Category Archives: war in Afghanistan

Deadly attack by Taliban tests new strategy

Deadly attack by Taliban tests new strategy
By Joshua Partlow and Greg Jaffe, Washington Post, October 5, 2009

US commanders had been planning since late last year to abandon the small combat outpost in mountainous eastern Afghanistan where eight U.S. soldiers died Saturday in a fierce insurgent assault.

The pullout, part of a strategy of withdrawing from sparsely populated areas where the United States lacks the troops to expel Taliban forces and to support the local Afghan government, has been repeatedly delayed by a shortage of cargo helicopters, Afghan politics and military bureaucracy, U.S. military officials said.

The attack began in the early morning hours. Taliban-linked militiamen struck from the high ground using rifles, grenades and rockets against the outpost, a cluster of stone buildings set in a small Hindu Kush valley that has been manned by 140 U.S. and Afghan forces. By the end of a day-long siege, eight Americans and two Afghan security officers were dead, marking the highest toll for U.S. forces in over a year.

The deaths brought into stark relief the dilemma the Obama administration faces in Afghanistan. Without more soldiers and supplies, the Taliban and allied insurgents are gaining ground, but committing more forces could sink the country deeper into an increasingly deadly and unpopular war. [continued…]

‘Almost a lost cause’
By Greg Jaffe, Washington Post, October 4, 2009

Nine U.S. soldiers were killed and 27 were wounded during the July 13, 2008, attack, which raged for several hours and was one of the bloodiest of the Afghan war. Among the dead was [1st Lt. Jonathan] Brostrom.

In recent months, the battle of Wanat has come to symbolize the U.S. military’s missteps in Afghanistan. It has provoked Brostrom’s father to question why Jonathan died and whether senior Army officers — including a former colleague and close friend — made careless mistakes that left the platoon vulnerable. It has triggered three investigations, the latest initiated last week by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And it has helped drive a broader reassessment of war strategy among top commanders in Afghanistan, who have begun to pull U.S. troops out of remote villages where some of the heaviest fighting has occurred. Senior military leaders have concluded that they lack the forces to wrest these Taliban strongholds away from the enemy and are instead focusing on more populated and less violent areas. [continued…]

McChrystal faulted on troop statements
By Scott Wilson, Washington Post, October 5, 2009

National security adviser James L. Jones suggested Sunday that the public campaign being conducted by the U.S. commander in Afghanistan on behalf of his war strategy is complicating the internal White House review underway, saying that “it is better for military advice to come up through the chain of command.”

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who commands the 100,000 U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, warned bluntly last week in a London speech that a strategy for defeating the Taliban that is narrower than the one he is advocating would be ineffective and “short-sighted.” The comments effectively rejected a policy option that senior White House officials, including Vice President Biden, are considering nearly eight years after the U.S. invasion. [continued…]

The distance between ‘we must’ and ‘we can’
By James Traub, New York Times, October 4, 2009

Over the next few weeks, Barack Obama must make the most difficult decision of his presidency to date: whether or not to send up to 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, as his commanding general there, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has reportedly proposed.

This summer, Mr. Obama described the effort in Afghanistan as “a war of necessity.” In such a war, you do whatever you need to do to win. But now, as criticism mounts from those who argue that the war in Afghanistan cannot, in fact, be won with more troops and a better strategy, the president is having second thoughts.

A war of necessity is presumably one that is “fundamental to the defense of our people,” as Mr. Obama has said about Afghanistan. But if such a war is unwinnable, then perhaps you must reconsider your sense of its necessity and choose a more modest policy instead. [continued…]

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What I saw at the Afghan election

What I saw at the Afghan election
By Peter W. Galbraith, Washington Post, October 4, 2009

Before firing me last week from my post as his deputy special representative in Afghanistan, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon conveyed one last instruction: Do not talk to the press. In effect, I was being told to remain a team player after being thrown off the team. Nonetheless, I agreed.

As my differences with my boss, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, had already been well publicized (through no fault of either of us), I asked only that the statement announcing my dismissal reflect the real reasons. Alain LeRoy, the head of U.N. peacekeeping and my immediate superior in New York, proposed that the United Nations say I was being recalled over a “disagreement as to how the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) would respond to electoral fraud.” Although this was not entirely accurate — the dispute was really about whether the U.N. mission would respond to the massive electoral fraud — I agreed.

Instead, the United Nations announced my recall as occurring “in the best interests of the mission,” and U.N. press officials told reporters on background that my firing was necessitated by a “personality clash” with Eide, a friend of 15 years who had introduced me to my future wife.

I might have tolerated even this last act of dishonesty in a dispute dating back many months if the stakes were not so high. For weeks, Eide had been denying or playing down the fraud in Afghanistan’s recent presidential election, telling me he was concerned that even discussing the fraud might inflame tensions in the country. But in my view, the fraud was a fact that the United Nations had to acknowledge or risk losing its credibility with the many Afghans who did not support President Hamid Karzai. [continued…]

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Report cites firefight as lesson on Afghan war

Report cites firefight as lesson on Afghan war
By Thom Shanker, New York Times, October 3, 2009

The paratroopers of Chosen Company had plenty to worry about as they began digging in at their new outpost on the fringe of a hostile frontier village in eastern Afghanistan.

Intelligence reports were warning of militants massing in the area. As the paratroopers looked around, the only villagers they could see were men of fighting age idling in the bazaar. There were no women and children, and some houses looked abandoned. Through their night scopes they could see furtive figures on the surrounding mountainsides.

A few days later, they were almost overrun by 200 insurgents.

That firefight, a debacle that cost nine American lives in July 2008, has become the new template for how not to win in Afghanistan. The calamity and its roots have been described in bitter, painstaking detail in an unreleased Army history, a devastating narrative that has begun to circulate in an initial form even as the military opened a formal review this week of decisions made up and down the chain of command.

The 248-page draft history, obtained by The New York Times, helps explain why the new commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is pressing so hard for a full-fledged commitment to a style of counterinsurgency that rests on winning over the people of Afghanistan even more than killing militants. The military has already incorporated lessons from the battle in the new doctrine for war in Afghanistan.

The history offers stark examples of shortcomings in the unit’s preparation, the style of combat it adopted, its access to intelligence, its disdain for the locals — in short, plenty of blame to go around. [continued…]

Residents of Afghanistan’s Shomali Plain deeply conflicted over presence of U.S. troops
By Pamela Constable, Washington Post, October 3, 2009

The last time Taliban forces swept across the Shomali Plain, they left behind a wasteland of scorched vineyards and decapitated fruit trees that farmers have spent the past eight years nursing back to life.

Now, the inhabitants of this fertile region north of Kabul are fearful that the whirlwind will come again, destroying their hopes and hard work. Yet they are deeply conflicted about whether American and NATO troops should remain here to defend them, or whether the Western forces are exacerbating problems that Afghans should settle among themselves.

These growing concerns echo the urgent debate taking place in Washington, where policymakers are sharply divided on whether to commit more troops to Afghanistan or pull them out, as well as on how to define the mission — as an effort to shore up Afghanistan’s troubled democracy or to focus more narrowly on killing Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

“If the foreigners leave, one man will just set fire to the next man’s house,” said Mirza Mahmad, 50, who was playing marbles with his grandson in this central Shomali town. “When I was a soldier, we defeated the Russians with old clothes and borrowed bullets, and they got stuck in the mud of Afghanistan. We need the Americans, but if they don’t win the trust of the people, they will get stuck here in the mud forever.” [continued…]

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White House eyeing narrower Afghan war effort

White House eyeing narrower war effort
By Scott Wilson and Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post, October 2, 2009

Senior White House officials have begun to make the case for a policy shift in Afghanistan that would send few, if any, new combat troops to the country and instead focus on faster military training of Afghan forces, continued assassinations of al-Qaeda leaders and support for the government of neighboring Pakistan in its fight against the Taliban.

In a three-hour meeting Wednesday at the White House, senior advisers challenged some of the key assumptions in Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s blunt assessment of the nearly eight-year-old war, which President Obama has said is being fought to destroy al-Qaeda and its allies in Afghanistan and the ungoverned border areas of Pakistan.

McChrystal, commander of the 100,000 NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has asked Obama to quickly endorse his call for a change in military strategy and approve the additional resources he needs to retake the initiative from the resurgent Taliban. [continued…]

McChrystal rejects scaling down Afghan military aims
By John F Burns, New York Times, October 2, 2009

The top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, used a speech here on Thursday to reject calls for the war effort to be scaled down from defeating the Taliban insurgency to a narrower focus on hunting down Al Qaeda, an option suggested by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as part of the current White House strategy review.

After his first 100 days in command in Kabul, General McChrystal chose an audience of military specialists at London’s Institute for Strategic Studies as a platform for a public airing of the confidential assessment of the war he delivered to the Pentagon in late August, parts of which were leaked to news organizations. General McChrystal, 55, did not mention Mr. Biden or his advocacy of a scaled-down war effort during his London speech, and referred only obliquely to the debate within the Obama administration on whether to escalate the American commitment in Afghanistan by accepting his request for up to 40,000 more American troops on top of the 68,000 already deployed there or en route.

But he used the London session for a rebuttal of the idea of a more narrowly focused war. When a questioner asked him whether he would support scaling back the American military presence over the next 18 months by relinquishing the battle with the Taliban and focusing on tracking down Al Qaeda, sparing ground troops by hunting Qaeda extremists and their leaders with missiles from remotely piloted aircraft, he replied: “The short answer is: no.” [continued…]

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After clash over Afghan election, U.N. fires a diplomat

After clash over Afghan election, U.N. fires a diplomat
By Richard A Oppel Jr and Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, October 1, 2009

The United Nations fired its No. 2 official in Afghanistan on Wednesday after the diplomat, Peter W. Galbraith, wrote a scathing letter accusing the head of the mission here of concealing election fraud that benefited the campaign of the incumbent president, Hamid Karzai.

The head of the mission, Kai Eide, angrily denied the accusation, and senior United Nations officials and diplomats said Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had decided to recall Mr. Galbraith because of irreconcilable differences with Mr. Eide, who is Norwegian.

“He reaffirms his full support for his special representative, Kai Eide,” said a terse statement attributed to Mr. Ban’s spokesman. The day before, Mr. Ban also expressed confidence in Mr. Galbraith in a news conference at the United Nations headquarters.

But the letter to Mr. Ban from Mr. Galbraith, the highest-ranking American official working for the United Nations in Afghanistan, made clear the depth of the animosity between Mr. Galbraith and Mr. Eide and illustrated the profound concerns that remain among some international observers that the presidential election was hopelessly undermined by fraud. [continued…]

Several Afghan strategies, none a clear choice
By Peter Baker and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, October 1, 2009

The president, vice president and an array of cabinet secretaries, intelligence chiefs, generals, diplomats and advisers gathered in a windowless basement room of the White House for three hours on Wednesday to chart a new course in Afghanistan.

The one thing everyone could agree on: None of the choices is easy.

Just six months after President Obama adopted what he called a “stronger, smarter and comprehensive strategy” for Afghanistan and Pakistan, he is back at the same table starting from scratch. The choices available to him are both disparate and not particularly palatable. [continued…]

On war, Obama could turn to GOP
By Scott Wilson, Washington Post, October 1, 2009

With much of his party largely opposed to expanding military operations in Afghanistan, President Obama could be forced into the awkward political position of turning to congressional Republicans for support if he follows the recommendations of the commanding U.S. general there.

Congressional Democrats have begun promoting a compromise package of additional resources for Afghanistan that would emphasize training for Afghan security forces but deny Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal the additional combat troops he has indicated he needs to regain the initiative against the Taliban insurgency. The emerging Democratic consensus is likely to constrain the president as he considers how best to proceed with an increasingly unpopular war.

On Wednesday, Obama chaired a three-hour discussion on Afghanistan with Cabinet members and senior officials at the White House. The meeting was largely a reassessment of the past eight years of American involvement in the region, with the president repeatedly probing his military and civilian advisers to justify their assumptions, according to one participant. This source said there was a recognition that the decision facing Obama is one of the most critical of his presidency. [continued…]

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Lawrence of Afghanistan

Lawrence of Afghanistan
By John C Hulsman, Foreign Policy, September 29, 2009

It’s easy to assume that the Counterinsurgency Field Manual — the U.S. military’s new, post-Iraq-surge bible on unconventional warfare — is something of a revolution in military thought. Afghanistan itself is rewriting the rules of war every day, it seems. But history has a funny way of repeating itself. The U.S. generals dictating strategy to their troops would have done better to pass around a 1917 publication by Lawrence of Arabia, “27 Articles.”

Like the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which was written at a time when the U.S. military was losing Iraq, “27 Articles” was composed during difficult days. It was the height of the Great War in August 1917, following the astonishing capture of Aqaba in the desert campaign against the Ottoman Empire. The British were using Arab insurgents to harass the Turks, and the high command in London, fearing that Aqaba’s conqueror, Lawrence of Arabia, could be killed at any moment, tasked him with codifying what he had learned in dealing with his Arab allies. It was meant to be a manual for British officers serving in the field with Faisal, the Hashemite prince and insurgent leader, and his troops. So, in the midst of leading his guerrilla campaign, Lawrence wearily began typing “27 Articles” in the heat of the desert sun. [continued…]

From McChrystal’s mouth to Obama’s ear
By Peter Baker, New York Times, September 30, 2009

When President Obama looks at the screen in the Situation Room on Wednesday, he will find a face he has not seen lately except in newspapers. There, via secure video from Kabul, will be Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, his commander in Afghanistan, explaining directly to the president for the first time why more troops are needed.

General McChrystal has not spoken with Mr. Obama since submitting his grim assessment of the war a month ago and has spoken with him only once in the 100 days since he took command of all American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The lack of direct communication has generated criticism and fueled suspicions of strains between the White House and Kabul. [continued…]

Afghanistan: NATO’s graveyard?
By John Feffer, TomDispatch, September 29, 2009

Celebrating its 60th birthday this year, NATO is looking peaked and significantly worse for wear. Aggressive and ineffectual, the organization shows signs of premature senility. Despite the smiles and reassuring rhetoric at its annual summits, its internal politics have become fractious to the point of dysfunction. Perhaps like any sexagenarian in this age of health-care crises and economic malaise, the transatlantic alliance is simply anxious about its future.

Frankly, it should be.

The painful truth is that NATO may be suffering from a terminal illness. Its current mission in Afghanistan, the alliance’s most significant and far-flung muscle-flexing to date, might be its last. Afghanistan has been the graveyard of many an imperial power from the ancient Macedonians to the Soviets. It now seems to be eyeing its next victim. [continued…]

The Taliban’s toll
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, The American Conservative, November 1, 2009

Forget opium poppies for a moment. The Taliban has another huge source of revenue, worth up to $1 billion a year, which generously supplements its heroin-trafficking income and the cash-flow from rich oil sheiks in the Persian Gulf.

This money comes from you.

The allegation that millions of dollars of U.S aid and military funds have been siphoned off by the Taliban through elaborate extortion rackets is not something government officials readily discuss. But the departing head of the Army Corps of Engineers recently conceded that there was little his agency could do to stop it, and the U.S. State Department launched an investigation after reports of the scandal finally penetrated the mainstream news.

