Wikileaks revelations won't end the war

Noam Chomsky's article comes from the magazine In These Times. I take excerpts from the article. Chomsky's agrees that the wikileaks documents may help to raise questions about the U.S. role in Afghanistan and challenge Obama's and the media echo chamber's justifications for it. However, in his view, while documents like those released by WikiLeaks may help to increase opposition to the war/occupation in Afghanistan, it will take a riled and mobilized American citizenry to bring it to an end.

This article is permanently archived at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/6280/


Why WikiLeaks Won’t Stop the War
By Noam Chomsky


http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/6280



August 3, 2010


The War Log...released on the Internet by the organization WikiLeaks--documents a grim struggle becoming grimmer, from the U.S. perspective. And for the Afghans, a mounting horror.


While the documents are generally viewed as providing support against the continued war and occupation of Afghanistan by U.S. troops, Chomsky has another view. The War Logs, however valuable, may contribute to the unfortunate and prevailing doctrine that wars are wrong only if they aren't successful--rather like the Nazis felt after Stalingrad.


Last month came the fiasco of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, forced to retire as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and replaced by his superior, Gen. David H. Petraeus.


A plausible consequence is a relaxation of the rules of engagement so that it becomes easier to kill civilians, and an extension of the war well into the future as Petraeus uses his clout in Congress to achieve this result.


President Obama's principal justification of the continued Afghanistan intervention makes little sense. [....] The official goal is to protect ourselves from al-Qaida, a virtual organization, with no specific base -- a "network of networks" and "leaderless resistance," as it's been called in the professional literature. Now, even more so than before, al-Qaida consists of relatively independent factions, loosely associated throughout the world.


The CIA estimates that 50 to 100 al-Qaeda activists may now be in Afghanistan, and there is no indication that the Taliban want to repeat the mistake of offering sanctuary to al-Qaeda.
[....]


In February, in the first exercise of Obama's new strategy, U.S. Marines conquered Marja, a minor district in Helmand province, the main center of the insurgency, but failed to oust the Taliban permanently.
[....]


According to Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, commander of the Marine expeditionary brigade in Helmand Province. `Most people here identify themselves as Taliban. [....]


Chomsky compares the situation being faced by the U.S. military forces to what U.S. forces confronted in Vietman in 1969.


[....] In 1969, Douglas Pike, the leading U.S. government scholar on Vietnam, lamented that the enemy--the National Liberation Front--was the only "truly mass-based political party in South Vietnam." Pike then recommended that the only way to overcome the NLF's political force was
by using our comparative advantage, violence--with horrifying results.


Chomsky also refers to other comparable unwinnable situation, for example to the Russians in Afghanistan during the 1980s, where they won every battle but lost the war.

[....]


After the Marja triumph, the U.S.-led forces were expected to assault the major city of Kandahar, where, according to a U.S. Army poll in April, the military operation is opposed by 95 percent of the population, and 5 out of 6 regard the Taliban as "our Afghan brothers"--again, echoes of earlier conquests. The Kandahar plans were delayed, part of the background for McChrystal's leavetaking.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that U.S. authorities are concerned that public support for the war in Afghanistan may erode even further.

In May, WikiLeaks released a March CIA memorandum about how to sustain Western Europe's support for the war. The memorandum's subtitle: "Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough."
[....]

Democratic societies rely not on force but on propaganda, engineering consent by "necessary illusion" and "emotionally potent oversimplication," to quote Obama's favorite philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr.

The battle to control the internal enemy, then, remains highly pertinent--indeed, the future of the war in Afghanistan may hinge on it.

© The New York Times Syndicate

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate.