There are questions we should ask and answers we should know
Note: I’ve bolded the most important links, plus all the questions.
The Algerian man - Sufyian Barhoumi - sent home after nearly 20 years of imprisonment:
”The United States eventually determined he was involved with various extremist groups but was not a member of al-Qaida or the Taliban, according to a report by a review board at the prison that approved him for release in 2016.
U.S. authorities attempted to prosecute Barhoumi in 2008 but the effort was dropped amid legal challenges to the initial version of the military commission system set up under President George W. Bush.”
’involved with various extremist groups’…. was it the Proud Boys? The Oathkeepers? QAnon? Twenty years is a long time to be held without trial for not doing anything to the United States. Is our government based on a system of law or not? And what does ‘involved with’ mean? Did he join a group that wanted to overthrow our government like Ginni Thomas did? Will these guys get imprisoned for 19+ years for ‘being involved with various extremist groups’?
Barhoumi lost 4 fingers in a land mine explosion in Afghanistan sometime before he was arrested in 2002. Since we had no troops in Afghanistan at the time, presumably the land mine was placed by the Russians or Afghani government from their prior war. I wonder if I’d be tempted to join extremist groups if I lost 4 fingers from a land mine. Land mines kill and maim innocent victims for years after they were planted, in every war where land mines are used. Twenty years of imprisonment without a trial, with no known acts of violence against the US seems a bit wrong.
There’s 37 men left at Guantanamo. 18 are eligible to be repatriated or resettled elsewhere, so only 19 are considered too dangerous to be released still. We certainly should have bedspace in our maximum security prisons for them. So why aren’t we giving them trials and transferring them so Guantanamo can be shut down?
If justice is important in the US more people need to ask this.
And since it was the Taliban that sheltered Bin Laden for a bit and we warred with them and killed some of them while they killed some of us in return, isn’t it odd that recently we worked out a peace treaty with them, even though they had American blood on their hands (unlike Barhoumi)?
No, it’s not odd. Every peace treaty that ends a war is between people with blood on their hands. Which leads to another question.
After the terror attack of 9/11, our government demanded that the Taliban turn over Bin Laden. They refused. They indicated that a trial in absentia would be necessary to demonstrate that Bin Laden was responsible before they’d hand him over. President Bush wasn’t having any of that bullshit, so he launched a war with Afghanistan to eliminate the Taliban and al-Qaida, with overwhelming support for that action. Democrat, Republican, conservative, moderate, liberal didn’t matter. Most Americans in each of this groups felt that al-Qaida and the Taliban had to go.
But Bin Laden escaped the initial attempts to capture him. No one’s sure whether he hid in virtually impenetrable mountais in Tora Bora for awhile before ultimately settling in at a military compound in Pakistan. President Bush failed to locate, arrest or kill him from 9/11/2001 through 1/20/2009 when he left office. That’s more than 7 years and 4 months of failure.
Replaced by President Obama, who ultimately succeeded in tracking him down and taking him out in 2 years, 3 months and 13 days. He was in a Pakistani military compound. So here’s my questions:
1) Why do some Trump supporters believe Trump got Bin Laden? Bin Laden was dead for more than 5-1/2 years when Trump took office.
2) President Biden pulled the last US combat troops out of Afghanistan on 8/30/2021. Why did it take more than 10 years after Bin Laden was killed to end the longest war in US history?
3) During the largest airlift in world history, as the US military, US diplomats, and Afghanis who provided critical support were pulled out of the country, a suicide bomber - not the Taliban - pulled a surprise attack. 13 US troops were killed and dozens of Afghani civilians were wounded at the Kabul airport.
Over the 19+ year war (the longest war in US history outside of the one fought against the indigenous tribes of North America) 2,325 US troops died. In the final years of that war, we lost 29 in 2017-2018, 23 in 2019, 11 in 2020 and those 13 members in 2021 just 4 days before our exit was completed. Why do some politicians and the sketchiest news outlets (that consider entertainment and propaganda more important than factual reporting) insist that President Biden is worse than his predecessors, when he lost the fewest troops in Afghanistan (13) by any measure?
