Yoda, the Jedi Master in the Star Wars films, once pointed out that the future is all too difficult to see and it’s hard to deny his insight. Yet I’d argue that, when it comes to the U.S. military and its wars, Yoda was just plain wrong. That part of the future is all too easy to imagine. It involves, you won’t be shocked to know, more budget-busting weaponry for the Pentagon and more military meddling across the globe, perhaps this time against “near-peer” rivals China and Russia, and a global war on terror that will never end. What’s even easier to see is that peace will be given no chance at all. Why? Because it’s just not in the interests of America’s deeply influential military-congressional-industrial complex.

When that vast complex, which President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about six decades ago, comes to my mind, I can’t help thinking of a song from the last years of the then seemingly endless Cold War. (How typical, by the way, that when the Soviet Union finally imploded in 1991, it barely affected Pentagon funding.)

“The future’s so bright (I gotta wear shades)” was that 1986 song’s title. And I always wonder whether that future could indeed be nuclear-war bright, given our military’s affection for such weaponry. I once heard the saying, “The [nuclear] triad is not the Trinity,” which resonated with me given my Catholic upbringing. Still, it’s apparently holy enough at the Pentagon or why would the high command there already be planning to fund the so-called modernization of the American nuclear arsenal to the tune of at least $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years? Given this nation’s actual needs, that figure blows me away (though not literally, I hope).

What is that “triad” the complex treats as a holy trinity? It consists of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs; nuclear-weapons-capable bombers like the B-1, B-2, and the venerable B-52; and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, or SLBMs. Given our present vast nuclear arsenal, there’s no strategic need for building new ICBMs at a price beyond compare. In fact, as the most vulnerable “leg” of the triad, the ones the Air Force currently has should be decommissioned.

Nor is there a strategic need for an ultra-expensive new bomber like the Air Force’s proposed B-21 Raider (basically, an updated version of the B-2 Spirit “stealth” bomber that’s most frequently used these days for flyovers at big college and Super Bowl football games). America’s Ohio-class nuclear submarines that still wander the world’s oceans armed with Trident missiles are more than capable of “deterring” any conceivable opponent into the distant future, even if they also offer humanity a solid shot at wholesale suicide via a future nuclear winter. But reason not the need, as Shakespeare once had King Lear say. Focus instead on the profits to be made (he might have added, had he lived in our time and our land) by building “modernized” nukes.

As my old service, the Air Force, clamors for new nuclear missiles and bombers, there’s also the persistent quest for yet more fighter jets, including overpriced, distinctly underperforming ones like the F-35, the “Ferrari” of fighter planes according to the Air Force chief of staff. If the military gets all the F-35s it wants, add another $1.7 trillion to the cost of national “defense.” At the same time, that service is seeking a new, “lower-cost” (but don’t count on it) multirole fighter — what the F-35 was supposed to be once upon a time — even as it pursues the idea of a “6th-generation” fighter even more advanced (read: pricier) than 5th-generation models like the F-22 and F-35.

I could go on similarly about the Navy (more Ford-class aircraft carriers and new nuclear-armed submarines) or the Army (modernized Abrams tanks; a new infantry fighting vehicle), but you get the idea. If Congress and the president keep shoveling trillions of dollars down the military’s gullet and those of its camp followers (otherwise known as “defense” contractors), count on one thing: they’ll find ever newer ways of spending that dough on anything from space weaponry to robot “companions.”

Indeed, I asked a friend who’s still intimate with the military-industrial complex what’s up with its dreams and schemes. The military’s latest Joint Warfighting Concept, he told me, “is all about building Systems of Systems based in AI [artificial intelligence] and quantum computing.” Then he added: “All it will do is give us more sophisticated ways to lose wars.” (You can see why he’s my friend.) The point is that AI and quantum computing sound futuristically super-sexy, which is why they’ll doubtless be used to justify super-expensive future budgetary requests by the Pentagon.

In that context, don’t you find it staggering how much the military spent in Afghanistan fighting and losing all too modernistically to small, under-armed units of the Taliban? Two trillion-plus dollars to wage a counterinsurgency campaign that failed dismally. Imagine if, in the next decade or two, the U.S. truly had to fight a near-peer rival like China. Even if the U.S. military somehow won the battles, this nation would undoubtedly collapse into bankruptcy and financial ruin (and it would be a catastrophe for the whole endangered planet of ours). It could get so bad that even Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk might have to pay higher taxes, if, that is, they haven’t already slipped the surly bonds of Earth to mingle with the twinkling stars.

If America’s post-9/11 war-on-terror military spending, including for the Afghan and Iraq wars, has indeed reached the unimaginable sum of $8 trillion, as Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates, imagine how much a real war, a “conventional” war, featuring the air force, the fleet, big battalions, and major battles, would cost this country. Again, the mind (mine at least) boggles at the prospect. Which is not to say that the U.S. military won’t fight for every penny so that it’s over-prepared to wage just such a war (and worse).

The idea that this country faces a perilous new cold war that could grow hot at any moment, this time with China, crops up in unusual places. Consider this passage by Dexter Filkins, a well-known war reporter, that appeared recently in the New Yorker:

“We’ve spent decades fighting asymmetrical wars, but now there’s a symmetrical one looming. The United States has never faced an adversary of China’s power: China’s G.D.P. is, by some measures, greater than ours, its active-duty military is larger than ours, and its weapon systems are rapidly expanding. China appears determined to challenge the status quo, not just the territorial one but the scaffolding of international laws that govern much of the world’s diplomatic and economic relations. If two forever wars are finally coming to an end, a new Cold War may await.”

A new war is “looming.” Our adversary has more money and more troops than us and is seeking better weaponry. Its leadership wants to challenge a “status quo” (that favors America) and international laws (which this country already routinely breaks when our leaders feel in the mood).

Why are so many otherwise sane people, including Joe Biden’s foreign policy team, already rattling sabers in preparation for a new faceoff with China, one that would be eminently avoidable with judicious diplomacy and an urge to cooperate on this embattled planet of ours?

Future wars won’t keep Americans together Looking at the U.S. from across an ocean, a British friend of mine was bemused by this country’s propensity for turning rivals into dangers of the worst sort. He asked me whether the very unity of the United States hinges on hyping and then confronting external enemies, an “artificially contrived military commonality,” as he put it, that may serve to prevent this country’s states from performing their own little “Brexits.”

He has a point. What is it about this country that makes our leaders so regularly revel in inflating threats to our well-being? War profits, of course, as well as the kinds of dangers that seem to justify an ever more colossal military. Still, I suggested to my friend that inflating such dangers hasn’t induced a sense of national unity, though it has, at least, provided a major distraction from what, so late in the game, can still only be called class warfare. (Spoiler alert: the richest among us have already won that war, Karl Marx be damned.) They also, of course, offer our oligarchs and kleptocrats yet more opportunities to plunder taxpayer dollars.

Despite the recent wall-to-wall coverage on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 of how that moment united us in a desire for revenge, our wars generally haven’t brought Americans together. (Remember the Civil War?) The lone exception was World War II, which is why it’s still so constantly cited. Perhaps the Cold War provided some sense of unity, as long as you weren’t the subject of a McCarthyite witch hunt, but the Vietnam War tore America apart. The memory of that nightmare undoubtedly helps explain why our leaders have worked so hard to ensure that today’s wars happen in the background and are no more than an afterthought for most of us (which is exactly how the Pentagon and weapons makers want it).

As an Air Force buddy of mine said to me recently, you really can’t blame members of the complex “for hustling an easy buck.” It’s what they’re geared to do. “The bigger issue,” he suggested, “is with their enablers, who are legion. Because society is so cut off from the military, most of us have no way to really understand what it does or to measure its effectiveness. You see the four stars and rows of ribbons on those generals and think they must know their business. The funny part is that, by the standards of the business world, these guys are failures, their ROI [return on investment] is terrible.”

If I truly wanted to effect change, my friend added, I should focus on ordinary Americans. Wake them up, tell them tough truths, and forget about Congress and those defense contractors. His advice reminded me of a scene I witnessed recently at the beach. A small boy was aiming a squirt gun at the incoming tide. “Take that, wave!” he shouted, firing again and again. Sometimes I feel like that boy, firing my own squirt gun of critiques as wave after wave from America’s oceanic military-congressional-industrial complex crashes at my feet. The riptide of militarism in the U.S. can be both exhausting and deadly.

Twenty years after the war on terror began and even with the war in Afghanistan seemingly over, most Americans remain remarkably isolated from this country’s conflicts and the rest of what passes for “national defense.” The first tough truth is this: America has a runaway empire. The second: Somehow, we must unite and dismantle it, before it dismantles us.

My squirt-gun message Here’s the rest of my message to my fellow citizens. Stop rewarding the Pentagon and its failed generals and admirals with yet more money. Hold them accountable for their disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere. Pay closer attention to current events. Seek out alternative media. Know when you’re being conned. (Hint: any war in a far-off place you’ve barely heard of is almost sure to prove another con job.)

Recognize that the wars in our recent past have been disasters, reports of “progress” have been shams, and the national treasury has been continually plundered before our very eyes. In other words, your wallets and your purses have been emptied to buy more bullets and bombs to kill or uproot the lives of mostly brown and black people across the globe who posed you little threat and few of whom ever meant you any harm.

Some of those same foreigners, however, might well be pissed off by now and contemplating a measure of revenge, which is basically the definition of blowback, as Chalmers Johnson warned us before 9/11 even happened. Someone must break the never-ending twenty-first-century cycle of violence. Why not us for once?

Recognize, too, that greed is not good, especially when it’s driven by profits from weapons that could quite literally extinguish life on Earth. Recall President Eisenhower’s words that spending on wars and weapons represents a theft from those who hunger; that U.S. leaders, in building more weapons and prosecuting more wars, are stealing from the future of your own children and grandchildren. Learn how to hate not the alleged “evil” foreigners but war itself and the war machine that lives off it, as well as the terrible waste of it all. Refuse to follow leaders who yearn for yet another cold (no less hot) war, who sing that old siren song of uniting in a crusade against another “axis of evil.”

Finally, recognize that this country is stronger together. That what unites us is more important than what divides us. Learn to ignore the methods of the richest few and their political allies, who work so hard to stir us up and keep us distracted, disunited, and angry at each other. Let them know that they’re playing with fire.

So, maybe Yoda’s right after all. The future is difficult to see. It’s always in motion. The question is: Do we have the courage to unite and head in a new direction? Why not set a new course for peace and, in the process, remake our democracy?

It’s surely better than the same old future of ever more weapons, ever more wars, and far less hope.

William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Copyright ©2021 William Astore — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 September 2021

Word Count: 2,248

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Over the past weeks, multiple crises have merged: a crisis of democracy with the most significant attack on voting rights since Reconstruction; a climate crisis with lives and livelihoods upended in the Gulf Coast and the Northeast by extreme weather events and in the West by a stunning fire season; and an economic crisis in which millions are being cut off from Pandemic Unemployment Insurance, even as August job gains proved underwhelming. There’s also a crisis taking place in state legislatures with an ongoing attack on women’s autonomy over our own bodies. The Supreme Court let a law go into effect that makes abortions nearly impossible in Texas and turns its enforcement over to vigilantes. And then, of course, there’s the looming eviction crisis that could precipitate the worst housing and homelessness disaster in American history.

Indeed, the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Texas abortion ban was hardly its only horrific decision this summer. Its willingness to end a moratorium on evictions instantly put hundreds of thousands of people at risk of eviction, with tens of millions more in danger in the weeks to come. With an unequal economic recovery, surging Covid-19 cases (thanks to the highly infectious Delta variant), and poor and homeless people disproportionately suffering the effects of fires and floods, this decision could truly prove catastrophic. Nor is it the only one likely to impact poor and low-income communities of color drastically. That stacked court, the Trump court (if you want to think of it that way), is offering a remarkably vivid demonstration of just how connected voting rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, and poverty really are.

President Biden critiqued the Supreme Court recently for its ruling on the Texas abortion case. “For the majority to do this without a hearing, without the benefit of an opinion from a court below, and without due consideration of the issues,” he said, “insults the rule of law and the rights of all Americans to seek redress from our courts.” And as continued injustices, especially from that court’s “shadow docket,” have come to light, former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, now head of the American Constitution Society, tweeted, “SCOTUS’s increasing use of the shadow docket to issue massive legal decisions is yet another reason why Supreme Court reform needs to be taken seriously.”

In reality, the Supreme Court is an institution of minority rule. According to Ari Berman, a voting-rights expert and journalist who has tracked that court for years, “A majority of conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by GOP presidents who initially lost the popular vote and confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population.” As he’s also pointed out, “No one has benefited more from minority rule — and done more to ensure it — than Mitch McConnell.”

After all, McConnell blocked President Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court on the flimsy pretext that it was too close to an election, only to ram through Donald Trump’s pick just eight days before the 2020 election when 65 million votes had already been cast. What this amounts to is simple enough: a Supreme Court that doesn’t represent the opinions or values of the majority of Americans.

As a biblical scholar and Christian pastor, I find the words of the Bible particularly relevant in a moment like this. Proverbs 22 reads, “Do not exploit the poor because they are poor and do not crush the needy in court, for the Lord will take up their case.”

