This report by the Committee majority staff is part of our continuing examination of the conflict in Afghanistan.
When we went to war less than a month after the attacks of September 11, the objective was to destroy Al Qaeda and kill or capture its leader, Osama bin Laden, and other senior figures in the terrorist group and the Taliban, which had hosted them. Today, more than eight years later, we find ourselves fighting an increasingly lethal insurgency in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan that is led by many of those same extremists. Our inability to finish the job in late 2001 has contributed to a conflict today that endangers not just our troops and those of our allies, but the stability of a volatile and vital region. This report relies on new and existing information to explore the consequences of the failure to eliminate bin Laden and other extremist leaders in the hope that we can learn from the mistakes of the past.
Sincerely,
JOHN F. KERRY, Chairman,
SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE
November 30, 2009
Dear Friend and Reader:
We are fast approaching the astrology of Uranus stationing direct, and the hours leading up to President Obama’s Full Moon speech on America’s plan to “finish the job” in Afghanistan. On Tuesday night, he is scheduled announce another phase of what was started over eight years ago in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. by Al-Qaeda. With Uranus stationing direct at 23 Pisces, we might ask: What job is he planning to finish? And is it possible to finish any job in Afghanistan? For this, we have to look at history. Please follow along with a summary.
The war in Afghanistan is President Obama’s by inheritance. This inheritance did not begin in 2001 with the multinational hunt for Osama Bin Ladin. It began much earlier during the Cold War with the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, a Communist state established by the Saur Revolution in 1978. With Soviet backing, Afghan Marxists modernized the country, built roads, hospitals, and schools. Traditional marriage laws were upended for a more modern system that encouraged women’s education. These changes met resistance from the more traditional Muslim population. Harsh landscape and language divides made it difficult for new policies to take root nationwide. Insurrection was inevitable. A civil war between the Afghan Marxists and insurgents, also known as the mujahideen, began immediately, spurring the Soviets to invade Afghanistan in 1979 to support the Marxist government.
That year, President Jimmy Carter initiated US support for the anti-Marxist resistance with aid, food, and supplies. In the early 1980’s President Reagan aggressively pursued that same policy; this time providing aid, supplies and weaponry to intensify mujahideen resistance of the Marxist regime. In ten years of protracted war against the Soviets, much of the infrastructure built by the Marxists was destroyed. By conducting this policy of proxy Cold War using local insurgents as surrogates, the Reagan Administration subverted Congress and a country wary of another Vietnam—the metaphor for defeat. This policy, known as the Reagan Doctrine, was successful in exhausting the Soviet war machine in Afghanistan, destabilizing and ultimately collapsing the Soviet Union itself. The doctrine was used to support the contras in Nicaragua and insurgencies in Angola, with plans for Cambodia, Ethiopia, Libya, Vietnam. The Reagan Doctrine helped provide weapons to Saddam Hussein, who used them to wage war on Iran. We also supplied weapons and intelligence to a CIA operative in the region, Osama bin Laden.
As successful as it was, the price to be paid by the Reagan Doctrine was that of blowback – the consequences of leaving behind the weaponry used in creating insurgencies against your enemies. One day, those weapons can be used against you; those enemies can turn on you.
Fast forward to 1998. President Clinton bombs Afghanistan and the Sudan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, who masterminded the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by Al-Qaeda, and who is also a friend to the Bush family. Three years later, in the wake of 9-11, a multinational force led by Americans fight the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in an attempt to capture bin Ladin and al Qaeda operatives. As Sen. Kerry reports eight years later, we lost the opportunity to bring in the conspirators in favor of pursuing a war against Iraq. But this is not news. This information has been around for years.
American troops begin occupying Afghanistan with the mission to keep the Taliban pushed back, and like the Soviet regime before, its main mission was to build roads, hospitals, and schools encouraging education of girls and women. In effect, rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed twenty years ago using the mujahideen as our wrecking crew of the regime.
The Soviet defeat is not without precedent. Throughout Western history armies invading Afghanistan meet their doom: the Greeks in 180 BCE, the Arabs in the 7th century, the Mongols and Genghis Khan in the 13th, the Persians in the 16th, the British in the 19th and the Soviet Union in the 20th. None has been able to outlast the ferocious tribal resistance of the people and harsh landscape of Afghanistan.
