Tomgram: William Astore, Taking Selfies in Iraq and Afghanistan
By William Astore
Posted on October 27, 2015, Printed on October 27, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176061/
Afghanistan!
Whether the story is the fall of a major city to the Taliban, the
destruction of a hospital with staff and patients still in it, or the
president's announcement that U.S. troops will remain in that country until
at least 2017, it's true that you never feel there's an exclamation point
after "Afghanistan." Fourteen years later, it remains part of the
relatively humdrum background reality of American life. And yet imagine for
a moment that you jumped into a time machine and took a spin back to 1978.
There, you told the first American you ran into that you had just mainlined
into the future and discovered that, starting in 1979, the U.S. would be
involved in two wars (broken by a decade-long semi-absence) in a single
country adding up to a quarter-century of conflict. If you had then asked
for a guess as to which country that might be, I can guarantee you one
thing: no American would have said Afghanistan.
I can guarantee you something else, too: if you had insisted that this was
America's war-fighting future, you might have found yourself
institutionalized. Back in 1978, if an American knew anything about that
country, it was probably as an exotic stop on the "hippie trail," not as a
war-torn land the U.S. could never leave. The very thought that Afghanistan
was crucial to American "national security" or that the U.S. would someday
pump hundreds of billions of dollars into that country in a fruitless
attempt to "secure" it would have seemed laughable. Similarly, in the
endless years of our second Afghan War, that the country would become the
world's leading producer of a single agricultural product with consistently
record-breaking yields -- I'm talking, of course, about opium -- and be
responsible for 75% of the global heroin supply, would have seemed like
material for a science fiction novel, not reality. All of this would have
been beyond imagining in the America of 1978.
So welcome back to the twenty-first century! That none of this shocks us
today, that the word "Afghanistan" isn't joined at the hip to an exclamation
point (or at least a question mark) in our thinking, if not the news, tells
us just how strange -- and yet how normal -- the bizarre imperial world of
the planet's "sole superpower" has become. As TomDispatch regular and
retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore suggests today, what
this country needs is a medical intervention. After all, as he points out,
in Afghanistan and elsewhere we're suffering from Imperial Tourism Syndrome.
Tom
Tourists of Empire
America's Peculiar Brand of Global Imperialism
By William J. Astore
The United States is a peculiar sort of empire. As a start, Americans have
been in what might be called imperial denial since the Spanish-American War
of 1898, if not before. Empire -- us? We denied its existence even while
our soldiers were administering "water cures" (aka waterboarding) to
recalcitrant Filipinos more than a century ago. Heck, we even told
ourselves we were liberating those same Filipinos, which leads to a second
point: the U.S. not only denies its imperial ambitions, but shrouds them in
a curiously American brand of Christianized liberation theology. In it,
American troops are never seen as conquerors or oppressors, always as
liberators and freedom-bringers, or at least helpers and trainers. There's
just enough substance to this myth (World War II and the Marshall Plan, for
example) to hide uglier imperial realities.
Denying that we're an empire while cloaking its ugly side in
missionary-speak are two enduring aspects of the American brand of
imperialism, and there's a third as well, even if it's seldom noted. As the
U.S. military garrisons the planet and its special operations forces alone
visit more than 140 countries a year, American troops have effectively
become the imperial equivalent of globetrotting tourists. Overloaded with
technical gear and gadgets (deadly weapons, intrusive sensors), largely
ignorant of foreign cultures, they arrive eager to help and spoiling for
action, but never (individually) staying long. Think of them as the
twenty-first-century version of the ugly American of Vietnam-era fame.
The ugliest of Americans these days may no longer be the meddling CIA
operative of yesteryear; "he" may not even be human but a "made in America"
drone. Think of such drones as especially unwelcome American tourists,
cruising the exotic and picturesque backlands of the planet loaded with
cameras and weaponry, ready to intervene in deadly ways in matters its
operators, possibly thousands of miles away, don't fully understand. Like
normal flesh-and-blood tourists, the drone "sees" the local terrain,
"senses" local activity, "detects" patterns among the inhabitants that
appear threatening, and then blasts away. The drone and its operators, of
course, don't live in the land or grasp the nuances of local life, just as
real tourists don't. They are literally above it all, detached from it all,
and even as they kill, often wrongfully, they're winging their way back home
to safety.
