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.

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.

Most Dangerous Trouble Spot In The World Update

The Pakistani government should actually be commended for this recent move against their indigenous Taliban, now threatening to become a two-front war:

A militant commander in northwest Pakistan tore up a peace deal with the Pakistani government Tuesday, dealing a major blow to the government's campaign against Islamist insurgents in the extremist-controlled Waziristan region.

The commander, Gul Bahadur, who heads the Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan, ended his pact with Islamabad and threatened more attacks on the army after an assault on a military convoy in his area Sunday claimed the lives of at least 16 soldiers.

Pakistan's military had sought to confine the battle in Waziristan to warlord Baitullah Mehsud, a rival of Bahadur and an ally of al Qaida who's led the militant takeovers of several other regions in northwest Pakistan, but now it finds itself facing both Baitullah Mehsud and Bahadur, as well as a third Taliban commander in the region bordering Afghanistan. Maulvi Nazir, an ally of Bahadur, also announced the end of a peace agreement with Pakistan in recent days.

The government is moving against this home-grown Taliban, not to be confused with the Afghan Taliban (which the military apparently supports), because it's good politics. Pakistan, contrary to popular belief, believes in civil society. The biggest demonstration in recent years there was a protest of the sacking of the chief justice of the Supreme Court. The images of Taliban members stoning a young girl inspired rage throughout the country and the scales feel from the eyes of those who formerly looked the other way at extremism.

A new poll by worldpublicopinion.org has found that the Pakistani public has turned against the Taliban in a big way, with 81% now seeing the Taliban in the Northwest of Pakistan as a critical threat to the country. This is up from 34% in September, 2007. And some two-thirds of Pakistanis view all religious militant groups in the country as a whole as a critical threat to it. This proportion is up from 38% in September of 2007, and it is a significant shift, since a lot of Pakistanis had view the religious militants as freedom fighters for the cause of Kashmir or the liberation of Afghanistan from Western occupation.

The bad news for President Obama is that the Pakistani public's souring on the Taliban has not resulted in higher favorability ratings for the United States. A majority does not trust Obama to do the right thing. Overwhelming majorities believe the US wants to divide and weaken the Muslim world, and 82% reject Obama's predator drone strikes on Pakistani soil. Some 79% want the war in Afghanistan ended now.

We can cheer a waning of religious nationalism in Pakistan, but must be mindful of the continuance of anti-imperialism. And the US engaging in surveillance flights over Pakistan and dropping Predator drone strikes won't help out self-image. We need to be happy about Pakistan's contribution to fighting extremist Islam, but we also need to get out of their way.

Stalemate Sounds About Right

I got to listen to a talk about Afghanistan the other day from Anand Ghopal, a writer for the Christian Science Monitor, and soon, the Wall Street Journal. He offered a really detailed, comprehensive take about the challenges we face in Afghanistan, clearing up some misconceptions about the country. The Taliban, he said, cannot take over the country. They are confined to their ethnic Pashtun base, which represents maybe 40% of the population. The other ethnicities, perhaps because of lingering effects of past civil wars and repression, still hate the Taliban and want the American presence. However, the Americans have little ability to successfully remove the Taliban insurgency from those Pashtun areas, because they are deeply embedded there. It's basically a stalemate, and only a political reconciliation can resolve it. In the meantime, airstrikes and house raids make the US less and less welcomed in the region. And then there's the sticky problem of Pakistan, fighting the indigenous Taliban presence in their own country while continuing to offer aid and comfort to the Afghan Taliban. Ghopal had much, much more, but I think the word "mess" came to mind several times during the talk.

And that shines through in recent coverage of the war. The British launched a major offensive against Taliban forces, using just 350 troops and an enormous amount of air superiority. This is the precise OPPOSITE of what escalation would facilitate - and end to relying on airstrikes. As a result people just left the area and melted away. There was nothing left to hit, except the IEDs that the insurgents laid for the incoming troops. We actually got Kyrgyzstan to reverse their decision to deny air basing rights to US troops, albeit with higher rent (read: bribes), but the very fact that we continue to rely on air bases to resolve this conflict shows the dichotomy between trying to win hearts and minds while dropping bombs on the heads of villagers. In Pakistan, this is more intense, as a drone attack killed 60 mourners at a funeral for a Pakistani Taliban leader, in an effort to strike at Baitullah Mehsud, who earlier killed a key rival and the kind of moderate Taliban with whom a settlement could be reached. Clearly other rivals to Mehsud will be scared off from siding with the West after this incident.

