Walking the walk in Afghanistan

I reviewed Rory Stewart's excellent book, "The Places in Between," about walking across much of Afghanistan, taking the mountainous route in the dead of winter, in the Register's Sunday Commentary section. The book illustrated, whether purposely or not, as if there weren't enough reasons, why Afghanistan is likely to be a more difficult task than Iraq -- which is still a tale regarding the U.S. unjustified invasion whose ending has not been written yet. People in one valley often enough don't know much or care much about the people in the next valley, let alone a phony central government in Kabul.

Places In Between

I have not been completely frivolous in my reading since being put on disability due to my cancer and the need for surgery and treatment. One of the motre interesting boks I've read was Rory Stewart's "The Places in Between." It records his walk from Herat in western Afghanistan across various snow-covered mountains -- starting in January 2002, no less, just after the Taliban was thrown out -- to Kabul, a trek that took him 36 days, all on foot. There was no electricity along the route he traveled, but various valleys controlled by different tribes. These places were generally isolated from the rest of the country. In some valleys the ousting of the Taliban made a difference in who controlled the local region, and in some valleys it made no difference.

Stewart took money with him so he could buy food if it was for sale in a marketplace in some of the villages he visited, but for the most part he depended on the ancient Muslim custom of hospitality to strangers (the fact that he was British rather than American and spoke some local dialects probably helped). He had some rough patches - youngsters threw rocks at him and at the mastiff dog he adopted along the way more than once, and some people with Kalashnikovs started out rather hostile -- but he made it. He incorporates some history into his observations -- he was in fact following a path taken by Babur, the first Mughal emperor of India. It was quite an adventure. I think his experience helps to point up the difficulty of establishing an effective central government in Afghanistan, let alone a reasonably honest one. The local villages he visited were isolated and felt no desire to have a central government meddling with the way the elders ran things.

Definitely worth reading.

Is Obama just obtuse about Afghanistan?

Most of the other hypotheses don't seem to make much sense, so I'm starting to approach the conclusion that Barack Obama is just not that smart. It should hardly come as a surprise. He undoubtedly has an IQ slightly higher than normal or he wouldn't have made it through college and law school (though it might be interesting to see his transcripts, which to my knowledge he hasn't released yet). But in retrospect what he seems to have displayed throughout his career is more cunning or what some would call sagacity rather than real learning. He has obviously been extremely ambitious for a long time; perhaps he has had the presidency in mind since early college days. So he has been alert to the main chance, aware of the kinds of alliances he ought to make, aware that a sensitive autobiography would make him look special in the eyes of the easily duped intellectuals of our fading empire, aware of how to present himself as a multicultural black man. But his reputation for being really smart is belied by so many of his actions.

What has me going this time is not health care, though there's plenty of evidence there, but Afghanistan. His visit there earlier this week cemented this war as "his" war. But the war makes so little sense that you would think almost any reasonably intelligent person -- I suspect he didn't take any international relations classes in college and he certainly has not shown any special interest in that field heretofore, so maybe that's a mitigating factor -- would have been able to figure it out. The official line about keeping al-Qaida out of Afghanistan is obviously absurd -- al-Qaida hasn't been there since 2002. He has to know the Taliban is an indigenous Afghan outfit without international ambitions, so while a takeover would be sad for many Afghans it would have few if any international repercussions. He is obviously aware enough that Karzai is a corrupt tool and uncooperative to boot that it annoys him. So why does he insist on maintaining a U.S. presence in the Graveyard of Empire? Does he really want to preside over the fall of the American Empire? Is he so deluded as to think we can bring a semblance of democracy, stability or semi-decent governance in the next 15 months or so? Is he just cunning enough to realize that historians tend to rank American presidents who have presided over wars as "greater" than those who presided over peaceful periods?

Maybe he's just not that smart.

Taliban attack and a hollow U.S. strategy

I think it has been insufficiently appreciated just how thoroughly the Taliban attack in downtown Kabul earlier this week exposes the hollowness of what passes for U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. (I suspect I'll make that the subject of a columns for Antiwar.com). The McChrystal counterinsurgency strategy outlined in the memo Woodward acquired last September was to focus on keeping the civilian population safe and gradually expand the area of safety while training more Afghan security forces, who would eventually take over the security assignment, as this Register editorial explains. The attack in Kabul makes a mockery -- almost certainly intentionally, as it was reasonably sophisticated and well-planned -- of the strategy, so it was successful from a terrorist or guerrilla perspective. It showed the civilian population in the capital city is vulnerable despite (because of?) the U.S. presence.

Foreign crises enfolding Obama

No wonder Obama wants to run to Copenhagen and talk about the Olympics and act like a Chicago wardheeler. He's discovering that giving speeches is not the same thing as actually governing, that selling policies few who are not hopeless ideologues feel any sense of urgency about (health care) is not easy, especially when your method is to repeat the same vague assurances over and over and over and over again. And now he's getting a taste of making decisions about foreign policy that are likely to have actual consequences. I pointed out some of the difficulties with the counterinsurgency idea in Afghanistan in this article for the Register's Sunday Commentary section. Aside from the smart-ass remark about military intellectuals, which alienated some readers and kept some from reading the piece dispassionately and considering its arguments, I think it holds up pretty well. And now Iran rears its ugly head with ugly promises (though I suspect not all that much progress toward a weapon). I'd run off to Copenhagen too.

