By Gary North
Nov.15, 2001
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/2001/terrorismtheirsandours15nov01.shtml
[ Forward courtesy of American Friends Patriot Network (AFPN).]
Bait-And-Switch in Afghanistan
When I was a boy, a common sales technique
was for a local store to advertise a deep-discount special that would pull
lots of shoppers into its showroom. Shoppers would be met by a salesman
who was trained to sell them an upscale model of the product, which cost
substantially more. Shoppers would be told that the product was "out
of stock due to high demand." This marketing technique relied on
highly skilled salesmen. The mark of bait-and-switch selling is an
inventory that never has the promised item.
(Note: When you think "out of stock due to
high demand," think "Osama bin Laden.")
The Federal Trade Commission long ago made
this sales technique illegal. So did most states. But it still
goes on. On the Web, you can read about fabulous prices for certain
items. You place the order. They promise to send it out that day.
But you will get a call-back trying to up-sell you on some high-priced
related item that you never asked for, and which was never mentioned in
the ad. If you resist, you will finally be told that the item is
out of stock and won't be back in stock for weeks. A twenty- something
hustler tried this strategy on me this summer with a $595 price on a $750
camcorder. When I refused to buy a $15 battery charger for $120, the camcorder
that had been in stock (which I had twice asked him to verify) disappeared
from stock a week later.
This sales technique is immoral -- fraudulent
-- and it's also illegal. But it's only illegal for businesses.
It is a way of life in democratic politics everywhere. The technique over
the last two months has been used to establish a new government in Afghanistan.
The United States, as of this week, has officially joined with the United
Nations in a joint nation-building operation. We have seen all this many
times. Let me review, briefly, how this bait-and-switch technique
works in American foreign policy. Remember this: "War is foreign
policy conducted by other means" (Clausewitz).
Getting Us Into War
In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson ran for his
second term on this political platform: "He kept us out of war."
He won the election, but just barely. The campaign slogan was fraudulent
from the beginning. From 1915 onward, he had been re-shaping American
foreign policy in order to get America into the war on the side of the
British, a goal that he achieved in 1917. His Secretary of State,
William Jennings Bryan, had resigned in 1915 in protest to Wilson's phony
neutrality program. This was the highest-level resignation in American
history, before or since. (The best book on Wilson's strategy is
Charles C. Tansill's AMERICA GOES TO WAR [1938].) Wilson's ultimate goal
was to set up a post-war League of Nations: the first stage in the creation
of a world government. Had the Senate not refused to ratify the treaty,
he would have pulled it off.
I came across a key document a few years ago,
a letter from the American Under-Secretary of the League of Nations, Raymond
Fosdick, which he sent to his wife in July, 1919. Fosdick told her
that he and France's Under-Secretary, Jean Monnet, were working daily to
lay the foundations of "the framework of international government. . .
." (Fosdick to his wife: July 31, 1919; in Fosdick, ed., LETTERS
ON THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS [Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1966], p. 18.) This was no idle boast. Over the next six decades,
Jean Monnet became the driving force behind the creation of the European
Common Market and the New European order. Meanwhile, after the Senate
refused to ratify the Versaille peace treaty treaty in 1919, Fosdick returned
to New York, where he became John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s lawyer. He
ran the Rockefeller Foundation for the next three decades. He had
been on Rockefeller's payroll since 1913. He became a founding member
in 1921, along with Rockefeller, of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Fast forward two decades. In 1940, Franklin
D. Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented third term. He ran on a platform
of neutrality toward the war in Europe. "I abhor war," he said.
"My wife Eleanor abhors war." "I will not send American boys to war."
But by then he had already promised Churchill that he would do what he
could to bring America into the war. He then established restrictive
trade policies that pressured Japan to attack us. (The best book
on this is Tansill's BACK DOOR TO WAR [1953]. Robert Stinnett's DAY
OF INFAMY [1999] is also good.) Hitler accommodated him by declaring
war on the U.S. on December 11, which was the worst foreign policy decision
in modern history.
The anti-Axis allied nations during the war
called their alliance "the United Nations." In a classic bait-and-switch
operation, the foreign policy internationalists took this name in 1945,
added the word Organization, and attached it to the replacement of the
failed League of Nations. America's Alger Hiss was elected as the
first Secretary General of the UN in 1945. He had been a Soviet spy
ever since his days in the Department of Agriculture, a member of the "Ware
cell," the Communists' first spy ring inside the U.S. government.
By 1945, he was a senior official in the State Department.
There is an old rule in football: when you
have a play that works, keep using it until it doesn't work any more.
