By David Swanson and Tom Engelhardt
9-2-9
A presidential candidate opposed to the Iraq War is elected and enters the Oval Office. Yet six months later, there are still essentially the same number of troops in Iraq as were there when his predecessor left, the same number, in fact, used in the original invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Moreover, the new president remains on the "withdrawal" schedule the previous administration laid out for him with the same caveats being issued about whether it can even be met.
That administration also built a humongous, three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar embassy in Baghdad, undoubtedly the most expensive on the planet. Staffed with approximately 1,000 "diplomats," it was clearly meant to be a massive command center for Iraq (and, given neocon dreams, the region). Last weekend, well into the Obama era, the Washington Postreported that the State Department's yearly budget for "running" that embassy - $1.5 billion (that is not a misprint) in 2009 - will actually rise to $1.8 billion for 2010 and 2011. In addition, the Obama administration now plans to invest upwards of a billion dollars in constructing a massive embassy in Islamabad and other diplomatic facilities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, too, there will be a massive influx of "diplomats," and here, too, a U.S. command center for the region is clearly being created.
What's striking are the continuities in American foreign and military policy, no matter who is in the White House. The first-term Obama foreign policy now looks increasingly like the second-term Bush foreign policy. Even where change can be spotted, it regularly seems to follow in the same vein. The New York Times, for instance, recently reported that the controversial "missile defense shield" the Bush administration was insistent on basing in Poland and the Czech Republic is being reconsidered in a many-months-long Obama administration "review." While this should be welcomed, the only option mentioned involved putting it elsewhere - in Turkey and somewhere in the Balkans. At stake is one of the great military-industrial boondoggles of our age. Yet cancellation is, it seems, beyond consideration in Washington.
Organizer David Swanson, founder among other things of the website AfterDowningStreet.org, was long in the forefront of those calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney - and now for bringing them to trial. He gives the term "activist" a good name and he's a prodigious, energetic, thoughtful writer as well. If you're as struck by today's piece as I was, you should consider giving his new book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, published on this very day, a careful look. He's special.
Tom
Bush's Third Term?
You're Living It
By David SwansonIt sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can't you just picture it?
There's Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture himformalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some "due process" even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.
I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn't torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture "if needed," and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine himcontinuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.
If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his Secretary of Defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.
Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He'd surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new "surge" there. He'd probably also beescalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan's tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.
If Bush were still "the decider" he'd be employing mercenaries like Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even be expanding the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with disreputable corporate executive types. You'd have somebody like John ("May I torture this one some more, please?") Rizzo still serving, at least for a while, as general counsel at the CIA. The White House and Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones, and Eric Holder. Most of the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.
In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in his second term would still be rolling along - with a similar crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would certainly have been reappointed to run the Fed. And Bush's third term would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying around with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the Democrats proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign. At this point in Bush's third term, no significant new effort would have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.
If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such proposals to their advantage. And he would haverefused to release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just whom he'd been talking to.
During Bush's second term, some of the lowest ranking torturers from Abu Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials responsible for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained untouched. If the public continued to push for justice for torturers during the early months of Bush's third term, he would certainly have gone withanother bad apple approach, perhaps targeting only low-ranking CIA interrogators and CIA contractors for prosecution. Bush would undoubtedly have decreed that any higher-ups would not be touched, that we should now be looking forward, not backward. And he would thereby have cemented in place the power of presidents to grant immunity for crimes they themselves authorized.
If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits, but what Americans actually read wouldn't be significantly worse than what we'd already known. What documents saw the light of day would surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden from the public eye. Bush's lawyers would be fighting in court, with ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of sight.
Now, here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency in its first seven months.
Which doesn't mean there aren't differences in the two moments. For one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving expanded presidential powers and even - in the case of wars, military strikes, lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the obstruction of justice - presidential crimes. In addition, in the new Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been strikingly defunded and, in some cases, even shut down. Many progressive groups now, in fact, take their signals from the president and his team, rather than bringing the public's demands to his doorstep.
If we really were in Bush's third term, people would be far more active and outraged. There would already be a major push to really end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. Undoubtedly, the Democrats still wouldn't impeach Bush, especially since they'd be able to vote him out before his fourth term, and surely four more years of him wouldn't make all that much difference.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Get out NOW and take FULL responsibility for your failure
1 in 10 chance of success in Afghanistan
By C-J
REAL MEN LOVE LOGISTICS
If the Afghan War was ever winnable the Cheney-Bushistas (bullshistas) would have done so, because they wanted and craved the glory. They soon discovered, after a few staged and super-hyped "successes", that they couldn't win their war and were mired down. To distance themselves from the looming catastrophe, they made a name change from American Forces to NATO Forces. To escape even more embarrassment, for their reckless adventure in Afghanistan, they "ginned up" and super-hyped another war to find those "WMD's" that were here or there and maybe even everywhere. In quick succession they began appointing a series of new NATO and American Commanders in 2 "theaters" of war. (They were all American Generals) Unfortunately all these Generals in Command have adopted historically failed military strategies. They should have read "The Art of War" or the military strategies of Alexander The Great. The Cheney-Bushistas last desperate act before the 2008 elections was to download their unfinished business onto another Presidency and blame it for the loss.
Because the Cheney-Bush Presidency didn't negotiate long term leases with Kyrgyzstan, (A logistical blunder with imminent consequences) the Government of Kyrgyzstan will close the US military base in Manas to Americans. They have virtually ordered the Americans (NATO) out of their Country, shutting an indispensable supply line for America(NATO). The only remaining land supply lines are through the steep gorges and nearly indefensible high mountain passes like the Khyber Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The steep and narrow valley gorges between Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan are already under siege and effectively closed. The Taliban have demonstrated they can close any high mountain pass between Afghanistan and Tajikistan or Pakistan, almost at will. America (NATO) may have to fight it's way out of Afghanistan through Pakistan. This is a Military Planer's nightmare and it could come true. Lets hope not, but the logistical odds are against us, about 10 to 1.
If the passes were cut off, then the only exit would be by expensive, cumbersome and limited airlift, leaving most of the heavy weapons and materials behind. Only a moron would deploy forces into areas without reliable logistical support. But that's exactly what the Cheney-Bush Presidency did. The 103,000 troops under McChrystal's command in Afghanistan, include 63,000 Americans, more than half of whom arrived this year as part of an escalation strategy begun under the previous Cheney-Bush Presidency. Under the Obama Presidency the force is set to rise to 110,000 including 68,000 Americans by December 2009.
