pakistani sensibilities.

In a week in which the presidents of both Pakistan and Afghanistan have, like two satraps, dutifully trekked to the U.S. capital to be called on the carpet by Obama and his national security team, Washington officials have been issuing one shrill statement after another about what U.S. media reports regularly term the “dire situation” in Pakistan.

Of course, to put this in perspective, we now live in a thoroughly ramped-up atmosphere in which “American national security” — defined to include just about anything unsettling that occurs anywhere on Earth — is the eternal preoccupation of a vast national security bureaucracy. Its bread and butter increasingly seems to be worst-case scenarios (perfect for our 24/7 media to pounce on) in which something truly catastrophic is always about to happen to us, and every “situation” is a “crisis.” In the hothouse atmosphere of Washington, the result can be a feeding frenzy in which doomsday scenarios pour out. Though we don’t recognize it as such, this is a kind of everyday extremism.

Being Hysterical in Washington

As the recent release of more Justice Department torture memos (which were also, in effect, torture manuals) reminds us, we’ve just passed through eight years of such obvious extremism that the present everyday extremity of Washington and its national security mindset seems almost a relief.

We naturally grasp the extremity of the Taliban — those floggings, beheadings, school burnings, bans on music, the medieval attitude toward women’s role in the world — but our own extremity is in no way evident to us. So Obama’s statement on Pakistani sovereignty is reported as the height of sobriety, even when what lies behind it is an expanding “covert” air war and assassination campaign by unmanned aerial drones over the Pakistani tribal lands, which has reportedly killed hundreds of bystanders and helped unsettle the region.

Let’s stop here and consider another bit of news that few of us seem to find strange. Mark Lander and Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times offered this tidbit out of an overheated Washington last week: “President Obama and his top advisers have been meeting almost daily to discuss options for helping the Pakistani government and military repel the [Taliban] offensive.” Imagine that. Almost daily. It’s this kind of atmosphere that naturally produces the bureaucratic equivalent of mass hysteria.

In fact, other reports indicate that Obama’s national security team has been convening regular “crisis” meetings and having “nearly nonstop discussions” at the White House, not to mention issuing alarming and alarmist statements of all sorts about the devolving situation in Pakistan, the dangers to Islamabad, our fears for the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, and so on. In fact, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landy of McClatchy news service quote “a senior U.S. intelligence official” (from among the legion of anonymous officials who populate our nation’s capital) saying: “The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse, and no one has any idea about how to reverse it. I don’t think ‘panic’ is too strong a word to describe the mood here.”

Now, if it were the economic meltdown, the Chrysler bankruptcy, the bank stress tests, the potential flu pandemic, or any number of close-to-home issues pressing in on the administration, perhaps this would make some sense. But everyday discussions of Pakistan?

You know, that offensive in the Lower Dir Valley. That’s near the Buner District. You remember, right next to the Swat Valley and, in case you’re still not completely keyed in, geographically speaking, close to the Malakand Division. I mean, if the Pakistani government were in crisis over the deteriorating situation in Fargo, North Dakota, we would consider it material for late night jokesters.

And yet, in the strange American world we inhabit, nobody finds these practically Cuban-Missile-Crisis-style, round-the-clock meetings the least bit strange, not after eight years of post-9/11 national security fears, not after living with worst-case scenarios in which jihadi atomic bombs regularly are imagined going off in American cities.

Keep in mind a certain irony here: We essentially know what those crisis meetings will result in. After all, the U.S. government has been embroiled with Pakistan for at least 40 years and for just that long, its top officials have regularly come to the same policy conclusions — to support Pakistani military dictatorships or, in periods when civilian rule returns, pour yet more money (and support) into the Pakistani military. That military has long been a power unto itself in the country, a state within a state. And in moments like this, part of our weird extremism is that, having spent decades undermining Pakistani democracy, we bemoan its “fragility” in the face of threats and proceed to put even more of our hopes and dollars into its military. (As Strobel and Landy report, “Some U.S. officials say Pakistan’s only hope, and Washington’s, too, at this stage may be the country’s army. That, another senior official acknowledged Wednesday, ‘means another coup.'”)

In the Bush years, this support added up to at least $10 billion, with next to no idea what the military was doing with it. Another $100 million went into making that country’s nuclear-weapons program, about which there is now such panic, safer from theft or other intrusion, again with next to no idea of what was actually done with those dollars. And now the Obama administration is rushing to create a new Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund that will be controlled by General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command. If Congress agrees — and in this panic atmosphere, how could it not? — there will be an initial rushed down payment of $400 million to train the Pakistani military, probably outside that country, in counterinsurgency warfare. (“The fund would be similar to those used to train and equip Iraqi and Afghan soldiers and police, Petraeus said.”)

Doomsday Scenarios

Oh, and speaking of extremism, the ur-extreme statement of the last few weeks came from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and was treated like the most ho-hum news here. In congressional testimony, she insisted that the situation in Pakistan — that Taliban thrust into Swat and the lower Dir Valley — “poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world.”

Umm… Okay, the situation is unnerving — certainly for the Pakistanis, the large majority of whom have not the slightest love for the Taliban, have opted for democracy and against military dictatorship with a passion, and yet strongly oppose the destabilizing American air war in their borderlands. It could even result in the fall of the elected government or of democracy itself — not exactly a rare event in the annals of recent Pakistani history. It’s undoubtedly unnerving as well for the American military, intent on fighting a war in Afghanistan that has spilled disastrously across the open border. (As Pakistan expert Anatol Lieven wrote recently: “The danger to Pakistan is not of a Taliban revolution, but rather of creeping destabilization and terrorism, making any Pakistani help to the U.S. against the Afghan Taliban even less likely than it is at present.”)

