The Next Ten Years

The US (and a hell of a lot of other countries) is approaching the zero point marking the official start of "The Global War On Terrorism (GWOT.)"  To err on the side of accuracy, the US had already been in a war against advocates of violent political Islam for eight years when the hijacked passenger aircraft were turned into cruise missiles.

Osama bin Laden had dispatched his declaration of war against the US six years earlier, but few here paid any attention.  Two years before that, violent political Islamists only semi-associated with al-Qaeda had tried to take down the World Trade Center with a VBIED.  The Clinton administration in the lawyerly way which typified that brand treated this informal, undeclared act of war by a non-state actor to be a criminal offense rather than an act of overt aggression.  The later al-Qaeda sponsored attacks on the USS Cole, the Khobar Towershousing complex in Saudi Arabia, and the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania did merit a military response of a limited and highly irrelevant sort.  The dispatch of Tomahawk missiles rather than FBI teams must have bothered the peace loving Clintonites--and was equally ineffective.

The 9/11 strikes could not be termed other than an act of war even if the aggressor was a non-state actor.  It was Afghanistan's misfortune to be the state on whose territory and under whose protection the attack was planned and launched.  It was even more unfortunate that the head of the Taliban government (if that term is truly apposite), Mullah Omar, valued Islamic hospitality over the territorial integrity of his country or the lives of his fellow Afghans.

Nearly ten years later there is little doubt but the original al-Qaeda is all but dead.  At the least this particular band of violent political Islamists has been organizationally weakened to the point it presents no direct threat to the US or other "infidel" states.  The same cannot be said of Taliban, particularly as it appears that the US and its allies are seeking a political accommodation with the group and are supported in this by at least some critical segments of the Kabul regime.

Neither can there be any optimism about success having been achieved against any of the many groups espousing and practicing violent political Islam which have come into existence since 9/11.  Some of these have consciously adopted the al-Qaeda brand name or claimed affiliation with the legendary name of the initial group and its leader.  Two of these, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), constitute very real threats to the nations of the West as well as regional states.

As between the two al-Qaeda franchises, the first, AQAP, is the larger menace.  Located in the rapidly disintegrating state of Yemen, AQAP has not only established a strong presence (effectively becoming the government of at least one province), it has brokered relations with two African entities, al-Shabaab in the fictional country of Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country.  Because of its successes to date and apparent prospects for doing even more in the months and years to come, AQAP has become the  new focus of the Americans as they pursue the GWOT.

The US is currently planning to ramp up its use of armed UAVs with the goal of replicating the success in targeted assassinations enjoyed in the FATA of Pakistan.  The use of the highly lethal unmanned platforms over the past two years in particular has been largely responsible for the emasculation of al-Qaeda and the progressive reduction of Taliban's ability to conduct hard target operations.  The Obama administration believes the Predators and Reapers can work the same grim magic in Yemen against the AQAP.

The ongoing political crisis in Yemen with its prospect of internal war gives a new urgency to the challenge of defeating AQAP before its creative bomb makers can score a success or before the American born and educated immam, Anwar al-Awlaki, can smooth talk another incomplete personality into undertaking a one man martyrdom operation.  Should an Awlaki guided suicide bomber or a well concealed package bomb penetrate US security with a resultant high body count, it would be difficult or impossible to avoid sending the troops one more time to a land filled with inhospitable terrain and flatly hostile people.

Awlaki is a mediagenic fellow.  AQAP's online publication Inspire is equally attractive to the Western media. The past bombing attempts by AQAP have been noteworthy in both the imagination behind them--and their failure.  Overall AQAP has attracted a very great deal of attention and generated a significant amount of apprehension without having actually done anything significant outside of Yemen.

In short, AQAP is far more shadow than substance.  AQAP is, in the deathless words of Chairman Mao,  "a paper tiger."

The fear that AQAP will slide easily into power in Yemen as the state energetically disassembles is overstated.  There are a couple of reasons for this push back against the conventional wisdom.

The first is the tribal nature of Yemen's population.  AQAP is primarily supported by one tribe, the one from which Awlaki springs.  Other tribes are not thrilled by taking orders from either AQAP or its tribal sponsor.  They will fight to preserve their autonomy and the privileges which go with it.

The second reason is the Salifist austerity of the AQAP is not compatible with the views of most Yemenis.  In those cities where AQAP has been able to establish dominance in recent months, the locals have bridled rapidly when confronted with the severe limitations the Salifists place upon life and its few pleasures.  This is in keeping with prior experiences in both Iraq and Afghanistan where the austere advocates of violent political Islam outwore their welcome with surprising speed.  Salifists from Kabul to Somalia have proven themselves to be their own worse enemies.

The combination of popular rejection and tribal hostilities automatically limits the probability or even the possibility of AQAP exercising an increasing sway in the ruins of Yemen.  Their natural support base is too deficient to provide for long term, unchallenged authority.  They would not even find the same percentage of initial support as Taliban had in its first year or two in power.  (And, never forget, Taliban never had a firm hold on the non-Pushtu population of Afghanistan.)

There is an important caveat to this.  Should the US kill too many civilians, the base of support for AQAP will grow rapidly.  This is not to say Yemenis will embrace either Salifist religious ideology or necessarily support AQAP's agenda of violent political Islam.  They will simply seek to resist the Americans who are killing their kinsmen.

Reports out of the FATA are contradictory, but the many which point at increased animosity directed at the US as a result of the Predators killing non-combatants should not be discounted.  Neither should they be diminished.  The Afghans have demonstrated great antipathy over the killing of civilians by US and allied forces.  The same animosity is not shown regarding the deaths of civilians caused by Taliban bombs and bombers.  In both the FATA and Afghanistan, the locals expect their Muslim civilians to be killed by Muslim combatants.  It is OK.  A fact of life.  But, they do not cotton up to being killed by infidels.

When the infidel Predators cause collateral fatalities in Yemen, the first result will be the engendering of hostility to the US and those Yemenis who support or are seen as supporting the US.  The winner would be AQAP.

The US is facing the prospect of a self-fulfilling prophecy in Yemen.  In the attempt to stamp out a menace which does not yet exist, we are in danger of creating a genuine menace which cannot be stamped out.

We did this once before.  In Vietnam.  The bombing campaign directed against infiltration into South Vietnam by North Vietnam which did not exist prior to the commencement of the bombing resulted in the North starting up infiltration of supplies and trained manpower which could never be stopped.

Arguably, we are doing much the same today in the FATA although the prospect may very well be overstated.  But even in an overstated form, any bolstering of the Taliban or Haqqani network is not in our better interests. So far, the balance between positive and negative effects in the FATA has been on the plus side of the ledger. However, that is not a proof of concept which should be used to justify the employment of UAVs in Yemen.

Right now, the least-worst option is using the Predators in a watch and wait role only.  The situation in Yemen is to tenuous to run the risk of tilting affairs in favor of AQAP.  Watch, wait, and try to work sub rosa to help the Yemeni themselves contain and finally eliminate the adherents of violent political Islam.  Odds are the locals can do the job--unless we 'help' them in a lethal way.

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.

The Land Of Pinocchio Is At It Again

No one oriented in time and place expects governments to be open, honest, and ever truthful in their public (or most private) statements.  Diplomacy is often a contest of careful mendacity on a par with the sort practiced by lawyers working in an adversarial system.  That is, blatant duplicity of the easily exposed sort is eschewed in favor of the well-crafted framing of a statement, an issue, a position.  The good diplomat like the good advocate in court depends on what is not said even more than that which is said to mask the truth--particularly when the truth is uncomfortable from one's perspective.

