How is it going after Obama's Thursday policy speech?

The White House website now has an official transcript of the May 19 Remarks by the President on the Middle East and North Africa.

It's hard to find the initial reactions to major elements of the President's speech encouraging.

Obama: We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.

Antonio Caño, Israel rechaza el plan de paz de EE UU El País 21.05.2011

Mazal Mualem, Cabinet rallies around Netanyahu after rejection of Obama speech Haaretz 22.05.11



Gideon Levy writes in Netanyahu has invited America to punish Israel Haaretz 22.05.11:

The United States has three choices. One is to distance itself again from the issue. That would be no less than a disaster. ...

Obama's second option is to speak to the Israelis over the heads of their leader. That will not work. ...

There is a third way, ostensibly more difficult for Israel than the others - pressure. A U.S. vote in the United Nations in favor of a Palestinian state would have to be the first step. Then would come isolation - it won't be pleasant fending alone with Micronesia - cuts in aid and abandonment. Although it would cause panic in Jerusalem and no less so in Tel Aviv, this is the only way to show Israel true friendship. Netanyahu has said (for all intents and purposes ) that this is the way. He has left no alternative.

But based on their record so far, any other response by the Obama Administration than the first one - "distance itself again from the issue" - seems to me unlikely in the extreme.

Obama: President Assad now has a choice: He can lead that transition, or get out of the way. The Syrian government must stop shooting demonstrators and allow peaceful protests.

Syria mourners 'attacked by security forces' Aljazeera English 05/21/2011 "At least 11 mourners have been killed and at least 27 wounded in Homs after security forces opened fire on a massive funeral procession, according to human rights activists."

Enric González, El Asad lanza otra oleada de represión a pesar de la advertencia de Obama El País 21.05.2011



Obama: And through the moral force of non-violence, the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in decades.

Scott Peterson, NATO airstrikes cap week of rising pressure on Libya
Staff writer Christian Science Monitor 05/20/2011: "NATO aircraft struck eight Libyan warships overnight Thursday, just hours after President Obama capped a week of increasing international pressure with a vow that Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi would fall from power." This action, of course, is entirely consistent with Obama's goal of regime change through war in Libya.

And for a bonus, on a development already in progress before Obama's speech:

China-Pakistan alliance strengthened post bin Laden AFP/Dawn 05/15/2011

Ángeles Espinosa, Pakistán refuerza sus relaciones militares con China El País 21.05.2011

Kalbe Ali, 'China agrees to run Gwadar port' Dawn 05/22/2011: Pakistani "Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar ... said Pakistan was grateful to the Chinese government for building the Gwadar port. 'However, we shall be more grateful to the Chinese if they agree to build naval base at Gwadar'."

US-Pakistan relations chronically suffers from another border dispute that resonates in the Muslim world but goes scarcely discussed in American news, the Pakistan-India dispute over Kashmir. Pakistani policy is to strive for a pro-Pakistan government in Afghanistan; Pakistan views the Karzai government in Kabul as pro-India. As long as that situation persists, Pakistan will continue to play a double game in Afghanistan, helping NATO in counterinsurgency on the one hand and supporting anti-Karzai guerrillsa (Taliban) on the other.

Tags: israel, daniel levy, obama administration, pakistan, syria, us foreign policy

Pakistan and the end of Bin Laden

Aljazeera English has a 47-minute discussion on Pakistan, terrorism and the US, posted on YouTube 05/05/2011 PDT:



Here is a 24-minute discussion from a day earlier, which brings out how important India is in Pakistan's foreign policy and how that affects US-Pakistan relations:



Tom Hayden, who has been watching - and opposing - wars for decades, has an interesting speculation based on the fact that Osama bin Laden seems to have been rather surprisingly lightly defended, according to the accounts available when he wrote this. Hayden doesn't present it as anything other than speculation, but it's a clever one (Question: Why was Bin Laden so lightly guarded? Peace and Justice Resource Center 05/03/2011):

Apparently, there was no Internet service at the compound, so online meetings with other Al Qaeda leaders or cadre were difficult or impossible. A courier was Bin Laden's slow mode of communication, not Skype.

Perhaps this suggests a different role by Pakistan. What were they to do? They could not hand Bin Laden over to the Americans. They could not arrest him, jail him, try him, convict him. They could not or would not kill him. But they could shelter him in exchange for an unknown agreement on the parameters of his behavior. They could offer him a life in semi-retirement, perhaps with dialysis treatment. If so, the rent Bin Laden paid must have been significant. This might have been the most pragmatic arrangement at which the Pakistani military could arrive.

Then, last July, the Americans found the trail of the courier and, shortly after, the compound was targeted. This may be the back story of the growing antagonism between the U.S. and Pakistani governments, militaries and spy agencies, even the recent blow-up over the CIA contractor Raymond Davis, arrested and finally released after killing two Pakistani nationals in March. President Obama lied about Davis’ CIA affiliations and American diplomats put on enormous pressure before Davis was released. Davis was investigating Pakistani militants in a top-secret operation, which could mean he was on the trail of Bin Laden.

