Sex & Wikileaks: That Other Scandal

Even though the official Obama administration review of Afghanistan shows just how shaky the occupation there is, Wikileaks continues to be the big news story two weeks on (thanks in no small part to the US decision to try and take down Julian Assange via a sex scandal—the media loves them some sex scandals, especially ones involving slender, pale blonds).

There’s one document in the first thousand released that I want to highlight here, in part in observance this weekend and Friday of the monthly War Moratorium. The story takes place at the corner of Afghanistan and Wikileaks. Though it also features non-consensual sex, it has received little play in the US media. (No blonds, perhaps?) And behind the sex lies an even more shocking story.

The cable (as they are called) from Kabul to Washington reports a desperate plea by Afghan Minister of the Interior Hanif Atmar to US embassy officials. He needs help covering up a story he fears will break soon.

It seems that a Texas-based mercenary firm, DynCorp, which rakes in about $2 billion a year, 95% of it from your tax dollars, is being paid to run centers (RTCs) to train Afghan police and troops. At their Kunduz center, DynCore threw sort of a graduation party for their most recent charges. on April 2009

This was a bacha-bazi (translation: “boy-play”) party. The entertainment was procured from local pimps: young teen and pre-teen boys who had been dressed in women’s clothes, made up and forced to gyrate seductively to music for their stoned audience of Afghan troops and DynCorps employees.

At the end of the evening’s entertainment, the kids were raffled off, with the winners taking them back to their quarters to fuck.

It’s not surprising that Minister Atmar freaks out when some reporter is rumored to have gotten hold of the story. The embassy advises him not to make a big deal of it or approach the reporter; that will only make things worse.

And, indeed, when a Washington Post article touches on the story in July of last year, nothing much seems to have happened. It’s covered as an incident of "questionable management oversight" in which foreign DynCorp workers "hired a teenage boy to perform a tribal dance at a company farewell party.”

Move along, folks, nothing to see here...

Well, let me just point out a couple more things that we need to see, beyond the grim horror that was DynCorp’s idea of Prom Night and beyond the widespread and telling silence from the US media, even now that the leak of the State Department cable has given them a chance at a do-over.

First, the leaked document features one of the more bizarre parenthetical statements seen recently in any government report. Interior Minister Atmar begs the US vice ambassador to have the US military increase the level of its oversight of DynCorp. Embassy folks shine him on:

We are also aware of proposals for new procedures, such as stationing a military officer at RTCs, that have been introduced for consideration.

Then the sender of the “cable” reminds his State Department superiors, in the parentheses I mentioned:

(Note: Placing military officers to oversee contractor operations at RTCs is not legally possible under the currentDynCorp contract.)

Just try and wrap your brain around that—the US government has no right to oversee the operations of the mercenaries it has hired to do its dirty work. And, let me note, this contract language exists despite the fact DynCorp employees were exposed as kidnapping, raping and buying and selling young girls during US military operations in Bosnia in 1999.

Second, another State Department statement that patronizingly calls the dancing boys a "widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape," especially in the Pashtun South of the country, displays a striking ignorance about recent Afghan history.

The Taliban, the main enemy of the US occupation in Afghanistan, is of very recent origin. With the Soviet occupation defeated by 1989, the country became a battleground of brutal warlords. In the spring of 1994, one of them abducted two young girls in Singesar, shaved their heads and raped them.

A one-eyed veteran of the anti-Soviet war, now teaching at a madrassah near Kandahar, Mullah Omar, mobilized 50 of his students. (The word Taliban is just the plural of the word talib, “student”.) They armed themselves, freed the girls and hung the commander from a tank barrel.

Word spread and ordinary folk in the area begged further help. In the fall, Omar and the students were told about two other local commanders who had killed civilians while battling to seize a young boy. Again, the Taliban moved, defeating the militias, killing the commanders and freeing the boy.

