Solving Afghanistan?

[batmannow]

McKiernan, Afghans in Pre-surge Talks
April 10, 2009
Associated Press

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - The top U.S. general in Afghanistan reached out to influential Afghan tribesmen in regions where U.S. troops will soon deploy, apologizing for past mistakes and saying he is now studying the Quran, the Muslim holy book.
Gen. David McKiernan met with villagers in Helmand and Kandahar - two of Afghanistan's most violent provinces - in an attempt to foster good will ahead of the U.S. troop surge that will send 21,000 more forces here this summer to stem an increasingly violent Taliban insurgency.
McKiernan said he wanted to show respect to tribal elders by traveling to Kandahar on Wednesday to explain some of the mistakes U.S. forces have made in the past - such as arresting people based on information taken from one side in a tribal fight, or killing civilians during operations.

"I'm trying to connect to the local population in a bottom-up way and try to explain what the new U.S. strategy means and why they're going to see an increased force presence where they live," McKiernan said during the trip to Kandahar aboard the seven passenger jet he flies in.
McKiernan for the first time disclosed precise locations where the combat troops arriving this summer will deploy. The 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, expected to arrive in May or June, will deploy in eastern Farah province and from Lashkar Gah - the capital of Helmand province, the world's largest opium producing region - south toward Garmser.

An Army Stryker brigade from Fort Lewis in Washington state expected in July and August will deploy in Kandahar province, in the eastern districts around Spin Boldak and northern regions around Arghandab, Khakrez and Shah Wali Kot, he said.
Some 250 tribesmen traveled to a sparkling new Afghan army base just outside the main NATO base in Kandahar for two separates sessions with the four-star general on Wednesday.
McKiernan explained to elders from Spin Boldak how the U.S. is training the Afghan army and police so that U.S. troops can one day leave, apologized for past mistakes committed by U.S. soldiers and said the Iraq war had diverted resources from Afghanistan that were needed to fight the Taliban.

"Until (militant) safe havens are eliminated across the border in Pakistan, there cannot be peace in Afghanistan," he said, generating enthusiastic applause from the elders.

U.S. and Afghan officials say that Taliban militants use lawless areas in northwest Pakistan as safehavens to train, arm and rest. Insurgents then travel back over the Afghan-Pakistan border to launch attacks.

Afterward, several Afghan elders spoke. One picked up on McKiernan's Pakistan message.

"When you come here and the Taliban is pushed out, why doesn't the violence stop? Destroy their safe havens," the Afghan said.

McKiernan told the Afghans that President Barack Obama's new strategy is to combat instability in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region as a whole. He said that in the future, Afghan forces will enter villagers' homes if necessary, a pledge that brought another round of applause. He then said he was studying the Muslim holy book.

"I'm reading a very good book now about this part of the world. It's written in English, but it's all about you - it's the Quran," McKiernan said to applause. Moments later an Afghan man stood up and gave McKiernan a bright purple, red and green cloth in which to wrap the translated version of holy book.

Government leaders from Kandahar province were not invited to the meeting. McKiernan said he wanted to talk straight to the tribal leaders in the hope their words weren't influenced by the presence of possibly corrupt government officials. Government leaders were invited to a similar session in Helmand last week.

During a second session with Afghans from Arghandab, Khakrez and Shah Wali Kot, which has seen more violence than the Spin Boldak region, McKiernan faced a tougher audience.

No one applauded during his speech. Afterward, Haji Saran Wal praised McKiernan for admitting past U.S. mistakes and for saying the Iraq war depleted resources. Then he asked McKiernan to prohibit house searches by U.S. forces.

Back in Kabul, while driving to NATO's headquarters, McKiernan called the day "pretty positive."

"I think it was a good give-and-take session," he said.
© Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

 

[batmannow]

Apr 10, 2009



INTERVIEW
Holbrooke reaches out to Hekmatyar

By Syed Saleem Shahzad
Asia Times Online :: Asian news hub providing the latest news and analysis from Asia

The recent meeting between a deputy of Richard Holbrooke, the United States special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and an emissary of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA), is by all accounts a landmark move in the United States' stated aim of involving militant groups in ending the conflict in Afghanistan.

The choice of Hekmatyar also indicates just how desperate the US is in finding an escape route from the escalating crisis in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar is a declared terrorist with a reported $25 million price on his head. The 61-year-old engineer from Kunduz province and his anti-government fighters are responsible for large numbers of attacks against Afghan and international forces, mainly in the northeast of the country. For years, Washington has branded Hekmatyar an irreconcilable militant.
The HIA, founded by Hekmatyar, was one of the most effective mujahideen groups to fight the Soviet invasion during the 1980s. But, according to reports, the party became a favorite of Pakistan's intelligence agency and Hekmatyar's men were known as the most fundamentalist of all Afghan resistance fighters.

To date, however, the US has failed miserably in attracting mainstream Afghan forces of the past back into the political process, including tribal warlords, the Taliban, the Northern Alliance and the HIA. This means, as Peter Lee wrote last month in Asia Times Online, "...the unpredictable Hekmatyar, who has survived the jihad, the civil war, defeat at the hands of the Taliban, exile in Iraq, an assassination attempt by the CIA, and return to Afghanistan as an insurgent leader, is the great hope of all parties as the only Pashtun strongman untainted by al-Qaeda and possibly capable of taking on the Taliban." (See Taliban force a China switch, Asia Times Online, March 6, 2009.)
The insurgents loyal to Hekmatyar have now emerged as the most important component of anti-Western coalition resistance in Afghanistan. While most of Taliban-led resistance is situated near the Pakistan Afghanistan borders, insurgents loyal to Hekmatyar hold complete command over Kapissa province's Tagab valley, only 30 kilometers north of Kabul. The HIA, whose political wing has offices all over Afghanistan and keeps 40 seats in the Afghan parliament, is fully geared to replace President Hamid Karzai in the upcoming presidential elections.
Now, eight years after the US attack on Afghanistan, Washington is initiating dialogue with Hekmatyar through his longtime lieutenant Daoud Abedi, the link between the Hekmatyar and the West. Abedi is an Afghan-American based in California as well as a prominent businessman, social worker and a former representative of the HIA.

In an exclusive interview from his home in Los Angeles, Abedi explains what was discussed between himself and the US official representing Holbrooke and the White House.
ATol: Please shed light on your recent visit to the region of Pakistan and Afghanistan and your meeting with US officials on behalf of Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan.

Dauod Abeidi: Brother Shahzad, first of all, I thank you for the call and I appreciate your attention regarding Afghanistan and international affairs. I always read your articles and I am enlightened by your writings. May Allah reward you. ... As you know, I represented HIA in the US. Yes, I was approached by the US government here and we did speak. We want a new policy of the US for Afghanistan and [we want] to bring peace to this war-torn country. ... Based on that, I spoke to some people here and al-Hamdullilah [thank God] the results of the talks were positive ... This is something which I personally started and forwarded to our Hezb brothers in Afghanistan ... The purpose of those meetings was to see how we can bring peace Afghanistan and to make sure foreign troops leave Afghanistan as soon as possible.

ATol: Could you please name the officials who you met?

DA: I think since talks are still going, it is best to keep that [quiet] for the moment. You will hear more about the talks [but] since they are ongoing I think it is better to keep it that way.

ATol: Could you please confirm whether Pakistan is involved in this dialogue process - or is this just between the HIA and the US?

DA: I have not met with any Pakistani official at all. This is my personal initiative since I know what the HIA wants and what the Taliban wants in order to see if we could make a situation possible in which foreign troops leave Afghanistan as soon as possible. This is the demand of both sides, the HIA and the Taliban. This is the first priority: that foreign troops must leave Afghanistan as soon as possible. And based on that we [want] to find the way to bring peace to this war torn country.

