Michael Scheuer: 5 Years After 9/11, We're Less Safe

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year CIA vet who specialized in studying bin Laden, answers six questions for Harpers. The bit that will be quoted the most, I think, is this: “In the long run, we’re not safer because we’re still operating on the assumption that we’re hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we’re hated because of our actions in the Islamic world.”

I’m posting a couple of excerpts, but it’s worthwhile to read the whole thing.

From a feminist perspective, this comment about Afghanistan is the most interesting:

Q: Things seemed to have turned for the worse in Afghanistan too. What’s your take on the situation there?

A: The President was sold a bill of goods by George Tenet and the CIA—that a few dozen intel guys, a few hundred Special Forces, and truckloads of money could win the day. What happened is what’s happened ever since Alexander the Great, three centuries before Christ: the cities fell quickly, which we mistook for victory. Three years later, the Taliban has regrouped, and there’s a strong insurgency. We paid a great price for demonizing the Taliban. We saw them as evil because they didn’t let women work, but that’s largely irrelevant in Afghanistan. They provided nationwide law and order for the first time in 25 years; we destroyed that and haven’t replaced it. They’re remembered in Afghanistan for their harsh, theocratic rule, but remembered more for the security they provided. In the end, we’ll lose and leave. The idea that we can control Afghanistan with 22,000 soldiers, most of whom are indifferent to the task, is far-fetched. The Soviets couldn’t do it with 150,000 soldiers and utter brutality.

Describing what the Taliban did as “they didn’t let women work” is obviously a ridiculous understatement. But I’m more interested in the second part of the sentence: “that’s largely irrelevant in Afghanistan.” Why is it irrelevant? Because there is no logical connection between “we need to improve women’s rights in Afghanistan” and “bombing the shit out of Afghanistan.” Kicking the Taliban’s ass in battle does not and did not provide a real, sustainable solution to the problem of women’s rights in Afghanistan; because our allies that we’ve put into power, like the Northern Alliance, are just as woman-hating as the Taliban was.

It’s worth nothing that RAWA – a group of radical Afghan women who for many years have risked their lives fighting misogyny and anti-women laws in Afghanistan – did not favor the US invasion of Afghanistan. They argued, and in hindsight they were correct, that misogyny cannot be defeated with bombs. What’s necessary is engagement from the grass roots up, and long-term support for Afghan groups working for change.

Q: And finally, an extra question—what needs to be done?

A: This may be a country bumpkin approach, but the truth is the best place to start. We need to acknowledge that we are at war, not because of who we are, but because of what we do. We are confronting a jihad that is inspired by the tangible and visible impact of our policies. People are willing to die for that, and we’re not going to win by killing them off one by one. We have a dozen years of reliable polling in the Middle East, and it shows overwhelming hostility to our policies—and at the same time it shows majorities that admire the way we live, our ability to feed and clothe our children and find work. We need to tell the truth to set the stage for a discussion of our foreign policy.

At the core of the debate is oil. As long as we and our allies are dependent on Gulf oil, we can’t do anything about the perception that we support Arab tyranny—the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and other regimes in the region. Without the problem of oil, who cares who rules Saudi Arabia? If we solved the oil problem, we could back away from the contradiction of being democracy promoters and tyranny protectors. We should have started on this back in 1973, at the time of the first Arab oil embargo, but we’ve never moved away from our dependence. As it stands, we are going to have to fight wars if anything endangers the oil supply in the Middle East.

What you want with foreign policy is options. Right now we don’t have options because our economy and our allies’ economies are dependent on Middle East oil. What benefit do we get by letting China commit genocide-by-inundation by moving thousands and thousands of Han Chinese to overcome the dominance of Muslim Uighurs? What do we get out of supporting Putin in Chechnya? He may need to do it to maintain his country, but we don’t need to support what looks like a rape, pillage, and kill campaign against Muslims. The other area is Israel and Palestine. We’re not going to abandon the Israelis but we need to reestablish the relationship so it looks like we’re the great power and they’re our ally, and not the other way around. We need to create a situation where moderate Muslims can express support for the United States without being laughed off the block.

Comments?

(Curtsy to Brutis at Creative Destruction.).