Afghanistan: The Great Deception

Witnessing young and middle-aged Afghans running toward a fleeing United States Air Force plane conjures up the notion that supposedly the Afghans don’t want to bid farewell to their U.S. “friend.” The perception this gives to many Americans watching this on television is one of pity and derision, a narrative repeated by policymakers and media personalities alike: We spent billions and lost thousands of service people for a country that just “can’t get it together.” For Afghans, this should be an awakening from the notion that their “friend” the United States — or the so-called “international community” — who came to rescue the country from the Taliban, build the country, and bring democracy, is leaving all too hastily and leaving Pakistan to export the Taliban back into the country.

Both perceptions could not be farther away from the actual truth. This can be easily debunked in three obvious ways. Taking into account the U.S.’s specific military, economic and political actions in Afghanistan, we must recognize that the invasion and occupation were never intended as a route to democracy or progress.

Military Deception: Systemic Underfunding and Harm

The Afghan National Army was systematically underfunded from the very beginning. Afghan soldiers and police were getting paid less than what the Taliban were able to pay their foot soldiers and recruits. Even the meager salaries they did receive were not reliably paid on time. Soldiers and police went months without pay before the Taliban takeover while the Taliban had a functional office in Qatar and reliably paid its recruits.

Furthermore, according to two very revealing books, Douglas Wissing’s 2012 Funding the Enemy: How the US Taxpayers Bankroll The Taliban and Anand Gopal’s 2014 No Good Men Among the Living: America, The Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, after the 2001 U.S. invasion, most Taliban rank and file members were ready to assimilate back into Afghan society. Yet the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) continued to harass, imprison, and kill Taliban leaders and soldiers to the point of forcing them to take up arms again to defend themselves. By 2005, according to Gopal and Wissing, the U.S. had effectively revived the Taliban.

Simultaneously, the way the U.S. and NATO structured the country’s development aid system seems to have nurtured the immense corruption of warlords and strengthened the Taliban by indirectly funding them through transportation and building contracts. Furthermore, the U.S. and Britain’s “war on drugs” also fueled this corruption: The country has produced around 90 percent of the worlds’ opium supply since the beginning of the U.S. occupation, from which the Taliban received around 50-60 percent of their funding.

Added to this was U.S.’s brutal counterinsurgency policies of bombing villages and its night raids in rural areas with nonexistent infrastructure, which further alienated a rural Afghan population already experiencing high unemployment and underdevelopment due to decades of war.

Economic Deception: U.S./NATO Economic Investments Neglected the Most Important Sectors of “Nation-Building”

How is it that 40 of the world’s most developed countries involved in the U.S./NATO operation supposedly spent more in Afghanistan than they did in implementing the Marshall Plan in Western Europe, and yet, somehow still systematically disregarded where that investment needed to go? If sincerely invested, this money would have gone toward building the central state’s administrative capacity for social services and law and order as well as the agricultural sector, since the vast majority of Afghanistan’s population has lived in rural areas for the past 20 years, which is also incidentally the region from which the Taliban got most of their recruits. The World Bank estimates that 74 percent of Afghans live in rural areas, but that number is almost certainly an undercount due to the way in which its figures categorize rural residents who have only temporarily moved to cities.

Instead, the agricultural sector was willfully neglected, which contributed to the high national unemployment rate of at least 40 percent in a country where about 70 percent of the population is under 25 years old. This is rather ironic when the U.S. and the European Union (EU) subsidize their own agricultural sectors, which make up not more than 5 percent of their national labor forces respectively — about $49 billion and $101 billion just in 2019. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, a country with a total GDP of about $20 billion that they occupied for 20 years, they could not subsidize Afghan farmers enough in order to make the country food self-sufficient while creating jobs in the rural areas.

The policies of the U.S. and NATO, because of its lukewarm commitment to “nation-building,” systematically undermined building Afghanistan’s central state capacity (as it also did in Iraq during de-Baathification, destroying its central state capacity), by avoiding giving the majority of the reconstruction aid to the relevant government ministries with the excuse that there wasn’t sufficient capacity in the Afghan government to absorb the aid or that there was corruption.

However, the corruption was nurtured precisely because the majority of the reconstruction funds went to U.S. private contractors, which then subcontracted the projects without proper accountability measures, with the end result being that 90 percent of the reconstruction aid took a “round trip” finding its way back to U.S. private security firms, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contracts granted to U.S. corporations. Only 2 percent or less of U.S. spending actually reached “the Afghan people in the form of basic infrastructure or poverty-reducing services.” The showcasing of the so-called reconstruction investments with high visibility was a way to foster global perceptions about the generosity of US/NATO development projects, which in reality they were building schools without students and teachers, power plants that were not usable, etc.

It is not surprising then that after the U.S. spent billions supporting the Mujahadeen during the 1980s to destroy Afghanistan’s central state, the ensuing civil war among the Mujahadeen and the Taliban from 1992-2001 reduced the standard of living in Afghanistan (as measured by poverty, life expectancy, unemployment, clean water, electricity, etc.) to one of the lowest in the world by 2001. Yet after 20 years of occupation, its poverty rate is about 55 percent, which is no lower than it was in 2001.

