Long knives, Washington, Afghanistan, part 2

I’ve been thinking more about the timing of the WaPo’s publication of Woodward’s bombshell and the accompanying materials this morning.
It seems clear to me Woodward must have had the text of the McChrystal Assessment for a number of days. His colleagues had the time to do some good follow-up reporting with Gen. Jim Jones and other senior officials. Also, the WaPo and the Pentagon had time to negotiate the amounts of the assessment that the WaPo could put onto its public web-site. So obviously, the folks inside the administration knew that Woodward had it and the WaPo was going to publish it.
Yesterday, Obama was doing his big t.v. blitz– going onto five major t.v. news-discussion programs to discuss primarily health-care but also aware he’d be getting questions about Afghanistan and other issues.
Here’s what he said on Afghanistan on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos:

    When we came in, basically, there had been drift in our Afghan strategy. Everybody acknowledges that. And I ordered a top to bottom review. The most important thing I wanted was us to refocus on why we’re there. We’re there because al Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans and we cannot allow extremists who want to do violence to the United States to be able to operate with impunity.
    Now, I think we’ve lost — we lost that focus for a while and you started seeing a– a classic case of mission creep where we’re just there and we start taking on a whole bunch of different missions.
    I wanted to narrow it. I did order 21,000 additional troops there to make sure that we could secure the election, because I thought that was important. That was before the review was completed. I also said after the election I want to do another review. We’ve just gotten those 21,000 in. General McChrystal, who’s only been there a few months, has done his own assessment.
    I am now going to take all this information and we’re going to test whatever resources we have against our strategy, which is if by sending young men and women into harm’s way, we are defeating al Qaeda and — and that can be shown to a skeptical audience, namely me — somebody who is always asking hard questions about deploying troops, then we will do what’s required to keep the American people safe.

Well, strictly speaking, back on March 27, when he made the decision based on that first “top to bottom review”, he decided to expand both the troop numbers and the troop mission in Afghanistan. Only at some later point did he decide he wanted to “narrow” it.
In their piece in the WaPo today, Rajiv Chadrasekaran and Karen DeYoung write that the chaos surrounding the holding of last month’s Afghan election was a turning point for the administration.
Also, note the apparent put-down of McChrystal in what Obama said.
So, a couple of quick points here. Did the WaPo delay the publication of today’s news reports to allow Obama to get his version out to the public first– or was there some other reasoning behind the timing of publishing these stories?
Also, McChrystal may well not last long in his job.
But whether he does or not, the bigger issue here is that Obama and his national-security team are going to have to do some very broad thinking (as I noted earlier– see # 2 here) if they want to find a way to ramp down the currently huge risks the US/NATO troops face in Afghanistan.

Long knives out in Washington over Afghanistan

You can criticize Bob Woodward– and I have– for the insidery, back-scratching nature of most of his recent journalism. But he still manages to pull out a significant number of real news items.
Wow! In today’s WaPo, he has a piece describing a document (PDF) that was most likely leaked to him by someone on the staff of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US general in Afghanistan, in which McC warned that

    he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict ‘will likely result in failure.’

The leaked document was sent by McChrystal to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on August 30, under the title “COMISAF’S INITIAL ASSESSMENT”. (COMISAF is the acronym for “Commander of the [US-led] International Security Assistance Force”.)
I have not had time to pore over the PDF version yet. But Woodward and various other writers at the WaPo evidently have done so. The PDF version posted on the WaPo website is one for which they received a security clearance after certain portions were removed.
An accompanying article by Rajiv Chadrasekaran and Karen DeYoung gives an account of some– but certainly far from all– of the political context within the Obama administration, within which someone took the decision to leak this very sensitive document to Woodward.
Chandra and DeYoung write,