ATol: Have the Americans agreed to any schedule for the withdrawal of their troops from Afghanistan?

DA: President Obama has mentioned many times that they are not staying there forever. They want to leave Afghanistan as soon as there is a peace through the Afghans and [create] a possibility that allows [them] to leave. So we are hopeful and there is no other way to bring peace to Afghanistan except that foreign troops leave and that the Afghan people decide their own future and their own type of government.

ATol: Were Taliban on board for this dialogue process, or were they just apart?
DA: There was the discussion about the Taliban. Taliban are also the sons of Afghanistan. They are sacrificing for Afghanistan and for the freedom of Afghanistan so we are hopeful that they will give a positive answer to our request as well.
ATol: Is there any chance that HIA shall join the Afghan government in the near future?
DA: No. There is no such chance because we want to solve the problems through all Afghans. We are not planning to take sides against one another. The HIA's stance is to bring peace in Afghanistan and we all know that peace cannot come to Afghanistan without Hezb-e-Islami. Because of that issue, we are trying to work with all sides especially with the Taliban and with the US. The Kabul government has not been able to bring peace to Afghanistan and based on that we are hoping Kabul will also understand [it is] time for the Afghan people to choose their own future leaders in the government.

ATol: Has Hekmatyar given approval for these talks [with the US]? Is he ready for any immediate truce with NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] troops?
DA: Brother Hekmatyar has approved my talks. But as I have mentioned, this was started by myself and later he gave his approval with the condition of the departure of foreign troops from Afghanistan.

ATol: Would [Hekmatyar] agree to any immediate ceasefire with the NATO troops?

DA: A ceasefire is possible once talks are over and we know the exact schedule for the departure of the foreign troops. This has not been discussed yet, but we are hopeful that if there is an accepted date for the departure of the foreign troops, then all sides could talk - the HIA, Taliban and the foreigners - and see if we could agree on a ceasefire as a goodwill gesture. But that can be done only when there is a confirmed date of departure.

ATol: What would be the future of al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden once any peace deal is signed between the HIA, the Taliban and NATO? Where would they stand [on such a deal]? DA: First of all, nobody knows where Shiekh Osama Bin Laden is. It is not proven that he is in Afghanistan. The second thing is, al-Qaeda doesn't have big numbers of members. Foreign forces searched Afghanistan inch by inch and they could not find one al-Qaeda member. If they are somewhere else, we are not aware. As far as Afghanistan is concerned, they are not there.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd.

 

[S-2]

This article and one you've posted elsewhere about the ANP really illustrate the many heads of this monster. Corruption and the frustration evident in the American officers who have to endure such impediments is maddening.

So too the internecine violence of tribal relations. That was evident in McKiernan's apology for arrests made in the past that only reflected one side of a tribal dispute and not always the correct side at that.

Konar is another example. There we face a fascinating mix of Al Qaeda, local militants and lumber barons. The illegal timber industry is threatened, thus enemies. Who'd have imagined that this issue of timber mitigation would be a component of a successful counter-insurgency strategy? Considered previously or not, it's now found it's rightful and recognized place on the agenda.

Lot of things that go on in any nation that are violent or wrong but have nothing to do with war. They sure make fighting a war more difficult though.

 

[dabong1]

The americans up there stupid tricks again.......thinking they will Hekmatyar to fight the taliban...dreamers.

 

[muse]

they were pacified through the Awakening which basically happened because the tribal chieftains and local leaders realized that Al-Qaeda ideology was unacceptable to their way of life and their own long term interests. Societies as a whole accept and reject ideologies and trends, the long term implications of Taliban/Al-Qaeda rule make it unsustainable

Read $$$ and lots of them. Read below and see the game is the same - Afghan for rent -- to focus their mind, make them think who they fear more, for unreasonable people, this is the meaning of benevolence



In Recruiting Afghan Militias, U.S. Faces Test

Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images, for The New York Times

Published: April 14, 2009

MAIDAN SHAHR, Afghanistan — The ambitious American plan to arm local militias in villages across the country was coming down to a single moment.
The American officers sat on one side of a long wooden table; a group of Afghan elders on the other. The pilot program was up and running, but the area’s big enclave of Pashtuns — the ethnic group most closely identified with the Taliban — had not sent any volunteers. They were worried about Taliban reprisals.

“We agreed to meet today and, I believe, make a decision,” Lt. Col. Kimo Gallahue told the elders, 11 in all. “Time is running out.”

Then he laid down a challenge: “I am so proud to be in the same room with the men who defeated the Soviet Union. Please find the courage to take responsibility for your own security.”

The elders, shrouded in their turbans and beards, stared blankly back at the Americans across the table.

For two hours, the meeting unfolded, laying bare the torments facing any Afghan Pashtuns who might be contemplating defying the Taliban — and the extraordinary difficulties facing American officers as they try to reverse the course of the war.

The meeting in Maidan Shahr, Wardak Province’s capital, tucked into the mountains about 30 miles southwest of Kabul, concerned one of the most unorthodox projects the Americans have undertaken here since the war began in 2001: to arm, with minimal training, groups of Afghan men to guard their own neighborhoods.

The military is borrowing a page from a similar program that helped bring about the recent calm to Iraq, where the Americans signed up more than 100,000 Iraqi Sunnis, many of them insurgents, to keep the peace.

The hope here is that the militias will come to the aid of the overwhelmed Afghan Army and the police, which take longer to train and equip and number only about 160,000. Hundreds were killed last year in Taliban attacks.

If the militias work in Wardak, the Americans say they want to replicate them throughout the country. So the experience in Wardak has been instructive, for what the Americans can accomplish and what they cannot.

At first, everything went well in Jalrez, the mountainous area where the program is based. Young men from two of Jalrez’s main ethnic groups, the Tajiks and Hazaras, enthusiastically came forward; both have largely supported the American presence. Several dozen Pashtuns from other villages showed up as well. Two hundred forty-three volunteers were selected, each vetted by the police, the elders and the local religious leaders. The first crop of recruits went through the three-week course — presided over by American Special Forces officers — and graduated three weeks ago. They are now patrolling the dirt roads of Jalrez.

The trouble came from the Pashtun enclave of Zayawalat, one of five large villages in Jalrez.

The Americans setting up the guard force waited patiently, hoping to bring Zayawalat’s elders along. They agreed to a meeting with the elders, and then another and another. At a meeting last week, the fourth, the Pashtun elders said they would make a final decision and report back this week.

But when they showed up Monday morning, the elders said they still were not ready to give up their sons. “It’s not that the people in Zayawalt don’t support the government—they do,” said Hajii Janan, the leader of the Wardak provincial council, who presided over the meeting. “But, as you can see, people are under pressure.”

Mr. Janan wasn’t exaggerating. Last month, a local Taliban commander named Abdul Jameel, based in Maidan Shahr, came forward with 10 of his fighters and declared that he would fight no more. Wardak’s governor, Halim Fidai, accepted his surrender and told him to go home. The governor offered Mr. Jameel no protection for this act of defiance. Two weeks ago, Taliban gunmen came into Mr. Jameel’s home and killed him, his wife, his uncle, his brother and his daughter.

At the meeting, the elders produced copies of three different leaflets, called “night letters,” that were slipped under the doors of their homes. “The holy warriors urge you to reject the American plan,” one of the milder leaflets said. “Stay with us.”

The Americans said that although they were sympathetic to the Pashtuns’ fears, the time for bravery had come. In January, the Americans dispatched two battalions to Wardak Province, about 1,600 men, a huge increase over what was here before. Afghans had to risk their lives, too.

The Americans’ staunchest ally was the local commander of the National Directorate of Security, Gen. Mullah Razik. He is a Pashtun, too, but has been working with the Americans since 2001.

“This isn’t some program imposed by the Americans,” General Razik told the elders. “It is for you, your country, your sons and your daughters. It’s up to us.”

Then there were the two leaders of the council of elders, Ghulam Mohammed and Abdul Ahmed. Both had fought for the Taliban. They were leading the opposition to the militia plan.

Like most Afghans, the life stories of Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Ahmed are full of twists and turns and turnabouts, making their current allegiance somewhat difficult to determine. In the 1980s, Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Ahmed joined a group called Harkat Enqelab Islami, or Movement for the Islamic Revolution, and fought the Soviet Union. One of their comrades then was General Razik. All three men have known one another since they were young.

Then, in the 1990s, the Taliban came along, and Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Ahmed joined them. “The Taliban were forcing people to join,” Mr. Mohammed said before the meeting. Both Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Ahmed said they quit the Taliban in November 2001, when the group was driven from Kabul by the American-led invasion.

But one of the questions hanging over the meeting was whether Mr. Ahmed and Mr. Mohammed were still working with the Taliban, after all.

“I don’t think they even know what side they are on,” said an American Special Forces officer, who is helping to train the militias. He spoke on the condition that he not be named. “Those two are right on the fence, trying to figure out which side to go with. They are trying to get the best deal for themselves.”

Indeed, Mr. Ahmed said as much, wondering whether, if he threw in his lot with the Americans and the Afghan government, they could keep him safe.

“Sure, I could round up 50 guys for you,” Mr. Ahmed said. “But the general here has a uniform. He’s got guns. All I’ve got is the turban on my head and a piece of bread.”

After two hours, the elders could not decide. Once again, they asked the Americans for more time.

The Americans shook their heads in exasperation.

“This is your last chance,” General Razik told the elders. “If you don’t take it, we are just going to associate you with the Taliban.”

And they agreed to meet again.

 

[BanglaBhoot]

By CONN HALLINAN

Afghanistan is a gatherer of metaphors: “crossroads of Asia,” “graveyard of empires,” and the “Great Game,” to name a few, although it might be more accurate to think of it as a Rubik’s Cube, that frustrating puzzle of intersecting blocks that only works when everything fits perfectly. The trick for the Obama Administration is to figure out how to solve the puzzle in a time frame rapidly squeezed by events both internal and external to that war-torn central Asian nation.

At first glance, the decision to send 21,000 more U.S. troops into a conflict that has dragged on for almost 30 years seems to combine equal parts illusion and amnesia: illusion that the soldiers could make a difference, amnesia in trying something that failed disastrously in 2005.

But then, Afghanistan seems to have a deranging effect on its occupiers.

In the spring of 2005, British Lt. Gen. David Richards, then commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in southern Afghanistan, told a press conference in Khandahar that quadrupling the number of allied troops in Helmand Province would spell the end for the Taliban. Three years later Helmand is unarguably the most dangerous province in the country.

As former British Foreign Service officer Rory Stewart argues, “when the decision to increase the number of troops in 2005 was made, there was no insurgency.” Indeed, it was the surge—and the civilian casualties which accompanied it—that ignited the current resistance movement. Back then the Taliban controlled 54 percent of the country. Today that figure is 72 percent and rising. In February, Taliban soldiers attacked Kabul, killing scores of people and besieging several government buildings.

The illusion is that adding 21,000 troops to the 38,000 U.S. soldiers and 50,000 NATO soldiers could possibly make a difference. The U.S., with 500,000 soldiers, could not prevail in South Vietnam, a country of 67,000 square miles and 19 million people. Afghanistan has half again that population and 250,000 square miles of some of the planet’s most unforgiving terrain.

As Brig. Gen. Mark Carleton-Smith, Britain’s top military officer in Afghanistan, bluntly told the Sunday Times, “We’re not going to win this war.”

So has the madness that seems to seize Afghanistan’s invaders infected the White House? Maybe not.

First, if Obama were serious about a military victory in Afghanistan he would have sent 40,000 soldiers, not 17,000 combat troops and 4,000 trainers. The former figure—which the Administration initially discussed—would fulfill the Pentagon’s formula of soldiers to population counterinsurgency strategy.

Second, unlike the Bush Administration, the White House included Iran in a regional conference on the war, and the President has hinted he is open to talking with at least some of the Taliban. Neither of these moves suggests the Administration is only thinking in terms of a military “victory” in Afghanistan.

In a sense the Administration has little choice.

The price tag alone should give the White House pause. According to the Congressional Research Service, Afghanistan has cost $173 billion and is on track to cost $1 trillion.

And, increasingly, the U.S. is on its own. In recent NATO meetings the Europeans made it clear that they would not be joining the “surge.” Polls show a substantial majority of Germans, British, French and Italians are opposed to sending any more troops to Afghanistan.

The U.S. is also facing trouble among its regional allies.

The 2005 surge not only revitalized the Taliban, it spread the war to Pakistan and sparked the creation of a Pakistani Taliban that now has a major presence in the Swat Valley and most of the Northwest Territory and Tribal Regions. This war has killed over 1500 Pakistani soldiers, innumerable civilians, and cost Islamabad at least $35 billion. With the country’s economy in serious trouble, pouring money into the U.S. war on terrorism is deeply unpopular. According to polls, 89 percent of the Pakistani population opposes it.

The widespread use of U.S. drones to assassinate Taliban leaders has also angered Pakistanis , in part because one wing of the local Taliban has responded to the attacks by launching a bombing campaign. Pakistanis are also unhappy with Washington’s cavalier attitude toward their nation’s sovereignty.

According to senior officials in the Obama Administration, the U.S. intends to increase the use of drones and expand their attacks into Baluchistan, which will almost certainly increase civilian casualties. While the U.S. strategy of using drones avoids fatalities among its own forces, Pakistanis caught up in the retaliatory bombings and attacks are not so lucky.

The war has also ratcheted up tensions between Pakistan and India.

India has deployed the paramilitary Indo-Tibetan Border Patrol in Afghanistan to protect its road building projects from Taliban attacks. But for the Pakistanis, their traditional enemy now has troops on both borders. Indian and Pakistan have fought three wars since the 1947 partition of the two countries, and India is currently in the middle of a major expansion of its military.

Another point of tension is the 123 Agreement between the U.S. and India that allows New Delhi to bypass the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and may ignite a nuclear arms race between the two countries, a race which neither can afford and which will measurably increase the possibility of nuclear war in South Asia. Both countries came perilously close to one in 1999.

There is widespread suspicion that the 123 Agreement was a quid pro quo for India’s growing involvement in Afghanistan. The Bush Administration needed regional allies and India was only too willing to play that role—for a price. The price was a nuclear agreement that allows India to import uranium for its civilian nuclear power industry, while using its domestic supplies to fuel its nuclear weapons program.

The right wing Hindu fundamentalist BJP, jockeying for position in the upcoming Indian elections, has called for a military retaliation, including the blockade of the port of Karachi, for the recent attack on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants.

In the meantime, the political situation within Afghanistan is growing increasingly unstable. President Harmid Karzai, once the darling of Western powers, has come under intense criticism for his regime’s widespread corruption, and the U.S. and NATO may not back him in the upcoming August elections.

And ominously for the allies, a BBC poll of Afghans shows 73 percent are opposed to an increase in U.S. military presence, with a majority now supporting a negotiated end to the war, even if that means a coalition government that includes the Taliban.

While Afghanistan looks increasingly unstable, the Taliban appear to be getting their act together. According to Saeed Shah of the McClatchy newspapers, Mullah Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, has forged an alliance with the fractious Pakistan Taliban that will direct the power of both organizations toward fighting “the occupation forces inside of Afghanistan.”

The pact declares a truce on attacks against “the Pakistan security forces” and “fellow Muslims in the tribal areas and elsewhere in Pakistan,” which Omar says is “harming the war against the US and NATO forces.”

According to retired Pakistani General Talat Masood, the pact is the reason for the recent truce in the Swat Valley and an end to the fighting in Bajaur Province in the Tribal Territories.

The recent round of attacks by the Taliban in the Punjab appears to be a response to U.S. drone attacks, not a breakdown in the Mullah Omar-negotiated peace pact.

With NATO falling away, regional allies at each other’s throats, growing turmoil inside of Afghanistan, and the Taliban uniting, this is a “lions and tigers and bears” moment for the Obama Administration .

But manipulated just right, the Rubik’s puzzle is solvable.

For instance, while the Taliban have united to fight, Mullah Omar, through Saudi Arabian King Abdullah, also made a seven point peace offering that no longer requires the western forces to withdraw before opening talks. The plan proposes setting a timetable for withdrawal, forming a “consensus government,” and consolidating the Taliban forces into a national army.

The inclusion of Iran suggests that U.S. is correctly viewing the Afghan war as a regional problem, but one that will force the White House to grasp one of South Asia’s thorniest problems: Kashmir. While New Delhi says this issue if off the table, if the U.S. is serious about resolving regional tensions it will eventually have to visit the what may be the most dangerous flashpoint on the planet.

To make all the Rubik’s cubes fit together, the Obama Administration will have to recognize that the U.S. is only one player at the table, and that the interests of other parties, both inside and outside of Afghanistan, must be given equal weight. It will also need to reconsider the Bush Administration’s ill-advised nuclear agreement with New Delhi, which not only increases tensions in the region, but also threatens to unravel a critically important international nuclear treaty.

What the Obama Administration must avoid is an aggressive military surge like the one in 2005 that will only further destabilize Afghanistan, as well as the dead-end tactic of refusing to talk with people you don’t agree with.

Conn Hallinan: The Afghan Rubik's Cube

 

[BanglaBhoot]

MAYDEN SHAHR, Afghanistan -- The deepening U.S. involvement in the Afghan war is forcing villagers to answer a dangerous question: Whose side are you on?

The Afghan government and U.S. military have kicked off an ambitious project to build local opposition to the Taliban, reminiscent of a successful American effort to win over Sunnis in Iraq's once-turbulent Anbar province. For the elders of the village of Zayawalat, a safe haven for insurgents conducting attacks into Kabul, it's time to make the call on whether to join. So far, they have balked.

Some villages here in Wardak Province have signed up for the effort, but Zayawalat's hesitancy indicates the potential hurdles. The U.S. seeks to train and arm locals to form neighborhood-watch forces, about 50 per village, dubbed Guardians. It's one of a series of moves designed to complement the Obama administration's troop increase for Afghanistan. While smaller in scale than the Sunni project in Iraq, it's an indicator of whether the Taliban's resurgence can be blunted.

"We're offering these guys an opportunity to be legitimate players in the system," says Lt. Col. Kimo Gallahue, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, part of a 1,400-strong coalition force that moved into Wardak in February.

Last month, the first class of 243 volunteers came home from training with new olive-drab uniforms, Czech-made assault rifles and white Ford pickup trucks, and began patrolling mosques, schools, bridges and other key sites, for pay of $120 a month.

Each volunteer had to be endorsed by his mullah, village elder and two character witnesses, and was vetted by the Afghan spy service for insurgent sympathies.

Zayawalat, a set of muddy villages surrounded by apple orchards and snowy peaks, didn't send anyone. The village is largely Pashtun, the ethnic group at the heart of the insurgency. The head of its shura, or council of elders, is Ghulam Mohammed. U.S. officers suspect him of continuing militant ties, but he says he left the Taliban in 2001.

Mr. Mohammed, 50 years old, with a thick beard fringed in red, was a mujahedeen fighter during the 10-year Soviet war. He says he shot down one Soviet plane and one Soviet helicopter with U.S. Stinger missiles. He also spent more than two years in a U.S.-run prison at Bagram Airfield, he and U.S. officials say.

Last Thursday, the Afghan government and U.S. military invited Mr. Mohammed and the Zayawalat elders to Meydan Shahr, the Wardak provincial capital, to discuss the Guardian program. Almost two dozen elders sat around a long conference table with officials including Lt. Col. Gallahue and Brig. Gen. Abdul Razeq, the commander of the Afghan National Army brigade in Wardak.

Lt. Col. Gallahue reminded the elders that in recent months the U.S. had increased its troop commitment to Wardak more than ten-fold. The message: The U.S. and Afghan armies won't abandon them if they choose to defy the Taliban. "The eyes of Kabul, the eyes of the world, are on Wardak Province," he told the elders.

Behind the cajoling lay a threat: If the Zayawalat elders passed up the opportunity to join the Guardian program, the 50 slots would go to another village. And so would reconstruction funds, medical assistance and other aid.

The elders, however, wouldn't commit. Mr. Mohammed promised they would talk it over after Friday prayers and reconvene Monday in Zayawalat to give an answer.

On Sunday, the elders let it be known they didn't think it was safe to hold a meeting in Zayawalat. After late-night negotiations, the meeting was rescheduled for the provincial capital.

In an interview before the meeting, Mr. Mohammed professed nervousness. "The Taliban are up there, and they're always threatening to kill people if they join" the Guardians, he said. "The people are under pressure from both sides." One local Taliban fighter who turned in his weapons was killed recently by insurgents, along with his family.

Moreover, the elders are no longer certain their word is law. "Right now the sons aren't listening to the fathers, and the fathers aren't listening to the sons," Mr. Mohammed said.

Inside, Mr. Mohammed sat next to Brig. Gen. Razeq, a respected mullah as well as a military man. "This is for you," began Brig. Gen. Razeq. "This is for your neighborhoods. This is for your communities. This is for your sons and daughters."

The elders said the Taliban had threatened to kill anyone who attended meetings with the Americans. They had also posted notes, called night letters, on mosques and homes. "We are calling all of the Muslim residents of Wardak Province," one read. "The Americans and those who work with them are working together against the people who live here."

The military officers, both Afghan and American, reminded the elders that there were now two U.S. battalions and two Afghan National Army battalions in the province. Brig. Gen. Razeq was blunt. "Stand up," he said. "You have weapons. Stand up on your own two feet."

Abdullah Ahmed, Mr. Mohammed's deputy, took off his brown and tan turban and addressed Brig. Gen. Razeq. "I'll get you your 50 people for the Guardian program," he said. He cautioned that he didn't have the authority of a military uniform. "I just have this turban and a piece of bread in my hand."

But Mr. Mohammed appeared to contradict his deputy. The elders, he said quietly, will "talk more about what to do." They would get back to the general with an answer.

"If not," Brig. Gen. Razeq shot back, "we're going to associate you with the Taliban. That's the risk you take." The U.S. officers gave the village a deadline of Thursday to decide.

U.S. Takes Afghan Strategy to Villages - WSJ.com

 

[S-2]

"Behind the cajoling lay a threat:If the Zayawalat elders passed up the opportunity to join the Guardian program, the 50 slots would go to another village. And so would reconstruction funds, medical assistance and other aid."

This is no threat. It is a fact. Civil reconstruction aid will not be wisely spent anywhere it's security can't be assured. Simple logic. If a village will assist in securing itself, it makes far more likely the implementation of aid projects.

If not, it gets that much harder.

I didn't like the tone. The article was suggesting coercion and arm twisting but we've a village saying "no" when others say "yes". I know this. A denial won't bring bombs...right away.

