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Paul Merrell

[Heart of Empire] | The Long Shadow of a Neocon, by Andrew Cockburn | Harper's Magazine - 0 views

  • As jihadists everywhere celebrate their stunning victories in Mosul and Tikrit, as well as the abject retreat of the United States from Afghanistan, we can only hope that they accord due credit to a man who was indispensable to their success. Now an obscure businessman seeking crumbs from the table as an “international consultant,” Zalmay Khalilzad was in his day an imperial envoy sent by the United States to decree the fates of Afghanistan and Iraq. His decisions, most especially his selection of puppet overseers to administer the conquered lands, were uniformly disastrous, contributing in large degree to the catastrophes of today. To be sure, many others among the neocon clique and their liberal-democrat interventionist allies deserve a place on the jihadist honor roll of useful idiots, but few contributed as much as Khalilzad, the Afghan-born former academic who selected Hamid Karzai and Nuri al-Maliki as suitable leaders for their respective countries. Initially promoted up the ranks of the national-security clerisy by Albert Wohlstetter, the dark eminence of neoconservative theology who also mentored neocon godfather Richard Perle, Khalilzad found a useful niche in such company as the only Muslim any of them knew, ready to spout their militarist nostrums at the flutter of a grant check. I myself got an early intimation of Khalilzad’s tenuous grasp on military reality in 1981, when he assured me in all seriousness that the Afghan mujahideen were enjoying great success in disabling Soviet tanks by thrusting thick carpets into their treads. During the administration of the elder Bush, he worked in the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby. In 1992 he wrote the initial draft of the Defense Planning Guidance, which became an iconic neoconservative text.
  • Khalilzad’s leap out of relative obscurity came with the post-9/11 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Following the collapse of the Taliban regime in 2001, an Afghan Loya Jirga assembly indicated by a clear majority that they wanted their aged king, Zahir Shah, to return from his long exile in Rome to preside over the government. This was not to the taste of presidential special envoy, and later ambassador, Khalilzad, who importuned Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi to prevent the Shah from leaving Rome as he meanwhile brusquely informed the Loya Jirga that their leader was to be Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun of modest reputation. Afghan politicians of all stripes concluded that Khalilzad had purposefully picked someone with little internal support in order to ensure that his own authority remained unchallenged. This authority he exercised by operating as supreme warlord, rewarding or threatening the lesser strongmen who had emerged in various provincial power bases with grants of aid or threats of airstrikes from the bombers and Predator drones at his command. Afghans who could foresee the inevitable consequence of this laissez-faire policy toward the universally hated warlords did their best to persuade Khalilzad to change course. One of them later related to me that he suggested that Khalilzad put “ten of them in handcuffs and ship them off to the International Court at The Hague for crimes against humanity.”
  • “I’m going to bring them in and demobilize them,” countered Khalilzad confidently. “No, Zal,” replied the Afghan sadly, “you’re going to legitimize them.” So it transpired. While Karzai presided, in his self-designed costume of furry hat and cape, over a regime of staggering corruption, large swaths of Afghanistan fell under the control of characters like Hazrat Ali, a ruffian of pliable loyalties who used American support to gain control of the eastern city of Jalalabad and installed himself, with Khalilzad’s approval, as security chief of Nangahar Province. He then began vying with fellow warlord Sher Mohammed Akhunzada for the title of world’s leading heroin trafficker (a practice both men denied engaging in) while delivering hapless victims labeled “high value targets” to the torture cells of Bagram or the oubliette of Guantánamo. In inevitable consequence, disgusted Afghans rallied to a resurgent Taliban. The rest is history.
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  • Resolutely failing upward, Khalilzad became the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in 2005. His signal accomplishment came in 2006, when, searching for a suitable candidate to replace Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister, he summoned Nuri al-Maliki, a relatively low-ranking Dawa Party functionary who had spent much of his adult life in exile in Damascus (with an intervening spell in Tehran), where he subsisted on the earnings of a butcher shop he’d opened. Maliki’s party activities were largely related to security, and his experiences imbued him with a generally paranoid attitude to the outside world — not the best preparation for reconciling Iraq’s disparate sects and factions. Nevertheless, Khalilzad thought Maliki was just the man to make piece with the Sunnis, crack down on Moqtada al-Sadr (whom the American government mistakenly believed to be an Iranian pawn), and stand up to the Iranians. Summoned by Khalilzad, Maliki was abruptly informed that he was to become prime minister. “Are you serious?” said the astonished erstwhile butcher. The British ambassador, William Patey, had been invited to attend the meeting but when he started to object to Maliki’s anointment, Khalilzad promptly kicked him out of the room.
  • True to form, all of Khalilzad’s presumptions about Maliki turned out to be wholly in error. So far from reconciling with Sunnis, Maliki went out of his way to alienate them, combining paranoia about the possibility of a neo-Baathist coup with an opportunistic calculation that heightened sectarian tension would bolster his support among Shia. He showed no sign of serving as the wished-for bulwark against Tehran, and, most importantly, evinced little interest in building a responsible administration. Instead, Iraqi government, never a model of probity, devolved into a midden of corruption in which every office, including those in the military, was for sale. By 2014, the going price for command of an Iraqi army division was reported to be around $1 million, payable over two years as the purchaser recouped his investment via fees levied at roadblocks and other revenue streams. Little wonder that when called on to fight the disciplined and ruthless ISIS, the Iraqi army has melted away. Meanwhile, Khalilzad’s other choice, Hamid Karzai, has overseen a reign of pillage similar in scale to Maliki’s, opening the way for a Taliban restoration and rendering futile the entire American investment in Afghanistan. Defeat is an orphan, they say, but it would be a shame if this particular parent of America’s twenty-first-century humiliations were to be totally forgotten.
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    With neocons angling again to have Iraq's Maliki replaced by Ahmed Chalibi, it's a good time to check in again on the neocon kingmaker for Southwest Asia, Zalmay Khalilzad.
Paul Merrell

