The Narrowness Of The Afghan Debate

The White House, a day after stating that the only part of Afghanistan war policy off the table is ending it, is throwing up a trial balloon that they will pull back on their nation-building project there:

President Obama’s national security team is moving to reframe its war strategy by emphasizing the campaign against Al Qaeda in Pakistan while arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States, officials said Wednesday.

As Mr. Obama met with advisers for three hours to discuss Pakistan, the White House said he had not decided whether to approve a proposed troop buildup in Afghanistan. But the shift in thinking, outlined by senior administration officials on Wednesday, suggests that the president has been presented with an approach that would not require all of the additional troops that his commanding general in the region has requested.

It remains unclear whether everyone in Mr. Obama’s war cabinet fully accepts this view. While Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has argued for months against increasing troops in Afghanistan because Pakistan was the greater priority, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have both warned that the Taliban remain linked to Al Qaeda and would give their fighters havens again if the Taliban regained control of all or large parts of Afghanistan, making it a mistake to think of them as separate problems [...]

The White House appears to be trying to prepare the ground to counter that by focusing attention on recent successes against Qaeda cells in Pakistan. The approach described by administration officials on Wednesday amounted to an alternative to the analysis presented by General McChrystal. If, as the White House has asserted in recent weeks, it has improved the ability of the United States to reduce the threat from Al Qaeda, then the war in Afghanistan is less central to American security.

I'm glad that there's at least some pushback on the silly "safe havens" theory, which if allowed to predominate would lead us down a road of endless escalation. So scaling back the mission from one that is simply unachievable to a more achievable one makes sense. The counter-insurgency cult is quite dangerous. The best you can say about it is that it keeps warmongers away from an anti-China defense buildup.

Joking aside, it’s worth keeping in mind when you see arguments about counterinsurgency that there are really two different debates happening. One is the debate inside the military and the defense policy establishment which is really a debate about COIN versus non-COIN military activity. Another is a debate about that pertains to the larger question of the strategic and budgetary priorities of the United States. In my experience COIN enthusiasts tend to have the better of the limited argument about the relative allocation of military resources, but generally decline to engage in a serious way with the larger question of national priorities. In other words, a debate that ranges from “we should fight a series of small wars against Muslims” to “we should prepare for a big war against China” is really seen as “lively” rather than incredibly cramped and narrow.

Perhaps policymakers are coming to their senses about COIN, but not about the overall need to disengage from pointless wars. But they should. New liberal hero Alan Grayson, who's been saying this stuff for a while, effectively articulated the alternative the other day:

"I think that the aid program is a fig leaf trying to make congress and the American people feel better about the war and about killing. I think that diplomacy in the areas of fig leaf to try to make the American people think that there is some constructive alternative to the war when the war itself is destructive and not constructive [...]

If we wanted to rethink Afghanistan in our image, we’d have to destroy the north to save it, and I don’t think the American people are ever going to do that to anybody. So I think that the underline premise is simply wrong.

I’ve been to 175 countries all around the world including Afghanistan, including every country in that region, and what I’ve seen everywhere I go is that there are some commonalities everywhere you go, everywhere you go people want to fall in love. It’s an interesting thing. Everywhere you go, people love children. Everywhere, they love children. Everywhere you go, there’s a taboo against violence. Every single place you go. And everywhere you go, people want to be left alone. And that’s the best foreign policy of all. Just to leave people alone."

President Obama is holding a troop request in his hands and deciding between a big escalation or a small escalation. Nowhere is there a strategy for no escalation, to shut it down, in the words of Charlie Wilson, the original American interventionist in Afghanistan.

Bringing Afghanistan Back To Core Strategy

Yesterday's big bipartisan meeting on Afghanistan hasn't resolved the decision from the White House, although it clarified a few data points:

House and Senate leaders of both parties emerged from a nearly 90-minute conversation with Obama with praise for his candor and interest in listening. But politically speaking, all sides appeared to exit where they entered, with Republicans pushing Obama to follow his military commanders and Democrats saying he should not be rushed [...]

Obama said the war would not be reduced to a narrowly defined counterterrorism effort, with the withdrawal of many U.S. forces and an emphasis on special operations forces that target terrorists in the dangerous border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Two senior administration officials aides say such a scenario has been inaccurately characterized and linked to Vice President Joe Biden, and that Obama wanted to make clear he is considering no such plan [...]

Obama may be considering a more modest building of troops — closer to 10,000 than 40,000 — according to Republican and Democratic congressional aides. But White House aides said no such decision has been made.

The New York Times confirms this. This seems to almost be the worst possible option. If you're continuing a counter-insurgency strategy, all of the literature on it dictates that it needs a certain amount of resources far greater than what exist in the country now. If you're shifting to counter-terrorism, you would necessarily need less ground troops. This just seems like a recipe for muddling through, and shifting really to the same kind of air war that we saw under George Bush. I know there's data that the drone attacks are working to disrupt Al Qaeda in Pakistan, but an air war in more populous areas, where the Taliban is essentially embedded with local populations, doesn't seem like a useful option.

This Quinnipiac poll has fairly good news for advocates of muddling through. While only 30% want to stay in Afghanistan "as long as it takes," 65% are willing to have soldiers fight there, at least for the moment. A plurality believe that the fight will not be successful in defeating any terrorist threat, however. So it's muddled as well. I think there's a base of support for antiwar actions, but that voice has been stilled for so long that I'd say the mass of the public is generally resigned to a seeming perpetual war, and will accept whatever decision the President makes.

It doesn't seem like Obama is seeking out voices apart from Congress and his staff of advisors. You know who he should ring up? Audrey Kurth Cronin from the US National War College, who is focusing on the core question of how the terrorist threat can be reduced.

The history of terrorist groups points to various ways they may decline and end: the destruction of leadership, failure to transition between generations, achieving their stated cause, negotiating a settlement, succumbing to military or police repression, losing popular support and transitioning to other malignant activities such as criminality or war [...]

American use of military force signified Western resolve, killed al Qaeda leaders and prevented attacks, all of which were vital; but force alone cannot drive this group to its end.

A loss of popular support has ended many terrorist groups, and it is a plausible scenario for al Qaeda. Support can be compromised through miscalculation, especially in targeting, and popular backlash. The Real Irish Republican Army and India's Sikh separatists come to mind. Or a campaign can fail to convey a positive image or progress toward its goals, which amply applies to al Qaeda.

While the group continues to be dangerous, the faltering popularity of this campaign with most Muslims provides clear evidence of this dynamic underway [...]

In this regard, it is counterproductive to consider al Qaeda as a global insurgency. This concept bestows legitimacy, emphasizes territorial control, encourages our enemies to join forces and puts the United States into an us-versus-them strategic framework that precludes clear-eyed analyses of the strategies of leverage that are being used against the United States and its allies.

In short, if we are thinking about classic pathways to the end, the secret to undermining this campaign is not "winning hearts and minds" but enhancing al Qaeda's tendency to lose them.

I read this to mean that the dynamic of military force to subdue the Al Qaeda threat is misplaced. They are diminishing of their own accord and we can accelerate that through strategic engagement and public diplomacy with the Muslim world. Obama has a foothold here - his presence has actually lifted the status of the United States to the world's most admired country again. But that can be fleeting. And intensifying a war in the Muslim world will sap at that goodwill. We can use intelligence capabilities to weaken Al Qaeda and allow their extremist rhetoric to play itself out among their constituency. None of this necessarily involves nation-building.

I don't think this framework is part of the discussions in the White House at all. And that's tragic.

Meetings On Endless War

The President abruptly summoned Congressional leaders in both parties to the White House for a meeting tomorrow about Afghanistan. This is the first bipartisan White House meeting in months, and considering that Republicans support the war far more strongly than Democrats, that stands to reason.

The White House does want everyone to know that they're not leaving, however.

Obama may take weeks to decide whether to add more troops, but the idea of pulling out isn't on the table as a way to deal with a war nearing its ninth year, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

"I don't think we have the option to leave. That's quite clear," Gibbs said.

Of course we can't leave. We can't seem to leave anywhere. US troops still live in Germany and Japan and Korea. America is the house guest that overstays its welcome by 50-60 years.

Maybe instead of the Congresscritters, Obama could invite Peter Galbraith to the meeting. He was the UN official who witnessed the fraudulent Afghan election and got fired for having the temerity to want to address the situation realistically instead of handing the country to Hamid Karzai. Maybe lawmakers could benefit from his experience in the country. He certainly has some settled views:

GALBRAITH: In the absence of having a credible Afghan partner…it makes no sense to ramp up. On the other hand we cannot afford to pull out. … At this point, no surge. … [W]e also don’t have unlimited resources and unless those troops can secure an area in a way that then Afghan partners, the government, the Afghan army, the Afghan police can come in and fill in after them, we’re going to be there as an occupying force for a very long time and that to me doesn’t make sense [...]

Unfortunately, there is no analogy between what happened in Iraq and what’s going on in Afghanistan. In Iraq in the Sunni areas of the country, the al Qaeda element, the fundamentalists, moved from attacking the Shiites to attacking the tribal sheiks themselves so this was a matter of their self-defense.

In Afghanistan the tribal elders, many of them are supporting the Taliban, they are the Taliban or and this is the more common situation, they are neutral. They see no reason to choose a government which they experience as inexperienced, corrupted and abusing power.

Galbraith isn't advocating an immediate withdrawal, but his logic inevitably leads you to the conclusion that we cannot have an open-ended commitment to fight a war where we have no partner to defend.

Rep. Barbara Lee has introduced a bill to block the escalation. It's HR 3699. There's one problem, however:

However, something she told me at the meeting yesterday put me on DefCon-5 alert. The House has already passed (with Lee in opposition of course)-- and the Senate is considering-- a bill that will exempt Department of Defense from coming under the budgetary pay-go strictures. Let me explain why that is so dangerous for those eager to end the deadly and catastrophic U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

Bush funded his wars with supplemental budgets which meant he just printed money-- trillions of dollars-- to pay for them without having to worry about raising taxes (on current voters) or about cutting services directly. One result has been the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Obama campaigned on a promise not use supplemental budgets but to ask Congress for money through established budgetary procedures. That would kick in pay-go and a member of Congress voting for funds to escalate expensive occupations of other countries would have to agree to either raise taxes on his or her constituents-- what do you think Boehner, Cantor, Pence, Ryan and other leading GOP warmongers will think of that?-- or cut back on social programs, a prospect none too attractive to many of the conservative and moderate Democrats who have gone along with Bush's outrageous supplemental budgeting and are thereby complicit in the economic disaster that has ensued.

I really thought "pay-go" was our ace-in-the-hole to stop the war in Afghanistan. Not even a political thug like Rahm Emanuel could bully and bribe enough Democrats and Republicans to go for this, especially not at a point when the war is as increasingly unpopular as it is. If the Senate doesn't kill the legislation that the House passed, it is, in effect, a vote for a war that will last until Obama is voted out of office.

It's not surprising that Congress would willingly constrain itself when it comes to helping provide health care to all or strengthen the social safety net for the needy, but has no problem waiving those constraints when it comes to permanent war and occupation. This is just dangerous. The money will inevitably flow to war as a kind of stimulus package. It's got to be stopped.

Another Cheney, Another Kagan

Liz Cheney's father basically presided over the biggest mess of a Presidency in American history. So of course, she's lionized as a real up-and-comer in Republican politics. That's because she tells the crowd what they want to hear - for example, the glories of torture:

“Mr. President, in a ticking time-bomb scenario, with American lives at stake,” she said, “are you really unwilling to subject a terrorist to enhanced interrogation to get information that would prevent an attack?”

By speech’s end, the crowd was standing, and the former vice president’s daughter was being mobbed for photos and hounded to run for office.

For this, she's called "one of the fresh faces of our movement" by one sycophant. It's somewhat appalling to see torture used as an applause line.

But that's the party out of power. I'm not really concerned how unmoored from reality they have become. It's far more disturbing that another neocon scion, in this case Fred Kagan, is personally advising the top general in Afghanistan during the Obama Administration.

It had been reported that Kagan and his wife, military historian Kimberly Kagan, were part of the group that advised McChrystal on the high-profile assessment that warns of "mission failure" if more troops are not sent. But it wasn't previously known that Kagan's work with McChrystal extended beyond the review.

It's striking that Kagan, who writes for the Weekly Standard, guest blogs at National Review, and advised the Bush Administration on Iraq, is now advising President Obama's top commander in Afghanistan.

A McChrystal spokesman said that the commander gets a lot of information, but his troop request for Afghanistan lines up PERFECTLY with Kagan's escalation numbers in a recent WaPo op-ed. And the truth is that the foreign policy establishment is littered with groupthink, and whether it's Brookings or AEI or CNAS or whatever other think tank, all of official Washington wants to send 40,000 or so more American men and women halfway around the world to fight.

As much as we get angry that a Liz Cheney can rise through the ranks in Washington, it's more the norm than anything out of the ordinary.

Days Of Decision

The McChrystal request for more troops in Afghanistan is reportedly as much as 45,000. It's now on a shelf at the Pentagon as deliberations continue in the White House on reviewing the overall strategy. Obama has no scheduled events today. That could be in observation of Yom Kippur (Emanuel and Axelrod are certainly indisposed today), but what's also likely is a day of internal discussion over the way forward in Afghanistan. The President has reached beyond his circle of advisors and even to Colin Powell in making this decision.

The competing advice and concerns fuel a pivotal struggle to shape the president’s thinking about a war that he inherited but may come to define his tenure. Among the most important outside voices has been that of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired four-star Army general, who visited Mr. Obama in the Oval Office this month and expressed skepticism that more troops would guarantee success. According to people briefed on the discussion, Mr. Powell reminded the president of his longstanding view that military missions should be clearly defined.

Mr. Powell is one of the three people outside the administration, along with Senator John F. Kerry and Senator Jack Reed, considered by White House aides to be most influential in this current debate. All have expressed varying degrees of doubt about the wisdom of sending more forces to Afghanistan.

Mr. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has warned of repeating the mistakes of Vietnam, where he served, and has floated the idea of a more limited counterterrorist mission. Mr. Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and an Army veteran, has not ruled out supporting more troops but said “the burden of proof” was on commanders to justify it.

In the West Wing, beyond Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has advocated an alternative strategy to the troop buildup, other presidential advisers sound dubious about more troops, including Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, and Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, according to people who have spoken with them. At the same time, Mr. Obama is also hearing from more hawkish figures, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Even inside the Pentagon, opinions are mixed as to whether more troops will make a difference.

The assumption of the hawks, that allowing Afghanistan to fall to the Taliban will automatically signal a return of Al Qaeda into the country in a safe haven, reminds me of the domino theory - speculative, ignorant of the local dynamic, based on scant evidence. James Jones, the national security advisor, seemed to dismiss it the other day. While Al Qaeda's presence in the border region hasn't been wasy, with drone strikes and other pressures, the severe anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, such that the government is openly hindering government visa requests and de facto protecting Al Qaeda, suggests that they are much more comfortable where they are than moving back into Afghanistan, where the Taliban suffered decapitation the last time they gave them harbor, are not as ideologically aligned with them this time around and would be wary of entering into the same agreement. Notwithstanding the argument that "safe havens" in host countries are unnecessary for a plot to be carried off in, for example, Denver and Queens, or for core leadership to gravitate to North Africa or some other area. An Afghanistan-centered strategy, in this context, seems foolish.

I think the linchpin of all of this is Joe Biden. He was maybe the pre-eminent humanitarian interventionist in the Democratic Party for a long time, until coming up against Afghanistan and recognizing that the nation-building effort had no partner and was doomed to failure. It's the personal meetings between Biden and Hamid Karzai that appear to have soured him on the whole project and shift to a counter-terrorism focus:

Nothing shook his faith quite as much as what you might call the Karzai dinners. The first occurred in February 2008, during a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan that Biden took with fellow senators John Kerry and Chuck Hagel. Dining on platters of rice and lamb at the heavily fortified presidential palace in Kabul, Biden and his colleagues grilled Karzai about reports of corruption and the growing opium trade in the country, which the president disingenuously denied. An increasingly impatient Biden challenged Karzai's assertions until he lost his temper. Biden finally stood up and threw down his napkin, declaring, "This meeting is over," before he marched out of the room with Hagel and Kerry. It was a similar story nearly a year later. As Obama prepared to assume the presidency in January, he dispatched Biden on a regional fact-finding trip. Again Biden dined with Karzai, and, again, the meeting was contentious. Reiterating his prior complaints about corruption, Biden warned Karzai that the Bush administration's kid-glove treatment was over; the new team would demand more of him.

