William PFAFF

What Is the Afghanistan War About?

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:00:00 CET

Paris, November 13, 2008 Barack Obama has said that he is not against war, only against stupid wars. One might then reasonably ask if the present war in Afghanistan is not a stupid war?

During the election campaign the president-elect said it was the right war (instead of the one in Iraq), and that he would even support opportunistic illegal raids into Pakistan to seize Osama bin Laden, in emulation of that contempt for international law that when displayed by the George W. Bush administration won the United States so much condemnation.

What is this war for? To seize Osama bin Laden and his associates. The American government believes that he and his headquarters are in Pakistan, and presumably has intelligence to support that conclusion -- although it has not been good enough for many months of American air attacks and special forces operations into the badlands of the Pakistani-Afghanistan frontier to succeed in capturing him.

What level of confidence do American officials have that he still is there, despite all the effort to find him? If he is still in Pakistans tribal region, and given that he is an intelligent man, why should he stay there, waiting to be bombed or captured? Assuming that he is still alive.

During the Vietnam war, according to Stanley Karnows comprehensive history, the American command insisted that there was a large Communist headquarters, COSVN, Central Office for South Vietnam, located in the so-called Fishhook region of Cambodia. That was one reason for the Nixon-Kissinger invasion of Cambodia. The combined South Vietnamese and American operation was in part motivated by the goal of finding and destroying this headquarters.

When they found it, according to Karnow, instead of being the miniature Pentagon imagined by official U.S. spokesmen, American troops found a scattering of empty huts, their occupants having fled weeks before.

What reason is there to think that Osama Bin Laden is less prudent than the Vietnamese? Given six years of warnings that Washington believes he is in the Pakistan tribal territories, and is trying to find him there, would it not be reasonable for him to make other arrangements?

Is it not possible that he and his headquarters would be gone by the time Americans, or their auxiliaries, the reluctant Pakistani army and frontier police, finally arrive? Assuming that they do.

Credit Crisis: The Guilty

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 13:00:00 CET

Paris, November 11, 2008 During a weekend discussion of the world credit crisis by the Trilateral European Group, meeting in Paris, one of a panel of bankers said that the time for recriminations is past; we all made mistakes, now we must look to the future, etc. At that, a member who is also a deputy in the French parliament leaped up and demanded the floor. What am I going to tell the public when in a few months the French unemployment rate has soared, and there are three million people marching in the streets of Paris? That we all made mistakes? That no one was really responsible?

The indignation was completely justified. Not only are there guilty men, but many have since compounded their guilt by what they have done with taxpayer money handed over to banks and financial institutions to restore the flow of credit essential to the economy. In the U.S., some have coolly diverted the money to buy up distressed institutions to aggrandize their own organization, profits, and personal perquisites.

In Washington, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson failed to impose conditions on the use of government aid, and only belatedly, under congressional pressure, stipulated that the public should benefit from any eventual profits generated by currently unsalable instruments. Taxpayers should have a share in any turnaround.

When British Prime Minister Gordon Brown introduced his plan to partially nationalize British banks, they were instructed that the money was for business loans to get the economy functioning. The American reluctance to set conditions apparently reflected the assumption that business and financial circles would consider this socialist interference with the free markets whose self-inflicted collapse had brought all of this on.

Rigid market ideology is a professional deformation of American bankers and flows through the veins of business itself (hence the furious debate over whether General Motors deserves government rescue from its own managerial incompetence). It also has influenced foreign bankers and business executives who learned their economics according to the doctrines proclaimed by the University of Chicago and Harvard Business School. They went home to attack such heresies as social capitalism and state supervision of finance, so that even Germany today finds some of its banks drowned in the tide of junk financial instruments from America.

The Neo-conservative Claim on Obama's Foreign Policy

Fri, 7 Nov 2008 15:50:00 CET

Paris, November 6, 2008 Since the triumph of Barack Obama nearly every medium of news and political comment in the United States and abroad has carried a compendium of challenges and dangers facing the new president. Yet when these challenges are examined, they nearly all turn out to be potential opportunities.

So far as they are obstacles, they usually involve efforts by other governments to block the United States from continuing policies of the Bush government meant to manipulate or intimidate them.

