Via Juan Cole comes the rather jaw-dropping news that Mullah Omar will be dropped from the U.S. State Department terrorist list.
By U.S. standards, they don’t get much more terroristy than Mullah Omar, head of the Taliban and onetime leader of the hard-core Islamic fundamentalist Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, who blew up Buddhas, burka’d the female population, instituted sharia law, and harbored bin Laden until he was deposed by the 2002 U.S.-led invasion.
Recognizing him as a political actor in good standing makes the whole deadly, six-year, multi-billion dollar effort to bring freedom and democracy to Afghanistan look like some kind of bad joke.
Of course, rehabilitating Mullah Omar is all about the reopening of the negotiation track with the Taliban that has been brewing for the last few months and is being executed by our new CENTCOM chief, David Petraeus.
However, Omar should not start measuring the presidential office in Kabul for new drapes just yet. I don’t think the United States is sincere about bringing him into the big tent unless he brings the head of Osama bin Laden with him—and that’s not likely.
If events in Iraq are any guide, the invite to Mullah Omar is part of the U.S. strategy to get various Taliban groupings to start talking to the United States instead of conspiring between themselves and wedge one of the weaker commanders away from the rest with the promise that the U.S. will give him a better deal than he’ll get as part of a Taliban reconquest. It’s a stretch, but I’m voting for the terminally vicious Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (interesting point that Mullah Omar’s coming off the State Department’s terrorist black list but Hekmatyar’s apparently still on; wonder if the U.S. is trying to get into Hekmatyar’s head with that one) as Afghanistan’s Maliki.
With Hekmatyar ensconced in the presidential palace, the Pashtun insurgency split, and the Tajiks and other ethnic group buddying up to the only Taliban who isn’t going to cut their heads off, at least for the time being, the U.S. military hopes to be presiding over an uneasy peace or, from another perspective, another billion-dollar Mexican stand-off that gives the United States the decisive role of power broker in Afghanistan.
And Mullah Omar comes away from the talks empty-handed as the U.S. tries to grind him down through direct military operations, assassinations, and the assistance of Afghan and Pakistani forces.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, the factor that militates against this rosy scenario is the fact that Pakistan isn’t Iran.
Iran is a force for stability in Iraq, reining in the Dawa Party and al-Sadr, since it has the confidence that its propinquity and political and economic reach guarantee that Maliki, a sometime U.S. client, will be a full-time ally of Iran.
Pakistan, on the other hand, weak, divided, teetering on the edge of political and economic collapse, beset with a Pashtun insurgency it is more interested in accommodating than destroying, and precious little power to project will see little profit if Kabul is in control of a renegade Taliban with a pro-U.S. and Iranian tilt.
Pakistan—and, for that matter, Saudi Arabia—have too little stake in a stable Pakistan and little interest in eliminating or marginalizing Mullah Omar. It’s likely that the Pashtun insurgency will keep the pot boiling some time to come despite the negotiation initiatives.
Showing posts with label Petraeus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Petraeus. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Friday, November 07, 2008
There Will Be Blood
Democracy and Its Death Squads
To civilian liberals of a hawkish bent, General Petraeus projects the reassuring image of the thinking person’s general. It’s kind of hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that operating death squads might be an integral—and perhaps the vital—component of the vaunted Petraeus doctrine of counterinsurgency. Or that death squads will probably continue to play a central role in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan under an Obama administration.
As his adoring Wikipedia biography relates, General Petraeus is quite the intellectual:
Petraeus was the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College—class of 1983. He subsequently earned a M.P.A. degree (1985) and a Ph.D. degree (1987) in International Relations from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He later served as Assistant Professor of International Relations at the U.S. Military Academy and also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University. He has a BS from the U.S. Military Academy—class of 1974—from which he graduated as a distinguished cadet (top 5% of his class).
For twenty years, Petraeus climbed the ladder with a series of staff assignments. From 1991 to 1993, a lieutenant colonel, he got his command ticket punched by leading a regiment and later a battalion of the 101st Airborne, before returning to staff work.
In an indication of the indignities that prolonged peace can inflict on military biography, Wikipedia had to make do with this example of courage and tenacity under fire:
As battalion commander of the Iron Rakkasans [nickname for the 187th Infantry Regiment of the 101st’s 3rd Battalion; comes from a mangling of the Japanese word for “paratrooper”—ed], he suffered one of the more dramatic incidents in his career when, in 1991, he was accidentally shot in the chest during a live-fire exercise when a soldier tripped and his rifle discharged. He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, where he was operated on by future U.S. Senator Bill Frist. The hospital released him early after he did fifty push ups without resting, just a few days after the accident.
Combat experience finally came in 2003 when, as Major General, Petraeus commanded the 101st Airborne during the invasion of Iraq and settled in to occupy the Ninawa Governate and its chief city, Mosul, in northwest Iraq.
Petraeus treasured his credentials as the enlightened counterinsurgency expert—and the rational, astute military man culturally at ease with civilians and civilian leadership--and assiduously cultivated the mainstream media. His diligence was rewarded:
An often-repeated story of Petraeus's time with the 101st is his asking of embedded Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson to "Tell me how this ends," an anecdote he and other journalists have used to portray Petraeus as an early recognizer of the difficulties that would follow the fall of Baghdad…[Petraeus] was "prepared to act while the civilian authority in Baghdad was still getting organized," according to Michael Gordon of The New York Times. Some Iraqis gave Petraeus the nickname 'King David', which was later adopted by some of his colleagues. Newsweek has stated that "It's widely accepted that no force worked harder to win Iraqi hearts and minds than the 101st Air Assault Division led by Petraeus."
Before we bid adieu to General Petraeus’ Wikipedia entry, we should unpack the description of his signature success—the pacification of Mosul during the occupation:
In Mosul, a city of nearly two million people, Petraeus and the 101st employed classic counterinsurgency methods to build security and stability, including conducting targeted kinetic operations and using force judiciously, jump-starting the economy, building local security forces, staging elections for the city council within weeks of their arrival, overseeing a program of public works, reinvigorating the political process, and launching 4,500 reconstruction projects.
The traditional preoccupation of the military—killing people and blowing stuff up—is recast as “targeted kinetic operations and using force judiciously”. It makes military operations sound more like policework than fighting, and only one of six equally important ingredients in the appetizing and nutritionally well-balanced COIN salad.
This sort of verbiage is important.
In the United States, there is a powerful compulsion to shoehorn warmaking into the ranks of admirable activities conducted by good people with fine minds. General Petraeus fulfills an important need, especially for the responsible-liberal quadrant of the commentariat and the incoming Obama administration which, I imagine, will be staffed by Ivy League intellectuals and not be chock-a-block with blood and thunder military types.
For the United States to put up with occupations and COIN/pacification operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that may go on for more than a decade, the public needs to believe that the occupation is some kind of combination of FDR’s New Deal and the superhero Justice League, using American know-how and values to continually improve the economic and security well-being of the peoples in our care.
However, in real life, occupation and counter-insurgency are a nasty, degrading, and bloody business. Commanders in a hostile land far from home, intent on protecting their own forces, aren’t always using a surgical scalpel to extract the tumor of insurgency. Sometimes the meat axe is swung indiscriminately, slaughtering patient and bystanders alike.
And the proper description of “targeted kinetic activity” is, perhaps, “death squad”.
According to Bob Woodward’s most recent book, The War Within, the activities of death squads in Iraq was one of the key factors in the reduction of violence under General Petraeus’s watch as commander of the Multi-National Force-Iraq:
Beginning in the late spring of 2007, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies launched a series of top-secret operations that enabled them to locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups. The operations incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government.
Senior military officers and officials at the White House urged against publishing details or code names associated with the groundbreaking programs, arguing that publication of the names alone might harm the operations that have been so beneficial in Iraq. As a result, specific operational details have been omitted in this report and in "The War Within."
But a number of authoritative sources say the covert activities had a far-reaching effect on the violence and were very possibly the biggest factor in reducing it. Several said that 85 to 90 percent of the successful operations and "actionable intelligence" had come from the new sources, methods and operations. Several others said that figure was exaggerated but acknowledged their significance.
Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) responsible for hunting al-Qaeda in Iraq, employed what he called "collaborative warfare," using every tool available simultaneously, from signal intercepts to human intelligence and other methods, that allowed lightning-quick and sometimes concurrent operations.
Asked in an interview about the intelligence breakthroughs in Iraq, President Bush offered a simple answer: "JSOC is awesome."
It would seem to me that “the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government” had been deployed in Iraq to battle the insurgency from the beginning, and the U.S. military have been eavesdropping, bribing, and strongarming the locals in order to improve its tactical position in raids from Day One.
What probably made special operations so “awesome” in 2007 was the employment, coordination, and organization of these “techniques and information” in the service of a unified, strategic, and pro-active policy of targeted killings to decapitate and disrupt the opposition to the occupation.
In other words, death squads. Calling them “targeted killings” looks like a distinction without much of a difference. And “special operations” is just a euphemism.
And I guess we’ll just have to take General Petraeus’s word for it that there was some kind of vetting and due process, that people were not improperly killed because of those death squad doppelgangers, greedy and grudge-holding informants, that non-violent opponents of the occupation weren’t targeted as a matter of COIN doctrine, and that “collateral damage” was accidental, avoided when at all possible, and not used as a tool to intimidate the local populace into turning against the insurgents.