That village will be closely scrutinized by the military, though. Suspicions are high. They'll run higher if this man turns down this opportunity-and rightfully so, IMHO.

 

[Hellfire]

<edit: off topic/flame bait>

I think this is a very important step in turning the tide against the Taliban. For ensuring sucess, they need the support of local population. A wise move by US forces.

regards

 

[S-2]

&#8220;This is your last chance,&#8221; General Razik told the elders. &#8220;If you don&#8217;t take it, we are just going to associate you with the Taliban.&#8221;

And they agreed to meet again."

I sense a limit to the General's and the Americans patience, particularly as this program is being implemented in other locales throughout Wardak.

They'll get on board or be left out of the civil aid pie altogether, and naturally so. Where security of NGOs or civil aid teams can't be assured, this work is pointless. It either won't be pulled off or undone by shabnamah or demolitions after sunset.

Further, this village will receive the unquestioned scrutiny of the American combat battalions in the area. As some are secured, the areas remaining such as Zayawalat become increasingly likely as sources of trouble.

The vetting read well but I'll be curious to what standards and accountability these men are held. In Iraq bio-metrics were used to tag Sons of Iraq in the event that they were captured at night operating on both sides of the fence. If so, the tribes suffered collectively through their leadership and we had very few problems consequently.

In any case, this will be an interesting year in Afghanistan as well. Fence-sitting by anybody is going to prove increasingly difficult. Both sides will fight for the allegiance of these people.

The taliban will do everything possible to destroy these villagers if they turn for Kabul in lieu of them so, once committed, there's no turning back. Sometimes views need to be crystallized to achieve the necessary clarity of hard but stark choices.

Here's an instance of such.

 

[IceCold]

There is a similar thread going on with the same title. Mods kindly merge the two.

 

[Munir]

`The difference is that US occupies Afghanistan and will leave now or in the future... But wil the Afghan accept the arrogant posture of the US? I do not think so.

 

[Lockheed F-16]

The untold story of why the U.S. is bound to fail in Afghanistan
The Afghan scam

The first of 20,000 to 30,000 additional U.S. troops are scheduled to arrive in Afghanistan next month to re-win the war George W. Bush neglected to finish in his eagerness to start another one. However, "winning" the military campaign against the Taliban is the lesser half of the story.

Going into Afghanistan, the Bush administration called for a political campaign to reconstruct the country and thereby establish the authority of a stable, democratic Afghan central government. It was understood that the two campaigns -- military and political/economic -- had to go forward together; the success of each depended on the other. But the vision of a reconstructed, peaceful, stable, democratically governed Afghanistan faded fast. Most Afghans now believe that it was nothing but a cover story for the Bush administration's real goal -- to set up permanent bases in Afghanistan and occupy the country forever.

Whatever the truth of the matter, in the long run, it's not soldiers but services that count -- electricity, water, food, health care, justice, and jobs. Had the US delivered the promised services on time, while employing Afghans to rebuild their own country according to their own priorities and under the supervision of their own government -- a mini-Marshall Plan -- they would now be in charge of their own defense. The forces on the other side, which we loosely call the Taliban, would also have lost much of their grounds for complaint.

Instead, the Bush administration perpetrated a scam. It used the system it set up to dispense reconstruction aid to both the countries it "liberated," Afghanistan and Iraq, to transfer American taxpayer dollars from the national treasury directly into the pockets of private war profiteers. Think of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Blackwater in Iraq; Louis Berger Group, Bearing Point, and DynCorp International in Afghanistan. They're all in it together. So far, the Bush administration has bamboozled Americans about its shady aid program. Nobody talks about it. Yet the aid scam, which would be a scandal if it weren't so profitable for so many, explains far more than does troop strength about why, today, we are on the verge of watching the whole Afghan enterprise go belly up.

What's worse, there's no reason to expect that things will change significantly on Barack Obama's watch. During the election campaign, he called repeatedly for more troops for "the right war" in Afghanistan (while pledging to draw-down U.S. forces in Iraq), but he has yet to say a significant word about the reconstruction mission. While many aid workers in that country remain full of good intentions, the delivery systems for and uses of U.S. aid have been so thoroughly corrupted that we can only expect more of the same -- unless Obama cleans house fast. But given the monumental problems on his plate, how likely is that?

The jolly privateers
It's hard to overstate the magnitude of the failure of American reconstruction in Afghanistan. While the US has occupied the country -- for seven years and counting -- and efficiently set up a network of bases and prisons, it has yet to restore to Kabul, the capital, a mud brick city slightly more populous than Houston, a single one of the public services its citizens used to enjoy.

When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, they modernized the education system and built power plants, dams, factories, and apartment blocs, still the most coveted in the country. If, in the last seven years, George W. Bush did not get the lights back on in the capital, or the water flowing, or dispose of the sewage or trash, how can we assume Barack Obama will do any better with the corrupt system he's about to inherit?

Between 2002 and 2008, the U.S. pledged $10.4 billion dollars in "development" (reconstruction) aid to Afghanistan, but actually delivered only $5 billion of that amount. Considering that the U.S. is spending $36 billion a year on the war in Afghanistan and about $8 billion a month on the war in Iraq, that $5 billion in development aid looks paltry indeed. But keep in mind that, in a country as poor as Afghanistan, a little well spent money can make a big difference.

The problem is not simply that the Bush administration skimped on aid, but that it handed it over to for-profit contractors. Privatization, as is now abundantly clear, enriches only the privateers and serves only their private interests.

Take one pertinent example. When the inspectors general of the Pentagon and State Department investigated the US program to train the Afghan police in 2006, they found the number of men trained (about 30,000) to be less than half the number reported by the administration (70,000). The training had lasted eight weeks at most, with no in-the-field experience whatsoever. Only about half the equipment assigned to the police -- including thousands of trucks -- could be accounted for, and the men trained were then deemed "incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work."

The American privateer training the police -- DynCorp -- went on to win no-bid contracts to train police in Iraq with similar results. The total bill for American taxpayers from 2004 to 2006: $1.6 billion. It's unclear whether that money came from the military or the development budget, but in either case it was wasted. The inspectors general reported that police incompetence contributed directly to increased opium production, the reinvigoration of the Taliban, and government corruption in general, thoroughly subverting much ballyhooed U.S. goals, both military and political.

In the does-no-one-ever-learn category: the latest American victory plan, announced in December, calls for recruiting and rearming local militias to combat the Taliban. Keep in mind that hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly donated by Japan, have already been spent to disarm local militias. A proposal to rearm them was soundly defeated last fall in the Afghan Parliament. Now, it's again the plan du jour, rubber-stamped by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Afghans protest that such a plan amounts to sponsoring civil war, which, if true, would mean that American involvement in Afghanistan might be coming full circle -- civil war being the state in which the US left Afghanistan at the end of our proxy war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. American commanders, however, insist that they must use militias because Afghan Army and police forces are "simply not available." Maj. Gen. Michael S. Tucker, deputy commander of American forces, told the New York Times, "We don't have enough police, [and] we don't have time to get the police ready." This, despite the State Department's award to DynCorp last August of another $317.4 million contract "to continue training civilian police forces in Afghanistan," a contract DynCorp CEO William Ballhaus greeted as "an opportunity to contribute to peace, stability and democracy in the world [and] support our government's efforts to improve people's lives."

America first
In other areas less obviously connected to security, American aid policy is no less self-serving or self-defeating. Although the Bush administration handpicked the Afghan president and claims to want to extend his authority throughout the country, it refuses to channel aid money through his government's ministries. (It argues that the Afghan government is corrupt, which it is, in a pathetic, minor league sort of way.)

