By Steve Hynd
There are two important stories about Afghanistan today which between them set the inevitable scene for American disaster on the sub-continent. The first is the Washington Post's revelation of hidden incrementalism by the Obama administration:
President Obama announced in March that he would be sending 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But in an unannounced move, the White House has also authorized -- and the Pentagon is deploying -- at least 13,000 troops beyond that number, according to defense officials.
The additional troops are primarily support forces, including engineers, medical personnel, intelligence experts and military police. Their deployment has received little mention by officials at the Pentagon and the White House, who have spoken more publicly about the combat troops who have been sent to Afghanistan.
The deployment of the support troops to Afghanistan brings the total increase approved by Obama to 34,000. The buildup has raised the number of U.S. troops deployed to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan above the peak during the Iraq "surge" that President George W. Bush ordered, officials said.
The second is the New York Times' report that Gates and Clinton are combining to advocate splitting the difference between zero extra combat troops and McChrystal's 40,000.
as President Obama leads yet another debate on whether to deploy tens of thousands of additional troops there, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense will once again constitute a critical voting bloc, the likely leaders of an argument for a middle ground between a huge influx of soldiers and a narrow focus aimed at killing terrorists from Al Qaeda, according to several administration officials.
As Peter Feaver notes at Shadow Government:
Even without Clinton and Gates recommending it, most observers probably would bet that President Obama is going to split the difference in this fashion. The politics of the Afghanistan decision are such that a split-the-difference option is almost inescapable. Having the two most important cabinet principals endorsing it would make it virtually a foregone conclusion.
I don't think I'm sticking my neck out in any way when I predict there will be an increase in combat troops, somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000. And then there will be another, less public, increment of support troops to bring that number up to somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000. Then, in three to six months, there will be yet another strategic review and another increase, and another after that - all heading inexorably towards McChrystal's outer limit of 80,000.
The simple truth is that the bipartisan consensus of neoliberal and neoconservative interventionist, hegemonic hawks has ruled supreme in America for some time now, among both lawmakers and the think-tanks that fuel foreign policy thinking, and isn't looking to give up that supremacy anytime soon. The mainstream argument is really about resourcing that hegemony - drawdown or withdrawal were never on the table. Those of us urging a deep change in that dynamic are just gnats biting at the war beast. So no matter how right Andrew Bacevich is or how much folk like Glenn Greenwald warn that:
It's not only perpetual war that is the result, but also the endless civil liberties erosions and expansions of government power -- detention, surveillance and secrecy -- that inevitably accompany it.
Perpetual war will be the paradigm going forward until the interventionists bite of so much more than they can chew that they become entirely discredited. Iraq was almost that bite, Afghanistan looks like it will be. If not, then it will be Yemen, Iran, Somalia, or some other foreign field that is the "central front" in the war on something-or-other. At the very best, those almost-bites will combine to bleed the hegemony to death. That's how Empire always goes, whether that Empire claims to be the "good guys" or not.
No comments:
Post a Comment