The empire vs the graveyard
The American imperial project is doomed to failure in Afghanistan
BY TOM ENGELHARDT
It is now a commonplace – as a lead article in The New
York Times’s Week in Review pointed out recently – that Afghanistan is "the
graveyard of empires". Given Barack Obama’s call for a greater focus on the
Afghan war ("we took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq…") and given
indications that a "surge" of US troops is about to get underway there,
Afghanistan’s dangers have been much in the news lately. Some of the writing on
this subject, including recent essays by Juan Cole at salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss
at The Nation and John Robertson at the ‘War in Context’ website,
has been incisive on just how the new administration’s policy initiatives might
transform Afghanistan and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands
into "Obama’s war".
In other words, "the graveyard" has been getting its due. Far
less attention has been paid to the "empire" part of the equation. And there’s a
good reason for that – at least in Washington. Despite escalating worries about
the deteriorating situation, no one in our nation’s capital is ready to believe
that Afghanistan could actually be the "graveyard" for the American role as the
dominant hegemon on this planet.
In truth, to give "empire" its due you would have to start with
a reassessment of how the cold war ended. In 1989, which now seems centuries
ago, the Berlin Wall came down; in 1991, to the amazement of the US intelligence
community, influential pundits, inside-the-Beltway think-tankers and
Washington’s politicians, the Soviet Union, that "evil empire", that colossus of
repression, that mortal enemy through nearly half a century of threatened
nuclear MADness – as in "mutually assured destruction" – simply evaporated,
almost without violence. (Soviet troops, camped out in the relatively cushy
outposts of eastern Europe, especially the former East Germany, were in no more
hurry to come home to the economic misery of a collapsed empire than US troops
stationed in Okinawa, Japan, are likely to be in the future.)
In Washington, where, in 1991, everything was visibly still
standing, a stunned silence and a certain unwillingness to believe that the
enemy of almost half a century was no more would quickly be overtaken by a sense
of triumphalism. A multigenerational struggle had ended with only one of its
super-participants still on its feet.
The conclusion seemed too obvious to belabour. Right before our
eyes the USSR had miraculously disappeared into the dustbin of history with only
a desperate, impoverished Russia, shorn of its "near abroad", to replace it;
ergo we were the victors; we were, as everyone began to say with relish, the
planet’s "sole superpower". Huzza!
Masters of the universe
The Greeks, of course, had a word for it: "hubris". The ancient
Greek playwrights would have assumed that we were in for a fall from the
heights. But that thought crossed few minds in Washington (or on Wall Street) in
those years.
Instead, our political and financial movers and shakers began to
act as if the planet were truly ours (and other powers, including the Europeans
and the Japanese, sometimes seemed to agree). To suggest at the time, as the odd
scholar of imperial decline did, that there might have been no winners and two
losers in the cold war, that the weaker superpower had simply left the scene
first while the stronger, less hollowed out superpower was inching its way
towards the same exit, was to speak to the deaf.
In the 1990s, "globalisation" – the worldwide spread of the
Golden Arches, the Swoosh and Mickey Mouse – was on all lips in Washington while
the men who ran Wall Street were regularly referred to, and came to refer to
themselves, as "masters of the universe".
The phrase was originally used by Tom Wolfe. It was the brand
name of the superhero action figures his protagonist’s daughter plays with in
his 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. ("On Wall Street he and a
few others – how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become
precisely that... Masters of the Universe…") As a result, the label initially
had something of Wolfe’s cheekiness about it. In the post-cold war world however
it soon enough became purely self-congratulatory.
In those years, when the economies of other countries suddenly
cratered, Washington sent in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to
"discipline" them. That was the actual term of tradecraft. To the immense pain
of whole societies, the IMF regularly used local or regional disaster to pry
open countries to the deregulatory wonders of "the Washington consensus". (Just
imagine how Americans would react if today the IMF arrived at our battered doors
with a similar menu of must-dos!)
Now, as the planet totters financially, while from Germany to
Russia and China world leaders blame the Bush administration’s deregulatory
blindness and Wall Street’s derivative shenanigans for the financial hollowing
out of the global economy, it is far more apparent that those titans of finance
were actually masters of a flimflam universe. Retrospectively, it is clearer
that in those post-cold war years Wall Street was already heading for the exits,
that it was less a planetary economic tiger than a monstrously lucrative paper
tiger. Someday it might be a commonplace to say the same of Washington.
Almost 20 years later in fact it may finally be growing more
acceptable to suggest that certain comparisons between the two cold war
superpowers were apt. As David Leonhardt of The New York Times
pointed out recently, "Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, argues that the US
bubble economy had something in common with the old Soviet economy. The Soviet
Union’s growth was artificially raised by huge industrial output that ended up
having little use. America’s was artificially raised by mortgage-backed
securities, collateralised debt obligations and even the occasional Ponzi
scheme."
