Kori Schake argues that the Obama administration is prematurely writing off the Afghan war:

The evident confusion among senior policy makers in the administration prefigures the administration's cratering commitment to win the war in Afghanistan. The White House has narrowed its war aims from defeating all threats to only defeating al Qaeda. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, testified to Congress this week that the deaths of senior al Qaeda leadership have brought us to a "critical transitional phase for the terrorist threat," in which the organization has a better than 50 percent probability of fragmenting and becoming incapable of mass-casualty attacks.

The White House appears set to use progress against al Qaeda as justification for accelerating an end to the war in Afghanistan. Since the president has concluded that we aren't fighting the Taliban, just al Qaeda, no need to stick around Afghanistan until the government of that country can provide security and prevent recidivism to Taliban control. The president will declare victory for having taken from al Qaeda the ability to organize large scale attacks, and piously intone that nation building in Afghanistan is Afghanistan's responsibility.

This policy will not win the war in Afghanistan. It will not even end the war in Afghanistan. It will only end our involvement in that ongoing war.

It's also not clear to me why defeating al-Qaeda is somehow an insufficient standard for victory here. Rather, it is the standard.

Does Schake believe that the Afghan Taliban really have the werewithal or intent to take the fight to the United States once we depart Afghanistan? If Rory Stewart's testimony is to be believed, large numbers of them could not locate the United States on a map.

To the extent that the Afghan Taliban will play host to what's left of al-Qaeda, that is a threat that we can tackle with a far lighter footprint and, yes, no nation building. Complete disengagement would be a mistake. But we need to put the commitment to Afghanistan alongside some rational cost/benefit analysis about the threat we're attempting to mitigate. The danger of an American dying of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil is vanishingly small. It's not zero and will never be zero - no matter how long we stay in Afghanistan and how much money we sink into the place.

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One of the central arguments sustaining American strategy in Afghanistan is that a failure to stabilize Afghanistan would have disastrous consequences in Pakistan. Proponents of the Afghan surge argued that while Afghanistan may not be strategically worth such a huge investment in blood and treasure, the prospect of instability spilling into nuclear-armed Pakistan warranted the move.

This argument never made much sense and a recent leaked NATO report confirms it:

The U.S. military said in the document Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) security agency was assisting the Taliban in directing attacks against foreign forces.

Pakistan is the architect of instability in Afghanistan, not its victim. It's more than a little ridiculous to argue that we have to fight Pakistan-backed insurgent forces for the sake of Pakistan's security.

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In his YouTube/Google + question and answer, President Obama fielded some questions about America's drone campaign. Here, via USA Today, is his defense:

Well, you know, I think that we have to be judicious in how we use drones.

But understand that probably our ability to respect the sovereignty of other countries and to limit our incursions into somebody else's territory is enhanced by the fact that we are able to pinpoint strike on al Qaeda operative in a place where the capacities of that military in that country may not be able to get them.

So, obviously, a lot of these strikes have been in the Fattah [sic] and going after al Qaeda suspects, who are up in very tough terrain along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. For us to be able to get them in another way would involve probably a lot more intrusive military actions than the one that we're already engaging in.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be careful about how we proceed on this. And you know, obviously, I'm looking forward to a time where al Qaeda is no longer operative network and, you know, we can refocus a lot of our assets and attention on other issues.

But this is something that we're still having to deal with, there's still active plots that are directed against the United States, and I think we are on the offense now. Al Qaeda's been really weakened, but we've still got a little more work to do, and we've got to make sure that we're using all our capacities in order to deal with it.

Speaking of Google+, you can now find RCW there as well.

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Two Marines walk the dusty streets at Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan, Dec. 18. As the final U.S. forces departed Iraq, nearly 100,000 American troops continued counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan.
Photo by Cpl. Brian Adam Jones

By Brian Adam Jones

I have a rather polite alarm clock next to my bed.

At night, it douses my room in a cool, blue light. In the morning, it gently nudges me awake with soft tones that gradually increase in severity. The clock offers a welcome contrast to the lonely and gritty discomfort of Afghanistan, to the very concept of War.

But at 5 a.m. on Christmas morning, I was not happy to hear it.

Grumpy and bleary-eyed, I pulled on my desert camouflage uniform and laced up my boots. I’m sure my sentiment was echoed by the other American military men and women spending Christmas away from home.

As a combat journalist and communications specialist with 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing (Forward) in Helmand province, Afghanistan, my Christmas morning was spent facilitating a live interview between a Detroit television station and two hometown heroes.

Not far away, on adjacent Camp Bastion, Marine Corps UH-1Y Hueys lifted off into the cold morning air.

Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 369 launched Operation Noel, an effort to deliver care packages and Christmas cheer to Marines in remote outposts that don’t regularly receive mail and don’t enjoy the relative safety I have here at Camp Leatherneck.

While most of the remaining American forces in Iraq were able to make it home in time for Christmas, nearly 100,000 other U.S. troops spent Christmas morning in Afghanistan, quietly working as a part of an international coalition to create an increasingly peaceful and independent infrastructure here.

Continue reading "Unfinished Business in Afghanistan" »

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Master Sgt. Robert Allen, a native of Pawnee, Okla., serves as the aircraft rescue firefighting chief for Marine Wing Support Squadron 371 in Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan. An avid musician, Allen wrote a Christmas song for his wife, Carla, as he spends the holidays away from her and their three children.
- Photo by Cpl. Brian Adam Jones

By Brian Adam Jones

Afghanistan’s getting cold. My Marines and I have hung our Christmas stockings from a table with care, and strung lights along the top of the plywood wall in our office on the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing (Forward) compound on Camp Leatherneck.

As public affairs Marines, Thanksgiving was spent linking Marines with their hometown television, radio and newspaper outlets, with Christmas promising much of the same.

My favorite part of my job as a combat journalist is meeting and interacting with all the great men and women in uniform, proud Americans who leave their friends and loved ones in the spirit of defense.

But there’s one Marine I’ve met here who certainly stands out.

Master Sgt. Robert Allen, an aircraft rescue firefighter with Marine Wing Support Squadron 371, loves playing the guitar. The first time I met the bald-headed Oklahoman with a big smile, it was to take his photo for articles by the Tulsa World and Stillwater News Press.

“Hey,” he said to me anxiously, “Can you listen to this song I wrote, let me know if you think it’s any good?”

Continue reading "A Marine's Christmas Song" »

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Danger Room has assembled a powerful slide show of graphic photos taken by Noor Behram, a resident of North Waziristan:

Before posting Behram's photos we took a number of measures to confirm as best we could what was being shown. We verified Behram’s bona fides with other news organizations. We sifted through the images, tossing out any pictures that couldn’t correlate with previously reported drone attacks. Then we grilled Behram in a series of lengthy Skype interviews from Pakistan, translated by Akbar, about the circumstances surrounding each of the images.

Still, we weren't at the events depicted. We don't know for sure if the destruction and casualties shown in the photos were caused by CIA drones or Pakistani militants. Even Behram, who drives at great personal risk to the scenes of the strikes, has little choice but to rely on the accounts of alleged eyewitnesses to learn what happened.

But we know for sure that these are rare photos from a war zone most Americans never see.

Behram's images are not conclusive proof that the Obama administration was incorrect (or disingenuous) when it claimed that no civilians had been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, but it's additional evidence that the claim was unfounded. It does beggar belief why such a claim was made in the first place. I suspect most Americans would support drone strikes even if the administration acknowledged that they carry the risk of killing innocent bystanders. Yet rather than level with the public about the hazy nature of the drone campaign, the administration insisted on a clear-cut assertion that no "non-combatants" had been killed.

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More good news out of Pakistan:

A growing storm over a confidential memo is laying bare the profound division between Pakistan’s powerful army and its civilian government, and the nation’s relationship with the United States is again at the center of the gulf.

At issue are allegations that the government of President Asif Ali Zardari asked for U.S. help to prevent a military coup after the Navy SEAL raid in May that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The claim is thought to have enraged Pakistan’s army, and the resulting controversy prompted Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, to offer his resignation this week.

The Cable's Josh Rogin has been all over this story.

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According to the Long War Journal, the Haqqani Network has taken a page out of the al-Qaeda playbook and released a video of its fighters doing the jungle-gym routine.

The Journal quotes a source saying that the camp is located in Pakistan.

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Sgt Maj. Steven Lunsford mans the .50-caliber machine gun on a CH-53E Super Stallion during a recent mission in the Afghan sky. Lunsford is the sergeant major of Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 464.
-- Photo by Cpl. Brian Adam Jones

By Brian Adam Jones

Boarding a CH-53E Super Stallion at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, recently, I thought a member of the helicopter’s crew looked familiar.

For a recent project I was working in the Helmand River valley, I flew on a Super Stallion from Camp Bastion, a major aviation port in Afghanistan, to a small landing zone attached to a patrol base.

As one of the first passengers on the aircraft at Camp Bastion, I attentively watched a Marine in a flight suit as he attended to cargo being loaded onto the massive aircraft.

Crew chiefs or aerial observers aid with the operations of the helicopter, manning .50-caliber machine guns and managing passengers and cargo. This post is frequently stood by young, junior Marines and noncommissioned officers, but from what I could see of him from under the visor on his helmet, this Marine was older, and I knew him from somewhere.

Continue reading "Leadership in the Afghan Sky" »

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Army Major General Peter Fuller was relieved of his command for telling the truth Politico that Hamid Karzai was an ungrateful ally. Joshua Foust makes the case that it was the right call and that to the extent that Karzai is a problem, he's one of America's own making:

Complaining about Karzai's zealous regard of Afghan interests over American interests is something of a tradition in both the military and the pro-military commentary class. And in almost all cases, those complaints miss the point entirely. Karzai's failures have little to do with who Karzai is as a person, but are rather tied up in the fundamentally unworkable institution of the Afghan President -- an institution we, the United States (including the United States Military) created for him. His failure is our failure, and complaining about his failure should also imply complaining about our own failure.

Tom Ricks pitches in with a list of 19 true things that insiders and veterans of Afghanistan agree on but that a General shouldn't say. The list should be read in full but a few, in particular, stand out:

Even non-Taliban Afghans don't much like us.

Afghans didn't get the memo about all our successes, so they are positioning themselves for the post-American civil war.

And they're not the only ones getting ready. The future of Afghanistan is probably evolving up north now as the Indians, Russians and Pakistanis jockey with old Northern Alliance types. Interestingly, we're paying more and getting less than any other player.

Speaking of positioning for the post-American civil war, why would the Pakistanis sell out their best proxy shock troops now?

This last point in particular is something I have yet to understand. It seems that every month, Secretary Clinton pops into Pakistan to deliver a "tough" message about how this time, Pakistan better get its act together or else. But the incentives for Pakistan to do this are very weak next to the stakes involved (although there have been hopeful signs of Pakistani rapprochement with India of late). As with Iraq and Iranian influence, the interests at play are geographical ones that no amount of American "will" or rhetoric can surmount.

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If you haven't yet read the Wall Street Journal's piece on the U.S. drone program, it's definitely worth your time. In it, we learn about the two-fold nature of drone targeting:

The March 17 attack was a "signature" strike, one of two types used by the CIA, and the most controversial within the administration. Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren't always known. The bulk of CIA's drone strikes are signature strikes.

The second type of drone strike, known as a "personality" strike, targets known terrorist leaders and has faced less internal scrutiny.

During the 1990s the Clinton administration reportedly agonized over firing submarine-based cruise missiles into Afghanistan to kill bin Laden due to a variety of concerns (the intel was sketchy, there was a high risk of collateral damage, a Gulf prince had parked his jet too close to the target, etc.). This overabundance of caution arguably allowed the 9/11 attacks to unfold. Today, we have the reverse: the U.S. is not only willing to use force against al-Qaeda's leadership (a good thing) but to fire bombs willy-nilly* into Pakistan's tribal region in the hopes of hitting something important.

Without access to any of the intelligence used in targeting, it's impossible to say what's going on but it's telling that the administration is admitting that, in some instances at least, it's willing to kill groups of people inside Pakistan without a firm grasp of their culpability. Is this a strategy that the administration hopes to export into Yemen and Somalia?

Paradoxically, the end result of this aggressive strategy may be the same as the Clinton-era indecisiveness - a heightened risk of a terrorist attack.

*Some poetic license here.

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Capt. Michael Gagnon teaches Afghan children how to fist bump in the Helmand River Valley of southwestern Afghanistan, Oct. 21. Gagnon, a native of Oxford, Mass., commands a team of roughly 20 men dubbed “Task Force Nomad.” Over the next several weeks, the task force, a subset of Marine Wing Support Squadron 371, will construct or improve helicopter landing zones along the valley.
-- Photo by Cpl. Brian Adam Jones

By Brian Adam Jones

Last week, I like to think I had the opportunity to glimpse at the future of Afghanistan.

“Yo, Gimme some chocolate,” said the Pashtun boy.

Four English words and a spirited request for candy demonstrated the effects of a decade of American presence in the region.

“Yo,” answered Capt. Michael Gagnon, a logistics officer with Marine Wing Support Squadron 371. He responded in Pashto that he didn’t have any.

As of last week, I had been in Afghanistan roughly two and a half months and I’d hardly seen any Afghans.

My role as a combat journalist with 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing (Forward) means I don’t have the opportunity to interact with the population the way other forces do, but nonetheless, I was eager to be on the ground.

I traveled to the Helmand River Valley to spend a few days with Gagnon, who is on his third Afghan deployment in two years, and his small team, operating out of Patrol Base Alcatraz to construct helicopter landing zones for the small outposts here.

Having spent the last two months in the desert, I found the Helmand River Valley weird. I hadn’t seen a tree since July when I left North Carolina for Afghanistan. The thin strip of lush vegetation surrounding either side of the Helmand River was surreal to me, and I was eager to explore it.

In the midst of constructing a helicopter landing zone for one of the countless patrol bases that dot the heavily-populated valley, Gagnon, myself and the rest of the team encountered a group of curious Afghan children.

Continue reading "A Glimpse at the Future of Afghanistan" »

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1st Lt. Austin Skinner, the platoon commander of 2nd Platoon, Company B, 1st Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment, searches a vehicle during drug interdiction operations in southwestern Afghanistan, Aug. 18.
-- Photo by Cpl. Brian Adam Jones

By Brian Adam Jones

My path to Afghanistan was as unpredictable as America’s.

I didn’t deserve a single opportunity afforded to me, and I had several. I grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Maryland and New York City. I graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire before starting college at Hofstra University on Long Island.

My biggest issue as a teenager was that my laziness exceeded my intelligence. I had no work ethic, no discipline and a frail, selective concept of morality.

The older I got, the more I realized I needed to tear things down and rebuild them the way I wanted them.

At 20, I enlisted in the Marine Corps.

Two years later, an Air Force C-17 Globemaster carried me from Manas Air Transit Center in Kyrgyzstan to Camp Bastion, Afghanistan. I looked out the small window on the door of the plane as the landscape below gradually shifted from snow-capped mountains to barren desert.

I landed in that desert late one summer morning, blasted by hot air as the back ramp of the Globemaster opened.

Continue reading "My Path to Afghanistan" »

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AEI's Thomas Donnelly unearths what I think is a good insight into why the U.S. has so much trouble convincing Pakistan to do what Washington wants it to do:

Pakistan’s problems are deep; indeed, they are embedded in the country’s very identity. But our strategic interests are equally deep. The war in Afghanistan and the rise of India are indicators that the balance of power in South Asia​—​like the balance of power in Europe, the Persian Gulf, or Pacific Asia​—​is emerging as a core security concern of the United States and an increasingly important test of the international system.

A coherent American strategy rests on convincing Islamabad of three things: that the United States has come to South Asia to stay; that India’s rise should be met with strategic cooperation, not competition; and that playing a “China card” won’t work. [Emphasis mine]

I don't think it's plausible to argue that America's interests in Pakistan run as deep as Pakistan's "very identity." Can you imagine what an outside power would have to do to change Washington's conviction that America is an exceptional nation created to spread freedom to the far corners of the Earth? Neither can I, which is why any strategy predicated on such a fundamental revolution in another country's political identity is destined to fail.

