In its support for the Afghan war, the Center for American Progress is aligning itself with the “experts” who have been wrong about pretty much everything
By Jeremy Scahill | RebelReports, APRIL 6, 2009
An image from the CAP report supporting Obama’s Afghanistan war.
Reading the Center for American Progress’ new report supporting President Obama’s escalation of the US war against Afghanistan is a very powerful reminder of how much neoliberals and neocons are alike. This, of course, is not some genius observation, particularly since CAP and the neocons are making it hard to miss, what with their love triangle with the war. Indeed, CAP’s launch event for its report, “Sustainable Security in Afghanistan: Crafting an Effective and Responsible Strategy for the Forgotten Front,” included a leading neocon, Frederick Kagan and was promoted by William Kristol’s new version of the Project for a New American Century, the Foreign Policy Initiative. So, here is part of what we are seeing unfold: Running parallel to the bi-partisan war machine within the official government is a coordinated campaign in the shadow government—the think tanks. Or, as Naomi Klein describes them, the people paid to think by the makers of tanks. CAPs particular role in this campaign appears to be attempting to sell Obama’s war.
“The problem is not that the Bush administration’s effort in Afghanistan failed,” CAP declares. “The problem is that it was never given a chance to succeed.” The report is replete with the language of Empire and phrases like, “vital U.S. interests” and “U.S. national interests.” The phrase “Afghan interests” is never used. CAP also calls for a continuation of the US bombing raids in Pakistan. In calling for an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, CAP relies on the classic hubris of empire, saying, “U.S. policymakers and military leaders must be aware that throughout their history Afghans have resisted large numbers of foreign forces on their soil, but today the situation is different.” Why is it different? According to CAP, “Nearly two-thirds of Afghans still support U.S. forces throughout the country.” This claim would be funny if it wasn’t so lethally misleading.
US-backed leader Hamid Karzai can barely step foot outside of his palace without risking being killed. “Some intelligence officials estimate that the government of president Hamid Karzai now controls approximately one-third of Afghan territory,” CAP acknowledges. How on earth, then, do they pretend to know that Afghans actually love the US occupation? Well, check the footnotes in CAPs report and you see that CAP is basing its claim on an ABC News poll, “Public Opinion Trends in Afghanistan,” which is based on 1,534 interviews conducted in December 2008/January 2009. When you actually take the time to read the details of the poll CAP cites, that claim that “two-thirds” of Afghans “support…U.S. forces throughout the country” is extremely dubious and outright misleading. The poll actually says that 52% of Afghans have an “unfavorable” view of the United States—up from 14% in 2005. It also says Afghans give the US a 32% performance rating, down from 68% in 2005. Only 37% of Afghans say there is “support” in their area for US/NATO/ISAF forces. The statistic the CAP report singles out for its “two-thirds support” claim is one labeled “Presence of US Forces in Afghanistan,” which says that 63% of Afghans support it. However, in the next graph, only 18% of Afghans say they want the force increased and 44% want it decreased. So, read into this what you will, but do read it before buying CAP’s claim.
In its report, CAP acknowledges the growing global unpopularity of the US occupation of Afghanistan, saying, “In a U.S. poll taken in mid-March, 42 percent of the respondents said the United States made a mistake in sending military forces to Afghanistan, up from 30 percent just a month before and from 6 percent in January 2002. Europeans are even more skeptical, with majorities in Germany, Britain, France, and Italy opposing increased troop commitments to the conflict.” Such public opinion is worrying to CAP and the report says, “Convincing the American people, our NATO allies, and the countries in the region why an increased effort in Afghanistan is essential to their vital security interests will be one of the most difficult challenges facing the new administration.” In its report, CAP called on Obama to forcefully make the case for escalating the war in Afghanistan and Obama certainly did his best on his trip through Europe for the G20. The bottom line for CAP’s argument, which is also Obama’s, is this: “Unlike the war in Iraq, which was always a war of choice, the war in Afghanistan was and still is a war of necessity.” This line is hardly new. The report says “vital US interests will be served” by:
—“Ensur[ing] that Afghanistan does not again become a launching pad for international terrorism.”
—“Prevent[ing] a power vacuum in Afghanistan that would further destabilize Pakistan and the region.”
—“Prevent[ing] Afghanistan from being ruled by extreme elements of the Taliban and other extremist groups.”
