Tuesday 19th of March 2024

repeating history with hindsight...

heusgenheusgen

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. , you served as a foreign policy adviser to Angela Merkel from the time she took office in 2005 until 2017. Merkel is considered a major proponent of realpolitik, especially when it comes to foreign policy. What explanation can you offer regarding the degree to which Berlin was taken by surprise by the reality on the ground in Afghanistan?

 

Heusgen: It wasn’t just in German foreign policy circles – everyone was surprised by the dynamics that developed in Afghanistan.

DER SPIEGEL: Shouldn’t we have been able to predict that the Taliban was going to seize power in the country again?

Heusgen: Hindsight is always 20/20. As a matter of principle, it was right for us to be engaged in Afghanistan, both militarily and in terms of development policy. But we made the mistake of not forcing good governance on Afghan leaders. We should have attached much stricter conditions to our aid. Having seen how Afghan politicians thought first and foremost about themselves and their clans, it is not surprising in retrospect that this government had no standing with the population or with the security forces. When things got serious, everyone ran for the hills. This could have been foreseen with a little common sense.

DER SPIEGEL: Do you think the West could have succeeded in Afghanistan if things had been done differently?

Heusgen: Personally, I think we should have stayed longer in Afghanistan, just as the Americans did for decades in Japan, South Korea and Germany. The key difference was the that the governments there helped in building democracy and institutions, and they also had the backing of the people.

DER SPIEGEL: What bothered you more: the negotiations with the Taliban under former U.S. President Donald Trump or the unconditional withdrawal under Joe Biden?

Heusgen: Excuse me, but the Trump administration was an amateurish, diplomatic mess. It was a grave mistake to forge an agreement with the Taliban and sideline an Afghan government that had been receiving support for years. Biden’s decision was logical and consistent. He knows how incredibly expensive the deployment is and how unpopular it is in the U.S. But I still wish he would have decided differently.

DER SPIEGEL: What does the defeat in Afghanistan mean for current and future deployments? How, for example, can we prevent a similar situation from arising in Mali, where the German armed forces are also deployed?

Heusgen: The lesson is that we need to set clearer conditions. We cannot have a transitional president who refuses to move forward with the transition to civilian rule. We need to be clear: Either you implement good governance reforms, or we will end our support. If the government doesn’t look after the welfare of its people, the terrorists will continue to gain ground. Foreign troops can’t do anything to change that.

DER SPIEGEL: But you also then have to carry through with it.

Heusgen: Yes, then you have to get out.

DER SPIEGEL: Was Afghanistan a defeat for the West?

Heusgen: I have actually eliminated the term "the West" from my vocabulary.

DER SPIEGEL: Why?

Heusgen: From my point of view, it is no longer about a dispute between the West and the East today, but between states that adhere to a rules-based international order, to the United Nations Charter, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and those that do not. These principles are not Western, but universal. The West has become a negative fighting word that the Russians and Chinese use against us, along the lines of: The West is yesterday’s news.

DER SPIEGEL: What’s your assessment of foreign policy in the Merkel era?

Heusgen: Over the past four years in New York (where Heusgen was Germany’s ambassador to the United Nations), I have seen that Germany has an excellent reputation, thanks in part to its chancellor. When I then return to Germany, I can only shake my head at my nagging compatriots, who complain about so many things here. People are always envious of us in New York, as an example of a country that works well and of a chancellor with foresight who, for 16 years, has ensured reliability, stability and balanced crisis management – in the euro and financial crises, the Ukraine crisis and the refugee crisis. When it comes to the refugee crisis, especially, perceptions in Germany and abroad diverge widely. My American colleague Susan Rice told me at the time that the refugee policy had permanently changed her view of Germany. Opening the border to Syrian refugees in 2015 was a great thing for our country’s reputation.

DER SPIEGEL: Crisis management is indeed considered to be Merkel’s legacy. But shouldn't the aim of successful foreign policy be to avoid crises, to pursue forward-looking policies? The refugee crisis, in particular, could have been avoided if the migrants in Syria’s neighboring countries had been dealt with at an early stage.

Heusgen: It is true that more could have been done. We have learned from that. Today, Germany is the second-largest financial contributor to the United Nations. We provide massive support to the World Food Program and UNICEF.

