Daily Archives: December 3, 2009

Obama’s war of necessity

Obama’s war of necessity
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, December 3, 2009

Among the many unanswered questions about President Obama’s approach to the war in Afghanistan, there is at this point one thing about which we can be certain: He does indeed regard this as a war of necessity.

But necessary for what?

Necessary for defeating al Qaeda?

Nah. Much as Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that eradicating terrorism might be akin to eradicating smallpox — an endeavor which if engaged with sufficient thoroughness could actually have an end — it should by now be clear to all but the most simple-minded that the kernel of the episodic terrorist threat to America is contained in dangerous and highly contagious ideas. It is not confined to a particular group of people confined to a particular location. The war in Afghanistan is doing more to cultivate the conditions for a continuation of that threat rather than being an instrument for its removal.

Necessary for ending the war in Iraq?

In part, yes — at least this was the presidential campaign logic. The war in Iraq needed to be wrapped up as quickly as possible because that war was a distraction and the war in Afghanistan was a necessity.

Obama’s opposition to the war in Iraq could only be sold in a campaign against hawkish Republicans if he could prove he was not an opponent of war per se — just an opponent of that particular one. “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars,” Obama said in 2002 when laying out his credentials as an un-antiwar Illinois State Senator.

In the 2008 campaign, Obama’s proof that he possessed an adequate level of war-zest was to pronounce that he was a true believer when it came to the war in Afghanistan — the righteous war; the necessary war; the real war; the war the George Bush had neglected to win.

Necessary for re-election?

Maybe. The answer to that question might well be contained in the genesis of July 2011 as the date US troops will start pulling out of Afghanistan. As CBS News reports, that date is “locked in”. “The president told [press secretary Robert Gibbs, the date — contrary to assertions from US senators] IS locked in — there is no flexibility. Troops WILL start coming home in July 2011. Period. It’s etched in stone. Gibbs said he even had the chisel.”

The Pentagon doesn’t like firm dates. It cleaves firmly to the line that everything is provisional, depending on the current conditions. So it’s hard to believe that General McChrystal or General Petraeus would have volunteered this timetable.

Did it come from David Axelrod? Does July 2011 fit as a “necessity” into a 2012 campaign calender?

The Afghanistan parenthesis

The Afghanistan parenthesis
By David Bromwich, Huffington Post, December 2, 2009

… who exactly are Al Qaeda now, and where are they located? In many ways the Vietnam War, though of an atrociousness the Afghanistan War has not yet approached, was pursued by the U.S. obedient to a much sounder theory than any offered for the present war. The theory was that World Communism was all one thing and its spread to a single country would lead inevitably to its spread to a continent. The theory turned out to be false; and its falseness was perceived as early as 1964 by critics of the war such as Hans J. Morgenthau. But what are we doing in Afghanistan but following an inferior and less persuasive version of a similar theory: namely that World Terrorism is all one thing, that its heart is in Afghanistan (because that is where we found it), and that if we don’t “defeat” it soon by “completing the mission,” the terror will stay and spread.

Omitted is the fact that Afghanistan is not our country. Admittedly, this is a truth that comes hard to Americans. “The very idea of the fabrication of a new government,” wrote Edmund Burke, “is enough to fill us with disgust and horror.” But David Brooks disagrees: “aside from killing bad guys,” he wrote in the spring, American troops are “also trying to figure out how to reweave Afghan society.” By what right do we engage in the reweaving and refabrication of a society that has thrown out conquerors for thousands of years? The effect of the self-conceit can only be to unite the society in hostility against us. For America to look on the native resistance to an occupying army as proof of terrorism will surely increase the obduracy of the resistance itself, and serve to recruit more terrorists.

Our war in the border regions is being fought by drone assassinations. A man at the control sits in front of a screen in Las Vegas, and fires when he has a certain shot. To a primitive mind (but not only to a primitive mind), this experiment on a country not our own has the trappings a video game played in hell. But the procedure was here embraced by the president in the antiseptic idiom of a practiced technocrat. He gave no sign of the effects of such killings by a foreign power out of reach in the sky. To assassinate one major operative, Baitullah Mehsud, as Jane Mayer showed in a recent article in the New Yorker, 16 strikes were necessary, over 14 months, killing a total of as many as 538 persons, of whom 200-300 were bystanders. What comes of the reputation of policemen in a crime-ridden neighborhood when they conduct themselves like that? And what makes anyone suppose the reaction will be less extreme when the policeman comes from another country? And yet, from the president’s West Point speech, one would not guess that he has reflected what our mere presence in West Asia does to increase the enchantment of violent resistance and to heat the anger that turns into terrorists people who have lost parents, children, cousins, clansmen, and friends to the Americans. The total number of Muslims killed by Americans in revenge for the attacks of September 11th now numbers more than a hundred thousand. Of those, few were members of Al Qaeda, and few harbored any intention, for good or ill, toward the United States before we crossed the ocean as an occupying power. [continued…]