Of course, there are opponents of the Obama administration’s escalation in Afghanistan who argue for a withdrawal from Afghanistan on moral grounds, as the War Resisters League, Peace Action and others have. “Others have laid out reasons from Afghanistan’s topography to the U.S. economic crisis that would make an expanded war in Afghanistan ‘unwinnable,’” declared the WRL in a recent statement. “WRL does not base our opposition on such arguments. While they may be correct, we challenge the very idea of a ‘winnable’ war and oppose this one as we oppose all war: not solely for practical and strategic reasons, but because of our, and [Martin Luther] King Jr.’s, decades-long commitment to nonviolence.” That position is very clear. However, there are others who agree with Obama and CAP in their basic portrayal of the “threats,” but who still question the military escalation, arguing that it will make the situation even worse. As Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin recently argued, “the decision to send 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan — and possibly an additional 10,000 troops next year — before fully confronting the terrorist safe havens and instability in Pakistan could very well prove ineffective, or worse, counterproductive. So long as the Taliban can flee into Pakistan and operate from there with relative ease, any gains against them in Afghanistan may well be temporary at best. Meanwhile, our troops would be threatened by forces who are largely beyond their reach, in Pakistan, while our increased military presence in Afghanistan could stoke resentment among the Afghan people.”
In late March, a bipartisan group of lawmakers sent Obama a letter arguing, “The 2001 authorization to use military force in Afghanistan allowed military action ‘to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States.’ Continuing to fight a counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan does not appear to us to be in keeping with these directives and an escalation may actually harm US security.”
CAP, however, is clearly not listening to “progressive” or anti-war lawmakers. In fact, CAP says that Bush did the war against Afghanistan “on the cheap and committed too few troops and resources.” Therefore, CAP is calling for a stunning expansion of the scope of the military occupation of Afghanistan, a “nearly 300 percent increase over the average force level for the period from 2002 to 2007,” according to the report. CAP goes beyond what Obama has already committed to and calls for 70,000 US troops and an additional 30,000 allied troops—a total of 100,000 troops, plus an expanded Afghan Army and police force. CAP calls for “a prolonged U.S. engagement using all elements of U.S. national power—diplomatic, economic, and military—in a sustained effort that could last as long as another 10 years.”
To pay for this, CAP in part suggests taking what it claims will be a $330 billion savings from “reduced combat missions in Iraq” and applying $25 billion of it every year for five years to the “increased U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan” with another $5 billion per year “to increase U.S. foreign aid and diplomatic operations.” While there is a much bigger argument to be had here about spending priorities while millions of Americans are suffering from the economic meltdown, there is serious reason to question the idea that somehow we are going to be seeing any substantial “savings” in Iraq spending (except, of course, through the kind of creative accounting that masks actual US military expenditures, particularly relating to Iraq).
While calling for the US military to hammer the regions of Afghanistan where opposition to the occupation and the puppet regime in Kabul is strongest, CAP suggests the US “disperse economic assets and development teams to more stable and cooperative parts of the country.” The goal of this is to “reward the allied population with improved economic conditions and to demonstrate to the adversarial population the tangible benefits of cooperating with U.S. and allied forces.” This is similar to the US economic wars against Iraq and Cuba where the population is punished for its leadership and the US attempts to force them into submission to occupation or subjugation.
CAP acknowledges the “Taliban’s increasing power and influence,” adding that “many Afghan leaders have become increasingly critical of the conduct of international military operations in the country… Primarily because of the increasing and understandable unpopularity of NATO and U.S. air strikes,” but doesn’t call for a halt to them. Instead, CAP concludes, “it should be noted that violent insurgent attacks, particularly the proliferation of suicide bombings, still inflict the majority of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.”
CAP doesn’t just limit its belligerence for the Afghans. The report bluntly states that Obama must “Maintain capability to conduct missile strikes in Pakistan’s border regions absent Pakistani capability and will to do so itself.” Perhaps CAP should check in with retired United States Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and ask him why he recently declared that the U.S. should halt all Air and Predator drone strikes against Pakistan.
Filmmaker Robert Greenwald just returned from Afghanistan as part of his important documentary series, Rethink Afghanistan, which he is producing as a rolling web-based work-in-progress. In a climate where anti-war voices are being systematically kept off the corporate airwaves, Greenwald has managed to break up the party a bit, even making it onto MSNBC where he said “there is a significant belief that troops are not the answer.” While Greenwald is not exactly storming the White House to demand the immediate withdrawal of all US troops, his Brave New Films Foundation has issued a petition calling for hearings in both the House and Senate before Obama deploys more troops to Afghanistan, saying, “At a time when our country faces a credibility crisis around the world, record casualties in Afghanistan, and an economic meltdown at home, oversight hearings are needed now more than ever.” That is the least Congress could do and Greenwald’s ever-expanding film would be a good starting place for lawmakers to do some (overdue) fact-finding. The folks at CAP would be wise to watch them as well before putting out any more reports.