If you have Google Earth I encourage you to familiarize yourself with the countries on all sides of Afghanistan and ask yourself the following question; How can I give adequate logistical support to the present forces or more forces in the future? Then take a ground eye view of the Khyber Pass and ask yourself; How could I move thousands or even 10 troops through this natural killing field? You can't and you shouldn't because these passes can close at any time for any reason. Currently all passes between Afghanistan and Pakistan are closed because of an "agriculture inspection" quarrel. These switchback passes are narrow and enclosed within steep gorges and high canyon walls. Vulnerable bridges can be closed by landslides, earthquakes, snow, rain, mud slides, flash floods, Taliban attacks or simple quarrels between neighboring tribes. Any of which can disable or wipe out infrastructure for weeks at a time. Imagine the predicament of a battalion including heavy vehicles and tanks caught between two non-existent bridges and a steep cliff on one side and a deep gorge on the other. Do you begin to see their vulnerabilities, now just add rain or snow. Would the Taliban allow them to pass without a single casualty? Even if 1 tank were simply disabled could the others continue unhindered?
All domestic costs including Congressional allocations of about a hundred or so billion dollars a year, will be between $3 to $6 trillion dollars. This is equal to 1/4 to 1/2 our Gross Domestic Production. Most if not all of our domestic programs, including Medi-Care and Social Security will become impossible. Afghanistan will be politically fatal for this and future Presidencies. All choices will end in tears. Now the logical question arises; "Should we bet the farm and go for it"? Unfortunately the Cheney-Bush Presidency already did and the farm is in jeopardy
In the background we can still hear the apoplectic Pentagon shill, Dick Cheney, shouting out his constant and reckless drivel, desperately continuing to shift the blame onto the following Presidency. He is obviously and irresponsibly defending his fabricated justifications for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. There was no meaningful reason to invade Afghanistan. I agree with George F. Will, "Only Pakistan really mattered".
In a recent article by James Cordesman he lays out his reasons for the apparent failures up to today. The main point I would make about his article is; He is fully vested in failed policies and was a prominent talking head during the cheer leading portion of the run-up to the Afghan and Iraqi wars. He also lays out the same tired and discredited view that it's ”Not our fault”. (When will they ever take responsibility for their job?) It is my recollection that during every funding request, they were given more money than they asked for and they spent it. I remember seeing pallets of money being unloaded in Baghdad and it simply disappeared without any accounting, whatsoever. Maybe Afghanistan became the stepsister of Iraq, but they had a job to do and they are now whining about not having sufficient support. Well here is the best advice that the Military/Industrial Complex can get; “Get out now and take responsibility for your failure”.
One correction is necessary. The Cheney-Bushistas knew that the recent history of Afghanistan proved a war was unwinnable and they betray their fore-knowledge by trying to make it Obama's war. President Obama was barely 100 days into his Presidency when the Military-Industrial-GOP complex named it "Obama's War". If it were winnable they would have taken the credit, instead they download their sack of manure on America and call it their patriotic duty.
By C-J
REAL MEN LOVE LOGISTICS
If the Afghan War was ever winnable the Cheney-Bushistas (bullshistas) would have done so, because they wanted and craved the glory. They soon discovered, after a few staged and super-hyped "successes", that they couldn't win their war and were mired down. To distance themselves from the looming catastrophe, they made a name change from American Forces to NATO Forces. To escape even more embarrassment, for their reckless adventure in Afghanistan, they "ginned up" and super-hyped another war to find those "WMD's" that were here or there and maybe even everywhere. In quick succession they began appointing a series of new NATO and American Commanders in 2 "theaters" of war. (They were all American Generals) Unfortunately all these Generals in Command have adopted historically failed military strategies. They should have read "The Art of War" or the military strategies of Alexander The Great. The Cheney-Bushistas last desperate act before the 2008 elections was to download their unfinished business onto another Presidency and blame it for the loss.
Because the Cheney-Bush Presidency didn't negotiate long term leases with Kyrgyzstan, (A logistical blunder with imminent consequences) the Government of Kyrgyzstan will close the US military base in Manas to Americans. They have virtually ordered the Americans (NATO) out of their Country, shutting an indispensable supply line for America(NATO). The only remaining land supply lines are through the steep gorges and nearly indefensible high mountain passes like the Khyber Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The steep and narrow valley gorges between Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan are already under siege and effectively closed. The Taliban have demonstrated they can close any high mountain pass between Afghanistan and Tajikistan or Pakistan, almost at will. America (NATO) may have to fight it's way out of Afghanistan through Pakistan. This is a Military Planer's nightmare and it could come true. Lets hope not, but the logistical odds are against us, about 10 to 1.
If the passes were cut off, then the only exit would be by expensive, cumbersome and limited airlift, leaving most of the heavy weapons and materials behind. Only a moron would deploy forces into areas without reliable logistical support. But that's exactly what the Cheney-Bush Presidency did. The 103,000 troops under McChrystal's command in Afghanistan, include 63,000 Americans, more than half of whom arrived this year as part of an escalation strategy begun under the previous Cheney-Bush Presidency. Under the Obama Presidency the force is set to rise to 110,000 including 68,000 Americans by December 2009.
If you have Google Earth I encourage you to familiarize yourself with the countries on all sides of Afghanistan and ask yourself the following question; How can I give adequate logistical support to the present forces or more forces in the future? Then take a ground eye view of the Khyber Pass and ask yourself; How could I move thousands or even 10 troops through this natural killing field? You can't and you shouldn't because these passes can close at any time for any reason. Currently all passes between Afghanistan and Pakistan are closed because of an "agriculture inspection" quarrel. These switchback passes are narrow and enclosed within steep gorges and high canyon walls. Vulnerable bridges can be closed by landslides, earthquakes, snow, rain, mud slides, flash floods, Taliban attacks or simple quarrels between neighboring tribes. Any of which can disable or wipe out infrastructure for weeks at a time. Imagine the predicament of a battalion including heavy vehicles and tanks caught between two non-existent bridges and a steep cliff on one side and a deep gorge on the other. Do you begin to see their vulnerabilities, now just add rain or snow. Would the Taliban allow them to pass without a single casualty? Even if 1 tank were simply disabled could the others continue unhindered?
All domestic costs including Congressional allocations of about a hundred or so billion dollars a year, will be between $3 to $6 trillion dollars. This is equal to 1/4 to 1/2 our Gross Domestic Production. Most if not all of our domestic programs, including Medi-Care and Social Security will become impossible. Afghanistan will be politically fatal for this and future Presidencies. All choices will end in tears. Now the logical question arises; "Should we bet the farm and go for it"? Unfortunately the Cheney-Bush Presidency already did and the farm is in jeopardy
In the background we can still hear the apoplectic Pentagon shill, Dick Cheney, shouting out his constant and reckless drivel, desperately continuing to shift the blame onto the following Presidency. He is obviously and irresponsibly defending his fabricated justifications for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. There was no meaningful reason to invade Afghanistan. I agree with George F. Will, "Only Pakistan really mattered".
In a recent article by James Cordesman he lays out his reasons for the apparent failures up to today. The main point I would make about his article is; He is fully vested in failed policies and was a prominent talking head during the cheer leading portion of the run-up to the Afghan and Iraqi wars. He also lays out the same tired and discredited view that it's ”Not our fault”. (When will they ever take responsibility for their job?) It is my recollection that during every funding request, they were given more money than they asked for and they spent it. I remember seeing pallets of money being unloaded in Baghdad and it simply disappeared without any accounting, whatsoever. Maybe Afghanistan became the stepsister of Iraq, but they had a job to do and they are now whining about not having sufficient support. Well here is the best advice that the Military/Industrial Complex can get; “Get out now and take responsibility for your failure”.
One correction is necessary. The Cheney-Bushistas knew that the recent history of Afghanistan proved a war was unwinnable and they betray their fore-knowledge by trying to make it Obama's war. President Obama was barely 100 days into his Presidency when the Military-Industrial-GOP complex named it "Obama's War". If it were winnable they would have taken the credit, instead they download their sack of manure on America and call it their patriotic duty.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Afghanistan--"The Military Industrial complex doesn't need to win a war, just make a profit"
By C-J
Like my friend Nate says "The Military Industrial complex doesn't need to win a war, just make a profit"
The Afghan Situation And US Choices
Letter to a Friend
William R. Polk
9-1-9
Thank you for sending me the August 27, 2009 article "Combat Patrols Afghanistan" by Mr. Bing West, who I understand is a film maker and who was recently "embedded" with US soldiers in Afghanistan. From this experience, he offers his view of the war and our policy. To summarize, he says, "More senior-level attention must be paid to inflicting severe enemy losses in firefight and to arresting the Taliban, so that their morale and networks are broken[we] need also to design concepts that bring more lethality to the ground battlefield. We're pumping billions in UAVs. Surely we can find technologies and techniques for the grunt." I assume that what he will portray in his film (of which he provides a 30-second "teaser" in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN2Qk2Tbzo8 ) is summed up in what he writes. So, while I have not seen his film, I am moved to comment since film is a very powerful medium and when focused on combat is very popular.
What he writes is interesting, but like our policy on Afghanistan, it misses the point.
The point is that Afghanistan is a country with its own, very different, mores and structure. The traditional rulers and its largest community are Pashtun, and, whether we like it or not, the Taliban is their only effective political-military wing. The Taliban have many characteristics we don't like, but they are natives who are anchored in the deeply venerated religion (a rather primitive form of Islam) and the social/cultural code (known in the south as the /Pashtunwali/ but with variations governing the lives of all the Afghans). To fight them is to fight Afghanistan. And that is a fight we cannot win.
When I first went to Afghanistan in 1962 to write a US National Policy paper, I hit on an image to bring out the major characteristics of the country: it was like a rocky hill, cut by deep gullies, on which were scattered some 20,000 ping pong balls. The balls represented the autonomous village-states. These communities were united with others by religion and custom but ran their own affairs and were largely autarkic. What the Russians later found was that while they could (and did) smash many balls and chased away the population of thousands of others, they could never find a way to negotiate the end of the war. At any given time, even with the commitment of large military forces enjoying rapid mobility, much like ours, they never controlled more than about 20% of the country and while they won most of the battles they were unable to win the war.
Despite a decade of fighting, with the loss of about 15,000 soldiers, the Russians pulled out in 1989; by then the war in Afghanistan had virtually destroyed the Soviet Union. Theirs was not a wholly new experience. The British had led the way, fighting wars with the Afghans in 1842, 1878-1880 and 1919, losing about as many Englishmen and British Indian soldiers as the Russians did, before giving up.
The current senior Russian official, Zamir N. Kabulov, who has been there for nearly 30 years, has remarked that we Americans have repeated all their mistakes and are now making new ones "for which we [the Russians] do not own the copyright."
We are trying to smash the Taliban with force, as Mr. West points out, while keeping our casualties down. He does not discuss it, but we are also attempting to split the Taliban leadership and to divide the Taliban from the Afghan people. A key element in this program is to work through a native government of our choice.
These policies call forth comparison with Vietnam. There we tried and failed to split the Viet Minh leadership, attempting to find "moderates" with whom we could deal and who would turn against the hardliners. We also made continuous, enormous efforts to sever relations between the Viet Minh and the general population ("strategic hamlets," etc.). And we worked through a native government of our choice. Actually, we had a greater chance of success there than in Afghanistan because the ideology of the Viet Minh, Communism, was foreign to a large part of the population whereas in Afghanistan Islam and the cultural code are "native."
Our tactics were, of course, what we learned to call "counterinsurgency." Listen to what the most extensive and detailed _official_ account of the war, /The Pentagon Papers/, has to say about it: "the attempt to translate the newly articulated theory of counterinsurgency into operational reality [through] a mixture of military, social, psychological, economic and political measures[was] marked by consistency in results as well as in techniques: all failed dismally."
That is essentially the policy that General David Petraeus has resurrected or reinvented and General Stanley McCrystal is attempting to implement.
In 1963, while a Member of the Policy Planning Council, I gave a talk to the US National War College predicting that we would lose the war in Vietnam. In my analysis, I divided the challenge we faced into three parts (political, administrative and military) and in "1960s think," I assigned to each a percentage of importance. I then put those categories in a historical perspective. I think it is germane today to Afghanistan so I summarize it briefly here: the political component accounted for about 80% and in Vietnam it had been won by the Viet Minh by the late 1940s. As President Eisenhower observed, Ho Chi Minh could have won a free election even in the South. To the administrative element I assigned 15%. By the end of the 1950s, the Viet Minh had destroyed the administration of the South, killing large numbers of officials, policemen, teachers, and even doctors, so that no taxes could be collected, no messages delivered, no services provided, and no movement made even by South Vietnamese soldiers after dark. The remaining 5%, the military engagement, was what we fought over for the next decade. We had grabbed the short end of the lever. I was sure in 1963 that we would lose. Counterinsurgency and even large-scale combat were effectively irrelevant.
Apply this to Afghanistan: we cannot exercise much if any influence on the political or cultural nature of the country. Neither the British nor the Russians could either. The Afghans uniformly hate foreign intrusion, always have, and do today. So we are concentrating on administration and warfare.
On administration, we have drawn up a laundry list (as Congress required) of the check points of our success. There have been some successes, not many, but some. However, they are ephemeral. As soon as our troops pull out, the Taliban, like the Viet Minh, overturn what has been created or at least encouraged.
Richard Oppel, Jr. fleshed this situation out for one Afghan province in /The New York Times /on August 23, 2009. The governor of Khan Neshin told him he had "no body of advisers to help run the area, no doctors to provide health care, no teachers, no professionals to do much of anything. About all he says he does have are police officers who steal and a small group of Afghan soldiers who say they are here for 'vacation.'"
It may be better in some areas, but it is certainly worse in others. To stick to my percentage evaluation, give our activities on "nation building," generously, half of my estimate or 8%.
So that leaves the military about whom Mr. West writes. With superior firepower, we will win all the significant engagements. In the nature of guerrilla warfare, the insurgents will fade away when they cannot win. But they will come back. And today, reports suggest that all we hold is where at any given moment we are on the ground in force. This was our experience in Vietnam and the Russian experience in Afghanistan. So, again generously, let us give our military effort 3%.