The basic Bush policies defense spending at levels higher than all the rest of the world combined, unilateralism, hostility to the UN and international law, advocacy of preventive wars, efforts to dominate the Middle East, constant pressure on Russia and what might be called contingent hostility towards China, opposition to European Union efforts at military cooperation all have been promoted since the 1990s by nationalist and neo-conservative Republicans acting through the conservative Washington think-tanks.

These reflect the long-term ambitions for economic and military hegemony which animated Bush administration foreign policy. Many of the same people and their followers will try to introduce the same ideas into the foreign policy of the new Obama government. The newly-elected president is a foreign policy novice and will find himself under great pressure to follow Middle Eastern and China and Russia policies inherited from George Bush, even though these are what Barack Obama was elected to change or terminate.

The Nominee

Wed, 5 Nov 2008 16:10:00 CET

Paris, November 4, 2008 I write on election day, but because of the transatlantic time difference I do so at about the hour most American polling places on the East Coast have just opened, with the other time zones to follow. Thus the great question of who becomes the 44th American president is known to you reading this, but not to me until early morning tomorrow. The evidence says Barack Obama, but other outcomes remain possible, above all the one that many in the Obama camp have kept raising, that of vote or voting machine tampering in certain swing states.

After the enormous number of new voter registrations, and the unprecedented numbers of early voters during the weekend and when polls opened Tuesday, generally presumed signs of Obama support, serious evidence of voting machine manipulation or vote count fraud would stir loud protest and possible street demonstrations by Obama voters -- no doubt welcomed by Republican militants and Bush administration officials anxious to discredit or if possible reverse as revolutionary an Obama victory.

The striking thing about the campaign platforms of the two candidates has been their totally unrevolutionary spirit. To judge from them, very little tangible change would come from victory by either side. Even a mountainous Democratic victory that gave Obama a filibuster-proof Congressional majority seems likely to give birth only to political mice.

The campaigns have made much noise over issues open to dramatic legislative change. Financing expanded health care generates much heat, but neither Republicans nor Democrats would dream of so daring a step as to take the private insurance companies and their profitable bureaucracies out of the system and go to a single-payer government program, as in Britain and Canada, or the highly successful government plus mutual insurance system in France (considered by the World Health Organization the most successful in the world). By some calculations this could save as much as $350 billion a year to an American health system that at present is simultaneously the most expensive and least effective in the advanced industrial world.

On the environment, Obama offered 80% reduction in harmful emissions by 2050 (over the 1990 level). McCain said 60% reduction between now and 2050, and $300 million to invent a new battery for hybrid or electrical cars, plus oil rigs in the prohibited areas of Alaska. Obama counters with $150 billion for new energy sources and maybe (or maybe not) offshore drillings in Alaska. On immigration, both want stricter controls.

Ho Hum! Nothing much in this to set the tumbrels rolling. One issue on which people are passionate is the politics of future supreme court appointments, which formerly was a boring matter of established judicial eminence, but now is totally ideological.

Henry Kissinger on McGeorge Bundy and Vietnam

Mon, 3 Nov 2008 19:40:00 CET

Paris, October 30, 2008 Henry Kissinger has just published [IHT Oct.29] a curious and revealing review of a new book on the Vietnam war, written by the man who was the research associate for McGeorge Bundys projected account of his period in the 1960s as National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Bundy did not live to write his planned book. His research collaborator, Gordon M. Goldstein, has now collected fragments of Bundys draft materials and other writings, together with the documentary research he had assembled for their joint book, and turned it into an new account of the Vietnam war as reflected in the papers that crossed the desk of the National Security advisor and the other documents with which Bundy worked. The book is called "Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (to be published November 11).

Kissingers review is unexpected in its implied sympathy for Goldsteins work, despite the fact that he describes it as unremittingly hostile to Bundys decisions in office. This was the crucial period when the ground was prepared for the eventually huge U.S. military intervention in Indochina that followed, but it deals with events preceding Richard Nixons election to the presidency in 1968, when Kissinger became National Security Advisor.

Kissinger draws policy lessons from the book that seem at odds with the policy followed by himself and Richard Nixon in Vietnam, but more to the point today is that they conflict with the policy followed by George W. Bush in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the currently enlarged NATO war in Afghanistan.

