Afghanistan: US big media go AWOL

The news pages of the US MSM have gone completely AWOL on coverage of the rapidly unravelling strategic situation in Afghanistan. (A situation whose strategic importance I started to discuss here, on Friday.)
Today’s NYT magazine did carry an excellent piece by Elizabeth Rubin about the resurgence of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. It contained a lot of good material that she had gathered during a reporting trip back in summer, and definitely has a lot of helpful detail about the ambiguous (at best) policy toward the Taliban pursued by Pakistan’s infamous ISI intel service. So yes, it does provide some really useful background to the “news” events that have been occurring in Afghanistan over the past week…
But where is the coverage in the big US media of these momentous news events?
Almost nowhere, it seems… Most likely, because there are very few US service people left in Afghanistan any more. They have all been sucked up into the big “flood the zone” deployment in Iraq. And meanwhile, the Canadians, Brits, and other non-US members of NATO have been left holding the bag in Afghanistan.
Which probably also explains why the MSM in those countries has been covering the Afghan story much more than the US MSM.
Following up on the outspoken comments made by Chief of the British Defense Staff Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt ten days ago, his predecessor Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge reportedly told a meeting of European experts last Tuesday that the British forces risk defeat in Afghanistan.
Here is how Mark Townsend and Peter Beaumont described Inge’s remarks in a piece in today’s Observer:

    ‘I don’t believe we have a clear strategy in either Afghanistan or Iraq. I sense we’ve lost the ability to think strategically. Deep down inside me, I worry that the British army could risk operational failure if we’re not careful in Afghanistan. We need to recognise the test that I think they could face there,’ he told the debate held by Open Europe, an independent think tank campaigning for EU reform.
    Inge added that Whitehall had surrendered its ability to think strategically and that despite the immense pressures on the army, defence received neither the research nor funding it required.
    ‘I sense that Whitehall has lost the knack of putting together inter-departmental thinking about strategy. It talks about how we’re going to do in Afghanistan, it doesn’t really talk about strategy.’

Well, if Whitehall has stopped thinking strategically about how to plan and balance the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, you can be almost certain that Washington DC hasn’t been doing any better at the task.
What I still don’t understand, though, is why people in the big US media are so asleep on this story?

Jim Baker’s dance of the seven veils

There’s been some public buzz generated recently by this “Iraq Study Group”, convened by the U.S. Institute of Peace and co-chaired by Bush I’s longtime consigliere and fixer James Baker and veteran Democratic wiseman Lee Hamilton.
Steve Weisman has a pretty good article on the ISG in today’s NYT. The key quote in the deadwood version I just read has for some reason been omitted from the web version. It is this:

    The one hallmark of Mr. Baker’s efforts, associates said, is that he would not undertake a project destined to sit on a shelf and be ignored. His modus operandi is to use the Iraq Study Group not so much to “study” the problem as to work out a solution behind the scenes that is acceptable to a broad spectrum of people, most of all the president.

My own best source in the ISG’s entourage agrees with this characterization of its role.
From this point of view, Hamilton’s function as co-chair is more or less– for now– one of window dressing. But of course if the Dems win control of one or both houses of Congress come November 7 then winning bipartisan support for “the Baker plan” will become much, much more important. So any negotiations that go on among the ISG’s members over the content of its final report will have to wait till after the post-election balance of political power is known; and thus, delaying its report till December or January, which has all along been the plan, makes a lot of US-political sense. (Regardless of whether this will prolong or exacerbate the agony of the Iraqis. But colonial/imperial self-referentialism was ever thus…)
Meanwhile, the group’s members are not really “studying” anything at all, but mainly spinning their wheels… But still, even while it’s not doing much of anything right now, the ISG still has– from the President point of view– an important role to play: This is is simply to be there, in a Chance Gardener-ish kind of way, so that when asked searching questions about the unraveling debacle in Iraq, the President can say “I have Mr. Baker and others of the nation’s finest minds working on this problem.”
Meanwhile, though, Baker is also– as it happens– flacking his latest book, “amusingly” titled Work Hard, Study Hard, and Keep out of Politics! No shrinking violet he. He was on the Jon Stewart show the other night– and I have to say he turned in an excellent performance to that tough, Generation Y-ish new York audience. So as he goes around promoting his book he’s been getting asked lots of questions about the ISG, and he’s been throwing out just enough hints to make it seem as though the group’s eventual report might be recommending some “bold” changes.
As Weisman writes:

    Mr. Baker has declared that neither Mr. Bush’s “stay the course” message nor what the White House calls the “cut and run” approach of critics offers a way out.
    “There are other options other than just those two,” Mr. Baker said recently on National Public Radio while promoting his new book… His group’s proposals, Mr. Baker added, will probably not please the administration or its foes.