Couldn't happen to a more deserving fella.

Maybe Afghanistan won't be complete disaster?

The closest I've seen to encouraging news about the U.S. role in Afghanistan is this piece from George Friedman at Stratfor.com that describes a strategic debate between Gen. David Petraeus (CentCom commander) on one hand and SecDef Gates and Pres. Obama on the other. (The piece also has about as good a thumbnail sketch as I've seen of how things are -- at this point -- turning out better in Iraq than anyone could have believed possible in 2006, though I think Friedman gives somewhat more credit to U.S. tactics than is due.)

Fresh off a fairly decent outcome in Iraq and having devised the Army's counterinsurgency strategy, Gen. Petraeus, according to Friedman, "is arguing that the strategy pursued in Iraq should be used as a blueprint in Afghanistan, and it appears that Obama and Gates have raised a number of important questions in response. Is the Iraqi solution really so desirable? If it is desirable, can it be replicated in Afghanistan?" And so on. Gates and Obama apparently have serious questions about what level of commitment would be required to establish an effective government in Afghanistan when the essential thing is to get the Taliban to agree not to give al-Qaida bases in the country. That would requires a much less intrusive or long-term U.S. commitment.

Of course, as I noted some time ago, more than once, Friedman actually favors a military withdrawal from Afghanistan and relatively low-key intelligence and special-forces activity against al-Qaida in Pakistan. Maybe he's seeing the possibility of an outcome closer to what he wants. But he usually looks at situations pretty cold-bloodedly.

No real strategy in Af-Pak

Just saw Presidents Zardari of Pakistan and Karzai of Afghanistan on the late-night repeat of "Meet the Press." I'll give Karzai credit for acting as if he is really an independent president of an independent country and taking the U.S. to task for a "strategy" that too often involves bombings that kill innocent civilians. But the fact is -- and maybe I'll soften when he wins the next election -- he was chosen and installed by the west, and however personally impressive he is (I want a cape like his!), his writ does not run much beyond Kabul, and probably nopt there after dark.

Perhaps he deserved the question David Gregory seemed so obsessed with, whether Afghanistan passed a law that permits husbands to rape their wives (I suspect it's not so simple). When a country becomes completely dependent on another country for security, etc., it can expect citizens of that country to expect it to live up to the subsidizing country's values, indeed to think nothing much of imposing values. He who pays the piper and all.

Andrea Mitchell and Steve Coll, who "analyzed" the appearances, were especially lame. They have no idea what sensible objectives would be, though Steve Coll insists we simply have to be there.

I spent most of yesterday with a friend who is slated to go to work in the press section of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. He didn't try very hard to persuade me that the U.S. knows what it's doing there. Good thing. Beyond wanting to make sure the Paki nukes are secure, there's little we should do and even less we can realistically accomplish. But despite all our sour experiences, too many Americans continue to think we have to intervene and build nations in our image whenever other countries get into trouble.

A bad month for the Empire

The American Empire has had better months. In the war that was supposed to have been won to the point of virtually wrapping up a stable democracy, thanks to Bush's courageous "surge," violence has been rising. April was the most violent month in Iraq since March of 2008. Unfortunately, one response to this increase in violence will be pleas to keep U.S. military forces in Iraq a while longer, "just until things calm down again. The possibility that the very presence of U.S. troops is a contributory factor to the violence will get short shrift.

In Afghanistan, even before President Obama's "surge" is properly underway, things are deteriorating, with increased attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the Pakistani government doing its Wicked Witch of the West routine -- "I'm melting, I'm melting" -- in the face of multiple challenges including its own sclerosis.

The likely result of these two situations is the commitment of even more resources the U.S. doesn't really have -- check out the deficits and projected deficits -- to military, quasi-military or "nation-building" to enterprises likely to involve years of strenuous effort with depleted resources with outcomes that are hardly likely to be favorable. Is this the way empires end -- not with a bang but a whimper of pain from taxpayers?

AfPaks just want more

At a forum in Washington, the ambassadors to the US from Afghanistan appeared together and agreed on one thing: they want the U.S. government to send more of everything. More troops, more money, more school construction, more training, more weapons, more aid, ad infinitum. Nice try, Obama, but no cigar. Our needs will be endless as long as you decide the U.S. has to be the one that confronts the various bad guys on the ground. We;'ll never be satisfied.

I wonder just when the world will begin to understand that Uncle Sugar is not only out of money but deeply, deeply in debt and going further into debt by the millisecond. China, which is holding so much of that debt, is starting to get worried, but other countries seem to think the basket of bounty is bottomless. Well, as long as U.S. leaders keep acting as if they can just keep on spending endlessly, perhaps you can't blame them.