In these ever-less United States, of course, it’s not only the Supreme Court that doesn’t respect the rights of the poor. Consider housing and the lower courts. In recent studies of landlord-tenant court cases in states across the country, landlords typically won 95% of eviction cases in Oklahoma and Hawaii and, in 2017, 99.7% percent of those in Kansas City.  According to the ACLU, ”Eviction proceedings historically have been unfair and imbalanced. In the courts, the odds are stacked against tenants: 90% of landlords are represented by legal counsel in evictions, but fewer than 10% of tenants have representation.”

Eviction in a pandemic Recently, as Ivana Saric pointed out at Axios, a new report from Goldman Sachs predicted significant hardship because of the way the Supreme Court upended the moratorium on evictions. As she wrote, “Roughly 2.5 million to 3.5 million American households are behind on their rents… They owe landlords between $12 billion and $17 billion… Evictions are likely to be ‘particularly pronounced in the cities hardest hit’ by Covid-19 because they have stronger apartment rental markets.”

Even more dire, reports CNBC, “The coronavirus pandemic could result in some 28 million Americans being evicted… By comparison, 10 million people lost their homes in the Great Recession.” These predictions come, in part, from Emily Benfer, the chair of the American Bar Association’s Task Force Committee on Eviction and co-creator with the Eviction Lab at Princeton University of the Covid-19 Housing Policy Scorecard. As she points out, “We have never seen this extent of eviction in such a truncated amount of time in our history.”

Add to that something else: this eviction crisis is happening at a moment when there’s already an existing population of 8 to 11 million homeless Americans who have only been thrown into a deeper set of crises during this seemingly never-ending pandemic. Although some homeless families received relief during the pandemic, homeless assistance funding was based on a count of only half a million homeless Americans and so, was woefully inadequate. Worse yet, sweeps and evictions of homeless encampments continued even during this crisis, while the limited protections won by housing activists — including, in some places, hotel rooms for those previously living on the street or in shelters — have, in many cases, been rolled back.

To put the eviction moratorium in perspective: Initially, it was instituted as part of the CARES Act that Congress passed in March 2020. Although limited in its reach and scope, it did indeed protect hundreds of thousands of people from homelessness at a moment when, in some places, landlords were flocking to eviction court in the middle of a pandemic to get rid of tenants. The CARES moratorium expired in July 2020. That September, in the absence of any further Congressional action, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stepped in to extend the moratorium to December 31st as a public-health measure to prevent an even greater spread of the virus. Then, in January of this year, the moratorium was extended by the new Congress until July when the CDC again intervened to extend it through October 3rd at least in areas where pandemic cases were high.

Many are familiar with the stand Congresswoman Cori Bush took in early August when the congressional moratorium expired. As someone who had experienced homelessness herself, she camped out on the steps of the Capitol to call attention to the looming housing disaster. Her actions, combined with powerful organizing by grassroots groups, called attention to the eviction crisis, but more is now needed.

The average household debt burden has only grown during the pandemic and no legislative action has been taken to relieve such a rent or housing crisis. The stimulus payments, unemployment insurance, and an expanded child tax credit were simply not enough. As a result, more than 10 million households are now estimated to be behind on their rent. Rather than bailing out renters and homeowners by canceling such debts or even efficiently distributing the $45 billion in rental assistance that has largely languished in a bureaucratic hell, Congress failed to extend the eviction moratorium, paving the way for disaster.

Homeless, not helpless Over more than 40 years, while a crisis of homelessness has exploded, a narrative has been popularized that sees it largely through stereotypes. For a wealthy elite that’s advanced a generation of neoliberal reforms, it’s been critical to cast homelessness in this way — as an aberration on the margins of an otherwise healthy society, rather than as a startlingly visible indictment of a political and economic order in which homelessness and poverty are at the very core of society.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, major structural shifts in the global economy were accompanied by deep tax cuts, the deregulation of banking and the financial markets, the privatization of public utilities and services, and anti-labor measures. In the midst of all this, homelessness grew, as the government demolished public housing while investing in private urban development projects that fueled gentrification and pushed poor families from their homes.

Up from the streets and out of the shelters, poor and homeless people began organizing themselves into communities of mutual-aid and solidarity. In just a few years, the National Union of the Homeless (NUH) broke into the national narrative, challenging the prevailing notion that its members were poor and homeless because of bad personal decisions and moral failures in their family lives. Instead, they targeted the systems and structures that produced their poverty.

Recently, images of the flooding of Tompkins Square Park when what was left of Hurricane Ida hit downtown New York City received significant attention. Over the summer, the number of homeless people living in that park increased strikingly and neighbors began organizing mutual-aid projects to help the unhoused. Such conditions and projects of survival connect this particular moment to the past — specifically to a time decades ago when homeless and formerly homeless organizers from Tompkins Square first helped form the National Union of the Homeless. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NUH would organize 25 chapters in cities across the United States representing thousands of homeless people.  Its slogans then included “Tompkins Square Everywhere,” “No housing, no peace,” and “You only get what you’re organized to take” — and they still resonate today.

The NUH was known for coordinating housing takeovers: those lacking housing moved into abandoned, government-owned dwellings in a politicized and organized way. The spectacle of homeless people directly challenging public property in the name of survival was striking. In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s, these bold actions resulted in the union winning the right of the homeless to vote, setting up housing programs run by the un-housed themselves in nearly a dozen cities, and so shifting the national narrative on poverty and homelessness.

In the midst of the present pandemic and the eviction crisis that now goes with it, the National Union of the Homeless is taking to the streets again. Indeed, its leaders know that it will take the concerted action of the poor and dispossessed continually putting pressure on the powers that be for the legislature and courts to do what’s right.

After all, history shows that social transformation happens when those most impacted by injustice band together with people from all walks of life and build the political will to push through change. Perhaps this is what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said, “Public sentiment is everything.  With it, you can accomplish almost everything. Without it, practically nothing.” It’s what the Reverend Martin Luther King emphasized in 1968 shortly before his death. “Power for poor people,” he said, “will really mean having the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness and the aggressiveness to make the power structure of this nation say yes when they may be desirous to say no.”

How Congress must act I started working with the National Union of the Homeless and other organizations led by the poor in the early 1990s. It was about the time that spell check became commonplace on personal computers. I remember then writing papers and articles on homelessness, which was growing rapidly at the time. But as the word wasn’t yet in the spell-check dictionary, my computer tried endlessly to correct me. One reason for that: economic homelessness — people being downsized from their jobs or paid too little to pay their rent — was then a relatively new phenomenon in this country. In the last three decades, however, it’s grown so commonplace that most of us consider it both age-old and inevitable.

So, it’s worth saying what should be but isn’t obvious: that poverty, eviction, and homelessness are not eternal, that life truly does not have to be this way. Although in the recent eviction-moratorium debacle the Supreme Court, Congress, and the White House have all tried to shift the blame elsewhere, solutions do exist to address deep-seated, as well as emergency-induced, poverty and deprivation. After all, the very existence of a moratorium on evictions proves that ending them is possible.

The Supreme Court rationalized its decision by claiming that the CDC had overstepped its authority and that it was up to Congress to resolve the eviction crisis through legislative action. In its majority opinion, the judges highlighted the “irreparable harm” suffered not by the poor but by the association of realtors that brought the case. They wrote, “As harm to the [realtor’s association] has increased, the Government’s interests [in maintaining the moratorium] have decreased.”

Of course, the genuine irreparable harm suffered in this moment by millions of families facing eviction in a country that has more abandoned houses than homeless people should be obvious. At the same time, a court that increasingly denies people the right to vote and women the right to health care and control over their own bodies should be the definition of “harm.” A government more interested in placating the real estate industry than ensuring that its people are housed should be challenged.

In fact, at this very moment, grassroots groups have come forward with solutions to just such harm. We would do well to attend to them. They include:

• Making evictions from any dwelling, including cars, tents, and encampments, illegal.

• Canceling the housing and rental debt that has been accumulated during the moratorium period.

• Ending predatory speculation that raises rents and makes housing unaffordable in every state in the country.

• Ensuring living wages and a guaranteed income so every American can afford a decent place to live.

• Protecting and expanding voting rights including for the poor, homeless, disabled, and elderly so people have the right to vote officials into office who will represent the interests of the unhoused, the temporarily housed, and those facing evictions.

• Ending the Senate filibuster that’s preventing the passage of bold and visionary policies, including the expansion of health care, the raising of wages, the introduction of new anti-poverty programs, and so much more.

Those facing eviction, those underpaid and excluded, and many of the 140 million people who are poor and low-income can’t wait for those in power to act (if they ever do). Grassroots efforts like the National Union of the Homeless, Housing Justice for All, Cancel the Rents, Homes Guarantee, and other networks promoting rent strikes and eviction resistance will continue to organize to ensure that all Americans have a place to live, thrive, and build the sort of society we know is possible.

In early September, the National Union of the Homeless put out a statement for Labor Day in which they wrote:

“Our Union members include autoworkers who spent decades on the assembly lines only to end up in the soup line, who built cars only to end up sleeping in them. Our members include former construction workers and farmworkers who provided real homes and grew food for the world but now can’t afford to buy or pay rent in the houses they built or buy the food they harvested…

“We challenge the false narrative, the mythology that we are an ‘underclass,’ a dredge on society, helpless, deserving only pity or scorn, to be corralled into mass congregant shelters (read: homeless internment camps), and pushed into the ‘Homeless Management Information System’ just to get a few crumbs at the cost of our dignity and our political rights… We reject the false narrative that our plight is the result of our ‘bad choices’ when it’s really about a system that builds for the rich at the expense of the poor, where everyone who works for a living is only one paycheck, one family medical crisis, one eviction away from becoming homeless… Together we can survive today to build a new, fair, and equitable world tomorrow.”

May it be so.

Liz Theoharis writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor and the soon-to-be-published We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign. Follow her on Twitter at @liztheo.

Copyright ©2021 Liz Theoharis — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 September 2021

Word Count: 2,685

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Disagreements over how to assess the American exodus from Afghanistan have kept the pundits busy these last weeks, even though there wasn’t much to say that hadn’t been said before. For some of them, however, that was irrelevant. Having overseen or promoted the failed Afghan War themselves, all the while brandishing various “metrics” of success, they were engaged in transparent reputation-salvaging.

Not surprisingly, the entire spectacle has been tiresome and unproductive. Better to devote time and energy to distilling the Afghan war’s larger lessons.

Here are four worth considering.

Lesson One When you make policy, give serious thought to possible unintended consequences.

The architects of American policy toward Afghanistan since the late 1970s bear responsibility for the disasters that occurred there because they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, look beyond their noses. As a result, their policies backfired with drastic consequences. Some historical scene-setting is required to understand just why and how.

Let’s start in another country and another time. Consider the December 1979 decision of the leadership of the Soviet Union to send in the Red Army to save the ruling Marxist and pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Having seized control of that country the previous year, the PDPA was soon pleading for help. By centralizing its power in the Afghan capital, Kabul (never a good way to govern that land), and seeking to modernize society at breakneck speed — through, among other things, promoting the education and advancement of women — it had provoked an Islamic insurgency that spread rapidly. Once Soviet troops joined the fray, the United States, assisted by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and even China, would start funding, arming, and training the mujahedeen, a collection of Islamist groups committed to waging jihad there.

The decision to arm them set the stage for much of what happened in Afghanistan ever since, especially because Washington gave Pakistan carte blanche to decide which of the jihadist groups would be armed, leaving that country’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Agency to call the shots. The ISI favored the most radical mujahedeen groups, calculating that an Islamist-ruled Afghanistan would provide Pakistan with “strategic depth” by ending India’s influence there.

India did indeed have close ties with the PDPA, as well as the previous government of Mohammed Daoud, who had overthrown King Zahir Shah, his cousin, in 1973. Pakistan’s Islamist parties, especially the Jama’at-i-Islami, which had been proselytizing among the millions of Afghan refugees then in Pakistan, along with the most fundamentalist of the exiled Afghan Islamist groups, also helped recruit fighters for the war against the Soviet troops.

From 1980 until 1989, when the defeated Red Army finally departed from Afghanistan, Washington’s foreign policy crew focused in a single-minded fashion on expelling them by arming those anti-Soviet insurgents. One rationale for this was a ludicrous theory that the Soviet move into Afghanistan was an initial step toward Moscow’s ultimate goal: conquering the oil-rich Persian Gulf.  The spinners of this apocalyptic fantasy, notably President Jimmy Carter’s hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, seemed not to have even bothered to peruse a map of the terrain between Afghanistan and the Gulf. It would have shown that among the obstacles awaiting Russian forces headed there was the 900-mile-long, 14,000-foot-high Zagros mountain range.

Enmeshed in a Cold War-driven frenzy and eager to stick it to the Soviets, Brzezinski and others of like mind gave no thought to a critical question: What would happen if the Soviets were finally expelled and the mujahedeen gained control of Afghanistan? That lapse in judgment and lack of foresight was just the beginning of what proved to be a chain of mistakes.

