Posts Tagged ‘Afghanistan’

Iran may have the bomb

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

A report suggests that the most recent North Korea nuclear test, which used Uranium, not Plutonium as in their others, may have been the Iranian bomb.

the RAND Corporation reports that the third North Korean nuclear test appears to many experts to be fundamentally different from its previous two efforts. North Korea’s first tests used plutonium to trigger the nuclear explosion. This one, according to some atmospheric tests, likely used highly enriched uranium, exactly the form of nuclear weapon pursued by Iran.

The report is not that positive about the weapon type.

Key aspects of North Korea’s third nuclear weapon test, carried out on Tuesday, remain unknown. We do not know whether it was a test of a plutonium or highly enriched uranium weapon, though many experts suspect the latter.

The report is hardly definitive but it would not be a surprise if Iran has pushed through to a success in its program, unencumbered by any serious US opposition. Still, there is some serious concern.

The question is whether the weapon North Korea tested this month was its own, Iran’s or a joint project. A senior U.S. official told The New York Times, “It’s very possible that the North Koreans are testing for two countries.” It would be foolish for Iran to test a nuclear weapon on its own soil. Nuclear weapons cannot be detonated in secret; they leave unique seismic markers that can be traced back to their source. An in-country test would simply confirm the existence of a program that for years Iran has denied.

Ralph Peters has some serious concerns about where the Obama administration is going.

(more…)

Another reason to leave Afghanistan.

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

Spengler provides another reason why Afghanistan is a place we should be leaving.

An article in the Scotsman of May 24, 2002, reported, for example: “In Bagram, British marines returning from an operation deep in the Afghan mountains spoke last night of an alarming new threat – being propositioned by swarms of gay local farmers. An Arbroath marine, James Fletcher, said: ‘They were more terrifying than the al-Qaeda. One bloke who had painted toenails was offering to paint ours. They go about hand in hand, mincing around the village.’ While the marines failed to find any al-Qaeda during the seven-day Operation Condor, they were propositioned by dozens of men in villages the troops were ordered to search.”

Another interviewee in the article, a marine in his 20s, stated, “It was hell. Every village we went into we got a group of men wearing makeup coming up, stroking our hair and cheeks and making kissing noises.”

The trouble, the researchers surmise, is “Pashtun society’s extremely limited access to women,” citing a Los Angeles Times interview with a young Pashtun identified as Daud. He only has sex with men, explaining: “I like boys, but I like girls better. It’s just that we can’t see the women to see if they are beautiful. But we can see the boys, and so we can tell which of them is beautiful.”

Many of the Pashtuns interviewed allow “that homosexuality is indeed prohibited within Islam, warranting great shame and condemnation. However, homosexuality is then narrowly and specifically defined as the love of another man. Loving a man would therefore be unacceptable and a major sin within this cultural interpretation of Islam, but using another man for sexual gratification would be regarded as a foible -undesirable but far preferable to sex with a ineligible woman, which in the context of Pashtun honor, would likely result in issues of revenge and honor killings.”

Uggh!

Afghanistan, Egypt and Obama

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

I have previously posted my opinion that Afghanistan is not worth the cost. I stated my reasons why we should leave here and here and here. Nothing has changed there but a lot is happening elsewhere in the Middle East.

Egypt’s escalating tensions amount to the first real foreign crisis for the Obama administration that it did not inherit. The crisis serves as a test of Obama’s revamped White House operation. Daley, a former Commerce secretary in the Clinton administration, is now running a staff that is briefing Obama regularly on Egypt.

They have handled it badly. This is a very dangerous time for us. The Egyptian Army seems to be siding with the protesters. That may or may not last.

The left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz says that Egyptian army officers in Cairo’s central square have tossed aside their helmets and joined the crowd. “The Army and the people are one,” they chanted. MSNBC’s photoblog shows protesters jubilantly perched on M1A1 tanks. The real significance of these defections is that the army officers would not have done so had they not sensed which way the winds were blowing — in the Egyptian officer corps.

