How Capitalism Steered Innovation Toward Social Control Rather Than Technological Wonders

Why Don't We Have Flying Cars?
The technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance and work discipline.

By David Graeber, The Baffler
June 18, 2012

The following article has been adapted from the Baffler. To read the piece in its entirety check out the Baffler.com. 

A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.

Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?

We are well informed of the wonders of computers, as if this is some sort of unanticipated compensation, but, in fact, we haven’t moved even computing to the point of progress that people in the fifties expected we’d have reached by now. We don’t have computers we can have an interesting conversation with, or robots that can walk our dogs or take our clothes to the Laundromat.

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For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with the export of factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union movement and destroyed any possibility of effective working-class politics.

Meanwhile, despite unprecedented investment in research on medicine and life sciences, we await cures for cancer and the common cold, and the most dramatic medical breakthroughs we have seen have taken the form of drugs such as Prozac, Zoloft, or Ritalin—tailor-made to ensure that the new work demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally crazy.

With results like these, what will the epitaph for neoliberalism look like? I think historians will conclude it was a form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time. There is every reason to believe that destroying job security while increasing working hours does not create a more productive (let alone more innovative or loyal) workforce. Probably, in economic terms, the result is negative—an impression confirmed by lower growth rates in just about all parts of the world in the eighties and nineties.

But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor and over determining the future. Economically, the growth of armies, police, and private security services amounts to dead weight. It’s possible, in fact, that the very dead weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will sink it. But it’s also easy to see how choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that could be different from our world is a crucial part of the neoliberal project

At this point all the pieces would seem to be falling neatly into place. By the sixties, conservative political forces were growing skittish about the socially disruptive effects of technological progress, and employers were beginning to worry about the economic impact of mechanization. The fading Soviet threat allowed for a reallocation of resources in directions seen as less challenging to social and economic arrangements, or indeed directions that could support a campaign of reversing the gains of progressive social movements and achieving a decisive victory in what U.S. elites saw as a global class war. The change of priorities was introduced as a withdrawal of big-government projects and a return to the market, but in fact the change shifted government-directed research away from programs like NASA or alternative energy sources and toward military, information, and medical technologies.

Of course this doesn’t explain everything. Above all, it does not explain why, even in those areas that have become the focus of well-funded research projects, we have not seen anything like the kind of advances anticipated fifty years ago. If 95 percent of robotics research has been funded by the military, then where are the Klaatu-style killer robots shooting death rays from their eyes?

Obviously, there have been advances in military technology in recent decades. One of the reasons we all survived the Cold War is that while nuclear bombs might have worked as advertised, their delivery systems did not; intercontinental ballistic missiles weren’t capable of striking cities, let alone specific targets inside cities, and this fact meant there was little point in launching a nuclear first strike unless you intended to destroy the world.

Contemporary cruise missiles are accurate by comparison. Still, precision weapons never do seem capable of assassinating specific individuals (Saddam, Osama, Qaddafi), even when hundreds are dropped. And ray guns have not materialized—surely not for lack of trying. We can assume the Pentagon has spent billions on death ray research, but the closest they’ve come so far are lasers that might, if aimed correctly, blind an enemy gunner looking directly at the beam. Aside from being unsporting, this is pathetic: lasers are a fifties technology.

Phasers that can be set to stun do not appear to be on the drawing boards; and when it comes to infantry combat, the preferred weapon almost everywhere remains the AK-47, a Soviet design named for the year it was introduced: 1947.

The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue. Had the Internet been described to a science fiction aficionado in the fifties and sixties and touted as the most dramatic technological achievement since his time, his reaction would have been disappointment. Fifty years and this is the best our scientists managed to come up with? We expected computers that would think!

