Category: Afghanistan (vintage)

September 11 and the war in Afghanistan

For many Americans, including many who have seen the war in Iraq as unjustified and unwise, the war in Afghanistan has until now had a very different aura. In the US, Afghanistan has generally been thought of (sometimes in direct contrast to the war in Iraq) as “the Good War.” It has, after all, always been presented to the US public as both

    (a) directly justified as being the entirely legitimate response to Al-Qaeda’s heinous attacks against America, and also
    (b) laudable in a more general sense because it has “saved” the hard-pressed Afghan people from the desperately repressive and backward-looking social policies of the Taleban.

This year, seven years after the horrendous killings of September 11, it is a good idea to subject both these justifications for our country’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan to serious examination. I shall make my contribution by undertaking the following review of the Afghan situation:
1. How the US went to war.
Yesterday, I went to a great session at the New America Foundation where former Senator Lincoln Chafee talked about his new book Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President. Until he was defeated in the 2006 elections, Chafee was one of the last (very) few liberal Republicans in either house of Congress. The whole of his book is worth reading. It is steeped in a deep sense of regret for where our country is heading. The book’s sub-title more or less tells you what his main theses are.

Continue reading “September 11 and the war in Afghanistan”

Oliver North???

You know there’s been this long-running dispute between, on the one hand, the US military command in Afghanistan and on the other, the Afghan government and the United Nations, over the number of civilians killed in a controversial US air attack near Azizabad, Afghanistan on August 22.
According to this story in today’s London Times it turns out the US military was relying to some degree in its repeated confirmation of its original (very low) casualty estimates on the say-so of– guess who– that infamous trickster Oliver North.
Hat-tip to Siun of Firedoglake.
I completely concur with the judgment Siun expressed there: “Pardon me while I throw up.”

Continue reading “Oliver North???”

Afghanistan: Can NATO succeed?

The more I think about this, the more outrageously– and tragically– improbable this appears.
Let’s review the reasons:

    1. NATO is a military alliance. What its members have trained extensively to do and are equipped and organized to do is to fight a military enemy, including by the application of overwhelming firepower, and to win actual military wars. Afghanistan’s worsening crisis of governance is not a military problem.
    2. NATO is the military club of the “North Atlantic”– that is, West and Central European and non-Hispanic North American– powers that comprise, roughly speaking, the dominant grouping within the construct of “the West”. Afghanistan is far distant from the North Atlantic, geographically, culturally, politically. Just look at the length of the supply lines! Just look at the length of the cultural misinterpration possibilities!
    3. NATO’s Afghanistan mandate was only won from the UN as a result of a particular conjunction of circumstances in late 2001. As NATO’s failure to resolve Afghanistan’s escalating crisis of governance becomes ever more evident, the Security Council and whatever legitimacy-seeking portions of Afghanistan’s national government remain will have to look for a new instrument of de-escalation and peacebuilding in Afghanistan. NATO, meanwhile, might lie in ruins. (Remind me, anyway, what exactly is its rationale for still being existence 17 years after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact?)

This is my big-picture take on the current situation in Afghanistan, which is one of continuing tragedy for most of the country’s 32 million people. For example, on August 1, a network of NGOs in the country said that “Up to 1,000 civilians are among the 2,500 killed in armed conflict so far in 2008.” Also, “July was reportedly the worst month for Afghan civilians in the past six years, with 260 civilian casualties recorded.”
Those casualties counted there, remember, include only those that (a) were the direct result of the physical violence of armed clashes, and (b) were reported in ways that reached the national news media and/or the NGO networks. So they don’t include either those killed by direct physical violence that was not reported or, even more significantly, those who died because of the indirect results of the conflict that continues in the country, including people who:

    — died from causes that decent basic health care including access to hospitals could have prevented, but where that care and access were blocked by the continuing conflict;
    — died from diseases, especially those related to unsafe drinking water, that could easily have been prevented in a time of public security and the provision of basic public health services that were blocked by the continuing conflict;
    — died from complications of childbirth that a functioning public health system could have identified and treated;
    — etc…

In short, the situation in which many or most Afghan people are living is fraught with uncertainty, fear, and the blighting of human capabilities. Western news reports tend to focus only on “western” casualties in the country.
For example, this recent AFP report led with the news that “Bomb blasts killed five NATO soldiers in Afghanistan on Friday…” But it relegated to the second graf the news that “Five Afghan policemen were also killed in an overnight bomb attack… ” And it left till the fourth paragraph the news that four of the killed NATO soldiers were– oh, by the way– also accompanied by a civilian interpreter who was also killed in the attack…
Why did they not write the lead thus: “Five NATO soldiers, five Afghan policemen, and a civilian interpreter were killed in bomb attacks Friday”? Or better still: “Six Afghans working with the security forces and five NATO soldiers were killed in bomb attacks Friday””? Anyone who is a NATO soldier has, after all, quite voluntarily taken the oath of military service under which he or she recognizes that s/he can indeed be killed in the line of duty (while s/he also has the right, under certain circumstances, to kill others while undertaking those same duties.)
Civilians have never taken such an oath. Their deaths in combat therefore have a far graver ethical weight.
Bigger point: The western media have not been giving anything like adequate coverage to the crisis of governance that’s been escalating in Afghanistan under NATO’s “rule” there, and to the extensive human suffering this has caused.
… Last week, the US Institute of Peace hosted a presentation by Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, an adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai who since 2005 has served as vice chair of Afghanistan’s Demobilization and Reintegration Commission. I was unable to attend that, but frequent JWN commenter Bob Spencer did get there. He filed this short report of the event.
He writes:

    After one and a half hours of listening to highly motivated and deep thinking specialists, it was clear that we, in the West, have only begun to scratch the surface of identifying the “challenges” and dynamics of Afghanistan’s complex politics. On top of that, I began to wonder if the western mind might not ever adapt to, let alone comprehend, Afghanistan’s complex ways…

Ah, but isn’t the model being applied that it’s Afghanistan’s people who should be expected to “adapt to”– and indeed, completely adopt– the ways of the west, which are, after all (in the view of many westerners) what this whole thing called the “international community” is all about?
By the way, Stanekzai published a pretty interesting report on the dysfunctions of the present western effort in Afghanistan, back in June.
And if you want to listen to the MP3 audio of his most recent presentation, you can do so here.