That means the odds against us are about ten to one.
Consider also that the former South Vietnam and current Afghan governments are similar in key respects: they are hated and feared by the population. The corruption of the South Vietnamese government was monumental. Officials stole aid money and even the food we were trying to give their people; the equipment and arms we gave them to fight the Viet Minh they sold to the Viet Minh; and they left the dangerous jobs to us. A member of the interagency task force I then headed, a Marine Corps Colonel (who later became a Lt. General), remarked to me that his experience as operations chief of a division was that if the South Vietnamese army learned of American plans, the Marines were sure to run into an ambush.
Compare Afghanistan: the government we condoned and effectively installed is deeply involved in the drug traffic, sells offices in the police, army and civil service, decides law cases by the size of bribes, steals everything its officials touch, and even has been caught selling our arms and ammunition to the Taliban. Everything is for sale. The reelection of Hamid Karzai was not a travesty; it was a joke. The result (as in Iran) was announced before the votes were counted. Even the ink used to mark voters and ballots turned out to fade. And the Karzai government has, like the Vietnamese government, almost no effect outside of downtown Kabul. Our troops find that Afghan soldiers keep as far out of danger as possible; many even go over to the Taliban. As in Vietnam, our opponents, aided by the local population, "own the night."
What is different from Vietnam in Afghanistan is the presence of the warlords. They are hated and feared universally, and they virtually control the government. Karzai had to call back the notorious Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum to win, if that is what he did, his election and now has made him effectively co-ruler. Worse, the warlords are associated in the public mind with us. They are the Taliban's greatest asset. Even people who hate the Taliban prefer them to the warlords. Not the most subtle or diplomatic man in the world, Richard Holbrooke apparently engaged in a shouting match three days ago with Karzai over the role of the warlords and the blatant fraud of the elections. (For those who remember former Vice President Henry Cabot Lodge's dealings with the Ngo Dinhs, it was Vietnam /redux/!)
So what does the future hold? President Obama says we must win. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says we must stay there "a few years." The senior British commander-designate, General Sir David Richards, put a number on it: 40 years. (That, incidentally, was the number Neoconservative James Woolsey came up with for our worldwide Crusade, so I suppose it translates into what /The Economist /called "the path desired by the Neoconservatives, permanent, unending war." ) But, the well-informed British ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, wrote a few months ago in a leaked memorandum that the war was already lost. The Spaniards are about to withdraw; a remarkable photographic collection (carreterasafganistan.pps) shows why: even without considering the Taliban, they could not cope with Afghan terrain. Canada has put a terminal date on its involvement and both the Germans and Norwegians are "wobbling."
My calculation, amateurish as it may be but based on more professional calculations on the Iraq campaign, is that the Afghan war will cost the American economy (not just the Congressional allocations of a hundred or so billion dollars a year) between $3 and $6 trillion dollars or a quarter to a half of our GDP, making much of President Obama's domestic plan impossible. In short, Afghanistan is on the way to becoming as politically fatal for him as Vietnam was for Lyndon Johnson.
Despite this, President Obama has decided to "stay the course" and has sought to justify his decision by proclaiming that Afghanistan is the fountain-head of terrorism. Terrorists based there will attack America. This is wrong in two senses:
First, terrorism will be promoted rather than contained by our military action in Afghanistan (especially as our campaigns have spilled over into Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq and potentially could include Iran). More "boots on the ground" is a recipe for increased danger.
Second, terrorists do not need Afghanistan for their work. It is a poor launching pad, remote and poorly served by communications and transport. The men who carried out the attacks in the September 2001 were based in Europe. And, future terrorists could attack from anywhere. Even "winning" in Afghanistan would not stop but almost certainly would incite them.
Despite our long experience with it, dating back to our own revolution (as I have shown in my book /The Birth of America/), we have not understood the nature and cause of terrorism: in a few words, terrorism is the weapon of the weak and they will use it when it is the only means they have to attempt to redress what they regard as wrongs. This story has been repeated over the last two centuries in various parts of South America as well as in Ireland, Spain, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, France, Palestine, Turkey, South Africa, Kenya, India, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, China and Russia (as I document in my book /Violent Politics/)/. / When we approve of the terrorists' aims we call them Freedom Fighters, but the only difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is our attitude toward their objectives, not their means of action.
We also confuse the Taliban and al-Qaida, but they are very different from one another: the Taliban, as I have said, is a national political organization, indeed a government in /internal/ exile, based on the traditional leadership and largest community of Afghanistan, while al-Qaida is a loose amalgam of men and women from all over the world who act on their own; it is not an organization and lacks central command. Usama bin Ladin is not their general but their guru. Their issues vary but, in general, they arise from the ragged, violent heritage of (mostly but not entirely Western) imperialism.
So what to do about these things:
1) we must get out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible with as little damage to us and the Afghans as is possible. I have (separately) identified a way to do this. We have what may be a fleeting opportunity right now to do it quickly and cleanly.
2) We will have to continue to take reasonable police action against and to collect information on hostile groups. But no amount of police or especially military action will give us complete protection. Moreover, use of these means is dangerous to our own society and to our political and legal system. We must tread the fine line that divides "security" from "tyranny." Doing so is now and will continue to be one of the major domestic challenges for Americans. The danger of failure is great and the cost of failure would be horrible. Forty years of warfare, as the Neoconservaties advocate and the generals tell us the war in Afghanistan will require, will probably not defeat /them /but it certainly could destroy what we most cherish.
3) Consequently, the long term policy we need is one that will address issues that empower terrorists. We cannot "solve" or even ameliorate all of them. (For example, there is little or nothing we can do about the Chinese imperialist and colonialist policies against Tibet or the Uigurs in Xinjiang/Sinkiang/Chinese Turkestan.) But we can help to reach accommodations on a number of others and smooth the path toward national conciliation. We should make these actions a basic thrust of our national defense policy. Wisely carried into effect, it is our best route to security over the longer term.
4) I do not believe what happens to Usama bin Ladin is a "vital" issue for us. Chasing him makes good press but, in fact, he is little more than a symbol. However, if we decide that he must be immobilized, I have identified a way to accomplish this within the context of the Afghan /Pashtunwali's /code of /melmastia /(roughly, "sanctuary"). What we have tried to do, capture or kill him by offering the Pashtuns huge bribes, has so far at least failed; attempting it has antagonized the Pashtuns because it is taken as an insult to their code of honor; but there is a way we can render him harmless which is what even those who believe him to be a major danger should desire.
5) We must educate our people to understand and accept the fact that our little globe is multicultural. The more we try to force other peoples to recast themselves in our mold, as the Neoconservatives have tried to make us do, the more enemies we make and the greater danger we create. Indeed, even trying to do so is both beyond our means and also is destructive of the very things that we should cherish. We should aim instead to turn President Obama's June 2009 speech in Cairo into real policy. I have also elsewhere sketched out some of the steps we could take in this direction.
