Dial

Well-known member
Disconnect

TomDispatch has had some interesting articles on Afghanistan lately. Here's one on the disconnect between fantasies of what the Afghan army is, or might be, and reality. The size difference, and its consequences, between the soldiery of the two nations is fascinating in itself.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175116/ann_jones_us_or_them_in_afghanistan_

And here the US military playing Obama into a lose lose situation. (Helped by Obama's desire to appear 'tough') With Petraeus in the background angling toward a 2012 Presidential bid.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175118/a_military_that_wants_its_way
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
from Dial's second piece (hi Dial!)

The question is: will an already heavily militarized foreign policy geared to endless global war be surrendered to the generals?

heh. like a self-fulfilling prophecy maybe, going forward, eating itself to stay alive?!
 

vimothy

yurp
The question is: will an already heavily militarized foreign policy geared to endless global war be surrendered to the generals?

Really though, this is a bit cheesy. I didn't think anyone thought like that any more. (What, is this the Profane Existance forum now)? I'm sure that significant numbers of the US High Command hate the fiddly shit that the US military is doing at the moment and can't wait to get back to planning for the conventional stuff. To say nothing of the vested interests in the industrial military complex. Even if you think in terms of conspiracies, you can't discount the possibility that some military experts and leaders actually do think that, in order to win the war -- if that's what civilian leaders want them to do -- they will need more troops. Just imagine that's the case. To pull off what's being demanded operationally, you need more troops. But getting more troops is a political issue, and the politicians don't want to leave or stay, so the war will just get lost inch by miserable inch. How's that for a bit of speculation?
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
i must admit the line in the Ann Jones piece where she wrote

The Taliban fight for something they believe -- that their country should be freed from foreign occupation.

set my teeth on edge
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I'm kinda baffled that you could describe it as such whilst simultaneously agreeing with Howard's substantive point*...?

oh yes, I was waiting for this.

in the how, not the what, just rubs me the wrong way really. mostly in that he uses "terrorists" and, even worse, "criminals" for all Arab/Jewish fighters under the British occupation of Palestine, as well as for the Irish (c'mon that one should resonate with you!). as well as for Malaya, which also seems inaccurate, I dunno enough about Cyprus. right after he - correctly - demarcates terrorism as a tactic, not something you can fight a war against, it seems a bit off to toss around those words loosely, esp. the latter.

also his substantive point is pretty bleeding obvious isn't it. it took me a long time, when I was a kid, to realize that "War on Terrorism" was really supposed to mean "War on a particular ideology that often uses terrorism as a tactic". but tbf I think he's right that that euphemism has gotten us into a whole bunch of dodgy business, for example kinda halfway, dubiously supporting Russia in Chechnya.

curious to hear why you disagree as well...
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
And here the US military playing Obama into a lose lose situation. (Helped by Obama's desire to appear 'tough') With Petraeus in the background angling toward a 2012 Presidential bid.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175118/a_military_that_wants_its_way

I think this is nonsense, to be frank. the bit about Obama & the Dems & toughness, alright. but for the 100th time, the military doesn't set policy. the politicians do. mission creep, alright, but not the policy in the first place.

suggesting that it has something nefarious to do w/a Petraeus presidential bid is esp. ridiculous, but hey.
 

vimothy

yurp
in the how, not the what, just rubs me the wrong way really. mostly in that he uses "terrorists" and, even worse, "criminals" for all Arab/Jewish fighters under the British occupation of Palestine, as well as for the Irish (c'mon that one should resonate with you!). as well as for Malaya, which also seems inaccurate, I dunno enough about Cyprus. right after he - correctly - demarcates terrorism as a tactic, not something you can fight a war against, it seems a bit off to toss around those words loosely, esp. the latter.

Well, that's just fair, isn't it? If terrorism is a tactic then it doesn't really speak to the rightness or wrongness of the cause in question. And "criminal" just follows directly from his argument. I don't see anything to disagree with there, personally.

also his substantive point is pretty bleeding obvious isn't it.

Perhaps yes, perhaps no... And "obvious" is not necessarily better / correct.
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Well, that's just fair, isn't it? If terrorism is a tactic then it doesn't really speak to the rightness or wrongness of the cause in question. And "criminal" just follows directly from his argument. I don't see anything to disagree with there, personally.

yeah, you caught me, I just don't like the idea of some crusty old British guy going on about Irish Republicans (or Jews or Palestinians) being criminals. even if some of them were/are criminals.

seriously tho, criminals does seem inaccurate. I'm reminded of Chiang Kai-Shek referring to the Communists as bandits. it's fine if it's accurate, a bad mistake if it's not.