However, for those who have followed the U.S.’s foreign development aid record for the past 70 years, Afghanistan’s (or Haiti’s or Iraq’s) case is not a surprise at all. The U.S. foreign aid program is notorious for its poor quality and the stingy quantity it provides to the Global South. It is poor quality because most of the supposed aid money it gives a country usually does not help the receiving country build self-sufficiency in its local agricultural, manufacturing or infrastructural capacity. Instead, most of the aid is “tied aid,” where the receiving country has to spend the majority of the aid money buying from U.S. firms, even though there are less expensive options. Despite the perception of generosity the U.S. has created, its aid amount is one of the lowest among the world’s high-GDP countries: The U.S. gives less than 0.20 percent of its national income to development aid. It does not even give 0.70 percent of its national income, which it has agreed to since the 1970s.

Political Deception: The U.S. Disregarded Afghanistan’s Political Tradition of Democracy

From the very beginning, the U.S./NATO alliance ignored Afghanistan’s longstanding tradition of democracy. The political tradition of the “Loya Jirga” (Grand Assembly) is rooted for at least several centuries in the Afghan tradition of “Jirga” where a council of tribal elders or village elders get together in a gathering similar to a town hall meeting and deliberate about a land dispute or other matters that are creating tensions and conflict between villages or tribes.

In the case of the Loya Jirga, this takes place at the national level where community and religious elders across the country have an assembly to discuss and decide on important matters of the nation. In the Loya Jirga at the Bonn conference in 2001, the Afghan delegates chose Professor Abdul Sattar Sirat — who was a respected Afghan from its Uzbek community, a minister of justice in the Afghan government in the 1970s and a representative of the former Afghan king — as the proposed leader of the interim administration.

However, the U.S. imposed Hamid Karzai by methods of duplicity and intimidation against the delegates’ choice. Karzai was a former Pashtun mujahideen and Taliban representative who had little experience and administrative skill, let alone expertise in rebuilding the Afghan state after 20 years of war and no following or popularity inside Afghanistan. He was seemingly selected because he would be dependent on U.S./NATO support and therefore, submissive to U.S. directives.

Contrary to the dominant orientalist narrative about Afghanistan being a tribal society without a history of a centralized state, Afghanistan had, from the 1880s to about 1992, a modern state with a qualified and professional civil administration that could govern and develop the country professionally so that it would not remain a weak and illegitimate government.

Unfortunately, instead of appointing government officials based on merit and qualifications, the U.S. and NATO deliberately chose a cadre of neoliberal, Ivy League technocrats and warlords with their attendant foreign advisers leading the transition government that ultimately became an infestation of corruption run by NGOs and foreign consultants, with little to no state capacity being built.

As the U.S.’s own special inspector general for Afghanistan’s reconstruction, John Sopko, revealed, much of the reconstruction money in the name of Afghanistan was recklessly spent faster than it could be accounted for and properly monitored. For this reason, according to Sopko’s report, the U.S. “ultimately achieved the opposite of what it intended: it fueled corruption, delegitimized the Afghan government, and increased insecurity,” hence providing the conditions for the resurgence of the Taliban to grow.

The last couple of months of negotiations with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, have further revealed that building a legitimate and professionally staffed Afghan central state with a productive economy for its tax base was never the true intention for Afghanistan, the Middle East or the Central Asian region.

The U.S./NATO’s rhetorical game of nation-building and democracy-building, all while funding the very forces they were officially fighting in the “war on terror,” is one of the greatest deceptions of the last 20 years. The reality is that Afghanistan has become one more bucket-list country in the Project for New American Century (PNAC), and once again, its women, children, elderly and young will pay the biggest price. Hopefully the world will awaken from the belief that the U.S. and NATO — with their shameful colonial legacy and their present neocolonial relations in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, South-East Asia, and Africa — can actually bring peace, prosperity and progress to the Global South.

 

A voice of reason in an insane world: Why a legendary diplomat resigned from the United Nations

Photo credit: indybay.org // Denis HallidayNicolas J. S. Davies April 15, 2021

 

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Denis Halliday is an exceptional figure in the world of diplomacy. In 1998, after a 34-year career with the United Nations—including as an Assistant Secretary-General and the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq—he resigned when the UN Security Council refused to lift sanctions against Iraq.

Halliday saw at first hand the devastating impact of this policy that had led to the deaths of over 500,000 children under the age of five and hundreds of thousands more older children and adults, and he called the sanctions a genocide against the people of Iraq.

Since 1998, Denis has been a powerful voice for peace and for human rights around the world. He sailed in the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza in 2010, when 10 of his companions on a Turkish ship were shot and killed in an attack by the Israeli armed forces.

I interviewed Denis Halliday from his home in Ireland.

Nicolas Davies: So, Denis, twenty years after you resigned from the UN over the sanctions on Iraq, the United States is now imposing similar “maximum pressure” sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, denying their people access to food and medicines in the midst of a pandemic. What would you like to say to Americans about the real-world impact of these policies?

Denis Halliday: I’d like to begin with explaining that the sanctions imposed by the Security Council against Iraq, led very much by the United States and Britain, were unique in the sense that they were comprehensive. They were open-ended, meaning that they required a Security Council decision to end them, which of course never actually happened – and they followed immediately upon the Gulf War.

The Gulf War, led primarily by the United States but supported by Britain and some others, undertook the bombing of Iraq and targeted civilian infrastructure, which is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and they took out all electric power networks in the country.

This completely undermined the water treatment and distribution system of Iraq, which depended upon electricity to drive it, and drove people to use contaminated water from the Tigris and the Euphrates. That was the beginning of the death-knell for young children, because mothers were not breast-feeding, they were feeding their children with child formula, but mixing it with foul water from the Tigris and the Euphrates.

