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    Some Boots on the Ground Leave Odd Footprints

    Most people consider the trillions of dollars spent by the Americans on military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq to have been a waste of money and the sign of a failed vision. When US President Joe Biden reasoned that it was time to put a stop to the spending, he claimed it had long ago achieved its most essential objectives: “to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again.”

    Biden thus implicitly admitted that most of the operational objectives defined and pursued over the past two decades ended in failure. He noted that once Osama bin Laden was out of the picture, there was nothing further to accomplish in Afghanistan. “We delivered justice to bin Laden a decade ago,” he proudly announced, “and we’ve stayed in Afghanistan for a decade since,” he complained.

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    Anyone who has been through Harvard Business School (HBS) and understands the basic principles of economics would recognize that there were probably better things to do with that amount of money. Hal Brands and Michael O’Hanlon, the authors of an article in Foreign Affairs, have penned an article with the title, “America Failed Its Way to Counterterrorism Success.” Neither did an MBA at HBS. Both men aimed higher, frequenting other elite universities (Stanford, Yale and Princeton), where they focused on what really matters: managing the global strategies of an expanding empire. They share a solid reputation as experts in strategic defense and are associates respectively of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and the centrist Brookings Institute. 

    Brands and O’Hanlon have teamed up to convince their public of the Leibnitzian truth that all was for the best despite the obvious fiasco. In their analysis of the profligate waste that appears on the Pentagon’s still unaudited books, they recognize but appear unconcerned by a two-decade-long failure to produce even a minimal return on investment. Thanks to their clever detective work, they believe that there is a hidden success story waiting to be told.

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    Their embarrassment with the obvious facts becomes clear in two sentences that begin respectively with the words “but” and “yet.” “But since around 2014,” they affirm, “Washington has settled on a medium-footprint model based on modest investments, particularly in special operations forces and airpower, to support local forces that do most of the fighting and dying.” In the same paragraph, they explain: “Yet the experience of the past two decades suggests that the medium-footprint strategy is still the best of bad options available to the United States.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Medium-footprint:

    In geopolitics, a size that sounds reasonable after realizing that an effort based on maximum power by a mighty nation has catastrophically failed. The virtue associated with a medium footprint follows the convincing reasoning that spending less on wasteful activities is more virtuous than spending more.

    Contextual Note

    For the past two decades, US foreign policy has accelerated the trend, influenced by McDonald’s, of supersizing everything, all in the name of security needs. But the supersized milkshake appears to have fatally slipped from every administration’s hands and has now crashed to the ground in the place it all began. President Biden’s decision has rocked the foundations of America’s belief in the efficacy of its unparalleled military might.

    Brands and O’Hanlon agree with the now commonly held opinion that the entire campaign in Afghanistan was, in terms of its stated goals, a spectacular failure. They see it as tragic overreach. But rather than applaud Biden for seeking to put an end to “unsustainably expensive military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq,” they complain that “the United States underreached by pulling back from the broader Middle East too fast and allowing old threats to reemerge.” They appear to lay the blame on all three occupants of the White House since 2014: Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. At the same time, they applaud what they see as a trend of downsizing the supersized calamities initiated by the Bush administration.

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    When the Americans put boots on the ground, the footprints they leave tend to be outrageously big and messy. Rather than simply marching forward, US military campaigns have a habit of seeking to mash into the ground everything that seems a bit foreign on their path. The authors think they can do better and applaud what they see as a trend toward a medium footprint as a form of progress. In their eyes, it may even justify all the otherwise obvious failure.

    They present the medium-footprint model as a kind of silver living in a somber and depressing cloud, daring to invoke a possible positive return on investment. “When combined with nonmilitary tools such as intelligence cooperation, law enforcement efforts, and economic aid,” they write, “this approach provides reasonably good protection at a reasonable price.” They recast the failure as a kind of research and development investment that has prepared a brighter future and will guarantee increased market share for US military domination (i.e., security).

    Historical Note

    In their audit of success and failure, Hal Brands and Michael O’Hanlon rejoice in one accomplishment: that “Washington has inflicted devastating losses on its enemies and forced them to focus more on surviving than thriving.” An honest historian would be tempted to reframe this in the following terms: Washington has inflicted devastating losses on multiple civilian populations and forced them to focus more on surviving than thriving.

    That is the obvious truth concerning people’s lives and social structures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. Is this something Americans who celebrate their military as “a force for good in the world” can really rejoice in? Reducing entire populations to the struggle for survival seems a far cry from spreading democracy and defending human rights. Creating misery is an aggressive denial of human rights. It creates conditions that encourage further violations of those rights.

    Playing the imaginary role of a CEO called in to take over a failing enterprise, the authors note that thanks to their vaunted medium-footprint strategy, “the rate of expenditure has come down markedly in the last decade.” They point out that wars that “once cost as much as $200 billion a year in all” now cost “just a few billion dollars.” That is effective downsizing.

    They define the new strategy as “managing intractable problems rather than solving them or simply walking away.” In other words, the Goldilocks principle. Not too heavy, not too light. “Just right,” or, as the authors put it, “meant to be both aggressive and limited.” 

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    Could this be an example of Aristotle’s golden mean as a moral principle? In such situations, Aristotle defines an extreme to be avoided as anger, which provokes the subject “to inflict pain, and to perceive his revenge.” That was the official motivation the Bush administration adopted for its war on the Taliban in 2001. “Managing intractable problems” presumably involves taking into account all the parameters of a situation. It should include engaging in dialogue and negotiation. 

    But that is not what the authors envision. The “aggressive” side they recommend involves delegating the nasty part of war to local partners who “clear and hold terrain,” assured that they will be accompanied by the “direct use of U.S. military power — especially special operations forces, drones, and manned airpower.” Aristotle would object that that could not be thought of as managing the problem. It is simply a more complex and messier prosecution of anger.

    The authors believe this strategy worked against the Islamic State (IS), a movement that wouldn’t even have arisen without the initial “heavy footprint.” But did it work or merely seem to work? There has been a lot of seeming over the past 20 years. Last week’s attack at Kabul airport was conducted by the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, a regional affiliate of IS.

    The authors explain the purpose of their medium footprint: “to maintain the regional military footholds.” From footprint to foothold, all seems to be clear. They even imagine that such strategies pay off in the form of “deeper reform once conditions stabilized.” Can they cite any cases of reform and stabilized conditions as a result of either heavy or medium footprints? Not really, because there haven’t been any. Instead, they console themselves with this conclusion: “On the whole, the medium-footprint strategy was more sustainable and effective than anything Washington had tried before.”

    The lesser of two evils? Or simply the slower of two evils?

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Has the US Always Been at War?

    Here’s the strange thing in an ever-stranger world: I was born in July 1944 in the midst of a devastating world war. That war ended in August 1945 with the atomic obliteration of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the most devastating bombs in history up to that moment, given the sweet code names “Little Boy” and “Fat Man.”

    I was the littlest of boys at the time. More than three-quarters of a century has passed since, on September 2, 1945, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed the Instrument of Surrender on the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, officially ending World War II. That was V-J (for Victory over Japan) Day. But in a sense for me, my whole generation and the US, war never really ended.

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    The United States has been at war, or at least in armed conflicts of various sorts, often in distant lands, for more or less my entire life. Yes, for some of those years, that war was “cold” — which often meant that such carnage, regularly sponsored by the CIA, happened largely off-screen and out of sight — but war as a way of life never really ended, not to this very moment.

    In fact, as the decades went by, it would become the “infrastructure” in which Americans increasingly invested their tax dollars via aircraft carriers, trillion-dollar jet fighters, drones armed with Hellfire missiles and the creation and maintenance of hundreds of military garrisons around the globe, rather than roads, bridges or rail lines (no less the high-speed version of the same) here at home. During those same years, the Pentagon budget would grab an ever-larger percentage of federal discretionary spending and the full-scale annual investment in what has come to be known as the national security state would rise to a staggering $1.2 trillion or more.

    In a sense, future V-J Days became inconceivable. There were no longer moments, even as wars ended, when some version of peace might descend and America’s vast military contingents could, as at the end of World War II, be significantly demobilized. The closest equivalent was undoubtedly the moment when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the Cold War officially ended and the Washington establishment declared itself globally triumphant. But of course, the promised “peace dividend” would never be paid out as the first Gulf War with Iraq occurred that very year and the serious downsizing of the US military (and the CIA) never happened.

    Never-Ending War

    Consider it typical that, when President Joe Biden recently announced the official ending of the nearly 20-year-old American conflict in Afghanistan with the withdrawal of the last US troops from that country by September 11, 2021, it would functionally be paired with the news that the Pentagon budget was about to rise yet again from its record heights in the Donald Trump years. “Only in America,” as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore wrote recently, “do wars end and war budgets go up.”

