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.

Reconciliation Stops Insurgencies

The head of the Tamil Tigers, the only insurgent group I know of that has a nickname, has reportedly been killed, seemingly putting an end to the 25 year-old civil war. However, despite this there is still a Tamil minority and a Sinhalese majority, and if the central Sri Lankan government persists in what the Tamils believe to be repression, some new Velupillai Prabhakaran, a different rebel leader, will rise up in his place, and the guerrilla war will start anew. The Sri Lankans must understand that insurgencies sustain themselves through repression as an instrument of state policy, and to defeat an insurgency you must end the repression. The next few years, with no successor to the Tamil Tiger movement, offers an opportunity.

Matt Yglesias has similar thoughts.

The Return Of Sectarian Violence?

Violence raged in Iraq today, but the country has yet to be fully pacified; hundreds of Iraqis die every month in bombings and other actions. A certain level of violence is expected. What would truly change the dynamic toward an uneasy stability in the country can be found in stories like this:

The American military marked another milestone the other day in the initiative perhaps most responsible for taming the violence in Iraq: All but 10,000 of the 94,000 Sunni militiamen — many of them former insurgents who agreed, for cash, to stop killing American soldiers — had been turned over to the control of the Iraqi military.

Significantly, the militiamen themselves were not celebrating.

The same day, one group of the fighters north of Baghdad announced they were resigning from their Awakening Council, the Iraqi name for what the Americans call the Sons of Iraq. And in the town of Salman Pak, councils in southern Baghdad and its suburbs, an area once called “the ring of death,” met to denounce Iraqi efforts to integrate them.

These are among the signs that the fighters’ patience is fraying badly at a difficult moment. After months of promises, only 5,000 Awakening members — just over 5 percent — have been given permanent jobs in the Iraqi security forces. Those promises were made last year when Iraq was flush with oil money.

Now with Iraq’s budget badly battered by falling oil prices, the government is having trouble paying existing employees, much less bringing in Sunni gunmen already regarded with suspicion by the Shiite-led government.

In interviews with leaders from a dozen local Awakening Councils, nearly all complained that full-time jobs were lacking, that pay was in arrears and that members were being arrested despite promises of amnesty.

Perhaps most ominously, many expressed concern this might drive some followers back to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi group with some foreign leadership, at a time when both Iraqi and American military commanders say that the group seems to be making gains, small but worrisome, around Baghdad.

We've been hearing that the Sunni Awakening forces were unhappy with the ruling government's indifference and even hostility toward them for a while. With a full rift along those lines, the country could easily lapse back into a resumption of the tensions and violence of the civil war period in 2005-2006. Some of this could simply be bargaining positions by the Sunnis, to get the best deal for their men. But commanders should take the threat of a renewed insurgency seriously. It was easier for the Maliki government to make promises about hiring 100,000 Sunnis when oil revenues were high. Since the collapse of the global economy, the government is in a much weaker position, and the Sunnis will surely be the first to get squeezed.

Perhaps the only good news that can come of this would be if everyone stopped their thrall to a "surge strategy" that may well not work and wasn't the exclusive province of the American military, anyway. Nobody "won" in Iraq; instead everyone punched themselves out, and neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed to the extent that something slightly less awful but no less fragile could predominate. Now this Sunni-Shiite rift would turn something slightly less awful into something just as awful, and it frankly doesn't matter a bit whether we have 150,000 troops or 100,000 troops or no troops standing by when the chaos erupts. Perhaps this should NOT be the model for next steps in Afghanistan, after all.

...More hopeful signs exist, as well.

Afghanistan in 2009

The new year kicked off in Afghanistan with 20 policemen dead in a Taliban attack. They were targeting a renegade mullah who became a government chief in a city in Helmand Province. The battles we're seeing in the country are not unlike local turf wars. And the Taliban has been winning the lion's share, establishing what amounts to a de facto government everywhere but in the capital, Kabul.

Two months ago, Mohammad Anwar recalls, the Taliban paraded accused thieves through his village, tarred their faces with oil and threw them in jail.

The public punishment was a clear sign to villagers that the Taliban are now in charge. And the province they took over lies just 30 miles from the Afghan capital of Kabul, right on the main highway.

The Taliban has long operated its own shadow government in the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan, but its power is now spreading north to the doorstep of Kabul, according to Associated Press interviews with a dozen government officials, analysts, Taliban commanders and Afghan villagers. More than seven years after the U.S.-led invasion, the Islamic militia is attempting — at least in name — to reconstitute the government by which it ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s.

Over the past year in Wardak province alone, Taliban fighters have taken over district centers, set up checkpoints on rural highways and captured Afghan soldiers. The Taliban in Wardak has its own governor and military chief, its own pseudo-court system and its own religious leaders who act as judges. Bands of armed militants in beat-up trucks cruise the countryside, dispensing their own justice against accused spies and thieves.

Adding forces into this conflict for the purposes of "maintaining security" won't accomplish wresting control of the outlying areas from those who currently hold it. There will have to be offensive operations to drive the Taliban back. Meanwhile, outside the country, Taliban-affiliated groups have been destroying supply lines for US equipment and provisions from Pakistan. Now, the Pakistani military is launcing a major offensive to secure that route, but the US is preparing alternate supply routes through Central Asia. Of course, we'd be working with human rights abusers like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but that's never stopped us before.

It seems to me that, if we are struggling with finding a proper way into the country, and the adversary basically controls everything from Kabul to the border, and foreign fighters aren't really seen positively by the citizenry, well, the prospects for success are, shall we say, diminished.

Oh, Judgment?

Today John McCain set the record straight. He's not questioning Obama's patriotism, he's questioning Obama's judgment.

That would be the judgment that was against invading Iraq. That would be the judgment that has been calling for an increased commitment to Afghanistan for years, and now that Afghanistan is reaching a point of crisis (a HUNDRED insurgents attacked the French? A separate attacked tried to overrun an entire base in Khost?), even the Pentagon is starting to agree:

The Pentagon will be sending 12,000 to 15,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, possibly as soon as the end of this year, with planning underway for a further force buildup in 2009.

A request by Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, for three U.S. brigades with support staff has been approved. "Now that means we just need to figure out a way to get them there," adds a senior defense official [...]

And there may be even more to come. "I've also asked for some additional forces on top of that for the current fight," says McKiernan, who wants to bolster the 101st Airborne Division in Regional Command East, which has been rocked by recent insurgent attacks. In July, nine U.S. troops were killed by insurgents who overran a combat outpost on the Kunar border of eastern Afghanistan. This week, militants tried but failed to overrun a base in Khost, just a few miles from the border, launching waves of attacks just before midnight on Monday.

Finding those particular troops to supplement the 101st, however, depends on conditions and troop levels in Iraq, adds McKiernan, who took over the NATO command in June. "That's really a zero-sum decision."

I don't agree with dumping more forces into Afghanistan long-term, although there does appear to be a short-term security crisis. But isn't it interesting how Obama is driving the actual foreign policy results, with McCain (and Bush) following? More troops for Afghanistan, a time horizon for Iraq, moving beyond Musharraf in Pakistan? On all of these judgments, Obama is on much more solid ground, and gets there much faster than his opponents.

Another facet to this: Spencer Ackerman flags NATO Commander McKiernan's comments about more troops being a "zero-sum decision" and says that comment was directed right at David Petraeus. Iraq has its own problems - the looming powderkeg in Kirkuk, a more assertive Nouri al-Maliki pushing around prominent Sunnis throughout the country and muscling out Shiite rivals before provincial elections, the very real threat of spasms of violence if the elections are seen as rigged - but those are localized and, honestly, inevitable in the jockeying for power, and our troops there are serving no national interest. Whereas in Afghanistan, there's at least some notional national interest in a short-term effort to garner some sense of stability. But with troops tied up in Iraq, Afghanistan gets short shrift, and it will soon be Petraeus' job to make assessments of the whole region, at which point he'll need to take the Iraq blinders off.

Most Dangerous Trouble Spot In The World Update

Been a while since I did one of these. But this story on the Taliban regrouping in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan made me remember.

The Taliban has regrouped after its initial fall from power in Afghanistan and the pace of its attacks is likely to increase this year, according to a Pentagon report that offers a dim view of progress in the nearly seven-year-old war.

Noting that insurgent violence has climbed, the report said that despite U.S. and coalition efforts to capture and kill key leaders, the Taliban is likely to "maintain or even increase the scope and pace of its terrorist attacks and bombings in 2008."

The Taliban, it said, has "coalesced into a resilient insurgency."

That's just awesome. And Iraq is the catalyst for this for a number of reasons - not only did we bug out when we had the chance to finish the Taliban and Al Qaeda off in the Tora Bora Mountains, but the sophistication of insurgency tactics inside the proving ground of Iraq has certainly migrated east. Suicide bombers were once very rare in Afghanistan and are now commonplace.

The Taliban has, in fact, started to move into the Pakistani city of Peshawar, leading military forces to finally combat them. When the Taliban sits in their mountain hideouts and plans attacks on Afghan targets, the Pakistanis do nothing. When they start to threaten their territory, suddenly it's a problem. I doubt there will be a lot of follow-through on this, though it's the first effort by the new Pakistani government to confront the Taliban instead of placating them.

Handing Over Control Of The Government

There's one passage in today's execrable op-ed by Saints McCain and Lieberman from Our Lady of the Endless War that give you pause:

As the surge should have taught us by now, troop numbers matter in Iraq. We should adjust those numbers based on conditions on the ground and the recommendations of our commanders in Iraq -- first and foremost, Gen. Petraeus, who above all others has proven that he knows how to steer this war to a successful outcome.

So we're supposed to basically outsource commander-in-chief operations to a military commander instead of the civilian leadership. Hm. Mike Huckabee has said this as well, by the way, and it's been George Bush's mantra for some time. Of course, Petraeus only commands one piece of our military footprint. He's going to ask for as many resources as possible to sustain his theater. So will those commanders in Afghanistan, who want 3,000 more Marines. So will every commander in every operation around the world. That's why this is a democracy and not a military junta.

The answer, clearly, is that while a responsible president needs to listen to what his military commanders in theater think but then he needs to use independent judgment. You're never going to get an answer like "Sir, my strategy has failed" or "Sir, this other guy's mission is more important than mine" out of an official in any kind of organization -- military or civilian.

What's President McCain going to do when it turns out that all of his subordinates throughout the government want more resources to be put at their disposal?

Well, we kind of know what he'll do: overburden the military in a quest for endless war. It's what he's been doing for a long time. And talk of exit strategies, of the political progress needed to get us out of Iraq, will be put aside in favor of some other narrative he wants to spin. Here's how that plays out in practice:

From Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to Army privates and aid workers, officials are expressing their willingness to stand back and help Iraqis develop their own answers. "We try to come up with Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems," said Stephen Fakan, the leader of a provincial reconstruction team with U.S. troops in Fallujah.

In many cases -- particularly on the political front -- Iraqi solutions bear little resemblance to the ambitious goals for 2007 that Bush laid out in his speech to the nation last Jan. 10. "To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis," he pledged. "Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year . . . the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution."...

To Crocker, the meaning of "Iraqi solutions to Iraqi problems" is "blindingly obvious. Iraq has got a government. It's got a system. It's got provincial governments. It's got a military and a police. And it has leaders of all of these things who increasingly take themselves seriously as leaders."

That's basically surrender. That says "we don't know what to do to influence the mess of a government we've ended up with, so we'll let them fight it out." It's completely irresponsible. So is this continued talk that any uptick in violence represents a "desperate" insurgency. If that's true they've been desperate for five years.

McCain's "plan" for Iraq is to do absolutely nothing, put it all in the hands of the generals, give them every last resource at the expense of breaking the military, and hoping the Iraqis can stumble across a political solution on their own.

That's considered the "experienced and sensible" view of foreign policy.

Lying To Congress Is A Crime

David Petraeus said over and over and over during his two days of testimony that "we aren't arming the Sunnis." It was not a slip of the tongue, there was no equivocation in the statement. He said that "What we have done is applaud when they ask if they can point their guns at al-Qaeda."

Of course, we knew that this was just a distinction without a difference. Spencer Ackerman noted that the NYT reported that the military is paying local tribes $10 per person to maintain security in their areas, and funding those tribes isn't all that different from arming them. And then there's this, from a CNN appearance in June:

[Question] (on camera): Will the assistance or the coordination with these former insurgent groups extend to arming [them] or helping them out in logistics in any sense?

GEN. BENJAMIN MIXON, U.S. REGIONAL COMMANDER IN IRAQ: It certainly will. We have seen this in counterinsurgency operations before, using local nationals, if you will, arming them, forming them into scouts, if you will. And that's the primary role that we want to use them in. They know the territory, they know the enemy.

So somebody is not telling the truth here. Either we're arming security units made up of Sunni tribesman, or we're just applauding. Are we supposed to be so ignorant to believe that Sunni tribes respond to applause like a Pavlovian dog? They are being supported in their efforts. Gen. Mixon says it's with guns.

We all know the danger of arming both sides of a civil war. We are entrenching Sunni tribal leaders in their own region while presiding over the ethnic cleansing in mixed areas like Baghdad. Since practically everyone in Iraq doesn't want a partitioned system, and really are interested in a strong central government on their own terms, civil strife and a battle for power is inevitable, and arming virtually everybody in the region ensures that will be a deadly battle.

General Petraeus came out even at best from his testimony, if not worse. I agree with Kos that the initial reviews have ranged from "cool to hostile." Gen. Petraeus' demurral to answer whether or not the Iraq occupation is making America safer proved his irrelevance to the ultimate debate, unable to answer Cindy Sheehan's key question "for what noble cause," unable and unwilling to understand the larger geopolitical question of how to best secure the nation, and how a myopic focus on Iraq damages that. If he is also found to be lying about the extent to which we are arming former Sunni insurgents who not long ago were killing Americans, and may still be, his credibility will be completely eliminated.

It's also a crime; I believe they call it perjury. For an explanation, contact Gonzales, Alberto at the US Dept. of Justice (until Friday).

The Baghdad Money Machine

While it may not be the main reason for the occupation of Iraq, profit-taking does seem to be the main sport for contractors and Iraqis alike. Right now, the Pentagon is investigating dozens of cases totaling more than $5 billion dollars in contracts. We know that the intracacies of the contracting and the chaos of the war zone make Iraq ripe for abuse. But in addition to making money for American contractors, apparently Iraqi insurgents are financing their guerrilla operation through this rampant corruption as well.

Iraq's deadly insurgent groups have financed their war against U.S. troops in part with hundreds of thousands of dollars in U.S. rebuilding funds that they've extorted from Iraqi contractors in Anbar province.

The payments, in return for the insurgents' allowing supplies to move and construction work to begin, have taken place since the earliest projects in 2003, Iraqi contractors, politicians and interpreters involved with reconstruction efforts said.

A fresh round of rebuilding spurred by the U.S. military's recent alliance with some Anbar tribes — 200 new projects are scheduled — provides another opportunity for militant groups such as al Qaeda in Iraq to siphon off more U.S. money, contractors and politicians warn.

"Now we're back to the same old story in Anbar. The Americans are handing out contracts and jobs to terrorists, bandits and gangsters," said Sheik Ali Hatem Ali Suleiman, the deputy leader of the Dulaim, the largest and most powerful tribe in Anbar. He was involved in several U.S. rebuilding contracts in the early days of the war, but is now a harsh critic of the U.S. presence.

So to get anything made in Iraq, American companies have to pay an insurgent tax. And if American companies start providing too much in reconstruction aid, presumably the insurgents would break their pledge and start to disrupt the services. Not to mention the fact that they are buying munitions and supplies to kill American troops and Iraqi civilians indirectly from our taxpayer dollars.

And if anyone speaks out about this or any contracting problem, they are punished with harsh interrogation, 97 days in detention without being charged, and worse abuses. Somehow just talking about contracting issues in Iraq is worthy of being thrown in the military brig. There is a culture of fear that has grown up, forcing everyone to look the other way. Meanwhile our taxpayer dollars are fleeced, and BOTH SIDES of the Iraqi civil war are paid handsomely. It's almost as if the military WANTS it to continue, to justify keeping the troops there.

The Soldiers Are Paid To Fight

Tbogg quotes Michael Corleone in Godfather II while noting that the insurgents needed only about a week to figure out how to carry out their business in the wake of the surge.

A suicide bomber struck a funeral in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing at least seven people as militants show increasing defiance to a major security operation in the capital.

The attacker, wearing a belt packed with explosives, followed a funeral procession into a tent before detonating the blast in a mostly Shiite district of eastern Baghdad, police said. At least 15 people were injured.

In other bloodshed across Baghdad, a car bomb and a suicide attacker killed at least 11 people. About 12 miles outside the capital, a truck carrying chlorine gas ran over a roadside bomb. Two people died in the explosion and nearly 150 exposed to the fumes were treated for injuries, said Brig. Gen. Qassim Moussawi, a military spokesman.

This comes after yesterday's brazen attack on a US combat outpost, which killed two soldiers. One of the aspects of the surge is that US troops are setting up these combat outposts, which are less fortified than the sprawling bases where they were previously stationed. The idea is to better monitor events on the ground and be able to hold positions more effectively, but it also opens up the opportunity for another Beirut.

No wonder the White House disputed the idea that Iraq is "the worst mistake" in US history. The mistake may yet be just beginning. As Mr. Corleone said:

MICHAEL: I saw an interesting thing today. A man was being arrested by the Military Police; probably an urban guerrilla. Rather than be taken alive, he exploded a grenade hidden in his jacket, taking the command vehicle with him.

The various men look up as Michael eats his cake, wondering what the point of it is.

MICHAEL: It occurred to me: the police are paid to fight, and the Rebels are not.

ROTH: So?

MICHAEL: So, that occurred to me.

You keep fighting insurgencies, you will keep losing. Yes, even the Boer War.