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The CIA has eyes in the heavens and eyeballs in the sky but  is blind to the failure all around it in the Hindu Kush. The US intelligent agencies can hear every phone call in the world but is deaf to the footsteps of defeat in the Khyber. The Pentagon can simulate a hundred different “What If” scenarios but is unable to comprehend the reality on the ground on the Kabul River. The White House is able to fly to any capital on the planet but is unable to take a few steps to end the malaise in Afghanistan. A cacophony of voices from Islamabad to Kabul are telling the US to stop the insanity of war, surges and drone bombings, but it continues to justify war, murder and mayhem. Tom Engelhardt is one of the saner voices on the third planet from the sun. He demolishes the CIA contention that the drones are helping anyone. He deciphers the doublespeak of “Big Brother” so that we all can hear the translated version of the truth–not the official gobbledygook doled out by the CIA.

Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates is still mentally incarcerated in his Cold War paradigm, unable and unwilling to undo the mess him and his Neocon ilk have created in South And West Asia. In justifying the drone bombings, Bob Gates mentions the “safe havens” in FATA. The absurdity of that claim is self evident under the scrutiny of truth. If the Taliban control 80% of Afghanistan, and the incompetent NATO has been unable to do anything about it, why would one blame Pakistan. If the insurgents in Afghanistan control all the major highways and ISAF is impotent to reverse that, how can they blame Pakistan. If the US forces are unable to control the territories under their control, blaming Pakistan is just an excuse. Bombing Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam war did not help the war effort. Bombing FATA is actually creating more insurgents.

This qualifies as an anti-imperial joke. The “leftist” president of Ecuador was doing no more than tweaking the nose of Goliath. An Ecuadorian base in Miami? Absurd. No one on the planet could take such a suggestion seriously.

On the other hand, when it comes to the US having a major base in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian land that not one in a million Americans has ever heard of, that’s no laughing matter. After all,Washington has been paying $20 million a year in direct rent for the use of that country’s Manas Air Base (and, as indirect rent, another $80 million has gone to various Kyrgyzstani programs).

another $100 million into construction at Manas “to expand aircraft parking areas at the base and provide a ‘hot cargo pad’ – an area safe enough to load and unload hazardous and explosive cargo – to be located away from inhabited facilities”. That, however, was when things started to go wrong. Now, Kyrgyzstan’s parliament has voted to expel the US from Manas within six months, a serious blow to our resupply efforts for the Afghan War. More outrageous yet to Washington, the Kyrgyzstanis seem to have done this at the bidding of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has the nerve to want to re-establish a Russian sphere of influence in what used to be the borderlands of the old Soviet Union.

As late as last October, the Pentagon was planning to sink

Put in a nutshell, despite the crumbling US economic situation and the rising costs of the Afghan war, we still act as if we live on a one-way planet. Some country demanding a base in the US? That’s a joke or an insult, while the US potentially gaining or losing a base almost anywhere on the planet may be an insult, but it’s never a laughing matter. The dictionary of empire-speak By Tom Engelhardt. Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Many empires have found their graveyards in Afghanistan. The Mongols, Alexander, the USSR and Britain went to Afghanistan and left in a hurry.The lessons of history are lost on the Generals and the establishment. They continue the wars and bomb new planes–creating new insurgents, and new enemies.

2009: Obama’s South Asian policy: A Marshall Plan for AfPak
Selective Amnesia of Americans: Pakistan is the most mistreated friend in the world
Fixing AfPak expedites the inevitable union between Pakistan and Afghanistan
The Algeriafication of Pakistan, the Egyptianization of Bangladesh may will yield Iranian type of revolutions

Imperial thought: Recently, to justify those missile attacks in Pakistan, US officials have been leaking details on the program’s “successes” to reporters. Anonymous officials have offered the “possibly wishful estimate” that the CIA “covert war” has led to the death (or capture) of 11 of al-Qaeda’s top 20 commanders, including, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report, “Abu Layth al-Libi, whom US officials described as ‘a rising star’ in the group.”

