Juan Cole offers today his expert comments on and links to recent events and trends in Afghanistan. You can find this information, as well as other recent and past posts, at his award-winning blog, Informed Comment. One implication of today's post by Cole is that the US-led war in Afghanistan is on a downward spiral with respect to winning the hearts and minds of Afghan citizens or with respect to the creation of a legitimate and un-corrupted Afghan government.
Afghan Villagers Protest US Air Strike, as Ballot Fraud Evidence Surfaces
Posted on September 27, 2010 by Juan Cole
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According to the Afghanistan government, about 186 civilians have died in each of the last 6 months in the war. (Other studies suggest the bulk of them are killed in Taliban attacks).
While it is true that some 300 civilians were killed in Iraq in August, or nearly twice the Afghan toll, earlier in 2010 the toll there was on the order of 200 a month. That is, Afghanistan violence is creeping up toward Iraq levels.
Past 6 months in Afghanistan according to Ministry of Interior spokesman, Zemarai Bahsari (Tolo News):
Insurgent attacks:
4012 Civilians killed:
1119 Civilians wounded:
2473 Police killed:
959 Police wounded:
1345 Insurgents killed:
3098 Insurgents arrested:
2800 Insurgents wounded:
632....
Lara Logan’s report on CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday struck me as highly pessimistic and as supporting with its footage the reality of these grim statistics.
One of her stories was about going out to a village with an American officer and his men. They found that the village had turned against them and would not talk to them. Then on the way back they were attacked and seemed barely to get out of it alive. It sounded to me like the surrounding countryside was full of such dangerous villages, and that the previously safe village had turned deadly strikes me as a bad sign. The officeer admits that he controls perhaps 18 sq. kilometers of the 300 sq. km. for which he is responsible; the rest is in Taliban hands and there are many villages to which he cannot go. Logan points out that the datum is astonishing. I would have said depressing.
Andrew Bacevich slams Bob Woodward for indulging in Washington salon gossip in his new book on the Afghanistan war, instead of asking the hard questions of an investigative reporter about what in the world we are doing there.
Der Spiegel is reporting that recently Afghan army and police have been boycotting joint patrols with American and German troops in Qunduz Province. The German article is here.
Meanwhile, Aljazeera English is reporting that video evidence is now emerging of ballot fraud in the recent parliamentary elections. This issue has the potential to render the Afghanistan government invalid altogether, which would be a real blow to it in the midst of a hard fought battle against the Taliban.
A recount has been ordered of ballots at voting stations across 7 provinces.
Afghans were not surprised. Before the election, only 36% though that the election would be free, fair and transparent. Some 65 percent of Afghans think Karzai is doing a bad job, and 95 percent of people in Kabul (where he actually rules) think that. Only half say that NATO & US troops make them safer.
According to this Dari Persian newspaper, hundreds of people demonstrated on Saturday in Mehtarlam, Laghman province, over a US-led raid on Masmood village in Alishang district, Laghman Province, that allegedly killed innocent, civilian villagers. The demonstrators chanted anti-American slogans.
NATO initially announced that it had killed 30 insurgents and that no civilians had been in the area.
The governor of Laghman Province, Muhammad Iqbal Azizi, initially denied the villagers’ claims. But on Sunday he met with the villagers and became convinced that 13-14 civilians had in fact been killed in the operation, which had involved 250 NATO, US and Afghanistan army and police personnel.
A provincial council member blamed an overzealous American pilot for the error.
Afghans all across the country are suspicious of the US military presence and have been demonstrating against it in recent weeks. The threat of some Christian crazies in the US to burn the Quran explains some of the failure to win hearts and minds.
Showing posts with label counterinsurgency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label counterinsurgency. Show all posts
Monday, September 27, 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
Thursday, September 9, 2010
High-level study group recommends significant reductions of US troops
Two high-level reports, one from the US, the other from the UK, call for policy options that
would increase the chances of significant reductions on US force levels beginning next summer.
The thrust of the reports, focusing mostly on the US report, is that the US should reduce its ambitions in Afghanistan from nation-building through counterinsurgency (winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people) because it is too costly and ineffective. Rather, the members of the US group, The Afghanistan Study Group, prefer a counter-terrorist approach, involving fewer troops and narrowly targeted at al Qaeda and other violent extremist groups. The goals in this case is one of deterrence and containment and lowered costs. It does not recommend a full withdrawal of US troops, but a reduction in troops and a different strategic goal.
I cite below sections of three articles to provide a sense of what is being reported on this alternative approach of the Afghanistan Study Group.
First, Jim Lobe provides information on the US and UK reports in an article titled “Calls for Change of Afghan Strategy Grow Louder, September 9, 2010. You can find his full report at: http://original.antiwar.com/lobe/2010/09/08/calls-for-change-of-afghan-strategy-grow-louder
“Amid continued high levels of violence and a steady stream of reports of high-level government corruption in Kabul, a growing number of foreign policy specialists are urging President Barack Obama to reconsider his counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan.
“In a new report released here Wednesday, a bipartisan group of some three dozen former senior officials, academics, and policy analysts argued that the administration’s ambitious "nation-building" efforts in Afghanistan are costing too much in U.S. blood and treasure and that, in any event, "prospects for success are dim."
“Calling for an accelerated timetable for reducing the U.S. military presence there, the "Afghanistan Study Group," which also urged intensified efforts to reach a negotiated solution with the Pashtun-based Taliban, echoed many of the points made in the latest strategic survey which was released by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London Tuesday.
“‘(A)s the military surge reaches its peak and begins to wind down, it is necessary and advisable for outside powers to move to a containment and deterrence policy to deal with the international terrorist threat from the Afghan/Pakistan border regions,’ said IISS’s director-general, John Chipman, in introducing this year’s report.
"At present the COIN strategy is too ambitious, too removed from the core security goals that need to be met, and too sapping of diplomatic and military energies needed both in the region and elsewhere," he noted. "(F)or Western states to be pinned down militarily and psychologically in Afghanistan will not be in the service of their wider political and security interests."
[….]
Second, here are sections from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s article, “Finding a Way Out of Afghanistan.” The full article can be accessed at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/08-5
[....]
“At a moment when the administration and too many members of Congress have failed to explore alternatives to Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy, the importance of this clear and cogent [bipartisan] report can't be overstated.
“The report offers a thorough analysis of why and how we must dramatically reduce America's footprint in our nation's longest and most expensive war. Although the war is justified by its proponents as an effort to eradicate al-Qaeda, the report notes that "there are only some 400 hard-core al-Qaeda members remaining in the entire Af-Pak theater, most of them hiding in Pakistan's northwest provinces."
“Meanwhile, the war costs U.S. taxpayers approximately $100 billion a year -- about seven times Afghanistan's annual gross domestic product of $14 billion and more than the cost of the Obama administration's health-care plan. Considering that price tag alongside the number of troops killed or seriously wounded, the report concludes that "the U.S. interests at stake in Afghanistan do not warrant this level of sacrifice."
[….]
Third, Steve Clemons offers further views in his article, “Rethinking US War in Afghanistan, which can be found at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/08-8
[….]
“Far from admitting defeat, the report acknowledges the many limitations of a military solution in a region where U.S. interests lie in political stability. The group's recommended policy seeks to shift resources to focus on U.S. foreign policy strengths in concert with the international community to promote reconciliation among the warring parties, advance economic development and encourage region-wide diplomatic engagement.
[….]
“….The group's core recommendations do not include full, immediate troop withdrawal, but rather a decrease in the military footprint in Afghanistan.
“The five key recommendations are:
1. Emphasize power sharing and political inclusion. Washington should fast-track a peace process designed to decentralize power within Afghanistan and encourage a power-sharing balance among the principal parties.
2. Downsize and eventually end military operations in Southern Afghanistan and reduce the U.S. military footprint. The United States should draw down its military presence - which radicalizes Pashtuns and aids Taliban recruitment.
3. Focus security efforts on Al Qaeda and domestic security. Special forces, intelligence assets and other U.S. capabilities should continue to seek out and target known Al Qaeda cells in the region. They can be ready to act should Al Qaeda attempt to relocate elsewhere or to build new training facilities. In addition, part of the savings from our drawdown should be reallocated to bolster U.S. domestic security efforts and to track nuclear weapons globally.
4. Encourage economic development. Because destitute states can become incubators for terrorism, drug and human trafficking and other illicit activities, efforts at reconciliation should be paired with an internationally led effort to develop Afghanistan's economy.
5. Engage regional and global stakeholders in a diplomatic effort designed to guarantee Afghan neutrality and foster regional stability. Despite their considerable differences, neighboring states, such as India, Pakistan, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, share a common interest in preventing Afghanistan from being dominated by any single power or from being a permanently failed state that exports instability.
[….]
“Washington is now spending more on Afghanistan - and failing in its efforts - than the entire annual cost of the new U.S. health insurance program. This is money that could be used to better counter global terrorist threats far away from Afghanistan, reduce the $1.4 trillion annual deficit, repair and modernize a large portion of U.S. infrastructure, radically enhance U.S. educational investment, launch a massive new Manhattan Project-like effort for energy alternatives research - or put approximately 2 million Americans back to work.
“Thousands of American and allied personnel have been killed or gravely wounded. Too many innocent Afghans and Pakistanis have become victims - assuring unpredictable blowback in the years ahead.
“The U.S. interests at stake in Afghanistan do not warrant this level of sacrifice.
[….]
would increase the chances of significant reductions on US force levels beginning next summer.
The thrust of the reports, focusing mostly on the US report, is that the US should reduce its ambitions in Afghanistan from nation-building through counterinsurgency (winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people) because it is too costly and ineffective. Rather, the members of the US group, The Afghanistan Study Group, prefer a counter-terrorist approach, involving fewer troops and narrowly targeted at al Qaeda and other violent extremist groups. The goals in this case is one of deterrence and containment and lowered costs. It does not recommend a full withdrawal of US troops, but a reduction in troops and a different strategic goal.
I cite below sections of three articles to provide a sense of what is being reported on this alternative approach of the Afghanistan Study Group.
First, Jim Lobe provides information on the US and UK reports in an article titled “Calls for Change of Afghan Strategy Grow Louder, September 9, 2010. You can find his full report at: http://original.antiwar.com/lobe/2010/09/08/calls-for-change-of-afghan-strategy-grow-louder
“Amid continued high levels of violence and a steady stream of reports of high-level government corruption in Kabul, a growing number of foreign policy specialists are urging President Barack Obama to reconsider his counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan.
“In a new report released here Wednesday, a bipartisan group of some three dozen former senior officials, academics, and policy analysts argued that the administration’s ambitious "nation-building" efforts in Afghanistan are costing too much in U.S. blood and treasure and that, in any event, "prospects for success are dim."
“Calling for an accelerated timetable for reducing the U.S. military presence there, the "Afghanistan Study Group," which also urged intensified efforts to reach a negotiated solution with the Pashtun-based Taliban, echoed many of the points made in the latest strategic survey which was released by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London Tuesday.
“‘(A)s the military surge reaches its peak and begins to wind down, it is necessary and advisable for outside powers to move to a containment and deterrence policy to deal with the international terrorist threat from the Afghan/Pakistan border regions,’ said IISS’s director-general, John Chipman, in introducing this year’s report.
"At present the COIN strategy is too ambitious, too removed from the core security goals that need to be met, and too sapping of diplomatic and military energies needed both in the region and elsewhere," he noted. "(F)or Western states to be pinned down militarily and psychologically in Afghanistan will not be in the service of their wider political and security interests."
[….]
Second, here are sections from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s article, “Finding a Way Out of Afghanistan.” The full article can be accessed at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/08-5
[....]
“At a moment when the administration and too many members of Congress have failed to explore alternatives to Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy, the importance of this clear and cogent [bipartisan] report can't be overstated.
“The report offers a thorough analysis of why and how we must dramatically reduce America's footprint in our nation's longest and most expensive war. Although the war is justified by its proponents as an effort to eradicate al-Qaeda, the report notes that "there are only some 400 hard-core al-Qaeda members remaining in the entire Af-Pak theater, most of them hiding in Pakistan's northwest provinces."
“Meanwhile, the war costs U.S. taxpayers approximately $100 billion a year -- about seven times Afghanistan's annual gross domestic product of $14 billion and more than the cost of the Obama administration's health-care plan. Considering that price tag alongside the number of troops killed or seriously wounded, the report concludes that "the U.S. interests at stake in Afghanistan do not warrant this level of sacrifice."
[….]
Third, Steve Clemons offers further views in his article, “Rethinking US War in Afghanistan, which can be found at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/08-8
[….]
“Far from admitting defeat, the report acknowledges the many limitations of a military solution in a region where U.S. interests lie in political stability. The group's recommended policy seeks to shift resources to focus on U.S. foreign policy strengths in concert with the international community to promote reconciliation among the warring parties, advance economic development and encourage region-wide diplomatic engagement.
[….]
“….The group's core recommendations do not include full, immediate troop withdrawal, but rather a decrease in the military footprint in Afghanistan.
“The five key recommendations are:
1. Emphasize power sharing and political inclusion. Washington should fast-track a peace process designed to decentralize power within Afghanistan and encourage a power-sharing balance among the principal parties.
2. Downsize and eventually end military operations in Southern Afghanistan and reduce the U.S. military footprint. The United States should draw down its military presence - which radicalizes Pashtuns and aids Taliban recruitment.
3. Focus security efforts on Al Qaeda and domestic security. Special forces, intelligence assets and other U.S. capabilities should continue to seek out and target known Al Qaeda cells in the region. They can be ready to act should Al Qaeda attempt to relocate elsewhere or to build new training facilities. In addition, part of the savings from our drawdown should be reallocated to bolster U.S. domestic security efforts and to track nuclear weapons globally.
4. Encourage economic development. Because destitute states can become incubators for terrorism, drug and human trafficking and other illicit activities, efforts at reconciliation should be paired with an internationally led effort to develop Afghanistan's economy.
5. Engage regional and global stakeholders in a diplomatic effort designed to guarantee Afghan neutrality and foster regional stability. Despite their considerable differences, neighboring states, such as India, Pakistan, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, share a common interest in preventing Afghanistan from being dominated by any single power or from being a permanently failed state that exports instability.
[….]
“Washington is now spending more on Afghanistan - and failing in its efforts - than the entire annual cost of the new U.S. health insurance program. This is money that could be used to better counter global terrorist threats far away from Afghanistan, reduce the $1.4 trillion annual deficit, repair and modernize a large portion of U.S. infrastructure, radically enhance U.S. educational investment, launch a massive new Manhattan Project-like effort for energy alternatives research - or put approximately 2 million Americans back to work.
“Thousands of American and allied personnel have been killed or gravely wounded. Too many innocent Afghans and Pakistanis have become victims - assuring unpredictable blowback in the years ahead.
