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.

Bob Woodward Subscribes To The Progressive Book Club

I'm baffled as to why the Washington Post put this on the front page, and why most other papers referred to it as if Bob Woodward had a Watergate-esque scoop.

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.

Al-Qahtani's interrogation logs, clearly showing torture, have been released. TIME Magazine published them over three YEARS ago. Phillippe Sands wrote an entire book about it, Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. In it, many people unequivocally state that we tortured al-Qahtani.

As for the supposed scoop that Crawford is the first Bush Administration official to admit to torture, um, how about Dick Cheney? CIA Director Michael Hayden? George W. Bush?

There is some news value in Crawford's remarks, on a couple of fronts. She admits that a combination of techniques that were authorized, administered in succession and over a long period of time, can have the same effect as torture. And the fact that she held back military lawyers from prosecuting him because of the torture used underscores what some are calling the difficulty with closing Guantanamo and dealing with the detainees.

The Qahtani case underscores the challenges facing the incoming Obama administration as it seeks to close the controversial detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including the dilemmas posed by individuals considered too dangerous to release but whose legal status is uncertain. FBI "clean teams," which gather evidence without using information gained during controversial interrogations, have established that Qahtani intended to join the 2001 hijackers. Mohamed Atta, the plot's leader, who died steering American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center, went to the Orlando airport to meet Qahtani on Aug. 4, 2001, but the young Saudi was denied entry by a suspicious immigration inspector.

"There's no doubt in my mind he would've been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country in August 2001," Crawford said of Qahtani, who remains detained at Guantanamo. "He's a muscle hijacker. . . . He's a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don't charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, 'Let him go.' "

These decisions have to made for a relatively small group of individuals, maybe a dozen. And really, the answer is that the government should have thought of this before deciding to torture. As it is, they're going to have to do some investigative work and find the evidence of Al-Qahtani and other suspect's involvement rather than relying on confessions gained through torture. If you can find it, you charge them. If not, you release them. US courts have dealt with hundreds of terrorism trials and have methods for dealing with classified information. The sham military commissions need to stop. They're not even effective in dealing with the suspects they were DESIGNED to adjudicate, as this case shows.

...Omar Khadr's trial is scheduled for a week after Obama's inauguration. Khadr was 15 when he was captured, a child soldier. That military commission cannot go forward. Obama can stop it with the stroke of a pen.

How Dare They Don't Appreciate Lying In A Puddle Of Their Own Sick

So Bob Woodward has a new book out. It's the usual compendium of "inside the palace" gossip and amazing revelations that upon further inspection aren't usually all that revelatory. For instance, it's interesting that Bush thinks the Iraqis are ingrates, but he's actually said this publicly and privately on a few other occasions, and it's been reported thusly.

Still, the shock of that perspective never fails to wear off:

WOODWARD: He has a meeting at the Pentagon with a bunch of experts and he just said, ‘I don’t understand that the Iraqis are not appreciative of what we’ve done for them,’ namely liberated them.

PELLEY: But tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed in the invasion and through the occupation. He didn’t understand why they might be a little ungrateful about what had occurred to them?

WOODWARD: His beacon is liberation. He thinks we’ve done this magnificent thing for them. I think he still holds to that position.

Never mind the dead, the wounded, the displaced. Can't they feel the warm wind of freedom at their backs now? Or maybe that's the queasy feeling of disease:

Cholera has broken out in a province south of Baghdad and at least 20 cases of the waterborne disease have been confirmed there, a Health Ministry official said Monday.

However, local authorities in Babil province insist the real figure is much higher and have complained that the government in Baghdad has been slow in responding to the outbreak.

Health Ministry official Dr. Ihsan Jaafar said the figure of confirmed cases was based on an examination of samples taken from the victims over the last week. He said one death — a 60-year-old man — had been confirmed [...]

Cholera is endemic in Iraq, which lacks facilities to supply clean drinking water, especially in the countryside. Last year, a cholera outbreak in northern Iraq killed 14 people.

So five years after invasion and occupation, Iraqis are dying from filthy water, which we haven't managed to provide yet. And the clueless Boy King wonders why they're not sufficiently grateful of our fine work blowing up their buildings and switching a Sunni strongman for a Shiite one. "The nerve of them!" he must think.

By all rights, this should be an issue in the campaign. We bombed a country that did not attack us, overthrew their leaders, and did so little for their infrastructure and political stability that the new regime is at an impasse and kids are dying of cholera. And this is the foreign policy John McCain wants to ape.

Of course, there are a lot of things that should be an issue in this campaign...