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    Of course, even the ending of that never-ending Afghan War may prove exaggerated. In fact, let’s consider Afghanistan apart from the rest of this country’s war-making history for a moment. After all, if I had told you in 1978 that, of the 42 years to follow, the US would be involved in war in a single country for 30 of them and asked you to identify it, I can guarantee that Afghanistan wouldn’t have been your pick. And yet so it’s been. From 1979 to 1989, there was the CIA-backed Islamist extremist war against the Soviet army there (to the tune of billions and billions of dollars). And yet the obvious lesson the Russians learned from that adventure, as their military limped home in defeat and the Soviet Union imploded not long after — that Afghanistan is indeed the “graveyard of empires” — clearly had no impact in Washington.

    Or how do you explain the 19-plus years of warfare there that followed the 9/11 attacks in 2001, themselves committed by a small Islamist outfit, al-Qaeda, born as an American ally in that first Afghan War? Only recently, the invaluable Costs of War Project estimated that America’s second Afghan War has cost this country almost $2.3 trillion (not including the price of lifetime care for its vets) and has left at least 241,000 people dead, including 2,442 American service members. In 1978, after the disaster of the Vietnam War, had I assured you that such a never-ending failure of a conflict was in our future, you would undoubtedly have laughed in my face.

    And yet, three decades later, the US military high command still seems not faintly to have grasped the lesson that we “taught” the Russians and then experienced ourselves. As a result, according to recent reports, they have uniformly opposed  Biden’s decision to withdraw all American troops from that country by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. In fact, it’s not even clear that, by September 11, 2021, if the president’s proposal goes according to plan, that war will have truly ended. After all, the same military commanders and intelligence chiefs seem intent on organizing long-distance versions of that conflict or, as the New York Times put it, are determined to “fight from afar” there. They are evidently even considering establishing new bases in neighboring lands to do so.

    America’s “forever wars” — once known as the global war on terror and, when the administration of George W. Bush launched it, proudly aimed at 60 countries — do seem to be slowly winding down. Unfortunately, other kinds of potential wars, especially new cold wars with China and Russia (involving new kinds of high-tech weaponry) only seem to be gearing up.

    War in Our Time

    In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that, as the Vietnam War began winding down in 1973, the draft was ended and war itself became a “voluntary” activity for Americans. In other words, it became ever easier not only to not protest American war-making, but to pay no attention to it or to the changing military that went with it. And that military was indeed altering and growing in remarkable ways.

    In the years that followed, for instance, the elite Green Berets of the Vietnam era would be incorporated into an ever more expansive set of Special Operations forces, up to 70,000 of them (larger, that is, than the armed forces of many countries). Those special operators would functionally become a second, more secretive American military embedded inside the larger force and largely freed from citizen oversight of any sort. In 2020, as journalist Nick Turse reported, they would be stationed in a staggering 154 countries around the planet, often involved in semi-secret conflicts “in the shadows” that Americans would pay remarkably little attention to.

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    Since the Vietnam War, which roiled the politics of this nation and was protested in the streets of this country by an antiwar movement that came to include significant numbers of active-duty soldiers and veterans, war has played a remarkably recessive role in American life. Yes, there have been the endless thank-yous offered by citizens and corporations to “the troops.” But that’s where the attentiveness stops, while both political parties, year after endless year, remain remarkably supportive of a growing Pentagon budget and the industrial (that is, weapons-making) part of the military-industrial complex. War, American-style, may be forever, but — despite, for instance, the militarization of this country’s police and the way in which those wars came home to the Capitol on January 6 — it remains a remarkably distant reality for most Americans.

    One explanation: Though the US has, as I’ve said, been functionally at war since 1941, there were just two times when this country felt war directly — on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and on September 11, 2001, when 19 mostly Saudi hijackers in commercial jets struck New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

    And yet, in another sense, war has been and remains us. Let’s just consider some of that war-making for a moment. If you’re of a certain age, you can certainly call to mind the big wars: Korea (1950-53), Vietnam (1954-75) — and don’t forget the brutal bloodlettings in neighboring Laos and Cambodia as well — that first Gulf War of 1991 and the disastrous second one, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then, of course, there was that global war on terror that began soon after September 11, 2001, with the invasion of Afghanistan, only to spread to much of the rest of the greater Middle East and to significant parts of Africa. In March, for instance, the first 12 American special-ops trainers arrived in embattled Mozambique, just one more small extension of an already widespread American anti-Islamist terror role (now failing) across much of that continent.