“The U.S. interests at stake in Afghanistan do not warrant this level of sacrifice.
[….]
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Changing course in Afghanistan
Getting Out of Afghanistan
Editorial by The Nation magazine editors, published in the August 16/23, 2010, issue of the magazine. [See URL at the end of the post.] In what follows, I offer a summary of what I see as their principal points.
The editors of The Nation magazine have given up on President Obama’s Afghanistan policy. Unless he changes the policy, they think, his chances of reelection are diminished.
More troops, more special forces, more bombing and drones, the continuing occupation overall have not changed the corrupt government structure that is “unable to deliver the most basic services.” The Afghan people want the occupation to end. Continuing civilian deaths and casualties only deepen the hostility toward the occupation.
Further, a growing number of Americans also question the war/occupation, with its rising costs, troop casualties, and no clear measure of success. The US-led attack on Marja in Helmand province last spring, with overwhelming forces, failed to keep the Taliban from returning to the district. Looking to the future, the editors note importantly “...Petraeus’s proposal for building village defense forces is fraught with problems, not the least of which is that it would empower local militias and warlords and add more fuel to the civil war.”
“Time is not on our side,” the editors maintain. With rising Afghan casualties, the Taliban have grown and this will continue. “Even if we are able to eliminate many Taliban leaders, younger and more radical ones may take their place.” Therefore: “Better to negotiate with the ones we know today than those who may be radicalized by the fighting to come.”
“The war is expensive,” and there are many unmet and growing need at home. “A drawdown of forces would allow Obama to stop the loss of American and Afghan lives, reduce the drain on the federal budget and redeploy resources to create jobs and rebuild the battered US economy.”
There is, additionally, “uncertainty over whether the administration will adhere to the July 2011 drawdown....[Thus] “In June a majority of House Democrats supported legislation demanding an exit strategy and a timetable for withdrawal, and in late July the number of Democrats voting against the supplemental funding for the war tripled, to more than 100....”
What then should Obama do? “It would be better...for the administration to clear the air with a firm timetable for withdrawal and redirect its efforts toward regional diplomacy....” Such a changed course of policy could also improve the political chances of Obama in 2012.
If the editors are right, what then is spurring Obama, so far, in the wrong direction, toward an escalation of the war/occupation? Like so many US Democratic presidents before him, Obama may be stalled in the failed Afghan policy out of fear of being criticized for “losing a war.” For a detailed and insider’s view of how this fear applied to Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, see Daniel Ellsberg’s book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
Then there is also the pervasive influence of the military-industrial complex, the concern of losing influence in any part of an oil-rich region, and the growing influence of China.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/38031/getting-out-afghanistan
Editorial by The Nation magazine editors, published in the August 16/23, 2010, issue of the magazine. [See URL at the end of the post.] In what follows, I offer a summary of what I see as their principal points.
The editors of The Nation magazine have given up on President Obama’s Afghanistan policy. Unless he changes the policy, they think, his chances of reelection are diminished.
More troops, more special forces, more bombing and drones, the continuing occupation overall have not changed the corrupt government structure that is “unable to deliver the most basic services.” The Afghan people want the occupation to end. Continuing civilian deaths and casualties only deepen the hostility toward the occupation.
Further, a growing number of Americans also question the war/occupation, with its rising costs, troop casualties, and no clear measure of success. The US-led attack on Marja in Helmand province last spring, with overwhelming forces, failed to keep the Taliban from returning to the district. Looking to the future, the editors note importantly “...Petraeus’s proposal for building village defense forces is fraught with problems, not the least of which is that it would empower local militias and warlords and add more fuel to the civil war.”
“Time is not on our side,” the editors maintain. With rising Afghan casualties, the Taliban have grown and this will continue. “Even if we are able to eliminate many Taliban leaders, younger and more radical ones may take their place.” Therefore: “Better to negotiate with the ones we know today than those who may be radicalized by the fighting to come.”
“The war is expensive,” and there are many unmet and growing need at home. “A drawdown of forces would allow Obama to stop the loss of American and Afghan lives, reduce the drain on the federal budget and redeploy resources to create jobs and rebuild the battered US economy.”
There is, additionally, “uncertainty over whether the administration will adhere to the July 2011 drawdown....[Thus] “In June a majority of House Democrats supported legislation demanding an exit strategy and a timetable for withdrawal, and in late July the number of Democrats voting against the supplemental funding for the war tripled, to more than 100....”
What then should Obama do? “It would be better...for the administration to clear the air with a firm timetable for withdrawal and redirect its efforts toward regional diplomacy....” Such a changed course of policy could also improve the political chances of Obama in 2012.
If the editors are right, what then is spurring Obama, so far, in the wrong direction, toward an escalation of the war/occupation? Like so many US Democratic presidents before him, Obama may be stalled in the failed Afghan policy out of fear of being criticized for “losing a war.” For a detailed and insider’s view of how this fear applied to Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, see Daniel Ellsberg’s book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
Then there is also the pervasive influence of the military-industrial complex, the concern of losing influence in any part of an oil-rich region, and the growing influence of China.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/38031/getting-out-afghanistan
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Obstacles to a settlement in Afghanistan
The following article, orginally from Guardian newspaper online, was included in short commentaries and a list of abridged articles from various sites on today's Just Foreign Policy website: http://justforeignpolicy.org, July 20-10.
One of the central points of the article, expressing the views of various experienced and knowledgeable analysts, is that the US-led occupation cannot succeed. Why? The insurgency is too strong, the Afghanistan state is in shambles, and the sanctuaries to which insurgents can retreat and regroup are plentiful across the border in Pakistan. In addition, the US-led counterinsurgency is focused on Kandahar and Helmand provinces, where the Taliban have their greatest influence. Counterinsurgency is not effective in this context.
Some analysts now think that there is no constructive point in extending the conflict. In the end, there will be a settlement that allows the Taliban to control southern provinces, while warlords will dominate elsewhere in the country. There is not much attention paid in this discussion to "democracy." US and/or UN forces would, it's suggested, keep the Taliban confined in the south. Pakistan could play a vital role in constraining the Taliban. If there is a settlement of this kind in the not-to-distant future, it would leave little room for democratic participation, secular education, or women's rights.
Taliban talks: the obstacles to a peace deal in AfghanistanJon Boone, Guardian, 19 July 2010 20.02 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/19/taliban-talks-obstacles-peace-deal-aghanistanKabul -
[...]
Organisers have attempted to attach great historic symbolism to the half-day conference. Of the nine international conferences on Afghanistan held in the last nine years, this is the first to actually convene inside Afghanistan. But even diplomats involved in the five-hour event roll their eyes when asked whether it is going to produce any dramatic changes in policy.
The communique - already leaked in draft form to the media - focuses on efforts to build up the Afghan state by making it more effective, better funded and less corrupt. But on the fringes of the conference the hot topic is a subject that is barely mentioned in the draft and until recently eschewed by the US administration; making peace with the Taliban.
That's because despite the fact that the Afghan government is finally strong enough to organise its own conference, the prospect of that government ultimately prevailing over an ever stronger insurgency has never looked more bleak. At an evening reception a few days before the conference, a senior European diplomat said glumly: "I cannot think of a single reason to die for Afghanistan."The country, which has suffered almost 30 years of war of one form or the other, is a problem for its neighbours, not for Europe, he said. It was a different a few years ago, when most people still thought victory was possible, he said. But now, pessimism has taken over.
"Afghanistan is in a state of freefall and I don't think strategy proposals announced at a one-day conference will solve that," said Candace Rondeaux, a senior analyst from the International Crisis Group. A paper by the Afghanistan NGO Security Office articulated what most people believe: that the counter-insurgency programme cannot win. It sees this summer's surge of US troops in southern Afghanistan as the "grand finale" of a western intervention which is looking to wind itself up.
The biggest problem is that what Nato soldiers are trying to do cannot be achieved on the time frames of the "political clocks" ticking down in Washington and its allied cities. In a recent off-record briefing, one of the most senior US soldiers in Afghanistan pointed out that no counter-insurgency has prevailed against an enemy with sanctuaries of the size the Taliban and other groups enjoy over the border in Pakistan.
No wonder then that most people's thoughts, including Barack Obama's administration, are turning to some sort of negotiated settlement with the insurgents. It is now part of the conventional wisdom in Kabul that the west will have to make compromises with insurgents that once would have been unthinkable, including dropping efforts for women to be given a more equal place in Afghan society. Few people put it quite as bluntly as Francesc Vendrell, a retired senior diplomat who served first the UN in Afghanistan before 2001 and then worked as the top representative of the European Union in Kabul. He recently told the Guardian that the current military effort to push the Taliban out of Kandahar and Helmand was particularly foolish because these are precisely the areas that, in his view, will have to be handed over to Taliban control.
Such a handover of the south could be achieved, he argued, through constitutional reform that would decentralise power from Kabul. In a trice, the south would be ceded to Taliban control, under the pretence of local democracy. Meanwhile, the north would similarly be handed back to the old warlords, the former strongmen who rose to prominence during the 1980s resistance to the Soviet occupation and its violent aftermath.
[...]
European diplomats say that whatever the latest thinking in the White House might be, David Petraeus, the new US commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan seems interested in making the fight against the Taliban last as long as possible. After years of refusing to contemplate even the most secret of discussions with a movement viewed as partly responsible for the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the Americans have precious few ways of reaching out to the other side.
A security official who has in the past been involved in efforts to reach out to the Taliban bemoaned the fact that so many years had been wasted, pointing out that in Northern Ireland the British government had contacts "from the beginning".
Instead of a well-organised effort to talk to the Taliban, there is currently an extraordinary free-for-all, with a whole range of people and countries trying to make contacts with the quetta shura, the Taliban's leadership council. They include Karzai's elder brother Qayoum, and even Burhanuddin Rabbani, a northern power broker and former president. Countries interested in getting in on the act are the UK, Germany, Turkey and Indonesia.
[...]
One of the central points of the article, expressing the views of various experienced and knowledgeable analysts, is that the US-led occupation cannot succeed. Why? The insurgency is too strong, the Afghanistan state is in shambles, and the sanctuaries to which insurgents can retreat and regroup are plentiful across the border in Pakistan. In addition, the US-led counterinsurgency is focused on Kandahar and Helmand provinces, where the Taliban have their greatest influence. Counterinsurgency is not effective in this context.
Some analysts now think that there is no constructive point in extending the conflict. In the end, there will be a settlement that allows the Taliban to control southern provinces, while warlords will dominate elsewhere in the country. There is not much attention paid in this discussion to "democracy." US and/or UN forces would, it's suggested, keep the Taliban confined in the south. Pakistan could play a vital role in constraining the Taliban. If there is a settlement of this kind in the not-to-distant future, it would leave little room for democratic participation, secular education, or women's rights.
Taliban talks: the obstacles to a peace deal in AfghanistanJon Boone, Guardian, 19 July 2010 20.02 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/19/taliban-talks-obstacles-peace-deal-aghanistanKabul -
[...]
Organisers have attempted to attach great historic symbolism to the half-day conference. Of the nine international conferences on Afghanistan held in the last nine years, this is the first to actually convene inside Afghanistan. But even diplomats involved in the five-hour event roll their eyes when asked whether it is going to produce any dramatic changes in policy.
The communique - already leaked in draft form to the media - focuses on efforts to build up the Afghan state by making it more effective, better funded and less corrupt. But on the fringes of the conference the hot topic is a subject that is barely mentioned in the draft and until recently eschewed by the US administration; making peace with the Taliban.
That's because despite the fact that the Afghan government is finally strong enough to organise its own conference, the prospect of that government ultimately prevailing over an ever stronger insurgency has never looked more bleak. At an evening reception a few days before the conference, a senior European diplomat said glumly: "I cannot think of a single reason to die for Afghanistan."The country, which has suffered almost 30 years of war of one form or the other, is a problem for its neighbours, not for Europe, he said. It was a different a few years ago, when most people still thought victory was possible, he said. But now, pessimism has taken over.
"Afghanistan is in a state of freefall and I don't think strategy proposals announced at a one-day conference will solve that," said Candace Rondeaux, a senior analyst from the International Crisis Group. A paper by the Afghanistan NGO Security Office articulated what most people believe: that the counter-insurgency programme cannot win. It sees this summer's surge of US troops in southern Afghanistan as the "grand finale" of a western intervention which is looking to wind itself up.
The biggest problem is that what Nato soldiers are trying to do cannot be achieved on the time frames of the "political clocks" ticking down in Washington and its allied cities. In a recent off-record briefing, one of the most senior US soldiers in Afghanistan pointed out that no counter-insurgency has prevailed against an enemy with sanctuaries of the size the Taliban and other groups enjoy over the border in Pakistan.
No wonder then that most people's thoughts, including Barack Obama's administration, are turning to some sort of negotiated settlement with the insurgents. It is now part of the conventional wisdom in Kabul that the west will have to make compromises with insurgents that once would have been unthinkable, including dropping efforts for women to be given a more equal place in Afghan society. Few people put it quite as bluntly as Francesc Vendrell, a retired senior diplomat who served first the UN in Afghanistan before 2001 and then worked as the top representative of the European Union in Kabul. He recently told the Guardian that the current military effort to push the Taliban out of Kandahar and Helmand was particularly foolish because these are precisely the areas that, in his view, will have to be handed over to Taliban control.
Such a handover of the south could be achieved, he argued, through constitutional reform that would decentralise power from Kabul. In a trice, the south would be ceded to Taliban control, under the pretence of local democracy. Meanwhile, the north would similarly be handed back to the old warlords, the former strongmen who rose to prominence during the 1980s resistance to the Soviet occupation and its violent aftermath.
[...]
European diplomats say that whatever the latest thinking in the White House might be, David Petraeus, the new US commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan seems interested in making the fight against the Taliban last as long as possible. After years of refusing to contemplate even the most secret of discussions with a movement viewed as partly responsible for the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the Americans have precious few ways of reaching out to the other side.
A security official who has in the past been involved in efforts to reach out to the Taliban bemoaned the fact that so many years had been wasted, pointing out that in Northern Ireland the British government had contacts "from the beginning".
Instead of a well-organised effort to talk to the Taliban, there is currently an extraordinary free-for-all, with a whole range of people and countries trying to make contacts with the quetta shura, the Taliban's leadership council. They include Karzai's elder brother Qayoum, and even Burhanuddin Rabbani, a northern power broker and former president. Countries interested in getting in on the act are the UK, Germany, Turkey and Indonesia.
[...]
Neither counterinsurgency nor US occupation under any guise works
Tom Engelhardt writes in the article below that counterinsurgency is not advancing US goals in Afghanistan. Along with special forces operations, counterinsurgency kills too many civilians, fails to win the "hearts and minds" of most Afghanis, and puts many Afghanis in the intolerable position of having to choose between the occupation, with all of its lethal manifestations, or the Taliban, often led by foreigners from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or elsewhere in the Middle East.
