Category: Afghanistan (vintage)

Logistical impasse for the US in Afghanistan?

Bernhardt of Moon of Alabama has a good short post up today on the huge logistics challenge involved in keeping the US/NATO forces in Afghanistan supplied.
He’s commenting on this fascinating report in today’s WaPo on the security problems the truck-based supply route through Pakistan has faced for many months now. The WaPo reporters write, “Before the Taliban raid and border closure last week, an average of 600 to 800 tractor-trailers moved through [the Pakistan-Afghanistan border crossing at] Torkham a day, according to Afghan customs officials.” That flow of traffic has frequently been reduced considerably, or choked off completely by anti-US or pro-Taliban forces acting inside Pakistan.
On Monday, the Pakistani army received orders to “shoot to kill” those attacking US convoys. Yesterday (Tuesday) the traffic flow resumed a little. But still Customs officials said they expected only around 200 trucks to pass through that day.
Bernhardt has a very handy link to a “Request for Info” issued by the US Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) which is,

    conducting a market survey on industry capabilities and potential sources for inter-theater surface transportation of military cargo to/from various destinations in Afghanistan utilizing two possible options. The first option is to move cargo between Northern Europe and various destinations in Afghanistan through Caucus’ and Central Asia. The second option is to move cargo between CONUS and Afghanistan through Asia and Central Asia. In addition to the options above, the Government is also looking for other possible innovative routing and intermodal solutions which may include air transportation.

Do they look a little desperate there? “Looking for other possible innovative routing and intermodal solutions…”?
B has also very helpfully produced a rough map of what the “European” and “Asian” options for new supply lines might look like. The Asian option notably goes mainly through China before getting to Afghanistan through one or more of the other Stans.
(Check out Stratfor’s handy map of the two new links China is making to the rail network the Soviets built, back in the day, in all the Stans they controlled. China has also recently, as I noted here, won a contract with the Afghan government to, inter alia, build the country’s first-ever national north-south rail line, that will connect western China’s rail network with that of Pakistan, and through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea.)
But China’s big new engineering projects in the region will come far too late to save the US/NATO troops trapped in Afghanistan at the end of extremely long and tortuous supply lines…
USTRANSCOM’s “Request for Info” seems based primarily on the US military’s desire not to be wholly dependent in Afghanistan on trans-Russian supply lines, and not to be dependent at all on the other, geographically very obvious route into Afghanistan, which would be to go in through Iran.
In Bernhardt’s post, he writes,

    A retreat from Iraq would relieve the U.S. from some costs. But to supply a soldier in Afghanistan might easily cost double or triple as much as supply for a soldier in Iraq. Has Obama thought about how he will finance that war?

I think his estimate of the relatively much higher cost of sustaining each soldier inside Afghanistan is quite correct. And this is a matter that the US Congress– holder of the war-making purse-strings, remember!– should take into full account, as well as the incoming President.
Meanwhile, as Don Bacon has documented so ably for us here, the political-strategic part of the war effort in Afghanistan has been going abysmally badly. It truly is time to look for an alternative to continued US dominance of the “stabilization” (or whatever) project there.
Time for the Security Council as a whole to consider a whole range of other, much less unilateralist, less “western”, and less heavily militarized approaches.

Operation Enduring Failure

Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old. –Rudyard Kipling
It’s been seven years since the initiation of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, what’s going on? Well, it’s certainly enduring. The Taliban government has been overthrown and replaced, but it’s not going well, nobody’s yet declared “mission accomplished” and apparently Afghanistan has become even more important to the US.
President-elect Obama, during his visit to Afghanistan, said that United States needs to focus on Afghanistan in its battle against terrorism.

    “The Afghan government needs to do more. But we have to understand that the situation is precarious and urgent here in Afghanistan. And I believe this has to be our central focus, the central front, on our battle against terrorism.”

“Precarious and urgent” — the enemy is at the gates, according to Obama, in the “battle against terrorism.” Obama has obviously drunk the endless “war on terorism” Kool-Aid. When one starts with wrong assumptions one’ll never be successful. It’d be Bush redux. Okay, more on that in the next piece, now back to Afghanistan.
A draft report by American intelligence agencies has concluded that Afghanistan, that graveyard of empires, is in a “downward spiral” and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban’s influence there, according to American officials familiar with the document.
And the International Herald Tribune agrees:

    This has been the deadliest year for NATO forces and Afghan forces in Afghanistan since the invasion in late 2001, as Taliban insurgents have attacked persistently, in particular with ambushes and roadside bombs. The offensive has severely curtailed efforts by NATO and the government to expand their control from towns into the countryside.
    As the summer fighting dragged on, it became clear that 19,000 foreign troops deployed in the southern provinces, alongside thousands more Afghan soldiers and police officers, were in a stalemate with the insurgents, as one senior NATO commander put it.

Continue reading “Operation Enduring Failure”

‘China Hand’ on extrajudicial killings

The excellent (though sporadic) blogger China Hand has a great new post today tracking the degree to which extensive use of extra-judicial killings has been incorporated into the “standard operating procedures” of the counter-insurgency forces fielded by Gen. Petraeus in Iraq and his former counterparts– now subordinates– running the US-led war in Afghanistan.
As I wrote in this recent JWN post,

    Extra-judicial killings, also known as assassinations, are always abhorrent. They shock the conscience of anyone who believes in the rule of law. When carried out by states they represent a quite unacceptable excess of state power.

I was writing that in response to the bland, non-questioning reception by members of the US’s elite MSM corps of the spin that the recent US killing raid into Syria was somehow “okay” because it was part of a (possibly) “targeted” killing raid against a named individual.
That is an absolutely unacceptable argument.
What China Hand has done, though is review the evidence that is already widely available that the use of deliberate, extra-judicial killings has been deeply integrated by the US military into its conduct of “counter-insurgency” operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan.
He refers mainly to two easily available sources: the Wikipedia entry on Gen. Petraeus (which CH describes as “adoring”), and Bob Woodward’s latest book on the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, titled The War Within.
One thing CH does effectively is unpack the mendacious, though apparently highly “technologized”, language that “people in the know” use to talk about such operations… They do that to hide the fact that, as he states straightforwardly, in the end their policy relies simply on deploying some form of “death squads.”
One of these terms is “targeted kinetic activity.” Personally, when I hear a slimy euphemism like that, I want to vomit.
CH comments:

    I guess we’ll just have to take General Petraeus’s word for it that there was some kind of vetting and due process, that people were not improperly killed because of those death squad doppelgangers, greedy and grudge-holding informants, that non-violent opponents of the occupation weren’t targeted as a matter of COIN doctrine, and that “collateral damage” was accidental, avoided when at all possible, and not used as a tool to intimidate the local populace into turning against the insurgents.

For my part, I am not prepared to take anybody’s word that such hush-hush, quite opaque deliberations have any integrity or justifiability to them at all. At all. (And to be fair to China Hand, I think he was writing there with ironic intent.)
President-elect Obama: Please pay attention to this question of extra-judicial killings! They are exactly what the word says: extra-judicial, that is, quite inimical to any concept of the rule of law.
Yes, our country has found itself in a situation where a certain number of people are working actively to harm it. There are many ways to deal with that challenge that do not involve actions that directly undermine the concept of the rule of law.
At a purely utilitarian level, there is absolutely no way the US military can ever “kill” itself successfully out of the many problems and challenges it currently faces in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan.
But beyond that, at a moral/political level, embracing the use of extra-judicial killings (i.e. death squads) as an integral part of what our troops are doing in those distant countries is directly inimical to our own self-understanding and our own interests.
So please: Stop the death squads!

Discussing Afghanistan, UN over at Registan

I am continually amazed at the number of otherwise thoughtful and well-informed Americans who seem to have a deep blindspot when it comes to looking at the record of the UN. The most recent case in point is Joshua Foust over at Registan. I’ve been engaged in a discussion on this very point with him over there, since yesterday.

More on Afghanistan, the unwinnable war

China Hand has posted yet another great round-up of what’s been happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan recently.
He notes that just about everybody except the US’s leading politicians and Pakistani prez Asif Ali Zardari has now become convinced that the US-led military campaign against the Taleban– and, I would add, other anti-Karzai forces– in Afghanistan is unwinnable. (Zardari may or may not think it’s unwinnable. But for now, he is so deeply reliant on the financial aid he’s getting from the Pentagon that he carries on acting as though it can be won.)
China goes through a long list of people who now say publicly that the Taleban have to be negotiated with and cannot be destroyed or defeated on the battlefield. These include:

    * Afghan prez Hamid Karzai,
    * Taleban head Mullah Omar,
    * The Saudis (who recently hosted a reconciliation meeting between reps of the above two parties),
    * The British military commander in Helmand,
    * The editors of Britain’s Financial Times,
    * Britain’s outgoing ambassador to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Cowles,
    * The Danish Foreign Minister,
    * The UN Sec-Gen’s rep in Kabul, Kai Eide…

… So the only major relevant parties who still act as though a military “victory” is possible against the Taleban are… the two US presidential candidates, nearly all other members of the US political elite– and Prez Zardari of Pakistan.
What’s more, as this report from the Council on Foreign Relations’ ‘Pakistan Policy Working Group’ makes clear, a US military “success” in Afghanistan also requires that Washington use muscular means to force Pakistan to support the effort.

Continue reading “More on Afghanistan, the unwinnable war”

US military admits to larger toll in August hit

So US Central Command has now admitted that the civilian casualty toll from that controversial air-raid in western Afghanistan August 22 was indeed much higher than they’d earlier said.
The BBC tells us this:

    US Central Command said 33 civilians, not seven, had died in the village of Azizabad in Herat province.
    While voicing regret, it said US forces had followed rules of engagement.
    Officials from the UN and the Afghan government say up to 90 people – including 60 children – died in the strike on Azizabad.
    Video footage, apparently of the aftermath of the raid, showed some 40 dead bodies lined up under sheets and blankets inside a mosque.
    The majority of the dead captured on the video were children, babies and toddlers, some burned so badly they were barely recognisable.

You’ll recall the case became very high-profile inside Afghanistan after both the national government and the U.N. mission there announced their public adherence to the much higher casualty toll.
The US military stuck to its original figure of “seven” — and all alleged ‘militants!– for a long time, even after video footage of many bodies lined up in a mosque became available.
The US military claimed it had sent its own recce team back into the location after the attack to confirm its own casualty figure. Turned out that recce team included none other than well-known serial liar Oliver North.
It’s small wonder the UN’s mission head in Afghanistan is now publicly arguing that there is no way the “international community” can “win” in Afghanistan using military means. And the outgoing UK ambassador there has said the same.
Shouldn’t someone tell Barack Obama that?

Google Reader highlight #1: Registan

I thought JWN readers might want to check out some of the more interesting things I’ve been following on my Google Reader recently. So GR highlight #1 today is Registan, sub-title: “Central Asia News– All Central Asia, All The Time.”
Special kudos to their contributor Joshua Foust, who brings a wise and well-informed eye to this crucial region.
Up on Registan today (though posted yesterday) we have this brilliant take-down of a recent Council on Foreign Relations study group report on Pakistan. It’s titled “Wishing for Ponies”.
Foust writes:

    I want a pony, too. Well, I don’t—the Ironman suit would suffice. But you get what I mean. This kind of report is the essence of Yglesias’ Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics: if only we try hard enough, we can achieve perfect U.S. goals and never face any trade-offs! Let’s put these goals up side-by-side, and see how they really stack up…

(Of course, as the current economic crisis continues to play out, the CFR will become considerably more marginal to the real world of global politics and diplomacy.)
Foust’s colleague Michael Hancock has a broad round-up of reports of recent meteorological and political events in Kyrgyzstan.
And Foust penned a brief but very thought-provoking critique of this recent op-ed on Afghanistan by Nathaniel Fick and Vikram Singh. Fick and Singh are affiliated with the generally liberal-hawkish “Center for a New American Security.”
Foust’s post is titled “How COIN Generalists Fail Afghanistan.” He writes that Fick and Sin gh’s op-ed

    reveals some interesting thinking from establishment counterinsurgency theorists [that] I think helps to explain why we seem to be understanding Afghanistan so poorly.
    It’s not that the op-ed is necessarily bad or deficient in any way (though it is in many), but rather where they make leaps of imagination…

He concludes his more detailed critique with this:

    unless there was a serious word-count limitation, they don’t seem to understand the fundamental forces driving conflict in Afghanistan. It isn’t government legitimacy, and it’s not even necessarily corruption (though anti-corruption is a highly effective COIN tool): the problem, the big problem they did not mention once, is security.
    Oh sure, like all Americans writing about Afghanistan, they mentioned the 280 soldiers we’ve lost this year. They didn’t mention the (approximately) 720 policemen, or the (approximately) 680 ANA troops Afghanistan has lost (we don’t really know how many died because as best I can tell there is no official monitoring system for local counterinsurgent losses). While losing 280 soldiers is indeed tragic, many thousand civilians have died this year—and a not-insignificant number of those have been at U.S. or ISAF hands. The biggest reason more villages and villagers don’t support Karzai or the U.S. is fear, plain and simple. And Singh and Fick don’t seem to consider that an issue because, it seems, to them, and to far too many Big Thinkers in DC, it’s all about us—and not them. The “them” is the critical missing piece of the fight, and until we start to learn how we can help “them,” we won’t win.

Anyway, Registan: definitely worth putting on your feed reader if you’re interested in Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia.