[Note for TomDispatch readers: I have a special offer to make today. Nick Turse has written regularly for this site since 2003. He’s a genuine home-grown star of TomDispatch and has just published a new book on the Afghan War, its title highlighting the sole option that seems not to be on Washington’s “table” when all the options are supposedly there: The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso). The remarkable British journalist Patrick Cockburn has termed it “a fascinating and essential guide,” and it contains a stellar line-up of leading critical analysts of the Afghan War, including Andrew Bacevich, Malalai Joya, Chalmers Johnson, and Ann Jones. As a sign of his support for TomDispatch, Turse has agreed to sign a copy of his book for any TD reader or enthusiast willing to contribute $75 to this site. (All contributions to TomDispatch.com are tax-deductible to the extent provided by law. For more information, click here.)
In the past, surprising numbers of you have dug into your pockets and contributed generously to this website, helping us expand modestly, offer a little extra support to young writers, develop our TomCast audio interviews and podcasts, hire some part-time help to take the load off my aging brain, and simply stay afloat. Those of you willing to dig into your pockets, whether for the first time or again, and contribute $75 directly to TomDispatch (by clicking on the “support us” icon to the right of the main screen or simply by going here), will get your own personalized, autographed copy of Turse’s new book, and I can’t tell you how appreciative we at TD will be. Keep in mind that if you can’t offer such a sum, but are still eager for Turse’s latest work (as well you should be!), you can order it by clicking here. If you buying his book (or anything else) after arriving at Amazon.com via a TomDispatch book link, we get a small cut of your purchase, a gesture of support that won’t cost you a cent! Tom]
On January 1, 1970, when Noam Chomsky’s essay “After Pinkville” was first published in the New York Review of Books, reading was still an antiwar activity, and often a transformative one. Books and articles changed minds, altered lives, helped you mobilize, and then keep going. And it almost seemed that everyone who was doing anything was also writing about it. As Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., noted in 1971 in Armed Forces Journal -- while pointing to “widespread conditions among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by the French Army’s Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of [the] Tsarist armies [of Russia] in 1916 and 1917” -- as many as 144 “underground” papers were being published for soldiers. Some were simply aimed at them by antiwar activists, but a surprising number were written and published by dissident troops themselves. “In Vietnam,” the Ft. Lewis-McChord Free Press typically wrote, “the lifers, the Brass, are the true Enemy, not the enemy.”
Recently, I reread Chomsky’s “After Pinkville.” (“Pinkville” was a generic U.S. military name for the village of My Lai where a company of U.S. Army troops carried out the single most horrific, up-close-and-personal slaughter of the war: more than 500 Vietnamese women, children, infants, and old men were murdered, none resistant, many finishing breakfast.) Chomsky’s essay remains a devastating account of the kind of large-scale, widespread destruction -- the dimensions of which are now largely forgotten and even at the time were ill-known here -- the U.S. military visited on rural South Vietnam at the height of the war. As he then summed it up, “The world’s most advanced society has found the answer to people’s war: eliminate the people.” In that essay, Chomsky was chiding the antiwar movement for not doing more and urging on those of us in it. It made a singularly powerful impression on me at the time -- and it should have. He concluded: “Continued mass actions, patient explanation, principled resistance can be boring, depressing. But those who program the B52 attacks and the ‘pacification’ exercise are not bored, and as long as they continue in their work, so must we.”
Today, the U.S. has been fighting two nightmarish wars of destruction on either end of the Greater Middle East, and yet such an essay would, in essence, be almost impossible to write. There is, in a sense, no one to write it for. Nick Turse who, in recent years, has traveled the backlands and rural villages of Vietnam and Cambodia interviewing villagers who suffered through the American wars in their countries, knows a good deal about what war really means to those who can’t leave when the going gets tough and stays tough, year after miserable year. He also knows a good deal about what sorts of war literature were available to Americans, then and now. His just-published book, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan, runs distinctly against the tide of twenty-first century war publications in America. (To catch him discussing the “Pentagon printing press” and the Afghan War in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
Publish or Perish
Getting a Read on American War
By Nick TurseQuick -- name the five most important, influential, and best known books on the Afghan War. Okay, name three. Okay, I’ll settle for two. How about one?
While the American war in Vietnam raged, publishers churned out books whose titles still resonate. In 1967 alone, classics like Mary McCarthy’s Vietnam, Howard Zinn’s Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, Thich Nhat Hanh’s Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, not to mention Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam: A Novel all hit the shelves.
