Ann Marlowe

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/23/afghanistan-troop-withdrawal-obama-speech-s-misplaced-triumphalism.html

Obama’s Misplaced Afghan Triumphalism

Announcing the Afghan troop drawdown was more or less a concession of defeat, but you’d never know it from Obama’s speech, which was all victorious cadences—and illogical statements.

by Ann Marlowe | June 23, 2011 1:25 AM EDT

If there is anyone who could make the excellent idea of reversing the Afghan surge sound like a bad one, it’s our president.

“America,” Obama said in his clever and infuriating speech Wednesday night, “it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.”

In other words, we can stop wasting so much money in Afghanistan—and start wasting it at home. Yet, illogically, the president also seemed to say that our objective in Afghanistan was never nation-building, it was denying al Qaeda a safe haven. Part of Obama’s alleged political mastery is that he believes he can make opposites cohere simply by uttering them. Americans no longer believe in nation-building in Afghanistan and do believe we have struck a major blow at al Qaeda by killing bin Laden. So just string those ideas together and ignore the massive waste of American money and lives that occurred on Obama’s watch.

Obama alluded very obliquely to the billions in taxpayers’ money thrown away by subsidizing the Karzai cartel and others with American contracting money. (The Afghan government must move “from an economy shaped by war to one that can sustain a lasting peace.”) But he never said, we were wrong, I was wrong, we have learned something.

Our national-security establishment appears unable to learn. The graph no one has ever published would overlay the number of troops in Afghanistan and the number of IEDs planted in Afghanistan. They are tightly correlated. In 2010, Afghan insurgents planted 14,661 IEDs, a 62 percent increase over 2009’s 7,228, which was a 120 percent increase over 2008.

More troops means more IEDs, period. More troops not only attracts more of the seemingly infinite supply of young Pakistani and Afghan men to the insurgent cause, it also makes the country more dangerous, which gives the Taliban greater appeal with their promise of order. While Obama spoke of not making Afghanistan a “perfect place,” he ignored the fact that it has gone from being a relatively safe place in 2002 and 2003 to a dangerous place today. Afghanistan was far safer and less corrupt with 10,000 Americans than it is now with 100,000.

But our president is constitutionally, small c, unable not to perceive himself as a winner, and though the occasion was more or less a concession of defeat, the speech was all triumphalism, even to Obama’s cadences. He even used this occasion to make the meandering and inadequate American intervention in Libya seem like a strategy, speaking of our “supporting allies in protecting the Libyan people and giving them the chance to determine their destiny.”

The speech aimed vainly at Lincolnesque echoes (“With confidence in our cause; with faith in our fellow citizens; and with hope in our hearts”) but thudded to earth with New Age resonances. Obama said, “We must chart a more centered course,” which means exactly nothing; he could have said “centrist” or “self-centered,” both of which were hinted at in that “centered.”

While men and women who truly love freedom die in Syria and Yemen, not to mention Libya, Obama spoke of supporting the Arab revolutions “with fidelity to our ideals, with the power of our example, and with an unwavering belief that all human beings deserve to live with freedom and dignity.” In other words, we will support you by living our lives in indifference to your struggle—or even as we help your oppressors, as we seem to have done in Bahrain.

I am as happy as anyone that Obama is calling an end to the surge that has increased violence in Afghanistan—and American military deaths and injuries—exponentially. But with an essentially dishonest president and national-security establishment, it is unlikely that an era of waste and error is ending.

from The Daily, the tablet-based original news publication. http://bit.ly/e7Dsov

What’s in store

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Yet another all-too-ordinary Afghan tragedy: On Jan. 28, the Finest supermarket on 15th Street in Wazir Akbar Khan, a suburb of Kabul, was destroyed by a Taliban assault culminating in a suicide bombing. The target, the Taliban claimed, was the Afghan head of military contractor Blackwater (now known as Xe Services). But the 14 victims included a well-known Afghan human rights activist, Hamidi Barmaki, her husband, Dr. Massoud Yama, and their four children. Several employees of the market also died, but Western news reports haven’t given their names.

I shopped at the Finest about every other day during my last stay in Kabul. I didn’t know the murdered family, but I remember the Afghans who ran the market as unfailingly helpful and polite. In a country where customer service is a new concept, they were ahead of the curve. They would even send a young boy to help me carry my purchases four muddy blocks to my home. The Finest boasted not only an incredible selection of packaged foods, local handicrafts, toys, imported toiletries, and housewares, but ATMs from two different local banks. There are at least 10 other similar supermarkets in Kabul now, but of those I’d visited, the Finest had the most helpful staff.

What’s especially hateful about this attack is that the Taliban are taking aim at the fragile beginnings of a civil society and middle class in Afghanistan.

The Finest was frequented not only by foreigners but by upscale Afghans like the unfortunate Barmaki-Yama family. While some items, like pet food, were bought mainly by foreigners or hyphenated Afghans, the Finest also carried large samovars and other kitchen goods used mainly by Afghans. The toys on the second floor were also aimed at Afghans, as foreigners almost never bring their children to Afghanistan, lest they suffer the fate of the Yama kids. In November, I bought a model helicopter there for the son of Afghan friends in a second-tier city, Mazar-i-Sharif, where they don’t have such toys.

Stores like the Finest are not just providers of goods. In a place like Afghanistan, which has next to no public sphere, they provide one. Both men and women go to the elite supermarkets. Women do not buy food in traditional outdoor bazaars in Afghanistan; men do that shopping. But women can come to indoor places like the Finest, which are considered safer. As I’ve seen in another context — a popular park in a gated community in Mazar — Afghans often feel more relaxed in confined spaces that are accessible to the public than they do in more open public areas.

Even the fact that the Finest stocked a variety of shampoos is a small gesture toward civilization. After all, people who are comparison-shopping for shampoo are people who are not thinking about blowing themselves up tomorrow. The Finest turns out to have its own website, which speaks the language of retail worldwide, in often touching phrases (“afghan and expects customers”).

Private, Afghan-run businesses like the Finest are doing as much as or more than anything Western nations do in Afghanistan to pull the country out of benighted poverty and into the modern world. You might think they would have the vigorous support of the Afghan government. But you’d be wrong.

President Hamid Karzai did not offer his condolences on the occasion of the bombing, as he often does when Taliban are killed by coalition forces in a so-called wedding party. No, he was busy proposing that the war criminal and Osama bin Laden cohort Abdul Rasoul Sayyaf be the new speaker of Parliament, and condemning foreign Provincial Reconstruction Teams as “serious obstacles to the process of building government” — a description far more appropriate for Karzai himself.

And so it goes in our war, in which ordinary Afghans are often doing their damnedest to build up Afghanistan, and the president the United States subsidizes by the billions is trying to tear it down. The world was watching the thrilling events in Egypt while the Barmaki-Yama family was dying. I wonder when the Afghans too will decide they’ve had enough of their American-enabled autocrat, and stand up together as citizens to take back their country.