Antony Loewenstein

Turning a profit from war is an old story, way before September 11, 2001, but the last decade has seen an explosion of companies making a killing from countless, Washington-led wars.

This recent story in USA Today is a cracking yarn and reveals how deeply problematic is vulture capitalism:

As the Pentagon has sought to sell wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to often-hostile populations there, it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on poorly tracked marketing and propaganda campaigns that military leaders like to call “information operations,” the modern equivalent of psychological warfare.

From 2005 to 2009, such spending rose from $9 million to $580 million a year mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon and congressional records show. Last year, spending dropped to $202 million as the Iraq Warwrapped up. A USA TODAY investigation, based on dozens of interviews and a series of internal military reports, shows that Pentagon officials have little proof the programs work and they won’t make public where the money goes. In Iraq alone, more than $173 million was paid to what were identified only as “miscellaneous foreign contractors.”

“What we do as I.O. is almost gimmicky,” says Army Col. Paul Yingling, who served three tours in Iraq between 2003 and 2009, including as an information operations specialist. “Doing posters, fliers or radio ads. These things are unserious.”

…

As to whether the hundreds of millions of dollars spent in Afghanistan and Iraq have been worth the U.S. investment, the USA TODAY investigation found:

The Pentagon’s top information operations contractor in Afghanistan, California-based Leonie Industries, was started in 2004 by a brother-and-sister pair with no apparent experience working with the military. Camille Chidiac and Rema Dupont have more than $4 million in liens on their homes and property for failure to pay federal income taxes. Leonie Industries has Army contracts that could surpass $130 million; the Army has already paid them more than $90 million.

•Contractors like Leonie plant unattributed broadcasts, plaster the countryside in war zones with billboards, stage concerts and drop leaflets with the intent of bending the will of civilians and combatants to U.S. aims. Contracts show that the companies often measure the effects of the propaganda they produce, essentially grading their own work, although the military reviews the metrics.

•In Afghanistan, the Pentagon continues to create at least 11 hours a day of what it calls “unattributed” radio and television programming. Information operators seek to tell Afghans who their real enemies are, why Taliban propaganda was wrong, what the Afghan government is accomplishing, how non-governmental organizations are helping them, and why they should serve in the security forces. Whether that’s all worthwhile is open to debate.

Karl Eikenberry, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and a retired Army three-star general who led forces there, wrote the State Department in July 2009 to say that information operations campaigns that “focus predominantly on negative enemy operations may be counterproductive” because they emphasize the Taliban’s success, scare the Afghan people and show that the Afghan government can’t protect them.

Michael Hastings:

They say [the shooter] has a traumatic brain injury. But what we see on a weekly basis is…Afghans being killed. It happens because we have 100,000 troops in Khandahar who know that we’re leaving… If he’s insane, he’s a symptom of an insane policy.

Words fail. A nation that occupies millions of Palestinians has values like us? Well, I guess Australia is fond of backing American-led occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan so perhaps it’s true. The man has form.

The Australian Jewish News reports:

Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott gave a strong endorsement of Israel’s right to defend itself during a speech at the Central Synagogue last Friday night.

Appearing as a special guest as part of Central’s ongoing “Studio Central” youth program, Abbott spoke about the contribution Jewish Australians have made to our nation, before noting the similarities between Australia and Israel.

“In so many ways, [Israel is] a country so much like Australia, a liberal, pluralist democracy,” he said, “A beacon of freedom and hope in a part of the world which has so little freedom and hope.”

He added that Australians “can hardly begin to comprehend” the existential threat Israelis live under. “It is so easy for us in Australia to get moral qualms, if you like, when we read about Israeli actions in – on the West Bank for instance – or Israeli involvement in Lebanon.”

“And yet, we are not threatened in the way Israel was and is, and if we were threatened in the way Israel was and is, I am sure that we would take actions just as strong in our own defence.

“When Israel is fighting for its very life, well, as far as I’m concerned, Australians are Israelis. We are all Israelis in those circumstances.”

Fascinating insights, published by Matthieu Atkins in GQ:

This month’s issue of GQ contains an exclusive account of the 20-hour assault on the U.S. embassy in Kabul last September. As the article shows, the attack—though militarily unsuccessful—was a public relations victory for the Taliban. In February, excerpts from a classified NATO report were leaked in the press that further undermined the official U.S. military line on the war. GQ has obtained a copy of the secret report, which contains a frank assessment of the Taliban, their ties to Pakistan, and their prospects for victory over the Afghan government.