(What, is this the Profane Existance forum now)

as it happens I am wearing an old Profane Existence t-shirt right now so you can get stuffed innit. Making punk a threat "again" = greatest slogan ever (esp. if by threat you mean spending most of your time hunting down obscure Dbeat 7"s on Ebay and making sure the studs on your jacket are perfectly spaced)

very little of reprimanding consequence was said to Russia by her wealthy trading partners pre-9/11, tbf

yeah, it's true. I just mean that as soon as the "War on Terrorism" was announced pretty much every f**ker who's a petty dictator saw that he could get into our good graces by claiming to be fighting "terrorism" while they stamped out dissidents (admittedly the 2 could & do sometimes go hand in hand). Egypt, Pakistan, etc etc and not that the U.S. doesn't have a long history of propping up petty dictators for dubious reasons, but that doesn't make me feel better about any of it.
 
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Dial

Well-known member
Even if you think in terms of conspiracies, you can't discount the possibility that some military experts and leaders actually do think that, in order to win the war -- if that's what civilian leaders want them to do -- they will need more troops. Just imagine that's the case. To pull off what's being demanded operationally, you need more troops. But getting more troops is a political issue, and the politicians don't want to leave or stay, so the war will just get lost inch by miserable inch. How's that for a bit of speculation?

Well I won't argue that's it's not cheesy/a little strained. But look at it from the other side: Let's imagine that Obama isn't the virtual Bush clone he seems to be, and wants to get out of the war. Are the generals/military establishment going to support him in that aim? While Engelhardt's depiction might be cheesy your responses seem credulous in regard to the military establishment and its own self interest and imperatives.

I think this is nonsense, to be frank. the bit about Obama & the Dems & toughness, alright. but for the 100th time, the military doesn't set policy. the politicians do. mission creep, alright, but not the policy in the first place.

And the military have no power/influence in this equation, right? Mere handmaidens to the awesomeness of the politicians and the binding beauty of the constitution.

Talk about 'sycophants for empire' ;)

btw, cheers Scott.
 

vimothy

yurp
seriously tho, criminals does seem inaccurate. I'm reminded of Chiang Kai-Shek referring to the Communists as bandits. it's fine if it's accurate, a bad mistake if it's not.

Hmm -- but you can't have it both ways: if banditry is illegal, then bandits are criminals, just as if terrorism is illegal, then terrorists are criminals. (Obviously, I'm not claiming that all Irish Republicans, e.g., were/are terrorists). Unless it's a war, in which case they are enemy combatants.

as it happens I am wearing an old Profane Existence t-shirt right now so you can get stuffed innit. Making punk a threat "again" = greatest slogan ever (esp. if by threat you mean spending most of your time hunting down obscure Dbeat 7"s on Ebay and making sure the studs on your jacket are perfectly spaced)

Speaking of D-beat, I am listening to this awesomeness right now:

sekt.jpg


It's deranged discore black metal with some of the Skitsystem dudes playing guitars...
 

vimothy

yurp
Well I won't argue that's it's not cheesy/a little strained. But look at it from the other side: Let's imagine that Obama isn't the virtual Bush clone he seems to be, and wants to get out of the war. Are the generals/military establishment going to support him in that aim?

They don't have any choice, of course. Does the military have influence? At the theatre level, it's all the military (at least, one hopes). In terms of (national security) strategy, yes, it has influence to the extent that it can say "we can achieve x with y". Politicians can run with that, or not, but they make the decision. Can you really imagine the military refusing to draw down operations in Af/Pak if that's what the CiC ordered? I guess Congress would keep sending them funding regardless, eh? This is through the looking glass stuff -- there's no way it could happen.

There are real questions about whether operations are driving strategy in Afghanistan, about whether we should be in Afghanistan, about what we should be in Afghanistan for, and the military is part of this debate, but it's not the final arbiter.

Reading your description of Obama as a "virtual Bush clone" made me think -- the hard right think Obama is a leftist Islamic terrorist, while the hard left think Obama is a neocon right wing terrorist. Too jokes, I'm sure you'll agree. But anyway, I was wondering, a Bush clone, ok, but which term?