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In Kabul and Washington, the push is on to wind down a fight that on Friday will mark its 10th anniversary. U.S. officials, who are facing a future of fewer troops and less money for reconstruction, are narrowing their goals for the country. The constrained ambitions come amid pressure from the Obama administration to scale back the U.S. commitment at a time of flagging public support. - Washington Post

There's a telling scene at the 10 minute mark of this Frontline documentary on Afghanistan that I think speaks volumes about our situation there. In it, a former Taliban commander who has flipped sides to support the government has a conversation with a village elder not knowing his microphone is still on. Watching it, one gets the sense that there were two possible outcomes for the U.S. in Afghanistan in October 2011 - a massive effort to police, secure and rebuild the country costing trillions of dollars and entailing the deployment of close to a million coalition forces to seal the borders with Pakistan. Or a sharper pull out that left in place some intelligence collection and the bribing of Northern Alliance fighters to keep the Taliban and al-Qaeda rump on defense. The disastrous hybrid that the Bush administration pursued and that the Obama administration doubled down on has made us even more enemies in Afghanistan without accomplishing all that much.

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

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A new poll from Pew Research takes the pulse of U.S. veteran's views on war as compared to other Americans:

While Americans remain supportive of their all-volunteer military (only one half of 1% of the population has been on active duty service in the past decade), the length of the conflicts has reshaped attitudes toward war and sacrifice, the survey found.

Nine out of 10 expressed pride in the troops and three-quarters say they thanked someone in the military. But 45% said neither of the wars fought after the September 11, 2001, attacks has been worth the cost and only a quarter said they are following news of the wars closely. And half of the public say the wars have made little difference in their lives....

More than half of post-9/11 veterans also felt that too much reliance on military force to combat terrorism leads to more terrorism. On this topic, the public view was nearly identical -- 52% said too much force is not a recipe for success.

Post-9/11 veterans were keen supporters of nation-building with 59% supporting those roles for America's service members. But only 45% of the public and pre-9/11 veterans thought the military should be involved.

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Pivoting off of the revelation that the U.S. had been aware for years that Pakistan was willing to kill U.S. troops and foment instability in Afghanistan to pursue its interests, Michael Cohen wonders how the administration could have still doubled down in Afghanistan:

One thing we've seen repeatedly in regard to the war in Afghanistan is that Pakistan will, even at the risk of eroding their alliance with the United States, aggressively pursue its interests in Afghanistan - and yet the US strategy for Afghanistan has been based, in part, on the notion that Islamabad would shift its strategic calculus at the urging of US officials (and the carrot of foreign assistance). Two years later we're seeing the singular foolish [sic] of that strategy - but again it should have been evident back then. Rather than trying to get Pakistan to act against its interests the United States should have been looking to put in place a strategy that melded with Pakistan's strategic calculus regarding Afghanistan. We're today reaping the ill-rewards of that approach.

What's even more surreal about this whole episode is that many of the advocates of the Afghanistan surge - including Frederick Kagan and Stephen Biddle - insisted that one of the reasons more American lives and money had to be put at risk in Afghanistan was to - wait for it - protect Pakistan! They saw the Taliban and the instability they caused as a threat to Pakistan when in reality - and as was evident at the time - Pakistan was the architect of this instability and was using it toward their own ends. In other words, the surge boosters completely misread the strategic dynamic.

Like Cohen, I am trying hard to understand the administration's Afghanistan policy - is it being driven by wishful thinking, political cowardice, sheer incompetence or is it just an inability on my part to see the big picture (where things are actually better than they appear). I'm open to any of those interpretations at this point...

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Senator Graham is apparently open to starting a war with Pakistan. That will help stabilize Afghanistan.

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But even as the Americans pledge revenge against the Haqqanis, and even amid a new debate in the Obama administration about how to blunt the group’s power, there is a growing belief that it could be too late. To many frustrated officials, they represent a missed opportunity with haunting consequences. Responsible for hundreds of American deaths, the Haqqanis probably will outlast the United States troops in Afghanistan and command large swaths of territory there once the shooting stops. - New York Times

Of course they will outlast the United States: they live there.

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U.S. officials said there was mounting evidence that Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency had encouraged a guerrilla network to attack U.S. targets, while a Senate committee voted to make aid to Islamabad conditional on fighting the militants.

The decision by the Senate Appropriations Committee, which did not specify any amount of aid for Pakistan in fiscal 2012, reflects growing anger in Washington over militants operating out of Pakistan and battling U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Some U.S. intelligence reporting alleges that Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) specifically directed, or urged, the Haqqani network to carry out an attack last week on the U.S. Embassy and a NATO headquarters in Kabul, according to two U.S. officials and a source familiar with recent U.S.-Pakistan official contacts. - Reuters

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A new poll from Rasmussen:

Just 21% of Adults believe the original mission behind the war in Afghanistan has been accomplished. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 60% think the mission has not been accomplished, with another 18% not sure.

Thirty-five percent (35%) of Republicans think the mission to end al Qaeda’s safe harbor has been accomplished, but that compares to just 10% of Democrats and 19% of adults not affiliated with either of the major parties. Most Democrats (75%) and most unaffiliated adults (59%) feel the mission has not been accomplished, and even a plurality (47%) of Republicans agrees.

Yet these findings come at a time when 59% of Likely Voters want all U.S. troops brought home from Afghanistan either immediately or within the next year. Just 22% believe the United States has a clearly defined mission in Afghanistan.

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As the U.S. takes stock of the decade since the 9/11 attacks, it's worth considering the impact elsewhere. First up, Pakistan:

Before 9/11, Pakistan had suffered just one suicide bombing — a 1995 attack on the Egyptian Embassy in the capital, Islamabad, that killed 15 people. In the last decade, suicide bombers have struck Pakistani targets more than 290 times, killing at least 4,600 people and injuring 10,000.

The country averaged nearly six terrorist attacks of various kinds each day in 2010, according to a report by the Pak Institute for Peace Studies....

For Pakistanis, said Cyril Almeida, a leading Pakistani columnist, "it was easy to connect the dots. 9/11 happened, America invaded Afghanistan, and Pakistan went to hell. That's the most common narrative that's offered."

Pakistan's leaders maintain that the alliance with the U.S. against Islamic militants has destroyed the country's investment climate, caused widespread unemployment and ravaged productivity. The government estimates the alliance has cost it $67 billion over the last 10 years.

But it's not as simple as that. Since 2001, the U.S. has sent Pakistan more than $20 billion in direct aid and military reimbursements. And from 2003 to 2007 under Musharraf, the economy grew at a robust rate of 6% a year.

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The International Crisis Group relays the latest from Afghanistan:

There is no possibility that any amount of international assistance to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) will stabilise the country in the next three years unless there are significant changes in international strategies, priorities and programs. Nor will the Afghan state be in a position by 2015 to provide basic services to its citizens, further undermining domestic stability. Moreover, a rush to the exit and ill-conceived plans for reconciliation with the insurgency by the U.S. and its allies could threaten such gains as have been achieved in education, health and women’s rights since the Taliban’s ouster.

The amount of international aid disbursed since 2001 – $57 billion against $90 billion pledged – is a fraction of what has been spent on the war effort. More importantly, it has largely failed to fulfil the international community’s pledges to rebuild Afghanistan. Poor planning and oversight have affected projects’ effectiveness and sustainability, with local authorities lacking the means to keep projects running, layers of subcontractors reducing the amounts that reach the ground and aid delivery further undermined by corruption in Kabul and bribes paid to insurgent groups to ensure security for development projects.

Is there any way that Afghanistan will not collapse as NATO starts to draw down? It seems impossible to conceive of any other outcome.

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Joshua Foust dissects America's failures in Afghanistan:

The biggest barriers to Afghanistan developing economically are political, institutional, and regulatory—not physical or security or investment. Yet, most of the U.S. government’s efforts to improve Afghanistan’s security focus on physical solutions (like expanding the airport in Kandahar to export things like fruit and cement), security solutions (like the Village Security Operations the special operations forces are so enamored with), or foreign direct investment (as the TFBSO is so focused on). They focus on the wrong solutions to the wrong problem.

The U.S. government is not very active in resolving the political issues plaguing Afghanistan’s government, or its relationships with Iran and Pakistan, two absolutely crucial prerequisites to it ever becoming a stable country again. We should not expect a particularly successful outcome so long as the politics of the region are relegated to secondary concerns, if they are concerns at all.

I think it's not simply a lack of concern - it's an inability to solve these political problems. It's not as if the U.S. is not trying - perhaps not at the level of the Afghan potato farmers whose plight Foust relays in his post, but certainly at the level of envoys and embassies. To the extent that this hasn't worked, is it really an issue of inattention or simply reflective of the sheer difficulty (impossibility) of the task?

(AP Photo)

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The news last week that the CIA held a fake polio clinic in Pakistan to get bin Laden's children's DNA has sparked something of an outcry among some journalists. Matthew Steinglass is the latest to pile on, calling the program "despicable and stupid." The basic contention is that there's a lot of ignorance and paranoia in Pakistan, and in the region generally, about vaccinations, and therefore the CIA should have let this ignorance and conspiratorial paranoia guide its attempts to verify bin Laden's identity.

While I'm sympathetic to the argument that the U.S. frequently leaps before it looks when it comes to foreign policy, much of the case against this CIA program hinges on hindsight. Steinglass arguess that: "If the fake vaccination campaign was a necessary part of the operation to "take out" Osama bin Laden, it would have been better to leave Mr bin Laden in. One more ailing ex-terrorist holed up in a ratty house in remote Pakistan, watching old videos of himself; this was not worth jeopardising global vaccination campaigns."

But of course, no one knew he was holed up in a (not at all remote) house watching videos of himself before he was killed. Still, maybe the CIA did over-reach here. What do you think?

(AP Photo)

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Via the Federation of American Scientists, an analysis of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Click the image for a larger version. According to FAS, Pakistan's nuclear arsenal may approach that of Great Britain in the next decade. Good times.

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David Rothkopf thinks the U.S. should form an alliance with India to contain Pakistan:

Pakistan is America's ally, of course. We say it all the time. Unfortunately, Pakistan also harbors our enemies, supports our enemies, tolerates the intolerable by our enemies, and is therefore also our enemy. Not all of Pakistan, of course. Just some of the most influential of its elites and institutions as well as substantial cross-sections of its population.

Pakistan therefore has no one to blame for the steady deepening of the security ties between the United States and India than itself. As containing the problems within Pakistan through cooperation with the Pakistanis looks increasingly difficult, it is only natural that the United States should simultaneously develop a Plan B approach. That approach is containment and it necessarily must involve a partnership with India.

What would potentially solve, or at least mitigate, Pakistan's support for militant groups would be a change in the dynamic between itself and India, and to the extent that greater U.S. ties to India could encourage a rapprochement there it's all for the better. But that's unlikely to happen, given how India views outside interference on the Kashmir issue.

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According to a new poll from Rasmussen:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Voters shows that just 22% now believe the situation in Afghanistan will get better in the next six months. Thirty-five percent (35%) expect the situation to get worse, while 30% predict it will remain about the same. Thirteen percent (13%) are undecided.

The number of voters expecting the situation to improve hovered around 20% for months until May when it jumped to 27% following bin Laden’s death. Last month, 26% expected the situation to get better.

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The Washington Post's Pamela Constable looks back through sepia-tinted glasses on 10 years of western involvement in Afghanistan and laments at the loss of the Kabul she once knew:

I can’t find my old house, my old street or the bakery where I used to watch the early-morning ritual of men slapping dough into hot ovens beneath the floor. They’ve all vanished behind a high-security superstructure of barricades and barbed wire, a foreign architecture of war. Elsewhere in the Afghan capital, a parallel construction boom is underway. The slapdash sprawl of nouveau riche development has sprouted modern apartment buildings, glass-plated shopping centers, wedding halls with fairy lights, and gaudy mansions with gold swan faucets and Greco-Roman balustrades, commissioned by wealthy men with many bodyguards and no taxable income.

She concludes that the real tragedy of Afghanistan is how little advantage it has taken of the enormous international goodwill that followed the defeat of the Taliban in 2001:

Showered with far too much aid, clever Afghans have learned to imitate Western jargon, skim project funds and put their relatives on the payroll — while many show little interest in learning the modern skills that would propel their country forward. At its core, this remains a society of tribal values and survival instincts. Goals such as democracy and nationhood come much further down the list.

There's little to take issue with in her analysis. However, one overlooked cause of today's frustration might be the boundless optimism she describes after the fall of the Taliban:

I was privileged to witness that awakening and to experience the exhilaration of a society being given a new chance after a generation of war and ideological whiplash. In those early years, I met Afghan exiles who had given up careers in Germany or Australia to participate in their homeland’s renaissance, and American jurists and agronomists who had come to help rebuild an alien land.

Foreigners were welcome everywhere, and a new generation of Afghans was in a hurry to catch up. In the cities, I met girls who led exercise classes and boys who took computer lessons at dawn. In rural areas, women still hid behind curtains and veils, but schools reopened in tents, and mud-choked irrigation canals were cleaned. In 2004, long lines of villagers proudly flashed their ink-dipped thumbs after voting in the country’s first real democratic election.

The Taliban were a symptom, not a cause, of Afghanistan's troubles. Instead of curing the condition their excision only exposed the deeper fissures of Afghan society.Instilling the belief in Afghans and foreign donor governments that things would change for the better overnight, instead of the reality of trading in one basket of problems for another filled with longer standing issues, is part of what has added to Afghan and donor fatigue.

The war would have been a hard sell to Congress and other NATO governments if they had been told beforehand that it would last over a decade and its end would have little resemblance to a traditional victory. But at least this would have girded governments and their citizens for what was needed to do the job right or allowed them to bow out gracefully before getting stuck in the mire of nation building. But the business of coalition building requires compromise and consensus, which all too often means kicking these questions of commitment down to succeeding administrations.

This is not the first time western expectations have split from reality in Afghanistan.

In 1988, Rambo III hit theaters across the U.S. The movie, the most violent of its day, lionized the pious Mujahideen in their battle against the godless Soviets (see clip here). The film makes much of the Afghan struggle for freedom (another clip here and here), providing a glimpse into the popular opinion of the day.

However, only a year after the movie's release the U.S. disengaged with Afghanistan. Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the problem seemed solved to western eyes. The much-vaunted Mujahideen, re-labeled warlords, were left to fight among themselves and would eventually spawn the Taliban.

In the closing credits to Rambo III the film is dedicated to "the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan." After the attacks of 9/11 this was changed to "the gallant people of Afghanistan."

As the U.S. declares a marginal victory and begins extracting itself from Afghanistan once again, it is worth remembering that expectations ought to be managed and that pedestals are inherently unstable.

Alim

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The Guardian has an interesting piece on the hunt for Osama:

The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader's family, a Guardian investigation has found.

As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the "project" in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and US officials and local residents.

The doctor, Shakil Afridi, has since been arrested by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) for co-operating with American intelligence agents.

As difficult as an operation such as this undoubtedly was, it seems easier than the efforts to transform the Karzai government into a less-corrupt steward of America's interests.

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The Obama administration contends that the Afghanistan surge has blunted the Taliban's momentum. Spencer Ackerman notes that Taliban attacks have actually increased:

According to military statistics acquired by Danger Room, attacks initiated by insurgents from May 1 to June 30 rose 2 percent from that same period in 2010. That’s the dawn of the so-called “spring fighting season,” when the Taliban typically fight the hardest. And it seemingly contradicts Petraeus’ assertion to the New York Times this morning that “insurgent attack numbers are lower” for the first time since 2006....

Can the insurgency’s momentum be reversed with fewer U.S. troops? Heading to Afghanistan on Saturday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta urged the military to keep “maximum pressure on the Taliban” in order to convince insurgents to sue for peace. The reigning theory is that the Taliban won’t talk seriously until they take a beating. Peace talks are the only political strategy on hand to end the war, but the numbers hardly give a reason to believe the Taliban should feel cowed.

