Drones Are Fool's Gold: They Prolong Wars We Can't Win

White House Hail In An Era Of Hands-Free Warfare. Yet These Weapons Induce Not Defeat, But Retaliation

By Simon Jenkins
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"

The greatest threat to world peace is not from nuclear weapons and their possible proliferation. It is from drones and their certain proliferation. Nuclear bombs are useless weapons, playthings for the powerful or those aspiring to power. Drones are now sweeping the global arms market. There are some 10,000 said to be in service, of which a thousand are armed and mostly American. Some reports say they havekilled more non-combatant civilians than died in 9/11.

I have not read one independent study of the current drone wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the horn of Africa that suggests these weapons serve any strategic purpose. Their "success" is expressed solely in body count, the number of so-called "al-Qaida-linked commanders" killed. If body count were victory, the Germans would have won Stalingrad and the Americans Vietnam.

Neither the legality nor the ethics of drone attacks bear examination. Last year's exhaustive report by lawyers from Stanford and New York universities concluded that they were in many cases illegal, killed civilians, and were militarily counter-productive. Among the deaths were an estimated 176 children. Such slaughter would have an infantry unit court-martialled. Air forces enjoy such prestige that civilian deaths are excused as a price worth paying for not jeopardising pilots' lives.

This week President Obama appointed two drone "enthusiasts" as his new defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, and his new CIA chief, John Brennan. Drone war is now the flavour of the month and the military-industrial complex is licking its lips. If Obama, himself a lawyer, had any reservations about the legality of these weapons, he has clearly overcome them.

Quite apart from ethics and law, I find it impossible to see what contribution these weapons make to winning wars. The killing of officers merely sees others replace them, eager for revenge. The original Predator was intended for surveillance but was adapted for bombing specifically to kill Osama bin Laden. When he was finally found, the drone was considered too inaccurate a device to risk, and old-fashioned boots-with-guns had to be sent instead.

As for the inevitable killing of civilians, however few or many, this is not just "collateral damage" but critical to victory or defeat. It does not occupy or hold territory and it devastates hearts and minds. Aerial bombardment has long been a questionable weapon of war. It induces not defeat but retaliation.

On Monday a BBC documentary on the siege of Malta devastatingly charted the German bombing assault, the most intensive of the second world war. Though it took a heavy toll on the island's infrastructure it did not stop its resistance. Belief in bombers and the failure to invade Malta cost Germany the Africa campaign. A weapon of airborne terror that fails to cow an enemy and merely invites defiance is not effective at all. Three-quarters of Pakistanis are now declared enemies of the US.

Yet each week Obama apparently sits down and goes through a "kill list" of Muslims he intends to eliminate, with no judicial process and no more identification than the word of a dodgy spy on the ground. At least Britain's drones in Helmand, we are told, are used only in close air support for ground troops.

Since the drone war began in earnest in 2008, there has been no decline in Taliban or al-Qaida performance attributable to it. Any let-up in recruitment is merely awaiting Nato's departure. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has called the attacks "in no way justifiable". The Pakistan government, at whose territory they are increasingly directed, haswithdrawn all permission.

The young Yemeni writer Ibrahim Mothana protested in the New York Times of the carnage drones are wreaking on the politics of his country, erasing "years of progress and trust-building with tribes". Yemenis now face al-Qaida recruiters waving pictures of drone-butchered women and children in their faces. Notional membership of al-Qaida in Yemen is reported to have grown by three times since 2009. Jimmy Carterdeclares that "America's violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends".

The drone wars seem pointless yet unstoppable. Their appeal to western leaders lies partly in their sheer novelty, partly in the hope they may make defeat less awful. They are like the USS New Jersey's shelling of Lebanon's Chouf mountains in 1984, a blood-thirsty display to cover withdrawal. The drone is not an aid to victory, but it eases the defeat its use has made more likely.

The Taliban in Waziristan are no threat to London or to Washington. Al-Qaida can do no more to undermine the state than set off the occasional bomb, best prevented by domestic intelligence. Today's "wars of choice" reflect a more sinister aspect of democracy. Elected leaders seem to crave them, defying all warnings of the difficulty of ending them. Mesmerised by Margaret Thatcher's gain from the Falklands, they all want a good war.

In this the drone is fool's gold. Driven by high-pressure arms salesmanship, Obama (and David Cameron) are briefed that they are the no-hands war of the future, safe, easy, clean, "precision targeted". No one on our side need get hurt. Someone else can do the dirty work on the ground.

The tenuous legality of this form of combat requires the aggressor to have "declared war" on another state. But al-Qaida is no state. As a result these attacks on foreign soil are not just wars of choice, they are wars of self-invention. How soon will it be before the US finds itself "at war" with Iran and Syria, and sends over the drones? When it does, and the killing starts, it can hardly complain when the victims retaliate with suicide bombers.

Nor will it just be suicide bombers. Drones are cheap and will easily proliferate. Eleven states deploy them already. The US is selling them to Japan to help against China. China is building 11 bases for its Anjian drones along its coast. The Pentagon is now training more drone operators than pilots. What happens when every nation with an air force does likewise, and every combustible border is buzzing with them?

I did not fear nuclear proliferation because I believe such bombs are mere prestige acquisitions, so horrible not even lunatics would use them. Drones are different. When they were called guided missiles, they were in some degree governed by international law and protocol, as was the practice of global assassination.

Obama rejects all that. He and the US are teaching the world that a pilotless aircraft is a self-justifying, self-exonerating, legal and effective weapon of war. However counter-productive a drone may be strategically, it cuts a glamorous dash on the home front. It is hard to imagine a greater danger to world peace.

"As We Search For Monsters, We Create Them"

When a country conducts foreign policy like the United States, you really can't be shocked when violence is directed toward its officials.


Last year Chris Stevens was very active in helping the Libyan rebels from Benghazi and other towns, to overthrow Gaddafi's dictatorship:

Chris Stevens, a former U.S. Embassy official in Tripoli and the highest-ranking U.S. representative to travel to Libya since the uprising began, will explore ways to open the funding spigots for an opposition movement that is desperately short of cash and supplies, a State Department spokesman said Tuesday.

“We’re well aware that there’s an urgency,” spokesman Mark Toner told reporters. “The Transitional National Council does need funding if it’s to survive, and we’re looking for ways to assist them.”

When the operation to topple and kill Gaddhafi was completed, Stevens was named U.S. ambassador to Libya.

As ambassador Chas W. Freeman explained in a speech last week:

The so-called “global war on terror” or “militant Islam,” as so many now openly describe it, has become an endless run in a military squirrel cage that is generating no light but a lot of future anti-American terrorism. It turns out that all that is required to be hated is to do hateful things. Ironically, as we “search abroad for monsters to destroy,” we are creating them – transforming our foreign detractors into terrorists, multiplying their numbers, intensifying their militancy, and fortifying their hatred of us. The sons and brothers of those we have slain know where we are. They do not forget. No quarter is given in wars of religion. We are generating the very menace that entered our imaginations on 9/11.Those lovable rebels that heroically dragged Gaddhafi's body through the streets of Libya's are now "thugs" for doing the same to the U.S. ambassador. This is obviously a self inflicted wound. . . .

Murdering the U.S. Ambassador in Libya will make further U.S. support for the insurgency in Syria, which is also supported by Al Qaeda and by Libyan Salafist fighters, more unlikely. One might even hope that this incident will lead to a complete turn around of current U.S. policies towards Syria. Hillary Clinton's and the other state department furies who had urged the U.S. to attack Libya and who are also behind the drive against Syria are now confronted with the ruins of their policies. They carry at least some blame for yesterday's deaths.

Heart & Mind-O-Matic

Post by "Sayf Maslul"


By "Mark Fiore"


Learn all about the US drone program in Pakistan and other lucky countries across the globe! See how fortunate one young villager is to have the US looking out for him and fighting extremism. Never mind the attacks on funerals and rescuers. A Mark Fiore political animation.

U.S. Troops Posed With Body Parts Of Afghan Bombers

A soldier from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division with a dead insurgent's hand on his shoulder. It's one of 18 photos given to The Times of troops posing with corpses.


An American soldier says he released the photos to the Los Angeles Times to draw attention to the safety risk of a breakdown in leadership and discipline. The Army has started a criminal investigation.

By David Zucchino,
April 18, 2012, 4:30 a.m.
Courtesy of "The Los Angeles Times"

The paratroopers had their assignment: Check out reports that Afghan police had recovered the mangled remains of an insurgent suicide bomber. Try to get iris scans and fingerprints for identification.

The 82nd Airborne Division soldiers arrived at the police station in Afghanistan's Zabol province in February 2010. They inspected the body parts. Then the mission turned macabre: The paratroopers posed for photos next to Afghan police, grinning while some held — and others squatted beside — the corpse's severed legs.

A few months later, the same platoon was dispatched to investigate the remains of three insurgents who Afghan police said had accidentally blown themselves up. After obtaining a few fingerprints, they posed next to the remains, again grinning and mugging for photographs.


Two soldiers posed holding a dead man's hand with the middle finger raised. A soldier leaned over the bearded corpse while clutching the man's hand. Someone placed an unofficial platoon patch reading "Zombie Hunter" next to other remains and took a picture.

The Army launched a criminal investigation after the Los Angeles Times showed officials copies of the photos, which recently were given to the paper by a soldier from the division.

"It is a violation of Army standards to pose with corpses for photographs outside of officially sanctioned purposes," said George Wright, an Army spokesman. "Such actions fall short of what we expect of our uniformed service members in deployed areas."

Wright said that after the investigation, the Army would "take appropriate action" against those involved. Most of the soldiers in the photos have been identified, said Lt. Col. Margaret Kageleiry, an Army spokeswoman.

The photos have emerged at a particularly sensitive moment for U.S.-Afghan relations. In January, a video appeared on the Internet showing four U.S. Marines urinating on Afghan corpses. In February, the inadvertent burning of copies of the Koran at a U.S. base triggered riots that left 30 dead and led to the deaths of six Americans. In March, a U.S. Army sergeant went on a nighttime shooting rampage in two Afghan villages, killing 17.

The soldier who provided The Times with a series of 18 photos of soldiers posing with corpses did so on condition of anonymity. He served in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne's 4th Brigade Combat Team from Ft. Bragg, N.C. He said the photos point to a breakdown in leadership and discipline that he believed compromised the safety of the troops.

He expressed the hope that publication would help ensure that alleged security shortcomings at two U.S. bases in Afghanistan in 2010 were not repeated. The brigade, under new command but with some of the same paratroopers who served in 2010, began another tour in Afghanistan in February.

U.S. military officials asked The Times not to publish any of the pictures.

Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said the conduct depicted "most certainly does not represent the character and the professionalism of the great majority of our troops in Afghanistan.... Nevertheless, this imagery — more than two years old — now has the potential to indict them all in the minds of local Afghans, inciting violence and perhaps causing needless casualties."

Kirby added, "We have taken the necessary precautions to protect our troops in the event of any backlash."

Times Editor Davan Maharaj said, "After careful consideration, we decided that publishing a small but representative selection of the photos would fulfill our obligation to readers to report vigorously and impartially on all aspects of the American mission in Afghanistan, including the allegation that the images reflect a breakdown in unit discipline that was endangering U.S. troops."

The photos were taken during a yearlong deployment of the 3,500-member brigade, which lost 35 men during that time, according to icasualties.org, a website that tracks casualties. At least 23 were killed by homemade bombs or suicide bombers.