We’ll have to take his word for it as far as Iraq goes, anyway.
In Afghanistan, things are a little different. We’re not doing too well there, and the Karzai government is often willing to present its own version of U.S. operations.
Yesterday President Karzai went on record deploring an incompetently targeted tactical kinetic operation that apparently killed 40 people--including two dozen children--when U.S. warplanes accidentally bombed a wedding party while trying to put paid to some fleeing Taliban militants nearby.
And in Pakistan, things are a lot different. Everybody there hates what we’re doing, the independent media aggressively reports U.S. operations, and the government leaks like a sieve. And in the middle of this we’re trying to mount a successful death squad campaign 1) across borders and 2) remotely, using drones and 3) trying not to kill so many civilians that the Pakistan government moves beyond toothless protests to actual opposition to the incursions.
Perhaps not a recipe for success. But we’re certainly trying. And General Petraeus is on board.
In recent weeks, Pakistan’s western tribal areas have been subjected to a flurry of U.S. Predator drone attacks targeting al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. According to the Washington Post, since August there have been 18 attacks, which have killed over 100 people.
The Washington Post article further reported on an interesting development, one that maybe puts some flesh on those “most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government,” in the context of the most recent strike, which killed up to 19 people in North Waziristan:
Brig. Gen. Mahmood Shah, former longtime head of government security in the tribal areas, said the missile attacks have become notably more precise, leading some to believe that local tribesman in the border areas are supplying the U.S. military with better information about potential targets.
Shah said rumors about so-called U.S. spies among the tribes have fed paranoia about potential small-scale spying devices being deployed in local villages. Called "patri" by the locals in the dominant language of Pashto, tribesmen have lately made a habit of constantly sweeping the areas around their homes for any signaling devices, he said.
"They're not sitting outside in their compounds anymore because they are afraid that they will be struck by these missiles," Shah said. "These people have their own enmity between each other so there is a fear that they could just throw one of these chips or devices into their enemy's house."
The take in yesterday’s attack, according to an unnamed Pakistan intelligence officer: four foreign fighters killed out of a total of up to 19 dead (the Washington Post headline led with the more comforting but unsourced statement that only 12 people had died in the attack, giving a more acceptable collateral damage to bad guy ratio of 3:1).
And Pakistan can expect more of the same, according to newly minted CENTCOM chief General Petraeus, who was just in Islamabad (also from the Washington Post article):
U.S. Gen. David H. Petraeus said during a visit to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad this week that he would heed the Pakistani government's concerns about the U.S.-led, cross-border strikes. But during a subsequent visit to Afghanistan this week, Petraeus touted the success of such attacks in eliminating top Taliban commanders. He has made no express promise to end the missile strikes.
During an interview with AP in Afghanistan reported by Pakistan’s Daily Times, General Petraeus’ irony detector was perhaps off-line when he talked about:
[C]onfronting the extremists who have turned what used to be fairly peaceful areas into strongholds for individuals who . . . believe that they have the right to blow up other people who do not see the world the way they do.”
Death squads are inseparable from counter-insurgency. If we’re going to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan (and take the battle to Pakistan) we should get used to them. And we shouldn’t let General Petraeus—or his willingness to pander to our desire to distract ourselves with hearts and minds fables of counterinsurgency --shield us from the truth.
To civilian liberals of a hawkish bent, General Petraeus projects the reassuring image of the thinking person’s general. It’s kind of hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that operating death squads might be an integral—and perhaps the vital—component of the vaunted Petraeus doctrine of counterinsurgency. Or that death squads will probably continue to play a central role in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan under an Obama administration.
As his adoring Wikipedia biography relates, General Petraeus is quite the intellectual:
Petraeus was the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College—class of 1983. He subsequently earned a M.P.A. degree (1985) and a Ph.D. degree (1987) in International Relations from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He later served as Assistant Professor of International Relations at the U.S. Military Academy and also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University. He has a BS from the U.S. Military Academy—class of 1974—from which he graduated as a distinguished cadet (top 5% of his class).
For twenty years, Petraeus climbed the ladder with a series of staff assignments. From 1991 to 1993, a lieutenant colonel, he got his command ticket punched by leading a regiment and later a battalion of the 101st Airborne, before returning to staff work.