The Pentagon did not respond to TAC’s inquiries about charges that local contractors who deliver supplies and equipment to remote NATO bases in Afghanistan are charging Western governments “protection money” to pay off the Taliban, or Taliban-connected middlemen, to protect convoys along dangerous overland supply routes. Yet a growing consensus supports a fearsome prospect: U.S. taxpayers are funding the enemy. [continued…]

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US accepts Hamid Karzai as Afghan leader despite poll fraud claims

US accepts Hamid Karzai as Afghan leader despite poll fraud claims
By Giles Whittell, The Times, September 29, 2009

The White House has ended weeks of hesitation over how to respond to the Afghan election by accepting President Karzai as the winner despite evidence that up to 20 per cent of ballots cast may have been fraudulent.

Abandoning its previous policy of not prejudging investigations of vote rigging, the Obama Administration has conceded that Mr Karzai will be President for another five years on the basis that even if he were forced into a second round of voting he would almost certainly win it.

The decision will increase pressure on President Obama to justify further US troop deployments to Afghanistan to prop up a regime now regarded as systemically corrupt. [continued…]

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U.S. commander in Afghanistan submits request for more troops

U.S. commander in Afghanistan submits request for more troops
By Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy, September 25, 2009

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, hand-delivered his request for as many as 45,000 more troops to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Germany Friday and made his case for why he needs more forces to fight an increasingly unpopular war.

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, traveled to Ramstein Air Base in Germany to meet with McChrystal and get “a better understanding of the pending resource requirement,” a Pentagon official told McClatchy. The official wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wouldn’t share McChrystal’s troop request with anyone until the administration completes its review of the situation in Afghanistan. Only then will other top Pentagon officials review the request and make comments before submitting it to the White House for President Barack Obama to consider, he said. [continued…]


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Obama is considering strategy shift in Afghan war

Obama is considering strategy shift in Afghan war
By Peter Baker and Ellisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, September 23, 2009

President Obama is exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan, including a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday.

The options under review are part of what administration officials described as a wholesale reconsideration of a strategy the president announced with fanfare just six months ago. Two new intelligence reports are being conducted to evaluate Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials said.

The sweeping reassessment has been prompted by deteriorating conditions on the ground, the messy and still unsettled outcome of the Afghan elections and a dire report by Mr. Obama’s new commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal. Aides said the president wanted to examine whether the strategy he unveiled in March was still the best approach and whether it could work with the extra combat forces General McChrystal wants. [continued…]

More U.S. troops to Afghanistan? Obama’s caught in a vise
By Steven Thomma, Jonathan S. Landay and David Lightman, McClatchy, September 21, 2009

With the military and Republicans publicly pressuring him to send more troops to Afghanistan soon and his own administration now deeply divided about how to proceed there, the eight-year war against al Qaida and the Taliban has become an increasingly urgent policy and political dilemma for President Barack Obama.

He can escalate an unpopular and open-ended war and risk a backlash from his liberal base or refuse his commanders and risk being blamed for a military loss that could tar him and his party as weak on national security.

Obama’s decision could be a defining moment of his presidency, and it will reveal much about how he leads. Friends and enemies around the world will be watching — and judging — whether he’s firmly in charge or whether he instinctively seeks some safe middle ground. [continued…]

It’s not about the troops
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, September 22, 2009

The push is on for President Barack Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan, perhaps as many as 40,000 more. Boxing in Obama was almost certainly the aim of whoever gave the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward a copy of the 66-page internal memo by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Most of the news stories about the memo have emphasized its conclusion that, without more U.S. troops, the war will probably be lost to the Taliban. But the memo (reprinted in full on the Post’s Web site) says many other things, too. In fact, high up in his report, McChrystal emphasizes that focusing only on troop requirements “misses the point entirely.”

The point that this focus misses, the general writes, is that this is a war against insurgencies and therefore requires “a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign,” in which the main objective is not so much to destroy the enemy but rather to protect the Afghan people—to provide them with security so that the Afghan government can deliver basic services. [continued…]

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McChrystal: more forces or ‘mission failure’

McChrystal: more forces or ‘mission failure’
By Bob Woodward, Washington Post, September 21, 2009

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict “will likely result in failure,” according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.

McChrystal concludes the document’s five-page Commander’s Summary on a note of muted optimism: “While the situation is serious, success is still achievable.”

But he repeatedly warns that without more forces and the rapid implementation of a genuine counterinsurgency strategy, defeat is likely. McChrystal describes an Afghan government riddled with corruption and an international force undermined by tactics that alienate civilians. [continued…]

Changes have Obama rethinking war strategy
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, September 21, 2009

From his headquarters in Kabul, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal sees one clear path to achieve President Obama’s core goal of preventing al-Qaeda from reestablishing havens in Afghanistan: “Success,” he writes in his assessment, “demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign.”

Inside the White House, the way forward in Afghanistan is no longer so clear.

Although Obama endorsed a strategy document in March that called for “executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy,” there have been significant changes in Afghanistan and Washington since then. A disputed presidential election, an erosion in support for the war effort among Democrats in Congress and the American public, and a sharp increase in U.S. casualties have prompted the president and his top advisers to reexamine their assumptions about the U.S. role in defeating the Taliban insurgency.