Though the PDPA government outlasted the Red Army’s retreat, the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 proved a death sentence for its Afghan allies. Instead of forming a unity government, however, the mujahedeen promptly turned on one another. There ensued a vicious civil war, pitting Pashtun mujahedeen groups against their Tajik and Uzbek counterparts, with Kabul as the prize. The fighting destroyed large parts of that city’s western and southern neighborhoods, killing as many as 25,000 civilians, and forcing 500,000 of them, nearly a third of the population, to flee. So wearied were Afghans by the chaos and bloodletting that many were relieved when the Taliban, themselves former participants in the anti-Soviet jihad, emerged in 1994, established themselves in Kabul in 1996, and pledged to reestablish order. 

Some of the Taliban and Taliban-allied leaders who would later make the United States’ most-wanted list had, in fact, been bankrolled by the CIA to fight the Red Army, including Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the now-infamous Haqqani Network, and the notoriously cruel Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e-Islami, arguably the most extreme of the mujahedeen groups, who is now negotiating with the Taliban, perhaps angling for a spot in its new government.

Osama Bin Laden’s links with Afghanistan can also be traced to the anti-Soviet war. He achieved his fame thanks to his role in that American-backed jihad and, along with other Arabs involved in it, founded al-Qaeda in 1988. Later, he decamped to Sudan, but after American officials demanded his expulsion, moved, in 1996, back to Afghanistan, a natural haven given his renown there.

Though the Taliban, unlike al-Qaeda, never had a transnational Islamist agenda, they couldn’t deny him succor — and not just because of his cachet. A main tenet of Pashtunwali, the Pashtun social code they lived by, was the duty to provide refuge (nanawati) to those seeking it. Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader, became increasingly perturbed by Bin Laden’s incendiary messages proclaiming it “an individual duty for every Muslim” to kill Americans, including civilians, and personally implored him to stop, but to no avail. The Taliban were stuck with him.

Now, fast forward a couple of decades. American leaders certainly didn’t create the Islamic State-Khorasan Province — aka IS-K, an affiliate of the main Islamic State — whose suicide bombers killed 170 people at Kabul airport on August 26th, 13 of them American troops. Yet IS-K and its parent body emerged partly from the ideological evolution of various extremists, including many Taliban commanders, who had fought the Soviets. Later, inspired, especially after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, to continue the jihad, they yearned for something bolder and more ambitious than the Taliban’s version, which was confined to Afghanistan.

It should hardly have required clairvoyance in the 1980s to grasp that funding an anti-Soviet Islamist insurgency might have dangerous long-term consequences. After all, the mujahedeen were hardly secretive about the sort of political system and society they envisaged for their country.

Lesson Two Beware the overwhelming pride produced by the possession of unrivaled global power.

The idea that the U.S. could topple the Taliban and create a new state and society in Afghanistan was outlandish considering that country’s history. But after the Soviet Union started to wobble and eventually collapsed and the Cold War was won, Washington was giddy with optimism. Recall the paeans in those years to “the unipolar moment” and “the end of history.” We were Number One, which meant that the possibilities, including remaking entire countries, were limitless.

The response to the 9/11 attacks then wasn’t simply a matter of shock and fear. Only one person in Washington urged reflection and humility in that moment. On September 14, 2001, as Congress prepared to authorize a war against al-Qaeda and its allies (the Taliban), Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) gave a prescient speech. “I know,” she said, “this resolution will pass, although we all know that the president can wage a war even without it. However… let’s step back for a moment… and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.”

In the heat of that moment, in a country that had become a military power beyond compare, no one cared to consider alternative responses to the al-Qaeda attacks. Lee’s would be the lone no vote against that Authorization to Use Military Force. Afterward, she would receive hate mail, even death threats.

So confident was Washington that it rejected the Taliban’s offer to discuss surrendering Bin Laden to a third country if the U.S. stopped the bombing and provided proof of his responsibility for 9/11. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld also refused to consider the Taliban’s leadership attempts to negotiate a surrender and amnesty. The Bush administration treated the Taliban and al-Qaeda as identical and excluded the former from the December 2001 Bonn talks it had convened to form a new Afghan government. As it happened, the Taliban, never having received the memo from various eminences who pronounced it dead, soon regrouped and revved up its insurgency.

The United States then faced two choices, neither of them good. Its top officials could have decided that the government they had created in Kabul wouldn’t survive and simply withdrawn their forces. Or they could have stuck with nation-building and periodically “surged” troops into the country in hopes that a viable government and army would eventually emerge. They chose the latter.  No president or senior military commander wanted to be blamed for “losing” Afghanistan or the “war on terror,” so the baton was passed from one commander to the next and one administration to another, each claiming to have made significant progress. The result: a 20-year, $2.3-trillion fiasco that ended chaotically at Kabul airport.

Lesson Three Don’t assume that opponents whose values don’t fit yours won’t be supported locally.

Reporting on the Taliban’s retrograde beliefs and pitiless practices helped foster the belief that such a group, itself supposedly a Pakistani creation, could be routed because Afghans reviled it. Moreover, the bulk of the dealings American officials and senior military leaders had were with educated, urbane Afghan men and women, and that strengthened their view that the Taliban lacked legitimacy while the U.S.-backed government had growing public confidence.

Had the Taliban truly been a foreign transplant, however, they could never have kept fighting, dying, and recruiting new members for nearly two decades in opposition to a government and army backed by the world’s sole superpower. The Taliban certainly inspired fear and committed numerous acts of brutality and horror, but poor rural Pashtuns, their social base, didn’t view them as outsiders with strange beliefs and customs, but as part of the local social fabric. 

Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s first supreme leader, was born in Kandahar Province and raised in Uruzgun Province. His father, Moulavi Ghulam Nabi, had been respected locally for his learning. Omar became the leader of the Hotaki tribe, part of one of the two main Pashtun tribal confederacies, the Ghilzai, which was a Taliban mainstay.  He joined the war against the Soviet occupation in 1979, returning to Kandahar once it ended, where he ran a madrassa, or religious school. After the Taliban took power in 1996, though its leader, he remained in Kandahar, seldom visiting the capital.

The Kabul government and its American patrons may have inadvertently helped the Taliban’s cause. The more that ordinary Afghans experienced the raging corruption of the American-created system and the viciousness of the paramilitary forces, militias, and warlords the U.S. military relied on, the more successful the insurgents were at portraying themselves as the country’s true nationalists resisting foreign occupiers and their collaborators. Not for nothing did the Taliban liken Afghanistan’s U.S.-supported presidents to Shah Shuja, an exiled Afghan monarch the invading British placed on the throne, triggering an armed uprising that lasted from 1839 to 1842 and ended with British troops suffering a catastrophic defeat.

But who needed history? Certainly not the greatest power ever.

Lesson Four Beware the generals, contractors, consultants, and advisers who eternally issue cheery reports from war zones.

The managers of wars and economic projects acquire a vested interest in touting their “successes” (even when they know quite well that they’re actually failures). Generals worry about their professional reputations, nation-builders about losing lucrative government contracts.

Senior American commanders repeatedly assured the president and Congress that the Afghan army was becoming a thoroughly professional fighting force, even when they knew better. (If you doubt this, just read the scathing analysis of retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who did two tours of duty in Afghanistan.)

Reporter Craig Whitlock’s Afghanistan Papers — based on a trove of once-private documents as well as extensive interviews with numerous American officials — contains endless example of such happy talk. After serving 19 months leading U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen declared that the Afghan army could hold its own, adding that “this is what winning looks like.” General John Campbell, who held the same position during the last quarter of 2015, praised those troops as a “capable” and “modern, professional force.” American generals constantly talked about corners being turned.

Torrents of data were cited to tout the social and economic progress produced by American aid. It mattered not at all that reports by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction questioned the readiness and capabilities of the Afghan army, while uncovering information about schools and hospitals funded but never built, or built but never used, or “unsafe,” “literally crumbling,” or saddled with unsustainable operating costs. Staggering sums of American aid were also lost to systemic corruption. U.S.-funded fuel supplies were typically stolen on a “massive scale” and sold on the black market. 

Afghan commanders padded payrolls with thousands of “ghost soldiers,” pocketing the cash as they often did the salaries of unpaid actual soldiers. The economic aid that American commander General David Petraeus wanted ramped up because he considered it essential to victory fueled bribe-taking by officials managing basic services. That, in turn, only added to the mistrust of the U.S.-backed government by ordinary citizens.

Have policymakers learned any lessons from the Afghan War? President Biden did declare an end to this country’s “forever wars” and its nation-building (though not to its anti-terror strategy driven by drone attacks and commando raids). Real change, however, won’t happen until the vast national security establishment and military-industrial complex nourished by the post-9/11 commitment to the war on terror, regime change, and nation building reaches a similar conclusion. And only a wild optimist could believe that likely.

Here, then, is the simplest lesson of all: no matter how powerful your country may be, your wishes are not necessarily the world’s desires and you probably understand a lot less than you think.

Rajan Menon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated. He is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

Copyright ©2021 Rajan Menon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 September 2021

Word Count: 2,382

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The collapse of the American project in Afghanistan may fade fast from the news here, but don’t be fooled. It couldn’t be more significant in ways few in this country can even begin to grasp.

“Remember, this is not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a television audience on August 15th, the day the Taliban swept into the Afghan capital, pausing to pose for photos in the grandly gilded presidential palace. He was dutifully echoing his boss, President Joe Biden, who had earlier rejected any comparison with the fall of the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, in 1975, insisting that “there’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

Both were right, but not in the ways they intended. Indeed, the collapse of Kabul was not comparable. It was worse, incomparably so. And its implications for the future of U.S. global power are far more serious than the loss of Saigon.

On the surface, similarities abound. In both South Vietnam and Afghanistan, Washington spent 20 years and countless billions of dollars building up massive, conventional armies, convinced that they could hold off the enemy for a decent interval after the U.S. departure. But presidents Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam and Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan both proved to be incompetent leaders who never had a chance of retaining power without continued fulsome American backing.

Amid a massive North Vietnamese offensive in the spring of 1975, President Thieu panicked and ordered his army to abandon the northern half of the country, a disastrous decision that precipitated Saigon’s fall just six weeks later. As the Taliban swept across the countryside this summer, President Ghani retreated into a fog of denial, insisting his troops defend every remote, rural district, allowing the Taliban to springboard from seizing provincial capitals to capturing Kabul in just 10 days.

With the enemy at the gates, President Thieu filled his suitcases with clinking gold bars for his flight into exile, while President Ghani (according to Russian reports) snuck off to the airport in a cavalcade of cars loaded with cash. As enemy forces entered Saigon and Kabul, helicopters ferried American officials from the U.S. embassy to safety, even as surrounding city streets swarmed with panicked local citizens desperate to board departing flights.

Critical differences So much for similarities. As it happens, the differences were deep and portentous. By every measure, the U.S. capacity for building and supporting allied armies has declined markedly in the 45 years between Saigon and Kabul. After President Thieu ordered that disastrous northern retreat, replete with dismal scenes of soldiers clubbing civilians to board evacuation flights bound for Saigon, South Vietnam’s generals ignored their incompetent commander-in-chief and actually began to fight.

On the road to Saigon at Xuan Loc, an ordinary South Vietnamese unit, the 18th Division, fought battle-hardened North Vietnamese regulars backed by tanks, trucks, and artillery to a standstill for two full weeks. Not only did those South Vietnamese soldiers take heavy casualties, with more than a third of their men killed or wounded, but they held their positions through those long days of “meat-grinder” combat until the enemy had to circle around them to reach the capital.

In those desperate hours as Saigon was falling, General Nguyen Khoa Nam, head of the only intact South Vietnamese command, faced an impossible choice between making a last stand in the Mekong Delta and capitulating to communist emissaries who promised him a peaceful surrender. “If I am unable to carry out my job of protecting the nation,” the general told a subordinate, “then I must die, along with my nation.” That night, seated at his desk, the general shot himself in the head. In South Vietnam’s last hours as a state, four of his fellow generals also committed suicide. At least 40 more lower-ranking officers and soldiers also chose death over dishonor.

On the road to Kabul, by contrast, there were no heroic last stands by regular Afghan army units, no protracted combat, no heavy casualties, and certainly no command suicides. In the nine days between the fall of Afghanistan’s first provincial capital on August 6th and the capture of Kabul on August 15th, all of the well-equipped, well-trained Afghan soldiers simply faded away before Taliban guerrillas equipped mainly with rifles and tennis sneakers.

After losing their salaries and rations to graft for the previous six to nine months, those hungry Afghan troops simply surrendered en masse, took Taliban cash payments, and handed over their weapons and other costly U.S. equipment. By the time the guerrillas reached Kabul, driving Humvees and wearing Kevlar helmets, night-vision goggles, and body armor, they looked like so many NATO soldiers. Instead of taking a bullet, Afghanistan’s commanders took the cash — both graft from padding their payrolls with “ghost soldiers” and bribes from the Taliban.

The difference between Saigon and Kabul has little to do with the fighting ability of the Afghan soldier. As the British and Soviet empires learned to their dismay when guerrillas slaughtered their soldiers in spectacular numbers, ordinary Afghan farmers are arguably the world’s finest fighters. So why wouldn’t they fight for Ashraf Ghani and his secular democratic state in far-off Kabul?