And if al-Qaida is all but iced, as Panetta argues, then it may not be so important that the Taliban’s momentum has merely stalled, since the U.S. only cares about the Taliban insofar as it aids al-Qaida. But would Obama have endorsed the surge if he knew that the most it would accomplish after 18 months is a two percent increase in insurgent attacks?

Even if the Taliban is considerably weaker now than it was 18 months ago, it doesn't bode well for the long-term security of Afghanistan that they can mount more operations despite the full court press from the U.S. and its coalition partners. The Obama administration needs something akin to the Anbar Awakening among the Pashtuns to really drive down violence - and that doesn't seem to be happening. Quite the contrary, as M K Bhadrakumar writes, the "serpent of Pashtun nationalism" has reared its head and is attacking both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Still, a regional solution might be possible. As Bhadrakumar suggests, India and Pakistan are moving slowly toward reconcilable positions on the future of Afghanistan. Faster, please.

(AP Photo)

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Gideon Rachman sees echoes of the Vietnam end game in Afghanistan:

I don’t know whose bright idea it was to schedule peace talks with the Taliban in Munich. But somebody with a sense of history might have avoided that location. Ever since Chamberlain and Daladier signed over the Sudetenland to Hitler there in 1938, the phrase “Munich agreement” has had an unfortunate ring to it.

That said, the talks with the Taliban remind me more of Kissinger’s protracted negotiations with North Vietnam in the 1970s. In both cases, the fighting was taking place alongside the negotiating. In both cases, the Americans were trying desperately to get out of a protracted conflict that they had concluded could not be won on the battlefield. In both cases they were destabilising the region by bombing enemy safe-havens in a third country – Cambodia then, Pakistan now.

Amazing that Washington has found itself in similar (although not identical) circumstances.

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Peter Beinart dings President Obama for failing to level with the American people about the consequences of a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan:

Even if we stayed for 20 years, building a government that can stand on its own might be beyond our capacity. We’d go broke trying, and there is little reason to believe the future of this Afghan government is vital to U.S. security. Barack Obama didn’t even say so in his speech.

But Obama did imply that his administration’s surge has so weakened the Taliban that they’ll trade their weapons for negotiations and eventually join the current government, thus allowing the U.S. to leave an Afghanistan headed towards peace. That’s what Mr. Amini was disputing. There’s an honest way to advocate for withdrawal from Afghanistan and a dishonest way. The dishonest way is to suggest that we’ll leave behind a government that can secure the country and a political process than can end the war. The honest way is to acknowledge that the Afghanistan we leave behind will be a chaotic, ugly place where the Taliban rules large swaths of the country, and much of what we have built may be washed away.

That's a winning message to take into 2012, isn't it?

But seriously, spinning the U.S. withdrawal doesn't make a lot of sense. I suspect most Americans understand that the U.S. will leave Afghanistan much as we found it - at war with itself.

(AP Photo)

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According to a new Gallup poll:

Americans broadly support President Barack Obama's plan to begin withdrawing U.S. forces in Afghanistan this year, with additional troops scheduled to leave by the end of next summer and the remainder by 2014. Nearly three-quarters, 72%, are in favor, while 23% are opposed.

The vast majority of Democrats and independents, as well as half of Republicans, favor the outlines of Obama's plan, according to the June 25-26 Gallup poll.

The same poll finds a more mixed reaction to the near-term goal of having 30,000 U.S. troops out of Afghanistan in 15 months. Forty-three percent of Americans consider this number about right, 29% call it too low, and 19% too high.ort President Barack Obama's plan to begin withdrawing U.S. forces in Afghanistan this year, with additional troops scheduled to leave by the end of next summer and the remainder by 2014. Nearly three-quarters, 72%, are in favor, while 23% are opposed.

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Robert Kagan argues that continuing to nation build inside Afghanistan is actually a bargain:

Failure in Afghanistan will cost much, much more than the billions spent on this surge. What was the cost to the U.S. economy of the attacks on 9/11? What will be the cost if the terrorist groups now operating in Afghanistan—the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e Taiba, as well as al Qaeda—are able to reconstitute safe havens and the next president has to send troops back in to clear them out again? It is a peculiar kind of wisdom that can only see the problems and costs of today and cannot imagine the problems and costs of tomorrow.

This is a particularly interesting line of argument and one that I think undermines Kagan's case for the surge. First - the benchmark is not the costs of 9/11, since there is nothing we're doing inside Afghanistan that will prevent another mass-casualty terrorist attack inside the United States. There are multiple countries that play host to al-Qaeda cells and there is even the possibility of a small number of U.S. citizens banding together to commit some atrocity. Even a large-scale withdrawal from Afghanistan would not be so comprehensive as to leave the U.S. with no means of collecting intelligence or targeting terrorist camps. It is difficult - though not impossible - to imagine a scenario whereby al-Qaeda is able to get itself reconfigured in Afghanistan to the point where they can launch a sophisticated mass-casualty terrorist attack against the continental United States. They have been trying to do so from within Pakistan to no avail and it is far easier to travel from Pakistan to the UK and then from the UK to the U.S. than to travel from Afghanistan into the West.

Still, it's happened once so let's assume for the sake of argument that it does indeed happen again. What would it cost the U.S.? There's no fixed number for the "costs of 9/11" as such, but there are estimates of the economic toll the attacks wrought. The estimated economic cost of 9/11 was in the neighborhood of $40 billion in insured losses and $28 billion in property damage. Other estimates range from $50 - $100 billion in economic costs of the attacks themselves. A World Bank study estimated a $90 billion drop in national income. Finally, a study (pdf) by the Congressional Research Service concluded "that 9/11 is more appropriately viewed as a human tragedy than as an economic calamity. Notwithstanding their dire costs in human life, the direct effects of the attacks were too small and too geographically concentrated to make a significant dent in the nation’s economic output."

This doesn't capture all of the economic costs of 9/11, since it led to the creation of new bureaucracies and the war in Afghanistan. And it obviously ignores the devastating human toll, which must be a vital part of any cost/benefit analysis. Still, I think those are serviceable numbers. So at the high-end, the 9/11 attacks cost the U.S. $100 billion. For the fiscal year 2010, the U.S. spent $105 billion in Afghanistan. This year, the figure is expected to be $108 billion. This spending also doesn't capture the human costs nor the costs of long-term care for the wounded who return home unable to work and in need of care. Nevertheless, it seems that it's costing the U.S. far more to conduct a counter-insurgency inside Afghanistan than the economic damage wrought by 9/11.

But Kagan does helpfully elucidate the central argument: the war in Afghanistan is about keeping the U.S. homeland safe from terrorist attacks. Keeping the Taliban from ruling parts of Afghanistan is a means to that end - not the end itself. Properly framed, there are obviously "less expensive" ways of keeping al-Qaeda from attacking the United States.

It's also worth stating that the prospect that anyone will die from terrorism is vanishingly small:

Just to give you some context here, one of my friends, an astronomer, has calculated the worldwide chance of anyone being killed by international terrorism outside of war zones over an 80-year lifetime, assuming, incidentally, that every several years there is another 9/11. It comes out to be 1 in 80,000. Since he is an astronomer, he has also calculated the chance of being killed by a comet or asteroid over a lifetime of 80 years, and it comes out to be about the same.

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Just over a month ago, an irresistible slice-of-life story jumped the divide between Afghan and western media.

National Public Radio was the first to report on the trend story of Afghan aversion to the number 39:

It’s hard to find a credible story to explain what exactly it means, but everyone knows it’s bad. Many Afghans say that the number 39 translates into morda-gow, which literally means “dead cow” but is also a well-known slang term for a procurer of prostitutes — a pimp.

In Afghanistan, being called a pimp is offensive, and calling someone a pimp could carry deadly consequences. Similarly, being associated with the number 39 — whether it’s on a vehicle license plate, an apartment number or a post office box — is considered a great shame. And some people will go to great lengths to avoid it.

Three weeks later the Wall Street Journal weighed in on the conspiracy theories swirling around the growing taboo:

One rather credible conspiracy theory contends that the entire 39 mania has been inflamed by underhanded Kabul car dealers.

Kabul car dealer Mahfuzullah Khairkhwa, who has 39 on his own license plate, admitted that, at the very least, he takes advantage of the curse to turn an easy profit.

“The problem is only in Kabul,” said Mr. Khairkhwa, who conceded that he could knock several thousand dollars off the purchase price of a car in Kabul with 39 on its plate and then turn around to sell it for a profit in the surrounding provinces, where the urban legend has yet to spread.

The head of the union of car dealers in Kabul offered a retort in a Reuters piece this month:

Najibullah Amiri, blames corrupt police officers for fanning the trend.

The issue has gained prominence just as number plates for Afghan cars — which carry five digits — rolled over from the series that starts with 38, to a new series that starts with 39.

Amiri said officials at the police traffic department charge buyers between $200 and $500 to change a “39″ number plate for a new car to something less offensive.

This is not the first salacious episode involving Kabul’s automotive fleet. As the “39″ story was breaking, drivers were urgently removing rainbow decals that had begun arriving stuck onto imported cars and became fashionable until conservative Afghans learned they were also gay pride symbols.

Rainbow stickers can be peeled off but Kabul’s problem with pimp-mobiles has, overnight, thrown the city’s booming car sales industry into chaos. Dealers are reporting that “thousands of dollars of stock is now sitting unwanted in their yards, with even a prime condition vehicle almost unsaleable if its plates bear the now-hated numerals.”

To read the rest of this article, visit Forbes.com, where it was originally published.

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I was travelling during President Obama's Afghan speech and after reading and abosrbing the commentary surrounding it, I think it's clear that President Obama was faced with an impossible rhetorical task - he had to explain to the United States that it won, then lost, the Afghan war.

The problem that has plagued the Afghan war from the start has been Washington's inability to define a narrow, achievable objective. Since January 2002, the U.S. squandered a quick and limited victory against the Taliban and al-Qaeda by larding on additional objectives involving the political structure of the Afghan state. The basic idea was noble enough - the U.S. would help rebuild an Afghanistan that could forge a terror-free, post-Taliban era.

Unfortunately, the move from a limited goal of destroying al-Qaeda's safe haven and killing those responsible for 9/11 to the more ambitious goal of creating a post-Taliban Afghanistan was well beyond anything the U.S. had the capabilities, resources or will to achieve. It was a goal at odds with how bin Laden's global terror network had evolved since losing its Afghan safe haven. It was also premised on the debatable proposition that regular Afghans would staff a national army tasked with fighting and dying to advance American policy priorities.

The Obama administration has paid lip service to this reality, publicly ratcheting down U.S. goals, but rather than adjust tactics it simply doubled down on the original proposition that Afghanistan could be rebuilt (i.e. "stabilized") to the point that the U.S. could leave the place relatively in tact before departing.

After listening to the president's speech, I believe Obama wants to appear committed to unwinding the U.S. nation building effort, but he is still bound by an orthodoxy that insists that the U.S. can build an Afghan state that's to its liking. It's an understandable, even commendable, impulse. It is also a counter-productive one.

(AP Photo)

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Gentlemen,

Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by His Majesty’s ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our headquarters.

We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty’s Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence.

Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstance, since we are at war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall.

This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instruction from His Majesty’s Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both:

1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the
accountants and copy-boys in London or, perchance…
2. To see to it the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain

Your most obedient servant,

Wellington

The above letter - dated August 11th, 1812, and addressed to the British Foreign office in London - is attributed to the Duke of Wellington who, at the time, was waging his Peninsular Campaign. The war for the Iberian Peninsula, which would thrust the general to prominence, marked an early example of modern warfare. For it was on the Spanish plains that pitched battles between standing armies of professional soldiers gave way to the spontaneous emergence of large-scale guerrilla warfare (the term guerrilla, being the diminutive of guerra, Spanish for “war” or quite literally “little war”). The British press quickly seized on the novel uprising: for the first time, peoples, not princes, were in rebellion against the “Great Disturber.”

To read the rest of this article, visit Forbes.com, where it was originally published.

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In a 2012 Republican presidential field with relatively little foreign policy heft, Jon Huntsman has it in spades. The former ambassador and oft-traveled billionaire, heir to a massive chemical conglomerate fortune, is one of the most globally minded candidates in a field of otherwise parochial, or even isolationist, figures within the party.

Talking to his associates from his time in China, one hears near-universal respect for the man and his views of America's role within the world - even to the point of turning his time away from the states in China into a potential political asset, an instance of confronting communists with a case for freedom. They'll tell you Huntsman truly does view his role as one of duty and service to the nation - even to the point of setting aside his Mormon religious views on drinking alcohol to drink the disgusting baijiu liquor which is mandatory at Chinese events (I'm told Huntsman would drink the clear alcohol once and then switch to water, hoping no one noticed after the first round). Huntsman's tenure as ambassador was marked by only one significant public gaffe, a bizarre incident where he attended, then fled, from a Jasmine Revolution protest, attracting attention for the large American flag patch on his arm (he claims he stumbled across the protest by accident).

Yet for someone whose campaign has already adopted a view prioritizing global issues, and whose announcement in front of the statue of liberty this week was purposefully constructed to spark recollections of Ronald Reagan's run against Jimmy Carter, Huntsman's publicly-expressed foreign policy views seem to have more in common with Carter than with Reagan.

Without question, Huntsman is the furthest left of any purportedly serious candidate for the nomination when it comes to forming a response to Afghanistan. His press release on the president's remarks this week emphasized his approval for "a safe but rapid withdrawal," but his critique on NBC's Today show went much further. Asked by host Ann Curry whether he thought a drawdown of 30,000 troops by next year was too much or too rapid, Huntsman responded by saying that "I think that we can probably be more aggressive over the next year" in drawing down troops.

Despite the comparisons to John McCain's 2008 presidential run - and on the campaign and organizational side, there are many - Huntsman's statement could not be more at odds with McCain's views on Afghanistan and the necessity of preventing losses of the gains made in the past two years. Like Obama, Huntsman emphasized the need for “nation building at home” (as if the two goals are inconsistent) - but Huntsman went further, saying it was time to "get serious about what needs to be done on the ground, not a counter-insurgency but a counter-terror effort." While nearly every Republican in the race has emphasized the need to heed the advice of the commanders with on-the-ground experience on the front, Huntsman is purposefully setting himself apart in unequivocally rejecting the advice of Gen. David Petraeus and Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from afar. More significantly, in supporting a more aggressive drawdown to be replaced by a limited counter-terror strategy, Huntsman is essentially endorsing the view by Vice President Joe Biden - a view which proved too rapid and risky even for President Obama.

Whether you agree with them or not, even supporters must concede that Huntsman's foreign policy views are a clear rejection not just of George W. Bush, but of thirty years of the views of Republican nominees on the proper attitude toward war fighting and engagement. One does not have to accept the view of Washington's neoconservative elite in order to take a view of America's role in the world that has been consistent in the Republican Party since the post-Nixon era. And Huntsman's foreign policy team - which includes former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, CFR head Richard Haass and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, the leaker of Valerie Plame's identity - has already sparked concern among Jewish groups that Huntsman's views on America's relationship with Israel could be as out of sync with Republican values as the rest of his portfolio.

Rather than playing games of triangulation, Huntsman may simply be saying what he believes. But perhaps the reason he's caught fire with so many leading media figures is that he's saying things they tend to agree with. This is all well and good, and coherent so far as it goes. It's just not very Republican.

(AP Photo)

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There was little surprising about President Obama's announcement last night that he will withdraw 10,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2011, increasing to the full level of his 33,000-troop surge by the end of next summer. But there are a number of questions sparked by his remarks; questions we won't know the answers to for some time, raising concerns about the long-term results of this decision.

Despite the intonations of some commentators about its catastrophic consequences - Jen Rubin at the Washington Post called it "the most irresponsible speech ever given in wartime by a U.S. president," while Dana Milbank is calling it Obama's "Mission Accomplished" moment - this actually can be measured as a slight win for those forces within the administration who argued for a slower drawdown than was politically preferable. It certainly was not a victory Senate Armed Service Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, who wanted 50 percent more, or for Vice President Joe Biden, who reportedly wanted forces withdrawn by the beginning of next summer.

