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Afghan Envoy Holbrooke and Senate in La La Land
“Man, those dudes are in La La Land,” a young intern said to me on the way out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan on June 14, his eyes rolling. “You can’t win in Afghanistan. Don’t they read history?”
It had been hard to sit through hours of Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke’s storytelling about some far-off land he called Afghanistan. In his Afghanistan, there were new gains in agriculture and a reduction on poppy production for opium. We were empowering women and rebuilding everything from the rule of law to the electrical grid. President Karzai was really intent on tackling corruption. There was an exciting soon-to-be-unveiled program to integrate the lower-level Taliban. We were making significant gains in training the Afghan security forces, and we had real commitments from the Pakistani government to crush Al Qaeda.
We’ve heard this tall tale for the past eight years, which made some of the Senators a bit skeptical—although not skeptical enough to stop funding the war.
The most skeptical were the Republicans, who also happen to be the most anxious to keep fighting there, indefinitely. Senator Bob Corker said that despite more than an hour of testimony by Holbrooke, "I have heard nothing, nothing" about how progress will be measured. "I have no earthly idea what our objectives are on the civilian front.”
Ranking Republican Richard Lugar was also confused about our objectives. Sometimes, he said, it seems that we are trying to “remake Afghan economic, political and security culture”, which is “beyond our resources and powers.” Other times it seems the goal is simply to prevent Afghanistan from being a haven for terrorists. Either way, Lugar didn’t think we could accomplish the President’s desire to begin withdrawal by July 2011.
Holbrooke, while trying to support the President, admitted that he was leery of setting a date certain for leaving. This is, after all, “not where you would choose to defend the American homeland…It’s the most remote and logistically difficult place the U.S. has ever fought in our history,” Holbrooke said, adding that “Fate and destiny have put us there.”
Senator John Kerry, the Committee chair, showed his imperial stripes when he complained that the Afghans weren’t stepping up to the plate. "The problem is that the key element of this strategy is the one over which we have the least control, and that is the willingness and ability of Afghans to assume ownership of the efforts," Kerry lamented. All the billions and our best efforts are irrelevant, he said, if the Afghans continue to be bystanders in what they perceive as a fight between the West and Al Qaeda.
Holbrooke chided his predecessors who had trained Afghan security forces for years, at enormous costs, without realizing that we had to also teach them to read and write. Literacy, he assured the senators, is now part of our training. No one asked why the Taliban fighters, who are also illiterate, were outmaneuvering both the Afghan security forces and U.S. military.
Referring to the pending U.S. offensive in Kandahar, Kerry admitted that the presence of the U.S. military whips up the insurgency. "Prior to American troops announcing they were going to go in (to Kandahar), there were not assassinations. There was not a level of violence," Kerry said. "The mere announcement has now brought on the process of assassination and intimidation, and I doubt that we are going to have enough troops to be able to pacify the city."
Several times during the hearing Holbrooke insisted that Afghanistan was not the unwinnable war of Vietnam, and that we had real security issues in Afghanistan. Ironically, on the very same day of the hearing, Senator Kerry released—for the first time ever—some 1,200 pages of transcripts from private meetings 40 years ago of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Vietnam War. They showed the Senators expressing the same concerns about not having a reliable partner, getting overly-rosy reports from the administration, wondering how much the war would cost in lives and dollars, and having hard time picturing what victory might look like.
“Some of the parallels are almost eerie,'' Kerry said, insisting the lawmakers should learn from the past. But that learning has escaped Kerry himself, who continues to support what has now become Obama’s Vietnam and America’s longest war.
The most concrete rationale for staying in Afghanistan emerged when the senators asked about recent reports of enormous mineral wealth such as copper and lithium. Holbrooke said the mineral wealth not a new discovery, but there were now modern techniques that now allowed the minerals to be more easily mined. Holbrooke assured the senators that we are helping Afghans develop their resources and strengthen their economy. Oh yes, he added, we want to make sure that the U.S. has “a level playing field” in getting access to those minerals.
Meanwhile, on the ground in Afghanistan, young soldiers are assuring that “level playing field” with their lives. On the day of the hearing, eight soldiers were killed, bringing to 33 the number of American troops killed this month amid the worst bloodshed of the nine-year conflict.
The young intern who spoke to me about La La Land has more sense than Obama, Holbrooke or the Congress that continues to fund this disaster. Or maybe he is just less jaded than politicians like Senator Lugar who supports the war but remarked, during the hearing, that the U.S. had become stuck in a “slow-motion caravan to ultimate failure.” La La Land, it seems, is not poor Afghanistan, but Washington DC, where politicians send our youth off to fight and die in an endless war they themselves don't believe in.