That bombing of infrastructure, including communications systems and electric power, wiped out the production of food, horticulture, and all of the other basic necessities of life. They also closed down exports and imports, and they made sure that Iraq was unable to export its oil, which was the main source of its revenue at the time.

In addition to that, they introduced a new weapon called depleted uranium, which was used by the U.S. forces driving the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait. That was used again in southern Iraq in the Basra area, and led to a massive accumulation of nuclear debris which led to leukemia in children, and that took three, four or five years to become evident.

So when I got to Iraq in 1998, the hospitals in Baghdad, and also of course in Basra and other cities, were full of children suffering from leukemia. Meantime adults had gotten their own cancer, mainly not a blood cancer diagnosis. Those children, we reckon perhaps 200,000 children, died of leukemia. At the same time, Washington and London withheld some of the treatment components that leukemia requires, again, it seemed, in a genocidal manner, denying Iraqi children the right to remain alive.

And as you quoted 500,000, that was a statement made by Madeleine Albright, the then American Ambassador to the United Nations who, live on CBS, was asked the question about the loss of 500,000 children, and she said that the loss of 500,000 children was “worth it,” in terms of bringing down Saddam Hussein, which did not happen until the military invasion of 2003.

So the point is that the Iraqi sanctions were uniquely punitive and cruel and prolonged and comprehensive. They remained in place no matter how people like myself or others, and not just me alone, but UNICEF and the agencies of the UN system – many states including France, China and Russia – complained bitterly about the consequences on human life and the lives of Iraqi children and adults.

My desire in resigning was to go public, which I did. Within one month, I was in Washington doing my first Congressional briefing on the consequences of these sanctions, driven by Washington and London.

So I think the United States and its populus, who vote these governments in, need to understand that the children and the people of Iraq are just like the children of the United States and England and their people. They have the same dreams, same ambitions of education and employment and housing and vacations and all the things that good people care about. We’re all the same people and we cannot sit back and think somehow, “We don’t know who they are, they’re Afghans, they’re Iranians, they’re Iraqis. So what? They’re dying. Well, we don’t know, it’s not our problem, this happens in war.” I mean, all that sort of rationale as to why this is unimportant.

And I think that aspect of life in the sanctions world continues, whether it’s Venezuela, whether it’s Cuba, which has been ongoing now for 60 years. People are not aware or don’t think in terms of the lives of other human beings identical to ourselves here in Europe or in the United States.

It’s a frightening problem, and I don’t know how it can be resolved. We now have sanctions on Iran and North Korea. So the difficulty is to bring alive that we kill people with sanctions. They’re not a substitute for war – they are a form of warfare.

Nicolas Davies: Thank you, Denis. I think that brings us to another question, because whereas the sanctions on Iraq were approved by the UN Security Council, what we’re looking at today in the world is, for the most part, the U.S. using the power of its financial system to impose unilateral sieges on these countries, even as the U.S. is also still waging war in at least half a dozen countries, mostly in the Greater Middle East. Medea Benjamin and I recently documented that the U.S. and its allies have dropped 326,000 bombs and missiles on other countries in all these wars, just since 2001 – that’s not counting the First Gulf War.

You worked for the UN and UNDP for 34 years, and the UN was conceived of as a forum and an institution for peace and to confront violations of peace by any countries around the world. But how can the UN address the problem of a powerful, aggressive country like the United States that systematically violates international law and then abuses its veto and diplomatic power to avoid accountability?

Denis Halliday: Yes, when I talk to students, I try to explain that there are two United Nations: there’s a United Nations of the Secretariat, led by the Secretary-General and staffed by people like myself and 20,000 or 30,000 more worldwide, through UNDP and the agencies. We operate in every country, and most of it is developmental or humanitarian. It’s good work, it has real impact, whether it’s feeding Palestinians or it’s UNICEF work in Ethiopia. This continues.Where the UN collapses is in the Security Council, in my view, and that is because, in Yalta in 1945, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, having noted the failure of the League of Nations, decided to set up a United Nations that would have a controlling entity, which they then called the Security Council. And to make sure that worked, in their interests I would say, they established this five-power veto group, and they added France and they added China. And that five is still in place.

That’s 1945 and this is 2021, and they’re still in power and they’re still manipulating the United Nations. And as long as they stay there and they manipulate, I think the UN is doomed. The tragedy is that the five veto powers are the very member states that violate the Charter, violate human rights conventions, and will not allow the application of the ICC to their war crimes and other abuses.

On top of that, they are the countries that manufacture and sell weapons, and we know that weapons of war are possibly the most profitable product you can produce. So their vested interest is control, is the military capacity, is interference. It’s a neocolonial endeavor, an empire in reality, to control the world as the way they want to see it. Until that is changed and those five member states agree to dilute their power and play an honest role, I think we’re doomed. The UN has no capacity to stop the difficulties we’re faced with around the world.

Nicolas Davies: That’s a pretty damning prognosis. In this century, we’re facing such incredible problems, between climate change and the threat of nuclear war still hanging over all of us, possibly more dangerous than ever before, because of the lack of treaties and the lack of cooperation between the nuclear powers, notably the U.S. and Russia. This is really an existential crisis for humanity.

Now there is also, of course, the UN General Assembly, and they did step up on nuclear weapons with the new Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which has now officially entered into force. And every year when it meets, the General Assembly regularly and almost unanimously condemns the U.S. sanctions regime against Cuba.