Instead of giving aid money for Afghan schools to the Ministry of Education, for example, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) funds private American contractors to start literacy programs for adults. As a result, Afghan teachers abandon the public schools and education administrators leave the Ministry for higher paying jobs with those contractors, further undermining public education and governance. The Bush administration may have no particular reason to sabotage its handpicked government, but it has had every reason to befriend private contractors who have, in turn, kicked back generously to election campaigns and Republican coffers.

There are other peculiar features of American development aid. Nearly half of it (47%) goes to support "technical assistance." Translated, that means overpaid American "experts," often totally unqualified -- somebody's good old college buddies -- are paid handsomely to advise the locals on matters ranging from office procedures to pesticide use, even when the Afghans neither request nor welcome such advice. By contrast, the universally admired aid programs of Sweden and Ireland allocate only 4% and 2% respectively to such technical assistance, and when asked, they send real experts. American technical advisors, like American privateers, are paid by checks -- big ones -- that pass directly from the federal treasury to private accounts in American banks, thus helping to insure that about 86 cents of every dollar designated for US "foreign" aid anywhere in the world never leaves the USA.

American aid that actually makes it abroad arrives with strings attached. At least 70% of it is "tied" to the purchase of American products. A food aid program, for example, might require Afghanistan to purchase American agricultural products in preference to their own, thus putting Afghan farmers out of business or driving even more of them into the poppy trade. (The percentage of aid from Sweden, Ireland, and the United Kingdom that is similarly tied: zero.)

Testifying before a congressional subcommittee on May 8, 2001, Andrew Natsios, then head of USAID, described American aid as "a key foreign policy instrument [that] helps nations prepare for participation in the global trading system and become better markets for U.S. exports." Such so-called aid cuts American business in right from the start. USAID has even developed a system for "preselecting" certain private contractors, then inviting only those preselected companies to apply for contracts the agency wants to issue.

Often, in fact, only one of the preselected contractors puts in for the job and then -- if you need a hint as to what's really going on -- just happens to award subcontracts to some of the others. It's remarkable, too, how many former USAID officials have passed through the famed revolving door in Washington to become highly paid consultants to private contractors -- and vice versa. By January 2006, the Bush administration had co-opted USAID altogether. The once independent aid agency launched by President Kennedy in 1961 became a subsidiary of the State Department and a partner of the Pentagon.

Oh, and keep in mind one more thing: While the private contractors may be in it for the duration, most employees and technical experts in Afghanistan stay on the job only six months to a year because it's considered such a "hardship post." As a result, projects tend not to last long and to be remarkably unrelated to those that came before or will come after. Contractors collect the big bucks whether or not the aid they contracted to deliver benefits Afghans, or even reaches them.

These arrangements help explain why Afghanistan remains such a shambles.

The Afghan scam
It's not that American aid has done nothing. Check out the USAID website and you'll find a summary of what is claimed for it (under the glorious heading of "Afghanistan Reborn"). It will inform you that USAID has completed literally thousands of projects in that country. The USAID loves numbers, but don't be deceived by them. A thousand short-term USAID projects can't hold a candle to one long, careful, patient program run, year after year, by a bunch of Afghans led by a single Swede.

If there has been any progress in Afghanistan, especially in and around Kabul, it's largely been because two-thirds of the reconstruction aid to Afghanistan comes from other (mostly European) countries that do a better job, and partly because the country's druglords spend big on palatial homes and services in the capital. But the one-third of international aid that is supposed to come from the U.S., and that might make a critical difference when added to the work of others, eternally falls into the wrong pockets.

What would Afghans have done differently, if they'd been in charge? They'd have built much smaller schools, and a lot more of them, in places more convenient to children than to foreign construction crews. Afghans would have hired Afghans to do the building. Louis Berger Group had the contract to build more than 1,000 schools at a cost of $274,000 per school. Already way behind schedule in 2005, they had finished only a small fraction of them when roofs began to collapse under the snows of winter.

Believe me, given that same $274,000, Afghans would have built 15 or 20 schools with good roofs. The same math can be applied to medical clinics. Afghans would also have chosen to repair irrigation systems and wells, to restore ruined orchards, vineyards, and fields. Amazingly enough, USAID initially had no agricultural programs in a country where rural subsistence farmers are 85% of the population. Now, after seven years, the agency finally claims to have "improved" irrigation on "nearly 15%" of arable land. And you can be sure that Afghans wouldn't have chosen -- again -- the Louis Berger Group to rebuild the 389-mile long Kabul/Kandahar highway with foreign labor at a cost of $1 million per mile.

As things now stand, Afghans, as well as Afghan-Americans who go back to help their homeland, have to play by American rules. Recently an Afghan-American contractor who competed for reconstruction contracts told me that the American military is getting in on the aid scam. To apply for a contract, Afghan applicants now have to fill out a form (in English!) that may run to 50 pages. My informant, who asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, commented that it's next to impossible to figure out "what they look for." He won a contract only when he took a hint and hired an American "expert" -- a retired military officer -- to fill out the form. The expert claimed the "standard fee" for his service: 25% of the value of the contract.

Another Afghan-American informed me that he was proud to have worked with an American construction company building schools with USAID funds. Taken on as a translator, he persuaded the company not only to hire Afghan laborers, but also to raise their pay gradually from $1.00 per day to $10.00 per day. "They could feed their families," he said, "and it was all cost over-run, so cost didn't matter. The boss was already billing the government $10.00 to $15.00 an hour for labor, so he could afford to pay $10.00 a day and still make a profit." My informant didn't question the corruption in such over-billing. After all, Afghans often tack on something extra for themselves, and they don't call it corruption either. But on this scale it adds up to millions going into the assumedly deep pockets of one American privateer.

Yet a third Afghan-American, a businessman who has worked on American projects in his homeland, insisted that when Bush pledged $10.4 billion in aid, President Karzai should have offered him a deal: "Give me $2 billion in cash, I'll kick back the rest to you, and you can take your army and go home."

"If Karzai had put the cash in an Afghan bank," the businessman added, "and spent it himself on what people really need, both Afghanistan and Karzai would be in much better shape today." Yes, he was half-joking, but he wasn't wrong.

Don't think of such stories, and thousands of others like them, as merely tales of the everyday theft or waste of a few hundred million dollars -- a form of well-organized, routine graft that leaves the corruption of Karzai's government in the shade and will undoubtedly continue unremarked upon in the Obama years. Those multi-millions that will continue to be poured down the Afghan drain really represent promises made to a people whose country and culture we have devastated more than once. They are promises made by our government, paid for by our taxpayers, and repeatedly broken.

These stories, which you'll seldom hear about, are every bit as important as the debates about military strength and tactics and strategy in Afghanistan that dominate public discourse today. Those promises, made in our name, were once said to be why we fight; now -- broken -- they remind us that we've already lost.

-- Ann Jones wrote at length about the failure of American aid in Kabul in Winter (Metropolitan Books), a book about American meddling in Afghanistan as well as her experience as a humanitarian aid worker there from 2002 to 2006. For more information, visit her website. For a concise report on many of the defects in international aid mentioned here, check out Real Aid (pdf file), a report issued in 2005 by the South African NGO Action Aid.

Source: Middle East Online
/Al Jazeera

 

[BanglaBhoot]

It didn't take long. Only 11 days after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, a Newsweek cover story proclaimed the Afghan War "Obama's Vietnam." And there wasn't even a question mark. As John Barry and Evan Thomas wrote grimly in that January piece, "[T]here is this stark similarity: in Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, we may now be facing a situation where we can win every battle and still not win the war -- at least not within a time frame and at a cost that is acceptable to the American people." In the two and a half months since that piece appeared, the President and his advisors have, in fact, doubled-down on what is increasingly the ****** War -- with the expanding fighting in Pakistan's tribal borderlands helping to destabilize that regional nuclear power. As a result, it would hardly be surprising if "Obama's Vietnam" became an ever more common refrain in the year ahead.

