September 11 and the war in Afghanistan

For many Americans, including many who have seen the war in Iraq as unjustified and unwise, the war in Afghanistan has until now had a very different aura. In the US, Afghanistan has generally been thought of (sometimes in direct contrast to the war in Iraq) as “the Good War.” It has, after all, always been presented to the US public as both

(a) directly justified as being the entirely legitimate response to Al-Qaeda’s heinous attacks against America, and also
(b) laudable in a more general sense because it has “saved” the hard-pressed Afghan people from the desperately repressive and backward-looking social policies of the Taleban.

This year, seven years after the horrendous killings of September 11, it is a good idea to subject both these justifications for our country’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan to serious examination. I shall make my contribution by undertaking the following review of the Afghan situation:
1. How the US went to war.
Yesterday, I went to a great session at the New America Foundation where former Senator Lincoln Chafee talked about his new book Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President. Until he was defeated in the 2006 elections, Chafee was one of the last (very) few liberal Republicans in either house of Congress. The whole of his book is worth reading. It is steeped in a deep sense of regret for where our country is heading. The book’s sub-title more or less tells you what his main theses are.

In Chapter 6 (and in the presentation yesterday) Chafee recalled the sequence of events in Washington right after the 9/11 attacks. As early as 9/14, both houses of Congress were presented with two draft bills. One had to do with approving a large donation of emergency funds to New York City. The other was an Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, known as AUMF.
Chafee writes that both bills were presented together that morning, and in such a rushed fashion that it was hard for many members– including himself– to even figure out which bill they were voting for during each vote. His original intention was to vote “aye” on the funds for New York and “nay” on the AUMF, which he did. He recalled saying to a fellow senator, “We have to slow this thing down. We haven’t thought this thing through. We haven’t had any real discussion.”
But at the impassioned urgings of his staff Chafee then changed his vote on the AUMF to an “aye” before the vote was closed. During the session yesterday he didn’t (to my regret) express any real regret for having done that. He noted only that the one member, Rep. Barbara Lee (Democrat of California’s 9th district), who had voted against the AUMF received so many death threats afterwards that she had to have police protection.
I’d like to take this opportunity to salute Rep. Lee once again for the exemplary bravery she exhibited that day.
She said at the time that she had voted “no”,

not because she opposed military action but because she believed the AUMF, as written, granted overly-broad powers to wage war to the president at a time when the facts regarding the situation were not yet clear. She explained “It was a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the September 11 events — anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long- term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit. In granting these overly broad powers, the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration…. The president has the constitutional authority to protect the nation from further attack and he has mobilized the armed forces to do just that. The Congress should have waited for the facts to be presented and then acted with fuller knowledge of the consequences of our action.”

We have many accounts now– from Bob Woodward and others– of how the Bush administration responded to the attacks of 9/11by rushing into a decision to invade Afghanistan. There, as later in Iraq, there was far too little forethought invested in figuring out how, once the existing regime was overthrown, a country already long torn apart by war, could be rehabilitated and set back on its feet. But the mainstream media here in the US that have examined the war’s aftermath in Iraq in great detail have devoted far too little attention to the tragic aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan. Still, the general idea here seems to be that– even if there have been some shortcomings in the execution of the war and its aftermath– still, the original goal of toppling the Taleban by force was a good one…
I have always disagreed with that. I have always argued that robust international police work in conjunction with all those many other governments around the world that were horrified by 9/11 would have been more successful in the long run. At the same time, strong political engagement with the reasonable concerns of Muslim publics around the world would have reduced toward zero the numbers of Muslims worldwide who were still prepared to condone the activities of the violent extremists in their midst. Addressing the constituencies of present Qaeda condoners in a way that would reduce toward zero their desire to continue condoning this violence was always, in my view, the real key to longterm success.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 even Afghanistan’s Taleban rulers might well have been persuaded to disavow Al-Qaeda and stop giving them sanctuary. That was, indeed, the key (force-backed) demand, or demarche, that the Bush administration delivered to them. The Taleban’s first response was to offer to try Bin Laden in an Islamic court. That was not an acceptable offer, but Washington could at least have undertaken some sustained further attempts– working alongside allies– to persuade the Taleban to get serious about disavowing Bin Laden, cooperating in dismantling his networks, and handing him and his key lieutenants over to a duly constituted international court for trial.
Washington made no attempt at all to pursue that “robust diplomacy” option. Instead, only 48 hours after the demarche had been delivered the US military started an assault against Afghanistan designed to expel the Taleban from power and replace them with US allies. The invasion and subsequent US-led military operations in Afghanistan were named Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), though the Bush administration’s original concept of OEF covered just about any aspect of the “Global War on Terror” that it chose– apart from the invasion of Iraq, which was called Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) from the get-go.
2. What happened during the war.
Probably the best near-contemporaneous account and analysis of the initial invasion phase of the war is the exhaustively researched and carefully written Strange Victory: A critical appraisal of Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan war, which was published by Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives in January 2002. In Appendix 1 of the report, Conetta tried to cut through the considerable “fog of war” that still then– and indeed to this day– hung over Afghanistan, a country that already, prior to 2001, had lived through 22 years of nearly constant large-scale internal and external armed conflict.
Conetta wrote there:

This report uses an estimate of 8,000-18,000 Afghani deaths occurring during the mid-September to mid-January period and due to starvation, exposure, associated illnesses, or injury sustained while in flight from war zones. Of this total, at least 40 percent of the deaths (3200+) are attributed to the effects of the crisis and war.

