Category Archives: Defense Department

Obama wants to expand America’s military reach

As President Obama prepares to present his first Nuclear Posture Review, the news is that he’s about to announce plans to eliminate thousands of nuclear weapons from the United States arsenal. So good so far — but it gets worse from here on in.

If a smaller arsenal might look like a step towards the elimination of nuclear weapons, the fact that this president wants to retain a first strike option is not a step in the right direction. Worst of all are the designs for a non-nuclear future in the shape of what is called “Prompt Global Strike” — the ultimate form of remote warfare through which the US could strike any target on the planet in less than an hour.

This is how the New York Times describes the new class of non-nuclear weapons:

The idea, officials say, would be to give the president a non-nuclear option for, say, a large strike on the leadership of Al Qaeda in the mountains of Pakistan, or a pre-emptive attack on an impending missile launch from North Korea. But under Mr. Obama’s strategy, the missiles would be based at new sites around the United States that might even be open to inspection, so that Russia and China would know that a missile launched from those sites was not nuclear — to avoid having them place their own nuclear forces on high alert.

Better than firing nuclear weapons, isn’t it? Of course. But the one virtue of strategic nuclear weapons is that their use has seemed unthinkable to a point where we’ve gone 65 years without their use — apart from in testing.

To call Prompt Global Strike a “non-nuclear option” is to imply that it is some kind of relatively benign alternative to nuclear force. On the contrary, what we’re looking at here are two classes of weapons of mass destruction: one whose primary function is that they be held in reserve as a diabolical threat; the other system is very much designed for use. Indeed, one can imagine that at some point in his or her term of office, every American president will make a point of showcasing American power with a prompt global strike.

Noah Shachtman describes how this would work:

A tip sets the plan in motion — a whispered warning of a North Korean nuclear launch, or of a shipment of biotoxins bound for a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon. Word races through the American intelligence network until it reaches U.S. Strategic Command headquarters, the Pentagon and, eventually, the White House. In the Pacific, a nuclear-powered Ohio class submarine surfaces, ready for the president’s command to launch.

When the order comes, the sub shoots a 65-ton Trident II ballistic missile into the sky. Within 2 minutes, the missile is traveling at more than 20,000 ft. per second. Up and over the oceans and out of the atmosphere it soars for thousands of miles. At the top of its parabola, hanging in space, the Trident’s four warheads separate and begin their screaming descent down toward the planet. Traveling as fast as 13,000 mph, the warheads are filled with scored tungsten rods with twice the strength of steel. Just above the target, the warheads detonate, showering the area with thousands of rods-each one up to 12 times as destructive as a .50-caliber bullet. Anything within 3000 sq. ft. of this whirling, metallic storm is obliterated.

If Pentagon strategists get their way, there will be no place on the planet to hide from such an assault.

What Prompt Global Strike is really about is turning inter-continental ballistic missiles (minus nuclear warheads) into usable weapons.

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The rise of militainment

At Foreign Policy, P W Singer writes:

The country of Ghanzia is embroiled in a civil war. As a soldier in America’s Army, your job is to do everything from protect U.S. military convoys against AK-47-wielding attackers to sneak up on a mountain observatory where arms dealers are hiding out. It is a tough and dangerous tour of duty that requires dedication, focus, and a bit of luck. Fortunately, if you get hit by a bullet and bleed to death, you can reboot your computer and sign on under a new name.

America’s Army is a video game — a “tactical multiplayer first-person shooter” in gaming lingo — that was originally developed by the U.S. military to aid in its recruiting and training, but is now available for anyone to play. Among the most downloaded Internet games of all time, it is perhaps the best known of a vast array of video game-based military training programs and combat simulations whose scope and importance are rapidly changing not just the video-game marketplace, but also the way the U.S. military finds and trains its future warriors and even how the American public interfaces with the wars carried out in its name. For all the attention to the strategic debates of the post-9/11 era, a different sort of transformation has taken place over the last decade — largely escaping public scrutiny, at modest cost relative to the enormous sums spent elsewhere in the Pentagon budget, and with little planning but enormous consequences.

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U.S. deaths in Pakistan fuel suspicion

Time magazine reports:

By killing three U.S. soldiers in a bomb attack in a remote corner of northwest Pakistan on Wednesday, Feb. 3, the Taliban scored a political jackpot. With anti-American sentiment cresting in Pakistani public opinion, the presence of the three American trainers in a convoy passing through Koto village when it was struck by a roadside bomb has set off a flurry of questions and even wild conspiracy theories about the U.S. presence in the country. The news left Islamabad in a difficult position, deepened suspicion of the U.S. and further strained an already troubled relationship.

The trainers’ presence had been Pakistan’s worst-kept secret. They’re here at the invitation of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, the front-line force in the battle against the Pakistan Taliban, to help improve its poor counterinsurgency capability. In 2008, Washington dispatched 100 military personnel to train Pakistani officers, who would in turn pass on their skills to rank-and-file soldiers; but local sensitivities precluded the Americans from being given direct access to the troops. As U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke told reporters in Washington, “There is nothing secret about their presence there.”

Noah Shachtman adds:

The U.S. military has 200 troops on the ground in Pakistan. That’s about the double the previously-disclosed number of forces there. It’s a whole lot more than the “no American troops in Pakistan” promised by special envoy Richard Holbrooke. And let’s not even get into the number of U.S. intelligence operatives and security contractors on Pakistani soil.

The troop levels are one of a number of details that have emerged about the once-secret U.S. war in Pakistan since three American troops were killed yesterday by an improvised bomb. The New York Times reports that the soldiers were disguised in Pakistani clothing, and their vehicle was outfitted with radio-frequency jammers, meant to stop remotely-detonated bombs. “Still, the Taliban bomber was able to penetrate their cordon. In all 131 people were wounded, most of them girls who were students at a high school adjacent to the site of the suicide attack,” the paper reports.

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US missile test mimicking Iran strike fails

From Reuters:

A U.S. attempt to shoot down a ballistic missile mimicking an attack from Iran failed after a malfunction in a radar built by Raytheon Co (RTN.N), the Defense Department said.

The abortive test over the Pacific Ocean coincided with a Pentagon report that Iran had expanded its ballistic missile capabilities and posed a “significant” threat to U.S. and allied forces in the Middle East region.

The Missile Defense Agency said that in Sunday’s test both the target missile, fired from Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, and the interceptor, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, had performed normally.

“However, the Sea-Based X-band radar did not perform as expected,” the agency said on its web site. Officials will investigate the cause of the failure to intercept, it said.

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The sanctity of military spending

The sanctity of military spending
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, January 26, 2010

In sum, as we cite our debtor status to freeze funding for things such as “air traffic control, farm subsidies, education, nutrition and national parks” — all programs included in Obama’s spending freeze — our military and other “security-related” spending habits become more bloated every year, completely shielded from any constraints or reality. This, despite the fact that it is virtually impossible for the U.S. to make meaningful progress in debt reduction without serious reductions in our military programs.

Public opinion is not a legitimate excuse for this utterly irrational conduct, as large percentages of Americans are receptive to reducing — or at least freezing — defense spending. A June, 2009 Pew Research poll asked Americans what they would do about defense spending, and 55% said they would either decrease it (18%) or keep it the same (37%); only 40% wanted it to increase. Even more notably, a 2007 Gallup poll found that “the public’s view that the federal government is spending too much on the military has increased substantially this year, to its highest level in more than 15 years.” In that poll, 58% of Democrats and 47% of Independents said that military spending “is too high” — and the percentages who believe that increased steadily over the last decade for every group.

The clear fact is that, no matter how severe are our budgetary constraints, military spending and all so-called “security-related programs” are off-limits for any freezes, let alone decreases. Moreover, the modest spending freeze to be announced by Obama tomorrow is just the start; the Washington consensus has solidified and is clearly gearing up for major cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, with the dirty work to be done by an independent “deficit commission.” It’s time for “everyone” to sacrifice and suffer some more — as long as “everyone” excludes our vast military industry, the permanent power factions inside the Pentagon and intelligence community, our Surveillance and National Security State, and the imperial policies of perpetual war which feed them while further draining the lifeblood out of the country. [continued…]

Obama liquidates himself
By Paul Krugman, New York Times, January 26, 2010

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.” [continued…]

Obama would ‘rather be really good one-term president’
By Mark Mooney, ABC News, January 25, 2010

President Obama, buffeted by criticism of his massive health care reform bill and election setbacks, said today he remained determined to tackle health care and other big problems despite the political dangers to his presidency.

“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” he told ABC’s “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview today. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — As though he’s in a men’s store trying out a new suit for size, Obama’s trying on the One-Termer — wants to see if he likes the cut.

If as a bold political choice this president was to make a commitment not to run for re-election, that could be a decisive way of breaking free from the stranglehold of powerful interest groups. But with this statement, as in so many others, there’s nothing bold about what Obama is doing.

Bob Herbert, who is clearly clutching hold of the last straws of hope, sees tomorrow’s State of the Union speech as an slim opportunity for the renewal of faith: “Americans want to know what he stands for, where his line in the sand is, what he’ll really fight for, and where he wants to lead this nation. They want to know who their president really is.”

This really is the most damning statement: that after one year Americans have less of a sense of who occupies the White House than they did before he took office – back when he was perceived as an unknown.

