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A look back at the official photographs of Obama’s presidency shows his skill at conjuring a sense of pride and possibility – but today his victories seem narrow indeed. By Blair McClendon
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Barack ObamaBarack Obama: tax the rich, including me, to fund Biden spending planFormer president says billionaires should ‘pay a little bit more in taxes’ to fund healthcare, childcare and the climate crisis fight
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In 2008, many of Barack Obama’s supporters hoped he would bring the global war on terror to a close. Instead, he expanded it – and his successors have done nothing to change course. By Samuel Moyn
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BooksThe Afghanistan Papers review: superb exposé of a war built on lies Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post used freedom of information to produce the definitive US version of the warJulian BorgerSun 5 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 5 Sep 2021 02.02 EDTIn the summer of 2009, the latest in a long line of US military commanders in Afghanistan commissioned the latest in a long line of strategic reviews, in the perennial hope it would make enough of a difference to allow the Americans to go home.‘The intensity has not changed’: Jason Kander on the fall of Afghanistan – and trying to get friends outRead moreThere was some excitement in Washington about the author, Gen Stanley McChrystal, a special forces soldier who cultivated the image of a warrior-monk while hunting down insurgents in Iraq.Hired by Barack Obama, McChrystal produced a 66-page rethink of the Afghan campaign, calling for a “properly resourced” counter-insurgency with a lot more money and troops.It quickly became clear there were two significant problems. Al-Qaida, the original justification for the Afghan invasion, was not even mentioned in McChrystal’s first draft. And the US could not agree with its Nato allies on whether to call it a war or a peacekeeping or training mission, an issue with important legal implications.In the second draft, al-Qaida was included and the conflict was hazily defined as “not a war in the conventional sense”. But no amount of editing could disguise the fact that after eight years of bloody struggle, the US and its allies were unclear on what they were doing and who they were fighting.The story is one of many gobsmacking anecdotes and tragic absurdities uncovered by Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter at the Washington Post. His book is based on documents obtained through freedom of information requests, most from “lessons learned” interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), a watchdog mandated by Congress to keep tabs on the hundreds of billions flowing into Afghanistan.In the Sigar files, and other interviews carried out by military institutes and research centres, Whitlock found that soldiers of all ranks and their civilian counterparts were “more open about their experiences than they likely would have been with a journalist working on a news story”.Blunt appraisals were left unvarnished because they were never intended for publication. The contrast with the upbeat version of events presented to the public at the same time, often by the very same people, is breathtaking.The Afghanistan Papers is a book about failure and about lying about failure, and about how that led to yet worse failures, and so on for 20 years. The title and the contents echo the Pentagon Papers, the leaked inside story of the Vietnam war in which the long road to defeat was paved with brittle happy talk.“With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict,” Whitlock writes. “Instead, they chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift.”As Whitlock vividly demonstrates, the lack of clarity, the deception, ignorance and hubris were baked in from the beginning. When he went to war in Afghanistan in October 2001, George Bush promised a carefully defined mission. In fact, at the time the first bombs were being dropped, guidance from the Pentagon was hazy.It was unclear, for example, whether the Taliban were to be ousted or punished.“We received some general guidance like, ‘Hey, we want to go fight the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan,’” a special forces operations planner recalled. Regime change was only decided to be a war aim nine days after the shooting started.The US was also hazy about whom they were fighting, which Whitlock calls “a fundamental blunder from which it would never recover”.Most importantly, the invaders lumped the Taliban in with al-Qaida, despite the fact the former was a homegrown group with largely local preoccupations while the latter was primarily an Arab network with global ambitions.That perception, combined with unexpectedly easy victories in the first months, led Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to believe the Taliban could be ignored. Despite offers from some leaders that they were ready to negotiate a surrender, they were excluded from talks in December 2001 on the country’s future. It was a decision the United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, called the “original sin” of the war.Rumsfeld declared there was no point negotiating.“The only thing you can do is to bomb them and try to kill them,” he said in March 2002. “And that’s what we did, and it worked. They’re gone.”Not even Rumsfeld believed that. In one of his famous “snowflake” memos, at about the same time, he wrote: “I am getting concerned that it is drifting.”In a subsequent snowflake, two years after the war started, he admitted: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”’The Taliban had not disappeared, though much of the leadership had retreated to Pakistan. The fighters had gone home, if necessary to await the next fighting season. Their harsh brand of Islam had grown in remote, impoverished villages, honed by the brutalities of Soviet occupation and civil war. The Taliban did not represent anything like a majority of Afghans, but as their resilience and eventual victory have shown, they are an indelible part of Afghanistan.Bruised Biden tries to turn the page after US debacle in AfghanistanRead moreWhitlock’s book is rooted in a database most journalists and historians could only dream of, but it is far more than the sum of its sources. You never feel the weight of the underlying documents because they are so deftly handed. Whitlock uses them as raw material to weave anecdotes into a compelling narrative.He does not tell the full story of the Afghan war. He does not claim to do so. That has to be told primarily by Afghans, who lived through the realities submerged by official narratives, at the receiving end of each new strategy and initiative.This is a definitive version of the war seen through American eyes, told by Americans unaware their words would appear in public. It is a cautionary tale of how a war can go on for years, long after it stops making any kind of sense.TopicsBooksAfghanistanSouth and Central AsiaUS militaryUS foreign policyUS national securityGeorge BushreviewsReuse this content More