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Show All- Other times it seems the goal is simply to prevent Afghanistan from being a haven for terrorists -
And I scream and yell - Public Law 107-40! It's the declaration of war against future terrorism. Stop ignoring it!
The endless war machine was set in motion 9/18/01. Nothing that these feckless idiots can say will stop this "slow-motion caravan to ultimate failure.”
We must deal with the law that started the insanity, that drives it (and us) ever onward toward the abyss.
Do something about Public Law 107-40 and the insanity ends.
locust
literally one computer user stubbornly typing
Locust - Agreed!
feckless idiots - I like that - talk about framing - ahahahahahah
What Medea fails to mention here is that Holbrooke is an accessory to war crimes and should be tried in The Hague.
This article is misleading in the sense that it suggests we have been hearing such lies for "the last eight years" as if these fabrications, with only minor alterations to suit different scenarios, are unique to the last administration.
Funny isn't it when you consider Holbrooke himself has been involved in these types of purposeful lies for decades and Medea does not point this out.
I really despise it when wholesale slaughter is soft pedaled as a "disaster."
=====
A little bio is in order here:
Richard Holbrooke will have major sway over U.S. policy, whether or not he gets an official job. A career diplomat since the Vietnam War, Holbrooke’s most recent government post was as President Clinton’s ambassador to the U.N. Among the many violent policies he helped implement and enforce was the U.S.-backed Indonesian genocide in East Timor. Holbrooke was an Assistant Secretary of State in the late 1970s at the height of the slaughter and was the point man on East Timor for the Carter Administration.
According to Brad Simpson, director of the Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, "It was Holbrooke and Zbigniew Brzezinski [another top Obama advisor], both now leading lights in the Democratic Party, who played point in trying to frustrate the efforts of congressional human-rights activists to try and condition or stop U.S. military assistance to Indonesia, and in fact accelerated the flow of weapons to Indonesia at the height of the genocide."
Holbrooke, too, was a major player in the dismantling of Yugoslavia and praised the bombing of Serb Television, which killed 16 media workers, as a significant victory. (The man who ordered that bombing, now-retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, is another Obama foreign policy insider who could end up in his cabinet. While Clark is known for being relatively progressive on social issues, as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, he ordered bombings and attacks that Amnesty International labeled war crimes.)
Like many in Obama’s foreign policy circle, Holbrooke also supported the Iraq war. In early 2003, shortly after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the UN, where he presented the administration’s fraud-laden case for war to the UN (a speech Powell has since called a "blot" on his reputation), Holbrooke said: "It was a masterful job of diplomacy by Colin Powell and his colleagues, and it does not require a second vote to go to war. … Saddam is the most dangerous government leader in the world today, he poses a threat to the region, he could pose a larger threat if he got weapons of mass destruction deployed, and we have a legitimate right to take action."
mcoyote wrote:
"This article is misleading in the sense that it suggests we have been hearing such lies for "the last eight years" as if these fabrications, with only minor alterations to suit different scenarios, are unique to the last administration."
Huh? By "the last eight years", she clearly means the Bush and Obama administrations together, since Obama has been president for the last eighteen months, and "the last eighteen months" are generally considered to be part of "the last eight years."
Eight years in the Middle East. I'm sure you remember all those WMD's that Saddam had? Al Qaida was in Iraq? Al Qaida is in Afghanistan? The Taliban attacked up?
What would you call this stuff, fairy tales?
Thanks so much for the bio.
The part of Colin Powell's bio that should always be mentioned is that he made his bones for the mafia that owns our country by trying to cover up My Lai. It is a testament to the propaganda arm of the Military Industrial Complex that ANYONE thinks that Colin Powell should be believed when it comes to important matters. Like all members of their mafia, you can count on Powell choosing to serve the interests of the mafia over the people of the United States.
I am sorry to say this, but i am always amazed when people are amazed that even american military personnel get killed in wars. I think that only feeds the idea that it is o.k. if non americans are killed and secondly, it simply promotes the idea, even if on a subliminal level, that it is best to use drones and remote warfare.
In other words, as long as u.s. military isn't hurt...........
From the article:
"The most skeptical were the Republicans, who also happen to be the most anxious to keep fighting there, indefinitely."
Or, put more succinctly, "The war is a disaster! We must have more of it!"
Not the worst bloodshed,
the worst is when 100 plus Afghan civilians are murdered in one bombing by USA forces.
Yesterdays article explaining how people resist in order to defend their culture explains why the USA puts so much effort into desroying traditional culture along with infrastructure ( more infrastruture was destroyed in Iraq).
