FOR BOTH BUTCHERY AND expenditure, we moderns rival all of history’s barbarian hordes put together; the distinguished British military historian John Keegan concludes that Hitler, not Genghis Khan or Attila, was “the most dangerous war leader ever to have afflicted civilization.” So why does Keegan’s compact yet encyclopedic “A History of Warfare” kiss off us and our world wars and our nukes true, they haven’t fulfilled their early promise–in a few pages? Well, Keegan’s done World War II (“The Second World War,” 1990). But his scheme reminds us that modernity is an eyeblink in history and that innovations mask continuities. Hitler’s blitzkrieg tactics, Keegan writes, were used by Epaminondas, Alexander and Napoleon; he even traces Hitler’s SS back through the Freikorps to the kaiser’s guard to a Swiss battalion under Napoleon.
But the discontinuities are equally striking. Clausewitz’s famous (and crudely translated) dictum that war is “a continuation of policy by other means,” Keegan argues, reflects a 19th-century Prussian’s cultural perspective, not timeless and universal truth: war, in fact, “antedates the state, diplomacy and strategy by many millennia.” Combatants coming face to face and slugging, slashing and shooting it out is a Western innovation; “primitive” war was ritualized, evasive, innocent of the Clausewitzian notion of the decisive battle–and safer. A sort of malign multiculturalism has disseminated strategies and technologies–from the chariot and bow to the missile and hydrogen bomb–though cultural blindness made some warriors slow on the uptake. The Crusaders’ armored charge, for instance, failed against the Muslims, “whose main intention was not to stand and receive it.” Despite all he knows about us–and a history of warfare is, in effect, a history of humankind–Keegan is optimistic that today war may be “ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable or productive…means of reconciling their discontents.” Nice to hear it, especially from him.
title: “War Without End” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-15” author: “Floyd Gerleman”
Giraldo personifies a disturbing new trend in Colombia’s huge narcotics industry: right-wing paramilitary leaders fighting to take control of the country’s coca fields. In the past two years Giraldo and his Los Chamizos (Charred Tree) militiamen have joined leaders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a loose-knit coalition of private right-wing armies, to force 20,000 Marxist guerrillas out of many key cocaine- and heroin-producing regions. Colombian intelligence sources now estimate that 40 percent of the country’s total cocaine exports are controlled by these right-wing warlords and their allies in the narcotics underworld. These sources believe Giraldo alone is head of a burgeoning drug syndicate that accounts for $1.2 billion in annual shipments to the United States and Europe. That puts him among the country’s top five cocaine traffickers. Some Colombian intelligence officials believe that Giraldo, the son of a dirt-poor cattle rancher, may one day rival the late Medellin-cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar in both wealth and power.
Yet when it comes to right-wing drug lords, American policymakers–and even some counternarcotics officials–are rarely accused of knowing too much. In a recent interview, two of Washington’s top drug warriors in Bogota said they had never heard of Giraldo. That admission goes to the core of a key problem with Wash- ington’s multibillion-dollar program to staunch the export of heroin and cocaine from Colombia. For political reasons, U.S. officials have been largely content to focus on drug-trafficking by Marxist guerrillas who have been fighting the government since 1964. (Targeting the guerrillas is the central aim of Washington’s chief ally, Colombian President Andres Pastrana, and his $7.5 billion Plan Colombia to cut drug production in half.) But as the leftists retreat, right-wing private armies–which have grown in response to leftist threats to businessmen and farmers–are prospering, and the Colombian government may be looking the other way.
The Bush administration is just beginning to grapple with these issues. Last week Bush nominated hard-liner John Walters as his new drug czar. Walters helped design drug-interdiction efforts in the Andean region for the first Bush administration. But NEWSWEEK has learned that even Walters has expressed some skepticism about Plan Colombia, and that the White House has ordered a policy review. One of Walters’s concerns: too much U.S. aid is going to the Colombian military, which has long been tied to the right-wing paramilitaries. “It looks like we’re heavily invested in a country where the situation is destabilizing rapidly,” says a senior administration official. “It’s enough to give everybody pause.”
In recent weeks the State Department has seemed to shift tack on the paramilitaries. At the end of April it included Carlos Castano, head of the AUC paramilitary movement, on its terrorist-watch list for the first time. The significance of the decision was diminished somewhat because the AUC was placed in a second-tier category of “other terrorist organizations” that are deemed not to be direct threats to U.S. citizens or companies. But some Colombian officials suspect that Castano and his cohorts couldn’t care less either way. “I don’t think the paramilitaries are any more worried about the [State Department list] than atheists are of excommunication,” said Prosecutor General Alfonso Gomez Mendez. “The important thing is arresting the paramilitary leadership.”
Giraldo has already been arrested once–to no avail. That was in 1989, when he was still trafficking in marijuana. Giraldo had been convicted for the massacres of 20 unionized banana-plantation workers, crimes for which he got a 20-year prison sentence. Undercover police agents snatched him just outside Santa Marta and brought him to Bogota to face charges. But apparently the case was never followed up, and before long Giraldo was back in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.