The key difference would seem to lie in the fading of America’s aura as the planet’s number one power and of its state-building capacities. At the peak of its global hegemony back in the 1960s, the United States, with its unequalled material resources and moral authority, could make a reasonably convincing case to the South Vietnamese that the political mix of electoral democracy and capitalist development it sponsored was the way forward for any nation. Today, with its reduced global clout and tarnished record in Iraq, Libya, and Syria (as well as in prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo), America’s capacity to infuse its nation-building projects with any real legitimacy — that elusive sine qua non for the survival of any state — has apparently dropped significantly.

The impact on U.S. global power In 1975, the fall of Saigon did indeed prove a setback to Washington’s world order. Still, America’s underlying strength, both economic and military, was robust enough then for a partial rebound.

Adding to the sense of crisis at the time, the loss of South Vietnam coincided with two more substantial blows to Washington’s international system and the clout that went with it. Just a few years before Saigon’s collapse, the German and Japanese export booms had so eroded America’s commanding global economic position that the Nixon administration had to end the automatic convertibility of the dollar to gold. That, in turn, effectively broke the Bretton Woods system that had been the foundation of U.S. economic strength since 1944.

Meanwhile, with Washington mired in its self-made Vietnam quagmire, that other Cold War power, the Soviet Union, continued to build hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles and so functionally forced Washington to recognize its military parity in 1972 by signing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Strategic Arms Limitation Protocol.

With the weakening of the economic and nuclear pillars on which so much of America’s paramount power rested, Washington was forced to retreat from its role as the great global hegemon and become a mere first among equals.

Washington’s relations with Europe Almost half a century later, the sudden, humiliating fall of Kabul threatens even that more limited leadership role. Although the U.S. occupied Afghanistan for 20 years with the full support of its NATO allies, when President Biden walked away from that shared “nation-building” mission, he did so without the slightest consultation with those very allies.

America lost 2,461 soldiers in Afghanistan, including 13 who died tragically during the airport evacuation. Its allies suffered 1,145 killed, including 62 German soldiers and 457 British troops. No wonder those partners held understandable grievances when Biden acted without the slightest notice to or discussion with them. “There is serious loss of trust,” observed Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to Washington. “But the real lesson… for Europe is this: Do we really want to be totally dependent on U.S. capabilities and decisions forever, or can Europe finally begin to be serious about becoming a credible strategic actor?”

For Europe’s more visionary leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron, the answer to that timely question was obvious: build a European defense force free from Washington’s whims and so avoid “the Chinese-American duopoly, the dislocation, the return of hostile regional powers.” In fact, right after the last American planes left Kabul, a summit of European Union officials made it clear that the time had come to stop “depending on American decisions.” They called for the creation of a European army that would give them “greater decision-making autonomy and greater capacity for action in the world.”

In short, with America First populism now a major force in this country’s politics, assume that Europe will pursue a foreign policy increasingly freed from Washington’s influence.

Central Asia’s geopolitics And Europe may be the least of it. The stunning capture of Kabul highlighted an American loss of leadership that extended into Asia and Africa, with profound geopolitical implications for the future of U.S. global power. Above all, the Taliban’s victory will effectively force Washington out of Central Asia and so help to consolidate Beijing’s already ongoing control over parts of that strategic region. It, in turn, could prove to be the potential geopolitical pivot for China’s dominance over the vast Eurasian land mass, home to 70% of the globe’s population and productivity.

Speaking at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan in 2013 (though nobody in Washington was then listening), China’s President Xi Jinping announced his country’s strategy for winning the twenty-first-century version of the deadly “great game” that nineteenth-century empires once played for control of Central Asia. With gentle gestures that belied his imperious intent, Xi asked that academic audience to join him in building an “economic belt along the Silk Road” that would “expand development space in the Eurasian region” through infrastructure “connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea.” In the process of establishing that “belt and road” structure, they would, he claimed, be building “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”

In the eight years since that speech, China has indeed been spending over a trillion dollars on its “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) to construct a transcontinental grid of railroads, oil pipelines, and industrial infrastructure in a bid to become the world’s premier economic power. More specifically, Beijing has used the BRI as a geopolitical pincers movement, a diplomatic squeeze play. By laying down infrastructure around the northern, eastern, and western borders of Afghanistan, it has prepared the way for that war-torn nation, freed of American influence and full of untapped mineral resources (estimated at a trillion dollars), to fall safely into Beijing’s grasp without a shot being fired.

To the north of Afghanistan, the China National Petroleum Corporation has collaborated with Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to launch the Central Asia–China gas pipeline, a system that will eventually extend more than 4,000 miles across the heart of Eurasia. Along Afghanistan’s eastern frontier, Beijing began spending $200 million in 2011 to transform a sleepy fishing village at Gwadar, Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea, into a modern commercial port only 370 miles from the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Four years later, President Xi committed $46 billion to building a China–Pakistan Economic Corridor of roads, rails, and pipelines stretching nearly 2,000 miles along Afghanistan’s eastern borderlands from China’s western provinces to the now-modernized port of Gwadar.

To the west of Afghanistan, Beijing broke through Iran’s diplomatic isolation last March by signing a $400 billion development agreement with Tehran. Over the next 25 years, China’s legions of laborers and engineers will lay down a transit corridor of oil and natural gas pipelines to China, while also building a vast new rail network that will make Tehran the hub of a line stretching from Istanbul, Turkey, to Islamabad, Pakistan.

By the time these geopolitical pincers pull Afghanistan firmly into Beijing’s BRI system, the country may have become just another Middle Eastern theocracy like Iran or Saudi Arabia. While the religious police harass women and troops battle festering insurgencies, the Taliban state can get down to its real business — not defending Islam, but cutting deals with China to mine its vast reserves of rare minerals and collect transit taxes on the new $10 billion TAPI gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan (which desperately needs affordable energy).

With lucrative royalties from its vast store of rare-earth minerals, the Taliban could afford to end its current fiscal dependence on drugs. They could actually ban the country’s now booming opium harvest, a promise their new government spokesman has already made in a bid for international recognition. Over time, the Taliban leadership might discover, like the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Iran, that a developing economy can’t afford to waste its women. As a result, there might even be some slow, fitful progress on that front, too.

If such a projection of China’s future economic role in Afghanistan seems fanciful to you, consider that the underpinnings for just such a future deal were being put in place while Washington was still dithering over Kabul’s fate. At a formal meeting with a Taliban delegation in July, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi hailed their movement as “an important military and political force.”

In response, Taliban head Mullah Abdul Baradar, displaying the very leadership that American-installed President Ashraf Ghani so clearly lacked, praised China as a “reliable friend” and promised to foster “an enabling investment environment” so that Beijing could play “a bigger role in future reconstruction and economic development.” Formalities finished, the Afghan delegation then met behind closed doors with China’s assistant foreign minister to exchange what the official communiqué called “in-depth views on issues of common concern, which helped enhance mutual understanding” — in short, who gets what and for how much.

The world-island strategy China’s capture of Eurasia, should it be successful, will be but one part of a far grander design for control over what Victorian geographer Halford Mackinder, an early master of modern geopolitics, called the “world island.” He meant the tricontinental land mass comprising the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. For the past 500 years, one imperial hegemon after another, including Portugal, Holland, Britain, and the United States, has deployed its strategic forces around that world island in a bid to dominate such a sprawling land mass.

While for the last half-century Washington has arrayed its vast air and naval armadas around Eurasia, it generally relegated Africa to, at best, an afterthought — at worst, a battleground. Beijing, by contrast, has consistently treated that continent with the utmost seriousness.

When the Cold War came to southern Africa in the early 1970s, Washington spent the next 20 years in an arm’s-length alliance with apartheid South Africa, while using the CIA to fight a leftist liberation movement in Portuguese-controlled Angola. While Washington spent billions wreaking havoc by supplying right-wing African warlords with automatic weapons and land mines, Beijing launched its first major foreign-aid project. It built the thousand-mile Tanzania-to-Zambia railway. Not only was it the longest in Africa when completed in 1975, but it allowed landlocked Zambia, a front-line state in the struggle against the apartheid regime in Pretoria, to avoid South Africa when exporting its copper.

From 2015 on, building upon its historic ties to the liberation movements that won power across southern Africa, Beijing planned a decade-long trillion-dollar infusion of capital there. Much of it was to be designated for commodities-extraction projects that would make that continent China’s second-largest source of crude oil. With such an investment (equaling its later BRI commitments to Eurasia), China also doubled its annual trade with Africa to $222 billion, three times America’s total.

While that aid to liberation movements once had an ideological undercurrent, today it’s been succeeded by savvy geopolitics. Beijing seems to understand just how fast Africa’s progress has been in the single generation since that continent won its freedom from a particularly rapacious version of colonial rule. Given that it’s the planet’s second most populous continent, rich in human and material resources, China’s trillion-dollar bet on Africa’s future will likely pay rich dividends, both political and economic, someday soon.

With a trillion dollars invested in Eurasia and another trillion in Africa, China is engaged in nothing less than history’s largest infrastructure project. It’s crisscrossing those three continents with rails and pipelines, building naval bases around the southern rim of Asia, and ringing the whole tricontinental world island with a string of 40 major commercial ports.

Such a geopolitical strategy has become Beijing’s battering ram to crack open Washington’s control over Eurasia and thereby challenge what’s left of its global hegemony. America’s unequalled military air and sea armadas still allow it rapid movement above and around those continents, as the mass evacuation from Kabul showed so forcefully. But the slow, inch-by-inch advance of China’s land-based, steel-ribbed infrastructure across the deserts, plains, and mountains of that world island represents a far more fundamental form of future control.

As China’s geopolitical squeeze play on Afghanistan shows all too vividly, there is still much wisdom in the words that Sir Halford Mackinder wrote over a century ago: “Who rules the World Island commands the World.”

To that, after watching a Washington that’s invested so much in its military be humiliated in Afghanistan, we might add: Who does not command the World Island cannot command the World.

Alfred W. McCoy writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author most recently of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books). His latest book (to be published in October by Dispatch Books) is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.

Copyright ©2021 Alfred W. McCoy — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 September 2021

Word Count: 2,914

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The 9/11 attacks and subsequent U.S.-led “Global War on Terror” have massively degraded life conditions for most people across the Arab region, in almost every dimension of life, society, and governance.

The attacks and GWOT did not emerge from a vacuum, however, or mark a new stage in regional or world history. The destructive cycle of human suffering and state fragility they spurred should be seen more accurately as peak moments in a much longer historical trajectory — one defined by rickety Arab states and increasingly suffering citizens, within a world of endless militaristic imperialism and colonialism.

These last 20 years accelerated and aggravated negative trends that had already defined most Arab societies, sparked a few new ones that plague it today, and promise continued pain for years or decades to come. We better understand this if we recognize that 20 years ago the Arab region was already plagued by a historic cycle of six destructive trends that the post-9/11 era has rapidly and significantly worsened.

Citizen pauperization amidst obscene wealth accumulation by small regime-linked minorities. U.N. and other credible analyses indicate that around 75 percent of people in Arab countries are poor or vulnerable, which has increased and deepened due to COVID-19. Inequality among Arab citizens is the highest in the entire world — the middle class has shrunk in recent years from 44 to 33 percent. Poverty has widened and deepened; it is also now chronic and trans-generational, as poor youth today are guaranteed a life of poverty and deprivation like their parents, given the inability of economies or governments to help them enter the middle class, as they did in previous eras of sustained development.

Declining quality or availability of state social services has been a main reason why passive citizens often turned into angry opposition activists since the 1980s, when basic education, health care, staple foods, housing, transportation, fresh water, heating oil, and other critical family needs either became more expensive, harder to access, or of lower quality. Recent regional surveys show that about 80 percent of families cannot meet their weekly essential needs, largely because the expansion of corruption across the region. Ordinary citizens recognize corruption as a main cause of the lack of social justice and governance systems, erratic social services, and a lack of opportunities for quality education and employment.

The politically helpless Arab citizenry is unable either to choose or hold accountable its national leaders. Most leaders are military elites who seized power in a coup, or single families that rule based on hereditary identities or being chosen by former colonial powers, who help keep them in power. The feeling of total powerlessness by most Arabs who suffer daily indignities was (in 2001) and remains even more so today a big reason why many otherwise ordinary middle class young men turn to extremist movements, militias, and resistance and terror groups like al-Qaida or ISIS. They do so largely to escape their helpless victimhood and, in their desperate worldview, seek a better world for themselves and their families.

The ongoing expansion of politically neutered citizens who are economically vulnerable and marginalized leads to alienation from structures of society, the state, and government. This phenomenon first gained steam in the 1970s, when the Muslim Brotherhood and other (mostly nonviolent) Islamists attracted huge popular followings during the oil-fueled spree that also included high inflation, wider corruption, and more foreign penetration of Arab economies and privatized basic services.

The continuing alienation has led to deep fractures in citizen-state relations and the birth of major non-state armed actors (Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, Popular Mobilization Forces) that often share sovereignty with the state. Al-Qaida and ISIS are merely the latest and most violent manifestations of Arab and other citizens turning away from their states to assert new identities that also assume new agency that replaces their former helplessness.