The real test of how much of a victory it is for the commanders likely depends on how much leeway the White House gives them on which 10,000 personnel come home - support battalions, or warfighters. Yet while most commentators are focused on the number, it is the timing of this withdrawal's second phase that should concern people more than the number. As the New York Times notes this morning, "the most significant effect of President Obama’s latest orders will be felt at this time next year, when as many as 23,000 American troops who would have been on missions at the peak of the summer fighting season will instead be packing for home."

And while I typically reject William Kristol's views on foreign policy, he seems right on this score: This is a timing decision made with the 2012 election primarily in mind, not the security picture or in anticipation of changing facts on the ground.

Triangulating works as domestic politics for a reason: Your metric for judging the outcome is making a decision placed between two poles that appeals to the largest portion of the electorate. This is less wise when it comes to strategic decision-making, particularly considering the potential consequences of this decision not just for Afghanistan or for American security, but for the nearly 70,000 U.S. troops who will remain in Afghanistan after this drawdown is complete.

It's hard to shake the feeling that Obama may come to regret deploying this approach to his decision-making process at some point in the future. But as Kori Schake noted prior to the remarks last night: "It's the president's choice. That's what he gets elected for."

And the consequences, for good or ill, could come to define his presidency. Let's hope he's right.

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Last night U.S. President Barak Obama announced the beginning of the end of his Afghan surge. Ten thousand U.S. troops will be home by the end of the year, with the remaining 20,000 surge troops returning stateside by next summer. That will leave approximately 70,000 to focus on Afghanistan’s restive borders to the south and east. Some of those will trickle back by 2014, when full security of the country is to be handed over to Afghan forces. Others are likely to be stationed at semi-permanent bases across the country into the near future.

The drawdown is seen as deeper and faster than anticipated by the Pentagon and, rather than signaling overwhelming success, reflects the heightened fiscal pressures that have descended on Washington along with the uncertainties surrounding the broad nation-building mission in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death.

To read the rest of this article, visit Forbes.com, where it was originally published.

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As President Obama prepares to tell us how many troops he will withdraw from Afghanistan, it's worth pointing out that the U.S. was never supposed to a launch a war against Afghanistan. It was supposed to be against several hundred Arabs and a hodge-podge of other nationalities who had taken up shop in Afghanistan to plot terrorist attacks, plus a slice of the Afghan population that thought sheltering them was a good idea. When the Bush administration largely accomplished that in early 2002, it decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by turning the war into a quest to give Afghanistan something it had not had in decades: a stable government.

This was a classic example of moving the goal posts, and it has been costly.

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Afghanistan’s second vice President, Karim Khalili, the Minister of Interior, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, MoI leadership, NTM-A Deputy Commanding General and EUPOL and German Police Project Team officials gathered for the ribbon cutting ceremony of Afghanistan’s largest premier police training facility.

So began a press release from the NATO Training Mission - Afghanistan (NTM-A). The article describes the modern training facilities that will house 3,000 cadets once construction is completed. The U.S.-funded, $106 million dollar facility has an impressive "23 barracks, eight classrooms, 23 guard towers, three dining facilities, three headquarters and administration buildings, gym, auditorium, medical facility, fire station and international trainers compound."

That fire station must have come in handy during yesterday's ribbon cutting ceremony, for, you see, the NATO public affairs officers missed a more gripping intro to their report.

Buried deep in the story was this apparent throwaway graf:

As the ceremony was concluding, a rocket impacted in the training center. There were no injuries or fatalities during the attack and dignitaries were able to safely depart the site. Wardak province has a history of sporadic rocket attacks that are the ongoing focus of Afghan and NATO forces in that area.

The Associated Press framed the incident differently:

The round crashed down and exploded within the grounds of the facility during its inauguration Wednesday, sending panicked police recruits crawling across the floor of a meeting hall and prompting bodyguards to bundle one of Afghanistan's vice presidents and the government minister in charge of police forces into helicopters and flee.

Spin is one thing but when self-congratulatory ribbon cuttings are deemed more news worthy than rocket attacks on senior Afghan politicians and NATO officials, a firm grounding in reality has somehow slipped away, if not in Afghanistan as a whole then at least in NATO's public affairs department.

Alim

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In the coming weeks, President Barak Obama will announce exactly what shape the termination of his Afghan surge will take. In light of this, and in the aftermath of bin Laden's death, pundits have been falling over themselves to voice just what all this means for the future of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

Defense Secretary Gates has called for a gradual withdrawal while Democrats in Congress are eager for a more hasty departure. The White House itself has said that the July drawdown will be "real" and the final decision will be based on "conditions on the ground" lining up with the president's stated objectives of defeating al-Qaeda and stabilizing Afghanistan, according to CFR.org.

Part of the calculus behind any drawdown schedule will be the progress of peace negotiations with the Taliban. Yesterday, The Express Tribune, a Pakistani newspaper affiliated with The International Tribune, ran a story alleging that, according to an unnamed source, the United States had made direct contact with Taliban leader Mullah Omar via an intermediary, a former Taliban spokesman known as Mohammad Hanif who was arrested by U.S. forces in 2007.

Rumors on high-level secret negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban have been swirling around Kabul for at least a year. Some of this hearsay could be credible, such as talks in Germany, the Persian Gulf and Turkey, while in others instances the U.S. has been outright hoodwinked by Taliban impostors.

According to the Express article, the U.S. had offered the Taliban control over the south of Afghanistan, while leaving the north for the other political forces under American influence. However, this was rejected by the Taliban.

Should this turn out to be true, it would seem the U.S. has taken a page from a recent Foreign Affairs article penned by Robert D. Blackwill, former U.S. ambassador to India and former deputy national security adviser for strategic planning.

In the article Blackwill writes:

Current U.S. policy toward Afghanistan involves spending scores of billions of dollars and suffering several hundred allied deaths annually to prevent the Afghan Taliban from controlling the Afghan Pashtun homeland -- with little end in sight. Those who ask for more time for the existing strategy to succeed often fail to spell out what they think the odds are that it will work in the next few years, what amount of casualties and resources they think the attempt is worth, and why. That calculus suggests that it is time to shift to Plan B....The time has come, therefore, to switch to the least bad alternative -- acceptance of a de facto partition of the country.

Blackwill proposes a long term combat role for as many as 50,000 U.S. troops in the north half of the country, ceding the rest of the country to the Taliban. "...Washington should accept that the Taliban will inevitably control most of the Pashtun south and east and that the price of forestalling that outcome is far too high for the United States to continue paying," argues Blackwill. The former ambassador's proposal amounts to a decade of nation-building in the north and counterterrorism in the south.

If the U.S. is indeed offering to barter half of Afghanistan for a peace treaty, perhaps the Obama administration has reluctantly arrived at the same conclusion as Blackwill: "Accepting a de facto partition of Afghanistan has enough downsides that choosing it makes sense only if the other options available are even worse. They are."

Alim

(AP Photo)

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Kabul is a hustle. But with a little scratch, a little nerve, a little luck and, yes, perhaps a little graft, all things are possible.

The economy grew by a blistering 22.5 percent last year, agriculture alone by 53 percent thanks to ample wet weather. The service sector bounded by double digits and mining, the purported panacea the country’s been longing for, jumped by a third.

Security, however, is at its worst since 2001, Afghanistan continues to provide 90 percent of the world’s heroin, the country ranks as second most corrupt and relies more heavily on foreign aid than any other.

It’s in front of such a backdrop that everyday Afghans have been eking out an existence through the nearly 10-year war.

A recent Guardian article illustrates how this drama is playing out in the capital of Kabul:

The 10-year international effort has seen Kabul change from being a moribund city of fewer than 400,000 to a bustling metropolis of 4.5 million flush with cash. The last two years have seen an explosion in conspicuous consumption. There are blocks of luxury apartments under construction, giant video hoardings advertising energy drinks, BMWs and Hummers blasting their way through the traffic with overpowered horns. Miralam Hosseini, 56, sells at least two $140,000 4x4s every week. Across the street from his showroom, an electronics shops stocks the latest 52in flat screen.

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Danielle Pletka makes the case for victory in Afghanistan:

The choices for America in Afghanistan are simpler than they appear in the fog of political debate: We can win or we can lose. Definitions can be debated, but in short, victory will mean that Afghanistan will not be a sustainable operational haven for al Qaeda, its political and terrorist affiliates, or a base for aggression against the U.S. and its allies.

Unfortunately, al-Qaeda does not current enjoy an "operational haven" in Afghanistan - it has one in Pakistan. So we've already won!

Indeed, the idea that we need to wage a massive counter-insurgency to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven begs a number of obvious questions - what about the other countries that either are, or could become, "operational" safe havens for al-Qaeda? Do they get 100,000-plus NATO forces? And what is an "operational" safe haven, anyway? Is there a threshold number of al-Qaeda fighters whereby a U.S. invasion and occupation becomes necessary? (The 9/11 attacks were plotted in, among other places, Hamburg, Germany.)

More fundamentally - how do we know when Afghanistan ceases to be a threat to U.S. security? Most of the recent terrorist plots that have been unearthed have originated in either Pakistan or Yemen. Isn't that significant? Is there any realistic time-frame when the country could not "potentially" be a safe haven? If we couldn't achieve this in 10 years, how much more time do we need?

(AP Photo)

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To take the issue of the "affordability" of Afghanistan a bit further, a new Congressional report highlights the costs:

One example cited in the report is the Performance-Based Governors Fund, which is authorized to distribute up to $100,000 a month in U.S. funds to individual provincial leaders for use on local expenses and development projects. In some provinces, it says, “this amount represents a tidal wave of funding” that local officials are incapable of “spending wisely.”

Because oversight is scanty, the report says, the fund encourages corruption. Although the U.S. plan is for the Afghan government to eventually take over this and other programs, it has neither the management capacity nor the funds to do so.

The report also warns that the Afghan economy could slide into a depression with the inevitable decline of the foreign military and development spending that now provides 97 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

The U.S. could "sustain" this indefinitely, but why would it want to?

(AP Photo)

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What the White House is attempting to do is paint... [nation building] as profligate, contrasting it to the cost-effectiveness of a narrower counter-terror approach. They ought to ask themselves why none of our military leadership is supporting the approach.

This feels like one more example of President Obama leading from behind. He has made little effort to build public support for the war -- he didn't even make a statement on the House debate over withdrawing from Afghanistan. By floating a cost-based objection to his own strategy, the president sets himself up to "respond to pressure" and constrain our effort in Afghanistan. This is terrible leadership on a crucial national security issue.

Responsible people can advocate different approaches to defending ourselves against the terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan and Pakistan. They can also advocate further cuts to defense spending. But it is dangerous to argue the cost of prosecuting a war that, while high, is marginal to our expenditures and by no means the driver of our debt, cannot be afforded. - Kori Schake

I think Shake is correct here - the U.S. can "afford" to continue nation building in Afghanistan through 2014 (or beyond). The more important question she eludes to, however, is: is it worth it? Just because the U.S. can afford a certain policy doesn't mean it's the best option. If the Obama administration concludes that nation building in Afghanistan is not worth it (no matter how "affordable" it is) then it needs to make the case directly.

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The war in Afghanistan is, at a very fundamental level, political. The dispute growing between the High Peace Council and the National Movement is, at a very fundamental level, political. I’ve been harping on this for years, that many of the biggest problems we face in Afghanistan are neither military nor economic in nature, but political. The U.S. has never had real challenges on the battlefield—the Army and Marines are terrifyingly good at “clearing” areas. But the politics of what to do with those cleared areas has always mystified NATO and ISAF.

The Washington Post recently reported that the Marines have spent nearly $1.3 billion in the last 18 months in Marjeh, and there remains no political structure to assist with governance. Even in supposedly successful places like Nawa, also in Helmand, the Marines have shown a marked inability to understand and affect the political context of the areas they control—and they have been substantially more successful than the Army in doing this! But they’re stuck in a stilted mode of thinking that, once the guys with guns sweep through, they can lavish money upon an area and declare it successful.

This is not a war the Taliban are winning: from a political perspective they’re barely more functional than the Afghan government is. It is a war we are losing—by ignoring the politics of Afghanistan, of the basic political question driving the war (e.g. what will be the ultimate political system of Afghanistan), and the politics preventing Afghans and Taliban from sitting down to negotiate, we are sowing the seeds of failure. - Joshua Foust

This sounds right to me. And let's be fair - it may not be possible for the U.S. to finesse the politics of Afghanistan to get the outcome Washington desires even if (a huge if) we properly understood these politics and the levers we'd need to move them in our direction. A "political" solution is contingent on a lot of factors, some of which may not be amenable to American bombs and/or bribes. The present course suggests the U.S. is simply trying to save face in Afghanistan - delivering enough of a blow to the Taliban that they will be weak enough for the Afghan National Army to hold them at bay when the U.S. departs in 2014.

There are, though, problems with that approach. Specifically, the Afghan National Army and police:

Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the American in charge of the NATO effort to train Afghan forces, said Monday that although NATO was on track to reach its goal of training 305,000 army and police forces by October, attrition remained a significant problem. Those forces currently total 296,000.

General Caldwell said that about 30 percent of Afghan soldiers leave the Army every year before their terms of service are up, particularly in areas of heavy combat where they are needed most. In addition, he said that only one in 10 recruits can read and write, meaning NATO must first provide literacy training so that soldiers are able to write their names and read serial numbers on their weapons. So far, he said, NATO has trained 90,000 men in basic literacy.

The Taliban, by contrast, do not have the world's most powerful military alliance training them in military techniques and literacy and equipping them. And yet, with 296,000 men under arms we're still not confident that these Afghan troops can keep the Taliban insurgency at bay. Pretty astounding, isn't it?

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When it comes to U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan that, according to one Obama official, is the question:

U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter, backed by top military officers and other State Department officials, wants the strikes to be more judicious, and argues that Pakistan's views need to be given greater weight if the fight against militancy is to succeed, said current and former U.S. officials.

Defenders of the current drone program take umbrage at the suggestion that the program isn't judicious. "In this context, the phrase 'more judicious' is really code for 'let's appease Pakistani sensitivities,' " said a U.S. official. The CIA has already given Pakistani concerns greater weight in targeting decisions in recent months, the official added. Advocates of sustained strikes also argue that the current rift with the Pakistanis isn't going to be fixed by scaling back the program.

Given the secrecy of the program, it's difficult to tell what kind of targets the CIA is hitting. I take the term "judicious" to mean that drone killings are reserved for "high level" al-Qaeda operatives (like Illyas Kashmiri). Individuals who are typically foreign fighters or clearly linked to acts of terrorism directed against the United States. Given the number and tempo of drone strikes conducted over the past two years, it's clear the CIA is targeting a much wider array of individuals than that. Indeed, it may be more appropriate to view the drone program not so much as a tool to assassinate terrorists in hard-to-reach places but as an extension of the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan: CIA drones can hit militant targets related to the Afghan war that NATO, for political and diplomatic reasons, cannot.

If that is indeed the case, then the drone program is quite analogous to the war in Afghanistan. What started as a limited campaign to target those who would kill Americans has been transformed into a wider and murkier conflict against second-order enemies who are primarily being killed because they are attacking the U.S. presence in the region.

(AP Photo)

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Sarah Palin dipped into the Afghan fray on Tuesday, posting a Facebook comment in response to President Karzai’s NATO ultimatum on civilian casualties after at least nine civilians were killed in their home in Helmand province:

What President Karzai is saying is that if we don’t severely limit our air campaign he will take “unilateral action.” And he further says that if the airstrikes continue we will be seen as an “occupying” power. This is an indirect way of saying that American and NATO forces will be fair game, which is obviously an unacceptable situation that threatens our troops…Let us be clear: we are in Afghanistan fighting for the Afghan people and for the security of our country and our allies. If President Karzai continues with these public ultimatums, we must consider our options about the immediate future of U.S. troops in his country. If he actually follows through on his claim that Afghan forces will take “unilateral action” against NATO forces who conduct such air raids to take out terrorists and terrorist positions, that should result in the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and the suspension of U.S. aid.

