Obama's War: A Lecture

During his presidential campaign, President Obama pledged more troops, ground intrusions, and drone attacks to end the war in Afghanistan. This is a promise he has kept, but it will not work. In this lecture, Tariq Ali talks about why the war is unwinnable and can only lead to a bloody stalemate. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] AFGHANISTAN IS NOW AT A CRITICAL STAGE. AND I AM VERY PROUD TO SAY THAT THE London Review of Books, whose 30th anniversary we are commemorating, has over the years published others and myself on this subject, taking essentially a critical stance to this war. It became fashionable all over the world--not just in the United States--to think of Iraq and Afghanistan as two very different wars. On one level they are, but good-thinking people placed different moral values on these wars. The view of large numbers of people in the United States today--and the uninterrupted view of an overwhelming majority of Europeans--is that the Iraq War was a bad war that never should have happened. The Afghanistan War, on the other hand, was meant to be a good war. This was the war against a country where the people who attacked the United States on September 11 were based and this had to be sorted out. The government that had given them refuge had to be toppled and this could only be done militarily. As a small footnote, the official September 11 inquiry said that the Afghan government never formally refused to hand over these people; they just demanded to see the evidence. The commission of inquiry made a point of noting that if convincing evidence were provided, the government would hand them over. Of course, no one supported this crazed attack on the United States, but some of us asked at the time what the motive was for sending an army in to conquer Afghanistan. Former president George W. Bush said the main aim was to sort out al Qaida and capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, dead or alive, in his unforgettable words. If they were dead, that was that; if they were alive, they presumably would be brought to the United States to stand trial for having ordered this attack. When that was said, I argued with one of the former president's leading supporters on the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer, in a debate that took place in Canada on Canadian television. If that was the case, I said, then the war was a failure because this was a small terrorist organization that was not going to hang around in Afghanistan for the U.S. army to capture it. It would flee and seek refuge in other parts of the world, most likely in the border badlands of Pakistan, but presumably elsewhere as well. So it would fail and did fail. If you announce that you are going to occupy a country to capture a, b, and c, they will move on. It is worth remembering that Afghanistan was captured without a struggle. No segment of Afghan society resisted the U.S.-NATO occupation. Why? Because Pakistan was the key player in this war. It had armed the Taliban and had sent the Taliban to take power and end a period of civil war. There were large numbers of Pakistani soldiers, Pakistani air force personnel, as well as Pakistani military and civilian intelligence people in Afghanistan who essentially told the Taliban leaders that now was not the time to fight. Shave your beards and return to Pakistan, but do not resist because you will all be killed. From their point of view, it was quite sane advice and, more astonishingly, the divided Taliban leadership accepted it. So Kabul fell without a struggle. For the first two years, the resistance to the United States and its NATO allies in Afghanistan was limited, episodic, and localized. What made it national was the U.S. decision to impose on Afghanistan a regime led by one of its CIA assets, Hamid Karzai. He was propelled into power (more on him later) and has since become a controversial figure by supposedly fighting with the United States. Let us go through the chronology. The United States imposed this regime and gave it a U. …

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