Obama’s Afghan pointlessness
Eight years after 9/11, and there seems little chance that American troops will be leaving Afghanistan anytime soon. On the contrary: President Obama has made clear his intention to keep intensifying the war effort in Afghanistan without any clear defined goal of what “victory” might look like.
The war in Afghanistan has played an integral role in America’s self-definition since 9/11. The two are are intimately related. The story goes that America invaded Afghanistan to take out Osama bin Laden, and that the war must continue in Afghanistan in order to end the terrorist threat. In other words: so long as America is in Afghanistan, the terrorist threat remains at large. Ending the Afghan war must mean that the terrorist threat is over, and normalcy can return. 9/11 will be over; America can resume a new path; life can go on.
It is because 9/11 and Afghanistan are so intertwined that the war in Afghanistan will likely continue for some time. To be blunt, America’s business and political leadership profits far too much from 9/11 to end it.
9/11 has been a veritable godsend for America’s leaders. It has created public fear and led to billions of dollars in financial profit. It has made people uncomfortable to question the government; it has avoided any inspection of America’s empire all over the world. It has created the “enemy” of terrorism — and when there is an enemy, then the government can do what it wants and corruption can take place without much oversight
This is not the first time an enemy has been used in American politics. After World War II, American politicians created the enemy of an alleged vast international communist conspiracy as the presumptive reason for America’s imperial project undertaken by combined efforts of business and political elites.
And it worked. For more than fifty years, people permitted Congress and the President to create a huge military-industrial complex (the very complex that President Dwight Eisenhower had warned the nation about in his farewell address) which pumped trillions and trillions of dollars into military spending at the expense of the domestic common good.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, America’s leaders realized there was no justification for the established presence of the military-industrial complex; and without an enemy, it was only a matter of time before people began to question spending hundreds of billions of dollars without any international enemy.
9/11 brought a new enemy in the form of Osama bin Laden. The specter of “international terrorism” could take the place of the old communist threat and justify a continued social order predicated on military spending and corporate power.
America did not have to go to war in Afghanistan. Indeed, prior to 9/11, terrorism was always thought of as a criminal matter, not a matter of war. In every country in the world, the perpetrators of terrorist acts are typically caught, put on trial, and made to serve long prison sentences. No “war” is ever declared. In fact, this was the exact approach taken after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in the United States: the conspirators were caught, put on trial, and sentenced. America chose to war, because war allows for an enemy. And it was time for a new enemy.
Without 9/11 — and without the Afghan war — those questions reemerge. Why does America need F-22s? What enemy exists that could challenge American power? What is America’s purpose in this world? Meaty questions that require substantive answers and genuine leadership.
The real shame in all of this is the role played by President Obama. President Obama has vowed to continue the Afghan war to some unclear end, at the expense of American and Afghani lives. For all his promises to honor civil liberties, to defend the common good, to end the influence of corporations and lobbyists, Obama has shown that he is little better than President Bush in the area of international affairs. He has shown that despite whatever good intentions he may have brought to the Presidency, he is held captive to the same interests and power structures that have created trillions of dollars in debt, a massive imperial war machine, and few remaining cherished liberties.
Instead of asking the American public tough questions and pulling out of Afghanistan, President Obama apparently favors the woefully misguided approach of his predecessor: pointless death, pointless war expenditure, pointless civilian casualties, all to simply delay the inevitable moment when America will leave.
To this day, Americans continue to hear the same old post hoc justifications for war, including the tried-and-true message used in any colonial war that the “women of Afghanistan” must be saved. No one in America really cares about Afghan women; if they did, they would wonder why American troops continue to kill these women in countless incidents of collateral damage.
Americans need to really challenge themselves to imagine a world that does not require constant American military intervention. It would be a wonderful thing for the American military to reserve and replenish itself after eight long years of hard fighting and actually take on a defensive posture, and to allow troops to come home to their loved ones.
But it is clear that peace — any type of peace — is the last thing that American political and business leaders want. The politicians and the business people benefit financially and politically from a constant state of war. Weapons can be sold, labor shipped overseas (thus dropping the unemployment rate), and the population kept in check by fear of an enemy that will never really materialize.
No, Afghanistan will be a battleground for American troops for some time; until Americans realize that it is possible to move beyond 9/11 to a different era, an era where fear can be put to rest and war doesn’t have to be the normal state of thing. That will be the challenge. And it is with great shame that it likely will be another leader, and not President Obama, who will help Americans get to that point.
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