September 11 retrospective: Chances missed

Anatol Lieven wrote about the risks and opportunities in the American and Western response to the 9/11 attacks in Strategy for terror Prospect 10/20/2001, which he says was written "a few hours after the attacks." (A somewhat revised version of this essay was included in James Hege, Jr. and Gideon Rose, eds, How Did This Happen? (2001) that somewhat confusingly makes it sound like it was written after the October 7 start of the Afghanistan War.)

Even in retrospect, I still think this was a true statement for the immediate aftermath of 9/11: "On the assumption that the perpetrators are identified and traced to some physical space a ferocious military response will be necessary. Not to do this would be to betray the victims and display weakness." It was, as he said, "the worst terrorist attack in history and the worst attack of any kind ever directed against the American mainland."

But this observation now looks like a description of opportunities terribly squandered:

A hardline response from the US is appropriate in the short-term. Moreover it would be wrong to execute any significant policy shifts that could be construed as a victory for the terrorists. ... Above all, a new US policy needs to be shaped by three linked realisations. First, that since the end of the cold war, there has come into being the basis of a unified world system in which the world’s other leading states are partners, not enemies, and in which all these states are under threat from similar forces. In other words, there really is the makings of an "international community" - or would be, if the US could stop acting as if it alone constituted this community. The community is based on shared adherence to western-led modernity. The only categorical opponents of this modernisation project are indeed religious maniacs - who are not to be found in Moscow or Beijing. Second, that with the exception of certain middle eastern states, the real threat to the world order comes not from states, but from below: from alienated populations. And third, since the US cannot occupy and police the Muslim world in the struggle against Muslim terrorism, it is essential to have the co-operation of leading Muslim states. This is something which was already emphasised by the aftermath of the attacks on Khobar Towers and the USS Cole. [my emphasis]

He didn't get the following exactly right. But he was correct in identifying the core problem, the fact that the American military establishing really has a strong self-perpetuaing dynamic, as John Kenneth Galbraith patiently insisted for much of his adult life:

The failure, until now, to move away from the cold war has its roots not only in various forms of inherited bigotry, but also in very strong interests within the US security establishment. This establishment was a product of the cold war, and it needs a cold war-type enemy: huge, identifiable, and, most importantly, armed with either high-tech conventional arms or with old-style nuclear missiles. Hence the endless insistence on the danger of a restoration of the Soviet Union. [my emphasis]

We need to be fair to Lieven on this. Who knew that the national security establishment and the many private firms that profit from it could recreate and bogeyman called "Al Qai'di," one based only in small part on the real existing organization lead by Osama bin Laden in 2001, that could serve as well or better than the nuclear-armed Communist Soviet Union to justify military spending at higher levels than the peak of the Cold War?

He made the following pragmatic observations that are also a reminder of opportunities lost:

One way of combating the kind of attacks we saw is of course better security in the US; but this will not necessarily prevent a terrorist attack, as long as that terrorist is prepared to die. In the end, the key to fighting this war successfully has to be good intelligence - and given the difficulty that American agents have of penetrating the world of the Islamist extremists, for such intelligence the west desperately needs Arab and Muslim allies. The Saudis in particular will have to be persuaded to drop the decades-old strategy begun by Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Ibn Saud, according to which the House of Saud has turned a blind eye to Saudi-based radicalism beyond the borders of the kingdom, as long as the radicals do not cause trouble within Saudi Arabia itself.

The help of leading Muslim states will also be essential if there is to be an invasion and occupation of some part of the Muslim world. For, in their different ways, the US bombardment of targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, and the aftermath of the Nato bombardment of Yugoslavia, have shown the inadequacy of long-range bombardment when it comes to destroying enemies on the ground, who are dispersed and hidden in a friendly civilian population. [my emphasis]

It's not that these aspects were entirely neglected. On the contrary, most of the real successes in the "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) have come from police and intelligence work, not from blowing up Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and whereever else the US military may be operating without public knowledge. It didn't come from creating a sado-masochistic torture regime in Guantánamo and our "black site" prisons, either, although many Republicans including Dick Cheney were happy to know that such twisted acts were occurring.

It's worth noting here that the United States, even with a government more deeply concerned with human rights and encouraging democracy abroad than either the Cheney-Bush or the Obama Administrations, has limited ability to pick and choose which government we deal with. I can't see that the diplomatic isolation of Cuba and Iran for decades has in itself yielded useful results.

What the US should have been doing and should do now is cooperate with governments, even nasty ones, on anti-terrorism while taking very seriously basic human rights concerns. Torture is a crime. And despite Obama's irresponsible and illegal decision to give effective amnesty ("Look Forward, Not Backward") to American torture perpetrators, the torture issue isn't going away. Dick Cheney may be doing a profitable book tour. And there's no guarantee of which individuals will eventually be put before a court on torture charges from that Adminsistration. Torture goes to the hear of the rule of law. There will be an historical and legal reckoning for the Bush Administration's torture crimes. The tragedy and shame is that it should have come from the American government itself. A large portion of the American Constitution will remain in abeyance until there is a real reckoning with the torture crimes.