In fact, between 1962 and 1970, as American involvement in the conflict accelerated and peaked, some 9,430 books were written about the Vietnam War. From 2002 to 2010, less than half as many -- 4,221 texts of all types -- have been written about the Afghan War.
[Note for TomDispatch readers: Last week, I asked you to consider writing friends, colleagues, relatives -- whomever -- and urge them to go to the "subscribe" window at the upper right of TD's main screen, put in their email addresses, hit “submit,” answer the “opt-in” email that instantly arrives in your email box (or, unfortunately, spam folder), and receive notices whenever a new post goes up. (Word of mouth is, of course, still the major kind of publicity this site can afford.) A number of you did so and TD got a nice stream of new subscribers. Many thanks indeed! If some of you meant to do this but didn't quite get around to it, now's as perfect a time as any! And it really does make a difference to us. Tom]
Back before email, a world traveler who wanted to keep in touch and couldn't just pop into the nearest Internet café might drop you a series of postcards from one exotic locale after another. Pepe Escobar, that edgy, peripatetic globe-trotting reporter for one of my favorite on-line publications, Asia Times, has been doing just that for TomDispatch readers as he explores the geography that undergirds our civilization, the pipelines that crisscross Eurasia through which flow energy -- and trouble. This, then, is his fourth "postcard" from what he likes to call Pipelineistan. The first in March 2009 began laying out a great, ongoing energy struggle across Eurasia and the Great Game of business, diplomacy, and proxy war between Russia and the U.S. that went with it.
In May of that year, he plunged eastward into tumultuous Central and South Asia and the expanding battleground that, in Washington, goes by the neologism Af-Pak (for the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations). Next, in October, he headed west toward Europe and another developing struggle, which he dubbed "Pipelineistan’s Ultimate Opera", over just how natural gas from the Caspian Sea would reach Europe. Now, in his first stop of 2010, he heads where, it seems, anyone interested in energy -- maybe anyone interested in anything at all -- more or less has to head these days: China and the new Silk Road of pipelines that offer the former Middle Kingdom a partial shot at future energy security and Washington future anxieties of all sorts. Tom
China’s Pipelineistan “War”
Anteing Up, Betting, and Bluffing in the New Great Game
By Pepe EscobarFuture historians may well agree that the twenty-first century Silk Road first opened for business on December 14, 2009. That was the day a crucial stretch of pipeline officially went into operation linking the fabulously energy-rich state of Turkmenistan (via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) to Xinjiang Province in China’s far west. Hyperbole did not deter the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, Turkmenistan’s president, from bragging, “This project has not only commercial or economic value. It is also political. China, through its wise and farsighted policy, has become one of the key guarantors of global security.”
The bottom line is that, by 2013, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong will be cruising to ever more dizzying economic heights courtesy of natural gas supplied by the 1,833-kilometer-long Central Asia Pipeline, then projected to be operating at full capacity. And to think that, in a few more years, China’s big cities will undoubtedly also be getting a taste of Iraq’s fabulous, barely tapped oil reserves, conservatively estimated at 115 billion barrels, but possibly closer to 143 billion barrels, which would put it ahead of Iran. When the Bush administration’s armchair generals launched their Global War on Terror, this was not exactly what they had in mind.
Consider this: the number three book at Amazon.com at the moment is entitled Obama’s Wars, and yet the war that may most truly turn out to be the president’s seems only now to be gaining steam. Is it a case of premature titling?
I’m talking, of course, about the U.S. war in (with?) Pakistan. Last Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the CIA was ready to beg, borrow, or steal any armed drone the U.S. military could spare to expand what has morphed from a “covert” assassination campaign against al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders into something closer to a full-scale robot air war over the Pakistani tribal borderlands, especially North Waziristan.
As the CIA’s drone war escalates, so have airborne border crossings of a different sort. U.S. helicopters are pursuing “fleeing” Taliban fighters as part of what the military terms armed “self-defense,” once known as “hot pursuit,” into those Pakistani “sanctuaries” from which the Taliban is said to be conducting its own successful surge in Afghanistan. ("Enraged and embarrassed," Pakistani officials have responded to the incursions by closing a key border crossing that supplies the American war effort in Afghanistan -- and the Taliban has torched a series of fuel trucks left idling near Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, by that blocked crossing.) Clearly escalating as well is the frustration of U.S. commanders at an enemy elusively lurking across a largely unmarked frontier.
