Nine Game-Changers of 2010 So Far

The documents didn't just expose the war in Afghanistan for what it is, it also laid bare America's addiction to war.

By releasing thousands of classified military documents about the war in Afghanistan, the advocacy organization WikiLeaks and its partners in the media put the nine-year-old war back on the front page.

These documents and graphic videos of the “collateral damage” of the western military onslaught are now circulating around the globe. They portray an open-ended and directionless shooting spree that has little progress to show for its massive expenditure of blood and treasure in Afghanistan – tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, and counting.

Even more alarming, the documents show that the war has taken a bad situation in Afghanistan and made it far worse, condemning the region (especially the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan) to turmoil and war for the foreseeable future.

We now know definitively that after the Taliban were removed from power with relative ease in 2001, they simply went underground and that their insurgency has been gaining strength ever since. America’s war effort, ostensibly aimed at “liberating” Afghans, is increasingly abhorred by a population whose cooperation is key if the insurgency is actually to be dealt with in a workable way.

President Obama, seeing this as “his” war, was quick to point out that the leak revealed “nothing new,” and that the U.S. expects its surge policy (putting more troops, equipment, and firepower on the ground) will work in bringing this war to a successful conclusion. He has more than doubled the number of American troops in Afghanistan, raising the total to over 100,000, and has just signed another appropriations bill allocating $60 billion to the effort for the next year.

For an increasingly war-weary American public, however, the leak is likely to raise grave questions about the nature and purpose of America’s wars and how “success” is being defined in Afghanistan. The proverbial “number of rounds fired” no longer suffices as the primary yardstick of progress.

The leak is thus likely to bring into question the very nature of modern war itself, throwing light on what’s wrong with a system where the world’s mightiest military force is chasing the mirage of an enemy whose most hardened soldiers are waiting them out in caves. Insurgents take refuge among a population living in abject poverty, where people live on a dollar or less a day, while America spends over ten times the GDP of Afghanistan every year on its military and private security contractors.

There is obviously something fundamentally wrong with a system where a private security contractor guarding a U.S. diplomat bills in one day what the average Afghan policeman (much less layperson) makes in a whole year. It should come as little surprise that corporate hired guns out to maximize their short term profit are no good at nation building.

This draws attention to the self-perpetuating nature of America’s war machine, even under a president who is one of the most progressive and reform-minded in contemporary history. The purpose of the war, certainly for the past eight years, has been the war itself – and the massive profits that have accrued to select contractors in America’s “free enterprise” system. Supply side economics, when applied in the military realm, create conditions that legitimate war for its own sake.

During the last decade, dubbed “The Decade from Hell,” by a Time Magazine cover story last December, the U.S. has spent well over a trillion dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq, directly or indirectly killing hundreds of thousands of people, and making millions homeless – not to mention sacrificing the lives of thousands of young Americans who answered their country’s call to service, or were just looking for a job. And what has been gained?

America’s addiction to war and the pervasiveness of its war machine is deeply enshrined in a political discourse, which has for over six decades seen our challenges through the prism of war: war on communism, war on drugs, war on crime, war on terror, and, in a seemingly more innocuous vein, war on poverty, war on cancer, and so on.

“War” has thus been a constantly promoted concept – based on the thinking that once the “enemy” is killed, removed, purchased, or otherwise neutralized, the problem is solved. And this is also considered good for business because the focus on war as the dominant motif shifts our attention away from the real collateral damage (social, environmental, health) that the wealth-generation (and destruction) processes leave in their wake.

Ever since President Harry Truman created the national security state after the Second World War, the need to be armed at all times has been entrenched in Americans’ psyche as a cornerstone of their national life – a key and defining national institution, a Hobbesian vision on the state of nature: a war of all against all, within America’s borders and beyond.

To show leadership, Obama has to take this opportunity and come clean on America’s addiction to war as end in itself. He has to muster the courage to confront America’s death and destruction machine, and re-channel its massive resources and capabilities to more productive and humane ends.

Disasters, both natural and man-made, as well as the overarching challenge of climate change, threaten us on all continents. Obama must convince the American public to allocate a growing portion of the country’s massive defence budget (which at $700 billion this year alone, is more than what the rest of the world combined spends on defence) on disaster preparedness at home and abroad. Otherwise, people everywhere will think that America’s cure to the world’s ills is worse than the disease itself.