In this imagined scenario, the Americans became certain that Bin Laden was hidden in the compound, and possibly made Pakistan an offer it could not refuse. We know you have Bin Laden under protective custody, they might have said, and now you must give him up or face the consequences. It remains to be investigated further, but how could it be accidental that the Pakistani military didn’t begin “scrambling their forces,” according to the Times, until the very time the Americans had finished the job, packed up the body, and turned over the women and children to Pakistani soldiers who were conveniently present?

Tags: osama bin laden, pakistan, tom hayden

Bin Laden's death: the original official story

We have initial versions of the military action that ended the life of Osama bin Laden. It will be interesting to see how those stories are amplified as we get more information.

This is a press conference with President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan talking about the killing of Osama bin Laden. Brennan is one of Obama's worst selections for a national security post.



Here is an account from Haaretz by Natasha Mozgovaya, U.S. had no choice but to kill bin Laden, says U.S. defense official 05/02/2011:

The United States has no choice but to kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden during the raid on his hideout in Pakistan, President Barack Obama's top counter terrorism adviser said Monday.

"We certainly were preparing to the possibility to capture him. If we had an opportunity to take him alive we would have done it‬," John Brennan said. The minutes passed like days and the president was very concerned about the security of our personnel. It was very intense. And finally we were informed about the results there was a sigh of relief‬." ...

U.S. national security officials said earlier Monday that special forces set out to kill Osama bin Laden and dump his body in the sea to make it harder for the al Qaeda founder to become a martyr.

"This was a kill operation," one of the officials said.

"If he had waved a white flag of surrender, he would have been taken alive," the official added. But the operating assumption among the U.S. raiders was that bin Laden would put up a fight -- which he did.

Bin Laden "participated" in a firefight between the U.S. commandos and residents of the fortified mansion near the Pakistani capital Islamabad where he had been hiding, the official said.

The official would not explicitly say whether bin Laden fired on the Americans, but confirmed that during the course of the 40-minute operation the U.S. team shot bin Laden in the head. ...

A senior Obama administration official said the commandos knew that bin Laden probably would be killed rather than captured.

"U.S. forces are never in a position to kill if there is a way to accept surrender consistent with the ROE (rules of engagement). That said, I think there was broad recognition that it was likely to end in a kill," the administration official said.

Paul Woodward of War in Context, whose work I don't check often enough, notes in The death of Osama bin Laden 05/02/2011 the careful wording in the official version of Osama's demise:

US forces on a mission to kill or capture (not capture or kill) bin Laden, killed him "in a firefight" in Pakistan. At least that’s what the Times reports. Only further into the report does it reiterate what Obama actually said: "After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body."

The White House chooses its words carefully. If bin Laden was killed during the firefight then it's reasonable to assume that this is exactly what Obama would have said. To say that the al Qaeda leader was killed after a firefight seems to suggest he was executed.

The exact manner in which the death occurred may explain why, at least thus far, no photographic evidence has been released. If bin Laden was indeed executed it was most likely for political reasons.

Bin Laden's capture could surely have provided an intelligence bonanza of inestimable value. His subsequent trial would indeed have been a compelling demonstration of what it should mean to deliver justice. But it would also have opened a can of worms.

If bin Laden had been tried in front of a military tribunal then yet again this government would be undermining the strength of the criminal justice system. If on the other hand he was tried in a civilian court, it would be hard for the administration to justify its continued use of military tribunals for any terrorism-related cases.

During a trial, there would be no predicting what kind of strategically damaging information might have been revealed that could have affected US relations with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or other Gulf nations.

And then there would be the headache of deciding where the trial could take place.

Just over a year ago, it was Attorney General Eric Holder who assured Congress that there was no risk of bin Laden ever being read his Miranda rights.

"The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom. That’s the reality. ... He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so he's not captured by us. We know that," Holder said emphatically.

Stephen Walt had an interesting post last week on targeted assassination, Taking Qaddafi out (and not for dinner) Foreign Policy 04/25/2011, occasioned by the obvious decision by NATO to try to kill Muammar Qaddafi as part of the Libya War strategy:

Of course, the United States (and some other countries) have been on this slippery slope for awhile, given our reliance on targeted killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. The practice is troubling on at least three grounds. First, due to the imperfect nature of intelligence and the inevitable "fog of war," targeted killings inevitably murder innocents along with the supposedly guilty. Second, and following from the first point, killing innocent bystanders may create more adversaries than it eliminate, thereby undermining the strategic purpose of the program itself.

Third, and perhaps most important of all, going after foreign leaders - no matter how despicable - helps legitimate a tactic that will eventually be visited back upon us. If the world's most powerful countries see fit to kill any foreign leader that they don't like, what's to stop those same (presumably evil) leaders from threatening to pay us back in kind? Targeted assassinations of foreign despots may seem like a cheap and efficient way of solving today's problem, but we won't enjoy living in a world where foreign adversaries think attacking U.S. leaders (including the president and his inner circle) is a perfectly legitimate way of doing business. And notice that making targeted killings more legitimate tends to level the international playing field: you don't have to be a powerful or wealthy state to organize a few hit squads and cause lots of trouble for your enemies.