Obama’s folly

Obama’s folly
By Andrew J. Bacevich, Los Angeles Times, December 3, 2009

Through war, Bush set out to transform the greater Middle East. Despite immense expenditures of blood and treasure, that effort failed. In choosing Obama rather than John McCain to succeed Bush, the American people acknowledged that failure as definitive. Obama’s election was to mark a new beginning, an opportunity to “reset” America’s approach to the world.

The president’s chosen course of action for Afghanistan suggests he may well squander that opportunity. Rather than renouncing Bush’s legacy, Obama apparently aims to salvage something of value. In Afghanistan, he will expend yet more blood and more treasure hoping to attenuate or at least paper over the wreckage left over from the Bush era.

However improbable, Obama thereby finds himself following in the footsteps of Richard Nixon. Running for president in 1968, Nixon promised to end the Vietnam War. Once elected, he balked at doing so. Obsessed with projecting an image of toughness and resolve — U.S. credibility was supposedly on the line — Nixon chose to extend and even to expand that war. Apart from driving up the costs that Americans were called on to pay, this accomplished nothing. [continued…]

President Obama’s secret: only 100 al Qaeda now in Afghanistan
By Richard Esposito, Matthew Cole and Brian Ross, ABC News, December 2, 2009

As he justified sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan at a cost of $30 billion a year, President Barack Obama’s description Tuesday of the al Qaeda “cancer” in that country left out one key fact: U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country.

A senior U.S. intelligence official told ABCNews.com the approximate estimate of 100 al Qaeda members left in Afghanistan reflects the conclusion of American intelligence agencies and the Defense Department. The relatively small number was part of the intelligence passed on to the White House as President Obama conducted his deliberations. [continued…]

Brzezinski calls anti-corruption crusade in Afghanistan hypocritical
By Sam Stein, Huffington Post, December 2, 2009

One of the most respected foreign policy voices in Democratic circles expressed “serious reservations” with components of a U.S. troop escalation in Afghanistan during an interview on Tuesday.

Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was an early skeptic about increasing troops in Afghanistan, said he was not necessarily opposed to Obama’s decision to send an additional 30,000 troops there. But he stressed that the mission had to be defined properly.

For starters, he argued that if America’s military efforts lack a sufficient multilateral component, “it will in fact help to feed the insurgency.” Brzezinski also cautioned that it would be hypocritical and counterproductive for America to stress that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government be purged of corruption. [continued…]

US strategy in Afghanistan

Something from nothing
By Nir Rosen, Boston Review, January/February, 2010

McChrystal’s announcements of new rules of engagement were part of a larger change of strategy in the eight-year-old war: a move to counterinsurgency (COIN).

In March 2009 the Obama administration gave itself one year to “shift the momentum” in the war—meaning, to stop losing. Three months later, Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked for McKiernan’s resignation. He was replaced by McChrystal, who, in late August, recommended increasing U.S.-troop deployment by 40,000 and implementing a COIN strategy. In his December 1 speech at West Point, Obama did not give McChrystal everything he asked for, but he largely embraced McChrystal’s analysis and fully accepted his COIN recommendations.

More than a specific code of action, COIN is about priorities. In a population-centric counterinsurgency campaign, the chief priority is protecting the population, not killing the enemy. The idea is to win over the people with security and services attentive to local needs, thereby depriving insurgents of popular support, dividing them from the people, and eventually affording an opportunity to kill or “reconcile” them.

In a near-fanatical fight for influence, proponents of COIN spent much of the past decade exhorting the U.S. military and government to embrace the strategy in the global war on terrorism. COIN shaped the “Surge” in Iraq in 2007, and its alleged success in reducing violence earned its military proponents a dominant role in strategic thinking. COIN’s biggest proponent is General David Petraeus, who is credited with designing the Surge and now oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as head of Central Command. Petraeus coauthored the latest edition of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, a seminal book in the COIN community. The Field Manual cites the view of “General Chang Ting-chen of Mao Zedong’s central committee . . . that revolutionary war was 80 percent political action and only 20 percent military.” According to the Field Manual, “such an assertion is arguable and certainly depends on the insurgency’s stage of development; it does, however, capture the fact that political factors have primacy in COIN” (emphasis added).