In an indication of the indignities that prolonged peace can inflict on military biography, Wikipedia had to make do with this example of courage and tenacity under fire:
As battalion commander of the Iron Rakkasans [nickname for the 187th Infantry Regiment of the 101st’s 3rd Battalion; comes from a mangling of the Japanese word for “paratrooper”—ed], he suffered one of the more dramatic incidents in his career when, in 1991, he was accidentally shot in the chest during a live-fire exercise when a soldier tripped and his rifle discharged. He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, where he was operated on by future U.S. Senator Bill Frist. The hospital released him early after he did fifty push ups without resting, just a few days after the accident.
Combat experience finally came in 2003 when, as Major General, Petraeus commanded the 101st Airborne during the invasion of Iraq and settled in to occupy the Ninawa Governate and its chief city, Mosul, in northwest Iraq.
Petraeus treasured his credentials as the enlightened counterinsurgency expert—and the rational, astute military man culturally at ease with civilians and civilian leadership--and assiduously cultivated the mainstream media. His diligence was rewarded:
An often-repeated story of Petraeus's time with the 101st is his asking of embedded Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson to "Tell me how this ends," an anecdote he and other journalists have used to portray Petraeus as an early recognizer of the difficulties that would follow the fall of Baghdad…[Petraeus] was "prepared to act while the civilian authority in Baghdad was still getting organized," according to Michael Gordon of The New York Times. Some Iraqis gave Petraeus the nickname 'King David', which was later adopted by some of his colleagues. Newsweek has stated that "It's widely accepted that no force worked harder to win Iraqi hearts and minds than the 101st Air Assault Division led by Petraeus."
Before we bid adieu to General Petraeus’ Wikipedia entry, we should unpack the description of his signature success—the pacification of Mosul during the occupation:
In Mosul, a city of nearly two million people, Petraeus and the 101st employed classic counterinsurgency methods to build security and stability, including conducting targeted kinetic operations and using force judiciously, jump-starting the economy, building local security forces, staging elections for the city council within weeks of their arrival, overseeing a program of public works, reinvigorating the political process, and launching 4,500 reconstruction projects.
The traditional preoccupation of the military—killing people and blowing stuff up—is recast as “targeted kinetic operations and using force judiciously”. It makes military operations sound more like policework than fighting, and only one of six equally important ingredients in the appetizing and nutritionally well-balanced COIN salad.
This sort of verbiage is important.
In the United States, there is a powerful compulsion to shoehorn warmaking into the ranks of admirable activities conducted by good people with fine minds. General Petraeus fulfills an important need, especially for the responsible-liberal quadrant of the commentariat and the incoming Obama administration which, I imagine, will be staffed by Ivy League intellectuals and not be chock-a-block with blood and thunder military types.
For the United States to put up with occupations and COIN/pacification operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that may go on for more than a decade, the public needs to believe that the occupation is some kind of combination of FDR’s New Deal and the superhero Justice League, using American know-how and values to continually improve the economic and security well-being of the peoples in our care.
However, in real life, occupation and counter-insurgency are a nasty, degrading, and bloody business. Commanders in a hostile land far from home, intent on protecting their own forces, aren’t always using a surgical scalpel to extract the tumor of insurgency. Sometimes the meat axe is swung indiscriminately, slaughtering patient and bystanders alike.
And the proper description of “targeted kinetic activity” is, perhaps, “death squad”.
According to Bob Woodward’s most recent book, The War Within, the activities of death squads in Iraq was one of the key factors in the reduction of violence under General Petraeus’s watch as commander of the Multi-National Force-Iraq:
Beginning in the late spring of 2007, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies launched a series of top-secret operations that enabled them to locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups. The operations incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government.
Senior military officers and officials at the White House urged against publishing details or code names associated with the groundbreaking programs, arguing that publication of the names alone might harm the operations that have been so beneficial in Iraq. As a result, specific operational details have been omitted in this report and in "The War Within."
But a number of authoritative sources say the covert activities had a far-reaching effect on the violence and were very possibly the biggest factor in reducing it. Several said that 85 to 90 percent of the successful operations and "actionable intelligence" had come from the new sources, methods and operations. Several others said that figure was exaggerated but acknowledged their significance.
Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) responsible for hunting al-Qaeda in Iraq, employed what he called "collaborative warfare," using every tool available simultaneously, from signal intercepts to human intelligence and other methods, that allowed lightning-quick and sometimes concurrent operations.
Asked in an interview about the intelligence breakthroughs in Iraq, President Bush offered a simple answer: "JSOC is awesome."
It would seem to me that “the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government” had been deployed in Iraq to battle the insurgency from the beginning, and the U.S. military have been eavesdropping, bribing, and strongarming the locals in order to improve its tactical position in raids from Day One.
What probably made special operations so “awesome” in 2007 was the employment, coordination, and organization of these “techniques and information” in the service of a unified, strategic, and pro-active policy of targeted killings to decapitate and disrupt the opposition to the occupation.
