By MARC W. HEROLD, Frontline
The Obama war machine has decided to accept more U.S. military casualties in order to keep NATO in America’s Afghan war.
ALEX BRANDON/AP
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA speaking at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, on August 17.
BURIED in the public relations blather of United States Marine legions “liberating” Helmand and Afghan (sham) “elections” as democracy restored1 is an unspoken trade-off over who disproportionately dies in America’s modern wars in the Third World. Under President George W. Bush, U.S. politico-military elites chose to fight the Afghan war with minimal regard for so-called collateral casualties. But the soaring toll of killed Afghan civilians swayed world public opinion and stoked the Afghan resistance as grieved Afghan family members sought revenge.
Enter Barack Obama. Faced with the prospect of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces being withdrawn as restless NATO-country citizens mobilised against the war, the Obama war machine took the decision to trade off (mostly) lower-class U.S. “volunteer” soldiers from rural America2 for fewer rural Afghan civilians killed. The decision had nothing to do with valuing Afghan lives and everything to do with a careful political calculation. In outlying areas such as in the Pakistan borderlands or in isolated rural areas of Afghanistan, Obama’s war machine cavalierly slaughters innocent civilians with the same impunity and at the same rate as his maligned predecessor did, as drone strikes in Pakistan and U.S. air strikes in Farah and Logar have demonstrated.
What has also changed is the public face of the war as one might expect from a President skilled in diction and possessing the persuasive skills of a well-trained lawyer. On the other hand, behind the soothing words, the rationales are identical: in Phoenix recently, Obama reiterated the Bush of September 2001:
“This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. This is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defence of our people.”3
So much for the current U.S. rationale for war. So much for “Change We Can Believe In”.
AFP
U.S. MARINES CROSS a makeshift bridge in the Garmsir district of Helmand Province on July 12.
The Obama approach finds strong support amongst U.S. liberals, the U.S. corporate media and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). As I have documented elsewhere, the UNAMA coughs up statistics on Afghan civilian deaths which cannot be fact-checked and which conveniently grossly underestimates the carnage caused by U.S./NATO actions. Sadly, the superficial impartiality of the U.N. gives such “faith-based” data credibility in the international media, which widely cite them. Former President Bush must look on with envy at how the U.S. media, including such “liberal” pillars as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (for example, the McNeill Lehrer News Hour) or MoveOn.org, now toe the Pentagon line on Obama’s Afghan war.
Almost eight years ago, I pointed out a trade-off taken by the U.S. military in its original bombing and invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001:
“From the point of view of U.S. policymakers and their mainstream media-boosters, the ‘cost’ of a dead Afghan civilian is zero as long as these civilian deaths can be hidden from the general U.S. public’s view. The ‘benefits’ of saving future lives of U.S. military personnel are enormous, given the U.S. public’s post-Vietnam aversion to returning body bags…. But, I believe the argument goes deeper and that race enters the calculation. The sacrificed Afghan civilians are not ‘white’, whereas the overwhelming number of U.S. pilots and elite ground troops are white. This ‘reality’ serves to amplify the positive benefit-cost ratio of certainly sacrificing darker Afghans today [and Indochinese, Iraqis yesterday] for the benefit of probably saving American soldier-citizens tomorrow. What I am saying is that when the ‘other’ is non-white, the scale of violence used by the U.S. government to achieve its stated objectives at minimum cost knows no limits.”4
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