Talking of Afghanistan

While Obama is in Kabul, I hope he gets the chance to talk to Rory Stewart, whose recent piece on Time.com “How to Save Afghanistan” has a lot of good sense in it. (Hat-tip Bob Consoli.)
Stewart is the former British SAS officer who published a very well-received book about walking across Afghanistan and who then returned to Kabul to set up a work project in the Old City. He’s on his way to head the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard.
The main point in Stewart’s essay that I applaud (and that I really hope Obama hears from him in person, while he’s in Kabul) is his argument that the solution in Afghanistan is not to deploy more US or other NATO troops there. He argues that the mission of the US/western troops who are there should be limited to counter-terrorism– leaving the Afghan government to get on with counter-insurgency and strengthening its administrative and political capabilities throughout the country.
Stewart is right to note that strengthening the Kabul government’s hold on the country (and its ability to deliver services to it) cannot be the job of westerners.
However, I think he is still arguing from within far too westocentric a perspective. He makes no mention of the possibility of any other actors than the western powers doing anything useful to help Afghanistan. Why not? After all, what the heck is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization doing in Afghanistan in the first place. Except prop up US power there, that is. But why should either the US or NATO be the prime providers of outside support to Afghanistan, and the prime deciders on the many, very tough security decisions that need to be made in that country. Afghanistan is– has anyone else noticed this?– very far indeed from both the US and the North Atlantic. It truly defies logic to suppose that the US and NATO should have any longterm special role there at all.
Maybe, too, Stewart should follow the logic of his argument that the “solution” in Afghanistan is not a western military solution a good bit further. He strongly suggests that western militaries would be better involved in Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, or Lebanon than in Afghanistan. But those would all be terrible mistakes! Under what mandate would they intervene in any of those countries? And what, pray, would US or other NATO troops actually do in Iran, Egypt, or anj of those other countires?
Bring the US and NATO troops home. Let their skills be put to good use rebuilding our own countries. Further military adventures overseas would be disastrous. The challenges in all those countries mentioned by Stewart have many, much sounder solutions than any that would involve the application of western military power.

Afghanistan’s opposition as a peasant-based insurgency, by Bob Spencer

Long-time JWN commenter Bob Spencer sent me the text of a thought-provoking small essay he has written, that takes as its starting point that the opposition movement in Afghanistan can best be considered as similar to most or all other peasant-based insurgencies.
I applaud this intentional attempt to get beyond (or quite out of) the discourse of “fighting terror” and to contextualize what’s happening in Afghanistan.
Here’s how Bob’s essay starts:

    In a peasant-based insurgency, the side that is least politically effective is the side that will escalate the violence. Also, the side that is least politically effective will most often lose the conflict.

Not wanting to buy (or in this instance, publish) any pigs-in-pokes, I asked Bob to tell us a little about himself. Here’s what he wrote:

    My background is somewhat unorthodox. I guess you can say that I have spent a lifetime writing and managing foundation and government human development grants. At the same time, I have spent most of my adult life studying about political development and insurgencies.
    If anyone asks for any details—and probably, nobody will; here’s the scoop.
    I worked in Viet Nam for four years during the war. I worked in refugee camps and village development. I was in the most intense part of the country and found myself backing into Vietnamese politics. Several of the most highly skilled Vietnamese political operators had the patience to teach me every day about Vietnamese politics. They included a prominent monk, the highest level spies, a highly admired and effective community organizer, and good civil servants. Life became pretty exciting and my life often depended upon my understanding of Vietnamese politics, so I tended to be as good a student as I could.
    I don’t know if it is good or bad, but much of my motivation came from anger and sadness at what I saw.

So, now you can go read his thoughts on Afghanistan here.
Please note that, as nearly all editors do, I put the headline onto the piece. Also note that, though I am happy to publish it because I think it pushes the discussion of what-all is happening in Afghanistan forward in helpful ways, still I don’t agree with everything Bob writes. Or rather, I think there are a couple of important questions that he fails to ask about the US-NATO project in Afghanistan.
But I don’t want to prejudice the discussion by bringing up those questions now. I invite readers to go read Bob’s piece and comment on them here.
Thanks for honoring JWN with your essay, Bob.

Al-Qaeda redux?

The NYT’s Mark Mazetti and David Rohde had an extremely important article in the June 30 edition of the paper, on the bureaucratic chaos and operational failure that have marked the Bush administration’s campaign against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and (mostly) Pakistan.
They write:

    After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a “war on terrorism” and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden’s network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.
    … The story of how Al Qaeda, whose name is Arabic for “the base,” has gained a new haven is in part a story of American accommodation to President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, whose advisers played down the terrorist threat. It is also a story of how the White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq.
    Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terrorist camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States. Officials say the new camps are smaller than the ones the group used prior to 2001. However, despite dozens of American missile strikes in Pakistan since 2002, one retired C.I.A. officer estimated that the makeshift training compounds now have as many as 2,000 local and foreign militants, up from several hundred three years ago.

Mazetti and Rohde base their story on “more than four dozen interviews in Washington and Pakistan.” It reveals how very unsuccessful that core portion of Bush’s so-called “Global War on Terror” has been. However, I don’t think they go nearly far enough in challenging the essential premise of the GWOT, namely, the idea that “terrorism” as such is something that can effectively be dealt with through a massive military campaign.
Instead, as I have argued consistently since 9/11, terrorism is a challenge that requires primarily a massive and determinedly multilnational police response. In the Afghanistan/Pakistan context– as most others– it also requires a huge, dedicated effort to address the horrendous social and economic crises in which these beleaguered populations are mired. This latter campaign is needed not only because it’s the right thing to do (which it is), but because stabilizing the lives and livelihoods of these communities will dry up the vast pool of terror condoners that they would otherwise continue to incubate.
I quite agree with the analysis of those who argue that Osama Bin Laden himself (like many of his immediate lieutenants) is not someone acting out of personal economic deprivation and the anger associated with that. However, even though Bin Laden himself would not make a credible leader for any “Movement of the Dispossessed”, he and his immediate cohort have found a way to strike a chord with many Muslims in extremely deprived and chaotic communities– primarily, those still reeling from the effects of lengthy armed conflict, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, or Lebanon. And it is in those communities that organizers and activists for the widely distributed Al-Qaeda networks are able to move around without any of their neighbors or friends turning them into the authorities.
That’s why I have long argued that dealing with the often very real social and economic grievances of the communities of potential condoners, and stabilizing the lives and prospects of the members of those communities, is the best way to supplement the police-based approach to dealing with Al Qaeda…
So Mazetti and Rohde do not, in their article, take on the whole conceptual framework of the GWOT in the way it needs to be taken on. But even working solely within the dominant paradigm of the GWOT, they show just how chaotic and unsuccessful the effort has been so far. They also demonstrate (yet again) the extent to which Bush’s misguided decision to invade Iraq in 2003 distracted attention and resources from addressing the real heart of the world terrorism challenge. JWN readers won’t need reminding that before March 2003, there was no such thing as “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” After March 2003, it became a huge presence, growing continuously for several years.
Anyway, there are many noteworthy pieces of information in this article, which is definitely worth a close reading. However, I’m on the road, and I left my annotated version of it at home. Bother!

Crunch time coming in Afghanistan?

Maybe crunch time is approaching much faster than I had expected in Afghanistan, for US military planners desperately trying to assemble forces to deal with the deteriorating situation there?
Today, the Pentagon released a pair of Congressionally mandated reports that apparently depict a “fragile” security situation. What’s more, even that Armed Forces Press Service (AFPS) report linked to there admits that the formal “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan”, which claimed some bright spots in the situation as of three months ago, may have been painting too rosy a picture compared with today…
The AFPS writer says:

    Underscoring the fragility of situation in Afghanistan and its tendency for rapid change is the fact that some of the report’s assertions about security success — based on information available several months ago and earlier — [are] no longer are as solid as once believed.
    For instance, the report highlights Khowst province in eastern Afghanistan as an example of a once-troubled region transformed by counterinsurgency operations.
    “Khowst was once considered ungovernable and one of the most dangerous provinces in Afghanistan,” the report states. “Today, tangible improvements in security, governance, reconstruction, and development are being made.”
    But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday expressed concern that attacks in NATO’s Regional Command East section of Afghanistan, which includes Khowst province, rose 40 percent from January to May.

To me, one of the most relevant aspects of today’s news– which in classic Washington fashion, the Pentagon tried to “bury” by issuing it late on a Friday– is that it probably makes much more urgent the arrival of the country’s top military planners at a “Dannatt moment”, named in honor of the former chief of the British armed forces who back in late 2006 recognized that the western alliance just does not have enough forces to sustain operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and therefore has to choose between them.
Back when Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt reached that conclusion, he opted unequivocally for focusing on Afghanistan. I assume (hope?) that the Pentagon’s top brass and suits will make the same choice once they reach Dannatt’s level of understanding about the impossibility of sustaining both theaters. Afghanistan and the lawless Afghan-Pakistan border are after all the zones in which Al-Qaeda was incubated, and in which the Qaeda-friendly Taliban have been making a big come-back in the past year. Iraq does have some violent Islamist networks that call themselves “Al Qaeda in Iraq” (who never existed there before the US invaded the country in 2003, we might note.)
But the far greater challenge of terrorist regroupment is still that in Afghanistan-Pakistan.
So when Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Joint Chiefs chair Adm. Mike Mullen reach their “Dannatt moment,” I hope they’ll make the same strategic choice that Dannatt made. What could make it easier is that, as I and others have argued for some time now, there really is a way we can plan for a US withdrawal from Iraq that is orderly, speedy, timely (and generous to Iraqis.) It’s far harder, at this point, to think of such a plan for Afghanistan, though realistically the need for that may come along some time pretty soon, too.
I see that Mullen sounded pretty desperate in remarks he made today in Garmisch, Germany, about the understaffing situation in Afghanistan.
The AFPS report linked to there says this:

    Mullen told about 200 students at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies he’s “desperate to get more capability” out of NATO. He said it’s critical that NATO lives up to its commitments to the alliance’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan…
    “The simple math is that I can’t put any more [US] forces in Afghanistan until I come down in Iraq,” he told the group. He noted that initiatives to “grow” the Army and Marine Corps will take two to three years to develop deployment-ready troops. Meanwhile, U.S. troops are “pressed very hard” from multiple deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, with too little time” at home stations between deployments. Mullen said keeping up the current operational tempo for the long term will be impossible.

In recent weeks, both Mullen and Gates have been pleading abjectly with the other NATO countries to contribute more forces to the Afghanistan mission. That AFPS report from Garmisch says,

    Mullen told students at the Marshall Center that he finds it difficult to understand why some NATO countries don’t share the deep concern the United States and other alliance members have about the situation in Afghanistan.
    “It is very clear to me that those who live in Europe see [the terrorist threat] differently from those of us in the United States,” he said. Why Europe “isn’t more excited about what’s going on there than those of us in the United States,” Mullen said, is a question to which he doesn’t know the answer.
    Afghanistan, where NATO leads the ISAF effort, is “at the heart of NATO right now,” he said. “And I believe that whether NATO is going to be relevant in the future is tied directly to a positive outcome in Afghanistan… ”

We could and probably should have a good discussion about why so many Europeans aren’t “excited” about what’s going on in Afghanistan. Maybe it’s because when the US’s gung-ho terrorist-hunting units there bomb populated areas and a lot of noncombatants die, many Europeans don’t see that as a winning strategy? Maybe because they, like me, scratch their heads trying to figure out how Afghanistan, a country in Central Asia, could in any way be thought of as lying “at the heart of” an organization associated the North Atlantic? Maybe because they are reluctant to serve in Afghanistan under the leadership of a country (the US) that is badly tainted because of its reckless decision decision to invade Iraq and its blatant disregard of many of the human rights and humanitarian-law norms that Europeans consider to be important? Well, who knows why?
So yes, the US government needs a far smarter, more multilateral (and by that I mean something much broader than NATO) and more successful strategy for Afghanistan. But in order to arrive at that, it needs to get out of Iraq.
Maybe while he’s in Europe, Adm. Mullen should go talk to Gen. Dannatt.

Iraq-Afghanistan: The crunch approaching?

George Bush’s general approach to dealing with the problems of Iraq and Afghanistan– as to the many other rapidly mounting challenges that confront Washington both globally and domestically– has been best summed up in this short animated cartoon published on April 11 by the WaPo’s extremely gifted Ann Telnaes. (Check out some of her other animations there, too.)
Bottom line: At this point, facing these omnipresent challenges, Bush is working simply to minimize the amount of damage they cause to him, and to presumed Republican nominee John McCain, in the time remaining till the November 4 election. And he is doing this, even if it quite predictably (and predictedly) results in building up much greater challenges for whoever it is that succeeds him next January.
But what if Bush’s attempt to postpone the eruption of full-blown crises until after Nov. 4– and preferably, from his perspective, until after January 20, 2009– fails, and these crises start erupting within the next six months?
This might well happen. Regarding many issues, including the domestic US economy and the Palestine question. I know that for the people directly concerned, their situations are already in extreme crisis. But I am talking here about the potential of these crises to become full-blown challenges to the Bush administration’s attempt to hold onto Washington’s power to “control” events in very distant parts of the world.
Today, it is the (functionally linked) crises the US faces in Iraq and Afghanistan that seem likely to mount most speedily to this point.
The functional link between these two crises is, of course, the force-level constraint and the trade-offs that exist between the two theaters in terms of the US military’s force planning. (One notable distinction between the US’s bid for global hegemony over the past 15 years and the maintenance by Britain, France, and other European powers of their globe-circling “empires” in earlier eras is that in the case of those European empires, the vast majority of the cannon-fodder required to police the distant colonies was pulled from the pauperized indigenous peoples of other colonies. The US, by contrast, has no power to compel citizens of other countries to fight its wars for it, and has shown little ability to persuade them to do so, either. Hence, it is the US that in both Iraq and Afghanistan has done the vast majority of the paying to raise the fighting forces, and the fighting and the dying there. Unlike when, for example, it was the British Army that got majorly caught short in Iraq in WWI– and it was Indian troops who did most of the dying there.)
Now, US force levels are stretched to the limit. The “surge” in Iraq was supposed to be temporary, but has turned out not to be. A week ago, when the Green Zone in Baghdad came under sustained mortar fire, the US and its Iraqi Security Force proxies tried to dig into, take, and control the whole of the southern third of Sadr City, in an attempt to deny the mortar-firers the proximity they needed to be able to hit the GZ. That involved a massive attempt at quadrillaging the southern end of Sadr City, an area that is home to 2.5 million human souls.
(I should note that Badger, over at Missing Links, is quite right to castigate all those US commentators on Iraqi affairs who did not sharply criticize the anti-humane quality of this US-led assault on Sadr City.)
Anyway, the US-led attempt to prevent the mortaring of the GZ was spectacularly shown to have failed yesterday and today, when a dust-storm prevented the US from flying the aircraft used to spot launchers, and the mortaring of the GZ resumed again.
It seems from that account by the WaPo’s Sholnn Freeman that the US-led forces had been trying to simply to carve a barrier right through the middle of Sadr City, in order to establish that line as a forward defensive perimeter for the GZ. That meant trying to push the new barrier right through the middle of some very densely populated districts. I can certainly imagine some of the suffering that has inflicted on all the families who live anywhere nearby. (The US military reported that 38 “gunmen” were killed in Sadr City yesterday. How about the noncombatant casualties, though? Also, why should we believe their designation that all those they counted as killed were actually involved in hostilities?)
Meanwhile, one other, extremely important effect of the US-led attempt to quadrillage Sadr City has been to firm up an emerging anti-US alliance between Iraqi MPs and political currents from a number of different currents that span Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic divides. About 50 leaders, including Ahmed Radhi, a member of the Iraqi Accord Front, and other Sunni-Arab and even Kurdish figures, joined a pro-national dialogue, and effectively pro-Sadr, protest in Sadr City yesterday.
McClatchy’s Hussein Kadhim and Raviya H. Ismail added to that report the following about Moqtada Sadr’s position:

    Sadr’s latest message, delivered during Friday prayers, called for the bloodshed between Iraqis to stop, yet asked for a united force against the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
    “We want liberation of ourselves and our lands from the occupier,” part of the message read. “To have a real government and have real sovereignty.”

I can certainly see that, after five years of the gross mismanagement of their country by the occupying force, many Iraqis– including many members of the struggling new Iraqi security forces– would find this appeal quite attractive.
(More analysis of the anti-US bloc from Badger, here. Kudos to him for his attentiveness to the politics of the story.)
Meanwhile, all has most certainly not been going well for the US-led effort in Afghanistan. Yesterday, the Taliban showed their ability to penetrate close to the heart of a very high-security event being staged by the Karzai government, with all the foreign ambassadors and other dignitaries present. Themilitary display and speeches there were designed both to mark the anniversary of the mujahideen’s victory over the Soviets 16 years ago, and to demonstrate the capabilities of the new, US-built and US-controlled Afghan security forces.
Oops.
Asia Times Online’s Syed Saleem Shahzad gives a lot of helpful background about the Taliban action. He notes that the attackers “penetrated no fewer than 18 security rings around the parade’s venue and they used their latest weaponry – small mortars that are only manufactured by a few Western countries, including Israel.” They got to within 500 meters of the event’s main stage, sending salvoes from machine guns and rocket launchers into the back of the stage.
Karzai and the dignitaries escaped unharmed, but three Afghan Security Force people and three Taliban were killed in the ensuing shootout.
It sounds eerily like the attack Egyptian Islamists mounted in 1981, when they killed President Sadat while he was reviewing troops at a big, high-profile public event staged to commemorate the Egyptian army’s successful crossing of the Suez Canal eight years earlier. In that one, the attackers succeeded in killing Sadat. In both cases, the attackers had evidently gathered useful intelligence cooperation from people within the national armed forces involved.
Since yesterday’s attack in Kabul, NATO and US spinmeisters have been working overtime to try to put a brave face on what happened. (E.g. here.) But the event certainly points to the fragile nature of the US-led order in Afghanistan. Shahzad’s piece has lots more details and what looks like a good and fair analysis. His bottom line: NATO has gotten smarter and somewhat more effective, but the Taliban have also adapted and learned… “Indeed,” he warns, “the Taliban have lined up a stream of attackers to target Kabul to rattle the Afghan government and NATO forces in coming days and weeks.”
Over recent weeks, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pleaded and pleaded with the NATO allies to commit more combat troops to Afghanistan. With little success. So how can the dangerous military situations that the US and its small number of combat-willing allies now face in both Iraq and Afghanistan be dealt with without disaster? Hard to say. But calling for the UN to convene and lead a much broader–that is, no longer US-dominated– political stabilization effort for both countries seems to be the only way to avoid a disaster in one or both theaters that might well blow up– even on George W. Bush’s watch.

    Update Monday evening: A well-researched piece of reporting about Afghanistan in Tuesday’s CSM, by Anand Gopal. He has material from an interview with a strongly pro-Taliban student at Kabul University, and a lot of other fascinating material.

Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan: Bushism in disarray

The past few weeks have not been good ones for the Bush administration’s project of establishing firm, pro-western beach-heads in a broad swathe of western Asia from Gaza to Afghanistan. Afghanistan, which since late 2001 has been ruled by the US-installed and heavily US-dependent Hamid Karzai, is probably the country where the situation seems most dire– for both the pro-Washington political order and the Afghan citizens themselves.
Afghanistan is, by some hard-to-fathom quirk of fate (okay, make that Bushist political necessity), a central part of the mission of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, despite its great distance from the Atlantic ocean. The BBC’s Caroline Wyatt was probably representing the views of many NATO leaders when she wrote yesterday,

    Nato’s members know they cannot afford to fail now. All sides are aware that stabilising Afghanistan is the mission Nato has staked its reputation on.
    That means that the alliance will have to pull together rapidly, for the sake of its own credibility as well as for the future of Afghanistan…

