US occupation in Afghanistan sharpens divisions & fails to win hearts and minds

Amy Goodman interviews Nir Rosen on Democracy Now!, December 2, 2009

http://democracynow.org/2009/12/2/nir_rosen_we_managed_to_make

Nir Rosen: “We Managed to Make the Taliban Look Good”

Nir Rosen, independent journalist and fellow at the NYU Center on Law and Security, responds to President Obama decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Rosen has covered both Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. His latest articles cover the current state of the US occupations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. See his article, "Something from Nothing: US Strategy in Afghanistan," in the Boston Review at http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.1/rosen,php

Excerpts from Interview

AMY GOODMAN: We’re here in the new Printing Press studios and joining us in New York, along with Andrew Bacevich in Boston BU professor, here in New York is independent journalist and fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security, Nir Rosen. He has covered Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. His latest articles cover the current state of the U.S. occupations in both countries, Iraq and Afghanistan. They appear in the Boston Review. Nir Rosen, welcome to Democracy Now! Your thoughts after the West Point address of President Obama announcing the surge of 30,000 troops? Though that is not it, because his General Stanley McChrystal wanted 40,000, he is pushing for NATO to supply the rest and they are saying it will be in the range of 5000. Of course we do not know the military contractors that will accompany all of these soldiers.

NIR ROSEN: Well, it is really no surprise. Even if Obama hadn’t wanted to escalate the troops, he is under so much political pressure that he would of had to, but I would have at least liked to hear the words Kashmir and Palestine. If we are talking about Al Qaeda and the whole reason for why we are in Afghanistan allegedly is this threat from Al Qaeda which has been severely exaggerated, then at least understand their motives. Their chief motives are the Indian occupation of Kashmir, the Israeli and American backed occupation of Palestine. These are the motives. If your goal is to weaken Al Qaeda, understand their motives, address their grievances....

AMY GOODMAN:What about President Obama talking about building up the Afghan forces in order for the U.S. troops to step down in, what, about a year and one-half, June, July 2011?

NIR ROSEN: Nobody familiar with the Afghan security forces really expects this to happen. Having spent time with them—I don’t even know if it is a good thing. I mean, the McChrystal report or assessment identified the Afghan police as one of the main problems in the country, so your going to double them? —So you’re going to double? Basically the Afghan police are the recruiters for the Taliban. They oppress the population. They are mostly on drugs. They are incompetent. Some of them are very brave and they are being killed in large numbers, but your going to double this corrupt and oppressive force? That is truly not going to win you any support among the local population. The Afghan army, meanwhile, which we have spent billions on, was a failure. We saw in the Helmand operation in July, they just decided not to show up. I was in Helmand and the Americans and Brits were surprised and complaining the Afghan army didn’t feel like taking part. They perceive themselves more as a force designed for external threats, not for internal purposes. So that’s a complete waste. And they also just don’t have the ability. They are also dominated by Tajiks and Uzbeks and they are fighting Pashtuns. You are going to see this force break down along ethnic lines. We see the increase or return of ethnic based militias throughout the country. One other mistake, I think, in the American approach is focusing on the south. A constant focus on the south as if there are no problems anywhere else in the country. This focus on the south allowed the center to fall apart. So you have Logar and Wardak, two provinces which are adjacent to Kabul that fell in the last year to Taliban control thanks to the American obsession with the south. You have Kunduz and other parts of the north falling to the Taliban thanks to this American obsession with the south, and now this new obsession with population centers. This was also the Soviet mistake. The Taliban aren’t present in population centers. It is a rural insurgency. They are not in the cities so much. They are in the villages, thousands and thousands of tiny little villages that are impossible to secure. This is not Baghdad which is easy to control, build walls around neighborhoods. You have thousands of remote villages, there is no way to get to them. You can control the cities if you want. The Taliban will spread like ink spots. This is a counter insurgency theory. The Americans think that they will spread like ink spots. In fact, I think the Taliban will spread like ink spots, like oil spots throughout the rural areas as the Americans focus on the cities were you don’t really have a Taliban presence and the Taliban don’t really care about the cities as much anyway. AMY

GOODMAN: It’s interesting. You talk about the Taliban growing presence and in the rest of the media it’s all about the U.S. soldiers winning the hearts and minds and with more troops they will be able to do that working on reconstruction, but this other view of U.S. occupation causing more recruits to the Taliban or even Al Qaeda. I wanted to go back though, to nearly three years ago, January 10, 2007. President Bush was announcing the surge in Iraq.

GEORGE W. BUSH: America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad. This will require increasing American force levels, so I have committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq. The vast majority of them, five brigades, will be deployed to Baghdad. These trips will work alongside Iraqi units and be embedded in their formations. Our troops will have a well-defined mission, to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.

AMY GOODMAN:That was President Bush. Now let me play for you an excerpt of what President Obama had to say last night at West Point.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Today, after extraordinary costs, we are bringing Iraq war to a responsible end. We will remove our combat brigades from Iraq by the end of next summer and all of our troops of the end of 2011. We’re doing so as a testament to the character of the men and women in uniform. [APPLAUSE] Thanks to their courage, grit and perseverance, we have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people.

