Taliban capture not bad, but strategic?

It certainly counts as good news that one Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, said to be the Taliban military commander and second-in-command to the reclusive Mullah Omar, was captured a week or so in Karachi -- a port city far from the embattled frontier provinces -- in Pakistan. As this Register editorial notes, the war in Afghanistan was and is a bad idea, but any time an enemy of U.S. troops is neutralized, especially if there's a chance of getting actionable intelligence from him, that's not a bad thing. The people in the military don't set policies.

It's fascinating how many different stories about the capture are being bandied about, however. David Ignatius of the WaPo, who has a lot of CIA sources (and on some occasions is something of a shill), says the US and Pakistani intelligence folks had a surefire "no-fooling" tip that Baradar was going to be in that house. On the other hand, the NYT reports that Baradar was a bonus of the raid -- they had no idea he was there and it took them a while to figure out what -- who -- they had.

It's likely that it will be weeks before we have a semi-accurate idea of how Baradar was captured, and there are certain things we will never know. The important things is that it shouoldn't have been necessary and may not be the least bit important to U.S. interests. The only real U.S. interest is al-Qaida, not the Taliban, and being in a military adventure in Afghanistan and working with the sinister Pakistani ISI may well be the worst possible ways to do anything effective about al-Qaida -- which is nowhere near as formidable as our masters want us to believe anyway.

Afghanistan: graveyard of empires

Here's my most recent piece for Antiwar.com, harping yet again, as I will probably do repeatedly for a while, on the foolishness of getting too closely drawn in to a war in Afghanistan. As even SecDef Gates has acknowledged, the core interest of the U.S. in Afghanistan is to make sure that it isn't a base camp or staging ground for al-Qaida or other terrorist groups that could launch an attack on the U.S. It isn't, and it isn't likely to be. The Taliban and al-Qaida are separate organizations. The Taliban is Afghan in origin and composition, and it isn't going away. Al-Qaida is in Pakistan and is seriously weakened compared to pre-9/11. The U.S. should leave Afghanistan to the Afghans, after putting them on notice that serious al-Qaida activity is likely to bring a swift U.S. attack, with maybe five minutes' notice to Kabul. The Afghan regime that emerges might not even feature a central government. So what? Focus traditional intelligence and maybe a special forces strike if appropriate on the places we think al-Qaida is hiding in Pakistan. The Obama team has let it be known that it is doing a thorough reevaluation of the Afghan strategy. I hope so.

Afghanistan could very well be Obama's Vietnam if he doesn't withdraw soon.

The government still doesn't understand

In my column for Antiwar.com this week, I teed off on the 9/11 anniversary to suggest that the U.S. government still doesn't come close to understanding the threat exemplified by that attack or having a good strategy for countering it. Al-Qaida and related groups are stateless terrorist groups; they can benefit from operating inside a nation-state with the cooperation of the government there, as they did in Afghanistan under the Taliban. But they don't require a state and they don't want to be state-sponsored (as some terrorism was during the communist era). Not only is the military a clumsy and ineffective tool -- at least a military not deeply steeped in counter-insurgency strategy and tactics, as ours wasn't and still isn't, -- it is largely counterproductive in this case.

Al-Qaida, as Rand terrorism expert put it a few years ago, is more like a franchise business than a state or state system. It has a "business" model it likes to teach adherents who can then go out and apply it in their local situation. Even the Rand Corp., hardly a nest of pacifists, issued a recent report saying that police and intelligence work is a better way to approach the terrorism problem than a military approach. Chuck Pena's book, "Winning the Un-War" is the best book-length trreatment of the issue. But to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. (Whether we'll have a hammer-like military when the Iraq misadventure is over (if it ever is) is another question.) So our government fell back on what seemed comfortable and familiar rather than really analyzing the problem and devising effective countermeasures -- not to mention that invading Iraq probably created more jihadist sympathizers than we'll ever be able to kill.

By the way, here's a link to my previous week's column. Sometimes Antiwar uses a generic url the first week a column is up and assigns it a more specific url when the next week's column comes it.

Jihadists lose big in Pakistan

Here's the piece I did last week for Antiwar.com, on Pakistan in the wake of the recent parliamentary elections. It noted that while the headline was the defeat of the pro-Musharraf party, perhaps the most encouraging news was the decline in support for Islamist or jihadist-sympathetic parties, including the defeat of a Taliban-like party that had actually won control of one province. Such parties had averaged 11 percent support last election and 4 percent in this one.