Instead of debating whether to give McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, more troops, the discussion in the White House is now focused on whether, after eight years of war, the United States should vastly expand counterinsurgency efforts along the lines he has proposed — which involve an intensive program to improve security and governance in key population centers — or whether it should begin shifting its approach away from such initiatives and simply target leaders of terrorist groups who try to return to Afghanistan. [continued…]

Meet the Afghan Army
By Ann Jones, TomDispatch, September 20, 2009

The big Afghanistan debate in Washington is not over whether more troops are needed, but just who they should be: Americans or Afghans — Us or Them. Having just spent time in Afghanistan seeing how things stand, I wouldn’t bet on Them.

Frankly, I wouldn’t bet on Us either. In eight years, American troops have worn out their welcome. Their very presence now incites opposition, but that’s another story. It’s Them — the Afghans — I want to talk about.

Afghans are Afghans. They have their own history, their own culture, their own habitual ways of thinking and behaving, all complicated by a modern experience of decades of war, displacement, abject poverty, and incessant meddling by foreign governments near and far — of which the United States has been the most powerful and persistent. Afghans do not think or act like Americans. Yet Americans in power refuse to grasp that inconvenient point. [continued…]

Afghan election woes raise Taliban’s stock
By Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, September 21, 2009

The big winner in the fraud-ridden, never-ending Afghanistan elections is turning out to be a party not even on the ballot: the Taliban.

A stream of revelations about systematic cheating during last month’s vote has given the Taliban fresh ammunition in their propaganda campaign to portray President Hamid Karzai’s administration as hopelessly corrupt. Infighting among U.S., U.N. and European diplomats over whether to accept the results with Karzai the winner or force a new round of voting has also fed the Taliban line that the government in Kabul is merely a puppet of foreign powers.

Mohammad Omar, the Taliban’s reclusive leader, broke his silence Saturday to denounce “the so-called elections which were fraught with fraud and lies and which were categorically rejected by the people.”

In a statement released on the Internet to mark the end of Ramadan, Omar also railed against what he called “the rampant corruption in the surrogate Kabul administration, the embezzlement, drug trafficking, the existence of mafia networks, the tyranny and high-handedness of the warlords,” according to a translation by the NEFA Foundation, a terrorism research group. [continued…]

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The nightmare scenario in Afghanistan

The nightmare scenario in Afghanistan
By William Maley, Marvin G. Weinbaum and Rani D. Mullen, Foreign Policy, September 18, 2009

This week, the most senior U.S. official working with the United Nations in Afghanistan went on “leave” out of frustration over the lack of response to fraud in the country’s presidential election. The head of the European Union’s election-monitoring commission said that as many as one-third of the votes President Hamid Karzai received were “suspect” and should be investigated. And Afghans themselves continue to criticize not just the controversial election, but also the government’s response to it. If this continues, it will fatally undermine the next Afghan government and the efforts of its international supporters. Steps should be taken immediately to avert a potentially violent legitimacy crisis.

We observed Afghanistan’s Aug. 20 presidential and provincial council elections in Kabul. Among us we have almost seven decades of experience in following Afghan politics, and we feel thoroughly alarmed by the lack of consensus on how to resolve the brewing crisis over the disputed elections. It is by now clear that there took place an industrial-scale effort to distort the election results and defraud the Afghan people. Should this effort succeed, the chance of the Barack Obama administration’s stabilizing Afghanistan and the broader region will be grim indeed. No one should be in any doubt as to the gravity and explosiveness of the situation. [continued…]

CIA expanding presence in Afghanistan
By Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times, September 20, 2009

The CIA is deploying teams of spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives to Afghanistan, part of a broad intelligence “surge” that will make its station there among the largest in the agency’s history, U.S. officials say.

When complete, the CIA’s presence in the country is expected to rival the size of its massive stations in Iraq and Vietnam at the height of those wars. Precise numbers are classified, but one U.S. official said the agency already has nearly 700 employees in Afghanistan.

The influx parallels the U.S. military expansion and comes as the nation’s spy services are under pressure from Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal to improve intelligence on the Taliban and find ways to reverse a series of unsettling trends. [continued…]

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Afghanistan: Why efforts to disarm the Taliban have failed

Afghanistan: Why efforts to disarm the Taliban have failed
By Tim McGirk, Time, September 18, 2009

Why has it been nearly impossible to coax Taliban fighters into turning in their weapons and cooperating with the Afghan government? The story of Mullah A stands as an all-too-common example.

A few years back, the Taliban commander thought his personal war with the Americans was over when he surrendered his Toyota Land Cruiser, a stack of rocket-propelled grenades and his personal weapons to the police chief in Kandahar. Mullah A, who prefers not to be identified, was exhausted. In late 2001, when U.S.-backed forces were pushing into northern Afghanistan, the commander saw most of his men wiped out by heavy American bombardment. He was one of the few survivors, and he fled south, back home to Kandahar, convinced that his fighting days had come to an end.