AMY GOODMAN:Yes, President Obama last night. Nir Rosen, your response, the surge in Iraq to the surge in Afghanistan?

NIR ROSEN: The conflict in Iraq was entirely different the conflict in Afghanistan. Iraq was a civil war. The increase in American troops after the Shias have basically won the civil war and crushed the Sunnis was important. The increase of American troops was a factor in the reduction of violence, but let’s not exaggerate the reduction in violence. You still have much more Iraqi civilians dying today than you do Afghan civilians. Iraq is still a hell hole. The civil war indeed is over, but you have an incredibly corrupt government, weak, oppressive and this so-called success in Iraq which we’re using as a model for Afghanistan, success that included the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the displacement of millions of Iraqis, the devastation of a country, the spread throughout the region of sectarianism and instability – so Iraq should hardly be a model for anything and certainly not for population security for peace and stability because Iraq is still a much more dangerous place than Afghanistan is. But again, the surge in Iraq followed the civil war in Iraq. It was not the counterinsurgencies so much, it was almost a peace keeping mission. The Americans which have been an occupying force were suddenly perceived by many Iraqis to be the least of all evils because of the Sunni – Shia fighting. And the Sunnis were basically crushed very brutally by a very harsh Shia counter insurgency force that was government and the militias. In Afghanistan what this would require would be that the much larger—Sunnis in Iraq are 20 percent, the Taliban is a Pashtun based insurgency, Pashtuns are about 40 percent, so you would need the Tajiks to completely crush the Pashtun population and expel them in large numbers and then perhaps the Americans could come in and look like the heroes. But that is not going to happen. There are much more Pashtuns, again it is a rural based insurgency so you are never going to get to them. You will, I think, have a civil war. Things seem to be going in that direction. But I think the similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan are very few.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama also praised the United States as a country that has not sought world domination or occupation.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: More than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades, a time that for all its problems has seen walls come down and markets opened, and billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress in advancing frontiers of human liberty. For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for, what we continue to fight for, is a better future for our children and grandchildren and we believe that their lives will be better if other people’s children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama last night at West Point. Nir Rosen?

NIR ROSEN: Every empire has claimed it’s not an empire, it doesn’t want to occupy, it wants to help. Indeed, the American empire has done the same thing. The British in Iraq were uttering the same things the Americans in Iraq were uttering in their occupation. Why do we have military bases all over the world if not an empire seeking to control much of the world? These days imperialism works in a different way. Maybe you don’t need direct physical control of every place, but you still have the physical force and the threat of violence. Indeed, I think we are actually a failure as an empire. We actually managed to make the Taliban look good. We took the most detested regime in the world, the Taliban, removed them in a matter of weeks and here seven or eight years later they’re more popular than ever. They’re stronger than ever.

AMY GOODMAN:Among who?

NIR ROSEN: Among the people in Pakistan and many Afghans, at least many Pashtuns. When I’ve been in Afghanistan you often hear non-Pashtuns expressing hostility to Americans. I have heard many Tajiks say, "Amreeka Dushman Islam”, “America is the enemy of Islam.” Nobody really wants the Americans there.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Professor Bacevich, your book is called “The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism”, responding to what Nir Rosen has said and President Obama’s last point about why we are in Afghanistan.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Yeah, I mean, I think the president’s sort of capsule description of modern U.S. history and our role in the world is extraordinarily important and the reason it is important is because that text could of been lifted out of a speech by Harry Truman, by John Kennedy, by Lyndon Johnson, by Richard Nixon, by Ronald Reagan, or by George W. Bush. This is the preferred narrative of American history, the way we prefer to see ourselves and, therefore, the narrative that we use to justify all that we do in the world. It is really telling and extraordinary that this president, whose background is quite different from all those other presidents that I just named, and who came to office promising to bring about change, it is extraordinary that he himself would embrace that narrative so uncritically. I think that is indicative of the extent to which whether there is going to be any change in Washington, it is simply going to be changes on the margins and that the Washington consensus, the status quo, is firmly in place.

AMY GOODMAN: Comment, Nir Rosen, on what you think, if you were standing at West Point last night, what you would have been saying?

NIR ROSEN: I would have mentioned Palestine and Kashmir and the history of American support for dictatorships in the Middle East and the Muslim world as the cause for this Al Qaeda phenomenon, for this resentment of the U.S. and I would have…

AMY GOODMAN:And the actions you announced?

NIR ROSEN: This is impossibly naïve and would require a revolution in the way America does business, but stop supporting dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and elsewhere, stop supporting the Pakistani dictatorships or quasi-dictatorship, stop supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Be perceived as a fair player in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Stop killing Muslims and Muslims will not want to kill you. It is really very easy.

AMY GOODMAN:Nir Rosen, independent journalist, recently back from Afghanistan has been covering Afghanistan and Iraq since 2003, a fellow at NYU Center on Law and Security and thank you very much to Andrew Bacevich, Professor of History and International Relations at BU, a retired colonel and Vietnam war vet, the author of “Limits of Power.”