And what’s happened so far may be only the beginning. In his new book, Bob Woodward reports that Obama administration officials, military and civilian, were eager to do something more in Pakistan as early as the fall of 2009. As Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, put it obliquely but clearly enough to the Pakistani ambassador at the time, if his country didn’t agree to a “strategic partnership,” essentially by moving against militant networks in North Waziristan, “[W]e will have to do what we must to protect U.S. interests.” Last Sunday, Greg Miller of the Washington Post reported that the administration's Afghan War “review” back then had actually “centered largely on the need to eliminate insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan.” He also noted that Afghan War commander General David Petraeus is now advocating “a more aggressive posture with Pakistan, and [has] been particularly supportive of the CIA drone effort.”
If one passage in recent news reports raised a warning flag, however, it’s this eerie one from Saturday's Wall Street Journal, which should give any reader the creeps: “U.S. officials say a successful terrorist strike against the West emanating from Pakistan could force the U.S. to take unilateral military action -- an outcome all parties are eager to avoid.” Such a strike would “force” the U.S. “to take unilateral military action”? Think about that for a moment. Amid a sudden drumbeat of announcements of possible strikes by Pakistani-based terrorist groups in Europe, there may, in fact, be a growing contingent of U.S. military and civilian officials so frustrated with the disastrous war in Afghanistan that they are ready to expand the war significantly in Pakistan, and are only awaiting the necessary excuse to do so.
Talk about playing with fire. Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan. Further major escalations of the American war in that country -- flailing responses to ongoing failure -- would be asking for trouble of every sort. Ask long enough, and it will come. With that in mind, consider the assessment Andrew Bacevich, author of the bestselling Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, offers of the first nine years of war in Afghanistan (and Pakistan). To catch Bacevich discussing how the U.S. military became specialists in quagmires in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview click here or, to download it to your iPod, here. Tom
The Long War: Year Ten
Lost in the Desert with the GPS on the Fritz
By Andrew J. BacevichIn January 1863, President Abraham Lincoln’s charge to a newly-appointed commanding general was simplicity itself: “give us victories.” President Barack Obama’s tacit charge to his generals amounts to this: give us conditions permitting a dignified withdrawal. A pithy quote in Bob Woodward’s new book captures the essence of an emerging Obama Doctrine: “hand it off and get out.”
Getting into a war is generally a piece of cake. Getting out tends to be another matter altogether -- especially when the commander-in-chief and his commanders in the field disagree on the advisability of doing so.
Happy Anniversary, America. Nine years ago today -- on October 7, 2001 -- a series of U.S. air strikes against targets across Afghanistan launched the opening campaign of what has since become the nation’s longest war. Three thousand two hundred and eighty five days later the fight to determine Afghanistan’s future continues. At least in part, “Operation Enduring Freedom” has lived up to its name: it has certainly proven to be enduring.
One strangeness of our moment is that any U.S. Army commander going into an Afghan village can directly pay locals to, say, fix some part of that country’s destroyed infrastructure. That’s considered a winning-hearts-and-minds counterinsurgency strategy. On the other hand, here in the U.S., it's other hearts and minds that are targeted. Our government has proven itself adept at handing untold sums over to failing banks, investment outfits, insurance firms, and auto companies, but remains allergic to handing significant dollars directly to out-of-work Americans, New Deal-style, to go back to work and help our aging infrastructure.
With the backing of the Nation Institute’s superb Investigative Fund, TomDispatch has sent its associate editor Andy Kroll on the road to confront the reality of the meteoric growth of long-term unemployment, of what joblessness really means to hearts and minds in our country. This is the first result of his journalistic labors. To catch him discussing the jobs crisis on Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here. Tom
Unemployed
Stranded on the Sidelines of a Jobs Crisis
By Andy Kroll[Research support for this story was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.]
Sometime in early June -- he's not exactly sure which day -- Rick Rembold joined history. That he doesn't remember comes as little surprise: Who wants their name etched into the record books for not having a job?
For Rembold, that day in June marked six months since he'd last pulled a steady paycheck, at which point his name joined the rapidly growing list of American workers deemed "long-term unemployed" by the Department of Labor. In the worst jobs crisis in generations, the ranks of Rembolds, stranded on the sidelines, have exploded by over 400% -- from 1.3 million in December 2007, when the recession began, to 6.8 million this June. The extraordinary growth of this jobless underclass is a harbinger of prolonged pain for the American economy.
This summer, I set out to explore just why long-term unemployment had risen to historic levels -- and stumbled across Rembold. A 56-year-old resident of Mishawaka, Indiana, he caught the unnerving mix of frustration, anger, and helplessness voiced by so many other unemployed workers I'd spoken to. "I lie awake at night with acid indigestion worrying about how I’m going to survive," he said in a brief bio kept by the National Employment Law Project, which is how I found him. I called him up, and we talked about his languishing career, as well as his childhood and family. But a few phone calls, I realized, weren't enough. In early August I hopped a plane to northern Indiana.