In fact, the more sophisticated the military invading it, the more futile their attempt to conquer it. Now in the 21st century, we have entered a new world with many of the same players, but this time the political landscape from the Cold War has been upended. Our old Cold War enemies are now new allies and business partners: the needs of the Chinese, the oil-rich Russians and now the Indians weigh heavily upon this White House. Their borders touch Afghanistan and a Taliban insurgency can bleed over into their territory, disrupting a fragile economic alliance in an already tense financial period for our country.
The insurgency can move straight across into a nuclear–armed Pakistan, a place with similar political instability at the top. Afghanistan is, as Eric wrote, a Damocles sword over President Obama.
According to Juan Cole at Informed Comment, at best, Obama could stabilize the Karzai government and let the Afghans have their say as to the control of their country with no proxy agendas. That is a big gamble with blood and money, given Karzai has little influence outside of Kabul, and the real battles are in the rural areas where the Taliban have a stronghold. We’re also trying to dig ourselves out of the economic hole dug by the Bush-Cheney administration caused by borrowing money from China to conduct a global war on terror against former friends Iraq. The same country Reagan armed twenty years ago to fight Iran. We’ve wasted billions rebuilding what we paid for decades ago to destroy.
How can Obama finish something that seems impossible to end? The history of the US, Afghanistan and the Middle East is a knot of conflicting interests and incestuous relationships made worse by an increasingly myopic view of history and terrible foreign policy decisions made over the last eight years. Decisions that benefited very few while killing thousands.
The Sabian symbols are a degree-by-degree method of reading the zodiac. Each degree gets an image. Uranus is stationing direct at 22+ Pisces, which we read as 23 Pisces. For this degree, we have the image: “A huge hulk of a woman medium has gone into trance. Around her are entities continually forming and dissolving.” The ghosts of past empires seem to apparate throughout this conflict, permeating our foreign policy. The Kozminsky symbol for that same degree is even more direct: “A heap of broken arms and military trappings lying in a muddy pool”. These two versions of the 23rd Piscean degree seem to read together as both warning and a hope.
I hope this president will have absorbed the history learned by so many empires lost there: that our empire is no different from any other. Since the mid to late twentieth century, when it comes to wars, we have trouble learning the lessons of history. But it seems the Afghan people know their history well. Empires rise and fall. Their fathers, grandfathers and their descendants have woven that reality into their culture.
Before us is “finishing the job of Afghanistan”—whatever that means. Stabilizing and rebuilding a country in the Middle East makes it much less a Petri dish for new terror cells to be nurtured. Lets pray that job to be finished is something we can live with, and takes us in a completely different direction, because the thought of anything else, particularly a repeat of what has been done before, is too much to bear.
Yours and truly,
Fe Bongolan
San Francisco
This article was written to provide some background and history of the country we are about to engage, which is something we rarely do when we talk about war.
Our is an Attention Deficit-rich nation that likes to revise history, burn it, discard it, or blow it up. What we wanted was to give us a summary of why we are at this place in Afghanistan now – which doesn’t begin with Obama or Bush, but Presidents, Kings, Queens and moghuls long before our country was a thought on the planet.
I neither blame Obama or hold him accountable for anything–yet. I haven’t heard the speech so there’s nothing for me to speculate with or on.
The key for me is this summation right here:
“The history of the US, Afghanistan and the Middle East is a knot of conflicting interests and incestuous relationships made worse by an increasingly myopic view of history and terrible foreign policy decisions made over the last eight years. Decisions that benefited very few while killing thousands.”
If we are going to end this war, we need to be pragmatic and heartfelt at the same time. The industries, economies and policies past leading to this decision did not germinate overnight, but came from decades of exploitation and a criminal neglect of democratic principles and humanity for profit. This is the history we need to immerse ourselves in so that this does not happen again.
Afghanistan is a failed state.
There is no Afghanistan. A failed state is a diplomatic entity that is no longer legally valid, cannot exert power, does not function, can not act, expend, think, respond, defend, cohere. It is beyond dead. It is History. This is a State Department term, reserved for the most miserably used corners of the world that have been ground by foreign ambition to bitter gray powder.
Failed and is no more. It is not my characterization,; you can go to the annals of Foreign Affairs and find it yourself penned by some genius or another.
Failed.
Failed is the Miracle Mile: failed is the great hope/dread of the apocalyptics. Failed is the loss of reason and function and cognition; failed is thousands of miles of hard yellow dust and spent shells and and weeping architecture that is robins egg blue gnawed sick with rust and the blood of the faithful and I can’t even bear to tell you what was there before that.
Fe Bongolan, listen, there is no Afghanistan. Go to Afghanistan, go there, and you will see it’s true. We can not wake it up to fight with us because it is gone. There is no Afghanistan, please listen to me. Please remember this, because when a war is “escalated” in a failed state there is no other truth than this: there is nothing left; not a hill, or a city, or a day; that can be won.
Fe writes: “Let’s send that intention clear into the Joint Chiefs offices and let it take hold.”
Y’asm. I suspect that something similar is afoot.
Staying tuned.
M
“My instinct, like my fellow progressives, is to get the hell out of there. But if we split, let’s take that good Chinese money and offer free rides, room, board and language lessons to every woman (and her children) who wants to live beyond the veil. Since we’re not likely to do anything so immediately compassionate and sensible, I say let the military perform ‘hearts and minds’ until prosperity has taken hold and the fundamentalist Islamic voodoo has been dispelled. ”
mystes:
Let’s send that intention clear into the Joint Chiefs offices and let it take hold.
Fe, as you know, I am buried in another project, but wanted to poke my head in the door and say “Shabash!” to your excellent article on an impossible situation.
Autonomy for Afghanistan? It has a certain appeal, except for the Pashtuns and Bahais and Zoroastrians and Buddhists plowed under. And the fact that when Afghanistan sneezes, Pakistan and Kashmir get a cold. The only solution I can see is to use our military to support the moderate and liberal Islamic elements in the region and convince them to call their Talib dogs to heel.
My instinct, like my fellow progressives, is to get the hell out of there. But if we split, let’s take that good Chinese money and offer free rides, room, board and language lessons to every woman (and her children) who wants to live beyond the veil. Since we’re not likely to do anything so immediately compassionate and sensible, I say let the military perform ‘hearts and minds’ until prosperity has taken hold and the fundamentalist Islamic voodoo has been dispelled.
Anybody got McChrystal’s number?
M
Len:
Thanks back atcha for your help with the Sabian/Kozminsky.
This was a big understaking of a moving target of which we have no actual reality yet– just speculation. That is, until the President speaks before us on the motivations to move with McChrystal’s deployment number.
In the meantime, we are going to be dealing with America’s war inheritance, of which this is a part. Perhaps this is what the Mars retrograde is giving us the opportunity to do.
That it took eight years for Congress to release the Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on Tora Bora says alot about what was governing this country at the time and who was pulling the puppet strings in Congress. These are the war industries. Fortunately, the web gave us the story, buried under clouds of yellow journalism we called news.
aword:
I hope you are bringing in some history to your son as well about this conflict. It is not Vietnam, which was our defeat. It is Afghanistan which is the defeat of many empires long before us. I send my thoughts out to you and parents of all young men and women considering service under these conditions. This is not a war we can win.
Thank you, Fe, for pulling the millennial morass together into a coherent and understandable update, complete with astrology. No small achievement. One may very well fill in between the lines with additional information. For example, would the upcoming Mars retrograde find synchronicity in a military dilemma? Are the interests of China, India and Russia confined to border security? But those questions are for another day. Great job today, Fe. Thank you so very much.
Fe, Thank you for writing.
Eric, Thank you for publishing.
I do not find it ironic that just yesterday my 16 year old brought up ‘the converstion’ about the military. Enough of his friends come from families that support ongoing conflict that it is not surprising he considers perhaps he could “get a college degree” by joining the military. All prior conversation aside, and particularly at his age, it is easy to be influenced…….
I trust in my son and his decisions. That, however, does not detract from my concern about continued conflict causing the draft to become more than the formality of registering.
and That, does not detract from my concern over what Fe has so well vocalized; will we see things differently this time? Will we discover that there IS another way to address our current situation – ? and will we be able to implement something different – ?
I asked my son to always consider one question when making life choices; ‘when death looks you in the eye – as one day she will no matter what choice/s you make – what life path will you see reflected back at you? Is the world a “better” place that you once walked here?’
Again, I pray that enough of “us” have a vision of “better” that is different from days past.