Overall, levels of research funding have increased dramatically since the seventies. Admittedly, the proportion of that funding that comes from the corporate sector has increased most dramatically, to the point that private enterprise is now funding twice as much research as the government, but the increase is so large that the total amount of government research funding, in real-dollar terms, is much higher than it was in the sixties. “Basic,” “curiosity-driven,” or “blue skies” research—the kind that is not driven by the prospect of any immediate practical application, and that is most likely to lead to unexpected breakthroughs—occupies an ever smaller proportion of the total, though so much money is being thrown around nowadays that overall levels of basic research funding have increased

Yet most observers agree that the results have been paltry. Certainly we no longer see anything like the continual stream of conceptual revolutions—genetic inheritance, relativity, psychoanalysis, quantum mechanics—that people had grown used to, and even expected, a hundred years before. Why?

Part of the answer has to do with the concentration of resources on a handful of gigantic projects: “big science,” as it has come to be called. The Human Genome Project is often held out as an example. After spending almost three billion dollars and employing thousands of scientists and staff in five different countries, it has mainly served to establish that there isn’t very much to be learned from sequencing genes that’s of much use to anyone else. Even more, the hype and political investment surrounding such projects demonstrate the degree to which even basic research now seems to be driven by political, administrative, and marketing imperatives that make it unlikely anything revolutionary will happen.

Here, our fascination with the mythic origins of Silicon Valley and the Internet have blinded us to what’s really going on. It has allowed us to imagine that research and development is now driven, primarily, by small teams of plucky entrepreneurs, or the sort of decentralized cooperation that creates open-source software. This is not so, even though such research teams are most likely to produce results. Research and development is still driven by giant bureaucratic projects.

What has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led everyone to adopt the language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. Although this might have helped in creating marketable products, since that is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do, in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic.

My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide.

The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.

As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure.

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet.

If all this is true in the social sciences, where research is still carried out with minimal overhead largely by individuals, one can imagine how much worse it is for astrophysicists. And, indeed, one astrophysicist, Jonathan Katz, has recently warned students pondering a career in the sciences. Even if you do emerge from the usual decade-long period languishing as someone else’s flunky, he says, you can expect your best ideas to be stymied at every point:

You will spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors, you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. . . . It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal, because they have not yet been proved to work.

That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.

READ THE REST OF THIS PIECE ON THE BAFFLER.

Inside the GOP's "Security Act"/Chamber of Commerce in Wonderland (2 articles)

Repealing Due Process, Declaring Permanent War
By MIKE WHITNEY

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) is pushing a bill through congress that will repeal due process and give the President nearly-unlimited powers to wage war wherever and whenever he chooses without congressional approval. Because the language in the so-called Detainee Security Act of 2011 is (intentionally?) vague, it's impossible to know at whom it is directed. Is the real focus on suspects captured by the military in the so-called War on Terror or civilians who oppose US foreign policy? It's hard to say. Here's an excerpt from an article in Talking Points Memo that mulls over that same question:

"The new language eschews references to September 11, and instead centers the authorization on "armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces," though "associated forces" is not defined. It replaces the authority to target "organizations" and "persons" domestically with the power to target "all entities that continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens, both domestically and abroad." ("Congress Poised To Give President Power To Continue GWOT Indefinitely", talkingpointsmemo.com)

Is that vague enough? Huffington Post's Daphne Eviatar thinks the bill will "authorize the use of military force domestically, if terrorists are found here at home." But, who knows?

In any event, President Barack Obama did not request these extraordinary powers, so it's unclear whose interests are being served. Did Rep. McKeon concoct this bill himself in order to make the country safer or is he merely acting in behalf of powerful constituents who want a more autocratic form of government in the US? It's impossible to know, but it's odd that a Republican congressmen would want to expand presidential powers when a Democrat is in the White House.

