Bulletin N° 639

 

 

 

Subject:  AT THE END OF THE YEAR 2014, THE DÉJÀ-VU OF CAPITALIST MOBILIZATION FOR WAR.

 

 

30 December 2014
Grenoble, France

 

 

Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,

 

In a decidedly pre-postmodernist discourse --in which theory follows from facts, and not the reverse-- the late American anthropologist/sociologist Jules Henry delivered a paper in late July 1967, at the famous International Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London, which he entitled, “Social and Psychological Preparation for War.” Here Professor Henry recounted his views of late capitalist development and the social impact it has had on our lives. Two elements to contemplate seriously in this coming New Year 2015, were clearly exposed in this presentation in which he warned the illustrius audiance of intellectuals and activists: a) that an enemy today is easily transformed into a friend tomorrow, and vice versa; and b) that US corporate interests have permeated the European economy completely and a European comprador class has been created and remains ever ready when called upon to serve these US corporate interests, jusqu'au bout ! These concepts, employed nearly half a century ago, serve as stellar examples of light passing through the darkness of space until it meets an object which confirms its existance. We live in such darkness today, in the second decade of the 21st Century.

 

The author of Culture Against Man (1965) began his presentation in the summer of 1967, with the following observations :

 

   The post-war ‘compassion’ of the modern ‘victor’, which recognizes the basic unity of the world social system, and therefore dresses the enemy’s wounds, is at 180 degrees from those ancient wars, in which the defeated enemy was put to the sword, enslaved, or condemned to tribute. This modern ‘compassion’ is partly a consequence of interlocking international corporations, partly an expression of the need to use one’s former enemies against one’s former friends. America’s use of Japan –particularly on Okinawa—as a staging area and source of supply for the war in Vietnam, and her support of German claims and hopes against the Soviet Union, are cases in point.

 

   The basic fact of modern warfare, then, is that it occurs within a mutually dependent world political economy and that all victories are therefore defeats for the people –for they have borne the burden of death and, through taxation, must bear the economic burden of compassion—and victories for the vanquished, for they often see their economies beautifully reconstructed. . . .

 

… business and technological know-how combined with low wages have given Japan such economic power that U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia is aimed as much as monopolizing that market against Japanese penetration as against Chinese. The Vietnam War is indirectly a war against Japan, who is part of our social system, and whom, at the same time, the U.S. is using in order to further her ends in Asia.

 

   Not all wars are shooting wars or even cold one. For years the United States has been fighting a kind of cold war with France, and England is a kind of casualty of that war. France’s (largely unsuccessful) efforts to keep American capital out, its determination to build its own computer industry and nuclear capability, its efforts to diminish American gold paramountcy and its objection to Britain’s entrance into the Common Market are all expressions, in part, of fear of United States’ economic power.

 

   It is clear, therefore, that in preparation of modern war an interdependent world political economy has within it sufficient conflicts of interests to make all nations potential enemies to all others. One of the ‘evolutionary achievements’ of modern culture has been to make the idea that ‘anybody can be my enemy at any time’ acceptable. (David Cooper, ed., To Free a Generation, 1967,pp.51-53)

 

Professor Henry went on to summarize his views of allies and enemies in the global system of late monopoly capitalism:

 

The social preparation for modern war therefore involves the following steps: (1) Establishment of a world system in which betrayal, conspiracy and entrapment are so commonplace that at any moment whoever is within the friendly system may be defined as outside of it; so commonplace, indeed that people accept it without thinking. (2) Manipulation of that system in the interests of particular classes or groups who stand to gain by particular definitions. (3) The manipulation, the molding of the perceptual capacities of the people by these groups through their control of the mass media. (4) The establishment of a world-wide social system which strictly limits choice. In this context Charles de Gaulle’s efforts to free France of American economic entanglements represent not only an effort to be free of the United States as such, but also as effort to be free of limiting options; to be free to seek new solutions to the problems of a hampering social system and in this context English economic entanglement with the United State illustrates the impossibility of ever arriving at new solutions to one’s problems as long as one is committed to a powerful ally who sees only the old, and limited, possibilities. The same holds within the group of states allied to the USSR. I hope I am making myself clear. All social systems have been set up in such a way as to limit options. Whether it be a primitive tribe where a man must marry his mother’s brother’s daughter and cultivate his land with the help of his clan brothers only; whether it be the members of the old British Commonwealth, trading largely with those within the sterling area; or whether it be the Unites States Government trying to stop the sale by other nations of so-called strategic materials to the ‘communist’ nations, every society, throughout history, has buttressed its internal structure and mobilized against outsiders by limiting choice. Fundamentally, primordially, free choice has been viewed as inimical to any social system. Arguments about free choice, therefore, have been absurd when they have not been hypocritical.(pp.54-55)

 

Later in this important paper, Henry focused on the state of America’s political economy in the mid-1960s, describing it in historical terms which have a certain relevance today, nearly half a century later.

 

   I turn now to an analysis of the organization of the American economy: In order to show how readily it can be mobilized for anything at all.

 

   In order that any social system be mobilized be mobilized for war, which means mobilization for maximum effort, it must have forms of structure –institutions—which can swiftly be brought together and integrated into a war system when necessary. . . .  The latent possibility for such organization existed long before World War II and the consolidation process was hastened by the immense insecurity of the Great Depression. ‘The modern centralized, militarized, and welfare-directed state’ is the result of a complex internal evolution taking several decades. I shall trace the pattern.(p.56)

 

He went on to illustrate the growing concentration of corporate power in industrial sectors such as automobile, oil, and steel production. The magnitude of corporate power, he warned, is not measured only by the size of the plants directly connected with it; it includes its subsidiaries as well, which provide raw materials, transportation facilities, financing, etc., etc… But beyond the plants and their subsidiaries exist the networks of managers and directors. He gave some examples:

 

In 1962 [the US Steel Corporation’s] eighteen directors accounted for eighty-five management interlocks with other companies, over which these directors might be expected to exercise influence, and these interlocks included twenty banks and financial institutions, ten insurance companies and fifty-four industrial-commercial corporations. Thus C. H. Bell, for example, was also a director of General Mills, Inc., the Winton Lumber Company, and the Northern Pacific Railway; and Mr. J. B. Black sat on the board of directors of FMC  corporation, Del Monte Properties Company, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Southern Pacific Company, Shell Oil, Pacific Gas Transmission Company, Alberta Natural Gas Company, and the Alberta and Southern Gas Company Limited.

 

The Dow Chemical Company, manufacturer extraordinary of napalm and explosives, operates several dozen plants in the United states, but through subsidiaries and through part ownership it controls or is deeply involved in other scores of manufacturing operations and corporations in the United kingdom (Dow Chemical International Ltd), Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, India and Spain . Though its affiliation with Schlumberger Ltd, Dow substantially controls plants in France, Germany, Spain, Spanish Sahara, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Iran, Venezuela, Trinidad, Bolivia and Argentina. Other operations substantially controlled by Dow are in Japan (Asahi-Dow Lts) and Ecuador. Literally the sun never sets on Dow! Thus through sheer size, through subsidiaries, through ownership of stock in other corporations and through management interlocks, the large

American corporations control much of the productive capability of the planet. In 1951, 135 American corporations owned nearly a fourth of the manufacturing volume of the world. This says nothing about how much is controlled, how much is a sphere of it interest, that is not owned outright.(pp.57-58)

 

Henry then discussed another aspect of the social organization for American corporate power. Interest groups reliably pursue common financial goals by the use of ‘interlocking directorates, mutual stock ownership, financial support, auditing and legal activities and membership in the same trade organizations.’

 

If various companies share board members and own one another’s stocks and bonds; if, further, certain financial institutions assume the burden of underwriting (financial responsibility) and disposing of stock flotations for certain corporations, while other consistently render legal and auditing services to all, we have a common financial interest and, therefore, a common- interest group.(p.59)

 

After laying out is some detail the structure of corporate controls in America, Henry turned to the relationship between government and corporate organization. The close relationship between big business and government began in the 1930s. Before the Great Depression it was believed that the capitalist system was self-regulating, that the laws of nature would eliminate inefficient and weak firms while leaving the field to the strong, able to beget power offspring. However, the prolonged crisis caused the corporate community to change its mind and massive government intervention was born. When war came the structures of mobilization were improved. It was clear to all that without this mobilization the economy would have collapse.

 

From this culture grew the military-industrial complex, which has since taken complete control of the American economy, and one might argue of the world economic system, as well. The rise of Socialism and violent Third World revolutions left the American corporate community feeing vulnerable after the Second World War. This community successfully communicated its fear and hate to the American public via the mass media. This economic structure and the political system was intact before the World War II, and now it could be effectively mobilized to defend the interests of the American corporate community, with the reliable collaboration of the American people. At this point Henry summed up is presentation thus far :

 

I have outlined the organization of American industry that provides the social intra-structure for war. I have shown that the basis is, in the first place, the giant corporations with its ramifying network of plants, subsidiaries, and stock-holdings that extend its influence throughout the nation and the world. I then pointed out how these corporations are linked to one another and organized into interest groups which are interlocked among themselves. I then described the process whereby the American corporate community, abandoning … the cry against government interference, became amalgamated with government, and I pointed out how the military has become part and parcel of American business. Given this structure, the traditional division of our society into business, government and military seems obsolete and illusory. Given this structure, it is possible to mobilize American industry for war output almost instantaneously. It is not far-fetched to say that now, by its very nature it is in a constant state of mobilization for war.(p.63)

 

He then went on to analyze the psychological factors at play in the US political economy. ‘Vulnerability’: since the Great Depression, only a fool or a con-artist would argue that the capitalist economy is ‘self-regulating’; the depression experience destroyed that idea forever in the minds of most people and some sort of government intervention is taken for granted. ‘Terror and Euphoria’: Consumer society expanded during the Cold War. It is fear of Communism that makes Americans willing to pay taxes for armaments, but since much of these taxes are returned to many Americans in the form of good salaries, Henry argues ‘Americans grow fat on fear.’ Their fear is anesthetized by ‘good times.’ ‘Confusion between Friend and Enemy’: Since WW II, the wild fluctuation of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ has produced in the ordinary citizen despondency, and a cynicism, a willingness to defer to ‘higher powers’ and ‘experts’. Any natural interest in politics is displaced by a concern for his standard of living, his family, and the omnipresent feeling of vulnerability. As a result, Henry argued, the ordinary American withholds committing himself to any worldview whatsoever. This commitment to superficiality make him susceptible to ideas promulgated by organized corporate interests. ‘Freedom, Enterprise and Docility’: The constraints under late capitalism are the opposite to freedom. What is called ‘free enterprise’ is simply the pursuit of a linear calculation that produces a maximum amount of profits, at practically any social and environmental cost. Any creativity is destroyed by this pathological impulse governed by a metaphysics that has no relationship with material reality other than destroying all obstacles in its path. The affluence in American society due to the war economy has produced a contented segment of the population, a white population that is exceedingly docile, which is an ideal preparation for war, as ‘docile people make excellent soldiers.’

 

By way of conclusion, Jules Henry observed :

 

… in the modern, as contrasted with the tribal, world the inimical is selected by the group in power and of the fact that the perceptual functions of the people are shaped to suit this group’s objectives. In modern times perception has rapidly evolved away from tradition-determined perceptions of the world to class determined cones and perception is manipulated by the mass media. So one acquires and pus off one’s enemies and friends , one’s ideas, one’s opinions, and one’s tastes somewhat as one changes style. Finally I pointed out the lack of sense in the words ‘freedom’ and ‘enterprise’. The last point I take up is the psychological consequences of the disappearance from life of any real options, of any real freedom.

 

   While it is unlikely that at any time man’s choices were not over-determined; while it is unlikely that Homo sapiens ever had a local or international system that allowed him to invent new solutions to his old problems, I feel that never before have so many felt that they lived in a room with no exit. This results in apathy and withdrq3al from life. . . .  The knowledge that there are no options, the feeling of entrapment, the feeling that one can do nothing because there are no doors, makes its inevitable contribution to war; for not only does it lead to ready acceptance of war as a solution to difficult problems, but it creates docility also. Man is everywhere chained to a system in which he perceives no new options. Yet there are –for the vast and radical political changes that have occurred in the past two generations [between 1947 & 1967] prove that man can create new options where there seemed to be none.(pp.70-71)

 

 

 

The 10 items below offer CEIMSA readers a look at future prospects for the New Year. The analyses and interpretations in these essays should provide evidence of contradictions and new opportunities for action, if our creative spirits have not been damaged by the ruling class warfare conducted against us.

 

Item A., from Information Clearing House, contain three reports of the economic war that is currently suggesting a prelude to World War III.

 

Item B., from Là-bas si j’y suis is an audio broadcast with the inimitable Daniel Mermet conducting interviews with: a)Serge Halimi on « the enemy within »; b)Pierre Rimbert on « the free press »; c)Anni-Cécile Robert on « Blaise Compaoré and Thomas Sankara »; and d)Benoit Bréville on « charity against the state ».

 

Item C., from Information Clearing House, is an article by Peter Koenig warning Europe of the pending world war which would bring more human suffering than they have ever know up to now.

 

Item D., from Edward S. Herman, is an article by James Meek, on the US in Afghanistan: a fate “worse than defeat.”

 

Item E., from The Real News Network, is a video report on the menace of capitalist housing development world wide, and more . . . .

 

Item F., from Information Clearing House, is an article by Paul Buchheit on how corporations and the supper-rich are stealing from the rest of us.

 

Item G., from Democracy Now!, is a report on the imprisonment of Kathy Kelly for her opposition to Drone Warfare.

 

Item H., from NYU Professor Mark Crispin Miller, founder of News from the Underground, is an article by Christine Hong on the U.S. Regime-Change Cowboy Policy toward North Korea.

 

Item I., from Là-bas si j’y suis is an audio broadcast with Daniel Mermet reading tales for the season.

 

Item J., also from Mark Crispin Miller, is a report from Amnesty International on the EU politics of  starvation in Eastern Ukraine.

 

And finally, we offer CEIMSA readers a New Year's gift in the form of visual delights from a series of short NASA films recently publsihed byThe New York Times documenting the creation of solar systems, while once again demonstrating the social contradictions we are all living today where high technology is governed by low intellegence . . . .

 

The Birth of a Star

http://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000003302881/born-from-dust.html?emc=edit_th_20141219&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=30100672

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sincerely,

Francis Feeley

Professor of American Studies

University of Grenoble-3

Director of Research

University of Paris-Nanterre

Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and Social Movements

The University of California-San Diego

http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/

 

 

 

__________________

A.

From Information Clearing House :

Date : 28 December 2014

Subject: Three Articles on economic Warfare Using Fossil Fuel Prices as the Ultimate Weapon.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/

 

 

1)

Why would the Saudis suddenly abandon a strategy that allowed them to rake in twice as much dough as they are today? Don’t they like money anymore?

 

Irreversible Decline?
Did the U.S. and the Saudis Conspire to Push Down Oil Prices?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40576.htm

by Mike Whitney

2)

Lawrence Wilkerson says the target of low oil prices is Russia and Iran whose economies are being thrown into turmoil and opens the doors to sovereign raiders.


US/Saudi Oil Play is Economic Warfare
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40583.htm

Video

3)

It would be ironic, indeed, were the tensions with Russia inadvertently to become the driver of America finally losing its petrodollar card.


Non-Dollar Trading Is Killing the Petrodollar
And the Foundation of U.S.-Saudi Policy in the Middle East
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40584.htm
by Alastair Crooke



 

 __________________

B.

From Là-bas si j’y suis :

Date : 20 December 2014

Subject: Déjà le Diplo revient là-bas !

http://la-bas.org/deja-le-diplo-revient-la-bas

 

Retrouvez notre dernière émission, autour du Monde Diplomatique de décembre.

Cet email ne s'affiche pas correctement ?
Voir cette Infolettre dans votre navigateur.

 

 

Déjà le Diplo revient là-bas !

 

Là-bas si j’y suite embarque le 21 janvier prochain mais déjà nous retrouvons l’émission mensuelle avec le Monde Diplomatique. Des sujets dans le numéro de décembre : l’ennemi intérieur avec Serge Halimi, la presse libre avec Pierre Rimbert, Blaise Compaoré et Thomas Sankara avec Anne-Cécile Robert, la charité contre l’État avec Benoit Bréville.

Retrouvez l’émission en accès libre, en écoute et en téléchargement

Chaque mois depuis plus de 20 ans, nous avons reçu l’équipe du « Diplo » pour faire entendre la manière de voir du journal français le plus vendu dans le monde, ce que nos élites ignorent superbement. Depuis la dénonciation de l’horreur économique au début des années 90 (Ignacio Ramonet) jusqu’au plaidoyer pour la (vraie) gauche (Frédéric Lordon, 2014) en passant par la création d’ATTAC (Bernard Cassen, 1998) ou la peinture au vitriol des nouveaux chiens de garde (Serge Halimi, 1997), les émissions avec le Diplo ne nous ont pas valu que des amis dans le monde des gagnants.

Désormais ces émissions sont consultables en libre accès dans nos archives depuis 2003. Une façon vivante de saisir notre trajectoire commune et d’y trouver le goût de l’infléchir vers de plus riantes contrées.

L’équipe de Là-bas
contact@la-bas.org

Vite abonnez-vous, offrez un abonnement !

 

Suivez nous sur Twitter | Facebook  

© Là-bas si j’y suis — 2014

Cet email a été envoyé à : francis.feeley@u-grenoble3.fr
 
Me désinscrire de cette Newsletter 

 

 

__________________

C.

From Information Clearing House :

Date : 29 December 2014

Subject: Soon Coming: “The Third World War in Europe!”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/

 

A dying beast knows no mercy. It rather destroys the universe and itself than leaving survivors behind.

 

Europe Beware!
WWIII Could Destroy Europe for the Third Time in a Century
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40579.htm

by Peter Koenig

 

 

_______________

D.

From: Edward S. Herman :

Date: 21 December 2014 

Subject : London Review of Books on UK in Afghanistn: Worse than a Defeat.

 

 

Francis,

This is enlightening and horrifying. 

ed herman

 

Worse than a Defeat

by James Meek

 

You are invited to read this free book review from the London Review of Books. Subscribe now to access every article from every fortnightly issue of the London Review of Books, including the entire LRB archive of over 13,500 essays and reviews.

‘The British wrote cheques they could not cash.’
--American Special Forces officer

 

In the morning, I left the village where I’d spent the night, the village where, in the ninth century, a famous king had beaten the army of a northern warlord. I climbed a steep path to a high plateau and walked along dusty tracks. There was gunfire in the distance. In the early afternoon I rested on a hilltop, on the ramparts of ancient fortifications whose shape was outlined in soft bulges and shadings on the slopes. Down in the fertile flatlands, I could see rows of the armoured behemoths Britain bought to protect its troops in Afghanistan from roadside bombs, painted the colour of desert sand and crowded around the maintenance sheds of a military base. There was a roar from the road below and the squeak of tank tracks. A column of Warriors clanked up the hill. The Warrior is a strong fighting vehicle. It can protect a team of soldiers as it carries them into battle. Bullets bounce off it. A single inch-thick shell from its cannon can do terrible damage to anything unarmoured it hits. But these Warriors looked tired. They came into service in the late 1980s, just as the Cold War they’d been designed for was ending, and Afghanistan has a way of diminishing and humbling military technology.

I’d walked the same route last year, leaving Edington after breakfast, walking round the edge of the military exercise area on Salisbury Plain and pausing at the Iron Age fort on Battlesbury Hill, which looks out over the British army’s Wiltshire estate. Since then most of the army in Afghanistan had come back to Britain, and an item of furniture had been added to the Battlesbury ramparts, among the cow parsley and purple clover: a bench. I was glad to sit down, as my pack was heavy. But the bench is also a shrine. When I came across it – this was in July – candles had been placed on it and a sun-bleached cloth poppy fastened to the back rest. It’s a memorial to six British soldiers: Nigel Coupe of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, and Jake Hartley, Anthony Frampton, Christopher Kershaw, Daniel Wade and Daniel Wilford of the Yorkshire Regiment. All except Coupe, a sergeant and father of two children, were aged between 19 and 21. They died in Afghanistan in March 2012, out on patrol in Helmand province, when their Warrior triggered the pressure plate of a huge home-made mine. The explosion flipped the vehicle on its side, blew off the gun turret, ignited its ammunition and killed everyone inside.

The British army is back in Warminster and its other bases around the country. Its eight-year venture in southern Afghanistan is over. The extent of the military and political catastrophe it represents is hard to overstate. It was doomed to fail before it began, and fail it did, at a terrible cost in lives and money.

How bad was it? In a way it was worse than a defeat, because to be defeated, an army and its masters must understand the nature of the conflict they are fighting. Britain never did understand, and now we would rather not think about it. The troops are home from a campaign that lasted 13 years, including Iraq in the middle. They are coming home from their bases in Germany, too. The many car parks’ worth of mine-proof vehicles you can see from Battlesbury Hill, ordered tardily for Afghanistan at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks.

David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack Fairweather writes in his powerful history of the war. The instruction was, it seems, hardly needed. The fall of Musa Qala in 2013, ‘once the focus of the British military’s anxiety about their standing in the world, barely registered in the national consciousness, and a desperate battle over Sangin in 2013 … attracted little attention’.

In 2012, when Frank Ledwidge was researching his book, which tallies the personal and financial cost of Britain’s Helmand campaign, he approached all six ministers who had held the defence portfolio since the start of the operation to ask what they thought its legacy would be. Not one – not Labour’s John Reid, now Baron Reid of Cardowan, or Des Browne, now Baron Browne of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to answer. For those not directly affected, the acceptable form of exculpation and remembrance involves obliterating any consideration of dead Afghans and folding the British war dead into a single mass of noble hero-martyrs stretching from 1914 to now. That, and more, bigger, shinier poppies.

The consequences of the Afghan war will linger. Neither the British in particular nor Nato in general kept count, but Ledwidge estimates British troops alone were responsible for the deaths of at least five hundred Afghan civilians and the injury of thousands more. Tens of thousands fled their homes. ‘Of all the thousands of civilians and combatants,’ Ledwidge writes, ‘not a single al-Qaida operative or “international terrorist’” who could conceivably have threatened the United Kingdom is recorded as having been killed by Nato forces in Helmand.’

Since 2001, 453 British forces personnel have been killed in Afghanistan and more than 2600 wounded; 247 British soldiers have had limbs amputated (the Ministry of Defence refuses to categorise the severity of these amputations on the grounds that releasing the information would help ‘the enemy’). Unknown numbers have psychological injuries.

Financially, the British operation in Helmand was under-resourced. It was, nonetheless, wildly expensive. Ledwidge puts the cost at £40 billion, or £2000 for each taxpaying household. Britain built a base in Helmand, Camp Bastion, bigger than any it had constructed since the end of the Second World War, occupying an area the size of Reading. It has now handed Camp Bastion over to the Afghan military which, at the time of writing, was struggling to prevent it being overrun by attackers. Everything the military did depended on the petrol, diesel and kerosene trucked in from Central Asia or Pakistan; one US estimate calculated that the price of fuel increased by 14,000 per cent in its journey from the refinery to the Afghan front line. In firefights, British troops used Javelin missiles costing £70,000 each to destroy houses made of mud. In December 2013, when they were packing up to leave, they had so much unused ammunition to destroy that they came close to running out of explosives to blow it up with.

Ledwidge adds in the cost of buying four huge American transport planes to shore up the air bridge between Afghanistan and the UK (£800 million), 14 new helicopters (£1 billion), a delay in previously planned cuts in the size of the army (£3 billion) and the cost of returning and restoring war-battered units (£2 billion). More contentiously, he includes the £2.1 billion spent on aid and development, not all of which was stolen or wasted – although much of it was. Ledwidge highlights the grotesque sums spent on providing security and creature comforts to foreign consultants: an annual cost of around half a million pounds per head. He was a consultant in Afghanistan himself, besides serving there as an officer. ‘A great many people, several hundred,’ he writes, ‘could be employed in Helmand for the price of a single consultant plus security team and “life-support”.’

