Taliban-US Talks Making Progress

Can We Trust Them?

Asia Times Online has been reporting on clandestine negotiations between the United States and the Taliban leadership conducted through intermediaries Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.  The news service that the process is "gaining momentum" as the U.S. and its allies look for ways to get out of Afghanistan.

In principle, the Taliban have agreed to clearly state their position on several issues so that formal talks with Washington will be internationally acceptable. In particular, the Taliban will explain their stance on al-Qaeda.



Asia Times Online has learned that the backchannel talks have to date resulted in the Taliban agreeing to issue a policy statement on their relationship with al-Qaeda. They will clarify that they provided protection to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in line with Afghan traditions of being hospitable.


The Taliban will spell out their position of decrying international terrorism and of not supporting violence in Muslim countries. Above all, they will clearly state that the Taliban are an indigenous movement struggling against foreign occupation forces with no agenda outside Afghan boundaries.

...During this Ramadan's talks in the UAE, Taliban representatives indicated a willingness to accept a more broad-based political setup in Afghanistan.

...During the talks in the UAE, it was clarified that the Taliban would not allow any training camps for international terrorism on their territory.

Can the Taliban be trusted to keep these promises?   Probably not.   Does that really matter?  Probably not.   The idea for Washington and its allies is to get out of Afghanistan with something, anything that provides a suitable appearance or narrative to justify an inconclusive, decade-long war.

Asia Times Online earlier reported that the deal being discussed might see something resembling a quasi-partition of Afghanistan with the Pashtun south going to the Talibs.   Curiously enough, that might be the only deal that would be acceptable to the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara tribes of the north.

What was that line Nixon coined?   Oh yeah, "Peace with Honour."

Within the United States the PR machine is already getting up to speed.   According to the LA Times, even some of the Afghan war's biggest boosters are now changing their tune:

"The current strategy isn't working, and it's costing roughly $100 billion a year," Haass, a former aide to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, told me last week. "It's time for a major recalibration: not an immediate withdrawal but a significant scaling down of our ambitions."



And last week, a group of 46 foreign policy experts issued a joint report arguing that the goal of building a unified, stable Afghanistan is beyond the ability of the United States, and unnecessary to boot. The panel, the Afghanistan Study Group, included both longtime critics of the war and some who supported U.S. policy until recently.


"A U.S. military victory over the Taliban is simply not necessary to protect U.S. interests," said one of its members, Paul R. Pillar, a former CIA counter-terrorism official.

Are WE Paying Protection Money To the Taliban?

Are NATO forces paying the Taliban Tax? According to the oh so conservative Times of London, we're doing just that, albeit indirectly.

NATO forces in Afghanistan are heavily dependent on masses of supplies brought in overland, usually by truck convoys out of Pakistan. And that, according to The Times, is where the Taliban take their cut:

"...the business of moving supplies from the Pakistani port of Karachi to British, US and other military contingents in the country is largely subcontracted to local trucking companies. These must run the gauntlet of the increasingly dangerous roads south of Kabul in convoys protected by hired gunmen from Afghan security companies.
The Times has learnt that it is in the outsourcing of convoys that payoffs amounting to millions of pounds, including money from British taxpayers, are given to the Taleban.

The controversial payments were confirmed by several fuel importers, trucking and security company owners. None wanted to be identified because of the risk to their business and their lives. “We estimate that approximately 25 per cent of the money we pay for security to get the fuel in goes into the pockets of the Taleban,” said one fuel importer.

Another boss, whose company is subcontracted to supply to Western military bases, said that as much as a quarter of the value of a lorry's cargo went in paying Taleban commanders."

A security company owner explained that a vast array of security companies competed for the trade along the main route south of Kabul, some of it commercial traffic and some supplying Western bases, usually charging about $1,000 (£665) a lorry. Convoys are typically of 40-50 lorries but sometimes up to 100.

He said that until about 14 months ago, security companies had been able to protect convoys without paying. But since then, the attacks had become too severe not to pay groups controlling the route. Attacks on the Kandahar road have been an almost daily occurrence this year. On June 24 a 50-truck convoy of supplies was destroyed. Seven drivers were beheaded by the roadside. The situation now was so extreme that a rival company, working south of the city of Ghazni, had Taleban fighters to escort their convoys.

“I won't name the company, but they are from the Panjshir Valley [in north Afghanistan]. But they have a very good relation with the Taleban. The Taleban come and move with the convoy. They sit in the front vehicle of the convoy to ensure security,” said the company chief."

Afghanistan's jugular is its ringroad, the main highway. There have been far too many incidents and accounts over the past year to doubt that the Talibs have seized control of that road. The US and NATO forces are just too woefully understrength to hold and secure the highway.

This raises the question - if the Taliban can run a protection racket against our military convoys, what happens when the day comes that it suits them to cut off our forces' supplies entirely?

May I Have Your Autograph, Please, Mr. Taliban?

The next thing you know they'll be on The View or maybe even Oprah.

Pakistan is talking to them, so is Afghanistan. The Saudis are always up for a chat with them. The Brits have exchanged pleasantries. Canada thinks it's not a bad idea that someone talks with them and now even the Americans are toying with the idea of having them over for tea.

The Terrors of the Khyber Pass are the most popular bunch in town these days. Everybody wants to make nice. But wait, these are the insurgents, the bad guys, the widowmakers of Kandahar. Aren't we supposed to be talking to them across open sights?

Welcome to the era of "if you can't beat'em, try something, anything else." Everybody is trying to find some deal sweet enough that even an Islamist fundamentalist can't refuse.

Imagine what it must be like to be a Taliban leader these days. You have to decide which invitations you're going to accept (presumably the ones with the best swag), what to wear, what hat goes with which shoes - these are tough things for a jihadi mountain man.

Now the trick is to always negotiate from a position of strength. Oh, that might be a problem for our side. You can't find an American or NATO general these days willing to say we can beat them. They used to say that - a lot - they said it for years - and years - but no more, sigh. Now that they've decided it's better for their careers to change course, it's no longer just a military problem, no, no, no. Now it's a political problem. In fact you just might notice that, when it comes to sitting down with these guys, there's not a general to be seen from our side. No, that would be rude.

So, if you're going to sell a deal, you have to have a deal to sell. We know they're not bringing any deals to us. We're the offeror, they're the offeree. What have we got that they want? What do they want? What do they have that we want?

