Afghanistan Or Pashtunstan--A Back-to-the-Future Ending

Overshadowed by the Great Debt Ceiling Battle, the Great Downgrading, and the Miracle of the Job Free Recovery, the US has reached a very critical crossroad in Afghanistan.  In truth we haven't just reached it, we have pushed for it, rushed to it, and sought it with the eagerness of a drowning man clawing for the sky.

The US wants out of Afghanistan in the worst sort of way.  With the exception of some military people, most but not all of senior rank, the current political leadership of the US along with most of We the People want out, right now if possible, but tomorrow at the latest.  This is the ground reality regardless of President Obama's patent bromide about pressing on regardless delivered in the wake of the Chinook shoot-down and the deaths of more than two dozen men from Boat Six.

Of course, We the People, the congress, and the Clueless Guy in the Oval would like it best if the US can get out of Afghanistan with a modicum of dignity and a sufficient simulacrum of success to offset the billions of bucks spent and the hundreds of lives sacrificed on the alter of "nation-building."  Congressman Ron Paul was speaking for many besides himself at the Iowa debate when he denounced the American adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan while warning against any repeat in Iran.  Heads no doubt nodded in agreement across the country as he delivered his neo-isolationist message for the umpteenth time.

One unnecessary and unjustifiable war is reaching its quite unsatisfying conclusion.  As the Iraqi excuse for a parliament dithers over whether or not to invite American "trainers" to remain in country after the last day of this year, it has become brilliantly clear that only Saddam Hussein lost to a greater extent than did the US over the course of this long, bloody exercise in regime change.

Iran has emerged as the big winner in the contest as shown by Baghdad's alignment with Tehran over the question of Syria.  This is simply the most recent, most dramatic example of the triumph of Shia faith over all other considerations in the deeply divided human terrain of Iraq.  But, far outside of international politics, in the quotidian dealings of business, it is instructive that US companies have lost out repeatedly and consistently to competitors from China, Russia, and Europe for the lucrative opportunities available in the country which was--we were assured--going to pay for the costs of liberation, rejoice in new democratic freedoms, greet American troops as the French did after D-Day, and generally rally to the American flag.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the US lost in the Iraqi gambit.  And, now, we face losing in Afghanistan as well.  No, we will not be defeated in the field by Taliban, the Haqqani network, and their Pakistani backers.  There are simply not enough lucky shots by RPGs to do that.  Rather, we will conspire in our own defeat at the hands not of Taliban alone, nor by the combination of Taliban and Pakistan but rather by the joint efforts of "our man in Kabul," Hamid Karzai, the Pakistanis, and Taliban.

Karzai wants out of the war with a fervor which surpasses even that of the US and its partners in the ISAF.  To this end he has been seeking a species of separate peace with Taliban for some time now.  He has been seeking this goal not through the public means of the Supreme Peace Jurga, a large, unwieldy and totally implausible group, but through low key, private, and ever-so-discrete conversations in the presidential palace as well as out of country locations.

The glue which would hold any peace agreement together is simply that Karzai as well as the overwhelming majority of Taliban is Pashtu speaking.  They are all good Pashtuns on the Secret Peace Bus.  As the Pakistanis understand and support the Pashtun super-tribe due to its domination of the key border areas of the FATA, there is no doubt but Islamabad is well represented on the Peace Bus as well.  This means their strategic political position in Afghanistan will be protected in full.

The ethnic Uzbeks, Tajjks, and Hazaras constituting the majority of the population in northern Afghanistan are not represented on the Karzai-Taliban-Pakistan All Pashtun Peace Express.  These are the same people who suffered the most under the rule of the Taliban and whose Northern Alliance comprised the bulk of the indigenous fighters cooperating with the American invaders ten years ago.

It is not surprising that the old Northern Alliance is silently reforming.  It is no surprise that the non-Pushtu population is rearming at a great rate of knots. Nor will it be surprising when renewed civil war greets the announcement of a peace brokered by Pushtuns for the benefit of Pushtuns.  Last of all, there will be no surprise when the US greets the peace with loud applause and the ensuing internal war with a complete and utter silence.

It is not that the Deep Thinkers around the Oval are unaware of what is taking place in Kabul.  Even if the totality of American intelligence assets was detained on matters of tactical and operational focus, the US is aware of both the ongoing Karzai effort and the probable outcome(s.)  The former head of Afghanistan's premiere intelligence service, Amrolah Saleh, has been all but shouting it from the minarets since he was forced from office last year by Karzai.

Saleh is not only very highly respected by intelligence professionals from the US, the UK, and elsewhere, he is personally honest, not at all corrupt, and, most important, committed to the notion of an Afghanistan which includes all the several ethnic groups on a basis of equality before the law as well as in politics.  He is post-tribal to a fault.  And, in Afghanistan, being post-tribal in worldview is a grave fault.

Saleh's message is simple, easy to corroborate, and very well rooted historically.  Should the Great All Pashtun Peace Express arrive at its destination, the result will be fatal for Afghanistan.  In short, Afghanistan will return to what it was the day before the first American boot hit Afghan soil.  A predominantly Pushtu, religiously predicated, and robustly violent Taliban will run the southern two thirds of the country to the advantage of Islamabad while the reconstituted Northern Alliance will fight a defensive insurgency based upon ethnic identity in the final third.

A decade or more of war, hundreds of American lives, billions of dollars to say nothing of the indescribable sufferings of the Afghans caught in the crossfire, will finally result in a back-to-the-future ending.  Worst of all, there is virtually nothing the US can do about it.

We were doomed in our efforts the moment George W. Bush and his neocon ninny crew decided to engage in nation-building in Afghanistan in lieu of a simple, straight forward punitive expedition.  In the rush to invade Iraq so as to teach the Arabs a lesson in how to elect good men which was not needed or indicated, the men of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration assured we were on a mission-impossible in Afghanistan.

Now we must reap the harvest of the seeds those intellectually challenged, ideologically driven men planted.  We can see the crop now, a government which is a broken, rotten travesty, a people demoralized and victimized by a war in which none have a direct stake, an army and police force which exists more in name than in the field, and an "ally" in Pakistan which is an adversary in all but name.  All that is needed to complete the harvest is the "success" of the Karzai-Taliban-Pakistan All Pushtun Peace Bus.

When that happens--and it is question of when not if, the US will be (including Vietnam) 0 for 3 in large scale interventionary operations.  That record is not simply pathetic, it is one of self-inflicted defeats unrivaled by any other major country in recent history.  (Even the French were only 0 for 2.)

Does this mean that Ron Paul is right?  Does it mean the US would be best served by an isolationist posture? It does imply that the US is so preposterously pathetic in its efforts at muscular nation-building that we should abandon any future efforts in that direction.  Of course, the world may not be willing to let us off so easy--and we may not be able to resist future temptations to do good.

The Geek has some thoughts on those questions.  (No shock there.)  Stay tuned.  He will be back.

Murder, Murder Most Foul

It continues to appear that the government of Afghanistan, a creation of the United States and its associates in the ISAF, is committed to perpetrating judicial homicide on a man named Said Musa.  The crime which will lead Mr Musa to meeting the public hangman is that of having converted to Christianity.

Said Musa is an amputee having lost a leg to a landmine while serving in the Afghan army some years ago.  More recently he has married, sired several children, worked with the Red Cross as an advisor to and facilitator of Afghans who had lost limbs--and become a Christian.  His conversion became a matter of record last May when  his image appeared on television as part of a program featuring private religious services conducted by and for Afghans only.  He was arrested on 31 May as he sought asylum in the German embassy in Kabul.

Since his arrest he has been confined in the most rigorous and debased conditions.  He has been threatened, assaulted, sexually abused, tormented, and tortured.  That was by the other prisoners.  The court operating under the provisions of a constitution which was approved by the US and in part written by American and other foreign experts, convicted Musa of the capital offense of conversion from Islam to Christianity.  It may be noted that Mr Musa received no defense as the lawyers both refused his case and spit in his face--literally.

The government of Hamid Karzai--our guy in Kabul--has justified its action by pointing to the constitution and laws of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.  They have, in essence, hoisted us by our own petard.  They have mocked our notion of the rule of law.

As Paul Marshall commented yesterday, Mr Musa's plight has received little attention in the Western media.  He also noted that Mr Musa has written to President Obama addressing him as "brother."  The salutation was undoubtedly meant in the same way the Apostle Paul wrote to his "brothers and sisters in Christ."  In his letter Said Musa begged for help.  None has been forthcoming beyond a mild chiding from Secretary Clinton.

It is not so much that Mr Musa begs for his life although it is clear that he in a manner akin to that of Jesus hopes very much that the bitter cup will be passed elsewhere.  Indeed, his major plea is for transfer to a less oppressive, less torment ridden prison.  He is willing to die for his faith and according to the dictate of his conscience.

Mr Musa is a martyr in the making.  He is not a martyr of the Muslim sort eager to die provided that in the process of dying he can kill.  Rather he is a most reluctant martyr, prodded to his death not by thoughts of paradise and waiting soulless virgins but by acceptance of the gift of redemption provided by the sacrifice of Jesus, defined in Christian doctrine as simultaneously the son of man and the Son of God, pure in nature in both aspects.  In this way Said Musa is identical to legions of earlier Christian martyrs from the time of the Roman arenas down to modern times in the former Soviet Bloc.

The looming judicial murder of Said Musa underscores in a particularly tragic way the underlying reasons why the effort to build a modern nation-state in Afghanistan has been doomed to fail but also why the US and other civilized states must abandon any notions of peaceful coexistence with states dominated by advocates of political Islam.  It points to the most fundamental reason that relations with Muslim majority states will be asymmetrical at best.

The root cause of failure in Afghanistan is the nature and character of Islam itself.  The same applies to our attempts to modify Iranian behavior or to broker a peace in the Mideast.  Islam in and of itself can provide an absolute barrier.

In ways which are terrifyingly evident, Islam is a religion of insecurity, fear, and hatred.  The theology of Islam is based on fear, fear of hell, fear of somehow, in some way, failing to do what the deity wills.  Islam's endemic insecurity is obvious in its intolerance, its refusal to compete in the marketplace of ideas, theological or otherwise.  Its insecurity is blindingly evident in the sentence of death imposed on Mr Musa for the crime of following his own conscience.

The antidote to both insecurity and fear prescribed by Islam is hatred.  Not only the Iranian government with its "Day of Hate" demonstrations yesterday in Tehran and elsewhere, but Muslim clerics beyond counting have demanded hate, hate of Christians, hate of Jews, hate of idolaters, hate of infidels, hate of apostates, hate of whomsoever we point our bony fingers of blame at.

No religion other than Islam demands its adherents hate.  No Christian pastor, no Jewish rabbi, no Buddhist bonze, no Hindu guru would urge hatred upon his fellows, would demand hate be directed at all who were beyond the pale of narrowly defined community.  Only Islam prescribes death as the necessary punishment for conversion.

That, bucko, is insecurity, fear, and hatred in one small package.  And, the label on the package is "Islam."

Looking at the case of Said Musa and the context surrounding it, one can only wonder at what sort of drugs the Bush/Cheney decision makers were taking when they shifted the American mission in Afghanistan from a purely punitive one to one of "nation-building."  One must also wonder at the good sense of the Obama administration in having failed to understand that while we are arguably winning the military engagements in Afghanistan, we are losing the overall war.

Had we stopped with a purely punitive objective in Afghanistan, we would have seen the last of that benighted place years ago.  Also we would have fired a cautionary shot across the bows of the Pakistanis who favor political Islam.  And, we would not have the blood of Mr Musa on our hands.

The lessons for the future are clear.

If we ever must consider an armed intervention in a Muslim majority venue, the intervention must be sharply focused on punishing the bad guys.  There must be no thought of nation-building or otherwise uplifting the great unwashed.

The other lesson is broader.  Islam is the problem.  The US and other civilized states must not only understand this bitter truth, they must start firm and ongoing programs with the goal of undercutting the ideological appeal of Islam, particularly those forms most given to political expression.  The US and other civilized states as an urgent matter of self-interest and self-defense must put an increasing emphasis on the values and norms of the West most directly responsible for the overall success of the West over the past centuries.  In short, we must blow our horn--loudly.

Full disclosure:  The Geek is not a member or adherent of any faith community.

The Old Whore Keeps Repainting Her Face

War formerly was easy to recognize and define.  In the good old days of not that long ago, most (but, critically, not all) wars were fought between states using organized, identifiable armed forces.  Almost as much ink as blood was spilled on defining the nature of belligerents, the rights of non-combatants, and the limits which might be applied reasonably in the use of armed force.

The exception to the readily defined inter-state war was insurgency.  But even that breed of cat came to be defined and understood over the past two hundred years.  Over time the customary rights and immunities were extended from uniformed soldiers under national flags to those seeking the overthrow of the established political order by force and violence.  After World War II the major powers of the world even came to official agreement regarding the rights of an occupied citizenry to resist the occupying forces even though in the real world these understandings are often more honored in the breech than in the observance.

In most recent years the introduction of non-state actors, part time insurgents, full time terrorists, criminal gangs with ambitions which transcend mere minor league avarice have come to complicate the old picture with results which are most discomfiting to policy makers and military operators alike.  Accompanying these instrumental changes has been a major shift in motivation on the part of advocates of violence.  High on the list here are the reawakening of religious passions and the profit motive.

Both religion and profit have raised the attractiveness of the newer and less readily defined forms of war.  When looking at venues as disparate as Afghanistan and Mexico, the observer not only sees the prominence of the newer forms of non-state, non-uniformed combatant forces but also the potency of both belief and the quest for profit.  For practitioners of older forms of war and coercive diplomacy, the development of alternative means and motives has been an unwelcome and all too often unrecognized phenomenon.

To look briefly at Afghanistan, it has become unpleasantly evident that the power of the mosque, or, to err on the side of accuracy, the local cleric, has more than simply offset the effectiveness of both the escalation of American forces and the new technologies of battlefield supremacy.  It has become the key to looming American defeat.  Not to put too fine a point on this Afghan dagger, the universal message of the thousands of clerics holding forth every Friday has been the need for solidarity in resistance to the foreign infidel.  Given that the mosque and the Friday sermon are the single most important source of news and opinion in Afghanistan, this is a development filled with difficulty for the US.

The resolutely anti-American, anti-foreigner, anti-West, anti-infidel message not only empowers those in the Afghan population most opposed to the outside presence, it undercuts all the well-intentioned efforts at "nation building" in the country.  The total inability of the US and its allies to sell their good intentions to the clerical establishment of Afghanistan has assured that each, every, and all the dollars and lives expended in the quest to transform Afghanistan have been wasted.

The clerical resistance couched as it is in the compelling language of belief has both grown and become more strident year to year since the first American boots hit the Afghan soil.  When the US made the fateful choice to switch objectives in Afghanistan from those of a simple punitive expedition to ones of national transformation, the door was immediately opened to the linkage of faith and nationalism--a linkage which cannot be either undone or defeated.

The single greatest reason the security situation has continued to deteriorate year over year is not the open border (although this is a non-trivial consideration) but rather the monolithic opposition of the Muslim clerics.  The opposition is so solid and so widespread that it has political implications, as when Karzai echoes the complaints of the clerics.  Taken with the corruption and inefficiency of the Karzai government, his necessary tilt in favor of the clergy serves to put the international coalition under stresses which will enervate its effectiveness, fatally.

The US is posed for failure not because the opposition has any military advantage.  It is posed for failure not because it has fought the war with inappropriate tactics and methods.  It is facing failure because the faith which motivates the opposition as well as the uncommitted majority of Afghans has proven obdurate.  The US is facing failure ultimately because decision makers failed to consider the nature of the human terrain in the country and limit the goals of the war to those which would be acceptable to the majority of the human terrain.

In short, the US and its allies are likely to be defeated because the Bush/Cheney administration did not recognize the nature of war as understood by Afghans.  As a result of this, the administration allowed or encouraged a redefinition of goals which was way, way too expansive.  At the end of it all, what can be written is that the US was defeated not by bullets or by the enemy having a better theory of victory but by the very nature of the human terrain and its understanding of war.

To our immediate south Mexico is engaged in a prolonged and very bloody conflict.  The irony is that the Mexican government cannot define accurately what is going on beyond the self-evident outpouring of corpses on the streets of Mexico.  The US government is no better off being unable to decide if Mexico is in the throes of insurgency or simply an unusually large scale turf battle between criminal syndicates.  Not that the semantics matter to the average Mexican as he steps over the blood and bodies of the previous day's festivities.

But, what is at work in Mexico is not an academic dispute over semantics or theories of conflict.  It is hard if not impossible to fight any sort of war without knowing what is at stake, what would constitute the better state of peace for which the war is being waged.

Four years ago when he launched the effort against large scale criminal, primarily drug trafficking, gangs, President Calderon probably believed he was inaugurating a simple program of robust law enforcement.  Whether policemen or soldiers did the job, it was the traditional task of compelling acceptance of the law's dictates by the criminally inclined.  There was nothing new at work here.

Whatever Calderon's intentions might have been, no matter what he expected, the outcome was both far more prolonged and bloody as well as inherently destabilizing than he or anyone anticipated.  The Mexican police and military quickly became simply one more combatant in an already underway multi-party struggle over territory and markets.  The government unintentionally became one more gang in a several gang armed contest.

Paradoxically, the entrance of the government allowed greater inter-gang violence.  Whether because of suborned treachery or simply as a fallout from its efforts, the armed forces and police would tilt toward one gang or another in each of the several contested areas.  By so doing, the security forces assured a process of consolidation would occur which would ultimately strengthen the successful gang in its goal of having a "law free zone" in which to carry out its profit making activities.

The process favored the criminals from the beginning.  The drug smugglers knew why they were fighting.  They had goals.  They defined the better state of peace.  By limiting its concept of operations to one of traditional law enforcement, the government was actually clueless in the real world.

The narco-trafficking gangs wanted two things: To eliminate rivals in the several corridors and to establish law free zones so they could operate without fear.  With a few psychopathic exceptions, the leaders of the several syndicates were indifferent as to which of the two traditional methods of accomplishing these goals would be used.  Silver or lead, the choice was up to the recipient not the grantor.

The combination of means as well as the unity of goals gave the advantage to the criminals.  Had Calderon never initiated his Made In Mexico war on drugs, the contest would have been settled with rather less blood and much more corruption.  One gang would have bought out the survivors of the others and established a profitable monopoly.  The law free zones would have been created through corruption not killing and terror.

This conclusion is predicated not on some belief that Mexicans are naturally given to crime and corruption to any unusual degree.  Rather it is based on the history of Mexico, the long-standing traditions of buying one's peace, one's freedom from authority.  More it is based on the equally hoary social, political, and economic dynamics of Mexico, including the remote indifference of the Mexican elites and their tool, the government, from the realities of life as they impinge on the majority of people.

The challenge presented by the Calderon Declaration of War resulted in the development of a form of war not seen even in the days of "narco-democracy" in Columbia two or three decades ago.  The new form of war represents a hybrid of gang conflict and defensive insurgency.  Over the past four years the criminal syndicates shifted from use of graft and corruption to secure territory to a reliance on violence and terror to create the necessary law free zones.

As a result, one which was easily predictable, the gangs have become the de facto shadow government in large swaths of Mexico's border states.  These same states are productive of more than a quarter of Mexico's GDP.  Most of their population and more of their territory now exist outside the authority of Mexico's government or governmental forces.

By virtue of not recognizing that the government was embarking on a new form of the old game of war, the Mexicans have lowered the national flag over a goodly part of their state.  At the same time the criminals have become a de facto government, in effect levying taxes--and collecting them, establishing whatever passes for law along most of the border, and have expanded their criminal enterprises into areas far removed from mere smuggling of drugs to the US.  This means the gangs have given themselves both more political will and more means to act in lieu of the official government.

This does not imply that Mexico is a failed or failing state.  It does imply that Mexico is in a far more desperate contest for survival in recognizable form.  It implies that US policy with respect to assisting the Mexican government has failed as well.

This failure will provide more challenges for the US in the months and years to come.  As the smugglers become more ambitious and more far reaching in their efforts and connections, the probability of diplomatic linkages with states hostile to the US increase as does the risk of adverse personnel and supplies being inserted into the US.

Other than the outcome, there is no real close resemblance between traditional forms of war and what is happening in Mexico.  When night falls, either the Mexican government will or will not be in control of the border states.  It either will or will not have unimpeded sovereignty over its territory.  Right now it looks very dismal for Mexico.

The irony here is that the impending Mexican failure like that of the US in Afghanistan is rooted in a failure to identify accurately the new features of war in play.  It is also rooted, again like the American failure in Afghanistan, in not realising that the local folk define what constitutes war and how to fight it.  It is, again like Afghanistan, based on an insistence that there is only one play book for war fighting--and the government wrote the book, not the locals.

Once Again It's "Strategic Review" Time For Afghanistan

While there is none of the delay and pseudo-drama of last year's "debate" over the Big Question of "Whether Afghanistan," there are definite and deep currents of difference regarding how well the US is doing in whatever it is purportedly doing in Afghanistan.  There is the ongoing contretemps between Afghan president Hamid Karzai and the US--particularly General Petraeus--over where American and other NATO or ISAF troops should be doing what.  And, not surprisingly there is the usual highly credentialed panel of self-designated experts damning the entire effort and the Obama ordered escalation as a total failure.

As if that were not a sufficient number of conflicting chefs to spoil the soup, the Pakistanis, which is to say the Army and Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has come roaring back demanding that Karzai enter into a power sharing agreement with Taliban and the Haqqani network without delay.  It borders on the ironic that the proposal set forth by Pakistani Army Chief of Staff Asfaq Kiyani is simply a more robust form of the conclusions drawn by the twenty-three academics, journalists, and former government officials.  Far less ironic and far more honest is the implicit admission by General Kiyani that Pakistan is and has been working both sides of the street in Afghanistan.

At the same time the Kiyani proposition underscores the major message of Karzai.  For years now the oft derided (by senior American diplomats and policy makers) Afghan president has argued that without ending the Pakistani support of Taliban, the Haqqani network, and al-Qaeda or sealing the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan hermetically, there will be no end to the war.  It is for this reason that Karzai has repeatedly and stridently demanded that the US and others deploy their combat power along the border rather than stage nocturnal raids on isolated Afghan homesteads or stage forcible entries into Afghan cities and towns.

While the US and its allies have seen the war in Afghanistan as one of counterinsurgency, Karzai and some others in both the Afghan government and military have seen it as one of an interstate nature.  The truth is that the war is a hybrid.  The war is an example of a very rare sort of conflict, the partisan war.  In a partisan war the combatants may be organic to the society under stress but do not have sufficient capabilities on their own to continue the war successfully.  The continuation of combat depends upon a direct cross-border supporter.

In the past century the best examples of partisan war are to be found in the several resistance movements in occupied Western Europe during World War II.  In none of the countries under Nazi domination could the domestic, organic resistance forces have accomplished the goal of ejecting the occupier on their own.  The French, the Dutch, the Danes, the Norse all relied not only on outside support from the Western Allies to continue their struggle but needed the outsiders to actually do the heavy lifting of killing Germans and destroying Germany.

The wars in South Vietnam contained partisan features when the North decided to answer the challenge of Operation Rolling Thunder by supplying and supporting the indigenous insurgents.  The partisan nature of the war became clear when Northern forces directly entered the war in sizable numbers thus relegating the insurgents to a supporting role at best.

While it is unlikely in the extreme that Pakistani forces will cross the border into Afghanistan, there has never been any lack of evidence regarding the degree to which Pakistan supports Taliban and others.  Nor has there been any doubt but Pakistan has established and controls the agenda behind the fighting in Afghanistan.  As a consequence, characterizing the war(s) in Afghanistan as a mixed state involving both insurgent and partisan features is the most accurate way of defining the war and the operational doctrines necessary to bring it to a successful (from the perspectives of Kabul and Washington) conclusion.

Ending the war will be a two stage process.  The first stage is that of hostilities termination.  The second consists of conflict resolution.  The first is primarily military in its accomplishment.  The second, the final stage, is completely political in nature.  It has been evident that the US at its senior decision making levels has never taken a firm grip on this reality.

Despite the impressive credentials of the "experts" and the cogency of their argument, their conclusion is fatally flawed at least in part.  The Obama ordered escalation has provided the manpower necessary to take the war directly to the insurgents.  The result has been a transfer in initiative from the Taliban to the US and its allies.  The increasing pressure on the insurgents has constricted both their ability and will to operate.  Even the resort to civilian casualty producing tactics such as the escalating employment of IEDs attests to this.  The Karzai decried nocturnal raids by Special Forces units and Afghan partners has done much to disrupt the organizational integrity of the Taliban and Haqqani network.

The overall effects of the offensive operations have been attenuated severely by the existence of the cross-border sanctuary in the Pakistani FATA.  Further attenuation has resulted directly from the on-going support and assistance provided by ISI and the army.  As long as these partisan war features continue, so also will the war.  It is just that simple.

The Predator and Reaper strikes against Taliban facilities and personnel in the FATA are not sufficient to offset the Pakistani assistance.  While these strikes send a nice number of trigger pullers and a small group of leaders to the Big Mo and seventy-two virgins, the net effect is not crippling to the Taliban and Haqqani network.  Crippling requires an end (or a serious reduction) of Pakistani support.

One can understand Karzai's frustration.  He has seen the problem for years with great clarity.  He has spoken and written to his American partners about it with force and moral courage.  At the same time he must deal with the internal political fallout from the nocturnal raids as he must with the collateral casualties of air strikes or artillery bombardments.  His political enemies (and he has many other than the insurgents) use every grievance real and pretended which results from a raid or air strike against him.  This has to become a real drag after a few years.

Karzai is a nationalist first and foremost.  This means he has to be treated as the head of a sovereign state.  Even when he is tossing one of his many hissy fits, he must still be treated with the respect which he believes he is entitled to and which demonstrates to the Afghan people that he and they are sovereign, respected, dignified, not the puppets and lackeys of foreigners.  General McChrystal understood this.  It is not at all evident that General Petraeus does so as well.

The matter of interpersonal relations factors directly into the problem of gaining Karzai's support for the current approach rather than attempting the utterly impossible--sealing the Pakistani border the air tight level which would be necessary to stop effective Pakistani support.  Karzai must be brought carefully on board.  He must be shown why even the advanced technology available to the US is not up to the task of securing the border.  At the same time he and his people must be given more approval rights with respect to the controversial nocturnal raids.  Again, this requires very careful handling and a willingness to forgo a raid or two in deference to local (and militarily irrational) considerations.

At the same time the US has to put pressure on the Pakistanis.  The new Pakistani "peace plan" gives adequate base to do so.  They have admitted they have the juice with Taliban and the Haqqani network.  They have effectively entered a guilty plea to Karzai's accusations.  Use it to get the ISI and army to turn the spigot down if not all the way off.