Ledwidge estimates the cost of the British military’s bloodshed and psychological trauma – the amount spent on the ongoing treatment of damaged veterans, compensation under the recently introduced Armed Forces Compensation Scheme (AFCS), and an actuarial estimate of the financial value of human life – at £3.8 billion. He points out that, despite the AFCS, Britain’s care for its veterans falls short of the elaborate system in the United States.

An Afghan who sought compensation from the British in Helmand after losing his sight as a result of a military operation might expect a payment of £4500. A British soldier suffering the same injury would be entitled to £570,000, Ledwidge writes, the maximum possible under the AFCS. That’s not all there is to the compensation hierarchy. Ledwidge picks out one soldier acquaintance who lost his ability to communicate when a mortar shell brought a concrete bunker down on him, crushing his skull. He stands to get the maximum £570,000. Had the same man been injured in a car accident, the insurance payout would have been closer to £4 million, most of which would have been to pay for continuous care.

Ledwidge also tells the story of ‘Peter’, who served with him in the same reservist unit. A talented linguist, physically fit and a promising commander, he was seen as an ideal candidate for special forces, but was seriously injured in a bomb attack in 2006. The MoD told him, wrongly, that as a reservist he wasn’t entitled to a pension or compensation. He had to fight for three years to get them to acknowledge their mistake and pay the money owed him, while the MoD tried to show his injuries weren’t serious and to prove he hadn’t been a good soldier. He won. But not many soldiers, Peter said, had his access to good lawyers and a network of able friends. ‘If I had been alone,’ he said, ‘it was the sort of thing which could have driven me over the edge; after everything that had gone before, the pain and disabilities, this was the kind of thing that can break you.’ ‘Help for Heroes and charities like it’, he added, were ‘fig leaves for a government that wants to pass on the costs to an unaccountable charitable sector’.

Ledwidge is blunt about the division of responsibilities between society and modern volunteer soldiers who make a conscious choice to become warfighters.

The soldiers who are killed and wounded today are not victims – they are not the conscript ex-civilians of the First World War. They are professionals, willingly trained in the business of killing, and (by and large) well paid and well treated while they are soldiers … Servicemen are under no illusions as to the risks they sign up to … In looking so closely at the human costs of this war, the key point that must be borne in mind is not ‘How terrible! Those poor soldiers …’ Rather it must be a realistic and firm realisation: ‘We sent them, now we must take care of the consequences.’

I was in Kabul in November 2001 when the first British troops arrived in Afghanistan, a small contingent that didn’t hint at the great deployment to come five years later. I drove out to Bagram airfield to see them, but they’d been forced to hide from the media because the new Afghan masters of Kabul, the Northern Alliance, had made it clear they didn’t trust them. It was an unpromising beginning. I caught a glimpse of them in the distance on the tarmac, looking astonishingly clean-shaven, neatly turned out and weaponless compared to the ebullient bearded gunmen in pyjamas I’d been hanging out with.

It seems strange now, but it was still possible then to believe that their presence might be useful. It is easy to forget, after Iraq and Afghanistan, how high the professional reputation of the British military was in 2001. Whatever one thought of the political decisions to use them, however ugly and bloody the means, the services could say they had done what was asked of them by governments in the Falklands, in the Gulf War of 1991, in Kosovo, in Bosnia, in Sierra Leone. Their grim start in Northern Ireland eventually found a redemption of sorts with the Good Friday Agreement. Even those Britons who found the retaking of the Falklands, the bombing of Serbia and the deployment of British troops in Ulster repugnant could take pride in General Mike Jackson’s refusal, in Kosovo in 1999, to follow the orders of a hot-headed American general that could have led to an unnecessary skirmish with Russia.

It’s clear from these books, and from my own very short time with British troops in Helmand in 2006, that the military – or at least the army, which was the dominant service in Afghanistan – still recruits remarkable people, still trains them well, and provides them with a certain amount of good equipment. It’s also clear that institutionally it has been riding its luck for generations. What began at some point in the 20th century as an unsavoury means to an end – trying to use American military might to leverage the waning British military, with the end of maximising British influence – floated loose of its original aim. Preserving the means became an end in itself. The goal of the British military establishment became to ingratiate itself with its US counterpart not for the sake of British interests but for the sake of British military prestige.

Among other things, this involved increasingly desperate stratagems by the generals, admirals and air marshals to delude the Americans and, no doubt, themselves and their subordinates, that they were capable of keeping up with the relentless evolution of US tactics and the gold-plated technology that enabled it. Sometimes they were found out. After the Soviets introduced advanced anti-aircraft missiles in the 1970s, the RAF trained crews to fly low to avoid enemy radar, while the USAF took a technological approach, more protective of its aircrew, which Britain couldn’t afford. In 1991, half a dozen RAF Tornados were shot down by Soviet technology in Iraq. In the Falklands War in 1982, the Royal Navy, supposedly capable of going head to head with Soviet forces in the North Atlantic, was exposed as lacking the US navy’s multi-layered air defences, and was able to stop its aircraft carriers being sunk only by sacrificing smaller warships. Sometimes the delusion remained untested. During the Cold War, British troops in Germany trained for a war of manoeuvre against attacking Soviet divisions. The plan was for infantry to use anti-tank missiles to hold off the Red Army while British tanks manoeuvred for a decisive counter-blow. But the missiles British troops were supposed to use to blow up the advancing Soviet tanks would work only if they hit the tanks from the side. In his scathing contribution to British Generals in Blair’s Wars, a collection of 26 essays mainly by retired generals, Sir Paul Newton uses this story to mock the cliché that the British armed forces ‘punch above their weight’. ‘This was like telling a lightweight boxer he can only hit his oncoming heavyweight opponent by punching sideways … The army embraced the manoeuvre myth for it gave a veneer of plausibility to an otherwise militarily meaningless proposition.’

Both these traits – the upper echelons of the British military making American approval their primary goal, and the delusional exaggeration of British military capabilities – peaked in the 2000s. It was inevitable the two would clash; that at some point the desire to impress the Pentagon by using the Pentagon’s own resources as cover for Britain’s relatively low-budget military would conflict with America’s own interests, and end up damaging Britain’s military reputation more in Washington’s eyes than if the MoD hadn’t puffed itself up in the first place.

This is exactly what happened. When General Robert Fry, the MoD’s head of strategic planning, came up with Britain’s Afghanistan intervention plan in 2004, it was predicated on rapidly drawing down British forces in southern Iraq and shifting them to Helmand. Fry felt Britain had proved to the Americans how well its low-level, Northern Ireland-style beret-and-foot-patrol security approach worked in making a population feel secure without antagonising them. ‘As far as Fry was concerned,’ Fairweather writes,

the British had mostly accomplished their mission in Basra, which was relatively peaceful compared to Baghdad, and they were ready for a new challenge. He calculated that taking the lead in Afghanistan would enable Britain to swap an unpopular war for one that still enjoyed widespread support. Equally important, it would secure the British partnership with America in its limitless ‘War on Terror’, while avoiding the accusation of abandoning their allies in an hour of need … it didn’t matter if British power derived from the Americans; what mattered was that the British had power to wield, and [Fry] didn’t mind admitting that he rather enjoyed wielding it.

For the top echelon of the British army, there was also the attraction of the extra funds they could squeeze out of the Treasury while the troops were on active duty, and the prospect of keeping hold of regiments that would otherwise be axed. Like the disastrous decision to follow George W. Bush into Iraq in 2003, responsibility for the disastrous decision to send the army to Helmand in 2006 belongs to Tony Blair. And yet it takes two to indulge in unnecessary wars: the leader to tell the military what to do, and the military to tell the leader that it can be done. Ledwidge quotes Matt Cavanagh, who worked in Downing Street on the Helmand plan, as saying that the chiefs of staff told them taking on Afghanistan’s largest and potentially most difficult province ‘was an appropriate level of ambition for a country with the UK’s military capabilities and its place in Nato and the world’.

This was not the situation as the US saw it. Senior American officers in Iraq had become weary of British boasting of their superiority in counter-insurgency. What the Americans saw in Basra was worsening security and Britain losing control. What they wanted in 2004 was more British troops in Iraq, not for the troops already there to move to another country. They saw a defeated ally coming up with a cover story for retreat. ‘As far as the US was concerned,’ Fairweather writes, ‘these promises of troops for Afghanistan were mostly just a way to get out of Iraq while saving face.’

The September 2004 draft of Fry’s plan for the switch from Iraq to Afghanistan featured a graph showing British troop numbers in Basra smoothly falling away as numbers in Helmand gradually rose. There was a cross on the chart where the two lines met. This would have been fine if Basra had stayed quiet, but as the time approached when the first troops were due to land in Helmand, it became more and more evident that the British had failed to bring anything resembling order and justice to southern Iraq. Even before the Helmand operation started, it was obvious Britain needed more troops in both theatres. But it didn’t have enough even for one.

By 2005 British forces were well on the way to ceding Basra and the surrounding area to armed Shia groups; they would end up hunkered down and isolated behind the ramparts of their main base at the city’s airport. ‘To rectify the situation in Basra, the British would have to send more troops,’ Fairweather writes. ‘And yet their pivot to Afghanistan required them to do the exact opposite and withdraw. Rather than confront this gaping hole in their strategy, the British opted to carry on regardless.’

The beginning of Britain’s deployment in Helmand coincided with the belated realisation by British high command that their American patrons considered them to have been beaten in Iraq. Their much vaunted light-touch counter-insurgency skills had failed and the US was going to have to bail them out. This disaster made it even more important, from the British generals’ point of view, to persevere in Afghanistan. ‘We needed to prove that we remained a crucial strategic partner,’ Fry told Fairweather. ‘We needed salvation.’ In 2009, in a speech at Chatham House, the then chief of the general staff, Richard Dannatt, said:

There is recognition that our national and military reputation and credibility, unfairly or not, have been called into question at several levels in the eyes of our most important ally as a result of some aspects of the Iraq campaign. Taking steps to restore this credibility will be pivotal – and Afghanistan provides an opportunity.

Helmand turned out to be neither salvation, nor opportunity. Within weeks of their arrival in the summer of 2006 British troops were fighting for their lives. Twelve were killed in the first four months. Success in terms of their original, Blairite fantasy mission – to stamp out opium production and provide security for the transformation of Helmand into a modern, gender-neutral, democratic, tolerant, enlightened land where terrorists would find no nesting place, all in three years – was not possible. The real-world task the British military found themselves facing in Helmand was losing as few men and killing as few Afghans as possible before their inevitable retreat.

One immediate problem was all too familiar. The British forces wanted to have all the equipment the Americans had, but couldn’t afford quite enough of it, quite so up to date or quite so soon. Helmand is about the size of Croatia, a little smaller than West Virginia. The populated areas are concentrated along the River Helmand, with much of the rest being empty desert, and the British focused on the central districts, roughly the size of the Home Counties. But there was only one proper road, and as British troops came under attack in 2006, helicopters were the only effective way to move men and supplies around.

In the beginning British commanders had just eight transport helicopters, the big twin-rotor Chinooks. Gordon Brown was attacked in the British press for cutting back on earlier plans to buy more. In fact, Brown was responsible for telling the MoD how much it had to spend overall; the decision to cut helicopter expansion was taken by the service chiefs. Delays in getting bomb-proof vehicles to British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan happened for the same reason: the top brass and MoD officials hated to jeopardise the money they’d set aside to prepare for imaginary future wars, for aircraft carriers and fleets of air-transportable armoured vehicles. They knew that the same armchair warriors who shrieked in the press about the shortage of equipment in Afghanistan would be there to denounce them in ten years’ time for not having had the foresight to prepare for a crisis that demanded the overnight dispatch of tanks to Albania, or aircraft carriers to Norway. Nonetheless, the result was that the British military establishment put the preservation of its long-term budget ahead of the preservation of its soldiers in the field.

But the biggest military problem for the army, as it was attacked across the province by assailants using automatic rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and home-made bombs hidden under or beside patrol routes, wasn’t about kit. It was more prosaic. It was about manpower. The initial headline deployment was 3500 British troops. Had the proportion of troops to locals been the same as in Bosnia, there would have been 28,000. And that 3500 covered everyone – the cooks, the mechanics, the medics. The proportion of men trained actually to go out on patrol, weapon in hand, was a mere one in five: about seven hundred, mainly paratroopers.

‘British troops were moved into Helmand before they had completed their task in Iraq,’ Hew Strachan writes in British Generals in Blair’s Wars.

The army was paying for its ‘can do’ mentality, its reluctance to challenge political direction which contradicted strategic sense, and its institutional fear that if it were not used it would be cut. Between 2006 and 2008 it fought two campaigns without being able to resource either of them properly … These were limited wars but they required masses of troops, and Britain did not have them.

The Afghan army in Helmand was non-existent. The local Afghan police were, on the whole, criminal. The Helmand director of education was illiterate. Shunned by the aid agencies, without the skills or resources to manage reconstruction on his own, under conflicting pressures from military chiefs in London, from Downing Street, from Nato commanders in Kandahar and Kabul, from US generals and from Afghan officials, the British commander, Brigadier Ed Butler, deployed small units of troops to far-flung, hostile towns where they were besieged by ephemeral bands of Pashtun gunmen. The commander of the paratroopers, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal, had imagined himself making a hundred-man foray into deep Helmand, away from the relatively quiet towns of Lashkar Gah and Gereshk, once a month. In the end, in the first month, he sent his men out on a dozen raids. The defence minister John Reid said he hoped the operation could be carried out without a shot being fired. In those first six months, Tootal’s men fired half a million bullets.

By September, Fairweather writes,

Pockets of UK troops were stationed in half a dozen outposts across the province, most of them under steady attack … These ‘platoon houses’ of only a few dozen men relied entirely on helicopter support to bring in food and water. Some weeks, when desert storms raged or [attackers] prevented helicopters from landing with small arms fire, the soldiers’ supplies dwindled to a bottle of water a day per man. They had little choice but to raid local marketplaces.

I spent a few days in Gereshk in 2006 with the first company of paratroopers stationed in Sangin.[1]​1 After a period of tranquillity, they’d been attacked five or six times a day. About every seventh man in the original unit of 65 had been killed or wounded. Among the dead was a Pakistan-born British Muslim soldier, Jabron Hashmi, a signaller attached to the Paras. Some men had lucky escapes: one was hit but saved by his chest armour; another was struck in an ammunition pouch he was wearing; another’s machine gun was hit while he was firing it. Combat engineers had to build fortifications under fire. The shortage of manpower meant that the troops not only had to devote their efforts to protecting themselves, they also wreaked terrible destruction around them in the process. At one point a B-1 bomber, designed to penetrate Cold War Soviet air defences, was used to drop bombs on Afghans shooting at the British in pyjamas and plastic sandals. One sergeant told me he’d called in an air strike within three hundred yards of his own position.

The soldiers I met fell into three groups. The young recruits were mostly exultant at having survived their battle initiation – they had joined the army to fight, after all. Their point of reference was the Paras who fought in the Falklands; they’d proved themselves, they told me, to be the equals of their regimental forebears. Then there were the officers, the major commanding the company and his two lieutenants. They were wary and diplomatic. Without playing down the scale of the fighting or the losses, they made it sound as if they’d always had the situation under control. This was difficult, as emails sent from Sangin by the major, Jamie Loden, had already been leaked to Sky News and told a more anxious story: ‘We are lacking manpower. Desperately in need of more helicopters.’

The most clear-eyed and honest assessment of what was going on came from the NCOs, the corporals and sergeants, seasoned professional soldiers, the backbone of the army. They were the ones who were prepared to admit how hard it was to put to the back of their minds the fact that a young fellow soldier, whose fiancée was expecting a baby, had just stepped on a mine and lost both his legs. They understood quickly, and weren’t embarrassed to say, that the people attacking them were local, not outsiders; and that all the British army’s efforts were being drawn into self-protection. The operation’s justification was itself; the men drew strength from protecting one another. I went out on patrol with them several times. We tramped silently through the cold looks of Gereshk market and crossed in thin-skinned vehicles the sudden boundary between the lush green plots of the irrigated zone and the powdery sand of the desert, where families will keep a single forlorn plant watered in the dirt in front of their mud-brick houses as a kind of pet. The Paras were reduced to the mere demonstration of their own existence. ‘You need more fighting troops out here,’ a sergeant told me one day, as we headed back from patrol in the back of an open truck. ‘This is such a big area to cover, the Helmand province. If you want to dominate the ground, you need a bigger force.’

By October 2006, Sangin market was a heap of rubble, many people in Musa Qala had been made homeless, and the entire civilian population of Now Zad had fled. More British troops were sent as the Basra garrison was drawn down, but attacks on them increased. In 2008 almost half of all attacks on Nato troops in Afghanistan were in Helmand. By March 2009, the British were being hit with a dozen bomb attacks every week. Eventually the Americans sent in the Marines, bailing Britain out a second time. Blair and the generals had bitten off far more than the British armed forces could chew.

In a way, the arrival of the Marines left British troops in a worse position. They were still under pressure from the chiefs of staff, Downing Street and the British media to uphold an ideal of military valour and efficiency alongside the Americans, but they were now effectively subordinate to US plans. Not only did the old disparity of firepower between the two members of the alliance remain; the Americans, inspired by the apparent success of their ‘surge’ in Iraq, were keen to implement the same aggressive policy in Afghanistan. The British, who, left to their own devices, might have cut deals with their attackers and quietly slipped away, were obliged to go along with it.

Things came to a head in the summer of 2009, in an operation called Panther’s Claw, designed to clear and hold the mine-infested dirt road between Lashkar Gah and Gereshk. One of the main British unit commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe of the Welsh Guards, feared he had neither the men nor the equipment to do the job. The British had so few helicopters, and so many home-made bombs had been planted in the territory, that his men were having to hand-clear mines just to resupply outlying garrisons with rations. But he followed orders and went ahead. On 1 July, his vehicle was blown up by a concealed bomb. He was the most senior British officer to be killed in action since the Falklands; a teenage soldier died with him. Three days later, a soldier was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade and two more by bombs. By the end of the week, the British had lost four more men. In one two-mile stretch of road, attackers had planted 53 bombs. Another officer was killed in the accidental crash of a Canadian helicopter. Then, in a remote outpost called Wishtun, stripped of its most experienced troops to support Panther’s Claw, a chain of linked bombs killed a young rifleman and injured six others. While the stretcher-bearers were trying to find a bomb-free landing spot for the medevac helicopter, another bomb chain went off, killing four more men. In ten days, 15 British soldiers died.

British Generals in Blair’s Wars kicks off with a vigorous attack on Tony Blair by Jonathan Bailey, who retired from the army as head of doctrine in 2005.[2]​2 But towards the end of the book, as the commanders who served in Afghanistan get their say, the dominant tone is of anger towards the Ministry of Defence and the army itself, which emerges as an organisation incapable of learning except by years of trial and error when real wars come along. The colonels and brigadiers aren’t envious of the American military’s budget or its technology so much as the esteem it gives to intellectual analysis, education and the public discussion of new ideas.

The army that went into Iraq and Afghanistan was hobbled by its lack of back office support. Defence Intelligence, the MoD’s in-house intelligence agency, had got rid of its linguists. The MoD’s main research centre was privatised in 2001. In the US, military students’ unclassified research is freely published online; the British equivalent is kept hidden. When the British criticised the Americans’ ignorance of counter-insurgency in Iraq in 2005, the US took it to heart; two senior officers, including David Petraeus, set about updating the American military’s counter-insurgency doctrine. But complacent Britain saw no need to do the same. Alexander Alderson, a colonel who served in Baghdad, points out that in 2008 the Americans, the Australians and the Canadians all had centres for studying counter-insurgency. Britain didn’t. The other nations, Alderson writes, ‘were mystified why, given the obvious difficulties the UK had had in Basra, we had done nothing about it … Sadly, by 2008, the UK was not just the junior coalition partner to the US, but the junior intellectual partner as well.’

Paul Newton’s article is typical of the barely restrained bitterness of mid-level generals towards an army damaged less by budget cuts than by institutional denial of the need to adapt, going back, in his case, to Ulster: ‘Having taken command of an operational brigade that was living off its reputation for, rather than a real proficiency in, the craft of counter-terrorism, leads me to suspect that when informal learning ends after the army leaves Helmand, the primary driver for military adaptation, as well as the folk memory, will rapidly fade.’

Alderson got to set up a counter-insurgency centre for the British army in 2009. This might seem like progress of a kind, were it not for powerful evidence that the war the British and the Americans fought in Helmand wasn’t a counter-insurgency at all. I’ve avoided using the word ‘Taliban’ up till now. That isn’t because they don’t exist, or didn’t play a role in attacking British troops in Afghanistan. They do; they did. But Mike Martin’s extraordinary book, based on interviews with 250 people, almost all of them Helmandis, lays out the wrong-headedness of the mainstream Western characterisation of the situation in Helmand from 2006 to the present day as a ‘Taliban insurgency’ against a ‘legitimate government’, which the British were helping stand up after a long, tyrannical deviation from civilised norms.

Martin, a Pashto speaker, a British officer who served in Helmand in the late 2000s and a protégé of both Alderson and Newton, argues that ‘insurgency is a pejorative term, one that is useful to governments in establishing their legitimacy or that of their allies and in defining their enemies.’ Martin believes that the conflict in Helmand should be seen as ‘a continuing civil war’. Because the British were ignorant of what was really going on – due, in large part, to their short six-month tours of duty and lack of linguists – they were manipulated into becoming pawns in long-running conflicts over land, water, drugs and power between local leaders.

British commanders in Helmand always knew they began with two big handicaps, over and above the shortage of men and helicopters. One was that the British army has a history of invading Afghanistan. The other was that they came to Helmand with the intention not only of making it a safer, better place, but of destroying the mainstay of its economy, opium farming. Afghanistan was (and still is) the source of most of the world’s heroin, and Helmand is the centre of poppy-growing. Most farmers depend on it for their livelihood. It was as if an Afghan army had come to Scotland proclaiming that they would make it better, and that their first step would be to blow up the distilleries and oil rigs. In fact, Britain underestimated the first factor, and misunderstood the second.

Hostility towards the British among the Pashto-speaking Pashtun tribes of Helmand goes back to the early 19th century. The two dominant groups in the province are the Barakzai, powerful in Gereshk and the central lowlands, and their rivals the Alizai, whose heartland is in the more mountainous northern areas of Musa Qala, Sangin and Kajaki.[3]​3 After the British first invaded in 1839, they managed to alienate both tribes by removing the Barakzai king of Afghanistan, Dost Mohammad, but failing to protect the Alizai from the predatory tax collectors the Barakzai had installed. When the Alizai killed one of the tax collectors, the British sent troops against them. The British were eventually driven out and slaughtered and Dost’s rule restored, but the resentment towards them remained. After Britain invaded again in 1878, they were attacked at Gereshk by an Alizai army. Although Britain tried to use Barakzai proxies against them, the two tribes formed a brief one-off alliance and defeated Britain at the Battle of Maiwand, in 1880.

Britain eventually won that war, but the Helmandis still celebrate Maiwand with the fervour and freshness Scots bring to celebrations of Bannockburn, Serbians Kosovo Field and Russians Stalingrad. The British were hated in Helmand before they’d fired a shot, although generally the locals were too polite to say so. The actual reason Britain deployed to Helmand rather than Kandahar, the main city of southern Afghanistan, was that the Canadians had bagsied Kandahar, but Helmandis had no way of knowing this. The reaction to the British arrival was one of astonishment. Fairweather quotes Ashraf Ghani, now the country’s president, who predicted: ‘If there’s one country that should not be involved in southern Afghanistan, it is the United Kingdom. There will be a bloodbath.’ A popular local assumption was that the British had come for revenge. When, within weeks of their arrival, the bombs began to fall, the Helmandis didn’t see it as the British defending themselves – even though the attackers were, in the main, Helmandis – but as confirmation of Britain’s thirst for vengeance. ‘From the perspective of the Helmandis,’ Martin writes, ‘the historical enemy had just turned up for round three.’