And even as Mubarak tottered, the Saudi king threw his unequivocal backing behind the aging dictator — not hedging like Obama — but the Iranians continued to back the Egyptian protesters. The Saudi exchange tumbled 6.44% on news of unrest from Cairo. Meanwhile, the Voice of America reports that Israel is “extremely concerned” that events in Egypt could mean the end of the peace treaty between the two countries. If Mubarak isn’t finished already, a lot of regional actors are calculating like he might be.

But Washington will not be hurried. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that President Obama will review his Middle Eastern policy after the unrest in Egypt subsides. The future, in whose spaces the administration believed its glories to lie, plans to review its past failures in the same expansive place. Yet time and oil wait for no one. Crude oil prices surged as the markets took the rapid developments in. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu observed that any disruption to Middle East oil supplies “could actually bring real harm.”

Of course, Mr Chu should not worry as we have wind and solar to take up the slack. Actually, we get our oil from Canada and Mexico but the price of oil shifts with the world’s supply.

The present Obama commitment to Afghanistan is ironic since he promised to bring troops home but he has declared that Iraq was NOT necessary and Afghanistan is. This is slightly crazy. The Iraq invasion was an example of US power being applied in a critical location; right in the middle of the Middle East. Afghanistan is a remote tribal society reachable only through unreliable Pakistan. It has minimal effect on world events. We went there to punish the Taliban for harboring the people who attacked our country. Thousands of them have been killed. We have little of interest there now. We should have left last year.

With a Shi’ite dominated government in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and a Muslim Brotherhood that may keep Egypt in neutral or tacitly accept Teheran’s leadership, how could things possibly get worse?

They can if Saudi Arabia starts to go. And what response can the U.S. offer? With U.S. combat power in landlocked Afghanistan and with the last U.S. combat forces having left Iraq in August 2010, the U.S. will have little on the ground but the State Department. “By October 2011, the US State Department will assume responsibility for training the Iraqi police and this task will largely be carried out by private contractors.” The bulk of American hard power will be locked up in secondary Southwest Asian theater, dependent on Pakistan to even reach the sea with their heavy equipment.

This is not where we want to be. The problem is that Obama and Hillary and the rest of this administration have no concept of strategy.

The Obama administration made fundamental strategic mistakes, whose consequences are now unfolding. As I wrote in the Ten Ships, a post which referenced the Japanese Carrier fleet which made up the strategic center of gravity of the enemy during the Pacific War, the center of gravity in the present crisis was always the Middle East. President Obama, by going after the criminals who “attacked America on 9/11? from their staging base was doing the equivalent of bombing the nameless patch of ocean 200 miles North of Oahu from which Nagumo launched his raid. But he was not going after the enemy center of gravity itself.

For all of its defects the campaign in Iraq was at least in the right place: at the locus of oil, ideology and brutal regimes that are the Middle East. Ideally the campaign in Iraq would have a sent a wave of democratization through the area, undermined the attraction of radical Islam, provided a base from which to physically control oil if necessary. That the campaign failed to attain many of objectives should not obscure the fact that its objectives were valid. It made far more strategic sense than fighting tribesmen in Afghanistan. Ideology, rogue regimes, energy are the three entities which have replaced the “ten ships” of 70 years ago. The means through which these three entities should be engaged ought to be the subject of reasoned debate, whether by military, economic or technological means. But the vital nature of these objectives ought not to be. Neutralize the intellectual appeal of radical Islam, topple the rogue regimes, and ease Western dependence on oil and you win the war. Yet their centrality, and even their existence is what the politicians constantly deny.

Events are unfolding, but they have not yet run their course; things are still continuing to cascade. If the unrest spreads to the point where the Suez and regional oil fall into anti-Western hands, the consequences would be incalculable. The scale of the left’s folly: their insistence on drilling moratoriums, opposition to nuclear power, support of negotiations with dictators at all costs, calls for unilateral disarmament, addiction to debt and their barely disguised virulent anti-Semitism should be too manifest to deny.

Leftism is making common cause with Islamic terrorism. Why ? I don’t really know. Some of it may be the caricature of Jews making money and being good at business. Some may simply be the extension of animosity to Israel extending to all Jews. The people behind Obama are not free of these sentiments. His Justice Department is filled with lawyers who defended terrorists at Guantanamo. Holder seems uninterested in voting rights cases if a black is the offender. He was even unwilling to say that Islamic terrorism was behind 9/11.

Because it will hit them where it hurts, in the lifestyle they somehow thought came from some permanent Western prosperity that was beyond the power of their fecklessness to destroy. It will be interesting to see if anyone can fill up their cars with carbon credits when the oil tankers stop coming or when black gold is marked at $500 a barrel. It is even possible that within a relatively short time the only government left friendly to Washington in the Middle East may be Iraq. There is some irony in that, but it is unlikely to be appreciated.

I would add a bit to this from one of my favorite essays on the topic. It compares Gorbachev to Obama.

Nor are the two men, themselves, remotely comparable in their backgrounds, or political outlook. Gorbachev, for instance, had come up from tractor driver, not through elite schools including Harvard Law; he lacked the narcissism that constantly seeks self-reflection through microphones and cameras, or the sense that everything is about him.

On the other hand, some interesting comparisons could be made between the thuggish party machine of Chicago, which raised Obama as its golden boy; and the thuggish party machine of Moscow, which presented Gorbachev as it’s most attractive face.

Both men have been praised for their wonderful temperaments, and their ability to remain unperturbed by approaching catastrophe. But again, the substance is different, for Gorbachev’s temperament was that of a survivor of many previous catastrophes.

Yet they do have one major thing in common, and that is the belief that, regardless of what the ruler does, the polity he rules must necessarily continue. This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern “liberal” mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.

In another passage:

There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.

A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.

Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

With an incredible rapidity, America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.

The turmoil in Egypt is a test that, I fear, Obama and his Secretary of State, will not pass.

UPDATE: The situation in Egypt festers with an ambiguous statement by Obama no help. Here is an example of how Reagan handled the Philippine overthrow of Marcos. A very different approach.

UPDATE #2: A column by Charles Krauthammer is indispensable reading today.

Elections will be held. The primary U.S. objective is to guide a transition period that gives secular democrats a chance.

The House of Mubarak is no more. He is 82, reviled and not running for reelection. The only question is who fills the vacuum. There are two principal possibilities: a provisional government of opposition forces, possibly led by Mohamed ElBaradei, or an interim government led by the military.

ElBaradei would be a disaster. As head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), he did more than anyone to make an Iranian nuclear bomb possible, covering for the mullahs for years. (As soon as he left, the IAEA issued a strikingly tough, unvarnished report about the program.)

Worse, ElBaradei has allied himself with the Muslim Brotherhood. Such an alliance is grossly unequal. The Brotherhood has organization, discipline and widespread support. In 2005, it won approximately 20 percent of parliamentary seats. ElBaradei has no constituency of his own, no political base, no political history within Egypt at all.

He has lived abroad for decades. He has less of a residency claim to Egypt than Rahm Emanuel has to Chicago. A man with no constituency allied with a highly organized and powerful political party is nothing but a mouthpiece and a figurehead, a useful idiot whom the Brotherhood will dispense with when it ceases to have need of a cosmopolitan frontman.

The Egyptian military, on the other hand, is the most stable and important institution in the country. It is Western-oriented and rightly suspicious of the Brotherhood. And it is widely respected, carrying the prestige of the 1952 Free Officers Movement that overthrew the monarchy and the 1973 October War that restored Egyptian pride along with the Sinai.

The military is the best vehicle for guiding the country to free elections over the coming months.

El Baradei also attempted to intervene in the 2004 US elections by releasing a letter that alleged US forces had allowed radicals to steal hundreds of pounds of explosives in Iraq by failing to guard the facility. After the election, it was proven that the letter was not true. The man is anti-American and a liar.

More reasons to get out of Afghanistan

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

Here is more to add to my previous reasons for getting out.

Word had come down the morning Brooks spoke to this reporter that watch towers surrounding the base were going to be dismantled because Afghan village elders, some sympathetic to the Taliban, complained they were invading their village privacy. “We have to take down our towers because it offends them and now the Taliban can set up mortars and we can’t see them,” Brooks added, with disgust.

