Interview excerpts - Daniel Ellsberg on Obama's good war in Afghanistan

Below I quote some points made on Democracy Now by Daniel Ellsberg, interviewed by Anjali Kamat and Amy Goodman, March 30, 2010. Ellsberg drew parallels between the war in Afghanistan and the Vietnam War. In the excerpts from the interview that follow I focus on some of his responses on Afghanistan – for the most part. Ellsberg’s position on the Afghanistan War is to bring it to an end as soon as it is reasonable to do so. (Go to democracynow.org for the full interview.)

A little background on Daniel Ellsberg - We [Democracy Now] are joined by a man who played a major role in efforts to end the Vietnam War in the 1970s. In 1971, the then-RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the media what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page classified history outlining the true extent of US involvement in Vietnam. After avoiding a life sentence on espionage charges, Daniel Ellsberg has continued to speak out against US militarism until the present day.

Daniel Ellsberg - [excerpts from interview follow]

Obama’s war - President Obama is taking every symbolic step he can to nominate this as Obama’s war, just as the Vietnam War became Nixon’s war in November of 1969, just about the time I was copying the Pentagon Papers in hopes of forestalling that, and Johnson made Vietnam his war, Johnson’s war, and McNamara’s war in June of 1965…with very much the same results in the end, tragic results.

Secret cables - Secret cables from the US ambassador in Kabul, Lieutenant General, retired, Karl Eikenberry were leaked by someone in January…He’s describing the President, Karzai, to whom he’s accredited and who he just visited with President Obama. And Karzai has presumably read Eikenberry’s assessment of him as—that he is not an adequate strategic partner for the United States, and for reasons of corruption and inefficiency.

Drugs are necessary to Afghan government- Allegedly, we hear that Obama’s reason for going seventeen hours over to Afghanistan was to convey in person our desire that he clean up his government….In Karzai’s government, as in the Mafia, corruption are us, drugs are us. Corruption is his government. That’s his constituency, his source of income. There is no chance whatever that he’ll, for instance, root out his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, from Kandahar, which is our next base of operations, despite the fact that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says no success is possible in Kandahar while corruption is still the heart of that, while drug dealing is the heart of that, so long as Wali, the President’s, Karzai’s brother, is in charge there.

Counterinsurgency will not work - What it ignores is that the recruiting tool of our adversaries there is predominantly the presence of foreign troops. And when we add more foreign troops, we are sustaining that recruiting tool. And for every enemy trying to eject foreigners from his country that we kill, and especially his families, the wedding parties, and the funeral parties after we’ve hit the wedding parties, all of those recruit more people in a way that will—assures us that, contrary to what President Obama is saying, we will not prevail. When he does say we aren’t going to quit, in the short run, at least, he’s right, unfortunately. We have many years ahead of us.

Additional US troops will make the problem worse - ….when we have those extra 30,000 to 40,000 troops there and are up to the level of 100,000, which, with NATO troops, will bring us up to the level at which the Soviets occupied Afghanistan and failed after ten years, the thought that that’s the last request by McChrystal is simply absurd. McChrystal himself was asking for 80,000 troops at this point, and that, too, was a first installment.

Training of Afghans for Afghan army [and police] will continue to go badly - ….That is not going to come from the Afghan troops, who desert about as fast as we recruit them and who are not very highly motivated working for foreigners, like the government of Vietnam soldiers we worked with. They are not going to fill that gap.

The number of US troops in Afghanistan will not be drawn down next year - ….four years from now we will have more troops in Afghanistan than we have two years from now.

Afghan civilian casualties -….He [Gen. McChrystal] also, for the first time, talks about wanting to reduce civilian casualties. But by increasing the number of US troops over there greatly and increasing the number of engagements, even if you reduce the rate of civilian deaths per engagement, the overall effect is going to be that you’re killing the relatives of people who are going to enlist in the insurgency.

Congress will have to withhold funding for the war to end, but that’s unlikely - ….The head of the Appropriations Committee, David Obey, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, Harry Reid in the Senate have all said they oppose further escalation, just like Eikenberry, the general who is our ambassador in Afghanistan. But does that mean they will vote against the appropriations that send those people over there to die and to kill? No, very, very unlikely