This time they kept rolling as other Afghans rallied to their standard. Within three months the Taliban controlled 12 provinces and were headed for Kabul. It certainly seems that a lot of ordinary Afghans somehow fail to understand that the widespread kidnapping and rape of their sons and daughters is “culturally sanctioned.”

What’s more, I rather doubt that the imprimatur of DynCore and the US occupation authorities is going to be enough to make this incident seem okay to the people of Kunduz Province.

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The Anti-War Movement Seven Years After Shock & Awe

[This important piece first appeared at the website of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad. It is reposted here because Fire on the Mountain, as a blog, has the capacity to house a discussion of its content, which we are starting here by following the piece with five interesting comments which appeared on a Facebook thread.]

by Dennis O'Neil & Eric See

The war in Iraq is still on. It's already the second most expensive war in US history--only WWII cost more.

The war in Afghanistan is heating up. It's now the second longest war in US history--only Vietnam lasted longer.

So what the hell happened to the anti-war movement? Today, the movement that turned out millions around the world to try and stave off the invasion of Iraq, that created the conditions for Barack Obama's history-making electoral victory, is nearly invisible and in disarray.

How Come?

We can stipulate a few causes everybody will agree on.

* Mainstream media coverage of the wars has been criminal.


Pop quiz: How many US troops are still in Iraq? (Answer: 100,000, and that's not counting an equal number of "contractors," i.e. mercenaries and logistics people our tax dollars are paying for.)

In some cases we're better off when they don't cover it. Take the Battle of Marja in Afghanistan. After breathless news reports quoting Pentagon spokespeople about a week-long offensive against the Taliban for control of this key city of 80,000, the place turned out to be a rural crossroads with more goats than people.

* The military has become very good at holding down casualty figures among US troops. In Iraq, they are hunkered down in bases and avoid combat, while the escalation in Afghanistan is just now starting to produce a new spike in US casualties. But people in this country have an unfortunate tendency to care only about "our" deaths, even as the super-expensive remote-controlled drone aircraft blow up schools and kill non-combatants in Afghanistan. (This, we are told, is okay, because the military wasn't actually trying to kill those kids.)

* Of course there is the ongoing economic meltdown which has become the principal focus for tens of millions of ordinary people looking fruitlessly for those green shoots of growth that the politicians and TV talking heads keep promoting. Activists, too, have been scuffling for their own survival and struggling to organize their coworkers and communities to fight cutbacks.

Behind The Obvious

There is another big-picture reason for the sorry state of the anti-war movement that is not easy to come to grips with. We have to face it: the 2008 election campaign and the Obama presidency are the biggest
things that have taken the wind out of the anti-war movement's sails.

From 2003-2008, a substantial and growing mass of class forces and social movements formed an objective bloc to the left of the Bush/Cheney administration. It was a broad united front consisting of sections and strata of the people including trade union members, environmentalists, educators, civil libertarians, college students, women's groups, African Americans, immigrants, veterans, etc.

The bloc was dominated by large, reform-minded, generally liberal organizations and coalitions whose leaders realized that there was no gain in kowtowing to the Bushies to try and get their programs passed. Still, it was more than a brief alliance of convenience, and was manifested in the deep visceral loathing for Bush/Cheney among the masses.

The lead unifying issue for this united front became the war in Iraq. For one thing, none of the forces in the bloc was strong enough to impose its program on the others: the unions weren't going to mobilize around reproductive rights nor the environmentalists around card check. More important, the war was, objectively, the principal contradiction facing the people of the US (and the world) and by early 2005 or so, popular rejection of the war had made it a very prominent vulnerable spot for the administration.

In fact, it can be said that it was the anti-war movement that elected Barack Obama. His Democratic rivals, Clinton and Edwards, had not spoken out during the buildup to the Iraq invasion, while Obama had. He became, by default, the anti-war candidate. And once the primaries were over and John McCain predicted that the US occupation of Iraq might continue for 50 or even 100 years, he was toast, even before the economy went belly-up.

