reaction paper 3

Blog 3
Bush’s War
Obama’s War
Rashid intro - 3

This blog covers the material’s of the past week.  First is Bush’s War, a frontline documentary that goes into the behind close doors fighting the occurred in Bush’s cabinet after 911 and how we ended up going to war with Iraq.  The second documentary was Obama’s War which is on the some of issues in Afghanistan and how they are now starting to pop up in Pakistan, like the Taliban.  The third piece of material is the intro through chapter 3 of Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid.  In all of these it is clear that the US went into Afganistan with a plan to rebuild the nation other than that they wanted to do so.  Part of the problem they ran into in rebuilding the nation after the war was that the US used a lot of their resources to invade Iraq and rebuild that country too.  Afghanistan took the second seat to the War in Iraq and still is having issues being rebuilt to date.  
The introduction Descent into Chaos talks a lot about some of the themes we have talked about in class so far.  From the influence from imperialism, western bureaucracy, the tribal nature of Afghanistan, and how the US wasn’t fully prepared to rebuild the country after it had defeated the Taliban.  All of these appear to be the main ideas of the book and will defiantly be talked about more later on in the book in more detail.  The introduction lays the foundation for the rest of the book.
In the first chapter Rashid talks about his friend’s Karzai story, the president of Afghanistan, and a little about the history of the country.  Karzai is depicted as a very intelligent figure and a true believer in Afghanistan by Rashid in this chapter.  Part of this can be chalked up to the fact that they are close friends and Rashid openly says this in the beginning of the chapter.  Everything that he says about Karzia has to be taken with a grain of salt.  Rashid probably isn’t going to publicly critique his friend that is also very powerful right now. The rest of the chapter gives a brief history of Afghanistan from Daud all the way to the Taliban and end at 911.
The second chapter was about Pakistan and its relationship to the US just after 911.  It focused on how Pakistan had ties to the Taliban and weren’t fully supportive of the US.  Most of the people in Pakistan were Islamic and had anti-American feelings that led to problems done the road.  The main reason Pakistan helped the US at all was to try and get some sanctions lifted and to avoid being Invade like Afghanistan was and Iraq would be later.  The problem was that it seemed like Pakistan wasn’t trying to help the US much at all.  They were doing the minimum required to still get aid from the US and not be declared a terrorist state.  After all Pakistan was a firm supporter of jihad and the US was attacking their allies.  
In the third chapter, Rashid talks about the personally history and Musharraf and how unstable he mad Pakistan and the whole region around it.  He had an western education, but was heavily influenced by the military.  He was the person that tried to get aid from the US by just supporting them on paper, and not actually doing much to help the US.  Along with the issues he had with the US, he didn’t have good relationships with other countries.  He was viewed badly by the Afghan people as he supported the Taliban heavily and suppressed his people’s freedoms heavily.  A lot of the problems in Pakistan including the leadership of Musharraf could have possibly been dealt with if the US didn’t use a lot of their resources in Iraq.  If the US had a plan to deal with Pakistan along with Afghanistan before going to war and didn’t get side tracked with Iraq it would have been a lot easier to rebuild Afghanistan and maybe the region wouldn’t still be in so much turmoil.

In Bush’s War it was clear that the War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq were very different.  They had some things in common like they were both ideas that came up shortly after the attacks on 911.  The War in Afghanistan was intended to strike back at Al Qaeda and to kill Bin Laden.  The second was not directly related to the attacks but came up as a result of it.  From some of the first meetings of the joint chiefs right after the attacks the idea to attack Iraq came up.  It was clear that the idea had been in the back of the minds of some people from the time of the first gulf war.  They seemed to think that it was left unfinished.  From then on it was almost guaranteed that we were going to eventually got to war with Iraq solely based on a few powerful peoples personal opinions.  

Bush’s staff had internal conflicts between staff members on whether Iraq had weapons and was a threat to the US.  Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were bent on going to war and listened to certain facts that the CIA gave to them.  They would like a few facts to the press outside of context that were at best dubious, and than cite the news stories as evidence.  One of the shocking things was that the press never bothered to check the facts and just went strait to publishing the article.  The CIA came to the conclusion that Iraq wasn’t making wmds but Dick Cheney thought the CIA was wrong just like they were about the economic collapse of the soviet union.  Rumsfeld held the same position as Cheney, both were at odds with Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell who didn’t think it was right to go to war with Iraq.  At the end of the day he had the last word with Bush and was most likely the person the had the most influence in getting him to go to war with Iraq.  

