Gregg Easterbrook

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq citing two justifications: to depose Saddam Hussein and to destroy Iraq’s banned weapons program. Within a year, Hussein and his accomplices were imprisoned, and it had been discovered there was no Iraqi banned weapons program. Having achieved its goals, why didn’t the United States leave? Seven years later, this question haunts the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

In 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan, citing two justifications: to find Osama bin Laden, and break up al Qaeda. Bin Laden is now dead, and al Qaeda broken.

So why doesn’t the United States leave?

By autumn, American forces will have spent a full decade in Afghanistan — conducting patrols, bombing the heinous, bombing the innocent. The United States has roughly 100,000 soldiers and air crew in Afghanistan, almost as many as the peak force in Iraq. The U.S. presence in Afghanistan constrains the Taliban, and the Taliban are an awful group. But the Taliban are a central Asian problem afflicting Afghanistan and Pakistan — their existence does not in any way threaten the United States’ national interest.

Having fulfilled its goals in Afghanistan, why doesn’t the United States leave?

Max Boot, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow, writes in the Wall Street Journal that, “Since 9-11, al-Qaeda has never had more than a few dozen fighters inside Afghanistan at any given time.” Boot is a hardliner — he supports the Afghanistan war, and is author of the 2003 book Savage Wars of Peace, a spirited defense of superpower engagement in low-level conflicts. Boot also thinks there are terrorist groups other than al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

But with bin-Laden dead, how could “a few dozen fighters” and miscellaneous criminal bands justify keeping 100,000 American military personnel, plus 40,000 NATO military personal, in Afghanistan? Justify the continuing violation of Afghan sovereignty? The United States has never declared war on Afghanistan — we just attacked.

Most important, how can the United States justify continuing to kill civilians in Afghanistan? U.S. and NATO forces may not intend to kill Afghan civilians. To the dead, it’s all the same.

After the al Qaeda attack on the United States, the United States counterattack on Afghanistan could be rationalized as self defense. With bin Laden dead, that rationale fades away. To think that any country that harbors scattered bands of bad people should be invaded and methodically bombed by the United States is madness.

So with bin Laden gone — why don’t we leave Afghanistan?

When Barack Obama became president, the United States had about 70,000 soldiers and air crew in Afghanistan. Obama promised the Afghanistan “surge,” which raised the force level, would end in summer 2011. So even before bin Laden was killed, U.S. forces were expected to begin leaving Afghanistan around now. Instead, the White House and Defense Department are saying combat forces will remain in Afghanistan perhaps until 2014.

That would be 14 years of occupation — thousands of Americans dead, tens of thousands of Afghans dead — in order to accomplish what? In order to demonstrate U.S. muscle flexing, and to postpone the moment when Western forces leave Afghanistan in worse condition than they found it. With bin Laden dead, the time has come to end American military adventurism in Afghanistan — can U.S. forces on the ground there even describe what they are now fighting for? — and begin Afghan reconstruction.

What follows are a few notes on the bin Laden raid, which your columnist thinks was moral and which I defended here on the BBC:

Those “stealth helicopters.” Radar evasion — which is debatable for a helicopter — had little, if anything, to do with their use. Two Black Hawks with stealth features, trailed by two Chinooks, flew toward bin Laden’s compound. The Chinook, a 1960s design, has no stealthy features: on radar screens, it looks like a flying barn. So the presence of the Chinooks would have betrayed the stealth helicopters to radar operators.

The reason for the “stealth” helicopters is that they make less noise than standard rotary aircraft, aiding the element of surprise. No helicopter is quiet: the Pakistani press reported people in Abbottabad left their houses to see what all the helicopter noise was. “Stealth” helicopters are merely loud, rather than ear-splitting. Also the stealth Black Hawk has infrared shielding, in case Pakistani forces fired heat-seeking missiles, which didn’t happen.

Why didn’t the Pakistani military respond to a 40-minute raid near its capital? One reason is that the Pak military is not exactly a well-oiled machine: the Russian fleet approaching Tsushima Strait in 1905 is the right analogy. This is something to think about when pondering that Pakistan’s army must protect atomic bombs. Another reason is that Pakistan’s defense net points east, toward India. The raiders approached from the west, from Afghanistan.

It also may be that the United States was “spoofing” Pakistani radars and communications: causing the raiding helicopters to disappear electronically, without “jamming” (producing static and systems failures), which would announce something unusual was happening. Don’t be surprised if it turns out one or more U.S. electronic warfare aircrafts were in Pakistani airspace that night, spoofing Islamabad’s national security net. And don’t be surprised if it turns out that U.S. ground-attack aircraft, including this heavily armed plane, specialized to fire on advancing soldiers, were above Pakistan in case the raid went south.

Why wasn’t the V-22 used? The Pentagon has spent at least $30 billion on the V-22 tilt-rotor, which is newer and more advanced than the Black Hawk helicopter. The V-22 was designed for a mission profile like the bin Laden raid — fly a long distance through hostile airspace at twice the speed of a helicopter, land and take off like a helicopter, fly back at twice helicopter speed. Yet the V-22 wasn’t used. Though operational since 2007, the V-22 has never been employed near hostile forces in Iraq or Afghanistan.