The heavyweights of the Pakistani military and intelligence service (ISI) fail to meet the standard of proper diplomatic lying.  This is unfortunate as the armed forces and ISI are the government of Pakistan far eclipsing in both power and public esteem the elected civilian political structure.  As such, they are far more a part of the problem and in no way a contributor to the solution as regards the threat posed to civilized states by the damaged but not yet defeated advocates of violent political Islam which stalk Afghanistan, the FATA, and Pakistan proper.

The power elite of the armed forces and ISI is back at it.  As has so often been the case, they are lying in a fashion which boggles the mind in its breathtaking absurdity.  In the most recent ejaculations of denial and counter accusation, the spokesman for the Pakistani general staff insults the intelligence of all who read or hear his thundering denunciation of a recent spate of articles and editorials linking the ISI and armed forces with groups dedicated to violent political Islam and the recent murder of a well known and respected Pakistani journalist.

The immediate reaction of any half-way intelligent and well-informed person to the preposterous posturing of Major General Athar Abbas' remarks is to quote Ronald Reagan's comment during one of the 1980 debates, "There he goes again."  The line delivered with a slow, sad shake of the head.  The modern major general was announcing that the shoe put upon the collective foot of the Pakistani military and ISI fit tightly--it pinched and he was yelling, "Ouch!"

As unbelievable fables go, the Abbas Denial was on a par with the outpouring of outraged dignity following the Great Abbotabad Raid.  The credibility of the Pakistanis, never high, was stretched far beyond its Young's Modulus with the earnest protestations of innocence with which the Pakistani heavies met the news that the Americans had found and liquidated Osama bin Laden within pistol shot of their very own military academy.

While the US government for reasons of state (the justification of all ill-advised and ultimately less than productive actions) has downplayed the possibility that the senior ranks of our "ally" in the "joint" war with al-Qaeda, the various Talibans, and all similar groups could possibly have known that bin Laden resided close at hand in comfortable isolation, this reticence should not be interpreted as accepting the Pakistanis as being pure and lofty of motives and intentions.  Indeed, it is hard to see how anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of the long standing relationship between ISI and the army on the one hand and the several terror merchant groups on the other could keep a straight face while stating they had seen "no smoking gun."

Back in the Oligocene--the days of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush--one did not have to be a member of the American intelligence community to know that ISI and the Pakistani armed forces were connected hip and shoulder with various Islamist groups, including the one which would come to power in Afghanistan as the Taliban.  Minority opinion in both administrations warned against turning over responsibility for the endgame in the anti-Soviet effort in Afghanistan to the Pakistanis as the latter would take advantage of the opportunity to install entities hostile to the interests of the US in the region and globally.  As is usually the case, the minority was shoved to the margins so they could watch their gloomy prognostications come to pass with the fullness of time.

Way back in the regime of Zia it was obvious that the Pakistani military would eagerly embrace the ideas of the dictator which focused on importing Wahhibism so as to promote Islam of the most austere and demanding sort as a mechanism of social and political cohesion.  The implications of this were high profile: The Islamification program would drive a move to the more and more extreme.  The program would facilitate the growth of violent political Islam oriented groups.  And, ultimately it would assure that Pakistan would become an evermore Islamist state.

American decision makers were immune to the negative counsel, seeing instead an easy way to slip out of the continued burden of doing something in a small, inconvenient, and out of the way state with a history of being ungovernable.  Anyway, the boys of Islamabad were big on reassuring Washington's rarefied levels about the pacifistic nature of Islam and the need of the Pakistani people for a stronger national identity in the face of Indian aggression.

In the event, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ending of the cold war put the problem of Pakistan and its operations in Afghanistan very much on the far back burner.  The Clinton administration was so disinterested in Pakistan that its Deep Thinkers would have had a hard time finding the place on a map--until the Pakistanis demonstrated their nuclear capacity.  By then, of course, it was too late.  Too late to stop the nuclear arms race between Pakistan and India.  Far too late to undo the damage done by the Pakistani backed installation of Taliban in Kabul.

Of course, the ending of the cold war reduced Pakistan's importance in American eyes.  For decades Islamabad had depended upon the Left-leaning policies of India to turn on the spigot of US military aid along with the occasional civilian project.

The best thing that happened to Pakistan was the attack on 9/11.  After a nearly proforma demonstration of reluctance, Islamabad signed on to the Global War on Terror in exchange for massive amounts of American money.  It was interesting to say the least that the goodies demanded by the armed forces of Pakistan were those useful for high intensity conventional war with India rather than the more pedestrian items having utility in counterinsurgent or counter terrorist operations.

To keep the goodies flowing, the Pakistanis had to rely on their capacity to lie convincingly and in a well-timed manner.  They played a transparently double game from the very outset of the so called "joint" effort.  Given that the US already knew that the only reason Osama bin Laden had escaped a cruise missile strike years before 9/11 was a phone call from Islamabad, yet we went on catering to the Pinocchio of the Sub-continent. There was no intention of even closing the borders to Taliban and al-Qaeda personnel escaping the American invasion and its aftermath let alone actually fighting the Mighty Men of the Koran.

But the Pakistanis talked a good game.  And, because they had a nuclear arsenal, we had to pretend they were telling us the truth.  All we could do was hope that the bribes we paid bought us sufficient influence on their decision making that the armed forces and ISI might stop their training, supporting, harboring, and strategic planning efforts.

The hope was illusory at best.  However, the US had compounded its errors by invading Iraq and so mishandling the day after "victory" that it became the main event and Afghanistan a mere sideshow.  As a result, we had to continue believing the palpably false assurances of cooperation issuing from Islamabad on a daily basis.  The reality was far different.  The Pakistanis provided sanctuary in the FATA in return for a promise, since broken, that the Great Warriors of the One True Faith would limit themselves to killing Americans and apostate Afghans.

During the long interim from 2004-2010 the Taliban(s) and the Haqqani network as well as al-Qaeda rested, retrained, refitted, and grew safe from harm in the cities and hillsides of Pakistan and the FATA.  As a result, the Americans were losing more and more in country and the Pakistani military and ISI felt more and more confident in their ability to lead Uncle Sam around by the nose using a string of lies.

The pity of it all was the lies worked.  They worked because there seemed no viable alternative available to American decision makers.  We became co-conspirators in our own defeat.  Our role was limited to a continued refusal to blow the whistle on the easily demonstrated prevarications of the Pakistanis.  One of the services provided by Private Bradley Manning and his publicists at WikiLeaks has been to expose many (but not all) of the lies peddled by Islamabad as well as the reality that American diplomats knew them to be untruths.  In short we were not stupid, merely adrift at the policy level.

The Pakistani string of successful lying came to an end dramatically in May.  There was no way the lies of the Pakistanis could be accepted, even as a pretense, after the raid.  It is regrettable that the Obama administration has not taken advantage of the sea change initiated by Boat Six to force the Pakistanis to choose sides finally and definitely.

The biggest advantage which will accrue to the US from the decision to draw down our forces in Afghanistan and adopt more of a counter terrorist posture is our logistics dependence upon Pakistan will be decreased.  This means we will be in a much better position to link any continued assistance to Islamabad on demonstrated performance rather than nice sounding words.  It is much harder to lie by actions than it is with mere words.  So, Pakistan will be deprived of its advantage, an advantage it has used against us for a decade now.