When I wrote my book about the war in Iraq, my final recommendations were that the senior American and British war criminals responsible for the war should be held criminally accountable, and that the U.S. and the U.K. should pay reparations to Iraq for the war. Could the General Assembly possibly be a venue to build support for Iraq to claim reparations from the U.S. and the U.K., or is there another venue where that would be more appropriate?

Denis Halliday: I think you’re right on target. The tragedy is that the decisions of the Security Council are binding decisions. Every member state has got to apply and respect those decisions. So, if you violate a sanctions regime imposed by the Council as a member state, you’re in trouble. The General Assembly resolutions are not binding.

You’ve just referred to a very important decision, which is the decision about nuclear weapons. We’ve had a lot of decisions on banning various types of weapons over the years. Here in Ireland we were involved in anti-personnel mines and other things of that sort, and it was by a large number of member states, but not the guilty parties, not the Americans, not the Russians, not the Chinese, not the British. The ones who control the veto power game are the ones who do not comply. Just like Clinton was one of the proposers, I think, of the ICC [International Criminal Court], but when it came to the end of the day, the United States doesn’t accept it has a role vis-a-vis themselves and their war crimes The same is true of other large states that are the guilty parties in those cases.

So I would go back to your suggestion about the General Assembly. It could be enhanced, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be changed, but it requires tremendous courage on the part of member states. It also requires acceptance by the five veto powers that their day has come to an end, because, in reality, the UN carries very little cachet nowadays to send a UN mission into a country like Myanmar or Afghanistan.

I think we have no power left, we have no influence left, because they know who runs the organization, they know who makes the decisions. It’s not the Secretary-General. It’s not people like me. We are dictated to by the Security Council. I resigned, effectively, from the Security Council. They were my bosses during that particular period of my career.

I have a lecture I do on reforming the Security Council, making it a North-South representative body, which would find Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa in situ, and you’d get very different decisions, you’d get the sort of decisions we get in the General Assembly: much more balanced, much more aware of the world and its North and South and all those other variations. But of course, again, we can’t reform the Council until the five veto powers agree to that. That is the huge problem.

Nicolas Davies: Yes, in fact, when that structure was announced in 1945 with the Security Council, the five Permanent Members and the veto, Albert Camus, who was the editor of the French Resistance newspaper Combat, wrote a front-page editorial saying this was the end of any idea of international democracy.

So, as with so many other issues, we live in these nominally democratic countries, but the people of a country like the United States are only really told what our leaders want us to know about how the world works. So reform of the Security Council is clearly needed, but it’s a massive process of education and democratic reform in countries around the world to actually build enough of a popular movement to demand that kind of change. In the meantime, the problems we’re facing are enormous.

Another thing that is very under-reported in the U.S. is that, out of desperation after twenty years of war in Afghanistan, Secretary Blinken has finally asked the UN to lead a peace process for a ceasefire between the U.S.-backed government and the Taliban and a political transition. That could move the conflict into the political realm and end the civil war that resulted from the U.S. invasion and occupation and endless bombing campaign.

So what do you think of that initiative? There is supposed to be a meeting in a couple of weeks in Istanbul, led by an experienced UN negotiator, Jean Arnault, who helped to bring peace to Guatemala at the end of its civil war, and then between Colombia and the FARC. The U.S. specifically asked China, Russia and Iran to be part of this process as well. Both sides in Afghanistan have agreed to come to Istanbul and at least see what they can agree on. So is that a constructive role that the UN can play? Does that offer a chance of peace for the people of Afghanistan?

Denis Halliday: If I were a member of the Taliban and I was asked to negotiate with a government that is only in power because it’s supported by the United States, I would question whether it’s an even keel. Are we equally powerful, can we talk to each other one-to-one? The answer, I think, is no.

The UN chap, whoever he is, poor man, is going to have the same difficulty. He is representing the United Nations, a Security Council dominated by the United States and others, as the Afghans are perfectly well aware. The Taliban have been fighting for a helluva long time, and making no progress because of the interference of the U.S. troops, which are still on the ground. I just don’t think it’s an even playing field.

So I’d be very surprised if that works. I absolutely hope it might. I would think, in my view, if you want a lasting relationship within a country, it’s got to be negotiated within the country, without military or other interference or fear of further bombing or attacks or all the rest of it. I don’t think we have any credibility, as a UN, under those circumstances. It’ll be a very tough slog.

Nicolas Davies: Right. The irony is that the United States set aside the UN Charter when it attacked Yugoslavia in 1999 to carve out what is now the semi-recognized country of Kosovo, and then to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. The UN Charter, right at the beginning, at its heart, prohibits the threat or use of force by one country against another. But that is what the U.S. set aside.

Denis Halliday: And then, you have to remember, the U.S. is attacking a fellow member state of the United Nations, without hesitation, with no respect for the Charter. Perhaps people forget that Eleanor Roosevelt drove, and succeeded in establishing, the Declaration of Human Rights, an extraordinary achievement, which is still valid. It’s a biblical instrument for many of us who work in the UN.

So the neglect of the Charter and the spirit of the Charter and the wording of the Charter, by the five veto members, perhaps in Afghanistan it was Russia, now it’s the United States, the Afghanis have had foreign intervention up to their necks and beyond, and the British have been involved there since the 18th century almost. So they have my deepest sympathy, but I hope this thing can work, let’s hope it can.

Nicolas Davies: I brought that up because the U.S., with its dominant military power after the end of the Cold War, made a very conscious choice that instead of living according to the UN Charter, it would live by the sword, by the law of the jungle: “might makes right.”

It took those actions because it could, because no other military force was there to stand up against it. At the time of the First Gulf War, a Pentagon consultant told the New York Times that, with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. could finally conduct military operations in the Middle East without worrying about starting World War III. So they took the demise of the Soviet Union as a green light for these systematic, widespread actions that violate the UN Charter.

But now, what is happening in Afghanistan is that the Taliban once again control half the country. We’re approaching the spring and the summer when the fighting traditionally gets worse, and so the U.S. is calling in the UN out of desperation because, frankly, without a ceasefire, their government in Kabul is just going to lose more territory. So the U.S. has chosen to live by the sword, and in this situation it’s now confronting dying by the sword.

Denis Halliday: What’s tragic, Nicolas, is that, in our lifetime, the Afghanis ran their own country. They had a monarchy, they had a parliament – I met and interviewed women ministers from Afghanistan in New York – and they managed it. It was when the Russians interfered, and then the Americans interfered, and then Bin Laden set up his camp there, and that was justification for destroying what was left of Afghanistan.

And then Bush, Cheney and a few of the boys decided, although there was no justification whatsoever, to bomb and destroy Iraq, because they wanted to think that Saddam Hussein was involved with Al Qaeda, which of course was nonsense. They wanted to think he had weapons of mass destruction, which also was nonsense. The UN inspectors said that again and again, but nobody would believe them.

It’s deliberate neglect of the one last hope. The League of Nations failed, and the UN was the next best hope and we have deliberately turned our backs upon it, neglected it and distrusted it. When we get a good Secretary General like Hammarskjold, we murder him. He was definitely killed, because he was interfering in the dreams of the British in particular, and perhaps the Belgians, in Katanga. It’s a very sad story, and I don’t know where we go from here.

Nicolas Davies: Right, well, where we seem to be going from here is to a loss of American power around the world, because the U.S. has so badly abused its power. In the U.S., we keep hearing that this is a Cold War between the U.S. and China, or maybe the U.S., China and Russia, but I think we all hopefully can work for a more multipolar world.

As you say, the UN Security Council needs reform, and hopefully the American people are understanding that we cannot unilaterally rule the world, that the ambition for a U.S. global empire is an incredibly dangerous pipe-dream that has really led us to an impasse.

Denis Halliday: Perhaps the only good thing coming out of Covid-19 is the slow realization that, if everybody doesn’t get a vaccine, we fail, because we, the rich and the powerful with the money and the vaccines, will not be safe until we make sure the rest of the world is safe, from Covid and the next one that’s coming along the track undoubtedly.

And this implies that if we don’t do trade with China or other countries we have reservations about, because we don’t like their government, we don’t like communism, we don’t like socialism, whatever it is, we just have to live with that, because without each other we can’t survive. With the climate crisis and all the other issues related to that, we need each other more than ever perhaps, and we need collaboration. It’s just basic common sense that we work and live together.

The U.S. has something like 800 military bases around the world, of various sizes. China is certainly surrounded and this is a very dangerous situation, totally unnecessary. And now the rearming with fancy new nuclear weapons when we already have nuclear weapons that are twenty times bigger than the one that destroyed Hiroshima. Why on Earth? It’s just irrational nonsense to continue these programs, and it just doesn’t work for humanity.

I would hope the U.S. would start perhaps retreating and sorting out its own domestic problems, which are quite substantial. I’m reminded every day when I look at CNN here in my home about the difficulties of race and all the other things that you’re well aware of that need to be addressed. Being policeman to the world was a bad decision.

Nicolas Davies: Absolutely. So the political, economic and military system we live under is not only genocidal at this point, but also suicidal. Thank you, Denis, for being a voice of reason in this insane world.Nicolas J. S. Davies is a researcher for CODEPINK, a freelance writer and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Secretary of State Blinken: Support for Invasions of Iraq and Libya

“In the U.S., there is no accountability for supporting the worst foreign policy disaster in modern history. Only rewards.”

Jake Johnson, commondreams.com

Anthony Blinken attends a press conference on August 10, 2016 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

With the upper ranks of President-elect Joe Biden’s foreign policy team beginning to take shape after new reporting indicated he plans to nominate long-time adviser Antony Blinken as secretary of state, progressives raised alarm over Blinken’s support for the disastrous 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the 2011 assault on Libya as well as his recent consulting work on behalf of corporate clients in the tech, finance, and arms industries.

Blinken served as deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration and, as the Washington Post reported Sunday, “has been described as having a centrist view of the world” and “has also supported interventionist positions.”

“He once broke with Biden and supported military action in Libya, for example,” the Post noted, referring to the Obama White House’s catastrophic decision to join with NATO to bomb that country, an armed intervention that helped unleash a violent civil war that is still ongoing.

When it came to Syria policy under Obama, Blinken is also reported to have supported more aggressive military measures against the government of President Bashar al-Assad and more recently has indicated that the Biden administration would opt for leaving U.S. troops in the war-torn country.

When Biden, then a senator and chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, voted in 2002 to authorize the Bush administration’s disastrous invasion of Iraq—a decision he has since described as a mistake—Blinken was the Democratic staff director of the committee. The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim reported last July that Blinken “helped craft Biden’s own support for the Iraq War”; speaking to the New York Times earlier this year, Blinken characterized the vote to invade Iraq as “a vote for tough diplomacy.”

“So we will have a president who supported the invasion of Iraq, and a secretary of state (Tony Blinken) who supported the invasion of Iraq,” tweeted Medea Benjamin, co-founder of anti-war group CodePink. “In the U.S., there is no accountability for supporting the worst foreign policy disaster in modern history. Only rewards.”

Biden’s choice of Blinken—expected to be announced publicly on Tuesday along with a slate of additional nominees—was not universally criticized by progressives. Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called Blinken “a good choice.”

“Tony has the strong confidence of the president-elect and the knowledge and experience for the important work of rebuilding U.S. diplomacy,” said Duss. “It will also be a new and great thing to have a top diplomat who has regularly engaged with progressive grassroots.”

After leaving the Obama administration, Blinken in 2017 co-founded the consultancy firm WestExec Advisors with Michèle Flournoy, who is believed to be a leading candidate to serve as Biden’s defense secretary. As The American Prospect reported in July:

WestExec would only divulge that it began working with “Fortune 100 types,” including large U.S. tech; financial services, including global-asset managers; aerospace and defense; emerging U.S. tech; and nonprofits.

The Prospect can confirm that one of those clients is the Israeli artificial-intelligence company Windward. With surveillance software that tracks ships in real time, two former Israeli naval intelligence officers established the company in 2010…

Despite multiple requests, neither the firm nor the Biden campaign would provide WestExec Advisors’ client list. “Transparency is very important to us,” said a Biden spokesperson. Blinken had recused himself from work at WestExec, according to the campaign, yet his profile remains on the consultancy’s website.

Biden’s reported selection of Blinken, and potential selection of Flournoy, to serve in two of his administration’s top foreign policy roles is likely to draw rebuke from progressives who have demanded that the president-elect assemble a cabinet committed to peace and diplomacy and free from the corrupting influence of weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, and other powerful corporate interests.

“Biden has been facing calls from Democratic lawmakers and progressive advocacy groups to end the revolving door between government and the defense industry,” The Daily Poster‘s Julia Rock and Andrew Perez noted Monday morning. “One-third of the members of Biden transition’s Depart­ment of Defense agency review team were most recently employed by ‘orga­ni­za­tions, think tanks, or com­pa­nies that either direct­ly receive mon­ey from the weapons indus­try, or are part of this indus­try,’ according to reporting from In These Times.”

“Meanwhile,” Rock and Perez added, “defense executives have been boasting about their close relationship with Biden and expressing confidence that there will not be much change in Pentagon policy.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), the first vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), pointed out on Twitter that, similar to Blinken, “Flournoy supported the war in Iraq and Libya, criticized Obama on Syria, and helped craft the surge in Afghanistan.”

“I want to support the president’s picks,” added Khanna. “But will Flournoy now commit to a full withdrawal from Afghanistan and a ban on arms sales to the Saudis to end the Yemen war?”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), also a member of the CPC, said in response to Khanna that the “bigger question is will Biden commit to that.”

“Ultimately,” said Omar, “it will be Biden’s foreign policy that his administration will execute.”

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Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines: Drones, Torture, and Mass Surveillance

CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies recently noted that Avril Haines “provided legal cover” for CIA torture and “worked closely” on the Obama administration’s expanded drone policy. 

Brett Wilkins, staff writer commondreams.com

Former Deputy National Security Advisor Avril Haines (center, standing) jokes with then-President Barack Obama and his National Security Adviser, Susan Rice (L), and Homeland Security Adviser Lisa Monaco in the White House on December 5, 2015.(Photo: Pete Souza/White House) 

Peace activists on Monday sounded the alarm over President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, citing her role in drone strike policy during Barack Obama’s presidency and covering up torture perpetrated by members of the George W. Bush administration.

Haines, as former deputy national security adviser and former deputy CIA director, worked closely with Obama and former CIA Director John Brennan as the administration dramatically increased drone strikes.

CIA Director Gina Haspel, as the New York Times noted, will report to Haines. Haspel had a role supervising the CIA’s torture program, and Haines supported President Donald Trump’s nomination of the agency chief in 2018.

As the Daily Beast reported in July, Haines approved an “accountability board” that spared CIA personnel reprisal for spying on the Senate’s torture investigators, and was part of the team that redacted their landmark report. After the administration ended, Haines supported Gina Haspel for CIA director, someone directly implicated in CIA torture, a decision that remains raw amongst progressive activists. Until late June, she consulted for the Trump-favorite data firm Palantir, which emerged from the CIA.

Haines’ nomination drew praise from Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who said he was “incredibly pleased” by the pick, adding it sends “a clear message of hope and support for American values to the world in choosing candidates who possess the qualifications, the demeanor, and the temperament to serve in leadership positions.” 

Peace and digital rights advocates—Haines also worked as a consultant for the surveillance state- and deportation-enabling tech firm Palantir Technologies—had a decidedly different take on her selection. Under the hashtag #FeminismNotMilitarism, the women-led peace group CodePink tweeted that “appointing a woman to be the director of national intelligence DOES NOT justify, atone, or excuse the U.S. intelligence community’s murderous drone strikes and violent counterterrorism strategies.” 

In a Common Dreams op-ed earlier this month, CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin and co-author Nicolas C. Davies noted that “Haines provided legal cover and worked closely with Obama and CIA Director John Brennan on Obama’s tenfold expansion of drone killings.” 

Benjamin and Davies wrote that Haines taking a prominent position in the Biden administration would be just one more troubling failure to reorient U.S. foreign policy away from past mistakes.