So even if this attempt at "decapitation" were to succeed in the short-term, the longer-term consequences may not be quite so salutary. [my emphasis]

Walt is specifically addressing the issue of targeting heads of state and government for assassination. But he's raising issues that our policymakers should be taking fully into account.

In another take, Ismail Khan in the Pakistani English-language paper Dawn, Was Osama killed by US troops or his own guard? 05/03/2011 reports on an alternative version given by a source he allows to remain anonymous:

Reports suggest that Bin Laden was shot dead with a single bullet to his head when he resisted capture, but an official indicated that the 54-year-old mastermind of the biggest and most devastating attack on US soil might have been killed by one of his own guards in line with his will to avert his capture.

"From the scene of the gunbattle it doesn't look like he could have been killed at point blank range from such a close angle, while offering resistance," said an official, who visited the scene of the night assault soon after the departure of the US assault team from the sprawling compound in Thanda Choa, now called Bilal Town, at stone’s throw from Pakistan Military Academy, Kakul.

I'm not sure how someone who saw the scene after the US team left carrying Bin Laden's body could have made a judgment about whether Bin Laden had been shot at close range. But that's the report. Khan also reports that one of the American helicopters went down:

One of the two helicopters involved in the assault went down during action and one official who visited the scene said there was no evidence to suggest that it might have been hit by a rocket or shot from the ground.

“There was no evidence of the helicopter having been shot down,” the official said. “From the wreckage it appears to be more a case of a crash,” he said.

But he said the one loud explosion heard during the gunbattle might have been caused by the departing assault team which bombed the chopper into pieces after retrieving their men and completing their mission.

His report also has two Bin Laden wives being left in the compound and another women wounded. But his report doesn't include the dead woman that John Brennan in the video above says had perhaps been used as a human shield to protect Bin Laden.

We'll see how this story develops. I'm skeptical about the Dawn account. But the idea that Bin Laden could have been killed by one of his own men acting under his orders does offer an alternative explanation. One that in international opinion could be more benign for the United States than the notion that it was an intentional assassination. And the dead wife? Well, maybe Dawn's account was more careful than John Brennan's: Osama "human shield" story may be bogus Salon 05/03/2011. He links to stories at Politico and Reuters noting that Brennan's claim may not be that solid.

Steven Thomma reports for McClatchy, which has consistently had some of the best reporting on the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, in U.S. hopes to bury rest of al Qaida with bin Laden 05/03/2011:

Americans reveled Monday in the death of Osama bin Laden, a moment the Obama administration hoped would be a pivot point in the long war against terrorism by showing the world that bin Laden lived and died as a hypocrite and a coward, and that his terror network is headed toward destruction as well. [my emphasis]

Thomma reminds us:

In fact, bin Laden had little support in the Muslim world, according to country-by-country polls by the Pew Research Center. In six Muslim countries polled this year, his support was highest in the Palestinian territories. Even there, only 34 percent of Muslims said they trusted him to do the right thing. That approval dropped to 25 percent in Indonesia, 22 percent in Egypt, 13 percent in Jordan, 3 percent in Turkey and 1 percent in Lebanon. [my emphasis]

Not surprisingly, alternative theories of Bin Laden's death are already circulating in Pakistan, according to another Dawn report from AFP, Theories on bin Laden's death take root in Pakistan 05/03/2011.

Tags: osama bin laden, pakistan

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

The US, Pakistan and the Raymond Davis case

Former Special Forces officer and CIA contractor Raymond Davis is scheduled to be arraigned in court in Lahore, Pakistan on Wednesday in a case which has seriously soured relations between the United States and Pakistan. Scott Horton has an informative background piece on the case in Spy Games Foreign Policy 03/11/2011 (updated 03/14/2011). Davis is accused of shooting two Pakistanis execution-syle in the street in Lahore. Horton writes:

The problem is that lately Washington and Islamabad have been less than friendly. "The diplomatic immunity struggle over Davis is a smokescreen for other issues," one senior AfPak analyst told me. "It actually goes to the heart of a dispute over national security issues of the utmost importance to both Pakistan and the United States."

More than a month after Davis's arrest, sources in Washington began to acknowledge what had been reported in the Pakistani media from the outset: Davis was a contractor for the CIA. In short time he was identified as its acting station chief. Shortly thereafter, Pakistani intelligence sources claimed that the motorcyclists Davis had killed, who had previously been portrayed by Davis's defenders as street thugs, had in fact been known to Davis -- as low-level operatives of the ISI, who had been assigned to tail him. Davis had crossed "a red line," Pakistani officials told ABC News.

But what was that "red line"? Neither the ISI nor the CIA is eager to air their disagreements in public. But in the last three months, the friction between them has grown so intense that the flashpoints have become obvious. Some disputes have to do with specific personnel; others have to do with broader questions of policy and specific operations. But the essence is clear: The ISI believes that the CIA can only be given free range to operate on Pakistani soil if it treats the ISI as an equal, sharing with the ISI information about its personnel, the operations on which it is engaged, and the information it secures from those operations. And until the CIA makes meaningful concessions on the ISI's demands, the ISI is prepared to clamp down on the CIA. Indeed, at present no one appreciates that point more intensely than Raymond Davis.

See also his blog post of the same name, Spy Games No Comment 03/14/2011.

Tags: pakistan, raymond davis, scott horton

More on revolutionary "contagion"

Being a terminal news junkie, I get excited about historical dramas being played out in real time. Heck, I have a major weakness for Hegelian Grand Theories about history - even though a big part of me suspects that successfully muddling through is what drives most of what we think of as History.

So I'm willing to entertain the idea that we're seeing some new upsurge of revolutionary contagion, or activist contagion, or democratic contagion, or whatever you want to call it.

But I can't help but think that Tom Engelhardt is letting his imagination get away with him in All-American Decline in a New World: Wars, Vampires, Burned Children, and Indelicate Imbalances Tom Dispatch 02/24/2011, when he writes:

But here’s the truth of it: you have to strain to fit this Middle Eastern moment into any previous paradigm, even as -- from Wisconsin to China -- it already threatens to break out of the Arab world and spread like a fever across the planet. Never in memory have so many unjust or simply despicable rulers felt quite so nervous -- or possibly quite so helpless (despite being armed to the teeth) -- in the presence of unarmed humanity. And there has to be joy and hope in that alone. [my emphasis]

The protests movements in Tunisia and Egypt look at me from what I know about them to be an awful lot like what Joschka Fischer called "revolution by implosion" in the former Warsaw Pact countries in Europe. But whether they result in a genuinely democratic trend remains to be seen, or rather to be accomplished by Tunisians and Egyptians.

Gaddafi's Libyan regime seems to be going the same direction. But it may not be so implosion-ready as Mubarak's government in Egypt was. Libya could still turn out to be more "Algeria" (civil war in the 1990s) than "Egypt".

Stephen Walt recently illustrated why you don't see him on TV in the company of Serious People like George Will and Tom "Suck.On.This." Friedman: Walt actually uses his brain, and actually takes some responsibility when he turns out to be wrong in his predictions. He was skeptical of the probabilities of "revolutionary contagion" in connection with the Tunisian unrest. He assesses why his expectations were wrong in that case in What I got wrong about the Arab revolutions and why I'm not losing sleep over it Foreign Policy 02/23/2011:

My post on why the revolution in Tunisia would not spread. To say my prediction was wrong is an understatement, and some of the usual critics have seized on this opportunity to take a shot or two. Fair enough ...

... I still think my reasons for being skeptical about the possibility of contagion were cogent, even if my forecast was clearly wrong in this instance. Large-scale protests are hardly a rare occurrence in many parts of the world, but the vast majority of them do not lead governments to fall. And when a government is toppled, most of the time this does not lead to similar upheavals elsewhere, and certainly not within a few days or weeks. My original prediction was off the mark, but it would have been correct in most cases. [my emphasis]

His estimation of why he was off the mark, with particular reference to Egypt, involves: the intensity of current resentment; the level of anti-government organization; the interaction of new media (Alajzeera) and communication technologies (Facebook, Twitter); the surprising weakness of the regimes in response to protest (the implosion effect); and, "the sense of common identification and cultural resonance that made events in one Arab country significant for many people in others."

There's nothing especially exotic about the latter point, which he expands by saying, "For Arabs, the fact that the initial spark was struck in Tunisia made it far more significant than a similar event in Bolivia or Burma would have been." He doesn't mention language, but the fact that the events in Tunisia were being played out in Arabic, combined with Aljazeera's now-established popularity and reach, surely had an effect. Language alone means that Americans are likely to find political events in Britain, Ireland or Canada to have more resonance than those in Argentina or Bulgaria. (To the extent that Americans take the foreign news seriously at all.)

Tom Engelhardt's thoughts in his article are worth reading, despite the somewhat melodramatic tone of this particular column. But they should be taken more as an example of using the events in the Middle East as a way or rethinking how Washington policymakers process information affecting key aspects of foreign policy. He has an especially good point that recent events should inspire some humility in Washington among both parties about the limits of American power. And provide some caution about the dangers of arrogance in assuming we understand political events in the Middle East perfectly well. One aspect of the latter concern is whether we have enough serious Arabists in the State Department and the intelligence services to provide the kind of information that should be informing our current foreign policies.