The reduction of support need not happen overnight to be effective.  It can be a process rather than an event as even a slight diminuation of Pakistani support will be reflected quickly by a degradation of insurgent combat capacity and will.  Coupled with a modest decrease of outside support and access to the sanctuaries of the FATA, the current offensive efforts (including the nocturnal raids) will prove effective in hostilities termination within a politically reasonable period (twelve to eighteen months.)

At this point--the point of hostilities termination which, to err on the side of accuracy, is more a process than an event--the politically oriented matter of conflict resolution takes over.  Importantly, as it the Afghans who must all live together in the years to come, the conflict resolution portion of the effort is almost entirely an Afghan owned procedure.  The nature and extent of power sharing is up to the Afghans alone--even if we are not pleased with the result.

It is true that problems of governance and governmental legitimacy are in play even before hostilities are terminated.  It is one more unpleasant ground truth that this is a matter for Afghans in which we outsiders play a limited role.  The degree of acceptable corruption is an Afghan matter not an American or European one.  As noted in a previous post bribery, graft, and corruption of both a political and economic nature are internal matters.  It is up to the locals to say how much is enough as well as to define what might be called equality of opportunity to be corrupt.

The way in which the several tribes, linguistic groups, and religious communities define political legitimacy, judicial independence, openness, and transparency or even fundamental honesty in government will be messy, convoluted, and probably throughly unpleasant when viewed from a Western perspective, but that is the way life is lived--get a grip on it.  Afghanistan is not, repeat, not, a contemporary Western polity and society in the making.  And, it never will be.  We have to get a grip on that as well.

Pace, experts, but we are not yet losing in Afghanistan.  The Obama escalation is not yet a failure.  Provided we do not make the fatal mistake we did in Vietnam of trying to take over both war and government, we will not lose, not militarily at least.  Provided we allow the Afghans to be effective stakeholders, we can actually reach a reasonable facsimile of winning--again at least through the hostilities termination phase.

To do this we need to keep on with our current operational doctrine.  We need to do a better job of bringing Karzai on board.  Most of all we must, repeat, must, lean on Islamabad to start the process of tamping down the partisan war aspects of the conflict.  Left to their own military and psychological resources, the organic insurgents can not hope to win.  Their only hope is to end the hostilities and seek the best accommodation in the conflict resolution process.

The road to peace in Afghanistan runs, in major part, through Islamabad but not in the way the Pakistani army and ISI hope.  The zealots in those two organizations must be brought to realize that without abandoning their duplicity in Afghanistan and getting right with Washington, they will lose access to the great American cash cow.  Since the Chinese will not play the same sort of obliging game which we have, this means they will be left very high and dry while still facing their own homegrown existential threat.

Survival is the name of the game for the men in Islamabad.  We just have to make certain that they understand it depends on the way in which they continue to play the game in Afghanistan.

Resetting The "Reset" Button?

Life is getting tougher for the Guy In The Oval in the old foreign relations corral.  You know matters are heading down the tubes when Afghan president Hamid Karzai demands--in the WaPo no less--that the US, in a term beloved by noted pundit Sarah Palin, "cease and desist" in executing the highly successful nighttime raids on suspected Taliban and Haqqani sites.

Admittedly this latest twist in the Saga of Hamid puts one in a position of accepting the diagnosis of manic-depressive psychosis once offered by Ambassador Eikenberry.  In the real world the probability of the hours of darkness operations taken always in conjunction with Afghan National Force members being halted is somewhat less than Ron Paul voting to expand the powers of the Federal Reserve System.  Hitting the heavyweights, the hard core of an insurgent group with a rapid tempo is a highly effective means of degrading both the combat efficiency and political will of the target groups.

The fact that some Afghans are bothered by the notion of women and children being rousted by Americans whose combat kit makes them look about as sympathetically human as the Imperial Stormtroops of Star Wars fame is a case of TS.  A few hurt Islamic sensibilities is a small cost to pay for the prospect of genuine lowering of the violence, the blood and death which falls disproportionately on the same civilian population.  Even Karzai must be aware of this governing reality and its necessary corollary: You can't be president of anything if the purveyors of violent political Islam take over or even remain as a viable, nascent threat to the Kabul regime.

The takeaway from the latest gust from the mouth of Hamid is simple:  This too will pass.  Swiftly.

The same realistic optimism cannot be applied to the growing frictions between the Obama administration and the Dynamic Duo in the Kremlin.  The festering issue of American ratification of the pending new START is developing with the rapidity of a case of gas gangrene.

Senator Jon Kyl, (R) Arizona, who is the point man for the GOP on the START ratification, has cut Mr Obama off at the knees.  Obama was so ill-advised (or so unrealistically certain of his own political juice) that he assured Russian president Medvedev that the treaty would be brought to a successful conclusion during the lame duck session.  Kyl has demurred.  This means the treaty in all its contentious whole will linger on until the next Congress with the increased Republican presence in the Senate.

The administration has attempted to sweeten the deal--or, more accurately--has genuflected to Republican fears that the new version of START will limit the capacity of the US to upgrade and modernize its rather elderly nuclear arsenal.  The difficulty comes in that the money pledges are scheduled over a ten year period with no enforceable means of assuring that future administrations and congresses will honor the promises.  Kyl and other Republicans want more money upfront so that work can be started and a dynamic created to make future funding more probable.  On this the current administration has dragged its collective feet.

Overall, the new START is a decent treaty.  It does, as usually has been the case in this sort of matter, give advantages to the Russians.  However none of these seriously alter the balance of terror which has worked so well so long to keep the peace between Russia and the US.  Ratification would provide a reasonably firm basis for other agreements on "tactical" nuclear systems, for example, or a new and more comprehensive test ban understanding.  It might even serve to increase mutual confidence such as to allow the Kremlin to work with the US in the anti-ballistic missile arena.  A creative and mutual understanding in this area would serve both countries' interests in a measurable way.

When the proposed treaty is finally brought to the Senate, the debate may be quite contentious.  There are more than a few Republicans there who are unreconstructed Cold Warriors who seem to believe that the collapse of the Soviet Union was some sort of shrewd commie plot.  There is a bit of truth here, but not in the way presumed.

Vladimir Putin shows both his age and background in his fundamental distrust of the US.  The current prime minister and past (as well as possible future) Russian president is rather much of the Cold Warrior himself albeit in more nationalistic ways than his predecessors of the pre-1991 sort.  That is why he has so obviously left the America brief in the hands of Medvedev.  Putin anticipates failure and is not going to have the tar of catastrophe sticking to his hands.  The Bare Chested Man On Horseback sees the US as the Main Enemy to this day and his attitude is not going to change for the better.

This is another good reason to ratify START.  A quick and relatively low contention ratification process will weaken Putin's hold on the internal levers of power in the Kremlin coterie.  The relative reduction of the power of Putin's anti-American view will enhance the possibilities of enhanced cooperation in the myriad of matters of coinciding national interest which rest on the table currently.

Putin's suspicions about and distrust of the US received a shot of steroids with the sudden, unannounced rendition of Viktor Bout by the government of Thailand.  Bout, a long time international dealer in weapons whose favored customers were rogue states and insurgent or terrorist groups, was indicted for violation of US law following a Drug Enforcement Administration sting operation.  Arrested in Thailand the legal wrangle was finally settled in favor of the American demand that the man be extradited for trial in the US.

When the rendition went down the Russians screamed bloody murder.  It was an unusual event.  Even the Russian foreign minister got into the act.  Rarely, if ever, has an international criminal received such massive and vocal support from the government of a major state.

To the Russians--who had used any amount of pressure and inducement to free Bout from the clutches of the Thais--the extradition as well as the process leading to it were redolent of American arrogance, of the sort of unilateralism regularly decried by Vladimir Putin back in the days of George W.  His foreign ministry and other organs of official opinion singled out the unwillingness of the American side to put its case on the table for mutual examination and joint determination.  This perspective is not uniquely Russian but the passion with which it is stated is as Russian as Ivan the Terrible.

There is, of course, more than insulted Russian national ego involved in the Bout Affair.  Faced with a horrific number of years as a guest of the Bureau of Prisons, there is a chance that Viktor will have an attack of the Talking Disease.  Certainly there are a lot of questions the US would like to place before the one time Russian air force interpreter.  We would like to know just how he got his hands on the more major weapons he peddled.  And, it would be interesting to determine who authorized the use of Russian Air Force transports to carry his "private enterprise" cargo.  The list goes on at some length but you get the point, eh, bucko?

Bout knows where the bodies are buried.  He knows just how ranking the buried bodies are.  He has a set of very good reasons to dime out anybody and everybody.  This gives Viktor a great capacity to produce fear in major sections of the Russian elite both in and out of the government and military services.

Coming hard on the heels of the revelations regarding the defection of a very high ranking spook in the successor agency of Vladimir's alma mater KGB, the prospects of the damage which a fast talking Bout might do is and will cause sleepness nights in the Kremlin and its ancillaries.  Both the Bout Affair and its spook community predecessor have heightened the Putin fear and loathing of the US.  Any delay or modification of the proposed START ratification process will do the same only more so.

President Obama will be meeting the "good cop" of the Dynamic Duo in the context of the upcoming NATO conference at which the top topics will be Afghanistan and the (not officially of course due to Turkish sensibilities) anti-Iran missile defense system.  Both subjects would be benefited greatly by Russian cooperation.  At this juncture, due to the ability of Mr Obama to promise what he cannot deliver and the bonfire of the Bout Affair, this cooperation is less rather than more likely.

In terms of US national interest Medvedev is greatly to be preferred as an interlocutor over his higher profile and nominally junior prime minister, Putin.  It is important, therefore, that both Mr Obama and the Republicans understand this as well as the ground truth that Russia is not going to go away.  It is not and never has been--pace the unfortunate and misguided remarks and policies of George W. Bush and, later, Joe Biden--one with Nineveh and Tyre.

The Russians and the Russian leadership are both insecure and possessed of a prickly sense of national pride. In all diplomatic doings including presidential promises this foundation reality must be kept in mind.  Russia is, at least in the minds of Russians high and low, a Great Power, and it is an absolute imperative that the US treat it as such in all matters, great and small.  Only by doing so with the utmost of sedulousness can the US hope to accomplish critical matters of central national interest.

A Better State Of Peace

In every war, both inter-state and interventionary, each and every belligerent fights in order to see the war end with a better state of peace. It is the conflicting views of what would constitute an improvement in the pre-war state of peace which lies at the heart of every war.

A very real complication emerges in the case of interventionary war. In this situation there may be real, deep contradictions between the "host" government and the foreign intervenor. So it is in Afghanistan. Not only is there a variance of view between the Karzai government and the insurgents, there is no harmonious symphony of agreement between the US government and its "host" in Kabul.

Had the US limited its goals in Afghanistan to the elimination of al-Qaeda as a threat and the punishment of Taliban for its ill-advised exercise of "Islamic hospitality," there would have been no disagreement between Washington and most of the rivals for power in Afghanistan as to what constituted a better state of peace. But the shift in American policy to the goal of creating a Western style pluralistic democracy with an independent judicial system, an absence of mass market corruption, civil liberties, gender equality, and, at least implicitly, a separation of faith and state assured that an increasingly large gap would emerge between Kabul and Washington (as well as other foreign capitals) as to the precise nature of a better state of peace.

The dichotomies have emerged in a high profile and utterly unmistakable way in the past few months. On subjects as crucial as power sharing, ending governmental corruption, squeezing the flow of drugs, corruption, and extortion generated money out of country, the animus between the governments of the US and Afghanistan have grown.

In each of these areas as well as the legion of lower profile issues, a careful parsing of the causes of the differing understandings of the much desired better state of peace hinge on one word. The word is one which is most unwelcome not only by the current American administration but by the opinion molding elites of the US and Western Europe. In the minds of many, perhaps all of these self-elected hoi olligoi, the word is a virtual epithet.

And, you might wonder, just what is this magic word, this word of unlimited ju-ju?

Nationalism.

Yep, bucko, that is the evil and ever-so-potent word. It is the word invoked by President Karzai and his people almost every other breath. To the Afghans the better state of peace is defined almost exclusively by the implications of nationalism.

In the US and most of the West, nationalism has been unilaterally consigned to the scrap heap of history. Nationalism is seen universally within the elite, academic, political and journalistic, as the cause of wars, the basis of misery, the virus of xenophobia, racism, and other ills which have beset humanity for generations. We are assumed to live in a post-nationalistic age where trans-national corporations, multinational institutions, the "international community" are celebrated as the axis around which the globe now rotates.

Ironically, the foreigner forces led by the US have been attempting to impose a highly nationalistic template upon the raw material of Afghanistan and the Afghans. Tossing multi-cultural sensitivities to the winds, the US and its partners have been beavering away in an effort to create a nation-state with all the features of the liberal democracies of the West, an arrogant and highly nationalistic notion to say the least.

Why anyone in the Obama administration would be surprised by the Karzai government's invocation of nationalism as a defense against the better state of peace sought by the outsiders is a mystery. Only Afghans can determine what is in their domestic interest which is to say what constitutes a better state of peace, Afghan style.

To Americans or Westerners generally it is impossible to believe that Afghans would willingly accept a government which tolerates, indeed engages in, corruption. Or why they might accept a better state of peace predicated upon an austere interpretation of Islamic law. Or, why they might welcome former insurgents, including the most barbaric members of Taliban, into the central government. Or, why they might be comfortable with a society and government which has more centripetal than centrifugal features.

We the People and our Western European counterparts would not see such features as desirable in our polity or society. Nor would we be comfortable with a legal system which is, at best, a hybrid of the sacred and the secular. We wouldn't find the pervasive presence of corruption, cronyism, or the supremacy of family, clan, and tribal identities conducive to a stable and comfortable environment.

The people of Afghanistan see the matter differently. For them all these features are as familiar and comfortable as one's own living room. To be sure some features are more objectionable than others, but as far as the locals are concerned, the most ineffective local remedies are infinitely superior to the best ideas imported or imposed by outsiders.

Governmental corruption is a very real, very live issue in Afghanistan. The Taliban uses its existence as a powerful tool for motivating support among the people who are always paying the graft--never receiving it. The use of graft is a universal tool for cementing political alliances, assuring family and tribal fortunes as well as (to quote Bruce Springstein) "to get a little something for yourself." Nearly everyone in Afghanistan wants to "do something" about corruption (usually make sure they are on the receiving end of it) but no one wants the outsiders to move in, take over indirectly, and clean the mess impartially.

Corruption and its control have become the line in the sand dividing the definition of a better state of peace as between Kabul and Washington. In a microcosm who does what with the corruption issue will determine whose definition prevails as the war enters its penultimate stage.

The takeaway for the donor nations, most of all the current administration, is simple. When all the money is spent (or blown) and the diplomatic rhetoric is exhausted, the Afghan people and only the Afghan people will define the better state of peace.

We had best get used to the idea. Get a grip on it. After all, it is nothing new in our experience. The towering figure of international morality, President Woodrow Wilson had the Marines land in Vera Cruz, Mexico to give the locals a lesson in good government and good citizenship. Even Mexican historians have allowed that under the American Marines the city and its surrounding area never had such good, effective, efficient, honest government.

It was a great lesson in good government. It failed to inspire the locals to emulate it. The huge elastic band which is culture, society, the force of "that's how things are done--here" took over the day after the last marine left. The good ole days of graft, corruption, ineffective government resumed as if there had been no interruption.

The lesson is simple. There is no need to relearn it in Afghanistan. When you are the outsider, your notions of a better state are as relevant as would be mammary glands on a bull. Only the locals know what is a better state of peace in terms of their history, their culture, their society, their ideas as to how "things are done around here."

That means we should kill al-Qaeda, Taliban and other armed troublemakers so as to provide an example to future Afghan governments as to what will happen should they repeat the fatal mistake of Mullah Omar and his Koran-waving thugs. Everything else must be left to the locals, for only they have a direct stake in the future.

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Getting The Hell Out Of Dodge--Or Kabul

In a perfect world an outside power supporting a host government threatened by insurgency would find itself in complete agreement with the host. On matters ranging from tactics and operations to governance, reform and power sharing with the insurgents, there would be a total meeting of the minds between the heavy hitters inside the Beltway and the local politicos and generals.

The problem comes in that the world is far from perfect. Nothing shows the vast gulf between the perfect universe of theory and the messy complications of reality better than the evolving relations between the US and Afghanistan, between the rhetoric of "nation-building" and the realties of not-losing a war.

When the neocon ninny Deep Thinkers of the Bush/Cheney administration rejected the doable option of a punitive expedition in which the sole goal would be the killing or capturing of the maximum number of al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders (and followers) in a minimum time, it embarked on a mission impossible. Instead of going in, killing the bad guys and getting out, leaving any idiocy of nation-building to the High Minded folks at the UN, the Bush/Cheney crowd decided to engage in the most silly of efforts--creating a modern, western style nation-state from the sow's ear of Afghanistan.

In practice this meant the US and its feckless allies jumped into the morass of Afghan politics of both the armed and unarmed sort. The transformation of American forces from a role of punishment and vengeance to one of counterinsurgency in support of our chosen government in Afghanistan assured that the US would lose influence over the actions, policies, and rhetoric of the Kabul government.

We had traveled that road before. In South Vietnam the decision by the Johnson administration to use air and later ground combat forces in direct action against the insurgent Viet Cong and their presumed sponsors in North Vietnam effectively told the Saigon government that the US was fighting a war of its own choosing for its own goals. The subtext was simply that the regime in power on any given day could ignore American advice, guidance, demands, and threats with impunity as the US had no choice but to ride the tiger it had mounted until it could dismount safely on the day of victory.

No matter how much American politicians and military commanders may blather about "partnering" with the Afghan government and military, the reality from Afghan eyes is that the US and the other foreigners are fighting a war which they must win for their own reasons. As a consequence the locals can stand back, do the minimum, and ignore (or, politely, simply pay no attention to) the demands, advice, counsel, and threats coming from time to time from Washington.

The only way to avoid this emasculation is to possess a credible capacity to decommit from the "joint" effort against the insurgents. The only way to assure that advice, guidance, and demands will not be met with silence at best and noisy rejection more commonly is having the believable political will to pull the troops out and cut losses.