The public statements of politicians are made to serve myriad audiences and their rhetoric should not be taken literally. Karzai is attempting to crest the wave of war fatigue and anti-foreigner sentiment rising through Afghanistan. Palin is trying to prove that the view from her Alaskan home extends beyond Russia, right into the heart of Asia. At most, their comments demarcate the extreme positions of the much more nuanced debate taking place behind closed doors and between cooler heads. At the very least they should be dismissed as posturing and brinkmanship.

However, the former governor gets a few things wrong. At no point did Karzai make the threat that “Afghan forces will take ‘unilateral action’ against NATO forces.” It’s his government that will take action, militarily, diplomatically or by other political means. And, in the wake of bin Laden’s death, Palin’s labeling of the Taliban as terrorists is subject to some debate.

Karzai, currently the only one of the two who is an elected official and representing a presidency, must be held to a higher standard of accountability than a private citizen on a non-campaign family bus tour. But with millions of “friends” comes great responsibility. The cyber-phenom that is Sarah Palin has so far stirred almost 4,000 responses to her Afghanistan Facebook post; likely far more than Karzai could ever hope to elicit, and dwarfing a lifetime of responses for this humble blogger.

Alim

(AP Photo)

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The news yesterday that China may build a naval base in Pakistan has raised some eyebrows. Gideon Rachman observes:

The story has come out of Pakistan, following the visit of the Pakistani prime minister to China last week. It may simply reflect Pakistani fury with the US, following the Bin Laden killing – rather than any genuine Chinese decision to go for an overseas naval base. Some western policymakers reckon that the Chinese will actually be wincing at the appearance of this story in the western press, since it will heighten the perception that China is overplaying its hand in the Pacific – an idea that has helped America to strengthen its military alliances across the region.

I don't think it's a Pakistan snub to the U.S., after all there are good strategic reasons for Pakistan and China to partner. And, as Rediff reports, they have been steadily expanding ties for some time:

A free trade area is in place from 2006, raw materials exploitation is in full swing in different parts of Pakistan, while China is building (often without international competitive bidding) infrastructure projects such as widening Karakoram highway, railway projects (closer to Abbottabad), port facilities at Gwadar and Karachi, hydro-electric projects in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, etc. Also, Pakistan procured 50 new fighter aircraft from China during Gilani's visit.

China had in the recent past substantially increased military supplies to Pakistan -- including JF-17 fighters, four frigates, six submarines, early warning aircraft and other ground forces equipment. More such projects are committed during this visit. Some Chinese retired naval officers and others have also demanded recently that China should set up military "facilities" in Pakistan. After the Chinese assistance to the Chashma III and IV nuclear power plants were cleared by the International Atomic Energy Agency in March this year (as a counter to the US-India 123 agreement), and as moves towards the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty are being made, the recent news about substantial increases in Pakistan's capability to produce nuclear warheads, is not surprising.

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By Elbridge Colby

The eminently gratifying and important killing of Osama bin Ladin is raising a host of questions – about the future of our counterterrorism policy, our relations with Pakistan, the revolutions in the Middle East, etc. One aspect that hasn’t been emphasized as much is that the United States just conducted a kinetic military operation within the confines of a nuclear-armed sovereign nation without its consent. Indeed, reports indicate that the Pakistanis scrambled interceptors once they picked up signs of the U.S. helicopters.

This is interesting because it is further demonstration that there are limits to how expansively nuclear weapons deter. Even if a country, like Pakistan, has a well-established and pretty formidable nuclear weapons capability, another nation has shown itself to be willing and able to penetrate its airspace, insert soldiers onto the ground, conduct military operations and kill targeted individuals – all without Islamabad’s consent. That’s striking because many argue that nuclear weapons possession so radically transforms the way nations behave – irrespective of the posture and nature of the states’ dispute – that possessing states will be protected from any significant military actions, certainly against their home territory. They will, so the argument goes, be so shielded from retort by their nuclear umbrella that they will have leave to get away with almost anything, such as sheltering Osama bin Ladin. There is some amount of truth to this view, of course. Nuclear weapons have enormous deterrent power, and countries will think far more carefully about taking serious action against a nuclear-armed power than against one without means of massively destructive reprisal.

Yet the commendable U.S. decision to go after bin Ladin – in an operation that involved inserting forces right into the middle of a nuclear-armed country and with full knowledge of the possibility that there could be shooting between U.S. and Pakistani forces – shows that nuclear weapons do not provide blanket protection for all manner of evils. Countries that have nuclear weapons can still be confronted and operated against without spurring escalation to nuclear use, particularly when the objective pursued is limited and discriminate, and especially when that objective is connected to a truly vital national interest. Presumably the president’s calculus was that there was almost no conceivable chance that Pakistan would resort to a nuclear response against the United States, which would be perforce irrational given America’s vast retaliatory capability, and that that miniscule probability was outweighed by the great national interest in taking just vengeance on the murderer of almost 3,000 Americans.

This fact should be borne in mind as we consider how to deal with today’s nuclear aspirants – and, perhaps more importantly, should be borne in mind by them. They may, despite our best efforts, succeed in getting nuclear weapons. But this will not give them blank check immunity to harbor the worst terrorists or continually attack South Korea with impunity. If we have the resolve, we can still take discriminate but effective action.
-----

Elbridge Colby served most recently with the Office of the Secretary of Defense on the New START agreement negotiation and ratification effort. Previously, he served as an advisor to the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission and with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The views expressed here are his own.

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Erik Voeten surveys some recent research:

The second paper finds that Pakistanis who are more favorable towards liberal democracy are also more favorable towards militant groups. The authors ascribe this finding to widespread beliefs among those who favor democracy that Muslim rights and sovereignty are being violated in Kashmir, although the relationship holds for support for all four militant groups.

I guess that Osama Bin Laden made a wise choice when he chose to hide in a middle class suburb.

He also links to a paper (pdf) that suggests that democratization and economic development "may be irrelevant at best and might even be counterproductive" to reversing support for militancy in Pakistan.

Maybe it's time for Plan B - or is that C?

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It is immaterial whether or not the Taliban, the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the others are currently targeting the American homeland. We cannot allow them to create a fundamentalist caliphate stretching from Kabul to Kashmir and beyond. Their takeover of Afghanistan—a first step toward this grandiose goal—would galvanize jihadists and could reverse the loss of momentum they have suffered because of the Arab Spring and bin Laden's death. It would also provide greater impetus to topple the nuclear-armed Pakistan next door. - Max Boot

If it's immaterial that a certain group of people are or aren't targeting the United States, then why aren't we sending troops into Somalia, Yemen, the Palestinian territories and anywhere else a few people pine for a caliphate? (Leaving aside, of course, the rather important question of whether the Haqqani network and LeT have the capability to fulfill such a grandiose vision.)

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The US and Pakistan struck a secret deal almost a decade ago permitting a US operation against Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil similar to last week's raid that killed the al-Qaida leader, the Guardian has learned.

The deal was struck between the military leader General Pervez Musharraf and President George Bush after Bin Laden escaped US forces in the mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001, according to serving and retired Pakistani and US officials.

Under its terms, Pakistan would allow US forces to conduct a unilateral raid inside Pakistan in search of Bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the al-Qaida No3. Afterwards, both sides agreed, Pakistan would vociferously protest the incursion. - Declan Walsh

This kind of news is difficult to interpret. It could easily be spin on Pakistan's part - a way to prove they were helping the U.S. even as the furor grows over bin Laden's Abbottabad hideaway.

On the other hand, it could be entirely accurate. And it's easy to see why Pakistan would agree to this kind of deal: their population has a largely negative view of the United States and any country, no matter how well disposed to the U.S., would have a hard time selling military incursions on their territory.

As a practical matter, if the U.S. was presented by Pakistan with this option or nothing, it's probably better than nothing. But this kind of arrangement is really corrosive to U.S.-Pakistani ties and to Pakistan's internal stability. It makes Pakistan's government look weak and duplicitious, which is bad for Pakistan. It also continues to perpetuate anti-Americanism inside Pakistan, which is bad for the U.S.

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Anatol Lieven has been a persistent voice in warning the U.S. off taking actions that could potentially destabilize Pakistan, which is why his piece in the National Interest arguing for a harder line is noteworthy:

For while it is entirely true that I have argued that Pakistan is more resilient than it looks, and is not yet a failed or failing state, the United States certainly cannot deliberately try to make it one—unless Pakistan has in effect become an open enemy. Even without the apocalyptic threat of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons or materials falling into the hands of terrorists, a serious fraying of the Pakistani military would lead to anti-aircraft missiles, trained engineers and immense stores of munitions and equipment going astray. That in itself would raise the terrorist threat to the West by an order of magnitude, and absolutely ensure defeat in Afghanistan. For it must be stressed that—provenly in the case of the Afghan Taliban, probably in the case of al-Qaeda—the Pakistani military has given shelter to our enemies, it has not yet actually armed them.

One thing supporters of indefinite nation building in Afghanistan argue is that we have to stay in the country for the sake of Pakistan and that much of our problems with Pakistan stem from the fact that we left Afghanistan once before and now they don't trust the U.S. to stick around for the long haul. But it seems like the longer we've stayed in Afghanistan, the worse relations have gotten with Pakistan. The U.S. doesn't have many realistic levers over Pakistan's behavior and our go-to source of leverage (money) has only gotten us so far.

As Lieven notes (and as I pointed out earlier), it's one thing to support militant groups whose scope is limited to Afghanistan, since, for better or worse, that is a vital Pakistani interest and not something we can do all that much about. Providing safe harbor for an organization that has a demonstrated capacity to launch attacks directly against the U.S. homeland, however, is another story. Unfortunately, so long as we're invested in building up Afghanistan we are going to have to keep relations with Pakistan on a somewhat even keel, no matter what uncomfortable revelations lie in store.

(AP Photo)

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Rasmussen finds an increased willingness among likely voters to pull troops out of Afghanistan:

A new Rasmussen Reports nation telephone survey finds that 35% of Likely U.S. Voters now favor the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, the highest level of support to date. Twenty-one percent (21%) more support the establishment of a firm timetable to bring the troops home within a year.

The combined total of 56% is up four points from the beginning of March, up 13 points from 43% last September, and up 19 points from September 2009.

Thirty percent (30%) of voters still oppose the creation of any kind of timetable for withdrawal and 15% remain undecided.

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In an article arguing that the U.S. must not withdraw from Afghanistan following bin Laden's death, Frederick and Kim Kagan make a very odd statement:

Bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan has once again concentrated the minds of Americans on the fact that Pakistan’s leadership has yet to come to consensus about the need to combat and defeat militant Islamist groups within Pakistan’s borders. Nor has the United States developed any real strategy for addressing this challenge.

But isn't this the whole enchilada? We are waging a counter-insurgency in Afghanistan premised on the fact that institutions and individuals favorably disposed to U.S. interests must prevail. Pakistan is also engaged in this counter-insurgency - mostly on the other side.

The Kagans lament the lack of a strategy for Pakistan, while pressing the U.S. to keep "resourcing" the Afghan war. But if you don't have a strategy for ending Pakistan's support for insurgent groups inside Afghanistan, you don't have a strategy to win the war in Afghanistan.

(AP Photo)

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According to a Friday poll from Rasmussen, a majority of Americans think Pakistan knew where bin Laden was:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 84% of American Adults think it’s at least somewhat likely that high-level officials in the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding. That includes 57% who say it is Very Likely they knew. Only nine percent (9%) believe it’s not likely that Pakistan knew.

Just 15% of Americans say the United States should continue military and financial aid to Pakistan. Sixty-three percent (63%) say that aid should not continue. Twenty-two percent (22%) are not sure.

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The world knows bin Laden as the architect of mass terror, but according to Rediff he was also something of a domestic maestro:

A senior security expert in Islamabad told rediff.com that the police officers who interrogated Osama's 12-year-old daughter and his three wives are marvelling at Osama's ability to manage such a large family so harmoniously under one roof even while hiding from the world and its best spy agencies.

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In the course of disparaging the Bush administration's handling of bin Laden at Tora Bora, Jacob Stokes praises President Obama's ability to multitask:

In contrast, President Obama – while managing the uprising in the Middle East, the war in Afghanistan and a government on the brink of shutdown – could have been too distracted to pay attention to what were surely incomplete intelligence reports saying the CIA had located bin Laden. He could have followed the advice of members of Congress and put the U.S. in the lead of the war in Libya, which would have occupied a significant portion of the national security apparatus’s attention. All of those things could have taken President Obama’s eye off the goal of capturing bin Laden. This opportunity could have been squandered.

This doesn't sound all that plausible to me. First, Libya is a fairly large distraction in its own right - it's not an Iraq-style debacle by any means, but it certainly reflects poorly on the administration's decision-making process. (For instance, where was Hillary Clinton yesterday - Islamabad? Nope, she was in Rome, trying to rescue the Libyan intervention.) Second, no matter what was going on, if CIA personnel walk into the Oval Office and say they think they know where bin Laden is living, any president is going to stop what he or she is doing and pay attention.

I think Stokes is a lot closer to the mark to say that casualty aversion was the prime culprit at Tora Bora.

(Photo credit: Pete Souza)

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Larison agrees that asking Pakistan to account for its behavior with respect to bin Laden is reasonable, but cautions against leaping to conclusions:

What bothers me about the snap judgments about Pakistan’s complicity (as opposed to complicity on the part of a relative few people within Pakistani intelligence) is that they are not informed by any clear evidence of complicity apart from the location of the compound. There is an assumption that complicity simply must be the explanation for why bin Laden was where he was, and there is an added assumption that this implicates a large part of the Pakistani establishment. This is jumping to conclusions at its worst. If there were elements within the ISI that sheltered bin Laden, as I assume there were, that doesn’t prove that they were acting with the knowledge or approval of all Pakistani authorities.

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According to a new Pew Research poll following the death of bin Laden:

While the public is more optimistic about success, there is little change in opinion about maintaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The public remains divided over whether the U.S. should keep troops in Afghanistan until the situation has stabilized (47%) or remove troops as soon as possible (48%), virtually unchanged from a month ago (44% keep troops, 50% remove troops).

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Thomas Mahnkem warns against it:

There will be a temptation among some quarters at home and abroad to declare, "Mission accomplished". Opponents of the war in Afghanistan will cite Bin Laden's death as evidence strengthening the case for reducing U.S. forces in the region. Those who oppose a vigorous internationalist strategy will escalate their calls for the United States to adopt more of an "offshore" role. The Pakistanis will attempt to tout their cooperation with the United States in bringing bin Laden to justice while diverting American attention from such uncomfortable questions as how and why bin Laden was able to live for months or years under the noses of Pakistani military and intelligence officers. Other partners, whose enthusiasm for defeating al Qaeda has been limited, may be perfectly willing to declare victory and go home.

This temptation must be resisted, however. Protracted wars are not decided on the outcome of any individual episode. Rather, they turn on the progressive attrition of the adversary's sources of power. Similarly, this conflict will not end in a single battle or campaign.

What I think proponents of "declaring victory" wish to do is wind down the nation building in Afghanistan, but not give up on trying to thwart terrorist threats around the globe. I think the manner in which bin Laden was dispatched makes a decent case for a counter-terrorist approach that relies on intelligence, small bases and precision instead of a full blown effort to rebuild Afghanistan.

(AP Photo)

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Great story here:

Could Osama bin Laden have been found faster if the CIA had followed the advice of ecosystem geographers from the University of California, Los Angeles? Probably not, but the predictions of UCLA geographer Thomas Gillespie, who, along with colleague John Agnew and a class of undergraduates, authored a 2009 paper predicting the terrorist’s whereabouts, were none too shabby. According to a probabilistic model they created, there was an 88.9% chance that bin Laden was hiding out in a city less than 300 km from his last known location in Tora Bora: a region that included Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed last night.

That's via Matthew Yglesias who believes the fact that bin Laden was holed up in a swanky compound in a city dispells the myth that terrorists need safe havens:

For one thing, a terrorist in rural Afghanistan is, by definition, not in the United States. It’s also hard to get from rural Afghanistan to the United States. And it’s difficult to communicate with people who aren’t in rural Afghanistan. It’s also, as Gillespie says, relatively likely that people will know what you’re up to. And in the scheme of things, it’s easier to be spotted by spy satellites and the like.

