And this is a defense of our Afghanistan War policy? (1)

Rory Stewart has an article in the 01/14/09 New York Review of Books, Afghanistan: What Could Work (article dated 12/17/09) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23562 making a case for Obama's Afghanistan War policy. Stewart makes a Goldilocks argument: not too hot, not too cold, but (almost) juu-uust right. Stewart's article is worth reading for the experience of watching his argument wander here and wander there in seeming contradictory directions before getting to the Goldilocks conclusion. His basic argument is that Obama's current strategy and troop levels create a good chance to reach a reasonably constructive goal in 20 years. For those of you familiar with Tom Friedman's famous series of the-next-six-months-are-decisive predictions about his pet Iraq War, Stewart is predicting that things will be okay in 40 "Friedman units".

He explains that this approach is moderate, wise and "revolutionary". It firmly puts Obama in control of the generals and slaps down the warmongers. And to be a good Goldilocks policy, of course that means that it especially has to slap down those dirty blogging hippie peacenik defeatocrats. The "almost" in the almost-just-right Goldilocks variation is that he thinks Obama has made a reckless, dangerous concession to the hippie peaceniks by establishing and vague goal of starting to reduce the number of US troops in only three Friedman units (18 months). Maybe we should start talking about "Obama units". He declared when he first took office that he would shut down Gitmo within a year. That year has now turned into sometime in an unspecified future but presumably before Hell freezes over. So the 18 months makes 1 1/2 "Obama units", which makes be enough to encompass Stewart's breezy optimism that in 20 years we'll see some positive results. Stewart also carefully avoids saying that when things get good in 2030 in Afghanistan, that US troops can actually start leaving that hellhole.

I'm increasingly seeing the policy questions around the Afghanistan War on two related but different levels. One is the more macro level that people like Andrew Bacevich and Tom Engelhardt having been raising for years, the issue of American overreach and the need to recognize the real limits of American power. From that level, the idea that the United States would commit to another 20 years of active military and political involvement in Afghanistan, on top of the nine years we've been there already, defines the situation as much more than a war. If the United States is going to be a key support for the Afghan regime for 20 years against all enemies internal and external, which is what Stewart describes in more euphemistic terms, that's not a war. That's adopting Afghanistan as a protectorate, which differs 20th century colonialism more in the packaging than in the substance.

Then there's the more immediate level of, given the reality of the current commitment, which proposals are more likely to benefit the US and our allies?

One way in which those two levels of perspective merge is in counterinsurgency (COIN) theory. The more I hear the COIN enthusiasts and our glorious generals - and the serving ones are all expected to be COIN enthusiasts these days - recite the virtues of their warm-and-fuzzy, serve-the-people approach to war, the more I start to wonder if the great Petraeus COIN Doctrine isn't 99% marketing hype. In this SPIEGEL interview with Afghanistan's lead US/NATO commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the general seems to be trying to come off as a cross between Ché Guevara and Mother Theresa: 'Killing the Enemy Is Not The Best Route to Success' 01/11/10. In a war in which blasting civilians to pieces as "collateral damage" in targeted assassination strikes has become routing, the general says:

At the end of the day, a counter-insurgency is decided by people's perceptions and by how people feel. I think any war like this is not a battle between material. It's not about destroying the enemy's cities. It's not even about destroying their army, their fighters. You have to weaken the insurgency. But it's really about convincing the people that they want it to stop and they ultimately will. The most effective way for us to operate is to be really good and effective partners with our Afghan counterparts, because it's not a technical problem, it's a human problem.

What does Gen. McChrystal say about those airstrikes? Why, he's totally against them and it's one of his highest priorities to avoid civilian casualties. But have any of the strikes that have actually occurred been a problem for him? Well, no:

SPIEGEL: Coming from your background in special forces, where targeting and killing people is actually the nature of the business, your tactical directive to avoid casualties which came out in July was quite a surprise. It says that killing the enemy is not effective and therefore needs to be avoided.

McChrystal: Well, the tactical directive was designed not just to give people specific guidelines, but to give them intent. That was to explain that killing the enemy was not the best route to success. If you kill two enemy fighters who are in somebody's house, and in doing so you destroy their house, then the individuals who own the house probably have very conflicted feelings about whether you did the right thing. If you take an action that has the risk of harming civilians, you have to carefully consider that decision, because you can't bring a civilian who has been killed back to life.

SPIEGEL: But what if commanders on the ground do not follow your guidance?

McChrystal: I haven't had the experience of commanders who don't follow guidance. What I've found is that in any big organization, people interpret guidelines or intent differently. However as long as I'm in command here, I will be making some of those same points, constantly.

In this passage, the general is in Mother Theresa mode:

What defeats terrorism is really two things. It's rule of law and then it's opportunity for people. So if you have governance that allows you to have rule of law, you have an environment in which it is difficult to pursue terrorism. And if you have an opportunity for people in life, which includes education and the chance to have a job, then you take away the biggest cause of terrorism. So really, the way to defeat terrorism is not military strikes, it's going after the basic conditions.

Here is where the propaganda aspect of COIN doctrine comes out strongly. Gen. McChrystal is describing a massive social service project in which military force plays a small role. But Obama didn't just add 30,000 new teachers to Afghanistan, he added 30,000 new soldiers. And despite the photos the Pentagon likes to post of nice soldiers talking to smiling children or Marines painting schools are whatever, the war McChrystal is running is a military one. And his emphasis on how the touchy-feely stuff is what will make the difference in the end rather than the military is a pre-emptory excuse: if things turn out badly, it's not because our infallible generals and our invicible military didn't do everything brilliantly and score triumph after triumph; it's because the unworthy civilians back home or in the country we're trying to save didn't measure up to the greatness of our glorious generals. Early in the interview, we see McChrystal saying in Ché Guevara mode:

McChrystal: In a counter-insurgency, your security ultimately comes from the people, because they help deny the insurgents support, then they provide you intelligence. Here is the conflict. To protect yourself perfectly, you get behind big forts, you wear body armor and travel in armored vehicles. But then you can't interact with people. And if you can't interact with people, the people will not protect you ultimately. If you want to swim, you have to let go of the side of the pool. You have to get in and amongst the people and build that relationship. In the long run you will suffer fewer casualties and you'll be more successful.

SPIEGEL: Your intelligence chief, Michael Flynn, just came up with a provocative document claiming that US spies in Afghanistan are totally clueless. They only focus on the insurgency, he says, and do not understand the most fundamental questions of people's lives and their environment. Is he right?

McChrystal: Understanding unconventional warfare is typically understanding the terrain, the physical terrain, and understanding the enemy. In a counter-insurgency the terrain is the people, rather than bridges and hills and forests. You have to understand tribes, leaders and the economic forces at work. Otherwise you can't deny the insurgency. What General Flynn has pointed out correctly is the fact that we need to widen our understanding. We need to understand how the enemy interacts with the people.

But to "get in and amongst the people" to rally the peasants to storm the feudal lord's palace is not what McChrystal is about. The US/NATO approach, despite the warm-and-fuzzy rhetoric, is to assert physical military control of their target areas. It's COIN on the principle of Lyndon Johnson's famous remark, when you've got 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. That core focus emerges in a comment later in the interview:

SPIEGEL: What would be needed for these people to switch sides?

McChrystal: I think they need protection first of all. Protection from the Taliban, protection for their families as well and an opportunity to either go back to the village from which they came and an opportunity to make a living again, to re-enter the workplace in their society. They also need respect. It's important that they are not ashamed as they do this because they are making an honorable decision.

This isn't the language of helping a legitimate government do it's job properly. It's the language of occupation and collaboration.

[Part 2 tomorrow]

Tags: afghanistan war, afpak war

Stab-in-the-back keeps on stabbing

Mark Moyar elaborates a version of the stab-in-the-back history of the Vietnam War in Disastrous Lessons Foreign Policy Online 10/19/09. That would be the version in which our brilliant generals brilliantly won the Vietnam War but were undercut by the gutless wimpy politicians and cowardly civilians back home.

This should be read in conjunction with this article from Rick Perlstein from a couple of years ago, which Digby recently highlighted: The Best Wars of Their Lives The Nation 09/27/09 (10/15/09 edition). Rick analyzes a couple of examples of books elaborating a stab-in-the-back viewpoint, one of them by Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (2006), which he describes as follows:

Here is right-wing Vietnam revisionism at its most respectable.

Moyar's method is simple: Take what the "orthodoxy" says and revise it 180 degrees hard to starboard. For instance, in 1954 the insurgent Communist forces of Ho Chi Minh beat French colonial forces (whom the United States backed) at the French garrison of Dien Bien Phu. Most have discerned in France's humiliating defeat a classic example of a hubristic colonial power foolishly underestimating a nonwhite enemy. Not Moyar. He cites Communist sources--more on this move later--to argue that France barely lost.

He walks through Moyar's fantasy version of the Vietnam War in more detail, noting that there are distinct and incompatible versions of the stab-in-the-back myth. In Moyar's version, it was William Westmoreland who had brilliantly won the war as chief commander in Vietnam.

In another version, represented in Rick's essay by Lewis Sorley, it was Westmoreland's successor, Gen. Creighton Abrams, who instituted a brilliantly brilliant counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy that recognized the need to secure the population and etc., etc. We've heard quite a bit of this version lately from advocates of endless war in Afghanistan and Iraq as alleged historical evidence for the magic virtues of COIN thinking. Which for the US military in practice has been a less-preferred method of justifying heavy use of bombing and artillery on largely civilian targets.

I don't want to dismiss the value of COIN thinking. I've quoted before Steven Metz' Rethinking Insurgency (June 2007), which makes a realistic argument for recognizing different types of COIN situations and adopting approaches appropriate to the practical possibilities presented by each one. But as we saw in some the footage from Frontline's recent program on the "AfPak" conflict, Obama's War, in a war now into its ninth year with no end in sight, American COIN approaches to winning the confidence of the population involves heavily armed American soldiers going out to talk to Afghan peasants in English, relying on an interpreter may not be able to communicate that well with the soldier in English to communicate the soldier's message to the Afghans. In other words, the current McCrystal COIN strategy is to a large extent a marketing ploy for the American public and Congress, not a dramatic change from the strategy of the previous eight years.

This 10/22/09 interview with Tom Hayden at Antiwar.com also goes into the reality of COIN as it is being implemented in our current wars.

Here's a real-time news report: U.S. forces kill four Afghans in car: police by Ismael Sameem and Golnar Motevalli, Reuters 10/24/09.

Tags: afghanistan war, afpak war, stab-in-the-back, vietnam war

Anxiety over Pakistan

Peter Bergen ask Is Pakistan really such a basket case? Foreign Policy Online 08/10/09. His own answer is no. He cites Juan Cole, both at his blog and in a new article, "Pakistan and Afghanistan: Beyond the Taliban", behind subscription in the Political Science Quarterly Summer 2009 as another leading advocate of the non-alarmist view.

Bergen also cites The Terrorist Threat to Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons by Shaun Gregory CTC Sentinel July 2009 that includes among reasons for concern the fact that there have been attacks on Pakistani nuclear facilities on at least three occasions in 2007-8.

The problems of nuclear proliferation is very real, and Pakistan has been the worst proliferater in recent years. Still, Gregory doesn't leave the impression that the Pakistani military is just leaving operative nuclear weapons lying around in easily accessible spots:

In terms of physical security, Pakistan operates a layered concept of concentric tiers of armed forces personnel to guard nuclear weapons facilities, the use of physical barriers and intrusion detectors to secure nuclear weapons facilities, the physical separation of warhead cores from their detonation components, and the storage of the components in protected underground sites.

Gregory raises a caution against the often-mentioned possibility that the US could go in and seize Pakistan's nukes in the event of a governmental crisis. He argues that not only would the army by likely to fight such an outside attempt, but that various security measures mean that at this point the US may not know where all the Pakistani nukes are. And:

Similarly, the use of U.S. precision strikes to destroy the weapons would need to rely on perfect intelligence and would risk not only significant radiological hazards at strike targets, but also the ire of the Pakistan Army and the wider Islamic world.

He also talks about the possibilities that the Pakistani military or elements of it sympathetic to Islamic extremists might facilitate the transfer of nuclear technology and/or weapons to terrorist groups. The sorts of possibilities he lists are the kinds of things intelligence agencies have to be concerned with. The best way to reduce those possibilities is to have an effective international nonproliferation program. Any way you slice it, as long as nuclear weapons are available, some damn fool is going to be tempted or even eager to use them. But the kinds of concerns he discusses there are not going to be effectively met by the US recklessly supporting military coups in Pakistan or by expanding direct military operations in Pakistan.

Juan Cole in the Political Science Quarterly piece cautions about one brand of threat inflation that we've been seeing in the Afghanistan War and with Pakistan:

Any region where al Qaeda operatives find refuge is a potential security threat, but making sure that the operatives lack access to airports and monitoring their communications would be more effective than provoking a feud with their tribal hosts. September 11 was launched not from Khost in Afghanistan but from Hamburg in Germany, not by tribal persons or seminarians but by engineers trained in the West. Even in their heyday in the 1990s, the Taliban were seldom directly involved in committing international terrorism. The conflation of Pushtuns, and their love of relative autonomy, with Talibanism frequently obscures the local politics that drive militancy. [my emphasis]

Tags: afghanistan war, afpak war, pakistan

Important political moment in Pakistan

But, despite the alarmist talk we've been hearing this year about how Pakistan and its nuclear weapons is about to fall under the control of the Taliban, our crack press corps seems to have basically ignored it so far. Citing this BBC report by Syed Shoaib Hasan, Musharraf emergency 'unlawful' 07/31/09, Juan Cole in an Informed Comment blog post of 08/07/09 explains:

But the really big news out of Pakistan in the last week was the finding of the restored Supreme Court that Gen. Pervez Musharraf's emergency decree of November, 2007, was unconstitutional. The ruling has larger implications, in perhaps suggesting that all of Pakistan's military coups have been unconstitutional. This is the first time that the Pakistani Supreme Court has so forcefully stood up to the military.

If the American press and political establishment was serious about supporting democracy in Pakistan and the Muslim World, we'd have seen an avalanche of comment praising the Supreme Court ruling as a victory for democracy. I did a keyword search at Lexis under television transcripts and could not find any evidence that anyone in national television or radio except Julie McCarthy at NPR even mentioned the epochal Pakistani Supreme Court ruling! ...

Pakistan is not, as is often alleged, a failed state, and the Supreme Court ruling is a big piece of evidence that the country has a functioning judiciary. [my emphasis]

We've expanded the Afghanistan War into Pakistan with all sorts of associated risk involved. But the US press can't be bothered to keep up with something like this. Cole calls this ruling "a bigger turning point in Pakistani history than any we have seen since 1947." If we had a functioning national press here in the US, more people might know about this.

This has longer-term implications for American policy. For years, the US foreign policy establishment has tended to feel more comfortable with military rulers in Pakistan than with elected governments there. This certainly complicates that policy option of encouraging military coups in Pakistan. Cole explains that our most recent friendly military dictator in Pakistan maybe wasn't entirely constructive for US interests:

Musharraf consistently got a pass from the US media and Washington establishment, even though he had been before September 11 a big supporter of the Taliban (it wasn't ideological; he is a secularist). Under his leadership, the Pakistani government took some $10 billion from the United States, some of which it appears to have used to reinvigorate elements of the Taliban so as to destabilize southern Afghanistan and to assert Pakistani power there (at the same time, the Pakistani army was ordered to fight other Taliban, presumably ones threatening Islamabad instead of Kabul). Musharraf even halted a Pakistani military operation initiated by [his predecessor] Nawaz Sharif and Bill Clinton to send in a SWAT team to capture or kill Usama Bin Laden. When Musharraf took power, he told the US he wasn't interested. Musharraf, in his arrogance that only he knows what is good for Pakistan, is actually quite scary, but Washington loved him because he said he was fighting Taliban! [my emphasis]

Tags: afpak war, pakistan

Pakistan, Afghanistan, India

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari

Graham Usher in this article from the London Review of Books focuses on a critical element of Pakistan's foreign policy that gets very little attention in American commentary on the AfPak War, the central role of its conflict with India over the disputed province of Kashmir: Taliban v. Taliban 04/09/09. He writes:

Pakistan and India have been at war since 1948. There have been occasional flare-ups, pitched battles between the two armies, but mostly the war has taken the form of a guerrilla battle between the Indian army and Pakistani surrogates in Kashmir. In 2004 the two countries began a cautious peace process, but rather than ending, the war has since migrated to Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas on the Afghan border. ‘Safe havens’ for a reinvigorated Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida, the tribal areas are seen by the West as the ‘greatest threat’ to its security, as well as being the main cause of Western frustration with Pakistan. The reason is simple: the Pakistan army’s counterinsurgency strategy is not principally directed at the Taliban or even al-Qaida: the main enemy is India. [my emphasis]

Usher goes on to explain various aspects of the role India plays in Afghanistan and how that effects Pakistan's policies toward various elements among the Pushtun groups that the Pentagon lumps into "the Taliban":

India is one of [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai's few remaining champions. Delhi sees the new Afghanistan as a part of its sphere of influence. It has four consulates in Afghanistan and has given its government $1.2 billion in aid: a remarkable sum for it to donate to a country that is 99 per cent Muslim and with which it has no common border. Delhi has also put up the new parliament building and chancery, and has helped to train the army. India’s most ambitious – and, for Pakistan, most alarming – Afghan project is a new highway that will provide a route to the Iranian port of Chabahar. Not only will Afghanistan no longer need to use Pakistani ports, the road’s destination is a clear indication of India’s intention to consolidate an alliance with Iran in western Afghanistan in order to counter Pakistan’s influence in eastern Afghanistan. The road network, as they see it, is a new way to fight an old war. It’s precisely in order to resist the India-Iran bloc – as well as the emerging axis between Delhi and Washington – that the ISI has aligned itself with the Afghan Taliban and [anti-American Afghan warlord Jalaluddin] Haqqani.

India just held a general election that, Reuters reports, Poll mandate give Prime Minister Manmohan Singh greater political flexibility in improving relations with Pakistan, which his Congress Party is more inclined to do than the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). (Poll mandate gives Singh freer hand on Pakistan Gulf Times [Qatar] 20.05.09.

Another book-review journal, the New York Review of Books also has a recent article on Pakistan, Pakistan on the Brink by Ahmed Rashid 07/14/09 (06/11/09 issue) this one reflecting something more in tune with the Obama administration's and the Pentagon's crisis view of that country. Like other such pitches, this one sounds drearily like a continuation of the long-standing US preference for military governments over civilian ones in Pakistan:

... Pakistan is now reaching a tipping point. There is a chronic failure of leadership, whether by civilian politicians or the army. President Zardari's decision to invade Swat in early May came only after pressure was applied by the Obama administration and the army and the government had been left with no other palatable options. But with the Taliban opening new fronts, it will soon become impossible for the army to respond to the multiple threats it faces on so many geographically distant battlefields. The Taliban's campaigns to assassinate politicians and administrators have demoralized the government.

The Obama administration can provide money and weapons but it cannot recreate the state's will to resist the Taliban and pursue more effective policies. Pakistan desperately needs international aid, but its leaders must first define a strategy that demonstrates to its own people and other nations that it is willing to stand up to the Taliban and show the country a way forward. [my emphasis]

The "Taliban" warlords whose only appeal is among the 10% or so of the Pakistani population that are Pashto (Pushtun) tribes clustered near the Afghan border is not going to take over Pakistan. So far, the biggest destabilization threat related to the Pashto warlords is the large number of refugees being generated by the government's military campaign against them, undertaken at the demand of the United States.

Rashid mentions the Pakistani concern with India:

As the Taliban stormed south from their mountain bases near the Afghan border in northern Pakistan in late April, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told the parliament that they posed no threat and there was nothing to worry about. Interior Minister Rehman Malik talked about how the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai was supporting the Taliban and how India and Russia were sowing more unrest in Pakistan.

But he dismisses this casually as a merely a "sense of unrealism". He does return later to how the army views India in the context of the AfPak War:

The army has always defined Pakistan's national security goals. Currently it has two strategic interests: first, it seeks to ensure that a balance of terror and power is maintained with respect to India, and the jihadis are seen as part of this strategy. Second, the army supports the Afghan Taliban as a hedge against US withdrawal from Afghanistan and also against Indian influence in Kabul, which has grown considerably. Containing the domestic jihadi threat has been a tactical rather than a strategic matter for the army, so there have been bouts of fighting with the militants and also peace deals with them; and these have been interspersed with policies of jailing them and freeing them—all part of a complex and duplicitous game. ...

Despite US military aid, anti-Americanism has flourished in the army, public opinion, and the press and television, fueled by the idea that Pakistan was being made to fight America's war, while the Americans were unwilling to help Pakistan regain influence in Afghanistan. The US is accused both of helping India gain a strong foothold in Kabul and of declining to put pressure on New Delhi to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Bush's signing of the nuclear deal with India last year was the last straw for the Pakistani army. In military and public thinking, Pakistan was seen as sacrificing some two thousand soldiers in the war on terror on behalf of the Americans, while in return the Americans were recognizing the legitimacy of India's nuclear weapons program. Pakistan's nuclear weapons got no such acceptance. [my emphasis]

He does mention this as a problem. But it's not at all clear why he thinks these concerns as just part of a "sense of unrealism". To Pakistani leaders, and not just military ones, those are real national interests that they have to address.

Tags: afghanistan war, afpak war, pakistan

AkPak War: Birth of a nightmare

The Nightmare (1781) Johann Heinrich Füssli

As a general rule, I like to see articles reminding us that US Afghanistan policy over the decades has been short-sighted and too-lightly informed. But Steve Coll's In Search of Success New Yorker 05/25/09 (accessed 05/18/09) defines the problem is a strange way:

The miscalculations across five Administrations are by now generally understood: near-unequivocal support for anti-American militias during the nineteen-eighties; averted eyes as Pakistan pursued its covert nuclear ambitions; the abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal; the failure to recognize the menace of Al Qaeda during the nineteen-nineties; erratic investments in Pakistan’s democracy, economy, and civil society; and, most recently, a war in Afghanistan after 9/11 which did not defeat Al Qaeda or the Taliban but chased them into Pakistan, where they regrouped and have proceeded to destabilize a country now endowed with atomic bombs.

I have several problems with that description.

The miscalculations don't seem to me to be well understood by our policymakers, much less the Congress and forget about our celebrity press corps.

As foolish as it was to celebrate Afghan tribal warlords and an international jihadists flocking to Afghanistan in the 1980s as brave, courageous, fiercely-independent freedom-fighters, it's at best a half-truth to say they were "anti-American" in the 1980s. The United States was supplying them with arms to fight their main enemy of the time, the Soviet Union. The jihadist ideology that developed around that fight was also anti-American. But that ideology was not what was driving the tribal warlords who conducted most of the fighting.

It's reasonable to say that US policymakers "averted eyes as Pakistan pursued its covert nuclear ambitions". A critical factor that is missing from most discussions like Cole's is the role Pakistan saw and sees Afghanistan playing in its long-running conflict with India. And while the desire to keep the cooperation of Pakistan's military in supplying the Afghan mujaheddin played a role in tolerating Pakistan's nuclear bomb program, the failure to take full account of the South Asian context of Pakistan-vs.-India over Kashmir actually seems to be a more significant problem in terms of how it has distorted American policy toward Afghanistan. Tolerating Pakistan's nuclear program has been more of a toxic side-effect of our Afghanistan policy.

This idea about "the abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal" has become boilerplate in US policy discussions of this period. But what does that really mean? The US didn't have troops in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Does it mean that we should have tried to replace the Soviet occupation with the USSR withdrew? After the Soviet withdrawal, Afghanistan still had a Communist government. Does it mean we should have aided the pro-Soviet Communist government that we had been supplying the mujaheddin for years to fight? I'm willing to think that the story in Afghanistan might have played out differently. But since the country was wracked with recurring civil war up until the Taliban took power, it's hard to picture what we would have done that would have constituted not-abandoning Afghanistan. The "abandonment of Afghanistan" has become a cliche without content.

I was especially struck by "the failure to recognize the menace of Al Qaeda during the nineteen-nineties". Failure by whom? The Clinton administration certainly recognized the danger of Al Qa'ida. Who is Coll talking about?

He names "investments in Pakistan’s democracy, economy, and civil society" as a generally acknowledged problem. I assume he means inadequate investment by the US and NATO. But it's not clear what he does mean. And US policy had had a long-term chronic bent toward preferring military governments in Pakistan.

And he frames the Afghanistan War as "a war in Afghanistan after 9/11 which did not defeat Al Qaeda or the Taliban but chased them into Pakistan, where they regrouped and have proceeded to destabilize a country now endowed with atomic bombs". This is a very flawed framework. For one thing, giving the Cheney-Bush administration its due on the matter, the initial weeks of war actually did destroy a large part of the Al Qa'ida infrastructure and killed a lot of their most experienced cadres. It wasn't as focused as it could have been, as described at the time by Philip Smucker in How Bin Laden Got Away Christian Science Monitor 03/04/02.

But the Taliban government was ousted from power in Kabul. The Pushtun groups today coded as "Taliban" by the military and media are only in small part the same group known as the Taliban in 2001. And the notion that Al Qa'ida and the Taliban have destabilized Pakistan is some combination of war propaganda and customary American preference for military over civilian governments in Pakistan.

Al Qa'ida-style jihadism has a continuing life, in no small part thanks to the Cheney-Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, their crusading anti-Islamic rhetoric and their torture program. But jihadism is a phenomenon of small groups around the world, not a worldwide conspiracy directed by Bin Laden or his original Al Qa'ida group. It's not at all clear to me that the "Al Qa'ida" of 2001 still exists. But as long as our press corps let American officials get away with depicting Al Qa'ida as some massive army of terrorists operating worldwide and presenting a threat on a par with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union, the public will not have a clear picture of what the military is actually doing over there. Coll uncritically quotes our Savior-General David Petraeus saying:

Al Qaeda, in particular, has sustained some very serious losses over the course of the last six to ten months or so, and there is a considerable concern among those leaders because of the losses that they have sustained.

How many times has the Pentagon announced crippling blows against "Al Qa'ida"? How many times have we captured or killed the "number two man" or "number three man" of "Al Qa'ida"?

A very good book about money written in the language of the 1970s version of alternative non-profit groups postulated that money is a dream. And that if you pursue something that is a dream in itself, you become a dream. As hippie-dippie as that may sound, there's something to it. In a more nitty-gritty sense, analysts following the anti-terrorism efforts of the West German government against domestic terrorists like the Rote Armee Fraktion in the 1970s and following years, sometimes talked about the concept of the RAF in particular as "a phantom". Steve Coll's own book about the early part of the Afghanistan War was called Ghost Wars.

The threat of the Al Qa'ida organization that had just attacked the USS Cole in late 2000 was very real at the time of the transition from the Clinton to the Cheney-Bush administration. And it was understood to be a concrete threat and the government had some realistic sense of the threat it posed. The Clinton administration did, anyway.

But when our Savior-General Petraeus in 2009 makes the latest in an endless series of pronouncements about our glorious victories over "Al Qa'ida", I'm not confident that he's talking about anything more than a propaganda construction, a dream, a phantom. And trying to conduct a war against a phantom dream can only end up as a nightmare.

Tags: afghanistan war, afpak war, steve coll

Gene Lyons takes a look at the Big Picture

Filipe II de Habsburgo: at least he didn't try to invade Afghanistan

Gene Lyons understands broad contexts in American politics as well as nitty-gritty reporting. But he uses commendable caution in minimizing his flights into grand historical generalizations. He makes an exception, though, in They're Obama's wars now Salon 05/14/09:

On TV chat shows, national security thinkers wax portentous at the dire prospect of the Taliban gaining control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. In sober moments, most admit that this is as unlikely as white supremacist militias overrunning the Pentagon, but it definitely makes for exciting melodrama.

And TV melodrama is how America governs itself. Within the Washington establishment, it's well-nigh treasonous to point out that we're talking here about the absolute end of the earth. That the United States hasn't got the manpower, resources or political will to control territory Pakistan's own government can't tame, and that the habit of treating the entire planet as a huge game of Risk is leaving the United States as overextended militarily and financially as the Spanish Empire in 1588 -- the year its Armada was destroyed off the coast of Ireland.

I'll have to declare myself agnostic on the likelihood of Obama finding himself in the position of Philip II (Filipe II de Habsburgo). But he's right in pointing out the risks.

Despite the headline on the article, Lyons isn't trashing Obama over the Iraq and AfPak Wars, though he clearly thinks escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a bad idea. He recognizes that Bush and Cheney left the country and the current administration with two awful problems in those wars. On the AfPak escalation, he writes that Obama seems "to be heeding a sports proverb: Always change a losing game".

Tags: afghanistan war, afpak war, gene lyons, pakistan

Pakistan: still collapsing after all these years?

Pakistan's flag

Manan Ahmed of the University of Chicago in Legends of the Fall The National (UAE) 05/07/09 argues that the notion that Pakistan is on the verge of collapse is a long-standing script among the American foreign policy community:

Times are bleak for the state of Pakistan, if the international media is to be believed. For the past six weeks, the world’s newspapers have charted the apparently unstoppable march of the Taliban toward Islamabad – with daily reminders that their forces are “only 100 miles” and then “only 80 miles” and then “only 60 miles” from the capital. That Pakistan is a “failed state” or “on the brink” no longer even requires elaboration: it is the universal consensus among pundits and "area experts" alike.

In the United States, the news articles have begun to game out the fall of the regime: the New York Times, hardly alone in its hyperventilating, has run two stories in as many weeks about America courting the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif as a replacement for Pakistan’s prime minister, Asif Ali Zardari. The counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen, a former adviser to General David Petraeus, has suggested in print that the state could fail within six months, while Petraeus himself warns that the next two weeks will be decisive, and that the army may have to return to power to prevent a total collapse.

The notion of Pakistan as a "failed state" has roots far deeper than the last few years; it was first deemed to have “failed” in the early 1960s, and this framework has dominated discussion of Pakistan in America from the days of the Cold War to the War on Terror. The surprisingly long history of the rhetoric of failure reveals that America’s engagement with Pakistan has rarely, if ever, transcended narrow strategic aims – and that, for the United States, the solution to Pakistan’s problems has always been, and will always be, the strong hand of a military ruler. [my emphasis]

Meanwhile, the Pakistani army's drive against the Pushtun tribal militants ("Taliban") has produced up to 300,000 refugees. Military campaigns, even ones based on serious threat inflation, have real effects that are not always beneficial.

Tom Hayden in Understanding the Long War (Part 1) The Nation 05/07/09 reminds us of a major element in the South Asian situation that much of the American reporting and commentary seems to ignore:

The likelihood of the United States' convincing Pakistan to view the domestic threat as greater than that from India is doubtful. Pakistan has fought three wars with India, and views the US as supporting the expansion of India's interests in Afghanistan, where the Pakistan military has supported the Taliban as a proxy against India. The Northern Alliance forces of Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks were strongly supported by India in 2001 against Pakistan's Taliban's allies, and the fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance was a "catastrophe" for Pakistan, according to Juan Cole. Since 2001, India has sent hundreds of millons [sic] in assistance to Afghanistan, including funds for Afghan political candidates in 2004, assistance to sitting legislators, Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Heart and Kandahar, and road construction designed, according to the Indian government, to help their countries' armed forces "meet their strategic needs."

Polls show that a vast majority of Pakistanis view the United States and India as far greater threats than the Taliban, despite the Taliban's unpopularity with much of Pakistan's public. While it is unlikely that the Taliban could seize power in Pakistan, it may be impossible for anyone to militarily prevent Taliban control of the tribal areas and a growing base among the Pashtun tribes (28 million in Afghanistan, 12 million in Pakistan). [my emphasis]

In comparison to the all-round disaster that was the Cheney-Bush foreign policy, Obama's is almost indescribably better. But on the "AfPak" War, he's pursuing a bad course that's going to end up badly. The only redeeming virtue I see so far is that the administration seems to be operating at the moment with some sense that the Russian experience in Afghanistan if very relevant and is dubious about escalating troops levels beyond the numbers the Russians had there.

And, as Hayden describes the situation with Pakistan, "No one on the [official] US side acknowledges that this spiraling disaster was triggered by US policies over the past decade."

Tags: afpak war, pakistan

What George McGovern says

Tags: afpak war, afghanistan war, george mcgovern

AfPak War

Pat Lang observes that it is not at all clear that the Obama administration has a clear strategy for Afghanistan (Iraq and Afghanistan Policy 04/26/09):

The announced Obama policy set the goals as essentially negative actions intended to confound and disrupt America's enemies. Covert action, limited SOF commando strikes, political support for our friends, some measure of basic infrastructure aid (roads, etc), these would be the kind of tools in such an effort. In spite of the announcement of these reasonable goals and implied actions, there continues to be a constant drum beat of talk, leaks, panel discussions in which people both within and without the administration insist that the real policy is a full blown COIN [counterinsurgency] campaign in which the United States will commit itself to an effort to create a socety [sic] in Afghanistan so attractive that rural Pushtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, etc. will support a unifying national government against Islamic zealots who do not believe in the legitmiacy [sic] of national governments at all. Such an effort would be hugely expensive and would last for decades. Well, which is it, Obama Administration, which is it? These two visions of the future are not comptible. [sic] [my emphasis]

The good news here is that if Obama wants to increase the US political and military investment in a situation that cannot turn out well for us, it's better that he's limiting the amount of new "investment".

And I'm happy to hear that Defense Secretary Robert Gates is publicly expressing caution about raising NATO troop levels higher than those already announced in Afghanistan. In an interview broadcast 05/03/09 on Fareed Zakaria's GPS show on CNN, Gates said:

ZAKARIA: You once said that the chief lesson you learned from 40 years in government was the limits of power. So, apply that lesson to Afghanistan today.

What does it -- what do you think of -- what are the limits to what America can do in Afghanistan?

GATES: Well, I have been quoted, accurately, as saying I have real reservations about significant further commitments of American military -- of the American military to Afghanistan, beyond what the president has already approved.

The Soviets were in there with 110,000, 120,000 troops. They didn't care about civilian casualties. And they couldn't win.

If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience. And I think there's a lot we can learn from that. ...

I think we will have -- between the American military commitment and our coalition partners, the ISAF partners --we will have about 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. That's only about 10,000 shy of what the Russians had. And I think we need to think about that. [my emphasis]

In a more recent post on Policy in Afghanistan 04/28/09, Lang has the following observations:

I think that we Americans need to stop exagerating [sic] the level of threat to the United States that originates or will originate in Afghanistan. The temptation to see the activities and scheming of takfiri jihadis as parts of a world war between the Islamic "House of War" and the rest of us has caused us to begin to re-design our society(ies) for total war against an all powerful and virtually eternal enemy. ...

In Afghanistan there is always war; war for resources, honor, leadership, authenticity of Islamic identity. The causes of war are endless. There are many different peoples in Afghanistan; Pushtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara, Turkmen, Nuristani, etc. etc. etc. Many of these groups speak mutually incomprehensible languages. They are mostly Sunni, but some, like the Hazara, are Shia. What we see now in Afghanistan is NOT a "theater of war" in a "global war on terror." Rather, it is a continuation of the ancient Afghan pattern of traditional warfare among the peoples, their groupings old and new, and sectarian definitions of Islamic truth. The minions of the Al-Qa'ida related zealot groups are scattered and hidden in the "landscape" of ever shifting conflict that is Afghanistan. They are like raisins in a cake. These "raisins" are a danger to the United States. They are a danger but not an "existential" threat to our "way of life" as they are sometimes described.

He actually likes the relatively restrained stated goals that Obama has articulated:

President Obama in his announcement of policy with regard to Afghanistan, said that our goal would be to disrupt, disorganize and destroy our enemies. That is an appropriate goal given the actual size and intensity of the threat. Forget about nation building in Afghanistan. Forget about generational commitments of vast amounts of treasure that we no longer possess.

I'm becoming increasingly dubious of the talk from advocates of COIN. Because for one thing, it's not at all clear that what the Army touts as its totally new COIN strategy integrating all the lessons of COINs past - like France's losing war in Algeria, or the US' losing war in Vietnam - comes down to anything much more than conventional warfare with fewer indiscriminate air strikes and slightly nicer PR. Buying off the Sunni insurgent groups was fine to give a short-term show of success. But it was a relatively short-term fix that threatened to make any Shi'a-Sunni national political reconciliation more difficult. It may have worked in the opposite direction. And sectarian violence has shown some worrisome signs of escalating significantly in Baghdad this month.

Also, I should point out that while Pat Lang cautions about exaggerating the threat from Afghanistan, he embraces the highly questionable concept that the Pushtun tribes in Pakistan could somehow seize control of Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal. His solution?

The nuclear arsenal of Pakistan makes a victory of the hillmen [Pushtuns] unacceptable to the US. As I wrote at the National Journal blog this week, a return to Pakistan Army control of the government and imposition of government control over the border country seems the only acceptable solution and the United States should stop impeding that outcome.

Putting US policy behind a coup in Pakistan would likely draw the US in even deeper to the political and internal military problems of that country. And the Pakistan-is-about-to-fall scenario sounds to me like threat inflation.

But as Obama prepares for important summit meetings in with the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan in Washington, the New York Times is pushing the Pakistani threat on its front page: Pakistan Strife Raises U.S. Doubts on Nuclear Arms by David Sanger 05/03/09.

Tags: afghanistan war, afpak war, pakistan