We woke up Monday morning to Bob Woodward’s piece in The Washington Post revealing details of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s report to President Obama on Afghanistan strategy. As luck would have it, we had three guests in our first hour with a few things to say about the McChrystal memo. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, was with us. And so was Lawrence Wilkerson, the retired US Army colonel who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department from 2002 to 2005, and who has since become a prominent critic of the Iraq war and of the strategy in Afghanistan.
Wilkerson finds the idea of adding more troops to Afghanistan, even with a new counterinsurgency strategy, unpromising to say the least. “I don’t see how we, with present troop levels, or even increased troop levels, can accomplish these objectives,” Wilkerson said. On the question of a deepening U.S. commitment, he said:
I see this as a recipe for another situation where 18 months to two years down the road, we’re examining our navels. And trying to figure out, why the heck did we do this? Because we’re no further down that road than we were at the present time.
In fact we may even be in a worse situation. We’ve got an illegitimate government now, by our own making…. We are now, as we were in Vietnam, supporting an illegitimate government. We are an occupier. The Afghans are going to grow more and more discomfited with us, the longer we stay….
Those Vietnam echoes kept coming back during the course of the hour. Later, we were joined by The New Yorker’s George Packer, who writes in the current issue about Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and how Holbrooke’s early experience in Vietnam helped shape his approach to the Af-Pak mission. Packer told us that he and Holbrooke spoke a lot about Vietnam in their conversations, and that the Obama administration is quite aware of the ghosts:
I can assure you that when the administration carried out its strategy review earlier this year, Vietnam was on their minds…. The strategy review was worried that this could be, you know, the LBJ syndrome of gradual escalation that leads to political disaster at home.
Packer went on to offer his own guess at what Holbrooke may be aiming for, based on their conversations:
My guess is, and it’s only a guess, is he is shooting to get into a situation where negotiations are going to happen. That’s what he ended up trying for as a junior member of the state department in Vietnam, and I’m guessing that is the ultimate goal here — that politically, he wants to get the United States into a situation where bringing in Pakistan, bringing in some of the other neighbors – including Iran and India, maybe even bringing in China – there’s a regional solution that gives Pakistan certain security guarantees. And in exchange Pakistan begins to push its friends in the Afghan Taliban toward a negotiation that could lead to a political settlement. I don’t think Richard Holbrooke imagines we’re going to win this war militarily.
The full hour with Ellsberg, Wilkerson, and Packer is well worth a listen. Tell us what you think.
As my just existing as an average citizens; somewhere Earth, USA, I am still not understanding why “Governments” use Trillions of dollars to bomb “other countries” and “it’s non-combatant citizens” to death? Russia spent a lot of Human life and resources on killing millions in Afghanistan and destroying its infrastructure to the point Farmers can’t even raise crops to feed the local population. What is the Point of any government representative i.e. Congress etc. to instruct its Military to go kill people? Because negotiations aren’t money makers? Can you put a program together showing what “Russia” did and what America is doing at this time to parallel them, in that they both are just polluting the Planet with explosions, the fall-out to our atmosphere must be caustic, and the end results are always Death to innocent people, with no resources to get out of the way? I do not think an Afgan Family cares what countries Bombs and bullets are killing their loved ones, and destroying their sensitive natural environment and habitat on the edge of extinction. Below is a site with quick easy compasion material as a resources. Thank you for your hard work in communicating with the “average citizen” in a clear tone and easy to understand. Steve
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan#Soviet_personnel_strengths_and_casualties
Posted by Steven Gunter, on September 24th, 2009 at 9:38 am EDTOpps, sorry for Off-Point here. Good stuff written above. Just blasted through looking for a different forum; ran out of time, and dumped here. sg
Posted by Steven Gunter, on September 24th, 2009 at 9:46 am EDTShades of Vietnam. Eisenhower started it, Kennedy and Johnson really got stuck with the consequences of it.
America is basically the adolescent of modern nations. We have yet to learn and maybe never will, that in the long run use of force rather than diplomacy does not yield long term results, and the destruction that has to be repaired outweighs any economic consideration that one may gain by resorting to war. We might not ever learn it because no modern war of great destruction has been fought on American soil. As long as we are fighting those wars on someone elses land, in someone elses home, destroying someone else’s livelihood, and someone else’s children’s futures, we are not likely to learn it.
In most cases, the American taxpayer pays for the wars, but American taxpayers reap the least benefit for it. It is usually a large corporation that creates jobs overseas and keeps its profits untaxed overseas who benefit from wars without really bearing much of the cost for them.
Posted by N.J., on September 28th, 2009 at 12:35 pm EDT