TNI: Blind In Kabul

October 21, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afpak, Nixon Center, The National Interest | Leave a Comment 

Over at The Nixon Center’s National Interest, editors note — in their daily editorial roundup — that some pundits see positive gains in the Afpak theater, but others argue that the White House has no strategy:

On Tuesday afternoon, Afghan President Hamid Karzai agreed to hold a runoff presidential election after a UN commission revealed massive fraud in the initial August poll. The Wall Street Journal praises Afghanistan in an editorial, noting that the country “demonstrated political maturity” by opting to resolve the disputed election in a democratic, peaceful fashion. There is more good news across the Durand Line, where our fair-weather allies in Pakistan have just launched an offensive against Islamist militants in the wild frontier regions straddling the border with Afghanistan. The Journal rightly points out that these are both sunny developments in an otherwise dismal part of the world. The new Afghan elections offer a fresh chance for Karzai (or his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah) to gain legitimacy, “as much in the U.S. as in Afghanistan.” And the new offensive in Pakistan is “an early litmus test” for Islamabad’s reliability as an ally in the war on terror.

All of these positive developments have come without major U.S. backing, and in spite of “President Obama’s all too public second thoughts over the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan.” Although Obama’s “advisers and generals deserve credit for helping to turn events around in the Afpak theater,” we’re leaving our friends in the region in the lurch by waffling in our commitments. They deserve better.

The New York Times thinks the Journal’s view paints an overly rosy picture of our Afghan friends. In an editorial, the Grey Lady notes that “Before Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, acceded to a runoff election on Tuesday, you could almost hear his arm being twisted. And it took a lot of top-level talent to do it.” Secretary Clinton, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner all pressured Karzai to agree to the new poll. And even then, “it took a five day marathon of negotiations with Senator John Kerry . . . to get Mr. Karzai to do what was necessary.” So the idea of the Afghan president as a willing and helpful partner is rather dubious.

The election itself will take even more effort to pull off, as it is only three weeks away. Remember what a security disaster the first one was? A repeat may be in the works. And if Karzai wins (which is likely), he won’t suddenly turn into the legitimate savior of Afghanistan. He’ll still be viewed as a warlord enabler who stays in power through American protection, unless he roots out corruption and delivers “basic services and security” to his people.

In short, the Times believes the White House has bungled its response to the political side of the Afghan crisis. Blaming the Bush administration can only work for so long, especially when the initial August election took place eight months into Obama’s tenure. The president “and his aides should have taken a lot more care to ensure that Mr. Karzai and his challengers understood that . . . wholesale fraud would be a disaster—in Afghanistan and the United States, where support for the war is evaporating.” Washington has been abuzz with high-profile debate about military policy. Now it needs to “devote at least as much attention to coming up with an effective political strategy” for Afghanistan.

Winning Afghanistan By Thinking About Vietnam

October 19, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afpak, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

Lewis Sorley, author of A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam, the book now circulating around the Pentagon, has a new op-ed in The New York Times that provides a comprehensive approach to winning the peace in Afghanistan based on the lessons learned from Vietnam:

AS President Obama and his advisers contemplate a new course for Afghanistan, many commentators are suggesting analogies with earlier conflicts, particularly the war in Vietnam. Such comparisons can be useful, but only if the characterizations of earlier wars are accurate and lessons are appropriately applied.

Vietnam is particularly tricky. While avoiding the missteps made there is of course a priority, few seem aware of the many successful changes in strategy undertaken in the later years of the conflict. The credit for those accomplishments goes in large part to three men: Ellsworth Bunker, who became the American ambassador to South Vietnam in 1967; William Colby, the C.I.A. officer in charge of rural “pacification” efforts; and Gen. Creighton Abrams, who became the top American commander there in 1968.

A closer look at key aspects of how these men rethought their war may prove instructive to those considering our options in Afghanistan today.

Continue reading at The New York Times.

Obama’s War

October 14, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Afpak | 1 Comment 

The first of the Frontline series on the Afghan War is now on the PBS website. Rife with new battlefield footage, spectacular scenes from the rugged Central Asian country, and interviews with troops and military experts, it details the tasks and complications of conducting a modern counterinsurgency:

Laughing Matters

October 11, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Afpak, Barack Obama, Comedy, History, Humor, Obama administration | 2 Comments 

On Thursday the Daily Show turned its attention to the news about Afghanistan.  Jon Stewart’s deconstruction of Speaker Pelosi’s body language is inspired.  And the profile of General McChrystal —”he’s as strong as a grizzly bear and better at catching salmon; his mother was a yeti and his father a ‘68 Camaro”— covers some serious ground.