    From his headquarters in Kabul, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal sees one clear path to achieve President Obama’s core goal of preventing al-Qaeda from reestablishing havens in Afghanistan: “Success,” he writes in his assessment, “demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign.”
    Inside the White House, the way forward in Afghanistan is no longer so clear.
    Although Obama endorsed a strategy document in March that called for “executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy,” there have been significant changes in Afghanistan and Washington since then. A disputed presidential election, an erosion in support for the war effort among Democrats in Congress and the American public, and a sharp increase in U.S. casualties have prompted the president and his top advisers to reexamine their assumptions about the U.S. role in defeating the Taliban insurgency.
    Instead of debating whether to give McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, more troops, the discussion in the White House is now focused on whether, after eight years of war, the United States should vastly expand counterinsurgency efforts along the lines he has proposed — which involve an intensive program to improve security and governance in key population centers — or whether it should begin shifting its approach away from such initiatives and simply target leaders of terrorist groups who try to return to Afghanistan.

And then, they have this devastating put-down of McChrystal:

    McChrystal’s assessment, in the view of two senior administration officials, is just “one input” in the White House’s decision-making process.

They add:

    Obama, appearing on several Sunday-morning television news shows, left little doubt that key assumptions in the earlier White House strategy are now on the table. “The first question is: Are we doing the right thing?” the president said on CNN. “Are we pursuing the right strategy?”
    “Until I’m satisfied that we’ve got the right strategy, I’m not going to be sending some young man or woman over there — beyond what we already have,” Obama said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” If an expanded counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan contributes to the goal of defeating al-Qaeda, “then we’ll move forward,” he said. “But, if it doesn’t, then I’m not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or . . . sending a message that America is here for the duration.”

I have a few quick reactions to this important news:

    1. I am really glad that Obama is looking at a range of options other than trying to continue the effort to mount a countrywide “counter-insurgency” campaign in Afghanistan that would also involve trying to build a functioning state system in the whole of that very complicated country.
    2. In the range of other options he’s looking at, he should certainly be looking at options that involve bringing other significant international partners into the operation rather than just, as at present, members of the NATO alliance. NATO is so much the wrong implement through which to be acting in Afghanistan, for the reasons I’ve blogged about a lot here over recent months. Other powers, located much closer to Afghanistan, have both (a) a much stronger direct interest in seeing some form sustainable stabilization take root there than members of distant NATO do, and (b) much greater capability– in terms of being both geographically and culturally closer to Afghanistan– to act effectively there. These nations include China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan (which has its own problems, of course), and most of the other Central Asian nations. The UN would seem to be so much the most appropriate body to convene and lead this new form of help for Afghanistan.
    3. Of course this would signal– and be a part of– a much broader shift in the balance of power in world politics between “the west and the rest.” But this shift is happening, anyway.
    4. Very evidently there is a huge, deep, and significant debate within the Obama administration over whether to continue with a “COIN”-only approach, or not. Chandra and DeYoung indicate that this seems to pit some military commanders (McChrystal and Chairman of the JCS Adm. Mike Mullen) against the civilian leadership in the White House.
    5. Unmentioned thus far have been the views of Gen. Petraeus, the highly political general who as head of CENTCOM is McChrystal’s immediate superior and thus stands between him and Mullen in the chain of command. Unknown also is the position in this tussle of Secdef Gates.
    6. All of the above people serve, of course, at the pleasure of our elected president. But a pointed resignation of any one of them, if he should disagree with the decision that Obama eventually makes, would be a major political blow to Obama. That gives all of them clout– but probably Gates and Petraeus the most clout of all.
    7. The leaking of McChrystal’s assessment seems very like a move to cover the rear-end of the military leaders in the– increasingly much more likely– event that the US/NATO “mission” in Afghanistan ends up in some degree of defeat, ignominy, chaos, or worse. Woodward tells us that McChrystal’s assessment concluded by saying, “While the situation is serious, success is still achievable.” But if McChrystal or anyone in his office had anything to do with the leaking of the document, then that act would indicate that the leaker really did not not judge “success” to be very likely at all.
    8. Woodward’s acquisition and leaking of this document are a reminder of the big journalistic coup of his early career in the 1970s, when he and Carl Bernstein leaked details of the dirty tricks President Nixon used against the Democrats during the Watergate affair. But they have more in common, substance-wise, with the 1971 leaking to the NYT of the “Pentagon Papers”, an internal Pentagon assessment that pointed to the unwinnability of the US-Vietnam War.

Anyway, the leak of the McChrystal assessment is a huge story. Chapeau to Woodward.

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb responds

    [In a follow-up to the exchange that I blogged here yesterday, Dr Amal Saad-Ghorayeb has written the response that follows. I will be happy to publish, in full, any further remarks that Dean Grant Hammond or any of his staff at the NATO Defense College (NDC) cares to submit. The subject of how, exactly, officials in key NATO structures like the NDC define NATO’s “mission” in the Israeli-Arab theater is an important one that citizens of all democracies– in Lebanon and elsewhere– should certainly be ready to discuss. Anyway, here is Saad-Ghorayeb’s contribution. ~HC]

by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb

Despite the very personal nature of Dean Grant Hammond’s
last e-mail (apparently sent to me by mistake), I had no intention of
dignifying his vulgar outburst with a reply. However, given the publication of
his response to Helena Cobban’s queries, I feel obligated to alert the reader
to the distortions of reality, inconsistencies, and omissions which
characterize his defensive tract, all of which can be readily discerned from
the—as yet unpublished– e-mail exchanges that took place between myself
and the NATO Defense College staff.

But more important than my efforts at
clarifying the episode, is my endeavor to underline its exact magnitude, lest
it appear a mere tit-for-tat exchange between myself and NDC
staff.

The episode is nothing short of a
botched attempt to enlist me –on account of my “academic expertise [on Hizbullah] and reputation” to borrow Hammond’s words– to
deliver a lecture on the Lebanese resistance movement to an audience of Israeli
and other NATO officers and diplomats,  and then, in clear violation of
my country’s laws, to engage IDF officers and diplomats in back-channel talks,
in the context of the scheduled “Q&A” session. It is crucial to repeat here
that these Israeli guests were not private citizens but diplomats and IDF
officers, and that accordingly, I was invited to not merely engage in cultural
normalization with Israeli academics, but in security normalization with
Israeli officers. 

Continue reading “Amal Saad-Ghorayeb responds”

NATO and Lebanon

For many years now,
successive US administrations have been vigorously trying to  persuade as many Arab countries
as possible—especially those that are still in a state of war with
Israel—to undertake “confidence building measures” in a purported attempt
to “entice” Israel into being more forthcoming in the peace diplomacy…

Now, an episode
involving the respected Lebanese political scientist Dr Amal
Saad-Ghorayeb shows us that the US-dominated NATO
alliance has also been part of this campaign.

Unless you’re a
particular kind of a military-affairs afficianado you
may not be aware that NATO runs its own institute of higher learning, the NATO
Defense College (NDC) , in Rome.  Through the work of this college, as
well as in other ways, NATO has been trying for some years now to impose its
own form of (military-based) normalization on the relations between Israel and
several Arab states– including Lebanon, a country that (a) is still in a
formal state of war Israel now, as it has since 1948, (b) has been the victim
of numerous acts of Israeli aggression over those decades, including a string
of extremely lethal major military invasions, occupations, and assaults, the
most recent (and one of the most lethal) being that undertaken in 2006, and (c)
continues to this day to be subject to Israeli aggression, including in the
form of very frequent military overflights.

In these circumstances,
it is scarcely surprising that Lebanon has a law barring its citizens from
having any contact with Israeli military personnel. Ah, but now it turns out
that NATO—a body that proclaims its support for (a certain version of)
the rule of law—has been seeking to tempt Lebanese citizens to skirt or
break this law by meeting with Israeli military officials in a clandestine,
“off the record” kind of way.

I could digress a bit
here and write about the deep problems NATO has been experiencing ever since,
with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991-3, it suddenly lost its
foundational raison d’etre and had to start inventing
“missions” for itself in various places far distant from its originally
envisaged Central European battlefields. 
(As I’ve blogged quite a few times in recent months, the continuing NATO
“mission” in Afghanistan is one that’s particularly ill-suited to NATO’s
capabilities, and may well bring about the dissolution of the alliance in its
present, neo-imperial form.)