As for opium, British forces, along with the civilian reconstruction and advisory teams they were there to back up, could hardly ignore the crop’s centrality to the Helmand economy. But that understanding was only a small part of the picture. In Martin’s analysis, seemingly cynical yet backed up by his heroic research, each outside intervention in Helmand – whether from an Afghan government in Kabul, from Moscow, London, Peshawar, Quetta or Washington – has two negative effects, whatever benefits it might bring. First, it lays down new local grievances on top of old ones that remain active. Second, it gives tribal barons new sources of funding and new ideological guises they can exploit in order to settle those grievances. These guises, these idealistic labels concealing the striving for clan or tribal advantage – the ‘mujahedin’ label, the ‘government’ label, the ‘communist’ label, the ‘Taliban’ label, even the ‘pro-British’ label – are what Martin calls ‘franchises’. Agencies from beyond Helmand give local big men money and/or weapons to act in their name, and a cause by which to justify their actions. The local leaders then bend this external support to personal ends.

The joint Afghan-American project to irrigate the Helmand valley in the 1960s, for instance, in the pre-opium days, was a boon to the region in that it brought bigger crops. It also brought grievances. The Alizai were angry (they still are) that the dam central to the project, at Kajaki, was on their territory, while the benefits flowed to the Barakzai on the plain. These events also marked the beginning of the era when such local grievances would be fought out through the adoption of labels of convenience. Although Martin says little about this moment, it seems possible that in those days there was genuine idealism and hope for change in Helmandi society. But the arrival of reformers from outside – the arrival, essentially, of a Western idea of central government – also gave powerful Helmandi tribes, families and opportunists the chance to pursue or suppress local grievances over land and water by adopting the labels, or ‘franchises’, that Martin describes: ‘pro-government’, ‘communist’, ‘anti-government’ or ‘Islamic’.

Throughout the communist era and the Soviet occupation, the opportunities for Helmandi barons to adopt franchises became more diverse, specific and lucrative. In the early days feuds could be expressed by support for national factions of the Communist Party: the woman-subordinating traditionalists of Khalq, or the more cosmopolitan, gender-liberal communists of Parcham. Later, the mujahedin era offered a new set of labels.

Martin describes the mujahedin groups set up in Helmand in the late 1970s to fight communism as entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity to get access to the stream of money, weapons and propaganda emanating from Muslim idealists in Pakistan and, later, from the CIA and the Gulf states. Starting with a small seed-group of armed men and a demonstrative skirmish or two, they would approach one of the Peshawar-based mujahedin groups, mainly the Muslim Brotherhood-influenced Hizb-e-Islami or the more traditionalist Harakat-e-Enqelab-e-Islami, seeking patronage.[4]​4 With Hizb or Harakat support, they would attract more fighters. With more fighters, they would attract more support, and so on.

When the communists fell, these mujahedin franchisees – besides fighting socialism, they had become the kingpins of the new opium economy – rebranded themselves as ‘government’, and set about plundering, racketeering and squabbling. With the coming of the Taliban, the ‘government’ fled and the Helmandis were largely left to their own devices. When the Taliban was pushed away in 2001 the ‘government’ franchisees soon re-established themselves. These were the hated mayors, policemen and secret policemen – who set up countless illegal checkpoints to extract tolls from travellers, stole their rivals’ opium and tricked Western troops into sending their personal enemies to Guantánamo – that British forces spent eight years fighting and dying for.

The British, Martin explains, were never fighting waves of Taliban coming over the border from Pakistan: they were overwhelmingly fighting local men led by local barons who felt shut out by the British and their friends in ‘government’ and sought an alternative patron in Quetta. The Taliban provided money, via their sponsors in the Gulf, and a ready-made, Pashtun-friendly ideological framework the barons could franchise. Since the British were hated even before they arrived, recruitment of foot soldiers was easy.

The degree to which outside powers get something in return, according to Martin, is in direct proportion to their knowledge of Helmand and the personal histories of its leading families. The British and Americans, accordingly, got played; the Pakistan-based Taliban, who were more familiar with the territory, did better out of allowing the Helmandis to attack the British under the ‘Taliban’ brand. But their success was limited. When, around 2010, the Quetta Taliban tried to enforce the strict operational control over the Helmandis fighting in their name that the British fantasised they’d always had, it didn’t work. The Helmandi ‘Taliban’ were following their own agenda.

This sketch oversimplifies the true situation in Helmand as Martin describes it. And Martin’s interlocutors told him that he had only begun to grasp the province’s tangled realities. No story shows the labyrinthine workings of Helmand politics better than that of the Akhundzada family, scions of an Alizai clerical dynasty from northern Helmand. Nasim Akhundzada formed a mujahed band in 1978, seizing Musa Qala from the Kabul government the following year, killing hundreds of people in the process. He spent the next few years fighting under the ‘Harakat’ brand against his local enemies in the north, making strategic marriages, buying popular support through handouts and small building projects, and developing his control over the opium crop. Because he was a ‘Harakat’ mujahed, meanwhile, the communist secret police gave him money in exchange for fighting ‘Hizb’ mujahedin; the police didn’t realise he wasn’t fighting them because Hizb were his enemies, but that they’d badged as Hizb because they were his enemies. The meaninglessness to Nasim of his ‘Harakat’ affiliation is shown by the fact that he sent his opium for processing to labs run in Iran by Hizb, his supposed rival. In 1990, what remained of the post-Soviet government in Helmand split into warring Khalq and Parcham factions, which formed alliances with Hizb and Harakat respectively. ‘The two halves of the “government” were openly working with opposed “mujahedin” groups, against each other,’ Martin writes. ‘The fluidity with which two bitter enemies, Hizb and Khalq, could align with each other left many to conclude that the spirit of the jihad had been hopelessly corrupted.’

At this point, Nasim was assassinated, to be replaced by his brother Rasoul. Three years later, after a grotesque sequence of double-crossings, gunfights and lootings, Rasoul and his allies chased the ‘Khalqi-Hizb’ factions out of the province and the Akhundzadas got their first taste of gubernatorial power. In 1994, Rasoul died and was replaced by his younger brother Ghaffour. After the Taliban took over, Ghaffour fled, but the Taliban assassinated him in Quetta, leaving Rasoul’s son Sher Mohammad Akhundzada to pick up the family business and its many feuds.

In Pakistan Sher Mohammad made friends, and an indirect tie of marriage, with Hamid Karzai. At that time Karzai was an obscure but politically ambitious Pashtun chieftain’s son. In 2001, when the Taliban were evicted from Afghanistan and Karzai became national leader, he and his US patrons saw to it that Sher Mohammad became the new governor of Helmand. Other former mujahedin commanders, noted for their rapaciousness and seniority in the opium business, returned in his wake to take over the reins of the Helmand ‘government’. The White House and the Pentagon were focused on invading Iraq and capturing Osama bin Laden: they had little interest in local politics or narcotics in an obscure corner of Afghanistan, except in so far as the local bigwigs might help them hunt down al-Qaida.

The small contingent of US special forces based in Helmand between 2001 and 2006 didn’t mean to poison the well for their successors, but that was what they, together with the mujahedin commanders, did. The commanders used the Americans to target their enemies, and get US bounty money, by branding their rivals ‘Taliban’ and having them sent to Guantánamo. One was beaten to death inside the American base. International poppy-eradication efforts were deliberately directed by commanders against rivals’ fields. The commanders attacked one another. They fought over control of the checkpoints used to shake down travellers. They stole opium from one another’s clients. They stole the opium harvests of the poor. They ruthlessly preyed on anyone whose safety wasn’t guaranteed by the big protection networks. They stole land. They dragged the Americans into a long-running quarrel over who controlled Sangin bazaar. In 2005 dozens were killed in a gun battle in Lashkar Gah when a lieutenant of Abdul Rahman Jan, the notoriously bullying ex-mujahedin commander who’d become chief of police, attacked a Sher Mohammad drugs convoy. Another big commander, Mir Wali, became the head of the Afghan army’s mainly illusory 93rd Division, for which he reaped government salaries; he ingratiated himself so skilfully with the Americans as to give the impression to his rivals that he was untouchable.

In 2004, just as Fry was preparing his plans for the British deployment, two processes began that would undermine it further. First, in reaction to their oppression by ‘government’ commanders and the careless harshness of the American forces apparently sponsoring them, ordinary Helmandis began to reactivate dormant ‘Taliban’ networks. Attacks on ‘government’ officials – that is, predatory ex-mujahedin and ‘police’ – and on the Americans increased in number. The Taliban’s credibility had been low when they were driven out in 2001: they’d failed to deal with a drought, they’d mysteriously banned the cultivation of opium but not its sale, they’d built nothing for the people except madrasas, and they were operating an obnoxious system of conscription. It took the coming of the Americans and the return of the mujahedin commanders to make the Taliban look good by comparison.

Second, the UN, with the best of intentions, launched a programme to disarm and retire the commanders. Mir Wali was sacked as head of the 93rd Division; later, Abdul Rahman lost his job. Sher Mohammad might have kept the governorship – Karzai and the Americans wanted him to stay – but to the incoming British, he was the spider in the centre of the web of everything corrupt and wicked in Helmand, and they insisted he be sacked. In December 2005, Karzai let him go. Ledwidge, Fairweather and Martin have different takes on the proximate cause of Sher Mohammad’s dismissal – the discovery, by a national Afghan police unit close to Britain, of nine tonnes of opium in his possession, enough to make nearly a tonne of heroin. Ledwidge reports Sher Mohammad’s claim that it was all a misunderstanding. According to Fairweather, the governor’s agents had legally seized the drug and reported it to a local American commander, who’d passed the information to Western embassies in Kabul. The next day the US officer went to inspect the haul before it was burned. He was just leaving when the British-sponsored team arrived. The American, Jim Hogberg, believes the British used his tip-off to entrap Sher Mohammad. According to Martin, whose information comes from a former Taliban commander in Lashkar Gah and an elder in the Alizai, Sher Mohammad’s tribe, the heroin was not ‘legally seized’, but simply stolen by Sher Mohammad from his then enemy and business rival in the drugs trade, Mir Wali.

Cast out of the ‘government’ system, with all its opportunities for patronage and abuse, Sher Mohammad and the other commanders lost no time seeking alternative backers. They turned to the Taliban in Quetta. The existing local uprising against the oppressive power of the ‘government’ barons, which the Taliban had embraced, was suddenly joined by those very barons and their sprawling client networks. Sher Mohammad, Martin writes, ‘ordered his commanders to begin fighting the British under the Taliban franchise’.

It is difficult to imagine how the situation for the British could have been less favourable. Their lack of resources, their lack of local knowledge, their mandate to attack the Helmandis’ chief means of livelihood and the popular belief that they had come for revenge would have been bad enough, without an indigenous, Taliban-branded revolt against marauding ‘government officials’ being joined by those very ‘officials’ and their men. To make matters worse, only the top commanders had been taken out of government – those who, no matter how badly they behaved, had the ruthlessness, negotiating skills and authority to bring whole communities on side. The British were left to try to work with – to try to fight for – the second-tier ‘government officials’, often the least capable and most rapacious lieutenants of the dismissed commanders. ‘Taliban commanders specifically mention the fact that the British were affiliated with the communities or commanders who had previously been oppressing them,’ Martin writes. ‘From the British point of view, they were not affiliated with anyone apart from the government, but it took time for them to realise just how partisan and non-cohesive the “government” was in Helmand.’

Counter-insurgency as practised by Nato in Afghanistan, Martin writes, had three parts: protect the population, improve governance, develop the country.

Looking at it from the Helmandi perspective, the population might well ask, ‘how can you protect us from ourselves when we are resisting you?’ This idea was recognised during the Soviet era as well. Neither the Soviets nor [Nato] had conceptual space in their doctrines for large sections of the population resisting them, so instead they were painted as Maoist-style insurgents from outside who were terrorising the community.