Bait-and-switch in foreign policy keeps working. So, they keep using
it.
Alice Through the Looking Glass: www.whitehouse.gov
The President is quoted all over the Web in
an October 25 speech as saying, "We're not into nation-building, we're
into justice." (I used Google and searched for: Bush, nation-building,
justice.) I wanted to verify this speech. I failed.
This speech has gone down the White House's memory hole. It's a very
big hole. The White House Web site is a masterpiece of keeping voters away
from anything really important that the President has said or done.
Let me explain.
If you click on the Home Page, "President:
Oval Office," you get a search engine for his speeches. There are
choices of topics. Terrific! I selected "Foreign Policy."
Here is what I got: a September 28 speech delivered to the King of Jordan.
The next one down is a May 29 speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.
At the top of the page, we read this: "23 results found, sorted by relevance."
Sorted by relevance? Hey, guys: America went to war in between these
two speeches!
There is not one speech on this list later
than June.
Well, maybe there is a list of speeches under
"Military Affairs." Sorry: no such category. Nothing on the
military. But you can select "Faith-Based & Community Initiatives."
Then I spotted an option at the bottom of the page of ten foreign policy
speeches. It's not in the topical search's options list: "Policies>Defense."
I clicked it. I got 116 speeches, beginning with January 20.
Then I selected "Sort by Date." At the top of the screen was a September
26 speech, "President Commends House for Passing Defense Bill." It
is six lines long. Next: "U.S., China to Discuss Missile Defense."
The date on that is September 5. Odd. I recall several speeches
in between September 5 and September 26. There was this problem on
September 11. Oh, well. This site was apparently designed by a disciple
of Lewis Carroll: "Alice Through the Looking Glass."
I used the Home Page's general search engine
to find the words "nation-building" and "justice." The search engine
retrieved dozens of speeches, but not the October 25 speech. I spent
an hour looking for it. Gone! Or maybe never posted.
Or lost. Anyway, it's beyond my ability to locate. So, I cannot
supply the link. (On Clinton's site, I could always find any speech
I was looking for.)
I did stumble onto this. Write this down. Keep it in your
scrapbook.
The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not
what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.
Remarks by the President at
Islamic Center of Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C. (Sept. 17, 2001)
Note for historically inclined: the word "Islam" means submission.
http://www.submission.org
Nation-Building Is Us!
Back to this theme: "We're not into nation-building."
On September 27, James Pinkerton, who made famous the phrase, "a new paradigm,"
commented on the origin of Bush's public commitment not to build nations.
In the 2000 presidential debates, George W. Bush repeatedly ripped the
Clinton-Gore foreign policy record. In Boston on Oct. 3, he declared
that he and Al Gore "have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes
in nation-building." And what was Bush for
instead? "I believe the role of the military is to fight and win
war and, therefore, prevent war from happening in the first place."
And so, he continued, his focus wouldn't be nation-building but rather
"rebuilding the military power."
Mr. Pinkerton has a very different vision --
the same vision that President Bush, Sr. called the New World Order back
in 1990, as we were getting ready to attack Iraq's troops. Mr. Pinkerton
spells out his vision, brought up to date. Soon, the Americans will go
and get Bin Laden. As Bush said, "We're focused on justice."
But what happens after that? Does the U.S. simply collect Bin Laden,
"dead or alive," as Bush said on Sept. 17, and come home?
If ever a nation needed building, it's Afghanistan.
Its 26 million people -- literacy rate, 32% -- eke out a subsistence living;
a country the size of Texas has just 1,700 miles of paved roads.
And that's not just a humanitarian problem for Afghans; it's a national
security problem for Americans because even after Bin Laden is gone, the
same chaotic countryside could yet again serve as an enterprise zone
for mass murderers.
If the U.S. takes military action against Afghanistan
and then comes home, it would be making the same mistake it made after
World War I. In 1918, the U.S. spearheaded the defeat of the Kaiser's
Germany at a cost of 116,516 American lives. But we stopped at the
Rhine frontier, told the Germans not to do it again and retreated back
across the Atlantic. Fifteen years later, the Germans elected Hitler.
By contrast, in 1945, the U.S. won a second, more costly war against Germany,
but this time, instead of stopping at the Rhine and telling the Germans
to get rid of Hitler, the Allies occupied much of the country. As
secretary of State George C. Marshall warned, "Europe's requirements are
so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial
additional help or face economic, social and political deterioration of
a very grave character."