The One-Termer — Obama doesn’t need to decide whether it’s a good fit or he can afford it — they’re giving them away for free. Try it on and it’s yours for keeps.

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The crime of not “looking backward”

The crime of not “looking backward”
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, January 19, 2010

The single biggest lie in War on Terror revisionist history is that our torture was confined only to a handful of “high-value” prisoners. New credible reports of torture continuously emerge. That’s because America implemented and maintained a systematic torture regime spread throughout our worldwide, due-process-free detention system. There have been at least 100 deaths of detainees in American custody who died during or as the result of interrogation. Gen. Barry McCaffrey said: “We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.” Gen. Antonio Taguba said after investigating the Abu Ghraib abuses and finding they were part and parcel of official policy sanctioned at the highest levels of the U.S. Government, and not the acts of a few “rogue” agents: “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Despite all of this, our media persists in sustaining the lie that the torture controversy is about three cases of waterboarding and a few “high-value” detainees who were treated a bit harshly. That’s why Horton’s story received so little attention and was almost completely ignored by right-wing commentators: because it shatters the central myth that torture was used only in the most extreme cases — virtual Ticking Time Bomb scenarios — when there was simply no other choice. Leading American media outlets, as a matter of policy, won’t even use the word “torture.” This, despite the fact that the abuse was so brutal and inhumane that it led to the deaths of helpless captives — including run-of-the-mill detainees, almost certainly ones guilty of absolutely nothing — in numerous cases. These three detainee deaths — like so many other similar cases — illustrate how extreme is the myth that has taken root in order to obscure what was really done. [continued…]

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Elite US troops ready to combat Pakistani nuclear hijacks

Elite US troops ready to combat Pakistani nuclear hijacks
By Christina Lamb, The Sunday Times, January 17, 2010

The US army is training a crack unit to seal off and snatch back Pakistani nuclear weapons in the event that militants, possibly from inside the country’s security apparatus, get their hands on a nuclear device or materials that could make one.

The specialised unit would be charged with recovering the nuclear materials and securing them.

The move follows growing anti-Americanism in Pakistan’s military, a series of attacks on sensitive installations over the past two years, several of which housed nuclear facilities, and rising tension that has seen a series of official complaints by US authorities to Islamabad in the past fortnight.

“What you have in Pakistan is nuclear weapons mixed with the highest density of extremists in the world, so we have a right to be concerned,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer who used to run the US energy department’s intelligence unit. “There have been attacks on army bases which stored nuclear weapons and there have been breaches and infiltrations by terrorists into military facilities.” [continued…]

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Obama pledges aid to Haiti

Obama pledges aid to Haiti
By Helene Cooper, New York Times, January 15, 2010

President Obama on Thursday promised $100 million along with more American troops for the relief effort in Haiti, vowing that the United States would stand with the impoverished nation as it grappled with the devastation of its capital city.

The Pentagon sent 125 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division based at Fort Bragg, N.C., and said that by the end of the week their number would grow to 3,000. Military officials said their primary mission would be to provide security as aid began to arrive.

Those Army troops will be supplemented in the coming days by 2,000 Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., who are scheduled to arrive in Haiti by Monday. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — How much is $100 million?

As much as the US Department of Defense spends in one hour, each hour, 24/7, 365 days a year. (In this case the DoD is of course making a major effort to help the people of Haiti so the US contribution will be more than $100 million.)

But since the United States is expected to spend over $880 billion on defense in 2010, it’s worth asking: Forgetting about the humanitarian imperative, which makes a more significant contribution to the US national security? A $100 million spent on relief work in Haiti or $100 million spent on the war in Afghanistan? (Before Obama announced his surge plan, the war was estimated to be costing $133 million a day.)

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How the US military is betraying its own wounded

How the US military is betraying its own wounded
By Amanda Carpenter, Washington Times, January 12, 2010

In 2007, a high-ranking Navy doctor sent a sobering warning to colleagues: The service may be discharging soldiers for misconduct when in fact they are merely displaying symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

By doing so, the anonymous doctor noted in a memo to other medical administrators, the service may be denying those troops their rights to Veterans Affairs benefits — including treatment for medical conditions they incurred while serving on the battlefield.

In the future, any military personnel facing dismissal for misconduct after a deployment should be screened first for PTSD, the memo said. The recommendation was never implemented. [continued…]

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White House aides said to chafe at slow pace of Afghan surge

White House aides said to chafe at slow pace of Afghan surge
By Elisabeth Bumiller and Helene Cooper, New York Times, January 9, 2010

Senior White House advisers are frustrated by what they say is the Pentagon’s slow pace in deploying 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and its inability to live up to an initial promise to have all of the forces in the country by next summer, senior administration officials said Friday.

Tensions over the deployment schedule have been growing in recent weeks between senior White House officials — among them Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff — and top commanders, including Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior commander in Afghanistan.

A rapid deployment is central to President Obama’s strategy, to have a jolt of American forces pound the Taliban enough for Afghan security forces to take over the fight. Administration officials said that part of the White House frustration stemmed from the view that the longer the American military presence in Afghanistan continued, the more of a political liability it would become for Mr. Obama. But beyond the politics, the speeded up deployment — which Mr. Obama paired with a promise to begin troop withdrawals by July 2011 — is part of Mr. Obama’s so-called “bell curve” Afghanistan strategy, whereby American troops would increase their force in Afghanistan and step up attacks meant to quickly take out insurgents.

One administration official said that the White House believed that top Pentagon and military officials misled them by promising to deploy the 30,000 additional troops by the summer. General McChrystal and some of his top aides have privately expressed anger at that accusation, saying that they are being held responsible for a pace of deployments they never thought was realistic, the official said. [continued…]

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US intelligence is ignorant

US intelligence is ignorant
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 5, 2010

So, apparently the CIA suffered a fatal strike by an al Qaeda blogger last week. And if you’re wondering how bad it’s got for American soldiers in Afghanistan: they say they can get more useful information from USA Today than they get from reading intelligence reports.

Is this David Letterman’s assessment? No. It comes from Major General Michael Flynn, deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan for the US military and its NATO allies.

OK, he didn’t refer specifically to USA Today, but in a newly-published report he did say: “Some battalion S-2 officers say they acquire more information that is helpful by reading US newspapers than through reviewing regional command intelligence summaries.”

This is not a testimony to the quality of American journalism.

“I don’t want to say we’re clueless, but we are. We’re no more than fingernail deep in our understanding of the environment,” the operations officer of one US task force told Flynn.

The United States has now been conducting military operations in Afghanistan for over eight years.

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An American world of war

An American world of war
By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse, TomDispatch, January 3, 2010

… let’s pause a moment as the New Year begins and take stock of ourselves as what we truly are: the preeminent war-making machine on planet Earth. Let’s peer into the future, and consider just what the American way of war might have in store for us in 2010. Here are 10 questions, the answers to which might offer reasonable hints as to just how much U.S. war efforts are likely to intensify in the Greater Middle East, as well as Central and South Asia, in the year to come.

1. How busted will the largest defense budget in history be in 2010?

Strange, isn’t it, that the debate about hundreds of billions of dollars in health-care costs in Congress can last almost a year, filled with turmoil and daily headlines, while a $636 billion defense budget can pass in a few days, as it did in late December, essentially without discussion and with nary a headline in sight? And in case you think that $636 billion is an honest figure, think again — and not just because funding for the U.S. nuclear arsenal and actual “homeland defense,” among other things most countries would chalk up as military costs, wasn’t included.

If you want to put a finger to the winds of war in 2010, keep your eye on something else not included in that budget: the Obama administration’s upcoming supplemental funding request for the Afghan surge. In his West Point speech announcing his surge decision, the president spoke of sending 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan in 2010 at a cost of $30 billion. In news reports, that figure quickly morphed into “$30-$40 billion,” none of it in the just-passed Pentagon budget. To fund his widening war, sometime in the first months of the New Year, the president will have to submit a supplemental budget to Congress — something the Bush administration did repeatedly to pay for George W.’s wars, and something this president, while still a candidate, swore he wouldn’t do. Nonetheless, it will happen. So keep your eye on that $30 billion figure. Even that distinctly low-ball number is going to cause discomfort and opposition in the president’s party — and yet there’s no way it will fully fund this year’s striking escalation of the war. The question is: How high will it go or, if the president doesn’t dare ask this Congress for more all at once, how will the extra funds be found? Keep your eye out, then, for hints of future supplemental budgets, because fighting the Afghan War (forget Iraq) over the next decade could prove a near trillion-dollar prospect. [continued…]

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US forces mounted secret Pakistan raids in hunt for al-Qaida

US forces mounted secret Pakistan raids in hunt for al-Qaida
By Declan Walsh, The Guardian, December 21, 2009

American special forces have conducted multiple clandestine raids into Pakistan’s tribal areas as part of a secret war in the border region where Washington is pressing to expand its drone assassination programme.

A former Nato officer said the incursions, only one of which has been previously reported, occurred between 2003 and 2008, involved helicopter-borne elite soldiers stealing across the border at night, and were never declared to the Pakistani government.