Iraq's Next PM? Ahmed Chalabi - 0 views

  • JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In other news from Iraq, pressure is mounting on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to form a less sectarian government or to resign. Earlier today, a representative of the influential Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for the creation of what he described as a new "effective" government. Meanwhile, on Thursday, The New York Times revealed that the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Robert Beecroft, and the State Department’s top official in Iraq, Brett McGurk, recently met with the controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, who has been described as a potential candidate to replace Maliki. AMY GOODMAN: Chalabi is the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, a CIA-funded Iraqi exile group that strongly pushed for the 2003 U.S. invasion. Chalabi’s INC helped drum up pre-war claims that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and had links to al-Qaeda. The group provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration, U.S. lawmakers, and journalists at The New York Times and other papers. After the invasion, Chalabi became chair of the Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification. Many blame his actions for politically isolating Iraq’s Sunni minority and causing sectarian strife.
  • Chalabi has defended his actions leading up to the invasion. In 2004, he told the London Telegraph, quote, "We are heroes in error. ... As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone, and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important," Chalabi said. Well, to talk more about Ahmed Chalabi, we’re joined by Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper’s Magazine. His latest piece for Harper’s is headlined "The Long Shadow of a Neocon." Welcome to Democracy Now!, Andrew Cockburn. Talk about what you understand is happening in this battle right now over whether Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will be—will be overthrown and what role Chalabi could play in this.
  • ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, my understanding is that the Americans have made it very clear in Baghdad that Maliki—they want Maliki to go, I mean, even to the point of saying—they were saying a couple days ago that there would be no aid of any kind—military aid, airstrikes or what have you—unless—while Maliki was leader of the government. I mean, they view him as the source of all their troubles, which is not totally inaccurate. There’s a certain irony in this, in that they—Maliki is in power, really, thanks to the—thanks to the U.S. Zalmay Khalilzad, then the ambassador to Baghdad, in 2006 selected Maliki, much to everyone’s surprise, including Maliki’s. When Khalilzad said, "How would you like to be prime minister?" Maliki said, "Are you serious?" So, and then that was reaffirmed again in 2010 when Maliki had basically lost an election, and the U.S. and Iran, for that matter—further ironies here—really got—really rammed him back down the throats of the Iraqi people. So, now to be saying, you know, Maliki has to go, as I say, is rich with irony.
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  • JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And your article on Khalilzad also talks about his influence in Afghanistan, as well. Could you talk a little bit about his history? ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, Khalilzad, yeah, he’s been a sort of longtime foot soldier in the neocon, neoconservative, movement. I mean, he has a sort of pretty grisly pedigree. He, early on—I mean, he’s an Afghan, and then made his way to the U.S. as a young man, as a bright student. And from there, he fell under the influence of Albert Wohlstetter, who was a character in Chicago who was very influential in the movement, who also mentored Richard Perle. And then you see Khalilzad—from the beginning of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, he’s very much in the mix. He claims now to have been instrumental in sort of directing the whole policy, which I don’t think is really the case. But anyway, there he was signing all the resolutions, calling for war with—overthrowing Saddam, and so forth.
  • And his moment came in 2001, or after 2001, when we, you know, successfully toppled the Taliban regime, and Khalilzad was really only the Afghan or sort of pretty much the only Muslim any of these people knew, and so they appointed him the overseer of the post-Taliban Afghanistan, from which position he selected one Hamid Karzai—again, much to the subsequent grief of U.S. administrations—really with the view of—a lot of Afghans I talked to at the time thought, well, Karzai was a fairly weak figure, and Khalilzad’s idea was that he, Khalilzad, would be the real ruler of Afghanistan and behave like that, really. He was bossing all them, and he restored—he fostered all these ghastly warlords and strongmen, with himself really as the biggest warlord of all. He’d threaten them with airstrikes and so forth. So, after he had pretty much ensured that no stable settlement would emerge in Afghanistan, and really his actions had led to the revival of the Taliban, he failed upwards and was moved to Iraq, where the U.S. was trying to sort of put in place some kind of government that they could entrust Iraq to. And as I said, they didn’t like the man they had, a prime minister called Jaafari. And Khalilzad looked around and selected this character, al-Maliki, who was a fairly comparatively obscure figure in the—had been in the exiled opposition. He had lived in Damascus for most of his adult life, running a butcher shop. And suddenly, as I say, he called in al-Maliki.
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