It’s not only that Obama has ordered the deployment of 17,000 more US troops. The administration is escalating Predator and Reaper air strikes against targets in both countries, and, according to both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times the air strikes are being quietly supported by Pakistan, even as Pakistan’s top officials criticize them in public. The Times reported that Obama has expanded the air strikes to attacks on the Pakistani Taliban, who are gaining momentum in that country, even as they continue to hit Al Qaeda and Taliban targets inside Pakistan who use the tribal areas there as a base for the Afghan insurgency. An important story in the Journal last week, entitled, “Pakistan Lends Support for U.S. Military Strikes,” said:
“Pakistan’s leaders have publicly denounced U.S. missile strikes as an attack on the country’s sovereignty, but privately Pakistani military and intelligence officers are aiding these attacks and have given significant support to recent U.S. missions, say officials from both countries.”
The cat’s out of the bag as far as US-Pakistani cooperation goes now, with Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, blurting out at a recent hearing that US air strikes are flown from military bases in Pakistan, not elsewhere. “As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base,” she said.
Meanwhile, as the Times reports today, a team of 70 US Special Forces troops and others has been in Pakistan for nearly a year “training Pakistani Army and paramilitary troops [and] providing them with intelligence and advising on combat tactics.” And:
“They make up a secret task force, overseen by the United States Central Command and Special Operations Command. It started last summer, with the support of Pakistan’s government and military, in an effort to root out Qaeda and Taliban operations that threaten American troops in Afghanistan and are increasingly destabilizing Pakistan. It is a much larger and more ambitious effort than either country has acknowledged.”
It’s clear that Obama is intent on a significant escalation of the war in Afghanistan itself along with a much more overt relationship with Pakistan’s armed forces and its intelligence services, including the ISI. It looks as if it’s all aimed at something called “victory,” even though more and more analysts say that victory — whatever that means — isn’t likely and the only real exit strategy is a negotiated deal with the insurgency, in both countries.
It’s troubling, therefore, to read all the criticism of efforts by Pakistan and Afghanistan to offer peace feelers to the other side. Top US officials are critical of Pakistan’s latest attempt at working out a deal with Taliban-related fighters in the Swat Valley, a settled area outside Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas that has largely been overrun by the Taliban. They are also quick to disparage President Hamid Karzai’s repeated feelers to the Taliban in Afghanistan, too. And, while it’s true that Obama’s Afghan-Pakistan review is still underway, the president himself isn’t saying much about involving India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia and China in bolstering both Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s feeble overtures for a deal.
An intelligent piece today in the Los Angeles Times by Julian Barnes describes the challenges facing Obama in Afghanistan thusly:
“President Obama’s war strategy began to take shape with his announcement last week that 17,000 additional U.S. troops are headed to Afghanistan. But the thorniest problems still await him: persuading militants to lay down their arms, coaxing help from allies and eliminating extremist havens on the Afghan-Pakistan border.”
But America’s allies in NATO aren’t likely to step up support for the war. (Obama will make a pitch to them directly during a high-stakes NATO summit in April.) The real solution lies in getting the vast majority of Afghanistan’s pro-Taliban and Taliban-leaning warlords, tribal chiefs, village leaders, and others, along with a hefty chunk of the Taliban leadership, to make a deal. As I reported in mt Nation feature last December, “Obama’s Afghan Dilemma” , the core of Obama’s strategy is based on the conviction that the Taliban won’t negotiate now because they think they’re winning. So, Obama believes, first the United States has to regain the military advantage and then start talking. My question is: why not test the reverse idea? Why not start talking now, and put an offer on the table of a US withdrawal, and see what happens?
Peace and Justice Post 
Suppressed History: How the Filipino Revolt Paved the Way for Vietnam and Iraq
October 24, 2008America’s wars of aggression against Viet Nam and Iraq might not have been waged if the U.S. government had not censored the true story of the widespread atrocities its troops committed in the Philippines at the end of the 19th Century.
America’s invasion of the Philippines in 1898 in the Spanish-American War and the suppression of that nation’s independence fighters afterwards resulted in the deaths of 4,374 U.S. troops — about as many as have been killed in Iraq. It also led to the deaths of 16,000 “guerrillas”(indigenous Filipino resistance fighters) and at least 20,000 civilians, writes Stephen Kinzer in his new history, “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq”(Times Books, Henry Holt and Co.)
The atrocities by U.S. forces, including a dreadful form of “waterboarding,” were so ubiquitous that novelist Mark Twain suggested redesigning the American flag by painting the white stripes black and replacing the stars with the pirate skull and crossbones.
In a review of Kinzer’s book, Dean Lawrence Velvel of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover notes, “The disappearance of the episode from our history books paved the way, of course, for the imperialism, and the repetition of disaster, which reached their zeniths in the disasters of, first, Viet Nam, and now Iraq,” Velvel writes. “It is another of the gross distortions of the history profession….”
As Kinzer writes, “The scandal over torture and murder in the Philippines, for example, might have led Americans to rethink their country’s worldwide ambitions, but it did not. Instead, they came to accept the idea that their soldiers might have to commit atrocities in order to subdue insurgents and win wars.”
Despite Washington’s success in censoring atrocity reports during the first half of the war, reporters got the sordid details from returning veterans. As the Philadelphia Ledger reported in 1901: “Our men have been relentless; have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog…Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to ‘make them talk,’ have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one…”
Velvel writes that America made war on Spain in 1898 as part of its search for influence. “Christianizing heathen nations, building a strong navy, establishing military bases around the world, and bringing foreign governments under American control were never ends in themselves. They were ways for the United States to assure itself access to the markets, resources, and investment potential of distant lands.”
Although the U.S. economy grew tremendously during the last quarter of the 19th Century, Velvel continues, the fruits were distributed unevenly. “Conditions for most ordinary people were steadily deteriorating. By 1893, one of every six American workers was unemployed, and many of the rest lived on subsistence wages. Plummeting agricultural prices in the 1890s killed off a whole generation of small farmers” and “strikes and labor riots” broke out from New York to California.”
American leaders clamored for an imperialist policy on grounds the country needed to resolve its “glut” of overproduction when, in fact, Americans lacked the means to consume. “The surplus production from farms and factories could have been used to lift millions out of poverty, but this would have required a form of wealth redistribution that was repugnant to powerful Americans. Instead they looked abroad,” Velvel writes, adding that today’s “globalization” is imperialism by another name.
Velvel is cofounder of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, a law school purposefully dedicated to the education of minorities, immigrants, and students from working-class backgrounds who would otherwise not be able to embark on a legal career. The school is famed for providing an affordable, quality education and widely regarded as a leader in the reform movement to make legal education more practicable.
Sherwood Ross, Media Consultant to Massachusetts School of Law, sherwoodr1@yahoo.com
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Tags:American wars of aggression, atrocities, invasion of the Philippines, Kizner's book, US troops
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