Imperial Tourism Syndrome
Call it Imperial Tourist Syndrome, a bizarre American affliction that
creates its own self-sustaining dynamic. To a local, it might look
something like this: U.S. forces come to your country, shoot some stuff up
(liberation!), take some selfies, and then, if you're lucky, leave (at least
for a while). If you're unlucky, they overstay their "welcome," surge
around a bit and generate chaos until, sooner or later (in places like Iraq
and Afghanistan, much, much later), they exit, not always gracefully
(witness Saigon 1975 or Iraq 2011).
And here's the weirdest thing about this distinctly American version of the
imperial: a persistent short-time mentality seems only to feed its opposite,
wars that persist without end. In those wars, many of the country's heavily
armed imperial tourists find themselves sent back again and again for one
abbreviated tour of duty after another, until it seems less like an
adventure and more like a jail sentence.
The paradox of short-timers prosecuting such long-term wars is irresolvable
because, as has been repeatedly demonstrated in the twenty-first century,
those wars can't be won. Military experts criticize the Obama
administration for lacking an overall strategy, whether in Syria, Iraq,
Afghanistan, or elsewhere. They miss the point. Imperial tourists don't
have a strategy: they have an itinerary. If it's Tuesday, this must be
Yemen; if it's Wednesday, Libya; if it's Thursday, Iraq.
In this way, America's combat tourists keep cycling in and out of foreign
hotspots, sometimes on yearly tours, often on much shorter ones. They are
well-armed, as you'd expect in active war zones like Iraq or Afghanistan.
Like regular tourists, however, they carry cameras as well as other sensors
and remain alert for exotic photo-shoots to share with their friends or the
folks back home. (Look here, a naked human pyramid in Abu Ghraib Prison!)
As tourists, they're also alert to the possibility that on this particular
imperial safari some exotic people may need shooting. There's a quip that's
guaranteed to win knowing chuckles within military circles: "Join the Army,
travel to exotic lands, meet interesting people -- and kill them."
Originally an anti-war slogan from the Vietnam era, it's become somewhat of
a joke in a post-9/11 militarized America, one that quickly pales when you
consider the magnitude of foreign body counts in these years, made more real
(for us, at least) when accompanied by discomforting trophy photos of U.S.
troops urinating on enemy corpses or posing with enemy body parts.
Here's the bedrock reality of Washington's twenty-first-century conflicts,
though: no matter what "strategy" is concocted to fight them, we'll always
remain short-time tourists in long-term wars.
Imperial Tourism: A Surefire Recipe for Defeat
It's all so tragically predictable. When it's imperial tourists against
foreign "terrorists," guess who wins? No knock on American troops. They
have no shortage of can-do spirit. They fight to win. But when their
imperial vacations (military interventions/invasions) morph into neocolonial
staycations (endless exercises in nation-building, troop training, security
assistance, and the like), they have already lost, no matter how many
"having a great time" letters -- or rather glowing progress reports to
Congress -- are sent to the folks back home.
By definition, tourists, imperial or otherwise, always want to go home in
the end. The enemy, from the beginning, is generally already home. And no
clever tactics, no COIN (or counterinsurgency) handbook, no fancy, high-tech
weapons or robotic man-hunters are ever going to change that fundamental
reality.
It was a dynamic already obvious five decades ago in Vietnam: a
ticket-punching mentality that involved the constant rotation of units and
commanders; a process of needless reinvention of the most basic knowledge as
units deployed, bugged out, and were then replaced by new units; and the use
of all kinds of grim, newfangled weapons and sensors, everything from Agent
Orange and napalm to the electronic battlefield and the latest fighter
planes and bombers -- all for naught. Under such conditions, even the U.S.
superpower lacked staying power, precisely because it never intended to
stay. The "staying" aspect of the Vietnam War was often referred to in the
U.S. as a "quagmire." For the Vietnamese, of course, their country was no
"big muddy" that sucked you down. It was home. They had little choice in
the matter; they stayed -- and fought.
Combine a military with a tourist-like itinerary and a mentality to match, a
high command that in its own rotating responsibilities lacks all
accountability for mistakes, and a byzantine, top-heavy bureaucracy, and you
turn out to have a surefire recipe for defeat. And once again, in the
twenty-first century, whether among the rank and file or at the very top,
there's little continuity or accountability involved in America's military
presence in foreign lands. Commanders are constantly rotated in and out of
war zones. There's often a new one every year. (I count 17 commanders for
the International Security Assistance Force for Afghanistan, the U.S.-led
military coalition, since December 2001.) U.S. troops may serve multiple
overseas tours, yet they are rarely sent back to the same area. Tours are
sequential, not cumulative, and so the learning curve exhibited is flat.