Resolved to see no repeat of political deterioration,
the U.S. combined justice -- that is, the Nuremberg war-crimes trials --
with nation-building and rebuilding; the Marshall Plan poured $13.3 billion
into devastated Europe, about 1.3% of U.S. output during those years. If
that level of commitment were converted into today's dollars, the total
expenditure would be about $150 billion. But the ultimate reward, of course,
has been a mostly democratic and prosperous Europe that is now partnered
with the U.S. in the fight against terrorism.
After Bin Laden, the U.S. confronts the opportunity
-- really, the necessity -- of building stable institutions in Afghanistan.
Will it be expensive? Yes. But will it be less ostly than another
Sept. 11? Yes again. Today, Bush is more than a partisan, or even
a president. He's a war leader, and so he needn't feel bound by the
shortsightedly opportunistic rhetoric recently uttered by Republicans --
even if he was once the one doing some of the uttering. If this commander
in chief comes to realize that justice and nation-building aren't either-or
concepts but rather ideas that should be twinned, he will have done the
whole world a service and a greater common good will yet come from this
tragedy.
As of November 13, Mr. Pinkerton's "new paradigm"
has become the official basis of American foreign policy in Afghanistan,
replacing President Bush's "no nation-building" vision. I call this
bait and switch.
United Nations (November 13, 2001 4:45 p.m. EST)
- The United Nations called Tuesday for a two-year transitional government
for Afghanistan backed by a multinational security force, while world leaders
urged the world body to have a leading role in the war-ravaged nation's
peace process. Lakhdar Brahimi, the top U.N. envoy for Afghanistan, told
the U.N. Security Council that a plan to bring Afghanistan's many ethnic
and tribal groups together should be completed "as early as humanly possible."
As northern alliance soldiers replaced fleeing
Taliban forces in the capital, Kabul, on Tuesday, there was concern that
the speed of the military campaign was outpacing U.N.-led diplomatic efforts
to get a transitional government installed. Many countries cautioned
the northern alliance not to repeat the violence that wracked Kabul during
their previous rule.
"We need a U.N. presence there as soon as
possible," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in London.
And John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations, told the Security Council: "An international presence
must be re-established as soon as possible."
President Bush called for a broad-based government
to replace the Taliban.
"We will continue to work with the northern
alliance to make sure they recognize that in order for there to be a stable
Afghanistan ... after the Taliban leaves, that the country be a good neighbor
and that they must recognize that a future government must include representatives
from all of Afghanistan," he said in Washington.
I call your attention to President Bush's phrase,
after the Taliban leaves." Here is my prediction: the Taliban isn't
going to leave. It has to be defeated. This is easier said
than done. It must now be defeated in the hills. This will
not be a piece of cake. The northern alliance foreign minister, who uses
the single name Abdullah, defended the opposition's move into Kabul, saying
it had no choice because the Taliban's sudden withdrawal left a security
vacuum. The United States had asked the alliance to avoid moving
on the capital, afraid its presence would complicate efforts to create
a coalition government. . . .
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan wants Brahimi's
deputy to travel to Kabul soon, and the United Nations is eager to get
its staff back into the country and to deliver humanitarian aid. Brahimi
ruled out a U.N. peacekeeping force for Afghanistan, which he said would
take several months to put together. He said his first preference would
be an all-Afghan security force, but said a multinational security force
could probably be assembled more quickly. Pakistan's president, Gen.
Pervez Musharraf, called Tuesday for a U.N. peacekeeping mission made up
of Muslim nations to deploy in Kabul and said Turkey and Pakistan could
contribute. "Kabul should remain as a demilitarized city," he said
in Istanbul. . . .
Things seem to be coming together nicely for
the United Nations and also for those nations with an interest in subduing
bin Laden, and whatever else they have planned, such as building an oil
pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the
Indian Ocean. On this point, see the 1999 maps, published by the
Council on Foreign Relations, relating to the Caspian Sea.
In New York, the so-called "six plus two" nations
-- those neighboring Afghanistan along with the United States and Russia
-- were slated to resume talks on a post-Taliban government. U.S.
Secretary of State Colin Powell dispatched James Dobbins, his special
envoy for Afghan opposition groups, to Rome, Italy, to meet with Afghanistan's
deposed king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, before heading to the region.
And the U.N. special representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, said
he hopes to assemble the Afghan groups in the "next couple of days."
A senior State Department official told CNN that Dobbins would make contact
with the Pakistani government and work with Afghans there on a
future government.
Over the last two years, America has sent $297
million to Afghanistan, by way of the United Nations and "non- overnmental
organizations" (NGO's). We have promised an additional $320 million.