In a number of ways, however, the ****** War couldn't bear less of a relationship to the Vietnam one. After all, this time around there is no superpower enemy like the Soviet Union or regional power like China supporting and arming the Taliban (or, for that matter, like the United States, which supported and armed the mujahideen to give the Soviets their own "Vietnam" in Afghanistan in the 1980s). In Vietnam, the U.S. faced a North Vietnamese professional army, well-trained, superbly disciplined, and supplied with the best the Soviets and Chinese could produce, including heavy weapons; while the guerrilla organization we fought in South Vietnam, which Americans knew as "the Vietcong," had widespread popular support, was unified, dedicated, well structured, and highly regimented.

The "Taliban," on the other hand, is a rag-tag, under-armed set of largely localized militias adding up to only perhaps 10,000-15,000 armed fighters, loyal to a range of leaders, including the pre-2001 Taliban leadership headed by Mullah Omar, various former mujahideen commanders of the anti-Soviet War, or sometimes just local warlords. Even where firmly lodged itself, the Taliban's support in rural Afghanistan, as far as can be told from what opinion polls exist, is at best unenthusiastic, and based largely on its ability to bring some safety to rural areas the corrupt central government has no control over, and above all, on its ability to present itself as the only real opposition to a foreign military occupation of the country.

Unlike the Vietnamese, the Taliban are largely incapable of bringing down American and NATO planes or helicopters, attacking big American bases, or massing for major offensives of any sort. While growing in strength by every measure available, what they are largely capable of doing, in military terms, is blowing things up via roadside bombs or suicide attacks (which is, of course, no small thing). As a result, American casualties, while serious and possibly due to rise this year (along with Afghan civilian casualties), are exceedingly modest if measured by a Vietnam-era yardstick.

In other words, in scale, the ****** War is unlikely ever to become a real "Vietnam" (Obama's or otherwise). Looked at another way, however, this war may have the capacity to inflict upon the U.S. the kind of defeat that the Vietnamese, for all their strength and nationalist fervor, were incapable of. In a sense, ****** threatens to be, in the personalized terms the American media often favors, not "Obama's Vietnam," but "Obama's Afghanistan" -- that is, our version of the defeat we once helped inflict on the Russians which played a role in breaking the back of the Soviet empire. The U.S. suffered a genuine defeat in Vietnam and its army nearly collapsed in the process, but the American empire and the American economic system stood in no mortal danger from it.

By the end of 2009, the cost of the Iraq War -- that is, of putting down another set of rag-tag insurgents -- will pass that of the Vietnam War and, in dollars spent, stand second only to World War II in U.S. history. Add to that the rising expense of a never-ending ****** War and -- in the worst of economic times -- you have the equivalent of a vast financial hemorrhage, an economic sinkhole. In short, if "Obama's war" proves a "quagmire," it may not be a Vietnamese-style one.

In one way, however, the ****** War has borne, and continues to bear, a certain eerie resemblance to the Vietnam one: in the manner in which Americans have chosen to fight it. Not surprisingly, as retired lieutenant colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore points out in the following striking piece, in this we resemble ourselves 40 years ago. As a result, for anyone who remembers Vietnam, much of our military's "new thinking" on counterinsurgency warfare, which has gotten such media praise, looks old and tired indeed. But let Astore take up the tale from here. Tom

---------------------------------------------------​

Mary McCarthy in Vietnam, Barack Obama in Afghanistan

Seven Lessons and Many Questions for the President

By William Astore

In 1967, outraged by the course of the Vietnam War, as well as her country's role in prolonging and worsening it, Mary McCarthy, novelist, memoirist, and author of the bestseller The Group, went to Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, to judge the situation for herself. The next year, she went to the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi. She wrote accounts of both journeys, published originally in pamphlet format as Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968), and later gathered with her other writings on Vietnam as a book, The Seventeenth Degree (1974). As pamphlets, McCarthy's accounts sold poorly and passed into obscurity; deservedly so, some would say.
Those who'd say this, however, would be wrong. McCarthy brought a novelist's keen eye to America's activities and its rhetoric in Vietnam. By no means a military expert, not even an expert on Vietnam -- she only made a conscious decision to study the war in Vietnam after she returned from her trip to Saigon -- her impressionistic writings were nevertheless insightful precisely because she had long been a critical thinker beholden to no authority.

Her insights into our approach to war-fighting and to foreign cultures are as telling today as they were 40 years ago, so much so that President Obama and his advisors might do well to add her unconventional lessons to their all-too-conventional thinking on our spreading war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

What were those lessons? Here are seven of them, each followed by questions that, four decades later, someone at President Obama's next press conference should consider asking him:

1. McCarthy's most fundamental objection was to the way, in Vietnam, the U.S. government decided to apply "technology and a superior power to a political situation that will not yield to this." At the very least, the United States was guilty of folly, but McCarthy went further. She condemned our technocentric and hegemonic form of warfare as "wicked" because of its "absolute indifference to the cost in human lives" to the Vietnamese people.
Even in 1967, the widespread, at times indiscriminate, nature of American killing was well known. For example, U.S. planes dropped roughly 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam and parts of Laos and Cambodia during the war, nearly five times the tonnage used against Germany during World War II. The U.S. even waged war on the Vietnamese jungle and forest, which so effectively hid Vietnamese guerrilla forces, spraying roughly 20 million gallons of toxic herbicides (including the dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange) on it.
In her outrage, McCarthy dared to compare the seeming indifference of many of her fellow citizens toward the blunt-edged sword of technological destruction we had loosed on Vietnam to the moral obtuseness of ordinary Germans under Adolf Hitler.

Questions for President Obama: Aren't we once again relying on the destructive power of technology to "solve" complex political and religious struggles? Aren't we yet again showing indifference to the human costs of war, especially when borne by non-Americans? Even though we're using far fewer bombs in the ****** highlands than we did in Vietnam, aren't we still morally culpable when these "precision-guided munitions" miss their targets and instead claim innocents, or hit suspected "terrorists" who suddenly morph into wedding parties? In those cases, do we not seek false comfort in the phrase, C'est la guerre, or at least that modern equivalent: unavoidable collateral damage?

2. As Richard Nixon campaigned for the presidency in 1968 by calling for "peace with honor" in Vietnam, McCarthy offered her own warning about the dangers that arose when the office of the presidency collided with an American desire never to be labeled a loser: "The American so-called free-enterprise system, highly competitive, investment-conscious, expansionist, repels a loser policy by instinctive defense movements centering in the ganglia of the presidency. No matter what direction the incumbent, as candidate, was pointing in, he slowly pivots once he assumes office."

Questions for President Obama: Have you, like Vietnam-era presidents, pivoted toward yet another surge simply to avoid the label of "loser" in Afghanistan? And if the cost of victory (however defined) is hundreds, or even thousands, more American military casualties, hundreds of billions of additional dollars spent, and extensive collateral damage and blowback, will this "victory" not be a pyrrhic one, achieved at a price so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat?

3. Though critical of the U.S. military in Vietnam, McCarthy was even more critical of American civilian officials there. "On the whole," she wrote, they "behaved like a team of promoters with a dubious 'growth' stock they were brokering." At least military men were often more forthright than the civilians, if not necessarily more self-aware, McCarthy noted, because they were part of the war -- the product, so to speak -- not its salesmen.
Questions for President Obama: In promising to send a new "surge" of State Department personnel and other civilians into Afghanistan, are you prepared as well to parse their words? Are you braced in case they sell you a false bill of goods, even if the sellers themselves, in their eagerness to speak fairy tales to power, continually ignore the Fantasyland nature of their tale?

