In an excellent piece in the Jamestown Foundations Terrorism Monitor, Hassan Abbas dissects the increasing loss over the seven Tribal Agencies by the Pakistani government. It is well worth a careful reading. http://mail.google.com/mail/?auth=DQAAAHgAAAAPFJhzd4Tq1IRsqILlyiDcGKJ3HlJUcPcXmTd1Hmua78fQGMk4YDG2dApnConq87C3FPjN27yqnbuyTJr8H3WjZJddXsDELFx29l-D_wF-H0ZI9UCNP6JqskpYporZ3rmCUVY8mgU-qHNkOgTdDK7JZJILS-RmaBg0w9l-zUA1Ig&shva=1
The increasing effectiveness of Taliban and Taliban-like groups in establishing authority over these Agencies (which include North and South Waziristan) has been highly worrisome. Taken in conjunction with the evident demoralization of the Pakistani army units operating or based in the Agencies, it is a strong sign of a failed state in the making.
That's bad news. Very bad news.
But, there is another related factor.
Afghanistan. Or, to err on the side of accuracy, the capacity of the Afghan National Army.
General Dan McNeill, the American commander of the 35,000 troops of the NATO force operating in Afghanistan has warned that the impressive gains made against anti-government forces in recent months can be lost without significant improvements in the Afghan army. So far, the Afghan national force has shown little ability to hold territory or protect civilians against Taliban.
Rather wistfully it seemed to the Geek, General McNeil commented to Reuters, "It would be nice if the Afghan national security force could hold it (the Helmand River valley, a Taliban heartland and prime opium producing area), then there is less of a chance that we'll have to do it again." http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2007-09-28T102516Z_01_L28295682_RTRUKOC_0_UK-AFGHAN-GENERAL.xml&src=nl_uktopnewsmid
The "it" referred to is the tough job of slogging through Helmand again, shooting Taliban and assorted foreign jihadists off the mountain tops along the way. This is a type of war which shows counterinsurgency at its worst. Hard yomps, hard combat, civilians littering the battlefield, and insurgents hiding in the homes of the uncommitted has been the name of the game.
Only an effective Afghan national army and a reasonably legitimate Afghan national government can prevent a replay of the past weeks and months in Helmand.
Taliban has been heaved onto the ropes militarily during the offensive sweeps by US and NATO forces as well as by the few relatively competent and motivated Afghan units. This conclusion is buttressed by the shift in Taliban tactics last spring from actions directed against foreign military forces first to those with Afghan police and military units in the crosshairs and then to suicide bombing of soft civilian targets.
Taliban quickly found out that the intentional killing of civilians was even more counterproductive than inadvertent or collateral killing such as results from US or NATO airstrikes. With the death of Terrorist-in-Chief, Mullah Abdullah, Taliban literally went back to the mountains and their heartland in Helmand on the border with Pakistan.
There has been well-rooted reason for guarded optimism about the "regime change" in Afghanistan. That is true as long as Pakistan, and, more specifically, the Tribal Agencies can be left out of the equation.
Leaving either out of the mix is impossible. Anyone who does is not well oriented in space and time.
As the British well understood during the years of the Raj, the Northwest Frontier, that is the area now known as the seven Tribal Agencies, is the key to Afghanistan. Effective control of the Northwest Frontier made domination of Afghanistan a possibility. Without it, Afghanistan is open to all comers.
Pakistan is the portal to Afghanistan. Like all portals it can be either open or closed. Right now, the door is open to Taliban and its cognates. Right now, the door is closed to us and our allies.
As long as the Tribal Agencies are more under the sway of Islamists and only under the control of the Pakistani central government in name only, there is no long term hope of successfully achieving the goals established by the "regime change" in Kabul.
Get a grip on this less-than-heartening reality.
There are very real limits to what the US or other Western powers can do in Pakistan. Right now neither more pressure nor more inducements will help the current regime in Islamabad. General Musharraf may have the necessary votes to be elected as president. That does not mean he has widespread support among the population.
Musharraf may have moved supporters into the crucial positions of Deputy Chief of Staff and head of Interservices Intelligence. That doesn't mean his writ runs far or deep within either the army or ISI. Both are heavily laden with Islamists or sympathisers with Islamist ideology.
Admiral Fallon, the Commander-in-Chief of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), which has military responsibility for Northwest Asia and the Persian Gulf, said recently that the increasingly bellicose rhetoric concerning Iran was "unhelpful." He has a wary eye on Pakistan.
He (and we) have to. Pakistan is teetering politically, socially, and ideologically on the edge of collapse. A Musharraf "victory" in the upcoming election won't change that. At least not right away.
Should Pakistan collapse, should it become another failed state, the challenges for the US and others will be immense. Not only would the failure of Pakistan make all the efforts and blood spent in Afghanistan nugatory, it would assure that Afghanistan went down the Taliban tube.
On the upside, the failure of Pakistan as a functional state would assure that the US administration wouldn't have to worry about the Iranians making atomic bombs or enriching uranium. Pakistan already has both. A collapsed Pakistan would allow nuclear leakage right quick.