There are many reasons for being in Afghanistan and many interest groups who support the war for their own reasons. One reason was mentioned in this article in the phrase 'empowering women'. Yes, this war could be re-named the 'Women's Liberation War in Afghanistan'. But Afghanistan is not the only country that the women's liberation movement is concerned about. Any country which tries to keep women in subjection to men by causing them to wear chadors or not be educated etc. is fair game. Terrorists are male chauvinists. Male chauvinists are terrorists. The war on terror is a war for women's liberation. It is good to know what one is fighting and dying (and paying) for.
It may be "good to know", but this line of reasoning, even if presented facetiously(as women's liberation is as strictly a fantastical reason as all the others given so far), is a bad reason. The only good reason that may arise from this catastrophe is if humanity in the collective finally wakes up to the fact that imperial ambitions, even with the short term gains by some, is a losing game of hideous outcomes for all.
Female terrorists ( very often fredom fighters) are male chauvinists?
When women did not have the right to vote in the USA should another nation have invaded the USA?
What do you mean, get rid of Public Law 107-40? Nobody ever gets rid of stupid laws. There are still laws on the books banning whistling on Sunday. Archaic laws still exist to give lawyers (ironically the most corrupt profession), more opportunity to litigate. As an old sage once said, "the more corrupt the society, the more numerous the laws". We desperately need to do what Napoleon did, update the entire legal code.
John Kerry is a disgrace. How could this man not demand an immediate end to this stupid and evil war? If the John Kerry of 1971 could see what the John Kerry of 2010 has become, he would mercifully kill himself.
I agree with throwing out all the laws and starting over with the basics.
The other half is we need to throw out all the present lawmakers first!
It is surprising that Holbrooke did not see fit in echoing some of the stock phrases that were used during the Vietnam conflict and apply them to Afghanistan by claiming that:
* Victory is just around the corner
* I can see the light at the end of the tunnel
The victory that the Afghans seek is when they see the last American military person board a plane which will take him or her back to the United States and away from their country.
Afghans-resist the American empire.
Priceless (well...not exactly "priceless"...lots of dead innocents, and billions of squandered American tax-payer dollars)quote:
Holbrooke, while trying to support the President, admitted that he was leery of setting a date certain for leaving. This is, after all, “not where you would choose to defend the American homeland…It’s the most remote and logistically difficult place the U.S. has ever fought in our history."
Wow...I agree, we should fight in Canada...much easier logistically AND has about as much to do with "defending" der faderlund (we're do they get these Nazis?) as our assault on the people of Afghanistan.
Senator Bob Corker said that despite more than an hour of testimony by Holbrooke, "I have heard nothing, nothing" about how progress will be measured. "I have no earthly idea what our objectives are on the civilian front.”
Ah...hello...how about recognizing the civilian's as human and treating them accordingly so? I clicked onto this article to try and find a critique for using "La La Land", but the phrase is as good as any and better then some for phrasing the incredibly fantastical mind-set of the US's republic decision making body -- Earth to the House, Earth to the Senate, Earth to the White House...come in please...hello?...hello?........
It's always the same guys, in or out of government, pushing the same cart full of bad ideas. It's not that they're amoral; they're anti-moral. The surviving Soviet generals are laughing their asses off.
What a surprise. Holbrooke is a major player in Afghanistan.
He is nothing more than an imperialistic retread from the Vietnam era and once supported the bogus South Vietnamese government backed by American war crimes.
Same same in Afghanistan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Holbrooke
"This involved supporting the South Vietnam government with economic development and enacting local political reforms. Holbrooke then moved to the US Embassy, Saigon where he became a staff assistant to Ambassadors Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr..[3] During this time, he served with many other young diplomats who would play a major role in American foreign policy in the decades ahead, including John Negroponte, Anthony Lake, Frank G. Wisner, Les Aspin, and Peter Tarnoff. As the conflict in Vietnam escalated, President Lyndon Johnson formed a team of Vietnam experts to work in the White House under the former head of the Phoenix Program, R.W. Komer, in an operation that was separate from the National Security Council. As a rising young diplomat with significant experience in the country, Holbrooke was asked to join the group when he was only twenty-four years old.
it's all the same people here today. In fact Obama's war cabinet, were also Bush's.
The American foreign policy establishment is so stupid and inept that massive slaughters and doomed missions are inevitable.
The Dutch Royal House of Orange is the largest stockholder of Shell Oil. I am surprised to learn that they are secretly Jewish Zionists.
They may be stupid from our rational view, but their rational is quite different, and that is, "all war all the time for greater profits and control control of civil life." They are not stupid, they know exactly what they are doing 24/7.
more on Hollbrooke:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Holbrooke
"During his time as a member of the board of directors of AIG the firm engaged in wildly speculative credit default insurance schemes that may cost the taxpayer hundreds of billions to prevent AIG from bringing down the entire financial system. He is a member of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and formerly served on the Advisory Board of the National Security Network"...etc.