Suicide attacks on two bases of the brigade's 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment killed six U.S. soldiers and four Afghan interpreters. The platoon whose soldiers posed for the photos was part of the battalion.

The soldier who provided the photos, and two other former members of the battalion, said in separate interviews that they and others had complained of inadequate security at the two bases.

An Army investigation into a July 2010 suicide attack in Kandahar that killed four U.S. soldiers found that senior members of the battalion had complained about security. But it concluded that force protection measures were "reasonable and prudent" in the face of limited resources.

Virtually all of the men depicted in the photos had friends who were killed or wounded by homemade bombs or suicide attacks, according to the soldier who provided the images. One paratrooper on the mission wore a bracelet bearing the name of a fallen comrade.

On the first mission, to the police station in the provincial capital of Qalat, Afghan police told the platoon that the severed legs belonged to a suicide bomber whose explosives detonated as he tried to attack a police unit, according to the soldier who provided the photos.

On the second mission, to the morgue in Qalat in late April or early May 2010, Afghan police told the platoon that explosives had detonated as three insurgents were preparing a roadside bomb.

The platoon was able to obtain some fingerprints from the corpses for a database maintained by U.S. forces, the soldier said.

The soldiers felt a sense of triumph and satisfaction, especially after learning that the insurgents had been killed by their own explosives, he said.

"They were frustrated, just pissed off — their buddies had been blown up by IEDs" — improvised explosive devices — the soldier said. "So they sort of just celebrated."

The Qalat photos were circulated among several members of the platoon, the soldier said, and soldiers often joked about them. Most of the soldiers in the photos were low-ranking — including six specialists or privates.

Col. Brian Drinkwine, then-commander of the 4th Brigade, and Lt. Col. David Oclander, then-commander of the 1st Battalion, said they were not authorized to comment on the photos.

The Pentagon declined a Times request that Army officials contact all active-duty soldiers in the photos to provide an opportunity to comment. The Times sent requests for comment by email and Facebook to seven soldiers in the photos. One, now serving in Afghanistan, declined to comment. The others did not respond.

The photos were taken during a tumultuous period in the brigade's deployment.

In January 2010, the commander of the brigade's 2nd Battalion and the battalion's top noncommissioned officer were relieved of duty and ordered home after slides with racial and sexist overtones were shown during daily PowerPoint briefings.

Separately, an Army investigation criticized Drinkwine for failing to prevent his wife from threatening and harassing some unit officers and their spouses during the deployment.

Ft. Bragg's commanding general, Lt. Gen. Frank Helmick, told the Fayetteville Observer in June 2010 that Drinkwine had created "a dysfunctional situation" in the unit. Drinkwine remained in command until after the deployment ended that August.

Making Taliban

By John Glaser,
April 03, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

Via Malou Innocent, embedded journalist Neil Shea writes in The American Scholarabout the mistreatment perpetrated on Afghans by U.S. soldiers, which the media (including himself, he admits) never include in the war coverage. From shooting valuable animals and pets to demolishing a family’s house and physically abusing civilians, Shea wonders how many “Taliban” were created as a response to this treatment.

Many times I have watched soldiers or Marines, driven by boredom or fear, behave selfishly and meanly, even illegally, in minor ways. In a few searing moments I have wondered what would come next, what the men would do to prisoners or civilians or suspected insurgents.

…The soldiers of Destroyer talked about how their house searches had become demolition parties. They shattered windows and china, broke furniture, hurled civilians to the ground. Earlier that day, they had blown up a building.

In reference to an Afghan prisoner:

“I think he remembers we were the ones who fucked him up last night,” the soldier said to Givens. “I think he’s starin’ at you.”

“Fuck him,” Givens said. “The only reason he’s still alive is because the United States of America holds 25 to life over my head.”

…”Yeah, we definitely made some Taliban out here,” he said. “It was like a week-long Taliban recruiting drive. And we had fun doing it. I love recruiting for the Taliban. It’s called job security.”

'Most Captured Taliban Were Civilians'

General David Petraeus says progress has been made against the Taliban, but critics think he conflated the number of fighters captured by US forces [GALLO/GETTY]


News Agency Says US Military Documents Indicate That Four In Five Captured Afghan 'Taliban' Were Actually Civilians.

By Gareth Porter
Last Modified: 27 Jun 2011 15:04
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

During his intensive initial round of media interviews as commander in Afghanistan in August 2010, General David Petraeus released figures to the news media that claimed spectacular success for raids by Special Operations Forces (SOF): in a 90-day period from May through July, SOF units captured 1,355 rank and file Taliban, killed another 1,031, and killed or captured 365 middle or high-ranking Taliban.

The claims of huge numbers of Taliban captured and killed continued through the rest of 2010. In December, Petraeus's command said a total of 4,100 Taliban rank and file had been captured in the previous six months and 2,000 had been killed.

Those figures were critical to creating a new media narrative hailing the success of SOF operations as reversing what had been a losing US strategy in Afghanistan.

But it turns out that more than 80 per cent of those called captured Taliban fighters were released within days of having been picked up, because they were found to have been innocent civilians, according to official US military data.

Even more were later released from the main US detention facility at Bagram airbase called the Detention Facility in Parwan after having their files reviewed by a panel of military officers.

Data Examined

The timing of Petraeus's claim of Taliban fighters captured or killed, moreover, indicates that he knew that four out of five of those he was claiming as "captured Taliban rank and file" were not Taliban fighters at all.

Checking on the claims of the number of Taliban commanders and rank and file killed is impossible, but the claims of Taliban captured could be checked against official data on admission of detainees added to Parwan.

An Afghan detained by US or NATO forces can only be held in a Forward Operating Base for a maximum of 14 days before a decision must be made about whether to release the individual or send him to Parwan for longer-term detention.

Inter Press Service news agency has now obtained an unclassified graph by Task Force 435, the military command responsible for detainee affairs, on Parwan's monthly intake and release totals for 2010, which shows that only 270 detainees were admitted to that facility during the 90-day period from May through July 2010.

That figure also includes alleged Taliban commanders who were sent to Parwan and whom Petraeus counted separately from the rank and file figure. Thus more than four out of every five Afghans said to have been Taliban fighters captured during that period had been released within two weeks as innocent civilians.

When Petraeus decided in mid-August to release the figure of 1,355 Taliban rank and file allegedly captured during the 90-day period, he already knew that 80 percent or more of that total had already been released.

Major Sunset R Belinsky, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) press officer for SOF operations, conceded last September that the 1,355 figure applied only to "initial detentions".

Task Force 435 commander Admiral Robert Harward confirmed in a press briefing for journalists on November 30, 2010 that 80 per cent of the Afghans detained by the US military during the entire year to that point had been released within two weeks.

"This year, in this battlespace, approximately 5,500 individuals have been detained," Harward said, adding the crucial fact that "about 1,100 have come to the detention facility in Parwan."

Harward did not explain the discrepancy between the two figures, however, and no journalist attending the Pentagon briefing asked for such an explanation.

Petraeus continued to exploit media ignorance of the discrepancy between the number of Taliban rank and file said to have been "captured" and the number actually sent to the FDIP.

Numbers Game

In early December, ISAF gave Bill Roggio, a blogger for "The Long War Journal" website, the figure of more than 4,100 "enemy fighters" captured from June 1 through November 30, along with 2,000 rank and file Taliban killed.

But during those six months, only 690 individuals were sent to Parwan, according to the Task Force 435 data – 17 per cent of the 4,100 Taliban rank and file claimed captured as "Taliban".

The total of 690 detainees also includes an unknown number of commanders counted separately by Petraeus and a large number of detainees who were later released from Parwan. Considering those two factors, the actual proportion of those claimed as captured Taliban who were found not to be part of the Taliban organisation rises to 90 per cent or even higher.