My own experience with Afghanistan, as I have mentioned, goes back almost half a century. My involvement in Vietnam was fleeting but benefitted from close contact with the major players and access to everything America could find out. And my study of insurgency, guerrilla warfare and terrorism has been exhaustive and is on record in my book /Violent Politics. /You will perhaps forgive me for looking somewhat askance at the instant experts who provide us -- and worse our President -- with "winning" formulas that have failed every time they were tried. It may make good cinema, but Mr. West's portrayal is the most recent in a long sequence of such beguiling efforts.
Odysseus was right to tie himself to the mast and stop up the ears of his crew when the sirens sangjust off the rocks.
Like my friend Nate says "The Military Industrial complex doesn't need to win a war, just make a profit"
The Afghan Situation And US Choices
Letter to a Friend
William R. Polk
9-1-9
Thank you for sending me the August 27, 2009 article "Combat Patrols Afghanistan" by Mr. Bing West, who I understand is a film maker and who was recently "embedded" with US soldiers in Afghanistan. From this experience, he offers his view of the war and our policy. To summarize, he says, "More senior-level attention must be paid to inflicting severe enemy losses in firefight and to arresting the Taliban, so that their morale and networks are broken[we] need also to design concepts that bring more lethality to the ground battlefield. We're pumping billions in UAVs. Surely we can find technologies and techniques for the grunt." I assume that what he will portray in his film (of which he provides a 30-second "teaser" in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN2Qk2Tbzo8 ) is summed up in what he writes. So, while I have not seen his film, I am moved to comment since film is a very powerful medium and when focused on combat is very popular.
What he writes is interesting, but like our policy on Afghanistan, it misses the point.
The point is that Afghanistan is a country with its own, very different, mores and structure. The traditional rulers and its largest community are Pashtun, and, whether we like it or not, the Taliban is their only effective political-military wing. The Taliban have many characteristics we don't like, but they are natives who are anchored in the deeply venerated religion (a rather primitive form of Islam) and the social/cultural code (known in the south as the /Pashtunwali/ but with variations governing the lives of all the Afghans). To fight them is to fight Afghanistan. And that is a fight we cannot win.
When I first went to Afghanistan in 1962 to write a US National Policy paper, I hit on an image to bring out the major characteristics of the country: it was like a rocky hill, cut by deep gullies, on which were scattered some 20,000 ping pong balls. The balls represented the autonomous village-states. These communities were united with others by religion and custom but ran their own affairs and were largely autarkic. What the Russians later found was that while they could (and did) smash many balls and chased away the population of thousands of others, they could never find a way to negotiate the end of the war. At any given time, even with the commitment of large military forces enjoying rapid mobility, much like ours, they never controlled more than about 20% of the country and while they won most of the battles they were unable to win the war.
Despite a decade of fighting, with the loss of about 15,000 soldiers, the Russians pulled out in 1989; by then the war in Afghanistan had virtually destroyed the Soviet Union. Theirs was not a wholly new experience. The British had led the way, fighting wars with the Afghans in 1842, 1878-1880 and 1919, losing about as many Englishmen and British Indian soldiers as the Russians did, before giving up.
The current senior Russian official, Zamir N. Kabulov, who has been there for nearly 30 years, has remarked that we Americans have repeated all their mistakes and are now making new ones "for which we [the Russians] do not own the copyright."
We are trying to smash the Taliban with force, as Mr. West points out, while keeping our casualties down. He does not discuss it, but we are also attempting to split the Taliban leadership and to divide the Taliban from the Afghan people. A key element in this program is to work through a native government of our choice.
These policies call forth comparison with Vietnam. There we tried and failed to split the Viet Minh leadership, attempting to find "moderates" with whom we could deal and who would turn against the hardliners. We also made continuous, enormous efforts to sever relations between the Viet Minh and the general population ("strategic hamlets," etc.). And we worked through a native government of our choice. Actually, we had a greater chance of success there than in Afghanistan because the ideology of the Viet Minh, Communism, was foreign to a large part of the population whereas in Afghanistan Islam and the cultural code are "native."
Our tactics were, of course, what we learned to call "counterinsurgency." Listen to what the most extensive and detailed _official_ account of the war, /The Pentagon Papers/, has to say about it: "the attempt to translate the newly articulated theory of counterinsurgency into operational reality [through] a mixture of military, social, psychological, economic and political measures[was] marked by consistency in results as well as in techniques: all failed dismally."
That is essentially the policy that General David Petraeus has resurrected or reinvented and General Stanley McCrystal is attempting to implement.
In 1963, while a Member of the Policy Planning Council, I gave a talk to the US National War College predicting that we would lose the war in Vietnam. In my analysis, I divided the challenge we faced into three parts (political, administrative and military) and in "1960s think," I assigned to each a percentage of importance. I then put those categories in a historical perspective. I think it is germane today to Afghanistan so I summarize it briefly here: the political component accounted for about 80% and in Vietnam it had been won by the Viet Minh by the late 1940s. As President Eisenhower observed, Ho Chi Minh could have won a free election even in the South. To the administrative element I assigned 15%. By the end of the 1950s, the Viet Minh had destroyed the administration of the South, killing large numbers of officials, policemen, teachers, and even doctors, so that no taxes could be collected, no messages delivered, no services provided, and no movement made even by South Vietnamese soldiers after dark. The remaining 5%, the military engagement, was what we fought over for the next decade. We had grabbed the short end of the lever. I was sure in 1963 that we would lose. Counterinsurgency and even large-scale combat were effectively irrelevant.
Apply this to Afghanistan: we cannot exercise much if any influence on the political or cultural nature of the country. Neither the British nor the Russians could either. The Afghans uniformly hate foreign intrusion, always have, and do today. So we are concentrating on administration and warfare.
On administration, we have drawn up a laundry list (as Congress required) of the check points of our success. There have been some successes, not many, but some. However, they are ephemeral. As soon as our troops pull out, the Taliban, like the Viet Minh, overturn what has been created or at least encouraged.
Richard Oppel, Jr. fleshed this situation out for one Afghan province in /The New York Times /on August 23, 2009. The governor of Khan Neshin told him he had "no body of advisers to help run the area, no doctors to provide health care, no teachers, no professionals to do much of anything. About all he says he does have are police officers who steal and a small group of Afghan soldiers who say they are here for 'vacation.'"
It may be better in some areas, but it is certainly worse in others. To stick to my percentage evaluation, give our activities on "nation building," generously, half of my estimate or 8%.
So that leaves the military about whom Mr. West writes. With superior firepower, we will win all the significant engagements. In the nature of guerrilla warfare, the insurgents will fade away when they cannot win. But they will come back. And today, reports suggest that all we hold is where at any given moment we are on the ground in force. This was our experience in Vietnam and the Russian experience in Afghanistan. So, again generously, let us give our military effort 3%.
That means the odds against us are about ten to one.
Consider also that the former South Vietnam and current Afghan governments are similar in key respects: they are hated and feared by the population. The corruption of the South Vietnamese government was monumental. Officials stole aid money and even the food we were trying to give their people; the equipment and arms we gave them to fight the Viet Minh they sold to the Viet Minh; and they left the dangerous jobs to us. A member of the interagency task force I then headed, a Marine Corps Colonel (who later became a Lt. General), remarked to me that his experience as operations chief of a division was that if the South Vietnamese army learned of American plans, the Marines were sure to run into an ambush.
Compare Afghanistan: the government we condoned and effectively installed is deeply involved in the drug traffic, sells offices in the police, army and civil service, decides law cases by the size of bribes, steals everything its officials touch, and even has been caught selling our arms and ammunition to the Taliban. Everything is for sale. The reelection of Hamid Karzai was not a travesty; it was a joke. The result (as in Iran) was announced before the votes were counted. Even the ink used to mark voters and ballots turned out to fade. And the Karzai government has, like the Vietnamese government, almost no effect outside of downtown Kabul. Our troops find that Afghan soldiers keep as far out of danger as possible; many even go over to the Taliban. As in Vietnam, our opponents, aided by the local population, "own the night."
What is different from Vietnam in Afghanistan is the presence of the warlords. They are hated and feared universally, and they virtually control the government. Karzai had to call back the notorious Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum to win, if that is what he did, his election and now has made him effectively co-ruler. Worse, the warlords are associated in the public mind with us. They are the Taliban's greatest asset. Even people who hate the Taliban prefer them to the warlords. Not the most subtle or diplomatic man in the world, Richard Holbrooke apparently engaged in a shouting match three days ago with Karzai over the role of the warlords and the blatant fraud of the elections. (For those who remember former Vice President Henry Cabot Lodge's dealings with the Ngo Dinhs, it was Vietnam /redux/!)
So what does the future hold? President Obama says we must win. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says we must stay there "a few years." The senior British commander-designate, General Sir David Richards, put a number on it: 40 years. (That, incidentally, was the number Neoconservative James Woolsey came up with for our worldwide Crusade, so I suppose it translates into what /The Economist /called "the path desired by the Neoconservatives, permanent, unending war." ) But, the well-informed British ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, wrote a few months ago in a leaked memorandum that the war was already lost. The Spaniards are about to withdraw; a remarkable photographic collection (carreterasafganistan.pps) shows why: even without considering the Taliban, they could not cope with Afghan terrain. Canada has put a terminal date on its involvement and both the Germans and Norwegians are "wobbling."
My calculation, amateurish as it may be but based on more professional calculations on the Iraq campaign, is that the Afghan war will cost the American economy (not just the Congressional allocations of a hundred or so billion dollars a year) between $3 and $6 trillion dollars or a quarter to a half of our GDP, making much of President Obama's domestic plan impossible. In short, Afghanistan is on the way to becoming as politically fatal for him as Vietnam was for Lyndon Johnson.
Despite this, President Obama has decided to "stay the course" and has sought to justify his decision by proclaiming that Afghanistan is the fountain-head of terrorism. Terrorists based there will attack America. This is wrong in two senses:
First, terrorism will be promoted rather than contained by our military action in Afghanistan (especially as our campaigns have spilled over into Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq and potentially could include Iran). More "boots on the ground" is a recipe for increased danger.
Second, terrorists do not need Afghanistan for their work. It is a poor launching pad, remote and poorly served by communications and transport. The men who carried out the attacks in the September 2001 were based in Europe. And, future terrorists could attack from anywhere. Even "winning" in Afghanistan would not stop but almost certainly would incite them.
Despite our long experience with it, dating back to our own revolution (as I have shown in my book /The Birth of America/), we have not understood the nature and cause of terrorism: in a few words, terrorism is the weapon of the weak and they will use it when it is the only means they have to attempt to redress what they regard as wrongs. This story has been repeated over the last two centuries in various parts of South America as well as in Ireland, Spain, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, France, Palestine, Turkey, South Africa, Kenya, India, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, China and Russia (as I document in my book /Violent Politics/)/. / When we approve of the terrorists' aims we call them Freedom Fighters, but the only difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is our attitude toward their objectives, not their means of action.
We also confuse the Taliban and al-Qaida, but they are very different from one another: the Taliban, as I have said, is a national political organization, indeed a government in /internal/ exile, based on the traditional leadership and largest community of Afghanistan, while al-Qaida is a loose amalgam of men and women from all over the world who act on their own; it is not an organization and lacks central command. Usama bin Ladin is not their general but their guru. Their issues vary but, in general, they arise from the ragged, violent heritage of (mostly but not entirely Western) imperialism.
So what to do about these things:
1) we must get out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible with as little damage to us and the Afghans as is possible. I have (separately) identified a way to do this. We have what may be a fleeting opportunity right now to do it quickly and cleanly.
2) We will have to continue to take reasonable police action against and to collect information on hostile groups. But no amount of police or especially military action will give us complete protection. Moreover, use of these means is dangerous to our own society and to our political and legal system. We must tread the fine line that divides "security" from "tyranny." Doing so is now and will continue to be one of the major domestic challenges for Americans. The danger of failure is great and the cost of failure would be horrible. Forty years of warfare, as the Neoconservaties advocate and the generals tell us the war in Afghanistan will require, will probably not defeat /them /but it certainly could destroy what we most cherish.
3) Consequently, the long term policy we need is one that will address issues that empower terrorists. We cannot "solve" or even ameliorate all of them. (For example, there is little or nothing we can do about the Chinese imperialist and colonialist policies against Tibet or the Uigurs in Xinjiang/Sinkiang/Chinese Turkestan.) But we can help to reach accommodations on a number of others and smooth the path toward national conciliation. We should make these actions a basic thrust of our national defense policy. Wisely carried into effect, it is our best route to security over the longer term.
4) I do not believe what happens to Usama bin Ladin is a "vital" issue for us. Chasing him makes good press but, in fact, he is little more than a symbol. However, if we decide that he must be immobilized, I have identified a way to accomplish this within the context of the Afghan /Pashtunwali's /code of /melmastia /(roughly, "sanctuary"). What we have tried to do, capture or kill him by offering the Pashtuns huge bribes, has so far at least failed; attempting it has antagonized the Pashtuns because it is taken as an insult to their code of honor; but there is a way we can render him harmless which is what even those who believe him to be a major danger should desire.
5) We must educate our people to understand and accept the fact that our little globe is multicultural. The more we try to force other peoples to recast themselves in our mold, as the Neoconservatives have tried to make us do, the more enemies we make and the greater danger we create. Indeed, even trying to do so is both beyond our means and also is destructive of the very things that we should cherish. We should aim instead to turn President Obama's June 2009 speech in Cairo into real policy. I have also elsewhere sketched out some of the steps we could take in this direction.
My own experience with Afghanistan, as I have mentioned, goes back almost half a century. My involvement in Vietnam was fleeting but benefitted from close contact with the major players and access to everything America could find out. And my study of insurgency, guerrilla warfare and terrorism has been exhaustive and is on record in my book /Violent Politics. /You will perhaps forgive me for looking somewhat askance at the instant experts who provide us -- and worse our President -- with "winning" formulas that have failed every time they were tried. It may make good cinema, but Mr. West's portrayal is the most recent in a long sequence of such beguiling efforts.
Odysseus was right to tie himself to the mast and stop up the ears of his crew when the sirens sangjust off the rocks.
Real Men Love Logistics
In Afghanistan, The U.S. Needs Iran and Russia
Without the support of Iran and Russia, the U.S. can't win in Afghanistan
By Juan Cole
Aug. 31, 2009 "Salon" --- There is an old saying in military affairs, that everyone wants to do strategy and tactics, but real men do logistics. That is, moving persons and materiel around and managing supplies seems tedious, but they are crucial to success. The Obama administration has substituted the Logistics of War for the War on Terror. It is moving troops and equipment and assets around in the millions, on a vast scale, and therefore its enemies -- whether the Sunni radicals in Iraq or the neo-Taliban -- are also concentrating on logistics. The staccato, desultory news items of bombings here and airstrikes there make sense if the individual incidents are viewed as struggles over supply lines-- whether supply lines for military purposes, or supplies of intangibles such as international legitimacy. And in this context, the gingerness with which Washington is now approaching Russia and Iran makes perfect sense.
The logistics war in AfPak were on full view Sunday, with the long fingers of blazing conflagrations jabbing the sky amid billowing waves of jet black smoke both in Chaman in Pakistan near the Afghan border, and in Kunar Province. The bombing of supply trucks is to this war what U-boat attacks on supply ships were to the two world wars.
In Chaman, Dawn reports, "At least 15 oil tankers, trailers and containers caught fire in Chaman on Sunday night after a blast in a vehicle carrying supplies for Nato forces in Afghanistan." The NATO supply vehicle became a sitting duck because the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan has been closed for the last few days over a dispute about whether Pakistani border guards may search Afghan fruit trucks.
Meanwhile, a different sort of supply line was hit in Mingora in the Swat Valley, when a Taliban suicide bomber killed 16 recent police recruits and wounded five others. The Pakistani army had attacked the 4,000 Taliban fighters that were dominating Swat this spring, much to the annoyance of the people of Swat, and had largely expelled them. But obviously furtive Taliban terrorist cells are still able to operate there, even against police stations. The point of these special operations police recruits was to make the expulsion of the Taliban permanent.
On the Afghan side of the border, militants from the Hizb-i Islami or "Islamic Party" of Gulbadin Hikmatyar "stormed a NATO supply convoy and torched at least 10 vehicles in the troubled eastern province of Kunar," according to Pajhwok News Service.
Meanwhile, the Taliban have used pockets of Pashtun populations in the north of the country as a base to take over three districts that allow them to block supplies coming in from Tajikistan, according to McClatchy.
These setbacks are taking place even as U.S. missiles slammed into a base of the militant Haqqani group in eastern Afghanistan, allegedly killing 35 guerrillas. The Haqqani group is cooperating with the Hizb-i Islami and with the "old Taliban" of Mulla Omar in attempting to undermine the Kabul government and its NATO backers.
Both Hikmatyar and Jalal al-Din Haqqani were assets of the Reagan administration in the 1980s fight against the Soviets and they received large amounts of monetary aid from Washington, but have now turned on it.
In any case, the Taliban are obviously attempting to cut the supply routes that allow the U.S. and NATO to keep their troops supplied with ammunition, fuel and food.
The hundreds of ballot fraud complaints now flooding into the offices of election monitors in Afghanistan threaten to deny legitimacy to the presidential election and thence to the Kabul government itself. In essence, the Obama administration and NATO intended those elections to form a supply line of international and domestic legitimacy, which has now been disrupted, apparently in some large part by partisans of President Karzai.
At the same time that NATO and the U.S. are trying to move troops and materiel into Afghanistan, the U.S. is attempting to move 1.5 million pieces of equipment out of Iraq, according to AP. Moreover, all but 40,000 U.S. troops out of 130,000 now in country should be out by this time next year. Just as the supply trails into Afghanistan are vulnerable, so too are those out of Iraq. Much of the materiel is being put on trucks and taken south through Mahdi army and Badr Corps (Shiite militia) territory to Kuwait in the south. Other trucks ply the once-perilous road between Baghdad and Aqaba in Jordan, going through sometimes hostile Sunni Arab territories. As the U.S. forces and military equipment in Iraq dwindle, the remaining troops become more vulnerable.
As for the southern route, the major forces that can convince the armed Shiites to let the U.S. leave in peace via Kuwait are the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, which has been positioning the new Iraqi army in the south and cultivating tribal levies there, and the Iranian government of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Should relations take a very bad turn for the worse between the U.S. and Iran, the danger of Shiite militia attacks on the U.S. convoys would spike.
Also in Afghanistan, the U.S. increasingly depends on Russian goodwill, and Iran is influential in Herat, Mazar, the Hazarah regions and Kabul. Iran can play a positive role in its two neighboring countries, de facto acting as an ally of the U.S. Or it could play spoiler.
The United States has been made a hostage to Iran and Russia by George W. Bush's miring of the U.S. military in the midst of 300 million hostile, anti-imperialist Middle Easterners.
Obama's presidency may succeed or flounder on his success in the recondite art of logistics, both in the strict military sense and in a wider metaphorical sense, of putting the right personnel and "assets" in place for political victories.
In that regard, Iraq could well be a big win.
AfPak, so far not so much.
Salon contributor Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and the author of "Engaging the Muslim World."
Without the support of Iran and Russia, the U.S. can't win in Afghanistan
By Juan Cole
Aug. 31, 2009 "Salon" --- There is an old saying in military affairs, that everyone wants to do strategy and tactics, but real men do logistics. That is, moving persons and materiel around and managing supplies seems tedious, but they are crucial to success. The Obama administration has substituted the Logistics of War for the War on Terror. It is moving troops and equipment and assets around in the millions, on a vast scale, and therefore its enemies -- whether the Sunni radicals in Iraq or the neo-Taliban -- are also concentrating on logistics. The staccato, desultory news items of bombings here and airstrikes there make sense if the individual incidents are viewed as struggles over supply lines-- whether supply lines for military purposes, or supplies of intangibles such as international legitimacy. And in this context, the gingerness with which Washington is now approaching Russia and Iran makes perfect sense.
The logistics war in AfPak were on full view Sunday, with the long fingers of blazing conflagrations jabbing the sky amid billowing waves of jet black smoke both in Chaman in Pakistan near the Afghan border, and in Kunar Province. The bombing of supply trucks is to this war what U-boat attacks on supply ships were to the two world wars.
In Chaman, Dawn reports, "At least 15 oil tankers, trailers and containers caught fire in Chaman on Sunday night after a blast in a vehicle carrying supplies for Nato forces in Afghanistan." The NATO supply vehicle became a sitting duck because the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan has been closed for the last few days over a dispute about whether Pakistani border guards may search Afghan fruit trucks.
Meanwhile, a different sort of supply line was hit in Mingora in the Swat Valley, when a Taliban suicide bomber killed 16 recent police recruits and wounded five others. The Pakistani army had attacked the 4,000 Taliban fighters that were dominating Swat this spring, much to the annoyance of the people of Swat, and had largely expelled them. But obviously furtive Taliban terrorist cells are still able to operate there, even against police stations. The point of these special operations police recruits was to make the expulsion of the Taliban permanent.
On the Afghan side of the border, militants from the Hizb-i Islami or "Islamic Party" of Gulbadin Hikmatyar "stormed a NATO supply convoy and torched at least 10 vehicles in the troubled eastern province of Kunar," according to Pajhwok News Service.
Meanwhile, the Taliban have used pockets of Pashtun populations in the north of the country as a base to take over three districts that allow them to block supplies coming in from Tajikistan, according to McClatchy.
These setbacks are taking place even as U.S. missiles slammed into a base of the militant Haqqani group in eastern Afghanistan, allegedly killing 35 guerrillas. The Haqqani group is cooperating with the Hizb-i Islami and with the "old Taliban" of Mulla Omar in attempting to undermine the Kabul government and its NATO backers.
Both Hikmatyar and Jalal al-Din Haqqani were assets of the Reagan administration in the 1980s fight against the Soviets and they received large amounts of monetary aid from Washington, but have now turned on it.
In any case, the Taliban are obviously attempting to cut the supply routes that allow the U.S. and NATO to keep their troops supplied with ammunition, fuel and food.
The hundreds of ballot fraud complaints now flooding into the offices of election monitors in Afghanistan threaten to deny legitimacy to the presidential election and thence to the Kabul government itself. In essence, the Obama administration and NATO intended those elections to form a supply line of international and domestic legitimacy, which has now been disrupted, apparently in some large part by partisans of President Karzai.
At the same time that NATO and the U.S. are trying to move troops and materiel into Afghanistan, the U.S. is attempting to move 1.5 million pieces of equipment out of Iraq, according to AP. Moreover, all but 40,000 U.S. troops out of 130,000 now in country should be out by this time next year. Just as the supply trails into Afghanistan are vulnerable, so too are those out of Iraq. Much of the materiel is being put on trucks and taken south through Mahdi army and Badr Corps (Shiite militia) territory to Kuwait in the south. Other trucks ply the once-perilous road between Baghdad and Aqaba in Jordan, going through sometimes hostile Sunni Arab territories. As the U.S. forces and military equipment in Iraq dwindle, the remaining troops become more vulnerable.
As for the southern route, the major forces that can convince the armed Shiites to let the U.S. leave in peace via Kuwait are the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, which has been positioning the new Iraqi army in the south and cultivating tribal levies there, and the Iranian government of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Should relations take a very bad turn for the worse between the U.S. and Iran, the danger of Shiite militia attacks on the U.S. convoys would spike.
Also in Afghanistan, the U.S. increasingly depends on Russian goodwill, and Iran is influential in Herat, Mazar, the Hazarah regions and Kabul. Iran can play a positive role in its two neighboring countries, de facto acting as an ally of the U.S. Or it could play spoiler.
The United States has been made a hostage to Iran and Russia by George W. Bush's miring of the U.S. military in the midst of 300 million hostile, anti-imperialist Middle Easterners.
Obama's presidency may succeed or flounder on his success in the recondite art of logistics, both in the strict military sense and in a wider metaphorical sense, of putting the right personnel and "assets" in place for political victories.
In that regard, Iraq could well be a big win.
AfPak, so far not so much.
Salon contributor Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and the author of "Engaging the Muslim World."
Afghanistan, pulling out early, a tried and but not necessarily true method of birth (war) control
By Peter Graff
George Will calls for pull-out
The elite conservative commentator will call for ground troops to leave Afghanistan, say publishing sources.
"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,” Will writes in the column, scheduled for publication later this week.
President Obama ordered a total of 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan in February and March, and casualties have mounted as the forces began confronting the Taliban more aggressively. August saw the highest monthly death toll for the U.S. since the invasion in 2001, the second record month in a row.
Will’s prescription – in which he urges Obama to remember Bismarck’s decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870 - seems certain to split Republicans. He is a favorite of fiscal conservatives. The more hawkish right can be expected to attack his conclusion as foolhardy, short-sighted and naïve, potentially making the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attack.
The columnist’s startling recommendation surfaced on the same day that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, sent an assessment up his chain of command recommending what he called “a revised implementation strategy.” In a statement, McChrystal also called for “commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort.”
In the column, Will warns that any nation-building strategy could be impossible to execute given the Taliban’s ability to seemingly disappear into the rugged mountain terrain and the lack of economic development in the war-plagued nation.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates was asked Monday by Peter Cook of Bloomberg TV: “Are we winning in Afghanistan?”
“I think it's a mixed picture in Afghanistan,” Gates replied. “I think that there aren’t too many people with too rosy a view of what's going on in Afghanistan. I think there are many challenges. But I think some of the gloom and doom is somewhat overdrawn as well. … I think that there are some positive developments. But there is no question our casualties are up and there's no question we have a very tough fight in front of us, a lot of challenges.”
George Will calls for pull-out
The elite conservative commentator will call for ground troops to leave Afghanistan, say publishing sources.
"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,” Will writes in the column, scheduled for publication later this week.
President Obama ordered a total of 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan in February and March, and casualties have mounted as the forces began confronting the Taliban more aggressively. August saw the highest monthly death toll for the U.S. since the invasion in 2001, the second record month in a row.
Will’s prescription – in which he urges Obama to remember Bismarck’s decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870 - seems certain to split Republicans. He is a favorite of fiscal conservatives. The more hawkish right can be expected to attack his conclusion as foolhardy, short-sighted and naïve, potentially making the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attack.
The columnist’s startling recommendation surfaced on the same day that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, sent an assessment up his chain of command recommending what he called “a revised implementation strategy.” In a statement, McChrystal also called for “commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort.”
In the column, Will warns that any nation-building strategy could be impossible to execute given the Taliban’s ability to seemingly disappear into the rugged mountain terrain and the lack of economic development in the war-plagued nation.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates was asked Monday by Peter Cook of Bloomberg TV: “Are we winning in Afghanistan?”
“I think it's a mixed picture in Afghanistan,” Gates replied. “I think that there aren’t too many people with too rosy a view of what's going on in Afghanistan. I think there are many challenges. But I think some of the gloom and doom is somewhat overdrawn as well. … I think that there are some positive developments. But there is no question our casualties are up and there's no question we have a very tough fight in front of us, a lot of challenges.”
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