While it may not be approved diplomatic form, it would be good politics both domestic and international to call the liars of Islamabad to account.  Diplomacy is usually conducted by vague words and ambiguous phrases so everyone walks away claiming success, but the Pakistanis need to be handled with a direct and blunt approach.

The time is now to say to Islamabad, to the armed forces, to ISI, to Major General Abbas, "Cut the crap!  You're busted!"

Cranking Up A (Too) Rapid Pull Out From Afghanistan

Reportedly the Obama administration is ginning up a public relations effort oriented at justifying a very rapid withdrawal of significant combat forces from Afghanistan.  Jerking out a giant posse of grunts from the Land Of Karzai will not only meet with widespread approval within the war weary American public, it will be greeted with hosannas on the part of Obama's base, particularly the congressional contingent where a very other worldly congresswoman has demanded that fifty thousand trigger pullers be brought back to CONUS ASAP.

The thought of a faster withdrawal will not only fit with the recently revealed conversations between the US and representatives of Mullah Omar but also with the latest expression of distaste for the presence of the "foreign forces" delivered by Hamid Karzai.  The US should be talking with Taliban.  The participation of this group in a comprehensive peace agreement is fundamental.  Given that Mullah Omar has long repented of his ill-advised extension of "Muslim hospitality" to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, there is strong reason to conclude that the old leadership of the group is ready to exchange the politics of the AK-47 for a less robust means of acquiring and exercising power.

Karzai is comfortable with Taliban as he and they share language and cultural ties as well as religion.  Taliban without the al-Qaeda dimension is no threat to Pushtu dominance.  The other ethnic and cultural groups which make up the Afghan mosaic are not so sure.  And, considering the memories of Taliban's repressive regime, there is no reason for women to support any role for Taliban in the future.  However, it is probable that Mullah Omar and his generational colleagues learned some key lessons in the limits of theocracy and may well be less objectionable in their attitudes and actions regarding women, education, and popular culture.  In any event, the US is well advised to abandon the hopelessly misguided Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Neocon Ninny notion of creating a modern Western style nation-state in Afghanistan.

The necessity of a political solution including Taliban is recognized and has been so for years by all observers well oriented in time and place.  The administration's new add-on in justifying a rapid and steep draw down in US combat forces centers on the effectiveness to date of our efforts to destroy al-Qaeda's organizational integrity and efficiency.  There is no doubt but the Predator strikes in the FATA along with special forces operations including but not limited to the Great Abbottabad Raid have severely degraded al-Qaeda's upper and mid-level management.  The organization has been disrupted severely.

This does not mean al-Qaeda no longer exists.  It does.  Nor does it mean that al-Qaeda no longer represents a threat to the US or other civilized states.  It does.  Rather, the point of the administration's argument is simply that al-Qaeda in Afghanistan no longer is central to the panoply of threats presented by assorted advocates of violent political Islam.  This is true.

It is also far less relevant than the administration would have any of us believe.

There are two ramifications of an overly rapid, overly steep withdrawal which the administration does not credit.  The first is the recuperative power of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan given the ready availability of support from Pakistan and the unwillingness of the Pakistani military or intelligence service to block that support.  The second is the power of history.

The US must not cut and run in a way which will allow the advocates of violent political Islam and their supporters or apologists to write a narrative in which the centerpiece is the assertion that the Mighty Warriors of the One True Faith defeated the infidel crusaders.  It was the willingness and ability of Osama bin Laden and others to claim victory over the Soviet forces which provided the original legitimacy for al-Qaeda and other similar groups--including the Taliban of Mullah Omar.

The Islamist version of history is not only specious, it is a total fabrication giving credit to Arab fighters which was and is totally undeserved.  Insofar as anyone defeated the Red Army, it was the Afghans--and the support they received from the US.  Afghan courage, blood, and endurance along with American technology defeated the Soviets--as much as they were defeated by external pressures.  The down and dirty truth was that the Soviets were not defeated.  They simply gave up.  This loss of political will was the made-in-the-Kremlin equivalent of the American self-inflicted defeat in Vietnam.  In a very real sense, the Afghan fighters simply had to keep on fighting, refuse to admit defeat until the Soviets packed it in.  This, of course, is the basic cause of any insurgent's success right on back to the patriot "victory" in the American War of Independence.

The Arab hijacking of reality in the according-to-Osama interpretation of history was a work of fiction which prevailed simply because nobody challenged it at the time.  The cause driven bin Laden invented a tale and kept telling it to all who would listen until one fine day it was taken, at least in the Arabian Peninsula, as the gospel truth.  The tale-telling sheik told his tale of faith and fighting so well and so often that the money and recruits flowed in.  Osama's version of history may not have been a Big Lie as Dr Goebbels understood the term, but it turned out to be a Great Lie, the greatest lie of the last decades of the Twentieth Century.

The bin Laden approach to creative fiction as history recommends itself to any and all advocates of violent political Islam today--and into the future.  If the American forces are withdrawn hastily and in too great a number, the next bin Laden will claim that the infidels were militarily defeated by the Holy Fighters Of The Koran.

It will not be a true and accurate history to be sure.  That does not and will not matter.  It will be the history that many Muslims will want to believe.  It will be history as they deeply wish it to have been.  There is no Islamic concept of history as we in the West understand the concept.  Rather, all history is in Muslim eyes a record of great men doing great deeds on behalf of the faith and in the pure name of the faith.  Thus the defeat of the infidel crusaders by the followers of Islam, the followers of the "martyred" Great and Learned Osama bin Laden will be believed eagerly and fervently by many future recruits to the cause of violent political Islam.

This powerful ground truth is not and will not be accepted by the Deep Thinkers in and around the Oval.  Yet it exists as a reality, a reality as potent and long lasting in effect as the American deficit and the war weariness of We the People.  In the contest between a work of fiction, a myth on the one hand, and mere facts, mind numbing statistics, the aggregate of countless after action reports, the first will defeat the second--particularly when the myth meets the needs of people who perceive themselves to have been exploited, marginalized, trivialized even though they are the members of a community promised global dominance by the deity and his prophet.

Wars are ultimately won and lost not on the physical battlefield but on the ineffable terrain of the human mind. It is this foundation truth that gave the Osama bin Laden fictional history of how the Arab true believers defeated the Red Army its power and persistence.  It is this foundation truth which will give some future myth maker vast potency when he creates the fiction holding the infidel Americans were defeated by the blood, courage, and conviction of the Men of Islam.

Contrary to a prevalent American belief, history does matter.  It matters far, far more than money and elections--even the reelection of Barack Obama.

What A Great Day!

This is one of those days which makes a guy glad to be alive--that is if he is a maven of how much can go wrong in the world all at the same time.  So much has gone so terribly out of whack in the past twenty-four or so hours that is hard to decide what most tickles the brain, that is, what deserves the virtual ink.

It is quite tempting to take a few shots at that LST (large slow target) named "Pakistan."  It is a hoot and a half to contemplate that less than a couple of dozen Mighty Warriors Of The One True Faith can take over a major naval air installation.  That these Glorious Fighters Of The Koran can hold off assorted Pakistani military forces for seventeen hours, destroying a pair of P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft, gifts of the American people delivered only last June, in the process.