Holbrooke is just another pathological pawn in the game of corporate imperialism that serves special interests but is sustained by tax dollars. This is little more than the systematic transfer of wealth from the many to the few.
And of course going back a bit in time, these policies of the American empire cost millions of lives in Vietnam.
And beginning with the end of the first Gulf War there have hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives lost. And now Iraq is a corporate colony thanks to the illegal invasion the occupation.
But the good news is we are not doing a body count in Afghanistan.
Holbrooke has a lot of blood on his hands.
The total GDP of Afghanistan is approximately $14 billion, we are spending $10 billion a year there. Let's look at this as business would, the return on investment just isn't there. In other words it is a perfectly good business decesion to cut our losses and bring home our troops. You see what happens when you frame your argument in a language that the politicians understand. Let the Republicans and Democrats argue that!
Oh, my dear, my dear. General Smedley Butler put it all down, and it is still so. Something like "Wars are fought for the benefit of the few at a great cost to the many." Except now it has an added international twist in that the benficiaries are a global upper crust of exploiters, using the US military arsenal as their force or battering ram.
The people and the welfare of this country are no longer the objectives of the majority of our different branches of govt. but rather the profits and power of those whose minions they are. The quest for world & resource domination has nothing to do with the average US person's daily existence with high unemployment, job offshoring to the cheapest locales, plummeting wages, rising costs, etc., etc.
Holbrooke is nowhere near "La La Land." He's pretending to do one thing while his goal is completely different. He knows exactly what he's doing. He's another version of "Stuff happens."
As for some Senators, all they have to do is stand up for the truth. And that they are not doing. They are not doing their job, and they know it. So, they seem dithering. Then there are the players, proffering the old ruse of blaming the victim: the Iraqis and now the Afghanis are not "stepping up to the plate." Oh heaven help us for all the hen houses are full of foxes.
"the benficiaries are a global upper crust of exploiters, using the US military arsenal as their force"
YEP
"Senator John Kerry, the Committee chair, showed his imperial stripes when he complained that the Afghans weren’t stepping up to the plate."
Kerry holds $32 Million in defense industry investments. With two very expensive imperial wars and occupations draining the Federal treasury and the American economy, I would imagine that his MIC stocks are doing very well.
He is just another wealthy criminal in Congress posing as a "liberal" Democrat.
Isn't that a "Conflict of Interest"? John is about money, money, money! That is why he never asked for an independent investigation of the death of Mike Connell. Mike was going to testify how he had the 2004 votes from Ohio sent to his offices before sending them back to Ohio. "The Power Elite" have ways of bringing down aircraft!
Anyway, The Taliban had allegedly eliminated the opium production in 2000 and only the Northern Alliance kept it going.
Holbrooke is a Kissinger puppet just as Obama is a Kissinger/Brzezinski puppet.....
The lies continue, no different than the Bush/Cheney lies. Aghanistan is OIL PIPELINE and drugs for Black Ops.........simple and easy to understand....Every one of those senators is making a fortune by keeping the Wars and Wall Street going.
And every one of those senators who is making a fortune by keeping the Wars and Wall Street going should be voted out of office (not going to happen) and tried for treason (definitely not going to happen). When was the last time (if ever) we had a government FOR the people, OF the people or BY the people. What we have is a cabal of rich, social psychopaths buying our elected officials, and those they can't buy they destroy. Afghanistan, BP and joblessness all have a common cause. The system is broke.
Actually, i don't see being a wealthy criminal in congress and being a "liberal" Democrat as being at all incompatible.
For their next trick, President Obama and the Republicans can occupy Waterloo, Belgium. This move will protect the U.S. from Al Qaeda terrorizing it.
“Man, those dudes are in La La Land”
They're stoned on petro-opiates.
"Senators a bit skeptical—although not skeptical enough to stop funding the war"
She means not skeptical enough to stop funding THEMSELVES.
"the willingness and ability of Afghans to assume ownership of the efforts"
Leave it to Kerry, the "do not elect me" candidate of 2004, to lament that Afghanis won't assume ownership of their own enslavement - to whitey elites dressed in monkey suits. No creature on the planet would assume ownership of their own enslavement.
Kerry knows he can't fool Afghanis. His real agenda is to brainwash Merkans.
Holbrooke was wrong on Bosnia, yet these same self-satisfied "experts" continue to run the U.S. policy.
Charlie Jackson
Texans for Peace
http://www.texansforpeace.org