Through all of this, the question of why we continue in Afghanistan persists. The country is desperately poor and we've exhausted practically all of our goodwill by the Bush Administration failing to follow through on any of their promises to the people. The country has never known a central government and shouldn't be expected to suddenly sprout a durable one. And the question of "denying safe havens to Al Qaeda" seems to me to be moot, considering that the current insurgency does not have the same radical view of Islam as the previous Taliban, and even Gen. Petraeus has acknowledged that Al Qaeda holds no footprint in the country. Today 138 House members called for an exit strategy in Afghanistan, and while they lost the vote as an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill, I have a feeling that those numbers will grow.

Dropping Bombs And Killing People - Amazingly, Unpopular

Andrew Exum, aka Abu Muqawama, is the coolest kid on the counter-insurgency block, so considering that the "good war" in Afghanistan and Pakistan is being revamped in the image of COIN, you'd think he'd appreciate the Obama Administration policy. But he manages to see the spectacle of mass killing from 30,000 feet as cutting against the policy of winning the hearts and minds of the locals. So he and David Kilcillen, another COINer, take to the op-ed pages of the NYT to criticize it.

First, the drone war has created a siege mentality among Pakistani civilians. This is similar to what happened in Somalia in 2005 and 2006, when similar strikes were employed against the forces of the Union of Islamic Courts. While the strikes did kill individual militants who were the targets, public anger over the American show of force solidified the power of extremists. The Islamists’ popularity rose and the group became more extreme, leading eventually to a messy Ethiopian military intervention, the rise of a new regional insurgency and an increase in offshore piracy [...]

Second, public outrage at the strikes is hardly limited to the region in which they take place — areas of northwestern Pakistan where ethnic Pashtuns predominate. Rather, the strikes are now exciting visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion in Punjab and Sindh, the nation’s two most populous provinces. Covered extensively by the news media, drone attacks are popularly believed to have caused even more civilian casualties than is actually the case. The persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government, and contributes to Pakistan’s instability.

Third, the use of drones displays every characteristic of a tactic — or, more accurately, a piece of technology — substituting for a strategy. These attacks are now being carried out without a concerted information campaign directed at the Pakistani public or a real effort to understand the tribal dynamics of the local population, efforts that might make such attacks more effective.

I've heard neocons like Fareed Zakaria (yes, he is one) claim that the Pakistanis like the drone attacks now, because they view the Taliban as a threat. But when you kill 14 terrorists and 700 civilians, a 2% hit rate, mass public opinion means little compared to reducing the threat. Hundreds of families experienced that loss, and hundreds of willing relatives will step up to replace those 14 dead. Meanwhile, we focus on these airstrikes at the expense of a larger strategy to win over the population. Insurgent commanders are simply easily replaced, so we would be better served by siphoning off recruitment.

I'm not even a COIN fan, and I think criticisms of the over-reliance on it in the military are well-founded. But you don't have to be a military expert to realize that killing civilians doesn't endear the population to your cause, nor does it make it any easier for an already-weak central government to maneuver.

Meanwhile, we're adding military trainers to Pakistan. This is how recent wars have begun - the trainers come in, and the mission expands. At some point, the war takes care of itself, no matter what the policymakers believe.

Most Dangerous Trouble Spot In The World Update

I'm surprised this didn't get more attention yesterday:

The U.S. military has begun flying armed Predator drones inside Pakistan and has given Pakistani officers significant control over targets, flight routes and decisions to launch attacks under a new joint operation, according to U.S. officials familiar with the program.

The project was begun in recent weeks to bolster Pakistan's ability and willingness to disrupt the militant groups that are posing a growing threat to the government in Islamabad and fueling violence in Afghanistan.

I mean, this basically confirms that we've crept the Afghanistan war into Pakistan, right? We're not talking about covert CIA missions, but the US military. And US officials acknowledged it today.

Now the President has a war of his own. In addition to his own humanitarian crisis.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, has called for a massive aid operation to help those displaced in north-west Pakistan.

He said that in the past two weeks, the UN had registered more than 800,000 Pakistanis fleeing fighting between the army and the Taleban.

Without help, he warned, they could contribute to the instability [...]

He said: "If you are not able to cope with the challenges posed by such an overwhelming number of people displaced, in communities that have not the economic capacity to absorb them, and if the very serious humanitarian response is not organised, this population will become a huge factor of destabilisation."

Wow, the stars go out of your eyes quickly in the face of all this death and suffering, don't they?

Saving Pakistan

John Kerry is making sense:

Just back from a visit to Pakistan, Sen. John Kerry says the Obama administration's plan for that volatile country, rolled out last month with great fanfare, "is not a real strategy."

"Pakistan is in a moment of peril," Kerry, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said during a session with USA TODAY reporters and editors. "And I believe there is not in place yet an adequate policy or plan to deal with it." [...]

As an example of how he believes counterinsurgency strategy is lacking, Kerry cited the example of a recent Pakistan army operation in Peshawar.

"The army went in, they expended a lot of energy for us, some lives, and you know, nothing came in underneath it — absolutely nothing. So you're going to wind up with a bunch of folks who are going to hate you.

"If the army's going to take the risk of going in there, for God's sake you have the civil component coming in, so you win something for it," Kerry said.

There's only one group in Pakistan with a bottom-up strategy to gain favor inside local communities, and that's the Taliban. They have exploited the general Pakistani anger at the United States and in particular at the drone attacks, to rally support for their cause. They now operate just miles from the capital in the Swat Valley, and Islamist extremism is certainly on the rise. I don't completely agree with the US intelligence officials quoted in this report that Pakistan is on course to become an Islamist state - there is a significant civil society component in Pakistan, just witness the protests over restoring the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court - but these opinions cannot totally be ignored:

"It's a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution," said a U.S. intelligence official with long experience in Pakistan who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.

Pakistan's fragmentation into warlord-run fiefdoms that host al Qaida and other terrorist groups would have grave implications for the security of its nuclear arsenal; for the U.S.-led effort to pacify Afghanistan; and for the security of India, the nearby oil-rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia, the U.S. and its allies.

"Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al Qaida sitting in two-thirds of the country which the government does not control," said David Kilcullen, a retired Australian army officer, a former State Department adviser and a counterinsurgency consultant to the Obama administration.

"Pakistan isn't Afghanistan, a backward, isolated, landlocked place that outsiders get interested in about once a century," agreed the U.S. intelligence official. "It's a developed state . . . (with) a major Indian Ocean port and ties to the outside world, especially the (Persian) Gulf, that Afghanistan and the Taliban never had."

"The implications of this are disastrous for the U.S.," he added. "The supply lines (from Karachi to U.S. bases) in Kandahar and Kabul from the south and east will be cut, or at least they'll be less secure, and probably sooner rather than later, and that will jeopardize the mission in Afghanistan, especially now that it's getting bigger."

While praising Kerry for saying what everyone refuses to, I can't see many good options for Pakistan. The government won't fight the Taliban and have other interests beyond US national security. The radical elements still collude with the local intelligence services. The drone strikes have both positive and negative effects. And the extremism grows.

It's such a toxic mix that I can't see how you do anything but contain it.

Open-Ended Commitment

American military commanders like to tamp down expectations and prep the battlefield for a long commitment, but this stretches it a bit:

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan said Monday it will be years before coalition forces can make a complete handoff to Afghan security forces, despite the arrival of thousands of new troops beginning this month and signs of diplomatic progress.

Army Gen. David McKiernan told newspaper executives gathered at The Associated Press annual meeting that militant havens across the border in Pakistan remain a challenge. And while he said that the Afghan army is now leading 60 percent of missions in Afghanistan, Afghan police lag in their ability to provide security [...]

"What we want to do is make a significant impact on the foundation of security ... and continue to move toward developing sufficient Afghan capacity and specifically, their army, their police, so at some point we can get to a tipping point where they lead the security in this country," he said.

"You're going to ask me when is that tipping point. I can't say, but I think it is a matter of years away," he said in a live satellite interview from Kabul.

What McKiernan describes above, frankly, is nation-building. That is a COMPLETELY separate issue from denying and dismantling safe havens for militant extremists. You can argue that the local forces being stood up here will eventually take that role, but the size of the security forces scheduled for Afghanistan, a poor country, would cost more than their total budget to maintain. We could easily move into a strategic overwatch position, using intelligence capabilities and law enforcement, to disrupt those safe havens (which occur throughout the world and not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan) and contain the threat. But instead, we use military means, which may be creating more terrorists than we destroy.

Even as the Obama administration launches new drone attacks into Pakistan's remote tribal areas, concerns are growing among U.S. intelligence and military officials that the strikes are bolstering the Islamic insurgency by prompting Islamist radicals to disperse into the country's heartland.

Al Qaida, Taliban and other militants who've been relocating to Pakistan's overcrowded and impoverished cities may be harder to find and stop from staging terrorist attacks, the officials said.

Moreover, they said, the strikes by the missile-firing drones are a recruiting boon for extremists because of the unintended civilian casualties that have prompted widespread anger against the U.S.

"Putting these guys on the run forces a lot of good things to happen," said a senior U.S. defense official who requested anonymity because the drone operations, run by the CIA and the Air Force, are top-secret. "It gives you more targeting opportunities. The downside is that you get a much more dispersed target set and they go to places where we are not operating."

U.S. drone attacks "may have hurt more than they have helped," said a U.S. military official who's been deeply involved in counterterrorism operations. The official, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly, called the drone operations a "recruiting windfall for the Pakistani Taliban."

Ultimately, this is why Americans are wary of Afghanistan. We have a defined goal to start and then it morphs into building security forces and protecting the central government until we are intimately entangled in the lives of millions of people half a continent away. Obama supposedly refined the mission, but the top commander is spouting the same rhetoric of entanglement. Seemingly our wars get longer with each successive generation, and no more decisive, either. The troop morale seems to still be high, but of course that's more a function of people wanting to protect their buddies in the unit than a sense of mission.

It disturbs me that we are already beginning to see signs of mission creep.

Afghanistan: Escalation And Narrowness Of Thought

Today, several bloggers are engaging in a day of discussion and debate about Administration policy in Afghanistan. Now that the President has announced his Afghanistan strategy and shared it with the world, we can begin to assess the policy. Europe has reacted to a call for more involvement with a show of support but few troops to offer to the effort, most of them temporary for security around the Afghan elections. And US commanders are already calling for 10,000 more additional US troops on top of the 17,000 combat forces and 4,000 trainers already pledged. Increasingly, this is becoming an American war.

Petraeus acknowledged that the ratio of coalition and Afghan security forces to the population is projected through 2011 to be significantly lower than the 20 troops per 1,000 people prescribed by the Army counterinsurgency manual he helped write.

"If you assume there is an insurgency throughout the country . . . you need more forces," Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as head of U.S. Central Command, said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said the Pentagon has not yet forwarded the troop request to the White House.

Michele Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy, testified that the new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan is based on a plan to concentrate forces in "the insurgency belt in the south and east," rather than throughout Afghanistan.

Obama "doesn't have to make a decision until the fall, so the troops would arrive, as planned, in 2010," she said.

The U.S. military has 38,000 troops in Afghanistan, and the number is projected to rise to 68,000 with deployments scheduled for this year. Those deployments include a 4,000-strong contingent of trainers from the 4th brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, 17,000 other combat troops, a 2,800-strong combat aviation brigade and thousands of support forces whose placement was not publicly announced, the Pentagon said.

Yes, the Administration snuck another 9,000 troops into the country when our heads were turned.

Clearly our commitment to the region in physical troops and treasure is escalating, and I fail to see how it could be de-escalated without the key goals being met. In other words, Plans A, B and C involve more and more troops to a part of the world that has not known peace in more than a generation, to carry out a policy that entrenches us in the region and with the governments there while publicly stating a desire to limit its focus.