Biden's revised view of Karzai was pivotal. Whereas he had once felt that, with sufficient U.S. support, Afghanistan could be stabilized, now he wasn't so sure. "He's aware that a basic rule of counterinsurgency is that you need a reliable local partner," says one person who has worked with Biden in the past. The trip also left Biden wondering about the clarity of America's mission. At the White House, he told colleagues that "if you asked ten different U.S. officials in that country what their mission was, you'd get ten different answers," according to a senior White House aide. He was also growing increasingly concerned about the fate of Pakistan. Biden has been troubled by the overwhelmingly disproportionate allocation of U.S. resources to Afghanistan in comparison to Pakistan, a ratio one administration official measures as 30:1. Indeed, before leaving the Senate last year, Biden authored legislation that would triple U.S. non-military aid to Islamabad to $1.5 billion per year. (House-Senate bickering has tied up the plan for months, and Biden has recently been working the phones to broker a compromise.)

Actually, that tripling of aid for Pakistan passed the Senate unanimously this past week.

Biden actually lost this fight the first time around to the hawks, but the futility of the fraudulent election has brought things into a different view. And yet the White House and other NATO members feel obliged to actually support Karzai, mainly because of his ethnicity (a Tajik like Abdullah Abdullah would lose the Pashto-dominated country quickly). Just writing a sentence like that leads to the conclusion that building a stable government here is impossible.

Frank Rich looks at the deliberations in the White House through the prism of the Vietnam era and the release of a new book detailing that policymaking:

George Stephanopoulos reported that the new “must-read book” for President Obama’s war team is “Lessons in Disaster” by Gordon M. Goldstein, a foreign-policy scholar who had collaborated with McGeorge Bundy, the Kennedy-Johnson national security adviser, on writing a Robert McNamara-style mea culpa about his role as an architect of the Vietnam War.

Bundy left his memoir unfinished at his death in 1996. Goldstein’s book, drawn from Bundy’s ruminations and deep new research, is full of fresh information on how the best and the brightest led America into the fiasco. “Lessons in Disaster” caused only a modest stir when published in November, but The Times Book Review cheered it as “an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans.” The reviewer was, of all people, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began in Vietnam and who would later be charged with the Afghanistan-Pakistan crisis by the new Obama administration [...]

As Goldstein said to me last week, it’s “eerie” how closely even these political maneuvers track those of a half-century ago, when J.F.K. was weighing whether to send combat troops to Vietnam. Military leaders lobbied for their new mission by planting leaks in the press. Kennedy fired back by authorizing his own leaks, which, like Obama’s, indicated his reservations about whether American combat forces could turn a counterinsurgency strategy into a winnable war.

We shall know the outcome of these days of decision within weeks. Obama has a responsibility, not to rubber-stamp the views of Washington hawks and counter-insurgency lovers, but to outline the best possible policy for the future. I don't see how committing 100,000-plus troops to Afghanistan for five years or more, to defend an illegitimate government, to fight an invisible enemy, fits with that mandate.

MoveOn Joins The Fray

The big progressive groups hadn't yet spoken on the question of escalation in Afghanistan - their silence was pronounced. MoveOn finally broke that silence today, appealing to the President to commit to a clear exit strategy. It's a pretty big step.

U.S. policy in Afghanistan has reached a pivotal moment. President Obama is poised to make a critical decision about the Afghanistan war in the next few weeks. And there’s a big debate happening right now about what to do.

Pro-war advocates both inside and outside the administration—including John McCain and Joe Lieberman—are calling for a big escalation. The general in charge of Afghanistan is expected to request tens of thousands more troops, and that may just be the beginning. They’re cranking up the pressure for an immediate surge.

But other powerful voices are urging caution: Vice President Biden and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have raised real concerns about the idea of sending more troops to Afghanistan without a clear strategy, as have Democrats in Congress. And a majority of Americans oppose increasing troop levels.

Can you write to the White House and tell them we need a clear exit strategy—not tens of thousands more US troops stuck in a quagmire? You can send the President a message by clicking below:

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51843&id=&t=1

Some administration officials are arguing for a smaller, nimbler approach with a narrow focus on the threat from al-Qaeda. But cheerleaders for the war refuse to acknowledge that there could be any viable strategy other than more and more troops. So they’re trotting out the same tired old lines and questioning the motives of those who disagree with them.

They figure they can cut off any debate about our ultimate goals in Afghanistan and the region. But President Obama has consistently shown a willingness to stand up for his more thoughtful approach to foreign policy, and that’s what he needs to do here, too.

The hawks are making their position heard. Now, the majority of Americans—those of us who are for as quick and as responsible an end to the war as possible—need to make our voices heard, too.

With Democrats opposing escalation by more than two to one, MoveOn is just reflecting the opinions of their membership. They're a bit late to the debate, but better than ducking it entirely.

Twisting The Knife

Digby noted that A Man Called Petraeus was ramping up his 2012 strategy. It continued today:

WASHINGTON, Sept 23 (Reuters) - The head of the U.S. Central Command, Army General David Petraeus, said on Wednesday that both he and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen had endorsed an assessment by the top commander in Afghanistan that says more troops would be needed.

"Obviously I endorsed, the chairman endorsed... Gen. (Stanley) McChrystal's assessment and description," Petraeus said at a counterinsurgency conference in Washington.

It's a little more complicated than that. Spencer Ackerman was there.

Question time. Trainor reminds everyone not to ask about Afghanistan. Did Petraeus’ strategy review ahead of the Obama administration include a resource request? Twenty counterinsurgents per thousand civilians was the recommendation in the counterinsurgency field manual, Petraeus says. “Concentrate your efforts in the areas where the insurgency is… most threatening the population.” He references Bruce Riedel’s strategy review for the Obama administration on Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, and shows a slide of insurgent activity focusing on the Afghan south and east to demonstrate where counterinsurgency efforts ought to focus.

Unprompted, Petraeus defends Obama’s review of Afghanistan strategy. “We said we expected some form of assessment that we thought would take place in the fall,” he said, and muses on the Afghan election. There have been “events like election that looks like it may not produce a government with greater legitimacy in the eyes of the people.” He praises Gen. McChrystal’s “superb” counterinsurgency guidance and his “highlight[ing] of the need to change the culture” by such things as obeying Afghan traffic laws. As for the resources McChrystal will request, Petraeus says, “the resource options piece will be in in a few days as well.”

It looks like Petraeus is content to let Obama walk into his own problem here. He asserts an endorsement of the McChrystal strategy, but is solicitous of the President's review process. Of course, with each passing day the Pentagon and the neocons can team up to bang on the "indecisive" President (Mitt Romney's already calling him Hamlet), so Petraeus can just sit on the sidelines, offer a hint of approval for escalation, expect everyone in the media to run with that and slowly constrict the President's options.

Petraeus is a better politician than anyone the Republicans have, at least from where I'm sitting.

The Biden Plan For Afghanistan

This would be a serious strategy shift, and the right one, IMO:

President Obama is exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan, including a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday.

The options under review are part of what administration officials described as a wholesale reconsideration of a strategy the president announced with fanfare just six months ago. Two new intelligence reports are being conducted to evaluate Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials said [...]

Instead of increasing troops, officials said, Mr. Biden proposed scaling back the overall American military presence. Rather than trying to protect the Afghan population from the Taliban, American forces would concentrate on strikes against Qaeda cells, primarily in Pakistan, using special forces, Predator missile attacks and other surgical tactics [...]

A shift from a counterinsurgency strategy to a focus on counterterrorism would turn the administration’s current theory on its head....But the Afghan presidential election, widely marred by allegations of fraud, undermined the administration’s confidence that it had a reliable partner in President Hamid Karzai. Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden already had raised doubts about Mr. Karzai, which were only exacerbated by the fear that even if he emerges from a runoff election, he will have little credibility with his own people.

Counter-terrorism was the initial goal and is still cited as the main reason for being in Afghanistan, so I don't know if I'd call it a shift in strategy more than a return to the actual strategy, the only one with national security implications.

This is probably another trial balloon, but it's clear that there is no unanimity of opinion in the White House on Afghanistan. Some people look at a country with no functioning government and a fraudulent, illegitimate leader, and they wonder how you can run a counter-insurgency campaign around that. And they would be right. Heck, General McChrystal said they're right, basically (via K-Drum):

McChrystal's point is that it's not simply "resources," not just U.S. and NATO troops, that will settle the war. It's also whether the Afghan government earns the trust of its people — whether the Afghan president and his entourage of ministers, governors, and warlords are willing — or are willing to be lured — to clean up their act, end their corrupt practices, and truly serve their people.

When Obama says he needs to review the strategy before he decides on troop levels, he almost certainly means that he needs to assess whether a counterinsurgency strategy makes sense if the Afghan government — the entity that our troops would be propping up and aligning themselves with — is viewed by a wide swath of its own people as illegitimate.