Martin’s is a bleak book, ending with the suggestion that, behind the fighting, the real crisis in Helmand – likely to draw in Iran as much as Pakistan – is the worsening shortage of water. The book is also, inevitably, incomplete. The remorseless focus on the actions and words of the Helmandi puppetmasters, of tribal elders and fighters and drug barons and policemen, crowds out other voices. Women are silent, and it is hard to believe that in all Helmand there aren’t actors who are playing on an Afghan national stage, or who seek to transcend blood feuds and tribal politics. But An Intimate War is the work of a wise and patient scholar. Although it is about how poorly Britain understands Afghanistan, it is also, implicitly, about how poorly Britain understands Britain; about how, that is, Britain became the country it is in 2014, with its schools and hospitals and bareheaded women, its weak ecclesiastical law, its gunlessness, its multiplicity of roads, its sewers, its literacy. A thousand years passed between the famously literate King Alfred of Wessex’s victory at the battle of Edington in Wiltshire and England’s introduction of universal education. Afghan children shouldn’t have to wait that long; it would be wrong to suggest Afghanistan is at some pre-set historical ‘stage’ which it would be better enduring in isolation. Afghanistan needs help, encouragement, advice, money. It’s just that next time we think about military intervention in a foreign country that hasn’t attacked us, it might be worth running a thought experiment to work out at exactly which moment, in the many internecine conflicts that have afflicted the British Isles, our forebears would have most benefited from the arrival of 3500 troops and eight helicopters, and for which ‘side’ those troops would have fought.

According to Martin, Helmandis believed deeply in the natural cunning of the British, so much so that the former chief (actual) Taliban commander in Helmand, the late Mullah Dadullah, was known as ‘the lame Englishman’ on account of his one leg and his extreme deviousness. For this reason people found it hard to account for Britain’s conduct in Helmand. There were two possibilities: the less likely was that the British were naive and ignorant. The favourite explanation, widely and sincerely believed, was that, secretly continuing to exercise imperial control over Pakistan, they were working hand in hand with the (actual) Taliban to punish Helmand, and that the Americans were trying to stop them.

Martin tells the story of one ‘Taliban’ commander who believed he’d been recruited by the British because, not knowing he was ‘Taliban’, they’d given him a card allowing him to claim compensation for damage to his house. His conviction was strengthened when his house happened to be searched by courteous British troops who somehow failed to find his hidden Kalashnikov. While he was waiting for what he imagined to be the first contact from his new British employers, he was killed by British special forces. Proof that the conspiracy theory was wrong? No, said his men; he was killed by the Americans, because he was on the books of their enemy, the British. The British and the Helmandis lived side by side for eight years, but didn’t get to know each other.

We hope you enjoyed reading this free book review from the London Review of Books. Subscribe now to access every article from every fortnightly issue of the London Review of Books, including the entire LRB archive of over 13,500 essays and reviews.

[1] On assignment for the Guardian, I was asked to visit the garrison at Sangin, but was told there wasn’t space on the helicopters. When I pointed out to my media minders that they’d found space for a reporter and a photographer from the Sun, I was told it was for recruitment purposes – the Sun would write the kind of story that would make British teenagers want to join the army.

[2] Hew Strachan notes that six further essays by serving generals were vetoed by the MoD. Such ‘official paranoia’, Strachan writes, put the lives of combat troops at risk.

[3] A third tribe, the Noorzai, has risen to prominence more recently.

[4] Mullah Omar was a Harakat member in his pre-Taliban days.


Vol. 36 No. 24 · 18 December 2014 » James Meek » Worse than a Defeat
pages 3-10 | 9443 words

 

 

__________________

E.

From The Real News Network :

Date : 29 December 2014

Subject: The Global Menace of Property Developers and more…..

http://therealnews.com/t2/

 

They're shamelessly greedy, they're tearing apart communities and they're one of the main drivers...

The New Global Menace: Property Developers - With Owen Jones

http://therealnews.com/t2/component/hwdvideoshare/viewvideo/78525

 

 

__________________

F.

From Information Clearing House :

Date : 28 December 2014

Subject: Three Articles on economic Warfare Using Fossil Fuel Prices as the Ultimate Weapon.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/

 

Main Street is going broke. Wall Street is cashing in.

How American Corporations and the Super Rich Steal From the Rest of Us
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40581.htm
by Paul Buchheit


__________________

G.

From Democracy Now ! :

Date : 29 December  2014

Subject: War Crimes in the White House.

http://www.democracynow.org/

 

Peace activist Kathy Kelly is about to begin a three-month prison sentence for protesting the U.S. drone war at a military base in Missouri earlier this year. Kelly, along with another activist, was arrested after offering bread and an indictment against drone warfare. Kelly is the co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare.

 

Peace Activist Kathy Kelly Heads to Prison for Protesting U.S. Drone War

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/12/29/peace_activist_kathy_kelly_heads_to

 

 

_______________

H.

From Mark Crispin Miller :

Dates: 29 December 2014           

Subject : Sony and the CIA's dark propaganda victory (MUST-READ on The Interview).

http://markcrispinmiller.com

 

Stranger than Fiction: The Interview and U.S. Regime-Change Policy Toward North Korea

Christine Hong

 

“And if it does start a war, hopefully people will say, ‘You know what? It was worth it. It was a good movie!’”

—Seth Rogen

 

“Wacky dictators sell newspapers, and magazines—for example, the 2003 Newsweek cover depicting Kim [Jong Il]

in dark sunglasses over a cover line that read ‘Dr. Evil.’ …But demonization, and ridicule, can be dangerous.

At its worst, dehumanizing the other side helps to lay the groundwork for war.”

—Donald Macintyre

 

Representations of North Korea as a buffoon, a menace, or both on the American big screen are at least as old and arguably as tired as the George W. Bush-era phrase, “the axis of evil.” Along with the figure of the Muslim “terrorist,” hackneyed Hollywood constructions of the “ronery” or diabolical Dr. Evil-like North Korean leader bent on world domination, the sinister race-bending North Korean spy, the robotic North Korean commando, and other post-Cold War Red/Yellow Peril bogeymen have functioned as go-to enemies for the commercial film industry’s geopolitical and racist fantasies. Explaining why the North Korean leader was the default choice for the villain in his 2014 regime-change comedy, The Interview, Seth Rogen has stated, “It's not that controversial to label [North Korea] as bad. It's as bad as it could be.”1

 

Indeed, one-dimensional caricatures of North Korea flourish in the Western media in no small part because “[w]acky dictators sell.”2 Yet when it comes to Hollywood’s North Korean regime-change narratives, the line between fact and fiction, not to mention the distinction between freedom of expression and government propaganda, is revealingly thin. Whether in Hollywood or Washington, the only permissible narrative for North Korea is what Donald Macintyre, former Seoul bureau chief for Time magazine, has called “the demonization script.”3 Not only have the dream machines of the entertainment industry long played an instrumental role within American theaters of war, but also, U.S. officials and political commentators often marshal the language of entertainment—for example, the description of U.S.-South Korea combined military exercises as “war games” and the Obama administration’s references to the Pentagon’s “playbook” with regard to North Korea—when describing U.S. military maneuvers on and around the Korean peninsula.

 

Beyond the American entertainment industry’s insatiable appetite for evildoers, how might we account for the anachronistic place of North Korea as a Cold War foe that outlasted the end of the Cold War within Hollywood’s post-9/11 rogues’ gallery? With the eyes of the world trained on various flashpoints in the Middle East, what mileage of any kind can be gotten from the North Korean “bad guy” in Hollywood? If American moviegoers might be depended on to possess a vague awareness of geopolitical context, perhaps even to have some sense of the history of U.S. “hot” involvement subtending Hollywood’s latest Islamophobic interventionist adventure, by contrast, North Korea, routinely depicted in the U.S. media as shrouded in mystery and beyond comprehension, can be counted on to draw a complete blank. Truth, we are often told, is wilder than our wildest imaginings in North Korea, therefore the rule-of-thumb when it comes to representing North Korea in Hollywood appears to be that anything goes—even films featuring Kim Jong Un’s head deconstructing and bursting into flames. Violent spectacle thus stands in for substantive treatment, leaving more complex truths about North Korea elusive. It is worth recalling that North Korea has been dubbed a “black hole” by former CIA director Robert Gates, “the longest-running intelligence failure in the history of espionage” according to ex-CIA Seoul station chief and former U.S. ambassador to South Korea Donald Gregg, and the “Heart of Darkness” in the words of congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.4 It’s against this backdrop of near-total ignorance about North Korea, a place about which Americans possess great conviction but little knowledge, that North Korea serves as a malleable screen onto which the entertainment industry’s fantasies can be projected—fantasies that reflect less reality about North Korea than commentary about Hollywood’s own murky ideological substratum.

 

Here, it merits considering two post-9/11, “axis of evil” films that move in opposite directions but intersect with U.S. policy in ways few critics have observed: Red Dawn 2, MGM’s 2012 reboot of the 1984 Cold War original, in which North Korean invaders vaingloriously attempt regime change on U.S. soil only to be outdone by a pack of suburban American teenagers who call themselves “the Wolverines,” and The Interview, Sony’s 2014 screwball comedy in which a fatuous American TV talk show host and his producer are enlisted by the CIA to “take out” Kim Jong Un as a sure-fire means of ensuring North Korean regime collapse.5 If Red Dawn 2, described by Wired as “the dumbest movie ever,” inadvertently descended into farce by expecting that American viewers would “take North Korea seriously as an existential threat,” The Interview, catapulted to unlikely world-historical importance, has become the focus of serious controversy and incessant Western media commentary.6

 

North Korea furnishes the central villain in The Interview—though, in this case, a rube of a “dictator” who has crippling “self-esteem and ‘daddy issues,’” according to leaked Sony emails.7 Yet, in the media-storm around the Sony hacking, North Korea has transitioned beyond the screen into an easy fall guy. At a juncture in which the White House has turned a new page with Cuba, even going so far as to describe a half-century of ineffectual U.S. isolationist policy aimed at Cuban regime change as a failure, North Korea, also long the target of U.S. regime-change designs, risks resuming its old place on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism from which it had been removed, by George W. Bush no less, in 2008.8 In other words, at a moment when Cuba stands to step off the four-country list, which also includes Iran, Sudan, and Syria, North Korea, accused of hacking into Sony and issuing terrorist threats over the release of The Interview, faces the prospect of stepping back on.9 At this moment, we are thus witness to two radically different dynamics: the prospect of long-awaited rapprochement, normalization, and engagement with Cuba in stark contrast to a war of words, threats of retaliation, and escalation when it comes to North Korea. In reference to the hacking of Sony, which the FBI has insisted can be traced to North Korea—an assertion of culpability that The New York Times dutifully reported as fact despite proliferating assessments and overwhelming opinion to the contrary in the larger cyber-security community—U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, on December 22, 2014, laid out an astonishing injury claim, on Sony’s behalf, against North Korea: “The government of North Korea has a long history of denying its destructive and provocative actions and if they want to help here they can admit their culpability and compensate Sony for the damage, damages that they caused.”10

 

Yet missing in this lopsided discussion of reparations and national amnesia is any grappling, on the part of the United States, with the profound human costs of six decades of hostile U.S. intervention on the Korean peninsula, much less the fact that the official relationship between the United States and North Korea remains one of unfinished war. In the mid-twentieth century, the United States, which set the stage for bloodshed by cleaving the Korean peninsula in two with no Korean input in 1945, and by supporting separate elections in the South in 1948, then militarily intervened in 1950 on behalf of its South Korean ally Syngman Rhee (a ruthless dictator, no doubt, but “our guy,” in the parlance of the Cold War State Department) in a war of national reunification that followed. That war, the Korean War, remains tragically unresolved to this day. During the war’s battle-phase, the United States wielded near-total aerial superiority, an index of asymmetrical warfare, to devastating consequences, especially in the North. When the dust settled, an estimated four million Koreans has been killed, seventy percent of whom were civilians, millions more were transformed into refugees, and one in three Korean families was separated by a dividing line that had been hardened by war into an impassable, intensely fortified, militarized border, which U.S. presidents ever since have referred to as “Freedom’s Frontier.” As historian Bruce Cumings notes, memory plays out differently north of the DMZ: “What is indelible is the extraordinary destructiveness of the American air campaigns against North Korea, ranging from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, and finally to the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final stages of the war.”11 This memory of ruin, so central to North Korea’s consolidation as a state, registers little, if at all, within the United States where the Korean War is tellingly referred to as “the Forgotten War.” Indeed, few in the United States realize that this war is not over, whereas no one in North Korea can forget it.

 

Fig. 1. Obama Peers into North Korea from What He Calls “Freedom’s Frontier” on March 25, 2012.

