© Tim HetheringtonLast week I saw Restrepo, the Sebastian Junger/Tim Hetherington fly-on-the-wall documentary about a US infantry unit stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a.k.a. “the most dangerous place on Earth.” Junger and Hetherington follow the troops as they exchange fire with and call in airstrikes on the omnipresent Taliban, try to justify civilian deaths (a.k.a. collateral damage) to the locals, and suffer tragic deaths themselves.
Desperate for any claim to accomplishment, the unit’s commanding officer talks proudly about OP Restrepo, the new outpost his men built on high ground less than a kilometre away from their main base, as a strategic masterstroke that changed the whole dynamic of the war in the valley. I almost believed him, too — until the punch line subtitle at the very end: The US Army withdrew from the Korengal Valley in April 2010.
Meanwhile, a shadowy and fascinating organization called Wikileaks, about which little is known other than that it is headed by a shadowy and fascinating Australian hacker named Julian Assange, has ignited a political firestorm by releasing more than 90,000 secret military documents from Afghanistan which reveal that, according to the Guardian, “coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in reported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared, and NATO commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.”
Full disclosure: Jacob Appelbaum, the Wikileaks associate who gave the keynote talk at last month’s Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in Assange’s stead — and as a result was detained, interrogated, and had his property confiscated by US Homeland Security — is a friend of mine. So I’m obviously biased. (And a little worried, too, given that a recent Washington Post op-ed called for Assange to be kidnapped on EU soil by the US military.) But it’s hard to see how anyone can interpret the War Logs, as the New York Times called them, as anything but damning evidence that Afghanistan has become Restrepo writ large. The American war there has transcended mere failure and become a tragic comedy. Things are now so bad that nobody has any idea what success would even look like, much less how to achieve it.
The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave likes to think it’s fighting for freedom, democracy, and civilization. Once upon a time that was true. But now America is spending thousands of lives and billions of dollars — much of it protection money for vicious warlords — to prop up a murderously corrupt and morally bankrupt regime that blatantly stole an election and has been repeatedly linked to drug smuggling and extortion. Some of her so-called allies appear to be training, financing, and supplying the enemy, who ordinary Afghanis increasingly consider the lesser evil, which may explain why everyone is now preparing to negotiate with the Taliban. Capturing bin Laden, eradicating opium, ending corruption, bringing stability to the region, building schools and clinics throughout the nation — and ultimately a whole new, shining Afghanistan — nobody talks about those as realistic goals anymore. There is no good scenario left.
So why is America (let alone Canada) there? Nobody really knows now. The US’s attempted justifications use the same tortuous doublethink logic that once hailed OC Restrepo as a massive achievement… until the day when the mighty American war machine was driven from the Korengal Valley.
All Wikileaks did was reveal to the world the depressing truth that Afghanistan is even worse off than we thought. The US has reacted in the tradition of incompetent authorities from time immemorial: by attacking the messenger. Yes, it’s regrettable that Wikileaks didn’t expunge the names of sources from those reports, but it’s breathtaking hypocrisy for the US government to accuse anyone else of needlessly endangering Afghan civilians. It should face the message instead.
Julian Assange has said there are more revelations to come. Let’s all hope so. America’s collective denial over the criminal incompetence of its nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan can probably only be cured with shock treatment. Further Wikileaks — and/or news of power-sharing negotiations with the Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s protector — may be just the jolts it needs.
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