Nir Rosen interview on Iraq and Afghanistan

[Cain]

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/radio/2010/12/13/rosen/index.html

Brilliant interview.  A couple of extracts:

But, having said all that, what we did in 2003, right from the beginning, even if the invasion itself was wrong, had we invaded with hundreds of thousands of more troops the way American military planners would have wanted, at least we could have prevented the looting that occurred, and this massive and pervasive sense of lawlessness which took over, because there was just no security. If you got rid of the mayor and the police, the government in New York City, and the electricity, and put nothing in place to replace them, you'd very soon see self-defense militias forming, former policemen would sell their services out, or prey upon the people, you'd see Jewish militias fighting Puerto Rican militias and Upper East Side militias fighting East Harlem militias, and the Upper East Side militias wouldn't do too well probably. Iraq wasn't unique.

We removed the state and allowed militias to take over, and those militias in a sense remained in power. So from the beginning you had militia warfare, you had total destruction of the state infrastructure, a civil war which began in 2003, but grew more and more intense, kidnapping and rapes and serious crime being committed right from the beginning and anybody with any kind of money, middle class, doctor or whatever, their kid would be kidnapped for ransom.

So rampant criminality, which also led to people seeking protection by forming militias. The dominance over Iraqi society on the part of religious groups would have gotten much stronger in the '90s thanks to the sanction devastating society and the flight of Iraqi liberals. Then of course we arrested tens and tens of thousands of Iraqi men, primarily men; the majority of them were never tried or sentenced, but they languished for years in American detention and in Iraqi detention where many were tortured and abused both in American detention and in Iraqi detention.

That left hundreds of thousands of people whose men and sons and husbands and fathers disappeared. Kids watching their fathers being taken away, the kids are screaming, daddy, daddy, and father's desperate and he's bleeding and being beaten and dragged away. So that's hundreds of thousands of families horribly brutalized and traumatized and children who were urinating on themselves at night because they're so scared, the Americans are coming and take them away too. And the women are left with nobody who can care for them and feed them, families devastated. Millions of refugees created. They are displaced either internally or abroad, living in poverty. People who may have been wealthy or middle class even.

Secular Iraqis, liberal Iraqis, educated Iraqis, now reduced to prostitution, having their kids sell cigarettes on the street, lives totally ruined when you're 50 years old, you cannot begin again, especially in a country like Syria or Jordan where there's already a poor economic environment and you don't have access to any kind of employment. And their kids can't go to school, so you now have a generation of children who haven't gone to school for about the last five years.

Every family that I've met in Iraq, or Iraqi refugees as well, has been touched by kidnapping and murder and rape and displacements. You have half a million Iraqis today living inside Iraq who are homeless, squatting in illegal settlements, living in shacks made out of tin cans and cardboard—I saw a house made out of used air conditioners piled up on top of each other—living in massive pits of sewage, stinking of shit, flies all over the place. And, of course, let's not forget you had hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, murdered, disappeared, tortured to death with power drills, with beheadings, their bodies found weeks later in garbage dumps. Hundreds and hundreds of villages in Iraq totally destroy in a civil war, like in Rwanda or Bosnia. Every house blown up. All that's left is a pile of rubble and women's shoes.

It's a totally destroyed society, and militias may not have a real hold today the way they did in the past, but torture is routine and systematic now. If you get arrested, you get tortured. Corruption is rampant; it's one of the most corrupt countries on Earth. Services are terrible, almost no electricity, dirty water, terrible malnutrition, kids not going to school. It's just a destroyed, brutalized and beaten place where the worst kind of people have taken over. There's no space for women—certainly it was better to be a woman under Saddam. Honor killings have increased. It's just a real betrayal of the hopes that Iraqis had with the removal of Saddam.

And

And a key element in the improvement in Iraq was Maliki's growth as a leader. He's brutal, and in many ways he resembles a Shia Saddam, but he asserted himself and the Iraqi state became much stronger and now dominates Iraq, and nobody can overthrow it. And he went after the Shia militias. Crucially, he made a decision to wipe out the Mahdi army and he did that effectively, which even won him the grudging acceptance of many Sunnis. He's credited with improving security somehow and with transcending narrow sectarianism.

And a key element of the American counter-insurgency theory is that you build the capacity of local governments so they can take over from you. Karzai is no Maliki. Even Maliki isn't that great, but Karzai is no Maliki. He has no legitimacy, no credibility; every election we've had in Afghanistan has only led to greater chaos, greater violence, and disappointments and the lack of rule of law, and deepen the fissures in Afghanistan. He's unable to assert his authority anywhere in the country, except through some patronage networks because of the money he gets from the Americans or the Iranians or drug deals.