    And then, of course, there were the smaller conflicts (though not necessarily so to the people in the countries involved) that we’ve now generally forgotten about, the ones that I had to search my fading brain to recall. I mean, who today thinks much about President John F. Kennedy’s April 1961 CIA disaster at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba; or President Lyndon Johnson’s sending of 22,000 US troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to “restore order”; or President Ronald Reagan’s version of “aggressive self-defense” by US Marines sent to Lebanon who, in October 1983, were attacked in their barracks by a suicide bomber, killing 241 of them; or the anti-Cuban invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada that same month in which 19 Americans were killed and 116 wounded?

    And then, define and categorize them as you will, there were the CIA’s endless militarized attempts (sometimes with the help of the US military) to intervene in the affairs of other countries, ranging from taking the nationalist side against Mao Zedong’s communist forces in China from 1945 to 1949 to stoking a small ongoing conflict in Tibet in the 1950s and early 1960s, and overthrowing the governments of Guatemala and Iran, among other places.

    There were an estimated 72 such interventions from 1947 to 1989, many warlike in nature. There were, for instance, the proxy conflicts in Central America, first in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas and then in El Salvador, bloody events even if few US soldiers or CIA agents died in them. No, these were hardly “wars,” as traditionally defined, not all of them, though they did sometimes involve military coups and the like, but they were generally carnage-producing in the countries they were in. And that only begins to suggest the range of this country’s militarized interventions in the post-1945 era, as journalist William Blum’s “A Brief History of Interventions” makes all too clear.

    Whenever you look for the equivalent of a warless American moment, some reality trips you up. For instance, perhaps you had in mind the brief period between when the Red Army limped home in defeat from Afghanistan in 1989 and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, that moment when Washington politicians, initially shocked that the Cold War had ended so unexpectedly, declared themselves triumphant on planet Earth. That brief period might almost have passed for “peace,” American-style, if the US military under President George H.W. Bush hadn’t, in fact, invaded Panama (“Operation Just Cause”) as 1989 ended to get rid of its autocratic leader Manuel Noriega (a former CIA asset, by the way). Up to 3,000 Panamanians (including many civilians) died along with 23 American troops in that episode.

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    And then, of course, in January 1991 the first Gulf War began. It would result in perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 Iraqi deaths and “only” a few hundred deaths among the US-led coalition of forces. Airstrikes against Iraq would follow in the years to come. And let’s not forget that even Europe wasn’t exempt since, in 1999, during the presidency of Bill Clinton, the US Air Force launched a destructive 10-week bombing campaign against the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.

    And all of this remains a distinctly incomplete list, especially in this century when something like 200,000 US troops have regularly been stationed abroad and US Special Operations forces have deployed to staggering numbers of countries, while American drones regularly attacked “terrorists” in nation after nation and American presidents quite literally became assassins-in-chief. To this day, what scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson called an American “empire of bases” — a historically unprecedented 800 or more of them — across much of the planet remains untouched and, at any moment, there could be more to come from the country whose military budget at least equals those of the next 10 (yes, that’s 10) countries combined, including China and Russia.

    A Timeline of Carnage

    The last three-quarters of this somewhat truncated post-World War II American century have, in effect, been a timeline of carnage, though few in this country would notice or acknowledge that. After all, since 1945, Americans have only once been “at war” at home, when almost 3,000 civilians died in an attack meant to provoke — well, something like the war on terror that also become a war of terror and a spreader of terror movements in our world.

    As journalist William Arkin recently argued, the US has created a permanent war state meant to facilitate “endless war.” As he writes, at this very moment, our nation “is killing or bombing in perhaps 10 different countries,” possibly more, and there’s nothing remarkably out of the ordinary about that in our recent past.

    The question that Americans seldom even think to ask is this: What if the US were to begin to dismantle its empire of bases, repurpose so many of those militarized taxpayer dollars to our domestic needs, abandon this country’s focus on permanent war and forsake the Pentagon as our holy church? What if, even briefly, the wars, conflicts, plots, killings, drone assassinations, all of it stopped? What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and came home?

    *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    The US in the Middle East: A Triumph of the Will

    In an article published by Fair Observer, political analyst Amin Farhad provides some much-needed clarity on the ambiguous situation concerning the US military presence in the Middle East after the strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on January 3.  Although there has been a lot of chatter about the US withdrawing from the region, […] More

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    The Global War of Error

    Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country’s a nightmare of inequality and there’s a self-promoting madman in the White House. So, isn’t it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century? Arguably, none has been more striking than the triumphal success of the American war system. Oh, you’re going […] More