Obama: More Aid, Troops for Afghanistan;
Stewart: Don't Put in More Troops
President-Elect Barack Obama talked to Afghan President Hamid Karzai by telephone on Saturday. Late that day, Karzai's office issued a statement about the conversation:
' "Obama said America will increase its commitment to bring security and stability to the government and people of Afghanistan . . .
"Obama also emphasized that combatting terrorism and bringing security to Afghanistan, the region and the world would be a priority of his government . . ." '
Reuters says that 4,000 persons have been killed in political violence in Afghanistan this year, about one third of them civilians.
Former British diplomat Rory Stewart, who runs a philanthropy in Kabul now, warns President-elect Obama against sending more troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. Stewart argues that Afghanistan is just not that important to US security. Stewart writes in the NYT
' President-elect Obama’s emphasis on Afghanistan and his desire to send more troops and money there is misguided. Overestimating its importance distracts us from higher priorities, creates an unhealthy dynamic with the government of Afghanistan and endangers the one thing it needs — the stability that might come from a patient, limited, long-term relationship with the international community.'
We invaded intending to attack Al Qaeda
The US has 32,000 troops in Afghanistan and NATO has over 30,000 more. The US Marines are drafting plans to send 15,000 more from their branch of the military to fight in the vast, rugged country.
NATO, Afghan army, and dissident Afghan forces are preparing for a long hard slog this winter, since fighting may not decline this year in the way it has in the past, says the LAT.
The idea of army tribal levies to fight Taliban and anti-government dissidents is fraught with dangers. It also may not work. Analyst Khalid Aziz sketches out a more promising plan:
' "If you look at the counterinsurgency history and its doctrine, you cannot win and fight against an insurgency only by using military forces. Twenty percent is supposed to be the military side of it [and] 80 percent is supposed to be the people side of it," Aziz said. "Now that is not the ratio that we are seeing in Pakistan or Afghanistan. It is the other way round, we see 80 percent military action and only 20 percent the civilian side." '
Just this weekend, 8 Canadian troops were wounded by a roadside bomb, and a French soldier was killed and another wounded south of Kabul.
Aljazeera English reports on Taliban attacks on NATO convoys bringing food and other supplies from Pakistan to Western troops in Afghanistan.
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/24/2008 12:09:00 AM
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9 Comments:
The Americans should learn from Iraq's Kurdistan which is similar to Afghanistan in having warlords sharing the "country". Warlords can be bought, and will become the allies of the paymaster as long as the money (from the rest of Iraq facilitated by the US occupation in case of Kurdistan) flows.
They should forget about nation-building and central control altogether, but also resist the temptation of playing the warlords against each other.
The US wrongly treated Iraq like Kurdistan, and also tried, and succeeded for a while, in playing groups against each other.
Pull the troops out, send the cash suit-cases in. Remeber that your officials are not remotely as clever as they and you think, so forget the cunning plans too.
If the US doesn't send in more troops, won't the Taliban make further headway? If there is a guy whose opinion I'd respect though, it would by Mr. Stewart's.
Thinking about our 80-20 counterinsurgency ration in Afghanistan, I remember reading a hard-line conservative complaining that the NY Times hardly ever ran pieces on the civil-action units in South Vietnam that built village infrastructure and gave medical assistance in order to "win hearts & minds." He attributed this lack of coverage to communist infiltration of the American news media.
My first thought was that "Well, if I were assigned the job of keeping my paper's circulation up and I were offered highly repetitive set-piece propaganda pieces like 'Ivan and his shiny new red tractor and the inevitable, glorious triumph of socialism'...um...well, okay, papers WILL print that sort of thing."
A month or so later, I was reading a set of essays by I.F. Stone, who pointed out that a single month of bombing by B-52s cost more than all of our civil-action programs for the whole year.
The reason the NY Times didn't cover civil-action stories was simple, civil-action was a trivial aspect of Vietnamese counter-insurgency. Shooting and killing and destroying was the "important" aspect of it.
Professor Cole,
Please, I am curious about the name Al Queda. I have heard that there is no such thing- that they do not refer to themselves in this fashion, nor do the Afghan people.
Also, it seems to me that this group is far afield from Islam itself. What is their power structure? It appears to be more Western- a militia, if you will, but with no cleric like Sadr or Sistani leading them.
What is specifically true about this organization?
Before he repeats the old mistakes about Afghanistan, lets hope Obama gets himself a copy of the Prince by Machiavelli. Chapter 4 he talks about the Turks (with central figure similar to Iraq) and France (a decentralized government)
Why the kingdom of Darius, which was conquered by Alexander, did not revolt against the successors of Alexander after his death
As Machiavelli points out central government (e.g. Saddam) was harder to defeat (1991-2003) but easier to maintain. Whereas a decentralized system (nobles in France aka warlords in Afghanistan) are easier to defeat (few weeks in 2001) but next to impossible to control. (2001-2008).
John Beckett, OpinionArtillery.org
11/24/08 -- "And it's 1, 2, 3, what're we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn. Next stop might be Tehran And it's 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates. Ain't no time to wonder why. Whoopee! We're all gonna die."
My apologies to Country Joe McDonald for updating his lyrics slightly, but his Vietnam-era classic Fixing to Die Rag came to mind today while reading a New York Times package of seven op-ed columns on the challenges the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will pose for the Barack Obama administration. I didn't expect to find any outside-the-box thinking from authors like Donald Rumsfeld and Anthony Cordesman. But from seven opinions in such a prestigious paper, I didn't expect to find the near-unanimity these articles offered, either. There was very little op in these op-eds.