In other words, it’s not a pretty picture. If you happen to live in the tribal borderlands, or Swat, or the Dir Valley, squeezed between the Taliban, the Pakistani Army, whose attacks cause great civilian harm, and those drones cruising overhead, you may be in trouble, if not in flight — or you may simply support the Taliban, as most of the rest of Pakistan does not. If you happen to live in India, you might start working up a sweat over what the future holds on the other side of the border. But all of this is unlikely to be a “mortal threat” even to Islamabad, the Pakistani military, or that nuclear arsenal American national security managers spend so much time fretting about. It is certainly not a “mortal threat to the security and safety of our country.”

So here’s a little common sense. If Pakistan poses a mortal threat to you in New York, Toledo, or El Paso, well then, get in line. Believe me, it will be a long one and you’ll be toward the back. Despite constant reports that lightly armed Taliban militants are only 60 miles from the “doorstep” of Islamabad, Pakistan’s national capital, and increasing inside-the-Beltway invocations of Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution in Iran, you’re unlikely to see a Taliban government in Islamabad anytime soon, or probably ever. As one unnamed expert commented recently in the insider Washington newsletter, the Nelson Report, “I find it troubling that we are hyping the ‘security situation’ in Pakistan. Pakistan is not being taken over, the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] is. This has been happening since 2004.”

Mind you, when Vice President Joe Biden said something extreme about flu precautions — don’t take the subway! — the media didn’t hesitate to laugh him off stage. When Hillary Clinton said what should be considered the equivalent about Pakistan, everyone treated it as part of a sober national-security conversation.

Of course, when it comes to hysteria, nothing helps like a nuclear arsenal, and in recent weeks nuclear doomsday scenarios have broken out like a swine flu pandemic, even though a victorious Taliban regime in Islamabad with a nuclear arsenal would undoubtedly still find the difficulties of planting and detonating such devices in American cities close to insurmountable.

By the way, for all our kindly talk about how the poor Pakistanis just can’t get it together democracy-wise, the U.S. has a terrible record when it comes not just to promoting democracy in that country, but to really giving much of a damn about its people. In fact, not to put too kindly a point on things, Washington has, over the past decades, done few favors for ordinary Pakistanis. Having played our version of the imperial Great Game first vis-à-vis the Soviets and, more recently, a bunch of jihadist warriors, we are now waging a most unpopular and destabilizing air war without mercy in parts of that country, and another deeply unpopular war just across its mountainous, porous border.

And this brings us to perhaps the most extreme aspect of the mentality of our national security managers — what might be called their empathy gap. They are, it seems, incapable of seeing the situations they deal through the eyes of those being dealt with. They lack, that is, all empathy, which means, in the end, that they lack understanding. They take it for granted that America’s destiny is to “engineer” the fates of peoples half a world away and are incapable of imagining that the United States could, in almost any situation, be part of the problem, not a major part of its solution. This is surely folly of the first order and, year after year, has only made the “situation” in Pakistan worse.

Closing the Empathy Gap?

To complete our picture of this over-the-top moment, we have to leave the heated confines of Washington and head for California’s China Lake. That’s where the U.S. military tests some of its advanced weapons.

On April 20th, Peter Pae of the Los Angeles Times reported the following: “A 5-pound missile the size of a loaf of French bread is being quietly tested in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles as the military searches for more deadly and far more precise robotic weapons for modern warfare.”

This tiny missile called the Spike will someday replace the 100-pound Hellfire missiles mounted on our Predator and more advanced Reaper unmanned aerial drones flying those assassination missions over the tribal lands of Pakistan. New weaponry like this is invariably promoted as being more “precise,” and so capable of causing less “collateral damage,” than whatever we’ve been using; that is, as an advance for humanity. But in this case, up to 12 of these powerful micro-weapons will someday replace the two Hellfires now capable of being mounted on a Predator, which means a future drone will have to come home far less often as it cruises the badlands of the planet looking for targets.

According to Pae, this new development is considered a “milestone” in weaponizing robot planes. Chillingly, he quotes Steven Zaloga, a military analyst with the Teal Group Corporation as saying, “We’re sort of at the same stage as we were in 1914 when we began to arm airplanes.”

Not only that but the Spike may someday soon be mounted on a new generation of more deadly drones, one of which, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems’ Avenger or Predator C, is already being tested. It will be able to fly 50% faster than the Reaper and at up to 60,000 feet for 20 hours before returning to base.

In other words, the decisions to be made in future panicky “crisis” meetings in Washington, when “American security” once again faces a “mortal threat,” are already being predetermined in the Mojave desert and elsewhere. In the Pentagon’s eternal arms race of one, a major vote is being cast at China Lake for future Terminator wars. In a crisis mood of desperation, we tend to fall back on what we know. This, too, plays into Washington’s national-security extremism.

By now it should be obvious enough that the military approaches to Afghanistan and Pakistan (or the newly merged Af-Pak battlefield) have been in the process of failing for years. Take just our drone wars: they are not only killing significant numbers of civilians, but also destabilizing Pakistan’s tribal lands — military and civilian officials there have long begged us to ground them — and so creating an anti-American atmosphere throughout that country. Recently, former advisor to Gen. David Petraeus and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen told Congress:

“We need to call off the drones… Since 2006, we’ve killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we’ve killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they’ve given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism… The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population.”

Sage advice. If President Obama temporarily suspended the Bush-era drone war, which his administration has recently escalated, it would represent a start down a different path, one not already strewn with the skeletons of failed policies. And while he’s at it — and here’s a little touch of extremism by American standards — why not declare a six-month moratorium on all drone research of any sort, a brief period to reconsider whether we really want to pursue such “solutions” ad infinitum?

Why not, in fact, call for a six-month moratorium on all weapons research? A long Pentagon holiday. Militarily, the U.S. is in no danger of losing significant military ground globally by shutting down its R&D machine for a time, while reconsidering whether it actually wants to lead the planet into a future filled with Spikes and Avengers.

If, however, nothing else was done, at least the president should order his national security team to calm down, skip those crisis meetings on Pakistan, tamp down the doomsday scenarios, and try to take a few minutes to imagine what the world looks like if you’re not in Washington or the skies over our planet. Are there really no solutions anywhere that don’t need to be engineered first in our national capital?