By mid-2008, the united front was largely incorporated into the Democratic Party campaign. With Obama's election, the main organized groupings from that bloc became part of the establishment, and they did so on terms dictated by the White House. What was once an objective bloc is now an array of interest groups, each pursuing its own agenda, and each tending to regard others as rivals for (increasingly shrinking) resources and positioning to "affect affairs of state."

None of these groups was about to put the war at the center of their agenda, especially when confronted with the catastrophic and ongoing collapse of the economic boom. Even when Obama announced two big troop escalations in Afghanistan in his first year in office and showed no sign that a rapid and complete withdrawal from Iraq was in the making, there wasn't a peep. Quite the opposite, Obama was able to bring anti-war groups into the White House for closed-door meetings before making his announcement.

We ask: Is there any basis for expecting even a weaker version of a broad united front to coalesce to the left of the Obama administration any time soon, in particular one centered on opposing the wars?

A Hard Look Around

Looking around, the organized anti-war movement found that these developments had downsized it to its hard core: essentially peace people (religious and secular) and the anti-imperialist left.

The long uphill slog of trying to end the occupations now seemed like a task that might never end. As Obama put more troops in harm’s way than had ever been deployed under Bush/Cheney, Congresspeople who had spoken and voted against war funding before were, with a few honorable exceptions, suddenly confused and silent.

More important, hundreds of thousands of everyday people who had participated during the Bush years simply weren't there any longer. Their organizations weren't mobilizing them. Individually, some figured the job was done with Obama's election, or that he deserved a chance to get it done. The economy pulled the attention of many. Others were dismayed at how little their efforts had produced and gave up.

That all had its own suppression effect, disheartening a good part of the hard core of the anti-war movement. That core group, mainly aged forty-five to sixty-five when the war started, is not only tired but nearly a decade older.

We ask: When was the last time you turned out for an anti-war mobilization?

This highlights a final problem facing the anti-war movement. The sheer duration of these occupations has tended to normalize war—with "acceptable" casualty levels—as a regrettable but inevitable fact of life in the US. The first-year college students who were demonstrating against education cuts in California and around the country last month were in 3rd grade when Afghanistan was invaded and occupied, and in 4th when the Iraq war started. They've never really known a country not in combat in that region, since during their lifetime “we have always been at war with Eurasia."

Could the anti-war movement become the equivalent of the nuclear disarmament movement, with a handful of stalwarts still lobbying and holding vigils, still fighting the good fight three generations after it started in the early '50s?

So What Do We Do?

If there were some quick and easy way to bring into being a vibrant and growing anti-war movement, it would already be happening. We have our work cut out for us.

But we must keep on. As much as the terrain has shifted under our feet and presented us with an even steeper uphill trek, we still have a duty to oppose the crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan that our rulers are committing, with our tax money, in our name.

The folks who marched with us in 2005 and 2006 and 2007 haven’t disappeared. There’s a whole layer of folks who cut their political teeth in the anti-war movement and are now organizers against budget cutbacks and the collapse of our social safety net. We need to reconnect the dots and bring an anti-war analysis and message into the struggles that have motion on the ground now.

One of the most powerful arguments against the wars right now is the astonishing bill for them. It costs $1 million a year to keep a single soldier in Afghanistan. How much does it cost to keep that person in college? Your city has a $300 million deficit? Simple--just don’t send 300 people to Afghanistan for a year, problem solved.

We need to build activity at the local level that’s easy for people to engage in and doesn’t require signing on to a whole stew of anti-imperialist statements. We also need to bring our bodies and signs to the marches and vigils against budget cutbacks in our communities, instead of just waiting for people to show up at an anti-war rally. We need to make the connections in our messages; “Heath care Not Warfare” at the rallies on the congressional showdown. “Books Not Bombs” when folks march in defense of public education.

This isn’t rocket science. We know how to do it. Let’s get going.


Dennis O'Neil is a member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad and active in the War Moratorium project.

Eric See became active during the first Gulf War, he was one of the co-founders of the War Moratorium project and currently works at Peace Action.