Now 4 percent of a population can wreak havoc with suicide bombings and the like, but the bogeyman of there being a great danger of jihadists getting control of the government and getting access to nukes, often used to justify the U.S. staying and subsidizing pretty much forever, is extremely unlikely. (There are already Taliban sympathizers in the military and the ISI secret police.)

It's also the case in Iraq, where the war whoopers talk about al-Qaida in Iraq taking control of the country if we leave -- McCain said it almost exactly that way in his recent long-distance campaign trail colloquy with Obama. Most unlikely. More likely is that without U.S. troops as a target it would be harder to recruit AQI members, and the Iraqis themselves would suppress it, probably more brutally and thoroughly than the U.S. would even think of doing.

Reasons for caution in Iraq

Here's a link to the Register's editorial today critiquing Bush's characterization of the situation in Iraq in his State of the Union message. We conceded the decline in violence and reasons to feel more optimistic than in past years, but noted several potential problems.

The "Anbar Awakening" preceded the surge and could be transient, especially if the Sunni militias fighting al-Qaida and patrolling meighborhoods aren't integrated somehow in the Shia-dominated national government's security forces. Muqtada al-Sadr is getting pressure to end the cease-fire he imposed on his Mahdi Army last summer. And the Iraqi government has taken maybe 3 of the 18 steps defined as essential benchmarks a year or more ago. Even the de-Baathification program looks like less than meets the eye.

I ran across a WaPo piece today that suggests other reasons to be pessimistic. According to Thomas Ricks, Army commanders in Iraq see three wars going on or worth worrying about. One against al-Qaida in Iraq, two against the domestic Sunni insurgency, and "the third conflict, and perhaps the most vexing for U.S. commanders, is with Shiite extremist militias. All three enemies adapt quickly to changed U.S. tactics, finding ways to adapt and keep stirring things up, as by switching from car bombs to suicide bombers when better cvheckpoints made car bombs less easy to detonate.

It's hard enough to win against one insurgency when you're a foreign occupying power. Handling three at once won't be easy.

Victory over al-Qaida?

American military comnmanders are ready to say they have "fatally wounded" al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) during recent battles. Now they're debating whether to crow about it, since it has a history of being adaptable and rising again. There's been some apparent success in Anbar, although William Lind isn't so sure. But the real point is that al-Qaida was always a sideshow in the bigger picture of trying to get Iraq stabilized (assuming that's the real mission). It was a tiny band led by foreign fighters, which made it easy to dislike, and it has tried to exacerbate sectarian tension and hatred, but that tension would be there without al-Qaida, and the Iraqi government has made almost no political progress -- except, perhaps in uniting over the demand that Blackwater USA be kicked out of the country.

Critical time for Pakistan

My friend Muazzam Gill, an international affairs analyst for UPI, didn't have much doubt when I talked to him. The crash of a Pakistani army helicopter escorting Pres. Pervez Musharraf on a tour of earthquake reconstruction in the Kashmir is most unlikely to have been an accident. Muazzam thinks it wasn't an assassination attempt on Musharraf this time, but a broad signal from some of his many enemies: you are in our sights and we are this close to you. Expect maintenance workers to be investigated.

Musharraf, of course, has been focused more on finding a way to get another term as president than on what else is going on in his country. Because he came in via a coup and has continued to be the head of the military throughout his tenure, he has still not made the effective alliances among Pakistan's political class he would have had if he had come up through the political end of things. That seems to be one of the reasons he is so eager to have former prime minister Benazir Bhutto return and be involved in government as prime minister. He apparently had to turn Nawaz Sharif, the other former prime minister who tried to return, away. Bhutto and Sharif are fierce rivals, and he had cast his lot with Bhutto.

Another result of the focus on succession is that little attention has been paid or leadership exercised in the struggle with the various militants, al-Qaida cells, tribal factions and other malcontents in the Federally Administered Tribal Regions and North West Provinces, along the Afghan border, where the writ of the central government has never run. Since July more than 250 of the security forces have been killed in fighting, with 45 killed in a several-day running battle this week. Government troops have been reactive rather than offensive, just holding on. That's partly because even without political turmoil, the government doesn't really know what it wants to do with those territories. The U.S. wants them to go after the Qaida/Taliban camps, but Pakistani public opinion seems to favor trying to find some kind of workable truce.

If, as and when Musharraf gets his second term in a way that confers a semblance of legitimacy, his troubles may have just begun.