Not since a similar commando unit hit and held the Pakistani army's headquarters a couple of years ago has the Islamic Republic been so humiliated.  It is presumed that the Great Strategists of Islamabad are down on their prayer rugs giving thanks to the deity that the Taliban trigger-pullers did not hit a certain facility only ten klicks over, conveniently adjacent to an airbase where nuclear weapons are stored.  For such small favors, the Pakistanis should give great and prolonged thanks.

For the rest of us, the Taliban raid raises the long standing questions regarding the security of Pakistan's arsenal of one hundred or so nukes to new heights.  After all, the night squad which cut its way through a pair of barbed wire fences and used low tech ladders to scale a wall were not in the same league as the men of Boat Six of Great Abbottabad Raid fame.  If a handful of jihadists with nothing more sophisticated than RPGs, AKs, and a willingness to die could storm the heavily guarded naval airfield, is it impossible for a similar group to do the same at either a nuclear weapons depot or manufacturing facility?

On the upside, such muscular measures might not be needful given the omnipresence of ideological soulmates within the Pakistani military and intelligence services.  Or the direct method might be obviated by the Pakistani version of the hoary Mexican approach of "silver or lead."  It is not unthinkable, considering the prevalence of corruption in the Islamic Republic, that the promise of silver might trump the threat of lead.

On another continent, the ardent observer of frothing wars and failing states must feel a pleasant glow contemplating the attack over the weekend by Sudanese forces on the contested oil center of Abyei.  The Khartoum regime has maintained with a straight face that its attack complete with air strikes and armored units was "retaliation" for the ambush last week of a UN convoy escorted by Sudanese army personnel.  To the not yet officially independent state of South Sudan, the occupation of Abyei constituted an act of war.

Abyei was supposed to have voted as to which side it would join--Sudan or South Sudan--at the same time as the overall referendum on Southern independence.  This did not occur because Khartoum insisted on including a nomadic tribe of Muslim affiliation among those franchised to vote in the election.  This demand was vetoed by the southerners.  As a result, the Abyei question has not been settled.  Nor is it likely to be settled by means other than the violent.

The UN has done the expected--denounce the attack and demand Khartoum withdraw its forces.  Assorted advocates for South Sudan (mainly George Clooney and assorted NGOs) are making predictable noises regarding the US and UK doing something to compel Khartoum to back down.  And, to insure the decibel level of rhetoric is high enough, spokesmen for South Sudan are warning darkly that the occupation of Abyei bodes well to restart the war between South and North which ended in 2005 after twenty-two years and hundreds of thousands of lives due to the diplomacy of the US and UK.

Just what the US or UK can do short of using highly kinetic coercive diplomacy to gain Khartoum's adherence to our policy requirements is unclear.  What is clear is that neither Washington nor London are in any hurry to send warplanes or troops anywhere beyond current theaters of operation.

The upcoming meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron has some potential for both sparks and amusement.  The two leaders are not in perfect tandem regarding what is being done in Libya to say nothing of what should be done.  The British and French are all in favor of more hairy chested efforts than those made to date.  In earnest of this intent, both have announced the deployment of helicopter gunships to the country.  The British will operate Apaches and the French machines of local manufacture from carriers in the Mediterranean.

Both states (the British more vocally) want the US to come back to Libya in a larger and more noise producing way than has been the case in recent weeks.  The redeployment of American A-10 and AC-130 aircraft is much desired by Whitehall.  While more muted in their stance, there is little doubt that M. Sarkozy's government would be very happy to see the weight of the US more heavily on the scales in favor of the rebels.

There is no indication that President Obama is in a mood to honor the requests.  Certainly, there is no evident pawing of the ground in favor of more and more high profile operations visible at the Pentagon.

This contretemps gives added importance to a little noticed event scheduled to occur during the Obama-Cameron meeting.  Reportedly the US and UK will establish a joint national security entity which will coordinate the perceptions and plans of the two countries to allow more effective joint and combined actions globally.  Considering the negative view held by Mr Obama regarding the "special relationship" between the UK and US, this is a surprising development.  If the reports are confirmed by events, it is a most welcome one as well.

While such a joint body may easily be nothing more than a pro forma exercise in policy futility, there is some chance that it will evolve into a genuine mechanism for meshing together the national security strategies and programs of two natural allies.  It might even point in the direction of growing to include several UK descended states--Australia, New Zealand, Canada and India--along with the US and UK into a tightly integrated political/military bloc which would be virtually unchallengeable in years to come.

Now, that sort of "international community" is one which is very pleasant to contemplate.  It gives the Geek a warm feeling and, being a sensitive sort of guy, he will end this post on this potentially very high note.

Happy Talk--But, There Is Bad News Coming

The Pentagon spin machine has released its latest Congressionally required semi-annual appraisal of the state of play in Afghanistan.  By and large it is 108 pages of happy talk, soothing mood music, a sort of happy-days-will-be-coming-soon-(maybe.)  The same tone, very upbeat, but with a slight note of caution obtains in the news release issued as a cover letter on the report.

The report spends fifty-three pages in consideration of the security situation in-country.  Much of the good news is contained in this section.  It is clear that operations over the past several months have shifted the initiative to the the ISAF/US/ANF coalition.  The insurgents despite their capacity to undertake high visibility attacks, plant IEDs, and generally give the appearance of still being in the fight have lost the initiative and seem to have lost some of their will to combat.

The Local Security Program which dates back to General McChrystal and is the descendant of the Vietnam War Combined Action Platoon Program as well as the much deprecated Regional Forces-Popular Forces ("Ruff-Puffs") has been developing with a fair degree of success even given the opposition of the Karzai government and the inherent corruption and inefficiency of the Afghan Interior Ministry.  Should this trend continue over the next six months, it bodes well for long term stability as only a credible locally based force with primary loyalty to the area it is protecting can assure Taliban and the other insurgent groups cannot and will not return after the foreigners leave.  It is clear that more external support for the development of the local forces is required.  It is equally evident that more pressure must be placed on Kabul to allow the local forces to develop and deploy.

The same applies to the Afghan Local Police.  This organization (to use the term generically and loosely only) is not only a necessary complement to the Local Security Program's Village Stability Operations, it provides the only governmental presence which is directly observable by and accountable to the local folks.  Thus it is a critical instrument of government which, if operating correctly, will go toward countering the impression of the Afghan National Police and Army as corrupt, distant, and non-responsive.  Again, Kabul has dragged its feet in allowing and encouraging the development of the Afghan Local Police due to its customary fear of losing control of the population--as if it actually ever had any such control.

The report way understates both the importance of these locally oriented efforts and the resistance to them which is presented by the central government.  This is unfortunate and raises doubts about the future ability of the Pentagon (and considering the impending change of management) the Agency to evaluate progress or lack thereof in Afghanistan.  The low balling of the local initiatives also erodes the ability of Congress to assure American dollars and manpower is put to the best possible use.

The thirty-five pages covering the development and deployment of the Afghan National Army and Police is optimistic but not overly so.  The report does note the severe problem presented by the very, very low level of basic literacy among the recruits.  It pays some attention to the chronic willingness of ANF&P personnel to desert, change sides, or "go rogue."  Overall, the attrition affecting the ANF&P represents a major challenge in meeting the ambitious goals for force size.  It may be necessary for Kabul to institute a draft of some sort which would open a very large can of very vicious political and tribal worms.