The three largest identity movements across the Arab region throughout the past century — Arabism, tribalism, and Islamism — have all challenged the modern states that came into being mostly after World War I. This hints that the core weakness in the modern Arab state is itself, which was never fully anchored to the identities, needs, or allegiances of its citizens. Those structural weaknesses in many Arab states have increased since 9/11.

Foreign military interventions at will in the region, mostly by non-Arab powers, have plagued Middle Eastern societies for the past two centuries or more — since Napoleon’s attacks in 1798. Such militarism has increased sharply since 2001 and has either initiated or hastened the slow collapse of Arab states like Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan.

While the colonial-era U.K. and France were once the main foreign military invaders in the region, in the past 40 years, and especially since 2001, the United States has led the large-scale military penetration of Arab and South Asian lands, which has since opened the flood gates. Now it is common to see troops or hired mercenary proxies from Russia, Turkey, Sudan, Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel active in many Arab countries. This perpetuates wars that continue to weaken national economies, increase poverty and emigration rates, destroy basic service facilities, weaken central governments, and hasten tendencies for secession or autonomy. The Iraqi Kurds, South Sudanese, and South Yemenis are the most distinct breakaway regions from existing Arab states, and others could follow.

Israel’s non-stop illegal colonization and annexation of Arab lands persists without protest by global powers that simultaneously wage war across the region in part, they say, to promote the rule of law. The core Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been among the most destabilizing and radicalizing forces in the Arab region since the 1940s, and its destructive wars and military spending among the biggest waste of Arab resources that should have gone into genuine national development. It also sparked the advent of Arab military coups and rulers, which have been a central source of Arab state mediocrity and economic mismanagement and corruption ever since. Israeli colonization and annexation of Arab lands have continued since 9/11, adding to the many reasons why many ordinary Arab citizens resent their governments’ weaknesses or explicit acquiescence in Israeli acts.

These six dynamics existed before 9/11, but they have all worsened rapidly and spread across Arab lands since the “war on terror.” The GWOT and its parallel world of militarism and corrupt local governments has directly led to some of the most dangerous new developments, like the birth and expansion of ISIS, the rebirth and triumph of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and al-Qaida’s survival and diversification across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

Perhaps GWOT’s most dangerous consequence, in view of the six major structural troubles within Arab societies, has been the U.S. reinforcement of authoritarian Arab and Asian regimes that have significantly weakened already thin human rights and freedom of speech conditions in many countries. As the U.S.-led wars resulted in the expansion of the number, reach, and activities of terror groups, local governments used U.S. and other foreign support to fight this threat by cracking down on political and media freedoms; this only exacerbated citizen anger against their state, and drove some men and women into joining ISIS, al-Qaida, or other such violent groups. The latest examples of states moving towards more top-heavy autocracies are Lebanon, Palestine, and Tunisia — which had shown glimmers of pluralism and personal and political freedoms in recent decades.

So, most Arabs link the U.S.-led “war on terror,” and Western political, economic, and military support, to their incompetent, autocratic, and corrupt governments. This has led, al-Qaida, for example, to diversify, diffuse its membership, and expand to new lands. It also incubated in Iraq and Syria the birth of new groups around the Middle East and Asia, like ISIS and its several branches, which emerged directly from ex-al-Qaida cadres that organized in American jails in Iraq.

Thus, the American-led drive to beat back terror threats in 2001 devastated once growing economies and sparked a massive wave of pauperization across the region — which in turn has fueled the growth of the very terror groups the United States initially aimed to contain. The containment effort succeeded in reducing attacks against the U.S. mainland, but massively increased the destruction in societies and the suffering of several hundred million people in the Arab-Asian region.

The last 20 years only confirm the combination of three or four main reasons that usually prompt an otherwise nonviolent middle class citizens to join a violent group like al-Qaida: socio-economic desperation, powerlessness to improve their condition through political action due to their government’s authoritarian rule, the presence of foreign militaries in lands they consider holy to them, and the destruction of life and property by the combined forces of their governments and the foreign militaries. We have witnessed this repeatedly in Islamist-led militant movements against the Soviets and U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, and by Islamist groups’ attacks that drove the Israeli occupation troops from Southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

After the so-called Islamic State came into being in 2014-15, credible public opinion surveys showed that in some countries, seven to eight percent of the population saw these movements positively. People were not going to join these movements, but they thought they were doing something that was righteous and justified in fighting corruption and foreign occupation.

The Arab region’s 11-year-old ongoing uprisings to remove their inept and corrupt government systems are perhaps the strongest testament to how people who have been degraded and humiliated by their own governments will fight back and use any means possible to achieve a normal life. Arabs across the region have tried to do this for decades, without success, due to the military force and foreign support of their governments.

We can trace this cycle back for several decades before the 9/11 attacks, when the levels of poverty, corruption, school dropouts, informal labor, ineptitude in delivering basic services like electricity and water to people all over the region were still manageable. Now they are completely out of control, given high rates of poverty, informal labor, school dropouts, poor access to clean water, poor social insurance coverage, and other basic life needs. Much of this deterioration happened in the last 20 years. The link between the “war on terror,” deteriorating life and security conditions in Arab lands, and the ongoing mass citizen rebellions is now clear. The American-led fight against terror by military force and supporting authoritarian governments in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa has ravaged the quality of governance and the lives of ordinary people. That is the fundamental equation that needs to be addressed.

Rami G. Khouri is the director of global engagement at the American University of Beirut, a nonresident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative, and an internationally syndicated columnist. Follow him on Twitter: @ramikhouri

This article originated at Responsible Statecraft

Copyright ©2021 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 September 2021

Word Count: 1,767

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GREENVILLE, CA — At 10 a.m. on July 22nd, I interviewed a New York University professor about using autonomous robots, drones, and other unmanned devices to suppress structural and wildland fires. I sent the interview to an online transcription service, walked down the steps of my second-floor office and a block to the Greenville post office, where I mailed a check to California Fair Plan for homeowners’ fire insurance. I then drove 25 miles to a dental appointment. I was lucky to make it home before burning debris closed the roads.

That night I became a climate refugee, evacuated from my house thanks to the Dixie Fire. Since then, it’s scorched a landscape nearly the size of Delaware, destroyed 678 houses and decimated several communities in Indian Valley, where I’ve been for 46 years. One of them was Greenville, California, a town founded in the Gold Rush era of the nineteenth century, where I happen to live. I never imagined myself among the 55 million people worldwide whose lives have already been upended by climate change. Maybe no one does until it happens, even though we’re obviously the future for significant parts of humanity. Those of us who acknowledge the climate disaster — especially those who write about it — may be the last to picture ourselves fleeing the catastrophes scientists have been predicting.

Climate change should come as no surprise to any of us, even in Greenville, one of four communities in rural Plumas County tucked into the mountains of the northern Sierra Nevada range, 230 miles northeast of San Francisco. No one would call most of us progressive. We’re a social mishmash of loggers, miners, and ranchers, many of whom strongly supported Donald Trump (despite a disparate population of aging hippies living among us). We squabble over water ditches and whose insurance should cover which parade. We picked to death a solar-power project and took five years to decide on a design for a community building. The town has been in decline since I moved there nearly half a century ago, slowly sinking into its dirt foundations.

Despite Greenville’s insularity, we’ve had some inkling that the world is changing around us. Old-timers talk about the winters when so much snow fell that they had to shovel from second-story windows to get out of their houses. Last winter, we got less than three feet of snow. In the 1980s, a warm March storm flooded Indian Valley with melted snow that floated stacks of newly sawn lumber away from a local sawmill into a just-created lake. We all cheered as brazen cowboys lassoed bundles of two-by-fours and hauled them off in their pickup trucks.

In a megadrought-ridden West, precipitation currently is half the normal amount, making it prospectively the driest year since 1894. Today, such modest clues to a changing climate seem quaint indeed in the face of the evidence now bombarding California and the rest of the West. As in recent years, this summer’s fires began breaking out here far earlier than the norm. Already 647 wildfires have burned 4.9 million acres of the West, an area three times the size of Rhode Island. In California, 31 new fires started on August 30th alone — and any significant rain or snow is undoubtedly still months away.

For me, as for the rest of us in Plumas County, the Dixie Fire delivered the reality of climate change in a raging fury that has forever changed our lives. It started July 13th in the Feather River Canyon, a 5,000-foot gorge that carries water to more than 25 million Californians through the State Water Project. Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) has built a series of power stations here that dammed the former trophy-trout stream and converted its cascading energy into electricity, generating around 15% of California’s hydropower. At approximately seven o’clock that Tuesday morning, a hydroelectric facility lost power at Cresta in the lower Feather River Canyon. Officials later reported a “healthy green tree” leaning perilously against a conductor on a pole with a fire burning on the ground near the base of that tree. By evening, that micro-blaze had exploded to 1,000 acres.

Over the next 14 days what came to be known as the Dixie Fire whipped up one side canyon and down another, driving residents out of the town of Indian Falls and incinerating their homes. It demolished Canyon Dam at the southern end of Lake Almanor. The inhabitants of the towns of Crescent Mills, then Greenville, and soon after Taylorsville fled. Some of us returned for a night or two, only to heed the sirens blaring from our cell phones mandating another evacuation. Believe me, we left in a panic: pizza parlors with dough still rising; beauty salons with hair littering the floor; offices with phones ringing. We fled on whatever roads remained open to wherever we could find housing or friends willing to take us in.

On August 4th, we watched from our separate hells as a 40,000-foot cloud the color of bruised flesh collapsed over the ridge west of Greenville. It was soon hurling flaming branches and red-hot embers down the mountainside, torching trees as it roared into town. We were transfixed by horror, snatching previously unimaginable images from Facebook, chasing down Twitter links, and trying to make sense of the devastation evolving on infrared maps.

We were witnessing Greenville’s near-obliteration. The Dixie Fire would thunder right down Main Street with its Western false fronts and tarnished Gold Rush charm. The 150-year-old warehouse converted to a museum years ago flamed up in a blaze of black-and-white photos, historic logging tools, and the genealogy of generations of the Mountain Maidu, the local Native American tribe. Fire gutted the brick-walled Masonic Lodge and the Way Station, our only local watering hole. Much of the town we had fled burned to the ground.

Hotter and drier The old-timers didn’t tell us about fires like this. I witnessed nothing remotely as turbulent during a long-ago season as a fire lookout on Dyer Mountain near Lake Almanor. Even firefighters (and my husband used to be one of them) hardened by a decade of recent experience say that this fire is behaving unlike anything they were trained to confront or have ever seen. It has them bamboozled as it circles back toward landscapes it’s already burned, storming through magic forests of old-growth red fir and stately stands of sugar pines, their foot-long cones just beginning to mature.

Dixie is roaring through forests transformed by a changing climate. The planet is simply hotter than it used to be. Worldwide temperatures have increased 2.04 degrees Fahrenheit since 1901. The United States has been warming even faster, adding 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970. In the Sierra Nevada, the 450-mile-long tilted block of granite that lies on California’s border with Nevada, a recent study by climate scientists at UCLA suggested that temperatures could rise a phenomenal 7 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. All that heat is grilling brush and small trees practically to the point of spontaneous combustion, priming them for the smallest spark. Scientists say that the number of days when Sierra forests are likely to burn has increased by 5% since the 1970s.

Nighttime temperatures are also rising, further confounding the efforts of firefighters to control such blazes. They count on cooler air and higher humidity after dark to help them in aggressive attacks. According to researchers at the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, California’s overnight lows are now running about 2 degrees Fahrenheit above the average for the 1981-2010 period that climate scientists use as a benchmark. Robbed of their after-dark advantages, firefighters report seeing flames torching off the crowns of trees in the middle of the night, something they’re not faintly used to.

The Sierra air is drier, too. We used to brag about our low humidity, mocking our East Coast friends dripping sweat on a 90-degree day while we basked in dry heat. Now, that’s a liability. Decreasing relative humidity has helped boost the number of days each year when forests are vulnerable to wildfire. It also accelerates evaporation from leaves, brush, and even dead trees, heightening the risk of intense fires and so exacerbating the challenge for firefighters.

Then there’s the wind. Once upon a time, on hot Sierra summer days, we welcomed the breezes that stirred the air and cooled us. This summer, the least stirring of leaves instills fear. Dixie’s erratic winds have, in fact, blown flames right back into previously burned areas, circling around the lines firefighters have built to try to control the fire.

Climate change doesn’t start wildfires. The vast majority are caused by human activity. But by drying out trees, chaparral, and other vegetation, it creates a warmer, more arid world, one ever more susceptible to extreme fire behavior. PG&E, which owns more than 130,000 acres of California, has reported an increase in fire vulnerability in the area it serves from 15% in 2019 to 50% by 2021.

The utility company has all but admitted responsibility for starting the Dixie Fire. If that proves true it would be the fourth such wildfire linked to it, a record that reeks of blatant neglect of fundamental power-line maintenance. PG&E officials have touted their routine inspections of the two power poles located where the fire started. They found nothing wrong, they reported to the California Public Utilities Commission. But the company also considers the span of power line near where the fire started to be among the top 20% of its distribution lines most likely to ignite a wildfire by tree contact. Keep in mind that the Dixie Fire started less than a mile from where PG&E’s power lines started the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and burned 18,804 buildings.