Opposition to the Detainee Security Act of 2011, which is lumped together with the National Defense Authorization Act, has been minimal for the simple reason that the public has no idea what's going on. This is another stealth campaign by the sleazebag-wing of GOP. The NDAA isn't even on anyone's radar, yet. But 32 (progressive) Democrats led by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) oppose many of the bill's provisions, particularly those that would "allow the war on terrorism to continue indefinitely" and which would "formalize an indefinite detention system at Guantanamo." ("Congress Poised To Give President Power To Continue GWOT Indefinitely", talkingpointsmemo.com)

Here's an excerpt from a letter from Conyers to McKeon expressing his concerns about the Detainee Security Act:

Dear Chairman McKeon:

We are writing concerning certain troubling provisions in H.R. 968, the Detainee Security Act of 2011, which we understand are likely to be considered as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of the Fiscal Year of 2012. Whatever one thinks about the merits of the Detainee Security Act, it is a serious enough departure from current counterterrorism policy and practice to merit consideration apart from the NDAA. Accordingly, we request that you use your chairmanship in the House Armed Services Committee to immediately hold hearings so that the public can further consider the various provisions within the Detainee Security Act.

Among the many troubling aspects of the Detainee Security Act are provisions that expand the war against terrorist organizations on a global basis. The Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) of 2001 was widely thought to provide authorization for the war in Afghanistan to root out al Qaeda, the Taliban, and others responsible for the 9/11 attacks. That war has dragged on for almost ten years, and after the demise of Osama Bin Laden, as the United States prepares for withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Detainee Security Act purports to expand the "armed conflict" against the Taliban, al Qaeda, and "associated forces" without limit. By declaring a global war against nameless individuals, organizations, and nations "associated" with the Taliban and al Qaeda, as well as those playing a supporting role in their efforts, the Detainee Security Act would appear to grant the President near unfettered authority to initiate military action around the world without further congressional approval. Such authority must not be ceded to the President without careful deliberation from Congress...."

The Detainee Security Act eliminates any process under which prisoners captured by the US military can establish their innocence. If you're caught by the military, then you're guilty; it's as simple as that.

Conyers again:

"The Detainee Security Act would also make permanent current transfer restrictions on Guantanamo detainees, further undermining the ability of the President to close the offshore detention facility."

So, if the bill is passed, Guantanamo Bay will stay open forever and prisoners will continue to be deprived of due process. Naturally, putting the military in charge without congressional oversight increases the likelihood that detainees will be tortured or abused as they have been in the past.

The real aim of the NDAA is to eviscerate the power of congress. It limits congress's power to restrain the president or to reign in the military. It enshrines the principle that the president can declare war by himself without getting a green light from congress. Thus, congress becomes a ceremonial institution stripped of any real political power.

The NDAA also includes other controversial provisions that are part of the right wing "wish list". For example, the bill would give "the Secretary of Defense the authority to conduct clandestine cyberspace activities in support of military operations." In other words, the military will continue to expand its spying, hacking and propaganda programs in and out of the country. But the main objectives of the new bill appear to be pretty straightforward: emasculate congress, savage the rule of law and elevate the executive to supreme leader. Then again, that's what the GOP has always wanted, right?

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Fighting Disclosure
By ROBERT WEISSMAN

It's a good rule of thumb: If the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- the trade association for large corporations -- is whipped up about something, there's probably good reason for the public to strongly back whatever has sent the Chamber into fits.

Well, the Chamber is apoplectic over a modest Obama administration proposed executive order that would require government contractors to reveal all of their campaign-related spending.

This is a case where the rule of thumb works. The proposed executive order would provide important information about campaign spending by large corporations, and work to reduce the likelihood that contracts are provided as payback for campaign expenditures. You can urge the administration to stand up to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by signing the petition here: .

The U.S. Chamber is of course no stranger to using exaggerated rhetoric to advance its positions. But its opposition to the Executive Order is astounding even by the standards of the Chamber.

A driving purpose of the Executive Order is to prevent corruption; the phenomenon of campaign contributors being given preferential access for contracting is so widely acknowledged that it has a slang name: "pay-to-play." In a spell-binding bit of Alice-in-Wonderland logic, the Chamber is arguing that the Executive Order will actually enable pay-to-play abuses!

An email action alert from the Friends of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce raises the specter of "your tax dollars only going to those companies or contractors that have contributed to a particular political party," asking, "Sounds like pay-to-play, right?"

