By Larry Jones
On March 22 the New York Times announced a new online film by activist film maker Robert Greenwald called “RETHINK AFGHANISTAN.” Produced by Greenwald’s company, Brave New Foundation, it is only 12 minutes long but packed with valuable and thought provoking insights, even with its limitations. You can view it here. http://rethinkafghanistan.com/troop_full.php
President Barack Obama has already sent a military surge of 17,000 troops to Afghanistan and a few days ago he announced that he’s now about to send a surge of diplomats and civilian advisors to the country. The problem he faces is the growing reality that the U.S. faces great difficulties imposing a military “solution” upon Afghanistan, and it’s doubtful that very many Afghans want foreign diplomats and advisors to try to remake their country either.
The consistent theme of Greenwald’s film is that the U.S. has no easy way of achieving what could be called “victory” in Afghanistan. Foreign correspondent and author Stephen Kinzer says the Afghans’ outlook is “I will be your friend as long as you don’t do the thing that is most vile in the Pashtun tradition.” Most Afghans are ethnic Pashtuns. Kinzer continues, “Do not invade my woman’s dressing room, do not invade my house, do not invade my complex, do not invade my village, do not invade my country.” As Kinzer says these words, the film shows U.S. troops doing these very things, a point he states with emotion.
At one point Kinzer says that “sending more troops will work only if this is a military problem. This is not a military problem.” This point is made over and again throughout the film.
More U.S. Military Means More Civilian Casualties, More Resistance
“More troops will cause more casualties of civilians, and more casualties of civilians will bring more people to join the insurgency and Taliban,” states Mohammad Osman Tariq, president of the pro-democracy group the National Council for Peace and Democracy in Afghanistan. However, it is certainly not clear that most Afghans are for a Western-style democracy for their country. The film talks about the Afghan police who were trained by U.S. troops but have now gone over to the Taliban. “We don’t want you to build our bridges or our roads, we just want you to leave,” says one of them.
The great validity of “RETHINK AFGHANISTAN” is that it sharply points out the futility of the U.S. mission there. American troops don’t understand either the culture or the language of Afghanistan, making identity with the masses almost impossible. Furthermore, the geography of the country make its military domination very difficult for any invader. Sixty percent of Afghanistan is rural, which cannot really be controlled, says Anand Gopal of the Christian Science Monitor. “Only the urban areas can be controlled, and I’m talking about five or six houses in a row as an urban area.”
The film makes clear that it takes forty troops to one Afghan to establish any kind of control and that means about 225,000 troops. When the Soviet Union was fighting the Taliban in the ‘80s they had over a million troops in Afghanistan.
An ABC News report within the film shows that the longer the U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, the less people polled support them.
The film offers no advice for the U.S. to follow. However, Brave New Foundation’s home page offers a letter one can sign calling for Congressional oversight of the Afghan involvement. Greenwald is known for his films about war profiteers, Wal-Mart’s lousy corporate practices, and an expose of Fox “News” Channel. However, his political outlook, while refreshing and welcome, is nevertheless seen through the prism of the U.S. capitalist/imperialist system.
I urge people to watch the film and forward it to friends, but to also recognize that appealing to Congress to oversee the Afghanistan situation is a bit like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. What is needed, and very urgently, is massive independent political opposition to the utterly unjust war for empire that the United States, under the leadership of Barack Obama, is waging in Afghanistan.
Larry Jones describes himself as a former Protestant minister and American, but says he gave them both up for the sake of humanity.