As part of the surrender, Kandahar’s police chief gave Mullah A a letter of protection. But the would-be ex-guerrilla fighter soon realized the paper was worthless. Like so many other Taliban who tried to lay down arms, the commander had a complex history, interwoven with tribal rivalries and greed. The CIA was offering $100,000 for the return of Stinger antiaircraft missiles, and the local intelligence chief, who belongs to the enemy Achakzai tribe (allied to President Hamid Karzai’s Popalzai tribe), was convinced that he could make good money if he shook down Mullah A to see if he was holding back a few Stingers. “I told him I didn’t have any,” Mullah A informed TIME by telephone. That resulted, the Taliban commander alleges, in the Achakzai intelligence chief arresting and torturing Mullah A’s brother and cousin. “My cousin was strangled to death,” the commander says. [continued…]

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Obama’s Afghanistan blind spot

Obama’s Afghanistan blind spot
By Kenneth Weisbrode, World Politics Review, September 16, 2009

On the ground, no doubt, U.S. and NATO forces are doing their best to implement a policy of limited liability in Afghanistan — meant to buy enough time for a predictable stalemate to emerge. We already know what that will look like: a non-Taliban-dominated government with friendly relations with its Pakistani neighbor. So long as Pakistan doesn’t collapse and the regime in Kabul is not nominally led by the Taliban or a similar Islamist regime opposed to the West, we can claim success after a decent interval.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this outcome. It approximates the post-Soviet situation in the country until the Taliban took control in the late 1990s. But for nearly all of that post-Soviet period, Afghanistan was embroiled in civil war among various factions, nearly all of them backed by outside powers — not simply Pakistan but also Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Saudi Arabia, and several others.

All of Afghanistan’s neighbors have a history of interfering in Afghanistan because they fear that militants not kept busy there will eventually wreak havoc within their own borders. At the same time, all have been unwilling to tolerate the “victory” of a single Afghan contender because of deep concerns about the aims of rival backers. The fears stem from internal conflicts in all of the neighboring countries, many of which, in turn, are linked to Afghanistan.

The specter of this “international civil war” haunts those dealing with Afghanistan today. There is only one way to prevent it besides an indefinitely long and costly military occupation: an agreement among neighboring powers to respect Afghanistan’s neutrality and to lend greater political assistance to U.S. and NATO efforts on the ground. It may not be sufficient to stabilizing Afghanistan, but it is necessary. [continued…]

Obama says he won’t rush Afghanistan troop decision
By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times, September 17, 2009

On a day when his administration outlined ambitious goals for Afghanistan and Pakistan, President Obama also moved Wednesday to call a timeout in the escalating national debate over a possible troop increase in Afghanistan.

Obama insisted he would not be rushed in deciding whether to send more troops — an action favored by top military leaders but questioned by a growing number of Democrats — saying that additional time is needed to refine strategy and assess needs.

Yet the lofty goals set by the White House — such as promoting an Afghan government that can combat extremism and corruption while supporting human rights — represent difficult, time-consuming work likely to require additional military and nonmilitary commitments at a time of flagging support from Obama’s wary political base. [continued…]

NATO says U.S. airstrike in Kunduz killed 30 civilians
By Yochi J Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2009

NATO investigators believe that 30 civilians were killed in a controversial U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan’s Kunduz province, a preliminary finding that could spark new pressure for disciplinary actions against the German and American personnel involved in the attack.

A team of military officers led by Canadian Maj. Gen. C.S. Sullivan spent more than a week probing the Sept. 4 bombing, which took place after a German commander in Kunduz ordered an airstrike on two hijacked fuel trucks that he feared would be used in a suicide attack against his troops.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization investigators believe roughly 100 people were killed in the resulting strike, including approximately 70 militants, according to people familiar with the matter. A separate Afghan government probe reached roughly the same conclusions about the militant and civilian death tolls, these people said. [continued…]

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Who’s afraid of a terrorist haven?

Who’s afraid of a terrorist haven?
By Paul R. Pillar, Washington Post, September 16, 2009

Rationales for maintaining the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan are varied and complex, but they all center on one key tenet: that Afghanistan must not be allowed to again become a haven for terrorist groups, especially al-Qaeda. Debate about Afghanistan has raised reasons to question that tenet, one of which is that the top al-Qaeda leadership is not even in Afghanistan, having decamped to Pakistan years ago. Another is that terrorists intent on establishing a haven can choose among several unstable countries besides Afghanistan, and U.S. forces cannot secure them all.

The debate has largely overlooked a more basic question: How important to terrorist groups is any physical haven? More to the point: How much does a haven affect the danger of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, especially the U.S. homeland? The answer to the second question is: not nearly as much as unstated assumptions underlying the current debate seem to suppose. When a group has a haven, it will use it for such purposes as basic training of recruits. But the operations most important to future terrorist attacks do not need such a home, and few recruits are required for even very deadly terrorism. Consider: The preparations most important to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took place not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States.

In the past couple of decades, international terrorist groups have thrived by exploiting globalization and information technology, which has lessened their dependence on physical havens.