It's obvious that we'd be happy if they stopped blowing up our convoys and shooting at people. We want them to "stop." To make sure they don't start again, we'd like them to integrate into the political structure of Afghanistan and of Pakistan. It would help no end if there was a viable political structure in either Afghanistan or Pakistan but you have to play the cards you're dealt. I mean, let's be realistic. What would you pay for a piece of the action at Hamid Karzai's table? Probably even less than it's worth and that's hard to do when it's worthless.

Reality sets in. We know we're not going to land any sweetheart deals with the Taliban so we'll leave that futile chinwag up to the Afghan, Pakistani and Saudi governments. What we want is to focus on the supposedly less-extreme parts of the Taliban, persuade them to defect. We'll set them up on Easy Street and that will lure even more to come over. This way we'll hollow out the insurgency.

It sounds like a plan - a very, very bad plan. To begin with, you never, ever let the other side know they've got the upper hand. You don't let on that they're winning. Well, that horse is already out of the barn. If we can't control the insurgency - and we can't - we can't protect defectors, or their families, from retribution. The Taliban doesn't get its support from playing nice, we know that. Given that the insurgents have already infiltrated the government and the police and the army, where's a defector to hide?

"Too many cooks." The Saudis and Afghans and Pakistanis are talking with the Taliban Head Office boys. If we Infidels start messing about with the Branch Office types, how well do you think that's going to go down with the Taliban board of directors?

The Talibs have always said they would negotiate but only after US and NATO forces leave. Do we have some reason to believe they're bluffing, that they'll settle for less? If we don't, we're in an "A" or "B" situation and if we can't break that, we'll eventually have to accept it. We've pretty much known that all along. That's the whole idea about establishing a strong, central government supported by a well-trained, well-equipped army. Now, if we were succeeding on the government thing and the army thing, we wouldn't be talking about negotiations, would we? Of course not. We'd have them sew on their brigade patches, hand them the keys to the armoury and di di mau right out of there. Oops, sorry for the Vietnam reference.

No, my take on all these negotiations is that they're a tacit admission of defeat, even fear. We haven't done what we said we'd do when we went in there seven years ago. We haven't even held the line. We haven't succeeded on a single front over there, not one. Now we're in a dilemma. The Taliban are not only resurgent in Afghanistan, able to operate pretty much as they chose wherever they chose, but they're also destabilizing our key ally next door, Pakistan. And we don't have anything in our fabulous, state-of-the-art bag of tricks to make it go away.

What would success from these negotiations look like? I figure if we could somehow get the Taliban to sever ties with al-Qaeda, that would be victory beyond what we deserve. We've spent the last seven years driving them into the arms of al-Qaeda so undoing what we've wrought would be a Herculean task. Still, al-Qaeda is an Arab outfit. It's not Pashtun or Hazara or Uzbek or Tajik or Turkmen or Kurd or any of the other ethnic players in the region. They're foreigners in a land that doesn't particularly like foreigners. That may be enough to tip the scales.

Getting out of Afghanistan isn't going to be pretty, no matter how these talks turn out.

We've Got a Whole Lot of Killing To Do

General Rick Hillier's estimate of a "few dozen ...scumbags" worth of Taliban in Kandahar province was always pretty stupid but now seems positively delusional. What was this guy thinking or was he even thinking at all?

Thanks to last Friday's prison break in our very own Kandahar province, the Taliban came into a fresh force of 400-hardened fighters. Now I would've thought the insurgents would be pleased enough to spirit their comrades away for a bit of R&R in some distant, safe rear area. Apparently not.

Over the weekend DefMin Peter MacKay assured us it was all the Afghan's fault that the Taliban were able to mass for an attack to overwhelm the major prison in our area and then get away, unmolested, with their liberated comrades. Terrible stuff, bad Afghans. He also assured reporters that Canadian forces were deploying in defence of Kandahar city.

Trouble is, no one told the Taliban that they were supposed to go to Kandahar city to duke it out. Instead they seem to have taken over a series of villages in a district north of Kandahar. From The Guardian:

"Around 500 Taliban fighters have taken over villages in Arghandab district, just north of Kandahar, Mohammad Farooq, the top official in the district, was quoted as saying by Associated Press.

The forces would be hard to remove from the strategically important area, a local tribal leader told the agency.

"All of Arghandab is made of orchards. The militants can easily hide and easily fight," Haji Ikramullah Khan said. "During the Russian war, the Russians didn't even occupy Arghandab, because when they fought here they suffered big casualties."

This one has a bad smell to it. When these guys stand and fight against vastly superior, Western forces, there's usually a solid reason for it.

By the way, Pete, remind me again just how much progress we're making over there.

Taliban - Playing By The Book

Of course it's not our book they're using. Jonathan Landy of McClatchey Newspapers reports that the Taliban and al-Qaeda seem to have gone back to classic insurgency tactics, "...of avoiding U.S and NATO forces and staging attacks in provinces that haven't seen major unrest and on easy targets such as aid organizations and poorly trained Afghan police."

In essence, the insurgents are exploiting our main and possibly fatal weakness - our lack of numbers. We're long on firepower but very, very short on soldiers and that means we can't do the one thing our side has to do in this sort of conflict - secure the population.

Because we can't secure the villagers against the Taliban, the insurgents are free to control these communities, running the show when we're not there. Once your survival and that of your spouse and your kids depends on the whim of one side, the one that is constantly in your life, do you think you would support the other side, especially if you saw that other side, the government side, as corrupt and predatory anyway?

But aren't these Taliban religious nutjobs? Sure they are but, in Afghanistan, who isn't? Tribal peoples who pay fealty to warlords and hold sacred the right to sell their children might be excused for finding our values, our ways just a little curious. They may not like the Taliban any more than they like Kabul's marauding police and security services but I'm sure they don't see the Taliban anything like the way we see them. We just expect the Afghan people to see them the way we see them.

While the brilliant, pseudo-journalists of the National Spot may proclaim that we've got the Taliban "on the run" in fact they've just moved on to target NGOs and the police and bringing their war to new corners of Afghanistan.

"Operationally, the Taliban appear to be putting more resources into attacking in provinces where allied forces are weaker and which are less accustomed to clashes," says an April 6 analysis written by John McCreary, a former senior intelligence analyst for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for dNovus RDI, a Texas-based contracting firm.

"They are starting to show the manifestations of a strategy" of keeping under-strength U.S. and NATO forces tied down in the south and east while stoking instability elsewhere, McCreary said in an interview."

Spreading out of the south and east means moving out of the Pashtun homeland and into the turf of the supposedly rival Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara - the Taliban's mortal enemies, the former Northern Alliance. With different language, different customs, even different ethnicity than some of these other tribes, it's hard to imagine how the Taliban could operate in these other territories without the support of these former enemies.

Is this the first sign of a Pan-Afghan insurgency, one in which NATO will be placed in the same spot as the former Soviet forces and the Kabul government of Karzai in the same, unenviable position as the former Marxist government?

In a nation built on a history of shifting alliances serving narrow self-interests, just about anything is possible. But, of course, we don't see it that way.

The Good News: More Troops, The Bad News: Haqqani

Asia Times reports of the surfacing of a legendary mujahadeen long thought dead who has joined the Taliban to lead its spring offensive.

The guy is Jalaluddin Haqqani and his recently released video, coinciding with the NATO conference, is said to mark the unification of a network of resistance groups with Mullah Omar's Taliban.

"Along with his son Sirajuddin, Jalaluddin Haqqani has built up a well-organized group, known as the Haqqani Network, with roots in Pakistan's tribal areas, that, now firmly allied with Mullah Omar, will pose a dangerous challenge to the coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Haqqani soundly dismissed any notion - as touted by senior NATO officials - that the Taliban were weakened and might forego their spring offensive. "All 37 allies [in NATO] will be humiliated and driven out of Afghanistan - jihad is compulsory and will continue until the end of time; we are without resources, but we have the support of God."

Haqqani said the Taliban and their allies in Afghanistan had come up with new plans to fight against NATO, but these did not have any room for reconciliation. "We are geared for war," Haqqani stated.

The long speech by the Pashtun leader, who made his name fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and remains the most-respected tribal figure in southeastern Afghanistan, is the most sophisticated yet of the Taliban's presentations to Pashtun people.

Copies of Haqqani's speech have spread all over eastern Afghanistan and are available in various formats, including on cassette tape and through cell phone downloads. After being silent for so long, and having been reported dead on numerous occasions, the impact of people listening to Haqqani is immense and will undoubtedly work as a galvanizing force among Pashtuns."

What Lurks Across the Border Inside Pakistan

Canadian journalists have generally done an abysmal job of covering the conflict in Afghanistan and events in neighbouring countries. The embedded scribes seem to be the worst. They either turn into a weird sort of Florence Nightingale with a keyboard or they're reduce to parroting the litany of absurd claims that regularly issue forth from Canadian commanders.

Absurd? I wish I could recall how many times I've read some Colonel boast that we have the insurgents trapped here or there, leaving them to choose between surrender and death, only to have them vanish, in good order with their weapons, to come back and fight another day at a time and place of their choosing. According to the boss, the Big Cod, Hillier, there were only a "few dozen" insurgents in Kandahar when we went there. Well those few dozen must have an unlimited supply of lives given the casualties we claim to have inflicted on them.

It's not surprising then that we are left to wallow in near total ignorance of what is actually going on across the border in Pakistan's tribal lands. Military and political leaders freely state that this is the key to winning in Afghanistan. Every now and then one of them loudly proclaims the need to go in there and winkle out the terrorists. We regularly blame Islamabad for not doing enough. So just what is going on in the Pakistani border territories?

In the January 28th edition of The New Yorker, journalist Steve Coll has an excellent article on Benazir Bhutto which provides a fascinating window into the state of the "Tribal Lands." Here are a few excerpts:

"...During 2004 and 2005, as the Taliban and Al Qaeda increased in strength in Pakistan, they carried out attacks on American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The bush Administration urged President Musharraf to dispatch the Pakistani Army into South Waziristan to disrupt them, and Musharraf agreed to do so. The Army had never before entered the Tribal Areas to subdue them by force' after British troops were defeated there, during the late imperial period, colonial and Pakistani governments had favored a system premised upon local autonomy. The invasion began poorly and has been deteriorating ever since; the Army has taken significant casualties, and, while its forces have killed or captured some Taliban leaders, they have also set off popular resentment."

"...By late 2006, after sporadic battles that received little international attention, the Army had been, in essence, "militarily defeated" by the Taliban and Al qadea, as a US Defence Department official put it."

"...Tariq Waseem Ghazi, a retired three-star general who served as Pakistan's Defense secretary between 2005 and 2007, told me that, among Pakistan's top commanders, 'everybody felt there was a need for a political accommodation' in the Tribal Areas. 'I think it was unreasonable at any time that we should go into the Tribal Areas with the same kind of motivation and fervor with which the coalition went into Afghanistan or into Iraq' he said. '...I kept telling them, Shock and Awe is fine for you if you fly in from the U.S. or Canada, but shock and awe is no good for us when we have to live with the Tribal Areas as a part and parcel of Pakistan.'"

"...Pakistan could have several motives in undertaking a covert program to aid or protect the Taliban: appeasing Pakistan's radicalized Pashtun population; pressuring Afghanistan's government into political concessions favorable to Pakistan; or preserving a historically friendly militia as a hedge against an eventual American withdrawal from Afghanistan."

"...Shuja Nawaz, the military historian, said he doesn't think that among the senior generals and intelligence officers 'there's any consensus that the Taliban are the enemy.; He explained, 'so long as the Taliban don't attack the Army, it sees them as perfectly fine. And, potentially, if they take over Afghanistan, it sees them as a group that would have at least some sympathies with Pakistan and vice versa."

The good/bad news is that the Taliban and al Qaeda appear to be turning their attention, this year at least, away from Afghanistan and onto Islamabad instead. There is always some hope that this may shatter their support within the ranks of the Pakistani Army and its intelligence service. That, however, remains to be seen. Pakistan seems to be descending into a state of political, religious and military turmoil. Rather than pressuring Musharraf we may be better off doing everything we can to support him.

As for fanciful notions of going into the Tribal Lands and North West Frontier to clean out the Taliban and al-Qaeda, we'd better be prepared to go in with a much bigger force than we have in Afghanistan today and we'd better be ready, before we set foot in there, to accept very heavy losses for a very doubtful outcome.

What's In a Name? Plenty and We Need to Understand That.

We're just now finally coming to grips with the realities of Afghanistan's ethnic melange but we also need to understand what's next door, in Pakistan. The name gives it away.

The name of the country was crafted by a bunch of university students at England's Cambridge. It's an acronym. P for the Punjabis, A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind, and the "tan," they say, for Baluchistan.

The country is essentially run by and for the military which is predominantly Punjabi. Benazir Bhutto and her ancestors belonged to the Sindhs. The Pashtun are blended into the Afghans and the Balochs are, of course, the tribesmen of the part of Balochistan that Pakistan shares with Afghanistan. Out of those five groups, the Punjabis and Sindhs vie for power. The others - Kashmiri, Pashtun and Baloch are beset by a variety of insurgents, terrorists and nationalist secessionists.

You don't just go into one part of Pakistan to clean up insurgencies. You effectively take one side against one or more or even all of the others. If the Punjabis can't bring order and security to the Baloch and Pashtun tribal lands, just what do we think NATO is going to accomplish? There's a reason the Punjabi-run military keeps trying to negotiate ceasefires with these tribes.

So let's drop the fanciful notions of bringing a little Western "know how" to sort out the tribal lands once and for all. That place isn't like southern Afghanistan with its level, wide open spaces and largely passive farmers. The tribal lands are extremely rugged, mountainous territory. It's the sort of terrain that doesn't lend itself to armoured vehicles, artillery and air support, the high tech firepower we so depend upon. In fact it's the sort of place where tanks and helicopters go to die.

By the way, another point of misunderstanding I've noticed popping up concerns Pakistan's military. Some suggest they just need a few extra soldiers from NATO to drive the Taliban out of their country. Think again.

The Pakistani military consists of 602,000 active duty personnel. Add in the coast guard and paramilitaries and it just clears 1,000,000 in total. They're all volunteers and they make up the 7th largest military in the world. They also have a reputation as very capable fighters. That's the military that hasn't been able to tame the tribal lands.

Militants Biting the Hand that Fed Them

Many of the violent events of the past several decades have come in the form of "blowback." It's a term that describes the potentially deadly plume of flame that blasts out of the backend when a shoulder-mounted rocket is fired. If you're not careful, your own weapon can inadvertently kill you.

The al-Qaeda movement is blowback. The progeny of the United States and Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence agency, al-Qaeda was trained, equipped and funded to help drive the Soviet forces out of Afghanistan. Afterward al-Qaeda turned on its American benefactors and ever since then Rudy Guiliani has had 9/11 Tourette Syndrome.

Outfits like this are risky but that hasn't stopped Pakistan's ISI from continuing to play the game, especially using the militants to block Afghani collaboration with India.

Now even the Pakistanis are reeling from blowback. From the New York Times:

"Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto."

Does this mean that Pakistan, its military and the ISI are finally going to turn on the militants? Maybe but I suspect they're as likely to wind up with some form of fresh accommodation involving the tribal lands adjacent to Afghanistan. The ISI has practised duplicity on a level that would make Machiavelli jealous and it's difficult to imagine that agency going "straight" anytime soon.

Taking the Fight to the Taliban

That was the title of a BBC documentary on the Queen's Company of the Grenadier Guards in Afghanistan that aired on CBC last night. It presented a troubling look at the Taliban, seen through a NATO gunsight.

The Brits are trying to control Helmand province just as Canada has responsibility for Kandahar province. Like Canada, the Brits are heavy on firepower and light on manpower.

The 90-minute documentary followed about 60-British soldiers patrolling for the Taliban. They found them. When the Brits fixed the insurgents' positions, they brought in gunship helicopters, mortars, heavy machine guns and, finally, jet fighters to pulverize their hopelessly outgunned guerrilla adversaries.

What happened? Time after time the Brits called down the best of Western killing technology on the Taliban. They rocketed houses where the bad guys were sited. They even blew entire housing compounds completely to rubble with 500-pound bombs. They lobbed mortar rounds at them and raked their positions with heavy machine gun fire. It was spectacular. And then there was calm and the Brits and their Afghan army counterparts began to relax and walk around. Within minutes the Taliban opened up again, sending them scrambling for cover.

This happened over and over. They must have been killing the Taliban in large numbers but, each time, it was the Taliban who brought the fight back to the Brits, attacking their vastly superior enemies.

I was left wondering how a handful of insurgents, armed with only 50s vintage assault rifles and a few rocket-propelled grenades, could stand their ground, again and again, against such withering fire? Why didn't they run?

Eventually sunset arrived and the Taliban did leave, on their own terms and with their weapons and casualties. When the Brits patrolled the area the following morning they found neither bodies nor abandoned weapons.

If this is the enemy we're up against, we can get rid of any illusions about breaking these people. Rockets and bombs and artillery aren't going to decide this conflict. I think we'd better figure out a new approach.

Pakistan's Taliban

“When planning a military expedition into Pashtun tribal areas, the first thing you must plan is your retreat. All expeditions into this area sooner or later end in retreat under fire.”

So wrote British general, Andrew Skeen, in the early 1900s in his guide to military operations in the Pashtun tribal belt.

While NATO and the US are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, so is the Pakistani army in the tribal lands of North and South Waziristan along the Afghan border. Taking the fight to the Pakistani Taliban is of critical importance to NATO. It's about the only means of denying the Afghan Talibs safe sanctuary to muster their forces and support operations in Afghanistan. So, how is the Pakistani army making out? According to the New York Times, about as well as one might expect:

The only consistent reports of offensive action by the Pakistani Army involve the use of helicopter gunships and artillery to attack militant compounds. Aerial assaults, when carried out without support from “boots on the ground,” serve but one purpose: they help sustain the illusion that the Pakistani government is taking effective action.

The truth is that the soldiers have lost the will to fight. Reports in the Indian press, based on information from the very competent Indian intelligence agencies, describe a Pakistani Army in disarray in the tribal areas. Troops are deserting and often refusing to fight their “Muslim brothers.”

Nothing illustrated this apathy more clearly than the capture of hundreds of troops in August by the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud with nary a shot fired in resistance."

So, what are the options? Throw more money at Islamabad? If money would do the trick it would have worked by now. Stop throwing money at Islamabad? No one's sure how that would turn out. Invade Pakistan? Please, we can't handle the job in Afghanistan. We're already grossly understrength. Where would we find the tens of thousands of soldiers that would be needed to repeat the Victorian British blunders in the Khyber?

That's what we're up against, seemingly insoluble challenges. It's not that the Taliban are better fighters than our troops, they're not. Our soldiers are better, they've got vastly better weapons and support technologies, they have better communications and total air superiority, better mobility. So why can't we just mop the floor with these backward warriors?

The Taliban have a number of advantages we've not been able to neutralize. One of them is in recruiting. Afghanistan is dirt poor but the insurgents have access to narco-bucks from the country's booming opium trade. This allows them to "hire" recruits. However there's another way they get support and that draws on their fiercely-held tribal code of Pashtunwali, particularly Mla Tarr. This requires all members of a man's family capable of carrying a gun to rise up when he's attacked. It's sort of a "kill one, get three free" plan.

The insurgents also have the "home turf" advantage. They have nowhere else to go, nothing else to fight for and, in fact, they're fighting for everything they have, their homeland. For the Pashtun, whether it's the half in Pakistan or the half in Afghanistan, the Taliban are the home team. Even Karzai, the country's president and himself a Pashtun, knows it.

We have the tactical advantage in firepower and technology - useful for fighting a tactical battle. The insurgents have the strategic advantage of time, as much time as it takes to keep wearing us down until we get tired and frustrated enough to leave. Put simply, their strategic advantage trumps our tactical advantage in the long run.

So General Skeen knew a century ago what our leaders have yet to understand. We can kill these people until we can't find any more bullets and then we leave. If the powerful Pakistani army can't control the Pashtun of Waziristan, all we're doing in Afghanistan is blowing smoke.

America's Shakey Assessment of Afghanistan

To listen to Peter MacKay and some Canadian generals, we're making solid progress in Afghanistan. That's the problem with listening to Peter MacKay and his generals. They can't afford to tell you how miserably "the mission" is faltering.

But, when it comes to tall tales you can expect the tallest to come from the Americans. So, what's their take on Afghanistan? According to the Washington Post, it's not nearly as rosey as the line coming out of Ottawa:

...the latest assessment [of the National Security Council] concluded that only "the kinetic piece" -- individual battles against Taliban fighters -- has shown substantial progress, while improvements in the other areas continue to lag, a senior administration official said.

This judgment reflects sharp differences between US military and intelligence officials on where the Afghan war is headed. Intelligence analysts acknowledge the battlefield victories, but they highlight the Taliban's unchallenged expansion into new territory, an increase in opium poppy cultivation and the weakness of the government of President Hamid Karzai as signs that the war effort is deteriorating.

The contrasting views echo repeated internal disagreements over the Iraq war: While the military finds success in a virtually unbroken line of tactical achievements, intelligence officials worry about a looming strategic failure.

But one senior intelligence official, who like others interviewed was not authorized to discuss Afghanistan on the record, said such gains are fleeting. "One can point to a lot of indicators that are positive . . . where we go out there and achieve our objectives and kill bad guys," the official said. But the extremists, he added, seem to have little trouble finding replacements.

Although growing numbers of foreigners -- primarily Pakistanis -- are joining the Taliban ranks, several officials said the primary source of new recruits remains disaffected Afghans fearful of opposing the Taliban and increasingly disillusioned with their own government. Overall, "there doesn't seem to be a lot of progress being made. . . . I would think that from [the Taliban] standpoint, things are looking decent," the intelligence official said.

Senior White House officials privately express pessimism about Afghanistan.

At the moment, several officials said, their concern is focused far more on the domestic situation in Afghanistan, where increasing numbers are losing faith in Karzai's government in Kabul. According to a survey released last month by the Asia Foundation, 79 percent of Afghans felt that the government does not care what they think, while 69 percent felt that it is not acceptable to publicly criticize the government.

Gee, does anyone remember another conflict not all that long ago where America won every battle but finished up losing the war?

Karzai Cozies Up To Taliban

With the Taliban insurgents said to be spreading throughout the Afghanistan countryside, Afghan President Hamid Karzai says he's in almost daily contact with the insurgents.

"Only this week I've had more than five or six major contacts, approaches, by the leadership of the Taliban trying to find out if they can come back to Afghanistan,” Karzai told reporters.

Of course it's not clear why the Taliban would be reaching out to Karzai for permission to "come back to Afghanistan." According to the Senlis Council the Taliban have already come back to Afghanistan in a big way and are closing in on Kabul.

By the way, here's a picture of another Karzai, Hamid's brother Ahmad, said to be a big wheel in the opium trade. Ahmad is shown meeting with notorious warlord Gul Agha. Nice, very nice.

Taliban On the Run? Hardly.

We've become accustomed to the Afghanistan rituals. There are the grim ramp ceremonies and the coverage of the flag-draped coffins of the dead being "repatriated" to Canada.

Then there's the ritual of the embedded reporter telling us of the bravery and commitment of our soldiers in the combat zone.

We also get the ritual briefings from mid-level and senior officers about the latest mission and how we're capturing this and driving the insurgents out of there and there and there. They always make sure to get out the message that it's a tough struggle but we're slowly winning. We just need a couple years more. Hmm.

It's these boastful and often groundless claims by the colonels and generals that sully the sacrifice of their soldiers. Remember how they gleefully pronounced Panjwai clear of the Taliban? They told us they were going to keep it that way. Yeah, sure. Didn't happen. The Taliban left, more or less intact, and returned when it suited them. They didn't have to wage a fierce battle to reclaim Panjwai, they just walked back in.

A report just released by the Senlis Council paints a grim picture completely at odds with our military leaders' glowing optimism. From The Guardian:

The Taliban has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into the group's hands, according to a report by an independent thinktank with long experience in the area.

Despite the presence of tens of thousands of Nato-led troops and billions of dollars in aid, the insurgents, driven out by the US invasion in 2001, now control "vast swaths of unchallenged territory, including rural areas, some district centres, and important road arteries," the Senlis Council says in a report released today.

On the basis of what it calls exclusive research, it warns that the insurgency is also exercising a "significant amount of psychological control, gaining more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people, who have a long history of shifting alliances and regime change".

The council goes as far as to state: "It is a sad indictment of the current state of Afghanistan that the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when this will happen and in what form. The oft-stated aim of reaching the city in 2008 appears more viable than ever and it is incumbent upon the international community to implement a new strategic paradigm for Afghanistan before time runs out".

The Senlis assessment is confirmed by Oxfam and, according to The Guardian, is also affirmed by "senior British and US military commanders."

We need to realize that our military's bag of tricks is just about empty. It's a matter of too little, too late. The question now is how many more ramp ceremonies we're going to permit before people like Rick Hillier come clean with us?

