Why We Won't Leave Afghanistan or Iraq

Yes, we could. No kidding. We really could withdraw our
massive armies, now close to 200,000 troops combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and
that's not even counting our similarly large stealth army of private
contractors, which helps keep the true size of our
double occupations in the shadows). We could undoubtedly withdraw them
all reasonably quickly and reasonably painlessly.

Not that you would know it from listening to the debates in
Washington or catching the mainstream news. There, withdrawal, when
discussed at all, seems like an undertaking beyond the waking
imagination. In Iraq alone, all those
bases to dismantle and millions
of pieces of equipment to send home in a draw-down operation worthy of
years of intensive effort, the sort of thing that makes the desperate
British evacuation from
Dunkirk in World War II look like a Sunday stroll in the park. And
that's only the technical side of the matter.

Then there's the conviction that anything but a withdrawal that would
make molasses in January look like the hare of Aesopian fable -- at
least two years in Iraq, five to ten in Afghanistan -- would endanger
the planet itself, or at least its most important country: us. Without
our eternally steadying hand, the Iraqis and Afghans, it's taken for
granted, would be lost. Without the help of
U.S. forces, for example, would the Maliki government ever have been
able to announce the death of
the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Not likely, whereas the U.S. has knocked
off its leadership twice, first in
2006, and again, evidently, last week.

Of course, before our troops entered Baghdad in 2003 and the American
occupation of that country began, there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq. But
that's a distant past not worth bringing up. And forget as well the
fact that our invasions and wars have proven thunderously destructive,
bringing chaos, misery, and death in their
wake, and turning, for instance, the health care system of Iraq, once
considered an advanced country in the Arab world, into a disaster
zone(that -- it goes without saying -- only we Americans
are now equipped to properly
fix). Similarly, while regularly knocking off Afghan civilians at
checkpoints on their roads and in
their homes, at
their celebrations and at work, we ignore the fact that our
invasion and occupation opened the way for the transformation of
Afghanistan into the first all-drug-crop
agricultural nation and so the planet's premier narco-nation. It's
not just that the country now has an almost total monopoly on growing
opium poppies (hence heroin), but according to the latest
U.N. report, it's now cornering the hashish market as well. That's
diversification for you.

It's a record to stand on and, evidently, to stay on, even to expand
on. We're like the famed guest who came to dinner, broke a
leg, wouldn't leave, and promptly took over the lives of the entire
household. Only in our case, we arrived, broke someone else's leg, and
then insisted we had to stay and break many more legs, lest the world
become a far more terrible place.

It's known and accepted in Washington that, if we were to leave
Afghanistan precipitously, the Taliban would take over, al-Qaeda would
be back big time in no time, and then more of our giant buildings would
obviously bite the dust. And yet, the longer we've stayed and the more
we've surged, the more resurgent the Taliban has become, the more
territory this minority insurgency has spread into. If we stay long
enough, we may, in fact, create the majority insurgency we claim to
fear.

It's common wisdom in the U.S. that, before we pull our
military out, Afghanistan, like Iraq, must be secured as a stable enough
ally, as well as at least a fragile junior democracy, which consigns
real departure to some distant horizon. And that sense of time may help
explain the desire
of U.S. officials to hinder Afghan President Hamid Karzai's attempts to
negotiate with the Taliban and other rebel factions now. Washington,
it seems, favors a "reconciliation process" that will last years and
only begin after the U.S. military seizes the high ground on the
battlefield.

The reality that dare not speak its name in Washington is this: no
matter what might happen in an Afghanistan that lacked us -- whether (as
in the 1990s) the various factions there leaped for each other's
throats, or the Taliban established significant control, though (as in
the 1990s) not over the whole country -- the stakes for Americans would
be minor in nature. Not that anyone of significance here would say such
a thing.

Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans really have in one of
the most impoverished lands on the planet, about as distant from us as
could be imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously? Yet, as
if to defy commonsense, we've been fighting there -- by proxy and
directly -- on and off for 30 yearsnow with no end in
sight.

Most Americans evidently remain convinced that "safe haven" there was
the key to al-Qaeda's success, and that Afghanistan was the only place
in which that organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even
though perfectly real planning also took place in Hamburg, Germany,
which we neither bombed nor invaded.

In a future in which our surging armies actually succeeded in
controlling Afghanistan and denying it to al-Qaeda, what about Somalia,
Yemen, or, for that matter, England? It's now conveniently forgotten
that the first, nearly
successful attempt to take down one of the World Trade Center
towers in 1993 was planned in the wilds of New Jersey. Had the Bush
administration been paying the slightest attention on September 10,
2001, or had reasonable precautions been taken, including locking the
doors of airplane cockpits, 9/11 and so the invasion of Afghanistan
would have been relegated to the far-fetched plot of some Tom Clancy
novel.

Vietnam and Afghanistan

Have you noticed, by the way, that there's always some obstacle in
the path of withdrawal? Right now, in Iraq, it's the aftermath of the
March 7th election, hailed
as proof that we brought democracy
to the Middle East and so, whatever our missteps, did the right
thing. As it happens, the election, as many predicted at the time, has
led to a potentially explosive gridlock and has yet to come close to
resulting in a new governing coalition. With violence
on the rise,
we're told, the planned drawdown of American troops to the 50,000 level
by August is imperiled. Already, the process, despite repeated
assurances, seems to be proceeding
slowly.

And yet, the thought that an American withdrawal should be held
hostage to events among Iraqis all these years later, seems curious.
There's always some reason to hesitate -- and it never has to do with
us. Withdrawal would undoubtedly be far less of a brain-twister if
Washington simply committed itself wholeheartedly to getting out, and if
it stopped convincing itself that the presence of the U.S. military in
distant lands was essential to a better world (and, of course, to a
controlling position on planet Earth).

The annals of history are well stocked with countries which invaded
and occupied other lands and then left, often ingloriously and under
intense pressure. But they did it.

It's
worth remembering that, in 1975, when the South Vietnamese Army
collapsed and we essentially fled the country, we abandoned staggering
amounts of equipment there. Helicopters were pushed over the
sides of aircraft carriers to make space; barrels of money were
burned at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon; military bases as large as
anything we've built in Iraq or Afghanistan fell into North Vietnamese
hands; and South Vietnamese allies were deserted in the panic of the
moment. Nonetheless, when there was no choice, we got out. Not
elegantly, not nicely, not thoughtfully, not helpfully, but out.

Keep in mind that, then too, disaster was predicted for the planet,
should we withdraw precipitously -- including rolling communist
takeovers of country after country, the loss of "credibility" for the
American superpower, and a murderous bloodbath in Vietnam itself. All
were not only predicted by Washington's Cassandras, but endlessly cited
in the war years as reasons not to leave. And yet here was the shock
that somehow never registered among all the so-called lessons of
Vietnam: nothing of that sort happened afterwards.

Today, Vietnam is a reasonably prosperous land with friendly
relations with its former enemy, the United States. After Vietnam, no
other "dominos" fell and there was no bloodbath in that country. Of
course, it could have been different -- and elsewhere, sometimes, it has
been. But even when local skies darken, the world doesn't end.

And here's the truth of the matter: the world won't end, not in Iraq,
not in Afghanistan, not in the United States, if we end our wars and
withdraw. The sky won't fall, even if the U.S. gets out reasonably
quickly, even if subsequently blood is spilled and things don't go well
in either country.

We got our troops there remarkably quickly. We're quite capable of
removing them at a similar pace. We could, that is, leave. There are,
undoubtedly, better and worse ways of doing this, ways that would
further penalize the societies we've invaded, and ways that might be of
some use to them, but either way we could go.

A Brief History of American Withdrawal

Of course, there's a small problem here. All evidence indicates that
Washington doesn't want to withdraw -- not really, not from either
region. It has no interest in divesting itself of the global
control-and-influence business, or of the military-power racket. That's
hardly surprising since we're talking about a great imperial power and
control (or at least imagined control) over the planet's strategic oil
lands.

And then there's another factor to consider: habit. Over the
decades, Washington has gotten used to staying. The U.S. has long been
big on arriving, but not much for departure. After all, 65 years later,
striking numbers of American forces are still garrisoning the two major
defeated nations of World War II, Germany and Japan. We still have
about three dozen military bases on the modest-sized Japanese island of Okinawa,
and are at this very moment fighting
tooth and nail, diplomatically speaking, not to be forced to
abandon one of them. The Korean War was suspended in an armistice 57
years ago and, again, striking numbers of American troops still garrison
South Korea.

Similarly, to skip a few decades, after the Serbian air campaign of
the late 1990s, the U.S. built-up the enormous Camp Bondsteel in
Kosovo with its seven-mile
perimeter, and we're still there. After Gulf War I, the U.S.
either built or built up military bases and other facilities in Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, as well as
the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. And it's never
stopped building up its facilities throughout the Gulf region. In
this sense, leaving Iraq, to the extent we do, is not quite as
significant a matter as sometimes imagined, strategically speaking.
It's not as if the U.S. military were taking off for Dubuque.