Nature may abhor vacuums, but political vacuums attract the ambitious.
No one has ever accused the mullahocracy in Tehran with lacking ambitions.
What does this mean to us?
Among other things, the possible (even probable) Talibanization of Pakistan means that the US will need a larger ground combat force than it possesses at the moment. Perhaps it is the contemplation of unpleasant looming possibilities that has propelled SecDef Gates to urge the funding of a larger army in the very near-term.
Robert Gates is a supreme realpolitiker. He must be worried by the impending reality he sees.
If Gates is worried, so is the Geek. You should be too.
Showing posts with label Adm William Fallon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adm William Fallon. Show all posts
Friday, September 28, 2007
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Admiral Fallon Versus General Petraeus
The bitter "sectarian" fight between End-The-War-Now! Democrats and There-Is-No-Substitute-For-Victory Republicans gets all the attention. It is front and center in both the mainstream media and the blogosphere.
There is another struggle in progress resting comfortably off the radar of MSM and the alternative media alike. It is probably--almost certainly--more important than the thunder and smoke in Congress.
The battle lines have been drawn and manned by two senior military commanders. One is George W.'s Man in Baghdad, General David Petraeus. The other is General Petraeus' superior, Admiral William Fallon, the Central Command commander (CINC/CENTCOM).
Admiral Fallon has a long (35 year) record as a man on the way up. He has made enemies along the way (as have all successful senior naval commanders). When he was the commander of Pacific Command, he showed a high degree of independence from the wishes of the neo-con core of the current administration when he promoted a policy of conciliation with the Peoples' Republic of China.
(Truth in blogery requires the Geek to state that his position regarding China was and is a lot closer to that of the neo-cons than to Fallon's.)
Fallon considers Petraeus a brown-nosing huckster for the current administration and has pulled no punches letting the General know it. What Petraeus says regarding the Admiral is less clear.
Now, the nitty-gritty. We need to get a grip on it.
Admiral Fallon wants to cut our force strength in Iraq to one-quarter of its present level by the end of 2009. This is scarcely a precipitous withdrawal. In the Geek's semi-military mind, the Admiral is a little conservative in his timeline. Provided the current indicators of developing Iraqi security force competence continue, the US should be able to take half its combat maneuver battalions out of Iraq by this time next year.
The reason Admiral Fallon wants US forces redeployed is this: He sees greater threats in the region for which he is responsible. In particular Fallon focuses on Pakistan.
The Geek is in tandem with the Admiral. The Islamist ideology may be world wide in distribution. Islamist groups may exist nearly everywhere. Nonetheless, Islamism has several important centers. One is Saudi Arabia. Another is Iran. The third is Pakistan.
At the moment, there is nothing the US can do about Saudi Arabia. At the present, the US would be ill-advised to do anything boisterous regarding Iran. But, Pakistan is a different affair.
If armed Islamism has a heartland, a vital center of command, control, and intelligence, it is located in the mountains of the Northwest Frontier area of Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan and conveniently proximate to Iran. Beyond the tribal areas, Pakistan furnishes any number of safe harbors for Islamists.
And, as virtually everyone well knows, Pakistan is on the verge of becoming a collapsed state. The idea of a collapsed, Islamist oriented, nuclear competent Pakistan quite correctly bothers Admiral Fallon. (As noted in a previous post it bothers the Geek as well.)
The CENTCOM chief apparently has a strategic view of potential US operations in the region. His concept puts US forces, including ground troops, in the role of First Responder. Get in fast. Do the heavy lifting as quickly as possible. Get out. Leave behind a combination of non-US stability forces to back the locals.
The Geek took a similar position over ten years ago in lectures at various US and NATO venues. Historically, the US military is good at defeating conventional forces. It is good at destroying discrete high-value targets. It is not good at counterinsurgency, peacekeeping, and similar long duration missions lacking clear phase lines of success.
Beyond that, the long term presence of US forces can be and often has been inherently destabilizing--even when there is good military reason for their presence. (Bear in mind that the presence of US forces and bases in Saudi Arabia during and after Operations Desert Shield/Storm provided most of the early propaganda fuel for bin Laden and al-Qaeda.)
General Petraeus has made it abundantly clear in both public and private that he favors a very long term continuation of a US role on the ground in Iraq. The ostensible justification for this position is that by doing so the security gains in Iraq might be assured. There is merit in this position.
But not at the expense of larger US interests. Not at the expense of mounting a successful Second Cold War. Not at the expense of lacking the means to intervene should the crash come in Pakistan.
General Petraeus (in common with many in the current administration) fails to acknowledge that the struggle in which the US now finds itself is not with guerrillas and terrorists in Iraq. It is not with terrorism per se. The burden is heavier than a mere repairing of the damage we have wrought in Iraq. The road is much longer than any in the current administration thought when they so blithely believed as Donald Rumfield put it,"shock and awe," would turn Afghanistan and Iraq into models of democracy, pluralism and free enterprise.
Admiral Fallon has a far more realistic view. He understands both the limits of the US military in numbers, resources, and public support. He sees Pakistan for what it is--a high potential candidate for intervention.
The Admiral is independent in his thinking. That's good. It's what We the People pay senior commanders to be. He calls matters as he sees them to the best of his knowledge and belief regardless of the effect on his career. That is very good. Too many senior commanders, as has been shown by the Iraq mess, put career ahead of the national interest.
Admiral William Fallon may have made enemies by the shipload on his trip up the chain of command. But, he's made another supporter and admirer by his stance on Iraq.
The Geek.
There is another struggle in progress resting comfortably off the radar of MSM and the alternative media alike. It is probably--almost certainly--more important than the thunder and smoke in Congress.
The battle lines have been drawn and manned by two senior military commanders. One is George W.'s Man in Baghdad, General David Petraeus. The other is General Petraeus' superior, Admiral William Fallon, the Central Command commander (CINC/CENTCOM).
Admiral Fallon has a long (35 year) record as a man on the way up. He has made enemies along the way (as have all successful senior naval commanders). When he was the commander of Pacific Command, he showed a high degree of independence from the wishes of the neo-con core of the current administration when he promoted a policy of conciliation with the Peoples' Republic of China.
(Truth in blogery requires the Geek to state that his position regarding China was and is a lot closer to that of the neo-cons than to Fallon's.)
Fallon considers Petraeus a brown-nosing huckster for the current administration and has pulled no punches letting the General know it. What Petraeus says regarding the Admiral is less clear.
Now, the nitty-gritty. We need to get a grip on it.
Admiral Fallon wants to cut our force strength in Iraq to one-quarter of its present level by the end of 2009. This is scarcely a precipitous withdrawal. In the Geek's semi-military mind, the Admiral is a little conservative in his timeline. Provided the current indicators of developing Iraqi security force competence continue, the US should be able to take half its combat maneuver battalions out of Iraq by this time next year.
The reason Admiral Fallon wants US forces redeployed is this: He sees greater threats in the region for which he is responsible. In particular Fallon focuses on Pakistan.
The Geek is in tandem with the Admiral. The Islamist ideology may be world wide in distribution. Islamist groups may exist nearly everywhere. Nonetheless, Islamism has several important centers. One is Saudi Arabia. Another is Iran. The third is Pakistan.
At the moment, there is nothing the US can do about Saudi Arabia. At the present, the US would be ill-advised to do anything boisterous regarding Iran. But, Pakistan is a different affair.
If armed Islamism has a heartland, a vital center of command, control, and intelligence, it is located in the mountains of the Northwest Frontier area of Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan and conveniently proximate to Iran. Beyond the tribal areas, Pakistan furnishes any number of safe harbors for Islamists.
And, as virtually everyone well knows, Pakistan is on the verge of becoming a collapsed state. The idea of a collapsed, Islamist oriented, nuclear competent Pakistan quite correctly bothers Admiral Fallon. (As noted in a previous post it bothers the Geek as well.)
The CENTCOM chief apparently has a strategic view of potential US operations in the region. His concept puts US forces, including ground troops, in the role of First Responder. Get in fast. Do the heavy lifting as quickly as possible. Get out. Leave behind a combination of non-US stability forces to back the locals.
The Geek took a similar position over ten years ago in lectures at various US and NATO venues. Historically, the US military is good at defeating conventional forces. It is good at destroying discrete high-value targets. It is not good at counterinsurgency, peacekeeping, and similar long duration missions lacking clear phase lines of success.
Beyond that, the long term presence of US forces can be and often has been inherently destabilizing--even when there is good military reason for their presence. (Bear in mind that the presence of US forces and bases in Saudi Arabia during and after Operations Desert Shield/Storm provided most of the early propaganda fuel for bin Laden and al-Qaeda.)
General Petraeus has made it abundantly clear in both public and private that he favors a very long term continuation of a US role on the ground in Iraq. The ostensible justification for this position is that by doing so the security gains in Iraq might be assured. There is merit in this position.
But not at the expense of larger US interests. Not at the expense of mounting a successful Second Cold War. Not at the expense of lacking the means to intervene should the crash come in Pakistan.
General Petraeus (in common with many in the current administration) fails to acknowledge that the struggle in which the US now finds itself is not with guerrillas and terrorists in Iraq. It is not with terrorism per se. The burden is heavier than a mere repairing of the damage we have wrought in Iraq. The road is much longer than any in the current administration thought when they so blithely believed as Donald Rumfield put it,"shock and awe," would turn Afghanistan and Iraq into models of democracy, pluralism and free enterprise.
Admiral Fallon has a far more realistic view. He understands both the limits of the US military in numbers, resources, and public support. He sees Pakistan for what it is--a high potential candidate for intervention.
The Admiral is independent in his thinking. That's good. It's what We the People pay senior commanders to be. He calls matters as he sees them to the best of his knowledge and belief regardless of the effect on his career. That is very good. Too many senior commanders, as has been shown by the Iraq mess, put career ahead of the national interest.
Admiral William Fallon may have made enemies by the shipload on his trip up the chain of command. But, he's made another supporter and admirer by his stance on Iraq.
The Geek.
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