Conspicuous by its absence was any anti-war voice. Less than a month after American voters thoroughly repudiated George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin and their imperialistic, God's war cohorts, and despite polls showing that Americans are sick and tired of these wars, not one of the Times' seven writers questioned the legitimacy of either war.
So, allow me to raise the strategic question that goes unanswered because it never gets asked: Why are we waging these wars?
The Iraq war was discredited long ago, but based on improved security, an Iraqi government that proved to be a tougher negotiator than our brass expected, and Obama's campaign promises to withdraw from that conflict, it is now possible that we will have removed most of our armed forces from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Afghanistan is another matter. During his campaign, Obama pledged to increase troops there, a shrewd political tactic that allowed him to be both dove and hawk. But to borrow a point McCain tried to use against Obama in one of the presidential debates, there is a difference between tactics and strategy. And it's time to ask, what strategy will be served by the tactic of sending more Americans to die in Afghanistan?
In other words, what do we hope to gain by continuing an Afghan war that increasingly is seen, even in military circles, as one we can't win?
Is it because our blood-lust for Bin Laden is so great that it won't be satisfied until we have sacrificed thousands of lives, of practically all nationalities, to kill or capture this one man? I can't believe we're naive enough to think that "getting" Bin Laden will end Muslim radicalism, which was around long before he was and is likely to stay around until three things happen: Middle Eastern countries become more democratic, Israelis treat Palestinians like people, and the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam learn to coexist. In comparison to these issues, whether the United States ever "gets" Osama Bin Laden is practically meaningless.
Or maybe we stay in the spirit of Colin Powell's doctrine of being responsible for what you break, which only sounds like it makes sense. Countries aren't bowls you drop at Pottery Barn, and war is the collapsed failure of responsibility. Diplomacy, at which Powell failed miserably, is the only sensible method for international relations and the only sensible solution in Afghanistan. As we have in Iraq, we now must negotiate with Afghanistan on when to withdraw our -- and NATO's -- forces.
Tactically, that will be much harder in Afghanistan because it is so big, so sparsely populated, so tribal, and so lacking in leadership and numbers on the pro-government side -- these latter two showing how poorly our military has done, for six years, at winning hearts and minds. After years of bombing wedding parties and causing a carnage of "collateral damage," increasing troops in Afghanistan is likely to increase only deaths on all sides and among civilians.
In response to 9/11, the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan, which was more than a little like using a baseball bat to swat a fly. That invasion went so easily, if not successfully in the Bin Laden sense, that Bush couldn't stop there. And now, here we are, mired in two wars.
For what?
Don't kid yourself. We're in Iraq for oil, although however much we ultimately get from it will pale compared to the price we will have paid in lives, dollars, and our world image. We're in Afghanistan for pipeline routes to Caspian Sea oil that both we (meaning the U.S. and NATO) and Russia covet. Obtaining more oil is, and always has been, the main goal of these wars.
They've also been about "spreading democracy," a slogan-strategy about as applicable in the real world as Powell's Pottery Barn dictum, as if we are the 21st century's Johnny Appleseeds of freedom. The problem with this strategy is that democracy is not transplantable. Being the will of the people, it has to spring from the people. No matter how hard we try, no matter how pure our motives, we are not the people of Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor can we force them to become democratic, an inherent contradiction in terms that one suspects has yet to occur to George W. Bush.
What I found most upsetting about the seven pieces in th e Times was the underlying assumption among most of the authors that we can, and should, re-make the world in our image. Guess what? We can't. Nor should we presume to have such a right. We have a Department of Defense, and that's what it should be. Over the years -- and not just the last eight years -- we have allowed it to become strategically, economically, and morally offensive. That must stop, starting with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Labelling Obama's lies as "a shrewd political tactic that allowed him to be both dove and hawk" is perhaps to be expected of an Obama supporter.
What I found most upsetting about the seven pieces in the Times was the underlying assumption among most of the authors that we can, and should, re-make the world in our image.
But of course that's exactly the position that Obama embraced throughout his campaign and that his supporters ignored.
Guess what? We can't.
Yes, we can't.
"The US wrongly treated Iraq like Kurdistan..."
Ummmmm - no. The U.S. wrongly treated Iraq like a country it could successfully invade, deconstruct, and transform into an economically, politically, and militarily dependent client state. It got the invasion part OK, and it successfully destroyed the state and civil structure that had been built and established over 80 years, as well as social, cultural, and historical structures and documentation, but that last part - the transformation part - Iraqis entirely predictably resisted, and successfully so, as everyone who actually "gets" Iraq knew would happen eventually.
Hubris has its consequences, and payback is a bitch. Maybe the neocons should have studied more Greek tragedy before going on their little empire-building rampage.
The ghost of Iraqi WMD is back?
Now that Clinton appears to be on the fast track to the post of State Secretary, the ghost of Iraqi WMD may be back. It is known that Iraq has actually abandoned its nuclear program in the early 1990-ies - exactly when Clinton was the President!
There is little doubt that both Clintons were well familiar with real intelligence on Iraqi WMD and played an important although passive part in the ugly Iraqi WMD story. This hardly looks like a good sign for the possible Clinton's tenure as a State secretary. It is hard to imagine why she would change her old way of treating regional info considering how advantageous it was for her personally.
In the short term, this can be of minor importance. However, considering the complexity of situation in Iraq and Afganistan, sooner rather than later, Clinton's talent to benefit personally from general failures is likely to show itself with vengeance.
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