100 Pushtun Guerrillas Killed at Spera from Air;
ISI under Civilian Control?
One hundred Pushtun guerrillas launched a major offensive in an attempt to take Spera District center. They drew down on themselves the full fury of US and NATO air forces that gave support to Afghan National Police, which killed up to 70 of them.
Jang reports in Urdu that Khost governor Arsala Jamal said that the guerrillas had begun by attacking police checkpoints. In the aftermath, local police asked for help from the Afghan army.
Kabul Pajhwok Afghan News says that Afghan National Police and ISAF (NATO) units surrounded the guerrillas, calling in air strikes and helicopter gunships. When guerrillas ran into a building to take cover, helicopters destroyed it with missiles. The fighting went on into the early hours of Sunday. A "small number" of ANP officers were killed.
There is a discrepancy here with Jang, which said that it was the Afghan army, not ANP, that riposted, and said that Afghan aircraft were flown in the counter-attack.
This incident was a sign of bad guerrilla tactics on the part of the Pushtun guerrillas. You can't launch conventional attacks and try to take and hold territory when your enemy is extremely powerful and controls the air. On the other hand, it is not a good sign that the Afghan police in the area could not fight off 100 guys by themselves.
The attack on Spera comes just a week after guerrillas took Arjistan, 150 mi. south of the capital of Kabul, from which US & NATO & Afghan forces dislodged them on Wednesday.
There was also a suicide bombing at Khost.
This news underlines Barack Obama's comments on Sunday, in AP's words: "In his first public appearance since returning to the United States, Barack Obama says Afghanistan's weak government and rampant drug trafficking are hampering efforts to fight al-Qaida terrorists who often take refuge in neighboring Pakistan."
Barnett Rubin is blogging up a storm on Afghanistan, and the prickly issues of narco-terrorism and how to fight it. He is skeptical of the meme that the tactics used in Colombia were a complete success. I hope everyone in the blogosphere is aware of how extraordinarily fortune we are to have direct access to the thinking of perhaps the foremost Afghanistan expert.
The problems in far southern Afghanistan are related to the increased organizational capacity of Baitullah Mahsud's Tehrik-i Taliban, which is a misnomer because a lot of his fighters appear just to be tribesmen, not seminarians (which is what "Taliban" means).
Some of the restiveness of the Pushtun tribes of the Pakistani Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) derives from a growing wheat shortage.
On Saturday, Edak tribesmen blocked the Bannu-Miranshah road in FATA, protesting the lack of flour. The American public should be alarmed to hear that like 15 percent of Pakistanis blame the US for their wheat shortage.
Meanwhile, The Pakistani government took back on Sunday an announcement made Saturday that Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistani military intelligence, had been put under the control of the civilian ministry of the interior. A clarification today said that the feared ISI, which is accused of using the neo-Taliban against Afghanistan, remains under the authority of the prime minister. That restatement might imply in turn that it remains under the control of the military, who supposedly report to the PM but actually dictate military policy to him.
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/27/2008 01:43:00 PM
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Afghanistan is getting a lot of attention internationally lately; it has remained the front burner international issue in Canada for some years.
I was just taking the time to read "Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?" a feature article in the NYT by Thomas Schweich, a former ambassador level "senior counternarcotics official" who coordinated policy for the US government.
It's difficult to see what would be advisable for that poor country and what is folly based on his account. He seems to rely too heavily on areal herbicide use (politically unacceptable in many quarters) and the Columbian model; which you rightly question as universally successful or viable.
Certainly a worthy read for an 'insder' view on the narco problem in Afghanistan and its international implications.
I've spent an hour googling, and still cannot find an Afghanistan-Body-Count (Iraq has the famous Iraq Body Count website).
This disturbs me. Coalition soldiers are kept track of, but Afghanis mean so little to the world.
Considering the CIA's long history of involvement in narco-trafficking to raise funds that are off the books, I have a hard time believing that American's are serious about counternarcotics operations except where they can be used to snuff out unwanted competition.
I hope an intrepid investigative journalist or some brave whistleblowers shed some light on this soon.
Cocaine Sustains War Despite Rebel Losses in Colombia
A four-decade-old, drug- fueled war is proving immune to U.S.-financed efforts to stop it.