One reason for the emphasis on conventional military action in the American response to terrorism is what Lieven himself says at the start of this essay, that the 9/11 attacks were "a very serious act of war, conducted by a formidably cruel, brave, fanatical and well-organised enemy with a terrifying capacity for both savagery and self-sacrifice." (my emphasis) I thought that at the time. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder used the phrase "act of war" immediately after the attacks in offering his unlimited support for the US in responding to it. (Schröder soon found that applying limits was indeed necessary!)

In retrospect, this understanding was wrong. It was a spectacular act of terrorism by a small, fanatical group acting on behalf of a demented religious ideology, not on behalf of a state. But by framing it immediately as a war, it lead to the consequences we now no so well. And we surely don't know all the consequences, since a pathological attitude toward government secrecy prevailed during the Bush Administration and, tragic to say, has been intensified under the Obama Administration.

Lieven also points to that perenniel failure of American foreign policy, the need to have a real peace settlement between Israel and Palestine. While noting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a major problem for US relations with the Muslim world, he reminds us, "To blame Muslim-based terrorism on Israel would be unfair and inadequate." It is part of the cause of such terrorism, even far removed geographically from Israel-Palestine. He points to severe development problems in the Arab world as having created the breeding ground for jihadist appeals. BAsed on his own research and reporting from Pakistan, he describes the appeal as follows:

In these depressing circumstances, adherence to a radical Islamist network provides a sense of cultural security, a new community and some degree of social support-modest, but still better than anything the state can provide. Poverty is recast as religious simplicity and austerity. Perhaps, even more importantly, belief provides a measure of pride: a reason to keep a stiff back amidst continual humiliations and temptations. In the blaring, stinking, violent world of the modern "third world" Muslim city, the architecture and aesthetic mood of the mosque is (like the Catholic churches in central America described by Graham Greene in The Lawless Roads) the only oasis, not only of beauty but of an ordered and coherent culture and guide to living. Of course this is true ten times over for a young male inhabitant of an Afghan, Chechen or Palestinian refugee camp.

Tags: 9/11, afghanistan war, anatol lieven, global war on terror, gwo, terrorism

Juan Cole and the complications of "humanitarian" war

Juan Cole was an enthusiastic supporter of the NATO intervention in the Libyan civil war. I wouldn't call his essay Top Ten Mistakes in the Libya War Informed Comment 06/19/2011 so much a rethinking of his position as continuing to think. But it's hard to imagine in reading it that the events of the real existing Libya War have given him a more sober viewpoint on the conflict:

War excites a lot of passions, as it should since it is so serious a matter. But it also excites a lot of black and white thinking, which is bad. Either you are for wholeheartedly or against. Some will take my essay today as a sign that I have become diffident. Not true. As I said, I think the UNSC did the right thing, and that those NATO and Arab League countries that have stepped up to the challenge are acting in accordance with international law, and that, whatever their ultimate motives, the side effect of their intervention has in fact been the salvation of thousands of lives and of a political movement for a freer Libya. But I think we would have all been better off if the emphasis had remained on civilian protection first and foremost, if better coordination with locals had be achieved more quickly, if the US component had comported with the US constitution, and if the Arab League had not lacked the courage of its convictions. If you go back through my previous essays on these subjects, I think you will find that I have been consistent on these emphases. [my emphasis]

The Kosovo War of 1999 created a lot of illusions: that "humanitarian" wars could be quick and effective; the air war could be a magic weapon; that a major intervention could be carefully limited in scope and costs; and, that a democracy could be established by external intervention quickly after the end of hostilities.

That Kosovo success story was a major boost for supporters of "humanitarian" war. In my view of the Kosovo War, it served a vital interest of the NATO countries by limiting the potential of the Balkan conflict spreading beyond the former Yugoslavia, with the real potential of NATO members Greece and Turkey intervening on opposite sides. It has never been that tempting to me to generalize much beyond the particular issues at stake in that conflict.

Which would be my main response to Cole's implied challenge here:

I think the UNSC did the right thing in calling for international intervention here. I can’t understand why the same people who have complained endlessly about the West, or the world, standing by while large numbers of people were killed in the Congo, Rwanda, Darfur, etc., are now cavilling that something practical has been done to stop the crushing of Benghazi et al.

I've always been highly skeptical of the potential for outside military intervention in those conflicts to have achieved constructive results. One of the lessons I took for the postwar experience in Kosovo is that even with the generally highly favorable conditions there for establishing a stable democracy, the presence of NATO troops is required there even today, the actual democratic government established has had severe corruption problems, and the Albanian majority there would up driving out a large portion of the ethnic Serbian minority.

One of Cole's criticisms of NATO's conduct of the Libya War is:

NATO (and this where the Arab League could have helped) has been incredibly slow in developing the ability to coordinate with Free Libya forces, who are the ones who must necessarily assert themselves against Qaddafi's special forces and mercenaries.

Here again, the downsides of the experience in Kosovo illustrate the hazards of bringing a group of rebels to power about whose intentions relatively little is known. NATO held the strange collection of armed rebels known as the Kosovo Liberation Army at arm's length in the Kosovo War. But it was obvious that expelling Serb forces would likely give that motley crew an enhanced role. Stéphanie Maupas writes in her article, "The Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal" in Roy Gutman, et al, eds, Crimes of War 2.0 (2007):

... the first trial of members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) has also taken place, ending in two acquittals and one guilty verdict. At the beginning of March 2005, the Prime Minister of Kosovo and former member of the KLA Ramush Hardinaj was finally indicted by the tribunal's current Cief Prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, despite political pressure against the move. [my emphasis]

Cole also writes as a criticism of NATO's intervention:

NATO put its emphasis on taking out command and control in the capital instead of vigorously protecting civilian cities under attack. The sieges of Misrata and of the Western Mountain regions went on for weeks with very limited NATO intervention. It is incredible that Qaddafi could roll tanks across the open desert and then concertedly shell noncombatants in cities without it being possible to intervene aerially.

This result should actually not be that surprising. The same thing occurred in Kosovo. The mission there actually had a limited immediate goal of protection Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing actions of the Serbian army. The Serbian army continued its ethnic cleansing during the air war. Only with the final capitulation of the Serbian regime - in face of a credible threat of NATO intervention with ground troops - was NATO able to stop the ethnic cleansing actions. They were not so successful in restraining the Albanian majority with the Serbians minority, as noted above. Continuing with his argument:

The US should have already recognized the Transitional National Council in Benghazi. What, are we vacillating about whose side we are on?

This rebel force has a poor fighting record so far. Their victory over the Libyan government is by no means inevitable. And they can scarcely be considered at this point to have secure control over even the territories from which they operate. All those are good reasons to show some diplomatic restraint about recognition. We've refused recognition to the Cuban regime for five decades and it's still around. Switching formal diplomatic recognition from the current Libyan regime to a highly dubious group of rebels is unlikely to add much effect clout to Qaddafi's opposition.

Cole also writes:

That the Libyan intervention is legal does not mean that the war has been prosecuted wisely. I urged after the UNSC resolution that it be a limited intervention aiming at protecting civilians from Muammar Qaddafi’s vicious attacks on innocent crowds and reckless endangerment of non-combatants in the tenement buildings being shelled by his tanks and cluster bombs, and from his forces’ relentless rolling of tanks on Free Libya cities. ...

NATO has focused on a ‘shock and awe’ strategy of pounding the capital, Tripoli, especially targetting [sic] the compound of dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Shock and awe does not work, and to the extent that it looks like a targeted assassination, it raised questions in critics’ minds about the purpose of the intervention. If command and control is being hit to protect noncombatants from military operations against them, this should be explained more clearly by NATO generals and specifics given.

Cole makes important and legitimate points there. It testifies to his willingness not simply to act as a cheerleader in a war he supports that he is willing to see and articulate those problems.

But what else did he really expect? Honestly. This is how NATO makes war. That's what it's equipped and trained for: bombing the bejeezus out of the Soviet Union that hasn't existed in two decades. And if NATO decides to make a "humanitarian" intervention in Syria or (God forbid!) Iran, they will do it in the same way. And it was no different in the model "humanitarian" war in Kosovo. Anatol Lieven wrote in"Hubris and Nemesis", Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen, eds, War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age (2001):

Mogadishu — along with Beirut, Grozny and other battlefields — suggests that the locus of political and military struggle is shifting from the mountains and jungles of the past, into the "urban terrain" of Third World cities — conditions unfavorable to the style of warfare preferred by American or Western European forces. Within those cities, the most dangerous enemy is not the general schooled in the conventions of traditional warfare, but the cunning, charismatic irregular who combines in one person the terrorist, ward politician, clan leader, criminal warlord, and gang boss. To defeat such an adversary requires an intimate knowledge of local conditions, exceptionally difficult for the "imperial police" to acquire. It may also demand commanders who themselves manifest the gang leader's mix of flexibility and utter ruthlessness — not qualities nurtured in the officer corps of the typical Western democracy. In the movie Casablanca, the character played by Humphrey Bogart taunted a German officer, "Major, there are parts of New York I wouldn't advise you to try and invade." In the decades since, New York may have been (partially) pacified, but Western nations contemplating intervention in quarters disordered by civil war, ethnic conflict, or massive violations of human rights would do well to heed Bogart's warning.

The UN Security Council resolution authorized only a no-flight zone. But this was a real act of war. The no-flight zone the US and Britain maintained over Iraq throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century was a continuing combat operation that made a recurrence of the Gulf War of 1991 far more likley.

One can't help but notice that the first in Cole's list of criticisms of NATO's Libya War is the contempt for Constitutional legality shown by the Obama Administration:

President Barack Obama should have gone to Congress for authorization to stay in the Libya war. Not doing so weakened the legitimacy of the war in the US public, and involved his setting aside the legal advice he received from government lawyers. He could have set a precedent for the return to constitutional rule in the US, but tragically declined to take up that opportunity. (I have held this position from the beginning, by the way). But a corollary I am not sure American nationalists will accept is that even if Congress authorizes a war, in the absence of an attack on the US, that would be illegal in international law unless the UNSC signed off on it. That is what did not happen with regard to Iraq. Those criticizing Obama now often did not criticize W., and often still do not, for a much more important legal violation.

I'm sure the recent revelation that the Cheney-Bush Administration demanded that the CIA conduct a smear campaign against Cole himself re-enforced his awareness of the importance of legal conduct in national security affairs. He blogged about it in Ret'd. CIA Official Alleges Bush White House Used Agency to "Get" Cole 06/16/2011 and in several subsequent posts.

I don't say that as any kind of criticism of Cole's critical post on NATO's war in Libya. Although I imagine that his somewhat defensive parenthesis "I have held this position from the beginning, by the way" reflects some sensitiveness on that point. What the Bushies wanted to do to Cole is a disgrace. Cole has been consistently critical of the many abuses of law and human rights that came along with the post-9/11 incarnation of the national security state. The revelation about the Cheney Administration targeting him that way should be a strong reminder not only to him but to all of us that the kind of national security and permanent war state we have in incompatible with the maintenance of a Constitutional democracy. And in reality, important parts of the Constitutional order - including Congressional war powers - have already been sacrificed to it.

Tags: anatol lieven, kosovo war, juan cole, libya war

Is there an Al Qa'ida 2.0?

Moisés Naím in Al Qaeda 2.0 El País 08.05.2011 gives a picture of the status of Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida organization that is very similar to that I heard recently from Anatol Lieven a month ago. Naím writes of the post-Bin Laden Al Qa'ida, "la nueva Al Qaeda es más una inspiración que una organización que actúa siguiendo órdenes emanadas de una sede central." (the new Al Qa'ida is more an inspiration than an organization that acts in accord with orders emanating from central authority.)

Anatol Lieven also thought there was not much left of Bin Laden's group in the sense of a cohesive, command-and-control type organization. While he thought it would be a great morale booster for the West to kill or capture Bin Laden or his deputy Zawahiri, he also believed it would not likely make much difference in terms of the actual terrorism threat for the United States.

Naím cautions, "Esto no significa que la vieja Al Qaeda haya desaparecido. Osama bin Laden seguía planeando ataques terroristas desde su guarida en Abbottabad." (This doesn't mean that the old Al Qa'ida has disappeared. Osama bin Laden kept on planning terrorist attacks from his refuge in Abbottabad.)

Lieven sees the terrorism threat from radical jihadists as being a loosely connected network of groups, some of which use the name "Al Qa'ida" (like Al Qa'ida in the Magreb) and may have had some direct connection to Bin Laden's group at some point, and others of which are radical Salafi jihadists with similar ideas but no direct connection to the original group. He said that some of the connections between such groups are like nodes in a computer network, with others are more diffuse like (he used a literally cosmic example) intergalactic gases clumping here and there.

But he also told an interesting story about a group of Baluch smugglers who got busted in Pakistan within the relatively recent past. This was a group who had worked closely with Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida smuggling Qa'ida fighters back and forth across the Afghan-Pakistan border. It emerged that they were smuggling a variety of international fighters into Afghanistan to work with the Afghan Taliban, including a group of Muslim doctors from Russia. (I believe he said Russia and not the former Soviet Union.) Lieven concludes from this that some remnant of Bin Laden's group is using that loose international network to act as personnel "headhunters" for the Afghan Taliban. But he stressed that this was not in the sense of a centralized organization with officals like a "station chief in Karachi" or whatever. But rather a dispersed network where word gets passed along that the Afghan Taliban is looking for certain kinds of specialists, like medical personnel and they arrange for them to be smuggled in.