Will corporate executives be held accountable for the Dixie Fire? Will they lose any sleep over the burly backhoe operator weeping publicly about the loss of his home with its newly remodeled kitchen? Will they spare a thought for the weary family of seven wandering through Safeway wondering how, as exiles, they’ll even pay for their groceries?

Climate refugees All of us who live in the mountainous West have come to expect wildfires. We don’t pack up at the first puff of smoke. During the early days after Dixie had started 50 miles down the Feather River Canyon from Greenville, I felt safe. Even when burning trees were visible from my office window as I grabbed photos and notebooks to evacuate, I still felt confident that I would return to my books and 40 years of journalism files, pieces ranging from local murders to ones on refugees from the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster in Fukushima, Japan, and forest fires burning in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in the Ukraine.

It took two more days before the winds shifted, blowing flames down North Canyon toward the town, overwhelming our firefighters. Today, all that’s left in Greenville’s downtown commercial area is devastation. The places I knew for so long are now gone, including Hunter Hardware, the business that welcomed us when my husband and I moved to Indian Valley, two blond toddlers in tow; Sterling Sage, where I bought jewelry for my granddaughter from the town’s most dapper businessman; and Village Drug, where our Plumas County supervisor took calls from constituents while dispensing medicines and school supplies. That was, in fact, Greenville’s oldest building and housed the office I shared with a poet/playwright and a corporate administrator with a passion for knitting that we liked to call Fiber, Fact, and Fiction. Now, it’s all ash.

How do you weigh the loss of such businesses against the hundreds of friends, neighbors, and acquaintances whose homes have been destroyed? Most of us waited days for some kind of confirmation about whether ours had made it or not, hanging on every word from state fire officials who described the advancing flames in twice-daily video meetings. We searched the Internet for shards of information and poured over maps with tiny red heat dots that might spell out our futures.

I danced for joy when I learned that my house had indeed survived, along with the timber-frame barn my husband had built from our own hand-milled timber. My ebullience plummeted into mourning for the sweet recluse who lost his beloved books and the widow whose family photos were all gone. Along Main Street in the town’s historic residential area, not a house remains, not even a single standing wall among brick walkways and charred garden plots.

Those 678 homeless neighbors of ours join millions around the world fleeing cyclones, hurricanes, fires, and floods, among other weather events brought to a boil by a changing climate. Like the majority of them, the fire that forced us to leave our homes was local and, given the size of this planet, relatively small-scale. It dominated the news cycle for a week or two before being displaced (without being faintly extinguished) by those fleeing hurricane Ida in Louisiana and political refugees trying to escape Afghanistan.

Greenville has plenty of experience with privation. As the county’s least affluent town we’ve rallied to keep our high school open when county officials planned to close it. We’ve rallied to install sidewalks and retain a health clinic after our only hospital closed. We may disagree about everything from who should be fire chief to the value of Covid vaccinations, but bully Greenville with an outside threat and we’re as one. The enemies of our enemies become our friends.

Today, we are facing a threat like no other. How do you rebuild a community with no post office, no library, and where, in the absence of public transportation, the closest gas station is now a 50-mile round trip? Who will step forward for those too broken to restore themselves?

Greenville and Indian Valley are now poised between devastation and possibility. Even as smoke still rises from the ashes, there are faint signs of hope. The generation that left for far-flung parts of the world has organized online donations and relief sites offering food, laptops, vehicles, and cash to the newly homeless. There are plans to expand the community garden from a concept and empty raised beds to a future bounty of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. After a century of genocide and abuse, the Mountain Maidu, the area’s first residents, have energized us with their vision of land and species restoration as they assume stewardship of around 3,000 acres of their ancestral territories. Some of us want to mount the works of local artists as four-by-four posters beautifying the fences designed to protect us from the toxic waste of burned-out buildings. Others are planning to stage local musical events on the lawn of the high school that somehow miraculously survived.

It’s a long, tough climb from incineration to inspiration for a community that’s physically scattered and emotionally shattered. Many of us remain in mind-numbing limbo, still awaiting word from some anonymous official that will allow us to return to homes, if we have them. Those of us allowed back, as my husband and I have been, are halted by National Guard troops and required to show paperwork proving that we belong here. We have little prospect of Internet or landline telephone service any time soon and we no longer expect consistent electricity from PG&E.

What may save us is the very reputation for defiance that has often been our undoing. We don’t accept defeat easily, not even against an adversary as daunting as climate change. As long as the odds are stacked against us, the independent and ornery will respond. If the soul of a community is its resilience, Greenville will revive. Still, we’re just a hint of what’s to come in this country and on this planet if all of us don’t change things in major ways. Remember, you could become a climate refugee, too.

Jane Braxton Little is an independent journalist who writes about science and natural resources for publications that include the Atlantic, Audubon, National Geographic, and Scientific American. She moved to Plumas County in 1969 for a summer that has yet to end. This article originated at TomDispatch.

Copyright ©2021 Jane Braxton Little — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 September 2021

Word Count: 2,647

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They weren’t kidding when they called Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.” Indeed, that cemetery has just taken another imperial body. And it wasn’t pretty, was it? Not that anyone should be surprised. Even after 20 years of preparation, a burial never is.

In fact, the shock and awe(fulness) in Kabul and Washington over these last weeks shouldn’t have been surprising, given our history. After all, we were the ones who prepared the ground and dug the grave for the previous interment in that very cemetery.

That, of course, took place between 1979 and 1989 when Washington had no hesitation about using the most extreme Islamists — arming, funding, training, and advising them — to ensure that one more imperial carcass, that of the Soviet Union, would be buried there. When, on February 15, 1989, the Red Army finally left Afghanistan, crossing the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan, Soviet commander General Boris Gromov, the last man out, said, “That’s it. Not one Soviet soldier or officer is behind my back.” It was his way of saying so long, farewell, good riddance to the endless war that the leader of the Soviet Union had by then taken to calling “the bleeding wound.” Yet, in its own strange fashion, that “graveyard” would come home with them. After all, they returned to a bankrupt land, sucked dry by that failed war against those American- and Saudi-backed Islamist extremists.

Two years later, the Soviet Union would implode, leaving just one truly great power on Planet Earth — along with, of course, those very extremists Washington had built into a USSR-destroying force. Only a decade later, in response to an “air force” manned by 19 mostly Saudi hijackers dispatched by Osama bin Laden, a rich Saudi prince who had been part of our anti-Soviet effort in Afghanistan, the world’s “sole superpower” would head directly for that graveyard (as bin Laden desired).

Despite the American experience in Vietnam during the previous century — the Afghan effort of the 1980s was meant to give the USSR its own “Vietnam” — key Bush administration officials were so sure of themselves that, as the New York Times recently reported, they wouldn’t even consider letting the leaders of the Taliban negotiate a surrender once our invasion began. On September 11, 2001, in the ruins of the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had already given an aide these instructions, referring not just to Bin Laden but Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein: “Go massive. Sweep it up, all up. Things related and not.” Now, he insisted, “The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders.” (Of course, had you read war reporter Anand Gopal’s 2014 book, No Good Men Among the Living, you would have long known just how fruitlessly Taliban leaders tried to surrender to a power intent on war and nothing but war.)

Allow a surrender and have everything grind to a disappointing halt? Not a chance, not when the Afghan War was the beginning of what was to be an American triumph of global proportions. After all, the future invasion of Iraq and the domination of the oil-rich Greater Middle East by the one and only power on the planet were already on the agenda. How could the leaders of such a confident land with a military funded at levels the next most powerful countries combined couldn’t match have imagined its own 2021 version of surrender?

And yet, once again, 20 years later, Afghanistan has quite visibly and horrifyingly become a graveyard of empire (as well, of course, as a graveyard for Afghans). Perhaps it’s only fitting that the secretary of defense who refused the surrender of the enemy in 2001 was recently buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full honors. In fact, the present secretary of defense and the head of the joint chiefs of staff both reportedly “knelt before Mr. Rumsfeld’s widow, Joyce, who was in a wheelchair, and presented her with the flag from her husband’s coffin.”

Meanwhile, Joe Biden was the third president since George W. Bush and crew launched this country’s forever wars to find himself floundering haplessly in that same graveyard of empires. If the Soviet example didn’t come to mind, it should have as Democrats and Republicans, President Biden and former President Trump flailed at each other over their supposedly deep feelings for the poor Afghans being left behind, while this country withdrew its troops from Kabul airport in a land where “rest in peace” has long had no meaning.

America’s true infrastructure spending Here’s the thing, though: don’t assume that Afghanistan is the only imperial graveyard around or that the U.S. can simply withdraw, however ineptly, chaotically, and bloodily, leaving that country to history — and the Taliban. Put another way, even though events in Kabul and its surroundings took over the mainstream news recently, the Soviet example should remind us that, when it comes to empires, imperial graveyards are hardly restricted to Afghanistan.

In fact, it might be worth taking a step back to look at the big picture. For decades, the U.S. has been involved in a global project that’s come to be called “nation building,” even if, from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to Afghanistan and Iraq, it often seemed an endless exercise in nation (un)building. An imperial power of the first order, the United States long ago largely rejected the idea of straightforward colonies. In the years of the Cold War and then of the war on terror, its leaders were instead remarkably focused on setting up an unparalleled empire of military bases and garrisons on a global scale. This and the wars that went with it have been the unsettling American imperial project since World War II.

And that unsettling should be taken quite literally. Even before recent events in Afghanistan, Brown University’s invaluable Costs of War Project estimated that this country’s conflicts of the last two decades across the Greater Middle East and Africa had displaced at least 38 million people, which should be considered nation (un)building of the first order.

Since the Cold War began, Washington has engaged in an endless series of interventions around the planet from Iran to the Congo, Chile to Guatemala, as well as in conflicts, large and small. Now, with Joe Biden having withdrawn from America’s disastrous Afghan War, you might wonder whether it’s all finally coming to an end, even if the U.S. still insists on maintaining 750 sizeable military bases globally.

Count on this, though: the politicians of the great power that hasn’t won a significant war since 1945 will agree on one thing — that the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex deserve yet more funding (no matter what else doesn’t). In truth, those institutions have been the major recipients of actual infrastructure spending over much of what might still be thought of as the American century. They’ve been the true winners in this society, along with the billionaires who, even in the midst of a grotesque pandemic, raked in profits in a historic fashion. In the process, those tycoons created possibly the largest inequality gap on the planet, one that could destabilize a democracy even if nothing else were going on. The losers? Don’t even get me started.

Or think of it this way: yes, in August 2021, it was Kabul, not Washington, D.C., that fell to the enemy, but the nation (un)building project in which this country has been involved over these last decades hasn’t remained thousands of miles away. Only half-noticed here, it’s been coming home, big time. Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency, amid election promises to end America’s “endless wars,” should really be seen as part of that war-induced (un)building project at home. In his own strange fashion, The Donald was Kabul before its time and his rise to power unimaginable without those distant conflicts and the spending that went with them, all of which, however unnoticed, unsettled significant parts of this society.

Climate war in a graveyard of empires? You can tell a lot about a country if you know where its politicians unanimously agree to invest taxpayer dollars.

At this very moment, the U.S. is in a series of crises, none worse than the heat, fire, and flood “season” that’s hit not just the megadrought-ridden West, or inundated Tennessee, or hurricane-whacked Louisiana, or the tropical-storm-tossed Northeast, but the whole country. Unbearable warmth, humidity, fires, smoke, storms, and power outages, that’s us. Fortunately, as always, Congress stands in remarkable unanimity when it comes to investing money where it truly matters.

And no, you knew perfectly well that I wasn’t referring to the creation of a green-energy economy. In fact, Republicans wouldn’t hear of it and the Biden administration, while officially backing the idea, has already issued more than 2,000 permits to fossil-fuel companies for new drilling and fracking on federal lands. In August, the president even called on OPEC — the Saudis, in particular — to produce significantly more oil to halt a further rise in gas prices at the pump.

As America’s eternally losing generals come home from Kabul, what I actually had in mind was the one thing just about everyone in Washington seems to agree on: funding the military-industrial complex beyond their wildest dreams. Congress has recently spent months trying to pass a bill that would, over a number of years, invest an extra $550 billion in this country’s badly tattered infrastructure, but never needs time like that to pass Pentagon and other national security budgets that, for years now, have added up to well over a trillion dollars annually.

In another world, with the Afghan War ending and U.S. forces (at least theoretically) coming home, it might seem logical to radically cut back on the money invested in the military-industrial complex and its ever more expensive weaponry. In another American world on an increasingly endangered planet, significantly scaling back American forces in every way and investing our tax dollars in a very different kind of “defense” would seem logical indeed. And yet, as of this moment, as Greg Jaffe writes at the Washington Post, the Pentagon continues to suck up “a larger share of discretionary spending than any other government agency.”

Fortunately for those who want to keep funding the U.S. military in the usual fashion, there’s a new enemy out there with which to replace the Taliban, one that the Biden foreign-policy team and a “pivoting” military is already remarkably eager to confront: China.