Before turning to Engelhardt's article, I want to recommend and pull a quote from his new book titled The American Way of War: How Bush's War Became Obama's. It is a collection of essays that originally appeared on TomDispatch.com. On p. 187, Engelhardt captures some of the failures of the US-led occuation where he writes:
"If it weren't so grim, despite all the upbeat benchmarks and encouraging worlds in the president's speech [i.e., Obama's speech], this would certainly qualify as Monty Python in Afghanistan. After all, three cabinet ministers and twelve former ministers are under investigation in Afghanistan on corruption charges. And that barely scratches the surface of the problems in a country that one Russian expert recently referred to as an 'international drug firm." where at least one-third of the gross national produce comes from the drug trade. The Taliban now reportedly take a cut of the billions of dollars in US development aid flowing into the county, much of which is otherwise squandered, and of the American money that goes into 'protecting' the convoys that bring supplies to US troops throughout the country. One out of every four Afghan soldiers has quit or deserted the Afghan National Army, while the ill-paid, largely illiterate, hapless Afghan police with their 'well-deserved reputation for stealing and extorting bribes,' not to speak of a drug abuse rate estimated at 15 percent, as it's politely put, 'years away from a functioning independently. Meanwhile, the insurgency is spreading to new areas of the country and reviving it in others."
The article.
Advice for General Petraeus on the Rules of Engagement:It’s Neither/Nor, Not Either/Or
Guest Editorial: Tom Engelhardt, author of the recently-published The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books, July 2010) and editor of Tomdispatch.com, writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment:
Posted on Juan Cole's blog, Informed Comment, July 20, 2010
Recently, we’ve been flooded with news stories and debate about the “rules of engagement” for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Now-discredited war commander General Stanley McChrystal, we’ve been told, instituted fiercely restrictive rules of engagement to lessen the number of Afghan civilians who died or were wounded at the hands of American forces, and to “protect the people,” just as the “hearts and minds” part of counterinsurgency doctrine tells us should be done.
Specifically, he made it far harder for U.S. troops under fire to call in air strikes or artillery support if civilians might possibly be in the vicinity of any firefight. Grumbling about this among those troops, according to Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter whose piece took McChrystal down, had already reached something close to fever pitch by the time the general and his special ops cronies began mouthing off in frustration in Paris.
Articles in which troops or mid-level officers claim to be “handcuffed by our chain of command” are now almost as common as implicitly critical stories about the dismal failure of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. General David Petraeus, on being given command of the war effort, turned immediately to those rules of engagement, promising not to change them, but to thoroughly review and “clarify” their “implementation and interpretation.”
What this means, we don’t yet know, but we should know one thing: the present discussion of counterinsurgency and of those rules of engagement makes little sense. They are being presented as a kind of either/or option — kill us or kill them — when it would be more accurate to say that it’s a neither/nor situation.
After all, in another, less protective part of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency war, he was bulking up special operations forces in the country and sending them out on night raids searching for Taliban mid-level leaders. These raids continue to caused a cascade of civilian casualties, as well as an increasing uproar of protest among outraged Afghans. In addition, even with McChrystal’s tight rules for normal grunts, stories about the deaths of civilians, private security guards, and Afghan soldiers from air strikes, misplaced artillery fire, checkpoint shootings, and those night raids continue to pour out, followed by the usual American initial denials and then formulaic apologies for loss of life.
Whatever the rules, civilians continue to die in striking numbers at the hands of guerrillas and of American forces, and here’s the thing: tighten those rules, loosen them, fiddle with them, bend them, evade them, cancel them — at some level it’s all still neither/nor, not either/or. In any counterinsurgency war where guerrillas, faced with vastly superior fire power, fight from cover and work hard to blend in with the populace, where the counterinsurgents are foreigners about as alien from the land they are to “protect” as humanly possible, and fight, in part, from on high or based on “intelligence” from others about a world they can’t fathom, civilians will die. Lots of civilians. Continually. Whatever rules you make up. The issue isn’t the “rules of engagement.” No rules of engagement will alter the fact that civilian death is the central fact of such wars.
It’s time to stop talking about those rules and start talking about the madness of making counterinsurgency the American way of war. It wasn’t always so. Not so long ago, after all, it was considered a scandal that, post-Vietnam, the U.S. military rebuilt its all-volunteer force without rewriting or reconsidering its counterinsurgency manual. The high command, in fact, let counterinsurgency go to hell, exactly where they thought it deserved to rest in peace, and were focused instead on preventing Soviet armies from pouring through Germany’s Fulda Gap (something they were conveniently never likely to do). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military would continue to focus for some years on Colin Powell’s doctrine of overwhelming force, decisive victory, and quick exit.
Then, of course, Iraq happened and decisive victory (“mission accomplished”) soured into decisive disaster. It was at this moment, in 2006, that Generals Petraeus and James “Mad Dog” Mattis (now respectively Afghan war commander and head of Centcom) dusted off the old, failed Vietnam-era counterinsurgency doctrine and made it sexy again. They oversaw the writing of a whole new guidebook for the Army and Marines, 472 pages of advice that even got its own (university press) trade edition, and became the toast of Washington and the Pentagon.
So, after being buried and disinterred, COIN, as its known, is once again the reigning monarch of American war-fighting doctrines as the Pentagon prepares for one, two, three Iraqs or Afghanistans — and the scandal is that (surprise, surprise!) it’s not working. This should, of course, hardly have been news. The history of counterinsurgency warfare isn’t exactly a success story, or our present COINistas wouldn’t have taken their doctrine largely from failed counterinsurgency wars in Vietnam and Algeria, among other places. It’s not so encouraging, after all, when the main examples you have before you are defeats.
Our generals might have better spent their time studying the first modern war of this sort. It took place in early nineteenth century Spain when the Islamic fundamentalists of that moment — Catholic peasants and their priests — managed to stop Napoleon’s army (the high-tech force of the moment) in its tracks. Just check out Goya’s “Disasters of War” series, if you want to see how grim it was. And it’s never gotten much better.
Looked at historically, counterinsurgency was largely the war-fighting option of empires, of powers that wanted to keep occupying their restive colonies forever and a day. Of course, past empires didn’t spend much time worrying about “protecting the people.” They knew such wars were brutal. That was their point. As George Orwell summed such campaigns up in 1946 in his essay “Politics and the English Language”: “Defenseless villagers are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set afire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” The rise of anti-colonialism and nationalism after World War II should have made counterinsurgency history. Certainly, there is no place for occupations and the wars that go with them in the twenty-first century.
Unfortunately, none of this has been obvious to Washington or our leading generals. Of course, if they can rewrite the Army’s counterinsurgency manual for a new century, any of us can, so let me offer my one-line rewrite of their 472 pages. It’s simple and guaranteed to save trees as well as lives: “When it comes to counterinsurgency, don’t do it.”
—-Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books),
Recently, we’ve been flooded with news stories and debate about the “rules of engagement” for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Now-discredited war commander General Stanley McChrystal, we’ve been told, instituted fiercely restrictive rules of engagement to lessen the number of Afghan civilians who died or were wounded at the hands of American forces, and to “protect the people,” just as the “hearts and minds” part of counterinsurgency doctrine tells us should be done. Specifically, he made it far harder for U.S. troops under fire to call in air strikes or artillery support if civilians might possibly be in the vicinity of any firefight. Grumbling about this among those troops, according to Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter whose piece took McChrystal down, had already reached something close to fever pitch by the time the general and his special ops cronies began mouthing off in frustration in Paris.
Articles in which troops or mid-level officers claim to be “handcuffed by our chain of command” are now almost as common as implicitly critical stories about the dismal failure of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. General David Petraeus, on being given command of the war effort, turned immediately to those rules of engagement, promising not to change them, but to thoroughly review and “clarify” their “implementation and interpretation.”
What this means, we don’t yet know, but we should know one thing: the present discussion of counterinsurgency and of those rules of engagement makes little sense. They are being presented as a kind of either/or option — kill us or kill them — when it would be more accurate to say that it’s a neither/nor situation.
After all, in another, less protective part of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency war, he was bulking up special operations forces in the country and sending them out on night raids searching for Taliban mid-level leaders. These raids continue to caused a cascade of civilian casualties, as well as an increasing uproar of protest among outraged Afghans. In addition, even with McChrystal’s tight rules for normal grunts, stories about the deaths of civilians, private security guards, and Afghan soldiers from air strikes, misplaced artillery fire, checkpoint shootings, and those night raids continue to pour out, followed by the usual American initial denials and then formulaic apologies for loss of life.
Whatever the rules, civilians continue to die in striking numbers at the hands of guerrillas and of American forces, and here’s the thing: tighten those rules, loosen them, fiddle with them, bend them, evade them, cancel them — at some level it’s all still neither/nor, not either/or. In any counterinsurgency war where guerrillas, faced with vastly superior fire power, fight from cover and work hard to blend in with the populace, where the counterinsurgents are foreigners about as alien from the land they are to “protect” as humanly possible, and fight, in part, from on high or based on “intelligence” from others about a world they can’t fathom, civilians will die. Lots of civilians. Continually. Whatever rules you make up. The issue isn’t the “rules of engagement.” No rules of engagement will alter the fact that civilian death is the central fact of such wars.
It’s time to stop talking about those rules and start talking about the madness of making counterinsurgency the American way of war. It wasn’t always so. Not so long ago, after all, it was considered a scandal that, post-Vietnam, the U.S. military rebuilt its all-volunteer force without rewriting or reconsidering its counterinsurgency manual. The high command, in fact, let counterinsurgency go to hell, exactly where they thought it deserved to rest in peace, and were focused instead on preventing Soviet armies from pouring through Germany’s Fulda Gap (something they were conveniently never likely to do). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military would continue to focus for some years on Colin Powell’s doctrine of overwhelming force, decisive victory, and quick exit.
Then, of course, Iraq happened and decisive victory (“mission accomplished”) soured into decisive disaster. It was at this moment, in 2006, that Generals Petraeus and James “Mad Dog” Mattis (now respectively Afghan war commander and head of Centcom) dusted off the old, failed Vietnam-era counterinsurgency doctrine and made it sexy again. They oversaw the writing of a whole new guidebook for the Army and Marines, 472 pages of advice that even got its own (university press) trade edition, and became the toast of Washington and the Pentagon.
So, after being buried and disinterred, COIN, as its known, is once again the reigning monarch of American war-fighting doctrines as the Pentagon prepares for one, two, three Iraqs or Afghanistans — and the scandal is that (surprise, surprise!) it’s not working. This should, of course, hardly have been news. The history of counterinsurgency warfare isn’t exactly a success story, or our present COINistas wouldn’t have taken their doctrine largely from failed counterinsurgency wars in Vietnam and Algeria, among other places. It’s not so encouraging, after all, when the main examples you have before you are defeats.
Our generals might have better spent their time studying the first modern war of this sort. It took place in early nineteenth century Spain when the Islamic fundamentalists of that moment — Catholic peasants and their priests — managed to stop Napoleon’s army (the high-tech force of the moment) in its tracks. Just check out Goya’s “Disasters of War” series, if you want to see how grim it was. And it’s never gotten much better.
Looked at historically, counterinsurgency was largely the war-fighting option of empires, of powers that wanted to keep occupying their restive colonies forever and a day. Of course, past empires didn’t spend much time worrying about “protecting the people.” They knew such wars were brutal. That was their point. As George Orwell summed such campaigns up in 1946 in his essay “Politics and the English Language”: “Defenseless villagers are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set afire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” The rise of anti-colonialism and nationalism after World War II should have made counterinsurgency history. Certainly, there is no place for occupations and the wars that go with them in the twenty-first century.
Unfortunately, none of this has been obvious to Washington or our leading generals. Of course, if they can rewrite the Army’s counterinsurgency manual for a new century, any of us can, so let me offer my one-line rewrite of their 472 pages. It’s simple and guaranteed to save trees as well as lives: “When it comes to counterinsurgency, don’t do it.”
—-Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books),
Before turning to Engelhardt's article, I want to recommend and pull a quote from his new book titled The American Way of War: How Bush's War Became Obama's. It is a collection of essays that originally appeared on TomDispatch.com. On p. 187, Engelhardt captures some of the failures of the US-led occuation where he writes:
"If it weren't so grim, despite all the upbeat benchmarks and encouraging worlds in the president's speech [i.e., Obama's speech], this would certainly qualify as Monty Python in Afghanistan. After all, three cabinet ministers and twelve former ministers are under investigation in Afghanistan on corruption charges. And that barely scratches the surface of the problems in a country that one Russian expert recently referred to as an 'international drug firm." where at least one-third of the gross national produce comes from the drug trade. The Taliban now reportedly take a cut of the billions of dollars in US development aid flowing into the county, much of which is otherwise squandered, and of the American money that goes into 'protecting' the convoys that bring supplies to US troops throughout the country. One out of every four Afghan soldiers has quit or deserted the Afghan National Army, while the ill-paid, largely illiterate, hapless Afghan police with their 'well-deserved reputation for stealing and extorting bribes,' not to speak of a drug abuse rate estimated at 15 percent, as it's politely put, 'years away from a functioning independently. Meanwhile, the insurgency is spreading to new areas of the country and reviving it in others."
The article.
Advice for General Petraeus on the Rules of Engagement:It’s Neither/Nor, Not Either/Or
Guest Editorial: Tom Engelhardt, author of the recently-published The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books, July 2010) and editor of Tomdispatch.com, writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment:
Posted on Juan Cole's blog, Informed Comment, July 20, 2010
Recently, we’ve been flooded with news stories and debate about the “rules of engagement” for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Now-discredited war commander General Stanley McChrystal, we’ve been told, instituted fiercely restrictive rules of engagement to lessen the number of Afghan civilians who died or were wounded at the hands of American forces, and to “protect the people,” just as the “hearts and minds” part of counterinsurgency doctrine tells us should be done.
Specifically, he made it far harder for U.S. troops under fire to call in air strikes or artillery support if civilians might possibly be in the vicinity of any firefight. Grumbling about this among those troops, according to Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter whose piece took McChrystal down, had already reached something close to fever pitch by the time the general and his special ops cronies began mouthing off in frustration in Paris.
Articles in which troops or mid-level officers claim to be “handcuffed by our chain of command” are now almost as common as implicitly critical stories about the dismal failure of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. General David Petraeus, on being given command of the war effort, turned immediately to those rules of engagement, promising not to change them, but to thoroughly review and “clarify” their “implementation and interpretation.”
What this means, we don’t yet know, but we should know one thing: the present discussion of counterinsurgency and of those rules of engagement makes little sense. They are being presented as a kind of either/or option — kill us or kill them — when it would be more accurate to say that it’s a neither/nor situation.