Given this fact, the parallels to Vietnam and the Diem government become clear. They never had a popular legitimacy there, either, making the fight a losing battle.

America does not have a good track record of de-escalating a war in the face of the evidence. It would be a very bold maneuver for a President not inclined toward bold maneuvers, at least so far. But getting trapped in a war because of the tauntings of hawks, when there's so much else to get right, would be a disappointment. I'm pleased that he hasn't rushed to the conclusion of the generals here, and is seriously thinking about the reality of the situation instead of some fantasy world where America builds an oasis of democracy in a country that has never known it.

...by the way, this sounds like a really good cover story, showing Bob Woodward and the Washington Post's commitment to the safety of the troops, without addressing the elephant in the room, that whoever leaked the document wanted to force the President's hand and Woodward let them. That would be the opposite of the "Pentagon Papers," to which Woodward likened it. It's a propaganda ploy designed to embarrass the commander-in-chief into escalation. And Woodward played along. What a hero.

Obama's Choice In Afghanistan

The presiding general in Afghanistan is delaying his troop request, providing more time for the President to assess the strategy in the light of a stolen election and a lack of legitimacy for the government. The White House official quoted in here is absolutely correct.

Even the best counterinsurgency strategy "cannot work" without a legitimate government in place, one White House official said, underscoring the intense debate within the administration about how to move forward [...]

One U.S. defense official said the fallout from the election was "certainly a complicating factor" in the way of swift consideration of McChrystal's troop recommendations.

Officials said the main question being asked was whether the counterinsurgency strategy could still succeed if Karzai's government was not seen by the Afghan people as legitimate.

"I don't think so," one official said when asked that question. "Will the Afghan people accept the results of the election? We don't even know that yet."

We're seeing McChrystal start to mass his forces in Kabul and other population centers, as if stability in the city means the same thing as stability in Baghdad, which was crucial to Iraq. Or maybe he's just preparing early for the inevitable riots once Karzai is named President. Either way, it's another example of an Iraq-centric strategy for a far different fight.

McChrystal is eventually going to ask for more troops. That's not only what all managers ask for - more resources - but what passes for wisdom in the foreign policy community. You can never withdraw, only escalate, troops are the answer to any question, and the other tropes common to both neocons and the entire foreign policy establishment in Washington, despite the fact that neocons have been proven wrong time and again.

Given this, it's remarkable for Obama to waver even the slightest bit at rubber-stamping the escalation. But he appears to be actually taking a look at reality, for a change.

Senator John McCain gave us a compelling insight into these matters in a foreword that he wrote about Vietnam for David Halberstam’s book, “The Best and the Brightest”:

“War is far too horrible a thing to drag out unnecessarily,” he said. “It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay.

“No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.”

The only thing that needs to be updated about Mr. McCain’s comments is that we now regularly send women as well as men off to war.

In the case of Afghanistan, we’re sending them off to fight and possibly die in support of a government that is incompetent and riddled with corruption and narcotics traffickers. We’re putting them in the field with Afghan forces that are ill trained, ill equipped and in all-too-many instances unwilling to fight with the courage and tenacity of the American forces. And we’re sending them off to engage in a mishmash of a mission that alternates incoherently between aggressively fighting insurgents and the admirable but unachievable task of nation-building in a society in which most Americans are clueless about the history, culture, politics and mores.

During the campaign Obama supported a return to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. But that was really about a return to focus on Al Qaeda and their ability to attack the US. Obama has actually done so, getting the Pakistanis to deal with their own internal threat and using intelligence and law enforcement to disrupt core leadership and satellite plots. Adding to that a nation-building effort in a country without a functioning government does not have to be part of the program. And of course, there's the prime fallacy at work, this notion that saving Afghanistan is connected to denying Al Qaeda a "safe haven," which falls apart upon scrutiny:

However that may be, the 'safe haven' argument just doesn't seem to add up. The safe havens or rather the training camps in the safe havens, where so many would-be terrorists apparently did an endless stream of calisthenics on those iconic monkey bars, were neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the 9/11 attacks. They were funded through too loosely guarded global financial networks, planned and organized in cities in Europe and executed right here in the USA. You certainly wouldn't want the Taliban again more or less openly hosting al Qaida or bin Laden and his main associates, which would allow them to operate more openly and presumably more easily communicate with their conspirators. But even if the Taliban again ruled the country, it's difficult to imagine that with our forces in the region and our army of drones, we'd have much problem raining down a ton of ordinance the first time they really put up their head.

This is known popularly as a containment strategy, one that says we can protect the country without a 100,000-odd military troop commitment to a country that is rejecting our presence and has no means to carry out the future we seem to be planning for them.

I don't see why we have to assume that the world remains static. We stepped away from Afghanistan at a crucial point to go fight an unnecessary war in Iraq, yes; but that doesn't mean that we return focus with Afghanistan in the exact same state as before. The Taliban are essentially a popular front insurgency now, not a group of radicalists, and Al Qaeda is not nearly as robust as before. We are not viewed as any kind of liberators in Afghanistan, and the government is despised. We don't have the same opportunities as we did in 2002-2003. Therefore, we can leave, and pursue a containment strategy, and end this fiction of bringing democracy to the Khyber Pass.

Stumbling Into Annihilation

Bob Woodward comes out of the mothballs today and produces a timely leak of an internal document designed to raise the spectre of "defeat" in Afghanistan and get all the serious types behind escalation.

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict "will likely result in failure," according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: "Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible." [...]

But he repeatedly warns that without more forces and the rapid implementation of a genuine counterinsurgency strategy, defeat is likely. McChrystal describes an Afghan government riddled with corruption and an international force undermined by tactics that alienate civilians.

He provides extensive new details about the Taliban insurgency, which he calls a muscular and sophisticated enemy that uses modern propaganda and systematically reaches into Afghanistan's prisons to recruit members and even plan operations.

We've heard this argument, or a variation of it, from military commanders for every war in my lifetime, and even before that. We cannot risk defeat, we need ever-increasing numbers of troops, the enemy is always more sophisticated and powerful than anyone ever expects but clearly inferior to us if we only don't "beat ourselves," etc. Gen. Westmoreland could have written this assessment. McChrystal also habitually confuses Al Qaeda and the Taliban, for good measure.

Spencer Ackerman makes the clearest connection and the most obvious: the strategy document was leaked by those who desire escalation and a broad counter-insurgency strategy:

The Washington Post’s headline — “McChrystal: More Forces Or ‘Mission Failure’” — does what the persons who leaked Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Afghanistan strategy review evidently wanted to do: box President Obama in to a static request for more U.S. troops and dare him to refuse his chosen commander’s recommendations. The moves to separate the strategy review, conducted for McChrystal by a group of (mostly) Beltway think tank security experts, from the request for resources and the expectation that the resource request will feature more than just that more-troops request may have been designed to keep the ends and means questions distinct, but they also had the effect of preserving Obama’s freedom of action. There’s going to be pressure on Obama to simply accede to any request for more troops, and the media will frame the request, and Obama’s decision, through that prism. So it’s worth remembering that while we’re reading about the strategy review’s details now, Obama read it weeks ago, and still told David Gregory that he refuses to add troops until he’s convinced that the strategy is correct. His advisers surely figured that it would only be a matter of time before the document leaked.

I would add that this article was mainly for Village consumption. Those who want more war - including that cadre of discredited neocons who still lurk behind every rock in Washington - need to create momentum for an inevitable escalation, such that any contrary action by Obama would produce shock and give an opening to the warmongers to call it a betrayal.

So far, Obama isn't biting, as Ackerman's link above shows. On virtually every Sunday talk show, the President was asked about Afghanistan, and he unilaterally pronounced himself a skeptic on more troops and noted that he didn't want a mission shift but one focused on the fundamental national security goals:

The question that I’m asking right now is to our military, to General McChrystal, to General Petraeus, to all our national security apparatus, is– whether it’s troops who are already there, or any troop request in the future, how does this advance America’s national security interests? How does it make sure that al Qaeda and its extremist allies cannot attack the United States homeland, our allies, our troops who are based in Europe?

And I think that McChrystal, at least, wants to offer a bank shot, claiming that a "Taliban" in power in Afghanistan (I put it in quotes because this iteration of the Taliban is not the same as the one which came to power in 1996, and most of the home-grown fighters just want revenge instead of an Islamic caliphate) would necessarily invite Al Qaeda back to plot world terror attacks. As a result, McChrystal shifts the strategy from disabling Al Qaeda to building a nation durable enough to withstand Taliban pressue, and his strategy seeks practically a one-to-one relationship between military forces and members of the local population. To achieve his ends practically every able man between 19-24 in the United States would need to be conscripted.