The subtext of the pages considering the procurement process for the ANF&P hints at but, unfortunately, does not state the difficulties presented by pervasive corruption.  The problem is that the corrupt actions are not simply those of locals but involve representatives of foreign firms offering both equipment and materiel.  It is easy to see the political/diplomatic considerations which demanded a heavy foot on the soft pedal.  Even if justifiable, this absence of accuracy misleads the reader, congressional, media, or private citizen.

Because of the mis-definition of the mission in Afghanistan as one of "nation-building" rather than one of punishment and deterrence, the report wanders at some length into the areas of governance and "reconstruction and development" as well as counternarcotics.  All of these areas may be of very real relevance to the Afghan population, but they are tangential at best to the US and its foreign allies.  The goal of assuring that Afghanistan does not and will never again provide a safe haven to groups practicing violent political Islam does not require the construction of a faux Western nation-state from the tribal warp and woof of the local population.

Unfortunately, the military does not question the importance of these civilian goals any more in this report than it has in previous efforts or in the decision making process regarding the nature and character of the military efforts in-country.  The underlying assumption that nation-building is central to effective counterinsurgency rides along in splendor, unquestioned, undoubted in this report.  A close reading of the sections regarding nation-building shows a surplus of fine sounding mood music, lofty words, and even loftier ambitions coupled with barely whispered lyrics concerning the sorry record of nearly unmitigated failure in all areas.

One lack is noteworthy due to its sheer obviousness.  There is not a word about religion or the role of religion in facilitating instability within the country.  Nor is there any consideration of the centrality of tribal affiliation and loyalties to the challenges of facilitating the construction of a unitary national identity and state in Afghanistan.  The leaving aside of the two most important features of individual and group self-identification so as to not consider their impact on the goals of nation-building is an inexcusable flaw in the report as it was in predecessors.  The complete absence of such key features skews the ability of any reader to accurately appreciate what can and cannot be done in-country along with what has and has not been accomplished.

A total of three, that's right, three pages was spent considering Afghanistan in its regional engagement context.  Considering that the Taliban and Haqqani network as well as the survivors of al-Qaeda would have been sent to Paradise years ago had Pakistan not been such a close and inviting ally, the failure to accurately and comprehensively consider the regional engagement aspect of the conflict is a fine example of moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

All and all this semi-annual exercise in shading reality resembles the everything-is-perfect-and-getting-better approach of the Pentagon during the Vietnam War.  One can only wonder if the denizens both in the Five Sided Wigwam and Afghanistan are deluding themselves or simply hoping to delude the rest of us--particularly the money givers on the Hill.

As if to prove the cautionary notes of impending problems and setbacks contained in the report are not only accurate but in their accuracy buttress the marginal credibility of the entire exercise, there are now two shop mutterings of Taliban major attacks coming in the next few days.  No details of course, just the vague words about casualties and ultimate Taliban failure.  It is a fine example of salvation through good timing or, to use the invisible motto over the entrance at Langley, "Thank God for coincidence."

Well, In Afghanistan, It's That Time Of Year--Again

Traditionally, the campaigning season in Afghanistan starts around Mayday.  The snows in the high passes have melted; travel across the FATA/Afghanistan border is easier.  The high country cold has retreated and so the armies can advance.

While the winter break this time around has not been as pronounced as in previous years and wars, the tempo of enemy driven operations is expected to increase over the next few weeks.  As that happens, as the number of Taliban or Haqqani network suicide bombers grows, as the density of IEDs ticks up, so also will the number of friendly forces killed and wounded.  Equally important, as the tempo of operations accelerates, the number of incidents involving collateral non-combatant casualties will ramp up as well.

As the bodies of maimed or dead non-combatants are piled higher and higher, Afghan outrage at the actions of the Americans and other infidel foreigners will escalate as well.  It will not matter if the dead die as a result of insurgent actions or those of the US/ISAF/Afghan National Forces, the result will be the same--demands that the Americans stop whatever it is that they are doing.  One can be sure that both the Karzai government and Muslim clerics supportive of political Islam will be in full-throated anger over the purported massacres of Afghan women and children.

The combination of religious and political imperatives admits of nothing else.  To Muslims, the notion that Muslims kill Muslims is infinitely less unacceptable than is the killing of Muslims by infidels.  Even the indiscriminate slaughter by IED is seen by Afghans as less worthy of condemnation than a misguided airstrike or a stray artillery round, or even the nocturnal raid of an insurgent occupied compound by infidel forces.

The single largest advantage enjoyed by the insurgents is the simple fact that they are Muslims and as such are not subject to condemnation under the guiding Islamic stricture of avoiding any appearance of division, of disagreement within the community of believers.  The power this particular and very fundamental requirement holds on most Muslims precludes any opposition to even the worst excesses of the tactics of murder practiced by Taliban or any other insurgent group.

At the same time the demands of solidarity within Islam as well as the division of all humanity into the opposing camps of "the House of Peace" (Islam) and the "House of War" (infidels, that is everyone who is not a proper Muslim) assures that all culpability for all casualties within the former is assigned unthinkingly to the latter.  As a consequence, the infidels are to blame when one Muslim kills another--particularly when the killing is technically unintentional as is always the case with an IED and is plausibly claimed with respect to suicide bombers hitting soft, civilian targets.

As Taliban et al escalate their efforts this Spring, it is to be expected that Afghan support for a compromise peace will grow with every non-combatant casualty.  The Karzai government will be found baying in the van of the "peace now" movement in Afghanistan.  Insofar as it can escape its ISI minders so also will much of Taliban.  This group has taken very heavy hits at its mid-level ranks as well as among its footsoldiers from the US/NATO/ISAF moves into their former heartlands.  The leadership echelon has also been the victim of attrition courtesy of the UAV attacks in the FATA.

The Haqqani network is unlikely to join in any peace oriented conversations as it is joined shoulders and hip with ISI.  Frantic to secure its fiction of strategic depth against the Indians, there is no way that either ISI or the Pakistani military will surrender any control over either the Haqqani network or any factions within the badly riven Taliban.  Nothing scares the Pakistani military more than the prospect they will lose a seat at the head of the table as Afghanistan enters its endgame phase.

No mistake should be made about this: The Afghanistan war is entering its endgame this spring.  Regardless of protestations to the contrary by, for example, NATO foreign ministers, the US and its "partners" will start an accelerating process of disengagement this summer.  The political realities within the various countries dictate an exit sooner rather than later and at any cost less than a frank admission of military failure or defeat.

No less an expert on covering the political posterior than Harry Reid in the course of an interview filled with internal inconsistencies has acknowledged the pull-out will be coming with greater certainty than Nancy Pelosi's next injection of Botox.  In short compass, the Nevada senator stated that he had "no confidence" in the war coming to a satisfactory conclusion, averred great respect and confidence in the optimistic predictions of General Petraeus, and blamed the upcoming debacle on the American public's "short attention span."  To cut to the chase, the Democratic leader expects the minority support for the war to erode further and for the war to be an issue of note in next year's elections which can be addressed successfully only by a withdrawal.

The situation is the same in all the other Western participants.  The war has no support among the various electorates.  Given the totality of economic and political circumstances, there is no real stomach for continuing the effort anywhere.  Even the several combatant forces are not enthralled with going on with a war which is fundamentally one which cannot be won for circumstances far removed from the sphere of military competence.

