From Seymour Hersh’s
The Killing of Osama bin Laden,
published in April by Verso Books. Read
Hersh’s
interview about the book on Alternet.
May 05,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Harpers"
-
It’s
now evident, fifteen years after the 9/11
attacks, that Obama’s foreign policy has
maintained many of the core elements of the
global war on terror initiated by his
predecessor—assassinations, drone attacks, heavy
reliance on special forces, covert operations,
and, in the case of Afghanistan, the continued
use of American ground forces in combat. And, as
in the years of Bush and Cheney, there has been
no progress, let alone victory, in the fight
against terrorism. The Islamic State has
succeeded Al Qaeda as the United States’ most
feared terrorist enemy, one that now reaches
deep into Africa and sends shockwaves into
Western Europe and America. Obama still views
Russia, a nation with the same international
terrorist enemies as Washington, as an evil
empire that must be confronted rather than as an
ally. Since 9/11 I have had access to some of
the thinking inside the White House on the war
on terror. I learned early in the Obama
presidency that he was prepared to walk away
from first principles. His first public act as
president took place on January 22, 2009, two
days after his inauguration, when he announced
that he was returning the nation to the “moral
high ground” by signing an executive order
calling for the closing, “as soon as practical,”
of Guantánamo. As of this writing, that has yet
to happen, and more than ninety prisoners
continue to fester there, with no due process
and no accountability, to America’s shame.1
The number of Guantánamo detainees has since fallen to eighty.
Obama
had described Afghanistan as “the right war”
during his campaign and talked about the need
for more troops on the ground there. Many of his
supporters were not listening, or chose not to
hear. I was told that within three weeks of
taking office he informed his senior advisers at
a secret National Security Council meeting of
his plan to send an additional 17,000 American
troops to join the more than 30,000 already
stationed there. This outcome was not the
product of an interagency staff decision, but a
unilateral action taken by Obama and retired
Marine Corps general James Jones, the national
security adviser at the time. Obama and Jones
were said to believe that the focus of American
foreign policy needed to be on Pakistan, a
nuclear power supporting and harboring the
Taliban troops that had become the main opponent
in Afghanistan after Al Qaeda’s retreat. There
was much hubris and—as usual in new
administrations—not much consideration of what
had gone before. Furthermore, I was told by
someone in a position to know that Jones had
explained at one meeting, in essence, that
“Afghanistan is not in our national security
interest, but we don’t want to betray the good
men who went there before. We will not abandon
Afghanistan, but we will not let it get worse.”
Obama
would spend much of his first year discussing
what to do about Afghanistan. The debate was not
about whether to expand the war there but how
many troops to commit to what would become
America’s longest and least successful war. The
president, who would spend the rest of his time
in office cracking down on press leaks and
internal dissent, stood aside as a group of
American generals staged what amounted to a
public debate over the number of troops needed
to “win” the Afghan war. At one point, a highly
classified internal request from Army general
Stanley McChrystal, an expert on special
operations and commander of U.S. forces in the
Afghan war, was leaked to the Washington
Post within a week of its delivery to the
White House, with no significant protest or
sanction from Obama. McChrystal had asked
permission to deploy as many as 80,000 more
troops.
Obama
eventually committed a first tranche of 30,000
additional American soldiers. It was a decision
marketed as a compromise between a reluctant
president and a gung-ho Pentagon. There was at
least one senior member of Congress who had
reason to suspect that Obama, despite his
resentment of the military’s public posturing,
had wanted these higher troop numbers all along.
By
2009, David Obey, a Democratic lawmaker from
Wisconsin, was chairman of the powerful House
Appropriations Committee, one of two committees
responsible for funding all government programs,
including secret military and intelligence
activities. Elected to Congress in 1969, at the
height of the anti–Vietnam War protests, Obey
was an outspoken liberal. He had dared to take
on George Bush and Dick Cheney over aspects of
their war on terror that—as Obey and others in
Congress believed—were not being shared with,
and perhaps were not even financed by, Congress,
as stipulated by the Constitution. Obey got
nowhere with his protests, but his efforts in
early 2005—including a little-noted speech on
the House floor and the solicitation of a rush
of unfulfilled promises from the Bush White
House to provide greater communication—were
remarkable simply for having taken place. He
told me at the time that “disquieting” actions
had been taken in secret and “Congress [had]
failed in its oversight abilities.”
Obey
stunned his colleagues in 2010 by announcing his
retirement. He and I had talked on and off
during the Bush years—he would listen but say
little. Six or so months after he left the
Congress he was more forthcoming. He told me of
a presidential meeting he and a few other
congressional leaders had attended at the White
House in March 2009. The issue was Afghanistan,
and Obama wanted them to know he was going to
make a significant troop commitment to the war
there. “He said he was being told by a lot of
people that he ought to expand the war and then
asked all of us, one by one, what we thought.
The only word of caution came from [Vice
President] Joe Biden, who raised a question
about the cost. When it came to me, I said, ‘Mr.
President, you could have the best policy in the
world but you need to have the tools to carry it
out—and the governments of Pakistan and
Afghanistan are pretty lousy tools. If you did a
surge in Afghanistan you will have to face the
fact that it would crowd out large portions of
your domestic program—except perhaps health
care.’” (A later in-house estimate put the cost
of the war, if forty thousand additional troops
were committed, at $1 trillion over the next ten
years, as much as the president’s health care
proposal.)
At the
end of the meeting, according to Obey, he had a
private chat with the president and asked him
whether he had ever spent time listening to the
broadcasts of President Lyndon Johnson’s
telephone conversations, in particular his
discussions about expanding America’s commitment
to the war in South Vietnam. Johnson had taped
more than nine thousand of his telephone calls
while in office. They created a sensation in
Washington upon their public release in
2003—just as President Bush was expanding
America’s war in Iraq. Obama said he had. “I
then asked Obama if he recalled listening to the
conversation with Richard Russell when they both
talked about how upping the American effort in
Vietnam wouldn’t help,” Obey said. “My point was
that Johnson and Russell were making a decision
to go ahead when they were telling themselves
privately that it would not work.”
Senator
Russell was a segregationist and
archconservative from Georgia, the chairman of
the Armed Services Committee, and a longtime
Johnson confidant. The conversation in question
took place in May 1964, fourteen months before
Johnson would make a major commitment of
American troops to the war. It remains one of
the most riveting and instructive of the
presidential recordings. Both men agreed that
any American escalation would lead to a major
war with China, with untold consequences. “I’ll
tell you,” Russell told Johnson, “it’ll be the
most expensive adventure this country ever went
into.” Johnson answered, “It just makes the
chills run up my back. . . . I haven’t the nerve
to do it, but I don’t see any other way out of
it.”
Obey
then asked a third question: “Who’s your George
Ball?” Ball, a high-ranking member of the State
Department in the Kennedy years, was renowned as
the only senior official in the government to
argue again and again—at great personal
cost—against Kennedy’s decision to escalate the
American presence in South Vietnam. Obama did
not answer. “Either the president chose not to
answer, or he didn’t have one,” Obey told me.
“But I didn’t hear anyone tell the president
that he ought to put on the brakes in
Afghanistan.”
In a
review of my interviews about Obama’s early
decision to raise the ante in Afghanistan, one
fact stood out: Obama’s faith in the world of
special operations and in Stanley McChrystal,
the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan who
worked closely with Dick Cheney from 2003 to
2008 as head of the Joint Special Operations
Command. JSOC’s forces include elite Navy SEALs
and the Army’s Delta Force, and they have won
fame in countless books and movies since 9/11
for their nighttime operations against the
Taliban in Afghanistan and the jihadists in
Iraq. It was a JSOC SEAL team that killed bin
Laden at his redoubt in Pakistan in early 2011.
There is no ambivalence about the skills and
determination of those special operators who
took part in Obama’s renewed nighttime war
against the Taliban in 2009 and thereafter. But,
as I was told at the time, there is another side
to the elite units. “You’ve got really good guys
who are strongly motivated, and individual
initiative is the game,” a former senior
military official said. “But JSOC’s
individualism also breeds a group of childish
men who take advantage of their operational
freedom to act immaturely. ‘We’re special and
the rules don’t apply.’ This is why the regular
army has always tried to limit the size of the
special forces. McChrystal was not paid to be
thoughtful. He was paid to let his troops do
what they want with all the toys to play with
they want.”