The team of ‘experts’ who advised McChrystal on his report—only one was expert on Afghanistan—included many celebrity pundits.

Opponents in the defense establishment warn that this emphasis on “political factors” undermines conventional war-fighting ability. They point to the Israeli military, bogged down as an occupying army for years and defeated by Hezbollah in conventional warfare in 2006. Some of these skeptics acknowledge COIN’s successes in the Iraq Surge. But Afghanistan, they argue, is a different case.

One circumstantial difference is that while General Petraeus conducted his Iraq review with people who knew the country well, McChrystal, a “hunter-killer” whose background in counterterrorism worried some supporters of COIN, called in advisors already committed to a population-centric COIN strategy. The team of “experts” who advised McChrystal on his August report—only one was expert on Afghanistan—included many celebrity pundits from both sides of the political divide in Washington, including Frederick Kagan, Stephen Biddle, Anthony Cordesman, and Michael O’Hanlon. It was a savvy move, sure to help win political support in Congress, but it had little to do with realities on the ground.

More fundamentally, COIN helped to control violence in Iraq because sectarian bloodshed—which changed the conflict from an anti-occupation struggle to a civil war, displaced millions, and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands—was already exhausting itself when the Surge started in 2007. The Sunnis were willing to cooperate with the Americans because the Sunnis knew they had been defeated by the time the “Sunni Awakening” began in Anbar Province in September 2006; the victorious Shias were divided, and militias degenerated into gangsterism. In comparison with al Qaeda in Iraq and Shia gangs, the Americans looked good. They could step into the void without escalating the conflict, even as casualties rose temporarily. Moreover, with more than two-thirds of Iraqis in cities, the U.S. efforts could focus on large urban centers, especially Baghdad, the epicenter of the civil war.

In Afghanistan, there is no comparable exhaustion of the population, more than two-thirds of which lives in hard-to-reach rural areas. In addition, population protection—the core of COIN—is more complicated in Afghanistan. The Taliban only attack Afghan civilians who collaborate with the Americans and their puppet government or who are suspected of violating the extremely harsh interpretation of Islamic law that many Afghans accept. And unlike in Iraq, where innocent civilians were targeted only by predatory militias, civilians in Afghanistan are as likely to be targeted by their “own” government as by paramilitary groups. Afghanistan has not fallen into civil war—although tension between Pashtuns and Tajiks is increasing—so the United States cannot be its savior. You can’t build walls around thousands of remote Afghan villages; you can’t punish the entire Pashtun population, the largest group in the country, the way the minority Sunnis of Iraq were punished. [continued…]

Between the lines, an expansion in Pakistan

Between the lines, an expansion in Pakistan
By David E Sanger and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, December 2, 2009

President Obama focused his speech on Afghanistan. He left much unsaid about Pakistan, where the main terrorists he is targeting are located, but where he can send no troops.

Mr. Obama could not be very specific about his Pakistan strategy, his advisers conceded on Monday evening. American operations there are classified, most run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Any overt American presence would only fuel anti-Americanism in a country that reacts sharply to every missile strike against extremists that kills civilians as well, and that fears the United States is plotting to run its government and seize its nuclear weapons.

Yet quietly, Mr. Obama has authorized an expansion of the war in Pakistan as well — if only he can get a weak, divided, suspicious Pakistani government to agree to the terms. [continued…]

Pakistan at odds with Obama’s vision
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, December 3, 2009

Pakistan, increasingly driven by the military establishment, is bent on looking after its own interests, regardless of the damage it might cause to the US’s plans. Pakistan is most worried of a spillover of the Afghan war into its territory – it is already fighting militants in the tribal areas.

In a recent letter to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Obama offered Pakistan an expanded strategic partnership, including the carrot of additional military and economic cooperation, along with the stick of a warning with unusual bluntness that Pakistan’s use of insurgent groups to pursue its policy goals would not be tolerated.

The two-page letter, which included an offer to help reduce tensions between Pakistan and India, was delivered to Zardari by National Security Adviser James Jones. It was accompanied by assurances from Jones that the US would increase its military and civilian efforts in Afghanistan and that it planned no early withdrawal.

Pakistan’s present focus is squarely on cleaning up the mess in the tribal areas through military operations against anti-establishment militants. At the same time, it wants to limit its role in the US-led “war on terror”, in which it has played a part since 2001, by striking peace deals with those groups which do not harm its national security. [continued…]