I can understand minimizing civilian casualties by making certain of your target. What is accomplished by this nonsense ?

“I don’t think the military leaders, president or anybody really cares about what we’re going through,” said Spc. Matthew “Silver” Fuhrken, 25, from Watertown, N.Y. “I’m sick of people trying to cover up what’s really going on over here. They won’t let us do our job. I don’t care if they try to kick me out for what I’m saying — war is war and this is no war. I don’t know what this is.”
To the soldiers and Marines risking their lives in Afghanistan, restrictions on their ability to aggressively attack the Taliban have led to another enormous frustration stalking morale: the fear that the Karzai government, with the prodding of the administration of President Obama, will negotiate a peace with the Taliban that wastes all the sacrifices by the U.S. here. Those fears intensified when news reached the enlisted ranks that the Karzai government, with the backing of senior Obama officials, was entering a new round of negotiations with the Taliban.
“If we walk away, cut a deal with the Taliban, desert the people who needed us most, then this war was pointless,” said Pvt. Jeffrey Ward, with 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, who is stationed at Forward Operating Base Bullard in southern Afghanistan.

We can’t replace Karzai. That was a fatal mistake we made in Vietnam. It may be that Obama’s promise to bail out next summer may have poisoned the relationship with Karzai. I fully expect him to move to the French Riviera when we leave.

From the front lines, the U.S. backing of the Karzai government, widely seen as riddled with corruption by the Afghans living in local villages, has given the Taliban a position of power in villages while undercutting U.S. moral authority.
Corrupt government officials have made “it impossible for us to trust anyone,” said elder Sha Barar, from the village of Sha Joy. The people of that village and many others profess fear of the Taliban, and recount tales of brutality and wanton killings by the Taliban and their sympathizers. But they don’t see the Karzai government as a positive force in their lives.

This is a dilemma with no possible solution that I see.

9/11 nine years later

Saturday, September 11th, 2010

On Tuesday, 9/11/01, I was having breakfast and preparing to catch the train to Los Angeles for a day of teaching first year medical students. I was watching a special edition of Good Morning America which was on early because of a mysterious fire in the World Trade Center. Normally, that program did not come on in California until 7 AM and it was just after 6, nine o’clock in New York. As Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson talked about the fire, a huge explosion occurred in the second, heretofore undamaged WTC tower. Diane Sawyer flinched visibly and I went into the other room to awaken my significant other suggesting she turn on the TV. This was not just a fire.

We hadn’t yet seen the video of the planes flying into them so there was still some mystery about what was going on. I still was scheduled to teach, although I doubted much would be accomplished that day, but I changed and caught the train. Much of the talk about the medical campus was vague and of the sort one would hear at any disaster occasion. Nobody yet was talking about the fact that we had been attacked.

What does all this mean for us nine years later ? First, radical Islam has been at war with us since 1979. We have been attacked repeatedly with major loss of life. I once attended a session at the American College of Surgeons meeting by the surgeons who had been on the ships offshore of Lebanon when the Iranians blew up the marine Barracks in Beirut. That was 1983.

In one of Ronald Reagan’s worst foreign policy decisions, he had placed those Marines in the middle of the Lebanese civil war and left them unarmed. The guards at the entrance to the underground garage saw the truck with the bomb coming. They saw the driver grinning as he saw success for his mission and his 72 virgins waiting. But their M 16s were not loaded. I have heard arguments that this is not true but the fact remains they did not fire.

The surgeons said the worst part of the whole disaster was that there were no patients. They received no wounded to treat. The Marines were all dead. 241 Americans died, including some CIA personnel who were at work early. The bombing was a sophisticated operation by Iran. We bombed Libya for a less serious incident. Why did Reagan not retaliate for the Marine barracks bombing ?

There is an interesting book, called Rogue Warrior by a former SEAL who retired as a full commander. He was in Beirut before the bombing and has a number of harsh criticisms of our security. Among other things, he writes that the US knew that truck bombs, which had been used before, had remote detonation devices activated by radio in case the driver had second thoughts. Since we knew the frequencies used, why not send out random signals to set off any bombs that might be under assembly or in transit. He was turned down because of the risk of civilian casualties. Better the bombs reach their target intact, I guess.

Bush attacked Afghanistan after the Taliban refused to give up bin Laden and his fighters, once they had been identified as the perpetrators. At first there was hand wringing from the usual suspects that we would be involved in a “quagmire” in Afghanistan. Initial reports of less that unqualified success were seized upon by the political left. There were actually peace marches conducted against any invasion of that country. Those marches have been conveniently forgotten by the Democrats.

We threw out the Taliban and made a good faith effort at stabilizing Afghanistan but now I think it is time to quit that fight. Our enemy over there is Pakistan, or at least the radical elements of the Pakistan Army and the ISI. I stated my reasons nearly a year ago and have not changed my mind. Our primary enemy remains Iran. That seems to be forgotten. The NY Post seems to get it.

Pakistan is an unreliable ally

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010

We have been in Afghanistan for nearly 9 years. We invaded after 2001 and routed the Taliban with a combination of non-Pashtun forces and our own Special Forces and air power. That campaign was a success. Now we are engaged in a nation building and COIN campaign in an area that has never been a nation or even a town. Prior to the Soviet maneuvering which resulted in invasion in 1979, Afghanistan had consisted of a city, Kabul, with a civilized society, and the vast countryside ruled by tribes and hostile to any attempt at central control by Kabul. The rather successful policy by the “central government’ was to leave them alone. Eventually, Soviet forces decided to take control with a series of coups.

The first was in 1971.

The workers started to get organised and became very active in the industrial areas of the country; the demonstrations, which had begun on the campus of the University and in the secondary schools of Kabul, soon spread to the provinces: riots became more and more frequent; the King was openly criticized.

Moscow had a plan ready and in Kabul and army was being infiltrated by the “Parcham” group. A period of transition was necessary before a Marxist government could be established. Someone had to be found, who could, at the same time, be trusted b Moscow and accepted by the Afghan people, in order to replace the King who was gradually loosing his popularity. Only one person met all the requirements, and that was Daoud. After ten years away from the political scene, he was still ambitious and eager to regain power. To achieve this goal, he was to take the King’s place, even if that meant as President of the Republic only. The Russians were in a hurry to put an end to the monarchy, which they considered to be a major obstacle to their objectives.

An agreement was reached in 1971 between two officers belonging to the “Parcham” group (Moscow’s favourite) and Dr. Hassan Sharq who was acting on Daoud’s behalf.

The tragedy of Afghanistan began here but there had never been a real central government. There was Kabul and then the rest of the country. Afghanistan had actually severed relationships with Pakistan in 1961. Pakistan is no friend of a real Afghanistan as an independent country. Afghanistan does have some natural resources and some rudimentary efforts were made to develop them under the Soviets.

The Pashtuns are the dominant tribal group of Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is a major obstacle to any solution of the Afghanistan problem. Pakistan was a political creation at the dissolution of the British control of India. It was poorly done and massive tragedy ensued. Kashmir is one of those mistakes but Pakistan is another in many ways. Perhaps it should have been Pashtunistan except that half the Pashtuns were in Afghanistan, which was about to severe relations with Pakistan.

Pakistan has fomented terrorism in India as part of its Cold War with its neighbor. Much of this is directed at Kashmir but some has been redirected, as in the Mumbai massacre which was originally directed at Kashmir. Pakistan is not a reliable ally.

Countering and Fomenting Insurgencies

In his monograph, Pakistan’s Security Paradox: Countering and Fomenting Insurgencies, Mullick observed what he described as a “duplicitous approach” in Pakistan’s insurgency policy:

* On the one hand, Pakistan has engaged in an effort to counter insurgency (COIN) within its own borders, particularly in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

* On the other hand, Pakistan has been fomenting insurgency (FOIN) across the border in Afghanistan.

* Mullick argued that this policy needs to be considered as part of a coherent Pakistani national security strategy to protect its territorial, economic, and geopolitical interests.

Pakistan is backing the Taliban in Afghanistan and fighting them in Pakistan. Some of this is Pashtun politics.

Mullick argued that Pakistan’s paradoxical COIN/FOIN strategy has undergone several evolutions. Two of these stages hold particular significance for U.S. interests in the region:

* 2001–2008: Pakistan pursued counterinsurgency campaigns against the Pakistan Taliban, Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and separatists in Balochistan. However, Pakistan decided to “selectively target,” and eventually abet, Afghan Taliban, many of whom fled to FATA after the American invasion

* 2009: The Taliban violated a peace deal struck by the government in the Swat Valley and brought their forces within 60 miles of Islamabad. Deciding to regain control over the Valley, Pakistan Army and Special Forces pursued a “hybrid COIN strategy.”

Thus, Pakistan fights when it is threatened but supports the insurgency in Afghanistan, perhaps as a way of redirecting the young militants from its own territory.

Curtis and Tellis questioned whether Pakistan’s shift in emphasis from FOIN to COIN represented a real “paradigm shift” or whether it was merely a transient refinement. Curtis, in particular, objected to the amoral symmetry that Mullick perceives exists between COIN and FOIN in Pakistan’s national security calculus. Pakistan, Tellis further noted, continues to target militant groups selectively, and several prominent networks remain active in Pakistan. These include the Haqqani network based in northern Waziristan, the Hizb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, and the Afghan Taliban. Tellis also emphasized that Pakistan has fomented terrorism in addition to insurgencies and that its efforts with regard to the former have historically been far more effective. To date, there appears to be little change with respect to Pakistan’s support for terrorist groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was responsible for the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India..

Pakistan cannot be trusted and, in fact, may constitute an enemy as it drifts toward militant Islam. Turkey is on the same path. We have to be realistic about what is going on. Our natural ally here is India, a society that has chosen modernity and is pursuing education and commercial development, unlike its neighbor and enemy Pakistan.

Afghanistan and Pakistan

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

UPDATE #3: The new issue of Rolling Stone (Not out yet) has an article about General McChrystal and his aides who contemptuous of President Obama and his people such as Richard Holbroke and the Ambassador Eikenberry. All hell has broken loose in the White House and McChrystal has been called back to Washington to explain.

UPDATE #2: This may be old news being pushed by the administration in a bit of cheer leading. The original studies were published in 2007. This sort of thing may be the reason.

UPDATE: It now appears there are large deposits of minerals, especially Lithium, in Afghanistan. Given the neighbors of the country, I doubt this will be a benefit for a very long time, if ever.

A month or two ago I suggested it is time to get out of Afghanistan. There are serious problems with any effort to build a modern nation in Afghanistan. It has no assets in terms of natural resources or a history of a middle class. It is also a part of the sphere of influence of Pakistan which is frustrating our efforts by supporting the Taliban at the same time it is giving lip service to our war on the same entity. The fact is that the Taliban is a creature of Pakistan’s ISI, the intelligence service of the country which is more Islamist than the supposed democratic government.

India, which is our natural ally in the region, is reporting that the ISI is supporting them almost openly.

ISI provides funding, training and sanctuary to Taliban in Afghanistan on a scale much larger than previously thought, a report claims and suggests that the spy agency may be backing the insurgents to undermine Indian influence in the war-torn country. The report by the London School of Economics (LSE), based on interviews with nine Taliban commanders in Afghanistan between February and May this year, says the support for the Afghan Taliban was “official ISI policy”.

The IED explosives that resist detection by mine detectors are supplied to the Taliban by Pakistan. These IEDs are now the principle tactic of the Taliban.

“They have conducted less direct fire attacks from the winter into this spring, and they’re using more IEDs, suicide vests and potentially a car bomb,” he said.

As an example he cited last month’s suicide attack against the US-operated Bagram air base outside Kabul, and a suicide car bombing by the Taliban the previous day which killed at least 18 people, including six NATO troops – five U.S. and one Canadian.

The Bagram attack “was really not one that I think could have achieved success in terms of penetrating the base itself,” Scaparrotti said.

Yet it sparked hours of battles, left an American contractor and 10 militants dead, and highlighted the increasing sophistication and relentless pace of the conflict in which the Taliban are waging an insurgency to overthrow the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.

It is now known that Pakistan, through the ISI, is now paying families of suicide bombers 200,000 Pakistani Rupees, about $1,000. This was a tactic of Saddam Hussein when he provided $25,000 stipends to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. In a society where young men have few options for successful careers in real work, the sums are a real incentive.

“Although the Taliban has a strong endogenous impetus, according to Taliban commanders the ISI orchestrates, sustains and strongly influences the movement,” wrote author Matt Waldman, a fellow at Harvard University.
“They say it gives sanctuary to both Taliban and Haqqani groups, and provides huge support in terms of training, funding, munitions, and supplies. In their words, this is ‘as clear as the sun in the sky’.”
Waldman said the ISI appears to exert “significant influence” on strategic decision-making and field operations of the Taliban and controls the most violent insurgent units, some of which appear to be based in Pakistan.
Insurgent commanders claimed the ISI — an acronym for Inter-Services Intelligence directorate — was even officially represented, as participants or observers, on the Taliban supreme leadership council, he said.
The report alleges that Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari himself had assured captive senior Taliban leaders that they were “our people” and had his backing. He had apparently authorised some to be released from prison.
The study drew an angry reaction from the Pakistani military.
“It is a part of a malicious campaign against the Pakistan army and the ISI,” Pakistan army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas told AFP.

The enemy we are fighting in Afghanistan is actually Pakistan and our aid to Pakistan is being used to fund our enemy in the field. This is worse than Vietnam where the enemy had sanctuary in supposedly neutral territory. Here, the enemy has sanctuary in our putative ally. We need to recognize this and get out. The enemy is Pakistan and our ally is India.

The recent expulsion of Michael Yon from Afghanistan is part of the delusion we are under in what is happening.

The intention was to write a detailed dispatch on the 3-17th Field Artillerly. Unfortunately, General Stanley McChrystals’ crew broke an agreement I had with the Army to stay until 5/2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team leaves Afghanistan, and so the research on this dispatch was not completed. However, there are some nice nighttime photos and so this dispatch is more about Canons than cannons.

He has incurred the displeasure of General McChrystal. The battle for Kandahar has been delayed and will probably not be successful. The expulsion of the best battlefield reporter we have is suspicious and suggests an effort to conceal the truth.

This is a political war on nearly every level. Though this will almost certainly be our most deadly year so far, violence is often a minor aspect of the struggle, while in some places combat is—by far—the most prevalent feature. Insofar as combat, our plans do not include serious fighting within Kandahar City, though soon after publication of this dispatch fighting will erupt in nearby areas. BfK is more of a process for both sides than a set battle. The Taliban are succeeding in their process to take Kandahar, and we wish to reverse that process.

The war is going to bring heavy casualties and I do not see the value of the struggle as we have committed to leaving next year, which makes the effort even less worth the cost.

We are losing in Afghanistan

Friday, April 16th, 2010

UPDATE: Michael is taking heat from milbloggers who have never been embedded and being defended by others.

How do I know ? Michael Yon has has his embed with the troops cancelled by McChrystal.

Michael Yon: McChrystal’s crew has spoken: Embed is ended. This comes from McChrystal’s own spokesman (through one CPT Jane Campbell USN cc RADM Greg Smith and COL Wayne Shanks USA). This lends confirmation to ideas that the disembed came from McChrystal’s crew. (If not before, 100% now.) McChrystal cannot be trusted to tell the truth about this war. Packing my bags.

Michael Yon was the only reliable reporter from Iraq and when that war was won, he moved on to Afghanistan. His photos have been fantastic and his reporting has been the only window on the real war. He is an Army veteran in good enough shape to go out on patrols with the troops for the past six years. Now his career as an embed, the only one, is over.

Michael Yon: The disembed from McChrytal’s top staff (meaning from McChrystal himself) is a very bad sign. Sends chills that McChrystal himself thinks we are losing the war. McChrystal has a history of covering up. This causes concern that McChrystal might be misleading SecDef and President. Are they getting the facts?

This is a very bad sign. Not only the implication that we are losing but that it is being covered up.