“The Pakistanis were kept entirely in the dark about it. It was one of those things we wouldn’t confirm officially with them,” said the source, who had detailed knowledge of the operations. [continued…]

Welcome to Pashtunistan: the aim of America’s secret war?
By Shaukat Qadir, The National, December 22, 2009

Few people by now can be unaware of Blackwater, later known as Blackwater Worldwide and now as Xe. The private security agency formed in 1997 and based in North Carolina is owned by Erik Prince, a former member of the US Navy Seal special forces, and has long-standing links with both the CIA and the FBI.

Its presence in Pakistan has been an open secret for some years. The investigative journalist and writer Jeremy Scahill, an authority on Blackwater and author of the bestselling Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, revealed last month that it has been there since 2006. He says Blackwater is being employed for covert ops, essentially intended to target high-value al Qa’eda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, but it has also assisted in providing information for drone attacks and has kidnapped suspects and transported them covertly to the US for interrogation.

In other words, it is an American agency with a licence to kill or kidnap, thus exonerating official American agencies that might one day be held accountable. (Although personally I doubt if the CIA will ever be held accountable. I continue to aver that it is the only real rogue intelligence agency in the world. Mossad might enjoy liberty of action for any operation, but it cannot undertake one without the approval of the Israeli prime minister: no such restriction applies to the CIA.) [continued…]

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Stunning statistics about the war every American should know

Stunning statistics about the war every American should know
By Jeremy Scahill, Antiwar.com, December 19, 2009

A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone — that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo [PDF] released by McCaskill’s staff, “From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000. [continued…]

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U.S.-Israeli arms cooperation quietly growing

U.S.-Israeli arms cooperation quietly growing
By Nathan Guttman, The Forward, December 16, 2009

Leaders in Washington and Jerusalem have publicly locked horns over the issue of West Bank settlements. And Israeli public opinion has largely viewed America’s new administration as unfriendly. But behind the scenes, strategic security relations between the two countries are flourishing.

Israeli officials have been singing the praises of President Obama for his willingness to address their defense concerns and for actions taken by his administration to bolster Israel’s qualitative military edge — an edge eroded, according to Israel, during the final year of the George W. Bush presidency.

Among the new initiatives taken by the administration, the Forward has learned, are adjustments in a massive arms deal the Bush administration made with Arab Gulf states in response to Israeli concerns. There have also been upgrades in U.S.-Israeli military cooperation on missile defense. And a deal is expected next year that will see one of the United States’ most advanced fighter jets go to Israel with some of America’s most sensitive new technology.

Amid the cacophony of U.S.-Israel clashes on the diplomatic front, public attention given to this intensified strategic cooperation has been scant. But in a rare public comment in October, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren praised the Obama administration’s response to complaints about lost ground during the close of the Bush years as “warm and immediate.” [continued…]

CIA working with Palestinian security agents
By Ian Cobain, The Guardian, December 17, 2009

Palestinian security agents who have been detaining and allegedly torturing supporters of the Islamist organisation Hamas in the West Bank have been working closely with the CIA, the Guardian has learned.

Less than a year after Barack Obama signed an executive order that prohibited torture and provided for the lawful interrogation of detainees in US custody, evidence is emerging the CIA is co-operating with security agents whose continuing use of torture has been widely documented by human rights groups.

The relationship between the CIA and the two Palestinian agencies involved – Preventive Security Organisation (PSO) and General Intelligence Service (GI) – is said by some western diplomats and other officials in the region to be so close that the American agency appears to be supervising the Palestinians’ work.

One senior western official said: “The [Central Intelligence] Agency consider them as their property, those two Palestinian services.” A diplomatic source added that US influence over the agencies was so great they could be considered “an advanced arm of the war on terror”. [continued…]

Obama told China: I can’t stop Israel strike on Iran indefinitely
By Barak Ravid and Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz, December 17, 2009

President Barack Obama has warned his Chinese counterpart that the United States would not be able to keep Israel from attacking Iranian nuclear installations for much longer, senior officials in Jerusalem told Haaretz.

They said Obama warned President Hu Jintao during the American’s visit to Beijing a month ago as part of the U.S. attempt to convince the Chinese to support strict sanctions on Tehran if it does not accept Western proposals for its nuclear program.

The Israeli officials, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the United States had informed Israel on Obama’s meetings in Beijing on Iran. They said Obama made it clear to Hu that at some point the United States would no longer be able to prevent Israel from acting as it saw fit in response to the perceived Iranian threat. Continue reading →

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McChrystal’s stovepipe operation

McChrystal’s stovepipe operation
By Mark Perry, Asia Times, December 10, 2009

President Barack Obama’s national address last Tuesday not only detailed the United States’ strategy on Afghanistan, it laid bare his new administration’s strengths and weaknesses – and confirmed the growing suspicion that, eight years after September 11, 2001, meeting America’s global challenges with a military response remains the default position of the Washington policymaking establishment.