“Rising star” is such an American phrase, melding as it does imagined terror hierarchies with the lingo of celebrity tabloids. In fact, one problem with empire-speak, and imperial thought more generally, is the way it prevents imperial officials from imagining a world not in their own image. So it’s not surprising that, despite their best efforts, they regularly conjure up their enemies as a warped version of themselves – hierarchical, overly reliant on leaders, and top heavy.

In the Vietnam era, for instance, American officials spent a remarkable amount of effort sending troops to search for, and planes to bomb, the border sanctuaries of Cambodia and Laos on a fruitless hunt for COSVN (the so-called Central Office for South Vietnam), the supposed nerve center of the communist enemy, aka “the bamboo Pentagon”. Of course, it wasn’t there to be found, except in Washington’s imperial imagination.

In the Afghanistan and Pakistan “theater”, we may be seeing a similar phenomenon. Underpinning the CIA killer-drone program is a belief that the key to combating al-Qaeda (and possibly the Taliban) is destroying its leadership one-by-one. As key Pakistani officials have tried to explain, the missile attacks, which have indeed killed some al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban figures (as well as whoever was in their vicinity), are distinctly counterproductive. The deaths of those figures in no way compensates for the outrage, the destabilization, the radicalization that the attacks engender in the region. They may, in fact, be functionally strengthening each of those movements.

What it’s hard for Washington to grasp is this: “decapitation”, to use another American imperial term, is not a particularly effective strategy with a decentralized guerrilla or terror organization. The fact is a headless guerrilla movement is nowhere near as brainless or helpless as a headless Washington would be.

Only recently, Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez of the New York Times reported that, while top US officials were exhibiting optimism about the effectiveness of the missile strikes, Pakistani officials were pointing to “ominous signs of al-Qaeda’s resilience” and suggesting “that al-Qaeda was replenishing killed fighters and midlevel leaders with less experienced but more hard-core militants, who are considered more dangerous because they have fewer allegiances to local Pakistani tribes … The Pakistani intelligence assessment found that al-Qaeda had adapted to the blows to its command structure by shifting ‘to conduct decentralized operations under small but well-organized regional groups’ within Pakistan and Afghanistan.” The dictionary of empire-speak By Tom Engelhardt. Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

80% of Afghanistan is under insurgent control. Taliban sanctuaries around Kabul thumb thier noses at ISAF, NATO & US forces. Why would Taliban need safe havens far away in Pakistan?Getting out of Valhalla or new goals for war in AfPak: Can Obama’s “Neocon Lite” advisors sell old wine in new bottle
Revising Finance 101 for the Chinese Century: Political impact of Center of Gravity shift from New York to Beijing
Obama’s “Surgers” vs. “Exiters”: Exit strategy now or scrambled hasty retreat later
China sets conditions for bailing out US and buying US T-Bills
Swat and FATA for dummies: Who are the terrorists?
Zaid Hamid video on Swat
US goes begging to Beijing: India feels the pain
Why the US gave up India as a strategic partner
India’s worst nightmares come true: Long term strategic malaise
Fixing AfPak expedites the inevitable union between Pakistan and Afghanistan
Betrayels and Balckmail: Cloaking failure as success, Hiding the defeat, declaring Victory, Withdrawing from Afghanistan within 12 months
Kabul: The Final assault begins. How long can NATO hang on?

 Does Obama have the courage to implement the real solutions to Obama’s Vietnam (AfPak)

The current Secretary of Defense is as wrong about Afghanistan as the former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was wrong about Iraq. Both can be as stubborn as mules and as obdurate as 2×3 plank of wood. Neither can comprehend the nuances and complexities of Afghanistan. If Bob Gates knew what he was doing, the situation in Afghanistan would have been different.

Mr. Gates analogizes between the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the American occupation of Afghanistan. In a recent interview Bob Gates mentioned the fact that the “safe havens” in Pakistan caused havoc to the Soviet occupation. Mr. Gates forgets a few minor details. Pakistan and the CIA were providing support to the Afghan based Mujahideen. The Mujahideen were all based in Afghanistan. Some of them never came to Pakistan during the entire war. The current “safe havens” are actually hideouts and do not represent the bases. The “sanctuaries” were only supply depots and worked only in the initial stages of the war against the USSR. When parts of Afghanistan had been liberated, the insurgents were based out of Afghanistan not Pakistan. Only logistical support was provided by the CIA from Pakistan. IN the current situation 80% of Afghanistan is under insurgent control. Why would the Taliban be based out of FATA.

Imperial dreams and nightmares: Americans have rarely liked to think of themselves as “imperial”, so what is it about Rome in these last years? First, the neo-conservatives, in the flush of seeming victory in 2002-2003 began to imagine the US as a “new Rome” (or new British Empire), or as Charles Krauthammer wrote as early as February 2001 in Time Magazine, “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome.”

All roads on this planet, they were then convinced, led ineluctably to Washington. Now, of course, they visibly don’t, and the imperial bragging about surpassing the Roman or British empires has long since faded away. When it comes to the Afghan war, in fact, those (resupply) “roads” seem to lead, embarrassingly enough, through Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Russia and Iran. But the comparison to conquering Rome evidently remains on the brain.

When, for instance, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post recently, drumming up support for the revised, age-of-Obama American mission in Afghanistan, he just couldn’t help starting off with an inspiring tale about the Romans and a small Italian city-state, Locri, that they conquered. As he tells it, the ruler the Romans installed in Locri, a rapacious fellow named Pleminius, proved a looter and a tyrant. And yet, Mullen assures us, the Locrians so believed in “the reputation for equanimity and fairness that Rome had built” that they sent a delegation to the Roman Senate, knowing they could get a hearing, and demanded restitution; and indeed, the tyrant was removed.

Admittedly, this seems a far-fetched analogy to the US in Afghanistan (and don’t for a second mix up Pleminius, that rogue, with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, even though the Obama-ites evidently now believe him corrupt and replaceable). Still, as Mullen sees it, the point is: “We don’t always get it right. But like the early Romans, we strive in the end to make it right. We strive to earn trust. And that makes all the difference.”

Mullen is, it seems, the Aesop of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, in his somewhat overheated brain, we evidently remain the conquering (but just) “early” Romans – before, of course, the fatal rot set in.
And then there’s the Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks, a superb reporter who, in his latest book, gives voice to the views of Centcom Commander David Petraeus. Reflecting on Iraq, where he (like the general) believes we could still be fighting in “2015″, Ricks begins a recent Post piece this way:

In October 2008, as I was finishing my latest book on the Iraq war, I visited the Roman Forum during a stop in Italy. I sat on a stone wall on the south side of the Capitoline Hill and studied the two triumphal arches at either end of the Forum, both commemorating Roman wars in the Middle East … The structures brought home a sad realization: It’s simply unrealistic to believe that the US military will be able to pull out of the Middle East … It was a week when US forces had engaged in combat in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – a string of countries stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean – following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Romans and the British.

With the waning of British power, Ricks continues, it “has been the United States’ turn to take the lead there”. And our turn, as it happens, just isn’t over yet. Evidently that, at least, is the view from our imperial capital and from our military viceroys out on the peripheries.

Honestly, Freud would have loved these guys. They seem to channel the imperial unconscious. Take David Petraeus. For him, too, the duties and dangers of empire evidently weigh heavily on the brain. Like a number of key figures, civilian and military, he has lately begun to issue warnings about Afghanistan’s dangers. As the Washington Post reported, “[Petraeus] suggested that the odds of success were low, given that foreign military powers have historically met with defeat in Afghanistan. ‘Afghanistan has been known over the years as the graveyard of empires,’ he said. ‘We cannot take that history lightly’.”

Of course, he’s worrying about the graveyard aspect of this, but what I find curious – exactly because no one thinks it odd enough to comment on here – is the functional admission in the use of this old adage about Afghanistan that we fall into the category of empires, whether or not in search of a graveyard in which to die.

And he’s not alone in this. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put the matter similarly recently: “Without the support of the Afghan people, Gates said, the US would simply ‘go the way of every other foreign army that’s ever been in Afghanistan.’”The dictionary of empire-speak By Tom Engelhardt. Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

The drones are attacking turbaned Pakhtuns with beards. All of FATA looks like that. The CIA predator cameras have been unable to distinguish between friend and foe. Most of the attacks have taken the lives of innocent civilians. Eliminating “Rising Star in the Al-Qaeda Network” is total gobbledygook created to justify killing of innocent women and children

Imperial blindness: Think of the above as just a few prospective entries in The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak that will, of course, never be compiled. We’re so used to such language, so inured to it and to the thinking behind it, so used, in fact, to living on a one-way planet in which all roads lead to and from Washington, that it doesn’t seem like a language at all. It’s just part of the unexamined warp and woof of everyday life in a country that still believes it normal to garrison the planet, regularly fight wars halfway across the globe, find triumph or tragedy in the gain or loss of an air base in a country few Americans could locate on a map, and produce military manuals on counterinsurgency warfare the way a do-it-yourself furniture maker would produce instructions for constructing a cabinet from a kit.
We don’t find it strange to have 16 intelligence agencies, some devoted to listening in on, and spying on, the planet, or capable of running “covert wars” in tribal borderlands thousands of miles distant, or of flying unmanned drones over those same borderlands destroying those who come into camera view. We’re inured to the bizarreness of it all and of the language (and pretensions) that go with it.
If The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak were ever produced, who here would buy it? Who would feel the need to check out what seems like the only reasonable and self-evident language for describing the world? How else, after all, would we operate? How else would any American in a position of authority talk in Washington or Baghdad or Islamabad or Rome?

So it undoubtedly seemed to the Romans, too. And we know what finally happened to their empire and the language that went with it. Such a language plays its role in normalizing the running of an empire. It allows officials (and in our case the media as well) not to see what would be inconvenient to the smooth functioning of such an enormous undertaking. Embedded in its words and phrases is a fierce way of thinking (even if we don’t see it that way), as well as plausible deniability. And in the good times, its uses are obvious.

On the other hand, when the normal ways of empire cease to function well, that same language can suddenly work to blind the imperial custodians – which is, after all, what the foreign policy “team” of the Obama era is – to necessary realities. At a moment when it might be important to grasp what the “American face” in the mirror actually looks like, you can’t see it.

And sometimes what you can’t bring yourself to see can, as now, hurt you. The dictionary of empire-speak By Tom Engelhardt. Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

US AfPak policy review results mimic Chinese demads given to Hillary Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived. ~Abraham Lincoln In 1821 The Taliban was a construct of the CIA and was armed by the CIA:–Congressman Dana RohrabacherObama’s Vietnam & Cambodiazation of the Afghan war Solutions to “Obama’s Vietnam” Kabul: The Final Spring Offensive? End of NATO? Afghanistan: The writing is on the wall. Can Obama read it?UK Brig. Smith: “We’re not going to win this [Afghan] war”
Failure and Defeat in Afghanistan: Inevitable Frustration & misdirected Payback for ally Pakistan US Charge of the Light Brigade into Pakistan is a US failure and has to stop
Pakistan’s do more list for the USA Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan & Swat run by Taliban Huge Migraine for India
Facing the Khyber poltergeist & Ganges hobgoblin NATO war: UK 1880 defeats in Afghanistan
“Charge of the Light Brigade” in Afghanistan AGAIN: Unfortunately the lessons of the unmitigated disaster of “Auckland’s Folly”, (First Anglo-Afghan War 1838–42) have not been taught to the Oxbridge students.
Bin Laden used Reagan’s USSR strategy to Destroy US Capitalism? Cambodiazation of the Afghan war Rescueing the Pashtuns of Afghania from Afghanistan
Unite! Erase the Durand LineSolution: Fixing “AfPak” expedites the inevitable union between Pakistan & Afghanistan