It certainly does!

Why does the Chamber make this point? Because it then goes on to argue "that's exactly what could happen if the White House, as expected, issues a new Executive Order (EO) requiring American employers seeking federal government contracts to disclose their political contributions in excess of $5,000."

And thus does Alice fall down the rabbit hole.

The best way to prevent pay-to-play abuses is simply to ban campaign spending by government contractors. But short of that, disclosing campaign expenditures -- as the Obama executive order would mandate -- is the best way possible to limit the potential for abuse. Disclosure of government contactors' campaign spending will help shine a light on the contracting process and diminish the likelihood of abuse and waste of taxpayer monies.

The Chamber attempts to argue that if the government knows which companies are making political expenditures, the administration in power will reward those it likes and punish those it doesn't. Here's the problem with that logic: The government already knows. Company political action committees must disclose their spending. Direct contributions by company executives and employees are already disclosed.

What is not disclosed publicly are the secret contributions that corporations funnel through trade associations and front groups to influence elections. Thanks to the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, more than $130 million in secret money was spent in the 2010 election, and that figure is certain to skyrocket in 2012. These secret donations are expenditures that corporations can use to extract special access and consideration -- without even the check of the public knowing about the corporations' leverage.

What is an example of a trade association that funnels such corporate money, you might ask.

Why, the number one example is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Is it just possible that this helps explain the vociferousness of the Chamber's objection?

(Hint: yes.)

Now, the U.S. Chamber rolls out some other complaints about the President's draft executive order. It would only apply to corporations, but not "big labor unions," grumbles the action alert from Friends of the U.S. Chamber. Actually, the executive order will apply to unions, in cases where they may be government contractors. But more to the point: There was legislation considered last year that would have required disclosure of all union contributions to groups making campaign-related expenditures, the DISCLOSE Act. That legislation was defeated by a single vote in the Senate ... thanks to the opposition of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its allies in the Republican Party.

"With America facing a severe budget crisis, your tax dollars should be closely protected," states the Friends of the U.S. Chamber action alert. "As such, government contracts should be awarded based on qualifications and cost -- just as they are in the private sector."

Exactly right.

Except that the Chamber draws exactly the wrong conclusion. To protect our tax dollars, we need -- at a bare minimum -- openness and disclosure of contractors' campaign spending. We can't afford and should not tolerate secret spending accounts that invite government contracting corruption.

The Pentagon and Military Will Do Anything to Continue Neverending War

The War Addicts
Perpetual war is in the military and Pentagon's blood -- and they're ready to face down the commander-in-chief to make it continue.
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on October 5, 2010

Sometimes it’s the little things in the big stories that catch your eye. On Monday, the Washington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the Commander-in-Chief into the smallest of Afghan corners. As an illustration, the Post included a graphic the military offered President Obama at a key November 2009 meeting to review war policy. It caught in a nutshell the favored “solution” to the Afghan War of those in charge of fighting it -- Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus, then-Centcom commander, General Stanley McChrystal, then-Afghan War commander, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others.

Labeled “Alternative Mission in Afghanistan,” it’s a classic of visual wish fulfillment. Atop it is a soaring green line that represents the growing strength of the notoriously underwhelming “Afghan Forces,” military and police, as they move toward a theoretical goal of 400,000 -- an unlikely “end state” given present desertion rates. Underneath that green trajectory of putative success is a modest, herky-jerky blue curving line, representing the 40,000 U.S. troops Gates, Petraeus, Mullen, and company were pressuring the president to surge into Afghanistan.

The eye-catching detail, however, was the dating on the chart. Sometime between 2013 and 2016, according to a hesitant dotted white line (that left plenty of room for error), those U.S. surge forces would be drawn down radically enough to dip somewhere below -- don’t gasp -- the 68,000 level. In other words, three to six years from now, if all went as planned -- a radical unlikelihood, given the Afghan War so far -- the U.S. might be back close to the force levels of early 2009, before the President’s second surge was launched. (When Obama entered office, there were only 31,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.)