But
back to NATO and Lebanon. Sometime this summer, Florence Gaub, who
works with something called the NATO Regional Cooperation Course (NRCC), which
is run out of the Rome-based NDC, invited Amal Saad-Ghorayeb to give a lecture to the members of this
fall’s NRCC course. Saad-Ghorayeb agreed to do it.
She also, not surprisingly, sought the assurance of those inviting her that she
would not be expected to work with Israeli military personnel while she was
there.

This assurance was not
forthcoming. On September 8, Gaub wrote to Saad-Ghorayeb noting that Israel was a full partner of
NATO’s in the NATO-sponsored “Mediterranean Dialogue”, one of the co-sponsors
of the NRCC course. She also wrote that, “I can not ensure that any of the NATO officers present does not by
chance hold a second Israeli passport.”

(This latter statement is
intriguing. How many of NATO’s member countries allow
members of their militaries to have Israeli– or other—second passports?
Or is it only Israeli passports that are permitted? Also, several NATO members
have sizeable military units serving in the beefed-up UNIFIL peacekeeping force
in south Lebanon. Might some of those soldiers be holders of Israeli passports?
An interesting thought, right there… )

In her September 8 email, Florence Gaub added,

Continue reading “NATO and Lebanon”

IPS piece on Obama-Netanyahu tussle over priorities

With all the fast-moving developments of the past couple of weeks, I felt it was time to draw out the main theme behind them…. I tried to do that in my IPS piece today. It’s here— also archived here.
As I thought about it and read it, I came to the conclusion there’s good news and bad news… as reflected in the concluding two paras of the piece:

    Washington cannot get its way in international bodies as easily now as it has for most of the past 20 years. So the probability of it being able to assemble a tough coalition against Iran is anyway receding. [That’s the good news.]
    But that fact does not bring serious U.S. efforts in the peace process any closer. Indeed, by making a strong anti-Iran coalition look unachievable under any circumstances, it may even lessen the motivation of some in Washington to push hard on Israeli-Palestinian peace diplomacy. [That’s the bad news.]

Of course, as Washington’s general ability to wield power in the world community continues to recede, its ability to single-handedly defend Israel from having to be accountable to anyone else, including the whole rest of the world community, will also recede. The next five years should be interesting ones.

Gaza police and noncombatant immunity

Phil Weiss, who’s read more of the Goldstone report than I have at this point, zeroes in on the paragraphs Goldstone and Co wrote about the IDF’s killings of police officers and cadets in Gaza.
He writes,

    The mission reports that 99 policemen and 9 civilians were killed in the first minutes of the slaughter. Overall, 240 policemen were killed during the war– a sixth of the Gaza casualties. Police were “deliberately” targeted. And on what basis? Well, Israel regards the police institutionally– or in large part individually– as part of the Gazan military.
    The mission analyzed the history of the Gaza police since the Hamas takeover in 2007. While policemen were recruited from Hamas followers, Goldstone found that the police are a “civilian law-enforcement agency” and that the police targets of Dec. 27 were none of them taking part in hostilities and had not lost their “civilian immunity.” Yes “individual” policemen were surely members of armed groups and can be considered combatants. But the Israeli attacks failed to strike an acceptable balance, between anticipated military advantage of destruction and civilian damage. The great majority of these policemen were civilians. So the mission concludes,This was a violation of international humanitarian law.