What a consummate Washington player the guy is.
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By the way, over at the Guardian I see that Julian Borger has also been writing about the ISG (hat-tip to Frank.) Borger also lays out what he describes as “eight options [for Iraq] that Washngton and London are discussing.” My own quick first reaction there is that not all of the options are mutually incompatible. Indeed, No.5 “Iraqi Strongman” (a possible plan to replace PM Maliki with a strongman like former thug Ayad Allawi) actually has no other substantive content of its own and requires one of the other “options” to give it substance. Interesting that that proposal should have been lifted onto the list at all though, really. Part of the Bushites’ on-again-off-again psywar against Maliki, I assume?
But more fundamentally than that, Borger makes no mention of what I see as an absolutely essential antecedent discussion between the two “allies”– the one on the broader strategic issue of how to manage the intense strategic challenges now arising within both Afghanistan and Iraq… Such as I attempted a first assay of here, yesterday.

Iraq: school attendance plummets

This, from Save the Children via IRIN:

    Thousands of students have been forced to stay at home due to escalating violence across the country. Attendance rates for the new school year, which started on 20 September, are a record low, according to the Ministry of Education.
    Recently released statistics from the Ministry indicate that only 30 percent of Iraq’s 3.5 million students are currently attending classes. This compares to approximately 75 percent of students attending classes the previous year, according to UK-based NGO Save the Children.
    “Last year I had nearly 80 students in my class. Today, there are less than 25. Families are keeping their children safe at home, waiting to see how violence will spread, particularly after many schools were targeted countrywide,” said Hiba Addel Lattef, a teacher and coordinator at Mansour Primary School in the capital, Baghdad.
    “Education [levels are] deteriorating as a result of violence,” Lattef added.
    …According to Faleh Hassan al-Quraishy, an official in the Ministry of Education, threats from insurgents have forced the government to close around 420 of the country’s 16,500 public schools. He added that 310 teachers had been killed and 160 injured over the past year….

Have you checked the ReliefWeb Iraq link on the JWN sidebar recently? This item here is just one of many very sobering reports there.

White House nixing Iraqi partition

The pressure has been growing on Pres. Bush to “do something” to reassure Americans– and in particular, the many millions of Republican voters who are currently disaffected, dubious, and distinctly unmotivated to vote GOP on November 7– that he “has a plan” to deal with the still-unraveling debacle in Iraq.
The Prez looks like a deer caught between two headlights: there’s the side of him that wants to repeat the well-worn mantra of “Stay the course” and the side of him that now wants to say “Okay, folks, I’m on top of this; I know how to be flexible and figure out new tactics to deal with evolving situations…”
You can practically see the two memes battling within him. The President “at war” (with himself.) Not a reassuring sight.
Today he did three things. As Reuters tells us here, he,

    said on Friday he will resist election-year pressure for a major shift in strategy in Iraq, despite growing doubts among Americans and anxiety over the war among Republican lawmakers.
    “Our goal in Iraq is clear and it’s unchanging,” Bush told Republican loyalists, denouncing Democrats who want a course correction as supporting a “doubt and defeat” approach.

He met (for a full half hour!) with Centcom head Gen. John Abizaid, the man responsible for US military operations in the portion of the world that includes both Iraq and Afghahistan. A follow-up meeting is planned for tomorrow, at which,

    Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and top White House officials will meet U.S. military officials in Iraq for a long-scheduled videoconference. Abizaid will be a key presenter at that meeting, [White House spokeswoman Dana] Perino said..

Note the stress that Ms. Perino felt she needed to place on the fact that this is a “long-scheduled” meeting. What, you think a “crisis-response” meeting might actually be more appropriate at the end of a week that has been this much disastrous for the US military in Baghdad? No, no! It’ll just be “business as usual” there in the Bush White House…
(I am not reassured. And I doubt if many Republican congressional candidates are either… )
Okay, that’s two things the Prez did today in response to the Iraq crisis. The third was to have press spokeman Tony Snow (aka “the President’s attempt at having a brain”) go out and try to explain the President’s Iraq policy to the public. Actually, everyone ought to go and read that White House spinscript there. Especially portions like this sophomoric piece of strategy-babble:

    The President understands the difficulty in a time of war. And he also understands that what you do is you adjust tactically. I was talking today with General Caldwell, and the way he describes it, the military term of art is you “work the plan.” And if things are not achieving the objectives as you wish, you adjust and you work the plan. And he says they’re continuing to work the plan in Baghdad and elsewhere. Those are the kinds of tactical adjustments…

But the most interesting part of the transcript is what comes right after that:

    What the President has made pretty clear is that there are a handful of things that he has ruled out. He is eager to hear about other ideas; but leaving is not going to work, and partition is simply off the table.