Haines joins a growing list of controversial names either already chosen or under consideration for jobs in the Biden administration, including his highest-ranking Cabinet pick to date, secretary of state nominee and Iraq and Libya invasion supporter Anthony Blinken. Both Haines and Blinken worked for WestExec Advisors, a key player in the revolving door world between government and the corporate sector whose founders include Blinken and former Clinton and Obama hawk Michèle Flournoy—who is widely considered the front-runner to become the first woman defense secretary. 

Writing at the Guardian Saturday, Arwa Mahdawi cautioned against “acting like Flournoy’s likely appointment as head of the Pentagon is some kind of win for feminism.”

“There is nothing remotely feminist about women in rich countries dropping bombs on women in poor countries,” wrote Mahdawi. 

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Your tax dollars at work: letting the Pentagon loose

Mandy Smithberger

Hold on to your helmets. It’s true the White House is reporting that its proposed new Pentagon budget is only $740.5 billion, a relatively small increase from the previous year’s staggering number. In reality, however, when you also include war and security costs buried in the budgets of other agencies, the actual national security figure comes in at more than $1.2 trillion, as the Trump administration continues to give the Pentagon free reign over taxpayer dollars.
You would think that the country’s congressional representatives might want to take control of this process and roll back that budget—especially given the way the White House has repeatedly violated its constitutional authority by essentially stealing billions of dollars from the Defense Department for the president’s “Great Wall” (that Congress refused to fund). Recently, even some of the usual congressional Pentagon budget boosters have begun to lament how difficult it is to take the Department’s requests for more money seriously, given the way the military continues to demand yet more (ever more expensive) weaponry and advanced technologies on the (largely bogus) grounds that Uncle Sam is losing an innovation war with Russia and China.
And if this wasn’t bad enough, keep in mind that the Defense Department remains the only major federal agency that has proven itself incapable of even passing an audit. An investigation by my colleague Jason Paladino at the Project On Government Oversight found that increased secrecy around the operations of the Pentagon is making it ever more difficult to assess whether any of its money is well spent, which is why it’s important to track where all the money in this country’s national security budget actually goes.

The Pentagon’s “base” budget: $636 billion
This year’s Pentagon request includes $636.4 billion for what’s called its “base” budget—for the routine expenses of the Defense Department. However, claiming that those funds were insufficient, Congress and the Pentagon created a separate slush fund to cover both actual war expenses and other items on their wish lists (on which more to come). Add in mandatory spending, which includes payments to veterans’ retirement and
illness compensation funds and that base budget comes to $647.2 billion.
Ahead of the recent budget roll out, the Pentagon issued a review of potential “reforms” to supposedly cut or control soaring costs. While a few of them deserve serious consideration and debate, the majority
reveal just how focused the Pentagon is on protecting its own interests. Ironically, one major area of investment it wants to slash involves oversight of the billions of dollars to be spent. Perhaps least surprising was a proposal to slash programs for operational testing and evaluation—otherwise known as the process of determining whether the billions Americans spend on shiny new weaponry will result in products that actually work. The Pentagon’s Office of Operational Test and Evaluation has found itself repeatedly under attack from arms manufacturers and their boosters who would prefer to be in charge of grading their own performances.
Reduced oversight becomes even more troubling when you look at where Pentagon policymakers want to move that money—to missile defense based on staggeringly expensive futuristic hypersonic weaponry.
As my Project On Government Oversight colleague Mark Thompson has written, the idea that such weapons will offer a successful way of defending against enemy missiles “is a recipe for military futility and fiscal insanity.”
Another proposal—to cut A-10 “Warthogs” in the Pentagon’s arsenal in pursuit of a new generation of fighter planes—suggests just how cavalier a department eager for flashy new toys that mean large paydays for the giant defense contractors can be with service members’ lives. After all, no weapons platform more effectively protects ground troops at a relatively low cost than the A-10, yet that plane regularly ends up on the cut list, thanks to those eager to make money on a predictably less effective and vastly more expensive replacement.
Many other proposed “cuts” are actually gambits to get Congress to pump yet more money into the Pentagon. For instance, a memo of supposed cuts shipbuilding programs, leaked at the end of last year, drew predictable ire from members of Congress trying to protect jobs in their states. Similarly, don’t imagine for a second that purchases of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, the most expensive weapons system in history, could possibly be slowed even though the latest testing report suggests that, among other things, it has a gun that still can’t shoot straight. That program is, however, a pork paradise for the military-industrial complex, claiming jobs spread across 45 states.
Many such proposals for cuts are nothing but deft deployments of the “Washington Monument strategy,” a classic tactic in which bureaucrats suggest slashing popular programs to avoid facing any cuts at all. The bureaucratic game is fairly simple: Never offer up anything that would actually appeal to Congress when it comes to reducing the bottom line. Recently, the Pentagon did exactly that in proposing cuts to popular weapons programs to pay for the president’s wall, knowing that no such thing would happen.
Believe it or not, however, there are actually a few proposed cuts that Congress might take seriously. Lockheed Martin’s and Austal’s Littoral Combat Ship program, for instance, has long been troubled, and the number of ships planned for purchase has been cut as problems operating such vessels or even ensuring that they might survive in combat have mounted. The Navy estimates that retiring the first four ships in the program, which would otherwise need significant and expensive upgrades to be deployable, would save $1.2 billion.