One question: given that Afghanistan is so important to NATO, and given that the Bush administration has pushed so hard with its plan to deploy an ABM system right next to the Russian border in Poland, why would Russia– or, come to that, China– feel any urgent desire to help NATO pull its chestnuts out of the Afghan fire as that fire burns on?
(Russia and China are both a lot closer to Afghanistan than the USA or any other NATO country. They have their own strong interests in not seeing the return of the Taleban order there. But short of that, I expect they are both quite happy to see NATO’s troops getting ground down there– and in Iraq, as well.)
And talking of Iraq… all that cock-a-hoop talk we heard from the Bushites a month or two ago, about how the surge was “working” and life in Iraq has been slowly returning to normal, has been shown to be a flash-in-the-pan. The US’s own casualty rates rose again in January; and yesterday Iraqi suicide bombers performed two more truly gruesome acts against crowded civilian markets.
And in Gaza, the US-Israeli attempt to besiege Gaza’s entire 1.5 million-strong population back into the Stone Age received a notable blow when the Gazans and their Hamas leaders simply walked en masse back to some form of a new, life-saving economic connection with Egypt.
Today, it is ten days since that bust-out occurred. On most of those days, Egyptian officials have sworn that they were “just about” to re-close the border– but guess what, it hasn’t happened yet. Meanwhile, US puppet Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has steadfastly refused to respond to the invitations issued by both Egypt and Hamas that he join a tripartite discussion on how to restore order at the Gaza-Egypt border. Abbas has lost considerable political popularity by maintaining a stance that looks suspiciously like one that seeks to uphold Israel’s ability to strangle Gaza’s economy whenever it pleases.
Hamas’s leaders actually seem to be taking some interesting leaves out of the Israeli playbook. Firstly, they want to proceed with their social reconstruction project in Gaza unilaterally, mirroring the unilateralism (i.e., no negotiations!) policy steadfastly pursued toward Gaza by Sharon and Olmert. Secondly, Hamas is intent on creating “facts on the ground” along the Gaza-Egypt border, to which they hope the diplomats can subsequently find a solution. Hey, creating “facts on the ground” always– until recently– worked well for Israel! So why not for the Palestinians too?
As of today, the Egyptians are promising they’ll get the border re-sealed on Sunday. We’ll see about that. But even if it is re-sealed for some period of time, the Egyptians, Israelis, and everyone else in the region now understands that Hamas could bust across that border into Egypt any time it feels it needs to in the future. So (a) Israel’s plans to maintain a complete siege have lost much of their relevance, and (b) the incentive for the Egyptians to be able to restore some semblance of order and regulation to the border zone will continue to be huge; and for that, clearly, they need to work with Hamas.
Incidentally, this whole Gaza border issue now also puts the EU on the spot. Back in 2005 the EU rashly agreed to act as Israel’s puppet in policing the one single, people-only crossing point between Gaza and Egypt, at Rafah. Basically, the scheme was that EU monitors– who lived in Israel— would sit in the Rafah crossing-point and check the documents of those small numbers of Gaza Palestinians who were allowed by Israel to cross in or out… and they had to transmit all the details of those travelers for prior approval to Israeli officials sitting a mile or two away, inside Israel. And whenever the Israelis wanted to close Rafah, all they needed to do was prevent the EU monitors from traveling to it. Which they have done, almost continuously over the past months.
Now, the Hamas people say (a) they want to have free passage for goods as well as people across the Gaza -Egypt border, and (b) they might agree to have European monitors there– but not if those monitors are beholden in any way to Israel.
How will the EU respond to these demands? Will it continue to kowtow to Washington and Israel? In which case, the Egyptians and Palestinians may well just go ahead and open their own borders. What is the EU’s standing under international law to have any role there, anyway?
A very bizarre arrangement. (Like NATO being in Afghanistan, you might say. More than a whiff of old-style colonialism?)
Anyway, I feel fairly hopeful that the Palestinians and Egyptians can sort out some workable regime for their mutual border. Both nations have a strong interest in the situation not being chaotic. There remains, of course, the not-small challenge of getting Abu Mazen to talk to the Hamas people. (Oh my! Maybe he would risk losing all the hefty amounts of money he and his followers have been getting from Washington and its allies! How could he deal with that blow!) But he’d probably better do it sooner rather than later, if he wants to retain any credibility as a national leader… Um, it’s not as he has done if anything else recently that has brought his people any tangible benefits?
Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan, and what it portends for this strange political animal called “NATO”, has attained new importance on the global scene.
NATO was founded back in the 1940s as the military alliance of the anti-Soviet powers of Western Europe and North America. You might think that after the collapse of not just the Warsaw Pact but also of the Soviet Union itself in the early 1990s, the NATO generals could all have folded up their general’s batons and their flags, and their strategic-planning Power Point presentations and gone home…
You’d be wrong.
NATO was pretty rapidly reborn at that point as, among other things, the main way the US, through its military, worked to hang onto a meaningful role in Europe. That, at a time when the eastward-moving growth of the European Union threatened to make Europe into something that was larger, stronger, non-American, and more self-sufficient. There were also some attempts to rebrand NATO as an alliance of the “democracies”, and in some way an agent of the democratic ideal. It always struck me as very muddle-headed, however– whether in Iraq or anywhere else– to imagine that the projection and use of military power had anything at all to do with being democratic. A commitment to democracy surely requires, above all, a commitment to working hard to resolve one’s political differences, however sharp, through nonviolent means? So the idea that any military alliance could be an agent of democracy, seems distinctly Orwellian.
But now– and this is what the BBC’s Caroline Wyatt was referring to– the over-stretching of military capabilities (and the casualties) that several NATO nations have been experiencing in Afghanistan has sparked off a battle royal among some of the alliance’s leading members. With spring approaching and the Taleban reportedly better organized than ever, Germany’s Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung on Friday brusquely rejected a written plea from US Secdef Robert Gates that Germany send troops to the combat zones in southern Afghanistan. (A strange old world, eh, when an American leader is begging Germany to deploy troops into combat zones outside its own borders?)
NATO members France, Turkey, and Italy have also refused to send their troops to the Afghan combat zones, keeping them instead in provinces less plagued by the Taleban’s recent “surge.” Canada’s government, which has had (and lost) quite a lot of troops in the combat zone, has come under huge domestic pressure and announced it will pull them out in, I believe September.
Britain has had troops in the combat zone all along. But now, a plan to deploy 1,800 Scottish troops there has stirred some pushback from the increasingly independent-minded Scots. And in London, veteran political commentator Simon Jenkins has an anguished piece in the February 3 Sunday Times under the headline Fall back, men, Afghanistan is a nasty war we can never win.
Jenkins writes,

    The American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, flies to Britain this week to meet a crisis entirely of London and Washington’s creation. They have no strategy for the continuing occupation of Afghanistan. They are hanging on for dear life and praying for something to turn up. Britain is repeating the experience of Gordon in Khartoum, of the Dardanelles, Singapore and Crete, of politicians who no longer read history expecting others to die for their dreams of glory.
    Every independent report on the Nato-led operation in Afghanistan cries the same message: watch out, disaster beckons. Last week America’s Afghanistan Study Group, led by generals and diplomats of impeccable credentials, reported on “a weakening international resolve and a growing lack of confidence”. An Atlantic Council report was more curt: “Make no mistake, Nato is not winning in Afghanistan.” The country was in imminent danger of becoming a failed state…
    Nato’s much-vaunted 2006 strategy has not worked…
    Kabul is like Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war.     It swarms with refugees and corruption while an upper crust of well-heeled contractors, consultants and NGO groupies careers from party to party in bullet-proof Land Cruisers. Spin doctors fighting a daily battle with the truth have resorted to enemy kill-rates to imply victory, General Westmoreland’s ploy in Vietnam.
    This is a far cry from Britain’s 2001 pledges of opium eradication, gender-awareness and civic-governance classes. After 87 deaths and two years of operations in Helmand, the British Army cannot even secure one dam. Aid successes such as a few new schools and roads in the north look ever more tenuous as the country detaches itself from Kabul and tribal elders struggle to make terms with Taliban commanders…