And this week’s issue of Time features a Fun with Photoshop Gallery of “Obama’s Other Awards” (in addition to his Heisman Trophy already noted here) — including an MTV Music Video Award, a Pulitzer Prize, an Oscar, and a Cy Young Award:

The Lesson From “A Better War”

October 8, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Afpak, Book Review, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

Fred Barnes is also promoting Sorley’s A Better War. He reviewed it ten years ago in The Weekly Standard, and now writes why it is more important than Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons In Disaster:

Sorley’s book is relevant because it points out what actually happened in Vietnam: by employing what we now call a counter-insurgency strategy, American forces had actually won the war by 1970, only to toss it away later by abandoning the South Vietnamese government. That strategy, similar to what has been pursued successfully in Iraq with the “surge,” replaced the failed search-and-destroy effort of General William Westmoreland. Despite this history, search-and-destroy, which had failed in Iraq, is what Vice President Biden and other Democrats are urging in Afghanistan. They refer to it today as counter-terrorism.

The hero in Vietnam was General Creighton Abrams. He concluded that concentrating on killing enemy soldiers, as Westmoreland had, was a losing strategy. Under Abrams, “the object was not destruction but control, and in this case particularly control of the population.” It worked. “There came a time when the war was won,” Sorley writes. “The fighting wasn’t over but the war was won.”

and

A Better War is far more timely and applicable to Afghanistan in 2009 than is Lessons in Disaster, which deals with military pressure on the White House to escalate the American effort in Vietnam in 1965. We know more now than the generals or the politicians did then about what works militarily and what doesn’t. They were stumbling in the dark.

Since the 1960s, two things have happened. As Sorley argues cogently, counter-insurgency worked in Vietnam after counter-terrorism failed. In Iraq, we experienced a rerun of that scenario.

So let’s review the bidding in the current debate on Afghanistan. Biden and many Democrats, reportedly including White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, want the president to adopt a strategy that failed twice and, so far as I know, has never led to success. Gen. McChrystal and Republicans, along with Senator Joe Lieberman and a few other Democrats, are in favor of a strategy that has twice proven to be successful.

Nixon, The War On Drugs, Russia, And Afpak

September 28, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Afpak, Nixon Center, Richard Nixon, Russia | 1 Comment 

Russia’s Drug Czar, Victor Ivanov, was at the Nixon Center last week to discuss the harrowing nature of the drug-trade in Afghanistan. A reality — he contends –that could lead to the rise of a narco-state and further threaten global stability:

According to Ivanov, Russia is the “main victim” of Afghanistan’s drug trafficking, with ninety percent of its addicts using Afghan opiates. There is a growing number of young users in the country, and Afghanistan’s stockpile of heroin – enough to produce over one trillion doses – threatens generations to come. But though Russia may feel the brunt of the effects of the drug trade, it “carries a fundamental threat to the whole world,” including the United States. Heroin profits – about 100 billion dollars each year – support corruption and organized crime, create political destabilization, destroy young democracies (such as Afghanistan itself), and fund terrorism.

For Ivanov, the venue of the Nixon Center was of no coincidence as RN knew the devastating impacts of the drug trade, and was the first to wage war on it forty-years ago this year:

Two weeks ago at the meeting of the Russian Federation’s Security Council, its Chairman, President Dmitry Medvedev, charted out the main vector of the national antidrug policy. While increasing the severity of punishment for drug lords for wholesale trafficking, it is necessary to launch an unconditioned humanization and democratization of the state’s policies towards drug addicts, who are, after all, no more than ill people.

Along with that, being here, at the Nixon Center, is good reason to recall that the “War on Drugs” was declared exactly 40 years ago by President Richard Nixon. And that decision was certainly no coincidence.

In 1969 American society faced a massive growth of not only cocaine and marijuana consumption, which entered the United States across the border with Mexico, but also of heroin consumption, which gushed into the country from Indo-China as a consequence of the Vietnam War.

As a result, in five years since 1969, the number of heroin addicts in America increased tenfold. As American newspapers wrote then, “the disgusting war came back to our homes as a boomerang”.

The Taleban, Pakistan, And Insecurity Elsewhere

July 16, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afpak | Leave a Comment 

Dave Kilcullen, a very influential adviser to General David Petraeus, writes in the British Spectator that between Pakistan and Afghanistan resides the largest tribal ethnic group (Pashtuns), a people without a state who comprise among the greatest portion of the world’s immigrant population:

Afghanistan has roughly 30 million inhabitants; Pakistan’s population and territory are more than five times larger. Two thirds of the Pashtun ethnic group, the world’s largest tribal society — one of the biggest nations without its own state and the main recruiting base for the Taleban — are in Pakistan not Afghanistan. The senior leadership of al-Qa’eda, the Afghan Taleban, and the other major insurgent factions are in safe havens in Pakistan. The Pakistani version of the Taleban has defeated the army in every major campaign since 2001, resulting in a series of face-saving ‘peace’ deals that have ceded huge swaths of territory and population to extremist control. There have been dozens of terrorist attacks within Pakistan over the past several years, and there has been a Pakistani connection in many of the most serious international terrorist attacks over the same period. The Pakistani diaspora stretches worldwide, so that events in Pakistan affect substantial immigrant populations in many parts of the world. Militancy or insecurity in Pakistan can create insecurity elsewhere.

Pakistan has more than 100 nuclear weapons, an army larger than that of the United States, an economy that was nearing collapse before the IMF bailout of late 2008 and is still in bad shape, and a weak government whose civilian leaders have proven unable to control their own national security establishment. Military institutions like the intelligence service, ISI, and some other security organisations, have complex and continuing ties to militant organisations, many of which they themselves created as proxies in the Soviet-Afghan war or as unconventional counterweights to Indian regional hegemony. Militant groups include the Afghan Taleban, religious extremist organisations, and groups like the Haqqani network centred on Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas — a thorny hedge of mountain peaks and unsubdued tribes that has never been governed by outsiders, even since before British India extended its imperial grasp to what is now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in the 1840s.

Riedel: Armageddon In Islamabad

July 16, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afpak, Nixon Center, The National Interest | 3 Comments 

Writing at The National Interest, former CIA officer Bruce Riedel discusses the perilous political dynamic in Pakistan and the specter of a Taliban takeover:

The growing strength of the Taliban in Pakistan has raised the serious possibility of a jihadist takeover of the country. Even with the army’s reluctant efforts in areas like the Swat Valley and sporadic popular revulsion with Taliban violence, at heart the country is unstable. A jihadist victory is neither imminent nor inevitable, but it is now a real possibility in the foreseeable future. This essay presumes (though does not predict) an Islamic-militant victory in Pakistan, examining how the country’s creation of and collusion with extremist groups has left Islamabad vulnerable to an Islamist coup.

THE ORIGINS of today’s crisis of course lie in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The modern global jihad began in the Afghan refugee camps of Pakistan’s frontier lands along the one-thousand-five-hundred-mile border between the two countries. Volunteers from across the Islamic world came to fight with the Afghans. According to a senior Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) commander at the time, the ISI trained eighty thousand fighters from forty-three countries

Reidel discussed his column with TNI editor Justine Rosenthal:

Return To Swat

July 13, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afpak | Leave a Comment 

When the Pakistani military stepped up, the Taliban and their brutal governance withered away, allowing refugees to return to the lush valley and former resort locale.

Moment Of Truth In Pakistan

June 11, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Afpak | Leave a Comment 

A development that American, Afghani, and Pakistani forces should exploit:

There are no scientific polls, but in informal interviews by The Associated Press with more than three dozen Pakistanis across the country Wednesday and Thursday, not a single person expressed sympathy or allegiance toward the Taliban. The most common answer was the militants should be hunted down and killed.

Many people told the AP they used to support the Taliban but no longer do so. The finding is supported by those of Pakistani analysts and commentators, who say they detect a similar shift in public opinion recently against the Taliban.

Certainly, the militants retain some support, particularly in the lawless tribal regions bordering Afghanistan that the Taliban and al-Qaida have used as sanctuary. The extremists would likely retreat to these areas if they continue to suffer defeats elsewhere.

But the change in public mood is empowering the army in its offensive against the militants — a campaign supported by the Obama administration, which believes security in Pakistan is vital to defeating the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan.

Now the army says it has the Taliban on the run, helped by tips from residents in villages under fire. It’s quite a change from several months ago, when the Taliban was on the march within 60 miles of the capital, Islamabad, and there was talk of the entire country falling to the militants.

“Like all of us, I was welcoming the Taliban in the beginning,” said Abdul Jabbar Khan, a 52-year-old shopkeeper. Khan now lives with eight family members in a relief camp in Mardan, along the northwest border with Afghanistan. They said they were forced from their home by fighting in Mingora, Swat’s biggest town.

“When Maulana Fazlullah started giving sermons on the radio, he was talking about good things — heaven and Islamic teachings,” Khan said, referring to the Taliban leader in Swat.

“Now we have the result,” he continued. “It is very miserable, painful for all of us. We had a good life there. We had a good home and everything. Now we are begging for even daily meals. These people are responsible. They betrayed us and played with our religious emotions.”

Drone Strikes Revisited

June 1, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afpak, Military | 3 Comments 

Thomas Ricks contends that the collateral prone predator drone strikes will end in conjunction with the rise of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former JSOC (Joint Special Operatation Command) commander in Iraq, Saddam captor, Zarqawi executioner, and overall expert in head-hunting.