By utilizing networks such as the Internet, terrorists’ organizations have become more network-like, not beholden to any one headquarters. A significant jihadist terrorist threat to the United States persists, but that does not mean it will consist of attacks instigated and commanded from a South Asian haven, or that it will require a haven at all. Al-Qaeda’s role in that threat is now less one of commander than of ideological lodestar, and for that role a haven is almost meaningless. [continued…]

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Afghanistan’s other front

Afghanistan’s other front
By Joseph Kearns Goodwin, New York Times, September 16, 2009

Allegations of ballot-stuffing in the presidential election in Afghanistan last month are now so widespread that a recount is necessary, and perhaps even a runoff. Yet this electoral chicanery pales in comparison to the systemic, day-to-day corruption within the administration of President Hamid Karzai, who has claimed victory in the election. Without a concerted campaign to fight this pervasive venality, all our efforts there, including the sending of additional troops, will be in vain.

I have just returned from Afghanistan, where I spent seven months as a special adviser to NATO’s director of communications. On listening tours across the country, we left behind the official procession of armored S.U.V.’s, bristling guns and imposing flak jackets that too often encumber coalition forces when they arrive in local villages. Dressed in civilian clothes and driven in ordinary cars, we were able to move around in a manner less likely to intimidate and more likely to elicit candor.

The recurring complaint I heard from Afghans centered on the untenable encroachment of government corruption into their daily lives — the homeowner who has to pay a bribe to get connected to the sewage system, the defendant who tenders payment to a judge for a favorable verdict. People were so incensed with the current government’s misdeeds that I often heard the disturbing refrain: “If Karzai is re-elected, then I am going to join the Taliban.” [continued…]

Can we bribe our way to victory?
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, September 15, 2009

…the unlikely figure of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., raised the key issue of the day. He began his questioning of Adm. Mullen by asking whether the Taliban had any tanks. No, Mullen replied. Graham then asked how many airplanes they have. None, the admiral answered, perhaps wondering where this line of inquiry was going.

Then Graham zeroed in. If that’s the case, he asked, how is it that the Taliban are gaining ground? The problem isn’t the Taliban, it’s the Afghan government, isn’t that right?

Mullen agreed. The problem, he said, “is clearly the lack of legitimacy of the government.”

Graham pushed the matter. “We could send a million troops, and that wouldn’t restore legitimacy in the government?” he asked.

Mullen replied, “That is correct.”

A few minutes later, under questioning from Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Mullen elaborated: “The Afghan government needs to have some legitimacy in the eyes of the people. The core issue is the corruption. … It’s been a way of life for some time, and it’s just got to change. That threat is every bit as significant as the Taliban.” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Fred Kaplan’s proposal — that the US government can “legitimize” an Afghan government by heavily bribing its officials — is, I imagine he would say, “counter-intuitive”. I’d call it stupid. It presupposes that everyone is bribable — everyone has their price. That certainly applies to those who are already corrupt, but I see no reason to view all Afghans as corruptable. On the contrary, those who have the strongest allegiance to their country or their tribe are least likely to have any interest in doing the bidding of an American paymaster.

Maybe the real solution requires that the Americans have the humility to accept that homegrown solutions are ultimately the only ones that take root.

Call for an Afghan surge
By Yochi J Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2009

America’s top military officer endorsed sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, a shift in Pentagon rhetoric that heralds a potential deepening of involvement in the Afghan war despite flagging support from the public and top Democrats in Congress. [continued…]

Afghan recount presents huge task
By Richard A Oppel Jr and Sangar Rahimi, New York Times, September 16, 2009

One out of every seven ballots in last month’s Afghan presidential elections — and possibly many more — will be examined as part of a huge recount and fraud audit that may force the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, into a runoff, Afghan election officials said Tuesday.

A United Nations-backed commission serving as the ultimate arbiter of the election ordered the recount from around 10 percent of the country’s polling stations because of suspected fraud, the head of the panel said Tuesday, though the number of actual votes covered by the order is much higher, numbers from a top Afghan election official showed.

The Aug. 20 ballot was racked by egregious voting fraud and ballot stuffing, international and Afghan election observers have said, throwing Afghanistan into an electoral crisis even as the Taliban gains ground in the rugged countryside. [continued…]

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Withdrawal without winning?

Withdrawal without winning?
By Robert Jervis, Foreign Policy, September 14, 2009

Most discussion about Afghanistan has concentrated on whether and how we can defeat the Taliban. Less attention has been paid to the probable consequences of a withdrawal without winning, an option toward which I incline. What is most striking is not that what I take to be the majority view is wrong, but that it has not been adequately defended. This is especially important because the U.S.has embarked on a war that will require great effort with prospects that are uncertain at best. Furthermore, it appears that Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan was less the product of careful analysis than of the political need to find a “tough” pair to his attacks on the war in Iraq during the presidential campaign. It similarly appears that in the months since his election he has devoted much more attention to how to wage the war than to whether we need to wage it.

The claim that this is a “necessary war” invokes two main claims and one subsidiary one. The strongest argument is that we have to fight them there so that we don’t have to fight them here. The fact that Bush said this about Iraq does not make it wrong, and as in Iraq, it matters what we mean by “them.” Presumably if we withdrew the Taliban would take over much of southern and eastern Afghanistan.This would be terrible for the inhabitants, but would it harm us? I don’t think anyone believes that the Taliban would launch attacks against us or our allies, so that the menace is not a direct one.