I'd also add that terrorists holed up in remote regions of lawless or poorly governed states are vulnerable to attack - by drones or from the air. We can also collect intelligence on terrorist networks without nation building in Afghanistan.

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Whenever an allied government doesn’t measure up to what the U.S. expects of it, it is tempting to accuse it of perfidy or betrayal, but that avoids considering whether we are expecting something that the ally can reasonably provide. Libya hawks have taken to bashing Germany for its pacifism, which is another way of saying that allies are supposed to act like satrapies: they are not permitted to make independent judgments about policy questions, nor are they allowed to act in their own interests. Iraq hawks derided Turkey for its opposition to the invasion, and some of them built up entire narratives that portrayed France as our traditional nemesis. Considering how widely loathed our government is in Pakistan, and considering how antagonistic many of our policies are to Pakistani interests, the U.S. has no reason to expect any Pakistani cooperation. For various reasons, we have received some cooperation anyway. Inevitably, that isn’t enough for some people, who seem to expect allied governments to commit a sort of suicide to fulfill our demands. - Daniel Larison

This is a very fair point with respect to Pakistan and their support for the Afghan Taliban, but I don't think it applies to allegations that they sheltered bin Laden or other al-Qaeda members. I think we agree that pushing Pakistan to do something it is almost constitutionally incapable of doing is reckless. Pakistan support for the Afghan Taliban is something that is deemed, for better or worse, a vital Pakistani interest and U.S. bribes and bombs have not really altered that calculus. We can't transform Pakistan into a country that suddenly trusts India and therefore doesn't seek strategic depth in Afghanistan - and efforts to change Pakistani behavior in this regard will naturally run aground, if not destabilize the country worse than it already has.

But what does that have to do with bin Laden and al-Qaeda? Keeping bin Laden secreted away doesn't advance Pakistan's aims vis-a-vis India or Afghanistan, as far as I can tell. And even if the ISI did have some kind of rationale, so what? Ultimately, we have to have some red lines and harboring fugitives responsible for slaughtering Americans on American soil is surely one of them.

Now, it's possible that bin Laden built a walled compound a few hundred yards away from a major Pakistani military institution with no one batting an eye. It's also possible that he managed to evade one of the most intense manhunts in human history without any help from well-placed insiders in the ISI or Pakistani military. (Jeffrey Goldberg makes that case here.) Even if he had that help, it's quite possible that the upper echelons in Pakistan's military (and certainly the civilian government) weren't quite clued in as to what was going on - or weren't very interested in finding out. We can't rule out sheer incompetence, either, given how much of it is routinely on display in our own government.

But it's also quite possible - I would say plausible - that Pakistan is at least partially complicit in sheltering bin Laden. I don't think that's a reason to invade or attack the country - which would be an insane act. But I don't think it's unreasonable to probe this question with more urgency and to demand changes in Pakistan's behavior if their complicity can be proven.

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Steve Coll reflects on the death of bin Laden:

The initial circumstantial evidence suggests... that bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control. Pakistan will deny this, it seems safe to predict, and perhaps no convincing evidence will ever surface to prove the case. If I were a prosecutor at the United States Department of Justice, however, I would be tempted to call a grand jury. Who owned the land on which the house was constructed? How was the land acquired, and from whom? Who designed the house, which seems to have been purpose-built to secure bin Laden? Who was the general contractor? Who installed the security systems? Who worked there? Are there witnesses who will now testify as to who visited the house, how often, and for what purpose?

A lot more questions than answers at this point.

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Interesting thought from Tom Ricks:

What suspicious minds are asking: Why did the Pakistanis give him up? And what did we give in return?

I also think this will strongly up the pressure on the Obama Administration to end its involvement in Afghanistan. Not just politicians but the man on the street is likely to say, Hey, we got him, mission accomplished, let's go home.

If Pakistan did indeed tip the U.S. off to bin Laden's whereabouts, did they do so as a way to ease the U.S. out of Afghanistan? It doesn't sound all that crazy...

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Picking up on Ben's post below, the important subtext of bin Laden's very welcome demise is less the future of al-Qaeda (important as that is) but the future of Pakistan. As Jane Perlez writes:

With Bin Laden’s death, perhaps the central reason for an alliance forged on the ashes of 9/11 has been removed, at a moment when relations between the countries are already at one of their lowest points as their strategic interests diverge over the shape of a post-war Afghanistan.

For nearly a decade, the United States has paid Pakistan more than $1 billion a year for counterterrorism operations whose chief aim was the killing or capture of Bin Laden, who slipped across the border from Afghanistan after the American invasion.

The circumstance of Bin Laden’s death may not only jeopardize that aid, but will also no doubt deepen suspicions that Pakistan has played a double game, and perhaps even knowingly harbored the Qaeda leader.

Perlez goes on to provide important details as to bin Laden's hideaway:

Rather, he was killed in Abbottabad, a city of about 500,000, in a large and highly secured compound that, a resident of the city said, sits virtually adjacent to the grounds of a military academy. In an ironic twist, the academy was visited just last month by the Pakistani military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, where he proclaimed that Pakistan had “cracked” the forces of terrorism, an assessment that was greeted with skepticism in Washington.

In addition, the city hosts numerous Pakistani forces — three different regiments, and a unit of the Army Medical Corps. According to some reports, the compound and its elaborate walls and security gates may have been built specifically for the Qaeda leader in 2005, hardly an obscure undertaking in a part of the city that the resident described as highly secure.

So in 2005, people start fortifying a compound to repel a ground assault in very close proximity to a major military institution and no one inside Pakistan looks into it? Is that believable?

One can understand the thinking behind Pakistan's support for Afghan Taliban groups, cultivated as an extension of Pakistan's strategic goals in a neighboring territory - but what explains covert assistance to bin Laden, if such assistance was in fact offered (or passively extended)? Was keeping bin Laden alive an effort to keep the U.S. gravy train rolling?

(As a side note, the photo above is via Nicholas Jackson who notes how quickly the bin Laden compound was located on Google Maps.)

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One key point which will be much discussed in the coming weeks is the role Pakistan's authorities played in protecting the location of Osama bin Laden over the past several years. Rather than living in a cave or a remote area, it appears now that bin Laden has been in roughly the same location for multiple years, perhaps stretching back to 2005, when modifications were made to the compound where he was killed.

The question during the entire hunt for bin Laden has always been to what degree Pakistan was merely useless vs. actively undermining our efforts. Now Yahoo's Laura Rozen reports the area where bin Laden was killed is going to spark these questions once again given its population and location:

Obama commended Pakistani officials as he touted the effort to hunt down Bin Laden. But some critics are already pointing out the incongruity of Bin Laden, who had long been thought to be sequestered in far more remote parts of the country, turning up in an affluent suburb of Pakistan's capital - one that is filled with Pakistani military officials, no less.

"Abbottabad has a large military cantonment area and the Army college and exam center are located there," a former U.S. official who has worked in Pakistan told The Envoy. "It is very much off the usual track for foreigners … and I simply do not believe Bin Ladin could hide there unaided by or unknown to the Pakistanis."

It seems noteworthy that in President Obama's remarks on the subject, he thanked Pakistan without expressing anything they actually did to help the process along - and it's clear from the White House briefings tonight on the raid that he did not share intel with them, or indeed with any nation, taking a unilateral path instead. Rozen's source leads us to the question many in the administration and outside it are likely thinking about tonight: who in Pakistan's government knew Osama was there, and how long did they know it?

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Happy Mujahideen Victory Day.

Nineteen years ago, today, a rag-tag group of insurgents overthrew the previously Soviet-supported Afghan government. It’s a national holiday here in Kabul. The roads, usually clogged with traffic and pedestrians, are clear not only because Afghans are staying home to celebrate but also because many international civilians are on lockdown.

A string of high profile attacks on government and military buildings in the past few weeks have cast a pall over the holiday. And a blockbuster prison break this week has only added to tensions.

But in commemorating a day that was precipitated by the withdrawal of Soviet troops three years earlier in 1989, it’s worth looking forward to how the next major foreign military withdrawal from Afghanistan might shape the country.

Lost in the stories of Taliban infiltration of Afghan security forces has been reporting on how Afghans across the country are starting to hedge their bets as U.S. and coalition forces prepare to drawdown their forces this July, a process that should end by 2014.

Taliban are turning themselves in to authorities to be reintegrated into society, sometimes as part of local militias. Ethnic minority groups are beginning to rearm themselves in anticipation of a return of the Pashtun Taliban. And armies of pundits have weighed in on the false hope of talks with the Taliban or are exasperated that a 10-year war has gone on this long without a diplomatic component to compliment the military hardware.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all this is what exactly happens after 2014. Ahmed Rashid recently commented on Karzai’s request for a “strategic partnership agreement” with the U.S. after 2014:

The Pentagon is keen on this so it can maintain between two and six bases in Afghanistan to keep pressure on al-Qaeda. Most countries in the region – such as Pakistan, China and Russia – will object to an indefinite U.S. military presence, while Iran will see it as a permanent threat.

The New York Times reports that upon hearing talk of a U.S. presence beyond 2014, Iranian, Indian and Russian officials made a mad dash to Kabul. The Times goes on to explain how talk of long-term U.S. bases could sink the burgeoning peace negotiations:

[The strategic partnership agreement] is without doubt a delicate process, and one that comes at a critical time. Afghan officials have expressed concern that the negotiations could scuttle peace talks with the Taliban, now in their early stages, because the insurgents have insisted that foreign forces must leave the country before they will deal. That they are already talking is an indication they are willing to compromise on the timing of a withdrawal – but it is hard to imagine Taliban acceptance of a lasting American presence here.

Discussions of permanents bases also plays into Afghan conspiracy theories that the U.S. is only here to steal Afghanistan’s mineral wealth and to have a permanent base in the region from which to exert influence over the eventual nuclear state of Iran and the current nuclear power of Pakistan, to say nothing of China and Russia.

A Wall Street Journal piece nicely explores the geopolitical posturing that surrounds an Afghan-U.S. strategic partnership:

Pakistan is lobbying Afghanistan’s president against building a long-term strategic partnership with the U.S., urging him instead to look to Pakistan – and its Chinese ally – for help in striking a peace deal with the Taliban and rebuilding the economy, Afghan officials say…

Some U.S. officials said they had heard details of the Kabul meeting, and presumed they were informed about [Pakistan's] entreaties in part, as one official put it, to "raise Afghanistan's asking price" in the partnership talks. That asking price could include high levels of U.S. aid after 2014. The U.S. officials sought to play down the significance of the Pakistani proposal. Such overtures were to be expected at the start of any negotiations, they said; the idea of China taking a leading role in Afghanistan was fanciful at best, they noted.

And yet, Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan, has met Karzai three times since the Pakistani overture.

Alim

(AP Photo)

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I'm just getting started on Ryan Lizza's big piece on the Obama administration's foreign policy, but this bit jumped out at me from the opening:

One of Donilon’s overriding beliefs, which Obama adopted as his own, was that America needed to rebuild its reputation, extricate itself from the Middle East and Afghanistan, and turn its attention toward Asia and China’s unchecked influence in the region. America was “overweighted” in the former and “underweighted” in the latter, Donilon told me. “We’ve been on a little bit of a Middle East detour over the course of the last ten years,” Kurt Campbell, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said. “And our future will be dominated utterly and fundamentally by developments in Asia and the Pacific region.”

So what has the administration done during its first years in office? Well, they launched a major effort to rekindle Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, surged tens of thousands of additional troops into Afghanistan (while quietly moving out the timeline for withdrawal to 2014), escalated military strikes in Pakistan and jumped into the middle of Libya's civil war.

For an administration intent on refocusing American foreign policy away from the Middle East and "unwinding" America's wars, they sure seem to have gone about it in a strange way.

(AP Photo)

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Jackson Diehl isn't impressed with the Obama administration's Afghan exit strategy:

The military drawdown appears likely to be accompanied by a new attempt to promote a political settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton promised a “diplomatic surge” in a February speech in which she seemed to soften previous conditions for talks with the Taliban. The administration is said to be quietly encouraging a Turkish initiative to allow the Taliban to open an office in Turkey, which would provide a clear channel for communications.

The idea of a quick political fix is seductive. There’s just one problem: It’s an illusion. Not only is there no chance of striking a workable deal with the Taliban, but the pursuit of one is only likely to make an already difficult political situation in Afghanistan worse.

The idea of some kind of political settlement to the Afghan war has been a hobbyhorse of a number of realists, but I don't see it happening. Unless we're willing to completely cede the field to Pakistan and their Taliban surrogates and call that a "political victory" there really is no political solution that is going to satisfy all parties to the conflict. I think it's immensely naive to argue that the Taliban can be convinced, bribed, threatened or cajoled into fully renouncing al-Qaeda, and even if they did formally break with the group, Afghanistan is a huge, rural country with plenty of places for al-Qaeda to hide even without formal Taliban sanction. Al-Qaeda managed to set up shop in Afghanistan with 100,000 U.S. troops in the country. Presumably they could do so again when U.S. troop numbers dwindle.

However, unlike Diehl, I don't believe the absence of a negotiated settlement is grounds for never leaving Afghanistan. Quite the contrary, it is the best argument for why America's effort is futile and overly ambitious. The basic fact is that the relevant political players in the Afghan war - the Taliban, Pakistan, India - have a much larger stake in the fight than the U.S. does. They have proven over time to be immune to U.S. bribes and resilient in the face of U.S. firepower. Unless we're willing to start a war with Pakistan over the future of the government of Afghanistan, we'd better start thinking about how to combat al-Qaeda terrorism without a sympathetic government in Afghanistan.

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Last night 60 Minutes aired an expose on Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson. While acknowledging his promotion of girls’ education in Pakistan and Afghanistan, their report brought into question his “origin story,” financial irregularities within his Central Asia Institute and exactly how many schools his NGO has built.

For those unfamiliar with Three Cups of Tea - recommended reading for the rank and file of both the U.S. military and Oprah’s book club - an Outside Magazine article chronicles Mortenson’s activities in Afghanistan.

The fascinating nexus between book clubs and the military was highlighted in a New York Times piece last summer:

The collaboration [between the US military and Mortenson], which grew in part out of the popularity of “Three Cups of Tea” among military wives who told their husbands to read it, extends to the office of Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Last summer, Admiral Mullen attended the opening of one of Mr. Mortenson’s schools in Pushghar, a remote village in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains.

On the ground here in Afghanistan development workers will confess that Mortenson’s inspirational story reignited their passion and drive for their often frustrating line of work. However, many hold reservations about the efficacy and sustainability - to say nothing of the possible harm - of this “cowboy” approach to development work.

Alim

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Barely a day after being issued a public warning about CIA activity in Pakistan, the U.S. went ahead and bombed the country anyway. Now, maybe we're back to the tacit understanding whereby Pakistan's leaders publicly denigrate the U.S. and privately allow us to prosecute the drone war. If not, this strike seems deliberately provocative and reckless. It would be one thing if the administration had bin Laden in its sites and had to take the shot (totally justifiable, in my view), but here's how the New York Times described the targets:

The targets of the attack were militants commanded by Maulvi Nazir, a Taliban leader from South Waziristan who is closely allied to the Haqqani network, the main Afghan Taliban group supported by the Pakistani military. American and Pakistani intelligence officials say Mr. Nazir is known to harbor Arabs affiliated with Al Qaeda. The Haqqani network and fighters associated with it are also responsible for many of the attacks against American and Afghan troops in eastern Afghanistan.

The drones struck a double-cabin pickup truck and a motorcycle as they returned from Afghanistan into Pakistan, a Pakistani military official said. Seven fighters were killed and six others were wounded in the attack just south of the village of Angor Adda on the border between the two countries.

Bombing a few Taliban fighters vs. undermining and embarrassing a crucial ally against al-Qaeda. Stoking anti-Americanism in Pakistan is just a monumentally short-sighted thing to do if you want to retain the country's cooperation and ensure that its citizens (and, crucially, expats living in places like the UK) don't fill the ranks of al-Qaeda. But such are the wages of nation building in Afghanistan.