[Note: You could easily drown in the tsunami of recent semi-hysterical pieces about the Pakistan or Af-Pak situation. Fortunately, I have Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, Paul Woodward’s The War in Context, and Antiwar.com to depend on to help me sort through the crucial reportage of this moment. What would I do without them? Let me thank as well Christopher Holmes, TomDispatch Tokyo bureau chief, whose keen eye keeps these posts relatively free of goofs. Note as well the appearance of the first TD author photo in this piece. Site photographer Tam Turse took it. We’ll probably be phasing in more of her author photos over the coming months.]

Secretary Doomsday and the Empathy Gap

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 more than seven 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 hit 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.

In response — no less part of this formula — have been the denials issued by American military officials or coalition spokespeople that those killed were anything but insurgents, and the assurances of the accuracy of the intelligence information on which the strike or raid was based. In these years, American spokespeople have generally retreated from their initial claims only step by begrudging step, while doggedly waiting for any hubbub over the killings to die down. If that didn’t happen, an “investigation” would be launched (the investigators being, of course, members of the same military that had done the killing) and then prolonged, clearly in hopes that the investigation would outlast coverage of the “incident” and both would be forgotten in a flood of other events.

Forgotten? It’s true that we forget these killings easily — often we don’t notice them in the first place — since they don’t seem to impinge on our lives. Perhaps that’s one of the benefits of fighting a war on the periphery of empire, halfway across the planet in the backlands of some impoverished country.

One problem, though: the forgetting doesn’t work so well in those backlands. When your child, wife or husband, mother or father is killed, you don’t forget.

Only this week, our media was filled with ceremonies and remembrances centered around the tenth anniversary of the slaughter at Columbine High School. Twelve kids and a teacher blown away in a mad rampage. Who has forgotten? On the other side of the planet, there are weekly Columbines.

Similarly, every December 7th, we Americans still remember the dead of Pearl Harbor, almost seven decades in the past. We still have ceremonies for, and mourn, the dead of September 11, 2001. We haven’t forgotten. We’re not likely to forget. Why, when death rains down on our distant battlefields, should they?

Admittedly, there’s been a change in the assertion/repeated denial/investigation pattern instituted by American forces. Now, assertion and denial are sometimes followed relatively quickly by acknowledgement, apology, and payment. Now, when the irrefutable meets the unchallengeable, American spokespeople tend to own up to it. Yep, we killed them. Yep, they were women and kids. Nope, they had, as far as we know, nothing to do with terrorism. Yep, it was our fault and we’ll pony up for our mistake.

This new tactic is 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 — just goes on.

Once again, evidently, everyone is supposed to forget (or perhaps simply forgive). It’s war, after all. People die. Mistakes are made. As for those dead civilians, New York Times reporter Jane Perlez recently quoted a former Pakistani general on the hundreds of tribespeople killed in the Pakistani borderlands in air strikes by CIA-run drones: they are, he said, “likely hosting Qaeda militants and cannot be deemed entirely innocent.”

Exactly. Who in our world is “entirely innocent” anyway?

Apologies Not Accepted

A UN survey tallied up 2,118 civilians killed in Afghanistan in 2008, a significant rise over the previous year’s figure, of which 828 were ascribed to American, 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 undercounts.) There are, in other words, constant “incidents” to choose from.

Recently, for instance, there was an attack by a CIA drone in the Pakistani borderlands that Pakistani sources claim may have killed up to eight civilians; or there were the six civilians, including a three-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy, killed by an American air strike that leveled three houses in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province. Sixteen more Afghans, including children as young as one, were wounded in that air attack, based on “multiple intelligence sources” in which, the U.S. military initially claimed, only “enemy fighters” died. (As a recent study of the death-dealing weapons of the Iraq War, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, indicates, 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, air power “killed the most civilians per event.”)

But let’s consider here just one recent 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. 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 [be] held accountable for their actions and avoid all attacks on innocent civilians in the country.”

In accordance with its new policy, the U.S. issued an apology:

“Further inquiries into the Coalition and ANSF operation in Khost earlier today suggest that the people killed and wounded were not enemy combatants as previously reported… Coalition and Afghan forces do not believe that this family was involved with militant activities and that they were defending their home against an unknown threat… ‘We deeply regret the tragic loss of life in this precious family. Words alone cannot begin to express our regret and sympathy and we will ensure the surviving family members are properly cared for,’ said Brig. Gen. Michael A. Ryan, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan.”

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

The grieving husband, father, and brother said, “I want the coalition leaders to expose those behind this and punish them.” He added that “the Afghan government should resign if it could not protect its people.” (Don’t hold your breath on either count.) And 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.

What Your Safety Is Worth

All of this was 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 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. That first Afghan wedding party was obliterated in late December 2001 when an American air strike killed up to 110 Afghan revelers with only two survivors. The fifth one on record was blown away last year. And count on it, there will be a sixth.

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 planning to “surge” into the southern and eastern parts of the country later this year, 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 U.S. The previous president regularly claimed that we were fighting over there, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan, to keep Americans safe here; 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 when, on March 27th, President Obama announced his latest Afghan bailout plan, he, too, played the 9/11 card heavily. As he was reported to have put it recently, “he is not ‘naive about how dangerous this world is’ and [he] said he 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 two 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 at the time. The “Defense Department” imagined its job to be “power projection” abroad, not protecting American shores (or air space), and our 16 intelligence agencies were in chaos.

So those towers came down apocalyptically and it was horrible — and we couldn’t live with it. In response, we invaded a country (“no safe havens for terrorists”), rather than simply going after the group that had acted against us. In the process, the Bush administration went to extreme efforts to fetishize our own safety and security (and while they were at it, in part through the new Department of Homeland Security, they 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-grubbing and 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:

“Who on earth would ever want to harm the Weeki Wachee mermaids? It staggers the imagination. Still, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has named Weeki Wachee Springs as the potential terror target of Hernando County, according to a theme park official.

“The Weeki Wachee staff is teaming up with the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office to ‘harden the target’ by keeping the mermaid theater and the rest of the park safe from a potential terror attack, said marketing and promotion manager John Athanason… Terror-prevention plans for Weeki Wachee may include adding surveillance cameras, installing lights in the parking lot and securing areas in the roadside attraction where there may be ‘security breaches,’ he said. But Athanason is also realistic. He said Walt Disney World is a bigger attraction and is likely to receive more counterterrorism funds.”

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 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 30 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. Unless somehow we can think our way out of a strategy guaranteed to kill yet more civilians in expanding areas of South Asia, it will only get worse still.

Maybe it’s time to suck it up and put less value on the idea of absolute American safety, since in many ways the Bush administration definition of our safety and security, which did not go into retirement with George and Dick, is now in the process of breaking us. Looked at reasonably, even if Dick Cheney and his minions prevented another 9/11 (and there’s no evidence he did), in doing so look what he brought down around our ears. What a bad bargain it’s been — and all in the name of our safety, and ours alone.

Ask yourself these questions in the dead of night: Do we really want stories like Awal Khan’s to float up out of the villages of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and who knows where else for the next seven years? Or the next 30 for that matter? Does that seem reasonable? Does that seem right? Is your supposed safety worth that?

[Note of thanks: Jason Ditz of the invaluable website Antiwar.com has, in almost daily reports, been covering the issue of civilian casualties in the Af-Pak War, among other matters, like a blanket. I’ve leaned on his work heavily and thank him for it. I also continue to rely, as ever, on that eagle-eyed newshound and analyst Juan Cole at his Informed Comment website.]

Killing Civilians

In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a future Earth, sent a cyborg assassin, a “terminator,” back to our time. His job was to liquidate the woman who would give birth to John Connor, the leader of the underground human resistance of Skynet’s time. You with me so far? That, of course, was the plot of the first Terminator movie and for the multi-millions who saw it, the images of future machine war — of hunter-killer drones flying above a wasted landscape — are unforgettable.

Since then, as Hollywood’s special effects took off, there were two sequels during which the original terminator somehow morphed into a friendlier figure on screen, and even more miraculously, off-screen, into the humanoid governor of California. Now, the fourth film in the series, Terminator Salvation, is about to descend on us. It will hit our multiplexes this May.

Oh, sorry, I don’t mean hit hit. I mean, arrive in.

Meanwhile, hunter-killer drones haven’t waited for Hollywood. As you sit in that movie theater in May, actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless surveillance and assassination drones armed with Hellfire missiles, will be patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings. And in the Pentagon and the labs of defense contractors, UAV supporters are already talking about and working on next-generation machines. Post-2020, according to these dreamers, drones will be able to fly and fight, discern enemies and incinerate them without human decision-making. They’re even wondering about just how to program human ethics, maybe even American ethics, into them.

Okay, it may never happen, but it should still make you blink that out there in America are people eager to bring the fifth iteration of Terminator not to local multiplexes, but to the skies of our perfectly real world — and that the Pentagon is already funding them to do so.

An Arms Race of One

Now, keep our present drones, those MQ-1 Predators and more advanced MQ-9 Reapers, in mind for a moment. Remember that, as you read, they’re cruising Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani skies looking for potential “targets,” and in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, are employing what Centcom commander General David Petraeus calls “the right of last resort” to take out “threats” (as well as tribespeople who just happen to be in the vicinity). And bear with me while I offer you a little potted history of the modern arms race.

Think of it as starting in the early years of the twentieth century when Imperial Britain, industrial juggernaut and colonial upstart Germany, and Imperial Japan all began to plan and build new generations of massive battleships or dreadnoughts (followed by “super-dreadnoughts”) and so joined in a fierce naval arms race. That race took a leap onto land and into the skies in World War I when scientists and war planners began churning out techno-marvels of death and destruction meant to break the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western front.

Each year, starting in 1915, new or improved weaponry — poison gas, upgrades of the airplane, the tank and then the improved tank — appeared on or above the battlefield. Even as those marvels arrived, the next generation of weapons was already on the drawing boards. (In a sense, American auto makers took up the same battle plan in peacetime, unveiling new, ramped up car models each year.) As a result, when World War I ended in 1918, the war machinery of 1919 and 1920 was already being mapped out and developed. The next war, that is, and the weapons that would go with it were already in the mind’s eye of war planners.

From the first years of the twentieth century on, an obvious prerequisite for what would prove a never-ending arms race was two to four great powers in potential collision, each of which had the ability to mobilize scientists, engineers, universities, and manufacturing power on a massive scale. World War II was, in these terms, a bonanza for invention as well as destruction. It ended, of course, with the Manhattan Project, that ne plus ultra of industrial-sized invention for destruction, which produced the first atomic bomb, and so the Cold War nuclear arms race that followed.

In that 45-year-long brush with extinction, the United States and the Soviet Union each mobilized a military-industrial complex to build ever newer generations of ever more devastating nuclear weaponry and delivery systems for a MAD (mutually assured destruction) world. At the peak of that two-superpower arms race, the resulting arsenals had the mad capacity to destroy eight or ten planets our size.

In 1991, after 73 years, the Soviet Union, that Evil Empire, simply evaporated, leaving but a single superpower without rivals astride planet Earth. And then came the unexpected thing: the arms race, which had been almost a century in the making, did not end. Instead, the unimaginable occurred and it simply morphed into a “race” of one with a finish line so distant — the bomber of 2018, Earth-spanning weapons systems, a vast anti-ballistic missile system, and weaponry for the heavens of perhaps 2050 — as to imply eternity.

The Pentagon and the military-industrial complex surrounding it — including mega-arms manufacturers, advanced weapons labs, university science centers, and the official or semi-official think tanks that churned out strategies for future military domination — went right on. After a brief, post-Cold War blip of time in which “peace dividends” were discussed but not implemented, the “race” actually began to amp up again, and after September 11, 2001, went into overdrive against “Islamo-fascism” (aka the Global War on Terror, or the Long War).

