Hundreds of tribal leaders backed President Hamid Karzai's plan for a "strategic partnership" with the United States on Sunday, a government spokesman said, a pact that could cement a long-term U.S. military presence in Central Asia. ...And now, it seems that expectation is going to be formalized.
About 17,000 American soldiers are in Afghanistan pursuing al-Qaida rebels and militant followers of the ousted Taliban government. A separate NATO-led force has about 8,500 troops in the capital and across the north and west.
American commanders have said they expect to have forces in the country, which borders Iran, nuclear-armed Pakistan and oil-rich Central Asia, for many years to come.
From the beginning, there have been those who questioned the official rationale for the assault on Afghanistan; one set of questions, the stories about the desire to put a pipeline across the country, which were abandoned in 1998 because of political unrest there but for which an agreement was made in December, 2002, are fairly well known. But personally, I've never been persuaded that was the why of the war: Multinational corporations are highly risk-averse and overthrowing the Taliban was not guaranteed to bring stability to the country and indeed hasn't in many areas. And after all, one of the arguments in favor of the "it-was-the-pipeline" notion is that building it while the Taliban was in charge would enrich a country the US viewed with disfavor. But just when have outfits like Unocal given a flipping damn about matters like that when it affected profits? (On the other hand, certainly big money was prepared to take advantage of the post-Taliban opportunity when it arose.)
I'd suggest rather that wars are very rarely fought over a pipeline or even "a" anything else. The causes are usually more general - or, to put it another way, vaguer - than that. In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, I wrote "So is the war about oil? Not directly. It's about what war is always about: power and control." It's the desire to control events, to make things go your way, that is a driving force. The desire, that is, to have your worldview, your way of perceiving the world and your place in it, be safe from any and all threats. That worldview assuredly can encompass economic ideologies but it is not limited to them and I think we do ourselves and our analysis a disservice when we try to wedge everything into a macroeconomic framework. There are mythologies about religion, about race, about nation-states that are every bit as basic and every bit as potent as economic mythologies - in fact, quite probably even more so on both counts. As Chris Hedges wrote, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.
One mistake we - actually, not just we, it's pretty universal, but it's we I'm addressing now - commonly make is assuming our enemies/opponents in a conflict see it the same way we do. I'm not talking about having the same cultural values and interests, but about the validity of your cause. That is, we see ourselves as "the good guys" and them as "the bad guys." Natural enough. But we also tend to think, without consciously taking account of it, that they also think of us as the good guys and themselves as the bad guys. That they agree - of course, never admitting it - that we're on the side of the angels and they're not. The result is, we assume consciously venal motives for every action by our opponents because we never do - never can - consider the possibility of honest conviction. (Bear in mind that a conviction can be mind-bogglingly wrong and fiercely destructive, even self-destructive, yet still be honestly held.)
Every society has its myths, its founding stories by which a culture defines itself, which, taken together, form a filter which controls how it views the world and its place in it. One of ours is what I have called the myth of American innocence and others have called the myth of American exceptionalism. I said this about that myth in March, 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War:
No matter what the circumstances, what the facts, what the record, Americans as a people still believe that we always act out of the highest ideals, that our motives are always pure, our intentions always honest, our honor always intact. The Monroe Doctrine, for example, still functions in American minds as "protection" of Latin America rather than domination of it. The "manifest destiny," one of the more blatantly imperialistic doctrines in the Western world's history, is usually viewed (when it's viewed at all) as the westward blossoming of a people too energetic to be confined. Jamming Japanese-Americans into concentration camps in World War II was an "aberration," Vietnam "a noble mistake," high-level political corruption right up through Teapot Dome, Watergate, and Gippergate always the work of "a small number of people," the invasion of Panama "to bring a criminal to justice," now the war against Iraq "to resist aggression."It also means that any attack on us, such as 9/11, becomes by definition "unprovoked aggression." That's why any hint of American culpability for it, even just in the sense of saying our policies could provoke anger, got and gets such a ferocious response: You're not simply questioning American policy, you are, for a great many of our fellow citizens, challenging the very nature of what it means to be an American. Even if not consciously conceived of this way, it's an assault on their concept of themselves.
These are not simply official justifications, not just the usual pack of lies governments toss around to paint their moral outrages with the gold leaf of "national purpose." These are things millions of Americans believe. Americans really believe that we are more moral, more trustworthy, more honest, more decent in our world affairs than are other nations. No matter how many Vietnams, how many Chiles, how many Grenadas, how many Gippergates - how many Gulf wars - there have been or may be, the belief stands: We are a perhaps uniquely moral people who always seek to do right and when we don't it's due to "mistakes," not selfishness or malevolence. In the face of each grisly new episode, each new monstrosity, each new offense, each new lie, we fool ourselves anew into believing it's either an act of nobility or, when the evidence mounts too high for even us to ignore, an "isolated case" the very isolation of which reaffirms the basic purity of the American political character.
I've gotten rather off the track here, so to bring it back to Afghanistan, it was clear from the very beginning that the US intent had to do with rather more than just a response to 9/11. As I wrote to a friend on October 19, 2001,
have you noticed how the image has shifted seamlessly from bin Laden being sheltered by the Taliban to bin Laden being the same as the Taliban and the claimed aim has segued from "getting" bin Laden to overthrowing the Taliban?Central Asia had been an area of US "concern" at least since the days of the Jimmy Carter administration and likely before; indeed likely at least as far back as the idea of "containment" of the Soviet Union, which originated in the Truman administration. In fact, in 1998 Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser, unapologetically admitted the CIA was aiding opponents of the pro-Soviet government in Kabul six months prior to the Soviet invasion.
My argument, in a nutshell, is that the attack on Afghanistan was not driven by Unocal's desire to build a pipeline across Afghanistan; they would have been quite pleased to deal with any stable government toward that end. Rather, its roots lie in the same desire that has driven most wars throughout history: The desire for power, for control, for the ability to direct events in areas beyond your borders, the better to mold the world in your image and thus to maintain your own self-image against what I once called "the terrifying prospect of change."
War, that is, is egomania writ large and in blood. I'm sure that individual exceptions can be found, but then again, "the exception proves the rule," the very fact that it's an exception is evidence of the existence of the general rule. And as that rule, war's purpose is dominance. For the stronger among us, it's dominance established as empire. Along with a string of military bases, occupations, establishments, treaties, and "strategic partnerships" to maintain it.
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