“Don’t underestimate the impact that eight years of the [George W] Bush administration has had in Washington,” a senior State Department official explained this last summer. “The Bush people set out the language of the war on terrorism, invented the vocabulary, defined the terms. People talk about the importance of ‘doing’ diplomacy, but no one really knows what that means or how tough it can really be.”

At least initially, this assessment seemed contradicted by the administration’s flurry of diplomatic activity. Its first months were taken up by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s globetrotting, special envoy George Mitchell’s high-profile Jerusalem meetings, AfPak specialist Richard Holbrooke’s repeated initiatives with Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari – and Obama’s decision to engage Iran in direct talks about its nuclear program.

Suddenly, surprisingly, the military seemed relegated to playing a minor role in Washington: Bush’s hero David Petraeus, the US commander for the greater Middle East, was no longer in the headlines, the war in Iraq seemed well in hand and Defense Secretary Robert Gates was nowhere to be seen.

All of this changed in May, when a series of well-timed Taliban offensives led to a spike in US casualties and Gates decided to replace the US Afghan commander, David McKiernan, with Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal. The change did not come as a surprise to Pentagon officers, who had watched Petraeus and McKiernan struggle through a difficult relationship: “The two couldn’t be in the same room together,” a McKiernan aide says. “We knew there’d be a fist fight if we left them alone.” The disagreement was personal: McKiernan resented answering to an officer whom he had once commanded and viewed as politically ambitious.

But the relationship was also scarred by a subtle disagreement over how to meet the Taliban challenge. Both McKiernan and Petraeus agreed that the Taliban posed a security challenge to the Afghan government, but McKiernan focused first on development – on building what he called “human capital”. Petraeus disagreed: you can’t build “human capital” without security, he argued, and the security situation in the country was deteriorating. Then too, Petraeus thought, what was needed in Afghanistan was an officer who could respond creatively to what Petraeus believed was turning into an asymmetric fight – and McKiernan was an officer with a deep background in running conventional wars.

McChrystal, a former Green Beret and a celebrated special operations commander, was the answer. Petraeus recommended a change to Gates, and Gates agreed. Within days of his May 11 appointment, McChrystal showed up in the Afghan capital, Kabul, with a team of counter-insurgency experts who commandeered McKiernan’s headquarters and fanned out throughout the country.

McChrystal’s teams were told to identify the problem and find a solution. “They absolutely flooded the zone,” a US development officer says. “There must have been hundreds of them. They were in every province, every village, talking to everyone. There were 10 of them for every one of us.” Not surprisingly, within weeks of their deployment, McChrystal’s team leaders had concluded that the US was facing was an escalating insurgency that could only be checked with an increase in US troops. In-country State Department officials rolled their eyes: “What a shock. If you deploy a gang squad, they’re going to find a gang,” a senior State Department official says with a tinge of bitterness. “They were looking for an insurgency and they found one.”

“From the minute that McChrystal showed up in Kabul, he drove the debate,” a White House official confirms. “You’ll notice – from May on it was no longer a question of whether we should follow a military strategy or deploy additional troops. It was always, ‘should we do 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000, or even 80,000’? We weren’t searching for the right strategy; we were searching for the right number.”

A senior State Department official, watching McChrystal from her State Department perch in Washington, remembers the frustration among the department’s top policymakers: “We kept saying ‘we need to open up to the other side, like we did in Iraq with the Anbar insurgency,’ and the military kept saying, ‘well this isn’t Iraq.’ And so we’d answer: ‘fine, so if Afghanistan isn’t Iraq, then why do you keep talking about a surge?’ And we never got an answer.”

The State Department’s frustration extended into the embassy in Kabul, where the US ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, was having his own problems with McChrystal. The appointment of Eikenberry in March of 2009 had been greeted with skepticism in the State Department because of his background as a West Pointer, a retired lieutenant general and a US security coordinator in the country. But if anyone would be sympathetic to McChrystal, it was now thought, it would be Eikenberry.

But that’s not what happened: Eikenberry won friends among professional diplomats for his easygoing manner and quick understanding of their problems – and for his open irritation at McChrystal’s imperious manner. “McChrystal came in and he just thought he was some kind of Roman proconsul, a [Douglas] MacArthur,” an Eikenberry colleague notes. “He was going to run the whole thing. He didn’t need to consult with the State Department or civilians, let alone the ambassador. This was not only the military’s show, it was his show.”

But McChrystal was not only able to “flood the zone” in Afghanistan, he was able to do so in Washington. As the director of the Joint Staff, a position he held just prior to arriving in Kabul, McChrystal established the Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordinating Cell (PACC), a 70-person military-civilian operations group housed in the Pentagon’s National Command Center, one of the most secure offices in the world. “This isn’t a place you just wander in and out of,” a senior Pentagon official says. The “PACC” bypassed the normal command structure – and the State Department. It reported to McChrystal, who rotated its officers in and out of Kabul every three to four months.