So you don't have a state you want to support; in effect, this is a predatory government which is hated. The last thing you want to do is build his capacity so he can further alienate people. The Taliban are an Afghan movement. They are Afghans fighting for local Afghan causes and reason with the support of communities throughout Afghanistan. We cannot fight a war against the Afghan people and defeat them. The US military thankfully isn't that brutal, and I'm a huge critic of the US military, but it's not the Israeli or the Russian military. They are not going to brutalize the Pashtun population sufficiently to teach them that insurgency is not going to work.

The only successful counter-insurgency in history perhaps is the British in Malaya, which the Americans often refer to in their books on counter-insurgency. But the British in Malaya took half a million ethnic Chinese and put them in concentration camps, and that worked because the insurgency in Malaya was dominated by ethnic Chinese, communists. We are not going to take millions and millions of Pashtuns and put them in concentration camps.

Iraq was also much easier in the sense that the battle was an urban one for the most part, and you could build these immense walls around different neighborhoods. It was very oppressive, it was like Palestine; it disrupted the social fabric, it made life hell, but it allowed you to control the people and control who went in and who went out of neighborhoods. You could conduct a census and determine who belonged. You could prevent arms and bombs from going in a neighborhood because you controlled the only entry and exit point to it. You could prevent militias from going into a neighborhood.

So once the Iraqi civil war had sufficiently devastated its population, the Americans came in there, kind of froze the gains of the civil war with these massive walls, in a way that reminded me of the way that the Dayton accords froze the Serbian gains in the Bosnian civil war. So you were able to control the population of Baghdad as an American occupier. Now Afghanistan is not an urban conflict. The center of gravity as they say of the insurgency is in the rural areas, where most of the people live. In the '80s the Russians controlled the cities, the communists controlled the cities in Afghanistan. The Mujahideen controlled the countryside.

Likewise today the Americans may control the population centers, the Taliban control the countryside, and once you leave the cities, the few capitals of the provinces, you are in Taliban territory, and you have thousands and thousands of villages with no roads, impossible to even physically control these areas. The Americans ended up living with the people in Iraq, able to base themselves in communities. You cannot in Afghanistan do that.

So even from an American counter-insurgency point of view, it's just much too challenging. They are living in bases remote from the population, they go out, they rumble along a road slowly for a couple of hours, shake hands with an elder in a village, drink tea with him, they feel like they're Lawrence of Arabia or something, and then they rumble back to their military bases a couple of hours away in time for the chow hole to be opened to get a burger before going to play video games in their rooms.

Meanwhile, that night, the Taliban can knock on the door of the elder whose hand we shook, and remind him who his neighbor is, and who is watching him, and undermine any deal you're going to strike with that guy. Another difference: Iraq, the conflict was fundamentally about controlling the state, because the main resource in Iraq is oil. Whoever controls the state controls the oil, and is rich. Afghanistan has not resources to speak of. In theory they have lithium, but they're never going to it. The main resource in Afghanistan is American dollars. We, our presence, is fueling a conflict economy. It's this corrosive presence, and everybody wants a piece of our money. The warlords in Afghanistan, even the Taliban, are getting our money.

In Iraq, our convoys were protected by private security companies like Blackwater. In Afghanistan, these convoys are protected by Afghan warlords. So it's our money which is fueling warlordism and corruption in Afghanistan. And the warlords pay off the Taliban, it's the Taliban that's more effective and will allow them to operate in Taliban areas. So Taliban is getting American money as well. It's a perfect storm of this conflict economy driven by American money which is flooding into a place that has no capacity to actually absorb it.

I'm glad someone understands these points, because every time I bring them up with friends who consider themselves knowledgeable on world affairs, their take is "wha?"  Rosen's book is also on my Xmas list now.

[Adios]

Good points. I want that book as well.

[Jenne]

We've been saying in this house for months if not YEARS that the US should literally leave the Afghans to their own devices.  They need to be left to take care of this Talib mess themselves at this point.  The people have no respect for the West, and they will subvert their intentions to "keep them safe," the enemy they KNOW vs. the enemby they DON'T know and don't WANT to know, etc.  Xenophobia runs rampant, and truly, they just are not equipped with the sophistication to handle the complex relationships that have cropped up as a result of all the multiple manipulations Afghans have gone through in the last 50 years.

Truth be known, Afghans are used to corruption and though they publicly decry it, they're hard-pressed to want it changed.  Again:  the enemy they know, etc.  I'm not sure they'd be happy with a straight-edged, transparent government.  Well, I know they wouldn't be, but they'd learn to appreciate it eventually.  It's just GETTING them to that place that's tough.

The fact is, the place has always been and will always be a total clusterfuck.  Probably.  I guess I shouldn't 'use absolutes here, though really, history has yet to prove me wrong. 

As for Iraq, that all makes so much sense and in fact I think I've read this elsewhere but can't remember...I want to say an Economist article or something but I could be mistaken.  Fucking great stuff, as usual, Cain.