Peter Preston questions why soldiers stationed in Afghanistan are dying needlessly, as the US and allied commanders and political leaders try desperately to find a rationale for pulling troops out of the country. The article is printed below, after some of my own fact-gathering observations and quotes from a new book by Chris Hedges.
The Afghanistan war has taken its toll on US and allied troops. The most recent troop fatality figures that I could find were at the website http://icasualties.org/. From 2001 up through 2010 [not clear whether this includes July and after], there were a total of 2,147 fatalities among US and allied troops, 1,323 were US troops, 340 were UK troops, and 484 were "other." With respect to the wounded, Cause USA estimates that through July 31, 2010, there were 7,285 US troops wounded. Many of these troops will require medical and psychological assistance for years and in some cases for the rest of their lives. In addition, there are often extraordinary financial and psychological demands on the families of these troops.
Afghan civilian deaths were in the tens of thousands. You can find some estimates at Wikipedi, Civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
In his cogent new book, Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges summarizes some of the financial costs of the war/occupation for US taxpayers and the misconceived foreign policies. He writes:
"Congress has approved $345 billion for the war in Afghanistan, which includes more than $40 billion for training and equipping the army and police, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan and Reconstruction. The United States spends an estimated $500,000 to $1 million per soldier or marine per year in Afghanistan, depending on whether expenditures on housing and equipment are included along with pay, food, and fuel. These funds do not include medical costs and veterans' compensation. Foreign aid to Afghanistan, including food and development assistance, has totaled $17 billion since 2002, according to the State Department and Congressional Research Service documents.
"But it is not the financial cost of the war that makes the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan so tragic, wasteful, and immoral. War as an instrument of change is brutal, savage, impersonal and counterproductive. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals, such as the imposition of Western-style democracy or the liberation of women. In an instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even hundreds of people, who never see their attackers. The power of industrial weapons is indiscriminate and staggering....The wounds for those who survive, result in terrible burns, blindness, amputation, and lifelong pain and trauma. No one returns the same from such warfare. And once these weapons are employed, all talk of human rights is a farce."
We are in the grip of a powerful military establishment in the US. It gets significant help from elected officials, both Democrats and Republicans, in the White House and Congress and from state governments. There is indeed a military-industrial complex, more so than ever before. The US is following a foreign policy that is based on military force and priorities. This is not all. There are geopolitical reasons for what we have been doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries, where the US has about 1,000 military bases. Our leaders are motivated by the aspiration of being a hegemon in the world and by the growing need to ensure America's corporations have privileged access to or control of increasingly scarce resources (e.g., oil and other minerals). The leaders give us the hogwash about wanting to create "democratic" regimes. See Hedges book to disabuse you of this nonsense. Also check out William Pfaff's just published book, The Irony of Manifest destiny: The Tragedy of America's Foreign Policy. We need what seems impossible now, that is, a transformation of our society's priorities from war- and profit-oriented to a democratic socialist agenda that includes environmental preservation and regeneration.
Peter Preston's article:
Despicable Afghanistan endgame: Obama and Cameron knowingly ask soldiers to die in vain
The politicians are just waiting for a politically acceptable moment to proclaim a phoney triumph and leave the Afghans to their own devices. It is dismaying when soldiers die needlessly, says former Guardian editor Peter Preston. It is despicable when they are knowingly asked to die in vain.
By Peter PrestonThe Guardian11 October 2010
Downloaded from: http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/2015/1/
You don't cry during TV news bulletins. But there I sat, a few nights ago, watery-eyed as a hero died again. Lieutenant Mark Evison of the Welsh Guards was back from the dead, gripping the imagination. His mother had wanted Channel 4 News to show the video of her son's last few hours on earth.
Evison, just 26, was leading his platoon on patrol in Helmand 18 months ago when the Taliban attacked. He couldn't get a radio connection to call for help, so he broke cover to try again. A bullet took him in the shoulder, rupturing an artery. His men carried Evison back inside their compound and called for an emergency helicopter. If he could get to a base hospital 20km away, perhaps the surgeons could save him. But the helicopter took 94 minutes to arrive. He bled to death.
Evison's mother wanted the film shown because she still sought answers to two questions. Were the radio signals really so frail that her son had had to put himself in harm's way to get a message through – and could a faster medical response have saved him? The answers on offer (via an inquest and a ritual Ministry of Defence statement) set your teeth on edge. An "extensive log" of the patrol's radio connections was produced, so the radios were working. (In which case, why did Evison make himself a target?) And no helicopter arriving even in seconds could have helped him: his wound was "unsurvivable".
Of course you can grow angry over duff equipment, duff support, duff military bureaucracy. But the filming of Evison's dying moments went beyond questions of kit and response time. This, in a way that Hollywood never contrives, was war: real chaos, real gallantry, real death.
Killing fields
I remember in northern Cyprus, once the shooting had subsided, looking down into a foxhole in a Turkish Cypriot garden, and seeing three young Turks lying at the bottom, shot to pieces. I remember travelling the Jammu sector as India and Pakistan fought yet again and seeing the bloated bodies of cows and bullocks alongside the bodies of dead infantry littering the killing fields of retreat. I remember our jeeps strafed by jets. I remember the chaos for myself.
Evison, by these lights, was just one more victim among millions stretching through history. Cue "war" as the darkest destroyer haunting mankind. But the grief, tinged with anger now, went beyond general revulsion over such folly. In death, as in life, stuff happens, which means that sometimes war can't be avoided, sometimes you have to fight.
In Afghanistan, though? In this particular war, with this particular rationale? It doesn't need a murdered aid worker and a botched rescue mission to show you that the reasons for carrying on grow more derisory day by day. Last week the Obama administration sent a report to Congress so feeble it barely crawled up the steps of Capitol Hill. The White House is scrabbling round looking for the nearest exit. Some leftover hawks, watching fuel convoys explode and supply lines blocked, natter about invading Pakistan. The insanity of the endgame.
No, the only "debate" here merely trades dates for Nato departure. Some, like the Dutch, have gone already. The Americans want to start going home next year. David Cameron is as eager as anyone to draw the last line under this misbegotten, failed foray. The last post cannot sound too soon. And that is the real reason to weep as Mark Evison's final moments flash across our screens.
So much bravery, loyalty, devotion; so many young lives snuffed out. But back in London or Brussels or Washington, other young men in expensive suits – who have never pulled on a uniform – are toiling over the politically acceptable moment to proclaim phoney triumph and leave the Afghans to their own devices. It is dismaying when soldiers die needlessly. It is despicable when they are knowingly asked to die in vain.
Showing posts with label bumbling intervention. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bumbling intervention. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
No consensus in Obama administration on how to proceed in Afghanistan
Gregg Carlstrom reports for the English edition of Al Jazeera on the inability of US government and military decision-makers and various experts to identify a clear path for the war/occupation in Afghanistan. On the one hand counterinsurgency has not produced reassuring results. On the other hand, there is no alternative to this strategy around which senior officials and mainstream experts have reached agreement. In the meantime, various Taliban groups appear to be extending their influence, though Al Qaeda is not a factor. The costs of the war to the Afghan and American people continue to rise. There are no public indications that the US government has been able to advance a strategy that would bring regional governments into a process to end the conflict. In the background, there are conflicting geopolitical interests in the region on pipelines, oil, and minerals. The gigantic, oversized US military faces another dubious outcome.
Searching for Plan B in Afghanistan
Discontent is growing in Washington and London over Obama's strategy, but concrete alternatives are hard to find.
Gregg Carlstrom Last Modified: 17 Sep 2010 18:18 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/09/201091784454474302.html
The White House has sought to put a positive spin on Afghanistan's parliamentary elections on Saturday, dispatching two senior administration officials late on Thursday to host a background conference call with reporters.
They emphasised a few positive developments - new reforms that will likely reduce (though hardly eliminate) electoral fraud, the Afghan army's lead role in providing security - and called the vote another positive milestone for US president Barack Obama's new strategy.
Asked to provide concrete metrics in support of that view, though, they resorted to body counts: One official praised the "increased operational tempo" of a "campaign to target Taliban mid-grade leaders".
It was hardly a reassuring argument, given that General Stanley McChrystal, the previous US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, said enemy body counts "distract from the real objectives and [aren’t] necessary to communicate what we're trying to achieve." (He stopped releasing them.)
Obama’s Afghan strategy, unveiled last winter after a lengthy strategy review, has always sat uneasily with many observers. Some doubted his decision to escalate the war at all; others questioned his focus on southern Afghanistan, his lofty goals for training the Afghan army and police, his confidence in the Afghan government's ability to deliver basic services. There was little consensus that Obama's strategy was the right one.
Today that consensus has all but collapsed. Nato promised a major push to secure Helmand and Kandahar provinces, but seven months after the "battle of Marja" - the sparsely-populated hamlet in Helmand that somehow became a centerpiece of Obama’s new strategy - the security situation in the south remains grave: Insurgent attacks in Kandahar and Helmand have increased by 40 per cent and 219 per cent, respectively.
Security has also worsened significantly across the east, and in six provinces in northern Afghanistan; and efforts to improve governance have proceeded in fits and starts, hindered both by insecurity and by an often corrupt and predatory central government.
Against that backdrop, then, it is little surprise that calls for an alternate strategy are gaining attention in Washington, even if many of the loudest voices struggle to articulate exactly what that strategy might look like.
A vague 'Plan B'
The highest-profile effort is a report released earlier this month by the 46-member "Afghanistan Study Group (ASG)," composed mostly of academics and think tank analysts, many of them longtime critics of Obama’s strategy.
The sluggish progress in Helmand has delayed a planned military offensive in Kandahar [Reuters]
The report, "A New Way Forward," proposes a five-point policy: It recommends a "fast-tracked" reconciliation process with insurgent groups; a greatly reduced US military force; a stronger emphasis on economic development, and on "engaging regional and global stakeholders"; and a "renewed focus" on al-Qaeda.
"We've moved away from confidence in the current plan and we haven't moved towards anything," said Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and one of the report's authors. "The big thing is have this report to serve as a vehicle and as a holding place for constructive, credible, alternative thinking about current policy."
But reaction to the report has been mixed, even from those who disagree sharply with current policy in Afghanistan.
Michael Cohen, a senior fellow at the American Security Project - and a frequent critic of Obama's strategy - said the ASG report "fails to deliver" an alternative. Joshua Foust, a military analyst who writes extensively on Afghanistan, called it "an exercise in determined ignorance".
Why such a critical response? One reason is that the report often seems to restate current policy. Obama's first Afghanistan strategy review, concluded 18 months ago, echoed the ASG's call for economic development: It called for a renewed focus on helping Afghanistan "develop an economy dominated by illicit drugs". And the president's second review, which wrapped up in December, urged a "more effective partnership with Pakistan," much like the ASG report does.
The goals are uncontroversial, in other words; the challenge is execution.
"For almost twenty years now, the UN has tried to gather precisely these countries to develop a common regional interest in ending the conflict inside Afghanistan," Foust wrote, referring to regional stakeholders like India, Pakistan and Iran. "It's come to naught."
In an interview, Clemons pushed back against the idea that the report simply restates current policy. He argued that the US should be doing more: setting higher barriers to capital flight in Afghanistan, for example, to prevent tens of millions of dollars from leaving the country for Dubai; or working harder to ratchet down regional tensions between India and Pakistan.
"We’re not doing the kinds of things that would be enormously significant," Clemons said. "For instance, the notion of what you could do for a billion dollars in trust-building between India and Pakistan with the Indus River valley, flood relief, a lot of these other issues... we’re just doing reactive stuff."
Internal inconsistencies
There are some other notable analytical omissions and logical contradictions in the ASG report. Steve Coll, the president of the New America Foundation, noted that "the report is silent on the question of training the Afghan security forces", a key goal if the US wants to create any kind of lasting security in Afghanistan.
The report calls for focusing on economic development, but it says little about how to provide the security that is generally a prerequisite for growth.
Clemons argued that the size of the US military presence does not necessarily correlate with stability: As the US occupation has increased over the last nine years, stability has decreased. But the reverse is not necessarily true, and security-conscious NGOs and companies might be even more reluctant to work in Afghanistan following a major pullout.
"I support the notion of stronger economic development, but how do you do both, development and a drawdown?" asked Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress.
Similarly, the report argues that the US occupation of Afghanistan is a major driver of radicalisation in the region. It "lends credence to jihadi propaganda about America’s alleged hostility to Islam", the authors note.
But Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who tried to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square in May, told investigators he was angry about the US drones bombing targets in northwest Pakistan - exactly the sort of "light-footprint" approach advocated by the ASG report’s authors.
A 'ballooning' war
Mosharraf Zaidi, a Pakistani journalist and one of the contributors to the report, acknowledged that the ASG does not present a comprehensive strategy. But he argued that the Pentagon and the White House, not the report's authors, should be responsible for detailed planning.
"I find much of the analysis to be reasonable, if somewhat lacking in depth," Zaidi said. "It's important to remember that this is not a policy analysis exercise; it is an exercise in trying to stimulate debate around alternatives."
And for all the criticism directed at the ASG report, there is indeed a growing debate about alternatives. Gilles Dorronsoro, an Afghanistan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called Obama’s strategy counterproductive and earlier this month urged an immediate dialogue with the Taliban.
And the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a respected British think tank, said in a recent report that Nato’s counterinsurgency strategy has "ballooned" out of proportion to the original goal of the war: preventing al-Qaeda from launching attacks from Afghanistan.
IISS warned that the ever-escalating war will leave "Western states... pinned down militarily and psychologically in Afghanistan", an outcome not "in the service of their wider political and security interests". John Chipman, the director of IISS, urged the US and Nato to abandon their counterinsurgency effort and focus on a narrow containment strategy.
Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst and one of the ASG report’s contributors, echoed that point at a panel discussion in Washington earlier this month, reminding the audience that al-Qaeda has been largely driven from Afghanistan.
"Much of the discourse has lost sight of what's at stake in Afghanistan," Pillar said.
Source:
Al Jazeera
Searching for Plan B in Afghanistan
Discontent is growing in Washington and London over Obama's strategy, but concrete alternatives are hard to find.
Gregg Carlstrom Last Modified: 17 Sep 2010 18:18 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/09/201091784454474302.html
The White House has sought to put a positive spin on Afghanistan's parliamentary elections on Saturday, dispatching two senior administration officials late on Thursday to host a background conference call with reporters.
They emphasised a few positive developments - new reforms that will likely reduce (though hardly eliminate) electoral fraud, the Afghan army's lead role in providing security - and called the vote another positive milestone for US president Barack Obama's new strategy.
Asked to provide concrete metrics in support of that view, though, they resorted to body counts: One official praised the "increased operational tempo" of a "campaign to target Taliban mid-grade leaders".
It was hardly a reassuring argument, given that General Stanley McChrystal, the previous US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, said enemy body counts "distract from the real objectives and [aren’t] necessary to communicate what we're trying to achieve." (He stopped releasing them.)
Obama’s Afghan strategy, unveiled last winter after a lengthy strategy review, has always sat uneasily with many observers. Some doubted his decision to escalate the war at all; others questioned his focus on southern Afghanistan, his lofty goals for training the Afghan army and police, his confidence in the Afghan government's ability to deliver basic services. There was little consensus that Obama's strategy was the right one.
Today that consensus has all but collapsed. Nato promised a major push to secure Helmand and Kandahar provinces, but seven months after the "battle of Marja" - the sparsely-populated hamlet in Helmand that somehow became a centerpiece of Obama’s new strategy - the security situation in the south remains grave: Insurgent attacks in Kandahar and Helmand have increased by 40 per cent and 219 per cent, respectively.
Security has also worsened significantly across the east, and in six provinces in northern Afghanistan; and efforts to improve governance have proceeded in fits and starts, hindered both by insecurity and by an often corrupt and predatory central government.
Against that backdrop, then, it is little surprise that calls for an alternate strategy are gaining attention in Washington, even if many of the loudest voices struggle to articulate exactly what that strategy might look like.
A vague 'Plan B'
The highest-profile effort is a report released earlier this month by the 46-member "Afghanistan Study Group (ASG)," composed mostly of academics and think tank analysts, many of them longtime critics of Obama’s strategy.
The sluggish progress in Helmand has delayed a planned military offensive in Kandahar [Reuters]
The report, "A New Way Forward," proposes a five-point policy: It recommends a "fast-tracked" reconciliation process with insurgent groups; a greatly reduced US military force; a stronger emphasis on economic development, and on "engaging regional and global stakeholders"; and a "renewed focus" on al-Qaeda.
"We've moved away from confidence in the current plan and we haven't moved towards anything," said Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and one of the report's authors. "The big thing is have this report to serve as a vehicle and as a holding place for constructive, credible, alternative thinking about current policy."
But reaction to the report has been mixed, even from those who disagree sharply with current policy in Afghanistan.
Michael Cohen, a senior fellow at the American Security Project - and a frequent critic of Obama's strategy - said the ASG report "fails to deliver" an alternative. Joshua Foust, a military analyst who writes extensively on Afghanistan, called it "an exercise in determined ignorance".
Why such a critical response? One reason is that the report often seems to restate current policy. Obama's first Afghanistan strategy review, concluded 18 months ago, echoed the ASG's call for economic development: It called for a renewed focus on helping Afghanistan "develop an economy dominated by illicit drugs". And the president's second review, which wrapped up in December, urged a "more effective partnership with Pakistan," much like the ASG report does.
The goals are uncontroversial, in other words; the challenge is execution.
"For almost twenty years now, the UN has tried to gather precisely these countries to develop a common regional interest in ending the conflict inside Afghanistan," Foust wrote, referring to regional stakeholders like India, Pakistan and Iran. "It's come to naught."
In an interview, Clemons pushed back against the idea that the report simply restates current policy. He argued that the US should be doing more: setting higher barriers to capital flight in Afghanistan, for example, to prevent tens of millions of dollars from leaving the country for Dubai; or working harder to ratchet down regional tensions between India and Pakistan.
"We’re not doing the kinds of things that would be enormously significant," Clemons said. "For instance, the notion of what you could do for a billion dollars in trust-building between India and Pakistan with the Indus River valley, flood relief, a lot of these other issues... we’re just doing reactive stuff."
Internal inconsistencies
There are some other notable analytical omissions and logical contradictions in the ASG report. Steve Coll, the president of the New America Foundation, noted that "the report is silent on the question of training the Afghan security forces", a key goal if the US wants to create any kind of lasting security in Afghanistan.
The report calls for focusing on economic development, but it says little about how to provide the security that is generally a prerequisite for growth.
Clemons argued that the size of the US military presence does not necessarily correlate with stability: As the US occupation has increased over the last nine years, stability has decreased. But the reverse is not necessarily true, and security-conscious NGOs and companies might be even more reluctant to work in Afghanistan following a major pullout.
"I support the notion of stronger economic development, but how do you do both, development and a drawdown?" asked Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress.
Similarly, the report argues that the US occupation of Afghanistan is a major driver of radicalisation in the region. It "lends credence to jihadi propaganda about America’s alleged hostility to Islam", the authors note.
But Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who tried to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square in May, told investigators he was angry about the US drones bombing targets in northwest Pakistan - exactly the sort of "light-footprint" approach advocated by the ASG report’s authors.
A 'ballooning' war
Mosharraf Zaidi, a Pakistani journalist and one of the contributors to the report, acknowledged that the ASG does not present a comprehensive strategy. But he argued that the Pentagon and the White House, not the report's authors, should be responsible for detailed planning.
"I find much of the analysis to be reasonable, if somewhat lacking in depth," Zaidi said. "It's important to remember that this is not a policy analysis exercise; it is an exercise in trying to stimulate debate around alternatives."
And for all the criticism directed at the ASG report, there is indeed a growing debate about alternatives. Gilles Dorronsoro, an Afghanistan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called Obama’s strategy counterproductive and earlier this month urged an immediate dialogue with the Taliban.
And the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a respected British think tank, said in a recent report that Nato’s counterinsurgency strategy has "ballooned" out of proportion to the original goal of the war: preventing al-Qaeda from launching attacks from Afghanistan.
IISS warned that the ever-escalating war will leave "Western states... pinned down militarily and psychologically in Afghanistan", an outcome not "in the service of their wider political and security interests". John Chipman, the director of IISS, urged the US and Nato to abandon their counterinsurgency effort and focus on a narrow containment strategy.
Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst and one of the ASG report’s contributors, echoed that point at a panel discussion in Washington earlier this month, reminding the audience that al-Qaeda has been largely driven from Afghanistan.
"Much of the discourse has lost sight of what's at stake in Afghanistan," Pillar said.
Source:
Al Jazeera
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Government corruption flourishing in Kandahar
Jennie Green, the author of the article below is the director of North American operations for the Arghand Cooperative in Kandahar. The title of the article is "The Curse of Kandahar. I found the article at: http://outlookafghanistan.net/news_Pages/Opinion.html#02, July 18, 2010. Her principal points are that Aghan citizens in Kandahar and NGOs attempting to offer genuine assistance are caught between an illegitimate central government, corrupt local government officials and police, Taliban insurgents, and a US-led occupation that has offered them little security or improvement in their conditions. Further, US money continues to flow to this same government. As one consequence, the Taliban insurgency is replenished as Afghanis become disillusioned with the government and the unfulfilled promises of President Obama and the realities of an ineffective US-led occupation.
The Curse of Kandahar
By Jennie Green
No wonder ordinary Afghans don't trust the U.S.: American leaders have backed a corrupt government. Even before the jet lag had worn off after a visit to Kandahar earlier this year, I received a disturbing e-mail from a colleague there. An improvised explosive device had detonated outside the home of one of the members of the cooperative I help run. It had apparently been placed to target a convoy in which the district chief of police was traveling.
Unharmed but outraged, the police chief ordered his subordinates to find out who owned the house. When my Afghan co-worker and his brother opened their gate, they were beaten and sworn at repeatedly, then hauled to police headquarters, where they spent the night. There was no evidence to suggest that the men had buried the IED, and every reason to think they hadn't. Between them, the brothers have many small children who might have been hurt in the explosion, and neither has ties to violent groups. Fortunately, my friend and his brother were released the following day, but only because of personal connections. Afterward, they cleared their house of anything that could be construed as a weapon, fearing that anyone who had it in for either of them could peg them as insurgents. They were taking a gamble.
Weapons are common in Afghan homes, in part because they are needed for protection against Taliban insurgents who regularly threaten ordinary citizens, particularly those who work for the Afghan government, NATO's International Security Assistance Force or foreigner-initiated organizations like our cooperative. For this reason, all members of our cooperative, which manufactures skin care products from locally grown fruits and flowers, are potential targets.
In the months after President Obama was sworn in and before the Afghan election of August 2009, many of the Afghans with whom I communicate regularly dared to hope that the new U.S. president would help bring about change in Hamid Karzai's administration. They applauded the way in which Obama immediately distanced himself from the Afghan president and condemned the rampant corruption that plagues the country. Finally, they thought, the international community might be able to compel Karzai to deliver the kind of responsible governance and rule of law that people craved.
But when those same officials wilted in the heat of an Afghan election so fraudulent that more than a million votes had to be disqualified, my friends became despondent. "Afghanistan is going in the river," one of them declared. "We are swimming now." Next came the Marja offensive, followed by a troop buildup for the much-publicized Kandahar operation. If ever there was a moment when it would seem as if Kandaharis would want to distance themselves from the loathsome Taliban and rally around their government and the formidable NATO forces that were ramping up to support it, this would be the time. Instead, more people than ever before seem to be joining the insurgency. Why? Because for all the talk about tackling corruption, including the "governments in a box" the U.S. promised to deliver, Kandaharis have yet to experience any noticeable improvements.
The infamous Ahmed Wali Karzai — the president's half brother, who has been publicly accused of all kinds of corruption, including opium trafficking, land confiscation and employing insurgents for his own advantage — is still running the province and much of the region as if they were his personal fiefdom. He still largely controls the appointment of officials, who then preside over an appalling system of patronage, protections and punishments. Worse still is the fact that ordinary citizens have to watch Wali Karzai and others of his ilk get showered with American dollars to provide private security, logistics, construction materials and intelligence.
People in the West tend to view corruption as something of an abstraction. But after six trips to Kandahar in the last three years, I've seen how favors are doled out as a form of patronage or in response to bribes. These are not victimless crimes. Every day, citizens face annoyance, expense and sometimes genuine trauma at the hands of corrupt officials. They are refused passports until they cough up half a month's salary in bribe money, or are forced at ruinous expense to produce documentation that proves they own their land to prevent it from being confiscated or avoid being hauled off to jail for no good reason. Everybody I have met in Kandahar has an impressive portfolio of such stories, and they are all exhausted from navigating an endless stream of humiliating abuses.
The people of Kandahar are caught between abusive governance and a lethal insurgency, and they are waiting for some indication that the Americans will do something more helpful than play warrior and build enormous, air-conditioned mansions with bulletproof windows for greedy Afghan officials.
In April, when I last visited, nobody even wanted to talk politics — that was too depressing. Now, when we talk over a bad Skype connection, my friends first rattle off a list of the most recent bombings and assassinations and then tell me that daily life in Kandahar is continuing on as usual.
To the Afghans I work with, it makes no difference which general runs the war, or how many of our troops get deposited on their soil, or even how many bad guys we kill. They won't trust the United States as long as it continues to cast its lot with corrupt politicians who profit shamelessly from the abusive governance that is driving so many of their countrymen into the Taliban's winning arms. Hearts and minds? I don't suspect we'll win too many of those until we take the lead in stepping out of the patronage game by refusing to play nice with gangsters.
(Courtesy LA Times)
The Curse of Kandahar
By Jennie Green
No wonder ordinary Afghans don't trust the U.S.: American leaders have backed a corrupt government. Even before the jet lag had worn off after a visit to Kandahar earlier this year, I received a disturbing e-mail from a colleague there. An improvised explosive device had detonated outside the home of one of the members of the cooperative I help run. It had apparently been placed to target a convoy in which the district chief of police was traveling.
Unharmed but outraged, the police chief ordered his subordinates to find out who owned the house. When my Afghan co-worker and his brother opened their gate, they were beaten and sworn at repeatedly, then hauled to police headquarters, where they spent the night. There was no evidence to suggest that the men had buried the IED, and every reason to think they hadn't. Between them, the brothers have many small children who might have been hurt in the explosion, and neither has ties to violent groups. Fortunately, my friend and his brother were released the following day, but only because of personal connections. Afterward, they cleared their house of anything that could be construed as a weapon, fearing that anyone who had it in for either of them could peg them as insurgents. They were taking a gamble.
Weapons are common in Afghan homes, in part because they are needed for protection against Taliban insurgents who regularly threaten ordinary citizens, particularly those who work for the Afghan government, NATO's International Security Assistance Force or foreigner-initiated organizations like our cooperative. For this reason, all members of our cooperative, which manufactures skin care products from locally grown fruits and flowers, are potential targets.
In the months after President Obama was sworn in and before the Afghan election of August 2009, many of the Afghans with whom I communicate regularly dared to hope that the new U.S. president would help bring about change in Hamid Karzai's administration. They applauded the way in which Obama immediately distanced himself from the Afghan president and condemned the rampant corruption that plagues the country. Finally, they thought, the international community might be able to compel Karzai to deliver the kind of responsible governance and rule of law that people craved.
But when those same officials wilted in the heat of an Afghan election so fraudulent that more than a million votes had to be disqualified, my friends became despondent. "Afghanistan is going in the river," one of them declared. "We are swimming now." Next came the Marja offensive, followed by a troop buildup for the much-publicized Kandahar operation. If ever there was a moment when it would seem as if Kandaharis would want to distance themselves from the loathsome Taliban and rally around their government and the formidable NATO forces that were ramping up to support it, this would be the time. Instead, more people than ever before seem to be joining the insurgency. Why? Because for all the talk about tackling corruption, including the "governments in a box" the U.S. promised to deliver, Kandaharis have yet to experience any noticeable improvements.
The infamous Ahmed Wali Karzai — the president's half brother, who has been publicly accused of all kinds of corruption, including opium trafficking, land confiscation and employing insurgents for his own advantage — is still running the province and much of the region as if they were his personal fiefdom. He still largely controls the appointment of officials, who then preside over an appalling system of patronage, protections and punishments. Worse still is the fact that ordinary citizens have to watch Wali Karzai and others of his ilk get showered with American dollars to provide private security, logistics, construction materials and intelligence.
People in the West tend to view corruption as something of an abstraction. But after six trips to Kandahar in the last three years, I've seen how favors are doled out as a form of patronage or in response to bribes. These are not victimless crimes. Every day, citizens face annoyance, expense and sometimes genuine trauma at the hands of corrupt officials. They are refused passports until they cough up half a month's salary in bribe money, or are forced at ruinous expense to produce documentation that proves they own their land to prevent it from being confiscated or avoid being hauled off to jail for no good reason. Everybody I have met in Kandahar has an impressive portfolio of such stories, and they are all exhausted from navigating an endless stream of humiliating abuses.
The people of Kandahar are caught between abusive governance and a lethal insurgency, and they are waiting for some indication that the Americans will do something more helpful than play warrior and build enormous, air-conditioned mansions with bulletproof windows for greedy Afghan officials.
In April, when I last visited, nobody even wanted to talk politics — that was too depressing. Now, when we talk over a bad Skype connection, my friends first rattle off a list of the most recent bombings and assassinations and then tell me that daily life in Kandahar is continuing on as usual.
To the Afghans I work with, it makes no difference which general runs the war, or how many of our troops get deposited on their soil, or even how many bad guys we kill. They won't trust the United States as long as it continues to cast its lot with corrupt politicians who profit shamelessly from the abusive governance that is driving so many of their countrymen into the Taliban's winning arms. Hearts and minds? I don't suspect we'll win too many of those until we take the lead in stepping out of the patronage game by refusing to play nice with gangsters.
(Courtesy LA Times)
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Skepticism about the timing of story on Afghanistan's potential mineral wealth
Timing of Afghan Mineral Story Wealth Evokes Skepticism
by Jim Lobe,
June 15, 2010 - http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/2010/06/14/timing-of-afghan-mineral-wealth-evokes-skepticism
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The timing of the publication of a major New York Times story on the vast untapped mineral wealth that lies beneath Afghanistan’s soil is raising major questions about the intent of the Pentagon, which released the information.
Given the increasingly negative news that has come out of Afghanistan – and of U.S. strategy there – some analysts believe the front-page article is designed to reverse growing public sentiment that the war is not worth the cost.
“What better way to remind people about the country’s potential bright future – and by people I mean the Chinese, the Russians, the Pakistanis, and the Americans – than by publicizing or re-publicizing valid (but already public) information about the region’s potential wealth?” wrote Marc Ambinder, the political editor of The Atlantic magazine, on his blog.
“The way in which the story was presented – with on-the- record quotations from the Commander in Chief of CENTCOM [Gen. David Petraeus], no less – and the weird promotion of a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense to Undersecretary of Defense [Paul Brinkley] suggest a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war,” he added.
The nearly 1,500-word article, based almost entirely on Pentagon sources and featured as the lead story in Monday’s “Early Bird,” a compilation of major national security stories that the Pentagon distributes each morning, asserted that Afghanistan may have close to $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits. These include “huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and critical industrial metals like lithium,” the story said.
Afghanistan’s total annual gross domestic product (GDP) last year came to about $13 billion.
One “internal Pentagon memo” provided to the Times‘ author, James Risen, predicted that Afghanistan could become “the ‘Saudi Arabia of lithium,’ a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and Blackberrys.”
“There is stunning potential here,” Petraeus told Risen in an interview Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant,” he said of the conclusions of a study by a “small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists.”
The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose recent efforts to begin a reconciliation process with the insurgent Taliban have been criticized by the Pentagon, quickly seized on the report.
In a hastily arranged press briefing Monday, Karzai’s spokesman, Waheed Omar, said the report was “the best news we have had over many years in Afghanistan.”
Other commentators, however, suggested the news about Afghanistan’s underground wealth was not all that new.
As noted by Blake Hounshell, managing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) already published a comprehensive inventory of Afghanistan’s non-oil mineral resources on the Internet in 2007, as did the British Geological Survey. Much of their work was based on explorations and surveys undertaken by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s.
The nearly trillion-dollar figure is based on a simple tabulation of the previous estimates for each mineral according to its current market price, according to Hounshell.
So, the question for many observers was why the article, which dominated much of the foreign news in the network and cable broadcast media during Monday’s news cycle, was published now.
Risen himself suggested an answer in his story, noting “American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan.”
Indeed, U.S. and NATO casualties have risen sharply in recent weeks; a four-month-old counterinsurgency offensive to “clear, hold, and build” in the strategic region around Marjah in Pashtun-dominated Helmand province appears to have stalled badly; and a planned campaign in and around the critical city of Kandahar has been delayed for at least two months.
The latest polling shows a noticeable erosion of support for Washington’s commitment to the war compared to eight months ago, when President Barack Obama agreed to the Pentagon’s recommendations to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan to bring the total U.S. military presence there to around 100,000 later this summer.
Moreover, what little support for the war remains among the publics of Washington’s NATO allies – never as high as in the U.S. in any event – is also fading quickly. NATO and non-NATO countries, excluding the U.S., currently have about 34,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan.
On the eve of a NATO ministerial conference in Brussels last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned that Washington and its NATO allies had very little time to convince their publics that their strategy against the Taliban was working – a message that has since been strongly echoed the coalition’s commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and by Petraeus himself.
Indeed, the administration is committed to a major review of its strategy in Afghanistan at the end of the year, and Obama himself has pledged to begin withdrawing U.S. troops in July 2011.
Obama is already coming under pressure from right-wing and neoconservative media – some of which have been cultivated by Petraeus, in particular – and Republican lawmakers to delay that date.
That view was seconded last week by former Petraeus aide, Lt. Col. John Nagl (ret.), a counterinsurgency specialist who is now president of the influential Center for a New American Security.
Nagl worked closely with Petraeus in authoring the much- lauded 2006 U.S. Counter-Insurgency Field Manual, which stressed the importance of efforts to influence media perceptions in any counterinsurgency campaign.
“The media directly influence the attitude of key audiences toward counter-insurgents, their operations, and the opposing insurgency,” they wrote. “This situation creates a war of perceptions between insurgents and counter-insurgents conducted continuously using the news media.”
In that respect, the appearance of the Times story Monday looked to many observers like part of an effort to strengthen the case for giving the counterinsurgency effort more time.
In an interview with Politico’s Laura Rozen Monday, former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani said he had commissioned the assessment of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth. “As to why it came out today… I cannot explain,” he said.
(Inter Press Service)
by Jim Lobe,
June 15, 2010 - http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/2010/06/14/timing-of-afghan-mineral-wealth-evokes-skepticism
Email This Print This
Share This
Antiwar Forum
The timing of the publication of a major New York Times story on the vast untapped mineral wealth that lies beneath Afghanistan’s soil is raising major questions about the intent of the Pentagon, which released the information.
Given the increasingly negative news that has come out of Afghanistan – and of U.S. strategy there – some analysts believe the front-page article is designed to reverse growing public sentiment that the war is not worth the cost.
“What better way to remind people about the country’s potential bright future – and by people I mean the Chinese, the Russians, the Pakistanis, and the Americans – than by publicizing or re-publicizing valid (but already public) information about the region’s potential wealth?” wrote Marc Ambinder, the political editor of The Atlantic magazine, on his blog.
“The way in which the story was presented – with on-the- record quotations from the Commander in Chief of CENTCOM [Gen. David Petraeus], no less – and the weird promotion of a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense to Undersecretary of Defense [Paul Brinkley] suggest a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war,” he added.
The nearly 1,500-word article, based almost entirely on Pentagon sources and featured as the lead story in Monday’s “Early Bird,” a compilation of major national security stories that the Pentagon distributes each morning, asserted that Afghanistan may have close to $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits. These include “huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and critical industrial metals like lithium,” the story said.
Afghanistan’s total annual gross domestic product (GDP) last year came to about $13 billion.
One “internal Pentagon memo” provided to the Times‘ author, James Risen, predicted that Afghanistan could become “the ‘Saudi Arabia of lithium,’ a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and Blackberrys.”
“There is stunning potential here,” Petraeus told Risen in an interview Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant,” he said of the conclusions of a study by a “small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists.”
The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose recent efforts to begin a reconciliation process with the insurgent Taliban have been criticized by the Pentagon, quickly seized on the report.
In a hastily arranged press briefing Monday, Karzai’s spokesman, Waheed Omar, said the report was “the best news we have had over many years in Afghanistan.”
Other commentators, however, suggested the news about Afghanistan’s underground wealth was not all that new.
As noted by Blake Hounshell, managing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) already published a comprehensive inventory of Afghanistan’s non-oil mineral resources on the Internet in 2007, as did the British Geological Survey. Much of their work was based on explorations and surveys undertaken by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s.
The nearly trillion-dollar figure is based on a simple tabulation of the previous estimates for each mineral according to its current market price, according to Hounshell.
So, the question for many observers was why the article, which dominated much of the foreign news in the network and cable broadcast media during Monday’s news cycle, was published now.
Risen himself suggested an answer in his story, noting “American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan.”
Indeed, U.S. and NATO casualties have risen sharply in recent weeks; a four-month-old counterinsurgency offensive to “clear, hold, and build” in the strategic region around Marjah in Pashtun-dominated Helmand province appears to have stalled badly; and a planned campaign in and around the critical city of Kandahar has been delayed for at least two months.
The latest polling shows a noticeable erosion of support for Washington’s commitment to the war compared to eight months ago, when President Barack Obama agreed to the Pentagon’s recommendations to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan to bring the total U.S. military presence there to around 100,000 later this summer.
Moreover, what little support for the war remains among the publics of Washington’s NATO allies – never as high as in the U.S. in any event – is also fading quickly. NATO and non-NATO countries, excluding the U.S., currently have about 34,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan.
On the eve of a NATO ministerial conference in Brussels last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned that Washington and its NATO allies had very little time to convince their publics that their strategy against the Taliban was working – a message that has since been strongly echoed the coalition’s commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and by Petraeus himself.
Indeed, the administration is committed to a major review of its strategy in Afghanistan at the end of the year, and Obama himself has pledged to begin withdrawing U.S. troops in July 2011.
Obama is already coming under pressure from right-wing and neoconservative media – some of which have been cultivated by Petraeus, in particular – and Republican lawmakers to delay that date.
That view was seconded last week by former Petraeus aide, Lt. Col. John Nagl (ret.), a counterinsurgency specialist who is now president of the influential Center for a New American Security.
Nagl worked closely with Petraeus in authoring the much- lauded 2006 U.S. Counter-Insurgency Field Manual, which stressed the importance of efforts to influence media perceptions in any counterinsurgency campaign.
“The media directly influence the attitude of key audiences toward counter-insurgents, their operations, and the opposing insurgency,” they wrote. “This situation creates a war of perceptions between insurgents and counter-insurgents conducted continuously using the news media.”
In that respect, the appearance of the Times story Monday looked to many observers like part of an effort to strengthen the case for giving the counterinsurgency effort more time.
In an interview with Politico’s Laura Rozen Monday, former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani said he had commissioned the assessment of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth. “As to why it came out today… I cannot explain,” he said.
(Inter Press Service)
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Bribes in Afghanistan may be funding Taliban
The US military and US government prove to be endless in the ways that try to recreate, justify, and implement the US-led war and occupation in Afghanistan. The following article addresses the issue of how US money ends up as bribes to Taliban fighters. Why? The Taliban are needed to protect US supply trucks. What a sheer waste of money and resources, not to mention the casualties to US and allied troops and the greater destruction and casualties suffered by Afghani civilians. This war goes on not to advance "democratic values." It goes on because US leaders believe that Afghanistan is important to their larger interests in the oil-rich Central Asia and Middle East regions. It goes on because our bloated military-industrial complex needs wars to justify its continued government support. US wars yield great harm, hatred of the US, and a distraction from, or underfunding of, many other efforts needed to confront the monumental crises confronting the US and the world.
Kucinich: ‘We may be funding our own killers in Afghanistan’
By Sahil KapurTuesday, June 8th, 2010
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0608/kucinich-war-critics-rebuke-usfunded-bribes-afghan-militants
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Click for New York Times story: US-backed 'bribes' in Afghanistan may be funding Taliban
On June 7, the day Afghanistan became America’s longest-ever war, the New York Times reported on an ongoing investigation poised to prove that private security companies "are using American money to bribe the Taliban" to fuel combat and thus enhance demand for their services. The news follows a "series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents," the Times said.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a leading opponent of the war, wondered, "Is the U.S. paying for attacks on U.S. troops?”
"Our troops are dying in Afghanistan, and now it turns out we may be funding their killers," Kucinich said in a statement e-mailed to Raw Story, renewing his longstanding call for a pullout. "Our continued presence in Afghanistan is detrimental to our security."
"The American people are paying to prop up a corrupt government that may be using our money to pay private companies to drum up business by paying the insurgents to attack our troops," he said.
Kucinich’s motion in March to implement a swift withdrawal of US troops from the region failed by a margin of 365-65 in the House.
"In the coming weeks, Congress is expected to be asked to give another $33 billion for war efforts... I will be bringing this report to the personal attention of individual Members of Congress prior to the vote on any additional war funding," the Ohio congressman said.
The Times interviewed a NATO official in Kabul who "believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban."
A White House spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
Robert Greenwald, an ardent war critic and director of the 2009 documentary "Rethink Afghanistan," viewed the Times story as vindication for his message.
“Supporting a corrupt elite in a civil war does nothing to make us safer, costs the United States billions of dollars, and it’s not working,” Greenwald told Raw Story.
It "confirms what we have heard numerous times from our friends, co workers and producers in Afghanistan. The United States is effectively funding both sides of the war all too often," he said.
The administration and large bipartisan majorities in Congress continue to support and fund 8-year-long military operations in Afghanistan, warning that a pullout could lead to a Taliban takeover and greater threats to American interests.
Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters Monday that the US, Japan, Britain and other countries have “committed” roughly “200 million dollars” to fund peace efforts in Afghanistan, Agence-France Presse reports. The Afghanistan Peace and Reconciliation Program aims to reintegrate Taliban fighters who have renounced violence into Afghan society.
Kucinich: ‘We may be funding our own killers in Afghanistan’
By Sahil KapurTuesday, June 8th, 2010
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0608/kucinich-war-critics-rebuke-usfunded-bribes-afghan-militants
Share
Click for New York Times story: US-backed 'bribes' in Afghanistan may be funding Taliban
On June 7, the day Afghanistan became America’s longest-ever war, the New York Times reported on an ongoing investigation poised to prove that private security companies "are using American money to bribe the Taliban" to fuel combat and thus enhance demand for their services. The news follows a "series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents," the Times said.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a leading opponent of the war, wondered, "Is the U.S. paying for attacks on U.S. troops?”
"Our troops are dying in Afghanistan, and now it turns out we may be funding their killers," Kucinich said in a statement e-mailed to Raw Story, renewing his longstanding call for a pullout. "Our continued presence in Afghanistan is detrimental to our security."
"The American people are paying to prop up a corrupt government that may be using our money to pay private companies to drum up business by paying the insurgents to attack our troops," he said.
Kucinich’s motion in March to implement a swift withdrawal of US troops from the region failed by a margin of 365-65 in the House.
"In the coming weeks, Congress is expected to be asked to give another $33 billion for war efforts... I will be bringing this report to the personal attention of individual Members of Congress prior to the vote on any additional war funding," the Ohio congressman said.
The Times interviewed a NATO official in Kabul who "believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban."
A White House spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
Robert Greenwald, an ardent war critic and director of the 2009 documentary "Rethink Afghanistan," viewed the Times story as vindication for his message.
“Supporting a corrupt elite in a civil war does nothing to make us safer, costs the United States billions of dollars, and it’s not working,” Greenwald told Raw Story.
It "confirms what we have heard numerous times from our friends, co workers and producers in Afghanistan. The United States is effectively funding both sides of the war all too often," he said.
The administration and large bipartisan majorities in Congress continue to support and fund 8-year-long military operations in Afghanistan, warning that a pullout could lead to a Taliban takeover and greater threats to American interests.
Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters Monday that the US, Japan, Britain and other countries have “committed” roughly “200 million dollars” to fund peace efforts in Afghanistan, Agence-France Presse reports. The Afghanistan Peace and Reconciliation Program aims to reintegrate Taliban fighters who have renounced violence into Afghan society.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Negotiations as the only potentially constructive goal
IN THESE TIMES
This article is permanently archived at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/6011/
The Case for Negotiations
Dealing with the Taliban is unsavory--but this war cannot be won.
By Gilles Dorronsoro
May 24, 2010
The coalition's strategy in Afghanistan is at an impasse. The renewed efforts undertaken since the summer of 2009 have failed to temper the guerrilla war. A few tactical successes are possible, but this war cannot be won. The coalition cannot defeat the Taliban as long as Pakistan continues to offer them sanctuary. And increasing resources to wage the war is not an option. The costs of continuing the war--to use Ambassador Karl Eikenberry's expression in the leaked telegram to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton--are "astronomical."
The entire U.S. strategy revolves around a swift Afghanization of the conflict, yet the coalition's Afghan partner is weaker than it was a year ago. The state's presence in the provinces has declined sharply and the legitimacy of President Hamid Karzai's government is contested.
As a result of the massive fraud in the August 2009 presidential elections, the government has no popular legitimacy, and the legislative elections slated for fall 2010 will probably undermine the political system even further because fraud is inevitable. It is unlikely that the Afghan regime will ever be able to assume responsibility for its own security.
As a result, the coalition faces an endless war accompanied by an intolerable loss of life and treasure. A less costly alternative would be to negotiate a broad agreement with the Taliban leadership to form a national unity government, with guarantees against al Qaeda's return to Afghanistan. But even if such negotiations might occur, they hold no guarantee of success.
Yet the cost of their failure is negligible compared with the potential gain: a relatively swift way out of the crisis that preserves the coalition's essential interests. Time is not on the coalition's side. The United States should contact Taliban leaders as soon as possible rather than waiting for the situation to deteriorate further.
In pursuit of a losing strategy
The Taliban cannot be defeated militarily because the border with Pakistan is and will remain open for the insurgents. The Pakistani army, which refuses to launch an offensive against the Afghan Taliban, has never considered taking action against the Taliban leadership based in Pakistan. The February arrest of acting Taliban military commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is probably a sign that the Pakistani military wants more control over the insurgency to prepare for the negotiation process.
What's more, the insurgency is now nationwide and cannot be contained by counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in two or three southern provinces. The COIN strategy cannot succeed because of the immense resources it requires. In a marginal, strategically unimportant district such as Marjah, the coalition would have to keep thousands of troops for years to prevent the Taliban's return. To replicate such strategy, even in one province, would overstretch the U.S. military.
In addition to COIN, military strategists think they can quickly weaken the Taliban through the creation of militias, the co-opting of Taliban groups and targeted assassinations. These policies will not strengthen the Afghan government's legitimacy or influence; to the contrary, they are destroying the Karzai government's credibility. The effects of this strategy are irreversible, and with the acceleration of political fragmentation, the coalition is faced with the prospect of a collapse of Afghan institutions.
The Karzai government is unlikely to engage in institutional reform, given that it is increasingly dependent on the networks that ensured its fraudulent re-election. Consequently, the coalition is having more and more trouble influencing Karzai. The weakness of the central political institutions means that the development of the army and the police force--the coalition's priorities--is occurring in a vacuum. Transferring security responsibilities to our Afghan partner will probably not be possible in the foreseeable future.
Afghans perceive their representative institutions as illegitimate. Between 10 percent and 15 percent of Afghan voters are believed to have supported Karzai during the 2009 presidential elections. All indications point to a high level of cynicism among the people and their rejection of the government; in fact, they massively refrained from voting even in places where security was reasonably good.
The legislative elections scheduled for September 2010 will further erode faith in the political system. The lack of security makes it impossible to hold credible elections in at least half of Afghanistan. And in February 2010, Karzai seized control of the ECC (Electoral Complaints Commission); there is no longer an independent institution to validate the process.
Aside from fraud and corruption, Karzai's lack of legitimacy is linked to his presumed lack of autonomy vis-Ã -vis the coalition. Internal U.S. Army studies, and the experiences of numerous journalists and researchers indicate that a majority of the population in combat zones now considers the foreign forces as occupiers. Military operations are polarizing the population against foreign forces and further weakening Karzai's regime, which appears irreparably unpopular and illegitimate. The coalition is perceived as the main provider of insecurity. Villagers do not want to see the establishment of coalition outposts that can bring only bombings and IEDs.
Furthermore, the coalition is hurt by the dependence of Karzai on his local allies, who generally oppose the coalition's objectives. The coalition is also undermined when the Afghan government aggressively distances itself from the coalition when civilians are killed by "friendly fire."
The failed Karzai government
The government in Kabul is now too weak to reassert control over the periphery of the country. As a result, the coalition is increasingly dependent on local strongmen who it helped put in place or with whom it has worked.
The weakening of the Afghan regime is very bad news for the coalition, which is promoting Afghanization in order to reduce its own investment. It is hard to build a military that is independent of the institutional network that constitutes the state. Problems such as ethnic tensions, local and national corruption, and the lack of a clear purpose make it hard to motivate soldiers and officers.
The coalition should recognize that an autonomous Afghan army is a very distant goal. The coalition's large offensive to "clear" Taliban territory will not work, because the Afghan army and the police are not ready. If the coalition tries to secure Taliban territory on a long-term basis, it will overstretch itself and casualties will increase significantly.
Modest objectives would be more realistic. Most observers recognize the impossibility of a military solution. Nonetheless, different arguments have been put forward to reject negotiations. First, the coalition needs more time. Reinforcements are not yet fully in place, so talk of failure is premature. Second, experts such as Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid explain that the Taliban have reached the height of their influence, implying that the coalition would be in a stronger position in the future.
One can counter that the coalition should begin negotiations now while it still has the means to exert military pressure. There is nothing to indicate that the Taliban are going to slow their advance. They are pursuing a strategy that includes expanding their influence in the cities. And nothing indicates that the Karzai regime won't be even weaker a year from now.
From this perspective, the Afghan surge will have had the same result as all troop increases since 2003: a deterioration of security. Consequently, marginal military gains for the coalition in the next 18 months are the exact equivalent of a strategic defeat. Hence the need for a negotiated settlement.
But negotiations with Taliban leaders can be undertaken only if the Pakistani army agrees to act as a broker. Without Pakistan, there will be no solution in Afghanistan. Official negotiations must also include the Karzai regime and international guarantees preventing the return of radical groups to Afghanistan.
Along with negotiations, it is important to increase areas of cooperation with the insurgence. A ceasefire must therefore be observed during the negotiation process. The reduction in violence could help demobilize the Taliban and distance them from the radical groups currently in Pakistan, such as al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. Likewise, aid must be demilitarized and NGOs must be permitted to negotiate directly with the Taliban in order to work in the regions under their control.
The privatization of security (reliance on militias, deals with individual tribes and private companies) is also dangerous. These groups will be difficult to control in the event of an agreement and are currently weakening Afghan institutions. The United States should immediately stop funding militias, which is counterproductive in the long term, and immediately bring an end to the proliferation of these armed groups.
Nothing guarantees that negotiations--if agreed to by the Taliban--will succeed. Furthermore, the regime that such negotiation will establish will be unstable for months, perhaps even years. But if the negotiations succeed, they will enable the formation of a national unity government in Kabul, a new constitution negotiated during a Loya Jirga, and both internal and international guarantees to prevent the return of al Qaeda.
Given the current impasse in which the coalition finds itself, such an outcome is the best that the United States can hope for.
This essay was adapted from Gilles Dorronsoro's April 2010 report "Afghanistan: Searching for Political Agreement," which can be read on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website.
Gilles Dorronsoro, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is the author of Revolution Unending: Afghanistan 1979 to the Present.
This article is permanently archived at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/6011/
The Case for Negotiations
Dealing with the Taliban is unsavory--but this war cannot be won.
By Gilles Dorronsoro
May 24, 2010
The coalition's strategy in Afghanistan is at an impasse. The renewed efforts undertaken since the summer of 2009 have failed to temper the guerrilla war. A few tactical successes are possible, but this war cannot be won. The coalition cannot defeat the Taliban as long as Pakistan continues to offer them sanctuary. And increasing resources to wage the war is not an option. The costs of continuing the war--to use Ambassador Karl Eikenberry's expression in the leaked telegram to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton--are "astronomical."
The entire U.S. strategy revolves around a swift Afghanization of the conflict, yet the coalition's Afghan partner is weaker than it was a year ago. The state's presence in the provinces has declined sharply and the legitimacy of President Hamid Karzai's government is contested.
As a result of the massive fraud in the August 2009 presidential elections, the government has no popular legitimacy, and the legislative elections slated for fall 2010 will probably undermine the political system even further because fraud is inevitable. It is unlikely that the Afghan regime will ever be able to assume responsibility for its own security.
As a result, the coalition faces an endless war accompanied by an intolerable loss of life and treasure. A less costly alternative would be to negotiate a broad agreement with the Taliban leadership to form a national unity government, with guarantees against al Qaeda's return to Afghanistan. But even if such negotiations might occur, they hold no guarantee of success.
Yet the cost of their failure is negligible compared with the potential gain: a relatively swift way out of the crisis that preserves the coalition's essential interests. Time is not on the coalition's side. The United States should contact Taliban leaders as soon as possible rather than waiting for the situation to deteriorate further.
In pursuit of a losing strategy
The Taliban cannot be defeated militarily because the border with Pakistan is and will remain open for the insurgents. The Pakistani army, which refuses to launch an offensive against the Afghan Taliban, has never considered taking action against the Taliban leadership based in Pakistan. The February arrest of acting Taliban military commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is probably a sign that the Pakistani military wants more control over the insurgency to prepare for the negotiation process.
What's more, the insurgency is now nationwide and cannot be contained by counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in two or three southern provinces. The COIN strategy cannot succeed because of the immense resources it requires. In a marginal, strategically unimportant district such as Marjah, the coalition would have to keep thousands of troops for years to prevent the Taliban's return. To replicate such strategy, even in one province, would overstretch the U.S. military.
In addition to COIN, military strategists think they can quickly weaken the Taliban through the creation of militias, the co-opting of Taliban groups and targeted assassinations. These policies will not strengthen the Afghan government's legitimacy or influence; to the contrary, they are destroying the Karzai government's credibility. The effects of this strategy are irreversible, and with the acceleration of political fragmentation, the coalition is faced with the prospect of a collapse of Afghan institutions.
The Karzai government is unlikely to engage in institutional reform, given that it is increasingly dependent on the networks that ensured its fraudulent re-election. Consequently, the coalition is having more and more trouble influencing Karzai. The weakness of the central political institutions means that the development of the army and the police force--the coalition's priorities--is occurring in a vacuum. Transferring security responsibilities to our Afghan partner will probably not be possible in the foreseeable future.
Afghans perceive their representative institutions as illegitimate. Between 10 percent and 15 percent of Afghan voters are believed to have supported Karzai during the 2009 presidential elections. All indications point to a high level of cynicism among the people and their rejection of the government; in fact, they massively refrained from voting even in places where security was reasonably good.
The legislative elections scheduled for September 2010 will further erode faith in the political system. The lack of security makes it impossible to hold credible elections in at least half of Afghanistan. And in February 2010, Karzai seized control of the ECC (Electoral Complaints Commission); there is no longer an independent institution to validate the process.
Aside from fraud and corruption, Karzai's lack of legitimacy is linked to his presumed lack of autonomy vis-Ã -vis the coalition. Internal U.S. Army studies, and the experiences of numerous journalists and researchers indicate that a majority of the population in combat zones now considers the foreign forces as occupiers. Military operations are polarizing the population against foreign forces and further weakening Karzai's regime, which appears irreparably unpopular and illegitimate. The coalition is perceived as the main provider of insecurity. Villagers do not want to see the establishment of coalition outposts that can bring only bombings and IEDs.
Furthermore, the coalition is hurt by the dependence of Karzai on his local allies, who generally oppose the coalition's objectives. The coalition is also undermined when the Afghan government aggressively distances itself from the coalition when civilians are killed by "friendly fire."
The failed Karzai government
The government in Kabul is now too weak to reassert control over the periphery of the country. As a result, the coalition is increasingly dependent on local strongmen who it helped put in place or with whom it has worked.
The weakening of the Afghan regime is very bad news for the coalition, which is promoting Afghanization in order to reduce its own investment. It is hard to build a military that is independent of the institutional network that constitutes the state. Problems such as ethnic tensions, local and national corruption, and the lack of a clear purpose make it hard to motivate soldiers and officers.
The coalition should recognize that an autonomous Afghan army is a very distant goal. The coalition's large offensive to "clear" Taliban territory will not work, because the Afghan army and the police are not ready. If the coalition tries to secure Taliban territory on a long-term basis, it will overstretch itself and casualties will increase significantly.
Modest objectives would be more realistic. Most observers recognize the impossibility of a military solution. Nonetheless, different arguments have been put forward to reject negotiations. First, the coalition needs more time. Reinforcements are not yet fully in place, so talk of failure is premature. Second, experts such as Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid explain that the Taliban have reached the height of their influence, implying that the coalition would be in a stronger position in the future.
One can counter that the coalition should begin negotiations now while it still has the means to exert military pressure. There is nothing to indicate that the Taliban are going to slow their advance. They are pursuing a strategy that includes expanding their influence in the cities. And nothing indicates that the Karzai regime won't be even weaker a year from now.
From this perspective, the Afghan surge will have had the same result as all troop increases since 2003: a deterioration of security. Consequently, marginal military gains for the coalition in the next 18 months are the exact equivalent of a strategic defeat. Hence the need for a negotiated settlement.
But negotiations with Taliban leaders can be undertaken only if the Pakistani army agrees to act as a broker. Without Pakistan, there will be no solution in Afghanistan. Official negotiations must also include the Karzai regime and international guarantees preventing the return of radical groups to Afghanistan.
Along with negotiations, it is important to increase areas of cooperation with the insurgence. A ceasefire must therefore be observed during the negotiation process. The reduction in violence could help demobilize the Taliban and distance them from the radical groups currently in Pakistan, such as al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. Likewise, aid must be demilitarized and NGOs must be permitted to negotiate directly with the Taliban in order to work in the regions under their control.
The privatization of security (reliance on militias, deals with individual tribes and private companies) is also dangerous. These groups will be difficult to control in the event of an agreement and are currently weakening Afghan institutions. The United States should immediately stop funding militias, which is counterproductive in the long term, and immediately bring an end to the proliferation of these armed groups.
Nothing guarantees that negotiations--if agreed to by the Taliban--will succeed. Furthermore, the regime that such negotiation will establish will be unstable for months, perhaps even years. But if the negotiations succeed, they will enable the formation of a national unity government in Kabul, a new constitution negotiated during a Loya Jirga, and both internal and international guarantees to prevent the return of al Qaeda.
Given the current impasse in which the coalition finds itself, such an outcome is the best that the United States can hope for.
This essay was adapted from Gilles Dorronsoro's April 2010 report "Afghanistan: Searching for Political Agreement," which can be read on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website.
Gilles Dorronsoro, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is the author of Revolution Unending: Afghanistan 1979 to the Present.
Monday, May 17, 2010
The hubris of US military policy in Afghanistan
May 17, 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney05172010.html
A Roadmap to Folly in Afghanistan
The Arrogance of Ignorance
By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY
Nisos Kos, Greece.
A report by Jonathan Landay and Dion Nissenbaum for McClatchy Newspapers provides important insights into our rapidly diminishing prospects for success in Afghanistan, some direct, others inferential:
First, the direct: the Qandahar operation that General McChrystal began trumpeting in late February is clearly going wobbly before it begins. The promise to demonstrate progress (i.e., to see light at the end of the tunnel) in Afghanistan by this summer is being bow-waved at least into the Fall, during the height of mid-term election season. The scope of the looming operation is also being scaled back, and its goals are being redefined in more ambiguous terms.
The Qandahar offensive always strained credulity: According to Landay’s sources in the Pentagon, the original concept assumed 20,000 troops could pacify the urban/rural region with 800,000 inhabitants. This level of effort always appeared grossly insufficient, especially when compared to recent Marjah offensive, which used 10,000 troops for an operation aimed at pacifying a rural region with one-tenth as many inhabitants. And the success of the Marjah operation to date has been problematic, to put it charitably. McChrystal can not rely on the Afghan forces to protect the Marjah “ink spot,” so he still needs the presence of Marines to pacify the region, which means less troops for spreading that ink spot of security to Qandahar. Moreover, a key component of McChrystal’s strategy -- the so-called ‘government in a box’ that McChrystal bragged he would put into place in Marjah -- has turned out to be a sham that has proven unable to protect the people. Given (1) that Qandahar is second largest city and the only major city in Afghanistan with an overwhelming Pashtun majority, (2) the fact that Qandahar is the spiritual home of the Taliban, and (3) the fact that the local ruler is the unmanageable, obscenely corrupt half brother of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, the task of permanently cleansing Qandahar of the Taliban on a permanent basis will be far more difficult than failed effort to clean out Marjah. Even if one were to assume that our counter insurgency strategy is a blueprint for success, achieving this object with confidence would require far more troops. But those troops are not available, and the probability of General McChrystal successfully squeezing the President again for another “surge” of reinforcing troops is close to nil.
More important in my opinion, however, is the information that can be teased out of the McClatchy report. This is embodied in the mindset revealed by the words General McChrystal used to explain his strategy: "It's important that we engage the population so that we shape the leaders, the natural leaders, the elders, political and economic leaders so that their participation helps shape how we go forward," [emphasis added]. This statement reveals why our current strategy is a roadmap to folly.
Landay et al did not say much about this comment, except to say that our forces have “made little headway in building a foundation for a respected local government capable of winning the confidence of the nearly 1 million Afghans who live in and around Kandahar,” a point expanded on in greater detail by Patrick Cockburn in an excellent report in the 16 May edition of the Independent. McChrystal’s verbiage is not casual milspeak -- the idea of “shaping” is deeply rooted in the US military mindset and derives from the doctrinal concept of shaping a battlefield prior to doing battle. In this case, however, the ‘shaping’ has been mutated into a cultural imperative, which is a far more subtle thing. The statement assumes we can “shape” the outlook and behaviour governing the minds of the natural leaders of the Pashtuns, or more precisely, that we can manipulate the all important Orientation function in the Observation - Orientation - Decision - Action or OODA loops of the traditional leaders.[1]
Just who are these leaders?
For starters, they are the leaders of the most xenophobic, historically-minded, proud tribal cultures in the world. McChrystal’s theory of shaping the OODA loops of these “natural” leaders reveals a contemptuous sense of superiority that is not just arrogant but also appallingly ignorant of the culture it assumes it can manipulate.
In the Pashtun culture, leaders at all levels (sub clan, clan, tribe, and tribal group) are not picked by primogenitor or god, they emerge out of an arduous process of consensus building among the members of the group. Leaders rise naturally, by consent, like cream in milk, based on demonstrated wisdom, bravery, and especially, the strength of their personal character, which is always ascertained in accordance with the Pashtun moral code, known as Pashtunwali. They have reached their position by demonstrating their worthiness to lead by adhering to and exemplifying the values of this code, which just happens to be one of the strictest and most demanding tribal codes of personal honor ever to have evolved. They are not easily manipulated, especially by outsiders.
When Pashtuns are left to themselves, the code of Pashtunwali is strong enough to limit the internecine quarrelsome behaviour of the members of the largest tribal vendetta culture remaining in the world. Being a vendetta culture means that Pashtuns have long memories, that affronts to honor are of paramount importance and must be avenged. Pashtuns also have a tradition of hospitality and sanctuary. Yet, they are united by hatred of foreign invaders and they often put aside internecine fighting and vendettas to expel invaders. And they are extraordinarily proud of their ability to expel invaders, which they have done with considerable success over the last 2,300 years. Pashtuns may have a wild and woolly culture from our perspective, but it would be a mistake to think of it as primitive or lacking a coherent moral center; it is highly evolved value system, well-tuned to the harsh conditions of the natural Afghan environment. It is also a culture that is very alien to the western European and American traditions, and therefore difficult for outsiders to comprehend.
It is the leadership of this culture that McChrystal and his fellow COIN travelers think they can turn into puppets
That the leaders in the United States military believe they can construct a successful strategy based on the premise that outsiders like themselves will be able to manipulate Pashtun leaders like puppets descends into transparent absurdity, when one juxaposes McChrystal’s ambition to the fact, well known among Pashtuns if not Americans, that the United States has contributed directly or indirectly to the murderous horror that has been Afghanistan since 1979.
The American complicity in this horror goes back at least to 1979, when the US National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, established the policy of inflaming Islamic fundamentalists (via the CIA) to destabilize Afghanistan in the hope that the threat of fundamentalist instability on Soviet Union’s vulnerable Central Asian flank would induce the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. Brzezinski’s aim was seduce the Soviets into entrapping themselves in their own Vietnam-like quagmire. The plan worked like a charm, as Brzezinski proudly admitted in a still little appreciated interview in the influential Parisian news magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur (15-21 January 1998, translation here). When asked if he had any regrets, Brzesinski dismissed the question in a tone that dripped with condescension, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” [see the last two paragraphs of the interview]
Now, ten years and a lot of stirring later, the details of the script may have changed, but the arrogance of the ignorance shaping the outlook of our leaders has not. That is why we now have an Army General concocting a “shaping” strategy based on the assumption that the American military can manipulate the behavior of millions of stirred up Afghans like puppets.
Don’t count on it.
Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com
Note.
[1] For readers unfamiliar with the theory of the OODA LOOP and its inventor, the American strategist Colonel John Boyd: A brief introduction can be found in my essay Genghis John. More comprehensive but accessible descriptions can be found in the books by Robert Coram and James Fallows, and Chet Richards, among many others. For those readers who are interested in heavy intellectually lifting, see Franz Ozinga's analysis of Boyd's strategic thought or even better, they could study Boyd's original presentations, which can be downloaded from the folder labeled “Boyd Briefs” in my Public Folder.
http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney05172010.html
A Roadmap to Folly in Afghanistan
The Arrogance of Ignorance
By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY
Nisos Kos, Greece.
A report by Jonathan Landay and Dion Nissenbaum for McClatchy Newspapers provides important insights into our rapidly diminishing prospects for success in Afghanistan, some direct, others inferential:
First, the direct: the Qandahar operation that General McChrystal began trumpeting in late February is clearly going wobbly before it begins. The promise to demonstrate progress (i.e., to see light at the end of the tunnel) in Afghanistan by this summer is being bow-waved at least into the Fall, during the height of mid-term election season. The scope of the looming operation is also being scaled back, and its goals are being redefined in more ambiguous terms.
The Qandahar offensive always strained credulity: According to Landay’s sources in the Pentagon, the original concept assumed 20,000 troops could pacify the urban/rural region with 800,000 inhabitants. This level of effort always appeared grossly insufficient, especially when compared to recent Marjah offensive, which used 10,000 troops for an operation aimed at pacifying a rural region with one-tenth as many inhabitants. And the success of the Marjah operation to date has been problematic, to put it charitably. McChrystal can not rely on the Afghan forces to protect the Marjah “ink spot,” so he still needs the presence of Marines to pacify the region, which means less troops for spreading that ink spot of security to Qandahar. Moreover, a key component of McChrystal’s strategy -- the so-called ‘government in a box’ that McChrystal bragged he would put into place in Marjah -- has turned out to be a sham that has proven unable to protect the people. Given (1) that Qandahar is second largest city and the only major city in Afghanistan with an overwhelming Pashtun majority, (2) the fact that Qandahar is the spiritual home of the Taliban, and (3) the fact that the local ruler is the unmanageable, obscenely corrupt half brother of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, the task of permanently cleansing Qandahar of the Taliban on a permanent basis will be far more difficult than failed effort to clean out Marjah. Even if one were to assume that our counter insurgency strategy is a blueprint for success, achieving this object with confidence would require far more troops. But those troops are not available, and the probability of General McChrystal successfully squeezing the President again for another “surge” of reinforcing troops is close to nil.
More important in my opinion, however, is the information that can be teased out of the McClatchy report. This is embodied in the mindset revealed by the words General McChrystal used to explain his strategy: "It's important that we engage the population so that we shape the leaders, the natural leaders, the elders, political and economic leaders so that their participation helps shape how we go forward," [emphasis added]. This statement reveals why our current strategy is a roadmap to folly.
Landay et al did not say much about this comment, except to say that our forces have “made little headway in building a foundation for a respected local government capable of winning the confidence of the nearly 1 million Afghans who live in and around Kandahar,” a point expanded on in greater detail by Patrick Cockburn in an excellent report in the 16 May edition of the Independent. McChrystal’s verbiage is not casual milspeak -- the idea of “shaping” is deeply rooted in the US military mindset and derives from the doctrinal concept of shaping a battlefield prior to doing battle. In this case, however, the ‘shaping’ has been mutated into a cultural imperative, which is a far more subtle thing. The statement assumes we can “shape” the outlook and behaviour governing the minds of the natural leaders of the Pashtuns, or more precisely, that we can manipulate the all important Orientation function in the Observation - Orientation - Decision - Action or OODA loops of the traditional leaders.[1]
Just who are these leaders?
For starters, they are the leaders of the most xenophobic, historically-minded, proud tribal cultures in the world. McChrystal’s theory of shaping the OODA loops of these “natural” leaders reveals a contemptuous sense of superiority that is not just arrogant but also appallingly ignorant of the culture it assumes it can manipulate.
In the Pashtun culture, leaders at all levels (sub clan, clan, tribe, and tribal group) are not picked by primogenitor or god, they emerge out of an arduous process of consensus building among the members of the group. Leaders rise naturally, by consent, like cream in milk, based on demonstrated wisdom, bravery, and especially, the strength of their personal character, which is always ascertained in accordance with the Pashtun moral code, known as Pashtunwali. They have reached their position by demonstrating their worthiness to lead by adhering to and exemplifying the values of this code, which just happens to be one of the strictest and most demanding tribal codes of personal honor ever to have evolved. They are not easily manipulated, especially by outsiders.
When Pashtuns are left to themselves, the code of Pashtunwali is strong enough to limit the internecine quarrelsome behaviour of the members of the largest tribal vendetta culture remaining in the world. Being a vendetta culture means that Pashtuns have long memories, that affronts to honor are of paramount importance and must be avenged. Pashtuns also have a tradition of hospitality and sanctuary. Yet, they are united by hatred of foreign invaders and they often put aside internecine fighting and vendettas to expel invaders. And they are extraordinarily proud of their ability to expel invaders, which they have done with considerable success over the last 2,300 years. Pashtuns may have a wild and woolly culture from our perspective, but it would be a mistake to think of it as primitive or lacking a coherent moral center; it is highly evolved value system, well-tuned to the harsh conditions of the natural Afghan environment. It is also a culture that is very alien to the western European and American traditions, and therefore difficult for outsiders to comprehend.
It is the leadership of this culture that McChrystal and his fellow COIN travelers think they can turn into puppets
That the leaders in the United States military believe they can construct a successful strategy based on the premise that outsiders like themselves will be able to manipulate Pashtun leaders like puppets descends into transparent absurdity, when one juxaposes McChrystal’s ambition to the fact, well known among Pashtuns if not Americans, that the United States has contributed directly or indirectly to the murderous horror that has been Afghanistan since 1979.
The American complicity in this horror goes back at least to 1979, when the US National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, established the policy of inflaming Islamic fundamentalists (via the CIA) to destabilize Afghanistan in the hope that the threat of fundamentalist instability on Soviet Union’s vulnerable Central Asian flank would induce the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. Brzezinski’s aim was seduce the Soviets into entrapping themselves in their own Vietnam-like quagmire. The plan worked like a charm, as Brzezinski proudly admitted in a still little appreciated interview in the influential Parisian news magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur (15-21 January 1998, translation here). When asked if he had any regrets, Brzesinski dismissed the question in a tone that dripped with condescension, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” [see the last two paragraphs of the interview]
Now, ten years and a lot of stirring later, the details of the script may have changed, but the arrogance of the ignorance shaping the outlook of our leaders has not. That is why we now have an Army General concocting a “shaping” strategy based on the assumption that the American military can manipulate the behavior of millions of stirred up Afghans like puppets.
Don’t count on it.
Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com
Note.
[1] For readers unfamiliar with the theory of the OODA LOOP and its inventor, the American strategist Colonel John Boyd: A brief introduction can be found in my essay Genghis John. More comprehensive but accessible descriptions can be found in the books by Robert Coram and James Fallows, and Chet Richards, among many others. For those readers who are interested in heavy intellectually lifting, see Franz Ozinga's analysis of Boyd's strategic thought or even better, they could study Boyd's original presentations, which can be downloaded from the folder labeled “Boyd Briefs” in my Public Folder.
US "flailing wars" in Afghanistan, etc.
In the following entry, I paraphrase and draw loosely on Tom Engelhardt's essay, "Obama's Flailing Wars." The full and original version of the article can be retreived at http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2010/05/16/obama-flailing-wars
Engelhardt sees US military strategy and operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a "tragedy," when not viewed as a "farce."
He reviews recent attempts by the US President and other US military and civilian leaders to stir Afghan President Hamid Karzai into more productive action, advising him, threatening him. Barak Obama recently flew into Kabul for a six hour for a dressing down of Karzai. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen met with Karzai a few days later in the same critical mode.
Then changing the tone, at least for the media, Karzai and some of his government officials visited the White House for what was orchestrated as a congenial confab. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Afghan War Commander Gen. Stanley McChristal were reported to reassure Karzai that the US military presence in Afghanistan was for the long term.
The flip flops, as Engelhard describes them, "seemed to reflect tactical and strategic incoherence," both with respect to Afghanistan and to Pakistan. He adds (later), "In place of strategic coherence, there is just one knee-jerk response: escalation," something like "the Washington mentality in the Vietnam War years."
Some seriously-grounded evidence indicaes that "the US mission in Afghanistan is going dreadfully, evan as the Taliban insurgency gains potency and expands." The recent US offensive in Marjah has proven to be a "fiasco," as Taliban groups "re-infiltrate the area," in the absence of a competent and non-corrupt Afghan government, police, and military. Engelhardt refers "to a report by the International Council on Security and Development...," which finds "the local population [in Marjah] is far more hostile about NATO forces after" the US-led attacks than before them.
Engelhardt stresses that the US occupation and escalation cannot succeed without an effective Afghan government "partner," and without well-trained, honest, and reliable Afghan police and army troops.
Any vision of winning some sort of American hegemony in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) is losing credibility, at great expense and destructiveness. That's a tragedy. That it is has something to do with ridding the world of Islamic extremists or Islamic insurgents appears more and more like a "farce."
Engelhardt sees US military strategy and operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a "tragedy," when not viewed as a "farce."
He reviews recent attempts by the US President and other US military and civilian leaders to stir Afghan President Hamid Karzai into more productive action, advising him, threatening him. Barak Obama recently flew into Kabul for a six hour for a dressing down of Karzai. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen met with Karzai a few days later in the same critical mode.
Then changing the tone, at least for the media, Karzai and some of his government officials visited the White House for what was orchestrated as a congenial confab. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Afghan War Commander Gen. Stanley McChristal were reported to reassure Karzai that the US military presence in Afghanistan was for the long term.
The flip flops, as Engelhard describes them, "seemed to reflect tactical and strategic incoherence," both with respect to Afghanistan and to Pakistan. He adds (later), "In place of strategic coherence, there is just one knee-jerk response: escalation," something like "the Washington mentality in the Vietnam War years."
Some seriously-grounded evidence indicaes that "the US mission in Afghanistan is going dreadfully, evan as the Taliban insurgency gains potency and expands." The recent US offensive in Marjah has proven to be a "fiasco," as Taliban groups "re-infiltrate the area," in the absence of a competent and non-corrupt Afghan government, police, and military. Engelhardt refers "to a report by the International Council on Security and Development...," which finds "the local population [in Marjah] is far more hostile about NATO forces after" the US-led attacks than before them.
Engelhardt stresses that the US occupation and escalation cannot succeed without an effective Afghan government "partner," and without well-trained, honest, and reliable Afghan police and army troops.
Any vision of winning some sort of American hegemony in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) is losing credibility, at great expense and destructiveness. That's a tragedy. That it is has something to do with ridding the world of Islamic extremists or Islamic insurgents appears more and more like a "farce."
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Headlines on recent developments in Afghanistan
The following four headlines from various media sources were gathered by Just Foreign Policy. Together they point to little progress for the US-led coalition in Afghanistan, and growing support for the Taliban/insurgents in southern parts of the country.
Bear in mind, these developments are unfolding after the Obama sanctioned increase to Afghnistan of 30,000 troops this year (bringing US troop levels to about 100,000), along with additional contractors, the ongoing training of Afhan army and police, and including some troops from NATO. The generals in the field now expect that the "need" for the occupation will go on for many years. There are other reports as well indicating that the Pentagon will soon be asking for another 20,000 US soldiers.
As time passes, the US-led occupation seems more and more like a rough re-run of what happened in Vietnam, with its death, destruction of villages and habitat, and lack of support from the indigenous population. In both cases, we were told that the continued escalation of war was necessary to our national security. It all sounds like a broken record. The opportunity costs, or how we might otherwise spend the tens of billions of dollars on the broken economic system of the US itself, are great and increasing.
There are perhaps larger concerns behind the day-to-day reports. While Afghanistan is not rich in fossil fuels, it is geographically situated so that a pipeline could be built through it to transmit the oil from other countries in central Asia. Additionally, Afghanistan figures in the tensions between Pakistan and India. Both countries would like to have a dominating influence in Afghanistan to advance their own perceptions of security and influence in the region. And the US administration and Pentagon apparently want to demonstrate that US hegemonic power is intact. Whatever the larger reasons, Afghanistan appears like a pawn in larger imperialistic plots. The dominos may be falling, but not to advance the interests of the societies that are being directly and indirectly affected.
Bob
---------------------------
Some headlines from Just Foreign Policy, April 30, 2010.
1) Nato's most senior civilian official said US and NATO troops deployed in Afghanistan can expect to be engaged in a combat role for three or four more years, the Guardian reports. Thereafter, they could be expected to remain in Afghanistan, training and mentoring local forces, for a further 10 to 15 years. President Karzai is due to visit Washington on May 10.
3) A U.S. night raid that killed a relative of Afghan parliamentarian Safia Siddiqi was conducted without informing the local police, the Los Angeles Times reports.
4) The most significant revelation in the Pentagon's Afghanistan report this week is that Gen. McChrystal and ISAF acknowledge officially that Taliban insurgents dominate a vast contiguous zone of heavily populated territory across southern Afghanistan that McChrystal regards as the most critical area in the country, writes Gareth Porter for Inter Press Service. The report admits that the population in key districts across most southern provinces is sympathetic to or supportive of the insurgents.
5) The Pentagon's report on the last six months in Afghanistan suggests the situation is little better over all than it was six months ago despite enormous expenditures of effort, money and lives by US and international forces, the New York Times reports. The report is mandated by Congress every six months.
Bear in mind, these developments are unfolding after the Obama sanctioned increase to Afghnistan of 30,000 troops this year (bringing US troop levels to about 100,000), along with additional contractors, the ongoing training of Afhan army and police, and including some troops from NATO. The generals in the field now expect that the "need" for the occupation will go on for many years. There are other reports as well indicating that the Pentagon will soon be asking for another 20,000 US soldiers.
As time passes, the US-led occupation seems more and more like a rough re-run of what happened in Vietnam, with its death, destruction of villages and habitat, and lack of support from the indigenous population. In both cases, we were told that the continued escalation of war was necessary to our national security. It all sounds like a broken record. The opportunity costs, or how we might otherwise spend the tens of billions of dollars on the broken economic system of the US itself, are great and increasing.
There are perhaps larger concerns behind the day-to-day reports. While Afghanistan is not rich in fossil fuels, it is geographically situated so that a pipeline could be built through it to transmit the oil from other countries in central Asia. Additionally, Afghanistan figures in the tensions between Pakistan and India. Both countries would like to have a dominating influence in Afghanistan to advance their own perceptions of security and influence in the region. And the US administration and Pentagon apparently want to demonstrate that US hegemonic power is intact. Whatever the larger reasons, Afghanistan appears like a pawn in larger imperialistic plots. The dominos may be falling, but not to advance the interests of the societies that are being directly and indirectly affected.
Bob
---------------------------
Some headlines from Just Foreign Policy, April 30, 2010.
1) Nato's most senior civilian official said US and NATO troops deployed in Afghanistan can expect to be engaged in a combat role for three or four more years, the Guardian reports. Thereafter, they could be expected to remain in Afghanistan, training and mentoring local forces, for a further 10 to 15 years. President Karzai is due to visit Washington on May 10.
3) A U.S. night raid that killed a relative of Afghan parliamentarian Safia Siddiqi was conducted without informing the local police, the Los Angeles Times reports.
4) The most significant revelation in the Pentagon's Afghanistan report this week is that Gen. McChrystal and ISAF acknowledge officially that Taliban insurgents dominate a vast contiguous zone of heavily populated territory across southern Afghanistan that McChrystal regards as the most critical area in the country, writes Gareth Porter for Inter Press Service. The report admits that the population in key districts across most southern provinces is sympathetic to or supportive of the insurgents.
5) The Pentagon's report on the last six months in Afghanistan suggests the situation is little better over all than it was six months ago despite enormous expenditures of effort, money and lives by US and international forces, the New York Times reports. The report is mandated by Congress every six months.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
US plan to arm tribal militia runs into problems
Reporting from Achin, Afghanistan, Anand Gopal offers examples of how conflicted, or potentially conflicted, Afghan tribes can be. (See Gopal's article below.) Tribes are divided into clans and sub-clans. And tribal elders, representing various clans, may not always cooperate with one another. The US military had the idea of rewarding tribes with money and promised development projects that created militia to fight off "Taliban" in their areas. Their notion was that these militia would eventually work with regular Afghan police or troops and expedite the removal of "Taliban" from their areas.
Gopal gives examples of how this has not worked out as planned. He identifies two problems. First, not all clan leaders are consulted about or willing to agree to creating anti-Taliban militia. When one clan goes along with the US authorities and some do not this can heighten inter-tribal conflict and vitiate the viability of a militia. Second, Gopal found that when tribal militias were put in place, they were sometimes viewed by local Afghans as worse than the Taliban.
One implication of Gopal's report is that the US military authorities don't really understand tribal dynamics. It may be that, as an occupying force, they never will obtain such understanding or acceptance.
----------------------------
U.S. plan to arm Afghan militia founders on tribal rivalries
Anand Gopal McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: April 27, 2010 07:56:04 PM
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/27/92976/us-plan-to-arm-afghan-militia.html
ACHIN, Afghanistan — The detritus of tribal war litters the road that leads into this quiet mountain hamlet in eastern Afghanistan. The charred bodies of vehicles and the skeletal remains of destroyed houses fill the desert that flanks the road. Most of the shops in the main bazaar are shuttered, and some residents have packed up and left.
Achin district, a home of the Shinwari tribe, is part of an ambitious countrywide U.S. push to fund tribal militias to stand against the Taliban and stabilize the violence-plagued region. A months-long feud between Shinwari clans has brought Achin to a standstill, however, threatening to undermine the effort and illustrating the difficulties in enlisting tribes to combat the insurgency.
The initiative encourages tribes and other community groups in a number of areas around the country to defend their territory from the Taliban. A similar effort in Iraq is widely credited with diminishing the violence there.
The groups don't receive weapons — which already are plentiful in Afghanistan — but U.S. Special Operations Forces provide money and in some cases training. The militias are meant to complement uniformed Afghan forces and Western troops.
Locals say that tribal dynamics complicate such initiatives, however. "We want to solve the Taliban problem, but not cause a whole series of other problems in the process," said Moyen Shah, the deputy head of the provincial council, which helps govern the eastern province of Nangarhar.
The drive began last summer in the rugged, mountainous district of Achin. Insurgents and smugglers regularly crossed the nearby Pakistani border into the area, which consists of a small bazaar and clusters of homes behind mud-brick walls.
In July, two Shinwari leaders raised a militia to attack these insurgents. The tribal force killed a key Taliban commander and expelled a small band of insurgent fighters from its territory.
The rare uprising sparked a series of meetings between some tribal leaders and U.S. troops, according to Shinwari elders, after which the leaders pledged early this year to bar the Taliban from Achin.
It was one of the clearest anti-Taliban stances that any Afghan tribe had taken in recent years. "If we catch anyone harboring Taliban, we will fine him and burn down his house," said Malek Osman, one of the elders who made the pledge. "The Shinwaris are a huge tribe. We can make a major difference."
U.S. military officials rewarded the tribe with $200,000 and promised more development funds to come.
With the funds and newfound prestige, however, came infighting. Like most other Afghan tribes, the Shinwari are subdivided into a tangle of clans and sub-clans, each with its own leaders. Only one of the clans, the Shobli, had made the pledge against the Taliban.
"We haven't participated in that decision," said Muhammad Nabi, an Achin resident and member of another Shinwari clan, the Ali Sher Khel. "Those tribal elders don't represent us, and they don't speak for all Shinwaris." A number of others who were interviewed agreed with this sentiment.
Shortly after the decision to expel the Taliban was announced, the Ali Sher Khel claimed that the Shobli had occupied part of their land on the outskirts of the Achin bazaar, and launched an attack. Thirteen people were killed and 35 injured, and most of the houses there were reduced to rubble.
Many Shobli fled, leaving behind smoldering ruins and heightened tensions. Locals said life still hadn't returned to normal. "Look around," Achin resident Abdul Habib said, pointing to a gaunt, nearly deserted central bazaar. "There is fear everywhere. The (clans) don't trust each other and they think fighting will start again at any minute."
The Shobli that remain in the area don't patrol or otherwise attempt to enforce the Taliban ban, for fear that it would further stoke tensions. Moreover, the police rarely venture far from the main bazaar into the patchwork of farms and orchards in the countryside or the nearby barren flatland, where many Ali Sher Khel live.
As a result, the Taliban still roam openly in parts of Achin, according to locals and government officials.
Tensions also are brewing between Shobli elders and the Afghan government. "The government is made up of thieves and mafia men," Osman said. "We prefer to work for the Americans."
The Afghan government, in turn, is wary of tribal groups that are beyond its control, something that it said could undermine the development of the national army and police. Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, the Nangarhar provincial spokesman, said the government aimed to incorporate the tribal militias into the Afghan police force.
North of here, in the northern province of Kunduz, a multiethnic area that has a large Taliban presence in the Pashtun regions, dozens of militias have sprouted recently. Many of their commanders are former warlords who participated in Afghanistan's civil war in the 1990s and were disarmed in the years after the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2001, only to rearm in recent months. In some areas — particularly those without large Pashtun populations — locals report that the militias have been reducing the Taliban threat.
In other parts of Kunduz, however, locals say that the new militias are even worse than the Taliban are. In the district of Imam Sahib, a militia leader known as Commander Nizam is widely accused of crimes that include looting and rape.
"His people stopped our bus one night," recalled Fardin Rasouli, a businessman from the area, "and took all of our money, even the jewelry from the women. During the day these people are supposedly providing security, but during the night they become thieves."
Kunduz government officials acknowledged that Nizam and other militias occasionally crossed the line. "There have been some complaints about the militias," said Mohebullah Saidi, a spokesman for Kunduz province. "Members of the suspected militias have been arrested, and there is an investigation ongoing."
Still, he said that the militias were needed until the government could field its own effective security force. U.S. Special Operations Forces are widely thought to have provided money to Nizam and other commanders, but neither side would comment on the issue.
Military officials say that the use of militias is subordinated to the development of Afghan security forces. The "over-reliance on tribal- or community-based security can promote instability or abuses of power that are associated with warlordism," said U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Thomas Porter, a spokesman with the international forces. "At the same time, we've learned that it's not productive to work against the grain of Afghan culture, which means respecting the existing system of tribal and communal ties."
Nonetheless, it's no surprise that governments are wary of any plan to arm the militias.
"We have a dangerous history in this country with militias," Abdulzai said, referring to the country's civil war, in which thousands died as a result of warring militias. "We need to learn from that experience and make sure we don't repeat the same mistakes."
(Gopal is a McClatchy special correspondent
Gopal gives examples of how this has not worked out as planned. He identifies two problems. First, not all clan leaders are consulted about or willing to agree to creating anti-Taliban militia. When one clan goes along with the US authorities and some do not this can heighten inter-tribal conflict and vitiate the viability of a militia. Second, Gopal found that when tribal militias were put in place, they were sometimes viewed by local Afghans as worse than the Taliban.
One implication of Gopal's report is that the US military authorities don't really understand tribal dynamics. It may be that, as an occupying force, they never will obtain such understanding or acceptance.
----------------------------
U.S. plan to arm Afghan militia founders on tribal rivalries
Anand Gopal McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: April 27, 2010 07:56:04 PM
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/27/92976/us-plan-to-arm-afghan-militia.html
ACHIN, Afghanistan — The detritus of tribal war litters the road that leads into this quiet mountain hamlet in eastern Afghanistan. The charred bodies of vehicles and the skeletal remains of destroyed houses fill the desert that flanks the road. Most of the shops in the main bazaar are shuttered, and some residents have packed up and left.
Achin district, a home of the Shinwari tribe, is part of an ambitious countrywide U.S. push to fund tribal militias to stand against the Taliban and stabilize the violence-plagued region. A months-long feud between Shinwari clans has brought Achin to a standstill, however, threatening to undermine the effort and illustrating the difficulties in enlisting tribes to combat the insurgency.
The initiative encourages tribes and other community groups in a number of areas around the country to defend their territory from the Taliban. A similar effort in Iraq is widely credited with diminishing the violence there.
The groups don't receive weapons — which already are plentiful in Afghanistan — but U.S. Special Operations Forces provide money and in some cases training. The militias are meant to complement uniformed Afghan forces and Western troops.
Locals say that tribal dynamics complicate such initiatives, however. "We want to solve the Taliban problem, but not cause a whole series of other problems in the process," said Moyen Shah, the deputy head of the provincial council, which helps govern the eastern province of Nangarhar.
The drive began last summer in the rugged, mountainous district of Achin. Insurgents and smugglers regularly crossed the nearby Pakistani border into the area, which consists of a small bazaar and clusters of homes behind mud-brick walls.
In July, two Shinwari leaders raised a militia to attack these insurgents. The tribal force killed a key Taliban commander and expelled a small band of insurgent fighters from its territory.
The rare uprising sparked a series of meetings between some tribal leaders and U.S. troops, according to Shinwari elders, after which the leaders pledged early this year to bar the Taliban from Achin.
It was one of the clearest anti-Taliban stances that any Afghan tribe had taken in recent years. "If we catch anyone harboring Taliban, we will fine him and burn down his house," said Malek Osman, one of the elders who made the pledge. "The Shinwaris are a huge tribe. We can make a major difference."
U.S. military officials rewarded the tribe with $200,000 and promised more development funds to come.
With the funds and newfound prestige, however, came infighting. Like most other Afghan tribes, the Shinwari are subdivided into a tangle of clans and sub-clans, each with its own leaders. Only one of the clans, the Shobli, had made the pledge against the Taliban.
"We haven't participated in that decision," said Muhammad Nabi, an Achin resident and member of another Shinwari clan, the Ali Sher Khel. "Those tribal elders don't represent us, and they don't speak for all Shinwaris." A number of others who were interviewed agreed with this sentiment.
Shortly after the decision to expel the Taliban was announced, the Ali Sher Khel claimed that the Shobli had occupied part of their land on the outskirts of the Achin bazaar, and launched an attack. Thirteen people were killed and 35 injured, and most of the houses there were reduced to rubble.
Many Shobli fled, leaving behind smoldering ruins and heightened tensions. Locals said life still hadn't returned to normal. "Look around," Achin resident Abdul Habib said, pointing to a gaunt, nearly deserted central bazaar. "There is fear everywhere. The (clans) don't trust each other and they think fighting will start again at any minute."
The Shobli that remain in the area don't patrol or otherwise attempt to enforce the Taliban ban, for fear that it would further stoke tensions. Moreover, the police rarely venture far from the main bazaar into the patchwork of farms and orchards in the countryside or the nearby barren flatland, where many Ali Sher Khel live.
As a result, the Taliban still roam openly in parts of Achin, according to locals and government officials.
Tensions also are brewing between Shobli elders and the Afghan government. "The government is made up of thieves and mafia men," Osman said. "We prefer to work for the Americans."
The Afghan government, in turn, is wary of tribal groups that are beyond its control, something that it said could undermine the development of the national army and police. Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, the Nangarhar provincial spokesman, said the government aimed to incorporate the tribal militias into the Afghan police force.
North of here, in the northern province of Kunduz, a multiethnic area that has a large Taliban presence in the Pashtun regions, dozens of militias have sprouted recently. Many of their commanders are former warlords who participated in Afghanistan's civil war in the 1990s and were disarmed in the years after the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2001, only to rearm in recent months. In some areas — particularly those without large Pashtun populations — locals report that the militias have been reducing the Taliban threat.
In other parts of Kunduz, however, locals say that the new militias are even worse than the Taliban are. In the district of Imam Sahib, a militia leader known as Commander Nizam is widely accused of crimes that include looting and rape.
"His people stopped our bus one night," recalled Fardin Rasouli, a businessman from the area, "and took all of our money, even the jewelry from the women. During the day these people are supposedly providing security, but during the night they become thieves."
Kunduz government officials acknowledged that Nizam and other militias occasionally crossed the line. "There have been some complaints about the militias," said Mohebullah Saidi, a spokesman for Kunduz province. "Members of the suspected militias have been arrested, and there is an investigation ongoing."
Still, he said that the militias were needed until the government could field its own effective security force. U.S. Special Operations Forces are widely thought to have provided money to Nizam and other commanders, but neither side would comment on the issue.
Military officials say that the use of militias is subordinated to the development of Afghan security forces. The "over-reliance on tribal- or community-based security can promote instability or abuses of power that are associated with warlordism," said U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Thomas Porter, a spokesman with the international forces. "At the same time, we've learned that it's not productive to work against the grain of Afghan culture, which means respecting the existing system of tribal and communal ties."
Nonetheless, it's no surprise that governments are wary of any plan to arm the militias.
"We have a dangerous history in this country with militias," Abdulzai said, referring to the country's civil war, in which thousands died as a result of warring militias. "We need to learn from that experience and make sure we don't repeat the same mistakes."
(Gopal is a McClatchy special correspondent
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Obama and Pentagon prepare to spend more on counterinsurgency preparation
The following notes are based on highlights of an article article by Michael T. Klare that appear in the April 26th issue of The Nation magazine. The title of the article is "Two, Three, Many Afghanistans." The complete article is available at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100426/Klare
The chief point of Klare’s article is that “Obama's Pentagon is preparing for a number of counterinsurgencies in the developing world,” all related to terrorism, failing states, rogue states, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, or other national-defense-sounding rationales. We gotta get them before they get us. Klare writes there are many similarities in the Obama plan to the counter-insurgency program that emerged back in the early 1960s under President Kennedy’s administration, when Kennedy “authorized a vast expansion of Special Forces” while continuing the expenditures on conventional and nuclear warfare.
Obama is interested in the same kind of military expansion. Klare quotes from a speech given by President Obama on “violent extremism,” in which Obama said: “Unlike the great power conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the twentieth century, our effort will involve disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies….(consequently) we’ll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power.” The Obama counterinsurgency policy will be used to keep Al Qaeda and other groups assumed connected to it from establishing a foothold anywhere in the world of developing countries.
Obama's counterinsurgency doctrine was, Klare writes, “first enunciated in a series of speeches by Obama and Gates [Secretary of Defense], and has been given formal character in the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon’s Congressionally mandated overhaul of strategy,” released on the first of February. The QDR reaffirms the idea of America “as [being] a global power with global responsibilities.” However, there are changes in the current international situation, with the growth of “non-state actors, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and other destructive enabling technologies.” Therefore, according to the QDR, US forces must be able to respond to “the full range of challenges that could emerge from a complex and dynamic security environment.” This is a rationale for endless wars, in which the government, especially the Pentagon and its congressional and industry supporters, can identify enemies in any number of places that are perceived as a danger to our national security.
US forces must “be equipped for counterinsurgency-type operations: helicopters, small arms, body armor, night-vision devices, mine-resistant vehicles, aerial gunships, surveillance drones and the like.” More revenues for Special Forces. More revenues for our partners “to strengthen their capacity for internal security.” The US has already exported this model to other areas, “supporting counterinsurgency operations in Columbia, the Philippines, and Yemen, among other countries.”
“The greatest risk,” Klare emphasizes, “is that the military will become bogged down in a constellation of grueling, low-level wars.” At the same time, the policy also wants more funding for conventional high-intensity warfare (e.g., big ships, big planes, submarines, large conventional armies, etc) “thereby producing ever-increasing military budgets, a growing national deficit and persistent economic paralysis.” The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan already demonstrate how costly and counterproductive war can be, whatever its guise.
What Klare does not emphasize in this article, but does document in his books and other writing, is that the real challenge for the US comes from a world in which there are increasingly not enough resources to go round. Military force will not help us resolve this basic fact, but only exacerbate it. We need different economic policies than we have, ones that encourage cooperation, equity, and an economic model that is consistent with the earth. In the meantime, we do the opposite, with military interventions in the forefront.
The chief point of Klare’s article is that “Obama's Pentagon is preparing for a number of counterinsurgencies in the developing world,” all related to terrorism, failing states, rogue states, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, or other national-defense-sounding rationales. We gotta get them before they get us. Klare writes there are many similarities in the Obama plan to the counter-insurgency program that emerged back in the early 1960s under President Kennedy’s administration, when Kennedy “authorized a vast expansion of Special Forces” while continuing the expenditures on conventional and nuclear warfare.
Obama is interested in the same kind of military expansion. Klare quotes from a speech given by President Obama on “violent extremism,” in which Obama said: “Unlike the great power conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the twentieth century, our effort will involve disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies….(consequently) we’ll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power.” The Obama counterinsurgency policy will be used to keep Al Qaeda and other groups assumed connected to it from establishing a foothold anywhere in the world of developing countries.
Obama's counterinsurgency doctrine was, Klare writes, “first enunciated in a series of speeches by Obama and Gates [Secretary of Defense], and has been given formal character in the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon’s Congressionally mandated overhaul of strategy,” released on the first of February. The QDR reaffirms the idea of America “as [being] a global power with global responsibilities.” However, there are changes in the current international situation, with the growth of “non-state actors, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and other destructive enabling technologies.” Therefore, according to the QDR, US forces must be able to respond to “the full range of challenges that could emerge from a complex and dynamic security environment.” This is a rationale for endless wars, in which the government, especially the Pentagon and its congressional and industry supporters, can identify enemies in any number of places that are perceived as a danger to our national security.
US forces must “be equipped for counterinsurgency-type operations: helicopters, small arms, body armor, night-vision devices, mine-resistant vehicles, aerial gunships, surveillance drones and the like.” More revenues for Special Forces. More revenues for our partners “to strengthen their capacity for internal security.” The US has already exported this model to other areas, “supporting counterinsurgency operations in Columbia, the Philippines, and Yemen, among other countries.”
“The greatest risk,” Klare emphasizes, “is that the military will become bogged down in a constellation of grueling, low-level wars.” At the same time, the policy also wants more funding for conventional high-intensity warfare (e.g., big ships, big planes, submarines, large conventional armies, etc) “thereby producing ever-increasing military budgets, a growing national deficit and persistent economic paralysis.” The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan already demonstrate how costly and counterproductive war can be, whatever its guise.
What Klare does not emphasize in this article, but does document in his books and other writing, is that the real challenge for the US comes from a world in which there are increasingly not enough resources to go round. Military force will not help us resolve this basic fact, but only exacerbate it. We need different economic policies than we have, ones that encourage cooperation, equity, and an economic model that is consistent with the earth. In the meantime, we do the opposite, with military interventions in the forefront.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
A few miscellaneous facts on profligate US occupation of Afghanistan
The following excerpts come from a longer article by Tom Englehardt that appears at http://www.zcommunications.org/believe-it-or-not-2010-imperial-edition-by-tom-engelhardt
The article is titled "Believe It or Not (2010 Imperial Edition)," with a subtitle: "US War-Fightin Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off."
Engelhardt writes regular in-depth articles at tomdispatch and other sites that keep readers up-to-date on a vareity of topics, particularly US foreign policy and wars. The excerpted paragraphs that follow illustrate the enormous sums the US military wastes in Afghanistan, though, as Engelhardt's essay reveals, the proflicacy is not limited to Afghanistan. There is also reflected in the numbers the ongoing power of the military-industrial complex, the hubris of our government leaders, including President Obama when it comes to Afghanistan, the hollowness of the U.S. Congress on most military matters, and the counter-productive consequences associated with the self-congratulatory claim of American hegemony.
-----------------------------------
Excerpts from Tom Engelhardt's essay.
....* Believe it or not, for instance, U.S. commanders in our war zones have more than one billion congressionally mandated dollars a year at their disposal to spend on making "friends with local citizens and help[ing] struggling economies." It's all socked away in the Commander's Emergency Response Program. Think of it as a local community-bribery account which, best of all, seems not to require the slightest accountability to Congress for where or how the money is spent.
....* Believe it or not, the Defense Logistics Agency shipped 1.1 million hamburger patties to Afghanistan in the month of March 2010 (nearly doubling the March 2009 figure). Almost any number you might care to consider related to the Afghan War is similarly on the rise. By the fall, the number of American troops there will have nearly tripled since President Obama took office; American deaths in Afghanistan have doubled in the first months of 2010, while the number of wounded has tripled; insurgent roadside bomb (IED) attacks more than doubled in 2009 and are still rising; U.S. drone strikes almost doubled in 2009 and are on track to triple this year; and fuel deliveries to Afghanistan have nearly doubled, rising from 15 million gallons a month in March 2009 to 27 million this March. (Keep in mind that, by the time a gallon of gas has made it to U.S. troops in the field, its cost is estimated at up to $100.)
....* Believe it or not, according to Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com, nearly 400 bases for U.S. troops, CIA operatives, special operations forces, NATO allies, and civilian contractors have already been constructed in Afghanistan, topping the base-building figures for Iraq by about 100 in a situation in which almost every bit of material has to be transported into the country. The base-building spree has yet to end.