In-ter-est-ing… Now I can see why in the run-up to an election Bush would want to slam the idea of “leaving” Iraq. Especially after he’s just criticized the Democrats for being the party of “cut and run”– or “doubt and defeat”, or even worse, as Snow put it there, the party of “walk and talk”, that is, a party that not only leaves Iraq but wants to talk to the Iranians while doing so (!) (Not that many Dems are, actually, advocating that right now. It’s mainly Republican consigliere James Baker who has been raising that as an idea so far. And honestly, good for him.)
But why is Bush/Snow so eager to slam the idea of partition?
I can see no possible party-political benefit in being as definitive about this as Snow (and the president) have been… So maybe they are really serious about it?
More from Snow’s press conference on this:

    Q On the partition question, you said yesterday it was a non-starter; today you said the President doesn’t want to think about it. You have prominent Republicans like Senator Hutchison and Senator Santorum saying that it should be looked at. Why does the administration —
    MR. SNOW: It has been looked at. It has been looked at.
    Q Why is it not — why is it a non-starter?
    MR. SNOW: It’s a non-starter because you don’t want to recreate the Balkans. What you have is — within Iraq there is a sense of national identity, and it was expressed at considerable risk by 12 million Iraqis last year. They made it clear that they consider themselves part of a nation. And the idea of breaking them into pieces raises the prospect in the south that you’re going to have pressure from Iran on the largely Shia south; you’re going to have difficulties in the north with the Kurds, with the Turks and the Syrians, who are worried about a greater Kurdistan; and then if you have in the middle a Sunni population that has been cut out of the prosperity by oil to the north and south, you have a recipe for a tinderbox…

I do think he’s trying to get a serious message out there– in particular, to the Iraqi Kurds, who have been working very hard, since 1991, not only to partition Iraq but also to secure Washington’s support for that policy. And the Kurds have plenty of (guilt-ridden) allies within the US political system for that.
So why does Bush seem to be so adamantly opposed to partition at this point?
I think it may be part of the slow process by which he is– oh so gradually!– coming to terms with reality in Iraq.
Look at it this way. Partition of nations has been either part of US policy or a quite acceptable fall-back option in a number of conflicts the US has gotten involved in since WW2. From SKorea to Germany to Vietnam, the US has been quite happy to go along with the partitioning of nations– even in cases where the “will of the people” was quite clearly in favor of national unity.
But in all those earlier cases, the “pro-US” fragment of the nation that was thus partitioned was directly connected to the US’s existing global military supply lines. A landlocked Kurdistan, by contrast, would be more like a landlocked West Berlin during the various Berlin crises from 1948 on than it would be like, say, West Germany or South Korea. A partitioned, quasi-“independent” Kurdistan would have no natural allies among its neighbors, and indeed, mught have to be “sustained” by the US in the midst of a completely engulfing sea of anti-Kurd hostility. Resupplying it would be a logistical challenge that would dwarf the Berlin Airlift… And for what? At least West Berlin played an important role in the US’s big struggle of that era, against the Soviet Union. But what strategic value would a US-dependent Kurdistan have?
If Kurdistan was in southern Iraq, next to the Gulf and next to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Bush and Snow might be speaking very differently about the prospect of partition in Iraq… (But that spot is already taken– by a social/political grouping that is very, very different from the Kurds.)
So I think what we’re seeing now, as the Bushites start to face up to the idea of some truly momentous decisions having to be made regarding Iraq, is the White House telling the Kurds as plainly as it can that yes, once again, as in 1975 and as in 1991, Washington is going to be letting them down. (In 1975, it was Kissinger who did it, too.)
The Iraqi Kurdish leaders are not particularly impressive as exemplars of democratic practice (to say the least!) But they are a wily bunch of guys who’ve survived in their part of the world for many decades now. At this point, they may well revert to some of their earlier alliances there– with Syria, with Iran– or who knows, even perhaps with some of the ethnic-Arab forces in Iraq.
As I said, interesting days.

Choice time: Iraq or Afghanistan?

This was basically the message that Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt was posing when he spoke to The Daily Mail last week; and he was answering it in favor of Afghanistan, arguing basically that the western nations “should get ourselves out [of Iraq] sometime soon.”
His argumentation was based mainly on operational considerations: Namely the fact that, as he assessed it, the western presence in Iraq “exacerbates the security problems,” whereas

    “There is a clear distinction between our status and position in Iraq and in Afghanistan, which is why I have much more optimism that we can get it right in Afghanistan.”

Dannatt did use a little bit of legal/political argumentation– namely, when he drew a distinction between, as he put it, the western forces having “kicked the door in” in Iraq, and their being in Afghanistan “at the invitation” of Karzai’s government. (He glossed over the door-kicking that did, in fact, occur in Afghanistan in October-November 2001, and the fact that Pres. Karzai, just as much as Pres. Talabani and PM Maliki, was installed under the auspices of the US-led occupation force. No matter.)
But the main thing is that, at an operational level– in terms of the prospects for mission success– Dannatt was arguing for concentrating the efforts of the British military and perhaps also that of the US military in Afghanistan rather than in Iraq.
And once Dannatt had expressed his view in public about the urgency of this situation, Tony Blair was forced to say he “agreed with every word.” (Game, set, and match to Dannatt, I would say.)
Is this discussion also being held in Washington? I very much hope so. I strongly suspect it is already being intensively held at the headquarters of Centcom there in Qatar… But it certainly needs to be held in Washington, too.
What are the strategic implications of this choice that now presents itself with increasing urgency– between Iraq and Afghanistan?
Of course, all of us could readily argue– as some of us did at the time– that this was a choice that should have been confronted and thought through carefully back in early 2002, the time at which Rumsfeld and the President started their planning in earnest for the invasion of Iraq, and for the concomitant diversion of much-needed resources and attention away from the post-invasion stabilization mission in Afghanistan.
But no, they did not confront that issue and that fateful choice back then. So now, four years, many scores of thousands of lost lives, millions of blighted lives, and $335 billion of war spending later, the US leaders, US citizenry, and the world will have to face it very soon now, and on terms very different from those that existed back in 2002.
Iraq vs. Afghanistan. For US strategic planners, this is quite a tough choice.
Is it one that this US government will try to make alone? Is it one that, at this point, any US government can make alone? I strongly suspect not.
I clearly need to write a whole bunch more about this issue in the days ahead. But my first thoughts are these:

    (1) The tasks the US faces in both countries are different. In Iraq, the task can only at this stage be described as being to avoid a catastrophic collapse of the US position. After the collapse of Operation “Forward Together” or whatever this latest debacle was called, catastrophe-avoidance seems to be the best that Washington can hope for. How might it be achieved? At this point, only through entering into speedy discussions with all of Iraq’s neighbors, over a plan for reordering the main strategic features of that immediate region in a way that will allow a speedy and orderly drawdown of the US troop presence inside Iraq…
    In Afghanistan, by contrast, though the strategic position of the NATO forces is pretty stretched and challenged, still there is some hope that, with some reconfiguring of the international troop presence and considerably increased investment of international attention and resources, the country’s situation might yet be stabilized…
    (2) The strategic importance of each country within the world system is distinct. In the late 19th century, Afghanistan and the other “Stans” to the east of it were at the epicenter of the “Great Game” that was played out between the three power centers of British India, Russia, and China. Today, the British no longer rule India, and there have been many other changes in the political/strategic geography of the region. But it is clear that the country remains a locus of intense concern to numerous different powers, including Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, China, and the other Stans… It is harder to see what NATO’s actual direct interest in Afghanistan is. It strikes me, NATO’s interest (and that of the US) is largely derivative, being focused on the “draining the swamp” aspects of the campaign against border-straddling terrorist groups. That makes NATO’s presence there somewhat “altruistic” rather than being motivated only by crass national self-interest. Altruism is not a bad thing. But surely it would be better to do it much more through economic and political stabilization measures that worked rather than through the present reliance on military measures, which seem not to?
    The strategic importance of Iraq, for many people in the US, can be summed up in three concepts: Oil, Countering Iran, and Protecting Israel. As we now know, when the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq back in 2002-2003, Iraq did not, in fact, form any threat to Israel, at any level, and it still does not today. That leaves Oil, and Iran as issues that we need to talk about. Regarding oil, the US occupation regime in Iraq has done a lousy job of shepherding the reconstruction of the Iraqi oil industry. Indeed, it has left much of Iraq’s oil sector in tatters. The oil sector, Iraq’s people, and the world will be much better off once public security, public order, and orderly government can return to Iraq, and that is quite evidently– based on 42 months of experience now– not going to happen so long as the US occupation continues. Regarding Iran, the two main tasks are, it seems to me, to avoid a catastrophic US-Iran confrontation, and to find a way to restore order and predictability to US-Iranian relations. Discussions over Iraq can be an appropriate lead-in to this.
    (3) The world-political challenge of achieving this retrenchment of the US global empire. We need to be quite clear: the strategic dead-end the US forces face in Iraq today is the result of significant and quite ill-considered imperial over-reach by the Bush administration. So Washington cannot at this point simply make one quick decision: “Okay, we’ll stick with Afghanistan; let’s forget Iraq” (or, more likely in my view, the other way around), implement this, and then get back to business as usual… There are a whole host of reasons why that would be impossible. Anyway, just as with the retrenchment (shedding) of the colonial empires by Britain, France, and other European powers that occurred in the post-WW2 era, so with the retrenchment of the US military empire today, the whole of the political system within this globalized world of ours will have to adapt itself to this shift…

But let’s all think where this might lead. Let’s think of being able to build a world that is more truly based than the present order on the principles of human equality and care for the flourishing of all of God’s children. And let’s place a huge focus on making the transition to this new situation orderly and peaceful. In the timeless words of A.J. Muste: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”
That has never been demonstrated more clearly than through the tragic fate of the Bush administration’s attempts to build a “stable and just” world order through the use of military violence.