Instead, the fear is of a repetition of the pre-2001 situation in which al Qaeda would have bases that would facilitate attacks. Obviously,this is a danger, but how great a one? The Taliban would not want to repeat what happened after 2001, and so I do not think one can simply assume that Taliban control would automatically lead to al Qaeda control. Nor is Afghanistan the only country that might permit an al Qaeda presence. Somalia is perhaps as troublesome, and yet no one calls for the U.S.to re-intervene there. Furthermore, al Qaeda has some sort of base of operations in Pakistan now (and is not likely to lose it even in the best outcome across the border); how much worse would it be if we withdrew? Continue reading →

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UN chief Peter Galbraith is removed in Afghanistan poll clash

UN chief Peter Galbraith is removed in Afghanistan poll clash
By James Bone, Jerome Starkey and Tom Coghlan, The Times, September 15, 2009

America’s top diplomat at the United Nations mission in Afghanistan has been ordered out of the country after a row with his boss over how to respond to last month’s fraud-riddled presidential elections, it has been alleged.

The alleged quarrel is threatening to spark a mutiny within the UN mission. At least a dozen senior staff are backing the American, Peter Galbraith, in the dispute with his Norwegian superior, Kai Eide.

Mr Galbraith, a close friend of the US special envoy Richard Holbrooke, left for Boston on Sunday after a heated meeting with Afghan election officials. His “pointed” questions to the Independent Election Commission (IEC) were evidence of a much tougher line towards the Afghan authorities than the “softly-softly” approach of Mr Eide, who heads the UN mission to Kabul.

“The relationship between Kai and Peter has completely broken down,” said a diplomat in Kabul. “Peter has left the country. The official line is that he’s on a three-week mission to New York. But Kai just turned round to Peter and said, ‘I want you out’.” [continued…]

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A somber warning on Afghanistan

A somber warning on Afghanistan
By Alison Small, New York Times, September 14, 2009

Western powers now in Afghanistan run the risk of suffering the fate of the Soviet Union there if they cannot halt the growing insurgency and an Afghan perception that they are foreign invaders, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter.

In a speech opening a weekend gathering of military and foreign policy experts, Mr. Brzezinski, who was national security adviser when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, endorsed a British and German call, backed by France, for a new international conference on the country. He also set the tone for a weekend of somber assessments of the situation.

He noted that it took about 300 U.S. Special Forces — fighting with Northern Alliance troops — to overthrow Taliban rule after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Now, however, with about 100,000 U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan, those forces are increasingly perceived as foreign invaders, much as the Soviet troops were from the start, Mr. Brzezinski said. [continued…]

In Kandahar, a Taliban on the rise
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post, September 14, 2009

The slow and quiet fall of Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city, poses a complex new challenge for the NATO effort to stabilize Afghanistan. It is factoring prominently into discussions between Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the overall U.S. and NATO commander, and his advisers about how many more troops to seek from Washington.

“Kandahar is at the top of the list,” one senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan said. “We simply do not have enough resources to address the challenges there.”

Kandahar in many ways is a microcosm of the challenges the United States faces in stabilizing Afghanistan. The city is filled with ineffective government officials and police officers whom the governor calls looters and kidnappers. Unemployment is rampant. Municipal services are nonexistent. Reconstruction projects have not changed many lives. A lack of NATO forces allowed militants free rein. [continued…]

Are US taxpayers funding the Taliban?
By Jean MacKenzie, GlobalPost, September 2, 2009

The United States Agency for International Development has opened an investigation into allegations that its funds for road and bridge construction in Afghanistan are ending up in the hands of the Taliban, through a protection racket for contractors.

And House Foreign Affairs Committee member, Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) vowed to hold hearings on the issue in the fall, saying: “The idea that American taxpayer dollars are ending up with the Taliban is a case for grave concern.”

U.S. officials confirmed that the preliminary investigation and the proposed hearings were sparked by a GlobalPost special report on the funding of the Taliban last month that uncovered a process that has been an open secret in Afghanistan for years among those in international aid organizations.

The report exposed that the Taliban takes a percentage of the billions of dollars in aid from U.S. and other international coalition members that goes to large organizations and their subcontractors for development projects, in exchange for protection in remote areas controlled by the insurgency. [continued…]

McChrystal: No major al-Qaida signs in Afghanistan
AP, September 11, 2009

The top commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan said Friday he sees no signs of a major al-Qaida presence in the country, but says the terror group still maintains close links to insurgents. [continued…]

Bin Laden calls Obama ‘powerless’ in Afghan war
AP, September 14, 2009

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden described President Barack Obama as “powerless” to stop the war in Afghanistan and threatened to step up guerrilla warfare there in a new audiotape released to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

In the 11-minute tape, addressed to the American people, bin Laden said Obama is only following the warlike policies of his predecessor George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and he urged Americans to “liberate” themselves from the influence of “neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby.”

The tape was posted on Islamic militant Web sites two days after the eighth anniversary of the 2001 suicide plane hijackings. The terror leader usually addresses Americans in a message timed around the date of the attacks, which sparked the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan the same year, and then in Iraq two years later.

Bin Laden said Americans had failed to understand that al-Qaida carried out the attacks in retaliation for U.S. support for Israel. If America reconsiders its alliance with the Jewish state, al-Qaida will respond on “sound and just bases.” [continued…]

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