In those years, our Evil Empire of the moment, except in the minds of a clutch of influential neocons, was a ragtag terrorist outfit made up of perhaps a few thousand adherents and scattered global wannabes, capable of mounting spectacular-looking but infrequent and surprisingly low-tech attacks on symbolic American (and other) targets. Against this enemy, the Pentagon budget became, for a while, an excuse for anything.

This brings us to our present unbalanced world of military might in which the U.S. accounts for nearly half of all global military spending and the total Pentagon budget is almost six times that of the next contender, China. Recently, the Chinese have announced relatively modest plans to build up their military and create a genuinely offshore navy. Similarly, the Russians have moved to downsize and refinance their tattered armed forces and the industrial complex that goes with them, while upgrading their weapons systems. This could potentially make the country more competitive when it comes to global arms dealing, a market more than half of which has been cornered by the U.S. They are also threatening to upgrade their “strategic nuclear forces,” even as Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama have agreed to push forward a new round of negotiations for nuclear reductions.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has just announced cutbacks in some of the more outré and futuristic military R&D programs inherited from the Cold War era. The Navy’s staggering 11 aircraft-carrier battle groups will over time also be reduced by one. Minor as that may seem, it does signal an imperial downsizing, given that the Navy refers to each of those carriers, essentially floating military bases, as “four and a half acres of sovereign U.S. territory.” Nonetheless, the Pentagon budget will grow modestly and the U.S. will remain in a futuristic arms race of one, a significant part of which involves reserving the skies as well as the heavens for American power.

Assassination by Air

Speaking of controlling those skies, let’s get back to UAVs. As futuristic weapons planning went, they started out pretty low-tech in the 1990s. Even today, the most commonplace of
the two American armed drones, the Predator, costs only $4.5 million a pop, while the most advanced model, that Reaper — both are produced by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems of San Diego — comes in at $15 million. (Compare that to $350 million for a single F-22 Raptor, which has proved essentially useless in America’s most recent counterinsurgency wars.) It’s lucky UAVs are cheap, since they are also prone to crashing. Think of them as snowmobiles with wings that have received ever more sophisticated optics and powerful weaponry.

They came to life as surveillance tools during the wars over the former Yugoslavia, were armed by February 2001, were hastily pressed into operation in Afghanistan after 9/11, and like many weapons systems, began to evolve generationally. As they did, they developed from surveillance eyes in the sky into something far more sinister and previously restricted to terra firma: assassins. One of the earliest armed acts of a CIA-piloted Predator, back in November 2002, was an assassination mission over Yemen in which a jeep, reputedly transporting six suspected al-Qaeda operatives, was incinerated.

Today, the most advanced UAV, the Reaper, housing up to four Hellfire missiles and two 500-pound bombs, packs the sort of punch once reserved for a jet fighter. Dispatched to the skies over the farthest reaches of the American empire, powered by a 1,000-horsepower turbo prop engine at its rear, the Reaper can fly at up to 21,000 feet for up to 22 hours (until fuel runs short), streaming back live footage from three cameras (or sending it to troops on the ground) — 16,000 hours of video a month.

No need to worry about a pilot dozing off during those 22 hours. The human crews “piloting” the drones, often from thousands of miles away, just change shifts when tired. So the planes are left to endlessly cruise Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani skies relentlessly seeking out, like so many terminators, specific enemies whose identities can, under certain circumstances — or so the claims go — be determined even through the walls of houses. When a “target” is found and agreed upon — in Pakistan, the permission of Pakistani officials to fire is no longer considered necessary — and a missile or bomb is unleashed, the cameras are so powerful that “pilots” can watch the facial expressions of those being liquidated on their computer monitors “as the bomb hits.”

Approximately 5,500 UAVs, mostly unarmed — less than 250 of them are Predators and Reapers — now operate over Iraq and the Af-Pak (as in the Afghanistan-Pakistan) theater of operations. Part of the more-than-century-long development of war in the air, drones have become favorites of American military planners. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in particular has demanded increases in their production (and in the training of their “pilots”) and urged that they be rushed in quantity into America’s battle zones even before being fully perfected.

And yet, keep in mind that the UAV still remains in its (frightening) infancy. Such machines are not, of course, advanced cyborgs. They are in some ways not even all that advanced. Because someone now wants publicity for the drone-war program, reporters from the U.S. and elsewhere have recently been given “rare behind-the-scenes” looks at how it works. As a result, and also because the “covert war” in the skies over Pakistan makes Washington’s secret warriors proud enough to regularly leak news of its “successes,” we know something more about how our drone wars work.

We know, for instance, that at least part of the Air Force’s Afghan UAV program runs out of Kandahar Air Base in southern Afghanistan. It turns out that, pilotless as the planes may be, a pilot does have to be nearby to guide them into the air and handle landings. As soon as the drone is up, a two-man team, a pilot and a “sensor monitor,” backed by intelligence experts and meteorologists, takes over the controls either at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, or at Creech Air Force Base northwest of Las Vegas, some 7,000-odd miles away. (Other U.S. bases may be involved as well.)

According to Christopher Drew of the New York Times, who visited Davis-Monthan where Air National Guard members handle the controls, the pilots sit unglamorously “at 1990s-style computer banks filled with screens, inside dimly lit trailers.” Depending on the needs of the moment, they can find themselves “over” either Afghanistan or Iraq, or even both on the same work shift. All of this is remarkably mundane — pilot complaints generally run to problems “transitioning” back to wife and children after a day at the joystick over battle zones — and at the same time, right out of Ali Baba’s One Thousand and One Nights.

In those dimly lit trailers, the UAV teams have taken on an almost godlike power. Their job is to survey a place thousands of miles distant (and completely alien to their lives and experiences), assess what they see, and spot “targets” to eliminate — even if on their somewhat antiquated computer systems it “takes up to 17 steps — including entering data into pull-down windows — to fire a missile” and incinerate those below. They only face danger, other than carpal tunnel syndrome, when they leave the job. A sign at Creech warns a pilot to “drive carefully”; “this, it says, is ‘the most dangerous part of your day.'” Those involved claim that the fear and thrill of battle do not completely escape them, but the descriptions we now have of their world sound discomfortingly like a cross between the far frontiers of sci-fi and a call center in India.