This
former senior official, who has been involved in
war planning since 9/11, was pessimistic at the
time about Obama’s reliance on special
operations. “The intersection between the
high-mindedness of Obama and the ruthlessness of
Dick Cheney is so great that there is a vacuum
in the planning. And no one knows what will
happen. My own belief is that over time we’re
going to do the Afghanization of the
war”—trying, as in Iraq, to finance and train an
Afghan Army capable of standing up to the
Taliban—“and the same thing will happen to them
as happened to our South Vietnamese Army allies.
In the end, the Taliban, disciplined and
motivated, will take the country back.”
McChrystal was cashiered in June 2010, after he
and his aides were quoted in Rolling Stone
making a series of derogatory remarks about the
president and others in the White House.
According to one of McChrystal’s advisors, he
thought an early face-to-face meeting with the
president was inconsequential and trivial—little
more than a “10-minute photo op.” By then, there
was much concern about a major aspect of
McChrystal’s approach to the war, which was to
find and kill the Taliban. I was visited that
June by a senior official of the International
Committee of the Red Cross whose humanitarian
mission is to monitor, in secret, the conditions
of civilians and prisoners of war in an effort
to insure compliance with the 1949 Geneva
Conventions. The ICRC was even granted limited
access to the prison at Guatánamo, among other
facilities in the war on terror, with the
understanding that its findings were not to be
made public. The official who sought me out did
not want to discuss the prison system in
Afghanistan, about which there have been many
public revelations. His issue was the Obama
administration’s overall conduct of the war. He
had come to Washington in the hope of seeing
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other
senior State Department officials, but had been
shunted aside. His message was blunt:
McChrystal’s men were killing the wrong people.
“Our inspectors are the only visitors from a
secular institution who are tolerated by the
Taliban leadership, and you Americans are
killing those who support our activity,” he
said. “You are killing those Taliban who are not
jihadists—who don’t want to die and don’t give a
shit about bombing Times Square. They have no
grudge against America.” The indiscriminate
targeting of all who are Taliban, he said, “is
reaching a point of no return, and the more
radical and extreme elements are picking up
momentum.”
At one
point, he said, there had been a heated internal
debate among the Taliban leadership about the
use of chemical weapons in an attack on Kabul,
the Afghan capital, and the moderates won. The
ICRC wouldn’t say how it learned of that debate,
but the official added, “The guys who prevented
that use have been smoked out”—assassinated by
JSOC operators—“by the Americans. The moderates
are going down.”
A
longtime consultant to the special operations
community depicted the mindless killing in
Afghanistan as a “symptom of the weakness in the
U.S. policy for combatting terrorism: It’s all
about tactics and nobody, Republican or
Democrat, has advanced a strategic vision. The
special-ops guys are simply carrying out orders,
like a dog eager to get off the leash and run in
the woods—and not think about where it is going.
We’ve had an abject failure of military and
political leadership.”
The
American-led coalition unilaterally declared an
end to the Afghan war at the close of 2014. And,
as widely predicted, the Afghan National Army,
supported at an annual cost of billions by the
Obama administration, continues to be riddled
with corruption and lacks leadership and
motivation. Obama again decided last year to
send over more troops, under the guise of
advisers, and, inevitably, they have been drawn
into combat. They kill and are killed in the
name of democracy—a word that has dwindling
appeal and little relevance for many Afghans.
Did any
of the dozens of analyses put forward as the
president reviewed the options in 2009 and in
2015 estimate the number of innocent lives that
would be lost as a consequence of the American
surge? Were those presidential advisers
skeptical of the capability and motivation of an
upgraded and modernized Afghan army able to find
a place at the White House planning table? Is
there an American soldier who wants to be the
last to die in Afghanistan?
It is
not too early to dwell on Obama’s legacy, a
deepening concern for any president as the end
of his tenure approaches. It would be easy to
say it will be mixed—on the plus side there was
the health-care bill and America’s recovery from
the economic shambles left by the Bush
administration. He faced an unbridgeable
congressional impasse caused by an increasingly
radical Republican opposition. But Obama,
whatever his private thoughts, still speaks of
American exceptionalism and still believes, or
acts as if he does, that the war on terror, a
war against an ideology, can be won with
American bombers, drone attacks, and special
forces. There is no evidence yet for that
belief.