The PACC is “a stovepipe operation”, this senior Pentagon official notes. “It’s beautiful. It’s headed up by McChrystal acolytes, former special operations officers who view him [McChrystal] as their patron. So they follow his lead. And there is no requirement for them to share any of the information they get from Kabul with the State Department or anyone else – let alone with Eikenberry. This is McChrystal’s game. The PACC people in Washington pass information to McChrystal without going through any channels and they take the best information from Kabul and they brief [JCS chairman Admiral Mike] Mullen – and he briefs the president. So during the run-up to the Afghanistan decision, the military always looked current. They had the best information. Everyone else looked like a bunch of amateurs. Eikenberry was out of the loop. He had no chop [influence] on any of it. They just ran circles around him.” [continued…]

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Obama wanted a surge, he’s getting a surge, and it feels good

Obama wanted a surge, he’s getting a surge, and it feels good
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, December 6, 2009

Mine might not be a headline the New York Times would choose, but that’s the story they tell under their flatly descriptive: “How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan.”

The narrative reads like a script for NBC’s “West Wing” as it dramatises Obama’s deliberative process and that seems to have been the object of the exercise for this stellar team of reporters: paint a picture of presidential solemnity that will inspire confidence in how Obama makes decisions and thereby drum up a bit of good old-fashioned blind-faith in the presidency.

If there is no inescapable logic to the idea that a faster surge will enable a swifter withdrawal, then — the Times would have its readers believe — we shouldn’t worry our little heads about that because our fabulously diligent president has performed an operation of executive intelligence that renders all further consideration superfluous.

In a similar vein I’ll spare readers here the tedium of wading through a 4,660-word article and pick out some of the highlights. Actually, to my eye there is really only one point of substance:

Mr. Obama and his advisers … considered options for stepping up the pursuit of extremists in Pakistan’s border areas. He eventually approved a C.I.A. request to expand the areas where remotely piloted aircraft could strike, and other covert action. The trick would be getting Pakistani consent, which still has not been granted.

For “expand the areas” read: Baluchistan.

If getting Pakistani consent to open a new front in the war simply comes down to diplomatic finesse, then yes, you could call it a “trick” managing to get those instransigent Pakistanis to do the right thing.

In reality, it is merely the imperatives of fluent story-telling that compels the Times to glide over this important detail in the much larger and grimmer story of the war. Understanding why Baluchistan represents a red line that Pakistan refuses to abandon is something that Washington might grasp only when it’s too late.

The matter of most importance both for this administration and for the New York Times has less to do with people, places, history and geography, than it does with high-value words. Words like “surge”.

Obama wants to push in hard so he can pull out fast.

A three-month strategic review thus produced a choreographic solution:

The plan, called Option 2A, was presented to the president on Nov. 11. Mr. Obama complained that the bell curve would take 18 months to get all the troops in place.

He turned to General Petraeus and asked him how long it took to get the so-called surge troops he commanded in Iraq in 2007. That was six months.

“What I’m looking for is a surge,” Mr. Obama said. “This has to be a surge.”

That represented a contrast from when Mr. Obama, as a presidential candidate, staunchly opposed President Bush’s buildup in Iraq. But unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama wanted from the start to speed up a withdrawal as well. The military was told to come up with a plan to send troops quickly and then begin bringing them home quickly.

On November 29, after winning the approval of all his immediate advisers, the president moved into action:

Mr. Obama then went to the Situation Room to call General McChrystal and Ambassador Eikenberry. The president made it clear that in the next assessment in December 2010 he would not contemplate more troops. “It will only be about the flexibility in how we draw down, not if we draw down,” he said.

Two days later, Mr. Obama flew to West Point to give his speech. After three months of agonizing review, he seemed surprisingly serene. “He was,” said one adviser, “totally at peace.”

Obama wanted a surge, he’s getting a surge, and it feels good — at least for now.

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Our timeline, and the Taliban’s

Our timeline, and the Taliban’s
By Max Hastings, New York Times, December 4, 2009

It is hard to be optimistic about the outcome of President Obama’s troop “surge” in Afghanistan. The additional forces sound large in headlines, but shrink small in the mountains. The commitment is intended as an earnest indication of America’s will. But neither the number of troops nor the timeline that mandates a drawdown in less than two years is likely to impress the Taliban, who think in decades, or for that matter the Afghan people.