Initial comments on this piece

FotM has taken the liberty of borrowing these from Facebook. Kindly add your own in the comments section below.

Sigrid: i have not been able to leave town, pretty much, since last summer (think gas & brake repair). seattle is 100 miles to the south of me & is the nearest protest game around...not to mention i can't find anyone who can, who would.

Diana: There was not enough interest to have a bus from the Lehigh Valley to Washington [for the March 20 Demonstration]. Wwe drove down last weekend. There are vigils in several places on different days in the area, but since the Republicans are out of office people don't seem as outraged as they should be about the wars, the drones, the 20% unemployment, climate change...

Bruce: there's nothing wrong with the anti-war movement being a little like the nuclear disarmament [movement]--which was, after all, was incredibly effective and made up of long distance runner-type activists.

Larry: This is a very sound and very valuable article, and I hope it gets wide distribution. I do want to say though that at the beginning, it seems to buy into the emotional roller coaster so typical of the left.The statement that the anti-war movement is now "nearly invisible and in disarray" is simply not true--and in fact the rest of the article demonstrates this. There is a broad and tested base of anti-war activists in every part of the country, including rural Virginia, where I live. Yes, the highly visible actions are not happening and would not be covered if they did.

It is critical, as the article suggests, that anti-war activists move into alliances, esp. around the budget, and otherwise respond effectively to current conditions. But it is also critical that we convey a historical or at least transgenerational awareness of our task. Of course the antiwar movement shrank after Obama's election. Of course it shrank after the national turn against the Iraq war (almost entirely due to the antiwar movement). and of course imperialism didn't go away because either of these events. These are the conditions we work with. They do not contradict the reality that the anti-imperialist movement has grown in numbers, sophistication, and geographical and racial and age diversity over the last 40 years. It will never be easy in the belly of the beast, but let's not confuse predictable short-term changes with deficiencies in the movement building for the long term.

Laurel: If you want to feel better, Dennis, check out http://ny4cg.org/resources/detail.php?rid=2396 [which] spotlights 20 of 150 organized events organized around the 7th anniversary of the war.

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Afghanistan & Heroin: Unmentioned Costs Of War

[This summer, I had several conversations with Zach Rudes, a very perceptive young writer, on the heroin epidemic in NW Connecticut, where high school students report that it's easier to score than marijuana! At my urging, Zach wrote this piece for Fire on the Mountain. He has crossposted it at his own blog, And Just Like That I Became A Pseudo-Journalist, which I recommend for your perusal.]

by Zach Rudes

President Obama's recent decision to send tens of thousands of additional American troops into Afghanistan got a lot of people talking. Suddenly, I was hearing questions being asked that should have been asked years ago. Some people wondered, "How much money is this going to cost?". Some people asked, "Do we really need to send over 30,000 more soldiers?" Others questioned, many for the first time, the need to fight this war in the first place.

Others were more occupied with the question "How many American lives is this costing us?" A quick internet search shows that something to the tune of 900 American soldiers have been killed since the start of the war in 2001. While 900 dead soldiers is 900 too many, I think the actual tally of lives lost is much much higher.

Quick! How many heroin users can you name off the top of your head? I can easily rattle off a dozen without taking a breath, all from the lovely rural northwest corner of Connecticut. And those dozen or so are just the tip of the iceberg. So where is this ruiner of lives coming from?You guessed it, folks. Well over 90% of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan. Before the war, our extremist friends put the 'ban' in Taliban and made the cultivation of poppies illegal. Heroin production plummeted.

But then, much to the relief of Afghanistan's poppy farmers, corrupt officials, and anyone else who could get in on a piece of the poppy pie, the Americans came, dismantled the regime, and production once again surged.