One comment from an Afghanistan vet: Greg Watson Mike – thanks for your work. I was in Kabul for 2007. The real story needs to be told. Your leaving scares me in a way that an uptick in attacks doesn’t.

Me too.

An analysis of the CIA disaster in Afghanistan.

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Stratfor analyzes the successful Taliban suicide attack against the the CIA in Khost last month.

As Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi exited the vehicle that brought him onto Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, on Dec. 30, 2009, security guards noticed he was behaving strangely. They moved toward al-Balawi and screamed demands that he take his hand out of his pocket, but instead of complying with the officers’ commands, al-Balawi detonated the suicide device he was wearing. The explosion killed al-Balawi, three security contractors, four CIA officers and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department (GID) officer who was al-Balawi’s handler. The vehicle shielded several other CIA officers at the scene from the blast. The CIA officers killed included the chief of the base at Khost and an analyst from headquarters who reportedly was the agency’s foremost expert on al Qaeda. The agency’s second-ranking officer in Afghanistan was allegedly among the officers who survived.

The CIA officers clearly violated tradecraft in this incident, which makes me wonder what else they were weak in. I am just not impressed with the CIA, especially in analysis. They attacked George Bush more successfully than they did the Islamists. I reviewed Timmerman’s book a couple of years ago. I wish I had more confidence in this institution.

Why I think we should get out of Afghanistan

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

I was in favor of the Iraq invasion in 2003 and, although the post-war period was botched, I think the Surge has made it a modest success. Iraq was always a better bet than Afghanistan because it is a rich country and had a modest middle class already. In fact, I think Iraq has a good chance to become the most successful Arab state. On the other hand, I think Afghanistan is a very risky situation.

During Afghanistan’s golden age which consisted of the last king’s rule, the country consisted of a small civilized center in Kabul while the rest of the country existed much as it did in the time of Alexander the Great. I have reviewed Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerilla, which explains much of the Afghan war. He is not optimistic about it and neither am I. Aside from the fact that Obama is a reluctant, very reluctant, warrior here, Pakistan is a serious obstacle to success.

Today, Andy McCarthy calls our attention to an explosive editorial in Investors’ Business Daily on the links between the Taliban and Pakistan’s army and intelligence services.

it’s an open secret the Taliban are headquartered across the border in the city of Quetta, Pakistan, where they operate openly under the aegis of Pakistani intelligence — and the financial sponsorship of the Saudis.

Sending more troops to Afghanistan is a necessary, albeit unfortunate, rear-guard action against marauding Taliban fighters armed, trained, supplied and deployed from Quetta — and funded from Riyadh.

NATO and U.S. military command know this. They’ve complained about it over and over in military action reports. So have Treasury officials regarding Saudi funding of the Taliban.

“Saudi Arabia today remains the location where more money is going to terrorism — to Sunni terror groups and the Taliban — than any other place in the world,” testified Stuart Levey, Treasury undersecretary.

This is Viet Nam all over again. The enemy has a sanctuary and our allies are siding secretly with our enemies.

Here’s how the game works. The Pakistanis are currently engaged in a much heralded crackdown on jihadists. But they are limiting those operations to the jihadists in the northwest tribal region — i.e., those whose primary target is the Pakistani government. By contrast, the Taliban — i.e., the jihadists targeting the U.S. and Afghanistan — are holed up in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, under the protection of the ISI. In fact, there are now reports that Mullah Omar has been moved to Karachi to protect him from U.S. drone attacks.

Pakistan is playing a double game. Secondly, our troops are handicapped by absurd rules of engagement.

The Times compiled an informal list of the new rules from interviews with U.S. forces. Among them:

• No night or surprise searches.

• Villagers have to be warned prior to searches.

• ANA or ANP must accompany U.S. units on searches.

• U.S. soldiers may not fire at the enemy unless the enemy is preparing to fire first.

• U.S. forces cannot engage the enemy if civilians are present.

This is ridiculous. Pakistan is protecting the enemy and our troops are restricted to idiotic limits, such as warning hostile villages before attacks. We should leave.

Then, if things deteriorate, Pakistan may become the target instead of Afghanistan.