The Pentagon’s slush fund: $69 billion
Both the Pentagon and Congress have used a war-spending slush fund known as the Overseas Contingency Operations account, or OCO, as a mechanism to circumvent budget caps put into place in 2011 by the Budget Control Act. In 2021, that slush fund is expected to come in at $69 billion. As Taxpayers for Common Sense has pointed out, if OCO were an agency in itself, it would be the fourth largest in the government. In a welcome move towards transparency, this year’s request actually notes that $16 billion of its funds are for things that should be paid for by the base budget, just as last year’s OCO spending levels included $8 billion for the president’s false fund-the-wall “national emergency.”

The nuclear budget: $27.6 billion
While most people may associate the Department of Energy with fracking, oil drilling, solar panels, and wind farms, more than half of its budget actually goes to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which
manages the country’s nuclear weapons program. Unfortunately, it has an even worse record than the Pentagon when it comes to mismanaging the tens of billions of dollars it receives every year. Its programs are regularly significantly behind schedule and over cost, more than $28 billion in such expenses over the past 20 years. It’s a track record of mismanagement woeful enough to leave even the White House’s budget geeks questioning nuclear weapons projects. In the end, though—and given military spending generally, this shouldn’t surprise you—the boosters of more nuclear weapons won and so the nuclear budget came in at $27.6 billion.

“Defense-related” activities: $9.7 billion
At $9.7 billion, this budget item includes a number of miscellaneous national-security-related matters, including international FBI activities and payments to the CIA retirement fund.

The intelligence budget: $85 billion
Not surprisingly, since it’s often referred to as the “black budget,” there is relatively little information publicly available about intelligence community spending. According to recent press reports, however, defense firms are finding this area increasingly profitable, citing double-digit growth in just the last year. Unfortunately, Congress has little capacity to oversee this spending. A recent report by Demand Progress and the Project On Government Oversight found that, as of 2019, only 37 of 100 senators even have staff capable of accessing any kind of information about these programs, let alone the ability to conduct proper oversight of them.
However, we do know the total amount of money being requested for the 17 major agencies in the U.S. intelligence community: $85 billion. That money is split between the Pentagon’s intelligence
programs and funding for the Central Intelligence Agency and other “civilian” outfits. This year, the military’s intelligence program requested $23.1 billion, and $61.9 billion was requested for the other agencies. Most of this funding is believed to be in the Pentagon’s budget, so it’s not included in the running tally below. If you want to know anything else about that spending you’re going to need to get a security clearance.

The military and Defense Department retirement and health budget: $7.8 billion
While you might assume that these costs would be included in the defense budget, this budget line shows that funds were paid by the Treasury Department for military retirement programs (minus interest and
contributions from those accounts). While such retirement costs come to $700 million, the healthcare fund costs are actually a negative $8.5 billion.

The Veterans Affairs budget: $238.4 billion
The financial costs of war are far greater than what’s seen in the Pentagon budget. The most recent estimates of War Project show that the total costs of the nation’s main post-911 wars through this fiscal year come to $6.4 trillion, including a minimum of $1 trillion for the costs of caring for veterans. This year the administration requested $238.4 billion for Veterans Affairs.

The international affairs budget: $51.1 billion
The International Affairs budget includes funds for both the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Numerous defense secretaries and senior military leaders have urged public
support for spending on diplomacy to prevent conflict and enhance security (and the State Department also engages in a number of military-related activities). In the Obama years, for instance, then-Marine General James Mattis typically quipped that without more funding for diplomacy he was going to need more bullets. Ahead of the introduction of this year’s budget, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Admiral Mike Mullen told congressional leaders that concerns about great-power competition with China and Russia meant that “cutting these critical investments would be out of touch with the reality around the world.”
The budget request for $51.1 billion, however, cuts State Department funding significantly and proposes keeping it at such a level for the foreseeable future.

The Homeland Security budget: $52.1 billion
The Department of Homeland Security consists of a hodgepodge of government agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Administration, the U.S. Secret
Service, Customs and Border Protection, and the Coast Guard. In this year’s $49.7 billion budget, border security costs make up a third of total costs. The department is also responsible for coordinating federal
cyber-security efforts through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Despite growing domestic cyber concerns, however, the budget request for that agency has fallen since last year’s budget.

Interest on the debt: $123.6 billion
And don’t forget the national security state’s part in paying interest on the national debt. Its share, 21.5% of that debt, adds up to $123.6 billion.

Final tally: $1,210.9 billion – too high
In other words, at $1.21 trillion, the actual national security budget is essentially twice the size of the announced Pentagon budget. It’s also a compendium of military-industrial waste and misspending. Yet
those calling for higher budgets continue to argue that the only way to keep America safe is to pour in yet more tax dollars at a moment when remarkably little is going into, for instance, domestic infrastructure.
The U.S. already spends more than the next seven countries combined on a military that is seemingly incapable of either winning or ending any of the wars it’s been engaged in since September 2001. So isn’t it
reasonable to suggest that the more that’s spent on what’s still called national security but should perhaps go by the term “national insecurity,” the less there is to show for it? More spending is never the solution to poor spending. Isn’t it about time, then, that the disastrously bloated “defense” budget experienced some meaningful cuts and shifts in priorities? Shouldn’t the U.S. military be made into a far leaner and more agile force geared to actual defense instead of disastrous wars (and preparations for more of the same) across a significant swath of the planet?

Mandy Smithberger is the director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

Source: TomDispatch 3220 http:www.tomdispatch.com