4. Well before Bush administration officials boasted about creating their own reality and new "facts on the ground" in Iraq, Mary McCarthy recognized the danger of another type of "fact": "The more troops and matériel committed to Vietnam, the more retreat appears to be cut off -- not by an enemy, but by our own numbers. To call for withdrawal in the face of that commitment... is to seem to argue not against a policy, but against facts, which by their very nature are unanswerable."

Questions for President Obama: If your surge in Afghanistan fails, will you be able to de-escalate as quickly as you escalated? Or will the fact that you've put more troops in harm's way (with all their equipment and all the money that will go into new base and airfield and road construction), and committed more of your prestige to prevailing, make it even harder to consider leaving?

5. A cursory reading of The Pentagon Papers, the famously secret government documents on Vietnam leaked to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg, reveals how skeptical America's top officials were, early on, in pursuing a military solution to the situation in South Vietnam. Nevertheless, knowing better, the "best and brightest," as journalist David Halberstam termed them in his famous, ironic book title, still talked themselves into it; and they did so, as McCarthy noted, because they set seemingly meaningful goals ("metrics" or "benchmarks," we'd say today), which they then convinced themselves they were actually achieving. When you trick yourself into believing that you're meeting your goals, as Halberstam noted, there's no reason to reexamine your course of action.

Questions for President Obama: Much has been written about an internal struggle within your administration over the wisdom of surging in Afghanistan. Now, you, too, have called for the setting of "benchmarks" for your new strategy's success. Are you wise enough to set them to capture the complexities of political realities on the ground rather than playing to American strengths? Are you capable of re-examining them, even when your advisors assure you that they are being achieved?

6. In her day, Mary McCarthy recognized the inequities of burden-sharing at home when it came to the war in Vietnam: "Casualty figures, still low [in 1967], seldom strike home outside rural and low-income groups -- the silent part of society. The absence of sacrifices [among the privileged classes] has had its effect on the opposition [to the war], which feels no need, on the whole, to turn away from its habitual standards and practices -- what for? We have not withdrawn our sympathy from American power and from the way of life that is tied to it -- a connection that is more evident to a low-grade G.I. in Vietnam than to most American intellectuals."

Questions for President Obama: Are you willing to listen to the common G.I. as well as to the generals who have your ear? Are you willing to insist on greater equity in burden-sharing, since once again most of the burden of Iraq and Afghanistan has fallen on "the silent part of society"? Are you able to recognize that the "best and brightest" in the corridors of power may not be the wisest exactly because they have so little to lose (and perhaps much to gain) from our "overseas contingency operations"?

7. McCarthy was remarkably perceptive when it came to the seductiveness of American technological prowess. Our technological superiority, she wrote, was a large part of "our willingness to get into Vietnam and stay there... The technological gap between us and the North Vietnamese constituted, we thought, an advantage which obliged us not to quit."

Questions for President Obama: Rather than providing us with a war-winning edge, might our robot drones, satellite imagery, and all our other gadgetry of war seduce us into believing that we can "prevail" at a reasonable and sustainable cost? Indeed, do we think we should prevail precisely because our high-tech military brags of "full spectrum dominance"?

One bonus lesson from Mary McCarthy before we take our leave of her: Even now, we speak too often of "Bush's war" or, more recently, "Obama's war." Before we start chattering mindlessly about Iraq and Afghanistan as American tragedies, we would do well to recall what McCarthy had to say about the war in Vietnam: "There is something distasteful," she wrote, "in the very notion of approaching [Vietnam] as an American tragedy, whose protagonist is a great suffering Texan [President Lyndon Baines Johnson]."
Yes, there is something distasteful about a media that blithely refers to Bush's or Obama's war as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis suffer. For American troops, after all, are not the only ones paying the ultimate price when the U.S. fights foreign wars for ill-considered reasons and misguided goals.

Tomgram: William Astore, Déjà Vu All Over Again in Afghanistan

 

[abdulrafi]

THE STANS
Military Matters: U.S. losing Afghan war

by William S. Lind

Washington, April 17, 2009

With the usual fanfare, the Obama administration in the United States has proclaimed a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. On the surface, it does not amount to much. But if a story by Bill Gertz in the March 26 edition of The Washington Times is correct, there is more to it than meets the eye. Gertz reported that "the Obama administration has conducted a vigorous internal debate over its new strategy for Afghanistan."
Gertz wrote: "According to two U.S. government sources close to the issue, senior policymakers were divided over how comprehensive to make the strategy. ...

"On the one side were Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg, who argued in closed-door meetings for a minimal strategy of stabilizing Afghanistan. ...

"The goal of these advocates was to limit civilian and other non-military efforts in Afghanistan and focus on a main military objective of denying safe haven to the Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists.

"The other side of the debate was led by Richard C. Holbrooke, the special envoy for the region, who along with U.S. Central Command leader Gen. David H. Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton fought for a major nation-building effort.

"The Holbrooke-Petraeus-Clinton faction, according to the sources, prevailed. The result is expected to be a major, long-term military and civilian program to reinvent Afghanistan from one of the most backward, least developed nations to a relatively prosperous democratic state."

I have not seen similar stories in other papers, so it is possible Gertz is not correct. But if he is, the Obama administration has just made the Afghan war its own -- and lost it.

Ironically, the reported decision duplicates the Bush administration's error in Iraq, another lost war. The next phase in Iraq's Sunni-Shiite civil war is now ramping up. The error, one that no tactical or operational successes can overcome, is setting unattainable strategic objectives.

Short of divine intervention, nothing can turn Afghanistan into a modern, prosperous, democratic state. Pigs will not only fly, they will win dogfights with Boeing F-15 Eagles before that happens.

The most Afghanistan can ever be is Afghanistan: a poor, backward country, one where the state is weak and local warlords are strong, one that is plagued with a drug-based economy and endemic low-level civil war. That is Afghanistan at its best. Just achieving that would be difficult for an occupying foreign power, whose presence assures that war will not be low-level and that no settlement will be long-term.

In fact, even the minimalist objectives reportedly urged by Biden are not attainable. The U.S. government cannot deny safe haven in Afghanistan for the Taliban because the Taliban are Afghans. They represent a substantial portion of the Pashtun population. The most the U.S. government can hope to obtain in a settlement of the Afghan war is the exclusion of al-Qaida.

That is a realistic strategic objective because al-Qaida is made up of Arabs -- that is to say, foreigners -- whom the Afghans dislike the same way they dislike other foreigners. The Taliban's commitment to al-Qaida is ideological, and the right combination of incentives can usually break ideological commitments.

Instead of a pragmatic, realistic approach to attaining that limited objective, it seems we are committed to a quixotic quest for the unattainable. Again, that guarantees the United States will lose the Afghan war. No means, military or non-military, can obtain the unattainable. The circle cannot be squared.

Here we see how little "change" the Obama administration really represents. The differences between the neoliberals and the neocons are few. Both are militant believers in Brave New World, a globalist future in which everyone on earth becomes modern. In the view of these ideologues, the fact that billions of people are willing to fight to the death against modernity is, like the river Pregel, an unimportant military obstacle. We just need to buy more Predators.

Meanwhile, the money is running out. The ancien regime syndrome that doomed the ancient monarchy of Kings Louis XV and Louis XVI in 18th century France looms ever larger: The U.S. government not only maintains but increases foolish foreign commitments at the same time that debt is piling up, those willing to lend are becoming fewer and the U.S. government is reduced to debasing the currency. Historians have seen it all before, many, many times. It never has a happy ending.

It appears Afghanistan will be the graveyard of yet another empire.

(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.)