What a strange situation. Let's look at a hypothetical example of how this could play out.
Step 1: War is declared.
Step 2: A taxpayer's money is used to fight a war.
Step 3: The war allows massive poppy cultivation to be restored.
Step 4: Excellent quality heroin floods parts of America, namely the Northeast.
Step 5: Taxpayer's child becomes a raging addict.
Step 6: Addict commits a petty crime spending more taxpayer money on judicial and incarceration costs (mom and dad can pick up the rehab bill)
Step 7: Vicious cycle of heroin addiction leads to life of incarceration at great cost to taxpayers and eventually death due to AIDS or health consequences.

Of course, not every person who tries Afghan heroin will spend their lives in jail until they die prematurely. All too many will, however. In addition to the user, heroin addiction takes a gigantic toll on friends, families, and communities. Those involved pay for heroin addiction in grief, money, time, and loss of life.

But just how many lives are lost? We just don't know. No government agency releases numbers on exactly how many fatal heroin overdoses occur each year in America. And even if we had that figure, how could we possibly account for all the dreams shattered, friendships broken, or families destroyed? How could we tally the total amount of property value lost in towns where heroin use has spooked potential homeowners? How many people die from AIDS complications who contracted HIV from sharing needles? I could ask a hundred questions like this.

But I have the sneaking suspicion these types of questions aren't being asked enough by the United States government. When Obama went strolling through Arlington on a soul search about the loss of life in times of war, I wonder if it occurred to him to take another walk through D.C.'s most heroin-inflicted neighborhoods to see the true magnitude of his decisions.

The heroin question pops up from time to time in newspaper articles, but for my little corner of Connecticut, it is an epidemic that cannot afford to be ignored. Many people in small towns in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, or New York State would agree with me. Others in cities like Hartford, Providence, or Baltimore could certainly say the same.

Political analysts like to talk about our disconnect from war and how removed we are from the reality of war. I'm calling bullshit. This war is everywhere. It is in your smashed car window, in your empty jewelry box, in your prison, and in your local emergency room.

So how much is this war costing in terms of human life?

The answer is simple. It's just like determining how many anti-war protestors march on Washington. You take the official estimate and you add many many many more.

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Obama's Million Dollar Gift To Anti-War Organizing

A million dollars a year!

That's what it costs to put one--that's right, one--soldier or Marine on the ground in Afghanistan and to house and supply him or her there. This figure comes directly from the White House and was widely quoted in in the flurry of PR around President Obama's West Point speech announcing his 30,000+ escalation of the occupying force in Afghanistan.

A million bucks a year. That's a nice round figure. A more useful tool for those of us working to revive the anti-war movement is hard to imagine.

This struck me yesterday when the Transit Authority here in NYC, faced with a severe budget crunch, decided to eliminate passes for kids going to and from school, to close whole subway lines and bus routes, to cut services and crowd trains more, and to limit the Access-A-Ride program for seniors and the disabled. All of this, one report said, would save $139 million in the first year.

The math is easy--simply don't send 139 troops to Afghanistan next year. That would cover the cost of averting brutal cuts to a public transit system used by more than 5 million people every day.

You get the idea. Call it what you want--a "troop year" perhaps. Anytime some government agency grappling with revenue collapse caused by the economic meltdown announces an increase in fees or a cutback in services, just figure how many troops not being shipped into harm's way in Helmand Province it would take to make that budget good.

Then spread the word! Use the fact in conversations, letters to the editor, emails to friends and family, leaflets, faxes to Congresscritters who are about to vote to appropriate more money for the war.

People in this country may not like thinking about the war, but they sure can't help thinking about the economy. This is a nice clear way to help them make the connection.

You know those college students in California who are in the middle of a fierce battle to block an unbelievable 32% tuition increase? That's right, just bring 505 troops who are already in Afghanistan home in 2010. Some of them might even want to enroll, too.

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NJ's People's Organization for Progress says "Afghan War Must End!"