Not until the final months of the war between South Vietnam and both the insurgents and the North did the US have a capacity to get the hell out of Saigon. Only then, confronted with the "date certain" actions of the Democrats in Congress did the South Vietnamese government and military start functioning effectively and efficiently. But, by then, it was too late.

The conundrum for the US has been that of creating a credible capacity to decommit from the Karzai government so as to gain the leverage necessary to reduce the probability of losing while not simultaneously encouraging the Taliban. We have not solved this conundrum. At least we have not solved it in an effective way.

There are (no surprise here) correct and incorrect ways to maintain a credible capacity to leave without benefiting the enemy at the same time. That means the Obama administration had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right.

The tragedy is that they got it wrong.

The right way to create or maintain a believable capacity to end interventionary support for an insurgency threatened host government is the setting of specific, mission, and context relevant milestones. These milestones should focus on two broad areas: the capacity and will of the local forces to enter into effective combat against the insurgents; the capacity and will of the government to expand its perceived functional legitimacy in the estimate of the uncommitted majority of the population. A third set of milestones would be of value. These should measure the will and ability of the government to settle for operational dominance rather than unquestioned authority over the insurgents.

The difficulty for Americans in the use of these types of milestones resides in the difficulties of assessing achievement. The most critical milestones are subjective. They deal with political will. They focus on perceptions. Very few are susceptible to the mathematical measurements so loved by bureaucrats both in and out of uniform. Being admittedly imprecise, these milestones are open to interpretation, inspire uncertainty, and allow a very large error bar.

Nonetheless, an examination of both armed domestic political turbulence and the role of outsiders shows these forms of assessment provide the best guide as to the progress made by the host in meeting both the military and perception challenges presented by insurgents. In short, sloppy and uncertain as these features might be, they are the most reliable way to assess when and how the outsider might leave with goals achieved.

The use of milestones which focus sharply, even solely, on the host government's will and ability to provide security, enhance its perceived legitimacy, and share power assures that the war will remained "owned" by the host regime and not the outside supporters. The host government is reminded constantly of two critical truths. The war is its sole property. The outsider will leave if the government does not meet the milestones.

The second crucial truth allows the intervenor to leave at a time and in a way of its own choosing. Should the host regime meet the milestones, the consequent success in countering the insurgency allows the intervenor to leave with a light heart, a happy smile, and a "mission accomplished!" banner held high. Should the host regime fail to meet the milestones, then the intervenor must leave before defeat is too apparent. No smiles this time, but rather the grim certainty that the host government was responsible for and owns the failure.

So much for the correct way. Now for the incorrect way, also known as the Obama Way.

In this simple, emotionally satisfying, politically expedient approach, the president of the United States simply announces a "date certain" on which the withdrawal of American troops will commence. The president's "progressive" political base (this is the group who sincerely believes the US has never been in a war which it did not deserve to lose) will cheer. The opposition will shake their collective heads in disbelief.

Other stakeholders will respond in their own unique fashions.

The host government will respond with shock, frustration, and bitterness. At least one senior US commander will dissent publicly, asserting the "date certain" will encourage the opposition by giving them hope that hanging on for a little bit longer will result in victory.

The dissent is well founded, even if Taliban has not yet taken a specific open stance. The weight of evidence shows the insurgents have a great degree of both patience and unexhausted political will.

At this point it is worth recalling two ground truths about insurgency. At root insurgency is a contest of political wills and not military forces per se. Secondly, the side with the greater ability to take casualties and expend time will be the side which wins.

Those two points are in explicit play with the Obama Pronouncement. No matter what qualifiers may be introduced later, the governing reality is the "date certain." Once announced, that date will encourage the insurgents to believe that there is a light visible from their end of the tunnel. On the other side there is a belief that unless the war has been won, absolutely and without any chance of mistake, by that "date certain," it will be lost beyond any shadow of a doubt. The "date certain" becomes by its very existence a form of self-fulfilling prophecy.

For ideological reasons the Bush/Cheney administration condemned the US and its allies to an expedition without realistic goal. Now Mr Obama, again for ideological reasons alone, has compounded the felonious blunder by waving the white flag.

The last time a president waved the banner of surrender it was on 31 March 1968 when LBJ walked away from his war on national television. It took several more years and tens of thousands of American deaths for his act of capitulation to involve the entire country, but this was akin to the time lag between the infection and consequent death.

Mr Obama probably did not intend to announce a forthcoming American defeat. Quite the contrary, he was most likely trying ineptly to give the American public a reason to hope the war in Afghanistan would come to an end if only we could hang on for a little while longer.

But, as the old cliche has it, "the road to hell (or defeat) is paved with good intentions." Good intentions are not enough to ensure success; they are more than enough to ensure defeat.

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Once More With Feeling--Let's Talk About Peace

Once more the air is filled with the sound of the cuckoo. That bird is crowing, "Peace! Peace! Give peace a chance." It's calls are echoing around Washington. Reverberating through Israel. The bird's cheerful noise is bouncing through the wadis and souks of Palestine. Resounding across the capitals of at least some Mideast states. And, throbbing amidst the gunfire and IED blasts of Afghanistan.

Fer sure, dudes.

The world has been through the cycle of unwarranted optimism and unmerited depression too often to exhibit the slightest joy over the recent announcement by the Obama administration that it is investing whatever might still linger of its diplomatic and political prestige and influence on hosting the opening round of the latest bout between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The chances of success were in no way enhanced by the belief expressed by senior members of Team Obama that within a year a comprehensive settlement on substantial issues will be achieved.

That rhetoric of faith is akin to the "peace in our time" piety expressed by Neville Chamberlin on his return from the Munich Conference. If the Secretary of State or any one else in the administration really, really believes that, there is a desperate need for a change in medications.

Even if the hard right coalition headed by Prime Minister Netanyahu is ready, willing, and, most importantly, politically able to achieve peace at the cost of pulling thousands of "settlers" out of the disputed territories, there is no reason to conclude the weak, fractured, Palestinian Authority government of Mahmoud Abbas can agree to any formula which settles for less than their maximum demands.

Netanyahu has promised to take any deal reached over the next months to both the Knesset and the Israeli people. Not that he would have any choice. Any agreement will be both at Israel's expense and risk. As the Israelis learned to their sorrow in the wake of evacuating the Gaza Strip, the rest of the world cheers the withdrawal but is terribly unconcerned if the aftermath includes the loss of Israeli lives to the "liberating" rockets and mortar bombs of Palestinian "freedom fighters" and Islamist killers.

The Palestinian Authority is a government in name rather than substance even in the territory which it purportedly rules. Its legitimacy is questionable in the minds of many Palestinians. Of course the PA is under direct, continual, quotidian threats from the very hard line Islamist regime of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Any sign of purported "weakness" on the part of the PA will be seized upon by Hamas and its allies, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran as one more lever with which to pry the Palestinian territory further into the irredentist camp.

The PA has a record of rejecting far better offers than any which can or will be made by the Netanyahu government. In the previous acts of pure rejectionism, the PA has continued the splendid record of diplomatic failure established back in the Thirties by the Arabs of the region and enhanced by the sorry and totally avoidable blunders of Fatah during and after the First and Second Intifadas.

As diplomats the Arabs of Palestine have a history which shows a level of sheer incompetence rivaled only by their success in military operations. The government of Israel is perfectly well aware of the Palestinian capacity for self-inflicted diplomatic defeat and will be prepared to take full advantage of it.

Of course, the PA is counting on the US and the European Union to do the necessary diplomatic heavy lifting. In this the PA is showing a shrewd understanding of the stance of both the Obama administration and the political and opinion molding elites of the EU.

The EU is clearly, if not pro-Palestinian, at least, quite anti-Israel. There is no doubt but the EU elites are fed up with the situation in the Mideast and hold the Israelis solely culpable for the current situation. There is equally little doubt but the EU will lean on Israel in every way possible regardless of reality or even without regard for the interests of the EU member states.

The Europeans have convinced themselves that a two state solution will not only bring in a permanent era of peace, love, and flower power between Israel and its Arab/Muslim neighbors, but will also end the global threat of terrorism and their domestic problems of creeping Islamism. This unicausal model is attractive because it is simple. It is wrong nonetheless.

The Obama administration will undoubtedly put the muscle on Israel. That is all it can do. It--and the US--have no measurable leverage on the governments of the Arab/Muslim states and no genuine credibility with the Arab/Muslim street. All the famed Obama "outreach" program has done is raise and quickly dash expectations among the many who are so ill-informed as to believe the hoary trope, "if the US can put a man on the moon, it can (fill in the blank.")

However there are very real limits on the amount of coercion the Obama administration can use on Israel. These limits are imposed by domestic political considerations which far transcend the purported power of the Israel Lobby or the alleged importance of the "Jewish vote," although neither of these are trivial matters. Poll after poll demonstrates that an overwhelming majority of We the People, particularly those who meet the Rasmussen poll definition of "mainstream," not only support Israel but pin the tail of blame on the Palestinian donkey.