In 2008, many of Barack Obama’s supporters hoped he would bring the global war on terror to a close. Instead, he expanded it – and his successors have done nothing to change courseby More
A look back at the official photographs of Obama’s presidency shows his skill at conjuring a sense of pride and possibility – but today his victories seem narrow indeedby More
OpinionClimate changeRemember Obama’s drill, baby, drill days? Democrats aren’t innocent on climateDavid SirotaObama campaigned in climate poetry and then governed in fossil fuel prose. Joe Biden may well follow in his footsteps Tue 10 Aug 2021 06.25 EDTLast modified on Tue 10 Aug 2021 16.29 EDTIf after Monday’s news you didn’t feel a pang of doom, you’re either a zen master, a recluse living in a news vacuum, or a nihilist. The new United Nations report on climate change predicts an actual, bona fide apocalypse unless our civilization discards our fetish for incrementalism, rejects nothing-will-fundamentally-change fatalism and instead finally takes the crisis seriously.The bad news is that we’ve been here before during the last era of Democratic supremacy, and if the Obama era we sleepwalked through now repeats itself, we’re done. It’s that simple.IPCC report shows ‘possible loss of entire countries within the century’Read moreThe glimmer of good news is that we still have time to defuse the worst effects of the climate bomb, and at least one part of the political dynamic may finally be changing.But if we allow corporate media and the political class to erase our memory of how we arrived here, then history will probably recur and we will all burn.The bad news: we’ve been here beforeAt its core, the climate crisis is a product of bipartisan corruption and greed. Politicians bankrolled by oil and gas interests ignored scientists’ warnings, and financed a fossil fuel economy knowing full well it would destroy the ecosystem that supports all life on the planet.Republicans were more explicit about their corruption, actively denying the scientific facts and resurrecting their own version of a Flat Earth Society that reassured voters that nothing has to change and everything will be fine. Democrats settled on a different, but similarly pernicious, form of climate denialism: They acknowledged the science and issued progressive sounding press releases about the environment, and then they continued supporting fossil fuel development.This strategy satiated liberals’ top priority: enjoying erudite speeches from Ivy League politicians that make affluent liberals feel smart, smug and superior, regardless of whether the rhetoric is subsequently betrayed and discarded in the actual legislative process, which Democrats’ MSNBC-addled base doesn’t seem to care about in the red-versus-blue partisan wars.The cynical formula crescendoed in the presidency of Barack Obama, who campaigned in climate poetry and then governed in fossil fuel prose.When Obama won the 2008 election, liberals lauded him for declaring: “Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”Little noticed was the concurrent Obama-Biden pledge to “promote the responsible domestic production of oil and natural gas,” “prioritize the construction of the Alaska natural gas pipeline,” and extract “up to 85bn barrels of technically recoverable oil [that] remains stranded in existing fields”.And so four years after that campaign, Obama delivered a speech in Cushing, Oklahoma, which perfectly summarized his actual legacy – and which future post-apocalypse historians (if any survive) will likely see as one of the pivotal moments in the cataclysm:“Under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years,” he said in a speech promising to increase pipeline capacity to flood the world with even more fossil fuels.“Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75% of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some. So we are drilling all over the place – right now.”You can try to tout Obama’s support for stuff like the Paris accords and electric vehicles, but his own boasts illustrate a record of climate denialism, as did Obama’s 2018 declaration one month after an IPCC sounded an alarm. Amid the worsening emergency, he told a Texas audience that “suddenly America is like, the biggest oil producer. That was me, people … just say, ‘Thank you,’ please.”Obama: “Suddenly America is the largest oil producer, that was me people … say thank you.” pic.twitter.com/VfQfX1SR0x— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 28, 2018