This aircraft had a poor safety record in testing, and has been cited by Defense Secretary Robert Gates as an example of procurement waste. If it wasn’t right for the bin Laden raid, the V-22 will never be right. Either the lack of V-22 use was inter-service rivalry of the silliest kind (Navy SEALS staged the mission, the V-22 is operated by the Marines and the Air Force) or the V-22 is a very expensive dud that needs to be canceled before any more taxpayer money is wasted.

Photos, top to bottom: Farmer Jalaluddin, 70, carries harvested vegetables past the compound where U.S. Navy SEAL commandos reportedly killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad May 5, 2011. Pakistan, in apparent reference to old rival India, said on Thursday any country that tried to raid its territory in the way U.S. forces did to kill Osama bin Laden would face consequences from its military. REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro; Part of a damaged helicopter is seen lying near the compound after U.S. Navy SEAL commandos killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, May 2, 2011. REUTERS/Stringer

Raymond Davis, an American who shot and killed two men in Lahore, Pakistan, under disputed circumstances, has just been revealed to be a CIA contractor. What a mess. And it’s a mess that makes me reflect on when I lived in Lahore, in the late 1980s.

Lahore is the cultural capital of Pakistan, home to writers, artists and intellectuals. Variously ruled in recent centuries by the Mughals, the Sikhs and the British during the Raj, Lahore is the great ancient city of the Punjab. There is magnificent old architecture, crazed and crowded marketplaces, sprawling slums. A sense of intrigue is part of the city’s lore, as one would feel in Marrakesh or Kathmandu.

Driving in the old-city areas of Lahore is unlike anything experienced in the West. Roads are bumper-to-bumper, drivers flagrantly disobey traffic laws — roaring the wrong way down a one-way street is practically normal. Davis said his car was wedged in by traffic, a common problem in the city, when he was approached by two men with guns. Having driven in the old-city areas of Lahore, I am sure that being in a wedged-in car and approached by armed men — roving thieves plague Pakistan, and there is nothing equivalent to the reliability of 911 — would be frightening. Whether Davis was justified in opening fire is something the courts must determine.

The revelation that Davis was working for the CIA has roiled Pakistan and embarrassed the United States, because Davis entered Pakistan on a diplomatic passport. Officially, such passports are only for diplomats and their dependents. On a practical basis, the United States and many other nations — surely, at some point, including Pakistan — grant diplomatic covers to intelligence agents. But when a bogus diplomatic status is exposed, this shames the nation involved. The United States looks extra-bad because after the shooting, American officials including President Barack Obama insisted Davis actually was a diplomat, a member of the administrative staff of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad.

Whether diplomatic immunity applies to Davis is a matter of keen debate. Often, intelligent agents caught in situations such as this are quietly spirited out of the country as the host government agrees to look the other way. Because the Davis case has stirred such controversy in Pakistan — was it really robbery, why did Davis fire so many times, what about the U.S. staff car that struck and killed a bystander while speeding toward Davis? — slipping him out of Pakistan would cause general outrage.

The case is controversial not only owing to Davis himself, but to the substantial CIA presence in Pakistan. American operatives are seeking al Qaeda figures on another nation’s soil, and are directing missile strikes on another nation’s soil. The Pakistani government is more-or-less cooperating with the United States against al Qaeda, but needed the presence of CIA operatives to remain, officially at least, a secret. Now that this is out in the open, Washington has placed the Pakistani government in an awkward position.

Imagine if Barack Obama signed a memo allowing agents of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate to operate on U.S, soil, including to fire missiles at houses where ISI believed terrorists were meeting, even if innocent bystanders are killed. Americans would be livid if Pakistani intelligence agents were given reign to act inside the United States. Yet that’s the agreement Pakistan has made regarding CIA operatives. Even if that agreement is in the interest of Pakistan, no one should be surprised that Pakistanis are livid.

The ISI almost surely knew Davis was in the CIA. This may simply have been disclosed, behind the scenes, when Davis arrived in Pakistan. If not, within U.S. embassy or consular environments, it just isn’t that hard to figure out which ones are the CIA people under diplomatic cover. They tend to behave differently than diplomats (often working at night, sleeping during the day), have different equipment in their offices, even drive distinctive types of cars. The local Lahore police who responded to the shooting wouldn’t have known who Davis was. But Pakistani intelligence had to know, and likely told Pakistani civilian authorities early on following the shooting whom they were really dealing with — as well as whether Davis’s account is credible.

You don’t have to be a spy novelist to wonder if Davis was lured into a trap by any of several bad actors, realized he was in an ambush and shot his way out. Or perhaps it will turn out that what really happened was a street robbery, the thieves choosing a man who surprised them by being well armed and who fired wildly because he was scared. The CIA being the CIA and Pakistan being Pakistan, the odds are there is more to this case than has yet emerged. For a thousand years, Lahore has been a city of intrigue. Adjust for modern touches such as the Glock and the GPS receiver, and Davis fits perfectly with Lahore’s tradition.

Photos; Top: Extended family members of Pakistanis who were killed hold an image of Raymond Davis, a U.S diplomat, and pictures of the men who were killed as they demand the hanging of Davis during a protest rally in Lahore February 2, 2011. REUTERS/Mohsin Raza

Bottom: A supporter of the political party Tehreek-e-Insaf takes part in a protest against Raymond Davis (pictured in the background) in Lahore February 3, 2011. REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood