America's intelligence agencies have concluded that Afghanistan is in a "downward spiral" in which the Kabul government is no longer capable of containing the resurgence of the Taliban.
The assessment isn't due to be released until after the November elections but officials involved in it have been speaking with journalists. They say the report will show that the Karzai government is hopelessly weakened by corruption at all levels. From The New York Times:
Inside the government, reports issued by the Central Intelligence Agency for more than two years have chronicled the worsening violence and rampant corruption inside Afghanistan, and some in the agency say they believe that it has taken the White House too long to respond to the warnings.
Henry A. Crumpton, a career C.I.A. officer who last year stepped down as the State Department’s top counterterrorism official, attributed some of Afghanistan’s problems to a “lack of leadership” both at the White House and in European capitals where commitments to rebuild Afghanistan after 2001 have never been met.
Mr. Crumpton, who was in charge of the C.I.A. teams that entered Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks but who said he had not seen the draft report, said that Afghanistan was “bad and getting worse” and that officials in Washington were just beginning to wake up to the problem.
So, what's the answer? When you've allowed warlordism to grab the reins of power for more than six years how do you go about undoing that?
You're already losing to the warlords of the Taliban. You have only a fraction of the troops necessary for that job. How do you take on the rest? Do you launch yourself into a Soviet-style Afghan War against all the tribes, all the warlords? Do you go to war with the entire goddamned country?
Even if you did decide to battle all the warlords and did find an army of four to five hundred thousand troops you were able to maintain in the field for ten or more years, you still need a viable central government to make it work, one that the people will support.
The answer, from the American side, seems to be to feed more troops into the mix but just a paltry ten to thirty thousand. According to the paper, they're also looking at resurrecting a tactic straight out of Vietnam - arming the tribesmen:
"The administration is considering whether the United States should devote more effort to working directly with tribal leaders in far-flung provinces, and possibly arming tribal militias, to fight the Taliban in places where Afghanistan’s army and police forces have been ineffective.
The Bush administration had long resisted making tribal elders a centerpiece of American strategy in Afghanistan. American officials had hoped instead that strong national institutions like the Afghan Army could protect the Afghan population, but the escalating violence this year has forced a reassessment of the value of the tribal system for counterinsurgency operations. "
This has to be warfighting at its very worst, it just doesn't get much dumber than this. The Americans act as though the passage of seven years is inconsequential. Their top general on these matters, Petraeus, knows better. He wrote that counterinsurgency forces need to get their job done quickly and get out. He's openly acknowledged that these forces have a short shelf-life after which they go in the locals' eyes from liberator to occupier.
But we don't always fight wars for the reasons we give the public. The Iraq adventure is a clear example of that. And we don't always fight the right war.
We've been fighting the wrong war in Afghanistan for almost seven years. We've been fighting a purely military war with all the shiny toys - the tanks and artillery and attack helicopters and strike fighters. It's perfect - a war we can't lose. These guys can't defeat us militarily but that's only important if they're willing to fight our war and they're not. Here's the problem: if they don't fight our war, we can't win it. We can't lose but we can't win. Meanwhile they're busy fighting their war, a political war of insurgency and they're winning their war.
I think it's too late to hope to defeat the insurgency at their war. It's no longer just the Taliban. There are now 14-separate entities participating in the insurgency and a number of the warlords we once took to be friendly are weighing their options. They're under no illusions about how well we've done these past seven years and that leaves them to pick sides between Karzai and the insurgency. In reality, a number of them have been playing both sides for a while.
The trap here is that there's no huge downside to carrying on fighting the military war, our war. We cannot be defeated militarily, it's simply out of the question. But, so long as bin Laden lives, no American president is going to consider leaving. The political costs would be enormous. By merely showing his face in an annual video, this one, diabolical man has the Americans tied down in Afghanistan.
What to do when you have an intractable war in support of a hopeless civil administration? It's at this point that the US normally goes into default mode - "coup." Get some locals, generals preferably, to oust the civilian administration, declare martial law, and then establish strongman rule.
Hey, wait a second! That's exactly what the British ambassador was talking about, wasn't it? Yes indeedy kiddies, that is exactly what the Top Brit was talking about, albeit in what was supposed to be a private, diplomatic conversation.
Let's face facts. For all the grandiose talk about evildoers and waging war on terror and bringing democracy and human rights to the people of Afghanistan, we really don't give two shits about any of that. That much was obvious when Bush took off for his adventures in the sands of Iraq and we sat there without so much as a complaint.
No, I suspect you'll see that the NATO participants will quietly pack their bags, one by one, and hand the war back to the Americans so they can pursue whatever they see as in their political best interests. Then we'll try to distance ourselves from this as much as we can and look for a deep hole where we can bury our share of the responsibility for this fiasco.
The assessment isn't due to be released until after the November elections but officials involved in it have been speaking with journalists. They say the report will show that the Karzai government is hopelessly weakened by corruption at all levels. From The New York Times:
Inside the government, reports issued by the Central Intelligence Agency for more than two years have chronicled the worsening violence and rampant corruption inside Afghanistan, and some in the agency say they believe that it has taken the White House too long to respond to the warnings.