As night falls in the next few months, the best which can be expected is the infliction of sufficient damage on Taliban and the Haqqani network to force a compromise peace which does not favor the advocates of violent political Islam.  Afghanistan will remain a semi-hollow state with much of the real power accruing to Islamabad at the expense of Kabul.  The country will remain a cesspool of Shariah in all its reprehensible manifestations.  It will exist as an area ripe for exploitation by outsiders including both Russia and China, both of which have an eye on the vast mineral resources proved out by American experts.  Once again the biggest losers will be as was the case the last time the US disengaged from Afghanistan the people of the place who desire to live without the oppression of a Ninth Century regime.

The tragedy of it all is that the debacle was a 'preventable accident.'  Had the Bush/Cheney administration focused on executing a punitive expedition without any thought of either appeasing Pakistan or playing at nation-building in Afghanistan, the outcome would have been vastly different.  Had the military used a more relevant doctrine in the opening months of the war, the outcome would have been vastly different.  Had President Obama not given into a momentary snit and fired the only man, General McChrystal, capable of going mano a mano with Karzai--and winning, the outcome would have been vastly different.  If General Petraeus could be as good at fighting a war as he is at practicing military (and Congressional) politics, the outcome would have been vastly different.  If President Obama had the guts and realism so sadly lacking with President George W. Bush and not given in to the extortion efforts of the Pakistanis, the outcome would have been vastly different.

But, what has happened, happened.  The war will soon start fading away to an endstate which will not be fully satisfactory and an accompaniment of whimpers and recriminations.  However, if the US and its partners can inflict sufficient losses on the insurgents and keep on with the decapitation strikes in the FATA while coddling Karzai to the fullest extent necessary, it is not too late to retrieve enough of an imitation of victory to make the sacrifices of life, limb, and money almost justifiable.

Caught In A Morass Of Delusions

Over the weekend Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari told the Guardian that the American war in Afghanistan was destabilizing his country.  Presumably with a straight face he averred that absent the war being waged by the US, Pakistan would be a fountainhead of democracy, free enterprise, and tranquility with nary a problem of the social, economic, political, or religious sort.

Continuing the exercise in monumental dementia, the head of the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which is the  organization that not only cranked up Taliban in the first place but has done everything in its considerable power to prop up, assist, hide, and facilitate in all respects not only Taliban but other, to use the Pakistani term, "anti-Indian assets," was in Washington today.  The ISI chief, LtGen Ahmad Sujah Pasha, was passing on an ultimatum which was decreed by the most powerful man in Pakistan today.

No.  Not the president.  Rather the armed forces chief of staff, Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.  General Kayani no doubt with the complete support and approval of LtGen Sujah Pasha has demanded an end to most Predator strikes, a reduction in force of both CIA and Special Operations personnel, and an abandonment of the Agency's attempts to penetrate the assorted "anti-Indian assets" established and to some extent controlled by ISI.

The purported basis for the virtual ending of the effective use of CIA personnel as well as the training program being operated by Special Forces troopers for the Pakistani Frontier Force was the arrest of CIA contract employee Raymond Davis.  Davis, you will certainly recall was busted on a murder rap after having blown away two Pakistanis usually characterized as "muggers."  Davis executed a good shoot on two men who were almost certainly assets of ISI who were assigned to harass Davis if not do more.

Davis, a former Green Beret fluent in Pushtu had been working out of the consulate in Kandahar tasked with penetrating Lashkar-e-Taiba.  LeT is another of those "anti-Indian assets" such as the Haqqani network both established and protected/facilitated by ISI.  CIA attempts to penetrate these groups without authorization from ISI, which is the only possible way to play the game given that ISI is not given to cooperation against its own goons.

ISI along with the Pakistani armed forces lives in a delusional universe where the most important consideration, the prime directive, is to defeat India in the next war.  These men are all of the view that another war with India is not only inevitable, it is desirable and will be won by the Mighty Warriors of the Koran if only the Pakistanis have sufficient strategic depth, a large nuclear arsenal, and the means of waging war on all levels from local terrorism to nuclear Armageddon.

To this end, the Pakistani military and its supporters in the country's elite have bent every effort toward the blessed day when war again breaks out.  The mere fact that this orientation has distorted the country's economy, suppressed domestic political freedoms, truncated education, imported Wahhibism and all that implies, fostered social divisions, and fractured the political structure is of no consequence.  Nor is it worthy of considering all available evidence indicating India has no desire for war, no plans of initiating war, and well understands that war would be very bloody, extremely destructive, and might take decades for recovery--and that is for the winner.

The Pakistani military is so consumed by its delusions that it sincerely believes that the US has two goals in mind currently: (1) Suppressing totally Pakistani influence in Afghanistan while allowing Indian influence to increase without limit, (2) Suppress Pakistan's nuclear capability while allowing that of India to cruise along unimpeded.  Therefore, the Agency and Special Forces operations in Pakistan are actually oriented toward one or the other of these two goals.

The military is supreme in Pakistan and President Zardari knows this.  His civilian government like all those which have gone before stays in office at the let and sufferance of the military.  Of course, it helps that Mr Zardiri like his predecessors lacks moral courage, lacks the capacity to take on the military, to enlist the citizenry of the long suffering nation in a hard trek back to some sort of political sanity.

The position of the US is of no aid in this matter.  While different administrations may from time to time weakly chastise the Pakistani government as the Obama administration did last week, the various extortion efforts made by Islamabad always result in more cash flowing to Pakistan's coffers.

When the end of the Cold War opened the door for the US to reappraise its long standing hostility to India and friendship with Pakistan, it took the chance.  There was a definite tilt to India during the years of Bill Clinton.  The Pakistanis were left comparatively speaking high and dry.  They were given a fresh start and a brand new chance following 9/11.

The W. Bush administration made the horrid decision that we could do nothing in Afghanistan without the cooperation of Pakistan.  This choice was made despite the definite knowledge extant inside the Beltway of the relationship between ISI and both Taliban and al-Qaeda.  The choice was made despite the awareness of history, awareness that the decision made by Reagan to hand off the endgame in Afghanistan to the Pakistanis had resulted in the creation of Taliban.  (The junior partnership of CIA in this creation should not be seen as mitigation of primary ISI culpability.)

The fateful decisions made by Bush/Cheney--not only the involvement of Pakistan, the paying of bribes to Pakistan, but also and more importantly, the changing of the mission from one which was primarily punitive to one of "nation-building"--cast our policy in a way which could do nothing but impair our interests in the region and block our goal of defeating violent political Islam in both Afghanistan and across the border in the FATA and adjacent regions of Pakistan such as Kandahar and Quetta.

Even now with the Pakistani president and chief of staff undertaking efforts of both rhetorical and practical nature to impair further the American efforts and policies, the US, at least publicly, continues to dance to the tune called in Islamabad.  The US ambassador has called for a "renewal."  Cameron Munter is of the view, if his public pronouncements are to be taken at face value (admittedly a dangerous activity when assessing the words of a diplomat) the US and Pakistan are on the same side facing the same enemy: violent political Islam.

Of course we are, provided one is willing to define the intelligence service of our "ally" here as something other than the founder, protector, and aid of nearly every Islamist group the US is fighting.  That can be done, but only if the US is willing to join Pakistan in the deadly morass of delusions.  Unfortunately, it appears that the Obama administration is willing to do so.