While Engelhardt's depiction might be cheesy your responses seem credulous in regard to the military establishment and its own self interest and imperatives.

Not implausible. But I want to problematise your representation of "the military", "the generals". Given that "it's monads, all the way down", given that even individuals are societies, I don't think you can talk about the desires of "the military" (even of "the generals") as one simple unidirectional urge. Do the people on the ground want to be fighting and dying? No and occasionally yes, surely. They get paid anyway, right? So what level of commissioned officer do you have to be before you acquire the urge to stay in Afghanistan (but not Iraq -- what's that all about?) indefinitely? You only have to read some of the volumes of books that have been written about or by soldiers involved in the war on terror to know that their views are pretty diverse.

"The generals" are no easier to caricature. Which generals? Does the Navy really want to be fighting COIN campaigns in landlocked central Asian states? And not getting any funding? I thought this was about self-interest and imperatives. The AF? They have the same problem. And the US army itself is pretty conflicted. There is lots of debate about the wisdom of re-tooling the US army so it is good at fighting counterinsurgency wars, and about fighting these counterinsurgency wars in particular. (Debate sadly lacking in the UK, for the most part). Since you are familiar with the US military, you'll know that the vast majority of it doesn't want to be fighting this war in this way, from the "generals" on down to the grunts. It wants to fight proper wars.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
Afghan FM in NY

Ahead of a United Nations Security Council briefing Tuesday on Afghanistan, the country's foreign minister urged patience from the international community in dealing with his struggling homeland.

Rangin Dadfar Spanta said abandoning Afghanistan now will only "embolden extremists in the region and beyond."

"What the Afghan nation expects and deserves from a renewed partnership with the international community is the reassurance of long-term commitment and solidarity," Spanta told the U.N. General Assembly on Monday.

The Security Council will be briefed on Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's report on Afghanistan which describes the violence as the single greatest impediment to the nation's progress. Ban also wrote that recent elections were challenging and that serious electoral fraud occurred primarily due to the lack of access to parts of Afghanistan mired in conflict.

[...]

"As with any emerging democracy, undoubtedly, there were irregularities," Spanta said. "But one should not assess a young terrorist-inflicted democracy with the criteria of stable, prosperous and centuries-old democracies. This is not a call to condone fraud and irregularities. But in passing judgment, we should be conscious of the context."
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Let's imagine that Obama isn't the virtual Bush clone he seems to be, and wants to get out of the war.

this, firstly, is absurd. whether or not one is an Obama supporter (or a Bush supporter, for that matter). how exactly is he a "virtual Bush clone"? be specific, please, no empty platitudes.

(I'm sure Bush was just getting around to canceling that missile defense shield for Europe, to trying to put health care reform through, to demanding that Israel halt settlements in the West Bank - yes, peas in a pod those two - I swear to god sometimes you just have to through up your hands at this stuff...)

And the military have no power/influence in this equation, right? Mere handmaidens to the awesomeness of the politicians and the binding beauty of the constitution

ouch, that stings. rapier wit & all that. of course they influence policy. I'd certainly hope the President would consult his senior military leaders before making important decisions about getting into or continuing wars. it being, yunno, their job to offer him advice on military matters.

& of course the military has power. but barring a military coup, yeah, they're still subservient to the decisions the civilians make. a lot of dudes were very unhappy about Iraq in 2003, if you'll recall (Shinseki, most prominently) - that was Bush's decision, no one else's. reckon a lot of dudes are pretty unhappy about Afghanistan too, for a variety of reasons. Vimothy already hit most of the main points so I won't rehash them.
 
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Dial

Well-known member
Villains clutching black boxes seen..

Vim:

I'l grant, and give a bow to your more nuanced and detailed view of the situation. I guess in reading the thread I fail to get much sense of any powerful or impassioned framework for discussion and/or critique. Indeed, it all seems dangerously like geek cocktail chatter.

This assessment might be my ignorance, or it might be fair assessment. I guess that in my simplistic, earnest, fashion I want to say its terribly fucked up and corrupt and point a finger at someone, or something, as I tremble with delicious, righteous anger. Some powerful villains/principles to refer to.

As for those monads, I'd also go for Latour's black boxes, wherein we consolidate those monads into stable entities, and then take them for granted so as to continue on and make further progress. We can talk about the military - and others - as a stable entity/force within certain contexts. We needn't constantly qualify.