There's a scene at the beginning of season four of "Homeland" in which
ex-CIA chief Saul Berenson is talking with some four-star generals. He
says: "If we'd known in 2001 we were staying in Afghanistan this long, we'd
have made some very different choices. Right? Instead, our planning cycles
rarely looked more than 12 months ahead. So it hasn't been a 14-year war
we've been waging, but a one-year war waged 14 times."
True enough. In Afghanistan and Iraq as well, the U.S. has fought
sequentially rather than cumulatively. Not surprisingly, such sequential
efforts, no matter how massive and costly, simply haven't added up. It's
just one damn tour after another.
But the fictional Saul's tagline on Afghanistan is more suspect: "I think
we're walking away with the job half done." For him, as well as for the
Washington establishment of this moment, the U.S. needs to stay the course
(at least until 2017, according to President Obama's recent announcement),
during which time assumedly we'll at long last stumble upon the
El-Dorado-like long-term strategy in which America actually prevails.
Of course, the option that's never on Washington's table is the obvious and
logical one: simply to end imperial tourism. With apologies to Elton John,
"sorry" is only the second hardest word for U.S. officials. The first is
"farewell."
A big defeat (Vietnam, 1975) might keep imperial tourism fever in check for
a while. But give us a decade or three and Americans are back at it,
humping foreign hills again, hoping against hope that this year's trip will
be better than the previous year's disaster.
In other words, a sustainable long-term strategy for Afghanistan is
precisely what the U.S. government has failed to produce for 14 years! Why
should 2015 or 2017 or 2024 be any different than 2002 or 2009 or indeed any
other year of American involvement?
At some level, the U.S. military knows it's screwed. That's why its
commanders tinker so much with weapons and training and technology and
tactics. It's the stuff they can control, the stuff that seems real in a
way that foreign peoples aren't (at least to us). Let's face it: past as
well as current events suggest that guns and how to use them are what
Americans know best.
But foreign lands and peoples? We can't control them. We don't understand
them. We can't count on them. They're just part of the landscape we're
eternally passing through -- sometimes as people to help and places to
rebuild, other times as people to kill and places to destroy. What they
aren't is truly real. They are the tourist attractions of American war
making, sometimes exotic, sometimes deadly, but (for us) strangely lacking
in substance.
And that is precisely why we fail.
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of
history, is a TomDispatch regular. He edits the blog the Contrary
Perspective.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 William J. Astore
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176061
Tomgram: William Astore, Taking Selfies in Iraq and Afghanistan
By William Astore
Posted on October 27, 2015, Printed on October 27, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176061/
Afghanistan!
Whether the story is the fall of a major city to the Taliban, the
destruction of a hospital with staff and patients still in it, or the
president's announcement that U.S. troops will remain in that country until
at least 2017, it's true that you never feel there's an exclamation point
after "Afghanistan." Fourteen years later, it remains part of the relatively
humdrum background reality of American life. And yet imagine for a moment
that you jumped into a time machine and took a spin back to 1978. There, you
told the first American you ran into that you had just mainlined into the
future and discovered that, starting in 1979, the U.S. would be involved in
two wars (broken by a decade-long semi-absence) in a single country adding
up to a quarter-century of conflict. If you had then asked for a guess as to
which country that might be, I can guarantee you one thing: no American
would have said Afghanistan.
I can guarantee you something else, too: if you had insisted that this was
America's war-fighting future, you might have found yourself
institutionalized. Back in 1978, if an American knew anything about that
country, it was probably as an exotic stop on the "hippie trail," not as a
war-torn land the U.S. could never leave. The very thought that Afghanistan
was crucial to American "national security" or that the U.S. would someday
pump hundreds of billions of dollars into that country in a fruitless
attempt to "secure" it would have seemed laughable. Similarly, in the
endless years of our second Afghan War, that the country would become the
world's leading producer of a single agricultural product with consistently
record-breaking yields -- I'm talking, of course, about opium -- and be
responsible for 75% of the global heroin supply, would have seemed like
material for a science fiction novel, not reality. All of this would have
been beyond imagining in the America of 1978.
So welcome back to the twenty-first century! That none of this shocks us
today, that the word "Afghanistan" isn't joined at the hip to an exclamation
point (or at least a question mark) in our thinking, if not the news, tells
us just how strange -- and yet how normal -- the bizarre imperial world of
the planet's "sole superpower" has become. As TomDispatch regular and
retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore suggests today, what
this country needs is a medical intervention. After all, as he points out,
in Afghanistan and elsewhere we're suffering from Imperial Tourism Syndrome.