Naím points out that the biggest challenge for the current jihadist movement, or "Al Qa'ida 2.0", are the democratic upheavals in the Arab world. Those movements are not demanding theocracies, much less a new Islamic caliphate, the nominal goal of Bin Laden. He also notes that the "Al Qa'ida 2.0" movement will have trouble rescuing their "brand." Organizations fighting under the "Al Qa'ida" name have killed far more Muslims than non-Muslim Americans or Europeans. Such an organization "tiene mucho que explicar" (has a lot to explain).

Lieven's pointing to evidence of Bin Laden's original organization still having a dispersed network that worked together with the Afghan Taliban is consistent with observations that Juan Cole makes about the post-Bin Laden quick withdrawal of Taliban fighters from some areas (Taliban, al-Qaeda Flee N. Afghanistan as Morale Collapses with al-Qaeda admission of Bin Laden’s Death Informed Comment 05/07/2011):

Pajhwok News Agency is reporting that in the wake of the death of Usama bin Laden at the hands of US Navy SEALs, Taliban guerrillas in the northeastern Afghan province of Qunduz are fleeing the province.

It appears that the Taliban were still linked to, and perhaps taking direction from, al-Qaeda, more than most analysts had suspected. It also appears that Bin Laden had more of an operational, strategizing role than we had thought.

If it is true that radicals are fleeing Qunduz, and indeed other provinces as well, and heading for safe havens in places like North Waziristan in Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt, it is likely primarily because they had direct contact with Usama Bin Laden and now fear that information about them is in American hands, since the SEALS captured his hard drives and thumb drives.

The Taliban and a few Arab al-Qaeda started being active in Qunduz about three years ago, in part in an attempt to block supplies for NATO and the US coming through Tajikistan.

Qunduz, with a population of about 800,000, is said to be about one third or more Pashtun in ethnicity, despite being in the north where most Afghans speak Persian. Qunduz city was among the Taliban’s last outposts in the north when they were forced to withdraw to Qandahar in late fall, 2001 as a result of the US air support to the Northern Alliance. Talibanism in Afghanistan has virtually no audience outside the Pashtuns or Pashto-speakers, who are Sunni Muslims, though it is also true that a majority of Pashtuns reject the Taliban and support the Kabul government of Hamid Karzai (a Pashtun) instead.

The strategic and anti-logistics character of the Taliban campaign in Qunduz raises questions about whether Bin Laden and some lieutenants were not actively directing a war against the US, NATO and Karzai.

That observation in the last paragraph strikes me as unlikely from what we know about how Bin Laden was concealing himself. One of the reports that has been consistent is that he didn't have Internet connections or telephone landlines in his hideout house. He was relying on an individual courier to carry messages. I suppose the fact that he was using a courier shows that he had his fingers in something, or at least hoped to. But the idea that he himself could be playing any kind of central command role in the Taliban's war against NATO seems far-fetched. Not impossible, but really far-fetched. For the same reason, one has to wonder just how much usable information is likely to be found on the hard drives and computers disks seized during the raid.

Tags: afghanistan war, anatol lieven, juan cole, mosés naím, osama bin laden

Anatol Lieven on Pakistan and on the Afghanistan War

I heard a presentation yesterday at UC-Berkeley by Anatol Lieven, a former journalist who covered Pakistan extensively who is now Professor of War Studies at King's College in London. He has spent time fairly recently in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, which has been the scene of conflict between the Pakistani Army and the Pakistani Taliban.

I asked him what he thought from his research was the current state of Bin Laden's original Al Qa'ida organization. His picture is that there's no much left of Bin Laden's group in the sense of a cohesive, command-and-control type organization. He said that while it would be a great morale booster for the West to kill or capture Bin Laden or his deputy Zawahiri, that it would not likely make much difference in terms of the actual terrorism threat for the United States.

He sees the terrorism threat from radical jihadists as being a loosely connected network of groups, some of which use the name "Al Qa'ida" (like Al Qa'ida in the Magreb) and may have had some direct connection to Bin Laden's group at some point, and others of which are radical Salafi jihadists with similar ideas but no direct connection to the original group. He said that some of the connections between such groups are like nodes in a computer network, with others are more diffuse like (he used a literally cosmic example) intergalactic gases clumping here and there.

But he also told an interesting story about a group of Baluch smugglers who got busted in Pakistan within the relatively recent past. This was a group who had worked closely with Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida smuggling Qa'ida fighters back and forth across the Afghan-Pakistan border. It emerged that they were smuggling a variety of international fighters into Afghanistan to work with the Afghan Taliban, including a group of Muslim doctors from Russia. (I believe he said Russia and not the former Soviet Union.) Lieven concludes from this that some remnant of Bin Laden's group is using that loose international network to act as personnel "headhunters" for the Afghan Taliban. But he stressed that this was not in the sense of a centralized organization with officals like a "station chief in Karachi" or whatever. But rather a dispersed network where word gets passed along that the Afghan Taliban is looking for certain kinds of specialists, like medical personnel and they arrange for them to be smuggled in.