DER SPIEGEL: Could we not have predicted the Ukraine crisis? It was becoming clear, after all, that Russia was not going to accept the country’s orientation toward the West. Did Germany fail to prevent Ukraine from getting pushed into this conflict?

Heusgen: No, the chancellor had that in mind. We did not want to promote that conflict. That is why, against strong opposition from the United States, she prevented Ukraine from being granted the prospect of joining NATO; nor did the Association Agreement with the European Union open up any prospect of membership. She always kept in mind what was tolerable for Russia. But then, overnight, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych said: No, I'm not going to do this thing with the EU.

 

Read more:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/interview-with-merkel-s-former-foreign-policy-adviser-i-have-eliminated-the-west-from-my-vocabulary-a-e3ab1e9d-998f-4d56-9b17-ab950cef5334

 

 

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milking the war cow...

 Top defense firms spend $1B on lobbying during Afghan war, see $2T return  

Everyone except the military industrial complex lost the ‘war on terror.’

 

By  (SEPTEMBER 2, 2021)

 

With the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s return to power, the unwinnable nature of the U.S. war in Afghanistan is increasingly obvious to Americans across the political spectrum. That’s probably one reason why over half of Americans support Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan even while disapproving of the handling of the withdrawal, according to a Pew Research poll released on Tuesday.

There will be inevitable finger-pointing for why three successive U.S. presidents continued the war in Afghanistan despite public reports and the congressional testimony from the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, casting serious doubts on the viability of efforts to nation-build in Afghanistan.

Indeed, the United States paid a high price for these mistakes — the Cost of War Project at Brown University estimates that the war in Afghanistan cost U.S. taxpayers $2.3 trillion to date and resulted in the deaths of 2,324 U.S. military personnel, 4,007 U.S. contractors and 46,319 Afghan civilians — but those costs weren’t shared by everyone.

While the American people financed the war with their tax dollars, and in some cases their lives, the top five Pentagon contractors enjoyed a boom in growth in federal contracts over the course of the war in Afghanistan. Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, found that Congress gave $2.02 trillion to the top five weapons companies — Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman — between 2001 and 2021.

And between 2002 and 2020, federal funding for those five weapons companies grew by 188 percent

In fairness, the weapons companies invested heavily to lobby members of Congress about a variety of matters, including budget and appropriations issues impacting their bottom-lines.

That wasn’t cheap. A compilation of data from lobbying disclosures archived at OpenSecrets shows that those five firms spent over $1.1 billion on lobbying between 2001 and 2021. That number seems like a staggering sum to spend on influencing policymakers but it may have been the most financially prudent decision these companies have made in the past 20 years.

Taken as a form of investment in procuring lucrative Pentagon contracts, the top five weapons firms earned $1,813 in Pentagon contracts for every dollar spent on lobbying.

Of course, the weapons firms made other investments in influencing policymakers. They sent $120 million in campaign contributions to federal candidates between 2002 and 2020, hired former government officials to sit on their boards while simultaneously advising U.S. policymakers to extend the withdrawal timeline from Afghanistan, and bankrolled think tanks that opposed the withdrawal and supported ongoing U.S. military engagement in the Middle East.

But those investments dwarf in comparison to the over $1 billion explicitly spent to influence policymakers via legal, registered, and documented lobbying, leading to enormous federal contracts and outsized gains for owners of weapons stocks.

“$10,000 of stock evenly divided among America’s top five defense contractors on September 18, 2001 — the day President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks — and faithfully reinvested all dividends, it would now be worth $97,295,” according to The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz.

The exact same investment in an S&P 500 index fund would be worth only $61,613.

The Global War On Terror was very good for a select group of companies that invested over $1 billion in lobbying Congress and securing over $2 trillion in taxpayer funds. While the American public takes a hard look at how and why an unwinnable war was fought at a staggering financial and human cost for two decades, the war’s biggest profiteers appear to be facing little accountability or scrutiny, especially from the policymakers who were the target of a billion dollar lobbying blitz.

 

Read more:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/09/02/top-defense-firms-see-2t-return-on-1b-investment-in-afghan-war/