In talking about Bundy, Kissinger notes that Bundy was a man of the second world war and had uncritically transferred his convictions, and worse, his strategic conceptions about Communisms containment and the Soviet military threat from the European cold war theater to Southeast Asia, where there were no firm military or political front lines, and where the challenge was to the legitimacy of governments, which was not determined by military power.

Obama & McCain: Economics & Foreign Policy

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:30:00 CET

Paris, October 30, 2008 -- The real issues of the American presidential election are the future of the economy and the future of American foreign policy. The one seems already settled. The second seems to unite John McCain and Barack Obama in support of a program doomed to fail.

The first is a matter of economic ideology. McCain, who admits that the subject doesnt really interest him, has made the traditional Republican argument that cutting taxes, particularly for the rich, causes economic growth. It says markets are the best available mechanism for making economic choices, and should not be regulated, since in the end individuals acting in their selfish interest always collectively make the best economic judgements.

This inherently implausible doctrine now is all but impossible to defend, since Alan Greenspan himself has confessed that his lifelong convictions have been disproven. These ultimately rested on the teaching of the cult writer Ayn Rand, that individual selfishness is the highest public virtue. American finance and business have now conclusively demonstrated that this is not true.

Obama believes that markets should be regulated and that government has an indispensable role to play in the direction of the national economy. McCain attacks him as a socialist, a meaningless term of abuse. The only socialists currently active in the modern industrial world are members of major European parties who alternate with conservatives and centrists in the direction of successful and competitive national economies, such as those of the European Union.

On this count, the vote has to go to Obama, who clearly is in touch with the realities, while McCains economic convictions are now part of the ruins that stretch from Wall Street to the family with the foreclosed mortgage.

The second big issue is foreign and security policy, where the two candidates have disputed how and when the United States should withdraw from Iraq, and whether priority should be placed on the struggle in Afghanistan.

Sarkozy and Russian-European Relations

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 13:00:00 CEST

Paris, October 23, 2008 Andrei Grachev, the former official spokesman of Mikhail Gorbachev during the final period of the Soviet Unions existence and one of the most thoughtful survivors of the Soviet Union, made an interesting point about Russias new president, Dimitri Medvedev, during a recent talk at the American University of Paris. He said that Medvedevs greatest importance is that he embodies generational change in Russia. Vladimir Putin is a man of the Soviet era, formed in its most important ruling institution, the KGB. He sees and reacts to the world from that perspective.

While Medvedev came to power by the grace and favor of Putin, he was formed in a Russia where the Soviet Union was over and done with. The Wests influences were the most important issues for his generation. How to westernize Russia itself, in the sense of finding the place for it in global institutions dominated by the United States and Europe.

Vladimir Putin as president offered a chance for changed relations with the West, but it was not taken up. The language still was of partnership and cooperation, when George W. Bush remained convinced that he had looked into Putins soul and found it good; but Washington was interested in drawing Russia into western institutions on American terms.

The enlargement of NATO to the former Warsaw Pact states, and then to states formerly part of the Soviet Union itself, has been crucial, in my opinion. There had to be hostility in Moscow to what clearly seemed military encirclement of Russia. The opportunity was lost to create, with Putin, a new relationship between Russia and the West.

With Medvedev, there may be a second chance to spare the world a sterile reenactment of a cold war that no longer has any serious purpose.

When Russia was a Leninist state it had an ideological mission to remake human society, a messianism historically linked to the era when the Russian church believed Russia the Third Rome (after Rome itself, and Constantinople), with Gods final message of salvation for the world. That all ended in the horrors of the second world war and then the cold war.

Russia's Revenge

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:40:00 CEST

Paris, October 21, 2008 It did not take the clash between Russia and Georgia to reveal that relations between Russia and the West have taken a bad turn. They have been deteriorating since the mid-1990s, when the decision was taken to expand NATO to include the former Warsaw Pact states.

At the time of that decision, George F. Kennan, the most eminent American diplomat of his time, said this could be the most disastrous mistake made in American foreign policy in decades. He erred only in underestimating the comparative scale of the blunders that would follow, in the George W. Bush administration.

In a recent column I quoted the final U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, on the promise made personally by President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev that if East Germany was allowed to unite with West Germany, and the U.S.S.R. placed no obstacle to a unified Germanys continuing as a NATO member, the western alliance would not attempt to expand any farther into what had been Warsaw Pact Europe.