The most intense of our various drone wars, the one on the other side of the Afghan border in Pakistan, is also the most mysterious. We know that some or all of the drones engaged in it take off from Pakistani airfields; that this “covert war” (which regularly makes front-page news) is run by the CIA out of its headquarters in Langley, Virginia; that its pilots are also located somewhere in the U.S.; and that at least some of them are hired private contractors.

William Saletan of Slate has described our drones as engaged in “a bloodless, all-seeing airborne hunting party.” Of course, what was once an elite activity performed in person has been transformed into a 24/7 industrial activity fit for human drones.

Our drone wars also represent a new chapter in the history of assassination. Once upon a time, to be an assassin for a government was a furtive, shameful thing. In those days, of course, an assassin, if successful, took down a single person, not the targeted individual and anyone in the vicinity (or simply, if targeting intelligence proves wrong, anyone in the vicinity). No more poison-dart-tipped umbrellas, as in past KGB operations, or toxic cigars as in CIA ones — not now that assassination has taken to the skies as an every day, all-year-round activity.

Today, we increasingly display our assassination wares with pride. To us, at least, it seems perfectly normal for assassination aerial operations to be a part of an open discussion in Washington and in the media. Consider this a new definition of “progress” in our world.

Proliferation and Sovereignty

This brings us back to arms races. They may be things of the past, but don’t for a minute imagine that those hunter-killer skies won’t someday fill with the drones of other nations. After all, one of the truths of our time is that no weapons system, no matter where first created, can be kept for long as private property. Today, we talk not of arms races, but of “proliferation,” which is what you have once a global arms race of one takes hold.

In drone-world, the Chinese, the Russians, the Israelis, the Pakistanis, the Georgians, and the Iranians, among others, already have drones. In the Lebanon War of 2006, Hezbollah flew drones over I
srael. In fact, if you have the skills, you can create your own drone, more or less in your living room (as your basic DIY drone website indicates). Undoubtedly, the future holds unnerving possibilities for small groups intent on assassination from the air.

Already the skies are growing more crowded. Three weeks ago, President Obama issued what Reuters termed “an unprecedented videotaped appeal to Iran… offering a ‘new beginning’ of diplomatic engagement to turn the page on decades of U.S. policy toward America’s longtime foe.” It was in the form of a Persian New Year’s greeting. As the New York Times also reported, the U.S. military beat the president to the punch. They sent their own “greetings” to the Iranians a couple of days earlier.

After considering what Times reporters Rod Nordland and Alissa J. Rubin term “the delicacy of the incident at a time when the United States is seeking a thaw in its relations with Iran,” the U.S. military sent out Col. James Hutton to meet the press and “confirm” that “allied aircraft” had shot down an “Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle” over Iraq on February 25th, more than three weeks earlier. Between that day and mid-March, the relevant Iraqi military and civilian officials were, the Times tells us, not informed. The reason? That drone was intruding on our (borrowed) airspace, not theirs. You probably didn’t know it, but according to an Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman, “protection of Iraqi airspace remains an American responsibility for the next three years.”

And naturally enough, we don’t want other countries’ drones in “our” airspace, though that’s hardly likely to stop them. The Iranians, for instance, have already announced the development of “a new generation of ‘spy drones’ that provide real-time surveillance over enemy terrain.”

Of course, when you openly control squads of assassination drones patrolling airspace over other countries, you’ve already made a mockery of whatever national sovereignty might once have meant. It’s a precedent that may someday even make us distinctly uncomfortable. But not right now.

If you doubt this, check out the stream of self-congratulatory comments being leaked by Washington officials about our drone assassins. These often lead off news pieces about America’s “covert war” over Pakistan (“An intense, six-month campaign of Predator strikes in Pakistan has taken such a toll on Al Qaeda that militants have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust, U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials say…”); but be sure to read to the end of such pieces. Somewhere in them, after the successes have been touted and toted up, you get the bad news: “In fact, the stepped-up strikes have coincided with a deterioration in the security situation in Pakistan.”

In Pakistan, a war of machine assassins is visibly provoking terror (and terrorism), as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no means fundamentalists. It is part of a larger destabilization of the country.

To those who know their air power history, that shouldn’t be so surprising. Air power has had a remarkably stellar record when it comes to causing death and destruction, but a remarkably poor one when it comes to breaking the will of nations, peoples, or even modest-sized organizations. Our drone wars are destructive, but they are unlikely to achieve Washington’s goals.

The Future Awaits Us

If you want to read the single most chilling line yet uttered about drone warfare American-style, it comes at the end of Christopher Drew’s piece. He quotes Brookings Institution analyst Peter Singer saying of our Predators and Reapers: “[T]hese systems today are very much Model T Fords. These things will only get more advanced.”

In other words, our drone wars are being fought with the airborne equivalent of cars with cranks, but the “race” to the horizon is already underway. By next year, some Reapers will have a far more sophisticated sensor system with 12 cameras capable of filming a two-and-a-half mile round area from 12 different angles. That program has been dubbed “Gorgon Stare”, but it doesn’t compare to the future 92-camera Argus program whose initial development is being funded by the Pentagon’s blue-skies outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Soon enough, a single pilot may be capable of handling not one but perhaps three drones, and drone armaments will undoubtedly grow progressively more powerful and “precise.” In the meantime, BAE Systems already has a drone four years into development, the Taranis, that should someday be “completely autonomous”; that is, it theoretically will do without human pilots. Initial trials of a prototype are scheduled for 2010.

By 2020, so claim UAV enthusiasts, drones could be engaging in aerial battle and choosing their victims themselves. As Robert S. Boyd of McClatchy reported recently, “The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to fire their weapons.”