“Dannatt effect” spreads to US generals?

Well, what did I say here just seven hours ago?

    But maybe Dannatt’s action was also directed toward encouraging his US counterparts to have a bit more spine in their dealings with their political “masters”? That would be interesting, now, wouldn’t it?

So then, we had the US military spokesman in Baghdad, Maj.-Gen. William Caldwell saying [BBC] publicly and forthrightly that Operation Forward Together– Gen. George Casey’s recent and much-acclaimed project to “flood the zone” in Baghdad with US troops in order to pacify the city prior to the US election– “ has not met our overall expectations of sustaining a reduction in… violence.”
The NYT’s Michael Luo has more Caldwell:

    In an unusually gloomy assessment, General Caldwell called the spike in attacks “disheartening” and added that the American military was “working closely with the government of Iraq to determine how to best refocus our efforts.”
    It is unclear, however, what other options might be available to American military commanders if their current efforts fail…
    In a worrisome development, General Caldwell revealed Thursday that American troops had to return last week to Dora, a troubled southern Baghdad neighborhood that had been a showcase of the new security plan and was one of the first areas to be cleared.
    A key concern from the outset of the stepped-up patrols in the capital was the difficulty of holding onto areas after they had been cleared. In other troubled areas of the country that American forces have sought to “clear and hold,” like towns along the Euphrates River corridor from west of Baghdad to the Syrian border, military officials have struggled to deal with insurgents simply melting away prior to the arrival of troops, only to return stronger than ever after focused military offensives have been completed. [Very sneaky of them, eh? ~HC]
    In Baghdad, the military has been observing a marked increase recently in sectarian attacks in so-called cleared areas, General Caldwell said, noting that insurgents were “punching back hard.”
    “They’re trying to get back into those areas,” he said. “We’re constantly going back in and doing clearing operations again.”
    General Caldwell also raised the possibility that insurgents have intentionally increased their attacks in recent weeks as a way of influencing political events in the United States.
    “We also realize that there is a midterm election that’s taking place in the United States and that the extremist elements understand the power of the media; that if they can in fact produce additional casualties, that in fact is recognized and discussed in the press because everybody would like not to see anybody get killed in these operations, but that does occur,” he said.
    By almost any measure, the situation in the capital is in a downward spiral. Last month, General Caldwell said in a briefing that suicide attacks were at an all-time high. October is also on track to be the third-deadliest month of the conflict for the American military, with a large portion of the deaths occurring in Baghdad.
    The military on Thursday announced the deaths of two more American troops — a Marine in Anbar province from “enemy action” and a soldier north of Balad from a roadside bomb — bringing the month’s total to at least 72.
    American commanders had predicted a spike in violence during Ramadan, but previous Ramadans have been nowhere near as deadly for American troops as October has been so far.
    Deaths in Baghdad specifically have leaped this month. Anbar province also continues to be deadly for American troops who are trying to root out Sunni insurgents there.
    On Thursday, dozens of black-clad gunmen, toting assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, paraded down a main street in Ramadi, one of the most troublesome cities in Anbar province for American troops. They waved banners identifying them as members of the Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella group for insurgents. The council had recently announced the creation of an Islamic state in the area, independent of the Iraqi government.

Right. Just in case it hasn’t been clear to JWN readers yet: The two parts of Iraq with the highest current levels of violence are the two areas with the highest concentration of US military operations…
Does anybody out there still claim the US has any valid claim whatsoever to be the power that “fixes” what has been broken in Iraq?
… Anyway, I did think it was worth noting the (relative) courage of Gen. Caldwell in speaking so forthrightly in public. However, from my long study of the US military I am 100 percent convinced that he would not have done this without getting explicit instructions to do so from his commanding officer, Gen. George Casey, the commanding officer in Iraq, and also quite possibly from Casey’s boss, Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of Centcom.
In which case, it would have been considerably more gutsy and effective if one of those two more senior generals had personally delivered the same kind of “brutally honest” assessment that, instead, they had their flack Gen. Caldwell deliver. In Britain, remember, it was the army’s very top officer, Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt, who delivered the bad news in public last week.
That was considerably gutsier.
Reuters meanwhile has reported that Gen. Casey had a yet lower-level flack deliver this message today:

    “General Casey has ordered a review of Operation Together Forward. U.S. casualties are a grave concern but that is not driving the review,” Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver said.
    “The enemy is adapting and we have to make changes,” he told Reuters. “This is a constant review process.” He said that General George Casey, who commands the 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq ordered the review last week…

Bottom line: Britain’s Dannatt still wins the “Speaking Truth to Power” medal for bravery, hands down.

Blair’s general woes

Last week, the British Army’s chief of staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, caused an uproar when he told interviewer Sarah Sands that, “we should get ourselves out [of Iraq] sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems…”
Mark Townsend and my old buddy Ned Temko had some great background on the whole Dannatt affair– including the hissy-fit of outrage that came from the US Embassy when news of the interview leaked out– in this piece, which ran in The Observer, last Sunday.
They noted this about reaction to Dannatt’s remarks from people in the British military:

    There was, however, a tangible lift in the body language of the British soldiers swapping banter in the mess tents of Basra and Lashkar Gar, Afghanistan. Those enduring the searing heat and danger of the desert battlefields celebrated a boss who talked the way they thought…
    A poll on an army website asking users whether Dannatt’s comments were right or wrong offers corroboration. By midday yesterday, 97 per cent believed their general was right or practically right with his assessment. No one deemed him wrong. The tone of the entries ranged widely, but the message was unmistakable.
    ‘Thank God – some genuine leadership based on reality,’ said one about their leader.

Since then, Blair’s woes with his mouthy generals have been multiplying.
On Tuesday, Brig. Ed Butler, the outgoing commander of the British forces in Afghanistan told reporters that, “The decision to divert forces to invade Iraq cost the West years of progress in Afghanistan.”
The author of that story, Peter Graff, notes that Britain still has more than 7,000 troops in Iraq, at the same time that it’s providing the overall NATO headquarters in Afghanistan as well as a task force in Helmand province. He continues:

    British commanders acknowledge that running both long-term campaigns has left them with virtually no spare capacity, and they have begged other NATO countries urgently to send more troops and aircraft to Afghanistan, so far with little response.
    Butler said the shortage of aircraft for resupplying his troops meant paratroops at remote forward bases were at times down to “belt rations” — eating only what they could carry.
    “It was very close,” he said.

Butler noted that for now, the latest Taliban offensive in helmand province had been beaten back. But he added: “If we take our eye off the ball and we don’t continue to invest in it then there’s a danger they could come back in bigger numbers next year.”
A lot more anger toward Blair was expressed by Col. (retd.) Tim Collins, who had headed the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, Collins says:

    The timescale for any British withdrawal from Iraq will be a complex matter and one wholly dependent on our American and Iraqi allies.
    Observers and commentators have given warning of the danger of failing to robustly pursue the mission in Iraq or face the possibility of actually compounding the problem.
    Three years into the occupation, with no real improvement, it is time to admit failure. That is what the Chief of the General Staff, Gen Sir Richard Dannatt, was doing last week. Indeed the British failure in Iraq may be characterised by history as “ill conceived and without enough effort”.

He notes that the British troops are “now almost confined to barracks.” (I believe that the same is true of the massive numbers of US troops in Iraq, too.)
He concludes thus:

    The British Army has not lost its spine; far from it. But the continued deployment to Iraq, long past any earlier UK estimates, coupled by the muddled state of domestic government in the UK – cuts to military strength whilst liabilities are dramatically increased – has struck at the roots of our military.
    Coupled with the further adventure in Afghanistan, our military has run out of resources. We must win in Afghanistan; our national security and control of the opium on to our streets demands this.
    Iraq was a “nice to do”. The end has come not because of any deeply contemplated policy decision, but because Tony Blair and his mates have driven our military like joyriders in a stolen car. Gen Dannatt has informed them that it has just run out of petrol. Let’s hope they don’t torch it to cover their tracks.

Ouch.
We should note the strategic-level judgment that Collins was expressing there: essentially, that not losing in Afghanistan is more important to (British) national security than not losing in Iraq. It strikes me this is the nub of the issue being debated within the British Ministry of Defence these days.
I wonder if this debate has even been seriously raised yet within policymaking circles in Washington? The resource constraints within the military– mainly, the manpower constraint– seem to have reached a critical point in Britain earlier than they have reached it in the US. But perhaps it is just that the British generals are braver about speaking out in public– where they deem it absolutely necessary– than the many, many highly overpaid flag officers within the US military…
But this issue of “Afghanistan vs. Iraq” is one that will surely require some very focused attention in Washington in the weeks ahead.
On the issue of generals speaking out in democracies, the WaPo’s Eugene Robinson recently roundly criticized Dannatt for having done so. Recalling his time as a correspondent in Brazil in the late 1980s, he argued that generals really should not intervene in politics.
He wrote:

    Dannatt, being correct in his analysis of the situation and properly worried about the state of his army, had two choices: He could have argued his case to Blair privately, or he could have resigned and spoken out publicly. Probably he has already done the former. Had he done the latter, I’d be singing his praises.
    But I don’t like active-duty generals dabbling in politics, even if I agree with them. Dannatt should run for Parliament if he wants to set foreign policy. If I were Blair, I’d advance Dannatt’s political career by relieving him of his current duties.

I am not sure about Robinson’s argument here. I think, firstly, that there’s a large difference between an army chief of staff speaking out in public with a professional assessment of the state of his forces and the strategic challenges ahead, and a chief of staff who stages a coup to seize political power. The Brazil analogy really doesn’t seem to hold much water.
Secondly, I expect that Dannatt was prepared for the prospect that Blair might seek his speedy firing after the publication of the remarks. But he went ahead and uttered therm anyway. Realistically, though, I would say that Dannatt probably assessed his chances of getting fired as low. In essence, that’s because Tony Blair’s political stock– in the country and even within his own party– is so low, and over precisely this isssue of Iraq, too, that he would merely end up making a fool of himself had he tried to fire the general.
But maybe Dannatt’s action was also directed toward encouraging his US counterparts to have a bit more spine in their dealings with their political “masters”? That would be interesting, now, wouldn’t it?
Anyway, one final note here. Lewis Page has a strong piece that defends Dannatt’s decision to speak out, on the Propsect mag website. He writes:

    By his oath of attestation, Dannatt is loyal to the Queen, not to Tony Blair or the Labour party. As a practical matter, unwritten like so much of the British constitution, this means that his true superiors are the British public. He has done nothing wrong by giving a professional opinion to his real bosses.
    Sadly, Dannatt’s outspokenness is unlikely to repeated by his successors. Although he will not be openly disciplined for speaking up on this one occasion—because Tony Blair doesn’t want to spend his last months in office conducting a messy purge—once the succession, presumably to Gordon Brown, has taken place, it will probably be business as usual for the civilian-military relationship.
    That will be a bad thing, far more of a danger to the British constitution than any fantastical military rebellion. Openness in government and freedom of speech are even more fundamental than military subordination to civil power, and these vital principles have been under sustained attack for some time now. The elected representatives of the British people voted freely to send our troops into Iraq, after all. They did so principally because all professional advice against the invasion was ruthlessly suppressed. The principle of constitutional loyalty was used to crush all authoritative dissent. An intelligence officer, John Morrison, who dared to speak out in 2004 was summarily fired. It has been made plain to military people that they will suffer the same fate if they ever contradict the party line.
    But the generals at the very top aren’t really afraid of being dismissed, or even passed over…

Good arguments there.

Riverbend on the ‘Lancet ‘study

She’s back… thank G-d.
She put up a post yesterday– her first since August 5– in which she somberly considered the recent Lancet study on Iraqi mortality and the controversy it has generated.
She writes,

    So far, the only Iraqis I know pretending this number is outrageous are either out-of-touch Iraqis abroad who supported the war, or Iraqis inside of the country who are directly benefiting from the occupation ($) and likely living in the Green Zone.
    The chaos and lack of proper facilities is resulting in people being buried without a trip to the morgue or the hospital. During American military attacks on cities like Samarra and Fallujah, victims were buried in their gardens or in mass graves in football fields. Or has that been forgotten already?
    We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons – with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?
    There are Iraqi women who have not shed their black mourning robes since 2003 because each time the end of the proper mourning period comes around, some other relative dies and the countdown begins once again.
    Let’s pretend the 600,000+ number is all wrong and that the minimum is the correct number: nearly 400,000. Is that better? Prior to the war, the Bush administration kept claiming that Saddam killed 300,000 Iraqis over 24 years. After this latest report published in The Lancet, 300,000 is looking quite modest and tame. Congratulations Bush et al….

As for her long absence from the blogosphere, she writes:

    There were several reasons for my disappearance the major one being the fact that every time I felt the urge to write about Iraq, about the situation, I’d be filled with a certain hopelessness that can’t be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis feel also.
    It’s very difficult at this point to connect to the internet and try to read the articles written by so-called specialists and analysts and politicians. They write about and discuss Iraq as I might write about the Ivory Coast or Cambodia- with a detachment and lack of sentiment that- I suppose- is meant to be impartial. Hearing American politicians is even worse. They fall between idiots like Bush- constantly and totally in denial, and opportunists who want to use the war and ensuing chaos to promote themselves…

I am so, so glad she is still alive, and still getting her unique voice out into the world. I can only imagine how hard, how soul-searing and desperate the past few months must have been– for her, and for all other Iraqis.
Bring the US troops home.

Bush reeling from Iraqi “Tet”?