Tom
Tourists of Empire
America's Peculiar Brand of Global Imperialism
By William J. Astore
The United States is a peculiar sort of empire. As a start, Americans have
been in what might be called imperial denial since the Spanish-American War
of 1898, if not before. Empire -- us? We denied its existence even while our
soldiers were administering "water cures" (aka waterboarding) to
recalcitrant Filipinos more than a century ago. Heck, we even told ourselves
we were liberating those same Filipinos, which leads to a second point: the
U.S. not only denies its imperial ambitions, but shrouds them in a curiously
American brand of Christianized liberation theology. In it, American troops
are never seen as conquerors or oppressors, always as liberators and
freedom-bringers, or at least helpers and trainers. There's just enough
substance to this myth (World War II and the Marshall Plan, for example) to
hide uglier imperial realities.
Denying that we're an empire while cloaking its ugly side in
missionary-speak are two enduring aspects of the American brand of
imperialism, and there's a third as well, even if it's seldom noted. As the
U.S. military garrisons the planet and its special operations forces alone
visit more than 140 countries a year, American troops have effectively
become the imperial equivalent of globetrotting tourists. Overloaded with
technical gear and gadgets (deadly weapons, intrusive sensors), largely
ignorant of foreign cultures, they arrive eager to help and spoiling for
action, but never (individually) staying long. Think of them as the
twenty-first-century version of the ugly American of Vietnam-era fame.
The ugliest of Americans these days may no longer be the meddling CIA
operative of yesteryear; "he" may not even be human but a "made in America"
drone. Think of such drones as especially unwelcome American tourists,
cruising the exotic and picturesque backlands of the planet loaded with
cameras and weaponry, ready to intervene in deadly ways in matters its
operators, possibly thousands of miles away, don't fully understand. Like
normal flesh-and-blood tourists, the drone "sees" the local terrain,
"senses" local activity, "detects" patterns among the inhabitants that
appear threatening, and then blasts away. The drone and its operators, of
course, don't live in the land or grasp the nuances of local life, just as
real tourists don't. They are literally above it all, detached from it all,
and even as they kill, often wrongfully, they're winging their way back home
to safety.
Imperial Tourism Syndrome
Call it Imperial Tourist Syndrome, a bizarre American affliction that
creates its own self-sustaining dynamic. To a local, it might look something
like this: U.S. forces come to your country, shoot some stuff up
(liberation!), take some selfies, and then, if you're lucky, leave (at least
for a while). If you're unlucky, they overstay their "welcome," surge around
a bit and generate chaos until, sooner or later (in places like Iraq and
Afghanistan, much, much later), they exit, not always gracefully (witness
Saigon 1975 or Iraq 2011).
And here's the weirdest thing about this distinctly American version of the
imperial: a persistent short-time mentality seems only to feed its opposite,
wars that persist without end. In those wars, many of the country's heavily
armed imperial tourists find themselves sent back again and again for one
abbreviated tour of duty after another, until it seems less like an
adventure and more like a jail sentence.
The paradox of short-timers prosecuting such long-term wars is irresolvable
because, as has been repeatedly demonstrated in the twenty-first century,
those wars can't be won. Military experts criticize the Obama administration
for lacking an overall strategy, whether in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, or
elsewhere. They miss the point. Imperial tourists don't have a strategy:
they have an itinerary. If it's Tuesday, this must be Yemen; if it's
Wednesday, Libya; if it's Thursday, Iraq.
In this way, America's combat tourists keep cycling in and out of foreign
hotspots, sometimes on yearly tours, often on much shorter ones. They are
well-armed, as you'd expect in active war zones like Iraq or Afghanistan.
Like regular tourists, however, they carry cameras as well as other sensors
and remain alert for exotic photo-shoots to share with their friends or the
folks back home. (Look here, a naked human pyramid in Abu Ghraib Prison!)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608464636/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608464636/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20As
tourists, they're also alert to the possibility that on this particular
imperial safari some exotic people may need shooting. There's a quip that's
guaranteed to win knowing chuckles within military circles: "Join the Army,
travel to exotic lands, meet interesting people -- and kill them."
Originally an anti-war slogan from the Vietnam era, it's become somewhat of
a joke in a post-9/11 militarized America, one that quickly pales when you
consider the magnitude of foreign body counts in these years, made more real
(for us, at least) when accompanied by discomforting trophy photos of U.S.
troops urinating on enemy corpses or posing with enemy body parts.
Here's the bedrock reality of Washington's twenty-first-century conflicts,
though: no matter what "strategy" is concocted to fight them, we'll always
remain short-time tourists in long-term wars.