Meanwhile, as Engelhardt reminds us, we are fighting a real campaign against revolutionary insurgents in Afghanistan, now lead by our Savior-General David Petraeus. It would be a major advance in democracy and decency if the public were to suddenly lose all confidence in the nightmarish propaganda being used to justify that war:

... on February 19th, just as all hell was breaking loose in Bahrain and Libya, the general visited the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul and, in dismissing Afghan claims that recent American air raids in the country’s northeast had killed scores of civilians, including children, he made a comment that shocked President Hamid Karzai’s aides. We don’t have it verbatim, but the Washington Post reports that, according to "participants," Petraeus suggested "Afghans caught up in a coalition attack in northeastern Afghanistan might have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties."

One Afghan at the meeting responded: "I was dizzy. My head was spinning. This was shocking. Would any father do this to his children? This is really absurd."

In the American echo-chamber, the general's comments may sound, if not reasonable, then understandably exuberant and emphatic: We’ve got the enemy by the throat! We didn’t create Afghan casualties; they did it to themselves! Elsewhere, they surely sound obtusely tone deaf or simply vampiric, evidence that those inside the echo chamber have no sense of how they look in a shape-shifting world.

This recalls for me that segregationists in the Deep South in the early 1960s would try to excuse arson attacks by the Ku Klux Klan or similar Christian terrorist groups by saying some civil rights worker set the fire to make the Klan look bad. This kind of alibi isn't serious. It's an expression of complete contempt for anyone criticizing the actual perpetrators. In this case, our Savior-General Petraeus is running a counterinsurgency campaign that inevitably produces large numbers of civilian casualties.

Engelhardt also discusses the important case of Raymond Davis, a CIA employee who murdered two people in Pakistan and has become the subject of a dispute between Pakistan and the US, because the Obama Administration doesn't think the Pakistani government should complain where Americans murder their citizens on the streets of Lahore.

Tags: afghanistan war, pakistan, stephen walt, tom engelhardt

Pakistan, India and the Afghanistan War

President Obama's trip to India is something to which our ally Pakistan - on whose territory we're also conducting a war - is watching closely. Margaret Talev of McClatchy Newspapers (Obama tells India Pakistan making slow progress on terror 11/07/2010) does something too rarely seen in US reporting on the Afghanistan War. She talks about how the India-Pakistan rivalry is a central issue in it:

India and Pakistan have fought three wars since their tumultuous founding in 1947, and the animosity between the rival nuclear nations is palpable. India constantly prods the United States to take a more aggressive role in pressing Pakistan to deal with anti-Indian militants that receive sanctuary in Pakistan and blames Pakistan for the Nov. 26, 2008, attacks in Mumbai that killed 160 people.

Balancing relations between the rival powers is a delicate one for Obama. The American president needs cooperation from both countries to extricate the United States from a decade of war in Afghanistan, which has increasingly become a proxy battleground for India and Pakistan. [my emphasis]

The disputed Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, which is part of India, is the biggest contentious issue between these two powers. Pakistan views the current government in Afghanistan as pro-India. And for Pakistan, its rivalry with India over Kashmir is far more important than American preferences in Afghanistan.

Tags: afghanistan war, india, pakistan

US-Pakistan relations

Juan Cole has been keeping his readers at Informed Comment up to date on the US conflict with Pakistan over drone strikes in Pakistan. Pakistan had closed the Khyber pass to US supply traffic after a number of drone strikes. A number of trucks were blown up by Taliban fighters while they were waiting for renewed permission to go into Afghanistan, which Pakistan has now granted. Cole gives some background:

Pakistan closed the crossing to trucks transporting goods for NATO & the US after a September 30 incident in which US helicopter gunships made incursions into Pakistani territory and then fired missiles at a Frontiers Corps checkpoint, apparently mistaking the scouts for Taliban. Two scouts were killed and four wounded. Pakistani nerves were already raw because of unmanned drone strikes on Pakistani territory. US President Barack Obama and Gen. David Petraeus appear to have decided to push for more hot pursuit missions into Pakistan from Afghanistan, and this decision was absolutely unacceptable to the Pakistani military, as well as to the public. When the Frontiers Corps scouts were killed, Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani appears to have felt the moment opportune to nip the 'hot pursuit' doctrine in the bud by closing the main NATO transport route and reminding Washington just how badly it needs Pakistani good will. [my emphasis]

Cole believes that Pakistan's action looks like a successful pushback against the US policy:

The US and NATO were forced into uncharacteristic apologies to the Pakistani government, over which Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and President Asaf Zardari waxed lyrical, and which appear to have mollified public opinion somewhat and to have saved face for the Pakistani elite. My guess is that the US has given representations to Kayani that no uncoordinated hot pursuits will be launched into Pakistan from Afghanistan by the US military.

In fact, In fact, Interior Minister Rahman Malik openly threatened the US and NATO after the apology was issued:: "Pakistani forces are capable of defending the sovereignty of the country and in case of any incursion in future, they will use any option in response."

To add insult to injury, the Pakistani government is considering imposing a tax on the NATO supply trucks. The huge trucks tear up the roads and do represent a cost to the government.

And he notes that this is another reminder that there really are limits to American power:

The whole affair reveals how weak Bush's wars have made the US. In 2001 Bush officials could just threaten to reduce Pakistan to rubble if it did not turn on the Taliban and join the Bush "war on terror."

Now, with the US bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq and in the wake of 9 years during which the US military was shown supremely vulnerable to unconventional military tactics, no such threat directed at Islamabad would be taken seriously. The US genuinely needs Pakistani help. The threats are being issued in the opposite direction, and the US military is the party that is being forced to swallow its pride and make an about-face on policy. [my emphasis]

Tags: afghanistan war, pakistan

Should we start saying "Pakistan War"?

One of the lessons of the Cheney-Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq on the grounds that they had "weapons of mass destruction," while North Korea's actual nuclear bomb program was handled through diplomacy, was that the US would attack and invade countries without a nuclear bomb, but not those with them.

Given that Pakistan has nuclear weapons, I wonder if that "lesson" of 2003 holds any longer, in light of recent developments in the Pakistan theater. In theory, Pakistan is supporter the American position in its attacks on mujahideen/terrorist/warlord forces in western Pakistan. But as time goes on, it starts to sound more and more like a war on Pakistan itself. Charley Keyes, Key senator lashes out at Pakistan government CNN 10/02/2010:

A top senator slammed Pakistan's government Friday, urging more action against terrorists and less complaining about American drone strikes.

"They have gone after some terrorist targets inside Pakistan but the ones they go after are the ones that threaten the Pakistan government," Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Michigan, said.

Is the White House notion that the way to rally your domestic political allies is to scold them and tell them to quit whining seems to be spreading to foreign policy?

Joe Biden can call it whining if he wants. But the Democratic Party should be trying to de-escalate and contain the "AfPak" War and seeking an early withdrawal of American soldiers and mercenaries.

Levin met Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and other officials Thursday. They discussed improved accuracy of U.S. drone attacks on terrorists targets inside Pakistan, Levin told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations. The United States has intensified attacks on terrorists but while also increasing efforts to limit civilian casualties.

"There is a significant improvement in the accuracy. The minister, the foreign minister of Pakistan, acknowledged this yesterday to me," Levin said. "There are mistakes made but there is a huge improvement in the accuracy and the reduction of mistakes."

This touches on a basic confusion about military technology that antiwar citizens need to challenge more. The military since the Gulf War of 1991 in paticular has made a point of claiming that increased accuracy of bombs and other munitions mean less civilian casualties. If you're bombing cities and getting more accurare in hitting them, that's increases civilian casualties. In the so-called targeted assassinations by drone strikes, if you're firing missiles into a village to assassinate one target, civilian noncombatants are likely to be killed. Improved accuracy will mean more of that happening.

"They object when we make mistakes," Levin said. "I mean we hit some Pakistani troops by mistake the other day and there is some strong blowback on that," he said. "This is understandable."

Yeah, killing troops in the army of your own allies tends to irritate your allies. I'm glad we have wise Senators like the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to explain such complex matters to us.

Rachel Maddow's reporting on the "end of combat" in Iraq was pretty credulous. But here she has a substantive report on the esclation of the US war in Afghanistan via Pakistan: Maddow: US quietly test driving escalation of war in Pakistan C&L Video Cafe 10/01/2010. She makes a good point that is obscured in the official rhetoric over the war. We can say that our "war on terrorism" is a worldwide war with no fixed boudaries. But the actual fighting takes places in particular countries.

The most dinguisshed statesmen and most talented generals have repeatedly found out over the millenia that the human race has been practicing war that the beast is very hard to control. It's anything but a trivial matter that we are shifting toward a shooting war with nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Juan Cole discusses the escalation in Pakistan in 27 US Fuel Trucks Torched as Pakistan Blocks US Supplies at Khyber Pass for 2nd Day Informed Comment 10/01/2010.

This is serious stuff. And not good for the United States. This is one of Obama's politicies that needs to be criticized no matter which elections are scheduled or when.

Tags: afghanistan war, pakistan

Gates visits Pakistan, Osama bin Laden takes credit for bungled Detroit bombing attempt

Robert Gates, Obama's Republican Secretary of Defense, has been visiting India and Pakistan, with the latter being less than thrilled with his performance as their guest. Meanwhile, a tape has surfaced of Osama Bin Laden claiming responsibility for the attempted Christmas bomb attack on a plane landing in Detroit.

Al Jazeera reports on the tape in Bin Laden warns US of more attacks 01/24/10, with an audio of the Arabic original itself. But I'm very skeptical of the extent to which Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida group exercises even that much direction over terrorist cells in Yemen or elsewhere. Given how pathetic the Detroit attempt was, it must be some kind of desperation that makes Bin Laden want to take any kind of credit for it. In any case, to talk about Al Qa'ida as a worldwide force of super-terrorists and a threat comparable to the nuclear-armed Soviet Union, which was the main justification for the Long War when we called it the Cold War, is nuts.

Juan Cole analyzes the Gates visit to Pakistan in Gates Strikes out In Pakistan;
Obama's AfPak Policies in Disarray 01/24/10. From Pakistan's point of view, the Afghanistan War is a sideshow to their long-running conflict with India over Kashmir. Gates also apparently slipped up and admitted the Xe/Blackwater mercenaries are performing military operations inside Pakistan. And some Pakistanis thought Gates was even giving approval to India to launch military operations against Pakistan - both countries are nuclear powers - in the even of another terrorist attack like that in Mumbai (Bombay) in 2008. Cole sums it up this way:

The message his mission inadvertently sent was that the US is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated; that he is pressuring Pakistan to take on further counter-insurgency operations against Taliban in the Northwest, which the country flatly lacks the resources to do; and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it.

The central role that the Pakistan-India conflict plays is one of the major weaknesses of the US/NATO Afghanistan War approach. Both India and Pakistan view the Karzai government as pro-Indian. Pakistan's cooperation with NATO against the Taliban insurgent groups in Afghanistan will always be limited so long as they see the Kabul regime as an ally of India against Pakistan:

Gates had one strike against him, since he came to Pakistan from India. Moreover while in New Delhi he clearly was a traveling salesman for the US war materiel industries, who would like to pick up some of the $60 billion India is planning to spend on weapons in the next few years. During the Cold War, the US had mainly supplied Pakistan's military, and had been lukewarm to India, which Washington felt tilted toward Moscow. The current shift of US strategy to wooing India to offset growing Chinese power in Asia is taken by some Pakistanis as a demotion.

Then, he encouraged a greater Indian role in Afghanistan, including, according to the Times of London, possibly in training Afghan police. Pakistan considers Afghanistan its sphere of influence and the last thing it wants is a role for Indian security forces in training (and perhaps shaping the loyalty) of Afghan police. Germany is currently in charge of the police training program, but India is afraid that in the next few years NATO will depart, and that Pakistan will then redeploy its Taliban allies to capture the country for Islamabad's purposes. India is also concerned about significant Chinese investments, as in a big copper mine, in Afghanistan. So New Delhi is considering the police training mission. [my emphasis]

Cole describes Pakistan's recent military role in relation to Afghanistan this way:

To be fair, the Pakistani military committed tens of thousands of troops to these two campaigns, in Swat and South Waziristan, and is in fact attempting to garrison the captured areas so as to prevent the return of the Pakistani Taliban. In the past two years, the Pakistani army has lost over 2,000 soldiers in such fighting against Taliban in the Northwest, a little less than half the troops the US lost in its 6-year Iraq War.

The Pakistani military campaigns of the past year, however, have not targeted those radical groups most active in cross-border raids into Afghanistan-- the Quetta Shura of Mullah Omar's Old Taliban, the Haqqani Network of Siraj Haqqani in North Waziristan, or whatever cells exist in Pakistan of the largely Afghanistan-based Hizb-i Islami (Islamic Party) of Gulbadin Hikmatyar. Washington worries that the effectiveness of its own troop escalation in Afghanistan will be blunted if these three continue to have havens on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line. And, Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani worries that the US offensive in Afghanistan will push thousands radicals over the border into Pakistan, further destabilizing the country's northwest.

The Haqqani group and warlord Gulbadin Hikmatyar were both considered brave mujaheddin freedom fighters back in the days when the US and the Saudis were actively supporting the Islamic resistance to the Soviet occupation.

Tags: afghanistan war, osama bin laden, pakistan

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

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

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

Is Pakistan on the brink?

Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog is an excellent example of what a difference blogging has made in terms of the immediate information, includijng expert information like his, available to the public about current events.

In Pakistan Crisis and Social Statistics 04/26/09 argues that Pakistan is not nearly so fragile as the Obama administration and seemingly most everyone else seems to think it is. This is obviously critically important to the escalating "AfPak" War. Because if Pakistan's democratic government is in no danger of being overthrown by the "Taliban" and "Al Qa'ida", then escalating military attacks inside Pakistan could make matters worse without any corresponding benefit.

Analyzing election statistics, ethnic composition and language factors, he finds it unlikely in the extreme that the Pushtun Islamic fundamentalists that our press codes generally as the "Taliban" could take over the Pakistani government:

What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan's nuclear capacity.

All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.

My guess is that the alarmism is also being promoted from within Pakistan by Pervez Musharraf, who wants to make another military coup; and by civilian politicians in Islamabad, who want to extract more money from the US to fight the Taliban that they are secretly also bribing to attack Afghanistan.[my emphasis]

On that latter point, it's not clear whether he's just speculating or making more of an educated guess. It's scarcely ever mentioned in our press, at least not that I see, that Afghanistan's regime is "pro-Indian" in Pakistan's eyes. And that the India-Pakistan differences are far more of a concern for their leaders, both civilian and military, than helping NATO keep a "pro-Indian" government in power in Afghanistan.

The hype about Pakistan is very sinister and mysterious and makes no sense to someone who actually knows the country.

Tags: afghanistan war, pakistan

Afghanistan/Pakistan: Obama settles on escalation

Dday at Digby's Hullabaloo blog calls it More Troops For The Graveyard Of Empires. Obama has announced he's decided to escalate the war in Afghanistan: Obama Approves Plan to Boost Troop Levels in Afghanistan by Ann Scott Tyson Washington Post Online 02/17/09.

And so far as I'm seeing, there doesn't seem to be any actual new strategy beyond some variation of The Surge of 2007-8 in Iraq.

Meanwhile, our allies - or is Pakistan soon to be our enemy? - seem to be taking their own approaches: Pakistan officials allow Sharia in volatile region by Zulfiqar Ali and Laura King Los Angeles Times 02/17/09.

And is Afghan President Hamid Karzai about to go the route of Nho Dihn Diem and other former American friends who became inconvenient or tiresome? Juan Cole reports (Informed Comment 02/15/09):

Afghan President Hamid Karzai tells Aljazeera that he has not spoken to President Barack Obama since the latter was sworn in in January. It seems clear that the Obama team views Karzai as a Bush crony who is personally corrupt and ineffective, and are willing to risk bad realtions [sic] in order to push the Afghan elite to adopt new policies.

Wow! Obama's starting on a new and likely open-ended escalation of the Afghanistan War, and he not even talking to the Afghan President directly? If Karzai's claim is true, something not very pleasant for him must be in the air. And in the Afghanistan War, that could be literally "in the air".

Tags: afghanistan war, pakistan

Looking for justifications for self-destruction in Afghanistan and Pakistan

David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert and an admirer of the brutal and controversial Phoenix Program the CIA ran in Vietnam, argues that NATO needs to wage a counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan that will take at least ten more years and maybe fifteen. (Crunch Time in Afghanistan-Pakistan Small Wars Journal 02/09/2009) And that's on top of the 7-plus years we've been fighting in Afghanistan already.

Kilcullen doesn't explicitly say he's talking about 10-15 additional years. But I don't see how any other reading of his piece is reasonable.

He gives the inevitable snappy slogan to the approach he advocates: Prevent, Protect, Build, Hand-Off.

Each represents an "essential strategic task”, he says. I'll quote them here in bullet-point form:

• We need to prevent the re-emergence of an Al Qaeda sanctuary that could lead to another 9/11.

• We need to protect Afghanistan from a range of security threats including the Taliban insurgency, terrorism, narcotics, misrule and corruption.

• We need to build sustainable and accountable state institutions (at the central, provincial and local level) and a resilient civil society.

• Then we can begin a phased hand-off to Afghan institutions that can survive without permanent international assistance.

He then gives a desultory description of a less expansive option, then ridicules it as (my summary) something only wimps and losers would want to try. You don't want to be a wimp or a loser, now do you?

If we wanted to set up, say, a British-style colony in Afghanistan, then a 15- or 20-year war might be the way to go. Then, there would be the constant low-level terrorism and the periodic uprising for the following decades, or the following century, or however long it took us to decide what a fool's errand the whole thing had been.

Kilcullen somehow figures that we will be able to get the Pakistani government to escalate counterinsurgency in its territories bordering Afghanistan without much direct American combat involvement. And he doesn't discuss in that article any of the problems that would come with Americans and Europeans carrying on a 20 Years' War in Afghanistan. The idea that NATO involvement in such a protracted war could itself become a strategic problem doesn't seem to faze him.

More importantly, he assumes that the remains of Al Qa'ida are such a major threat that they cannot be countered without the huge and very risky commitment to 10-15 more years of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan would be. As was too often the case in the Cold War, threat inflation remains a chronic problem for US foreign policy.

Reuters is reporting Obama orders Afghan-Pakistan policy review 02/10/2009 and Gates expects Obama Afghan troop decision in days by David Morgan 02/10/2009.

Morgan reports:

The Obama administration is looking at plans to eventually nearly double the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to about 60,000. There are currently 37,000 U.S. forces in the country as part of a western military presence of about 70,000 troops.

The enthusiasm of our NATO allies for such a proposed escalation and expansion of the war is doubtful: Obama Means Blood, Sweat and Tears for Germany by Claus Christian Malzahn Der Spiegel Online 02/09/2009.

Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai says he wants to open peace negotiations with some of the Pushtun rebel groups ("Taliban").

Fortunately, our quality news media are on the job, keeping us well informed about the situation. [cough, choke, cough] On the PBS Newshour for 02/09/09, Jim Lehrer interviewed two subject matter experts on Afghanistan: an Afghanistan hawk from the hawkish Rand Corporation and an Afghanistan hawk from the hawkish Heritage Foundation. The had a well-balanced discussion in which they mostly agreed with each other on the need to escalate the war in Afghanistan and expand it to Pakistan. (The opening news portion of the segment isn't too bad.)

Tags: afghanistan war, pakistan