Three hundred forty-five detainees, or 20 percent of the 1,686 total number of those who were detained in Parwan from June through November, were released upon review of their cases, according to the same February 5, 2011 Task Force document obtained by IPS news agency. The vast majority of those released from the facility had been sent to Parwan in June or later.

Detainees are released from Parwan only when the evidence against them is so obviously weak or nonexistent that U.S officers cannot justify continuing to hold them, despite the fact that the detainees lack normal procedural rights in the "non-adversarial" hearing by the Task Force's Detainee Review.

The deliberate confusion sowed by Petraeus by referring to anyone picked up for interrogation as a captured rank and file Taliban was a key element of a carefully considered strategy for creating a more favourable image of the war.

As Associated Press reporter Kimberly Dozier wrote in a Sepember 3, 2010 news analysis after an interview with Petraeus, he was very conscious that "demonstrating progress is difficult in a war fought in hundreds of small, scattered engagements, where frontlines do not move and where cities do not fall."

SOF raids, however, could be turned into a dramatic story line. "The mystique of elite, highly trained commandos swooping down on an unsuspecting Taliban leader in the dead of night plays well back home," wrote Dozier, "especially at a time when much of the news from Afghanistan focuses on rising American deaths and frustration with the Afghan government."

Petraeus made sure the impact of the new SOF narrative would be maximised by presenting the total of Afghans swept up in SOF raids as actual Taliban fighters.

The deceptive nature of those statistics, as now revealed by US military data, raises anew the question of whether the statistics released by Petraeus on killing of alleged Taliban were similarly skewed.

A version of this story was first published by Inter Press Service news agency.

The Military Occupation of Our Minds

By Tom Hayden
Former state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice and environmental movements
Posted: April 27, 2010 04:25 PM
Courtesy Of The Huffington Post

As Congress weighs Afghanistan funding, the military is escalating what it calls the "war of perceptions" at home and abroad. The question is whether the American media and Congress will collaborate in the Pentagon's press strategy or retain a critical edge.

It is no accident that the Pentagon is shaping the "information battlespace" by welcoming friendly reporters and think tank hacks to beam back commentaries about the Kandahar offensive to the American people.

Nor is it accidental that the US is soft-pedaling any public criticism of its crooked crony in Kabul, Hamid Karzhai, as thousands of American soldiers are being dispatched to face bullets in his defense.

Nor is there any question that Afghan civilian casualties are being downplayed or covered-up. The agency in charge of counting the bodies, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, published a footnote last year admitting "there is a significant possibility that UNAMA is under-reporting civilian casualties."

Paranoia? Do we live under Orwellian thought control? Of course not. But we the people, the media and the Congress, routinely accept taxpayer-funded Pentagon and White House public relations narratives. These often take disgusting forms, such as the false claims and cover-up that soldier Pat Tillman died under enemy fire, or the recent Special Forces' killing of three pregnant women which was followed by digging of bullets out of their bodies to cover up the crime.

The current cycle of military media manipulation began with the Iraq war, when the Pentagon enticed generals, intelligence officers, and defense contractors to become "message force multipliers" for the Bush administration's version of the war, "sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated." It took a New York Times' lawsuit to uncover 8,000 pages of documents showing that the chosen surrogates could be counted on to deliver propaganda messages "in the form of their own opinions."

The strategy goes far deeper than the sleaze of everyday public relations. This is about the Pentagon's turning of computer science into a weapon in the emerging field of information warfare, in which the deaths of men, women and children are less important than the perception of those deaths, or whether they are perceived by anyone at all. As Gen. McChrystal, whose entire career in Iraq remains a classified secret, said during a February briefing:

"This is not a physical war of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants."

McChrystal also has said, in a recent London speech, that Afghanistan is not like a football game but more "like a political debate after which both sides announce they have won."

McChrystal went on a public relations offensive to promote his request for a troop escalation earlier this year, giving interviews to the New York Times, Le Figaro, Newsweek, and to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

He was featured as a modern god delivering us from the impersonal forces of fate, in a worshipful piece by Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic in February. (In a 2003 Atlantic piece by Kaplan, titled "Supremacy by Stealth," he advised that America's wars best be fought "off camera, so to speak.")

Prior to the current media offensive someone leaked (or was it a pre-emptive launch?) McChrystal's August 30, 2009 confidential assessment of Afghanistan, which includes a length section on "Strategic Communication", where McChrystal declares that "the information domain is a battlespace" in the war over perceptions.

The irony is that the Taliban insurgents, with little if any information technology, "have undermined the credibility of the ISAF, the international community [IC], and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan [GIRoA]", according to McChrystal's own analysis. (It is noteworthy that the Afghan government is never referred to in the American media as an "Islamic Republic," because the frame is communicated to Afghans only.)

Shortening the term Strategic Communications to StratCom, McChrystal goes on for five single-spaced pages with directives for dominating the information battlespace. Of particular interest might be his plan for Offensive Information Operations [IO], which consists of "a robust and proactive capability to counter hostile information activities and propaganda", with every soldier "empowered to be a StratCom messenger for ISAF." A key strategic goal is to win over European and Canadian public opinion, or "the strategic center of gravity which is the maintenance of [NATO] Alliance cohesion." Afghanistan, in other words, is the glue which holds NATO together, as other official strategists have written.

The general does acknowledge, in one sentence, that the battle of perceptions does require a change of behavior on the ground. But the overwhelming emphasis on perception requires that the negatives always be minimized or covered-up, as in any aggressive public relations campaign.

Already, Special Operations forces account for half or more of the American military missions in Afghanistan, and all the operations in Pakistan. Clandestine raids against the Taliban -- not al Qaeda -- more than quadrupled recently, with 90 raids in November 2009. The Red Cross now reports that, as the Kandahar offensive begins, the number of civilian deaths attributed to NATO has doubled, despite McChrystal's orders to avoid such casualties.

From 2004-2009, the Pentagon's PR budget increased by 63 percent to at least $4.7 billion in 2009. The entire video budget for Brave New Foundation's "Rethink Afghanistan" campaign was approximately $350,000 in 2009.

This brings us to the US offensive in Kandahar, which might be called the mother of all media battles. The deadly hubris underlying the US information battleplan was recently exposed in a poll showing that Kandahar residents support negotiations with the Taliban instead of a military offensive by a 19:1 margin, and that five of six see the Taliban as "our Afghan brothers." [NYT, April 21, 2010]. As often happens, the poll was uncovered and released by the Wired magazine blog, not by the Congress or the mass media.

Given Afghan public opinion, the challenge for the Pentagon in shaping the information battlefield in Kandahar, therefore, is overwhelming, even impossible. That means the war of perceptions is going to be directed largely at American and congressional opinion as the heralded offensive gets underway.

A few American journalists, like Doyle McManus of the LA Times, have noted that the warm-up offensive in tiny Marja, back in February, has not met the military's expectations. That it was hardly an "offensive" at all is proven by the handful of US/NATO casualties, estimated in the range of thirteen by late February. The fatal premise of the Marja plan was that the Marines could bring in "a government in a box" after driving out the Taliban. That's a form of immaculate conception that will not happen.

In Kandahar, as in Marja before, the local insurgents probably will fight defensively, and probably launch spectacular bombing operations in other parts of Afghanistan, before gradually disappearing as the Americans advance, bringing their "government in a box". It's confusing, because that same "government" is actually there already, in the form of Karzhai's brother who is widely seen as a corrupt drug-dealing warlord with existing ties to the Taliban. So the US may gain a public relations victory which will mean deepening of the quagmire. Kandahar is not going to be Iwo Jima, forever frozen in a photograph as the turning point of World War 2.

Someday soon the White House and Pentagon will announce on camera that they have captured the Taliban's "spiritual homeland" of Kandahar. While the offensive goes on, few in Congress will be tough enough to take a hard look at the reality behind the war of perceptions. And when the "victory" is announced, Congress will pass another year's appropriation for the war.

This will go on, with American troops dying in vain, unless enough members of the American public, the mainstream media and the Congress finally wake up to the reality that we are no longer citizens but targets in a deliberate war for our minds.

Cultural Cleansing In Iraq

Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered

1 April 2010
Courtesy Of The Times Higher Education

Battle To Destroy Hearts and Minds

The dismantling of Iraqi intellectual life may have been a deliberate strategy, Roger Matthews learns

I first went to Iraq in 1984 to work on archaeological excavations near Mosul. Our workers were Yezidis from the neighbouring villages and together we worked long hours in the hot sun. Over the following few years I lived in Iraq as resident director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and worked on projects all over the country. We suspected then that we might be living the last years of a golden age of Mesopotamian discovery, uncovering Iraq's uniquely rich and important cultural heritage in collaboration with colleagues from Iraq and many other countries.

Today, the discipline of Mesopotamian archaeology lies in tatters; Iraq's universities and its antiquities service face an uncertain future in the midst of a harrowing present; standards of education, literacy and international engagement have plummeted to levels unknown in the history of Iraq; and the world continues largely to turn its back on calls for assistance from our Iraqi friends and colleagues. All this in a country renowned throughout the Arab world and beyond for its sophistication and open-mindedness, epitomised in the Arabic saying "Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads".

The editors and authors of this book believe that the planners of the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq were not simply grossly negligent in allowing Iraq to descend into this hell. Their argument is that the planners consciously facilitated the dismantling of Iraq's intellectual, academic and cultural apparatus in order to wipe the slate clean as a prelude to the rebirth of the country as a neo-capitalist secular democracy that would serve as a model for change across the Middle East. "To be remade, a state must be rendered malleable", as the editors of this volume observe. Hulagu and his Mongol hordes doubtless understood this when they ransacked Baghdad in AD1258.

In pursuit of this argument, the authors evaluate the impact of the invasion and regime change on multiple aspects of life in Iraq since 2003. Chapters deal in turn with the ideology of neoconservatism, cultural cleansing as state policy, the destruction of Iraq's archaeological, historical, cultural and archive resources and memories, and the terrible impact of the invasion and the subsequent chaos on Iraq's many minority groups, of whom the Yezidis are but one. The core of the book concerns the fate of Iraq's academics, who have suffered dreadfully in the past seven years. A sombre appendix to this book states that at least 432 scholars (and probably many more) from across all disciplines have been murdered. No Iraqi academic is safe from the threat of kidnap, torture, death or all three.

Later this month, the Seventh International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (www.7icaane.org) will take place in London. Many papers will deal with the archaeology of Iraq/Mesopotamia. But they will be heard by pitifully few Iraqi ears. Iraqi academics wishing to attend cannot obtain visas in Baghdad: they must make the expensive and sometimes dangerous journey to Amman, where they may or may not succeed in obtaining their papers. Of a predicted 1,000 participants from around the world, we expect fewer than six Iraqi scholars - a shameful reflection on Britain's treatment of its academic colleagues in Iraq.

As for the Yezidis I worked with a quarter of a century ago, they are clinging to their lands and their holy places in the face of repeated shootings, bombings and persistent persecution. Let them stand as an emblem of today's Iraq, of a friendly, outgoing, clever people whose injustices and sufferings are laid bare in this angry, articulate book. For now, the emphasis and energies must shift to assisting Iraq and all its people in reclaiming their rightful place in the world. All of us, in academe and beyond, can help with that.

Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered

Edited by Raymond W. Baker, Shereen T. Ismael and Tareq Y. Ismael

Pluto Press 312pp, £65.00 and £19.99

ISBN 9780745328133 and 8126

Published 14 December 2009