The President has good reason for skepticism.

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 [...]

In his 66-page assessment, McChrystal does not address other approaches to combating the Taliban. A senior U.S. military official in Kabul said the general was operating under the assumption that the earlier White House endorsement of a counterinsurgency approach "was a settled issue." ... The implicit recommendation is that the United States and its NATO partners need to do more nation-building, and they need to do it quickly [...]

But senior U.S. officials in Washington contend that much about Afghanistan has changed since March, when Obama stood before a row of flags, flanked by his secretaries of state and defense, and announced the new strategy. The dynamics have even shifted since McChrystal arrived in mid-June and began his assessment.

The principal game-changer, in the view of White House officials, was Afghanistan's presidential election last month, which was compromised by fraud, much of it in support of President Hamid Karzai. Although the results have not been certified, he almost certainly will remain in office, but under a cloud of illegitimacy that could complicate U.S. efforts to promote good governance.

Congressional Democrats have also expressed new doubts about sending more forces to Afghanistan. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said last week that she does not "think there's a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan in the country or the Congress." Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl M. Levin (Mich.), an influential voice on military matters, said the administration should not send additional forces until more Afghan soldiers have been trained.

The American public, which had broadly supported Obama's determination to focus on Afghanistan instead of Iraq, has begun to question the wisdom of the continued U.S. commitment. The Afghan war was deemed "not worth fighting" by 51 percent of respondents in a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The military is becoming impatient; the last line of the above article quotes one Pentagon staffer as saying "there is a frustration. A significant frustration. A serious frustration." I think they expected that, one the President signed off on the COIN strategy, he would listen to their every word and resource accordingly. They figured it was a Democratic President and he would want to look tough and obey the commanders and he would comply with their wishes. And that may be the case. But at this point, Obama looks reachable on the argument that it's unadvisable to engage in a mission creep and escalation in a country without a functioning government to build from or a desire to have Americans build it.

That may upset the military. It would also be, combined with a law enforcement and intelligence strategy to continue to protect from extremist attacks, completely rational and sound.

Sucked Into Another Quagmire

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen just put Barack Obama in an unwinnable position today by endorsing an effort to escalate the war in Afghanistan even further.

The top U.S. military officer said Tuesday that thousands more U.S. troops are needed in Afghanistan to regain the initiative against a worsening Taliban insurgency, and that a new program is underway to offer "incentives" to persuade Taliban fighters to switch sides.

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that between 2,000 and 4,000 military trainers from the U.S. and its NATO partners will be required in order to accelerate and expand the growth of Afghan army to 250,000 troops and increase the size of the Afghan police force in coming years.

Mullen also strongly suggested that more U.S. combat troops will be required to provide security in the short term, while the Afghan forces are being developed.

"A properly resourced counterinsurgency probably needs more forces," Mullen said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, calling the effort both "manpower and time-intensive."

These Afghan forces Mullen speaks about here? They're mostly functionally illiterate, they frequently abandon the army when they find out they'll be deployed to dangerous areas, and they are 100% dependent on American troops:

If we left Afghanistan tomorrow, lock stock and barrel, two things would happen to the security forces. The first would be the ANA and ANP would completely evaporate as functioning institutions in much of the country, probably in a matter of days if not hours. They are still very much artificial constructs that we've imposed, and wholly dependent on our technology for their survival so long as they continue to use the tactics we've taught them. The second would be that the revitalized Northern Alliance and other forces that the ANA replaced would resume doing exactly the kinds of nifty hit-and-run things, to protect their enclaves, that Malevich is talking about. Because that IS how they fight, when left alone.

To get the current Afghan army to do those things, you're talking basically starting over at this point... or taking a good chunk of the country and letting them run it with a bare minimum of Western troop support, operating almost covertly within their ranks. It would have to be a low-risk area of the country, because if you did that right now in the South the insurgents would eat them for lunch, but in another part of the country it might be possible.

Here's what we've trained the ANA to do, instead. They can in some circumstances involving the locals be useful interfaces for our forces. They can hold and defend fixed locations and the immediate environs. They can force-multiply small Western dets, which would be a lot more useful if there weren't more westerners in the south than ANA right now. They can do effective IED sweeps daily, and other such activities where the cumulative risk to Western troops would simply be too high. Umm, that's about it.

They've been trained for eight years as glorified interpreters and chum for explosives. And so increasing those forces will do nothing but provide more chum. If I didn't know better, I'd say that the US training and equipping effort for Afghan security forces was designed to fail to ensure a long-term American commitment that would act as a money funnel for the military-industrial complex. Heck, even if the Afghans were well-trained, maintaining an Army of that size would cost three times their gross domestic product, which is impossible.

I appreciate the strategy to buy out Taliban fighters - hey, it worked in Iraq - but there's still no articulation of an overall mission strategy or goal here, probably because if the public knew what that was, namely, building a democratic state in an part of the world which has never known one, they would react violently in opposition. They've already lost most of the country in the absence of any strategy.

We know how this game will be played. Gen. McChrystal will offer a menu of options and Obama will pick the one in the middle, so he can say he rejected the hawks and the doves. But that middle course will escalate the war. Mullen basically forced Obama's hand here, and the freak-out if the President rejected the advice of the top military commander would be unyielding.

There's a hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on this tomorrow. The Democrats are walking into a huge trap if they rubber-stamp an escalation for an unpopular war.

The Al Qaeda Slump

It's going to be a real blow to neocon efforts to frighten their way to victory, once they recognize that they may have to find a new enemy.

Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida is under heavy pressure in its strongholds in Pakistan's remote tribal areas and is finding it difficult to attract recruits or carry out spectacular operations in western countries, according to government and independent experts monitoring the organisation.

Speaking to the Guardian in advance of tomorrow's eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, western counter-terrorism officials and specialists in the Muslim world said the organisation faced a crisis that was severely affecting its ability to find, inspire and train willing fighters.

Its activity is increasingly dispersed to "affiliates" or "franchises" in Yemen and North Africa, but the links of local or regional jihadi groups to the centre are tenuous; they enjoy little popular support and successes have been limited.

This has a host of implications on our foreign policy moving forward:

• The article credits CIA drone strikes in part, although I do think they increase the amount of extremist activity in general. But there have always been extremists; Al Qaeda provided a durable network. Once which is foundering. And if the demand for extremism dries up with the lack of a durable network, then ultimately the entire project will topple upon itself.

• Of greater benefit is monitoring and law enforcement techniques, which have been proven effective in disrupting "core Al Qaeda," which is down to 6 or 8 people and maybe another couple hundred on the margins. To the extent that these techniques work, they are not labor-intensive, involve global cooperation and do not have a role for the US military to any strong extent. You do not put 100,000 troops in the field to deny 8 men safe havens. Much of the intelligence, in fact, is coming from relatives and friends, suggesting that giant military apparatuses are not required to deal with a movement that has become broadly unpopular.

• The Pakistan campaign is really helping disrupt Al Qaeda, as the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban have turned on the unit, probably because it's giving them so much trouble.

This all adds up to yet another reason why we have no need continuing escalation in Afghanistan. The local Taliban hate Al Qaeda and would not be likely to offer them safe havens should they topple the central government, which is unlikely outside the areas where they have ethnic solidarity. In Pakistan they're simply on the run. There's a better chance of Al Qaeda consolidating in a place like Somalia than Afghanistan. They don't exist there right now, and no group fighting for control wants them in place. So why are we still fighting there?

Nancy Pelosi said today that there's no support in the country for a further escalation. If people truly understood the lack of a threat from Afghanistan, how our presence has inflamed the insurgency, and how we can through a variety of containment, law enforcement and intelligence techniques maintain national security without a military footprint, that support would drop even further from the perilous point it's at right now.

The Battle To Defend The Clearly Fraudulent And Hated Afghan Government

The UN is now officially calling the Afghan elections fraudulent. And then calling for a... recount of the fraudulent data?

Afghanistan's troubled presidential election was thrown into further turmoil Tuesday when a U.N.-backed complaints panel charged widespread fraud and ordered a partial recount, just as election officials announced that President Hamid Karzai appeared to have gained enough votes to win.

The growing political crisis threatens to set off a direct confrontation between Karzai and his Western backers, who have been increasingly alarmed by mounting evidence of ballot-box stuffing and other irregularities, much of it reportedly benefiting Karzai's campaign.

In the days immediately following the Aug. 20 vote, U.S. officials were uniform in praising what President Obama called "a successful election." Obama said he looked forward "to renewing our partnership with the Afghan people as they move ahead under a new government."

But the widening fraud issue now seems likely to further prolong the slow election process, leaving the country without a clear leader for weeks or even months while tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops are battling the Taliban alongside Afghan forces. Obama's strategy also includes major economic development initiatives, improved delivery of services and a crackdown on corruption -- all of which will be difficult to implement without a valid Afghan government.

It puts the military in an unwinnable situation, trying to win hearts and minds over to a government which is clearly corrupt. And if riots break out, would the military come to the aid of the government against protesters against a stolen election?

Meanwhile, the situation is getting more dangerous for Americans over there. New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell barely escaped from the Taliban after a commando raid (his Afghan interpreter was killed in the melee). Insurgents trapped and killed four US soldiers yesterday in a firefight witnessed by McClatchy's Jonathan Landay:

"We will do to you what we did to the Russians," the insurgent's leader boasted over the radio, referring to the failure of Soviet troops to capture Ganjgal during the 1979-89 Soviet occupation.

Dashing from boulder to boulder, diving into trenches and ducking behind stone walls as the insurgents maneuvered to outflank us, we waited more than an hour for U.S. helicopters to arrive, despite earlier assurances that air cover would be five minutes away.

U.S. commanders, citing new rules to avoid civilian casualties, rejected repeated calls to unleash artillery rounds at attackers dug into the slopes and tree lines — despite being told repeatedly that they weren't near the village.

"We are pinned down. We are running low on ammo. We have no air. We've lost today," Marine Maj. Kevin Williams, 37, said through his translator to his Afghan counterpart, responding to the latter's repeated demands for helicopters.

Four U.S. Marines were killed Tuesday, the most U.S. service members assigned as trainers to the Afghan National Army to be lost in a single incident since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Eight Afghan troops and police and the Marine commander's Afghan interpreter also died in the ambush and the subsequent battle that raged from dawn until 2 p.m. around this remote hamlet in eastern Kunar province, close to the Pakistan border.

With the government having lost legitimacy, the Taliban has become emboldened, and its forces tied up with nationalists fighting occupiers. And our mission has become increasingly scrambled. Liberal hawks (like Howard Dean!) need to come to their senses and realize how far we've strayed from the mission in Afghanistan, and how little hope we have of a turnaround.

Neocons Go To Work

I had forgotten about the modern-day equivalent of the Project for a New American Century, called the "Foreign Policy Initiative" (can you get more anodyne)? Their existence is solely to pressure Barack Obama on foreign policy from the neocon right, and to pat him on the forehead when he performs in ways aligned with their beliefs. They did a little of both of this with this letter asking for a "properly resourced" war effort in Afghanistan (that means a massive escalation):

The letter’s signatories write: “The situation in Afghanistan is grave and deteriorating…Since the announcement of your administration’s new strategy, we have been troubled by calls for a drawdown of American forces in Afghanistan and a growing sense of defeatism about the war. With General McChrystal expected to request additional troops later this month, we urge you to continue on the path you have taken thus far and give our commanders on the ground the forces they need to implement a successful counterinsurgency strategy. There is no middle course. Incrementally committing fewer troops than required would be a grave mistake and may well lead to American defeat. We will not support half-measures that repeat the errors of the past.”

In addition to the usual suspects, the Kristols, Cliff Mays, Peter Wehners and Randy Scheunemanns of the world, Sarah Palin has signed on, clearly signaling her alignment with the neocons.

As Jeremy Scahill notes, this is exactly analogous to what the PNAC types did to Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

The neoconservative Project for a New American Century laid much of the groundwork for the foreign policy of the Bush administration. Its members received important postings in the White House, Department of Defense and other institutions. But what is seldom mentioned is that PNAC achieved its first great political victory during the Clinton administration when PNAC pushed Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. In January 1998, the group wrote to Clinton: “[Y]ou have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.” The Iraq Liberation Act, backed overwhelmingly by Democrats and Republicans and signed by Clinton, made regime change in Iraq official US policy and set the course for the eventual invasion and occupation.

And surely we all remember the alibi for starting war in Iraq that "Democrats agreed to and Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998!"

This is exactly the pincer movement that FPI is attempting with Obama. His Afghanistan policy has shrinking support among liberals, and so the neocons are among his only supporters. And of course, those neocons will only be pleased with a full escalation of the kind we had in Vietnam. So if Obama continues with involvement in Afghanistan, his most vocal supporters are pushing the debate severely to the right.

Neocons always do this. Under a Republican President, they waltz into the White House and make a mess of things. Under a Democrat, they head underground, prod and push from the right, and support the President when he accedes to their views, aloowing that President to claim bipartisan support (along with partisan Obama defenders) and allowing the neocons to control policy even when out of power. As Steve Hynd notes, the FPI letter urges Obama to "reverse the errors of previous years," when they were responsible for those errors.

If you lay down with dogs, you'll get up with fleas. It's time to begin drawing bright lines in the Af/Pak debate. The Obama administration and its neoliberal interventionist supporters have aligned themselves with the neocons, the instigators of so much atrocious American foreign policy. That bipartisan consensus of hawks is opposed by another bipartisan consensus of progressives and realist conservatives who oppose escalation, and by the bulk of the American public.

Progressives need to start asking themselves if they're at all comfortable with Obama's allies.

Indeed.

The Deepening Afghan Nightmare

This looks to me like a good pivot point to up and end involvement in Afghanistan.

A U.S. jet dropped 500-pound bombs on two tanker trucks hijacked by the Taliban before dawn Friday, triggering a huge explosion that Afghan officials said killed more than 70 people, including insurgents and some civilians who had swarmed around the vehicles to siphon off fuel.

Germany, whose troops called in the 2:30 a.m. strike in the northern province of Kunduz, said it feared the hijackers would use the trucks to carry out a suicide attack against its military base nearby.

We are completely in over our heads here. Once again we've allowed amorphous terms like "victory" to define our military involvement instead of achieving realizable goals. So a war initially based on dismantling Al Qaeda becomes a war to build a nation and protect an ethnic class. The country held an election that could lead to outbreaks of violence and unrest, as our man in Kabul is clearly corrupt and ineffectual. Tribal factions with no tradition of a central government have vowed armed conflict if Hamid Karzai is allowed to stand after multiple examples of election fraud. You could have a situation where the government is threatened by a popular uprising, leaving the US troops no clear guidance on how to react. And on top of that, dozens more civilians are bombed from above, leading to more alienation and more desire to drive out the occupiers. The latest in a series of after-the-fact inquiries will do us no good. Meanwhile, more Americans die every day without an articulated rationale.

The divisions in Afghanistan are mirrored by the divisions at home. Top advisers appear to be split on whether to add even more troops. Dick Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton look to be on the side of more troops. Robert Gates has been worried about the foreign footprint in Afghanistan but appears open to escalation. Joe Biden, no dove, is leading the group in the White House opposed to a long-term commitment, which is what escalation would signal. Inside the Pentagon, at least some officials will not acquiesce to Gen. McChrystal's request for more forces without major scrutiny. And in another sign that Obama would only have Republicans behind him if he orders more troops, Senate Democrats are not enthused by the prospect of deepening our commitment.

Speaking on a day when a U.S. bombed tanker trucks hijacked by the Taliban killing 70 people, including some civilians, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin said the U.S. must focus more on building the Afghan security forces. His cautionary stance was echoed by Sen. Jack Reed, who is also on the committee and spent two days in Afghanistan this week with Levin.

The senators will return to Washington next week, just as Obama receives a new military review of Afghanistan strategy that officials expect will be followed up by a request for at least a modest increase in U.S. troops battling insurgents in the eight-year-old war [...]

"There are a lot of ways to speed up the numbers and capabilities of the Afghan army and police. They are strongly motivated," Levin said from Kuwait. "I think that we should pursue that course ... before we consider a further increase in combat forces beyond what's already been planned to be sent in the months ahead."

Levin said there is a growing consensus on the need to expedite the training and equipping of the Afghan army to improve security in Afghanistan, where 51 U.S. troops died in August, making it the bloodiest month for American forces there since the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.

In a separate call, Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, said the U.S. must use a multi-pronged approach: build up the Afghan Army, send more civilians to Afghanistan to provide economic and political assistance, and reach out to Taliban supporters who are willing to recognize the Kabul government.

