This post focuses on excerpts from one of two classified cables sent by US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Gen. Eikenberry, to the Secretary of State in November, 2009. The cables were leaked that month and published in the New York Times shortly thereafter. You can see the original cables in their entirety at: http://documents.nytimes.com/eikenberry-s-memos-on-the-strategy-in-afghanistan#document/p1 The text of the cables is now available and/or commented on at numerous Internet sites. The cables have thus become a part of the public record, whatever their original status.
On the Democracy Now program yesterday (3-30-10), Daniel Ellsberg was interviewed. He is the citizen, then employed at the RAND Corporation with access to classified materials, who leaked the classified Pentagon Papers to the public during the Vietnam War. During the DN interview, Ellsberg drew parallels between the Pentagon Papers and the Eichenberry cables and discussed the implications and the need to have transparent public discussions on matters of importance to the American citizenry.
New York Time journalists Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Landler provide some background and context for understanding the implications of the Eikenberry cables in their article, "US Envoy Urges Caution on Forces for Afghanistan," Nov. 11. 2009. You can find the article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/us/politics/12policy.html_r=2.
In the first of the two cables, Amb. Eikenberry offers his views on why President Obama should not send additional US troops to Afghanistan, or "surge" the number of troops going there. We here at stopafghanwar are in accord with Eikenberry's position, as far as it goes. We would also support a firm timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from the country.
Amb. Eikenberry later modified his views, at least publicly at congressional hearings, and did not then demur from the surge-of-troops policy.
Bob
-----------------------------
First Eikenberry cable: (excerpts follow)
....Here are my reasons for this assessment:
1) President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner. The proposed counterinsurgency strategy assumes an Afghan political leadership that is both able to take responsibiltiy and to exert sovereignty in the furtherance of our goal—a secure, peaceful, minimally self-sufficient Afghanistan hardened against transnational groups. Yet Karzai continues to shun responssibiliy for any sovereign burden, whether defense, governance, or development. He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest futher. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending “war on terror” and for military bases to use against surrounding powers....
2) We overestimate the ability of Afghan security forces to take over. Success of the proposed counterinsurgency strategy hinges upon Afghan forces steadily assuming responsibility for security and fully taking over this duty by 2013....The Army’s high attrition and low recruitment rates for Pashtuns in the south are crippling. Simply keeping the force at current levels requires tens of thousands of new recruits every year to replace attrition losses and battlefield casualties; those requirements would steepen dramatically under the proposed strategy. Building an effective Afghan National Police, which is in many ways more crucial to extend the Afghan government’s reach into villages and districts will prove even tougher. The Police receive lower benefits and face higher risks in many places than the Army....
3) We underestimate how long it will take to restore or establish civilian government. The proposed strategy assumes that once the clearing and holding process has been accomplished in a given area, the rebuilding and tranferring to Afghans can proceed apace followed by a relatively rapid U.S. withdrawal. In reality, the process of restoring Afghan government is likely to be slow and uneven, no matter how many U.S. and other foreign civilian experts are involved. Many areas need not just security but healthcare, education, justice, infrastructure, and almost every other basic government function. Many have never had these services at all. Establishing them requires trained and honest Afghan officials to replace our own personnel. That cadre of Afghan civilians does not now exist and would take years to build....
5) The proposed strategy may not be cost-effective. Sending additional combat brigades will require tens of billions of dollars annually for years to come, costs not detailed in DOD [Department of Defense] charts....
– In particular, we should weigh whether a relatively small additional investment in programs for development and governance would yield results that, if not as visible as those from sending more troops, would move us closer to achieving our goals at far lesser cost and risk, both in lives and dollars. Accelerating our work on signature projects to deliver greater access to electricity, water, and education could have a high payoff in stability over the long term. With a greatly stepped-up development effort we can could be in a position at some point to call off further troop deployments, as Afghans begin to see their lives improving and their needs addressed....
Respectfully,EIKENBERY
Showing posts with label Daniel Ellsberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Daniel Ellsberg. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Interview excerpts - Daniel Ellsberg on Obama's good war in Afghanistan
Below I quote some points made on Democracy Now by Daniel Ellsberg, interviewed by Anjali Kamat and Amy Goodman, March 30, 2010. Ellsberg drew parallels between the war in Afghanistan and the Vietnam War. In the excerpts from the interview that follow I focus on some of his responses on Afghanistan – for the most part. Ellsberg’s position on the Afghanistan War is to bring it to an end as soon as it is reasonable to do so. (Go to democracynow.org for the full interview.)
A little background on Daniel Ellsberg - We [Democracy Now] are joined by a man who played a major role in efforts to end the Vietnam War in the 1970s. In 1971, the then-RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the media what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page classified history outlining the true extent of US involvement in Vietnam. After avoiding a life sentence on espionage charges, Daniel Ellsberg has continued to speak out against US militarism until the present day.
Daniel Ellsberg - [excerpts from interview follow]
Obama’s war - President Obama is taking every symbolic step he can to nominate this as Obama’s war, just as the Vietnam War became Nixon’s war in November of 1969, just about the time I was copying the Pentagon Papers in hopes of forestalling that, and Johnson made Vietnam his war, Johnson’s war, and McNamara’s war in June of 1965…with very much the same results in the end, tragic results.
Secret cables - Secret cables from the US ambassador in Kabul, Lieutenant General, retired, Karl Eikenberry were leaked by someone in January…He’s describing the President, Karzai, to whom he’s accredited and who he just visited with President Obama. And Karzai has presumably read Eikenberry’s assessment of him as—that he is not an adequate strategic partner for the United States, and for reasons of corruption and inefficiency.
Drugs are necessary to Afghan government- Allegedly, we hear that Obama’s reason for going seventeen hours over to Afghanistan was to convey in person our desire that he clean up his government….In Karzai’s government, as in the Mafia, corruption are us, drugs are us. Corruption is his government. That’s his constituency, his source of income. There is no chance whatever that he’ll, for instance, root out his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, from Kandahar, which is our next base of operations, despite the fact that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says no success is possible in Kandahar while corruption is still the heart of that, while drug dealing is the heart of that, so long as Wali, the President’s, Karzai’s brother, is in charge there.
Counterinsurgency will not work - What it ignores is that the recruiting tool of our adversaries there is predominantly the presence of foreign troops. And when we add more foreign troops, we are sustaining that recruiting tool. And for every enemy trying to eject foreigners from his country that we kill, and especially his families, the wedding parties, and the funeral parties after we’ve hit the wedding parties, all of those recruit more people in a way that will—assures us that, contrary to what President Obama is saying, we will not prevail. When he does say we aren’t going to quit, in the short run, at least, he’s right, unfortunately. We have many years ahead of us.
Additional US troops will make the problem worse - ….when we have those extra 30,000 to 40,000 troops there and are up to the level of 100,000, which, with NATO troops, will bring us up to the level at which the Soviets occupied Afghanistan and failed after ten years, the thought that that’s the last request by McChrystal is simply absurd. McChrystal himself was asking for 80,000 troops at this point, and that, too, was a first installment.
Training of Afghans for Afghan army [and police] will continue to go badly - ….That is not going to come from the Afghan troops, who desert about as fast as we recruit them and who are not very highly motivated working for foreigners, like the government of Vietnam soldiers we worked with. They are not going to fill that gap.
The number of US troops in Afghanistan will not be drawn down next year - ….four years from now we will have more troops in Afghanistan than we have two years from now.
Afghan civilian casualties -….He [Gen. McChrystal] also, for the first time, talks about wanting to reduce civilian casualties. But by increasing the number of US troops over there greatly and increasing the number of engagements, even if you reduce the rate of civilian deaths per engagement, the overall effect is going to be that you’re killing the relatives of people who are going to enlist in the insurgency.
Congress will have to withhold funding for the war to end, but that’s unlikely - ….The head of the Appropriations Committee, David Obey, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, Harry Reid in the Senate have all said they oppose further escalation, just like Eikenberry, the general who is our ambassador in Afghanistan. But does that mean they will vote against the appropriations that send those people over there to die and to kill? No, very, very unlikely
A little background on Daniel Ellsberg - We [Democracy Now] are joined by a man who played a major role in efforts to end the Vietnam War in the 1970s. In 1971, the then-RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the media what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page classified history outlining the true extent of US involvement in Vietnam. After avoiding a life sentence on espionage charges, Daniel Ellsberg has continued to speak out against US militarism until the present day.
Daniel Ellsberg - [excerpts from interview follow]
Obama’s war - President Obama is taking every symbolic step he can to nominate this as Obama’s war, just as the Vietnam War became Nixon’s war in November of 1969, just about the time I was copying the Pentagon Papers in hopes of forestalling that, and Johnson made Vietnam his war, Johnson’s war, and McNamara’s war in June of 1965…with very much the same results in the end, tragic results.
Secret cables - Secret cables from the US ambassador in Kabul, Lieutenant General, retired, Karl Eikenberry were leaked by someone in January…He’s describing the President, Karzai, to whom he’s accredited and who he just visited with President Obama. And Karzai has presumably read Eikenberry’s assessment of him as—that he is not an adequate strategic partner for the United States, and for reasons of corruption and inefficiency.
Drugs are necessary to Afghan government- Allegedly, we hear that Obama’s reason for going seventeen hours over to Afghanistan was to convey in person our desire that he clean up his government….In Karzai’s government, as in the Mafia, corruption are us, drugs are us. Corruption is his government. That’s his constituency, his source of income. There is no chance whatever that he’ll, for instance, root out his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, from Kandahar, which is our next base of operations, despite the fact that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says no success is possible in Kandahar while corruption is still the heart of that, while drug dealing is the heart of that, so long as Wali, the President’s, Karzai’s brother, is in charge there.
Counterinsurgency will not work - What it ignores is that the recruiting tool of our adversaries there is predominantly the presence of foreign troops. And when we add more foreign troops, we are sustaining that recruiting tool. And for every enemy trying to eject foreigners from his country that we kill, and especially his families, the wedding parties, and the funeral parties after we’ve hit the wedding parties, all of those recruit more people in a way that will—assures us that, contrary to what President Obama is saying, we will not prevail. When he does say we aren’t going to quit, in the short run, at least, he’s right, unfortunately. We have many years ahead of us.
Additional US troops will make the problem worse - ….when we have those extra 30,000 to 40,000 troops there and are up to the level of 100,000, which, with NATO troops, will bring us up to the level at which the Soviets occupied Afghanistan and failed after ten years, the thought that that’s the last request by McChrystal is simply absurd. McChrystal himself was asking for 80,000 troops at this point, and that, too, was a first installment.
Training of Afghans for Afghan army [and police] will continue to go badly - ….That is not going to come from the Afghan troops, who desert about as fast as we recruit them and who are not very highly motivated working for foreigners, like the government of Vietnam soldiers we worked with. They are not going to fill that gap.
The number of US troops in Afghanistan will not be drawn down next year - ….four years from now we will have more troops in Afghanistan than we have two years from now.
Afghan civilian casualties -….He [Gen. McChrystal] also, for the first time, talks about wanting to reduce civilian casualties. But by increasing the number of US troops over there greatly and increasing the number of engagements, even if you reduce the rate of civilian deaths per engagement, the overall effect is going to be that you’re killing the relatives of people who are going to enlist in the insurgency.
Congress will have to withhold funding for the war to end, but that’s unlikely - ….The head of the Appropriations Committee, David Obey, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, Harry Reid in the Senate have all said they oppose further escalation, just like Eikenberry, the general who is our ambassador in Afghanistan. But does that mean they will vote against the appropriations that send those people over there to die and to kill? No, very, very unlikely
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