In job terms, my timing couldn't have been better. I arrived around lunchtime, and was driving through downtown South Bend, an unremarkable cluster of buildings awash in gray and brown and brick, when my cell phone rang. Rembold's breathless voice was on the other end. "Sorry I didn't pick up earlier, man, but a friend just called and tipped me off about a place up near the airport. I'm fillin' up my bike and headin' up there right now." I told him I'd meet him there, hung a sharp U-turn, and sped north.
Twenty minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot of a modest-sized aircraft parts manufacturer tucked into a quiet business park. Ford and Chevy trucks filled the lot, most backed in. Rembold roared up soon after on his '99 Suzuki motorcycle. Barrel-chested with a thick neck, his short black hair was flecked with gray, and he was deeply tanned from long motorcycle rides with his girlfriend Terri. "They didn't even advertise this job," he told me after a hearty handshake. Not unless you count the inconspicuous sign out front, a jobless man's oasis in the blinding heat: "NOW HIRING: Bench Inspector."
[Note for TomDispatch readers: The 23,000 of you who get email notices whenever a new piece is posted, as well as the tens of thousands who bookmark TD or read its pieces reposted elsewhere, can support this site by encouraging new readers to sign on. TomDispatch spreads mainly thanks to word of mouth, a formidable force in the online world. For those of you already hooked, I urge you to lend the site a little more of that word-of-mouth power. I hope you'll consider putting together a modest list of friends, colleagues, relatives, or, for that matter, people you like to argue with who might benefit from getting TomDispatch regularly. You could urge them to go to the "subscribe" window to the right of the main screen, put in their e-mail addresses, hit “submit,” answer the confirmation letter that will quickly arrive in email boxes (or, fair warning, spam folders), and join the TD crew. Many thanks in advance for your efforts. TomDispatch associate editor Andy Kroll has written today’s introduction. Tom]
Let H. David Kotz put American surveillance activities in context by focusing our attention on what this government hasn’t spent much time looking at while it was putting its 24/7 efforts into watching the rest of us. Kotz is the inspector general for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and last week he arrived on Capitol Hill for another round of damning testimony on his bumbling employer, the nation's top financial regulator. It was Kotz who, in a 456-page report released last year, revealed the SEC's spectacular failure to uncover Bernie Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme, the largest in history, despite mountains of clues and tips. Now, Kotz laid bare for a Senate subcommittee the SEC's pathetic investigation of Texas financier Allen Stanford's $8 billion Ponzi scheme, a staggering monument to fraud and deception built over nearly two decades.
Kotz's report unearthed plenty of gems. For instance, an SEC examiner in Fort Worth, Texas, described Stanford's investor return rate as "absolutely ludicrous" and, as early as 1997, suspected the wealthy Texan of running a scam. (The commission wouldn't file a suit until 12 years -- and billions of dollars of investors' money -- later.) Or that the enforcement chief in the SEC's Fort Worth office, Spencer Barasch, had blocked six different opportunities to investigate Stanford. Or that after seven years of stymieing the commission's efforts, Barasch left the SEC and immediately sought to represent Stanford as his counsel in -- you guessed it -- the SEC's fraud suit.
As in his report on Madoff, Kotz painfully illustrated how our financial watchdogs, from examiners on the ground to executives in Washington, flubbed one of the biggest fraud cases in American history. If only the federal government were half as rabid about sniffing out Ponzi and pyramid schemes as it is in "protecting" our national security, where no lengths are ever too great, including secretly monitoring screenings of the documentary Gasland, a documentary film about the dangers of natural gas drilling. As Stephan Salisbury, author of Mohamed's Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland, points out, a rash of recent controversies has further illuminated the widening gyre of the American surveillance state, which weekly threatens to reach ever further into our daily lives. Andy
Surveillance, America’s Pastime
A Hall of Shame of State Snooping, Prying, and Informing Aimed at Destroying the Fabric of Civil Society
By Stephan SalisburyThe dried blood on the concrete floor is there for all to see, a stain forever marking the spot on a Memphis motel balcony where Martin Luther King, Jr. lay mortally wounded by a sniper’s bullet.
It is a stark and ghostly image speaking to the sharp pain of absence. King is gone. His aides are gone. Only the stain remains. What now?
That image is, of course, a photograph taken by Ernest C. Withers, Memphis born and bred, and known as the photographer of the civil rights movement. He was there at the Lorraine Motel, as he had been at so many other critical places, recording iconic images of those tumultuous years.