Now, Phil makes some very important points in that post. But he– and we– should note that a “civilian” is not the same as a “noncombatant”.
A noncombatant is a person whom, under international humanitarian law, it is forbidden to target, and who is therefore “protected” by IHL.
This includes civilians but it also includes members of a military formation who are not currently fighting. Hence the specificity of the term “noncombatant.”
This class of persons includes all civilians. It also includes members of military formations who are “hors de combat” because of injuries– along with members of military formations who are not “on duty” in the military at the time.
It would include, for example, even senior officers in the IDF or any other military (or of Hamas’s military formations) who are off duty– sleeping in their homes, or whatever. And it includes the many members of Israel’s reserve forces who, during the Gaza war or at any other time, might have been sleeping at home and going about their normal family and professional lives.
Many members of the police force in a place like Sderot may, for example, have also been reserve officers in the IDF. But at any time that they are not actually engaged in combat as part of the IDF– or, I think, in military training, which is a preparation for combat– they are considered noncombatants, and therefore have all the IHL protections of noncombatants.
Thus, for a Gazan, simply being a member of an armed group does not make a person into a “combatant”, that is, a legitimate target of Israeli fire. Unless he is currently engaged in combat, which the cadets at a police academy graduation ceremony evidently weren’t.
That’s the great thing about international humanitarian law: it applies to everyone in the same way.
… Anyway, that’s my only quibble with what is otherwise a really excellent post by Phil.

Gaza, the Obama administration, and the present

I was reading this account from Reuters of the way that Obama’s ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, today tried to sideline and bury the important report of the Goldstone Commission.
Firstly, she brushed aside the report’s recommendation that the Security Council should remain actively involved in the follow-up efforts to win accountability from the accused perpetrators of atrocities on both sides during Israel’s December-January assault on Gaza.
Then, this:

    Rice said the focus should be the future.
    “This is a time to work to cement progress toward the resumption of (Israeli-Palestinian peace) negotiations and their early and successful conclusion,” she said.

At first blush this looks like a classic “peace versus justice” dilemma, of the kind I’ve written about extensively in my work on conflict termination and the “justice” issues deriving therefrom.
But then I thought there is already a very, very long history of Palestinians having their “justice” claims brusquely pushed aside in favor of the promise of a future, western-led peacemaking effort… And throughout the past 61 years those efforts have never, ever led anywhere.
So today, the Palestinians are once again asked to forget about their past grievances, and to focus on a promise of some kind of a future peace settlement that, if the past is any kind of a reliable guide, may well prove quite illusory.
Lost in all this, however, is the situation of the Palestinians– in Gaza, but also elsewhere– in the present.
Is there anything the US could do about this?
Of course there is! And it’s not only the case that the US could do something to help the Gazans in the present– the US also should be doing a whole lot more than it has to date to alleviate the harm that they continue to suffer on a daily and continuing basis, since it has enormous leverage over the government of Israel.
But Washington has used not one iota of that leverage to force Israel to open Gaza’s borders up for the passage of the freight that the Strip’s 1.4 million people sorely need in order to conduct a normal, safe, and dignified life.
Winter is approaching in Gaza, where it can bring rain and some bitterly cold winds. And despite all the representations that various do-gooders have made since the parallel ceasefires wet into effect on January 18, Israel has not allowed into the Strip any of the most basic construction materials that are needed to repair the extensive damage that the IDF caused during last winter’s war, in many cases quite intentionally, to housing, schools, factories, and public infrastructure.
So maybe now is not the time to pull together a huge series of international court cases to look into the atrocities of the past. (Or maybe it is.)
And maybe we should give the US-led diplomacy one last chance to build a better future. (Or maybe not.)
But if we look only at the continuously unfolding present, then if the US does nothing to force Israel to open Gaza’s borders to the passage of vitally needed freight, then Washington will be directly complicit in the additional harms that Gaza’s people will suffer this winter.
(Meantime, in today’s statement, Rice criticized the mandate of the Goldstone Commission, and she criticized its policy recommendations. But I don’t think she questioned any of its actual findings. And those findings surely stand as the best draft we have to date of the historical record of who did what to whom in the Israel-Palestine theater in the time of the 2008-09 Gaza War. Even just as a record, the work of the Commission will be invaluable– and it can provide the basis for all kinds of court cases in the future.)

Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, “benchmarks”

Excellent analysis, as usual, from Reidar Visser on Biden’s latest trip to Iraq.
Noting that this is Biden’s second visit to Iraq as Vice-President, Visser writes,

    If anything, what these visits have demonstrated twice is that US leverage is quickly disappearing from Iraq. Biden today informed the press that no further “benchmark legislation” would be passed this side of Iraq’s parliamentary elections scheduled for 16 January 2010 (hopefully that statement was offered as a prognosis, since this issue supposedly is for the majority of the Iraqi parliament to decide!), whereas Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki used the opportunity of his joint press conference with Biden to coolly steer clear of any reference to national reconciliation issues…
    Biden’s frank assertion that he expects no major national reconciliation initiatives prior to the elections is useful in two ways. Firstly, it is good news in itself. It is often not realised that to leave these issues in suspense during the elections could actually have a positive impact on Iraqi politics in that voters may get the opportunity to discuss basic constitutional issues in Iraq in a less sectarian and confused atmosphere than that which prevailed during the two 2005 elections and ahead of the constitutional referendum that year…
    Biden’s comments are also useful in that they highlight the limited window that remains for the Obama administration to exercise diplomatic influences in Iraq’s internal political process. If Biden is correct, not much more will be attempted this side of the 16 January 2010 elections. On that day, it is possible that the Iraqi people will reject the SOFA in the referendum that will coincide with the parliamentary elections, in which case the Maliki government will notify Washington that they have one year to leave the country and the logistics of getting out will likely become the preoccupation of the Obama administration. But even if the SOFA is accepted by the Iraqi people, the time that remains for the US between January and the end of 2011 is in practice highly restricted. Combat forces must be out by August 2010, and Washington has already factored in a couple of months in the post-election period to secure a stable transition – meaning that by the time a new government has been formed and serious discussion of national-reconciliation issues can recommence, probably no earlier than April 2010 if past experience is anything to go by, the mechanisms of withdrawal will probably occupy most of the Obama administration’s attention. On top of this, the first batch of constitutional revisions will be passed by a straightforward majority decision in the Iraqi parliament; any crisis over Kurdish objections will erupt only after a subsequent referendum, probably in late 2010 at the earliest…

I always thought Washington’s earlier attempt to impose political “benchmarks” on a– supposedly already sovereign– Iraqi government was patronizing, colonialist, ham-handed, and unrealistic. Now, it is being rapidly buried (and no-one in Washington is paying much heed, at all.)
It is intensely depressing, though, to see the Obama administration now ginning up an effort to define political benchmarks for both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Have they learned nothing from the fate of the “benchmarks” defined for Iraq?
It is also as though people who live in the Washington policy bubble have zero awareness of how their actions are viewed by that 95% of humanity who happen not be American. Including, of course, Afghans and Pakistanis.
Erm, guys, I would like to introduce you to this thing called “the printing press.” Also, the “wireless telegraph.” And I’ve heard tell, too, of a device called “The Inter-Tubes.” Of course, if you’re still living in the days of the quill pen and the pony express, you could perhaps imagine that people living outside the US might not learn of your plans for colonialist-style arrogance.

Barak: Iran not existential threat

Ehud Barak to Yediot Aharonoth:

    “I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel.”
    Barak said “Israel is strong, I don’t see anyone who could pose an existential threat,” although he did add that he viewed Iran as a challenge to the whole world.

(HT: Stephen Walt.)
The Reuters report linked to above takes care to note– as few US media would*– that,

    Israel is assumed to possess the only atomic arsenal in the Middle East.

I would modify that a bit. Israel’s is the only ground-based nuclear arsenal in the region that we know of. However, a portion of the US Navy vessels plying the region’s waters can also be assumed to have them.
Still, it is excellent that Barak is on the record with this statement.
—
* Update: But MJ Rosenberg noted this in his very informative post on the topic at TPM Cafe.

Garlasco, suspended with full pay

The NYT’s John Schwartz reported last night that Human Rights Watch has decided to suspend the controversial military analyst Marc Garlasco with full pay, pending an investigation into his engagement with the hobby of collecting Nazi-era military memorabilia.
I think this is the right thing to do. Wish they’d done it some days earlier. Then we could be devoting more attention today to the very important findings of the Goldstone Commission.
Fwiw, I’m quoted a bit at the bottom of Schwartz’s piece.