And when would those troops dwindle to near zero? 2019? 2025? The chart-makers were far too politic to include the years beyond January 1, 2016, so we have no way of knowing. But look at that chart and ask yourself: Is there any doubt that our high command, civilian and military, were dreaming of, and most forcefully recommending to the president, a forever war -- one which the Office of Budget and Management estimated would cost almost $900 billion?

Of course, as we now know, the military “lost” this battle. Instead of the 40,000 troops they desired, they “only” got 30,000 from a frustrated president (plus a few thousand support troops the Secretary of Defense was allowed to slip in, and some special operations forces that no one was putting much effort into counting, and don’t forget those extra troops wrung out of NATO as well as small allies who, for a price, couldn’t say no -- all of which added up to a figure suspiciously close to the 10,000 the president had officially denied his war commanders).

When, on December 1, 2009, Barack Obama addressed the cadets of West Point and, through them, the rest of us to announce the second surge of his presidency, he was at least able to slip in a date to begin a drawdown of U.S. forces. (“But taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”) Hardly a nanosecond passed, however, before -- first “on background” and soon enough in public -- administration spokespeople rushed to reassure the rest of Washington that such a transfer would be “conditions based.” Given conditions there since 2001, not exactly a reassuring statement.

Meanwhile, days before the speech, Afghan war commander McChrystal was already hard at work stretching out the time of the drawdown date the president was still to announce. It would, he claimed, begin “sometime before 2013.” More recently, deified new Afghan War commander General David Petraeus has repeatedly assured everyone in sight that none of this drawdown talk will add up to a hill of beans.

More, Never Less

Let’s keep two things in mind here: just how narrow were the options the president considered, and just how large was the surge he reluctantly launched. By the end of the fall of 2009, it was common knowledge in Washington that the administration’s fiercely debated Afghan War “review” never considered a “less” option, only ones involving “more.” Now, thanks to Woodward, we can put definitive numbers to those options. The least of the "more" options was Vice President Biden’s “counterterrorism-plus” strategy, focused on more trainers for the Afghan military and police plus more drone attacks and Special Forces operations. It involved a surge of 20,000 U.S. troops. According to Woodward, the military commanders, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Secretary of Defense more or less instantly ruled this out.

The military’s chosen option was for those 40,000 troops and an emphasis on counterinsurgency. Between them lay a barely distinguishable 30,000-35,000 option. The only other option mentioned during the review process involved a surge of 85,000, and it, too, was ruled out by the military because troops in that quantity simply weren’t available. This, then, was the full “range” of debate in Washington about the Afghan War. No wonder the president, according to Woodward, exclaimed in anger, "So what's my option? You have given me one option."

It’s also important to remember that this round of surgification involved a lot more than those 30,000 troops and various add-ons. After all, the “president” -- and when you read Woodward, you do wonder whether a modern president isn’t, in many ways, simply a prisoner of Washington -- also managed to surge CIA personnel, triple State Department, USAID, and other civilian personnel, and expand the corps of private contractors.

Perhaps more significant, that December the president and his key advisors set the Af/Pak War -- to use the new term of that moment -- on an ever widening gyre. Among other things, that escalation included a significant acceleration in U.S. base-building activity which has yet to end; a massive increase in the CIA’s drone war over the Pakistani tribal borderlands (a quadrupling of attacks since the last year of the Bush administration, including at least 22 attacks launched this September, the most yet in a month); a recent uptick in Air Force bombing activity over Afghanistan (which General McChrystal actually cut back for a while), an increase in Special Operations activity throughout Afghanistan; and an increase in border crossings into Pakistan.