It’s a particular sadness of our world that, in Washington, only the military can dream about the future in this way, and then fund the “arms race” of 2018 or 2035. Rest assured that no one with a governmental red cent is researching the health care system of 2018 or 2035, or the public education system of those years.

In the meantime, the skies of our world are filling with round-the-clock assassins. They will only evolve and proliferate. Of course, when we check ourselves out in the movies, we like to identify with John Connor, the human resister, the good guy of this planet, against the evil machines. Elsewhere, however, as we fight our drone wars ever more openly, as we field mechanical techno-terminators with all-seeing eyes and loose our missiles from thousands of miles away (“Hasta la Vista, Baby!”), we undoubtedly look like something other than a nation of John Connors to those living under the Predators. It may not matter if the joysticks and consoles on those advanced machines are somewhat antiquated; to others, we are now the terminators of the planet, implacable machine assassins.

True, we can’t send our drones into the past to wipe out the young Ayman al-Zawahiri in Cairo or the teenage Osama bin Laden speeding down some Saudi road in his gray Mercedes sedan. True, the UAV enthusiasts, who are already imagining all-drone wars run by “ethical” machines, may never see anything like their fantasies come to pass. Still, the fact that without the help of a single advanced cyborg we are already in the process of creating a Terminator planet should give us pause for thought… or not.

[Note for TomDispatch readers: I particularly recommend the Christopher Drew New York Times piece cited above, “Drones Are Weapons of Choice in Fighting Qaeda,” which gives a vivid picture of our drone wars at home. In addition, let me offer a small bow to Nick Turse, who, back in 2004, began writing at this site about the way our government has restricted blue-skies dreaming to the military. To keep up on drones and drone warfare, there is no better place to start than Noah Shachtman’s Danger Room blog at Wired.com. It’s a must. To kee
p track of drone strikes as they occur in our world, keep an eye on Antiwar.com. And a final note of thanks to Christopher Holmes, whose keen copyediting eye makes this process so much less embarrassing than it might otherwise be.]

Terminator Planet

Let’s start by stopping.

It’s time, as a start, to stop calling our expanding war in Central and South Asia “the Afghan War” or “the Afghanistan War.” If Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke doesn’t want to, why should we? Recently, in a BBC interview, he insisted that “the ‘number one problem’ in stabilizing Afghanistan was Taliban sanctuaries in western Pakistan, including tribal areas along the Afghan border and cities like Quetta” in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

And isn’t he right? After all, the U.S. seems to be in the process of trading in a limited war in a mountainous, poverty-stricken country of 27 million people for one in an advanced nation of 167 million, with a crumbling economy, rising extremism, advancing corruption, and a large military armed with nuclear weapons. Worse yet, the war in Pakistan seems to be expanding inexorably (and in tandem with American war planning) from the tribal borderlands ever closer to the heart of the country.

These days, Washington has even come up with a neologism for the change: “Af-Pak,” as in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations. So, in the name of realism and accuracy, shouldn’t we retire “the Afghan War” and begin talking about the far more disturbing “Af-Pak War”?

And while we’re at it, maybe we should retire the word “surge” as well. Right now, as the Obama plan for that Af-Pak War is being “rolled out,” newspaper headlines have been surging when it comes to accepting the surge paradigm. Long before the administration’s “strategic review” of the war had even been completed, President Obama was reportedly persuaded by former Iraq surge commander, now CentCom commander, General David Petraeus to “surge” another 17,000 troops into Afghanistan, starting this May.

For the last two weeks, news has been filtering out of Washington of an accompanying civilian “surge” into Afghanistan (“Obama’s Afghanistan ‘surge’: diplomats, civilian specialists”). Oh, and then there’s to be that opium-eradication surge and a range of other so-called surges. As the headlines have had it: “1,400 Isle Marines to join Afghanistan surge,” “U.S. troop surge to aid Afghan police trainers,” “Seabees build to house surge,” “Afghan Plan Detailed As Iraq Surge ‘Lite,'” and so on.

It seems to matter little that even General Petraeus wonders whether the word should be applied. (“The commander of the U.S. Central Command said Friday that an Iraq-style surge cannot be a solution to the problems in Afghanistan.”) There are, however, other analogies that might better capture the scope and nature of the new strategic plan for the Af-Pak War. Think bailout. Think A.I.G.

The Costs of an Expanding War

In truth, what we’re about to watch should be considered nothing less than the Great Afghan (or Af-Pak) bailout.

On Friday morning, the president officially rolled out his long-awaited “comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan,” a plan without a name. If there was little news in it, that was only because of the furious leaking of prospective parts of it over the previous weeks. So many trial balloons, so little time.

In a recent “60 Minutes” interview (though not in his Friday announcement), the president also emphasized the need for an “exit strategy” from the war. Similarly, American commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, has been speaking of a possible “tipping point,” three to five years away, that might lead to “eventual departure.” Nonetheless, almost every element of the new plan — both those the president mentioned Friday and the no-less-crucial ones that didn’t receive a nod — seem to involve the word “more”; that is, more U.S. troops, more U.S. diplomats, more civilian advisors, more American and NATO military advisors to train more Afghan troops and police, more base and outpost building, more opium-eradication operations, more aid, more money to the Pakistani military — and strikingly large-scale as that may be, all of that doesn’t even include the “covert war,” fought mainly via unmanned aerial vehicles, along the Pakistani tribal borderlands, which is clearly going to intensify.

In the coming year, that CIA-run drone war, according to leaked reports, may be expanded from the tribal areas into Pakistan’s more heavily populated Baluchistan province where some of the Taliban leadership is supposedly holed up. In addition, so reports in British papers claim, the U.S. is seriously considering a soft coup-in-place against Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Disillusioned with the widespread corruption in, and inefficiency of, his government, the U.S. would create a new “chief executive” or prime ministerial post not in the Afghan constitution — and then install some reputedly less corrupt (and perhaps more malleable) figure. Karzai would supposedly be turned into a figurehead “father of the nation.” Envoy Holbrooke has officially denied that Washington is planning any such thing, while a spokesman for Karzai denounced the idea (both, of course, just feeding the flames of the Afghan rumor mill).