PASTO, Colombia — Along with Colombia’s successes in fighting leftist rebels this year, cities like Medellín have staged remarkable recoveries. And in the upscale districts of Bogotá, the capital, it is almost possible to forget that the country remains mired in a devilishly complex four-decade-old war.
But it is a different story in the mountains of the Nariño department. Here, and elsewhere in large parts of the countryside, the violence and fear remain unrelenting, underscoring the difficulty of ending a war fueled by a drug trade that is proving immune to American-financed efforts to stop it.
Soaring coca cultivation, forced disappearances, assassinations, the displacement of families and the planting of land mines stubbornly persist, the hallmarks of a backlands conflict that threatens to drag on for years, even without the once spectacular actions of guerrillas in Colombia’s large cities.
For those caught in the cross-fire, talk of a possible endgame for the war seems decidedly premature, even given the deaths this year of several top guerrilla leaders, the desertion of hundreds of rebels each month and the rescue of prized hostages like the former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.
“The armed groups are like malaria, evolving to resist eradication and killing with efficiency,” Antonio Navarro Wolff, governor of Nariño and a former guerrilla from the defunct M-19 group, said in an interview. “If anything, Nariño shows the guerrillas may have lost their chance for victory but not their ability to cause suffering.”
Obama's Sober Mood
Wolffe:
Based on what you've seen and heard on this trip, is there anything that has led you to review any policy, tweak things, rethink anything?
Obama:
Our success in Afghanistan is going to be deeply dependent not just on getting more troops there, which we need, but also some sustained high-level engagement with Pakistan—something that I discussed before but I think is significantly more urgent than even I had imagined.
Basically there doesn't appear to be any pressure at all being placed on Al Qaeda, on these training camps, these safe havens, in the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas].
(Sounds Familiar ;-) )
Afghan Soldiers Battle Taliban as NATO Leader Warns of Perils to Nation’s Stability -
The battle came as NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, warned of critical danger to Afghanistan, with foreign fighters and terrorists trying to destabilize the country. He called for greater international attention to the problem.
Basically there doesn't appear to be any pressure at all being placed on Al Qaeda, on these training camps, these safe havens, in the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas].
To be committed to the war on terror is to be committed to war. The war on terror is a further manifestation of the injustices that brought terror about to begin with. It is a war on civilians, invariably termed "collateral damage". Invariable killed by US troops in the war on terror.
If one wanted to end terror, one would end the war on terror.
Obama is committed to the war on terror although, perhaps unlike John McaCain, he knows that it is a positive feedback loop that which insures its own continued existence. That is the whole point of the war on terror.
Obama cares no more about the victims of the war on terror than he does about the Palestinians, for instance.
Or about anything else. It is just another hoop for him to jump through on his way to assume the ermine trimmed, red robe, the mantle of power from George Bush.
And yet, people are going to vote for him. I hope not in numbers sufficient to elect him.
Reply from Colombia to NY Times article
Cocaine Sustains War Despite Rebel Losses in Colombia
In re Colombia:
It's only relatively recently that the Colombian Army made one of the most significant changes in strategy in decades - to wit, 12 mos.-long, rather than month-long, deployments to the hairiest pockets of the country, after reclaiming the capitol, Medellin, Cali, etc.
Pushing outward gradually from the vital population centers, which naturally were the first order of business.
It's a truly ferocious bit of work to be out in the boondocks for a year at a time here, and yet the payoff has been substantial.
Perseverance pays.
Not simply the FARC desertions, but the take-downs, have been weekly. Unsurprisingly, the soldiers themselves (only volunteers go to "the front") have stood by this shift to clear and hold.
The other end of this challenging business is in the continued identifying of networks.
Everyone's still got their work cut out for them there.
How soon we forget how very bad it used to be.
We - but not the Colombians.
They know.
It could happen that before I leave, FARC's position has so deteriorated that they can be brought to political settlement. We certainly have every intention of supporting the Army's efforts to push them to, or past, that very point. It will be reached, regardless.
And again, what happened in that rescue mission has not yet been fully reported - and their circumstances today are consequently that much the worse.
I do not share, nor does the vast majority of Colombians share, the pessimistic outlook that still occasionally comes creeping out of the media.
Colombia is on its way to becoming the South American powerhouse, in no small part due to the very success that the NYT is wont to discount.
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