We're not fighting the Taliban's war and they're not fighting ours. The trouble is, it's the outcome of their war, the political war of insurgency, that will decide the future of Afghanistan. Centuries of fighting off foreigners has shown them how to defeat massively superior armed force. A couple of decades ago it was the Soviets. They had all the toys - special forces, armoured vehicles, tanks, artillery, strike fighters and attack helicopters - and they were willing to be awfully brutal in using them. But they didn't win.

Here's something else to ponder. Once the Taliban achieve a critical mass of legitimacy, how long will it be before the others - the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, throw in with them and drive out Karzai? If that happens, what are we going to do then? It's time to start watching the other players, the warlords such as Dostum, Hekmatyar, and Gul Agha.

Taking the Fight into Pakistan

The idea has been bandied about before - go after the Taliban insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists in their lairs inside Pakistan. It's an option George w. Bush himself brought up this week. It's a decision that also could have enormous ramifications, the sort that the frat boy Bush has repeatedly shown himself unwilling to grasp until it's too late.

Richard Nixon did it. He sent his military forces swarming into Cambodia to attack the safe havens of the North Vietnamese army infiltrators. He kicked proper hell out of the place, killed an awful lot of civilians, and maybe bought himself a year's grace before the inevitable.

The idea is the same but the turf is not and neither are the people our side would have to deal with, the Pashtun. It's sort of like putting a bare foot into a bag full of scorpions. You're going to get stung, it'll hurt like hell and it might even kill you. Chances are good, when it's over, you'll realize you made a huge mistake.

The Toronto Sun's Eric Margolis has travelled through these lands and he knows better:

I spent a remarkable time in this wild medieval region during the 1980s and '90s, travelling alone where even Pakistani government officials dared not go, visiting the tribes of Waziristan, Orakzai, Khyber, Chitral, and Kurram, and their chiefs, called "maliks."

These tribal belts are always called "lawless." Pashtun tribesmen could shoot you if they didn't like your looks. Rudyard Kipling warned British Imperial soldiers over a century ago, when fighting cruel, ferocious Pashtun warriors of the Afridi clan, "save your last bullet for yourself."

...there is law: The traditional Pashtun tribal code, Pashtunwali, that strictly governs behaviour and personal honour. Protecting guests was sacred. I was captivated by this majestic mountain region and wrote of it extensively in my book, War at the Top of the World.

The 40 million Pashtun -- called "Pathan' by the British -- are the world's largest tribal group. Imperial Britain divided them by an artificial border, the Durand Line, now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Pakistan's Pashtun number 28 million, plus an additional 2.5 million refugees from Afghanistan. The 15 million Pashtun of Afghanistan form that nation's largest ethnic group.

The tribal agency's Pashtun reluctantly joined Pakistan in 1947 under express constitutional guarantee of total autonomy and a ban on Pakistani troops entering there.

But under intense U.S. pressure, President Pervez Musharraf violated Pakistan's constitution by sending 80,000 federal troops to fight the region's tribes, killing 3,000 of them.

In best British imperial tradition, Washington pays Musharraf $100 million monthly to rent his sepoys (native soldiers) to fight Pashtun tribesmen.

As a result, Pakistan is fast edging towards civil war.

The anti-communist Taliban movement is part of the Pashtun people. Taliban fighters move across the artificial Pakistan-Afghanistan border, to borrow a Maoism, like fish through the sea. Osama bin Laden is a hero in the region.

Bush/Cheney & Co. do not understand that while they can rent President Musharraf's government in Islamabad, many Pashtun value personal honour far more than money, and cannot be bought.

Any U.S. attack on Pakistan would be a catastrophic mistake.

Margolis (quite correctly in my opinion) argues that carrying the fighting into Pakistan will only widen the war and transform it into a battle against western occupation. Think Iraq. Secondly, he points out that Musharraf's fate lies in the hands of his army's officers who may topple the general in response to US or NATO attacks. His third point is that this tactic could reignite the movement for a unified Pashtun homeland, Pashtunistan, that could fatally undermine the modern Pakistan state which, in case you need reminding, has a troublesome nuclear arsenal. Lastly he notes the US military has a mixed record from taking on what were, at best, weak and small opponents - such as Iraq. Pakistan, with its half-million soldier military, could well be much more than the US and NATO could handle.

Those Bush administration and Harper government officials who foolishly advocate attacking Pakistan are playing with fire.

We've Lost Our Bragging Rights

About a year ago Canada's military leadership heralded a great victory in Panjwai District. We had met the Taliban and thoroughly defeated them. Those who hadn't run away died where they stood. Sweet victory. We not only showed the Taliban but we also showed everyone else in NATO how it was done, that the insurgents could be crushed.

Well we got a few months out of that at least. Local Afghans returned to their homes. We got on with reconstruction and winning the hearts and minds.

And then the Taliban decided they'd like to return. They announced their arrival with IEDs, improvised explosive devices, a form of booby trap that took three Canadian lives in June and six more earlier this week.

Grame Smith of the Globe & Mail says our fortunes in Panjwai have taken a turn for the worse:

"...parts of the district are falling back into Taliban hands, locals say, after security duties were handed to a ragtag police force that quickly found itself overwhelmed by a lack of supplies and reduced to banditry for survival.

"The 05 Police Standby Battalion, a reserve unit, became notorious for corruption and desertions soon after it deployed to Panjwai this spring. The police unit also marked a new low point in the recent history of policing in the region when a police commander revived an old feud with an official from the National Directorate for Security, the Afghan intelligence agency.

"The personal dispute spiralled into open warfare between the two law-enforcement agencies around the villages of Mushan and Talokan in recent weeks, according to police who survived the battles, and village elders from the district.

"Ismatullah, a young police commander, said his 05 Battalion unit was assigned in April to take over security in Mushan, about 50 kilometres southwest of Kandahar city. By his own admission, Ismatullah says his men quickly resorted to thievery to supply themselves with things in short supply: money, food, bullets and fuel.

"Ismatullah says his unit contained 40 officers when they arrived in Mushan, but he now commands only a handful of men after 14 died, five were injured, and others ran away.

"Another police commander from the 05 Battalion, a middle-aged former mujahedeen fighter named Obidullah, said his unit in Zangabad has suffered similar losses. He commanded 50 police earlier this year, he said, but deaths and desertions have left him with 20 men.