His picture of the current relationship between the Pakistani army and intelligence with Pakistani jihadist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) that concentrate on the Kashmir issue is that they have a basic deal. They refrain from attacks in Western countries, which is particularly good for Britain, because a lot of the Pakistani immigrants to Britain come from the Punjab region near Kashmir and a lot of them are very sympathetic to LET. And mostly they have to refrain from attacks on India at the moment, after the huge Mumbai incident, with the promise they'll get to hit India again in the future. But they pretty much have a green light to help the Afghan Taliban against NATO and the Karzai government. Including the occasional target with special connection to India.

He stressed how much Pakistanis see the Afghanistan War in the context of the India-Pakistan conflict, with the current Afghan government being seen as pro-Indian. This is something that seems to only occasionally peek into American commentary on the war, so far as I've noticed. And this is a big part of what makes US-Pakistani relationship chronically troubled.

Lieven mentioned that the Pakistani elite tend to have a very Western orientation in terms of speaking English and sending their kids to Western universities and also in terms of their conception of property, etc. But he also said that many Pakistani officials would like to dump the current unsatisfying alliance with the US altogether and become an even closer ally to China.

He told about one factor I hadn't heard at all before. He said that it was common among Pashtun families (I took it he meant mainly in Pakistan) to send one son from the family to serve with the Pakistani Army and another to serve with the Afghanistan Taliban. When one of the two groups comes around looking for the son on the other side, the family can say, oh, that son's a bum and drug addict and a loser, but our good, sensible son is on *your* side.

He also said that the US military's perception that a lot of Afghan Taliban flee "across the border" to Pakistan is mistaken. What often happens, and what happened a lot in 2001-2, was that they simply go home and bury their weapons and wait to see how the military tide turns.

Lieven said that in his conversations with American military officials, they don't have a clear idea of what winning would mean. But they are haunted by their perceptions of Vietnam, which represents a clear idea of what losing would mean, the image of the helicopter on the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon in 1975 being a dramatic example. This is an interesting observation, because to hear official Pentagon spokespeople tell it, our armed forces haven't lost a single battle since probably Custer's Last Stand. And, more specifically, there is a widespread assumption in the officer corps that US *won* the Vietnam War militarily but that our victorious generals were stabbed in the back by the weak-kneed politicians and gutless civilians back home. (Though obviously not all versions are expressed that crassly.)

Lieven also says in that connection that the Pentagon right now tends to view an exit view a general peace agreement with the Taliban as being a kind of unacceptable defeat. He thinks the reports we hear of negotiations with the Taliban represents what he says was a similar approach by the Soviets to make one-off deals with individual commanders. But he thinks the Pentagon is pretty dead set against any general agreement with the Afghan Taliban. He said we shouldn't underestimate the Pentagon's determination to fight on for years to avoid what they see as a humiliating defeat.

Which tells me that if it's left up to our generals, we'll never stop fighting in Afghanistan. That seems to have been the case in Iraq, too; McCain's promise in 2008 of 100 year's war in Iraq reflected something like that attitude. But in Iraq's case, the pro-Iranian government in Baghdad eventually insisted on a status-of-force agreement that pulls out remaining US combat troops this year. And I'm already seeing some reports that the Pentagon is trying to find a way around that.

Lieven also said that it's his sense that the Pentagon is very cautious about any idea of going into Pakistan in a ground war. Which he thinks is a very appropriate caution. He has the sense that sending US ground troops into Pakistan on a large scale would probably wreck the US position completely in the Muslim world. He thinks that the operatives that the US has on the ground there now are "hostages to fate," as the Raymond Davis case illustrated so dramatically this year.

Tags: al qaida, afghanistan war, anatol lieven, osama bin laden, pakistan

Iran War, etc: And the beat goes on ...

Ivo Daalder, Bush II - More of the Same, Hankyoreh Daily 11/08/04:

Now that George W. Bush has won the reelection victory that eluded his father, will we see a different American foreign policy? Many political pundits think so. They believe that the president's preoccupation with his legacy will lead him to soften his hard charging ways. They will be disappointed.

U.S. won't attend international conference on land mines by George Gedda, AP 11/26/04:

The United States will not attend a major review conference next week about a 1997 international treaty on land mines because of the cost of participation and disagreement with crucial elements of the pact.

In making the announcement Friday, the State Department said the decision should not be seen as a sign of U.S. indifference to the land-mine problem.

You mean there are people out there who might think such a thing?!?

The conference, starting Monday in Nairobi, Kenya, will review compliance with the Ottawa Convention on anti-personnel mines. Ratified by 143 countries, the pact bans the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of anti-personnel mines and stipulates that mined areas be cleared within 10 years.

The United States, China and Russia are among 51 countries that have not ratified the treaty. ...