The self-congratulation came only two years after Obama tweeted: “Climate change is happening now. Denial is dangerous.” And in that contrast, we see the fundamental formula at work.Obama, like so many politicians, seems to believe that regardless of what’s happening in the physical world, he and his fellow elites can just tweet, Instagram influence, and speechify their way through it, and nobody will care.But this isn’t merely a sleight of hand. There’s also an ideology here – or, more accurately, a sociopathy. Obama’s presidency was an eight-year quest to secure the vaunted “pragmatic” label from corporate media’s bipartisanship fetishists, no matter the human cost of that pursuit.From the all-too-small stimulus, to the watered-down Wall Street reform bill, to the Heritage Foundation–originated healthcare legislation to the push for social security cuts to the approval of toxic chemicals to the Oklahoma speech’s embrace of drill-baby-drill, most major Obama initiatives represented an attempt to appease the right and punch a left.The Obama administration’s top-line goal was to prove to Washington pundits and corporate donors that the Democratic party will always prioritize compromise – even when it means compromising the lifespans of millions of people.All of this was enabled and fortified by Democrats who enjoyed giant majorities in Congress – and yet did nothing to change the dynamic. On climate in particular, that was most obvious: the Democratic House did pass a cap-and-trade bill, but Obama abandoned it in yet another effort to reach out to Republicans, and therefore it went nowhere in the Democratic Senate.Obama and congressional Democrats then helped the Republican party lift the crude oil export ban, and Democrats’ support for natural gas was so aggressive, one oil and gas law firm said it was a “case of policy continuity from Obama to Trump”.The good news: a line in the sand (maybe)Joe Biden, congressional Democrats and Democratic primary voters were not innocent bystanders in all this. Biden was the vice-president and had his name on the original initiatives to flood the world market with US fossil fuels during the climate crisis. Primary voters rewarded him with the presidential nomination as he was lauded by the fossil fuel industry for campaigning against a fracking ban – just as those same voters continue rejecting progressive climate candidates in favor of corporate-friendly incrementalists.Colorado’s 2020 Senate primary was the iconic example of that trend: a reliably blue state’s Democratic electorate obediently followed orders from party leaders in Washington and gave its US Senate nomination to one of America’s most ardently pro-fossil-fuel politicians – all while the local media and political class scoffed at his progressive primary opponent for airing an ad rightly predicting that climate change would prevent Coloradans from safely going outside.That past was a prelude to the last few months, which have seen Biden begin to pull an Obama.On the stump, he’s offered climate poetry, telling America that climate is the “No 1 issue facing humanity” and done photo-ops driving an electric truck. And like Obama, he’s breaking all sorts of campaign promises and governing in fossil fuel prose, increasing drilling to George W Bush levels, backing Trump-era fossil fuel projects, touting auto-emission rules weaker than Obama’s, deploying his energy secretary to promise a bright future for the fossil fuel industry.Now, Biden is championing a bipartisan infrastructure bill that omits major climate initiatives – and that legislation is moving through a Congress whose most powerful Senate Democrat profits off the coal business, and whose most powerful House Democrat laughed at the “green dream or whatever”. It doesn’t help that the party is run by a gerontocracy that can laugh off the emergency, knowing they won’t be around to suffer through the worst consequences of its climate compromises and capitulations.Clearly, if nothing fundamentally changes in our politics and for the donor class that is disproportionately driving the climate crisis, then everything in our natural world is going to change for the worse, with ecocidal consequences on a scale that our species has never experienced, and might not survive.Thankfully, that reality seems to finally be seeping into the consciousness of at least a handful of lawmakers – and even more thankfully, the narrowly divided congressional chambers mean only a small group of legislators are needed to actually alter the legislative dynamics.In recent weeks, progressive lawmakers from Representative Mondaire Jones, a Democrat from New York, to Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, have promoted a simple mantra: “No Climate, No Deal.” The idea is that they will vote down any bipartisan infrastructure bill until it is coupled with legislation that could be the last chance to mobilize the country for the epic battle against climate change, before Republicans win back Congress.This ultimatum is required in order to prevent Biden, Republicans and corporate Democrats from doing what they clearly want to do: simply pass an infrastructure bill that props up the fossil fuel industry with subsidies and road infrastructure, and then leave for vacation without any new climate initiatives as the world incinerates.Until now, progressive lawmakers have made a lot of noise and a lot of sententious declarations about the need for bold action and fearlessness – and then they’ve refused to follow up that sound with the fury of withheld votes. Most notably, they did not withhold their votes on the Covid relief bill in order to force the inclusion of a $15 minimum wage – and now that much-promised initiative has been surgically erased from the discourse, like the memory of an old flame in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.So, yeah, it’s fair to remain circumspect that these Democratic lawmakers would actually follow through on their new ultimatum, for fear of being labeled seditious traitors to the party – which is now considered the highest form of treason in American politics. Such skepticism is especially warranted since these legislators have not made clear what they consider “climate” and exactly what they are demanding for a deal.Then again, what ultimately constitutes “climate” in any agreement may be somewhat vague, but it’s kind of like the obscenity standard – you know it when you see it. Plus, Democratic lawmakers even threatening to act as a climate voting bloc is already providing far more pressure on Biden than Obama ever faced from his own party when he was bragging about his unrelenting support for the fossil fuel industry. And that pressure has at least produced an initial reconciliation proposal that is somewhat serious. So that’s something.As the IPCC report suggests, whether or not these Democrats follow through and force a climate confrontation in Congress – and whether or not their own constituents demand they hold out – could be the difference between a livable planet and a hellscape.It’s the difference between Democrats in 10 years bragging, “That was me, people!” about rescuing the world from disaster, or hunkering down at their Martha’s Vineyard compounds after they’ve laid waste to the planet.