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One argument that's frequently advanced on behalf of the counter-insurgency effort in Afghanistan is that while Afghanistan itself may be of marginal relevance to American strategic interests, Pakistan is another matter, and instability in Afghanistan will eventually bubble over to destablize a nuclear-armed, anti-American Pakistan.

The reality, however, appears to be the opposite: American efforts to stabilize Afghanistan by defeating the Taliban insurgency are actually driving instability in Pakistan. Exhibit A is the use of drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal region. Ostensibly a tool to target high level foreign fighters linked to al-Qaeda, the Obama administration has broadened their reach and tempo to hit more Taliban and Pashtun militant targets. Now, Pakistan is calling time:

Pakistan has demanded that the United States steeply reduce the number of Central Intelligence Agency operatives and Special Operations forces working in Pakistan, and that it halt C.I.A. drone strikes aimed at militants in northwest Pakistan. The request was a sign of the near collapse of cooperation between the two testy allies.

Who knows how seriously this will hamper U.S. anti-terror efforts, but it can't be good.

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Gallup finds the public mostly split:

Frank Newport discusses the implications:

At this point, there does not appear to be a groundswell of opposition to U.S. involvement in that country. While the U.S. has been involved in Afghanistan for more than nine years, less than half of Americans say sending U.S. military forces there was a mistake. In contrast, it took less than a year and a half for a majority of Americans to say sending troops to Iraq was a mistake.

Americans also do not appear to be overly concerned about the way things are going in Afghanistan, with about as many saying the war is going well as say it is going badly. This is a more positive assessment than was the case throughout last year and for much of 2009 and 2008.

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The Wall Street Journal has an ominous report on evidence that al-Qaeda is returning to Afghanistan:

In late September, U.S. fighter jets streaked over the cedar-studded slopes of Korengal, the so-called Valley of Death, to strike a target that hadn't been seen for years in Afghanistan: an al Qaeda training camp.

Among the dozens of Arabs killed that day, the U.S.-led coalition said, were two senior al Qaeda members, one Saudi and the other Kuwaiti. Another casualty of the bombing, according to Saudi media and jihadi websites, was one of Saudi Arabia's most wanted militants. The men had come to Afghanistan to impart their skills to a new generation of Afghan and foreign fighters.

Even though the strike was successful, the very fact that it had to be carried out represents a troubling shift in the war. Nine years after a U.S.-led invasion routed almost all of al Qaeda's surviving militants in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden's network is gradually returning.

Over the past six to eight months, al Qaeda has begun setting up training camps, hideouts and operations bases in the remote mountains along Afghanistan's northeastern border with Pakistan, some U.S., Afghan and Taliban officials say. The stepped-up infiltration followed a U.S. pullback from large swatches of the region starting 18 months ago. The areas were deemed strategically irrelevant and left to Afghanistan's uneven security forces, and in some parts, abandoned entirely.

What's notable about this al-Qaeda comeback, such as it is, is that it occurred during the troop surge, when the U.S. was supposedly breaking the Taliban's momentum. So even at the moment of maximum Western troop presence, al-Qaeda is still able to worm its way into vacant corners of the country. Obviously, some analysts will read this and conclude that we must have American forces in every square inch of Afghanistan forever to prevent small al-Qaeda camps from setting up shop, but how realistic and sustainable is that?

And while the return of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is troublesome, it also makes them more vulnerable. As the WSJ notes, the U.S. has been conducting ground raids and bombing strikes against al-Qaeda targets in the country - something it cannot aggressively do against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan.

(AP Photo)

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Mark Steyn thinks we're losing in Afghanistan because we're not killing enough Afghans:

The reason we're losing this thing is because of a lack of cultural confidence, of which the fetal cringe of this worthless husk out-parodies anything Coward could have concocted. When I'm speaking on this subject, I often get asked to reprise the words I quote in my book, from Gen. Sir Charles Napier in India explaining to the locals his position on suttee -- the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Napier was impeccably multicultural:

You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows.You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

In the absence of cultural confidence overseas, we are expending blood and treasure building an Afghanistan fit only for pederasts, tribal heroin cartels, and the blood-soaked savages of Mazar e-Sharif.

Steyn is responding to the admittedly sad spectacle of U.S. senators blaming the Koran-burning pastor rather than the Afghans for the recent bouts of carnage in that country. And he's right about where the fault lies (with the murdering Afghans, not the moron pastor). But the idea that we're losing in Afghanistan because we're unwilling to kill enough Afghans to change their cultural practices is absurd on its face. By this definition, we can only "win" in Afghanistan when Afghans don't go on murderous rampages against foreigners. That's an unreasonable standard and one that's wholly disconnected from the (tenuous) counter-terrorism rationales that still keep large contingents of Western troops in the country.

(AP Photo)

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The Persian new year was celebrated in Afghanistan just over a week ago. With it's passing, millions of wood-burning stoves have been relegated to storage and spring has officially arrived. Budding rose bushes and apricot trees dot Kabul courtyards.

But spring also heralds the return of the insurgent fighting season. The retreating cold releases its grip on supply routes to safe-havens across the mountainous Pakistani border, while the increasingly dense foliage provides impressive cover from NATO and U.S. fire.

There is hope, however, in both Washington and Kabul, that this spring will mark a new year that breaks the rhythm of war in Afghanistan. President Barack Obama's 30,000 troop surge, which came into place last fall, along with General David Petraeus' renewed focus on special operations and the continued enlargement of the Afghan National army have secured a handful of strategic districts in the country's restive south for the first time in years. Cricket diplomacy between Pakistan and India could pave the way toward Pakistan playing a more constructive role in negotiations with Afghanistan's Taliban. And fallout from the corruption scandal at Afghanistan's biggest bank may push forward reforms and introduce some semblance of accountability in the Karzai government. Just last fall, six in ten Afghans said the country was moving in the right direction.

Granted, expectations should be tethered. The afghan public is weary of the foreign military presence and gruesome pictures of a U.S. "kill team" do little to allay the fears of civilian casualties, which reached a high water mark last year. Moreover, this past winter proved more violent than most, a disturbing portent for the coming year. Barely a week into the new year, 300 Taliban - yes, 300 - overran an entire district in eastern Afghanistan.

Only a day before the Taliban invasion from the east, Laura King wrote this in the L.A. Times:

In addition, the spring will test a gamble by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force in eastern Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are being withdrawn from areas once described as crucial bulwarks against Pakistani-based militant groups such as the Haqqani network and the Hezb-i-Islami faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

U.S. troops have been "repositioned" away from former battlegrounds such as the Pech and Korangal valleys in Kunar province, where commanders said sophisticated surveillance and "intelligence-driven" raids would prevent a rush of cross-border movement.

Should old acquaintance be forgot, indeed.

Alim

(AP Photo)

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About a month ago, I shared some serious qualms I had about the veracity of a story by Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone on the PSYOP front. This month, RS is back again with more questionable coverage of the front, as Joshua Foust points out:

Reading the Rolling Stone piece, a reader walks away thinking that the killing of civilians is widespread and not at all limited to the troops associated with the “kill team.” The article paints the killings as the inevitable consequence of low morale and a rejection of counterinsurgency, and worse – it implies that murder is, in some way, a fact of being a soldier.

These sorts of implications, however, are difficult to square with the truth. Attention was first shed on the killings by fellow soldiers disgusted at the “kill team’s” alleged actions. Army rules — and U.S. law — considers such actions grievous crimes and stipulates immediate and harsh punishment for them. While the Army bureaucracy was slow to move — sadly, all too common regardless of the issue, whether an illegal killing, a problem with healthcare or even adapting to a rural insurgency in a war most people had forgotten about — that doesn’t automatically mean there is a cover up. Incompetence is a far more reasonable explanation than malice.

The point is, this is starting to turn into "war porn" - pairing shock video and images designed to create buzz. But the effect is to turn all combat deaths into murder (something that the RS author might believe, but most people don't), and murder exploited to sell magazines. Foust again:

There is a term for the sort of journalism Rolling Stone is engaging in here: war porn. In 2005, George Zornick wrote of the growing trend of many people both in and out of the military treating images of the war — weapons, death, combat and so on — in the same way one would treat pornography. The people posting these images, Zornick explained, “appear to regard the combat photos with sadistic glee, and pathological wisecracks follow almost every post.”

Continue reading "Rolling Stone and "War Porn"" »

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Syed Saleem Shahzad reports that Osama bin Laden has been quite mobile of late and parses the implications:

After a prolonged lull, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has launched a series of covert operations in the rugged Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan following strong tip-offs that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been criss-crossing the area in the past few weeks for high-profile meetings in militant redoubts....

The development has fueled speculation in intelligence circles that al-Qaeda could be planning another major attack along the lines of the September 11, 2001, assault on New York and Washington, and the July 2007 foiled bomb attack in London.

However, extensive investigations by Asia Times Online, including exchanges within al-Qaeda's camps, point in another direction: given the nature of Bin Laden's meetings, this appears to be the beginning of a new era for a broader struggle in which al-Qaeda, through its Laskhar al-Zil (Shadow Army), will try to capitalize on the Arab revolts and the Palestinian struggle and also revitalize and redefine its role in Afghanistan.

The whole piece is worth a read. The upshot appears to be that al-Qaeda number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri has lost an internecine ideological battle and as a result al-Qaeda may be changing strategy. Either way, hopefully a more mobile bin Laden means a more vulnerable one.

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Paul Miller makes the case for nation building in Afghanistan:

There are no practical alternatives. Vice President Biden and a growing chorus of others believe we should give up rebuilding Afghanistan and, instead, sustain an indefinite worldwide assassination campaign against al Qaida's senior leaders. His view of the war is myopic, narrow, and troubling. Such a campaign would do nothing to address Pakistan, the drug trade, NATO, the other great powers, or any of our other interests across South Asia. It is also morally troubling -- it amounts to a declaration that we reserve the right to kill anyone we deem to be a terrorist, anywhere in the world, forever. Call it the Biden Doctrine of the Forever War. States should not maintain a state of war indefinitely just because it is too inconvenient to settle the political conditions that led to the war in the first place. War should be the last resort, not the first.

Nation building in Afghanistan is the only pragmatic policy option that will secure the full range of our interests in South Asia and yield an actual end-point to the war, which is why Petraeus is right to be alarmed about the funding levels for our civilians.

I think Miller is right to warn about an open-ended campaign of assassinations against senior al-Qaeda leaders but his case for nation-building doesn't address that at all. What about al-Qaeda leaders operating outside of Afghanistan? The central question with respect to Afghanistan is which war our nation building efforts hope to win - the one against a native Taliban insurgency or the one against global jihadism? We could "win" in Afghanistan and still lose the broader effort. When you're dealing with constrained resources - and an executive branch in Washington seemingly eager to open up new fronts across the world - you have to question the wisdom of putting all our counter-terrorism eggs in one hugely expensive sinkhole called Afghanistan.

Furthermore, it's extremely difficult to see what American policy can do inside Afghanistan to "stabilize" Pakistan, other than to consent to Pakistan's wishes and make Afghanistan its proxy. Pakistan has made it abundantly clear that it will buck American wishes inside Afghanistan, yet proponents of indefinite nation building seem to wave this problem away or insist that somehow chaos in Afghanistan will endanger Pakistan. But that overlooks the rather glaring fact that it is Pakistan that is facilitating the chaos in Afghanistan for its own ends. Nation building proponents can't square that circle.

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A new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that two-thirds of the American public (64 percent) say that the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting and almost 75 percent believe President Obama should pull "a substantial number" of combat troops out of Afghanistan this summer. On the other hand, 53 percent of those polled believe the president will not withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan this summer.

(AP Photo)

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Courtesy of Ann Marlowe:

Second, plenty of Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathizers and enablers are already in the Afghan government, both in Parliament and in governor and district governor positions appointed by President Karzai. In fact, President Karzai’s choice for speaker of the lower house of Parliament, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, was the man who brought Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan in the first place. On Sunday, the legislators chose an obscure Uzbek Afghan as speaker, an MP from strife-torn Kunduz Province who had previously fought with Hekmatyar’s group Hezb-i-Islami. Not an encouraging selection, but miles ahead of Sayyaf, who’d had the highest vote total on a previous ballot.

Her whole piece, on why it's pointless to negotiate with the Taliban, is worth reading.

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According to a new poll from Rasmussen Reports:

A majority of voters, for the first time, support an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan or the creation of a timetable to bring them all home within a year.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 31% of Likely U.S. Voters now say all troops should be brought home from Afghanistan immediately, while another 21% say a firm timetable should be established to bring all troops home within a year’s time. The combined total of 52% who want the troops home within a year is a nine-point jump from 43% last September. Just 37% felt that way in September 2009.

Only 34% of voters now think there should be no timetable for withdrawal. Fifteen percent (15%) are not sure.

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The New York Times shares footage of Shahbaz Bhatti, the Pakistani minister gunned down this week in the latest violence in the increasingly fractured country. Bhatti, who had recently met with Secretary of State Clinton - was Pakistan's lone Christian minister. In the interview, Bhatti delivered a defiant rebuke to Pakistani radicals:

They want to impose their radical philosophy in Pakistan and whoever stands against their radical philosophy, they threaten them. When I’m leading this campaign against the Shariah laws and for the abolishment of [the] blasphemy law and speaking for the oppressed and marginalized, persecuted Christians and other minorities, these Taliban threaten me.

But I want to share that I believe in Jesus Christ, who has given his own life for us. I know what is the meaning of [the] cross and I’m following … the cross.

I’m ready to die for a cause. I’m living for my community and suffering people and I will die to defend their rights. So these threats and these warnings cannot change my opinion and principles. I will prefer to die for my principles and for the justice of my community rather to compromise.

Keep in mind that nearly all of Pakistan's provinces have an active separatist movement. In the wake of other events across the country, as well as increased violence and antagonism toward more liberal politicians and leaders, I think it is very likely that moderates in the nation will remain on the retreat.

(AP Photo)

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Late February, the New York Times ran an account of how the U.S. military was pulling out the Pech Valley, an area earlier deemed "vital" to America's war efforts against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Now, apparently, not so much. Or in the words of Major General Campbell, the U.S. isn't retreating but "realigning to provide better security for the Afghan people."

Leslie Gelb vents:

I'm not blaming the generals or their key aides who made these strategies. They were all sent to Afghanistan to do their duty for our country as Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama decreed. They were given a task to pacify an Afghanistan that we could not pacify, to prepare Afghans to govern and fight for themselves who turned out to be unwilling to fairly govern or effectively fight. The generals and their aides were given the task of searching for answers, for workable strategies, that didn't exist.

When viewed from the objective of keeping the American homeland safe from terrorist attacks, having 100,000-plus Western forces trying to prop up a ramshackle government in Afghanistan is not the best use of resources.

(AP Photo)

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According to a new poll from Angus Reid, more Canadians and Britons oppose the Afghan war than Americans do:

A year ago, a majority of Americans (58%) supported the mission in Afghanistan, while about two-in-five (38%) opposed it.

Now, in a trend that began late last year, respondents are evenly split, with 47 per cent backing the mission, and 46 per cent opposing it. The level of rejection to the Afghan mission is highest in the Northeast and West (both at 49%) and lowest in the South (44%).

For more than a year, a majority of Britons has expressed opposition to the mission in Afghanistan. This month, only 31 per cent of respondents are backing the military operation, while 60 per cent are against it.

This month’s result matches the high level of opposition to the mission, which was recorded in October 2010. Respondents in London (63%) and Scotland (62%) are more likely to reject the military operation.

For the first time since the war began, three-in-five Canadians (63%) voice opposition to the mission in Afghanistan. Support for the military effort has dropped to the lowest level recorded (32%).

This month’s numbers represent a drastic shift from a survey conducted a year ago, where 47 per cent of Canadians backed the war.

Full results here. (pdf)

(AP Photo)

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The New York Times clarifies the legal issues involved:

If Mr. Davis was listed as a technical staff member for the embassy’s diplomatic mission, then he would be covered by a 1961 treaty that gives diplomats total immunity to criminal prosecution. In that case, Pakistan should be allowed only to expel him. Victims’ families, however, might still be able to sue him for civil damages.