Here is the bottom line: the situation in Afghanistan is getting worse. As CAP states, “Last year was the deadliest on record for American troops, and fatalities in the first two months of 2009 are outpacing 2008 figures for a similar period. Afghan civilian casualties skyrocketed 40 percent in 2008—their highest since the beginning of the war.” According to the UN 2,118 civilians were killed in 2008 (other estimates put the number much higher). CAP even admits, “U.S. and NATO efforts to respond to the rise in attacks, have led to a dramatic increase in the number of civilian casualties suffered by the Afghan people.”
And yet somehow, in the eyes of CAP, all of these statistics seem to just beg for even more US troops in Afghanistan, continued bombing and sustaining the missile strikes in Pakistan. Those opposed to an escalation of the war in Afghanistan can take heart in the justice of their cause: on this issue, CAP is not on the side of those who were right about Iraq, who confronted the WMD lie, who stood up to the illegal war. No, instead, CAP is on the side of the neocons, the “experts” who know so little about so much who have been wrong about, well, almost everything for a long time.
Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill is author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine and a correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now! He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute.
![[A U.S. Marine patrols with his squad past destoyed houses in Now Zad in Helmand province Afghanistan on Wednesday.]](https://i0.wp.com/s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-DK438_uspaki_D_20090401212337.jpg)
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Peace and Justice Post 
Fake Faith and Epic Crimes
April 3, 2009By John Pilger | Information Clearing House, Apri 2, 2009
These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, “if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves.”
That is now happening. Spain, Germany, Belgium, France and Britain have long had “universal jurisdiction” statutes, which allow their national courts to pursue and prosecute prima facie war criminals. What has changed is an unspoken rule never to use international law against “ourselves,” or “our” allies or clients. In 1998, Spain, supported by France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, client and executioner of the West, and sought his extradition from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for trial he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity. Home Secretary Jack Straw let him escape back to Chile.
The Pinochet case was the ignition. On 19 January last, the George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley compared the status of George W. Bush with that of Pinochet. “Outside [the United States] there is not the ambiguity about what to do about a war crime,” he said. “So if you try to travel, most people abroad are going to view you not as ‘former President George Bush’ [but] as a current war criminal.” For this reason, Bush’s former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who demanded an invasion of Iraq in 2001 and personally approved torture techniques in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, no longer travels. Rumsfeld has twice been indicted for war crimes in Germany. On 26 January, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said, “We have clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but nevertheless he ordered torture.”
The Spanish high court is currently investigating a former Israeli defence minister and six other top Israeli officials for their role in the killing of civilians, mostly children, in Gaza. Henry Kissinger, who was largely responsible for bombing to death 600,000 peasants in Cambodia in 1969-73, is wanted for questioning in France, Chile and Argentina. Yet, on 8 February, as if demonstrating the continuity of American power, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, said, “I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger.”
Like them, Tony Blair may soon be a fugitive. The International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, has received a record number of petitions related to Blair’s wars. Spain’s celebrated Judge Baltasar Garzon, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinian military junta, has called for George W. Bush, Blair and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq — “one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history: a devastating attack on the rule of law” that had left the UN “in tatters.” He said, “There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay.”
This is not to say Blair is about to be collared and marched to The Hague, where Serbs and Sudanese dictators are far more likely to face a political court set up by the West. However, an international agenda is forming and a process has begun which is as much about legitimacy as the letter of the law, and a reminder from history that the powerful lose wars and empires when legitimacy evaporates. This can happen quickly, as in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of apartheid South Africa — the latter a spectre for apartheid Israel.
Today, the unreported “good news” is that a worldwide movement is challenging the once sacrosanct notion that imperial politicians can destroy countless lives in the cause of an ancient piracy, often at remove in distance and culture, and retain their respectability and immunity from justice. In his masterly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde R.L. Stevenson writes in the character of Jekyll: “Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter … I could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and, in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete.”
Blair, too, is safe — but for how long? He and his collaborators face a new determination on the part of tenacious non-government bodies that are amassing “an impressive documentary record as to criminal charges,” according to international law authority Richard Falk, who cites the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul in 2005, which heard evidence from 54 witnesses and published rigorous indictments against Blair, Bush and others. Currently, the Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly established Blair War Crimes Foundation are building a case for Blair’s prosecution under the Nuremberg Principle and the 1949 Geneva Convention. In a separate indictment, former Judge of the New Zealand Supreme Court E.W. Thomas wrote: “My pre-disposition was to believe that Mr. Blair was deluded, but sincere in his belief. After considerable reading and much reflection, however, my final conclusion is that Mr. Blair deliberately and repeatedly misled Cabinet, the British Labour Party and the people in a number of respects. It is not possible to hold that he was simply deluded but sincere: a victim of his own self-deception. His deception was deliberate.”