Veering off-course in Afghanistan

I think I said previously that I would probably be returning to the subject of Afghanistan and the likelihood of escalating U.S. involvement in the war there, and sure enough, it seems appropriate to do so again. Although the Obamaites say they're sending that additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan just to try to improved stability a tad while they rethink the issue, as I explained in my most recent column for Antiwar.com, it doesn't look as if they are rethinking it deeply enough to suit me (as if that matters to them).

As I and a few others have suggested, the important thing to remember is that al-Qaida and the Taliban are not one and the same, that the Taliban is an indigenous Afghan outfit while al-Qaida has international ambitions. Our core interest in Afghanistan, therefore, whoever nominally rules there, is that al-Qaida not be able to use the country as a base from which to plan attacks on the U.S. (and Western Europe). They're not able to do so now, so the best course would be to remove our military forces, which have about as much chance of prevailing as the Russians in the 1980s and the British in the 19th century, and inform whoever reigns in Kabul that if we detect al-Qaida activity we'll take it out by whatever means promises to work, and might, if we feel like it, give the nominal government maybe five minutes' notice. But it looks as if the Obama administration is preparing for a long-term commitment

End the Afghanistan campaign!

Here is the piece I did for yesterday's Register Sunday Commentary section on the problems with Obama's promise to beef up the "real central front in the war on terror" in Afghanistan. Citing people like George Friedman at Stratfor.com, with whom I had a nice conversation (he's much more mild-mannered and soft-spoken than you might think from his writing which can be brutally blunt) I think I focused on the realpolitik problems with beefing up the U.S. military. The problem is that the Taliban is indigenous to Afghanistan and the U.S. isn't. Friedman thinks we should pull U.S. military forces out of Afghanistan as quickly as is gracefully possible and use intelligence (and maybe special forces) to keep al-Qaida bottled up and ineffective in the Pakistani tribal areas where the writ of the government does not run. I'm certainly inclined to agree.

By way of comparison, here's the piece I did a few weeks ago for Antiwar.com. I'll keep harping. As I said in my interview for Antiwar Radio, there's a cottage industry of fairly respectable establishment types warning Obama that Afghanistan is a war he's unlikely to win. We need to keep the pressure on.

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.

Why Afghanistan?

Obama has said repeatedly that Afghanistan is the real central front in the misnamed "war on terror," and is apparently planning to commit up to 30,000 more U.S. troops (in addition to 36,000 there now) to the fight. SecDef Gates testified this week that we should scale back our objectives and focus on the military battle against the Taliban rather than nation-building (leave that to NATO, he said, though he didn't take enough notice that the Europeans would just as soon get their troops out). This strikes me as profoundly misguided.

As this Register editorial points out, Afghanistan is bigger than Iraq, with more difficult terrain and no tyradition of having a central government. Karzai's government is corrupt and ineffective and the Taliban is mostly indigenous rather than being foreign fighters. And they have that safe haven in Pakistan. We should leave Afghanistan to the Afghans after putting them on notice that we'll strike if we have a bead on Osama bin Laden, perhaps after giving them maybe five minutes notice. Otherwise we could be there and unlikely to dominate in the graveyard of empires. Even Stratfor.com, hardly a bunch of pansy isolationists, is inclined to agree, arguing that the real focus shold be on al-Qaida, by withdrawing troops from AFghanistan and giviung the anti-al-Qaida burdfen to intelligence and special forces.

NATO's existential crisis

President Bush is visiting Ukraine today, pushing for Ukraine to be the next new member of NATO, in advance of the NATO summit in Bucharest. He's beating an almost-dead horse. The poor dolt thinks he can do this without ticking off Putin -- and furthermore he thinks that if France agrees to send an additional 1,000 troops to Afghanistan that the summit will be a success. He doesn't realize -- he's not alone, few people do -- that NATO is on the verge of breaking over the Afghanistan commitment. Here's a Register editorial explaining some of the reasons.

NATO was founded as a defensive military alliance against the Soviet Union and has no real reason to exist now except to grant Good Housekeeping seals to eastern European countries and tick off a resurgent Russia. But what's likely to break it is the Afghanistan commitment. Almost all the European countries have committed to nation-building (in a nation that doesn't especially want to be built) reluctantly, and some stipulate that their troops won't go places where there might be actual combat. They're unlikely to have the patience to stick it out for five to 10 to 20 years, even if a Western-style regime could be constructed in Afghanistan in that time, which is unlikely. NATO is on the verge of breaking. But Bush doesn't care. It'll happen on the next president's watch. He is truly one of the most irresponsible presidents this country has had, and it's had some doozies.

Too little too late in Afghanistan

Here's a link to the Register's editorial on the decision to send 3,200 Marines to Afghanistan. It at least reflects some understanding that the locus of al-Qaida regeneration is in Afghanistan and Pakistan rather than in Iraq, and things aren't going well for the U.S. It's likely to be too little too late -- and of course no official would consider one effective way to undermine the Taliban: decriminalizing opium and its derivatives. Ah, well!