Whistling past the Afghan graveyard

[FarCenter]

By Tom Engelhardt http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KB07Df03.html

It is now a commonplace - as a lead article in the New York Times's Week in Review pointed out recently - that Afghanistan is "the graveyard of empires". Given US President Barack Obama's call for a greater focus on the Afghan War ("We took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq ... "), and given indications that a "surge" of United States troops is about to get underway there, Afghanistan's dangers have been much in the news lately.

Some of the writing on this subject, including recent essays by Juan Cole at Salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss at the Nation and John Robertson at the War in Context website, has been incisive on just how the new administration's policy initiatives might transform Afghanistan and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands into "Obama's War".

In other words, "the graveyard" has been getting its due. Far less attention has been paid to the "empire" part of the equation. And there's a good reason for that - at least in Washington. Despite escalating worries about the deteriorating situation, no one in our nation's capital is ready to believe that Afghanistan could actually be the "graveyard" for the American role as the dominant hegemon on this planet.

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Hand it to the Bush administration, in the last seven-plus years the US has essentially inflicted a version of the Soviets' "Afghanistan" on itself. Now the Obama team is attempting to remedy this disaster, but what new thinking there is remains, as far as we can tell, essentially tactical. Whether the new team's plans are more or less "successful" in Afghanistan and on the Pakistani border may, in the end, prove somewhat beside the point. The term Pyrrhic victory, meaning a triumph more costly than a loss, was made for just such moments.

After all, more than a trillion dollars later, with essentially nothing to show except an unbroken record of destruction, corruption, and an inability to build anything of value, the US is only slowly drawing down its 140,000-plus troops in Iraq to a "mere" 40,000 or so, while surging yet more troops into Afghanistan to fight a counter-insurgency war, possibly for years to come. At the same time, the US continues to expand its armed forces and to garrison the globe, even as it attempts to bail out an economy and banking system evidently at the edge of collapse. This is a sure-fire formula for further disaster - unless the new administration took the unlikely decision to downsize the US global mission in a major way.

Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the US is in command, but whether it can get out in time. If not, when the moment for a bailout comes, don't expect the other pressed powers of the planet to do for Washington what it has been willing to do for the John Thains of our world. The Europeans are already itching to get out of town. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Indians ... who exactly will ride to our rescue?