The last of these, in particular, reflects the increasing frustration of American commanders fighting a war going badly in Afghanistan in which key enemies have sanctuaries across the border. Thanks to Woodward’s book, we now know that, in 2002, the Bush administration allowed the CIA to organize a secret Afghan “paramilitary army,” modeled after the U.S. Special Forces and divided into “counterterrorist pursuit teams.” Three thousand in all, these irregulars have operated as proxy fighters and assassins in Afghanistan -- and, in the Obama era, they have evidently also been venturing into the Pakistani tribal borderlands where those CIA drone attacks are already part of everyday life. In addition, just days ago, U.S. helicopters upped the ante in the first of two such incidents by venturing across the same border to attack retreating Taliban fighters in what U.S. military spokespeople have termed “self-defense,” but what was known in the Vietnam era as “hot pursuit.”

In addition, U.S. military commanders, the New York Times reports, are threatening worse. (“As evidence of the growing frustration of American officials, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, has recently issued veiled warnings to top Pakistani commanders that the United States could launch unilateral ground operations in the tribal areas should Pakistan refuse to dismantle the militant networks in North Waziristan, according to American officials.”) In the next year, that label “Af/Pak” could come into its own as a war-fighting reality.

All of this is, of course, part of the unspoken Pentagon doctrine of forever war. And lest you think that the 2016 date for an Afghan drawdown was a one-of-a-kind bit of planning, consider this line from a recent New York Times report by Michael Gordon and John Burns on Pentagon anxiety over the new British government's desire to cut defense spending by up to 20%: “American and British officials said that they did not expect any cutbacks to curtail Britain’s capabilities to fight in Afghanistan over the next five years.” Let that sink in for a moment: “over the next five years.” It obviously reflects the thinking of anonymous officials of some significance and, if you do the modest math, you once again find yourself more or less at January 1, 2016. In a just released Rolling Stone interview, even the President can be found saying, vaguely but ominously, of the Afghan War: "[I]t's going to take us several years to work through this issue."

Or consider the three $100 million bases (or parts of bases) that Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reported the Pentagon is now preparing to build in Afghanistan. These, he adds, won’t be ready for use until, at best, “later in 2011,” well after the Obama troop drawdown is set to begin. According to Noah Shachtman of the Danger Room blog, one $100 million upgrade for a future Special Operations headquarters in northern Afghanistan, when done, will include: a “communications building, Tactical Operations Center, training facility, medical aid station, Vehicle Maintenance Facility... dining facility, laundry facility, and a kennel to support working dogs... Supporting facilities include roads, power production system and electrical distribution, water well, non-potable water production, water storage, water distribution, sanitary sewer collection system, communication manhole/duct system, curbs, walkways, drainage, and parking. Additionally, the project will include site preparation and compound security measures to include guard towers.”

A State of War to the Horizon

Tell me: Does this sound like a military getting ready to leave town any time soon?

And don’t forget the $1.3 billion in funds pending in Congress that Pincus tells us the Pentagon has requested “for multiyear construction of military facilities in Afghanistan.” We’re obviously talking 2012 to 2015 here, too. Or how about the $6.2 billion a year that the Pentagon is projected to spend on the training of Afghan forces from 2012 through 2016? Or what about the Pentagon contract TomDispatch’s Nick Turse dug up that was awarded to private contractor SOS International primarily for translators with an estimated completion date of September 2014? Or how about the gigantic embassy-cum-command-center-cum-citadel (modeled on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, now the largest in the world) which the Obama administration has decided to build in Islamabad, Pakistan?

And let’s not leave out the Army’s incessant planning for the distant future embodied in a recently published report, Operating Concept, 2016-2028, overseen by Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, a senior advisor to Gen. David Petraeus. It opts to ditch “Buck Rogers” visions of futuristic war, and instead to imagine counterinsurgency operations, grimly referred to as "wars of exhaustion," in one, two, many Afghanistans to the distant horizon.

So here’s one way to think about all this: like people bingeing on anything, the present Pentagon and military cast of characters can’t stop themselves. They really can’t. The thought that in Afghanistan or anywhere else they might have to go on a diet, as sooner or later they will, is deeply unnerving. Forever war is in their blood, so much so that they’re ready to face down the commander-in-chief, if necessary, to make it continue. This is really the definition of an addiction -- not to victory, but to the state of war itself. Don’t expect them to discipline themselves. They won’t.