UPDATED, Dec. 3—

Thanks to FotM reader, "Nat" who alerts us that POP's Plainfield Branch also held a demonstration against expanding the war in Afghanistan this past Saturday during their regular monthly picket of the so-called Army Career Center on Front Street. Tip o' the hat to Steve and the whole Plainfield Branch. Oh, and apologies for not including the Plainfield demonstration in this report (also included in this update is the link to December 3rd's Amsterdam News article about the POP demonstration…

Throughout its more than 25 years of defending our right to education, quality healthcare, peace in the streets and against police brutality, racism, sexual oppression and many other scourges on our community, the People's Organization for Progress has not been the kind of organization that waits to react to these attacks. When it became clear this past week that the federal government would use the goodwill of the Thanksgiving Holiday to launch the military's expanded attack on the Afghan people, it was imperative to call an emergency demonstration before these new deprecations become a fact.

"Money for Education, Not for War! Money for Healthcare, Not for War!" and "Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan… No More War!" POP members and supporters chanted as they picketed at the intersection of Broad and Market Streets in downtown Newark. "The US ambassador in Kabul reported that this war isn't winnable, that the government the Bush Administration put in place is corrupt. That Hamid Karzai's government is spending US tax dollars defending his brother's heroin business. We need that money in this country for schools and hospitals, for education and healthcare, not Ahmed Wali Karzai's poppy crop," Larry Hamm, chairman of the People's Organization for Progress told the crowd.

While the POP picket began with the usual 10-30 dedicated members who arrived earlier than the scheduled 12-noon starting time, the crowd quickly expanded as Broad Street shoppers picked up U.S. Out Of Afghanistan or Bring The Troops Home NOW! picket-cards and joined in, before going on with their Saturday activities.

Thanks to the creative influence of people who joined the picket, POP's signature rhythmic chants expanded to include references to Pakistan as well. In a brief address to those assembled, Larry Hamm had elucidated how a secret war was already sending robot drone-bombers across the border in Pakistan. To "older-heads" in the crowd this brought back memories of bombing raids on Cambodia and Laos, thirty years earlier. One Korean War veteran commented that "military plans don't get changed by the President's good intentions. The best guy may be in the White House, but the brass is supposed to take orders from their Commander-in-Chief, not the other way round…"

The New York Amsterdam News was unique among the print media in reporting on anti-war sentiment in the Black community. See Americans protest Afghanistan troop buildup for their report coverage, including POP's picketline this past Saturday.

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Is Afghanistan Strategic?

One of the first points in the fine new Freedom Road statement released on the occasion of the 6th anniversary of the occupation of Iraq is the interesting assertion that Afghanistan is less about the strategic interests of US imperialism than about bourgeois politics here at home:

The war in Afghanistan is not mainly about oil or gas pipelines nor, at this point, is it principally about al Qaeda. If the war there were central to US ruling class interests, the George Bush administration would not have low-balled it for eight years. If Afghanistan were a central strategic focus, the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations wouldn’t have completely ignored it from the Soviet defeat there in 1989 right through to 9/11/01.

Afghanistan is a pawn in the game of US domestic politics. Obama ran on Bush’s failure to keep his promise to capture Bin Laden, and in his statements during the campaign and since has repeatedly made his own pledge―Victory in Afghanistan. Yet no one in the administration can say what that would look like and it is acknowledged that so far there exists neither an overall strategic plan, clear goals nor an exit strategy.

I just ran across an interesting confirmation of that assertion, in an Agence France-Presse article tellingly entitled "West lowers sights in Afghanistan":

"We are lowering our ambitions," a senior French official admitted to AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The Americans are now looking for a way out, they no longer regard Afghanistan as strategic. It'll take two to five years, but we're in a logic of disengagement."

They want out because they are losing (as the FRSO/OSCL statement points out) and there's no way to "win" by practically any definition of the word, and because the real strategic problems for the US in the region remain Iraq, Iran and Pakistan.

I won't insult FotM readers by explaining why this does not mean that anti-war activists can breathe a sigh of relief and turn our attention to other issues. Let us rather take up the call made in the recent--and eloquent--open letter of IVAW, MFSO and VFP to the peace movement (available here):

We ask all those who have stood with us in the past to stay faithful to the cause.

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