A history of American withdrawal would prove a brief book indeed.
Other than Vietnam, the U.S. military withdrew from the Philippines
under the pressure of "people power" (and a
local volcano) in the early 1990s, and from Saudi Arabia, in part
under the pressure of Osama bin Laden. In both countries, however, it
has retained or regained a foothold in recent years. President Ronald
Reagan pulled American troops out of Lebanon after a devastating 1983
suicide truck bombing of a Marines barracks there, and the president of
Ecuador, Rafael Correa, functionally
expelled the U.S. from Manta Air Base in 2008 when he refused to
renew its lease. ("We'll renew the base on one condition: that they let
us put a base in Miami -- an Ecuadorian base," he said
slyly.) And there were a few places like the island of Grenada,
invaded in 1983, that simply mattered too little to Washington to stay.

Unfortunately, whatever the administration, the urge to stay has
seemed a
constant. It's evidently written into Washington's DNA and
embedded deep in domestic politics where sure-to-come "cut and run"
charges and blame for "losing" Iraq or Afghanistan would cow any
administration. Not surprisingly, when you look behind the main news
stories in both Iraq and Afghanistan, you can see signs of the urge to
stay everywhere.

In Iraq, while President Obama has committed himself to the
withdrawal of American troops by the end of 2011, plenty of wiggle room
remains. Already, the New York Timesreports,
General Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in that country, is
lobbying Washington toestablish "an Office of Military
Cooperation within the American Embassy in Baghdad to sustain the
relationship after... Dec. 31, 2011." ("We have to stay committed to
this past 2011," Odierno is quoted as saying. "I believe the
administration knows that. I believe that they have to do that in order
to see this through to the end. It's important to recognize that just
because U.S. soldiers leave, Iraq is not finished.")

If you want a true gauge of American withdrawal, keep your eye on the
mega-bases
the Pentagon has built in Iraq since 2003, especially gigantic Balad
Air Base (since the Iraqis will not, by the end of 2011, have a
real air force of their own), and perhaps Camp Victory, the vast,
ill-named U.S. base and command center abutting Baghdad International
Airport on the outskirts of the capital. Keep an eye as well on the
104-acre U.S. embassy built
along the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad. At present, it's the
largest "embassy" on the planet and represents something new in
"diplomacy," being essentially a
military-base-cum-command-and-control-center for the region. It is
clearly going nowhere, withdrawal or not.

In fact, recent reports
indicate that in the near future "embassy" personnel, including police
trainers, military officials connected to that Office of Coordination,
spies, U.S. advisors attached to various Iraqi ministries, and the like,
may be more than doubled from the present staggering staff level of
1,400 to 3,000 or above. (The embassy, by the way, has requested $1,875
billion for its operations in fiscal year 2011, and that was assuming a
staffing level of only 1,400.) Realistically, as long as such an
embassy remains at Ground Zero Iraq, we will not have withdrawn from
that country.

Similarly, we have a giant
U.S. embassy in Kabul (being expanded) and another mega-embassy
being
built in the Pakistani capital Islamabad. These are not, rest
assured, signs of departure. Nor is the fact that in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, everything war-connected seems to be surging,
even if in ways often not noticed here. President Obama's surge
decision has been described largely in terms of those 30,000-odd extra
troops he's sending in, not in terms of the shadow army of 30,000
or more extra private contractors taking on various military roles
(and dying
off the books in striking numbers); nor the extra
contingent of CIA types and the escalating
drone war they are overseeing in the Pakistani tribal borderlands;
nor the quiet doubling
of Special Operations units assigned to hunt down the Taliban
leadership; nor the extra State department officials for the "civilian
surge"; nor, for instance, the special $10
million "pool" of funds that up to 120 U.S. Special Operations
forces, already in those borderlands training the paramilitary Pakistani
Frontier Corps, may soon have available to spend "winning hearts and
minds."

Perhaps it's historically accurate to say that great powers generally
leave home, head elsewhere armed to the teeth, and then experience the
urge to stay. With our trillion-dollar-plus wars and yearly trillion-dollar-plus
national-security budget, there's a lot at stake in staying, and
undoubtedly in fighting two, three, many
Afghanistans (and Iraqs) in the years to come.

Sooner or later, we will leave both Iraq and Afghanistan. It's too
late in the history of this planet to occupy them forever and a day.
Better sooner.