Most decision-makers on both sides of the Atlantic now privately believe we are in the business of managing failure, and that is how the surge looks. The president allowed himself to be convinced that a refusal to reinforce NATO’s mission in Afghanistan would fatally weaken the resolve of Pakistan in resisting Islamic militancy. Meanwhile at home, refusal to meet the American generals’ demands threatened to brand him as the man who lost the Afghan war. Thus the surge lies in the realm of politics, not warfare. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — “July 2011 is not a withdrawal date, but a specific target date for beginning to transition security responsibility to Afghan forces, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on several morning talk shows today,” the Pentagon says.

“The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, scheduled to begin in July 2011, will ‘probably’ take two or three years, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday, although he added that ‘there are no deadlines in terms of when our troops will all be out’,” the Washington Post reports.

So, on the one hand we have defense chiefs emphasizing the caveats but on the other a White House has that date “etched in stone” — the date is “locked in,” and, as the Los Angeles Times notes, the proposed date “would make it such that the withdrawal of troops would begin just as the campaign for the 2012 presidential election was heating up.”

Hmmm. Sounds like a campaign theme: “the troops are coming home” — “no more re-deployments”. The war itself might not be over, but for each American soldier heading home the war will be over.

Still, there are those who haven’t let go of the idea that this war can be won.

Seth Jones, author of In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan and a civilian adviser to the US military sees victory (or failure) hinging on Baluchistan:

The United States and Pakistan must target Taliban leaders in Baluchistan. There are several ways to do it, and none requires military forces.

The first is to conduct raids to capture Taliban leaders in Baluchistan. Most Taliban are in or near Baluchi cities like Quetta. These should be police and intelligence operations, much like American-Pakistani efforts to capture Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other Qaeda operatives after 9/11. The second is to hit Taliban leaders with drone strikes, as the United States and Pakistan have done so effectively in the tribal areas.

The cost of failing to act in Baluchistan will be enormous. As one Russian diplomat who served in the Soviet Army in Afghanistan recently told me: “You are running out of time. You must balance counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan by targeting the leadership nodes in Pakistan. Don’t make the same mistake we did.”

The Cold War ensured that Baluchistan remained a safe haven in the ’80’s and there are compelling reasons why Pakistan will want it to remain off limits now.

Jones’ suggestion that Taliban leaders in Baluchistan can be hit with drone strikes seems a bit fanciful and it’s also odd that he doesn’t regard the use of drones as use of military forces.

Among the many good reasons for taking refuge in a city rather than an isolated tribal compound is that there really is safety in numbers. The death toll from any missile strike would be intolerably high in the eyes of Pakistanis and their government. As for policing operations, I suspect that the sympathies of the local population would likewise make that option unfeasible.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan government will depend on maintaining a certain level of goodwill among the Baluchis if Pakistan is to ever succeed in building the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline — a pipeline destined to run right through Baluchistan.

But irrespective of whether the Pakistani government gives its consent to the US opening a new front in its clandestine war, it appears that preparations are being made to expand the campaign of drone attacks and the New York Times is playing its part to create a permissive environment here if not in Baluchistan itself.

Scott Shane refers to CIA drone operators in Virginia as “sharpshooters” who killed eight Taliban and al Qaeda suspects two weeks ago. He goes on to quote a government official who claims that as a result of approximately 80 missile strikes over two years, “We believe the number of civilian casualties is just over 20, and those were people who were either at the side of major terrorists or were at facilities used by terrorists.”

While Shane acknowledges that that number is “strikingly lower than many unofficial counts,” he does not mention the reporting by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker who provided this characterization of the drone attacks:

…the recent campaign to kill Baitullah Mehsud offers a sobering case study of the hazards of robotic warfare. It appears to have taken sixteen missile strikes, and fourteen months, before the C.I.A. succeeded in killing him. During this hunt, between two hundred and seven and three hundred and twenty-one additional people were killed, depending on which news accounts you rely upon.

If in the coming months there are even larger death tolls in Baluchistan, Americans might yet again later realize that it’s worth knowing a bit of history about a people before you start killing them.

Chris Zambelis, an analyst for the Jamestown Foundation, provides a useful background report:

Reports that the U.S. is seeking Pakistan’s approval for expanding its controversial drone campaign against targets in Balochistan – a clear red line for Pakistan – have raised serious concerns in Islamabad about Washington’s ultimate intentions. As the Obama administration escalates its military campaign in Afghanistan, Pakistani leaders have expressed deep concerns about the potential destabilization of Balochistan resulting from the intensified fighting expected in Afghanistan in the coming months. As if these concerns were not enough, Balochistan remains a hotbed of ethno-nationalist militancy, drug smuggling, and organized crime. Balochistan is also in the throes of a refugee crisis that has been largely ignored. The confluence of these trends – which indirectly or directly reinforce each other – is making an already dangerous situation worse with severe implications for Pakistan and the wider region.

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