Things are going seriously badly in Iraq this month. For the Iraqis, but also for the Americans. The number of US dead there has now reached 70 since October 1— and we’re still only at October 18.
For every one of these US service members killed, tens must have been wounded very badly indeed. God help them all.
And of course, Iraqis are being killed, in the many different forms of violence now roiling the country, in far, far greater numbers.
At the Iraqi political level, PM Nuri al-Maliki made a double pilgrimage to Najaf today– to see Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and to see Mahdi Army chief Moqtada Sadr. This, after the phone conversation on Monday with President Bush, which– one can conclude– must have left Maliki far from satisfied about the baselessness of the many recent rumors that Washington was considering replacing him.
On coming out from the meeting with Sistani, Maliki stressed that,

    “The Iraqi government is a government of national unity that came to power through the will of the Iraqi people… The Iraqi people are the only authorized party that can remove this government or allow it to continue.”

It seems clear by now that the big gamble the US occupation authorities made in the past siux weeks– that by “flooding the zone” in Baghdad with US troops, they could restore something of a sense of order there before the US elections– has failed. With 147,000 US troops in the country, they still haven’t been able to get a handle on the situation.
This evening, Bill and I watched the highlights of the interview that ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos conducted with Bush somewhere in, I believe Georgia or Florida, earlier today. Bush was more than usually flustered and inarticulate, and really seemed badly taken aback by the direct and simple questions that GS asked him– about Iraq, especially.
As the account on the ABC News website there says,

    Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.
    “He could be right,” the president said, before adding, “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.”

Yes, indeed. If I were a Republican Party operative I would not find that reassuring.

More Fateh leadership woes

Danny Rubinstein of HaAretz has an interesting article in Thursday’s paper, in which he writes that PA President Mahmoud Abbas is facing a tough new challenge from other veteran leaders in (primarily) the exile wing of Fateh.
These internal insurgents are reportedly– and not surprisingly– being led by long-time Fateh/PLO veteran Farouq Qaddumi (Abul-Lutf), who lives mainly in Damascus.
Rubinstein writes that the big Fateh bosses had been preparing for a meeting of their movement’s 15-person Central Committee, due to be held this week in Amman. But,

    Abbas did not get the support he expected from his colleagues on the committee. The situation was so bad that the gathering was canceled – though officially, it was merely postponed for a week…
    Thus Abbas now finds himself embroiled in infighting and tension not only with Hamas, but also inside his own movement. And those who are supposed to back him up – the United States, the Quartet, the Arab states and Israel – consider him to be a weak leader who makes a lot of mistakes.
    Under any other circumstances, Abbas would have resigned his post. But now, his aides maintain, this possibility does not exist, since it would mean relinquishing all power in the Palestinian Authority to Hamas. His associates say that as a leader with a sense of national responsibility, he cannot quit…
    This is about a lot more than protocol. It is about a bitter struggle for power: Kaddoumi and two other members of the central committee, Ahmed Ghnayem and Mohammad Jihad, are veteran opponents of the peace process and the Oslo Accords, and refuse to come to the territories.
    Abbas had asked Kaddoumi and his two colleagues to return, at least to the Gaza Strip, which Israel evacuated. However, they have refused, arguing that the Israeli occupation of Gaza is still not over.
    Moreover, Abbas was informed that Kaddoumi had visited Damascus and met there with Meshal about how to include Hamas in the PLO and what positions Hamas leaders would receive in the Palestinian national leadership.
    Both Kaddoumi and Meshal believe that the Palestinian leadership should not be based in the territories, since there, it is at Israel’s mercy. Abbas and his supporters maintain that the leadership in the territories enjoys more freedom of action than has been granted to Palestinian politicians by the Syrian regime in Damascus.
    One serious problem for Abbas is that veteran members of the Fatah Central Committee do not fully support him. Some clashed with him during the period when there was friction between him and Arafat; others have personal gripes against him.
    In an effort to counter this problem, Abbas developed ties with younger members, such as Mohammad Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub, and he is pressing to add 21 younger members to the central committee, whose 15 current members are in their seventies and refuse to allow any changes.
    This mess is having a negative effect on Abbas’ ability to deal with both the Hamas government in Gaza and the Hamas leadership in Damascus. Despite backing from Jordan and Egypt, Abbas has been unable to convince Hamas even to accept the Arab peace initiative, which calls for recognition of Israel in return for a withdrawal to the 1967 lines. The question now is whether Abbas has the strength to announce the dissolution of the Hamas government, thereby risking the possibility of civil war.

Ah, Abul-Lutf. A very vain and silly man. But certainly, someone who by the end of the of the 1990s was able to capture the zeitgeist of that large portion of Fateh supporters forced to live for many decades now in exile outside the homeland– people who had been warily prepared to give the “Oslo” process a chance to succeed but to whom Oslo never offered anything. Period.
It strikes me that Abu Mazen was simply showing his political naviety yet again if he put any hope into the chance that the exile wing of Fateh might back him up in his present power struggle against Hamas. Aleksandr Kerensky, anyone?