Yet, whether they realize it or not, Americans view and naturalize North Korea through a lens that is clouded by the fog of an unfinished war. In what has unfurled as one of the strangest PR campaigns for a Hollywood Christmas release ever, the FBI’s assertions that North Korea was behind the cyberattack on Sony—an intelligence assessment presented without evidence yet framed as self-sufficient fact by the Obama administration—highlights the centrality of intelligence as the filter through which we are urged to perceive North Korea and other historic enemies of the United States. It is worth remarking that the two primary ways that Americans “know” North Korea are through forms of intelligence—defector and satellite, precisely the two types of supposedly airtight evidence that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the UN Security Council in early 2003 as incontrovertible “proof” that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Then as now, information about a longstanding U.S. military target is not aimed at producing a truthful picture about that society or its leadership but rather at defeating the supposed enemy—in short, paving the way to regime change. It is precisely within this haze of disinformation about North Korea that Hollywood churns out films that walk in lockstep with a relentless U.S. policy of regime change.

 

With Obama stepping into the role of booster-in-chief for The Interview, we might examine the blurred lines between what both the U.S. President and Seth Rogen have insisted is an issue of freedom of speech and artistic expression, on the one hand, and government propaganda, on the other. The collusion between Sony, the White House, and the military industrial complex, as revealed by leaked emails, merits a closer look. Not only did Obama, in his final 2014 press conference, manage to avoid any discussion of the CIA torture report, but also he gave outsized attention to a film that Sony had reportedly shelved, in effect giving an invaluable presidential thumbs-up for The Interview. With the spectacle of North Korea implausibly rearing its head in the president’s remarks as “the biggest topic today,” the pressing issue of U.S. accountability for torture, with even major media outlets calling for a criminal probe into the responsibility of former Vice President Dick Cheney, former CIA director George Tenet, legal architect John Yoo, among others, was deflected.12 Instead, North Korea was launched to front-page news and Sony’s temporary, arguably savvy, PR decision to pull The Interview was framed, in accordance with Obama’s comments, as a capitulation to censorship by “some dictator someplace.”13 We might ask: what political capital stands to be gained from maintaining a hard line on North Korea, at a moment of détente with Cuba? As hacked emails from the head of Sony Entertainment, Michael Lynton, disclose, Sony’s tête-à-tête with the Obama administration over The Interview must be dated back to the production stage. Having screened a rough cut of the film at the State Department, Sony appears to have queried officials, including Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, Robert King, specifically about what it worried was the over-the-top violence of the head-exploding assassination scene of Kim Jong Un (played by Randall Park). Harboring no such qualms, the State Department gave the green light.

Fig. 2. Obama Vows to Respond to Cyberattack on Sony at December 19, 2014 Year-End Press Conference.

 

Asked by The New York Times in a December 16, 2014 interview whether they were frightened by “the initial ambiguous threats that North Korea made,” lead actor James Franco stated, “They went after Obama as much as us,” adding in tongue-in-cheek fashion, “Because Obama actually produced the movie.” Seth Rogen, co-lead and, along with Evan Goldberg, co-director of The Interview, clarified, “They don’t have freedom of speech there, so they don’t get that people make stuff.”14 Within the space of the same NYT interview, however, Rogen offered a less innocuous account of the production process: “Throughout this process, we made relationships with certain people who work in the government as consultants, who I’m convinced are in the C.I.A.” Indeed, in addition to State Department officials, Bruce Bennett, a North Korea watcher and regime-change advocate at the Rand Corporation, the U.S. military-funded think tank, and a consultant to the government on North Korea, also served as a consultant with Sony on this film. His primary, albeit hardly novel, thesis on North Korea is that the assassination of the North Korean leader is the surest way of guaranteeing regime collapse in North Korea. In a June 25, 2014 email to Sony Entertainment CEO, Lynton, who also sits on the Rand Board of Trustees—an indication of Sony’s cozy relationship with the military industrial complex—Bennett implied that a North Korean regime-change cultural narrative, by dint of its politicized reception within the Korean peninsula, might oil the machinery of actual regime collapse. As he put it, referring to his 2013 book, Preparing for the Possibility of a North Korean Collapse, “I have been clear that the assassination of Kim Jong-Un is the most likely path to a collapse of the North Korean government. Thus while toning down the ending [the assassination scene] may reduce the North Korean response, I believe that a story that talks about the removal of the Kim family regime and the creation of a new government by the North Korean people (well, at least the elites) will start some real thinking in South Korea and, I believe, in the North once the DVD leaks into the North (which it almost certainly will). So from a personal perspective, I would personally prefer to leave the ending alone.”15 In their defense of the film’s creative integrity (prior to the email leaks), both Rogen and Goldberg claimed that their decision to explicitly identify the North Korean leader of the film as “Kim Jong Un” was met with “some resistance” at Sony, yet as The Daily Beast subsequently reported, the leaked emails “strongly suggest that it was Sony’s idea to insert Kim Jong Un in The Interview as the film’s antagonist” following consultation with “a former cia [sic] agent and someone who used to work for Hilary [sic] Clinton.”16

 

Perhaps none of this should come as a surprise. Hollywood, after all, has given us Black Hawk Down, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, and other propaganda films. Yet it runs counter to a reading of The Interview as harmless entertainment, much less as a matter of freedom of speech or pure artistic expression. It might also remind us that culture, when it comes to U.S. enemies, has always been a terrain of manipulation and war. During the Korean War’s hot-fighting phase, the United States dropped a staggering 2.5 billion propaganda leaflets on North Korea as part of its psy-war “hearts and minds” operations. Throughout the Cold War, the CIA, as is well-known, funded American arts and letters in a kulturkampf with the socialist bloc, maneuvering behind the scenes to foster “democratic” cultural expressions that would, in turn, be held up as evidence of the superiority of the culture of American freedom. Today, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a supposedly non-governmental agency established in the Reagan era to do what the CIA did covertly during the Cold War and funded almost entirely by Congress, sponsors and disseminates defector narratives, what the CIA calls “human intelligence,” as the truth about North Korea.17 Central to NED’s objectives is the promotion of “second cultural” products about target or “priority” countries, for example, the “dissemination of books, films or television programs illuminating or advocating democracy,” as a means of delegitimizing and ultimately destabilizing the leadership of “closed societies.”18 In its work on North Korea, NED supports defector organizations in South Korea and Japan, which it mobilizes as an exogenous alternative to North Korean civil society—a second culture whose propaganda can be infiltrated via radio broadcast, balloon drops, smuggled USB drives, and other underground distributional means into North Korea. Although leaked emails indicate that Sony’s South Korean division opted early on not to screen The Interview in South Korea, citing an aversion to its caricature of the leader of North Korea and spoof of a “North Korean” accent, South Korea’s centrality as a site for a more sinister distribution of the film might give us some pause.19 Much along the lines advocated by Bennett, organizations like the U.S.-based, right-wing Human Rights Foundation headed by the self-professed Venezuelan “freedom fighter” Thor Halvorssen Mendoza as well as South Korean defector groups asserted their readiness, even prior to Sony’s temporary pulling of the film, to conduct illegal balloon drops of DVD copies of The Interview from South Korea into North Korea. We might note that one of the Korean subheadings on Sony’s promotional poster for the film reads explicitly to a North Korean audience: “Don’t believe these ignorant American jackasses.” Of the film’s propagandistic value, Halvorssen, who describes comedies as “hands down the most effective of counterrevolutionary devices”—here, echoing Rogen’s cavalier assessment of the film’s supposedly subversive potential, “Maybe the tapes will make their way to North Korea and start a fucking revolution”—told Newsweek, “Parody and satire is powerful. Ideas are what are going to win in North Korea. Ideas will bring down that regime.”20

 

Fig. 3. Propaganda Balloon Drops Launched into North Korea by Human Rights Foundation.

Revealingly, those who profess to be so concerned about democracy when it comes to the release of The Interview rarely, if ever, consider the profoundly undemocratic implications of Obama’s militarized “pivot” toward Asia and the Pacific. Here, Hollywood’s North Korean “bad guy” merits critical consideration against the context of U.S. policy, past and present, within a larger Asia-Pacific region in which the United States seeks to ensure its dominance. Although Barack Obama’s foreign policy is unavoidably identified with the Middle East where he has continued and intensified Bush’s interventionist policies, his foreign policy vision from the outset has been explicitly oriented toward the Pacific. As Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton signaled the significance of Asia by making it her first overseas destination, bypassing Europe, the customary grand tour destination for her predecessors. Offering a blueprint of twenty-first-century U.S. power designs within the Asia-Pacific region, which he identified as America’s “future,” “the world’s fastest-growing region,” and “home to more than half the global economy,” Obama, in a November 2011 speech before the Australian Parliament, stated, “Our new focus on this region reflects a fundamental truth—the United States has been, and always will be, a Pacific nation.”21 As both Obama and members of his administration have taken pains to convey, the United States must be globally understood to be “a Pacific power.”22

 

Ripped from the script of Red Dawn 2, the bait-and-switch narrative Obama has adhered to with regard to Asia and the Pacific requires North Korea to fulfill a necessary devil-function. Here, it is worth recalling that in 2012, MGM, facing a barrage of criticism from news media in China—not coincidentally the second largest movie market in the world, one that brought Hollywood an estimated $1.4 billion dollars in the year of Red Dawn 2’s release—announced it had decided, at the eleventh hour, to replace the film’s Chinese bad guys with North Korean villains. North Korea, of little significance as an open consumer market in today’s global entertainment industry, could be pasted in as China’s proxy, with few financial consequences. Digitally altering PRC flags, military insignia, and propaganda posters to appear “North Korean” would cost the studio well over a million dollars in the post-production phase. Although Obama’s policy toward North Korea has officially been one his advisers dub “strategic patience,” or non-engagement, North Korea has served as a cornerstone in this administration’s interventionist approach toward the Asia-Pacific region. Although an expanded American military role in the region, including a “rebalancing” of U.S. naval forces to 60% (in contrast to 40% in the Atlantic), may be aimed at containing a rising China, the growing U.S. regional military presence, under Obama’s “pivot” policy, has been overtly justified by the specter of a nuclear-armed, volatile North Korea.

Fig. 4. The Chinese North Koreans Have Invaded. Still from Red Dawn 2 (2012) in which the original PRC flag was digitally altered to appear as a DPRK flag.

 

Not merely the stuff of Hollywood fantasies, North Korea, inflated as an existential menace, has been indispensable, for example, to “the deployment of ballistic missile defenses closer to North Korea,” not to mention sales of surveillance drone technology to regional allies.23 Indeed, central to the staging of U.S. forward-deployed missile defense systems—Aegis, Patriot, and THAAD (Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense)—in and off the coast of Hawai‘i, Guam, Taiwan, Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea (including, eventually on Jeju Island) has been the purported dangers posed by an armed, dangerous, and totally unpredictable North Korea to both the western coast of the United States and regional allies in the Pacific. In recent years, this portrait of an unhinged, trigger-happy North Korea has justified the acceleration of the THAAD missile-defense system in Guam, a second U.S. missile defense radar deployed near Kyoto, Japan, the positioning of nuclear aircraft carriers throughout the Pacific, and lucrative sales of military weapons systems to U.S. client-states through the Asia-Pacific region. Albeit all key elements in U.S. first-strike attack planning, this amplified militarization of the “American Lake” is justified by the Pentagon as a “precautionary move to strengthen our regional defense posture against the North Korean regional ballistic missile threat.”24 As early as June 2009, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in announcing the deployment of both the THAAD and sea-based radar systems to Hawai‘i, explained, “I think we are in a good position, should it become necessary, to protect American territory” from a North Korean threat.25 In early April 2013, in a press release announcing its missile defense deployment throughout the Asia-Pacific region, the Pentagon stated, “The United States remains vigilant in the face of North Korean provocations and stands ready to defend U.S. territory, our allies, and our national interests.”26 Advertised as safeguarding “the region against the North Korean threat,” the X-band radar system, which the United States sold to Japan “is not directed at China,” as U.S. officials were careful to state, but simply a defensive measure undertaken in response to the danger posed by Pyongyang.27

 

Fig. 5. Red Dawn 2 Redux? Lockheed Martin product page for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD).