* Believe it or not, according to the Washington Post, the Defense Department has awarded a contract worth up to $360 million to the son of an Afghan cabinet minister to transport U.S. military supplies through some of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan -- and his company has no trucks. (He hires subcontractors who evidently pay off the Taliban as part of a large-scale protection racket that allows the supplies through unharmed.) This contract is, in turn, part of a $2.1 billion Host Nation Trucking contract whose recipients may be deeply involved in extortion and smuggling rackets, and over which the Pentagon reportedly exercises little oversight.
.... And there's one more small contrast to be made when it comes to the finest military in the history of the world: for all the private security guards, mountains of burgers, lakes of gasoline, miles of blast walls, and satchels of cash to pass out to the locals, it's been remarkably unsuccessful in its pacification campaigns against some of the motliest forces of our time. The U.S. military has been fought to something like a draw by relatively modest-sized, relatively lightly armed minority insurgencies that don't even pass muster when it comes to shooting straight. Vast piles of money and vast quantities of materiel have been squandered; equipment by the boatload has been used up; lives have been wasted in profusion; and yet the winners of our wars might turn out to be Iran and China.
The article is titled "Believe It or Not (2010 Imperial Edition)," with a subtitle: "US War-Fightin Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off."
Engelhardt writes regular in-depth articles at tomdispatch and other sites that keep readers up-to-date on a vareity of topics, particularly US foreign policy and wars. The excerpted paragraphs that follow illustrate the enormous sums the US military wastes in Afghanistan, though, as Engelhardt's essay reveals, the proflicacy is not limited to Afghanistan. There is also reflected in the numbers the ongoing power of the military-industrial complex, the hubris of our government leaders, including President Obama when it comes to Afghanistan, the hollowness of the U.S. Congress on most military matters, and the counter-productive consequences associated with the self-congratulatory claim of American hegemony.
-----------------------------------
Excerpts from Tom Engelhardt's essay.
....* Believe it or not, for instance, U.S. commanders in our war zones have more than one billion congressionally mandated dollars a year at their disposal to spend on making "friends with local citizens and help[ing] struggling economies." It's all socked away in the Commander's Emergency Response Program. Think of it as a local community-bribery account which, best of all, seems not to require the slightest accountability to Congress for where or how the money is spent.
....* Believe it or not, the Defense Logistics Agency shipped 1.1 million hamburger patties to Afghanistan in the month of March 2010 (nearly doubling the March 2009 figure). Almost any number you might care to consider related to the Afghan War is similarly on the rise. By the fall, the number of American troops there will have nearly tripled since President Obama took office; American deaths in Afghanistan have doubled in the first months of 2010, while the number of wounded has tripled; insurgent roadside bomb (IED) attacks more than doubled in 2009 and are still rising; U.S. drone strikes almost doubled in 2009 and are on track to triple this year; and fuel deliveries to Afghanistan have nearly doubled, rising from 15 million gallons a month in March 2009 to 27 million this March. (Keep in mind that, by the time a gallon of gas has made it to U.S. troops in the field, its cost is estimated at up to $100.)
....* Believe it or not, according to Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com, nearly 400 bases for U.S. troops, CIA operatives, special operations forces, NATO allies, and civilian contractors have already been constructed in Afghanistan, topping the base-building figures for Iraq by about 100 in a situation in which almost every bit of material has to be transported into the country. The base-building spree has yet to end.
* Believe it or not, according to the Washington Post, the Defense Department has awarded a contract worth up to $360 million to the son of an Afghan cabinet minister to transport U.S. military supplies through some of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan -- and his company has no trucks. (He hires subcontractors who evidently pay off the Taliban as part of a large-scale protection racket that allows the supplies through unharmed.) This contract is, in turn, part of a $2.1 billion Host Nation Trucking contract whose recipients may be deeply involved in extortion and smuggling rackets, and over which the Pentagon reportedly exercises little oversight.
.... And there's one more small contrast to be made when it comes to the finest military in the history of the world: for all the private security guards, mountains of burgers, lakes of gasoline, miles of blast walls, and satchels of cash to pass out to the locals, it's been remarkably unsuccessful in its pacification campaigns against some of the motliest forces of our time. The U.S. military has been fought to something like a draw by relatively modest-sized, relatively lightly armed minority insurgencies that don't even pass muster when it comes to shooting straight. Vast piles of money and vast quantities of materiel have been squandered; equipment by the boatload has been used up; lives have been wasted in profusion; and yet the winners of our wars might turn out to be Iran and China.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Misinformation on Marja battle to mislead US public
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy, uncovers information on the US-led offensive on Marja, in Afghanistan's Helmand Province. The offensive included 7,500 US, NATO, and Afghan troops. In an article titled "Fiction of Marja as a City Was US Information War," Porter makes three major points.
First, "the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by the news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war." In the highly publicized run-up to the battle, US officials described Marja as "a city of 80,000 people." Porter reports that "Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agicultural area covering much of the Helmand River Valley, which covers "125 square miles." The focus of the attack was a location in Marja "where farmers gathered for markets" and included "a mosque and a few shops."
Second, Porter asks, "how did the fiction that Marja is a city of 80,000 get started?" "The idea," he reports, "was passed on to the news media by the US Marines in southern Helmand," and then picked up by the Associated Press and other news media. The story that was more or less repeated was that there were as many as a 1,000 insurgents in the town and that there would be deadly "house to house urban street fighting."
Third, why then was the fiction of an urban Marja perpetrated. Porter's answer can be gleaned from from the last two sentences in the article:
"The Washington Post reported Feb. 22 that the decision to launch the offensive against Marja was intended largely to impress US public opinion with the effectiveness of the US military in Afghanistan" - and how Afghan soldiers are becoming ready to engage the enemy and do their part in the fighting that lies ahead.
"The false impression that Marja was a significant city was an essential part of that message."'
One implication of Porter's reporting is that the US command in Afghanistan - and at the Pentagon - is groping for a military strategy that can convince American elected officials and the American public that pouring more resources into the Afghanistan occupation will eventually be successful or cost-effective. They seem to be making it up as they go. What a snow job.
http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2010/03/08/fiction-of-marjah-as-city.
First, "the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by the news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war." In the highly publicized run-up to the battle, US officials described Marja as "a city of 80,000 people." Porter reports that "Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agicultural area covering much of the Helmand River Valley, which covers "125 square miles." The focus of the attack was a location in Marja "where farmers gathered for markets" and included "a mosque and a few shops."
Second, Porter asks, "how did the fiction that Marja is a city of 80,000 get started?" "The idea," he reports, "was passed on to the news media by the US Marines in southern Helmand," and then picked up by the Associated Press and other news media. The story that was more or less repeated was that there were as many as a 1,000 insurgents in the town and that there would be deadly "house to house urban street fighting."
Third, why then was the fiction of an urban Marja perpetrated. Porter's answer can be gleaned from from the last two sentences in the article:
"The Washington Post reported Feb. 22 that the decision to launch the offensive against Marja was intended largely to impress US public opinion with the effectiveness of the US military in Afghanistan" - and how Afghan soldiers are becoming ready to engage the enemy and do their part in the fighting that lies ahead.
"The false impression that Marja was a significant city was an essential part of that message."'
One implication of Porter's reporting is that the US command in Afghanistan - and at the Pentagon - is groping for a military strategy that can convince American elected officials and the American public that pouring more resources into the Afghanistan occupation will eventually be successful or cost-effective. They seem to be making it up as they go. What a snow job.
http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2010/03/08/fiction-of-marjah-as-city.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
US military has little knowledge of Afghan people, culture, etc.
Published on Thursday, January 7, 2010 by The Nation
Blind in Afghanistan
by Robert Dreyfuss
One of the paradoxes of America's bumbling intervention in Afghanistan is that the United States knows next to nothing about the country it is occupying. Not only that, but America's learning curve is so steep that it will be years, or decades, before our military and our intelligence services finally figure out which end is up -- if they ever do. Which raises the question: how does years-long counterinsurgency learning curve sqaure with President Obama's pledge to start withdrawing troops by July, 2011?
I raise that question because that deadline will be long come and gone and US forces there still won't have any idea what they're doing.
Last October, in a column here entitled "McChrystal Admits: We Don't Understand the Afghans," [1] I quoted fairly extensively from General Stanley McChrystal's leaked, 66-page report on the war, in which he acknowledged that the United States and its allies, under the umbrella of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), are blind to Afghanistan's complexities. In the report, McChrystal wrote:
"ISAF has not sufficiently studied Afghanistan's peoples, whose needs, identities, and grievances vary from province to province and from valley to valley."
And:
"Afghan social, political, economic, and cultural affairs are complex and poorly understood. ISAF does not sufficiently appreciate the dynamics in local communities, nor how the insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power-brokers, and criminality all combine to affect the Afghan population."
Now comes Major General Michael T. Flynn, the deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan, who released a paper through the Center for a New American Security [2]that sharply criticizes America's floundering intelligence effort in Afghanistan. (You can read the entire 28-page document here [3].) In the executive summary, General Flynn writes:
"The paper argues that because the United States has focused the overwhelming majority of collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, our intelligence apparatus still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade."
Flynn brags about the recent creation of the "Information Dominance Center," whose Orwellian title suggests a comprehensive effort to figure out the country that we stumbled into nine years ago. The key quote from Flynn's report says otherwise:
"Ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers – whether aid workers or Afghan soldiers – U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis, and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency."
Meanwhile, a scathing piece in the New York Times [4] notes that the US military is pathetically deprived of the kind of people it needs before it has any idea about what to do in Afghanistan. The Times reports that Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is very concerned about the lack of Afghan experts inside the armed forces:
"In a memo sent last month to the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, Admiral Mullen expressed concern that the services were not consistently providing the 'best and the brightest leaders' for the program's corps, whose members will work in the field and at headquarters.
"'In many cases, the volunteers have been the right people for this very critical program,' Admiral Mullen said in the one-page memo, dated Dec. 14. 'However, I am concerned that this is not the case across the board.'"
To fix the problem, the military is stepping up training, recruiting, and language instruction, but on a timetable that suggests a years-long COIN effort, since the graduates of this effort won't even arrive in Afghanistan until mid-2011, exactly when the withdrawal of US forces is supposed to start:
"The program was conceived as a way to develop a pool of uniformed experts who would spend several years rotating between assignments in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and desk jobs in Washington or other headquarters working on the same regional issues. At the outset, volunteers receive cultural training and 16 weeks of language instruction in Dari, Pashto or Urdu. In time, they are expected to provide a deep bench for assignments that could significantly alter the course of the war.
"The military expects to fill all of the positions by the summer of 2011. The first 304 positions -- including trainers, military planners and advisers to Afghan ministries -- will be assigned in Afghanistan and Pakistan by November 2010."
Chas Freeman, the former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told me years ago, after the US blundered into Iraq, "We haven't invaded Iraq, we've invaded the Iraq of our dreams." What President Bush and his fellow bunglers did was to invade a country it knew virtually nothing about. The same can be said of Afghanistan. In both cases, the nations that America dreamed about have turned into nightmares.
© 2010 The Nation
Robert Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is an investigative journalist in Alexandria, Virginia, specializing in politics and national security. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam [5] and is a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, and Mother Jones.
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/07-3
Blind in Afghanistan
by Robert Dreyfuss
One of the paradoxes of America's bumbling intervention in Afghanistan is that the United States knows next to nothing about the country it is occupying. Not only that, but America's learning curve is so steep that it will be years, or decades, before our military and our intelligence services finally figure out which end is up -- if they ever do. Which raises the question: how does years-long counterinsurgency learning curve sqaure with President Obama's pledge to start withdrawing troops by July, 2011?
I raise that question because that deadline will be long come and gone and US forces there still won't have any idea what they're doing.
Last October, in a column here entitled "McChrystal Admits: We Don't Understand the Afghans," [1] I quoted fairly extensively from General Stanley McChrystal's leaked, 66-page report on the war, in which he acknowledged that the United States and its allies, under the umbrella of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), are blind to Afghanistan's complexities. In the report, McChrystal wrote:
"ISAF has not sufficiently studied Afghanistan's peoples, whose needs, identities, and grievances vary from province to province and from valley to valley."
And:
"Afghan social, political, economic, and cultural affairs are complex and poorly understood. ISAF does not sufficiently appreciate the dynamics in local communities, nor how the insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power-brokers, and criminality all combine to affect the Afghan population."
Now comes Major General Michael T. Flynn, the deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan, who released a paper through the Center for a New American Security [2]that sharply criticizes America's floundering intelligence effort in Afghanistan. (You can read the entire 28-page document here [3].) In the executive summary, General Flynn writes:
"The paper argues that because the United States has focused the overwhelming majority of collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, our intelligence apparatus still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade."
Flynn brags about the recent creation of the "Information Dominance Center," whose Orwellian title suggests a comprehensive effort to figure out the country that we stumbled into nine years ago. The key quote from Flynn's report says otherwise:
"Ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers – whether aid workers or Afghan soldiers – U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis, and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency."
Meanwhile, a scathing piece in the New York Times [4] notes that the US military is pathetically deprived of the kind of people it needs before it has any idea about what to do in Afghanistan. The Times reports that Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is very concerned about the lack of Afghan experts inside the armed forces:
"In a memo sent last month to the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, Admiral Mullen expressed concern that the services were not consistently providing the 'best and the brightest leaders' for the program's corps, whose members will work in the field and at headquarters.
"'In many cases, the volunteers have been the right people for this very critical program,' Admiral Mullen said in the one-page memo, dated Dec. 14. 'However, I am concerned that this is not the case across the board.'"
To fix the problem, the military is stepping up training, recruiting, and language instruction, but on a timetable that suggests a years-long COIN effort, since the graduates of this effort won't even arrive in Afghanistan until mid-2011, exactly when the withdrawal of US forces is supposed to start:
"The program was conceived as a way to develop a pool of uniformed experts who would spend several years rotating between assignments in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and desk jobs in Washington or other headquarters working on the same regional issues. At the outset, volunteers receive cultural training and 16 weeks of language instruction in Dari, Pashto or Urdu. In time, they are expected to provide a deep bench for assignments that could significantly alter the course of the war.
"The military expects to fill all of the positions by the summer of 2011. The first 304 positions -- including trainers, military planners and advisers to Afghan ministries -- will be assigned in Afghanistan and Pakistan by November 2010."
Chas Freeman, the former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told me years ago, after the US blundered into Iraq, "We haven't invaded Iraq, we've invaded the Iraq of our dreams." What President Bush and his fellow bunglers did was to invade a country it knew virtually nothing about. The same can be said of Afghanistan. In both cases, the nations that America dreamed about have turned into nightmares.
© 2010 The Nation
Robert Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is an investigative journalist in Alexandria, Virginia, specializing in politics and national security. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam [5] and is a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, and Mother Jones.
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/07-3
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