Note that those were not the “direct” casualties of the war’s physical violence, just secondary or tertiary casualties of the additional disruptions the war inflicted on a population that was already suffering from past disruptions and dislocations.
Regarding the more direct casualties, in a companion study published earlier in January 2002 Conetta wrote: “In Afghanistan, it is very likely that the bombing campaign claimed 1000-1300 civilian lives.” He noted that that bombing campaign caused greater numbers of civilian casualties than NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia, though nearly twice as many munitions had been used in Serbia as in Afghanistan.
Of course, many members of Al-Qaeda, members of the armed forces of the official (Taleban-run) Afghan government security forces, and many alleged members of those two bodies were also killed, whether from the air or the ground. In some of the most anti-humane incidents of the war, a number of entire sealed shipping containers full of alleged pro-Taleban fighters were simply kept sealed until the people inside them suffocated to death. (See also this report of the incident, from the Guardian in September 2002.)
In “Strange Victory” Conetta wrote that “More than 800 Taliban coalition troops were killed in reprisals or after capture.” I think that is a significant under-estimate– but if anyone can provide better estimates, please give us links to the relevant data in the comments here.
At the political level what happened during the war was, as we know, that the Taleban regime was toppled. Those of its members who survived melted back into the Pushtun population of south Afghanistan and/or northwestern Pakistan. The US won a UN resolution that ex-post-facto gave the Security Council’s endorsement to the invasion. It convened a big gathering of Afghan politicians and barely reformed long-time warlords in Bonn, Germany, in early December 2001; and from that gathering arose a coalition that wrote a quasi-liberal Constitution for the country, which resulted in the installation– under US and UN auspices– of Hamid Karzai as President.
3. What happened in 2002-2003.
With Afghanistan apparently “handled”, the Bush administration’s zealots– and, we should note, John McCain– all turned their attention to the “need” to launch a similarly regime-changing invasion of Iraq. That decision brought about results in Iraq (and for the US’s force planning, federal budget, and general standing in the world) that have all been documented at length here and elsewhere.
In Afghanistan, the major consequence of the decision to invade Iraq was that massive amounts of the funds and careful public attention that should have gone into the careful rehabilitation of Afghanistan were diverted instead into the sinkhole known as Iraq.
It is nice to imagine that if the funds and careful attention had been kept focused on Afghanistan and could have made the situation a lot better for the country’s 32 million people. Certainly, we in the US should recognize that we have a huge debt still outstanding to them, given the degree to which, back in the 1980s, we used their country as the battlefield in which US power brought the old Soviet Union to its knees. And then, after the Soviet collapse, the US simply walked away from Afghanistan.
Well, it’s nice to imagine that our government “might” have done the right thing in Afghanistan after 2001, absent the diversion to Iraq. However, there is little or no evidence that, under the Bushists with their heavily over-militarized mindset, this would ever have happened.
4. So where is Afghanistan today?
The situation for the country’s civilian population seems to have been deteriorating over the past two to three years. And the situation for the US and NATO forces there has certainly been deteriorating.
Regarding the situation of civilians, Human Rights Watch reported on September 8 that, “Civilian deaths in Afghanistan from US and NATO airstrikes nearly tripled from 2006 to 2007, with recent deadly airstrikes exacerbating the problem.”
And remember the big, very controversial US airstrike of August 22 in which, the Afghan government and the UN say, around 90 people, mainly civilians, were killed? This Reuters report from Kabul today tells us that,

Afghans are seething with anger over a spate of civilian deaths in air strikes mounted by U.S.-led coalition forces, a top Afghan defence official said on Wednesday, calling for greater involvement of the Afghan army in operations.
Major-General Zaher Azimi said there was no military justification for an air strike in western Herat last month in which the government says more than 90 people, most of them women and children, were killed, a figure backed by the United Nations.
“It is difficult for the Afghan people to tolerate any more. Civilian casualties happen in war, but they are now so much on the rise,” said Azimi, a former mujahideen commander and now an adviser and spokesman at the Afghan defence ministry.
The U.S. military, which plans to reinvestigate the Aug. 22 bombing in Herat’s Shindand district, says the air strike was called after coalition and Afghan army forces came under intense fire during an operation against suspected Taliban militants in the area.
It said 30 to 35 militants were killed in the raid.
But Azimi said the operation was flawed from the beginning because it was launched on the basis of intelligence input that was not coordinated with the Afghan National Army…

The Afghanistan Conflict Monitor (ACM), which is emerging as an excellent portal to ongoing news about Afghanistan, leads us to a this report on another extremely tragic by-product of the continuing war: the rise of incidents of female self-immolation. It says,

Over the past six months, at least 47 self-immolation cases have been recorded by Herat city hospital alone, of whom seven were saved but 40 died. ‘Ninety percent of the women who commit self-immolation die at hospital due to deep burns and fatal injuries,’ said Arif Jalai, a dermatologist at the Herat hospital. Almost all the women had doused themselves with petrol and set themselves alight, according to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC). More than six years after the ousting of the Taliban regime in 2001 when all women were denied the right to work and education, many women suffer domestic and social violence, discrimination and lack of access to unbiased justice and other services, women’s rights activists say. At least 184 cases of self-immolation were registered by the AIHRC in 2007 against 106 in 2006. The phenomenon is feared to have increased further in 2008, women’s rights activists said.”

How much misery and desperation must lie behind each such act?
And then there’s the rising death toll amongst the US and NATO military. This graph from the ACM shows us that as the US fatalities in Afghanistan nowadays inch toward 600, those of the allied NATO forces there are inching toward 300. This bar graph shows clearly how the numbers of occupation-force fatalities have risen each year since 2002, with the 12-month total this year also poised to increase over last year.
5. Bottom line, September 11, 2008
So the situation in Afghanistan today, seven years after Bush took the fateful decision to invade the country rather than use any of the other paths that were available to him in late 2001, remains very unstable. The first victims of that situation are undoubtedly the country’s own people.
At this point, we can ask whether the situation of the Afghan people is worse or better than how it might have been at this point if President Bush had chosen a path other than military invasion. From where I sit, I honestly cannot tell whether it is better or worse. I do know that under the Taliban, the entire female population of the country was horribly repressed; so were many male members of non-Pushtun ethnic groups. And several million Afghans were still displaced from their homes either inside or outside the country.
Today, it is not certain that the situation of either women as a whole (outside of Kabul), or of various ethnic groups or of the conflict-deisplaced is actually, on balance, any better than it was in August 2001. That is already a terrible indictment of the record of the US government, which has exercised effective tutelage over the whole country since November 2001.
In addition, though they ruled through violence, repression, and a medieval interpretation of Islam, the Taliban did restore a sense of public security to many areas of the country, and they clamped down hard on the opium business. In the present situation of continuing armed conflict both among different Afghan factions and also involving the very lethal weaponry of the US, in many parts of the country rampant public insecurity now suppresses the rights of women and men alike, while the ballooning of the opium business speaks to the failure of the US occupation regime’s projects to restore the country’s economy and livelihoods.
And did I mention that the US still have not caught Osama Bin Laden…and the Taliban have been making a very serious political and military comeback in many parts of southeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan?
At a broader level, too, this situation now poses an growing threat to the security of a large portion of Central and Southern Asia.
Back on August 4, I wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that a continuation of the present model of US domination of the political/security effort in Afghanistan cannot, there or in Iraq, lead to any durable and meaningful “victory” for the citizens of these countries. The US needs to share responsibility for the campaign that is still needed to restore peace and stability to the two countries, much more broadly with the world’s other Big Powers.
Such powers certainly include both China and Russia– both of which are also very much closer to Afghanistan than the US. Both of them also, having large and restive Muslim populations of their own, also have another very strong reason to want to see a broad-based reconstruction and peacemaking effort succeed. In this JWN post August 30, I noted that by making huge investments in both Iraq and Afghanistan, China already seemed to be putting down a down-payment to be included in the diplomacy going forward.
… And so, as the clock ticks on toward the dawn of yet another anniversary of 9/11, I think it is important this year for all US citizens to think about the effects that our government’s over-hurried, over-militarized, and ill-considered decision to respond to 9/11 by invading Afghanistan have had on the country’s still so vulnerable and war-traumatized people.
How many Afghans have lost their lives because of that decision? How many Afghan women– including many whose hopes may have been raised high by the original overthrow of the Taleban– have instead found their lives blighted over the past seven years by bereavement, loss of livelihoods, or a patriarchal oppression at home that may not even have changed much over the past 20 years?
It is certain that the number of Afghan casualties from the war and continuing instability in their country is now many times greater than the 2,800 Americans who died here on 9/11. Because of our government’s decision to invade and exercise effective, occupation-style domination over the country, there– just as in Iraq– the US bears the principal responsibility for assuring the security and wellbeing of its citizens. Washington has failed, quite tragically, to live up to that responsibility.
And the vast majority of the Afghan people had no responsibility for 9/11, at all.
But after 9/11 George Bush, the vast majority of the US political (and media) establishment, and a large portion of the American people simply wanted to “hit back” as close to Bin Laden as they could, and using the crudest means possible.
Tonight, I am thinking about all those, in the US, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere who have been bereaved by all this senseless and anti-humane violence, and those whose lives have been blighted by it in so many other ways, too.
Please, can we take a couple of important lessons from this whole tragic narrative:

1. There are always ways to deal with the challenges we face (however large these may be)– that do not involve the use of violence or the escalation of inter-group tensions.
2. The use of violence is a very counter-productive way to try to win peace.