At least when the latest infrastructure money is spent, if that compromise bill ever really makes it through a Congress that can’t tie its own shoelaces, something will be accomplished. Bridges and roads will be repaired, new electric-vehicle-charging stations set up, and so on. When, however, the Pentagon spends the money just about everyone in Washington agrees it should have, we’re guaranteed yet more weaponry this country doesn’t need, poorly produced for thoroughly exorbitant sums, if not more failed wars as well.

I mean, just think about what the American taxpayer “invested” in the losing wars of this century. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, $2.313 trillion went into that disastrous Afghan War alone and at least $6.4 trillion by 2020 into the full-scale war on terror. And that doesn’t even include the estimated future costs of caring for American veterans of those conflicts. In the end, the total may prove to be in the $8 trillion range. Hey, at least $88 billion just went into supplying and training the Afghan military, most of which didn’t even exist by August 2021 and the rest of which melted away when the Taliban advanced.

Just imagine for a minute where we might really be today if Congress had spent close to $8 trillion rebuilding this society, rather than (un)building and wrecking distant ones.

Rest assured, this is not the country that ended World War II in triumph or even the one that outlasted the Soviet Union and whose politicians then declared it the most exceptional, indispensable nation ever. This is a land that’s crumbling before our eyes, being (un)built month by month, year by year. Its political system is on the verge of dissolving into who knows what amid a raft of voter suppression laws, wild claims about the most recent presidential election, an assault on the Capitol itself, and conspiracy theories galore. Its political parties seem ever more hostile, disturbed, and disparate. Its economy is a gem of inequality, its infrastructure crumbling, its society seemingly coming apart at the seams.

And on a planet that could be turning into a genuine graveyard of empires (and of so much else), keep in mind that, if you’re losing your war with climate change, you can’t withdraw from it. You can’t declare defeat and go home. You’re already home in the increasingly dysfunctional, increasingly (un)built U.S. of A.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com (where this article originated). He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture.  A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2021 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 September 2021

Word Count: 2,122

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In recent months, Washington has had a lot to say about China’s ever-expanding air, naval, and missile power. But when Pentagon officials address the topic, they generally speak less about that country’s current capabilities, which remain vastly inferior to those of the U.S., than the world they foresee in the 2030s and 2040s, when Beijing is expected to have acquired far more sophisticated weaponry.

“China has invested heavily in new technologies, with a stated intent to complete the modernization of its forces by 2035 and to field a ‘world-class military’ by 2049,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testified in June. The United States, he assured the Senate Armed Services Committee, continues to possess “the best joint fighting force on Earth.” But only by spending countless additional billions of dollars annually, he added, can this country hope to “outpace” China’s projected advances in the decades to come.

As it happens, however, there’s a significant flaw in such reasoning. In fact, consider this a guarantee: by 2049, the Chinese military (or what’s left of it) will be so busy coping with a burning, flooding, churning world of climate change — threatening the country’s very survival — that it will possess scant capacity, no less the will, to launch a war with the United States or any of its allies.

It’s normal, of course, for American military officials to focus on the standard measures of military power when discussing the supposed Chinese threat, including rising military budgets, bigger navies, and the like. Such figures are then extrapolated years into the future to an imagined moment when, by such customary measures, Beijing might overtake Washington. None of these assessments, however, take into account the impact of climate change on China’s security. In reality, as global temperatures rise, that country will be ravaged by the severe effects of the never-ending climate emergency and forced to deploy every instrument of government, including the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), to defend the nation against ever more disastrous floods, famines, droughts, wildfires, sandstorms, and encroaching oceans.

China will hardly be alone in this. Already, the increasingly severe effects of the climate crisis are forcing governments to commit military and paramilitary forces to firefighting, flood prevention, disaster relief, population resettlement, and sometimes the simple maintenance of basic governmental functions. In fact, during this summer of extreme climate events, military forces from numerous countries, including Algeria, Germany, Greece, Russia,  Turkey, and — yes — the United States, have found themselves engaged in just such activities, as has the PLA.

And count on one thing: that’s just the barest of beginnings. According to a recent report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), extreme climate events, occurring with ever more frightening frequency, will prove ever more destructive and devastating to societies around the world, which, in turn, will ensure that military forces just about everywhere will be consigned a growing role in dealing with climate-related disasters. “If global warming increases,” the report noted, “there will be a higher likelihood that [extreme climate] events with increased intensities, durations and/or spatial extents unprecedented in the observational record will occur.” In other words, what we’ve been witnessing in the summer of 2021, devastating as it might now seem, will be magnified many times over in the decades to come. And China, a large country with multiple climate vulnerabilities, will clearly require more assistance than most.   

The Zhengzhou precedent To grasp the severity of the climate crisis China will face, look no further than the recent flooding of Zhengzhou, a city of 6.7 million people and the capital of Henan Province. Over a 72-hour period between July 20th and July 22nd, Zhengzhou was deluged with what, once upon a time, would have been a normal year’s supply of rainfall. The result — and think of it as watching China’s future in action — was flooding on an unprecedented scale and, under the weight of that water, the collapse of local infrastructure. At least 100 people died in Zhengzhou itself — including 14 who were trapped in a subway tunnel that flooded to the ceiling — and another 200 in surrounding towns and cities. Along with widespread damage to bridges, roads, and tunnels, the flooding inundated an estimated 2.6 million acres of farmland and damaged important food crops.

In response, President Xi Jinping called for a government-wide mobilization to assist the flooding victims and protect vital infrastructure. “Xi called for officials and Party members at all levels to assume responsibilities and go to the frontline to guide flood control work,” according to CGTN, a government-owned TV network. “The Chinese People’s Liberation Army and armed police force troops should actively coordinate local rescue and relief work,” Xi told senior officials.

The PLA responded with alacrity. As early as July 21st, reported the government-owned China Daily, more than 3,000 officers, soldiers, and militiamen from the PLA’s Central Theater Command had been deployed in and around Zhengzhou to aid in disaster relief. Among those so dispatched was a parachute brigade from the PLA Air Force assigned to reinforce two hazardous dam breaches along the Jialu River in the Kaifeng area. According to China Daily, the brigade built a one-mile-long, three-foot-high wall of sandbags to bolster the dam.

These units were soon supplemented by others, and eventually some 46,000 soldiers from the PLA and the People’s Armed Police were deployed in Henan to assist in relief efforts, along with 61,000 militia members. Significantly, those included at least several hundred personnel from the PLA Rocket Forces, the military branch responsible for maintaining and firing China’s nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs.

The Zhengzhou disaster was significant in many respects. To begin with, it demonstrated global warming’s capacity to inflict severe damage on a modern city virtually overnight and without advance warning. Like the devastating torrential rainfall that saturated rivers in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands two weeks earlier, the downpour in Henan was caused in part by a warming atmosphere’s increased capacity to absorb moisture and linger in one place, discharging all that stored water in a mammoth cascade. Such events are now seen as a distinctive outcome of climate change, but their timing and location can rarely be predicted. As a result, while Chinese meteorological officials warned of a heavy rainfall event in Henan, nobody imagined its intensity and no precautions were taken to avoid its extreme consequences.

Ominously, that event also exposed significant flaws in the design and construction of China’s many “new cities,” which sprouted in recent years as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has worked to relocate impoverished rural workers to modern, highly industrialized metropolises. Typically, these urban centers — the country now has 91 cities with more than a million people each — prove to be vast conglomerations of highways, factories, malls, office towers, and high-rise apartment buildings. During their construction, much of the original countryside gets covered in asphalt and concrete. Accordingly, when heavy downfalls occur, there are few streams or brooks left for the resulting runoff to drain into and, as a result, any nearby tunnels, subways, or low-built highways are often flooded, threatening human life in a devastating fashion.

The Henan flooding also exposed another climate-related threat to China’s future security: the vulnerability of many of the country’s dams and reservoirs to heavy rainfall and overflowing rivers. Low-lying areas of eastern China, where most of its population is concentrated, have always suffered from flooding and, historically, one dynasty after another — the most recent being the CCP — has had to build dams and embankments to control river systems. Many of these have not been properly maintained and were never designed for the sort of extreme events now being experienced. During the Henan flooding in July, for example, the 61-year-old Changzhuang Reservoir near Zhengzhou filled to dangerous levels and nearly collapsed, which would have inflicted a second catastrophe upon that city. In fact, other dams in the surrounding area did collapse, resulting in widespread crop damage. At least some of the PLA forces rushed to Henan were put to work building sandbag walls to repair dam breaches on the Jialu River.

China’s perilous climate future The Zhengzhou flooding was but a single incident, consuming the Chinese leadership’s attention for a relatively brief moment. But it was also an unmistakable harbinger of what China — now, the world’s greatest emitter of greenhouse gases — is going to endure with ever-increasing frequency as global temperatures rise. It will prove particularly vulnerable to the severe impacts of climate change. That, in turn, means the central government will have to devote state resources on an as-yet-unimaginable scale, again and again, to emergency actions like those witnessed in Zhengzhou — until they become seamless events with no time off for good behavior.

In the decades to come, every nation will, of course, be ravaged by the extreme effects of global warming. But because of its geography and topography, China is at particular risk. Many of its largest cities and most productive industrial zones, including, for example, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Tianjin, are located in low-lying coastal areas along the Pacific Ocean and so will be exposed to increasingly severe typhoons, coastal flooding, and sea-level rise. According to a 2013 World Bank report, of any city on the planet, Guangzhou, in the Pearl River Delta near Hong Kong, faces the highest risk of damage, financially speaking, from sea-level rise and associated flooding; its neighbor Shenzhen was described as facing the 10th highest risk.

Other parts of China face equally daunting threats from climate change. The country’s densely populated central regions, including major cities like Wuhan and Zhengzhou as well as its vital farming areas, are crisscrossed by a massive web of rivers and canals that often flood following heavy rainfall. Much of China’s west and northwest is covered by desert, and a combination of deforestation and declining rainfall there has resulted in the further spread of such desertification. Similarly, a study in 2018 suggested that the heavily populated North China Plain could become the deadliest place on Earth for devastating heat waves by century’s end and could, by then, prove uninhabitable; we’re talking, that is, about almost unimaginable future disasters.

China’s distinct climate risks were brought to the fore in the IPCC’s new report, “Climate Change 2021.” Among its most worrisome findings:

* Sea-level rise along China’s coasts is occurring at a faster rate than the global average, with resulting coastal area loss and shoreline retreat.

* The number of ever-more-powerful and destructive typhoons striking China is destined to increase.

* Heavy precipitation events and associated flooding will become more frequent and widespread.

* Prolonged droughts will become more frequent, especially in northern and western China.

* Extreme heatwaves will occur more frequently, and persist for longer periods.

Such onrushing realities will result in massive urban flooding, widespread coastal inundation, dam and infrastructure collapses, ever more severe wildfires, disastrous crop failures, and the increasing possibility of widespread famine. All of this, in turn, could lead to civic unrest, economic dislocation, the uncontrolled movements of populations, and even inter-regional strife (especially if water and other vital resources from one area of the country are diverted to others for political reasons). All this, in turn, will test the responsiveness and durability of the central government in Beijing.

Facing global warming’s mounting fury We Americans tend to assume that Chinese leaders spend all their time thinking about how to catch up with and overtake the United States as the world’s number one superpower. In reality, the single greatest priority of the Communist Party is simply to remain in power — and for the past quarter-century that has meant maintaining sufficient economic growth each year to ensure the loyalty (or at least acquiescence) of a preponderance of the population. Anything that might threaten growth or endanger the well-being of the urban middle-class — think: climate-related disasters — is viewed as a vital threat to the survival of the CCP.

This was evident in Zhengzhou. In the immediate aftermath of the flooding, some foreign journalists reported, residents began criticizing local government officials for failing to provide adequate warning of the impending disaster and for not taking the necessary precautionary measures. The CCP censorship machine quickly silenced such voices, while pro-government media agents castigated foreign journalists for broadcasting such complaints. Similarly, government-owned news agencies lauded President Xi for taking personal command of the relief effort and for ordering an “all-of-government” response, including the deployment of those PLA forces.

That Xi felt the need to step in, however, sends a message. With urban disasters guaranteed to become more frequent, inflicting harm on media-savvy middle-class residents, the country’s leadership believes it must demonstrate vigor and resourcefulness, lest its aura of competency — and so its mandate to govern — disappear. In other words, every time China experiences such a catastrophe, the central government will be ready to assume leadership of the relief effort and to dispatch the PLA to oversee it.

No doubt senior PLA officials are fully aware of the climate threats to China’s security and the ever-increasing role they’ll be forced to play in dealing with them. However, the most recent edition of China’s “white paper” on defense, released in 2019, didn’t even mention climate change as a threat to the nation’s security. Nor, for that matter, did its closest U.S. equivalent, the Pentagon’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, despite the fact that senior commanders here were well aware of, even riveted by, such growing perils.

Having been directed to provide emergency relief operations in response to a series of increasingly severe hurricanes in recent years, American military commanders have become intimately familiar with global warming’s potentially devastating impact on the United States. The still-ongoing mammoth wildfires in the American West have only further reinforced this understanding. Like their counterparts in China, they recognize that the armed forces will be obliged to play an ever-increasing role in defending the country not from enemy missiles or other forces but from global warming’s mounting fury.