PART I: What the Report Means
The report, “State of the Taliban: January 6, 2012,” is part of a regularly published series on the insurgency that’s based on the interrogations of thousands of detainees. It offers an unvarnished glimpse into the inner beliefs of the military establishment in Afghanistan for two reasons: First, as a classified document, it was intended solely for internal consumption, and second, it was put together by a special operations team working under the Joint Special Operations Command, which is responsible for the US military’s most secretive and demanding special forces missions, including the one that killed Osama bin Laden last year.

The special operations team that authored the report, known as Joint Task Force 3-10, allegedly helps oversee a “black site” prison at the largest US military base in the country, located at Bagram air base, just north of Kabul. In the introduction, the report describes how it was put together:

“Throughout the year, TF 3-10 conducted over 27,000 interrogations of over 4,000 Taliban, Al Qaeda, foreign fighters and civilians. As this document is derived directly from insurgents, it should be considered informational and not necessarily analytical.”While, as the authors note, the report is intended to be a presentation of the information they’ve gathered from detainees, in certain passages it clearly includes their own views and analysis. And though the ‘black sites’ operated by the CIA and special forces in Afghanistan have in the past been associated with detainee abuse, overall the interrogators seem notably sympathetic to the detainees’ motivations and understanding of Afghan politics and culture.

1. Who are the Taliban?
The report is remarkable for its clear-eyed view of the insurgency, a far cry from the caricature that often features in military press releases. Rather than merciless fanatics, the Taliban are portrayed as a nuanced and complex phenomenon — one deeply involved in violence and criminality, but also pragmatic and evolving, with a deep base of support among ordinary Afghans. It portrays them as motivated both by nationalistic and religious grounds:

“[Afghan government] corruption, abuse of power and suspected lack of commitment to Islam continue to provoke significant anti-government sentiment. The Taliban will be hostile to any government which appears to act as an agent of foreign powers to instill Western values.”The report makes clear the distinction between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, whose influence is seen as dissipating under the pressure of military strikes and the loss of much of its core leadership:

“In most regions of Afghanistan, Taliban leaders have no interest in associating with Al Qaeda. Working with Al Qaeda invites targeting, and Al Qaeda personnel are no longer the adept and versatile fighters and commanders they once were. Even Taliban groups with historically close ties to Al Qaeda, such as the Haqqani Network, have had little or no interaction with them in the last two years.”

Another tragedy in Afghanistan. And what do most of the corporate media focus on? How will this affect NATO strategy? What will US troops do? Will Obama’s supposed counter-insurgency tactics be derailed?

What about wondering about the Afghans themselves?

Here’s FAIR:

The news that a U.S. Army sergeant killed 16 civilians, most of them children, in southern Afghanistan early Sunday morning was treated by many media outlets primarily as a PR challenge for continued war and occupation of that country.

“Afghanistan, once the must-fight war for America, is becoming a public relations headache for the nation’s leaders, especially for President Barack Obama,” explained an Associated Press analysis piece (3/12/12). Reuters(3/12/12) called it “the latest American public relations disaster in Afghanistan.”

On the NBC Today show (3/11/12) the question was posed this way: “Could this reignite a new anti-American backlash in the unstable region?” The answer: “This is not going to bode well for the U.S. and NATO here in Afghanistan,” explained reporter Atia Abawi. “Obviously people here very fearful as to what’s going to happen next, what protests will come about throughout different parts of Afghanistan, and how the Taliban are going to use this to their advantage.” “People,” as used here, would not seem to include Afghans, who are presumably less frightened by protests against a massacre of children than they are by the massacre itself.

The front-page headline at USA Today (3/12/12) read, “Killings Threaten Afghan Mission.” The story warned that the allegations “threaten to test U.S. strategy to end the conflict.” In the New York Times (3/12/12), the massacre was seen as “igniting fears of a new wave of anti-American hostility.” The paper went on to portray occupation forces as victims:

“The possibility of a violent reaction to the killings added to a feeling of siege here among Western personnel. Officials described growing concern over a cascade of missteps and offenses that has cast doubt on the ability of NATO personnel to carry out their mission and has left troops and trainers increasingly vulnerable to violence by Afghans seeking revenge.”

The fact that the massacres occurred two days after a NATO helicopter strike killed four civilians was “adding to the sense of concern.”

This morning’s ABC Radio AM fit perfectly into the mould, playing quotes from Western leaders and White House flaks:

TONY EASTLEY: There are fears that the shooting rampage by a lone US soldier may derail the Afghan peace process and undo months if not years of work.

The Afghan army is on a higher alert after the American soldier killed 16 Afghan civilians and burnt their bodies. Nine of the dead were children.

The Afghan parliament has passed a resolution demanding the soldier face a public trial in Afghanistan, and already talks on a new strategic partnership between Kabul and Washington look like being put on ice.

Emily Bourke reports.

EMILY BOURKE: The deaths of 16 Afghan civilians at the hands of a rogue US soldier continues to outrage and worry world leaders, especially as the Taliban is now promising to strike back. 

The British prime minister David Cameron. 

DAVID CAMERON: Really is an absolutely appalling thing that has taken place and of course it will have its impact, but we must do everything we can to make sure that it doesn’t in any way derail the very good work that American and British and other ISAF forces are doing in Afghanistan. 

And it is worth remembering why we’re in Afghanistan – we’re there to train up the Afghan army and the police so that that country is able to look after its own security 

EMILY BOURKE: The Taliban has described the Americans as terrorists and barbarians, but White House spokesman Jay Carney says the US led mission will continue. 

JAY CARNEY: I’m sure there will be discussions ongoing between US military leaders as well as civilian leaders in Afghanistan and the Afghan government in the wake of this incident, but our strategic objectives have not changed and they will not change. 

“The country is in a state of slow decline”, says Jennifer Rowell, advocacy coordinator for CARE in Afghanistan, in the New York Times.

The country’s reliance on foreign aid has made the situation dire and as security deteriorates it appears many programs will disappear. Relying on mercenaries to protect civilian work creates a whole range of problematic equations. Here’s the Times:

The management at a company that does aid and development work for the American government knows that some of its employees in Afghanistan are keeping weapons in their rooms — and is choosing to look the other way. At another company in the same business, lawyers are examining whether the company can sue theUnited States Agency for International Development for material breach of contract, citing the deteriorating security in Afghanistan.

An Afghan government plan to abolish private security companies at the end of this month, along with the outbreak of anti-American demonstrations and attacks in the past month, has left the private groups that carry out most of the American-financed development work in Afghanistan scrambling to sort out their operations, imperiling billions of dollars in projects, officials say.

That, in turn, threatens a vital part of the Obama administration’s plans for Afghanistan, which envision a continuing development mission after the end of the NATO combat mission in 2014.

The recent upheaval, set off by the burning of Korans by American military personnel on Feb. 20, cast sudden doubt on nearly every facet of the American presence in Afghanistan, including a long-term strategic partnership deal. On Friday, some progress was made when the United States and Afghanistan reached an agreement for the Afghans to take control of the main coalition prison in six months.

But the fallout on the civilian development side of the mission is having an immediate effect, development workers and experts said. In particular, it is magnifying concerns about the new security arrangements being dictated by the Afghan government, which by March 20 aims to replace the private security companies that now guard aid workers with a hastily raised Afghan force.

Faced with the prospect of sudden change in their security arrangements, with no assurance that the Afghan force can be arranged in time or meet their specific needs, organizations are weighing the future of their operations in the country.

…

Through U.S.A.I.D., the American government contracts billions of dollars in projects to private companies based in the United States. The companies provide for their own security in Afghanistan as required under their contracts with the agency.

Until now, that has meant hiring private security companies, which in most cases provide expatriate managers — usually former American or British soldiers — to oversee Afghan guards. Private security companies also provide security for embassies and the United Nations, all of which are being allowed to keep their existing security arrangements.

The expatriate and Afghan guards, armed with handguns and assault rifles, have long been a fixture on the streets of Kabul, and President Hamid Karzai has railed against their presence as an affront to Afghan dignity and a threat to law and order for almost as long. In 2010, he abruptly ordered the security companies disbanded and replaced by a new force that he said the Afghan government would raise.

The plan that has since taken shape calls for private Afghan guards to become part of the new force, known as the Afghan Public Protection Force, which will be responsible for guarding everything from aid projects to NATO supply convoys.

The force has already trained 8,000 new guards, said Siddiq Siddiqi, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. He carries his own sidearm for protection.

The roughly 11,000 Afghan guards working for the 45 private security companies operating in Afghanistan will be subsumed into the force this month, he said. They will then be sent back to the same places they worked before, and the companies that had formerly paid a private security company for the guards would instead pay the Interior Ministry to cover their salaries, plus a 20 percent fee for overhead and to provide a profit — in itself, a useful arrangement for the financially strained government.

My following book review appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

A journalist with access to a superpower’s military machine refuses to toe the line.

“I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising,” independent American journalist Michael Hastings told The Huffington Post in 2010. ”My views are critical but that shouldn’t be mistaken for hostile – I’m just not a stenographer.”

Such a mindset is what makes this book a compelling read and ensures its status as one of the most devastating and incisive works on the Afghanistan war since Washington and its allies invaded in 2001.

Hastings concludes, after spending extensive time with generals and military advisers, as well as reporters who hang on their every word, that the conflict was lost years ago. The warped logic of the war, the author states, is that, ”we’re there because we’re there. And because we’re there, we’re there some more.”

Afghanistan today has nothing to do with September 11, 2001, ”terrorist havens” or al-Qaeda. ”It didn’t matter that in Afghanistan, the US military had come up short again and again,” Hastings argues. ”What mattered is that they tried. The simple and terrifying reality, forbidden from discussion in America [and mostly in the mainstream media in Australia], was that despite spending $600 billion a year on the military, despite having the best fighting force the world had ever known, they were getting their asses kicked by illiterate peasants who made bombs out of manure and wood.”

Hastings is that rare journalist who doesn’t believe in venerating military figures who give him access in Washington and American war zones. A key aspect of his investigation is its brutal excoriation of embedded media and the lack of accountability in the pundit class. His staccato writing feels immediate in today’s war debate.

He cites a meeting with a German reporter in Berlin in 2010, where the man says he backs the Afghanistan war and acknowledges fears it may not work out. Hastings is stunned: ”Julian was prepared to take ownership of the position he took and the consequences of it. I’d rarely heard an American journalist express any such regrets or take responsibility for the politics they promoted. Maybe it was a European thing.”

Hastings was commissioned in 2010 to write a profile for Rolling Stone, where he’s now a contributing editor, of Stanley McChrystal, the lauded then-commanding general of international and US forces in Afghanistan. The journalist was given nearly full access to the general and his staff as they travelled across Europe attempting to sell their counter-insurgency plan.

What Hastings found both shocked and pleased him. Though he loved the buzz of being close to McChrystal and quickly felt like a trusted member of the team – the allure of ”access” is what makes most corporate journalists little better than transcribers – he quickly remembered he was a reporter there to write a story. Despite being asked by senior military staff to exclude details of drunken adventures in European bars and meeting rooms, disparaging comments about President Barack Obama’s team are openly expressed and Hastings knew his aim: ”The access I’d gotten was unprecedented. But what do you do with it? Bury the story? Write a puff piece to ensure further access? Or write what actually happened?”

Hastings was under no illusion about how McChrystal and his team saw him. ”They weren’t talking to me because they liked me or because I impressed them; they were talking to me because they wanted the cover of Rolling Stone.” The magazine chose Lady Gaga for this coveted position, damaging the general’s desire to impress a younger generation with his prowess.

Hastings’s scoop was seen as shocking not because he was an anti-war activist but because he had seen the human cost of Iraq and Afghanistan on soldiers and civilians and refused to provide cover for those responsible.

The story was explosive and McChrystal was forced to resign. He was replaced by General David Petraeus (now CIA director), a man Obama believed could help salvage the failing Afghanistan war through an innovative counter-insurgency strategy. It failed spectacularly and Hastings explains why by quoting a former UN official in Kabul. ”There has never been a strategy to get rid of the warlords, who are the key problem,” John Matisonn says. ”The average Afghan hates them, whether they’re backed by the Taliban or the Americans. They see them as criminals. They know that the warlords are fundamentally undermining the rule of law.”

The Rolling Stone feature was expanded into this book and Hastings retains high-level access to a military and political establishment that often can’t speak for itself against misguided policies. Like Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks, Hastings believes in full transparency for our political class. The American and Australian mainstream media continue giving air time to people such as Petraeus and Australian counter-insurgency ”expert” David Kilcullen – who now runs the Caerus Associates consultancy firm in Washington DC – despite their disastrous records in Iraq and Afghanistan. In both nations, foreign forces merely empowered one group of thugs over another, with money and guns, and now the results are clear to see.

Hastings, whose first book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad, details his war reporting in post-2003 Iraq and the murder of his partner by a suicide bomber, doesn’t drink the Kool-Aid enjoyed by many of the ”national security” correspondents who populate our media landscape. For them, the ”war on terror” has been a wild decade of conflict. Private chats with generals and their minions constitute much journalism, while the public wonders why ”our” boys continue being killed by an effective insurgency. Afghan deaths and voices are largely invisible.

Hastings’s article about McChrystal was instructive, he writes, ”as the political and media class saw the story as a threat to their schmoozy relationship – their very existence and social life”.