This is not irrelevant, although it refers more to 'a political class' than the military. From Glenn Greenwald :

In an excellent new article in The*New York Review of Books this week, Gary Wills examines the underlying systemic and cultural reasons why, in the areas of civil liberties and national security, "the Obama administration quickly came to resemble Bush's." *Wills makes the point I've been emphasizing for some time:**as long as we remain a nation in a permanent state of war, devoted to imperial ends, maintaining our National Security State ensures that the*core assaults on civil liberties will never end; at best, we can tinker with them on the margins with the types of pretty words that the*Obama administration adores, but it will persist and grow on its own accord:

But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the "war on terror"—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order. . . .

Some were dismayed to see how quickly the Obama people grabbed at the powers, the secrecy, the unaccountability that had led Bush into such opprobrium. . . . .*
Now a new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is largely invisible to the citizenry. The United States maintains an estimated one thousand military bases in other countries. . . .

That is just one of the hundreds of holdings in the empire created by the National Security State. A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire's secrets. He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.

Wills' whole essay is highly worth reading.**None of it excuses "how quickly the Obama people grabbed at the powers, the secrecy, the unaccountability that had led Bush into such opprobrium."**But it does explain it and put it into context.* Even if*Obama were committed to undoing these policies -- just assume hypothetically that this were true -- the nature of*America's imperial and militarized political culture would make that, as Wills says, "a hard, perhaps impossible, task."**The*President is powerful, but there are many other factions that wield great power as well -- the permanent Washington political class, both public and private -- and they are firmly entrenched against any type of "change" in these areas as one can imagine, as it's from those policies that their power and purpose (and profits)*are derived

That's why I keep quoting the 1790 warning of James Madison about what happens -- inevitably -- to a country when it chooses to be a permanent war-fighting state devoted to maintaining imperial power:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied : and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Shouldn't we think about what that means?**All of these subsidiary, discrete battles are shaped by this larger truth.* We're a country that has been continuously at war for decades, insists it is currently at war now, and vows that it will wage war for years if not decades to come*(Obama:**we'll be waging this war "a year from now, five years from now, and -- in all probability -- ten years from now").**Exactly as Madison said*(and as Wills this week emphasized), as long as we're choosing to be that kind of a nation, then the crux of the Bush/Cheney approach will remain in place.* We can sand-paper away some of the harshest edges*("we're no longer going to drown people in order to extract confessions"); prettify some of what we're doing*("we're going to detain people with no charges based on implied statutory power rather than theories of inherent power"); and avoid making things worse ("we won't seek a new preventive detention law because we don't need one since we already can do that").**But no matter who we elect, the pervasive secrecy, essentially authoritarian character of the Executive, and rapid erosion of core liberties will continue as long as we remain committed to what Wills calls "the empire created by the National Security State."

I should go back and read the thread that birthed this one....
 

Dial

Well-known member
Agreed

this, firstly, is absurd. whether or not one is an Obama supporter (or a Bush supporter, for that matter). how exactly is he a "virtual Bush clone"? be specific, please, no empty platitudes.

Ok Padraig, I'm going to be a lazy fucker and post a link. Forgive me:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175109/david_swanson_the_more_things_change

ouch, that stings. rapier wit & all that. of course they influence policy. I'd certainly hope the President would consult his senior military leaders before making important decisions about getting into or continuing wars. it being, yunno, their job to offer him advice on military matters.

& of course the military has power. but barring a military coup, yeah, they're still subservient to the decisions the civilians make. a lot of dudes were very unhappy about Iraq in 2003, if you'll recall (Shinseki, most prominently) - that was Bush's decision, no one else's. reckon a lot of dudes are pretty unhappy about Afghanistan too, for a variety of reasons. Vimothy already hit most of the main points so I won't rehash them.

Shit, mate, sorry, I didn't mean to wound! You sound like your really smarting ;) Anyhow, between you and Vim, and a more mindful read of the Greenwald posted above, I think you're right in the sense that the military do take their orders from civilians. That said, do you really believe in a rock solid demarcation between the 'civilians' and military. Surely that third term 'money and influence' binds them in numerous ways? And, of course the not unrelated systemic woes they/we are all caught up in. Again, I refer to the above Greenwald on Wills.
 
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