In other words, death squads. Calling them “targeted killings” looks like a distinction without much of a difference. And “special operations” is just a euphemism.
And I guess we’ll just have to take General Petraeus’s word for it that there was some kind of vetting and due process, that people were not improperly killed because of those death squad doppelgangers, greedy and grudge-holding informants, that non-violent opponents of the occupation weren’t targeted as a matter of COIN doctrine, and that “collateral damage” was accidental, avoided when at all possible, and not used as a tool to intimidate the local populace into turning against the insurgents.
We’ll have to take his word for it as far as Iraq goes, anyway.
In Afghanistan, things are a little different. We’re not doing too well there, and the Karzai government is often willing to present its own version of U.S. operations.
Yesterday President Karzai went on record deploring an incompetently targeted tactical kinetic operation that apparently killed 40 people--including two dozen children--when U.S. warplanes accidentally bombed a wedding party while trying to put paid to some fleeing Taliban militants nearby.
And in Pakistan, things are a lot different. Everybody there hates what we’re doing, the independent media aggressively reports U.S. operations, and the government leaks like a sieve. And in the middle of this we’re trying to mount a successful death squad campaign 1) across borders and 2) remotely, using drones and 3) trying not to kill so many civilians that the Pakistan government moves beyond toothless protests to actual opposition to the incursions.
Perhaps not a recipe for success. But we’re certainly trying. And General Petraeus is on board.
In recent weeks, Pakistan’s western tribal areas have been subjected to a flurry of U.S. Predator drone attacks targeting al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. According to the Washington Post, since August there have been 18 attacks, which have killed over 100 people.
The Washington Post article further reported on an interesting development, one that maybe puts some flesh on those “most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government,” in the context of the most recent strike, which killed up to 19 people in North Waziristan:
Brig. Gen. Mahmood Shah, former longtime head of government security in the tribal areas, said the missile attacks have become notably more precise, leading some to believe that local tribesman in the border areas are supplying the U.S. military with better information about potential targets.
Shah said rumors about so-called U.S. spies among the tribes have fed paranoia about potential small-scale spying devices being deployed in local villages. Called "patri" by the locals in the dominant language of Pashto, tribesmen have lately made a habit of constantly sweeping the areas around their homes for any signaling devices, he said.
"They're not sitting outside in their compounds anymore because they are afraid that they will be struck by these missiles," Shah said. "These people have their own enmity between each other so there is a fear that they could just throw one of these chips or devices into their enemy's house."
The take in yesterday’s attack, according to an unnamed Pakistan intelligence officer: four foreign fighters killed out of a total of up to 19 dead (the Washington Post headline led with the more comforting but unsourced statement that only 12 people had died in the attack, giving a more acceptable collateral damage to bad guy ratio of 3:1).
And Pakistan can expect more of the same, according to newly minted CENTCOM chief General Petraeus, who was just in Islamabad (also from the Washington Post article):
U.S. Gen. David H. Petraeus said during a visit to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad this week that he would heed the Pakistani government's concerns about the U.S.-led, cross-border strikes. But during a subsequent visit to Afghanistan this week, Petraeus touted the success of such attacks in eliminating top Taliban commanders. He has made no express promise to end the missile strikes.
During an interview with AP in Afghanistan reported by Pakistan’s Daily Times, General Petraeus’ irony detector was perhaps off-line when he talked about:
[C]onfronting the extremists who have turned what used to be fairly peaceful areas into strongholds for individuals who . . . believe that they have the right to blow up other people who do not see the world the way they do.”
Death squads are inseparable from counter-insurgency. If we’re going to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan (and take the battle to Pakistan) we should get used to them. And we shouldn’t let General Petraeus—or his willingness to pander to our desire to distract ourselves with hearts and minds fables of counterinsurgency --shield us from the truth.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
The Afghan Shuffle
Barack Obama is acting presidential.
Via Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly blog Calpundit, we learn that Mr. Obama said this in a portion of an interview with Time’s Joe Klein entitled On negotiating with the Taliban:
"This is one useful lesson that is applicable from Iraq. The Sunni awakening changed the dynamic in Iraq fundamentally. It could not have occurred unless there were some contacts and intermediaries to peel off those who are tribal leaders, regional leaders, Sunni nationalists, from a more radical, messianic brand of insurgency. Whether there are those same opportunities in Afghanistan I think should be explored."
By “presidential”, I mean addressing issues as if he were president, as opposed to regurgitating campaign-ready talking points.