All of Jenkins’ piece is worth reading. It stands in stark contrast to this nonsense from the WaPo’s resident Bush-apologist, Jim Hoagland, whose main “argument” consists of whining that the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan are all Hamid Karzai’s and Pervez Musharraf’s fault.
I have argued for a long time now that invading Iraq was definitely “a bridge too far” for the projection of US military power into west-central Asia. (That is a purely “realist” argument. There were also, of course, weighty moral arguments against the venture, from the get-go.)
But I think what we can see now, as we survey the scene from Gaza, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, is that the major projects of the US-led “west” in the region are all in disarray. Partly, this is because of the arrogance with which the Bush administration pursued all its projects in the region (and partly because of the craven toadying to US power on behalf of too many other members of the “west”.) Partly it is because the Bushites always rejected using the UN’s legitimacy whenever they could, preferring to exercise their own “leadership”, as unfettered as possible, over their own self-assembled “coalition of the willing.” But in good part it has also been because of the west’s excessive reliance on the instruments of brute power, rather than consultation and diplomacy. From this point of view, Israel’s imposition of the crushing, anti-humane siege on all the population of Gaza was just as violent as the US’s use of massive air-launched missiles and bombs in Iraq or Afghanistan. (Israel has, of course, also used a lot of heavy ordnance against Gaza, as well as its attempts at siege.)
… So the Bush administration’s military planners are doubtless working late these days, trying to figure out what to do about Afghanistan, what to do about Iraq. Should they follow “the Dannatt rule” and work rapidly to redeploy forces from Iraq to Afghanistan?
Or the other way around?
Right now, they have no good choices. The Bushist conceit– that the US could maintain its “Uberpower” role in the world through the use of its own military power with the help only of those other powers ready to be be swirled along in its wake, and under Washington’s unquestioned leadership– is being revealed for what it has always been: imperial hubris. When will the non-US powers in the world step in and propose a better way forward? When will the US citizenry itself stand up and scream, “Enough! We need a better way!”
I have not been encouraged, frankly, by the calls that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have made in the past for “an increase in the overall size of the US military”, as providing any kind of an answer to the problems Washington has faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. (I am even less encouraged by the stress the Republican candidates have put on even more militaristic paths forwards.) But at least Barack Obama is saying the US President should talk to– and listen to– its opponents. He has put a lot more emphasis on diplomacy than Hillary; and he certainly doesn’t project the idea– as she does– that he feels he has “something to prove” in being commander-in-chief of the US’s 1.4 million-strong armed forces. He also stressed in Thursday’s debate that he sees the need to provide a clear contrast to the militaristic kinds of policies that the presumed GOP candidate, John McCain, has been advocating.
So Barack Obama may not– okay, he will not– solve all the problems in the US’s relationship with the rest of the world. But he sure looks a lot better than any of the rest of them.
And whoever is president on January 20, 2009, is going to be facing some truly massive challenges.

US military finally has “Dannatt moment” on Iraq/Afghanistan?

The Bush administration finally seems to be waking up to the need to (1) find a more effective policy in Afghanistan, and (2) if necessary, recalibrate its commitments in Iraq in an attempt to salvage/stabilize the situation in Afghanistan. (Read further down this post to learn why I judge that this latter task can’t actually be accomplished.)
In an important story in today’s WaPo, M. Abramowitz and P. Baker indicate very clearly that in Washington the pressure for an Iraq/Afghanistan recalibration is coming primarily from within the US military. This makes the decisionmaking process in Washington DC look strikingly like that in London in fall 2006, when British Army Chief of Staff Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt spoke out forcefully in public in favor of a swift shifting of British troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.
(Except that Dannatt seemed to have more guts and self-confidence in speaking out openly than anyone in the US military leadership currently seems to have.)
Britain handed over control of security in Basra province to the Iraqi “government” yesterday, retaining only a small British force at Basra airport. Read this commentary from Patrick Cockburn on why Britain’s five-year-long mission in Basra could never have succeeded, and on the damage it inflicted on the people of the province– and on Britain’s own military reputation.
Once you’ve read that, expand the concept of “Basra” to the level of “the whole of Iraq” and you can see that the US’s campaign in Iraq could similarly never have succeeded— and also that the damage it has inflicted on the people of Iraq and on the US’s military reputation (and its raw capabilities) have all been correspondingly much larger in scale than what happened to the Brits in Basra.
Back in October 2006, I was hopeful that the “Dannatt effect” had already, back then, started to spread to the US generals. Maybe it did, somewhat, in terms of their own internal analysis of the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the corresponding need to shift emphasis from the former theater to the latter. But in terms of infusing the US Joint Chief of Staff with the courage needed to stand up for their professional standards and the confidence they had in their analytical/strategic judgments? No. Sadly, no serving US military leaders has shown anything like the forthright courage that Dannatt displayed last year.
In Baker and Abramowitz’s piece, for example, no serving military officer is quoted by name as saying anything that indicates a need to draw resources and attention away from Iraq to Afghanistan. The only relevant reference to statements coming from a named, serving officer is this one:

    U.S. Army Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, is asking for an additional three battalions of troops from NATO countries — the equivalent of another brigade combat team — but colleagues believe that would not be enough…

“Colleagues”, huh? Un-named, un-identified.
Well, be that as it may, there is obviously a lot that needs to be said about the realization that is now, finally, starting to dawn within the Bush administration that invading Iraq may well all along have been, at a strategic level, a very damaging “bridge too far”— even for the world’s (now rapidly declining) Uberpower.
We need to look carefully at these key aspects of this issue:

    1. Can increased troop levels, on their own, bring about the US-led stabilization in Afghanistan that most US commentators now seem to be urging? And if this is not enough on its own, what else is needed there? (Also, as a further corollary, we should examine the validity of the calls that several US presidential candidates, from both parties, have been making for increasing the size of the US military as a solution for all our ills.)
    2. The validity of the judgment-call so many people seem to be making that the US-led effort in Afghanistan should take priority over the US-led effort in Afghanistan. What, actually, are the geostrategic issues at stake in each theater? Can the US hope to “win” in Afghanistan by a continuation of its current “Coalition of the Willing” approach there?
    3. If the US does draw down its force level in Iraq significantly faster than Bush has so far been planning, what are the prospects for the strategic balance of the Persian Gulf region?