Today, when it comes to Wall Street, you can feel the anger
rising on Main Street as Americans grasp that those supposed masters of the
universe actually hollowed out their world and brought immense suffering down on
them. They understand what those former masters of financial firms, who handed
out $18.4 billion in bonuses to their employees at the end of 2008, clearly
don’t. John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, for instance, still continues to
defend his purchase of a $35,000 antique commode for his office as well as the
$4 billion in bonuses he dealt out to the mini-masters under him in a quarter in
which his group racked up more than $15 billion in losses, in a year in which
his firm’s losses reached $27 billion.
At least now however no one – except perhaps Thain himself –
would mistake the Thains for masters rather than charlatans, or the US for a
financial superpower riding high rather than a hollowed-out economic powerhouse
laid low.
As it happens however, there was another set of all-American
"masters of the universe" even if never given that label. I’m speaking of the
top officials of our national security state, the key players in foreign and
military policy. They too came to believe that the planet was their oyster. They
came to believe as well that, uniquely in the history of empires, global
domination might be theirs. They began to dream that they might oversee a new
Rome or imperial Great Britain but of a kind never before encountered and that
the competitive Great Game played by previous rivalrous Great Powers had been
reduced to solitaire.
For them the very idea that the US might be the other loser in
the cold war was beyond the pale. And that was hardly surprising. Ahead of them,
after all, they thought they saw clear sailing, not graveyards. Hence
Afghanistan.
Twice in the same graveyard
It is here, of course, that things get eerie. I mean, not just
a graveyard but the same two superpowers and the very same graveyard. In
November 2001, knowing intimately what had happened to the USSR in Afghanistan,
the Bush administration invaded anyway – and with a clear intent to build bases,
occupy the country and install a government of its choice.
When it comes to the neocon architects of global Bushism, hubris
remains a weak word. Breathless at the thought of the supposed power of the US
military to crush anything in its path, they were blind to other power realities
and to history. They equated power with the power to destroy.
Believing that the military force at their bidding was nothing
short of invincible, and that whatever had happened to the Soviets couldn’t
possibly happen to them, they launched their invasion. They came, they saw, they
conquered, they celebrated, they settled in and then they invaded again – this
time in Iraq. A trillion dollars in wasted taxpayer funds later, we look a lot
more like the Russians.
What made this whole process so remarkable was that there was no
other superpower to ambush them in Afghanistan as the US had once done to the
Soviet Union. George W. Bush’s crew, it turned out, didn’t need another
superpower, not when they were perfectly capable of driving themselves off that
Afghan cliff and into the graveyard below with no more help than Osama bin Laden
could muster.
They promoted a convenient all-purpose fantasy explanation for
their global actions but also gave in to it and it has yet to be dispelled, even
now that the American economy has gone over its own cliff. Under the rubric of
the Global War on Terror, they insisted that the greatest danger to the planet’s
"sole superpower" came from a ragtag group of fanatics backed by the relatively
modest monies a rich Saudi could get his hands on. Indeed while the Bush
administration paid no attention whatsoever, bin Laden had launched a
devastating and televisually spectacular set of assaults on major American
landmarks of power – financial, military and (except for the crash of Flight 93
in a field in Pennsylvania) political. Keep in mind however that those attacks
had been launched as much from Hamburg and Florida as from the Afghan backlands.
Given the history of the graveyard, Americans should probably
have locked their plane doors, put in some reasonable protections domestically
and taken their time going after bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was certainly capable of
doing real harm every couple of years but their strength remained minimal, their
"caliphate" a joke and Afghanistan – for anyone but Afghans – truly represented
the backlands of the planet. Even now we could undoubtedly go home and,
disastrous as the situation there (and in Pakistan) has become under our
ministrations, do less harm than we’re going to do with our prospective surges
in the years to come.
The irony is that, had they not been so blinded by triumphalism,
Bush’s people really wouldn’t have needed to know much to avoid catastrophe.
This wasn’t atomic science or brain surgery. They needn’t have been experts on
Central Asia, or mastered Pashto or Dari, or recalled the history of the
anti-Soviet war that had ended barely a decade earlier, or even read the
prophetic November 2001 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, ‘Afghanistan:
Graveyard of Empires’, by former CIA station chief in Pakistan, Milton Bearden,
which concluded: "The United States must proceed with caution – or end up on the
ash heap of Afghan history."
They could simply have visited a local Barnes & Noble, grabbed a
paperback copy of George MacDonald Fraser’s rollicking novel, Flashman,
and followed his blackguard of an anti-hero through England’s disastrous Afghan
war of 1839-1842 from which only one Englishman returned alive. In addition to a
night’s reading pleasure, that would have provided any neocon national security
manager with all he needed to know when it came to getting in and out of
Afghanistan fast.
Or subsequently, they could have spent a little time with the
Russian ambassador to Kabul, a KGB veteran of the Soviet Union’s Afghan
catastrophe. He complained to John Burns of The New York Times
last year that neither Americans nor NATO representatives were willing to listen
to him even though the US had repeated "all of our mistakes" which he carefully
enumerated. "Now," he added, "they’re making mistakes of their own, ones for
which we do not own the copyright."
True, the Obama crew at the White House, the National Security
Council, the state department, the Pentagon and in the US military, even
holdovers like secretary of defence, Robert Gates, and Centcom commander, David
Petraeus, are not the ones who got us into this. Yes, they are more realistic
about the world. Yes, they believe – and say so – that we’re, at best, in a
stalemate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that it is going to be truly tough
sledding, that it probably will take years and years and that the end result
won’t be victory. Yes, they want some "new thinking", some actual negotiations
with factions of the Taliban, some kind of a grand regional bargain and, above
all, they want to "lower expectations".
As Gates summed things up in congressional testimony recently,
"This is going to be a long slog and, frankly, my view is that we need to be
very careful about the nature of the goals we set for ourselves in Afghanistan…
If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian
Valhalla over there, we will lose because nobody in the world has that kind of
time, patience and money."
Okay, in Norse mythology, Valhalla may be the great hall for
dead warriors and the secretary of defence may have meant an "Asian Eden" but
cut him a little slack: at least he acknowledged that there were financial
limits to the American role in the world. That’s a new note in official
Washington where global military and diplomatic policy have until now existed in
splendid isolation from the economic meltdown sweeping the country and the
planet.
Similarly, official Washington is increasingly willing to talk
about a "multipolar world" rather than the unipolar fantasy planet on which the
first-term Bush presidency dwelt. Its denizens are even ready to imagine a
relatively distant moment when the US will have "reduced dominance", as ‘Global
Trends 2025’, a futuristic report produced for the new president by the National
Intelligence Council, put it. Or as Thomas Fingar, the US intelligence
community’s "top analyst", suggested of the same moment: "[T]he US will remain
the pre-eminent power but that American dominance will be much diminished over
this period of time… [T]he overwhelming dominance that the United States has
enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic and,
arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with
the partial exception of military."
Still, it is a long way from fretting about finances, while
calling for more dollars for the Pentagon, to imagining that we already might be
something less than the dominant hegemon on this planet or that the urge to tame
the backlands of Afghanistan, half a world from home, makes no sense at all. Not
for us, not for the Afghans, not for anybody (except maybe al-Qaeda).
For all their differences with Bush’s first-term neocons, here’s
what the Obama team still has in common with them – and it is no small thing:
they still think the US won the cold war. They still haven’t accepted that they
can’t, even if in a subtler fashion than the Busheviks, control how this world
spins; they still can’t imagine that the United States of America, as an
imperial power, could possibly be heading for the exits.
Whistling past the graveyard
Back in 1979 national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
plotting to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan, wrote to President
Jimmy Carter: "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam
war."
In fact, the CIA-backed anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan that
lasted through the 1980s would give the Soviets far worse. After all, while the
Vietnam war was a defeat for the US, it was by no means a bankrupting one.
In 1986 Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, vividly described the
Afghan war as a "bleeding wound". Three years later, by which time it had long
been obvious that transfusions were hopeless, the Soviets withdrew. It turned
out however that the bleeding still couldn’t be staunched and so the
Soviet Union, with its sclerotic economy collapsing and "people power" rising on
its peripheries, went down the tubes.
Hand it to the Bush administration, in the last seven-plus years
the US has essentially inflicted a version of the Soviets’ "Afghanistan" on
itself. Now the Obama team is attempting to remedy this disaster but what new
thinking there is remains, as far as we can tell, essentially tactical. Whether
the new team’s plans are more or less "successful" in Afghanistan and on the
Pakistani border may in the end prove somewhat beside the point. The term
Pyrrhic victory, meaning a triumph more costly than a loss, was made for just
such moments.
After all, more than a trillion dollars later, with essentially
nothing to show except an unbroken record of destruction, corruption and an
inability to build anything of value, the US is only slowly drawing down its
1,40,000-plus troops in Iraq to a "mere" 40,000 or so while surging yet more
troops into Afghanistan to fight a counter-insurgency war, possibly for years to
come. At the same time, the US continues to expand its armed forces and to
garrison the globe even as it attempts to bail out an economy and banking system
evidently at the edge of collapse. This is a sure-fire formula for further
disaster – unless the new administration took the unlikely decision to downsize
the US global mission in a major way.
Right now Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In
Afghanistan and Pakistan, the question is no longer whether the US is in command
but whether it can get out in time. If not, when the moment for a bailout comes,
don’t expect the other pressed powers of the planet to do for Washington what it
has been willing to do for the John Thains of our world. The Europeans are
already itching to get out of town. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the
Indians… who exactly will ride to our rescue?
Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in
graveyards. They are, after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.
n
(Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of The American Empire Project, runs
The Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is also the author of The End of
Victory Culture, a history of the American age of denial. This article was
posted on TomDispatch.com on February 5, 2009.)
Courtesy: www.tomdispatch.com
|
|