General Myers: We Need To Use All Elements Of National Power

May 22, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Afpak, Military, National Security | 3 Comments 

The Former Chairman of The Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General Richard B. Myers was at the Nixon Library Wednesday to discuss his new book Eyes On The Horizon: Serving On The Front Lines Of National Security. He also gave us some time for an exclusive interview that TNN readers will find interesting; among other items, the General discusses the “global insurgency” waged against America and its allies, the strategies we need to apply to fight it, and the ethical questions surrounding them, including a take on the current controversy over interrogation and detainment policy:

Zal As Master Of Karzai

May 20, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Afpak | Leave a Comment 

M K Bhadrakumar from the Asia Times reports that the Obama administration wants to put former Bush administration official (former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations) and Afghanistan native Zalmay Khalizad in Kabul’s power structure to bypass Hamid Karzai’s incompetency and get the ball rolling in the ‘graveyard’:

So, the “smart” thing, which is the hallmark of the Obama administration, is to let Karzai be in his presidential robe, to pamper his vanity while neatly sidestepping him, ignore him gradually and eventually transact all real business of state through Zal. Cooper reports, “A plan that puts Khalilzad near the top of a Karzai government would provide the Obama administration with a strong condSuit to push American interests in Afghanistan.”

Obama, Clinton and Holbrooke – they must be holding breath and waiting and watching “whether Karzai remains willing to bring Khalilzad aboard”. The problem is not only that Zal had a bumpy relationship with Karzai when he served in Kabul as the American viceroy. Times have changed.

The old Karzai is no more the current Karzai. Zal cannot ride roughshod over him and expect him to take it in his stride, as he used to. Today, Karzai truly believes he is the leader of the Afghan people. Therefore, Zal must undergo a veritable metamorphosis himself and evolve into an altogether new butterfly. Karzai would like to be certain that Zal doesn’t begin to dictate once he is ensconced in power in Kabul.

Obama, on his part, cannot hold out any assurance to Karzai in this regard, either. It has to be left to Karzai and Zal to work out between then, which they are reportedly doing at the moment in Kabul. Nor can Karzai depend on the Afghan constitution to ensure that Zal will scrupulously function under his supervision.

For, the real catch is that Zal will be an extra-constitutional authority, not accountable to the Afghan constitution or parliament or people or, arguably, even to Karzai himself. Karzai would apprehend that ultimately, Zal is Zal and from the time he hit the ground, he would be sprinting and it would be impossible to match his stamina for outpacing his peer group.

To be sure, Zal will report only to Washington. All the same, Clinton, too, needs to be watchful. To quote Cooper, “While he was working for the Bush administration, Khalilzad often brushed up against other officials, including secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.” Now, that’s formidable dexterity – to bypass Condi and deal directly with Bush.

What Are They Crazy?

May 18, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afpak | Leave a Comment 

The Pakistani military — who are supposed to be using American aid to fight an assymetric Taliban insurgency just outside of Islamabad — are rapidly adding to their nuclear arsenal and making the spoils of war that much more worthwhile Thomas Shanker and David Sanger report at the New York Times:

Members of Congress have been told in confidential briefings that Pakistan is rapidly adding to its nuclear arsenal even while racked by insurgency, raising questions on Capitol Hill about whether billions of dollars in proposed military aid might be diverted to Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed the assessment of the expanded arsenal in a one-word answer to a question on Thursday in the midst of lengthy Senate testimony. Sitting beside Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, he was asked whether he had seen evidence of an increase in the size of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.

“Yes,” he said quickly, adding nothing, clearly cognizant of Pakistan’s sensitivity to any discussion about the country’s nuclear strategy or security.

Inside the Obama administration, some officials say, Pakistan’s drive to spend heavily on new nuclear arms has been a source of growing concern, because the country is producing more nuclear material at a time when Washington is increasingly focused on trying to assure the security of an arsenal of 80 to 100 weapons so that they will never fall into the hands of Islamic insurgents.

The administration’s effort is complicated by the fact that Pakistan is producing an unknown amount of new bomb-grade uranium and, once a series of new reactors is completed, bomb-grade plutonium for a new generation of weapons. President Obama has called for passage of a treaty that would stop all nations from producing more fissile material — the hardest part of making a nuclear weapon — but so far has said nothing in public about Pakistan’s activities.

Bruce Riedel, the Brookings Institution scholar who served as the co-author of Mr. Obama’s review of Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, reflected the administration’s concern in a recent interview, saying that Pakistan “has more terrorists per square mile than anyplace else on earth, and it has a nuclear weapons program that is growing faster than anyplace else on earth.”