Lincoln Bloomfield, the State Department's top official on land mines, said the administration decided it could not justify using tax dollars to support the Nairobi conference. The meeting, he said, "will have obviously a political platform that is not our policy."

Obviously.

U.S. needs to step in on Iran deal, some say by James Sterngold San Francisco Chronicle 11/27/04. At least this story tells us who says that, unlike the way Fox News commentators use "some people say" to introduce some Republican Party talking point or the other. One of those who say that is neoconservative publicist Max Boot:

"In my view, we are trapped in a no-win dichotomy with Iran," said Max Boot, a conservative military expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "The Europeans can make all the deals they want, but Iran won't stick to them, and the military option is not really possible. Once they have a bomb, we have almost no options." ...

Skeptics like Boot argue that diplomacy is essentially a sham and military force unthinkable, so the United States should use every tool it has to overthrow the Islamic regime from within, supporting opposition groups, beaming propaganda into Iran and imposing sanctions to weaken the government economically.

"That's the kind of thing we ought to be supporting because I don't think anything else would work," said Boot. "I'm not sure you can stop them with air strikes at this point. The Europeans can pursue negotiations, but we ought to pursue our own policy of regime change."

I call this the "Contra option," after the ill-fated operation to support the rightwing Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration. Boot's strategy at this point seems to be to make "regime change" the official policy of the US government and to escalate militarily through proxy forces. The ability of the US to intervene militarily is definitely constrained, as Sterngold's article explains:

Military force, the other choice, is hardly an option.

With 140,000 U.S. troops tied down in Iraq and no end in sight there, the United States does not appear to have the capability to launch a full-scale attack on Iran, even if it wanted to, or an invasion aimed at regime change. Experts say surgical strikes on suspected nuclear installations would not work either, because of the likelihood that Iran has spread out its nuclear facilities to ensure that some of them would survive.

I suspect that the need to show "credibility" in the face of this horrible, urgent Iranian threat will be the hook on which the Bush administration hangs its initial request to reactivate executive authority to impose military conscription, aka, the draft.

It will probably be lost soon enough in the fog of war fever against Iran, but its worth remembering that in 2002, when we were building up for war against Iraq, which had no WMDs, no WMD programs and no active connection with terrorists targeting Americans, it was well known - and publicly discussed, though not nearly widely enough - that Iran did have an active nuclear weapons program, and that they were the chief "state sponsor" of international terrorism, including groups that aimed at the United States. Now we don't have the ability to make a credible military threat against them, because there was such an urgent need to invade and occupy Iraq - which had no WMDs, no WMD programs and no active connection with terrorists targeting Americans - and to fight a years-long counterinsurgency war there with no realistic hope of success.

U.S. Lacks Reliable Data on Iran Arms by Greg Miller Los Angeles Times 11/27/04:

Although convinced that Iran is "vigorously" pursuing programs to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the U.S. intelligence community has few sources of reliable information on any illicit arms activities by the Islamic republic, current and former intelligence officials and Middle East experts say. ...

The dearth of quality intelligence has complicated American efforts to convince other nations to more aggressively confront Iran, and accounts for the caution expressed by some U.S. intelligence officials last week when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said he had seen important new evidence that Iran was pursuing ways to mount a nuclear warhead on a missile. ...

The combination of the hard-line U.S. diplomatic stance and the scant underlying intelligence has prompted comparisons to the United States' flawed case for war against Iraq.

Yeah, when you're relying on intelligence data from the pizza guy, it's a bit of a challenge to convince some obstinate countries to trust your information.

As Daalder writes in the article linked at the beginning:

[The] election results did not turn Bush timid. Quite the contrary. As he told reporters on Thursday, "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style." ...

Bush's ability to pursue his foreign policy preferences will inevitably be affected by economic events. Should the U.S. economy plunge into recession, say, because the historically high U.S. current accounts deficit becomes unsustainable or because oil prices spike to $100 per barrel, he could quickly find himself with no political capital to spend on foreign affairs.

But in the absence of such developments, American foreign policy during the second Bush term will be "more of the same." Of course, John Kerry meant that phrase as criticism. For George W. Bush, though, it is a badge of honor—and a good description of the foreign policy he intends to pursue.

Anatol Lieven addressed the problem the public faces with trying to understand Bush's Iran policy in an article last month (Liberal Hawk Down The Nation 11/25/04; also available at the Carnegie Endowment site) in which he reviewed some of the positions associated with "liberal hawks":

The American government today has no lack of Middle East experts in the State Department and the CIA; indeed, many predicted the disaster in Iraq well before the invasion. The problem is that the ranks of the US intelligentsia are packed with pseudo-experts who are willing to subjugate the most basic historical facts to the needs of their ideological or nationalist agendas. ...

Speaking of the failure of many of these intellectuals to distinguish between crucial factors such as the difference between Sunni and Shiite Islam, Lieven says:

It is bad enough that most of the American public is incapable of making this distinction, without the error being actively encouraged by so-called experts. In consequence, the Bush Administration may be stumbling toward an attack on Iran's nuclear program that could have the most disastrous consequences for Iraq, Afghanistan and the entire American position in the Middle East - without even a truly serious national debate taking place in the United States on the subject of US-Iranian relations.

Iran is predominately Shiite, as are most Iraqis and a large number of Saudis. Al Qaeda and his sort of jihadist groups are Sunni fundamentalists, though Al Qaeda has given some aid to Shiite groups on occasion - and has even had some operational cooperation with Iran, unlike Iraq under Saddam. The Baathist regime in Iraq that was overthrown by the American invasion was Sunni-dominated, so at least the Shiite Muslims can see some positive element in the Iraq War, since Iraqi Shiites now have the chance to have representation in the government closer to their weight in the population. But an American invasion of Iran could quickly squander even that sliver of good will, as Lieven warns:

Given the threat posed by Al Qaeda and its Sunni extremist allies to virtually every state and elite in the Muslim world, and given the savage divisions between these forces, the Shiite tradition and secular Arab nationalists like the Baath, there was a cornucopia of opportunities after September 11 to seek Muslim allies in the war on terrorism. From this point of view, for the Bush Administration to have succeeded in uniting Shiite radicals, Baath die-hards and Sunni extremists in Iraq; to have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq while simultaneously threatening Iran and Syria; and to have alienated both Turkey and Saudi Arabia--this almost defies description.

As Daalder says, we are seeing some analysts raising the possibility, even likelihood, that the second term will see a more moderate foreign policy. Governing Against Type by Edward Luttwak New York Times 11/28/04. Luttwak argues that "while re-elected presidents who no longer have to face the voters are theoretically free to pursue their wildest dreams, in practice they never do."

But from what we've seen so far, such expectations seem to fit the cynical definition of second marriages: the triumph of hope over experience. And even Luttwak's supposedly reassuring look forward envisions Iran and Syria meekly backing down before threats of war against them, based on their fear of American resolve or some such thing, as supposedly demonstrated by the invasion of Iraq.

Flashback

Prior to the 9/11 attacks, we didn't know, and maybe Bush himself didn't know, to what extent the Bush administration would embrace the "neoconservative" notion of wars of liberation in the Middle East. But Bush's arrogant, unilateralist approach was already clear in his cool-to-negative attitude toward our democratic allies in Europe and in his scorn of international agreements, from land mines to chemical weapons nonproliferation.

This 2001 column from Joe Conason, who certainly proved to be one of the most astute observers and analysts of Dubya's first administration, reminds us of a now-nearly-forgotten incident, a realtively minor diplomatic flap in retrospect, but one which showed the risks of the unilateralist approach. It was the outster of the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Bush league by Joe Conason Salon 05/08/01:

What this incident demonstrates, among other things, is how lamely the Bush administration is managing foreign policy -- despite the supposed competence of the president's courtiers. Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters he believed that the U.S. had locked up 43 votes, enough to ensure its reelection to the human rights body.

But that anticipated support evaporated, at least in part because the Bush White House disdains multilateral diplomacy, and consequently neglects U.N. business (including the payment of back dues). Moreover, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. is no longer a Cabinet-level position, as it was during the Clinton administration. And at the moment we don't even have a fully accredited representative at the United Nations because John Negroponte, the dubious Bush nominee, has yet to be sent up to the Senate for confirmation.

That would be the same John Negroponte who is now the US Ambassador to Iraq and therefore the de facto civilian proconsul there.

Instead, this vote ought to be taken by policymakers in the White House as a rather mild warning. The advancement of human rights and democracy around the world, while never a Republican priority, is certainly in our interest. So is the maintenance of alliances with other democratic nations. This latest fiasco only indicateshow poorly such vital interests have been served by the people who now wield power in Washington.

The erratic Howie Kurtz - it seems to be an informal requirement on liberal blogs that Kurtz's name has to be preceded by a derogatory adjective, e.g., the "loathsome" Howie Kurtz - did a roundup in June of 2001 about the anti-Europe ideology pouring from conservative Republican sources: Pundits Take Up Arms Against Europe by Howard Kurtz Washington Post 06/14/04.

Bush definitely faces more obvious and urgent foreign-affairs problems than a seat on the UN Human Rights Commission going into his second term. But his unilateralist orientation was alarmingly evident even in his first few months in office. They've obviously intensified by several degrees of magnitude, almost unaffected it seems by the outpouring of sympathy for the US across the world in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

We can expect more of the same arrogant unilateralism for the next four years.

Tags: anatol lieven, iran, iran war, ivo daalder, landmines