After all, in another, less protective part of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency war, he was bulking up special operations forces in the country and sending them out on night raids searching for Taliban mid-level leaders. These raids continue to caused a cascade of civilian casualties, as well as an increasing uproar of protest among outraged Afghans. In addition, even with McChrystal’s tight rules for normal grunts, stories about the deaths of civilians, private security guards, and Afghan soldiers from air strikes, misplaced artillery fire, checkpoint shootings, and those night raids continue to pour out, followed by the usual American initial denials and then formulaic apologies for loss of life.
Whatever the rules, civilians continue to die in striking numbers at the hands of guerrillas and of American forces, and here’s the thing: tighten those rules, loosen them, fiddle with them, bend them, evade them, cancel them — at some level it’s all still neither/nor, not either/or. In any counterinsurgency war where guerrillas, faced with vastly superior fire power, fight from cover and work hard to blend in with the populace, where the counterinsurgents are foreigners about as alien from the land they are to “protect” as humanly possible, and fight, in part, from on high or based on “intelligence” from others about a world they can’t fathom, civilians will die. Lots of civilians. Continually. Whatever rules you make up. The issue isn’t the “rules of engagement.” No rules of engagement will alter the fact that civilian death is the central fact of such wars.
It’s time to stop talking about those rules and start talking about the madness of making counterinsurgency the American way of war. It wasn’t always so. Not so long ago, after all, it was considered a scandal that, post-Vietnam, the U.S. military rebuilt its all-volunteer force without rewriting or reconsidering its counterinsurgency manual. The high command, in fact, let counterinsurgency go to hell, exactly where they thought it deserved to rest in peace, and were focused instead on preventing Soviet armies from pouring through Germany’s Fulda Gap (something they were conveniently never likely to do). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military would continue to focus for some years on Colin Powell’s doctrine of overwhelming force, decisive victory, and quick exit.
Then, of course, Iraq happened and decisive victory (“mission accomplished”) soured into decisive disaster. It was at this moment, in 2006, that Generals Petraeus and James “Mad Dog” Mattis (now respectively Afghan war commander and head of Centcom) dusted off the old, failed Vietnam-era counterinsurgency doctrine and made it sexy again. They oversaw the writing of a whole new guidebook for the Army and Marines, 472 pages of advice that even got its own (university press) trade edition, and became the toast of Washington and the Pentagon.
So, after being buried and disinterred, COIN, as its known, is once again the reigning monarch of American war-fighting doctrines as the Pentagon prepares for one, two, three Iraqs or Afghanistans — and the scandal is that (surprise, surprise!) it’s not working. This should, of course, hardly have been news. The history of counterinsurgency warfare isn’t exactly a success story, or our present COINistas wouldn’t have taken their doctrine largely from failed counterinsurgency wars in Vietnam and Algeria, among other places. It’s not so encouraging, after all, when the main examples you have before you are defeats.
Our generals might have better spent their time studying the first modern war of this sort. It took place in early nineteenth century Spain when the Islamic fundamentalists of that moment — Catholic peasants and their priests — managed to stop Napoleon’s army (the high-tech force of the moment) in its tracks. Just check out Goya’s “Disasters of War” series, if you want to see how grim it was. And it’s never gotten much better.
Looked at historically, counterinsurgency was largely the war-fighting option of empires, of powers that wanted to keep occupying their restive colonies forever and a day. Of course, past empires didn’t spend much time worrying about “protecting the people.” They knew such wars were brutal. That was their point. As George Orwell summed such campaigns up in 1946 in his essay “Politics and the English Language”: “Defenseless villagers are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set afire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” The rise of anti-colonialism and nationalism after World War II should have made counterinsurgency history. Certainly, there is no place for occupations and the wars that go with them in the twenty-first century.
Unfortunately, none of this has been obvious to Washington or our leading generals. Of course, if they can rewrite the Army’s counterinsurgency manual for a new century, any of us can, so let me offer my one-line rewrite of their 472 pages. It’s simple and guaranteed to save trees as well as lives: “When it comes to counterinsurgency, don’t do it.”
—-Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books),
Recently, we’ve been flooded with news stories and debate about the “rules of engagement” for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Now-discredited war commander General Stanley McChrystal, we’ve been told, instituted fiercely restrictive rules of engagement to lessen the number of Afghan civilians who died or were wounded at the hands of American forces, and to “protect the people,” just as the “hearts and minds” part of counterinsurgency doctrine tells us should be done. Specifically, he made it far harder for U.S. troops under fire to call in air strikes or artillery support if civilians might possibly be in the vicinity of any firefight. Grumbling about this among those troops, according to Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter whose piece took McChrystal down, had already reached something close to fever pitch by the time the general and his special ops cronies began mouthing off in frustration in Paris.
Articles in which troops or mid-level officers claim to be “handcuffed by our chain of command” are now almost as common as implicitly critical stories about the dismal failure of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. General David Petraeus, on being given command of the war effort, turned immediately to those rules of engagement, promising not to change them, but to thoroughly review and “clarify” their “implementation and interpretation.”
What this means, we don’t yet know, but we should know one thing: the present discussion of counterinsurgency and of those rules of engagement makes little sense. They are being presented as a kind of either/or option — kill us or kill them — when it would be more accurate to say that it’s a neither/nor situation.
After all, in another, less protective part of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency war, he was bulking up special operations forces in the country and sending them out on night raids searching for Taliban mid-level leaders. These raids continue to caused a cascade of civilian casualties, as well as an increasing uproar of protest among outraged Afghans. In addition, even with McChrystal’s tight rules for normal grunts, stories about the deaths of civilians, private security guards, and Afghan soldiers from air strikes, misplaced artillery fire, checkpoint shootings, and those night raids continue to pour out, followed by the usual American initial denials and then formulaic apologies for loss of life.
Whatever the rules, civilians continue to die in striking numbers at the hands of guerrillas and of American forces, and here’s the thing: tighten those rules, loosen them, fiddle with them, bend them, evade them, cancel them — at some level it’s all still neither/nor, not either/or. In any counterinsurgency war where guerrillas, faced with vastly superior fire power, fight from cover and work hard to blend in with the populace, where the counterinsurgents are foreigners about as alien from the land they are to “protect” as humanly possible, and fight, in part, from on high or based on “intelligence” from others about a world they can’t fathom, civilians will die. Lots of civilians. Continually. Whatever rules you make up. The issue isn’t the “rules of engagement.” No rules of engagement will alter the fact that civilian death is the central fact of such wars.
It’s time to stop talking about those rules and start talking about the madness of making counterinsurgency the American way of war. It wasn’t always so. Not so long ago, after all, it was considered a scandal that, post-Vietnam, the U.S. military rebuilt its all-volunteer force without rewriting or reconsidering its counterinsurgency manual. The high command, in fact, let counterinsurgency go to hell, exactly where they thought it deserved to rest in peace, and were focused instead on preventing Soviet armies from pouring through Germany’s Fulda Gap (something they were conveniently never likely to do). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military would continue to focus for some years on Colin Powell’s doctrine of overwhelming force, decisive victory, and quick exit.
Then, of course, Iraq happened and decisive victory (“mission accomplished”) soured into decisive disaster. It was at this moment, in 2006, that Generals Petraeus and James “Mad Dog” Mattis (now respectively Afghan war commander and head of Centcom) dusted off the old, failed Vietnam-era counterinsurgency doctrine and made it sexy again. They oversaw the writing of a whole new guidebook for the Army and Marines, 472 pages of advice that even got its own (university press) trade edition, and became the toast of Washington and the Pentagon.
So, after being buried and disinterred, COIN, as its known, is once again the reigning monarch of American war-fighting doctrines as the Pentagon prepares for one, two, three Iraqs or Afghanistans — and the scandal is that (surprise, surprise!) it’s not working. This should, of course, hardly have been news. The history of counterinsurgency warfare isn’t exactly a success story, or our present COINistas wouldn’t have taken their doctrine largely from failed counterinsurgency wars in Vietnam and Algeria, among other places. It’s not so encouraging, after all, when the main examples you have before you are defeats.
Our generals might have better spent their time studying the first modern war of this sort. It took place in early nineteenth century Spain when the Islamic fundamentalists of that moment — Catholic peasants and their priests — managed to stop Napoleon’s army (the high-tech force of the moment) in its tracks. Just check out Goya’s “Disasters of War” series, if you want to see how grim it was. And it’s never gotten much better.
Looked at historically, counterinsurgency was largely the war-fighting option of empires, of powers that wanted to keep occupying their restive colonies forever and a day. Of course, past empires didn’t spend much time worrying about “protecting the people.” They knew such wars were brutal. That was their point. As George Orwell summed such campaigns up in 1946 in his essay “Politics and the English Language”: “Defenseless villagers are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set afire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” The rise of anti-colonialism and nationalism after World War II should have made counterinsurgency history. Certainly, there is no place for occupations and the wars that go with them in the twenty-first century.
Unfortunately, none of this has been obvious to Washington or our leading generals. Of course, if they can rewrite the Army’s counterinsurgency manual for a new century, any of us can, so let me offer my one-line rewrite of their 472 pages. It’s simple and guaranteed to save trees as well as lives: “When it comes to counterinsurgency, don’t do it.”
—-Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books),
Friday, July 2, 2010
Counterinsurgency is Counterproductive
Ann Jones, award-winning journalist and women's rights activist, offers an insightful and informative, first-hand, and passionate analysis of how the US counterinsurgency policy in Afghanistan is, has been, and will continue to be a losing proposition at tremendous costs to Afghans, US troops, and further undermine the diminishing US international credibility that still exists. I found her article at http://www.zcommunications.org/counterinsurgency-down-for-the-count-in-afghanistan-by-ann-jones. The article was included there in Ann Jone's ZSpace Page. The original source of the article is Tom Dispatch.
Counterinsurgency Down for the Count in Afghanistan...
But the War Machine Grinds On and On and On
By Ann Jones
Source: TomDispatch
Friday, July 02, 2010
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....Why, when President Obama fires an insubordinate and failing general, does he cling to his failing war policy? And if our strategy isn't working, what about the enemy's? And if nothing much is working, why does it still go on nonstop this way? Let's take these one at a time.
1. What do you mean by "it's not working"?"It" is counterinsurgency or COIN, which, in fact, is really less of a strategy than a set of tactics in pursuit of a strategy. Counterinsurgency doctrine, originally designed by empires intending to squat on their colonies forever, calls for elevating the principle of "protecting the population" above pursuing the bad guys at all cost. Implementing such a strategy quickly becomes a tricky, even schizophrenic, balancing act, as I recently was reminded.
I just spent some time embedded with the U.S. Army at a forward operating base near the Pakistan border where, despite daily "sig acts" -- significant activity of a hostile nature -- virtually every "lethal" American soldier is matched by a "nonlethal" counterpart whose job it is, in one way or another, to soften up those civilians for "protection."General McChrystal himself played both roles. As the U.S. commander, he was responsible for killing what he termed, at one point, "an amazing number of people" who were not threats, but he also regularly showed up at Afghan President Hamid Karzai's palace to say, "Sorry." Karzai praised him publicly for his frequent apologies (each, of course, reflecting an American act or acts that killed civilians), though angry Afghans were less impressed.
The part of the lethal activity that often goes awry is supposed to be counterbalanced by the "sorry" part, which may be as simple as dispatching U.S. officers to drink humble tea with local "key leaders." Often enough, though, it comes in the form of large, unsustainable gifts. The formula, which is basic COIN, goes something like this: kill some civilians in the hunt for the bad guys and you have to make up for it by building a road....
Many Afghans, of course, are angry because they haven't been compensated at all, not even with a road to nowhere. Worse yet, more often than not, they've been promised things that never materialize. (If you were to summarize the history of the country as a whole in these last years, it might go like this: big men -- both Afghan and American -- make out like the Beltway Bandits many of them are, while ordinary Afghans in the countryside still wish their kids had shoes.)
And don't forget the majority of Afghans in the countryside who have scarcely been consulted at all: women. To protect Afghan women from foreign fighters, Afghan men lock them up -- the women, that is. American military leaders slip easily into the all-male comfort zone, probably relieved perhaps to try to win the "hearts and minds" of something less than half "the population."It's only in the last year or two that the Marines and the Army started pulling a few American women off their full-time non-combat jobs and sending them out as Female Engagement Teams (FETs) to meet and greet village women. As with so many innovative new plans in our counterinsurgency war, this one was cobbled together in a thoughtless way that risked lives and almost guaranteed failure.
Commanders have casually sent noncombatant American women soldiers -- supply clerks and radio operators -- outside the wire, usually with little training, no clear mission, and no follow up. Predictably, like their male counterparts, they have left a trail of good intentions and broken promises behind. So when I went out to meet village women near the Pakistan border last week with a brand-new Army FET-in-training, we faced the fury of Pashto women still waiting for a promised delivery of vegetable seeds.
[....]
....It turns out that the women of Afghanistan, whom George W. Bush claimed to have liberated so many years ago, are still mostly oppressed, impoverished, malnourished, uneducated, short of seeds, and mad as hell.
Count them among a plentiful crew of angry Afghans who are living proof that "it's not working" at all. Afghans, it seems, know the difference between genuine apologies and bribes, true commitment and false promises, generosity and self-interest. And since the whole point of COIN is to gain the hearts and minds of "the population," those angry Afghans are a bad omen for the U.S. military and President Obama.
Moreover, it's not working for a significant subgroup of Americans in Afghanistan either: combat soldiers. I've heard infantrymen place the blame for a buddy's combat injury or death on the strict rules of engagement ("courageous restraint," as it's called) imposed by General McChrystal's version of COIN strategy....
It's also clear that even the lethal part of counterinsurgency isn't working. Consider all those civilian deaths and injuries, so often the result of false information fed to Americans to entice them to settle local scores. To give just one example: American troops recently pitched hand grenades into a house in Logar Province which they'd been told was used by terrorists. Another case of false information. It held a young Afghan, a relative of an Afghan agricultural expert who happens to be an acquaintance of mine. The young man had just completed his religious education and returned to the village to become its sole maulawi, or religious teacher. The villagers, very upset, turned out to vouch for him, and the Army hospitalized him with profuse apologies. Luckily, he survived, but such routine mistakes regularly leave dead or wounded civilians and a thickening residue of rage behind.
Reports coming in from observers and colleagues in areas of the Pashtun south, once scheduled to be demonstration sites for McChrystal's cleared, held, built, and better-governed Afghanistan, are generally grim. Before his resignation, the general himself was already referring to Marja -- the farming area (initially trumpeted as a "city of 80,000 people") where he launched his first offensive -- as "a bleeding ulcer." He also delayed the highly publicized advance into Kandahar, the country's second largest city, supposedly to gain more time to bring around the opposing populace, which includes President Karzai. Meanwhile, humanitarian NGOs based in Kandahar complain that they can't do their routine work assisting the city's inhabitants while the area lies under threat of combat. Without assistance, Kandaharis grow -- you guessed it -- angrier.
From Kandahar province, where American soldiers mass for the well-advertised securing of Kandahar, come reports that the Afghan National Army (ANA) is stealing equipment -- right down to bottled drinking water -- from the U.S. military and selling it to the Taliban. U.S. commanders can't do much about it because the official American script calls for the ANA to take over responsibility for national defense.
NATO soldiers have complained all along about the ill-trained, uninterested troops of the ANA, but the animosity between them seems to have grown deadly in some quarters. American soldiers in Kandahar report that, for their own security, they don't tell their ANA colleagues when and where they're going on patrol. Back in the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet jihad we supported, we trained Afghan jihadists who have today become our worst enemies, and now we may be doing it again.
Factor in accounts of what General McChrystal did best: taking out bad guys. Reportedly, he was vigorously directing Special Forces' assassinations of high and mid-level Taliban leaders in preparation for "peeling off" the "good" Taliban -- that is, those impoverished fighters only in it for the money. According to his thinking, they would later be won over to the government through internationally subsidized jobs. But assassinating the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers -- or those we call the bad Taliban -- actually leaves behind leaderless, undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns more interested in living off the population we're supposed to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan poverty. From the point of view of ordinary Afghans in the countryside, our "good Taliban" are the worst of all.
I could go on. If you spend time in Afghanistan, evidence of failure is all around you, including those millions of American taxpayer dollars that are paid to Afghan security contractors (and Karzai relatives) and then handed over to insurgents to buy protection for U.S. supply convoys traveling on U.S. built, but Taliban-controlled, roads. Strategy doesn't get much worse than that: financing both sides, and every brigand in between, in hopes of a happier ending someday.
2. So why does Obama stick to this failed policy?
Go figure. Maybe he's been persuaded by Pentagon hype. Replacing General McChrystal with Centcom commander General David Petraeus brought a media golden-oldies replay of Petraeus's greatest hits: his authorship of the Army's counterinsurgency manual, updated (some say plagiarized) from a Vietnam-era edition, and of Bush's 2007 "surge" in Iraq, an exercise in sectarian cleansing now routinely called a "success." If you can apply the word "success" to any operation in Iraq, you're surely capable of clinging to the hope that Petreus can find it again in Afghanistan.
But like David McKiernan, the general he ousted, McChrystal has already misapplied the "lessons" of Iraq to the decidedly different circumstances of Afghanistan and so producing a striking set of failures. A deal to buy off the Shinwari Pashtuns, for instance, a tribe mistakenly thought to be the equivalent of the Anbar Sunnis in Iraq, ended in an uproar when they pocketed the money without firing a shot at a single Talib. Not so surprising, considering that the people they were paid to fight are not foreign invaders -- that would be us -- but their Pashtun cousins.
Moreover, the surge into the Afghan south seems only to have further alienated the folks who live there, while increasing violence against local residents. It has also come at the expense of American troops in the east, the ones I was recently embedded with, who face an onslaught of hostile fighters moving across the border from Pakistan.
3. What about the enemy strategy? How's that working?
It seems the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and various hostile fighters in Afghanistan drew their own lessons from Petraeus's surge in Iraq: they learned to deal with a surge not by fading away before it, but by meeting it with a surge of their own. An American commander defending the eastern front told me that hostile forces recently wiped out five border posts. "They opened the gate," he said, but with the American high command focused on a future surge into Kandahar, who's paying attention? In fact, as the battle heats up in the east, another official told me, they are running short of helicopters to medevac out American casualties. In this way, so-called strategy easily morphs into a shell game played largely for an American audience at the expense of American soldiers.
And all the while America's "partner" in this strategy, the dubious President Karzai, consolidates his power, which is thoroughly grounded in the Pashtun south, the domain of his even more suspect half-brother, Ahmed Wali. In the process, he studiously ignores the parliament, which lately has been staging a silent stop-work protest, occasionally banging on the desks for emphasis. He now evidently bets his money (which used to be ours) on the failure of American forces, and extends feelers of reconciliation to Pakistan and the Taliban, the folks he now fondly calls his "angry brothers." As for the Afghan people, even the most resilient citizens of Kabul who, like Obama, remain hopeful, say: "This is our big problem." They're talking, of course, about Karzai and his government that the Americans put in place, pay for, prop up, and pretend to be "partners" with.
In fact, America's silent acceptance of President Karzai's flagrantly fraudulent election last summer -- all those stuffed ballot boxes -- seems to have exploded whatever illusions many Afghans still had about an American commitment to democracy. They know now that matters will not be resolved at polling places or in jirga council tents. They probably won't be resolved in Afghanistan at all, but in secret locations in Washington, Riyadh, Islamabad, and elsewhere. The American people, by the way, will have little more to say about the resolution of the war -- though it consumes our wealth and our soldiers, too -- than the Afghans.Think of what's happening in Afghanistan more generally as a creeping Talibanization, which Afghans say is working all too well. In Marja, in Kandahar, in the east, everywhere, the Taliban do what we can't and roll out their own (shadow) governments-in-a-box, ready to solve disputes, administer rough justice, collect taxes, and enforce "virtue." In Herat, the Ulema of the West issue a fatwa restricting the freedom of women to work and move about without a mahram, or male relative as escort. In Kabul, the police raid restaurants that serve alcohol, and the government shuts down reputable, secular international NGOs, charging them with proselytizing. Taliban influence creeps into parliament, into legislation restricting constitutional freedoms, into ministries and governmental contracts where corruption flourishes, and into the provisional peace jirga tent where delegates called for freedom for all imprisoned Taliban. Out of the jails, into the government, to sit side by side with warlords and war criminals, mujahideen brothers under the skin. Embraced by President Karzai. Perhaps even welcomed one day by American strategists and President Obama himself as a way out.
4. If it's so bad, why can't it be stopped?
The threatening gloom of American policy is never the whole story. There are young progressive men and women running for Parliament in the coming September elections. There are women organizing to keep hold of the modest gains they've made, though how they will do that when the men seem so intent on negotiating them away remains a mystery. There are the valiant efforts of thoroughly devout Muslims who wish to live in the twenty-first century. When they look outward to more developed Islamic countries, however, they see that their homeland is a Muslim country like no other -- and if the Taliban return, it will only be worse.
American development was supposed to have made it all so much better. But tales abound of small, successful projects in education or health care, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and then dropped without a single visit from USAID monitors afraid to leave their Embassy fortress in Kabul. Regularly, USAID now hands over huge hunks of "aid" money to big, impossibly ambitious, quick-fix projects run by the usual no-bid Beltway Bandit contractors whose incompetence, wastefulness, unconscionable profits, and outright fraud should be a national scandal. This, too, is a process everyone knows but can't speak about because it's not part of the official script in which the U.S. must be seen as developing backward Afghanistan, instead of sending it reeling into the darkest of ages. Despairing humanitarians recall that Hillary Clinton promised as secretary of state to clean house at USAID, which, she said, had become nothing but "a contracting shop." Well, here's a flash from Afghanistan: it's still a contracting shop, and the contracts are going to the same set of contractors who have been exposed again and again as venal, fraudulent, and criminal.
Just as Obama sends more troops and a new commander to fight a fraudulent war for a purpose that makes no sense to anyone -- except perhaps the so-called defense intellectuals who live in an alternative Washington-based Afghanaland of their own creation -- Clinton presides over a fraudulent aid program that functions chiefly to transfer American tax dollars from the national treasury to the pockets of already rich contractors and their congressional cronies. If you still believe, as I would like to, that Obama and Clinton actually meant to make change, then you have to ask: How does this state of affairs continue, and why do the members of the international community -- the U.N., all those international NGOs, and our fast-fading coalition allies -- sign off on it? You have only to look around in Kabul and elsewhere, as I did this month, to see that the more American military there is, the more insurgents there are; the more insurgent attacks, the more private security contractors; the more barriers and razor wire, the more restrictions on freedom of movement in the capital for Afghans and internationals alike; and the more security, the higher the danger pay for members of the international community who choose to stay and spend their time complaining about the way security prevents them from doing their useful work.And so it goes round and round, this ill-oiled war machine, generating ever more incentives for almost everyone involved -- except ordinary Afghans, of course -- to keep on keeping on. There's a little something for quite a few: government officials in the U.S., Afghanistan, and Pakistan, for-profit contractors, defense intellectuals, generals, spies, soldiers behind the lines, international aid workers and their Afghan employees, diplomats, members of the Afghan National Army, and the police, and the Taliban, and their various pals, and the whole array of camp followers that service warfare everywhere.
It goes round and round, this inexorable machine, this elaborate construction of corporate capitalism at war, generating immense sums of money for relatively small numbers of people, immense debt for our nation, immense sacrifice from our combat soldiers, and for ordinary Afghans and those who have befriended them or been befriended by them, moments of promise and hope, moments of clarity and rage, and moments of dark laughter that sometimes cannot forestall the onset of despair.
Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter. Her new book, War Is Not Over When It's Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War, about her work with women in post-conflict countries, is to be published by Metropolitan Books in September. She is at work on her next book about what happens when America's wars come home. To visit her website, click here.[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project, author of The End of Victory Culture, as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books).]
Counterinsurgency Down for the Count in Afghanistan...
But the War Machine Grinds On and On and On
By Ann Jones
Source: TomDispatch
Friday, July 02, 2010
Change Text Size a- A+
Ann Jones's ZSpace PageJoin ZSpace
....Why, when President Obama fires an insubordinate and failing general, does he cling to his failing war policy? And if our strategy isn't working, what about the enemy's? And if nothing much is working, why does it still go on nonstop this way? Let's take these one at a time.
1. What do you mean by "it's not working"?"It" is counterinsurgency or COIN, which, in fact, is really less of a strategy than a set of tactics in pursuit of a strategy. Counterinsurgency doctrine, originally designed by empires intending to squat on their colonies forever, calls for elevating the principle of "protecting the population" above pursuing the bad guys at all cost. Implementing such a strategy quickly becomes a tricky, even schizophrenic, balancing act, as I recently was reminded.
I just spent some time embedded with the U.S. Army at a forward operating base near the Pakistan border where, despite daily "sig acts" -- significant activity of a hostile nature -- virtually every "lethal" American soldier is matched by a "nonlethal" counterpart whose job it is, in one way or another, to soften up those civilians for "protection."General McChrystal himself played both roles. As the U.S. commander, he was responsible for killing what he termed, at one point, "an amazing number of people" who were not threats, but he also regularly showed up at Afghan President Hamid Karzai's palace to say, "Sorry." Karzai praised him publicly for his frequent apologies (each, of course, reflecting an American act or acts that killed civilians), though angry Afghans were less impressed.
The part of the lethal activity that often goes awry is supposed to be counterbalanced by the "sorry" part, which may be as simple as dispatching U.S. officers to drink humble tea with local "key leaders." Often enough, though, it comes in the form of large, unsustainable gifts. The formula, which is basic COIN, goes something like this: kill some civilians in the hunt for the bad guys and you have to make up for it by building a road....
Many Afghans, of course, are angry because they haven't been compensated at all, not even with a road to nowhere. Worse yet, more often than not, they've been promised things that never materialize. (If you were to summarize the history of the country as a whole in these last years, it might go like this: big men -- both Afghan and American -- make out like the Beltway Bandits many of them are, while ordinary Afghans in the countryside still wish their kids had shoes.)
And don't forget the majority of Afghans in the countryside who have scarcely been consulted at all: women. To protect Afghan women from foreign fighters, Afghan men lock them up -- the women, that is. American military leaders slip easily into the all-male comfort zone, probably relieved perhaps to try to win the "hearts and minds" of something less than half "the population."It's only in the last year or two that the Marines and the Army started pulling a few American women off their full-time non-combat jobs and sending them out as Female Engagement Teams (FETs) to meet and greet village women. As with so many innovative new plans in our counterinsurgency war, this one was cobbled together in a thoughtless way that risked lives and almost guaranteed failure.
Commanders have casually sent noncombatant American women soldiers -- supply clerks and radio operators -- outside the wire, usually with little training, no clear mission, and no follow up. Predictably, like their male counterparts, they have left a trail of good intentions and broken promises behind. So when I went out to meet village women near the Pakistan border last week with a brand-new Army FET-in-training, we faced the fury of Pashto women still waiting for a promised delivery of vegetable seeds.
[....]
....It turns out that the women of Afghanistan, whom George W. Bush claimed to have liberated so many years ago, are still mostly oppressed, impoverished, malnourished, uneducated, short of seeds, and mad as hell.
Count them among a plentiful crew of angry Afghans who are living proof that "it's not working" at all. Afghans, it seems, know the difference between genuine apologies and bribes, true commitment and false promises, generosity and self-interest. And since the whole point of COIN is to gain the hearts and minds of "the population," those angry Afghans are a bad omen for the U.S. military and President Obama.
Moreover, it's not working for a significant subgroup of Americans in Afghanistan either: combat soldiers. I've heard infantrymen place the blame for a buddy's combat injury or death on the strict rules of engagement ("courageous restraint," as it's called) imposed by General McChrystal's version of COIN strategy....
It's also clear that even the lethal part of counterinsurgency isn't working. Consider all those civilian deaths and injuries, so often the result of false information fed to Americans to entice them to settle local scores. To give just one example: American troops recently pitched hand grenades into a house in Logar Province which they'd been told was used by terrorists. Another case of false information. It held a young Afghan, a relative of an Afghan agricultural expert who happens to be an acquaintance of mine. The young man had just completed his religious education and returned to the village to become its sole maulawi, or religious teacher. The villagers, very upset, turned out to vouch for him, and the Army hospitalized him with profuse apologies. Luckily, he survived, but such routine mistakes regularly leave dead or wounded civilians and a thickening residue of rage behind.
Reports coming in from observers and colleagues in areas of the Pashtun south, once scheduled to be demonstration sites for McChrystal's cleared, held, built, and better-governed Afghanistan, are generally grim. Before his resignation, the general himself was already referring to Marja -- the farming area (initially trumpeted as a "city of 80,000 people") where he launched his first offensive -- as "a bleeding ulcer." He also delayed the highly publicized advance into Kandahar, the country's second largest city, supposedly to gain more time to bring around the opposing populace, which includes President Karzai. Meanwhile, humanitarian NGOs based in Kandahar complain that they can't do their routine work assisting the city's inhabitants while the area lies under threat of combat. Without assistance, Kandaharis grow -- you guessed it -- angrier.
From Kandahar province, where American soldiers mass for the well-advertised securing of Kandahar, come reports that the Afghan National Army (ANA) is stealing equipment -- right down to bottled drinking water -- from the U.S. military and selling it to the Taliban. U.S. commanders can't do much about it because the official American script calls for the ANA to take over responsibility for national defense.