At this moment, the Department of Defense is preparing a new edition of its National Defense Strategy and this time climate change will finally be officially identified as a major threat to American security. In an executive order signed on January 27th, his first full day in office, President Joe Biden directed the secretary of defense to “consider the risks of climate change” in that new edition.

There can be no doubt that the Chinese military leadership will translate that new National Defense Strategy as soon as it’s released, probably later this year. After all, a lot of it will be focused on the sort of U.S. military moves to counter China’s rise in Asia that have been emphasized by both the Trump and Biden administrations. But it will be interesting to see what they make of the language on climate change and if similar language begins to appear in Chinese military documents.

Here’s my dream: that American and Chinese military leaders — committed, after all, to “defend” the two leading producers of greenhouses gases — will jointly acknowledge the overriding climate threat to national and international security and announce common efforts to mitigate it through advances in energy, transportation, and materials technology.

One way or another, however, we can be reasonably certain of one thing: as the term makes all too clear, the old Cold War format for military policy no longer holds, not on such an overheating planet. As a result, expect Chinese soldiers to be spending far more time filling sandbags to defend their country’s coastline from rising seas in 2049 than manning weaponry to fight American soldiers.

Michael T. Klare writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change. He is a founder of the Committee for a Sane U.S.-China Policy.

Copyright ©2021 Michael T. Klare — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 August 2021

Word Count: 2,578

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It ended in chaos and disaster. Kabul has fallen and Joe Biden is being blamed (by congressional Republicans in particular) for America’s now almost-20-year disaster in Afghanistan. But is the war on terror itself over? Apparently not.

It seems like centuries ago, but do you remember when, in May 2003, President George W. Bush declared “Mission accomplished” as he spoke proudly of his invasion of Iraq? Three months later, Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed, “We are winning the war on terror.” Despite such declarations and the “corners” endlessly turned as America’s military commanders announced impending successes year after year in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, the war on terror, abroad and on the home front, has been never-ending, as the now-codified term “forever wars” suggests.

By 2011, following the death of Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama admitted that the killing of the head of al-Qaeda would not bring that war to a close. In May 2011, he informed the nation that bin Laden’s “death does not mark the end of our effort” as “the cause of securing our country is not complete.” As President Biden signals his intention to bring the war on terror as we know it to an end, the question is: What will remain of it both abroad and at home, no matter what he tries to do?

The pivot abroad As the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks looms, the Biden administration is making it crystal clear that it intends to finally bring the most obvious aspects of that war to a close, no matter the consequences. “It is time,” Biden, the fourth war-on-terror president, said in April, “to end the Forever War.” Although mired in controversy, turmoil, and bloodshed, the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan did indeed take place, even if several thousand were then sent back to Kabul Airport to guard the panicky removal of the vast American embassy staff and others from that city. That was, as the administration announced, only a temporary measure as Taliban troops entered the Afghan capital and took over the government there.

Eighteen years after the invasion of Iraq, a shifting definition of the role of the 2,500 or so U.S. troops still stationed there is also underway and should be complete by the end of the year. Instead of more combat missions, the American role will now be logistics and advisory support.

Putting a fine point on both the Afghan withdrawal and the Iraqi change of direction, many in Congress have acknowledged the need to remove the authorizations passed so long ago for those forever wars. In June, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Force (AUMF) in Iraq that paved the way for the invasion of that country. And this month, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee followed suit — 18 years after George W. Bush deposed Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and disaster followed.

The removal of that 2002 AUMF remains, of course, painfully overdue. After all, it has been used through these many years to cover this country’s disastrous occupation of and attempts at “nation-building” in Iraq. Eventually, during Donald Trump’s last year in office, it was even cited to authorize the drone assassination of a top Iranian general at Baghdad International Airport. Like so many war-on-terror policies, once put in place, successive administrations showed no urge to let that AUMF go. In that way, what had once been a regime-change directive (based on a set of lies about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq) morphed into a long-term nation-building scheme, without any new congressional authorizations at all.

Plans are also now on the table for the repeal of the even more impactful 2001 AUMF, passed by Congress one week after 9/11. Like the Iraq War authorization, its use has been expanded in ways well beyond its original intent — namely, the rooting out of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Under the 2001 AUMF’s auspices, in the last nearly two decades, the United States has conducted military operations in ever more countries across the Greater Middle East and Africa. But in Congress, what’s now being discussed is not just repealing that act, but replacing it altogether.

Traditionally, when a war ends, there’s a resolution, perhaps codified in a treaty or an agreement of some sort acknowledging victory or defeat, and a nod to the peace that will follow. Not so with this war.

However unsuccessful, the war on terror, experts tell us, will instead continue. The only difference: it won’t be called a war anymore. Instead, there will be a variety of militarized counterterrorism efforts around the globe. With or without the moniker of “war,” the U.S. remains at war in numerous places, only recently, for instance, launching airstrikes on Somalia to counter the terrorist group al-Shabaab.

In Africa, Syria, and Indonesia, experts warn, the continued spread of ISIS, the reinvigoration of al-Qaeda, and the persistence of groups like Jemaah Islamiyah demand a continued American military counterterrorism effort. All of this was, in a strange way, foreseeable in the drafting of the 2001 AUMF in which no enemy was actually named, nor were temporal or geographical limits or conditions laid down for the resolution of the conflict to come. As the war on terror’s spread to country after country has demonstrated, once unleashed, such a war paradigm takes on a life of its own.

After 20 years of various kinds of failure in which the goals of the war on terror were never truly attained, the U.S. military, the intelligence community, and the Biden administration are now focused elsewhere. According to the latest government threat assessment issued in April by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), terrorism is far from the most serious threat the nation faces today. As Emily Harding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies sums it up, reflecting on the DNI’s report, the intelligence community’s priorities “are shifting… from a focus on counterterrorism to addressing near-peer competitors.”

“The United States is transitioning,” Harding explains, “from mostly low-tech, low-resourced adversaries (e.g., the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and their subsidiaries) to a focus on great power competition, in particular with China and Russia, both of whom have invested in sophisticated technical tools and are armed with robust conventional and nuclear forces.”

Still, however much the Biden administration may be pivoting to a new cold war with China in particular, just how long such a pivot lasts remains an open question, especially given the recent Afghan disaster. And despite the coming 20th anniversary of 9/11, no matter what Congress does or doesn’t rescind when it comes to those AUMFs, the U.S. forever war with terrorism will persist, even if, for a while, the threat of Islamic terrorism takes a back seat to other potential dangers in official Washington.

The pivot at home On the home front, there’s a similarly disturbing persistence when it comes to the war on terror. Like that set of conflicts abroad, counterterrorism efforts against Islamist terrorists at home have given way to other issues. Mirroring the reduced importance of international terrorism in the report of the director of national intelligence, for instance, Attorney General Merrick Garland recently highlighted a domestic shift away from Islamic terrorism in a memorandum to Department of Justice (DOJ) personnel.

Outlining the “broad scope” of the Department’s responsibilities, his priorities couldn’t have been clearer. His first commitment, he insisted, was to restoring the integrity of the Department, a clear reference to the DOJ’s rejection of independence from the White House during the Trump years. Meanwhile, he explained, the Justice Department will focus on its primary mission — protecting Americans “from environmental degradation and the abuse of market power, from fraud and corruption, from violent crime and cyber-crime, and from drug trafficking and child exploitation.” Only as a seeming afterthought did he add, “And it must do all of this without ever taking its eye off of the risk of another devastating attack by foreign terrorists.”

But his words hid a more subtle reality. Much of the domestic architecture created in the name of the war on terror persists at home as well as abroad. At its height, the counterterrorism movement at home involved an expansive and aggressive use of law enforcement and intelligence tools that readily — often with the assent of Congress and the courts — tossed aside constitutional protections and reinterpreted laws in ways that privileged American security over rights.

Passed in October 2001, the Patriot Act, for example, downgraded Fourth Amendment protections, enabling law enforcement to conduct mass warrantless surveillance on Americans. Muslims as a group — rather than based on individual suspicion — were detained without charge, targeted in stings and terror investigations, and threatened with imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay.

During President Obama’s term in office, some of these measures were revised for the better in the Freedom Act. Meant to replace the Patriot Act, while leaving many broad authorities in place, it banned the bulk intelligence collection of American telephone records and Internet metadata. For the most part, however, law enforcement’s counterterrorism powers, created to defeat al-Qaeda, have remained robust and are there for use against others.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), created in the wake of 9/11, has also turned its attention elsewhere. Almost from its inception, the agency used the powers granted to it in the name of counterterrorism in other ways entirely. It soon turned its attention to dealing with drug crimes, the control of the border, and immigration matters, all outside the realm of post-9/11 terrorist threats.

Under President Trump, in particular, DHS (by then, remarkably enough, the country’s largest law enforcement agency) refocused its resources on matters that had little or nothing to do with counterterrorism. During the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, for instance, its officials deployed helicopters, drones, and other forms of group surveillance to monitor protests and, in Portland, Oregon, even to quell them with force. In other words, the agency built for counterterrorism had, by then, become whatever a president wanted it to be.

A call for review The future of such powers and policies at home and abroad is now in a strange kind of limbo. Addressing the Trump administration’s misuse of the Department of Justice, for instance, Attorney General Garland did indeed signal his intent to limit any use of it for political purposes. In the process, he issued a clear directive against any possible White House politicization of the department. But not a mention has yet been made of authorizing a much-needed thorough review of the powers the DOJ gained in the forever-war years in the name of counterterrorism.

When it comes to the Department of Homeland Security, the path to reform is even less clear as, in its repurposed mission, counterterrorism aimed at foreign groups may be among the least of its tasks. As a recent report from the Center for American Progress points out “What America needs from DHS today… is different from when it was founded… [W]e need a DHS that prioritizes the rule of law, and one that protects all Americans as well as everyone who comes to live, study, work, travel, and seek safety here.”

In fact, in these years, both at home and abroad, counterterrorism agencies and the military were granted vast new powers. While they may now all be pivoting elsewhere in the name of new threats, they are certainly not focused on limiting those powers in any significant way.

And yet such limits couldn’t be more important. It would, in fact, be wise for this country to pause, review the uses of the post-9/11 powers granted to such domestic institutions, and revise the policies that allowed for their seemingly endless expansion at home and abroad in the name of the war on terror. It would be no less wise to place more confidence in the country’s ability to keep itself safe by embracing its foundational principles. At home, that would mean honoring fairness and restraint in the application of the law, while insisting on limits to the use of force abroad.

If only.

At present, it looks as if those forever wars have created a new form of forever law, forever policy, forever power, and a forever-changed America. And count on one thing: if changes aren’t made, we in this country will find ourselves living forever in the shadow of those forever wars.

Karen J. Greenberg writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and author of the newly published Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump (Princeton University Press). Julia Tedesco helped with research for this piece.

Copyright ©2021 Karen J. Greenberg — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 August 2021

Word Count: 2,062

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If I were Saudi Arabia’s MBS, the news out of Kabul would be making my heart go pit-a-pat. A conservative, undemocratic, Sunni religious government is taking form on the eastern frontier of his greatest enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The reborn Taliban emirate comes equipped with a strong battle-tested army, now bolstered by surrendered American weapons. But it will need money and assistance on how to function in the modern world.

Saudi Arabia, together with its allies Kuwait and the UAE, has an abundance of the former and decades of experience with the latter. It also has a history of financing religious militancy in Afghanistan going back to the Mujahideen fight against Soviet occupation.

In 2013, these anti-democratic Gulf allies showered billions of dollars on Egypt after General Sisi overthrew its elected Muslim Brotherhood government. So they can surely come up with whatever the Taliban emirate needs to repair war damage in Afghanistan and reverse its election-based democratic governing system. And MBS won’t be disturbed by a little unfairness toward women or a few reprisals against people the Taliban don’t like, such as the Hazara Shi‘ites.

It will not be lost on any Saudi strategic thinker that throughout Iran’s long history, only Alexander the Great and the Muslim Arabs have conquered the country from the mountainous west. But its eastern frontier is spectacularly vulnerable. The Israelis might come to see things in a similar light.

So long as the United States was Afghanistan’s overlord, Iran had little reason to fear actual military adventures by its Gulf adversaries. Washington, after all, would firmly resist any attempt to draw it into yet another Middle Eastern war. Moreover, Iran’s support for Yemen’s Houthis on Saudi Arabia’s southern flank has caused endless consternation in Riyadh.

But if Saudi Arabia were to become the big brother of the Taliban, Iran would have to consider seriously the prospect of a two-front war. Just imagine the political impact of Iran’s foes stationing a squadron of nuclear-capable aircraft at the Bagram airbase.

What would be the downside of MBS making the Taliban an offer of support too good to be refused? Particularly if he also formalized a joint Saudi-Taliban agreement to suppress al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which both parties see as dangerously disruptive movements despite some religious similarities? And perhaps extend to Afghanistan MBS’s public relations promise to improve, ever so slowly, the status of women?

Will Pakistan object? Will China? Will Russia? No, no, and no. As for Washington, the Saudis’ long-term friends in both political parties could easily see this outcome as making a tasty omelet out of broken eggs.

Richard W. Bulliet is professor emeritus in history at Columbia University.

Copyright ©2021 Richard Bulliet — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 August 2021

Word Count: 436

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