 

As critics have pointed out, “There is…nothing ‘defensive’” about any of this, least of all the “B-52 and B-2 nuclear strategic bombers,” which the Obama administration put into play in early 2013 on the Korean peninsula.28 Indeed, such “flights were designed to demonstrate, to North Korea in the first instance, the ability to conduct nuclear strikes at will anywhere in North East Asia.”29 Yet, even as the North Koreans have had to hunker down, with “single-minded unity,” in preparation for the prospect of a David-and-Goliath showdown with the United States, the true audience of the U.S.-directed dramaturgy of war styled as the “pivot” policy unquestionably has always been China.

 

Claiming to have done conducted “a lot” of research on North Korea, Seth Rogen has insisted that The Interview holds up a mirror to North Korea’s reality: “We didn’t make up anything. It’s all real.” His conclusion about North Korea after conducting exhaustive research? “It was f--king weird.”30 Yet, even as the curtains go up in movie theaters across the United States for The Interview, the centrality of the North Korean demon to Obama’s pivot policy within Asia and the Pacific, itself a historic theater of U.S. war, may prove to be far stranger than fiction.

 

Christine Hong is an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz. She is on the executive board of the Korea Policy Institute, the coordinating committee of the National Campaign to End the Korean War, and part of the Working Group on Peace and Demilitarization in Asia and the Pacific.

 

Recommended citation: Christine Hong, "Stranger than Fiction: The Interview and U.S. Regime-Change Policy Toward North Korea", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 52, No. 4, December 29, 2014.

 

Related articles

•Sahr Conway-Lanz, The Ethics of Bombing Civilians After World War II: The Persistence of Norms Against Targeting Civilians in the Korean War

•Mel Gurtov, Time for the U.S. to Engage North Korea

•Ruediger Frank, Why now is a good time for economic engagement of North Korea

•Morton H. Halperin, A New Approach to Security in Northeast Asia: Breaking the Gridlock

 

Notes

1 Josh Rottenberg, “Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg Like that Kim Jong Un Doesn’t Get the Joke,” LA Times 3 December 2014 . As Rogen’s comments in this interview with the LA Times reveal, the biographical particulars of the North Korean leader did not matter; indeed, one leader was interchangeable for another. Rogen and his fellow filmmaker Evan Goldberg initially envisioned Kim Jong Il as the arch-villain of the film but, with his death in December 2011, simply replaced him with Kim Jong Un.

2 Donald Macintyre, “U.S. Media and the Korean Peninsula,” Korea Witness: 135 Years of War, Crisis and News in the Land of the Morning Calm, ed. Donald Kirk and Choe Sang Hun (Seoul: EunHaeng Namu, 2006), 404.

3 Ibid., 407.

4As quoted in Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (New York: Basic-Perseus Books, 2001) 60; “North Korea’s Heart of Darkness,” Dong-A Ilbo, 23 May 2012, available here.

5 Sandy Schaefer, “‘The Interview’ Red Band Trailer: Rogen and Franco Serve Their Comedy,” Screen Rant, September 2014 .

6 David Axe, “North Korea Invades America in Dumbest Movie Ever,” Wired 4 August 2012.

7 Sam Biddle, “Leaked Emails: Sony Execs Scared of ‘Desperately Unfunny’ Interview,” Defamer, 15 December 2014.

8 As reported in The Daily Beast, Obama, in clarifying a new U.S. policy approach to Cuba, stated, “‘I do not believe we can continue doing the same thing for five decades and expect a different result,’ said Obama in a none-too-subtle allusion to a popular definition of insanity.” See Christopher Dickey, “Obama Realizes What 10 Presidents Didn’t: Isolating Cuba Doesn’t Work,” The Daily Beast, 18 December 2014.

9 See Amy Chozick, “Obama Says He’ll Weigh Returning North Korea to Terror List,” The New York Times, 21 December 2014.

10 State Department, Daily Press Briefing, Washington, DC, 22 December 2014. Noting that a heavy regime of U.S. and international sanctions prevents direct financial dealings with North Korea, AP reporter Matt Lee asked Harf to clarify what she meant by “compensation”: “‘How could Sony legally accept compensation from North Korea? Is there an exception?’ Lee asked. ‘Because as far as I know, if you’re getting a payment, a direct payment, from the North Korean government, you’re breaking the law.’” See “Reporter Dismantles State Dept Suggestion that North Korea Pay Compensation to Sony,” Free Beacon, 22 December 2014. On skepticism from cyber-security experts that North Korea was responsible for the hacking, see Elissa Shevinsky, “In Plain English: Five Reasons Why Security Experts Are Skeptical North Korea Masterminded the Sony Attack,” Business Insider, 22 December 2014 and Marc Rogers, “No, North Korea Didn’t Hack Sony,” The Daily Beast, 24 December 2014.

11 Bruce Cumings, “On the Strategy and Morality of American Nuclear Policy in Korea, 1950 to the Present,” Social Science Japan Journal 1:1 (1998): 57.

12 “Remarks by the President in Year-End Press Conference,” The White House, 19 December 2014; The New York Times Editorial Board, “Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses,” The New York Times, 21 December 2014.

13 “Remarks by the President in Year-End Press Conference.”

14 Dave Itzkoff, “James Franco and Seth Rogen Talk about ‘The Interview,’” The New York Times, 16 December 2014.

15 Although purportedly an expert on the Korean peninsula, Bennett offers an assessment of South Korean receptivity to The Interview that is contradicted by Sony’s own internal emails. Fearing controversy, Sony’s South Korean division passed on opening the film in South Korea. For an account of how another “axis of evil” film, the Bond thriller, Die Another Day (2002), incited widespread protests in South Korea, see Hye Seung Chung, “From Die Another Day to ‘Another Day’: The South Korean Anti-007 Movement and Regional Nationalism in Post-Cold War Asia,” Hybrid Media, Ambivalent Feelings, ed. Hyung-Sook Lee, special issue of Spectator 27:2 (2007): 64-78.

16 Rottenberg, “Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg Like That Kimg Jong Un Doesn’t Get the Joke”; William Boot, “”Exclusive: Sony Emails Say Studio Exec Picked Kim Jong-Un as the Villain of ‘The Interview,’” The Daily Beast, 18 December 2014.

17 On this point, William Blum writes: “Allen Weinstein, who helped draft legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991: ‘A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.’” See William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 2000), 180.

18 NED, “Statement of Principles and Objectives: Strengthening Democracy Abroad: The Role of the National Endowment for Democracy,” NED.

19 See Biddle, “Leaked Emails.”

20 Josh Eells, “Seth Rogen’s ‘Interview’: Inside the Film North Korea Really Doesn’t Want You to See,” Rolling Stone, 17 December 2014; Paul Bond, “Sony Hack: Activists to Drop ‘Interview’ DVDs over North Korea via Balloon,” The Hollywood Reporter, 16 December 2014; Katherine Phillips, “Activists to Send DVDs of ‘The Interview’ to North Korea by Balloon,” Newsweek, 17 December 2014 .

21 Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Obama to the Australian Parliament,” 17 November 2011.

22 Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy, 11 October 2014.

23 Barbara Starr and Tom Cohen, “U.S. Reducing Rhetoric That Feeds North Korea’s Belligerence,” CNN 13 April 2013.

24 Department of Defense, News Release No. 208-13, 3 April 2013.

25 John J. Kruzel, “U.S. Prepares Missile Defense, Continues Shipping Interdictions,” U.S. Department of Defense, 18 June 2009.

26 “Department of Defense Announces Missile Deployment,” Press Release, Department of Defense, 3 April 2014.

27 Lolita Baldor and Matthew Lee, “US and Japan Revamp Defense Alliance to Counter North Korean Threat,” Business Insider, 3 October 2013.

28 Peter Symonds, “Obama’s ‘Playbook’ and the Threat of Nuclear War in Asia,” World Socialist Web Site, 5 April 2013.

29 Ibid.

30 Judy Kurtz, “FLASHBACK—Seth Rogen: No Regrets about Making ‘The Interview,’” the Hill, 17 December 2014.



--

Marilyn B. Young
Professor
Department of History
New York University
53 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012

 

 

__________________

I.

From Là-bas si j’y suis :

Date : 24 December 2014

Subject: Des contes à écouter dans le noir avec un peu de lumière sous la porte.

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From Mark Crispin Miller :

Dates: 27 December 2014           

Subject : East Ukraine is starving under siege by Kiev battalions.

http://markcrispinmiller.com

 

Eastern Ukraine: Humanitarian disaster looms as food aid blocked

Humanitarian convoy blocked on a checkpoint near Donetsk on 18 December.

© Rinat Akhmetov Foundation

“As winter sets in, the already desperate situation in eastern Ukraine is being made even worse by the volunteer battalions preventing food aid and medicine from reaching those in need. It is no secret that the region is facing a humanitarian disaster with many already at risk of starvation.”

Denis Krivosheev, acting Director of Europe and Central Asia for Amnesty International

 

Wed, 24/12/2014

Pro-Kyiv volunteer battalions are increasingly blocking humanitarian aid into eastern Ukraine in a move which will exacerbate a pending humanitarian crisis in the run up to Christmas and New Year, said Amnesty International. 

 

 “As winter sets in, the already desperate situation in eastern Ukraine is being made even worse by the volunteer battalions preventing food aid and medicine from reaching those in need. It is no secret that the region is facing a humanitarian disaster with many already at risk of starvation,” said Denis Krivosheev, acting Director of Europe and Central Asia for Amnesty International. 

 

“These battalions often act like renegade gangs and urgently need to be brought under control. Denying food to people caught up in a conflict is against international law and the perpetrators must be held to account.” 

 

Amnesty International has received information that the pro-Kyiv battalions, which include Dnipro-1 and Aidar, have blocked aid entering territories controlled by the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR). 

 

The Dnipro-1 volunteer battalion, along with members of Donbass battalion and Pravyi Sector militia, are reported to have blocked 11 roads leading into the DNR-controlled territory. They have refused to allow most aid convoys through, because they believe food and clothing are ending up in the wrong hands and may be sold instead of being given as humanitarian aid. They also insist on the release of prisoners held by the separatist forces as a condition for granting access to the humanitarian aid to the east. 

 

At least four convoys sent by the humanitarian foundation of Rinat Akhmetov, one of Ukraine’s richest men, were blocked on the roads leading to the separatist-controlled territory by the Dnipro-1 battalion last week. 

 

After stopping one of the convoys Vladimir Manko, deputy commander of the Dnipro-1 battalion, told the Ukrainian media: 

"We don't have any control on the other side. It turns out that we're at war with them and we're spilling our blood, but in the same time we're feeding them." 

Over half of the population in these areas are now entirely dependent on food aid as wages, pensions and social benefits are not being paid regularly as a result of the conflict that began in May. The decision of the Ukrainian authorities in Kyiv to essentially cut off the region from the Ukrainian financial system in November is also contributing to the hardship of the local population. 

 

An aid worker from the Luhansk Region has informed Amnesty International that Aidar battalion is also stopping and searching cars that travel from Starobil’sk to Luhansk and vice versa. Members of the battalion, which was previously implicated in arbitrary detention and torture, are reportedly stopping food and medicines getting through to the region. 

 

The aid worker recalled a particular case when medicines for four elderly people in Krasnodon, who are suffering from heart and blood pressure conditions, were snatched from a bus at a checkpoint. 

 

“Checking the content of humanitarian convoys crossing frontline is one thing. Preventing it is another. Attempting to create unbearable conditions of life is a whole new ballgame. Using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a war crime,” said Denis Krivosheev. 

 

The population of the region has suffered from six months of fighting between Kyiv-controlled and pro-Russian separatist forces. More than 4,700 people have died and thousands more live in fear of being caught in the crossfire or being entirely cut off from vital food and medical supplies. 

Amnesty International reiterates its call for the Ukrainian authorities to reign in the volunteer battalions and to ensure that humanitarian aid reaches those who desperately need it. 

 

Background

Eastern Ukraine: Facing growing hardship, sliding towards a disaster

Blog, 16 December 2014

Eastern Ukraine: Both sides responsible for indiscriminate attacks

 

News, 6 November 2014

Disclaimer: Amnesty International is not responsible for information on third party websites.

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