Now we know why. We have been trying
to establish the legitimacy of the UN in Afghanistan. Now the UN
is about to supervise the building of a new nation, but without a UN occupying
force. Whose occupying force, then? This will be something
to see -- at a distance.
Winning This War
The strategy for winning every war you get
into is simple: redefine the enemy in mid-stream whenever you can't
beat him -- or, in this case, locate him. Our original enemy was --
way back when -- Osama bin Laden. I don't mean last July, when he
was a patient in the American-run hospital in Dubai for ten days.
That's too far back. I mean on September 20, when President Bush
gave his resounding speech to Congress. Back then, bin Laden and
Al-Qaeda were the targets.
Somehow, over the next few weeks, the enemy
morphed into the Taliban, whose recalcitrant leaders refused to hand over
bin Laden when told to by the Bush Administration. The media's news
reports steadily moved from the horror of the hijackings to the horror
of bearded men who do not let women go to college in a nation without
any colleges. Then America started dropping bombs on cities where
these women lived. As for killing bin Laden,
that was put on hold until the cities were destroyed. Or, to
coin a phrase, "We had to destroy Kabul in order to save it."
Now that the cities have fallen to the United
Front, President Bush has an opportunity to stop the bombing. Ramadan arrives
in Afghanistan at tomorrow, U.S. time. Because the cities are now secured
militarily, the justification for carpet bombing has ended, or at least
been made far less plausible. I hope and pray that the
bombing stops. The pressing immediate need is to get Afghan civilian
refugees into safer quarters before winter hits. If civilians are
no longer afraid of more bombing, they may decide to go home, unless their
homes were destroyed. Whatever we can do to get them through the winter,
we should do.
The war has to go into hibernation mode anyway.
If we can't locate bin Laden even in good weather, there is no need to
keep up the bombing. Winter will make it difficult to conduct a war
in the mountains. Wrote the NEW SCIENTIST:
Miserable winter weather and lofty terrain
could severely hamper a war on terrorists in Afghanistan. Cloud cover and
snow will increasingly make laser-guided bombing impossible and few aircraft
can work efficiently at the high altitudes of the Afghan mountain ranges,
according to a British military expert.
Laser-guided bombs, which were used in the
Gulf war, are not reliable unless the skies are clear. "The problem is
that lasers don't work in bad weather," says Robert Hewson, Editor of Jane's
Air-launched Weapons. "Rain and snow scatter the beams and they don't pass
through clouds." . . .
Afghanistan has mountain ranges over 6100 metres
(20,000 feet) and the thinner air at that altitude makes it difficult for
aircraft to operate. "It's not a problem for B-52s, but helicopters will
have a real problem above 10,000 feet and even lower than that if they're
carrying a lot of troops or equipment," says Hewson. "They're just
not designed for fighting people in the mountains."
The U.S. government must conduct simultaneous
public relations operations: the voters, the coalition, and the
Middle East's Islamic nations. This will not be easy. The
longer it takes to take out bin Laden, the more his legend will grow in
the Islamic world. It looks as though he will inflict a winter of
discontent on us.
Of course, for a man with kidney problems,
a winter in a cave could be lethal. His death would become a major
problem for his immediate followers. If he dies, his subordinates
may decide to keep him alive in the minds of their followers. They
may decide to bury him secretly. He would join Elvis in the land
of the not-quite-dead. But his TV broadcasts would then cease.
That would create suspicion, once the snow melts.
His continuing video broadcasts raise another
question. How do we know that he is still in Afghanistan? If he can
smuggle videotapes to qatar, what about smuggling himself? It would
be difficult to keep this a secret, but
this man's organization seems highly skilled at keeping secrets.
If he is not in Afghanistan, then our forces could wind up playing hide
and seek with a phantom. We keep hearing about our high-tech spy satellites.
Or we did early in the war. These days, we don't hear much about
them. But early in October, we were told the following:
Military and commercial satellites are taking
new images of the whole of Afghanistan every week, according to military
experts. US intelligence services will also be examining pictures
taken at least once a day from areas of known significance. Computers then
allow automatic comparison of this vast amount of data with previous images.
Differences that may indicate changes in military or civilian infrastructure
are highlighted. . . .
The huge surveillance operation is crucial
to the military operations aimed at capturing the prime suspects for the
US terrorist atrocities, Osama Bin Laden and his followers.