Make no mistake, these are extremely important issues. The way they get resolved will determine many key aspects of the global political/strategic balance for the next 50-70 years.
On the first question, this post that Barnett Rubin had over at the Informed Comment Global Affairs blog over the weekend contains some useful background information.
He notes the recent calls that some people have made for a new, and possibly non-US “high-level coordinator” to be appointed for Afghanistan. (Is Paddy Ashdown, my sister’s former MP from in Somerset who was thenthe “high level coordinator” for Bosnia, running activelyfor this job?) But then, Rubin comments:

    calling someone a “high level coordinator” does not enable him to produce high-level coordination. The position is reported to include being appointed both UN SRSG [Special representative of the Secretary-General] and the NATO Senior Civilian Representative and perhaps eventually EU Special Representative as well. But the UN SRSG has no budgetary authority over the UN agencies, let alone the bilateral donors (led by the U.S.) that provide aid through their own parallel (and very wasteful) channels. The NATO SCR has authority over neither military activities nor the civilian assistance provided by the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. The EUSR has no authority over the aid provided by the European Commission. Unless the “coordinator” presides over a pooled international budget for Afghanistan, including security sector reform, development aid, and counter-narcotics, he will just become another agency that needs to be coordinated. Inevitably, he will be tempted to spend his time hectoring the Afghan government rather than coordinating the international actors.

This is wise analysis, as far as it goes. However, Rubin would have done better to have spelled out more emphatically than he did that the “security” (or insecurity) presence inside post-2001 Afghanistan is specifically not a UN presence. Instead, it is yet another example of that strange– and intentionally UN-sidelining– phenomenon in global affairs called the US-led “Coalition of the Willing” (COTW.) Specifically, in Afghanistan there is both the US-led “ISAF force”, to which many NATO members and also deputy sheriff Australia all contribute, and a direct US “Special Forces” presence tasked with huntin’, shootin’, and killin’ terrorists, both real and imagined.
(In the comments section on Rubin’s post, Don Bacon writes pithily: “Multilateral armed Euro-centric colonialism. Once they work the bugs out it’ll be coming to a theater near you… “)
In contrast to Bacon, far too many western commentators still think and write about Afghanistan and related matters in a totally west-centric and self-referential way.
Just remember, dear readers, where Afghanistan lies on the map. It has a short direct border with China, and a long border with the former Soviet Union– that is nowadays occupied by a clutch of “Stans” that act as, essentially either buffer-states or zones of contention and competition between the US-led COTW forces in Afghanistan and the Russian Republic itself.
Afghanistan is many thousands of miles from the US and Australia, and also pretty darn far from Europe.
The thinking in Washington and Brussels currently seems to be trending toward the idea that the COTW needs to cut its losses so that it can then go on and “win” in Afghanistan. I certainly support the idea that the COTW needs to withdraw completely, and speedily from Iraq– though for very different reasons.
However, I also judge that the idea that the COTW can “win” in Afghanistan is completely chimeric– for a number of reasons, including these:

    1. Afghanistan is huge, hard to control, and far distant from the COTW’s homelands or supply bases; also, the COTW is deeply dependent on Pakistan to be able to sustain its presence in Afghanistan, and Pakistan itself is in an extremely problematic state.
    2. The COTW has certainly not yet shown that it has the leadership skills– including the internal-coordination skills, the “vision”, or the raw counter-insurgency skills– that would be needed to “win” in Afghanistan.
    3. It is anyway very hard to define what it would mean to “win” there. Stabilization? Democratization? Eradication of the Taliban? Their successful inclusion in the governing coalition? Other?
    4. Russia and China are rising powers that both have strong interests in the Afghanistan region and veto power on the Security Council. What is their incentive to see a US-led COTW “win” in Afghanistan? Would they not, almost certainly, prefer to be “cut in” on a deal to stabilize Afghanistan and to do so through a pan-UN initiative rather than a Washington-dominated COTW? And so long as they (and the UN) are marginalized from any effective role in decisionmaking regarding Afghanistan, why would they not prefer to see NATO pull itself part there, and US power-projection capabilities similarly being degraded there?

In sum, therefore, I think it virtually impossible that any set-up like the current COTW can “win” in Afghanistan– even if it has many thousands more troops, even if (miraculously) Washington and the European capitals could all come to agreement, even if they came up with a truly compelling vision of how to “win” and a sound plan for achieving that victory.
Bottom line: even if the COTW took all its forces from Iraq and sent them to Afghanistan, even if the US public and economy were able to raise an additional 100,000 troops to send there or NATO countries were somehow able to come up with that number of new troops– the COTW still can’t on its own “win”in Afghanistan.
We might remember, too, that for most of the 19th century, Afghanistan was the key locus of the contest between Russian, Chinese, and British (in India) power called the “Great Game.” In the 1980s, it was the key locus in the global Cold War. It will most likely play a similarly crucial role in the global politics of the 21st century. It’s time that the US punditocracy stopped thinking in such an unrealistic (and provincially minded) way about the place.
Time, too, that the US political elites as a whole stopped living with the dangerous delusion that projection of military power to distant places is an effective way to secure our people’s true national interests…
Okay, on reviewing this, I see I still haven’t even started to deal with a number of the points raised in the above survey. (Including but not limited to the question of what happens in the Gulf region after a US withdrawal from Iraq.)
Basically, the analysis I’m starting to come to is that, just as there are now increasing numbers of people talking about the need, at the level of the Gulf and the greater Middle East, to explore the terms of a possible US-Iran “grand bargain” that would address and resolve all the many remaining issues of contention/concern between them, so too is there a need at the broader level for an entirely new US-world “grand bargain” that would address the many thorny security/political problems outstanding between “the west and the rest” concerning the Gulf, Afghanistan, and many other issues.
This is, as it happens, one of the big themes that I address in my upcoming book, on US foreign policy after Bush. But maybe the acuity of the situations in both Iraq and Afghanistan means we need to do a lot more rigorous thinking about this issue right now.