As I pointed out in The Coming Change of Course in Afghanistan, opening a negotiation track with the Afghan Taliban is pretty much a done deal. The facts on the ground don’t support a solely military solution, everybody else in NATO wants to open talks with the Taliban, General Petraeus is mobilizing opinion inside the U.S. to support negotiations, and the primary purpose of any surge of “two to three” brigades into Afghanistan (Senator Obama’s formula for success) would be to strengthen the West’s negotiating hand in power-sharing talks.
So, Senator Obama is not out of step with elite, in-the-know U.S. foreign policy and military opinion on Afghanistan.
However, this conciliatory consensus hasn’t filtered down to the American electorate yet.
Pne would think that, with less than two weeks to go in a presidential campaign with an increasingly desperate challenger, one might think that Senator Obama would stick with better-strong-than-wrong soundbites about how he wants bomb the mountains of eastern Afghanistan into a flat sheet of glass so he can go bowling for Taliban with Osama bin Laden’s skull.
But he didn’t. Interesting.
In another sign of the converging views and interests between the politician who is likely to become America’s next president and the powerful general who is in a position to provide him with vital national-security political cover, Senator Obama made a point of praising General Petraeus:
On General David Petraeus, with whom he has disagreed over Iraq policy:
I'm glad Petraeus is in CENTCOM ... I think he's ... not just an astute soldier, but I think he's somebody who cares about facts and cares about the reality on the ground. I don't think he comes at this with an ideological predisposition. That's one of the reasons I think he's been successful in moving the ball forward in Iraq. And I hope that he's applying that same perspective to what's happening in Afghanistan.
As to what’s actually happening on the ground, U.S. General McKiernan, commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, endorsed negotiations and was then forced to do an awkward tap dance around the question of Taliban Numero Uno and bin Laden buddy Mullah Omar:
Asked whether dealing with the man who harbored Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was beyond the pale, McKiernan said, "I think that's a political decision that will ultimately be made by political leadership."
Although General McKiernan is a U.S. general who certainly follows U.S.-agreed policy in his remarks, the news report was entitled NATO does not rule out Afghan talks with Taliban, avoiding the dread capitulationism of putting “United States” and “talks with Taliban” in the same headline.
The unspoken wild card here, of course, is that General McKiernan does not speak for the 20,000 or so U.S. and other troops operating in eastern Pakistan under U.S. Central Command—which will be headed by General Petraeus come October 31.
Even if U.S. and NATO political initiatives are coordinated and the West acquires a more relaxed attitude toward Islamic fundamentalism regaining political legitimacy within Afghanistan, it is difficult to imagine welcoming Mullah Omar back into the fold unless he gives up bin Laden.
Mullah Omar’s not likely to do that and, if he’s in firm control of the Taliban insurgency—which seems to be doing rather well—it will be difficult for the Karzai regime or the United States to make much headway with a political settlement.
If it turns out that the idea that the Taliban onion can be peeled away from Mullah Omar is a piece of reality-denying wishful thinking that does not reflect the facts on the ground, the United States will be in for continued difficult times.
More to the point, the people of Afghanistan and western Pakistan will be in for continued difficult times as the United States tries to gain the upper hand militarily in order to achieve a more favorable negotiating position.
Long War Journal, a website of embedded and sympathetic journalists that does a very good job of covering U.S. operations in Afghanistan, provided some interesting details on the October 22 U.S. drone attack inside Pakistan that killed quite a few people at a madrassa run by a key pro-al Qaeda tribal militant group:
"We want the Haqqanis to know we will hit them anywhere," a senior US military intelligence official told The Long War Journal after the Sept. 8 strike on the Haqqani madrassa. The Haqqanis work closely with al Qaeda as well as conduct strikes against Afghan and Coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The Manba Ulom madrassa was established by Jalaluddin Haqqani, the family patriarch who has close ties with Osama bin Laden. The madrassa was used in the 1980s to train mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Haqqani family used the Manba Ulom madrassa as a training center and meeting place for senior al Qaeda leaders after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Considering that the madrassa was a Western asset in the mujahideen war against the Soviets in the 1980s, CIA probably knows everything there is to know about this madrassa down to the number and size of latrines—heck, the CIA probably paid for and built the latrines--and the U.S. military had already attacked it before, in September of this year, it would seem unlikely that the madrassa is still used as a training center and meeting place for “high value assets”.
More likely, the U.S. military decided to plaster the madrassa once again regardless of its tactical value, either out of frustration (at that dangerous point where “hearts and minds” goes out the window and “these colors don’t run” bloody-mindedness becomes the order of the day), or because we need to increase the human and material cost of resistance to the most painful level possible as a bargaining chip when negotiations start.
This canny strategy, I believe, did not serve us particularly well when President Nixon ramped up the bombing campaign against North Vietnam in order to give the U.S. additional leverage at the Paris peace talks—and demonstrate to President Thieu America’s undying commitment to South Vietnam’s defense.