In Obama’s War the documentary followed some politicians that were trying to help keep the Afghanistan government growing and stable and a few deployed soldiers that were trying to reopen a market in southern Afghanistan.  From the documentary it was clear that country still wasn’t fully under US control and never really has been since the start of the war.  Some of the farmers were still being threatened by the Taliban and were afraid to talk and help the US forces.  It also highlighted the fact that a lot of the Taliban have gone over the border into Pakistan and are operating there now.  It left the audience wondering what was going on inside of Pakistan and made me at least wonder if we were going to have to end up going to war with them too.  The documentary was geared towards an American audience and trying to show some of the problems that US forces were running into in Afghanistan.  It wasn’t showing a lot of fighting and tried to portray the Army in a positive light.  It also emphasized economics of the array a lot, and talking about some of the problems in southern Afghanistan.  Some of these issuese can be explain in what Rashid has written in his book, “The billions spent in Iraq were the billions that were not spent in Afghanistan”.  This is part of the reason why there is so many issues in the area and we are still there currently.  

War in Afghanistan reaction paper 2

Reaction Paper 2
Rasanayagam chapter 9 - end of the book
The man who knew

The main theme of the Rasanayagam book, is fusion followed by fission.  This is a key point that was brought up early in the book.  I think the main way this is illustrated is how every few years a great leader comes to power through the help of a western power.  The leader puts in a bunch of western bureaucracies.  The leader either than gets power hungry and tries to destroy his enemies through the bureaucracies or by crushing them under it.  This splits up the country and causes fission.  The other thing that happens is that in trying to create a western bureaucracy the country is divide amongst parties.  The book covers the history of Afghanistan from the time of the colonial imperialism up to the current war there. The history of Afghanistan is plagued with power struggles within government bureaucracy.  This isn’t just a problem with the government in Afghanistan it is something that was also highlight in the documentary “The Man Who Knew”.  The documentary is about the FBI agent John O’Neil and his problems within FBI in getting support to go after terrorist.

The first implementation of bureaucracy not working in this sections readings were during the Karmal regime after the Saur revolution.  In order to try and keep power the regime tried to instill a number of checks and balances that would prevent their political enemies from having any type of serous power in the government and military.  This move both weakened their army by removing high ranking officers and replacing them with less qualified and under prepared officers loyal to the party.  Their was also wide spread dissertation among the lower ranks of the army that led to at best a dis-functioning army.  Karmal’s game of trying to keep his enemies from gaining any power instead of working with them to improve the country left the country without a working army and in chaos.

After years of war and millions of refugees fleeing the country in 1985 their nationwide elections which brought Dr Najibullah into power.  He was a well respected by the people and had a background that marked him for leadership (119).  Better yet he was liked by Moscow, which allowed him some room to try and fix Afghanistan and reunite the country.  He was what seemed to be a lead figure in the Geneva Accords which forced the USSR to start with drawing the troops from Afghanistan and prevent Pakistan from having any influence over the new Afghanistan.  Although General Zia had no intentions of this being true at all (123).  He died in a plain crash before the Soviet Union fully pulled out of Afghanistan.  Shortly after the Soviet Union left Najibullah was able to keep control and fight off resistance from the Afghan Interim Government.  At the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Najibullah’a regime also collapsed due to no more aid coming from the USSR.

The next form of government was via the Peshwar Agreement.  It was quickly useless due to fighting between parties and tribes inside of Afghanistan again.  One of the emerging parties in this fighting was the Taliban which was a group founded in refugee camps in Pakistan.  They gained control of the country through violent fighting, better military tactics, and funding from Pakistan.  The Taliban were religious hardliners and had the support of religious leaders inside the country that allowed them to gain some control.  They were also funded by corporations that payed for the right to get oil or gas.  Under their rule terrorist like Bin Laden were allowed into the country because of their hard-line religious views against infidels.

In the documentary “the man who knew” by frontline, John O’Neill appeared to be someone in the government that knew about the structure of Al-Qaeda and that Bin Laden was more than just a fancier of terrorism.  He was a major player that grew the network of Al-Qaeda into a global threat to America and her allies.  The FBI had a major bureaucracy in it which in itself didn’t like people that were “mavericks” in the agency.  The prevented agent O’Neill from following all of his leads and going after some possible leads that could have possibly prevented 911.  This was due again to people wanting to have power and trying to keep it from others.  He was not allowed to go to Africa after the embassy bombings due to personality differences with other members of the FBI.  It because he wasn’t entirely like them and had nothing to do with possible results or being the best for a job.  It is kinda like how Karmal only kept people that were on his side in positions of power.

With all that being said about John O’Neill and what might have been different if he hadn’t been stopped by the government bureaucracy.  The documentary seemed to favor him a lot, their weren’t any interviews or news clips from people that weren’t friends with him.  All the people on the show him in a very positive light.  Even as smart as he was their had to be others going on behind close doors that prevented him from getting everything he needed to do his job after the series of attacks that led up to 911.  I think the documentary was suppose to make you think about how our government works and how it needed to change to fight terrorism at the time.  It was geared towards an American audience that still very angry over what happened on 911.  All in all, I would say that the documentary was good, it brought up a lot of good points and made me think.  The one thing that I didn’t like about it was the repeated emergency responder dispatcher audio loop in the background.  But that is more of something that just distracted me while watching it.