4) In order of the fatalities of all the major wars fought since our government was founded, we lost the most people (soldiers and civilians) in the Civil War (620,000), World War 2, World War 1, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Iraq War of this century (4,492), the Philippine-American War, the numerous battles against many indigenous tribes that US government troops conducted in the 1800s*, and the Spanish-American War…. and the War in Afghanistan lost fewer US troops than any of those. The only major mobilization of US troops with fewer US troop deaths were the first War on Iraq ordered by the first President Bush in 1991, which was a short, 43 day war that accomplished its mission (getting Iraq troops out of Kuwait) then withdrew (294 US troops killed) and the intervention against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that saw 76 US fatalities over nearly 5 years. (fatalities list here) (*a correct accounting is impossible to attain, as battles with indigenous tribes stretches back for more than 150 years before the national federal government became official)
The questions: isn’t perspective like this important in weighing the costs of war? And in determining the effectiveness of war strategies?
5) I’m going to be presumptuous here. I assume most people would answer ‘yes’ to the last two questions. We only lost 2,325 troops in the 19+ year Afghanistan War which sounds like a war waged very efficiently. But more perspective is required.
From Wikipedia, the monetary costs: The Pentagon's near-final estimate of the cost of the war in Afghanistan, including reconstruction, was $825 billion. This was provided in its 2020 year-end "Cost of War Report."[534] Another estimate that was recognized by US President Joe Biden put the costs at over $2 trillion.[535] As of 2013, the UK's contribution to the war in Afghanistan came to £37 billion ($56.46 billion).[536] For years, US officials had considered the cost of the war while discussing when to draw down troops.[537] In 2011, for example, the average cost of deploying a US soldier in Afghanistan exceeded US$1 million a year.[538] In March 2013, Linda Bilmes at Harvard Kennedy School estimated that the long-term costs of the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would come to total at least US$4 to $6 trillion, with a significant portion of the cost due to disability for veterans and interest payments on debt through to 2050.[539][540] As of 2021, Brown University estimates that the war in Afghanistan has already cost $2.261 trillion, out of which $530 billion has been spent on interest payments and $296 billion has been spent on veterans' care.[90]
Gee, that escalated rapidly. And how is this for inefficiency?
Corruption and inefficiency resulted in significant amounts of international aid not reaching their intended targets. In the first decade of the war, the United States lost between $31 and $60 billion to waste and fraud.[541] In the summer of 2013, preparing for withdrawal the following year, the US military destroyed over 77,000 metric tons of equipment and vehicles worth over $7 billion that could not be shipped back to the United States. Some was sold to Afghans as scrap metal.[542] In 2013, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a US government oversight body, criticized the misuse or waste of hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid, including the $772 million purchase of aircraft for the Afghan military especially since "the Afghans lack the capacity to operate and maintain them".[543]
In interviews conducted for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction's Lessons Learned Program, one interviewee estimated that 40 percent of US aid to Afghanistan since 2001 ended up in the pockets of corrupt officials, warlords, criminals and insurgents.[544] Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, told the investigators in a 2016 interview, "You just cannot put those amounts of money into a very fragile state and society, and not have it fuel corruption."[545]
Afghanistan is considered the second most corrupt country in the world now. It was probably the same before we went in. It’s really held together more by geography than national unity as it’s been ruled by the Taliban and regional warlords. It’s rarely had a strong federal government. When the USSR (Russia) invaded in the 1970s, it was further destabilized. The resistance to the Soviet troops was fueled by guerrilla forces who were armed heavily by the US government. That Cold War strategy proved effective as the costs helped break the USSR apart.
That’s not the first example of the futility of trying to defeat Afghanistan. The history of failures stretches back hundreds of years. So I presumed when a war was launched in 2001 in response to the 9/11 attacks that US planners would go after Bin Laden and other al-Qaida members, then we’d get out. I presumed wrong.
Instead they gave us our longest war since the US government was formed, an expensive and wasteful war. Our military planners in the think tanks and war colleges screwed up. Any US politicians who thought Afghani citizens would eagerly embrace the puppet government we installed or democracy itself badly misjudged. That puppet government mainly ruled the capital, Kabul, while the Taliban ruled most of the country.
It’s not that most of the populace of Afghanistan is corrupt. But the Soviet War, the Taliban fight to rule the country, then our 19+ year war have destroyed their economy. That, and global warming, has devastated their agriculture. Now they’re facing one of the worst famines in the world.
And it’s understandable that many Americans, worn out by that war and the other wars of the past two decades, are likely thinking ‘Fuck them. Let them die.’
Which really isn’t efficient, or ethical. Thank you, US military planners. You did this. And not a single one of you will be held accountable.
I strongly urge you to read the section called ‘NATO’s Inability To Stabilize Afghanistan’.
The section is mis-titled because the policies there were developed by US military planners and politicians, not NATO. NATO rubberstamped the policies that Bush and Cheney put together. Only Tony Blair of the UK was eager to invade Iraq, which further undermined the outcome in Afghanistan. Tens of millions of people in the US and Europe marched and protested hoping to convince Bush and Cheney not to launch a war against Iraq based on flimsy evidence from long discredited people like Ahmed Chalabi.
And certainly, Pakistan, Russia, Iran and China - at least - were eager to make hay with that mistake. It led to more corruption in Iraq, led to the faulty conclusion that numerous Arab governments would replace their autocrats with democracies and led to the creation of ISIL which possessed large swaths of Syria before the US, the Kurds, Syria and Russia eventually destroyed that threat.
One key conclusion in that section I’ll note: “In December 2019 The Washington Post published 2,000 pages of government documents, mostly transcripts of interviews with more than 400 key figures involved in prosecuting the Afghanistan war. According to the Post and the Guardian, the documents (dubbed the Afghanistan Papers) showed that US officials consistently and deliberately misled the American public about the unwinnable nature of the conflict,[558]”
I understand that the war planners and politicians - and others - would refute these contentions with comments like ‘Geopolitics isn’t simple.’ (Well duh) and ‘You’re being naive about the nature of people, especially warlike people’ (I’m not) and ‘Don’t play the both-sider game; the US leaders have motives more moral than Putin today.’ I’m actually not playing any game and comparative morality misses my points completely.
For one thing, a vast majority of Afghanis were very supportive when we initially knocked the Taliban out of power. They hoped for a more just society with more economic strength than eking out survival as they were doing under Taliban rule. I’m saying our planners screwed up the follow through, eroded that support and left Afghanis distrusting us.
The War on Iraq was worse. Strategically, it mainly benefited Iran. Corrupt politicians there bled us financially. It benefited fresh groups like ISIS, causing more deaths, costs, violence, etc. But yeah, the invasion itself was wrong. Strategically wrong and ethically wrong.
I was not surprised. The neocon politicians had been urging that war since the mid 1990s. And, as an amateur historian, I’ve come to understand that leaders with great resumes or bad make some foreign policy mistakes, pretty much all of them since WW1. FDR, who helped lift us out of the Depression, created the most effective anti-poverty program in US history (Social Security) and helped defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japan? He turned away Jewish refugee ships fleeing Hitler and interned Americans of Japanese descent.
To a degree, foreign policy is always a crapshoot and we should expect some mistakes to be made. But we absolutely should not tolerate spectacular and repetitious fuckups. And we must demand better follow-throughs that don’t lead to major blowbacks.
Consider these numbers:
We lost less than 2400 troops in the 19+ year war in Afghanistan. But, via Wikipedia:
During the War in Afghanistan, according to the Costs of War Project the war killed 176,000 people in Afghanistan; 46,319 civilians, 69,095 military and police and at least 52,893 opposition fighters. However, the death toll is possibly higher due to unaccounted deaths by "disease, loss of access to food, water, infrastructure, and/or other indirect consequences of the war."[1] According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the conflict killed 212,191 people.[2]
We only did a good job dismantling al-Qaida and keeping our troops safe.
And in Iraq, 4,431 fatalities were incurred by US forces. Depending on the way counting was done, between 151,000 and 1,033,000 people died in Iraq due to our unprovoked war. Though every estimate is disputed due to the differing factors used in compiling the data, due to direct or indirect causes it’s not a stretch to conclude that at least half a million people in Iraq died. Why?
If Saddam Hussein and his sons were a threat to the US, it took 9 months to capture him and kill his sons. That’s where we could easily have said ‘mission accomplished’ and left, sparing hundreds of thousands of lives. As noted before, though, I don’t think there’s a sustainable argument that he was a threat to the US to justify the war at all.
Hussein had no part in the 9-11 attacks. Because of the no-fly zones that Clinton instituted in the 1990s, his military capacities were greatly weakened. And from the pre-war UN inspections and beyond, it looks like any effort to produce nuclear weapons was being sabotaged from within.
He was a serious nuisance factor to Saudi Arabia and Israel but the damage done to that populace and the subsequent wars it spawned is different from a standard foreign policy mistake. In modern parlance, it was a massive clusterfuck. And a widely predicted one.
The financial costs of the Iraq War ranged from 758 billion to 1.1 trillion dollars. Dick Cheney estimated it would be a 2 year war that cost 100 billion. Counting delayed costs like aiding wounded veterans and interest on borrowed funds, $3 trillion is the estimated conservative cost. For that so-called mistake, we handed Dick Cheney a very comfortable retirement. That, too, is wrong.
Meanwhile in Ukraine now:
“Rape is an underreported crime and stigmatised issue even in peaceful times. I am worried that what we learn about is just going to be the tip of the iceberg.”
Rape and sexual assault are considered war crimes and a breach of international humanitarian law, and both Ukraine’s prosecutor general and the international Criminal Court have said they will open investigations into reported sexual violence. But what currently seems like a far-off possibility of justice has done little to assuage Ukrainian women’s fears of what may yet happen in a war that is far from over.
Antonina Medvedchuk, 31, said that when she woke up to the sound of bombing on the day the war broke out, the first things she grabbed before leaving Kyiv were condoms and scissors to use as a weapon to protect herself.
“Every break between curfew and bombing I was looking for emergency contraception instead of a basic first aid kit,” she said. “My mother tried to reassure me: ‘This is not a war like that, they don’t exist anymore, they are from old movies.’ I have been a feminist for eight years, and I cried in silence, because all wars are like this.”
”Because all wars are like this” should be loud and clear. Not just rape, but torture, deliberate killing of civilians and other war crimes occur. ON BOTH SIDES.
There’s my bothsider argument. It’s not about political parties. It does not suggest that a defensive war is unethical. It just states the obvious, that war crimes are a fact in all wars. And, of course, some folks have a hard time understanding why a torture or a rape is worse than bombing someone into oblivion.
All offensive wars are a crime per my moral compass. We went to war for defensive reasons in Afghanistan. I favored that, but in retrospect, there may have been better alternatives that would effectively spare more lives on all sides. But Iraq was an offensive war. Not only was that a crime but politicians who tried to justify ineffective practices like torture are war criminals too.
That’s a direct comparison to what Putin is doing. He’s doing it more openly and killing more indiscriminately but his lies mirror the lies we heard from Bush and Cheney. All three should be prosecuted.
After 9/11, the outpouring of sympathy was global. With only 2 or 3 exceptions, the world mourned with us and spoke of the things our country has done pretty well. All that was frittered away by Bush and Cheney which is yet another immeasurable cost of that ill-conceved war.
But…. even that does not justify what Putin’s been doing long before this year. Assassinations of critics, imprisonment of tens of thousands of citizens opposed to his policies, his efforts to rebuild another USSR with implied threats to use nuclear weapons? Far worse than Bush & Cheney’s war crimes.
Whether you agree or not, my biggest point is we can avoid more of this type of human evil. There are solutions. This is not an inherent character flaw of all humans. We can proceed to a human-caused armageddon if you’d rather. Or we can fix things.
Yes, there are solutions. Stay tuned.