This is actually just a fantasy, a hope that more Afghan security forces can reduce our troop numbers. It doesn't talk about the policy itself, which as a true counter-terrorism strategy would focus on intelligence and law enforcement and containing terrorist activity to within the borders. As Chuck Hagel said very expertly this week, foreign policy is not an abstraction. We are committing real lives and real treasure to this effort, and trying to impose our will on a nation which has no interest in mimicking us.

Accordingly, we cannot view U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan through a lens that sees only "winning" or "losing." Iraq and Afghanistan are not America's to win or lose. Win what? We can help them buy time or develop, but we cannot control their fates. There are too many cultural, ethnic and religious dynamics at play in these regions for any one nation to control. For example, the future of Afghanistan is linked directly to Pakistan and what happens in the mountains along their border. Political accommodation and reconciliation in this region will determine the outcome.

If the antiwar movement is truly planning a fall campaign, they should invite Hagel. He is as perceptive and cogent on this issue as anyone. Right now it appears that the DC establishment, while always tilting toward war, is split. The progressive groups who could engage the masses in a very powerful way are reluctant to challenge the President on his policy because, to be honest, they don't feel confident talking about foreign policy and national security. But the greatest organizing opportunity in recent progressive history, what brought Democrats the Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, was opposition to the war in Iraq. It galvanized a movement and made history. Moreover, it was the right thing to do. It's time for Americans to decide whether to agree to what amounts to endless war or not.

And They've Lost George Will

I admit to being surprised by yesterday's George Will column, though given his status as a paleocon I probably should not have been.

U.S. strategy -- protecting the population -- is increasingly troop-intensive while Americans are increasingly impatient about "deteriorating" (says Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) conditions. The war already is nearly 50 percent longer than the combined U.S. involvements in two world wars, and NATO assistance is reluctant and often risible.

The U.S. strategy is "clear, hold and build." Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state [...]

U.S. forces are being increased by 21,000, to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.

So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

Genius, said de Gaulle, recalling Bismarck's decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870, sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. Genius is not required to recognize that in Afghanistan, when means now, before more American valor, such as Allen's, is squandered.

Will is basically laying out a containment strategy, consisting of buying out the local interests, shoring up the government through supporting the non-corrupt local leaders, and using law enforcement and intelligence to thwart Al Qaeda globally instead of assuming that denying them safe havens in Afghanistan would prevent them from popping up anywhere else in the world. I disagree with Will on the invisible destructors like drones and airstrikes, which tend to radicalize populations, even if they have succeeded at taking out more terrorists than under Bush. But in general, we can use human intelligence and global cooperation to a much higher degree of success than pursuing a war in Afghanistan without defined goals.

The elections were clearly rigged, and the fallout could be tremendous to an already crippled central government. And yet, we will not act because a Pashto President makes more sense to our COIN strategy than a Tajik. As a result, the countryside will lose more faith in America's ability to deliver on its promises, and the expanded footprint will be even harder to maintain. And despite a decrease in opium prices and a slashed crop, no alternatives for poor farmers have arisen, and cartels still control the trade and funnel money to the insurgency.

What's more, we're using the same Bush-era gimmicks to add more troops into the field without displaying the costs to the public. This stealth troop increase by replacing support personnel with "trigger-pullers," while vastly expanding the use of unaccountable private military contractors is exactly how Bush keep the troop numbers artificially low in Iraq.

Obama really only has the warbloggers with him in this strategy, idiots who call for "spirited realists" when a realist would assess the situation in Afghanistan and determine that escalation has no material national security benefit. And yet the Pentagon still fears that Obama will not agree to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's escalation demands. I hope the Pentagon is right.

...this will make us look fantastic to the local population, I'm sure:

Private security contractors who guard the U.S. Embassy in Kabul have engaged in lewd behavior and hazed subordinates, demoralizing the undermanned force and posing a "significant threat" to security at a time when the Taliban is intensifying attacks in the Afghan capital, according to an investigation released Tuesday by an independent watchdog group.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) launched the probe after more than a dozen security guards contacted the group to report misconduct and morale problems within the force of 450 guards who live at Camp Sullivan, a few miles from the embassy compound.

The report highlighted occasions when guards brought women believed to be prostitutes into Camp Sullivan and videotaped themselves drinking and partially undressed. It also outlined communications problems among the guards, many of whom don't speak English and have trouble understanding orders from their U.S. supervisors.

Metrics Toward Ending The War In Afghanistan, Or To Justify It?

The commanding general in Afghanistan basically said yesterday that our strategy in the country is failing.

A top US general in Afghanistan has called for a revised military strategy, suggesting the current one is failing.

In a strategic assessment, Gen Stanley McChrystal said that, while the Afghan situation was serious, success was still achievable.

The report has not yet been published, but sources say Gen McChrystal sees protecting the Afghan people against the Taliban as the top priority.

The report does not carry a direct call for increasing troop numbers.

"The situation in Afghanistan is serious, but success is achievable and demands a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort," Gen McChrystal said in the assessment.

McChrystal is engaging in some sleight of hand here. The top priority for the Obama Administration, at least in the President's public statements, has never been "protecting the Afghan people against the Taliban." We've heard about dismantling Taliban safe havens, but not that our military should be used as an internal security force. We should at least have that debate if it's the new goal.

I'm more concerned that the Administration feels it has to race to show progress, basing their continued presence in Afghanistan not on any security objective, but simply meaning to justify the presence through demonstrable benchmarks. If the benchmarks, or "metrics" in the new parlance, are not tethered to a fundamental mission or strategy, how can we possibly define success? In recent years, the success or failure in achieving benchmarks or metrics have had no impact on the larger decisions of escalation or drawdown. A benchmark strategy just looks like a justification strategy rather than any kind of real assessment.

This is why we need a timetable to bring our troops home. We do not have a clear reason for remaining in the country - Al Qaeda has departed, we cannot expect to eradicate every safe haven everywhere in the world, nor can we expect to radically transform centuries of political and social reality in that part of the world through nation-building. As Bill Moyers said in his excellent interview with Bill Maher:

MOYERS: I’d think it would be a tragedy beyond description for this young, bright, exciting President to be drawn into an endless war in the same way that the last young, bright, exciting President was drawn into – intervened in Vietnam. I was there when Kennedy chose to send advisers to Vietnam – and was there when LBJ escalated – they both acted from noble intentions – actually they did – they wanted to stop Communism in Asia and spread democracy – but the advisers soon became bombers and the bombers became grounds troops and pretty soon, it became a regional crusade – and 12 years later, billions of dollars, and millions of lives later, including 60,000 American troops – we lost – because the U.S. is not good at that sort of thing.

Here Obama has 68,000 troops over there and the Generals are asking for another 20,000 -- maybe 30,000 more troops -- saying it’s not enough. The military and the hawks will always say "not enough." Obama has to say "enough" -- or he’s going to be drawn into it.

Now they’ve shifted the mission of troops: to protect the villages of Afghanistan. 100,000 Americans can’t protect the villages of Afghanistan – and now they say we’re going to be there to build a nation – we’re not good at building other nations – we’re hardly good at building our nation. If you're an Afghani and look up and see Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California legislature coming to build your nation, you’re going to run – you’re going to put up a No Trespassing sign. We need to come home.

We have this two-track problem, as Moyers expertly pointed out. We have a President, or more to the point a political system, captive to corporate special interests. And we have a promising foreign policy in other respect on the verge of being snuffed out by an obstinate focus on a nation-building experiment halfway across the world which we cannot even really hope to affect. We can defend our national security with law enforcement and intelligence and local information sharing. We do not need a war.

Coming Around?

Maybe the Obama Adminstration's apparent abandoning of missile defense installations in Eastern Europe can signal a new way of thinking about national security, instead of relying on the old thinking.

Expect the usual shrieking from the wingnut gallery. No one could ever conclusively argue why these bases were a good idea; they were supposed to deter Russia, but at the same time weren't aimed at Russia, and couldn't possibly have stopped a Russian attack. They were supposed to defend from Iranian missiles, even though no one could ever figure out a plausible reason why Iran would fire ballistic missiles at Europe. Eastern European missile defense was, in short, insane; it was conceived by missile defense fanatics in the United States, and abetted by policymakers in Poland and the Czech Republic who wanted a clear signal of US commitment to their defense. The latter motivation was defensible; the former not so much.

We cannot just be the world's protector; heck, with our desiccated financial state, we can hardly be our own protector anymore. A more balanced multilateralism will reduce our military commitment globally and promote a more lasting peace. Bugging out of useless missile defense sites in Europe could lead to bugging out of, I don't know, the military outposts in 130 nations throughout the world.

