Tom Engelhardt: Whistling past the Afghan graveyard

It is now a commonplace - as a lead article in the New York Times's Week in Review pointed out recently - that Afghanistan is "the graveyard of empires". Given US President Barack Obama's call for a greater focus on the Afghan War ("We took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq ... "), and given indications that a "surge" of United States troops is about to get underway there, Afghanistan's dangers have been much in the news lately.

Some of the writing on this subject, including recent essays by Juan Cole at Salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss at the Nation and John Robertson at the War in Context website, has been incisive on just how the new administration's policy initiatives might transform Afghanistan and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands into "Obama's War". In other words, "the graveyard" has been getting its due. Far less attention has been paid to the "empire" part of the equation. And there's a good reason for that - at least in Washington. Despite escalating worries about the deteriorating situation, no one in our nation's capital is ready to believe that Afghanistan could actually be the "graveyard" for the American role as the dominant hegemon on this planet.

Almost 20 years later, in fact, it may finally be growing more acceptable to suggest that certain comparisons between the two Cold War superpowers were apt. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed out recently:

Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, argues that the US bubble economy had
something in common with the old Soviet economy. The Soviet Union's growth was
artificially raised by huge industrial output that ended up having little use.
America's was artificially raised by mortgage-backed securities, collateralized
debt obligations and even the occasional Ponzi scheme.