The mustached, hard-drinking drug lord switched to cocaine as his primary export commodity in 1992. Since then Giraldo’s hit men have continued to kill suspected guerrilla sympathizers and trade-union members. In 1995 members of Giraldo’s private army kidnapped a wealthy local businessman named Ambrosio Plata and demanded $1 million in ransom for his release. According to Colombian intelligence sources, Giraldo ordered Plata shot and then carved up his body with a chain saw after the ransom money was delivered. He abducted the victim’s widow, Pilar, three years later and summarily executed her upon receipt of a $5 million ransom payment. A major in the Colombian Army’s anti-kidnapping squad met a similar fate in 1999 when he tried to collect a $150,000 fee from Giraldo for having guarded a 3,000-kilogram consignment of cocaine.
Over the years Giraldo has amassed a formidable network of properties and money-laundering businesses in the Santa Marta area. Colombian intelligence sources say he owns dozens of homes and farms, a fish-exporting business and a posh hotel. Generous donations to port authorities, police officials and politicians ensure that Giraldo’s narcotics shipments sail unhindered from the sparsely populated coastline east of Santa Marta. Prosecutor General Gomez argues that Giraldo and his confederates in the paramilitaries must have important friends within the Colombian security services. “There must be complicity on the part of those agencies that are supposed to carry out the orders for their arrest,” says Gomez. (The Pastrana administration declined to comment.)
The Colombian government recently has tried to look tough by launching some rare Army strikes against right-wing militias. But no one expects Giraldo himself to be captured or killed any time soon. Abetted by ranchers and police who advise him about the arrival of outsiders, Giraldo can easily vanish into the remote valleys of the Sierra Nevadas on foot or by mule. “He has informants working throughout the region who radio him when the authorities are coming in,” says one Colombian intelligence official. “That gives him ample time to flee into the mountains and avoid capture.” Then again, that may just be a convenient excuse for letting Giraldo roam free. And it may just give the Bush administration added justification to retreat from Plan Colombia.
title: “War Without End” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-22” author: “Mary Robertson”
No one doubts that the United States has won both of those wars, by any reasonable reckoning. But as both the statements acknowledge, winning a war and ending it are very different matters.
Bush’s speech on the carrier, just before it reached its home port in California after operations in the Persian Gulf, had been widely anticipated as a formal declaration that the war was over. Instead, the farthest he could go was to say that, “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” a fact which should have been apparent to any casual observer any time over the past two weeks. And half a world away, Rumsfeld appeared with President Hamid Karzai and had a similarly couched hedge. “We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities.”
A lot of soldiers in both places were surely shaking their heads. In Iraq, 150,000 American troops remain and most of them will stay for the foreseeable future. As Rumsfeld himself acknowledged, it remains a dangerous and unstable place. Despite the hot weather, all of the soldiers are under orders to continue wearing helmets and body armor–and with good reason. Grenades have been tossed into American compounds, snipers have picked off soldiers at night and their vehicles have been ambushed from highway overpasses. Those incidents, it’s true, are relatively few, but the potential is certainly there. So many weapons have been found in Baghdad that the Third Infantry Division is confiscating them at the rate of 50 truckloads a day–and still finding more. Looters infest the streets of every major city, fires are set by vandals so frequently that most are left to burn, and gunfire is often heard day and night. No American official or soldier sleeps anywhere but under heavy guard. Any sort of interim Iraqi government is weeks away, at best.
Things are much more stable in Afghanistan, if Afghanistan could ever be considered stable. A weak central government holds sway in Kabul only, and only under the protection of 4,500 peacekeepers. Warlords rule the provinces under a series of deals, often sealed with cash, between them and the Americans. And 8,500 American combat troops continue to scour the mountains looking for remnants of Al Qaeda.
The goals of both those wars have only imperfectly been met. No weapons of mass destruction of note have yet to be recovered in Iraq, though it’s true, as Bush said, that Iraq wouldn’t be able to share such weapons with terrorist groups. And Saddam Hussein’s regime has been smashed, even though he and most of his top henchmen remain on the loose. In Afghanistan, or perhaps next door in Pakistan, Osama bin Laden remains on the loose, although Al Qaeda’s ability to wage terror has been strikingly reduced.
But the president’s and the secretary’s declarations had little to do with whether these wars were indeed over. Instead, they were clearly an attempt to draw a line under the war so that the adminisration can focus more attention on domestic issues as campaign time grows near.
In Iraq, the president was hampered further by concerns about the Geneva Conventions. If the war were actually declared over, the United States would have to repatriate the more than 6,000 Iraqi prisoners of war it still holds. And under international law, the United States would no longer be able to pursue its playing deck of 55 most wanteds, from Saddam on down. In Afghanistan, the problem is different. How can you declare a war over when, after a year and a half of fighting, scarcely anything has changed?
Major combat operations may be over, but Iraq still looks very much like a war zone, and it probably will for a long time to come. Afghanistan will always look like a war zone, but it will also probably have American troops as a major feature of its landscape. In today’s world, wars both old and new don’t really end, they just fade away. Or at least our leaders hope they will.