Now, if we can apply this to Afghanistan, and actually think critically about the task at hand and how best to reach it, we may have something. Although, it appears the commanders will ask for another slow and steady escalation of 20,000 more troops. We have to break out of this kind of thinking.

Feels Quagmire-y

Admiral Mullen appeared on a couple Sunday shows yesterday as well, and he offered a fairly low opinion of the trajectory of the war in Afghanistan:

The situation in Afghanistan is "serious and deteriorating," Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said Sunday, as the Obama administration awaits an assessment by the new U.S. commander there and a possible request for more troops.

Mullen also expressed concern over recent opinion polls indicating that for the first time a majority of Americans do not think the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting. President Obama has described the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the central front against international terrorism and has pledged to give it all necessary resources.

I think the allegations of widespread fraud in the Afghan elections is a clear warning sign of the mess we face over there. That could easily erupt into an Iran-style uprising, but only in Kabul among the most fervent supporters of the two candidates - elsewhere in the country it will merely suggest that the government is weak and untenable. And the Taliban will be well-positioned to capitalize.

With the government in flux, support for the outlying regions won't be coming online anytime soon, which makes it impossible for the US military to carry out its mission.

American military commanders with the NATO mission in Afghanistan told President Obama’s chief envoy to the region this weekend that they did not have enough troops to do their job, pushed past their limit by Taliban rebels who operate across borders.

....The possibility that more troops will be needed in Afghanistan presents the Obama administration with another problem in dealing with a nearly eight-year war that has lost popularity at home, compounded by new questions over the credibility of the Afghan government, which has just held an as-yet inconclusive presidential election beset by complaints of fraud.

OK then. More troops aren't getting the job done because we're not getting any support from the Afghan government. So we're going to ask for more troops.

Overall, the evidence suggests that steadily increasing U.S. troop strength has had virtually no effect in the past; that the Taliban is getting continually stronger; that the central government is corrupt and incompetent; and that even under the best circumstances the Afghan army can't be brought up to speed in less than five years. At the same time, U.S. commanders say they understand that they have only 12-18 months to turn things around.

Someone needs to explain to me how that's going to happen. Anything even remotely plausible will do for a start. Because I sure don't see it.

I don't have any idea what we're trying to do in Afghanistan.

...do read Peter Baker's piece, Could Afghanistan Become Obama's Vietnam?

And Why Are We In Afghanistan?

The DFHs have convinced the nation about another misguided war.

A majority of Americans now see the war in Afghanistan as not worth fighting and just a quarter say more U.S. troops should be sent to the country, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Most have confidence in the ability of the United States to meet its primary goals -- defeating the Taliban, facilitating effective economic development and molding an honest and effective Afghan government -- but very few say Thursday's elections there are likely to produce such a government.

When it comes to the baseline question, 42 percent of Americans say the U.S. is winning in Afghanistan; about as many, 36 percent, say it is losing the fight.

The new poll comes amid widespread speculation that the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, will request more troops for his stepped-up effort to root the Taliban from Afghan towns and villages. That is a position that gets the backing of 24 percent of those polled, while nearly twice as many, 45 percent, want to decrease the number of military forces there. (Most of the remainder say to keep the level about the same.) [...]

Should President Obama embrace his general's call for even more U.S. military forces, he risks alienating some of his staunchest supporters While 60 percent of all Americans approve of how Obama has handled the situation in Afghanistan, his ratings among liberals have slipped and majorities of liberals and Democrats alike now, for the first time, solidly oppose the war and are calling for a reduction in troops.

Overall, seven in 10 Democrats say the war has not been worth its costs, and fewer than one in five support an increase in troop levels. Nearly two-thirds of the most committed Democrats now feel "strongly" that the war was not worth fighting. Among moderate and conservative Democrats, a slim majority say the United States is losing in Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan issue has crept to the sidelines of the national debate, but thousands of families are still directly affected. People still die; 6 more Americans fell today, and August 2009 could be the deadliest month in Afghanistan of the entire war. The President calls it a "war of necessity" and "fundamental to the defense of our people" but cannot credibly articulate what that actually means. Juan Cole identifies three main points that Obama makes about the war, which seem fine in isolation, but not in practice:

1. "This strategy recognizes that al Qaeda and its allies had moved their base to the remote, tribal areas of Pakistan."

2. "This strategy acknowledges that military power alone will not win this war—that we also need diplomacy and development and good governance."

3. "And our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals—to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies."

These three are praiseworthy points in themselves, but the question is how they work together. I couldn't catch the significance of al-Qaeda's move to northwest Pakistan for US military operations in Afghanistan itself. I agree that the key to success in Afghanistan is diplomacy, development and governance, but worry that the major emphasis being is put on sending more troops there and on highly kinetic military operations? And I'm not sure that the Taliban can be effectively disrupted by military means; why isn't diplomacy being mentioned in this third part?

I'd expand on this critique. The goal of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al Qaeda has almost no place in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, where many Al Qaeda leaders are now stationed. Gen. Petraeus admitted back in May that Al Qaeda is no longer operating in Afghanistan - we're fighting a home-grown Taliban insurgency more nationalist than religious extremist in nature. You could make the argument that a Taliban able to take over the country could usher in Al Qaeda safe havens, but the Taliban insurgents are small in number, and have been unable to gain acceptance in anything other than the Pashtun areas. I agree with Steven Walt on this:

First, this argument tends to lump the various groups we are contending with together, and it suggests that all of them are equally committed to attacking the United States. In fact, most of the people we are fighting in Afghanistan aren't dedicated jihadis seeking to overthrow Arab monarchies, establish a Muslim caliphate, or mount attacks on U.S. soil. Their agenda is focused on local affairs, such as what they regard as the political disempowerment of Pashtuns and illegitimate foreign interference in their country. Moreover, the Taliban itself is more of a loose coalition of different groups than a tightly unified and hierarchical organization, which is why some experts believe we ought to be doing more to divide the movement and "flip" the moderate elements to our side. Unfortunately, the "safe haven" argument wrongly suggests that the Taliban care as much about attacking America as bin Laden does.

Second, while it is true that Mullah Omar gave Osama bin Laden a sanctuary both before and after 9/11, it is by no means clear that they would give him free rein to attack the United States again. Protecting al Qaeda back in 2001 brought no end of trouble to Mullah Omar and his associates, and if they were lucky enough to regain power, it is hard to believe they would give us a reason to come back in force.

Third, it is hardly obvious that Afghan territory provides an ideal "safe haven" for mounting attacks on the United States. The 9/11 plot was organized out of Hamburg, not Kabul or Kandahar, but nobody is proposing that we send troops to Germany to make sure there aren't "safe havens" operating there. In fact, if al Qaeda has to hide out somewhere, I’d rather they were in a remote, impoverished, land-locked and isolated area from which it is hard to do almost anything. The "bases" or "training camps" they could organize in Pakistan or Afghanistan might be useful for organizing a Mumbai-style attack, but they would not be particularly valuable if you were trying to do a replay of 9/11 (not many flight schools there), or if you were trying to build a weapon of mass destruction. And in a post-9/11 environment, it wouldn’t be easy for a group of al Qaeda operatives bent on a Mumbia-style operation get all the way to the United States. One cannot rule this sort of thing out, of course, but does that unlikely danger justify an open-ended commitment that is going to cost us more than $60 billion next year?

There's more at the link. As Cole says, nobody disagrees that Al Qaeda may want to attack America, but we should wonder about their capability, and seek to thwart that. And that's not a fight that can be had in Afghanistan anymore - they have no presence there.

Actually, we have morphed our goals in Afghanistan, from counter-terrorism to counter-insurgency, without anyone really challenging it. The commanders on the ground have decided that making America safe from potential safe havens in Afghanistan means ensuring the legitimacy of the government at every level, as if we can replicate this in every unstable government in the world or even in Afghanistan, a tribal society that has not really known centralized leadership. Indeed, we're only getting a minimal competence from the current government by allowing it to create laws that harm women and court Uzbek human-rights-abusing warlords to gain votes. If we really want to involve ourselves so deeply with a government like this, we should at least gain some semblance of a national security benefit, and yet none really exists, especially relative to the costs incurred in lives and treasure.

This, over everything else, is why public support is sapping. As long as this is a back-burner issue, that may not hurt the President - even in the poll, respondents give him generally decent marks for his performance on the issue, mindful of the knottiness of the problem. But I would argue it should hurt him to an extent. We have been in Afghanistan eight years, and at this point nobody can credibly explain our presence.