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.

"Sword Of Justice"--One Plenty Bad Man

Regardless of how matters play out in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden's presumably as-good-as-on-the-ropes al-Qaeda has brought a new/old and very dangerous player to the global board.  Bin Laden personally named the new operations director, the man in direct operational charge of violent efforts against the West generally and the US in particular.

The man's name may be Muhammad Ibrahim Makkawi or Ibrahim Madani.  He has been called Omar al-Somali.  His self-chosen sobriquet is Saif al-Adel.  Translated this comes out as, sword of justice.  Modest, eh what?

Muhammad or Ibrahim or Omar or Saif was born in 1960.  Or, perhaps, 1963.  If you get the idea that there is little extant in the open literature regarding this one time colonel in the Egyptian army, that is correct.  Most of the little that is known comes from the Sword's autobiography written five years ago, and is difficult or impossible to confirm without the resources of CIA (and perhaps not even then.)

The details are less important than the main theme of the man's thinking, his concept of how to wage effective war against the US and the other "infidel, Crusader states."  He has a clear concept that is well rooted in a sound understanding of both the strengths and weaknesses of his enemy.

In 1987 Saif al-Adel was a rather impatient person with great ideas of how to reform the apostate government of Egypt.  His notions featured both a truck bomb and the use of a civilian aircraft as a cruise missile.  Both instruments of death and mayhem were to be employed against Egypt's parliament building.  The plans were aborted when security forces rolled up Saif and his fellow plotters of the rather directly albeit unimaginatively named group al-Jihad.   In the slammer Mr Adel became underwhelmed with the views of his fellow advocates of violent political Islam.

No, bucko, it is not as if the future Sword of Justice became disillusioned with the precepts and goals of violent political Islam.  That would have made future life too simple, too peaceful.  Rather the man viewed his fellow travelers as too impatient, too filled with zeal, and too able to underestimate the capacities of the assorted components of the House of War and its apostate tools.

For reasons known only to the heavyweights of Egyptian internal security, the man who would become the Sword of Justice was released.  He decamped to--where else?--Peshawar.  In those hospitable environs he made contact with the new kids of jihad, al-Qaeda.  He spent '91 and '92 in Khost training al-Qaeda trigger pullers and bomb throwers in the basics of military art and science.

Not surprisingly Saif trailed along when Osama bin Laden relocated to Sudan.  As has been attested to by the convicted terrorist, Mohammed Odeh, Saif was engaged at the bin Laden owned Damazine Farm where he whiled away the days teaching.  No, he was not instructing in the area of agricultural science but rather giving tuition in the manufacture and use of explosives.

When not giving helpful hints on how to blow things up and kill people, Saif waxed philosophical.  He was all in favor of moving the jihad to other areas of the world as Taliban was winning in Afghanistan and conditions in Sudan were not suitable to martyrdom operations.  Apparently Saif could forgo the inviting conflict in Bosnia as there is no record of his having accompanied any of the Mideast origin jihadis to that nasty little war.  Instead it appears that the peripatetic Egyptian spent several years traveling around the constellation of training camps in Africa and Asia set up by al-Qaeda and others of the violent political Islam sort.  Reputedly he was involved directly in forming working relations with jihadist groups in Iraq.

Saif was involved in the planning of 9/11.  In the late summer debate over the final execute decision, Adel took sides with Omar in opposing the idea.  The dissent registered by Mullah Omar and seconded by Adel was documented to the satisfaction of the 9/11 Commission.

As the US troops entered Afghanistan, Saif al-Adel left.  He went to Iran where he amused himself by planning and organizing several attacks on US and other foreign troops.  During its transient spasm of fear following the American invasion, the Iranian government authorized the arrest of Adel and other al-Qaeda leadership figures.  He was released a few months later.

The Saif al-Adel of 2005 was a man far different from his younger incarnation, the wannabe bomber of the Egyptian parliament.  The differences are what make the Sword a dangerous, a very dangerous opponent now.

Adel has become a prophet of protracted conflict.  His observations and ruminations had combined to convince him that the US along with the rest of the West could not survive a lengthy siege of terror politically. Operationally this means he supports relatively small, one-off, single actor attacks as opposed to the 9/11 sort.  In his estimate the best method of operation is one which envisions attacks no larger than the 7/7 London bombing or the similar strike on the Madrid subway.  In his mind a slow motion sequence of such attacks carried out over a long enough time primarily by homegrown "martyrdom seekers" would exhaust Western political will such that maximal Islamist demands would be met.

Adel is also convinced that it is essential that the global movement in violent political Islam have no geographic base.  The identification of Afghanistan with al-Qaeda was, he has concluded, a ghastly mistake, bad for both Afghanistan and al-Qaeda.

The Sword seeks a network of facilitators and recruiters even more diffuse than that which has existed in recent years.  He intends to make the "leaderless war" a reality.  The absence of an identifiable and thus targetable geographic center will inhibit, even prohibit, a Western retaliation or will render any retaliation far more provocative than punishing.

In both of these theses Adel is far more right than wrong.  American political will is strengthened mightily by a direct attack on our citizens and our soil.  Even if the butchers' bill is far smaller than that of 9/11, the demand of We the People for retaliation would be loud and long.  Provided there is a place upon which to retaliate, the probability of an American president not doing so is very, very slim at best.

A series of attacks, large or small in effect, but carried out by homegrown operatives gives no target against which to retaliate.  The absence of an identifiable outside figure, foreign group, alien sanctuary would prevent any meaningful American response beyond the judicial (provided the actors survive the act.)  The same dynamic would apply to Western European states.  The combination of Western values, norms, political relations render each and every government a pitiful helpless giant when confronted by domestic actors who have no direct, actionable ties with a foreign puppetmaster.

Adel intends to make an operational doctrine compatible with the political statement of Mullah Omar, who in 2009 explicitly (and belatedly) separated the Taliban in Afghanistan from the violent acts of groups such as al-Qaeda.  Adel like Omar understands that this sort of explicit rhetorical and operational separation serves best the coinciding interests of both states and non-state actors which share a commitment to political Islam.

Bright lad, eh, bucko?

Operational successes under a (distant and discrete) al-Qaeda umbrella when coupled with the current political trajectories in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, North Africa, and portions of sub-Saharan Africa will bode best for the fortunes of resurgent political Islam.  The combination will allow for peace in the "House of Islam" and a better form of war in the "House of War."

In his current thinking Saif al-Adel is putting into practice the idea first broached by the great-grandfather of contemporary violent political Islam, Abul Ali Mawdudi.  More than seventy years ago Mawdudi wrote, "war in the name of Islam is a revolutionary ideology which seeks to change the social and political order of the entire war."

And, so it is.  Now Saif al-Adel gives the ideology a new and far sharper edge.

In Afghanistan We Are Winning--Except When We Are Losing

The difference a week makes!  Only seven or so days ago the Geek posted on how even the war hating folks at the WaPo grudgingly admitted that the US and its allies were compiling a record of success against Taliban and the Haqqani network.  Alas!  The WaPo must have gotten its facts wrong.  Or so it appears today.

Along with other MSM, the Leaders Of The Washington Press now takes the position that the US is not making any real progress in Afghanistan.  Sourcing the new stance to the usual unnamed people in "US intelligence agencies," the latest party line is so dismal that one gets the impression it is all over excepting the Taliban victory parade.