NATO soldiers have complained all along about the ill-trained, uninterested troops of the ANA, but the animosity between them seems to have grown deadly in some quarters. American soldiers in Kandahar report that, for their own security, they don't tell their ANA colleagues when and where they're going on patrol. Back in the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet jihad we supported, we trained Afghan jihadists who have today become our worst enemies, and now we may be doing it again.
Factor in accounts of what General McChrystal did best: taking out bad guys. Reportedly, he was vigorously directing Special Forces' assassinations of high and mid-level Taliban leaders in preparation for "peeling off" the "good" Taliban -- that is, those impoverished fighters only in it for the money. According to his thinking, they would later be won over to the government through internationally subsidized jobs. But assassinating the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers -- or those we call the bad Taliban -- actually leaves behind leaderless, undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns more interested in living off the population we're supposed to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan poverty. From the point of view of ordinary Afghans in the countryside, our "good Taliban" are the worst of all.
I could go on. If you spend time in Afghanistan, evidence of failure is all around you, including those millions of American taxpayer dollars that are paid to Afghan security contractors (and Karzai relatives) and then handed over to insurgents to buy protection for U.S. supply convoys traveling on U.S. built, but Taliban-controlled, roads. Strategy doesn't get much worse than that: financing both sides, and every brigand in between, in hopes of a happier ending someday.
2. So why does Obama stick to this failed policy?
Go figure. Maybe he's been persuaded by Pentagon hype. Replacing General McChrystal with Centcom commander General David Petraeus brought a media golden-oldies replay of Petraeus's greatest hits: his authorship of the Army's counterinsurgency manual, updated (some say plagiarized) from a Vietnam-era edition, and of Bush's 2007 "surge" in Iraq, an exercise in sectarian cleansing now routinely called a "success." If you can apply the word "success" to any operation in Iraq, you're surely capable of clinging to the hope that Petreus can find it again in Afghanistan.
But like David McKiernan, the general he ousted, McChrystal has already misapplied the "lessons" of Iraq to the decidedly different circumstances of Afghanistan and so producing a striking set of failures. A deal to buy off the Shinwari Pashtuns, for instance, a tribe mistakenly thought to be the equivalent of the Anbar Sunnis in Iraq, ended in an uproar when they pocketed the money without firing a shot at a single Talib. Not so surprising, considering that the people they were paid to fight are not foreign invaders -- that would be us -- but their Pashtun cousins.
Moreover, the surge into the Afghan south seems only to have further alienated the folks who live there, while increasing violence against local residents. It has also come at the expense of American troops in the east, the ones I was recently embedded with, who face an onslaught of hostile fighters moving across the border from Pakistan.
3. What about the enemy strategy? How's that working?
It seems the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and various hostile fighters in Afghanistan drew their own lessons from Petraeus's surge in Iraq: they learned to deal with a surge not by fading away before it, but by meeting it with a surge of their own. An American commander defending the eastern front told me that hostile forces recently wiped out five border posts. "They opened the gate," he said, but with the American high command focused on a future surge into Kandahar, who's paying attention? In fact, as the battle heats up in the east, another official told me, they are running short of helicopters to medevac out American casualties. In this way, so-called strategy easily morphs into a shell game played largely for an American audience at the expense of American soldiers.
And all the while America's "partner" in this strategy, the dubious President Karzai, consolidates his power, which is thoroughly grounded in the Pashtun south, the domain of his even more suspect half-brother, Ahmed Wali. In the process, he studiously ignores the parliament, which lately has been staging a silent stop-work protest, occasionally banging on the desks for emphasis. He now evidently bets his money (which used to be ours) on the failure of American forces, and extends feelers of reconciliation to Pakistan and the Taliban, the folks he now fondly calls his "angry brothers." As for the Afghan people, even the most resilient citizens of Kabul who, like Obama, remain hopeful, say: "This is our big problem." They're talking, of course, about Karzai and his government that the Americans put in place, pay for, prop up, and pretend to be "partners" with.
In fact, America's silent acceptance of President Karzai's flagrantly fraudulent election last summer -- all those stuffed ballot boxes -- seems to have exploded whatever illusions many Afghans still had about an American commitment to democracy. They know now that matters will not be resolved at polling places or in jirga council tents. They probably won't be resolved in Afghanistan at all, but in secret locations in Washington, Riyadh, Islamabad, and elsewhere. The American people, by the way, will have little more to say about the resolution of the war -- though it consumes our wealth and our soldiers, too -- than the Afghans.Think of what's happening in Afghanistan more generally as a creeping Talibanization, which Afghans say is working all too well. In Marja, in Kandahar, in the east, everywhere, the Taliban do what we can't and roll out their own (shadow) governments-in-a-box, ready to solve disputes, administer rough justice, collect taxes, and enforce "virtue." In Herat, the Ulema of the West issue a fatwa restricting the freedom of women to work and move about without a mahram, or male relative as escort. In Kabul, the police raid restaurants that serve alcohol, and the government shuts down reputable, secular international NGOs, charging them with proselytizing. Taliban influence creeps into parliament, into legislation restricting constitutional freedoms, into ministries and governmental contracts where corruption flourishes, and into the provisional peace jirga tent where delegates called for freedom for all imprisoned Taliban. Out of the jails, into the government, to sit side by side with warlords and war criminals, mujahideen brothers under the skin. Embraced by President Karzai. Perhaps even welcomed one day by American strategists and President Obama himself as a way out.
4. If it's so bad, why can't it be stopped?
The threatening gloom of American policy is never the whole story. There are young progressive men and women running for Parliament in the coming September elections. There are women organizing to keep hold of the modest gains they've made, though how they will do that when the men seem so intent on negotiating them away remains a mystery. There are the valiant efforts of thoroughly devout Muslims who wish to live in the twenty-first century. When they look outward to more developed Islamic countries, however, they see that their homeland is a Muslim country like no other -- and if the Taliban return, it will only be worse.
American development was supposed to have made it all so much better. But tales abound of small, successful projects in education or health care, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and then dropped without a single visit from USAID monitors afraid to leave their Embassy fortress in Kabul. Regularly, USAID now hands over huge hunks of "aid" money to big, impossibly ambitious, quick-fix projects run by the usual no-bid Beltway Bandit contractors whose incompetence, wastefulness, unconscionable profits, and outright fraud should be a national scandal. This, too, is a process everyone knows but can't speak about because it's not part of the official script in which the U.S. must be seen as developing backward Afghanistan, instead of sending it reeling into the darkest of ages. Despairing humanitarians recall that Hillary Clinton promised as secretary of state to clean house at USAID, which, she said, had become nothing but "a contracting shop." Well, here's a flash from Afghanistan: it's still a contracting shop, and the contracts are going to the same set of contractors who have been exposed again and again as venal, fraudulent, and criminal.
Just as Obama sends more troops and a new commander to fight a fraudulent war for a purpose that makes no sense to anyone -- except perhaps the so-called defense intellectuals who live in an alternative Washington-based Afghanaland of their own creation -- Clinton presides over a fraudulent aid program that functions chiefly to transfer American tax dollars from the national treasury to the pockets of already rich contractors and their congressional cronies. If you still believe, as I would like to, that Obama and Clinton actually meant to make change, then you have to ask: How does this state of affairs continue, and why do the members of the international community -- the U.N., all those international NGOs, and our fast-fading coalition allies -- sign off on it? You have only to look around in Kabul and elsewhere, as I did this month, to see that the more American military there is, the more insurgents there are; the more insurgent attacks, the more private security contractors; the more barriers and razor wire, the more restrictions on freedom of movement in the capital for Afghans and internationals alike; and the more security, the higher the danger pay for members of the international community who choose to stay and spend their time complaining about the way security prevents them from doing their useful work.And so it goes round and round, this ill-oiled war machine, generating ever more incentives for almost everyone involved -- except ordinary Afghans, of course -- to keep on keeping on. There's a little something for quite a few: government officials in the U.S., Afghanistan, and Pakistan, for-profit contractors, defense intellectuals, generals, spies, soldiers behind the lines, international aid workers and their Afghan employees, diplomats, members of the Afghan National Army, and the police, and the Taliban, and their various pals, and the whole array of camp followers that service warfare everywhere.
It goes round and round, this inexorable machine, this elaborate construction of corporate capitalism at war, generating immense sums of money for relatively small numbers of people, immense debt for our nation, immense sacrifice from our combat soldiers, and for ordinary Afghans and those who have befriended them or been befriended by them, moments of promise and hope, moments of clarity and rage, and moments of dark laughter that sometimes cannot forestall the onset of despair.
Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter. Her new book, War Is Not Over When It's Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War, about her work with women in post-conflict countries, is to be published by Metropolitan Books in September. She is at work on her next book about what happens when America's wars come home. To visit her website, click here.[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project, author of The End of Victory Culture, as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books).]
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
McChystal episode reveals a war without coherence
Joshua Holland's article focuses on the media interest on General Stanley McChrystal, the commanding military officer in Afghanistan. The article appearing in the magazine Rolling Stone. Written by Matt Hastings, he reports on "derogatory comments McChrystal and his staff made about the White House. Media pundits and hosts are speculating on whether President Obama will fire McChrystal from his job because of the general's insubordination. While this part of Hastings' story has been covered widely in the media, the most important part of the story, Holland points out, is overlooked, namely, that the US-led war and occupation in Afghanistan is failing and has no coherent direction. Military leaders think that with enough time and more troops the war in Afghanistan can still be won. Here are excerpts from Holland's article.
Dont Let the McChrystal Frenzy Obscure the Dirty Truth About Afghanistan
By Joshua Holland, Printed on June 23, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147302/
It should come as no surprise that General Stanley McChrystal’s return to Washington to explain a series of derogatory comments he and his staff made about the White House has ignited a media frenzy.
[....]
....the most important part of Hastings’ article is largely being ignored by the corporate media.
Hastings told a tale of a project with no hope for success. His story shows us that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is all about tactics dressed up as a strategy. It’s a profile of a military establishment running on inertia -- unable to withdraw because withdrawing is an admission of defeat, but also unable to accomplish the wholly unrealistic tasks put before it.
This is perhaps the most revealing passage from Hastings’ report:
"[Team Obama] are trying to manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory – because victory is not even defined or recognizable," says Celeste Ward, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. "That's the game we're in right now. What we need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn't get run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become great in the near future."
...."If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular," a senior adviser to McChrystal says. Such realism, however, doesn't prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further.
[....]
Anan Gobal noted that in 2008, after seven years of fighting, less than a third of the country was under the control of the central government in Kabul, and added: “Many say even that is now an optimistic assessment.” Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that the Pentagon was making cash payments to Afghan warlords. According to Bloomberg, “Contractors told congressional investigators they believe that, in turn, the ‘warlords make protection payments to insurgents’ who are fighting the U.S.”
[....]
According to a report released in January, the U.S.-backed government is also awash in corruption, which Afghans now view “as a bigger concern than security and unemployment.” The government we’re backing may be extracting as much as one quarter of Afghanistan’s gross national product in bribes. And Karzai’s own brother has been implicated in Afghanistan’s rich drug trade.
[....]
Max Bergmann of the Center for American Progress didn’t miss what lies at the heart of the Rolling Stone report. “The significance of this food fight is not in what was said,” he wrote, “but in what it says about where the United States is in Afghanistan":
What has become apparent is that … the mythic status now given to the surge in Iraq led to a significant degree of over-confidence on the part of McChrystal and others about their ability to turn the Afghan war around after it had utterly deteriorated year after year under the neglectful watch of the Bush administration.
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.
Dont Let the McChrystal Frenzy Obscure the Dirty Truth About Afghanistan
By Joshua Holland, Printed on June 23, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147302/
It should come as no surprise that General Stanley McChrystal’s return to Washington to explain a series of derogatory comments he and his staff made about the White House has ignited a media frenzy.
[....]
....the most important part of Hastings’ article is largely being ignored by the corporate media.
Hastings told a tale of a project with no hope for success. His story shows us that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is all about tactics dressed up as a strategy. It’s a profile of a military establishment running on inertia -- unable to withdraw because withdrawing is an admission of defeat, but also unable to accomplish the wholly unrealistic tasks put before it.
This is perhaps the most revealing passage from Hastings’ report:
"[Team Obama] are trying to manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory – because victory is not even defined or recognizable," says Celeste Ward, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. "That's the game we're in right now. What we need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn't get run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become great in the near future."
...."If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular," a senior adviser to McChrystal says. Such realism, however, doesn't prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further.
[....]
Anan Gobal noted that in 2008, after seven years of fighting, less than a third of the country was under the control of the central government in Kabul, and added: “Many say even that is now an optimistic assessment.” Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that the Pentagon was making cash payments to Afghan warlords. According to Bloomberg, “Contractors told congressional investigators they believe that, in turn, the ‘warlords make protection payments to insurgents’ who are fighting the U.S.”
[....]
According to a report released in January, the U.S.-backed government is also awash in corruption, which Afghans now view “as a bigger concern than security and unemployment.” The government we’re backing may be extracting as much as one quarter of Afghanistan’s gross national product in bribes. And Karzai’s own brother has been implicated in Afghanistan’s rich drug trade.
[....]
Max Bergmann of the Center for American Progress didn’t miss what lies at the heart of the Rolling Stone report. “The significance of this food fight is not in what was said,” he wrote, “but in what it says about where the United States is in Afghanistan":
What has become apparent is that … the mythic status now given to the surge in Iraq led to a significant degree of over-confidence on the part of McChrystal and others about their ability to turn the Afghan war around after it had utterly deteriorated year after year under the neglectful watch of the Bush administration.
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Counter-terrorism rather than counter-insurgency, Juan Cole contends
Below you can find some major parts of Juan Cole's post today, June 22, 2010, on his blog Informed Comment, and my outline/comments on them. You can go to Cole's award-winning blog for the full article.
Cole reconstructs some of the present sniping within the Obama Administration over what the appropriate strategy in Afghanistan should be. The conflict revolves around the counter-insurgency strategy of General McChrystal, a strategy that now is in effect. On the other side, Cole identifies some of those who are opposed to this strategy, including Cole himself. The other strategy worth considering - and supporting - is a "minimalist" strategy of counter-terrorism. He also thinks that a third approach endorsing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country would result in a brutal Taliban victory, which he finds unacceptable.
If you have been following the posts on our blog, you know that we have been in support of a planned withdrawal of troops. Our position has been influenced by Afghan citizens like Malalai Joya. My impression of Cole's position is that he is grasping at straws when he discribes - and supports- a counter-terrorism strategy.
So, Cole says, it is counter-insurgency versus counter-terrorism, with the withdrawal of troops off the table. It is up to President Obama to decide the strategy that will prevail [between two bad options]. Here is some of what Cole suggests.
One, get rid of Gen. McChrystal, and plan to disgard the counter-insurgency strategy.