David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin and the founder of the Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter
This piece was originally published in the Daily Poster
TopicsClimate changeOpinionOilDemocratsBarack ObamaJoe BidenUS politicsEnergycommentReuse this content More
OpinionAfghanistanThe Guardian view on Afghanistan withdrawal: a retreat into uncertaintyEditorialJoe Biden’s actions will be felt most keenly in Kabul, but they pose a broader question for an army-dominated Pakistan Mon 5 Jul 2021 14.20 EDTLast modified on Mon 5 Jul 2021 16.10 EDTBy bringing home US troops from Afghanistan, and leading Nato and allied forces out of the country, the US president, Joe Biden, is acting on his campaign trail argument that American “forever wars” distract from more pressing issues at home. While the effect of the withdrawal will be felt most keenly in Afghanistan, where there are justifiable fears that the Taliban are poised to reclaim power, the broader question Mr Biden poses is for neighbouring nuclear-armed Pakistan and the role that it wants to play in the region.Bluntly, there is little trust between Washington and Islamabad despite Pakistan being a frontline state in America’s longest war. Mr Biden served as vice-president to Barack Obama, who in his memoir, A Promised Land, wrote that he had preferred not to involve Pakistan in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in 2011 because it was an “open secret” that elements inside Pakistan’s military, and especially its intelligence services, “maintained links to the Taliban and perhaps even al-Qaida, sometimes using them as strategic assets to ensure that the Afghan government remained weak and unable to align itself with Pakistan’s number one rival, India”.In Pakistan’s defence, it might be said that the past is another country. It says that it no longer provides any haven for terrorists or seeks to radicalise Muslim opinion with which it has influence. Pakistan has undoubtedly been the victim of terror attacks and shelters millions of refugees. Yet there was no disguising the anger of the Biden administration when, after eight days in office, Pakistan’s supreme court ordered the release of the man convicted in 2002 of orchestrating the abduction and killing of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter.Pakistan is an army with a country attached. Imran Khan serves as prime minister. But it is the chief of army staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who calls most of the shots. The general has had a phone call from Mr Biden’s secretary of defence. After it, the army chief pledged to “bury the past” with India. Mr Khan has yet to be rung up by the White House. That may be because Washington had wanted to pressurise Pakistan into granting the CIA a base in the country to launch drone strikes against the Taliban. The US was kicked out of its last Pakistani facility in 2011. Last month, Mr Khan wrote an op-ed quashing the idea that the US could regain a military foothold in the country.The ever-growing risks of a Taliban takeover will shape the region’s dynamics. Not least because decades ago they subjected the country to a reign of pious Sunni terror. Adjoining Iran sponsored an armed resistance. A Taliban regime in Kabul gave Pakistan the idea that it could control Afghanistan and acquire the “strategic depth” needed to challenge India. Since then, China has drawn closer to Islamabad. New Delhi, faced with a hostile Beijing, has attempted to improve relations with Pakistan. Mr Biden knows that Afghanistan is known as a “graveyard of empires” for good reason. He wants his foreign policy to mark a break with the past and face the challenges of the future. But turning points only work out if one knows where to turn.TopicsAfghanistanOpinionJoe BidenAl-QaidaBarack ObamaUS foreign policyNatoPakistaneditorialsReuse this content More