If the Obama Administration sticks to these goals, of dismantling and disrupting Al Qaeda safe havens, I would be fine with it. But most of them don't even exist inside Afghanistan but in Pakistan, where we are engaged in the same kind of "war at 30,000 feet" through unmanned drone strikes that failed to work in Afghanistan and necessitated the call for additional troops. In Pakistan, estimates of one million people have been displaced due to these airstrikes, and they have inflamed the local Taliban, who specifically cited the bombings as responsible for their run of suicide attacks deep inside their own country. We have succeeded in turning a national problem into a regional one, without the ability to mount a ground offensive inside Pakistan where the threat originates. In this sense, it can be said that the Taliban's strength is directly proportional to US involvement.

As for Afghanistan, I basically agree with Juan Cole. Obama expresses a latter-day domino theory to justify occupation in Afghanistan, yet while a failed state would certainly have consequences for Al Qaeda, the threat of that failure has been largely overstated (in both Afghanistan and Pakistan), and there are certainly means to contain a terrorist threat without the need for military occupation. And, "when a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise."

In a later piece, Cole details how Afghanistan is turning into Iraq, with its large military bases, use of private military contractors, unrealistic talk of an imminent decision point, and worst, the rise of a fundamentalist cental government:

The US has actually only managed to install a fundamentalist government in Afghanistan, which is rolling back rights of women and prosecuting blasphemy cases. In a play for the Shiite vote (22% or so of the population), President Hamid Karzai put through civilly legislated Shiite personal status law, which affects Shiite women in that country. The wife will need the husband's permission to go out of the house, and can't refuse a demand for sex. (Since the 1990s there has been a movement in 50 or more countries to abandon the idea that spouses cannot rape one another, though admittedly this idea is new and was rejected in US law until recently).

No one seems to have noted that the Shiite regime in Baghdad is more or less doing the same thing. In Iraq, the US switched out the secular Baath Party for Shiite fundamentalist parties. Everyone keeps saying the US improved the status of women in both countries. Actually, in Iraq the US invasion set women back about 30 years. In Afghanistan, the socialist government of the 1980s, for all its brutality in other spheres, did implement policies substantially improving women's rights, including aiming at universal education, making a place for them in the professions, and so forth. There were socialist Afghan women soldiers fighting the Muslim fundamentalist guerrillas that Reagan called "freedom fighters" and to whom he gave billions to turn the country into a conservative theocracy. I can never get American audiences to concede that Afghan women had it way better in the 1980s, and that it has been downhill ever since, mainly because of US favoritism toward patriarchal and anti-progressive forces.

After criticism, Hamid Karzai has vowed to review the spousal rape law, and elsewhere the Taliban has actually relaxed their policies on burqas and beards in their negotiations with the Afghan government. Yes negotiations:

...preliminary talks between President Hamid Karzai's government and Taliban insurgents are already under way, and appear to have yielded a significant shift away from the Taliban's past obsession with repressive rules and punishments governing personal behaviour. The Taliban are now prepared to commit themselves to refraining from banning girls' education, beating up taxi drivers for listening to Bollywood music, or measuring the length of mens' beards, according to representatives of the Islamist movement. Burqas worn by women in public would be "strongly recommended" but not compulsory. The undertakings have been confirmed by Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, who was the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan in the late 1990s, and who has been part of a Saudi-sponsored peace initiative.

According to Christoph Hörstel, a German analyst of Afghan affairs, Mullah Zaeef has confirmed that the Taliban are no longer insisting that their members should form the government. Instead, they would agree to rule by religious scholars and technocrats who meet with their approval following a national loya jirga, or community meeting, attended by public figures. The demand for a loya jirga could be met as early as next month if President Karzai convenes a meeting of elders to determine who should rule when his term officially ends on 21 May.

I sincerely believe the Administration would rather have the governments inside Pakistan and Afghanistan settle this danger themselves. That's what's behind the economic development and improving intergovernmental communication lines at the heart of the strategy. But the focus on "safe havens" betrays a rather antiquated thinking about where militant extremists can communicate and coordinate, namely anywhere. And the ability of Pakistan's government to help the United States through destroying their homegrown threat, or even to govern themselves, must be in serious question at this point.

Neoconservatives have thus far been quite supportive of the Administration's escalation policy in Afghanistan, and I agree that they pretty much pick their piece of imperialist policy that practically every President supports and latch themselves to it to maintain a certain legitimacy. In this case, I don't view it as neocons clinging to a Democratic President's policy, but the other way around, as they adhere to worn-out arguments to intensify a failed policy based on the continued fear of not wanting to lose a war.

Most Dangerous Trouble Spot In The World Update

The top line of this story about head of the Pakistani Taliban Beitullah Mehsud is that he threatened an attack on Washington. The subhead is much more damaging, and should actually be listened to by the policymakers.

Beitullah Mehsud, an Islamist leader from the South Waziristan tribal area in northwest Pakistan, called several international news agencies in Pakistan to assert responsibility for the armed occupation of the police training compound that ended with 11 people dead.

He also told reporters that he was planning to attack targets in the U.S. capital in retaliation for more than 30 strikes by unmanned U.S. drones that have targeted suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries in northwest Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan.

Charles Lemos had an interesting take:

It confirms my view that the predator drone attacks in Pakistan are having a positive effect depite the very real risk of alienating a major segement of the Pakistani population. While the aerial war in Afghanistan has been nothing short of a disaster, the unmanned attacks across the border have been more successful. One net positive of the Obama approach to the drone attacks is that they have widen the circle of targets which may also explain why the various elements of the Pashtun Taliban have now come together to join forces. By striking at the Mehsud network, the United States may be seeking to demonstrate to President Zardari that the Obama administration is willing to go after the insurgents of greatest concern to the Pakistani leadership. There are limits to the use of the predator drones, but it does seem clear that their use is disrupting the operations of the Islamist terror organizations.

Agreed to an extent, but one wonders how disruptive the attacks are when the same group can engineer a midday takeover of a police training compound. What it shows to me is that the consequences of drone attacks continue in Pakistan, just as they have in Afghanistan. They inflame local populations and turn them more militant and radical. They may succeed in the short term to disrupt terror organizations, but there's a cost as well as a benefit. If it gets Zardari off the sidelines, great. But more likely is the prospect that this will start to eat away at Zardari's leadership and make attacks inside Pakistan more likely. We're not going to bomb our way toward security against a terrorist threat. These tactics always come with consequences.

Let's Play "Bring Down The Government Of The Nuclear-Armed State"

Another Predator drone attack killed at least 20 in Pakistan, according to early reports. While the US government continues to claim that these strikes are successful, at the very least they anger local populations and provide fuel for extremist organizations like the Taliban, which are already established in much of Pakistan and willing to weaken an already struggling young democratic government.

Given the circumstances, why in God's name would Dianne Feinstein make a statement like this that could increase anger among the disaffected in the country?

A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an air base in that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counter-terrorism collaboration with the United States.

The disclosure by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a U.S. official had publicly commented on where the Predator aircraft patrolling Pakistan take off and land.

At a hearing, Feinstein expressed surprise over Pakistani opposition to the campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Islamic extremist targets along Pakistan's northwestern border.

"As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base," she said.

The basing of the pilotless aircraft in Pakistan suggests a much deeper relationship with the United States on counter-terrorism matters than has been publicly acknowledged. Such an arrangement would be at odds with protests lodged by officials in Islamabad, the capital, and could inflame anti-American sentiment in the country.

The Pakistani government, a nuclear-armed state, is literally fighting for their lives against Taliban forces. They have 120,000 soldiers in the fight. There are extremists and terrorists all over Pakistan - the government is finally acknowledging that the Mumbai attacks were launched from their soil. What can bring down the government in Pakistan quickly is losing the faith and support of the people, who are not disposed to the United States even under President Obama. It's extremely delicate and for Feinstein to make a statement like this, which will be seized on by the Taliban and used to whip up anger against Zardari and his government, is absolutely irresponsible.