After a decade observing the US in conflict, a superpower both uninterested in understanding its opponents and confused when being beaten by smarter forces, Hastings concludes that our leaders lie about the real purpose of the ”war on terror”. Embedded journalists must take their share of the blame for perpetuating the delusion.

Antony Loewenstein is a freelance journalist working on a book about disaster capitalism.

THE OPERATORS

Michael Hastings

Orion, 432pp, $35

Fascinating yet disturbing insight into a hidden world inside Afghanistan (via Channel 4):

In a Kabul suburb we have come to a woman’s house. We’ll call her Habiba. She’s playing with her daughter on the carpet, a toddler. There’s a small but modern flatscreen TV in the corner. A house of several bedrooms. In her headscarf and jeans she is very westernised by Afghan standards. On several occasions Channel 4 News meets Habiba and films and talks to her, with her husband not present. Even meeting an Afghan woman at all in her home would be quite unthinkable in most parts of this country and most of this city too – let alone doing so with no husband in the room.

But what we shall witness in this house goes so far beyond the norms of Afghanistan’s conservative society – so far beyond the norms of British society come to that – it is hard to find words to frame it.

Habiba, in her late 20s, is a schoolteacher. Her husband, a civil-servant. Or at least they were.

Some months back her husband’s epilepsy and other health problems forced him to leave his job, he said. And then he took to drink. And he also took to beating Habiba up if she declined to do his bidding.

By any standards in any society that bidding is extraordinary. He has forced her to leave the classroom and become a prostitute. He, the husband, is now also the pimp.

“I hate this life,” she says, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Right now I hate myself and my husband. I think I am the worst person in the world. It is horrible. And what about my daughter?”

Sorry what? If true (via Associated Press) this is the kind of insane idea that simply reinforces the belief across the Muslim world that Washington is determined to occupy Afghanistan indefinitely:

Top Pentagon officials are considering putting elite special operations troops under CIA control in Afghanistan after 2014, just as they were during last year’s raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, sources told The Associated Press.

The plan is one of several possible scenarios being debated by Pentagon staffers. It has not yet been presented to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the White House or Congress, the sources said.

If the plan were adopted, the U.S. and Afghanistan could say there are no more U.S. troops on the ground in the war-torn country because once the SEALs, Rangers and other elite units are assigned to CIA control, even temporarily, they become spies.

No matter who’s in charge, the special operations units still would target militants on joint raids with Afghans and keep training Afghan forces to do the job on their own.

The idea floated by a senior defense intelligence official comes as U.S. defense chiefs try to figure out how to draw down troops fast enough to meet the White House’s 2014 deadline. Pentagon staffers already have put forward a plan to hand over much of the war-fighting to special operations troops. This idea would take that plan one step further, shrinking the U.S. presence to less than 20,000 troops after 2014, according to four current and two former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the program involves classified operatives.

…

But a CIA-run war would mean that the U.S. public would not be informed about funding or operations, as they are in a traditional war. Oversight would fall to the White House, top intelligence officials, and a few congressional committees. Embedding journalists would be out of the question.

The last decade has seen an explosion in private security and intelligence companies making a killing in the “war on terror”.

And now, with growing anger towards both mercenaries and the Western occupying forces that use them, this suggestion seems both delusional and symptomatic of the rot that imperial thinking guarantees:

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee is intent on barring private security contractors and Afghans from guarding U.S. bases in Afghanistan, a move that could complicate President Barack Obama’s timetable for withdrawing American forces after more than a decade of war.

Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., introduced the legislation on Thursday in response to the insider attacks by Afghan security forces against U.S. and other coalition troops. McKeon held a hearing last month in which the military said more than 45 insider attacks have occurred since 2007 – 75 percent in the past two years.

In a recent spate of anti-American violence touched off by the burning of Muslim holy books at a U.S. base last week, two U.S. troops were gunned down by two Afghan soldiers and an accomplice on Thursday. All told, six Americans have been killed by their Afghan partners in recent days.

“War is bad enough that we put our young people out there at risk,” McKeon said in an interview taped for C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers.” “They shouldn’t have to worry about security within the base.”

The legislation would require the president to ensure that there are enough trained members of the military to fight the war in Afghanistan as well as provide security for American troops. If the president refuses, he must certify to Congress that private security contractors or the Afghan Public Protection Force can provide protection that is at least equal to the U.S. military.

The bill would prohibit the president from shifting troops from current operations in Afghanistan to protect bases. Such a step would force the president to increase the number of troops in the country – a move certain to face strong opposition in a war-weary Congress.