"The recent battles in Mushan started without any Taliban involvement, Obidullah said: The conflict was only between tribal relatives of two factions who held grudges dating back to the 1980s. But the infighting weakened the government forces and insurgents were able to seize the western edge of the district, he said.

"Lieutenant-Colonel Rob Walker, Canada's battle group commander, said in a recent interview that he knows the 05 Battalion has struggled. The district has grown more restive since early June, he said, but it's hard to tell why the police have suffered so many casualties.

"'They started getting hit,' he said. 'Was it because they were extorting people? Was it because they're soft targets for the Taliban?'"

The Bitter Truth

Canada's and NATO's policies in Afghanistan are fundamentally flawed. We're just not getting this right and it makes the loss of each of our soldiers killed over there especially bitter to take.

Since I began this blog back in August, I've been writing about the profound mistakes we're making in Afghanistan. If you do a quick search of this site you'll find those articles and there are plenty of them. Taken together, they stand as an indictment of our sitting prime minister and his top soldier, General Rick Hillier.

I wish that I had some genius no one else has, that I was prescient at a mystical level. I don't and I'm not. The fact is that everything I've drawn upon in coming to my criticisms is relatively common knowledge, not even very obscure. Insurgency and counter-insurgency is probably the most clearly defined form of warfare that exists. It's the only form of warfare in which the weakest side - the one that fights at a huge disadvantage in firepower, manpower, communications and mobility - almost always wins. It's been practised time and again and it's an experiment that produces consistent results. Every mistake that we're making in Afghanistan today has been demonstrated repeatedly in the past.

But what do I know. Fortunately I don't have to rely on my say so. The US military has finally come to its senses, digested the lessons of history (some of that history they themselves made) and produced a new counter-insurgency field manual FM 3-24. It virtually catalogues everything we're doing wrong in Afghanistan. Check out Lawrence of Arabia, Col. T.E. Lawrence has his excellent accounts of his successful insurgency in the Middle East in WWI. There are several others.

Now Thomas Walkom, writing in today's Toronto Star, summarizes a report written by Gordon

Smith, now director of the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria, is Canada's former ambassador to NATO and a former deputy minister of foreign affairs. His Canada in Afghanistan: Is it Working? was done for the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, a Calgary think-tank that is not known for being squishy on matters military.

Smith maintains that negotiating with the Taliban is our only realistic option:

"'We do not believe that the Taliban can be defeated or eliminated as a political entity in any meaningful time frame by Western armies using military measures,' he says.

"The reasons for this are fourfold. First, the Taliban are still the dominant force among Pashtuns in Afghanistan's south, where Canadian troops are operating. NATO bête noire Mullah Omar 'remains unchallenged as leader of the Taliban,' Smith writes. 'There is no alternative representing Pashtun interests who has more clout than he.'

"Second, neighbouring Pakistan 'is highly ambivalent about crushing the Taliban insurgency.' While technically on NATO's side in this matter, important elements of the Pakistani state apparatus, Smith writes, continue to support the Taliban as their proxy in Afghanistan – mainly as a way to fend off what they see as hostile Russian and Indian influences.

"To destroy the Taliban would be to end Pakistani influence in Afghanistan, he says – which perhaps explains Islamabad's less than total support for the NATO mission.

"Third, the NATO strategy of using air power and heavy armour is backfiring. So is the policy of opium eradication. One destroys Afghan lives, the other their livelihoods. The net result, writes Smith (and here he echoes reports from the London-based Senlis Council), is to make Afghans even more hostile to NATO troops.

"Fourth, NATO countries don't have the will to fight a protracted war in a faraway country.
'If NATO states it will only be satisfied with a decisive military victory, the Taliban will call our bluff,' Smith says. 'The Taliban have demonstrated greater resolve, tactical efficiency and ability to absorb the costs of war over the long term than have NATO forces.'

"As a result, 'talking to the Taliban' emerges as the only feasible solution. 'Given the costs of war,' he writes, 'NATO needs to look candidly at the prospects – aware that there can be no guarantee – of a political solution.'"

Smith is clearly right that we're not going to somehow win this battle but he ends his discourse a bit too soon. Not mentioned is the real hurdle that will remain to be cleared - restoring some balance in political power in Afghanistan.

The Pashtun of Afghanistan are the Shia of Iraq - a majority. Thanks for 5+ years of Western indifference the Kabul government has come to be dominated by warlords, drug lords and common criminals of the minority Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaris and Turkmen. As far as they're concerned, the Afghan civil war is over and they're the victors. The Taliban are obviously not accepting that result and want to renew the civil war.

To settle this conflict NATO or the US or Pakistan or all of them (India included) will have to use their influence to get these mortal enemies, the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, to engage in some sort of legitimate power-sharing. The US will also have to use its influence to prevent India from exploiting Afghanistan to wage a proxy war against Pakistan. But, if we cannot broker some genuine agreement between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance we'll have to decide whether we're going to become embroiled in their civil war or step completely away from it.

This is a real conundrum but it's one that might have been avoided had George Bush not turned indifferent to Afghanistan in 2001 so that he could conquer Iraq. The US should have played a more direct role in shaping Afghanistan's first post-Taliban government. It should have developed a legitimate political entity to represent the majority Pashtun and it should have given Karzai essential support to prevent the warlords and drug lords from seizing political power. Our side should have kept that scum out of government and thereby prevented the corruption of the country's security services that simply drives the Pashtun into the arms of the Taliban.

We have to recognize that we can't turn back the clock to 2001 (unless we oust the warlords and go to war with the Northern Alliance mujahideen). We can't use firepower to legitimize a corrupted regime. We can't even expect our firepower to defeat this insurgency. So just what the hell are we doing there? It's time we revisited that debate.

O.K. Corral - Kajaki Style

The Independent reports that British commanders are gearing up for what they claim will be the decisive battle for control of Afghanistan. Put simply, the Brits (and NATO) are counting on the Taliban coming out this year, although hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, and either be destroyed where they stand or mauled so badly that their popular support among the Pashtun people collapses. This, of course, begs the question of whether the Taliban is willing to follow the NATO script.

If the Taliban are simply willing to commit suicide, the Brits' predictions may prove to be right on the money. If the Talib, however, don't want to fight the conventional war, the one where NATO holds all the cards, and instead fight their war, a war of insurgency, then the Brits are wrong. In any insurgency, the decisive year is the final year of the conflict and the odds are 4-1 that turns out to be the year the foreigners pull up stakes and leave.