Protected by the fake sinecure of Middle East Envoy for the Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia), Blair operates largely from a small fortress in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, where he is an apologist for the US in the Middle East and Israel, a difficult task following the bloodbath in Gaza. To assist his mortgages, he recently received an Israeli “peace prize” worth a million dollars. He, too, is careful where he travels; and it is instructive to watch how he now uses the media. Having concentrated his post-Downing Street apologetics on a BBC series of obsequious interviews with David Aaronovitch, Blair has all but slipped from view in Britain, where polls have long revealed a remarkable loathing for a former prime minister — a sentiment now shared by those in the liberal media elite whose previous promotion of his “project” and crimes is an embarrassment and preferably forgotten.
On 8 February, Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer’s former leading Blair fan, declared that “this shameful period will not be so smoothly and simply buried.” He demanded, “Did Blair never ask what was going on?” This is an excellent question made relevant with a slight word change: “Did the Andrew Rawnsleys never ask what was going on?” In 2001, Rawnsley alerted his readers to Iraq’s “contribution to international terrorism” and Saddam Hussein’s “frightening appetite to possess weapons of mass destruction.” Both assertions were false and echoed official Anglo-American propaganda. In 2003, when the destruction of Iraq was launched, Rawnsley described it as a “point of principle” for Blair who, he later wrote, was “fated to be right.” He lamented, “Yes, too many people died in the war. Too many people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short.” In the subsequent six years at least a million people have been killed. According to the Red Cross, Iraq is now a country of widows and orphans. Yes, war is nasty and brutish, but never for the Blairs and the Rawnsleys.
Far from the carping turncoats at home, Blair has lately found a safe media harbour — in Australia, the original murdochracy. His interviewers exude an unction reminiscent of the promoters of the “mystical” Blair in the Guardian of than a decade ago, though they also bring to mind Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times during the 1930s, who wrote of his infamous groveling to the Nazis: “I spend my nights taking out anything which will hurt their susceptibilities and dropping in little things which are intended to sooth them.”
With his words as a citation, the finalists for the Geoffrey Dawson Prize for Journalism (Antipodes) are announced. On 8 February, in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Geraldine Doogue described Blair as “a man who brought religion into power and is now bringing power to religion.” She asked him: “What would the perception be that faith would bring towards a greater stability …[sic]?” A bemused and clearly delighted Blair was allowed to waffle about “values.” Doogue said to him that “it was the bifurcation about right and wrong that what I thought the British found really hard” [sic], to which Blair replied that “in relation to Iraq I tried every other option [to invasion] there was.” It was his classic lie, which passed unchallenged.
However, the clear winner of the Geoffrey Dawson Prize is Ginny Dougary of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Times. Dougary recently accompanied Blair on what she described as his “James Bondish-ish Gulfstream” where she was privy to his “bionic energy levels.” She wrote, “I ask him the childlike question: does he want to save the world?” Blair replied, well, more or less, aw shucks, yes. The murderous assault on Gaza, which was under way during the interview, was mentioned in passing. “That is war, I’m afraid,” said Blair, “and war is horrible.” No counter came that Gaza was not a war but a massacre by any measure. As for the Palestinians, noted Dougary, it was Blair’s task to “prepare them for statehood.” The Palestinians will be surprised to hear that. But enough gravitas; her man “has the glow of the newly-in-love: in love with the world and, for the most part, the feeling is reciprocated.” The evidence she offered for this absurdity was that “women from both sides of politics have confessed to me to having the hots for him.”
These are extraordinary times. Blair, a perpetrator of the epic crime of the 21st century, shares a “prayer breakfast” with President Obama, the yes-we-can-man now launching more war. “We pray,” said Blair, “that in acting we do God’s work and follow God’s will.” To decent people, such pronouncements about Blair’s “faith” represent a contortion of morality and intellect that is a profanation on the basic teachings of Christianity. Those who aided and abetted his great crime and now wish the rest of us to forget their part — or, like Alistair Campbell, his “communications director,” offer their bloody notoriety for the vicarious pleasure of some — might read the first indictment proposed by the Blair War Crimes Foundation: “Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, 4 million refugees, countless maiming and traumas.”
These are indeed extraordinary times.
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