Imperial Tourism: A Surefire Recipe for Defeat
It's all so tragically predictable. When it's imperial tourists against
foreign "terrorists," guess who wins? No knock on American troops. They have
no shortage of can-do spirit. They fight to win. But when their imperial
vacations (military interventions/invasions) morph into neocolonial
staycations (endless exercises in nation-building, troop training, security
assistance, and the like), they have already lost, no matter how many
"having a great time" letters -- or rather glowing progress reports to
Congress -- are sent to the folks back home.
By definition, tourists, imperial or otherwise, always want to go home in
the end. The enemy, from the beginning, is generally already home. And no
clever tactics, no COIN (or counterinsurgency) handbook, no fancy, high-tech
weapons or robotic man-hunters are ever going to change that fundamental
reality.
It was a dynamic already obvious five decades ago in Vietnam: a
ticket-punching mentality that involved the constant rotation of units and
commanders; a process of needless reinvention of the most basic knowledge as
units deployed, bugged out, and were then replaced by new units; and the use
of all kinds of grim, newfangled weapons and sensors, everything from Agent
Orange and napalm to the electronic battlefield and the latest fighter
planes and bombers -- all for naught. Under such conditions, even the U.S.
superpower lacked staying power, precisely because it never intended to
stay. The "staying" aspect of the Vietnam War was often referred to in the
U.S. as a "quagmire." For the Vietnamese, of course, their country was no
"big muddy" that sucked you down. It was home. They had little choice in the
matter; they stayed -- and fought.
Combine a military with a tourist-like itinerary and a mentality to match, a
high command that in its own rotating responsibilities lacks all
accountability for mistakes, and a byzantine, top-heavy bureaucracy, and you
turn out to have a surefire recipe for defeat. And once again, in the
twenty-first century, whether among the rank and file or at the very top,
there's little continuity or accountability involved in America's military
presence in foreign lands. Commanders are constantly rotated in and out of
war zones. There's often a new one every year. (I count 17 commanders for
the International Security Assistance Force for Afghanistan, the U.S.-led
military coalition, since December 2001.) U.S. troops may serve multiple
overseas tours, yet they are rarely sent back to the same area. Tours are
sequential, not cumulative, and so the learning curve exhibited is flat.
There's a scene at the beginning of season four of "Homeland" in which
ex-CIA chief Saul Berenson is talking with some four-star generals. He says:
"If we'd known in 2001 we were staying in Afghanistan this long, we'd have
made some very different choices. Right? Instead, our planning cycles rarely
looked more than 12 months ahead. So it hasn't been a 14-year war we've been
waging, but a one-year war waged 14 times."
True enough. In Afghanistan and Iraq as well, the U.S. has fought
sequentially rather than cumulatively. Not surprisingly, such sequential
efforts, no matter how massive and costly, simply haven't added up. It's
just one damn tour after another.
But the fictional Saul's tagline on Afghanistan is more suspect: "I think
we're walking away with the job half done." For him, as well as for the
Washington establishment of this moment, the U.S. needs to stay the course
(at least until 2017, according to President Obama's recent announcement),
during which time assumedly we'll at long last stumble upon the
El-Dorado-like long-term strategy in which America actually prevails.
Of course, the option that's never on Washington's table is the obvious and
logical one: simply to end imperial tourism. With apologies to Elton John,
"sorry" is only the second hardest word for U.S. officials. The first is
"farewell."
A big defeat (Vietnam, 1975) might keep imperial tourism fever in check for
a while. But give us a decade or three and Americans are back at it, humping
foreign hills again, hoping against hope that this year's trip will be
better than the previous year's disaster.
In other words, a sustainable long-term strategy for Afghanistan is
precisely what the U.S. government has failed to produce for 14 years! Why
should 2015 or 2017 or 2024 be any different than 2002 or 2009 or indeed any
other year of American involvement?
At some level, the U.S. military knows it's screwed. That's why its
commanders tinker so much with weapons and training and technology and
tactics. It's the stuff they can control, the stuff that seems real in a way
that foreign peoples aren't (at least to us). Let's face it: past as well as
current events suggest that guns and how to use them are what Americans know
best.
But foreign lands and peoples? We can't control them. We don't understand
them. We can't count on them. They're just part of the landscape we're
eternally passing through -- sometimes as people to help and places to
rebuild, other times as people to kill and places to destroy. What they
aren't is truly real. They are the tourist attractions of American war
making, sometimes exotic, sometimes deadly, but (for us) strangely lacking
in substance.
And that is precisely why we fail.
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of
history, is a TomDispatch regular. He edits the blog the Contrary
Perspective.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 William J. Astore
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176061