I think we're about to move into the Sitzkreig
phase of the war: "Hurry up and wait." Peace will not come to Afghanistan
until the Taliban is eliminated. The tribes of the United Front will
soon be killing each other. omeone
will have to maintain the peace. This will require an occupation
force, no matter what the UN says today. The
President told us that the war against terrorism will take many years,
but the war against bin Laden is now going into hibernation until spring.
Al Qaeda is not bottled up in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden may be. What the West has now done is to capture the
cities of a Muslim nation. It must now occupy it as an invading
army. Washington's deal-doers have shrugged this
off. While no one would be so politically incorrect as to say
it, they are thinking, as the British said a century
ago, "machine guns can handle the wogs."
Setting An Ancient Trap
The Taliban's forces have moved from the cities
-- now mostly rubble -- into the hills. This news has led to a
rise in the U.S. stock market. The Taliban's strategy is what every
stock broker's strategy is: to lure the naive into a trap. The Taliban
is a guerilla army that happened to take over a nation. The Taliban's
specialty is mountain
fighting. This has been Afghanistan's military tradition for
centuries. When challenged in the valleys, Afghan
military forces move into the mountains and wait for their opponents
to come and kill them. This strategy has yet to fail. The invaders
are not all Afghans. The toughest fighters are Uzbeks, who are under
the control of an ex-
Communist. They may not all be Muslims. I am informed by
an Armenian Uzbek that the Uzbek Muslims who run the government like to
assign the front-line fighting to non-Muslims.
Thus, when the Taliban abandoned the cities,
it was doing what the Afghans' age-old military strategy requires.
The invaders' trick will not be in holding the cities. The trick
will be to eliminate the Taliban. The Russians holed
up in Kabul for a decade. They used Kabul as headquarters. Their
possession of Kabul was supposed to give them a strategic advantage.
It didn't. Meanwhile, nobody in the attacking force has any idea
where Osama bin Laden is.
With respect to bin Laden's whereabouts, the
United States gets most of its intelligence from Pakistan, which
today is the only remaining nation that still officially recognizes
the Taliban government as legitimate. The other
two Muslim nations revoked their recognition last month. Pakistan's
General Musharraf's response to the fall of
Kabul was restrained horror. THE GUARDIAN reports:
Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez
Musharraf, last night expressed his dismay that the Northern Alliance had
been allowed to seize Kabul and said a UN peacekeeping force should be
sent in as soon as possible to stop opposition troops from "occupying"
the city.
Speaking in Turkey, Gen Musharraf said Kabul
should be rapidly "demilitarised" to prevent the "atrocities of the past"
from being repeated. The UN force should be made up of troops from Muslim
countries. . . .
The Northern Alliance has made little secret
of its hostility to Pakistan's military regime, which until two months
ago was the Taliban's most crucial ally. Over the past five years
Pakistan's powerful ISI intelligence agency has secretly given the Taliban
vital military support and advice.
I have doubts about the long-term prospects
of the new government of Afghanistan, whoever is in charge.
Britain's Tony Blair on November 14 said: "Though
there may be pockets of resistance, the idea that this is some sort of
tactical retreat is just the latest Taliban lie. They are in total
collapse." Or, as a previous British Prime Minister said, "Peace
in our time."
Conclusion
I end with a warning from Eric Margolis, who
spent time in Afghanistan with the mujahadin in the 1980's. In all my years
as a foreign affairs writer, I have never seen a case where so many Washington
'experts' have all the answers to a country that
only a handful of Americans know anything about. President George Bush,
who before election could not name the president of Pakistan, now intends
to redraw the political map of strategic Afghanistan, an act that will
cause shock waves across South and Central Asia.
Anyone who knows anything about Afghans knows:
1. They will
never accept any regime imposed by outsiders
2. An ethnic
minority government can never rule Afghanistan's ethnic majority, the Pashtun
(or Pathan), roughly half the population. Taliban are mostly Pushtun. Tajiks
account for 18-20% and Uzbeks for 6% of Afghans.
Washington's plan for `nation-building' in
Afghanistan is a recipe for disaster that will produce an enlarged civil
war that draws in outside powers.
Nation-building requires peace. This
peace must be enforced. The warring tribes that today are called
Afghanistan will be killing each other the day occupying Western forces
leave the country. This is now our war, for it is now our peace to
impose. We will have to supply most of the money, most of the weapons,
and some of the troops -- not just to get bin Laden but also to enforce
the peace among our Afghan allies.
My prediction: Our troops won't be home by Christmas. Not by next Christmas,
either.
Gary North
Web posted at: (http://www.twf.org/News/Y2001/1114-Terrorism.html)
"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something
that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the
grace of God, I will do." - Edward Everett Hale
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