NATO's Achilles' Heel still lies in the woeful lack of combat boots on the ground. This year they're going to try to clear - and hold - the area around the Kajaki dam to allow the power plant to be repaired. Beyond that, it'll mainly be "search and destroy" type missions, whipping around from place to place, clearing out the bad guys and then leaving and allowing the bad guys to move back in.

I really hope the Taliban are as stupid as NATO is counting on them to be. I hope they get totally trashed this year so that maybe we can just leave the country to the warlords and thugs and drug barons who run the government and get our troops home. I'm hoping and apparently so is NATO.

Why We're Losing in Afghanistan

I've written at length as to why we're not going to win in Afghanistan but sometimes it's good to hear from an expert. Michael Scheuer is an expert - on al-Qaeda and Afghanistan. He retired from the US Central Intelligence Agency in 2005. From 1996 to 1999 he was the chief of the Bin Laden Unit at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center.

Scheuer recently wrote an article published in the journal of the Jamestown Foundation describing how we're mismanaging the campaign in Afghanistan:

"Afghanistan is again being lost to the West, even as a coalition force of more than 5,000 troops launches a major spring offensive in the south of the country. The insurgency may drag on for many months or several years, but the tide has turned. Like Alexander's Greeks, the British and the Soviets before the US-led coalition, inferior Afghan insurgents have forced far superior Western military forces on to a path that leads toward evacuation. What has caused this scenario to occur repeatedly throughout history?

Scheuer writes that Western forces keep making the same mistakes: "...the West has not developed an appreciation for the Afghans' toughness, patience, resourcefulness and pride in their history. Although foreign forces in Afghanistan are always more modern and better armed and trained, they are continuously ground down by the same kinds of small-scale but unrelenting hit-and-run attacks and ambushes, as well as by the country's impenetrable topography that allows the Afghans to retreat, hide, and attack another day." Gee, remember when Rick Hillier was swaggering around, boasting that we were shipping out to Afghanistan to kill a "few dozen scumbags"?

"The latest episode in this historical tradition has several distinguishing characteristics. First, Western forces - while better armed and technologically superior - are far too few in number. Today's Western force totals about 40,000 troops. After subtracting support troops and North Atlantic Treaty Organization contingents that are restricted to non-combat, reconstruction roles - building schools, digging wells, repairing irrigation systems - the actual combat force that can be fielded on any given day is far smaller, and yet has the task of controlling a country the size of Texas that is home to some of the highest mountains on Earth.

"Second, the West underestimated the strength of the Taliban and its acceptability to the Afghan people. When invading in 2001, the West's main targets were al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and Taliban leader Mullah Omar and their senior lieutenants, and because the operation specifically targeted a group of top leaders, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was not sealed, and so not only did the pursued troika escape, so did most of their foot soldiers.

"Those escapees are now returning in large numbers, and are better armed, trained and organized than on their exit. It seems likely, in fact, that the force being fielded by the Taliban and their allies - al-Qaeda, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, among others - is at least equal in number to the coalition.

"Furthermore, the membership of the force is not just a few Taliban remnants and otherwise mostly new recruits; rather, they are the veteran fighters that the coalition failed to kill in 2001 and early 2002. The Taliban forces are not new; they are the seasoned, experienced mujahideen who are - like former president Richard Nixon in 1972 - tanned, rested and ready to wage the jihad.

"Western leaders in Afghanistan are also finding that many Afghans are not unhappy to see the Taliban returning. Much of the reason lies in the fact that the US-led coalition put the cart before the horse. Before the 2001 invasion, the Taliban regime was far from loved, but it was appreciated for the law-and-order regime it harshly enforced across most of Afghanistan. Although women had to stay home, few girls could go to school and the odd limb was chopped off for petty offenses, most rural Afghans could count on having security for themselves, their families and their farms and/or businesses.

"The coalition's victory shattered the Taliban's law-and-order regime and, instead of immediately installing a replacement - for which there were not enough troops in any event - coalition leaders moved on to elections, implementing women's rights and creating a parliament, while the bulk of rural Afghanistan returned to the anarchy of banditry and warlordism that had prevailed before the first Taliban era.

"Now in the sixth year of occupation, Western leaders are confronted not only by a stronger-than-2001 enemy, but also by the resurgent insularity and anti-foreign inclinations of the Afghan people.

"Today, the Afghans perceive themselves to be doubly ruled, and doubly badly ruled, by foreigners: the US-led coalition and the pro-Western, nominally Islamic, detribalized and corruption-ridden government of President Hamid Karzai. This perception of a "foreign yoke", along with spreading warfare, little reconstruction and endemic banditry, has created a fertile nationalistic environment for the Taliban and their allies to exploit.

"The future for the West in Afghanistan is bleak, and it is made more discouraging by the fact that much of the West's defeat will be self-inflicted because it did not adequately study the lessons of history."

Why are we hearing no discussion of these problems, nothing from Harpo, Gordo and Hillier? Why isn't the opposition raising these issues? Have we succumbed to "stay the course" and "support the troops" because no one has the courage to take a stand? If you really want to support the troops, don't waste their lives on a bungled cause.

Pulling Rabbits Out of NATO's Hat

Within a couple of months the Taliban and their allies are expected to launch their Spring Offensive. By all accounts this year's offensive is supposed to be the biggest ever since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001.

It has been reported that this year the Taliban will be showing up with its own coalition of the willing which may see mujahideen from the north, some warlords and the drug lords joining the Taliban to give NATO fits and to drive the already shakey Karzai administration out of power.

NATO is bracing for the big event, even hobbling together a Fast Reaction Force designed to quickly reinforce any area in danger of being overrun.

We tend to forget that for a country as large, in size and population, as Afghanistan, NATO forces are stretched thin on the ground. If the Taliban come with the expected force, they'll have their hands full holding on to the areas they still control and defending Kabul.

The Guardian reports that the Americans will be making quite an extraordinary request at today's NATO conference in Spain. Apparently they'll be asking NATO to undertake its own Spring Offensive, I guess to somehow pre-empt the bad guys.

It might not be a bad idea if you had your own territory under control and if you had enough surplus troops and equipment and support to mass the sort of force needed to go on the offensive without leaving yourself exposed and vulnerable behind the offensive. But NATO doesn't have its own territories under control nor does it have surplus troops and equipment to mount this sort of offensive.

Given the mess the Americans have made just two countries over, we should be really skeptical about embracing any US adventures in Afghanistan.