“We have two problems: culture and terrorism. Culture may take time to change, but it can’t kill you. Terrorists can kill you.”
-Sahira Zadran, June 4, 2004
The U.S. public owes President George Bush a round of applause and possibly even a one point “bump” in the polls on the question of how well he is handling the wars on terror.
What, you might ask, merits such approval? In his “war on terror,” Bush approved the Pentagon’s choice of the code name for the campaign in Afghanistan. A stroke of luck? Perhaps. But in terms of encompassing the more important aspects of the Afghan experience of the past 5 ½ years, “Operation Enduring Freedom” has proven to be a most apt description and a highly ironic warning about the future should the coalition of Western powers assisting the current government to rebuild, reintegrate, and reconcile once again turn its attention elsewhere, as it did in 2003.
Most irony is rhetorical and wry and, to a very large degree, relatively harmless except for embarrassment that might surface when events are compared and contrasted with each other or with pronouncements by those with authority or “standing” in the community. However, Afghanistan’s situation today and the possible outcomes that are still in play are potentially so lethal that they almost mock the war that is being waged ostensibly on behalf of the 31 million people who call this land “home.”
When “Operation Enduring Freedom” was launched, the president and the Pentagon seized on the obvious meaning of the phrase within the experience and context of the democratic tradition of the United States: the expectation that the spirit and the reality of personal and collective liberty will last as long as men and women are willing to struggle and to die, if necessary, to preserve them. (Hamid Karzai, who eventually became Afghanistan’s president, and others schooled in the Western political tradition undoubtedly would have thought the operation’s code name apropos had they been asked.)
Yet at the same time that Bush was implicitly and explicitly extolling the joys and advantages of a people whose rights are guaranteed by a Constitution that circumscribed the powers of government, he was undermining those freedoms by secret wiretaps and other intrusions of government into the personal affairs of those residing within the U.S., including residents who were not suspected of working for or with or of having any connection to terrorist organizations. Moreover, Bush – with little apparent forethought about the effect his words might have – nearly destroyed the freely evolving world-wide consensus against the use of terror or the harboring from international justice of those who commit acts that terrorize when he equated the coming struggle to the Crusades of the 11-13 centuries, which were struggles not for human freedom but for autocratic control of the Levant in the name of religion.
As to the “enduring” part of the code name, the war in Afghanistan has been the longest continual war in U.S. history other than the Revolution and Vietnam. (The post-Civil War “Indian Campaigns” were not continuous.) A major factor in prolonging the struggle was the premature diversion of U.S. resources from the tasks of consolidating the new government in Kabul, rebuilding vital infrastructure destroyed by a quarter century of fighting, and facilitating reconciliation among the various Afghan factions and tribes, to the planning for and then actually invading Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Despite the premature shift of attention from Afghanistan to Iraq, U.S. efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda and the man behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S., have never ceased. By the end of December 2001, about 2 ½ months after the first “precision munitions” started to fall on purported al-Qaeda training camps and government buildings in the Afghan capital, the Taliban had abandoned Kabul and were under heavy pressure all along the Afghan-Pakistan border from Tora Bora to Kandahar. Reportedly, bin Laden barely eluded capture near Tora Bora by crossing into Pakistan’s largely ungoverned Northwest Frontier. Subsequent attempts to find and either arrest or kill him have been futile.
This presents the second irony that emerges from “Operation Enduring Freedom.”
Bin Laden’s continued ability to elude capture – his “enduring freedom” – is a major theme in the continuing recruiting activities of both al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the Taliban. True, the scope and persistence of the efforts (other than by Pakistan) to find bin Laden have greatly circumscribed his ability to move and communicate freely. But this is of little consequence to those that comprise the pool of potential recruits rebelling against the secular and corrupt ruling regimes, most of which are anything but “free.”
The third ironic twist in the selection of the code name for Afghanistan involves the fatalities incurred. The number of Afghan non-combatant civilians who have died during the current fighting is as murky as is the equivalent figure for Iraq. For example, Human Rights Watch recently estimated that 1,800 civilians have been killed in the fighting since October 7, 2001. But it also said that more than half this total – some 930 – Afghans were killed in the fighting just in 2006 (700 killed by insurgents and 230 by U.S. and NATO-led coalition countries). What is not disputed is that casualties this spring have been heavier than in past years because the NATO-led coalition of 40 countries decided to pre-empt an expected large-scale resumption of warfare by insurgents once winter ended and the passes over the mountains from Pakistan re-opened to foot traffic. But so far, as noted in late May by the departing NATO force commander in the volatile southern province of Helmand, the expected offensive has not materialized.
What has been different is the predominant tactic employed by al-Qaeda and by the Taliban against coalition forces: more vehicular carried bombs and more improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Like Western troops, however, the Taliban and al-Qaeda frequently miss their intended targets, killing noncombatants instead.
In preparing for the expected insurgent spring offensive, NATO countries increased their troop concentrations. Even so, foreign forces supporting the current Kabul regime total only 35,000. Of this number, 14,500 are from the U.S. and another 11,000 U.S. troops operating under direct U.S. command. Because combat forces in Afghanistan are fewer but have more and more rugged terrain to patrol than do the forces in Iraq, Western forces rely heavily on close air support when fighting insurgents. Regardless of whom the combatants have been, the experience in every war over the past century is that the use of air power increases fatalities among combatants and non-combatants alike – and Afghanistan is no exception.
But of greater consequence are the growing number of incidents involving U.S. ground units that result in Afghan non-combatant fatalities – what in military-speak is called “collateral damage” or CD. There is a “surge” of outrage and exhaustion among the Afghan people, parliament, and president with the seemingly deliberate disdain of coalition troops for the lives of the indigenous people. For example, in March 2007 U.S. Marines reportedly killed ten unarmed Afghans as the unit sped away from an attempted ambush that failed as the unit patrolled near the Pakistan border. President Karzai personally complained to U.S. commanders. This was followed by adoption of a motion by the upper house of Afghanistan’s parliament demanding a military ceasefire, negotiations with the Taliban, and the setting of a withdrawal date for all foreign forces.
And this is the ultimate irony: the upper house of the Afghan parliament seems to be saying that, if what they have now is “freedom,” they are not sure that they or the Afghan people can endure much more of the accompanying carnage;
- In the first four months of 2007, the UN estimates that 380 Afghan civilians were killed by U.S. – led coalition forces or the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
- In the first 23 days of May, NATO forces reported an additional 85 people killed, of which 40 were “civilians.”
In sum, the Bush promise of transforming Afghanistan from a repressive, ultra-conservative, male-dominated society into a country in which all men and women are equal before the law, exercise the same civil liberties, and are accorded equal political rights, is in jeopardy. This war in fact has become more of an unwelcome yet enduring presence in the lives of Afghan citizens, a presence that will persist (endure) as long as true freedom and complete sovereignty of the Afghan state are in question.