Henry A. Crumpton, a career C.I.A. officer who last year stepped down as the State Department’s top counterterrorism official, attributed some of Afghanistan’s problems to a “lack of leadership” both at the White House and in European capitals where commitments to rebuild Afghanistan after 2001 have never been met.
Mr. Crumpton, who was in charge of the C.I.A. teams that entered Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks but who said he had not seen the draft report, said that Afghanistan was “bad and getting worse” and that officials in Washington were just beginning to wake up to the problem.
So, what's the answer? When you've allowed warlordism to grab the reins of power for more than six years how do you go about undoing that?
You're already losing to the warlords of the Taliban. You have only a fraction of the troops necessary for that job. How do you take on the rest? Do you launch yourself into a Soviet-style Afghan War against all the tribes, all the warlords? Do you go to war with the entire goddamned country?
Even if you did decide to battle all the warlords and did find an army of four to five hundred thousand troops you were able to maintain in the field for ten or more years, you still need a viable central government to make it work, one that the people will support.
The answer, from the American side, seems to be to feed more troops into the mix but just a paltry ten to thirty thousand. According to the paper, they're also looking at resurrecting a tactic straight out of Vietnam - arming the tribesmen:
"The administration is considering whether the United States should devote more effort to working directly with tribal leaders in far-flung provinces, and possibly arming tribal militias, to fight the Taliban in places where Afghanistan’s army and police forces have been ineffective.
The Bush administration had long resisted making tribal elders a centerpiece of American strategy in Afghanistan. American officials had hoped instead that strong national institutions like the Afghan Army could protect the Afghan population, but the escalating violence this year has forced a reassessment of the value of the tribal system for counterinsurgency operations. "
This has to be warfighting at its very worst, it just doesn't get much dumber than this. The Americans act as though the passage of seven years is inconsequential. Their top general on these matters, Petraeus, knows better. He wrote that counterinsurgency forces need to get their job done quickly and get out. He's openly acknowledged that these forces have a short shelf-life after which they go in the locals' eyes from liberator to occupier.
But we don't always fight wars for the reasons we give the public. The Iraq adventure is a clear example of that. And we don't always fight the right war.
We've been fighting the wrong war in Afghanistan for almost seven years. We've been fighting a purely military war with all the shiny toys - the tanks and artillery and attack helicopters and strike fighters. It's perfect - a war we can't lose. These guys can't defeat us militarily but that's only important if they're willing to fight our war and they're not. Here's the problem: if they don't fight our war, we can't win it. We can't lose but we can't win. Meanwhile they're busy fighting their war, a political war of insurgency and they're winning their war.
I think it's too late to hope to defeat the insurgency at their war. It's no longer just the Taliban. There are now 14-separate entities participating in the insurgency and a number of the warlords we once took to be friendly are weighing their options. They're under no illusions about how well we've done these past seven years and that leaves them to pick sides between Karzai and the insurgency. In reality, a number of them have been playing both sides for a while.
The trap here is that there's no huge downside to carrying on fighting the military war, our war. We cannot be defeated militarily, it's simply out of the question. But, so long as bin Laden lives, no American president is going to consider leaving. The political costs would be enormous. By merely showing his face in an annual video, this one, diabolical man has the Americans tied down in Afghanistan.
What to do when you have an intractable war in support of a hopeless civil administration? It's at this point that the US normally goes into default mode - "coup." Get some locals, generals preferably, to oust the civilian administration, declare martial law, and then establish strongman rule.
Hey, wait a second! That's exactly what the British ambassador was talking about, wasn't it? Yes indeedy kiddies, that is exactly what the Top Brit was talking about, albeit in what was supposed to be a private, diplomatic conversation.
Let's face facts. For all the grandiose talk about evildoers and waging war on terror and bringing democracy and human rights to the people of Afghanistan, we really don't give two shits about any of that. That much was obvious when Bush took off for his adventures in the sands of Iraq and we sat there without so much as a complaint.
No, I suspect you'll see that the NATO participants will quietly pack their bags, one by one, and hand the war back to the Americans so they can pursue whatever they see as in their political best interests. Then we'll try to distance ourselves from this as much as we can and look for a deep hole where we can bury our share of the responsibility for this fiasco.
2 comments:
Who'd a believed it!!! The only guys who got any of this right were the Dippers. Pull out NOW!!!!
Unfortunately we can't leave now. This is no time to be infuriating the Americans.
It would be great, however, if they could groom a genuinely nationalist army general to take over.
Someone is going to have to tame the warlords and drug barons and yet the corruption within the Afghan government at all levels is so systemic that an alternative power structure is going to have to be found. That pretty much means handing the place over to the Afghan Army or else the most favourable warlord of the lot. The latter would almost certainly mark the opening of the next Afghan civil war.
It was the Turkish military that has safeguarded the secular democracy of their country against fundamentalist theocracy. That might have to be the model for Afghanistan too.
Post a Comment