But if Mr. Davis were instead listed as a staff member for the consulate in Lahore, then he would be covered by a 1963 treaty that governs the rights of consular officials and that allows host countries to prosecute them if they commit a “grave crime.”

The longer this drags on, the more difficult it becomes for Zardari's government to extricate itself from the domestic firestorm this case has created.

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According to Gallup, there has been a slow but steady uptick in the number of Afghans who say they are "thriving." Those thriving are still a minority, however:

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The diplomatic standoff between Pakistan and the U.S. over the American Raymond Davis has taken a fairly odd turn. Reports Rediff:

Double murder-accused US official Raymond Davis has been found in possession of top-secret Central Intelligence Agency documents, which point to him or the feared American Task Force 373 (TF373) operating in the region, providing Al Qaeda terrorists with "nuclear fissile material" and "biological agents," according to a report.

Pakistan's ISI stat[ed] that top-secret CIA documents found in Davis's possession point to his, and/or TF373, providing to al Qaeda terrorists "nuclear fissile material" and "biological agents", which they claim are to be used against the United States itself in order to ignite an all-out war in order to re-establish the West's hegemony over a global economy that is warned is just months away from collapse.

How nuking the U.S. would enable it to re-establish hegemony over the global economy is beyond me...

(AP Photo)

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The Wall Street Journal reports that ties between the CIA and Pakistan's ISI are at a striking low point:

The state of relations, while never perfect, is now alarming counter-terrorism and military officials, who say close cooperation between the Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence is essential to the campaign against al Qaeda and the war against the Taliban and its allies in Afghanistan.

Behind the falling out is a series of controversial incidents starting late last year, which prompted tit-for-tat accusations that burst into the open with the December outing of the CIA's station chief in Islamabad.

More recently, tensions have risen to new highs over Pakistan's detention of former Special Forces soldier Raymond Davis, a U.S. government contractor in the city of Lahore, for killing two Pakistanis in disputed circumstances. A Pakistani court Thursday ruled to delay by three weeks a hearing on whether Mr. Davis is covered by diplomatic immunity.

Michael Cohen argues that Pakistan isn't really an ally:

Pakistan is one of America's largest foreign aid recipients and one of our supposedly most important allies in the region; just this week the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry traveled to Islamabad to try and resolve the issue - and was rebuffed; and the Obama Administration has steadily escalated the issue even threatening a downgrade in US-Pakistan relations in order to resolve the dispute.

Yet, Pakistan still refuses to release Davis. Indeed the announcement, even after Kerry's visit, that the matter will need another three weeks of consideration is a huge diplomatic slap in the face to the United States and especially this Administration.

Now I understand that the Pakistan government has some issues with anti-US attitudes in the country (clearly through some fault of their own) . . . and I know that Pakistan allows NATO supply trucks to transit the country and it allows US military drones to attack suspected al Qaeda terrorists (as well as those Pakistan Taliban groups that threaten the Pakistani state). But shall we catalog for a moment all the ways in which Pakistan is not just a lousy ally, but is actually undermining US interests.

And the indictment Cohen rolls out is indeed serious, but step back and ask yourself what other country on the planet would consent to having its territory bombed with something approaching impunity by another country?

The question is whether Pakistan would be just as uncooperative if the U.S. wasn't raining down Hellfire missiles in the tribal area - and I'd have to think they would be. Pakistan's stance toward the U.S. in Afghanistan is fundamentally driven by its concerns with India - concerns we obviously can't mollify.

(AP Photo)

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American officials say privately that corruption in Karzai’s government directly feeds the insurgency. And yet, as my piece in the magazine shows, the American response to the corruption in Karzai’s government has been one of passivity and silence. Meanwhile, American Marines and soldiers are pressing the offensive in the south, fighting and dying on Karzai’s behalf.

On corruption, the American strategy isn’t clear. The American military appears to be succeeding in clearing the Taliban from large swaths of southern Afghanistan. But then what? At some point, the Afghans themselves have to take over—that is, the Afghan government. Without a government that is legitimate—that serves the people—it’s hard to imagine that the hard-won American gains can ever stick. - Dexter Filkins

One thing that's frequently lost in the discussion of corruption in Afghanistan is that the country is surrounded by very corrupt countries. It's literally impossible for the U.S. to stamp it out fully, which is why the efforts have been lackluster or unimpressive. The basic problem for the U.S. in Afghanistan is not that Washington has been inattentive to the country's many problems, it's that we've embarked on a program of state-building that requires infinitely more blood and treasure than we're willing to devote to the task.

[Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan]

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Michael Cohen isn't happy with Max Boot's brusque treatment of a recent report on the prospects of splitting the Taliban from al-Qaeda:

But the worst part here is Boot's simplistic and unsupported reasoning for why this carefully researched report is wrong. He claims there is no doubt the Taliban and al Qaeda are closely linked - but actually provides no evidence, except the bizarre notion that Taliban thinking remains unchanged over the past ten years. He bemoans the fact that Mullah Omar won't trade away the chit of collaboration with al Qaeda - but why would he do such a thing before any serious negotiations with the US and/or the Karzai government?

By this argument America's enemies are not only incapable of strategic and pragmatic behavior, but should unilaterally disarm and rely on the good graces of the United States and its allies. Lastly, is it really impossible to recognize that the Taliban might have reason to turn on al Qaeda if they are returned to power - especially since the limitations on the use of US force that existed pre-9/11 certainly do not exist today and because al Qaeda would provide almost no benefit to the Taliban. At the very least isn't this a potential cleavage that we should be trying to exploit instead confidently declaring that the relationship between two organization with very different orientations and grievance structures is inviolate for all time?

I think this question of whether the Taliban can be "split" from al-Qaeda is ultimately neither here nor there. Afghanistan and Pakistan are large countries with a lot of mountainous, rural and lawless areas. Even if the "Taliban" formerly forswears ties to al-Qaeda, it's not as if the group can't stick around under the good graces (or intimidation) of another tribe in some out-of-the-way village.

The effort to get some members of the Taliban to say publicly that they won't support al-Qaeda is fine, as far as face-saving methods of extracting U.S. forces go, but who would really believe that? And even if it were true, how could you verify that? Our government doesn't want al-Qaeda operating in the U.S. - but they do. We're talking about small groups of people here, not armed divisions.

(AP Photo)

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"One year after the launch of the civilian assistance strategy in Pakistan, USAID has not been able to demonstrate measurable progress," said the report, an assessment of the program for the final three months of 2010. "We believe that USAID has an imperative to accumulate, analyze, and report information on the results achieved under its programs."

The Obama administration is hoping the aid program to Pakistan, the second-largest recipient of U.S. civilian aid after Afghanistan, will help stabilize the fragile but strategically important country and boost America's image among ordinary Pakistanis. The program is focusing on funding visible infrastructure projects like bridges, roads and power stations.

But the U.S. strategy has faced a number of obstacles, including an Islamist insurgency that has made it dangerous for U.S. aid personnel to operate in some parts of the country. The U.S. remains deeply unpopular in Pakistan, in part due to a campaign of unmanned Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes against Taliban militants on the border with Afghanistan. The strikes also have killed civilians. - Wall Street Journal

American drone strikes in Pakistan are frequently cited as a cause of anti-Americanism. But are they? In a Pew poll (pdf) conducted over the summer, only 35 percent of Pakistanis had even heard about drone strikes. Not surprisingly, the view of those strikes is overwhelmingly negative. Nevertheless, we have to wrestle with the fact that anti-Americanism in Pakistan runs deeper than the drone strikes and is probably not going to be assuaged with a few billion dollars.

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Apparently the New Yorker's investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has gone a bit 'round the bend:

He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta."

Hersh may have been referring to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Roman Catholic organization commited to "defence of the Faith and assistance to the poor and the suffering," according to its website.

"Many of them are members of Opus Dei," Hersh continued. "They do see what they're doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. They seem themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function."

"They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins," he continued. "They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.”"

While I think some of the "clash of civilizations" sentiment clearly exists, the Malta stuff just sounds loopy.

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Max Boot lauds America's counter-insurgency effort:

That is the way good counterinsurgency works. It is a slow, agonizing, costly process, but if skillful soldiers or Marines stick to their mission, they will gradually drive the insurgents away, as the Marines are doing in Sangin.

Boot is right to praise the bravery and skill of U.S. and coalition forces operating in Afghanistan, but the counter-insurgency effort there is not always about winning 'hearts and minds' and we shouldn't lose sight of the strategic goals we're trying to accomplish here.

To that end it's worth examining a pair of photos, courtesy of Paula Broadwell, writing on Thomas Ricks' blog, about a recent mission in Afghanistan:

According to Broadwell's account, the town was riven with Taliban booby traps and a danger to U.S. troops, so it was more or less leveled. The commander of U.S. forces responsible for the attack goes on to lament that the "reconstruction would consume the remainder of my deployed life."

It's worth reflecting on this dynamic as it relates to the broader question of American strategy in Afghanistan and how best to spend American resources to protect the country from international terrorists. Take the costs of blowing up this Afghan village, add to that the cost of rebuilding this Afghan village, throw in the intangible but no less significant damage to Afghans who used to live there and the risks to coalition forces, then ask whether this and other operations like it are the most important thing we can do to prevent a terrorist attack against U.S. soil or U.S. interests globally. Broadwell's piece did not suggest al-Qaeda members were hiding in the village - indeed the word "al-Qaeda" never appears in her post.

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According to a new Gallup poll, Americans rank terrorism as the 7th most important priority for the federal government, behind a host of domestic issues. The war in Afghanistan comes in at number 10. Iraq, a distant 14th.

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Daniel Larison thinks Grover Norquist's efforts to convince conservatives to give up the war on Afghanistan won't succeed, and isn't impressed with Norquist's analogy to President Reagan's pullout from Lebanon:

If we are having an honest conversation, the first observation I would make is that very few people are going to see the relevance of what the Reagan administration did after blundering into the middle of an Israeli invasion of its neighbor when it comes to thinking about Afghanistan one way or the other. U.S. involvement in Lebanon should never have happened in the first place, as the U.S. had no security interests at stake. Reagan’s recognition and correction of his earlier error were good, but the lesson to learn from Lebanon was that we should never have been involved. Very few people on the right agree that the U.S. should never have become involved in Afghanistan, and it seems to me that almost everyone on the right, including almost all opponents of the war in Iraq, believed that the war in Afghanistan was at least initially justified and appropriate, and almost all of them continued to believe this up until very recently. The Lebanon example doesn’t help get the conversation going, because it isn’t a particularly relevant example for the subject we’re discussing.

I would disagree here and say that it's quite relevant (politically) and quite unhelpful to Norquist's cause. In my understanding of mainstream conservative sentiment on the issue, Reagan made a huge mistake in pulling out of Lebanon in response to Iranian attacks on U.S. marines. In the conventional wisdom that has taken hold among many conservative analysts, the Beirut bombings marked the beginning of the Islamist "war against the West" and Reagan's act of loss-cutting served only to embolden our enemies.

Here's Max Boot:

Norquist seems quite enamored of Ronald Reagan’s pullout from Lebanon after the suicide car-bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. Perhaps he is not aware that this incident was routinely cited — along with the U.S. pullout from Somalia in 1993 — by Osama bin Laden in the 1990s to justify his belief that the U.S. was a “weak horse” that could be attacked with impunity.

In this telling, the Reagan and Clinton administrations should have never left Lebanon and Somalia but instead.... well, it's not quite clear what they should have done, is it? Stay? Until?

Either way, by dragging out the Lebanon example, Norquist is probably undermining his cause among most conservatives, not helping it.

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The Afghanistan Study Group has released a new survey of conservative and Tea Party sentiments of the war in Afghansitan.

When given a choice between three options, 66% believe we can either reduce the troop levels in Afghanistan, but continue to fight the war effectively (39%) or think we should leave Afghanistan all together, as soon as possible (27%). Just 24% of conservatives believe we should continue to provide the current level of troops to properly execute the war. 64% of Tea Party supporters think we should either reduce troop levels (37%) or leave Afghanistan (27%) while 28% support maintaining current troop levels. Among conservatives who don’t identify with the Tea Party movement, 70% want a reduction (43%) or elimination (27%) of troops while only 18% favoring continuation of the current level.

A majority of conservatives agree that the United States can dramatically lower the number of troops and money spent in Afghanistan without putting America at risk. 57% say they agree with that statement after hearing about the current number of troops in country and the funding needed to support them. Only a third (34%) do not agree with this statement. Among Tea Party supports 55% agree that we can reduce the number of troops without compromising security while 38% disagree. Among non Tea Party conservatives, 60% agree with this statement while 27% disagree.

Full results here. (pdf)

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Frederick and Kimberly Kagan state their view on what victory looks like:

Success in Afghanistan is the establishment of a political order, security situation, and indigenous security force that is stable, viable, enduring, and able--with greatly reduced international support--to prevent Afghanistan from being a safe haven for international terrorists.

This kind of thing sounds clear enough, but it really falls apart upon closer inspection. What does it mean to not be a "safe haven" for international terrorists? It can't mean that a country can't contain any terrorists - that's an absurd standard. It can't mean that the country can't have any terrorists capable of launching attacks beyond its borders, since that would mean there are literally dozens of terrorist safe havens around the world, including in Norway and the United States, which have produced individuals who traveled abroad to commit acts of terrorism or targeted their home countries for slaughter. Perhaps the authors mean that Afghanistan can't have any terrorist training camps - but given the low-tech approach shown by al-Qaeda of late, it's not clear that they need jungle gym training anymore. But if al-Qaeda is training for larger-scale operations, isn't it more likely that they'd do so in Pakistan or Yemen, where they are safer from large-scale reprisals from American air power?

In other words, this definition of success is not just vague and amorphous but untenable in an age when terrorists are a global menace lured into jihad via the Internet. You can make the case that U.S. policy in Afghanistan should be to train Afghan forces to fight the Taliban so we don't have to (a not unreasonable position), but if we're framing Afghanistan as part of a larger effort against jihadism then the investment in Afghanistan and its governing institutions is disproportionate.

(AP Photo)

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Americans have a pessimistic view of the course of the war in Afghanistan, according to a new poll:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 19% of Likely U.S. Voters think the situation in Afghanistan will get better in the next six months. Forty-one percent (41%) now expect the war in Afghanistan to get worse over the next six months while 28% predict it will stay about the same.

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With U.S. drone strikes cascading down on Pakistani soil at record levels in 2010 and open talk of American ground incursions into the country, many analysts are sounding the alarm that Pakistan's weak civilian government is being pushed too far. And now, said government has been roiled by the defection of two coalition partners. So has America pushed Pakistan's government to the breaking point? It appears the answer is no:

The ruling coalition headed by the Pakistan Peoples Party has struggled in recent weeks to keep its allies together amid rising criticism the government has failed to improve economic conditions, check corruption and halt growing inflation.

That doesn't mean the U.S. shouldn't be mindful of the pressure it's putting on Pakistan, but for now it seems that political discontent is boiling up around other issues.

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Senator Lindsey Graham thinks they're a good idea:

"I think it would be enormously beneficial to the region as well as Afghanistan. We have had air bases all over the world. A couple of air bases in Afghanistan would allow the Afghan security forces an edge against the Taliban in perpetuity. It would be a signal to Pakistan, the Taliban are never going to come back in Afghanistan that it could change their behavior," Graham said.

There is obviously going to be a U.S. security presence in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of most U.S. combat forces. But the issue of trying to use Afghanistan as a kind of strategic anchor in Central Asia is different - and from Sen. Graham's suggestion that such a presence would be "good for the region" we can infer that that's what he's thinking.

To have bases in Afghanistan, you need supply lines into Afghanistan - lines that run through Afghanistan's autocratic, unstable neighbors. The U.S. has established these lines by bribing states like Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan. Obviously, since we've been at this for a decade we could presumably continue to funnel taxpayer money in and around Central Asia to sustain longer-term military facilities in Afghanistan, but providing weapons to the Afghan government seems like a less expensive means to ensure they have a qualitative edge over the Taliban.

(AP Photo)

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Anatol Lieven makes a good point here:

However, i