What this all adds up to is an ambitious doubling down on just about every bet already made by Washington in these last years — from the counterinsurgency war against the Taliban and the counter-terrorism war against al-Qaeda to the financial love/hate relationship with the Pakistani military and its intelligence services underway since at least the Nixon years of the early 1970s. (Many of the flattering things now being said by U.S. officials about Pakistani Chief of the Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, for instance, were also said about the now fallen autocrat Pervez Musharraf when he held the same position.)

Despite that mention of the need for an exit strategy and a presidential assurance that both the Afghan and Pakistani governments will be held to Iraqi-style “benchmarks” of accountability in the period to come, Obama’s is clearly a jump-in-with-both-feet strategy and, not surprisingly, is sure to involve a massive infusion of new funds. Unlike with A.I.G., where the financial inputs of the U.S. government are at least announced, we don’t even have a ballpark figure for how much is actually involved right now, but it’s bound to be staggering. Just supporting those 17,000 new American troops already ordered into Afghanistan, many destined to be dispatched to still-to-be-built bases and outposts in the embattled southern and eastern parts of the country for which all materials must be trucked in, will certainly cost billions.

Recently, the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus dug up some of the construction and transportation costs associated with the war in Afghanistan and found that, as an employer, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers comes in second only to the Afghan government in that job-desperate country. The Corps is spending about $4 billion this year alone on road-building activities, and has slated another $4-$6 billion for more of the same in 2010; it has, according to Pincus, already spent $2 billion constructing facilities for the expanding Afghan army and police forces, and has another $1.2 billion set aside for more such facilities this year. It is also likely to spend between $400 million and $1.4 billion on as many as six new bases, assorted outposts, and associated air fields American troops will be sent to in the south.

Throw in hardship pay, supplies, housing, and whatever else for the hundreds of diplomats and advisors in that promised “civilian surge”; add in the $1.5 billion a year the president promised in economic aid to Pakistan over the next five years, a tripling of such aid (as urged by Vice President Biden when he was still a senator); add in unknown amounts of aid to the Pakistani and Afghan militaries. Tote it up and you’ve just scratched the surface of Washington’s coming investment in the Af-Pak War. (And lest you imagine that these costs might, at least, be offset by savings from Obama’s plan to draw down American forces in Iraq, think again. A recent study by the Government Accountability Office suggests that “Iraq-related expenditures” will actually increase “during the withdrawal and for several years after its completion.”)

Put all this together and you can see why the tactical word “surge” hardly covers what’s about to happen. The administration’s “new” strategy and its “new” thinking — including its urge to peel off less committed Taliban supporters and reach out for help to regional powers — should really be re-imagined as but another massive attempted bailout, this time of an Afghan project, now almost 40 years old, that in foreign policy terms is indeed our A.I.G.

Graveyard Thinking

As Obama’s economic team overseeing the various financial bailouts is made up of figures long cozy with Wall Street, so his foreign policy team is made up of figures deeply entrenched in Washington’s national security state — former Clintonistas (including the penultimate Clinton herself), military figures like National Security Adviser General James Jones, and that refugee from the H.W. Bush era, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. They are classic custodians of empire. Like the economic team, they represent the ancien régime.

They’ve now done their “stress tests,” which, in the world of foreign policy, are called “strategic reviews.” They recognize that unexpected forces are pressing in on them. They grasp that the American global system, as it existed since the truncated American century began, is in danger. They’re ready to bite the bullet and bail it out. Their goal is to save what they care about in ways that they know.

Unfortunately, the end result is likely to be that, as with A.I.G., we, the American people, could end up “owning” 80% of the Af-Pak project without ever “nationalizing” it — without ever, that is, being in actual control. In fact, if things go as badly as they could in the Af-Pak War, A.I.G. might end up looking like a good deal by comparison.

The foreign policy team is no more likely to exhibit genuinely outside-the-box thinking than the team of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers has been. Their clear and desperate urge is to operate in the known zone, the one in which the U.S. is always imagined to be part of the solution to any problem on the planet, never part of the problem itself.

In foreign policy (as in economic policy), it took the Bush team less than eight years to steer the ship of state into the shallows where it ran disastrously aground. And yet, in response, after months of “strategic review,” this team of inside-the-Beltway realists has come up with a combination of Af-Pak War moves that are almost blindingly expectable.

In the end, this sort of thinking is likely to leave the Obama administration hostage to its own projects as well as unprepared for the onrush of the unexpected and unknown, whose arrival may be the only thing that can be predicted with assurance right now. Whether as custodians of the imperial economy or the imperial frontier, Obama’s people are lashed to the past, to Wall Street and the national security state. They are ill-prepared to take the necessary full measure of our world.

If you really want a “benchmark” for measuring how our world has been shifting on its axis, consider that we have all lived to see a Chinese premier appear at what was, in essence, an international news conference and seriously upbraid Washington for its handling of the global economy. That might have been surprising in itself. Far more startling was the response of Washington. A year ago, the place would have been up in arms. This time around, from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs (“There’s no safer investment in the world than in the United States…”) to the president himself (“Not just the Chinese government, but every investor can have absolute confidence in the soundness of investments in the United States…”), Washington’s response was to mollify and reassure.

Face it, we’ve entered a new universe. The “homeland” is in turmoil, the planetary frontiers are aboil. Change — even change we don’t want to believe in — is in the air.

In the end, as with the Obama economic team, so the foreign policy team may be pushed in new directions sooner than anyone imagines and, willy-nilly, into some genuinely new thinking about a collapsing world. But not now. Not yet. Like our present financial bailouts, like that extra $30 billion that went into A.I.G. recently, the new Obama plan is superannuated on arrival. It represents graveyard thinking.

A.I.G…

Af-Pak War…

R.I.P.