However, it did provide President Nixon with the political cover to extricate us from Vietnam.
Readers with a taste for irony will enjoy the Wikipedia account of Operation Linebacker II (over 700 B52s, 20,000 tons of bombs in eleven days; the biggest U.S. heavy bomber operation since the Second World War).
In the words of John Negroponte (!), a Kissinger aide at the time: "We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions."
It will be interesting to see how Senator Obama will play the Afghanistan endgame if he becomes president.
Via Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly blog Calpundit, we learn that Mr. Obama said this in a portion of an interview with Time’s Joe Klein entitled On negotiating with the Taliban:
"This is one useful lesson that is applicable from Iraq. The Sunni awakening changed the dynamic in Iraq fundamentally. It could not have occurred unless there were some contacts and intermediaries to peel off those who are tribal leaders, regional leaders, Sunni nationalists, from a more radical, messianic brand of insurgency. Whether there are those same opportunities in Afghanistan I think should be explored."
By “presidential”, I mean addressing issues as if he were president, as opposed to regurgitating campaign-ready talking points.
As I pointed out in The Coming Change of Course in Afghanistan, opening a negotiation track with the Afghan Taliban is pretty much a done deal. The facts on the ground don’t support a solely military solution, everybody else in NATO wants to open talks with the Taliban, General Petraeus is mobilizing opinion inside the U.S. to support negotiations, and the primary purpose of any surge of “two to three” brigades into Afghanistan (Senator Obama’s formula for success) would be to strengthen the West’s negotiating hand in power-sharing talks.
So, Senator Obama is not out of step with elite, in-the-know U.S. foreign policy and military opinion on Afghanistan.
However, this conciliatory consensus hasn’t filtered down to the American electorate yet.
Pne would think that, with less than two weeks to go in a presidential campaign with an increasingly desperate challenger, one might think that Senator Obama would stick with better-strong-than-wrong soundbites about how he wants bomb the mountains of eastern Afghanistan into a flat sheet of glass so he can go bowling for Taliban with Osama bin Laden’s skull.
But he didn’t. Interesting.
In another sign of the converging views and interests between the politician who is likely to become America’s next president and the powerful general who is in a position to provide him with vital national-security political cover, Senator Obama made a point of praising General Petraeus:
On General David Petraeus, with whom he has disagreed over Iraq policy:
I'm glad Petraeus is in CENTCOM ... I think he's ... not just an astute soldier, but I think he's somebody who cares about facts and cares about the reality on the ground. I don't think he comes at this with an ideological predisposition. That's one of the reasons I think he's been successful in moving the ball forward in Iraq. And I hope that he's applying that same perspective to what's happening in Afghanistan.
As to what’s actually happening on the ground, U.S. General McKiernan, commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, endorsed negotiations and was then forced to do an awkward tap dance around the question of Taliban Numero Uno and bin Laden buddy Mullah Omar:
Asked whether dealing with the man who harbored Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was beyond the pale, McKiernan said, "I think that's a political decision that will ultimately be made by political leadership."
Although General McKiernan is a U.S. general who certainly follows U.S.-agreed policy in his remarks, the news report was entitled NATO does not rule out Afghan talks with Taliban, avoiding the dread capitulationism of putting “United States” and “talks with Taliban” in the same headline.
The unspoken wild card here, of course, is that General McKiernan does not speak for the 20,000 or so U.S. and other troops operating in eastern Pakistan under U.S. Central Command—which will be headed by General Petraeus come October 31.
Even if U.S. and NATO political initiatives are coordinated and the West acquires a more relaxed attitude toward Islamic fundamentalism regaining political legitimacy within Afghanistan, it is difficult to imagine welcoming Mullah Omar back into the fold unless he gives up bin Laden.
Mullah Omar’s not likely to do that and, if he’s in firm control of the Taliban insurgency—which seems to be doing rather well—it will be difficult for the Karzai regime or the United States to make much headway with a political settlement.
If it turns out that the idea that the Taliban onion can be peeled away from Mullah Omar is a piece of reality-denying wishful thinking that does not reflect the facts on the ground, the United States will be in for continued difficult times.
More to the point, the people of Afghanistan and western Pakistan will be in for continued difficult times as the United States tries to gain the upper hand militarily in order to achieve a more favorable negotiating position.