The British have taken a more nuanced (confused?) view of the situation.  The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, is under the impression that "progress" is being made.  Her Majesty's senior military figures are marching in the gloom parade, averring that the US/NATO/ISAF/Afghan national forces have "failed to inflict significant damage on Taliban."

It is self-evident that both interpretations cannot be accurate.  So, how to parse the contradiction?

The we-are-losing camp predicates its stance on several factors.  One is the resilience of the Taliban and Haqqani network, their ability to absorb casualties in the upper and middle rank leadership and not lose either political will or operational capacity.  The other is the existence of cross-border sanctuaries in the FATA providing ample space and time for recovery, resupply, and retraining.

As context it must be noted that both factors--inherent resiliency and cross-border safe-havens--have played critical roles in previous counterinsurgency operations.  Of the two there is no doubt but the self-organizing capacities of insurgent groups coupled with the imperative that defeat is existential in nature has provided the staying power of insurgencies from the American War of Independence on through to the contemporary events in Afghanistan.  The importance of cross-border sanctuaries is more debatable.

It has often been argued, for example, that the closing of the Yugoslav border by Tito to the Greek Communist guerrillas was critical in their defeat.  A closer examination shows that this thesis is untenable, that the Communist insurgents were actually beaten by a combination of their own political ineptitude and the growing competence of the US assisted and trained Greek National Forces.

The British success in the twelve year long Emergency in Malaya has been credited in large measure to the absence of external sanctuaries for the Communist insurgents.  While it is true that the "Bandits" of Malaya had no readily available safe havens, the actual cause of British success was their superior operational level doctrine, tactics, and the skill of their troops in the bush.

Critics of the American war in South Vietnam both at the time and retrospectively have attributed the US defeat to the ability of the Viet Cong and Peoples Army of North Vietnam to use safe areas in Cambodia and Laos for supply, unit restoration, and concentration centers.  American efforts to block the logistics routes through these countries both by air and land were not successful.  So, the critics have concluded, the enemy had unbeatable advantages with the result that the Americans and their South Vietnamese clients were defeated.

That analysis grossly oversimplifies a defeat which arose from many causes.  But, like other unicausal hypothesis, it is easy to understand and has the added advantage of displacing responsibility for failure from the Americans (their approach to fighting the war as well as their goals) to outside factors.  The worst that can be said of the American way of war in South Vietnam according to this view is that we were too kind, too gentle, too restrained.  We should have expanded the war to include the sanctuary areas and, if we had, we would have won.

The evaluation of the current conflicting views--are we winning or losing?--must be considered in terms of these past understandings.

Of the two factors referenced by the advocates of we-are-losing, it is easy to dispatch the one of insurgent resolve and resilience.  It is true.  It is also not all that relevant.  The irrelevance is indicated by the existence of preliminary conversations between elements of Taliban and the Karzai government.  Because Taliban is a loose assemblage of many different self-organizing groups, it is almost inevitable that some of the groups will have concluded that the degree of pressure and risk currently exerted by the US and its partners is too great for the potential rewards.  Thus, some have concluded that inclusion in the government structure through talk will provide all the requisite benefits without the risks.

Self-organization is thus both a strength and a weakness for insurgent entities.  It allows for great resilience under pressure.  At the same time it makes the path from violence to talks easy and attractive if the status quo power opts for power sharing while its military forces apply prolonged, unacceptably high pressure.

This leaves the question of the safety zones of the FATA.  There is no doubt that the insurgents enjoy a great advantage in having immediate and very convenient access to a high degree of safety right across the border in North Waziristan and other Agencies of the FATA.  It is not clear,  however, that the advantages are such as to constitute a war winner.

The US would like Pakistan to bite the bullet and move into North Waziristan.  The Obama administration has put great effort into convincing Islamabad to do its heavy lifting.  The efforts have failed.  Absent troops on the ground, the UAV campaign against Taliban and the Haqqani network will have only limited success.  The Predators and Reapers have killed a gratifyingly large number of insurgent leaders and trigger pullers.  The net positives of the campaign have been highlighted by the disapprobation expressed by UN officials and others of the you-Americans-don't-fight-fair crowd.

Even if by some miracle the Pakistanis were to move into the safe haven zone(s), the amount of benefit which would accrue is an open question.  As recent events have shown, the Pakistanis are ready, willing, and eager to allow the insurgents ample opportunity to leave the "threatened" area and relocate elsewhere.  The same would be expectable in any future operations.

Even with this in mind, it is to the advantage of the Obama administration as well as the governments of other countries exposed in Afghanistan to assure that a mighty moan is made regarding the sanctuaries of the FATA.  If nothing else, it allows the pinning of the tail of failure on the donkey of Pakistan.  In a more positive vein, the "leaks" from "US intelligence agencies" provide more pressure on Islamabad.  Looking ahead, should the Republicans do as well next Tuesday as projected, there will be more resistance in Congress to large foreign aid checks made payable to the government or army of Pakistan.

The administration can (or at least should) wave the Republican club in the direction of Islamabad.  "You want the money?  Well, you had best produce some results.  Fast."  This sort of (un)diplomatic language is easily understood by the extortionists in Islamabad.  It is, after all, the same game the Pakistanis have played for decades--only in reverse.

But, with all that, where does it leave us?  Are we wining or losing?

The short--and accurate--answer is: both.  Militarily we are winning in one very important sense.  The US and its partners hold the initiative on the battlefield.  A simple but highly accurate way of measuring who holds the initiative is comparing the number of friendly initiated contacts in comparison to the number of hostile initiated ones or those of a meeting engagement sort.  For most of the past year, the balance has swung to the US and its associates.  The swing has been most impressive in the past six months.

Another useful metric is provided by the nature of the tactics and operations used by the insurgents.  Over the past several months the insurgents have relied increasingly on indirect attacks on soft targets.  Roadside bombs, suicide bombers, and similar methods have been employed preferentially against civilians.  Other than when forced to do so by friendly forces, the insurgents have avoided force-on-force engagements.  This is not the sign of a confident enemy--or one of particular competence.

The losing occurs on the Afghan government side of the picture.  Put bluntly, the central government has not been able to provide services or even a credible presence in most of the territory cleared by military operations.  As a result there is no confidence on the part of the local populations that the insurgents will not come back as soon as the Americans or other foreign forces depart.

Confidence in the staying power or even the basic legitimacy of the central government is also eroded by the persistent corruption and systemic inefficiency of the central government.  This is worsened by the central government's extreme reluctance to see effective local instruments develop.

Continued failure on the part of Kabul in these critical areas will render all military successes irrelevant.  Indeed, the patterns of failure exhibited by the central government would render meaningless even the most successful Pakistani operations in the FATA.  In a way that is sublimely ironic, a hypothetical Pakistani military operation which resulted in the complete shut down of the safe harbors in the FATA would simply see the insurgents relocate to the Afghan side of the border.

The takeaway is just this: We are winning--except where and when we are losing.  But, the reasons pumped out as to why we are losing are not accurate.  They may not be bogus per se, but they are misleading.

Insurgent resilience is a given in every insurgency.  Cross-border sanctuaries are nice, but not war winners in and of themselves.  Most importantly, when night falls what matters is not simply the balance of success in battle but rather the capacities and perceived legitimacy of the government.  If either of those last features are absent or severely lacking, the war has been won by the insurgents no matter what the god of battles might have declared..