Further limiting the capacity of Mr Obama or his administration to play an effective role in the upcoming direct negotiations is the absence of credibility. If LBJ had a "credibility gap" during the Vietnam War, Obama has a yawning credibility canyon. His word simply cannot be trusted by the government of Israel. To say this limits his capacity to influence affairs is to state the overly obvious.

Over in Afghanistan the Karzai government has acknowledged the self-evident. Karzai personally allowed as how his government is engaged in ongoing conversations of an informal nature with members of Taliban. That admission is scarcely stop-the-presses news.

The Karzai government and the president himself would be criminally negligent as well as suicidally out-to-lunch not to have been talking with representatives of both Taliban and the Haqqani network. Conflict resolution, even hostilities termination, depend upon the achievement of a working agreement with the insurgents. When the shooting stops--or even to facilitate the stopping of the shooting--a power sharing arrangement must be achieved.

Unless an insurgency is focused solely upon the ejection of what is perceived as a foreign political and military presence, the two contestants will have to live together at war's end. Thus it is essential to redefine the conflict in a way that assures neither combatant sees the war as existential in nature.

It is clear that this has been Karzai's goal for some years now. He is a very able politician in the Afghan context. He understands perfectly that the greater the body count, the more inflexible the dividing lines between insurgent and government, the more war weary the uncommitted majority population becomes, the more difficult, even impossible it will be to end the war without one side or the other existentially eliminating the other.

Being both a realist and a powerful nationalist, Karzai has laid down only one key condition regarding who from Taliban and the Haqqani is an acceptable interlocutor. He demands that only those who are not aligned with or dominated by al-Qaeda or other "foreign" entities come to the table--even for the informal conversations which have been underway.

To his credit Mr Karzai has made no grandiose promises. He has put forth no timetable. He sees no specific result eventually coming from the conversations. Once again he is showing both realism and a keen grasp of the potentials of Afghan politics.

Best of all Mr Karzai has kept the Obama White House and administration basically out of the loop. Keeping the current administration at a very long arm's length is probably the best way to assure something positive emerges from the shadows of informal conversations, the talks which happen but never are given more than tacit, offhand mention.

If only the Israelis and Palestinians could do the same--success might crown their efforts.

Pull Out Now! The UN Says The War Is Lost

The UN has taken a look at the security situation in Afghanistan. The worthies and experts at that strategic think tank didn't like what they saw.

But, being willing to look defeat square in the face without blanching, the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon who is, as everybody knows, the finest military theorist since Karl von Clausewitz as well as an operational level commander on a par with George Patton, has informed the Security Council that Afghanistan is going to hell in a high speed, low drag wheelbarrow. Using the ever reliable indicators of roadside bombs, assassinations of low to mid-level government personnel in the provinces, and "complex" attacks, the SecGen all but declared the Taliban to have won.

The SecGen is not alone in his dismal appraisal of American and allied fortunes in Afghanistan. Over the past few weeks, those two pillars of independent, disinterested, and agenda-free impartial assessment of American success or failure in both war and diplomacy, the WaPo and the NYT, have made reached the same conclusion, at least by implication. The only feature lacking in either outlet is an editorial demanding a prompt American surrender to the Mighty and Pure Defenders of the One Truth Faith.

Admittedly, there are a number of good reasons to feel both gloom and doom hovering over the valleys of Afghanistan. The Afghan National Forces are far more a myth than a substantial reality capable of effective action in the field. The Karzai regime is corrupt, inefficient, self-serving, and far more interested in continuing its hold on power than seeing hostilities termination leading to long term conflict resolution. Mr Karzai himself is an excellent Afghan politician but a very infuriating partner with whom to engage.

At the same time Taliban deserves credit. It is comprised of tough, resilient fighters led by reasonably competent commanders. It has a set of clear goals. A very definite agenda well founded on religion. Beyond that Taliban has the support and assistance of the Pakistani Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence and, thus, constitutes a branch of the armed forces of Pakistan. As if that were not sufficient, Taliban receives support from Iran. Training camps are located convenient to the Afghan border in the wastes of rural Iran while the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps provides instructors. In a gesture of religious fraternity, the Iranians also provide explosively formed penetrators and other useful gadgets.

Even with the augmentation of American combat forces, the manpower available to the US and ISAF for combat missions is minimal (to put it charitably.) The correct decision by General McChrystal to limit the use of indirect and air delivered fire places more of a burden on the ground pounders, thus making the war even more manpower intensive. In order to assure that few (preferably no) Afghan non-combatants are killed by the "infidels," it is necessary to conduct each and every operation no matter how large or small on a retail basis, up close and personal.

Longer term this self-imposed constraint on the lethality of the battlefield is not only good, it is absolutely necessary. McChrystal understands perfectly that if civilians are to be killed, it is essential that they be killed by the insurgents. Insofar as Taliban et al kill civilians, non-combatants, women, children, and old men, whether by a roadside bomb, a suicide IED, or a "complex" attack, the resulting body count strengthens the counterinsurgent while weakening the insurgent.

That consideration constitutes a critical nuance unnoticed by either Generalissimo Ban Ki-Moon or the Deep Strategic Thinkers at the WaPo and NYT. The primary victims of the increased usage of roadside bombs and similar IEDs have been Afghan civilians. The same is true of attacks carried out by "martyrdom seekers" whether using suicide vests or vehicle borne IEDs. Even many of the larger attacks, characterized in the UN report as "complex" have resulted in more civilian than foreign combatant deaths.

The roadside bombs, the assassinations of minor government, police, and military personnel, even the majority of the "complex" attacks such as the strikes on foreign occupied guesthouses have not only resulted in an increased loathing for Taliban on the part of Afghans but show a high measure of desperation driving Taliban.

In previous insurgencies, assassination of local personnel have been a prominent feature either of the beginning of the insurgency or as a strong indicator of its being defeated. The same applies to indiscriminate attacks resulting in a high level of casualties among the uncommitted majority of the civilian population.

Previously in Iraq, in Pakistan, and in Afghanistan, when the insurgents have started killing civilians in large numbers, there has been an immediate push-back on the part of the threatened civilians. This is being seen again in Afghanistan in the past few months--the same period employed by Feldherr Ban Ki-Moon as a base for his prognostication of impending defeat.

Increasingly, local villagers equipped with (to use the term employed by US military sources) "personal assault weapons" have joined Afghan, US, and ISAF units to engage and destroy Taliban cells. The same upward trend is seen in the flow of unsolicited and actionable intelligence from locals who have had it up to their beards with Taliban.

Afghans, not unlike most people everywhere, are not strong on the idea of getting killed. They don't even appreciate the fine theological distinction between being killed by an "infidel" or an "apostate" rather than a good Muslim, a jihadi. Not surprisingly, the Afghans are ready, willing, and eager to seize the moment and abate the Taliban nuisance.

Rather than being indicators of near-term defeat, the increased Taliban reliance upon IEDs, assassination, and the odd media spectacular points to a loss of confidence within the command echelons of the insurgents. Taliban has lost the initiative in the quotidian conduct of operations; as a comparison between friendly initiated, hostile initiated, and meeting engagements shows, the capacity to control the pace and direction of operations has shifted increasingly in favor of the US and ISAF.

This pleasant reality in no way lessens the underlying reality that the war is not over. The US and its allies are not yet sure of achieving the minimum strategic goal of "not-losing," but the vectors have shifted in that direction. The next six to twelve months will be a long, hard pull in Afghanistan. Marja is not yet fully secured. The Kandahar operation has been delayed. Most importantly, the Afghan national government and forces have not yet shown either the will or the ability to carry their share of the freight.

Right now the major lost opportunity is not military but falls rather in the area of governance. The US and its allies have fallen too far into the trap of believing that the central government of Afghanistan is just that--a government. The US has also allowed itself to believe that success in Afghanistan cannot occur without the existence of a strong, credible, and effective central government.

These twin notions are bogus. For much of its existence, Afghanistan has gotten along quite well without a strong, credible, and effective central government. The Afghan culture states that a person's primary loyalty is to the extended family, secondary loyalty is to the clan, and the tertiary loyalty is to the tribe. This hierarchy allows but does not compel a loyalty to the central regime in Kabul.

This situation implies that Afghans have a high propensity toward and a good capacity for self-organizing. The self-organizing process moves from the most local to the more distant and has the automatic advantage of assuring high group coherence through the necessity for voluntary collaboration in the search for mutual self-interest.

The operational consequence of this orientation within the human terrain of Afghanistan is obvious. The US and its allies should--must, perhaps--put Kabul to the side and deal with the local power structure. The winning political approach is that of empowering the self-organizing capacities of the Afghan villages, the neighborhoods of Marja or Kandahar. Working with and backing the needs of the locals in all aspects of security, governance, and economic development would allow the effective circumvention of the obstructionists of Kabul. Doing things this way would have the additional advantage of cutting off Taliban from any pretense of legitimacy, by denying it the large target of central government corruption, cronyism , and flat out inefficiency.

There is a very high probability that General McChrystal is as aware of the self-organizing and provincial orientation of the Afghan human terrain as he is of the grave inadequacies of the central regime. If his lords and masters inside the Beltway can be brought to see the light, there is a better than good chance that the next few months will see a political success parallel the probable military defeat of Taliban.

There is, of course, only the slimmest of chances that the Obama administration can wake up to the tribal and family realities of Afghanistan so as to give a green light to adding the final ingredient which would well neigh onto guarantee success of an acceptable sort in Afghanistan. And, there is absolutely no chance in hell that the WaPo-NYT Strategic Studies Academy or Geo-Political Genus Ban Ki-Moon will ever get it.

Karzai Is Out For Himself--What A Shock!

There is a piece in the NYT which is disquieting but not at all surprising. Quoting the recently resigned or fired director of Afghan intelligence as well as a passel of unnamed "senior" sources privy to Karzai's thoughts, words, and action, the paper concluded that the Afghan president has lost faith in the US/NATO capacity to defeat Taliban and is off to make a separate peace behind the collective backs of the West.

Despite the introduction of increased forces and the new approach of General Stanley McChrystal, the Afghan president has convinced himself that the Westerners will lose to the Pakistan supported Afghan Taliban. The real deal is, of course, that Karzai is still hacked off from the accusations of vote fraud in last year's election and the high-handed hectoring he received from both President Obama in person and from assorted US civilian personnel.

Karzai is a highly impossible person with whom to deal. He is personally parsimonious with honesty. His relatives are even more afflicted with this feature. Karzai has a most prickly sense of honor and is more easily dissed than the most thin skinned homey in the hood. On top of that, he is tribal to the max, distrustful of other tribals in the extreme, and fiercely xenophobic. All this means Karzai is a good Afghan politician.

It is possible that the dark mutterings of a separate peace are being made and marketed with premeditation as a way of scaring more bucks from the US. And, one must never be ready to overlook the strong tendency of both the NYT and the WaPo to scent American defeat in either Iraq or Afghanistan whenever possible. Yet, there are good reasons for Karzai to cut a deal with Taliban in addition to simply staying alive and in power.

It is in his best interests as well as those of his relatives and tribe to cut the best possible deal with Taliban before the Westerners do more "damage" to the traditional order of affairs in Afghanistan. The slow motion, low friendly casualty approach to Marja and, yet to come, Kandahar does threaten the continuation of Afghan business as usual. It threatens the highly profitable opium trade. It threatens the tight web of corruption and favoritism which cements tribes and creates alliances between tribes.

Worse, as the Americans, British, and others expand their influence, it emboldens the local government types to bitch and moan with great justice regarding the yawning deficiencies in Karzai's central regime. The locals, the elders of the villages, districts, and provinces want to practice self-organization. Karzai and the rest of his Kabul crowd want centralization uber alles.

As long as Taliban controlled Helmand and other disputed territories, the locals had to keep their mouths closed. Now, with American and other foreign troops present and pushing Taliban hard as well as developing the notion of an Afghan national force, the locals are free to talk and the foreign correspondents are there to hear and record. Mr Karzai is not a happy camper with this sort of development.

At the same time we in the West have to keep in mind that Afghanistan under Karzai is not much more "liberal" and not a whit more "pluralistic" or "secular" than it was under the Taliban. The notion that the US or the ISAF or the UN could create a simulacrum of a modern, Western nation state was an exercise in self-delusion which boggles the imagination.

Afghanistan is and will remain a reactionary bastion of tribalism coupled with Islam--a religion which is little noted for its advanced, progressive, and expansive ideology. The place will remain mired in corruption, favoritism, feuds, and the other features of Afghan culture which assure it is not a candidate to join the League of Civilized States at any time soon.

What matters to the national and security interests of the US and others of the ISAF is that the government of Afghanistan--present and future--understand that any future harboring of bad actors such as al-Qaeda and Taliban will bring future boots on the ground. The Bush/Cheney crew had their chance to squash the jihadists and blew it. Now, McChrystal has a much harder task in doing the same--and very little time to do it.

Karzai's attitude does nothing to make McChrystal's job easier. But, provided the troops on the ground are allowed to get on with the job which, from all basic indicators, they are doing well, there is a very good chance that al-Qaeda and Taliban will be militarily defeated on the ground of Afghanistan. Of course, this means they will regroup across the border in Pakistan as well as bide time to do a deal with Karzai which will bring them back to Afghanistan.

As long as the Islamist goons of Taliban focus their free exercise of religion on such matters as keeping women in garbage bags and cutting the heads off of thought criminals along with the odd lopping off of thieves' hands, no worries, mate. Whatever happens in Afghanistan no matter how Medieval and barbaric, stays in Afghanistan. Only when the primitives of Islam decide to leave their stone huts and mountain fastnesses in order to hurt the Great Satan, do we need to be concerned.

Should the primitives of Islam once more seek to hurt Americans or others of a civilized country, then we will have to go back and do what should have been done by the rhetorically muscular but reality challenged Bush/Cheney/Rumfeld mob--go in, break things, and kill people until the survivors rue war for generations to come.

That's right, boyo, treat primitives like primitives. It may be unfashionable to think about let alone write about, but history shows time after (literally) bloody time that the concept has one thing going for it--it works.

Way To Go, Dr Liam Fox!

The new British Defense Secretary, Dr Liam Fox, opened his mouth in Kabul the other day. Out came a whole heap of truth. In response the Afghan government and media have gone exoatmospheric. In the process of going ballistic they have proven Fox to have been spot on.

In a press conference at the British embassy in Kabul, the visiting Defense Secretary said bluntly that the purpose of the intervention in Afghanistan was to facilitate British national security. He went on to say what the American led operation was not about in his estimate. It is not, he opined, "for the sake of an education policy in a broken 13th Century country."

Well, at least someone involved in the multi-national effort to squash Islamist jihad oriented assemblages of thugs such as al-Qaeda and Taliban has the intellectual, moral, and one might add, political courage to tell it like it is. The US and its associates--the first among which was and is, the UK--put boots on the inhospitable ground of Afghanistan in order to expunge not only the architects of the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda, but the government which protected these international criminals pursuant to the requirements of "Islamic hospitality," the government of Mullah Omar's Taliban.

The intent of the operation at the outset, before it was distorted by the Bush/Cheney administration, was simply to make the world safer for civilized folk by nullifying for once and all the threat posed by Islamist jihadists. As such, the operation was both legally and ethically justified. Had it kept to the original intent, the US, the UK and all the rest would have been long gone from a geographic expression which can be characterized with accuracy and honesty as being both broken and 13th Century.

The initial response by President Karzai, according to at least one (conveniently) unnamed "senior government source" and the Afghan excuse for a newspaper of record, was vehement, even vitriolic. The assorted respondents agreed that Dr Fox "dissed" Afghanistan something fierce.

The unnamed "senior source" averred that despite the "sacrifice" of British lives and the expenditure of British money, it was evident that the Brits were "racist" and showed "a lack of trust." The source also belabored the obvious: That Dr Fox thinks Afghanistan has not changed since the 13th Century and was as a consequence both "tribal" and "medieval."

Yeah, dude, that is pretty much the size of it. So, where's the problem?

Afghanistan is highly tribal in its social and political complexion. That reality has been noted by everyone from President Karzai to General McChrystal and from Joe Biden to George W. Bush. It is probable that even President Obama agrees.

As for being "medieval," that is another self-evident feature of much of the Afghan cultural, social, political, and intellectual landscape.

The ascendancy of religion over secular matters was a hallmark of Europe's medieval period. And, so it is in Afghanistan today. Consider a few salient points.

The primacy of personal loyalties over the demands of institutional affinity is another prominent feature of the European medieval experience. So it is in Afghanistan today.

Women were generally subjugated in Europe in those days. Such is their status in contemporary Afghanistan.

A preeminent dynamic in Europe during the medieval period was the struggle to establish and maintain the authority of a central government over regional and tribal figures. Tell us, Mr Karzai, how is it different in Afghanistan today?

There is nothing that foreign intervenors can do to fix the "broken 13th Century country" which Afghanistan is. Mounds of money and torrents of "advice" will do nothing real to address the reality to which Dr Fox referred. Externally sponsored (imposed?) nation-building is a monstrous fraud perpetrated upon not only those who furnish the ways and means but upon those who are the recipients.

When the Bush/Cheney bunch--along with the New Labor government in the UK--shifted the goal in Afghanistan from one of permanently abating the nuisance of al-Qaeda and Taliban to one of creating a 21st Century Western style ideal in Afghanistan, they did nothing but assure a long, bloody, and ultimately failed effort. Only blunt and realistic honesty of the type shown by Dr Fox can serve to deflect the collective effort from its current course.

Far from whining, complaining, and carping about the presumed racism and disrespect shown by the British Defense Secretary, the Karzai government and its supporters should welcome the honesty. They should be gratified by the retreat from the well-intended effort to impose a view of society and politics quite foreign to the Afghan experience.

Rather than using the Fox remarks as one more cause to bitch and moan, the Karzai government should embrace them. How refreshing it would be to hear Karzai or even some unnamed "senior source" allow that Afghanistan is a broken 13th Century country. "But it is up to us and us alone to fix it and drag it into the 14th or even 21st Century if we and we alone want to."

Not only would it be refreshing, such a statement would be a real step along the road to a more stable Afghanistan, an Afghanistan which might have a future other than one dictated by the most violent proponents of political Islam.