Long War Journal, a website of embedded and sympathetic journalists that does a very good job of covering U.S. operations in Afghanistan, provided some interesting details on the October 22 U.S. drone attack inside Pakistan that killed quite a few people at a madrassa run by a key pro-al Qaeda tribal militant group:
"We want the Haqqanis to know we will hit them anywhere," a senior US military intelligence official told The Long War Journal after the Sept. 8 strike on the Haqqani madrassa. The Haqqanis work closely with al Qaeda as well as conduct strikes against Afghan and Coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The Manba Ulom madrassa was established by Jalaluddin Haqqani, the family patriarch who has close ties with Osama bin Laden. The madrassa was used in the 1980s to train mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Haqqani family used the Manba Ulom madrassa as a training center and meeting place for senior al Qaeda leaders after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Considering that the madrassa was a Western asset in the mujahideen war against the Soviets in the 1980s, CIA probably knows everything there is to know about this madrassa down to the number and size of latrines—heck, the CIA probably paid for and built the latrines--and the U.S. military had already attacked it before, in September of this year, it would seem unlikely that the madrassa is still used as a training center and meeting place for “high value assets”.
More likely, the U.S. military decided to plaster the madrassa once again regardless of its tactical value, either out of frustration (at that dangerous point where “hearts and minds” goes out the window and “these colors don’t run” bloody-mindedness becomes the order of the day), or because we need to increase the human and material cost of resistance to the most painful level possible as a bargaining chip when negotiations start.
This canny strategy, I believe, did not serve us particularly well when President Nixon ramped up the bombing campaign against North Vietnam in order to give the U.S. additional leverage at the Paris peace talks—and demonstrate to President Thieu America’s undying commitment to South Vietnam’s defense.
However, it did provide President Nixon with the political cover to extricate us from Vietnam.
Readers with a taste for irony will enjoy the Wikipedia account of Operation Linebacker II (over 700 B52s, 20,000 tons of bombs in eleven days; the biggest U.S. heavy bomber operation since the Second World War).
In the words of John Negroponte (!), a Kissinger aide at the time: "We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions."
It will be interesting to see how Senator Obama will play the Afghanistan endgame if he becomes president.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
The Coming Change of Course in Afghanistan
I have a piece up at Japan Focus, The Coming Change of Course in Afghanistan, concerning the broad expert and international consensus concerning the need to engage with Afghanistan’s Taliban politically and negotiate some kind of settlement to end the fighting.
The American public will apparently be the last to know, since the Afghan war is our “Good War” and is inextricably linked in our minds with the hunt for bin Laden. Presumptive president Obama has already loudly proclaimed his determination to man up with two or three more brigades over there to reverse the slide in the military situation.
However, General Petraeus is already rallying his Powerpoint warriors to convince the incoming administration and
Indeed, negotiations with the Taliban are already going on.
Not just in clandestine meetings in
Also inside
International Peace Day, September 21, was marked in
Medics with polio vaccinations pushed into some of Afghanistan's most volatile provinces on the United Nations' Peace Day Sunday with a Taliban pledge they should not be harmed during the three-day drive.
The Taliban had also agreed to not carry out any attacks on Peace Day following a call from President Hamid Karzai that resulted in the Afghan and international military forces agreeing to refrain from offensive operations. . . .
The Taliban said Saturday it had ordered its followers to allow the vaccinators safe access to their areas. They had copies of a letter from the group's leadership asking for them to be unharmed, [WHO representative Peter] Graaff said.
In a further sign that the international community sees Taliban political and military strength as signs of a significant domestic insurgency that can and must be negotiated with, and no longer through the lens of the American Global War on Terror (GWOT) as a target for utter annihilation, the UN’s envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide also gave a cringing shout-out on the UN website to the Taliban to help the UN deliver humanitarian aid in significant swaths of the country in which the Karzai writ apparently runs not:
“I will take this opportunity to appeal to the Taliban and to appeal to its leaders to ensure access for food distribution and to expand the humanitarian agenda that we should share,” he said. “There are disagreements on so many things – but let us demonstrate that we can share this humanitarian agenda.”
The piece also includes a discussion of the continuing deterioration of Pakistan’s strategic position in South Asia, including the remarkable inroads that India--with the support of the United States and the Karzai regime—have been able to make in 99% Muslim Afghanistan.
Geo-wonks will find much of interest in my discussion (with maps!) of determined attempts by
Afghanistan now has an alternate route to the sea, via the recently completed Delaram-Zaranj highway to the Iranian border, built and paid for by the Indian government (and protected against relentless Taliban attacks by Indian troops!), linking the major Afghan cities to the Iranian port of Chabahar.
The ability of
When one looks at the marked unwillingness of the so-called “Friends of Pakistan” assistance group to provide meaningful aid to Islamabad during its current financial crisis, one has to wonder if the U.S. strategy isn’t to let the civilian government fall to pieces and cultivate a new military strongman to assume direction of the country and the effort against the Pakistan and Afghanistan Taliban.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)