If Obama doesn’t fire McChrystal, he will never be respected by anybody in the chain of command that leads to his desk. Moreover, moving McChrystal out now would be a perfect opportunity to pull the plug on the impractical counter-insurgency campaign that the latter has been pursuing, which probably has only a 10% chance of success. (A RAND study found that where a government that claimed to be a democracy actually was not, and where it faced an insurgency, it prevailed only 10% of the time. Sounds like President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan to me.)
[....]
Two, Obama should move toward support of a counter-terrorism strategy. [This approach would preclude bringing additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan. It is not clear whether the number of troops already stationed in the country would be kept at the same level or reduced.] He does offer an idea of what counter-terrorism would include: "intelligence work, deployment of special operations forces against small, specific targets, and use of air strikes and drones."
The most recent roots of this grudge match go back to the dispute within the Obama administration last year over how to deal with Afghanistan. Eikenberry, a former general, had been one of McChrystal’s predecessors as commander of US troops in Afghanistan. And Biden had spent decades either chairing or being ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. These seasoned observers of Central and South Asia concluded that the best the US could do in Afghanistan was small-scale targeted counter-terrorism. Counter-terrorism implies intelligence work, deployment of special operations forces against small, specific targets, and use of air strikes and drones. Biden is said to have suggested getting most US troops out of Afghanistan and just striking at al-Qaeda wherever it popped up, especially in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Three, more on what the ineffective counter-insurgency strategy entails.
In contrast, McChrystal’s plan called for counter-insurgency, which implies large-scale conventional military campaigns, to “take, clear, hold and build.” That is, the US troops would take territory now held by insurgents, would clear it of Taliban or other militants, would hold it for the medium or long term so as to reassure local elders that they were in no danger from returning Taliban, and would use the opportunity to build infrastructure and services. Biden’s target was the largely Arab, foreign al-Qaeda, organized as small terrorist cells; but McChrystal wanted to root out the Taliban and their new Mujahidin allies, a much larger force that had roots in Pashtun society in a way that al-Qaeda does not. McChrystal’s plan required a massive troop escalation and the conquest by the US of large swathes of Pashtun territory in the southeast and southwest of the country. The hope was that while the US did counter-insurgency on a large scale, NATO and US troops would be training and equipping a large Afghanistan National Army of 200,000 and a similarly sized police force, and that in a few years the country could be turned over to them.
Four, reasons why counter-insurgency will fail.
Eikenberry worried, in cables later leaked, that going beyond counter-terrorism to large-scale counter-insurgency was impractical because:
A big US troop escalation would have the effect of actually making the Afghanistan security forces more dependent on the US, not less, and so significantly delay the day when they could or would step up to security duties on their own;
A large-scale counter-insurgency campaign requires a strong Afghan political partner for the ‘hold’ and ‘build’ phases. But there is no such partner. President Hamid Karzai stole the presidential election last year, and is notoriously unreliable. The Afghanistan National Army will not soon be able to take over from the US troops as they take and clear wide swathes of territory.
Five, Obama hedged.
Obama backed McChrystal against Biden and Eikenberry, but threw McChrystal a curve ball by talking about beginning a troop withdrawal in summer of 2011 (thus taking a little piece of the Biden plan and inserting it awkwardly in the middle of Gen. McChrystal’s years-long counter-insurgency struggle– and thus inevitably undermining the latter).
Six, all the strategies have shortcomings, but counter-terrosim makes more sense than the other, Coal suggests.
Both the Biden/ Eikenberry and the McChrystal approaches have drawbacks. Counter-terrorism focusing like a laser on al-Qaeda would be largely irrelevant now in Afghanistan, where there is virtually no al-Qaeda. But that policy is being pursued in the tribal belt in Pakistan, alienating the Pakistani public because the drones often also kill innocent civilians. And, a rapid draw-down of US troops in favor of newly trained Afghan recruits may not be practical, given the poor esprit de corps, illiteracy, drug use, corruption and over-representation of minorities in the Afghanistan National Army and police. What would happen if, as the US drew down, the provinces around Kabul started swiftly falling to the Taliban or allied insurgents?
Seven, but withdrawal is out of the question, at least for some, perhaps, lengthy period of time.
I know one Afghan scholar who for years went back and forth consulting with the Karzai government, who is convinced that if the US and NATO suddenly pulled up stakes, the Karzai government would fall within 3 days. Whatever you think of President Karzai, the prospect of him being hanged by Mulla Omar is hard to contemplate with equanimity.
Eight, the counter-insurgency strategy is far too ambitious and should therefore be phased out.
On the other hand, McChrystal’s plan is in my view far too ambitious and likely completely impractical. It assumes that the Pashtuns want US Marines in their villages and would prefer them to the Taliban or other insurgents (most of whom are actually from the same tribes as and therefore cousins to these villagers). It assumes that the Kabul government can provide a ‘government in a box’ (in McChrystal’s words) to the provinces once the US military has conquered them. But Kabul is not well governed itself, much less being able swiftly to provide services and expertise in the provinces on demand. It assumes that the US push won’t alienate ever more Pashtuns, pushing them into the arms of the Taliban. It makes no distinction between Eastern and Western Pashtuns. And it assumes that an Afghanistan National Army of double the current size can be swiftly trained and deployed to replace the US troops as they move on to the next conquest. None of these assumptions is warranted, as is becoming clear in Helmand Province, where McChrystal’s demonstration project was the small farming villages of Marjah. It hasn’t gone as well as was initially suggested.
Nine, the next planned phase of counter-insurgency is counterproductive and should, implicitly, be discontinued.
McChrystal’s next Big Idea was to attack Taliban strongholds the major southwestern Pashtun city of Qandahar (pop. about 1 million). Such an operation is extremely dangerous. If urban Pashtuns were alienated by it, they could go over to the insurgency in much greater numbers. (Right now, the Pashtuns are probably split 80-20 in favor of Karzai against the Taliban, but the US could easily push the rest of the Pashtuns into the arms of the insurgents if it isn’t careful. That would set the stage for another Afghanistan Civil War, since the northern ethnic groups– Tajiks, Hazarahs, Uzbeks, etc., absolutely despise the Taliban).
Ten, Afghanistan is a mess.
Afghanistan is a mess and likely will go on being a mess. It is the fifth poorest country in the world, is a major center of opium production and trafficking, has been wracked by decades of war (for much of which Washington is responsible), has a literacy rate of only 28%, and suffers from poor infrastructure and weak, corrupt, inefficient government. Its most troubled regions are populated by tribal people who have it as a code of honor to engage in feuds, and some of what the US sees as insurgency is just ordinary feuding. Tribes fall out with each other, and fight for a while until they make up. That way of life will eventually subside, when people become more settled, urban, and educated. But that day is a ways off for most Pashtuns.
Eleven, Cole supports counter-terrorism with reservations, that is intelligence work, special forces' operations, and air-attacks including drones. The focus is on suspected Al Qaeda areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He conveys great ambivalence about drone attacks on Pakistan
In the meantime, I think counter-terrorism in Afghanistan is the right policy, though I think the drone strikes on Pakistani territory are very problematic and concur with those CIA officers who hold that they do more harm than good.
Twelve, Cole suggests that a counter-terrorism strategy will require the U.S.-led occupation to have the capacity to keep the Karzai government from falling and at the same time become effective, and also have the time to train new Afghan security forces so they can stand up to the enemy or die. But this seems to conflict with his ideas of accelerating the training of Afghan troops [which is bound to take a long time, if ever], holding the number of U.S. troops where it is. and, implicitly, winning support from Afghan villagers. Cole does not refer to reconstruction as an element of counter-terrorism. It is also not clear how a counter-terrorism strategy would keep the government from falling, let alone rising.
What you need in Afghanistan is a way of keeping the government from falling while you train up the new security forces (which must be put in a position where they either stand and fight or risk destruction– without the ability to depend on US infantrymen). I think this minimalist goal can be achieved via counter-terrorism. The counter-insurgency campaign was a dead end.
Cole reconstructs some of the present sniping within the Obama Administration over what the appropriate strategy in Afghanistan should be. The conflict revolves around the counter-insurgency strategy of General McChrystal, a strategy that now is in effect. On the other side, Cole identifies some of those who are opposed to this strategy, including Cole himself. The other strategy worth considering - and supporting - is a "minimalist" strategy of counter-terrorism. He also thinks that a third approach endorsing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country would result in a brutal Taliban victory, which he finds unacceptable.
If you have been following the posts on our blog, you know that we have been in support of a planned withdrawal of troops. Our position has been influenced by Afghan citizens like Malalai Joya. My impression of Cole's position is that he is grasping at straws when he discribes - and supports- a counter-terrorism strategy.
So, Cole says, it is counter-insurgency versus counter-terrorism, with the withdrawal of troops off the table. It is up to President Obama to decide the strategy that will prevail [between two bad options]. Here is some of what Cole suggests.
One, get rid of Gen. McChrystal, and plan to disgard the counter-insurgency strategy.
If Obama doesn’t fire McChrystal, he will never be respected by anybody in the chain of command that leads to his desk. Moreover, moving McChrystal out now would be a perfect opportunity to pull the plug on the impractical counter-insurgency campaign that the latter has been pursuing, which probably has only a 10% chance of success. (A RAND study found that where a government that claimed to be a democracy actually was not, and where it faced an insurgency, it prevailed only 10% of the time. Sounds like President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan to me.)
[....]
Two, Obama should move toward support of a counter-terrorism strategy. [This approach would preclude bringing additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan. It is not clear whether the number of troops already stationed in the country would be kept at the same level or reduced.] He does offer an idea of what counter-terrorism would include: "intelligence work, deployment of special operations forces against small, specific targets, and use of air strikes and drones."
The most recent roots of this grudge match go back to the dispute within the Obama administration last year over how to deal with Afghanistan. Eikenberry, a former general, had been one of McChrystal’s predecessors as commander of US troops in Afghanistan. And Biden had spent decades either chairing or being ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. These seasoned observers of Central and South Asia concluded that the best the US could do in Afghanistan was small-scale targeted counter-terrorism. Counter-terrorism implies intelligence work, deployment of special operations forces against small, specific targets, and use of air strikes and drones. Biden is said to have suggested getting most US troops out of Afghanistan and just striking at al-Qaeda wherever it popped up, especially in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Three, more on what the ineffective counter-insurgency strategy entails.
In contrast, McChrystal’s plan called for counter-insurgency, which implies large-scale conventional military campaigns, to “take, clear, hold and build.” That is, the US troops would take territory now held by insurgents, would clear it of Taliban or other militants, would hold it for the medium or long term so as to reassure local elders that they were in no danger from returning Taliban, and would use the opportunity to build infrastructure and services. Biden’s target was the largely Arab, foreign al-Qaeda, organized as small terrorist cells; but McChrystal wanted to root out the Taliban and their new Mujahidin allies, a much larger force that had roots in Pashtun society in a way that al-Qaeda does not. McChrystal’s plan required a massive troop escalation and the conquest by the US of large swathes of Pashtun territory in the southeast and southwest of the country. The hope was that while the US did counter-insurgency on a large scale, NATO and US troops would be training and equipping a large Afghanistan National Army of 200,000 and a similarly sized police force, and that in a few years the country could be turned over to them.
Four, reasons why counter-insurgency will fail.
Eikenberry worried, in cables later leaked, that going beyond counter-terrorism to large-scale counter-insurgency was impractical because:
A big US troop escalation would have the effect of actually making the Afghanistan security forces more dependent on the US, not less, and so significantly delay the day when they could or would step up to security duties on their own;
A large-scale counter-insurgency campaign requires a strong Afghan political partner for the ‘hold’ and ‘build’ phases. But there is no such partner. President Hamid Karzai stole the presidential election last year, and is notoriously unreliable. The Afghanistan National Army will not soon be able to take over from the US troops as they take and clear wide swathes of territory.
Five, Obama hedged.
Obama backed McChrystal against Biden and Eikenberry, but threw McChrystal a curve ball by talking about beginning a troop withdrawal in summer of 2011 (thus taking a little piece of the Biden plan and inserting it awkwardly in the middle of Gen. McChrystal’s years-long counter-insurgency struggle– and thus inevitably undermining the latter).
Six, all the strategies have shortcomings, but counter-terrosim makes more sense than the other, Coal suggests.
Both the Biden/ Eikenberry and the McChrystal approaches have drawbacks. Counter-terrorism focusing like a laser on al-Qaeda would be largely irrelevant now in Afghanistan, where there is virtually no al-Qaeda. But that policy is being pursued in the tribal belt in Pakistan, alienating the Pakistani public because the drones often also kill innocent civilians. And, a rapid draw-down of US troops in favor of newly trained Afghan recruits may not be practical, given the poor esprit de corps, illiteracy, drug use, corruption and over-representation of minorities in the Afghanistan National Army and police. What would happen if, as the US drew down, the provinces around Kabul started swiftly falling to the Taliban or allied insurgents?
Seven, but withdrawal is out of the question, at least for some, perhaps, lengthy period of time.
I know one Afghan scholar who for years went back and forth consulting with the Karzai government, who is convinced that if the US and NATO suddenly pulled up stakes, the Karzai government would fall within 3 days. Whatever you think of President Karzai, the prospect of him being hanged by Mulla Omar is hard to contemplate with equanimity.
Eight, the counter-insurgency strategy is far too ambitious and should therefore be phased out.
On the other hand, McChrystal’s plan is in my view far too ambitious and likely completely impractical. It assumes that the Pashtuns want US Marines in their villages and would prefer them to the Taliban or other insurgents (most of whom are actually from the same tribes as and therefore cousins to these villagers). It assumes that the Kabul government can provide a ‘government in a box’ (in McChrystal’s words) to the provinces once the US military has conquered them. But Kabul is not well governed itself, much less being able swiftly to provide services and expertise in the provinces on demand. It assumes that the US push won’t alienate ever more Pashtuns, pushing them into the arms of the Taliban. It makes no distinction between Eastern and Western Pashtuns. And it assumes that an Afghanistan National Army of double the current size can be swiftly trained and deployed to replace the US troops as they move on to the next conquest. None of these assumptions is warranted, as is becoming clear in Helmand Province, where McChrystal’s demonstration project was the small farming villages of Marjah. It hasn’t gone as well as was initially suggested.
Nine, the next planned phase of counter-insurgency is counterproductive and should, implicitly, be discontinued.
McChrystal’s next Big Idea was to attack Taliban strongholds the major southwestern Pashtun city of Qandahar (pop. about 1 million). Such an operation is extremely dangerous. If urban Pashtuns were alienated by it, they could go over to the insurgency in much greater numbers. (Right now, the Pashtuns are probably split 80-20 in favor of Karzai against the Taliban, but the US could easily push the rest of the Pashtuns into the arms of the insurgents if it isn’t careful. That would set the stage for another Afghanistan Civil War, since the northern ethnic groups– Tajiks, Hazarahs, Uzbeks, etc., absolutely despise the Taliban).