The president and the secretary of state agreed, with Baker saying, according to Matlock, not one inch. In September 1990, German unification took place.

Unfortunately the agreement seems never to have been written down. Chairman Gorbachev undoubtedly looked deeply into Bush and Bakers eyes, as Bushs son was eleven years later to look deep into the eyes of Vladimir Putin. Gorbachev saw the souls of American gentlemen.

Or it may have been that there was misunderstanding all around. Bush may have been assuring Gorbachev that NATO forces would never move into what was about to cease to be the German Democratic Republic - which indeed they did not, and have not.

It was Bill Clinton then who arrived in the White House at a time when the U.S. lobbies of the East European countries were demanding that these be included in NATO. The most influential was the Polish lobby in Chicago, which could swing the city and perhaps the state. In 1994 the so-called Partnership for Peace was created, a kind of cadet-membership in NATO. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined, and in 1999 became full members of NATO.

Europe Takes the Western Crisis Lead

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 12:20:00 CEST

Paris, October 16, 2008 Events since the beginning of August have made a deep impression on West European perceptions of European possibilities and European-American relations, now and in the future.
Accustomed to sixty years of deference to Washingtons leadership (and sometimes its intimidation), Europeans justified this to themselves by the overall success of the American economic system, into which they were drawn by the Marshall Plan following the second world war, the immense development of transatlantic trade and financial integration, and since the 1990s, by globalization.

Their political subordination also had a wartime and postwar origin, reinforced by American patronage of the European Union, the insecurities of the cold war, NATO, and by simple political inertia and fear of destabilizing change.

Most important has undoubtedly been the profound loss of self-confidence and the crippled ambition inflicted upon European civilization ever since the uncontrollable blood-letting of the first world war. Americans, isolated from all that, perhaps knew better how to run the world.

The United States, as Richard Holbrook observed several years ago, became and has remained in certain respects a European power ever since the second world war. Europeans have often grumbled, and Charles DeGaulle during his 1950s presidency successfully reestablished French political and strategic autonomy. But Frances critical position versus the U.S. has had relatively little serious consequence except by de-legitimating, so to speak, the Bush Administrations invasion of Iraq in 2003, forcing Washington to give up the attempt to win UN Security Council approval for that war.

That was six years ago, and Nicolas Sarkozy, when elected Frances president in 2007, proclaimed his admiration for the U.S. and his intention to restore France to full NATO membership. But since then, much political and financial drama has occurred.

Europeans and European governments alienated from Americas Iraq and Palestine-Israel policies, its use of torture and illegal imprisonment, and now being drawn by NATO towards the intractable Afghanistan-Pakistan tragedy, have become increasingly hostile to military involvements at Americas side. Whatever their doubts, though, Americas best friends in Europe this year mostly convinced themselves that Barack Obama was sure to be elected president, and that as Americans once sang of the Democratic presidential candidacy of the unlucky Alfred E. Smith in 1928, Happy Days Will Be Here Again.

America's National Strategy of Global Intervention

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:00:00 CEST

Paris, October 15, 2008 Last June the U.S. Department of Defense unexpectedly issued a new version of its National Defense Strategy. It was unexpected because there will be a new administration in Washington in January which might be expected to issue a statement of its own ideas about military strategy.

Some in Washington speculated that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, only recently named to that office, a man who gets along with Democrats as well as Republications, might be bidding to keep his job under a new administration.

The new statement lacks the Bush administrations unilateralism and triumphalism (as if there were anything left to be triumphal about), but it foresees a Long War of promoting freedom, justice and human dignity by working to end tyranny, promote effective democracies and extend prosperity; and confronting the challenges of our time by leading a growing community of democracies.

All that is straight Bush doctrine, drawn from his second inaugural address and Condoleezza Rices policy statement last summer predicting decades of a new American realism of nation-building to conquer extremism. By now the Long War, realistic or not, will have become orthodoxy for most of the Washington defense and strategic studies community.

The noteworthy thing about this National Defense Strategy statement is that it says nothing directly about American national defense. It is a strategy for intervening in other countries, and preventing others from blocking or resisting American interventions.