Ten, Afghanistan is a mess.
Afghanistan is a mess and likely will go on being a mess. It is the fifth poorest country in the world, is a major center of opium production and trafficking, has been wracked by decades of war (for much of which Washington is responsible), has a literacy rate of only 28%, and suffers from poor infrastructure and weak, corrupt, inefficient government. Its most troubled regions are populated by tribal people who have it as a code of honor to engage in feuds, and some of what the US sees as insurgency is just ordinary feuding. Tribes fall out with each other, and fight for a while until they make up. That way of life will eventually subside, when people become more settled, urban, and educated. But that day is a ways off for most Pashtuns.
Eleven, Cole supports counter-terrorism with reservations, that is intelligence work, special forces' operations, and air-attacks including drones. The focus is on suspected Al Qaeda areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He conveys great ambivalence about drone attacks on Pakistan
In the meantime, I think counter-terrorism in Afghanistan is the right policy, though I think the drone strikes on Pakistani territory are very problematic and concur with those CIA officers who hold that they do more harm than good.
Twelve, Cole suggests that a counter-terrorism strategy will require the U.S.-led occupation to have the capacity to keep the Karzai government from falling and at the same time become effective, and also have the time to train new Afghan security forces so they can stand up to the enemy or die. But this seems to conflict with his ideas of accelerating the training of Afghan troops [which is bound to take a long time, if ever], holding the number of U.S. troops where it is. and, implicitly, winning support from Afghan villagers. Cole does not refer to reconstruction as an element of counter-terrorism. It is also not clear how a counter-terrorism strategy would keep the government from falling, let alone rising.
What you need in Afghanistan is a way of keeping the government from falling while you train up the new security forces (which must be put in a position where they either stand and fight or risk destruction– without the ability to depend on US infantrymen). I think this minimalist goal can be achieved via counter-terrorism. The counter-insurgency campaign was a dead end.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
U.S. for nation-building from the bottom-up - another potential reason for extending occupation
Carlotta Gall reports in the New York Times about a U.S. effort in Afghanistan to build democracy from the bottom up in the form of elected district councils in some of the most unstable parts of the country. The article was published on June 19, 2010, with the title "U.S. Hopes Afghan Councils Will Weaken Taliban." Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Here is a summary of key points from the article and some quotes.
The council in Nadali, are, Gall writes, "part of a pilot program to set up 100 district" by July 2011 "to provide representative government in places where government has largely been absent...[and] convince people that there is a viable option to the Taliban."
The project runs up against Afghan populations that have "suffered at the hands of predatory officials and repeated military operations by foreign forces in recent years."
Another key element of the project is a "National Solidarty Program," designed to "set up small development councils...[and] to undertake small reconstruction projects in every village."
The process take times. Aside from insurgents or Taliban, "it takes six months just to elect and train community councilors and two years to complete a village project."
Even prior to reaching the stage where there are elections, it may take a year or more "of visiting villages and persuading people to cooperate with the government...."
Gall does not make clear how a village's representatives are "selected" for a district's council. Once selected, though, they elect the councilors. Thus, the plan is to have only local people participating in these local governance structures.
Another task is "to persuade local insurgents to give up the fight and return to a peaceful life in the community." One district chief who is quotes, says: "It takes time; you have to go and talk a lot and spend money."
Two questions:
(1) Can a locally-focused program succeed, given a continuing occupation by foreign troops, a weak central government, along with weak government at other levels and warlord domination in many districts, and insurgents or Taliban who have yet to be defeated or reconciled?
(2) My impression is that the whole idea will take many years to implement. If it is taken seriously by the Obama administration, the Pentagon, and the generals in the field, then the U.S. occupation may well continued beyond the summer of 2011, the scheduled time for the "beginning" of the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
NADALI, Afghanistan — More than 600 men, most of them farmers with weathered faces and rough hands, sat on the ground under an awning, waiting all day to deposit their ballots in plastic boxes. They had braved Taliban threats and road mines to come here to select a district council, part of a plan to strengthen local government in the most unstable parts of Afghanistan.
“The important thing is we are trying to build trust between the people and the government,” said Qari Mukhtar Ahmad, a senior cleric attending the election last month. “This district was under fighting for a long time, but now there is peace and we have to listen to the people and bring them together.”
Peace is a relative term in Nadali, a district in the southern province of Helmand with one of highest levels of roadside bombs per square mile. Government officials still have to fly by helicopter from the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, rather than risk the 20-minute drive.
The district encompasses Marja, a Taliban stronghold where United States Marines have been battling insurgents since February. Marja remains largely ungovernable, but the operation broke the hold of the Taliban in the rest of the district, making it stable enough to try to set up some local representation.
The election here, an exercise in nation-building from the ground up, is part of a pilot program to set up 100 district councils to provide representative government in places where government has largely been absent. But the councils, backed by the British and American governments, also represent a critical element of counterinsurgency strategy: if they succeed, the hope is they will convince people that there is a viable alternative to Taliban rule.
Since the beginning of the year, 35 such councils have begun work in nine provinces, and the American and British governments have pledged financing to establish 100 by July 2011, officials said. The ultimate goal is to have directly elected councils nationwide.
“It is a vital, basic element of administration,” said Christopher Demers, an adviser for the Agency for International Development in Kandahar. “Building a people’s body like this is important; it is giving people an opportunity to speak with the government.”
Military officials in the United States-led coalition have often expressed frustration at the inability of the Afghan government to move quickly into secured areas and start governing. Yet Afghan officials say that it is a lengthy task to build an administration from scratch and gain the trust of a population that has suffered at the hands of predatory officials and repeated military operations by foreign forces in recent years.
In many districts, like Nadali, there is little government presence, often only a district chief and a police chief, both appointed by the central government in Kabul. They have few resources or personnel. Most district chiefs have no official car and an official budget of only $12 a year, the United Nations said last year.
One of the successes of the Afghan government over the past eight years has been the National Solidarity Program, which set up small development councils across the country to undertake small reconstruction projects in every village. Yet it takes six months just to elect and train community councilors and two years to complete a village project, said Wais Ahmad Barmak, deputy minister in the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, who has 30 years experience in community development.
In the most insecure areas, like Helmand, the ministry has had to suspend its work, he said.
In Nadali it has taken a year of visiting villages and persuading people to cooperate with the government to get them to the point of electing the district council, said the district chief, Habibullah Shamlani, a former police academy instructor.
After several gatherings around the district, 600 representatives were selected to come and vote for 45 councilors, all of whom must live in the district, a change from the absentee landlords or tribal chiefs who have traditionally made the decisions.
“This district council should make all the decisions which affect the life of the district,” said Jelani Popal, who leads the local government directorate, an arm of the national government that is running the program. “We will use them for security reasons, like reintegration; they will be very active in deciding about development, but also governance; they can communicate or channel the grievances of the people to the governor and district governor.”
Those who took part in the selection said they were taking the risk because they needed representatives to intercede with the government and the foreign forces on a variety of problems, from securing the release of detainees and compensation for war damage to resolving tribal and land disputes and winning development assistance for their areas.
“We hope the government will do something for us if we have this district council and we can share our problems with the higher authorities,” said Feda Muhammad Khan, an elected councilor. “We are fed up with the fighting, and there is a drought, and we are hoping peace will knock on our door.”
One of the main tasks of the council will be to persuade local insurgents to give up the fight and return to a peaceful life in the community, or if not to move away and stop destabilizing the area, Mr. Shamlani, the district chief, said. Already 40 people who were with the Taliban have been persuaded to quit fighting, he said.
“We are working step by step,” he said. “We cannot put too much pressure on the people to reject the Taliban. Gradually now, people have found some courage to point out who are Taliban. If things are sustained the same as now I am hoping by next year we will know who is behind it all.”
The key has been to deliver on promises of assistance and treat the people well, he said. “It takes time; you have to go and talk a lot and spend money,” he said.
But there is already evidence that the Taliban are fighting the councils much as they have resisted other government initiatives.
Some of the participants said they risked assassination if the Taliban in their area discovered that they were cooperating with the government. At least five councilors have been killed and one has been wounded since the four councils were formed in Helmand Province, officials said, presumably by the Taliban.
And the representatives choosing the council here included Taliban members, several participants said. They, too, wanted representation to help win the release of their people who have been detained.
Maj. Abdul Salam, who runs the police criminal department in Nadali, said the fact that 600 representatives showed up was itself a vote of confidence in the process.
“These people are here because they have some hope that the government is gaining strength and they are hoping they can defend themselves,” he said. “But you are right, they are in some danger.”
The council in Nadali, are, Gall writes, "part of a pilot program to set up 100 district" by July 2011 "to provide representative government in places where government has largely been absent...[and] convince people that there is a viable option to the Taliban."
The project runs up against Afghan populations that have "suffered at the hands of predatory officials and repeated military operations by foreign forces in recent years."
Another key element of the project is a "National Solidarty Program," designed to "set up small development councils...[and] to undertake small reconstruction projects in every village."
The process take times. Aside from insurgents or Taliban, "it takes six months just to elect and train community councilors and two years to complete a village project."
Even prior to reaching the stage where there are elections, it may take a year or more "of visiting villages and persuading people to cooperate with the government...."
Gall does not make clear how a village's representatives are "selected" for a district's council. Once selected, though, they elect the councilors. Thus, the plan is to have only local people participating in these local governance structures.
Another task is "to persuade local insurgents to give up the fight and return to a peaceful life in the community." One district chief who is quotes, says: "It takes time; you have to go and talk a lot and spend money."
Two questions:
(1) Can a locally-focused program succeed, given a continuing occupation by foreign troops, a weak central government, along with weak government at other levels and warlord domination in many districts, and insurgents or Taliban who have yet to be defeated or reconciled?
(2) My impression is that the whole idea will take many years to implement. If it is taken seriously by the Obama administration, the Pentagon, and the generals in the field, then the U.S. occupation may well continued beyond the summer of 2011, the scheduled time for the "beginning" of the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
NADALI, Afghanistan — More than 600 men, most of them farmers with weathered faces and rough hands, sat on the ground under an awning, waiting all day to deposit their ballots in plastic boxes. They had braved Taliban threats and road mines to come here to select a district council, part of a plan to strengthen local government in the most unstable parts of Afghanistan.
“The important thing is we are trying to build trust between the people and the government,” said Qari Mukhtar Ahmad, a senior cleric attending the election last month. “This district was under fighting for a long time, but now there is peace and we have to listen to the people and bring them together.”
Peace is a relative term in Nadali, a district in the southern province of Helmand with one of highest levels of roadside bombs per square mile. Government officials still have to fly by helicopter from the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, rather than risk the 20-minute drive.
The district encompasses Marja, a Taliban stronghold where United States Marines have been battling insurgents since February. Marja remains largely ungovernable, but the operation broke the hold of the Taliban in the rest of the district, making it stable enough to try to set up some local representation.
The election here, an exercise in nation-building from the ground up, is part of a pilot program to set up 100 district councils to provide representative government in places where government has largely been absent. But the councils, backed by the British and American governments, also represent a critical element of counterinsurgency strategy: if they succeed, the hope is they will convince people that there is a viable alternative to Taliban rule.
Since the beginning of the year, 35 such councils have begun work in nine provinces, and the American and British governments have pledged financing to establish 100 by July 2011, officials said. The ultimate goal is to have directly elected councils nationwide.
“It is a vital, basic element of administration,” said Christopher Demers, an adviser for the Agency for International Development in Kandahar. “Building a people’s body like this is important; it is giving people an opportunity to speak with the government.”
Military officials in the United States-led coalition have often expressed frustration at the inability of the Afghan government to move quickly into secured areas and start governing. Yet Afghan officials say that it is a lengthy task to build an administration from scratch and gain the trust of a population that has suffered at the hands of predatory officials and repeated military operations by foreign forces in recent years.
In many districts, like Nadali, there is little government presence, often only a district chief and a police chief, both appointed by the central government in Kabul. They have few resources or personnel. Most district chiefs have no official car and an official budget of only $12 a year, the United Nations said last year.
One of the successes of the Afghan government over the past eight years has been the National Solidarity Program, which set up small development councils across the country to undertake small reconstruction projects in every village. Yet it takes six months just to elect and train community councilors and two years to complete a village project, said Wais Ahmad Barmak, deputy minister in the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, who has 30 years experience in community development.
In the most insecure areas, like Helmand, the ministry has had to suspend its work, he said.
In Nadali it has taken a year of visiting villages and persuading people to cooperate with the government to get them to the point of electing the district council, said the district chief, Habibullah Shamlani, a former police academy instructor.
After several gatherings around the district, 600 representatives were selected to come and vote for 45 councilors, all of whom must live in the district, a change from the absentee landlords or tribal chiefs who have traditionally made the decisions.
“This district council should make all the decisions which affect the life of the district,” said Jelani Popal, who leads the local government directorate, an arm of the national government that is running the program. “We will use them for security reasons, like reintegration; they will be very active in deciding about development, but also governance; they can communicate or channel the grievances of the people to the governor and district governor.”
Those who took part in the selection said they were taking the risk because they needed representatives to intercede with the government and the foreign forces on a variety of problems, from securing the release of detainees and compensation for war damage to resolving tribal and land disputes and winning development assistance for their areas.
“We hope the government will do something for us if we have this district council and we can share our problems with the higher authorities,” said Feda Muhammad Khan, an elected councilor. “We are fed up with the fighting, and there is a drought, and we are hoping peace will knock on our door.”
One of the main tasks of the council will be to persuade local insurgents to give up the fight and return to a peaceful life in the community, or if not to move away and stop destabilizing the area, Mr. Shamlani, the district chief, said. Already 40 people who were with the Taliban have been persuaded to quit fighting, he said.
“We are working step by step,” he said. “We cannot put too much pressure on the people to reject the Taliban. Gradually now, people have found some courage to point out who are Taliban. If things are sustained the same as now I am hoping by next year we will know who is behind it all.”
The key has been to deliver on promises of assistance and treat the people well, he said. “It takes time; you have to go and talk a lot and spend money,” he said.
But there is already evidence that the Taliban are fighting the councils much as they have resisted other government initiatives.
Some of the participants said they risked assassination if the Taliban in their area discovered that they were cooperating with the government. At least five councilors have been killed and one has been wounded since the four councils were formed in Helmand Province, officials said, presumably by the Taliban.
And the representatives choosing the council here included Taliban members, several participants said. They, too, wanted representation to help win the release of their people who have been detained.
Maj. Abdul Salam, who runs the police criminal department in Nadali, said the fact that 600 representatives showed up was itself a vote of confidence in the process.
“These people are here because they have some hope that the government is gaining strength and they are hoping they can defend themselves,” he said. “But you are right, they are in some danger.”
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