Has America Outstayed Its Welcome in Afghanistan Also?

Washington, and especially the Pentagon,  had big plans for a permanent military presence in Iraq until the Iraqis said "no."  Then they packed up their tanks and left.

Now a similar scenario may be unfolding in Afghanistan.   With the American and Afghan government at loggerheads, next year could see a total pullout of U.S. forces.

American officials say they are preparing to suspend negotiations absent a breakthrough in the coming weeks, and a senior administration official said talk of resuming them with President Hamid Karzai’s successor, who will be chosen in elections set for next April, is, “frankly, not very likely.”

“The time to conclude for us is now,” the administration official said on Friday. In the absence of a deal, “this fall, we are going to have to make plans for the future accordingly.”

The impasse, after a year of talks, has increased the prospect of what the Americans call the zero option — complete withdrawal — when the NATO combat mission concludes at the end of 2014. That is precisely the outcome they hoped to avoid in Afghanistan, after having engaged in a similarly problematic withdrawal from Iraq two years ago.

America should get out and stay out.  They've spent a dozen years babysitting an uresolved civil war, which may have  become Afghanistan's new natural state of political affairs.   Even one of the frontrunners vying to fill Karzai's spot as president in the April elections has his militia organized to go postal should he lose.   The others are probably no better.

What an Exodus Looks Like, Or Does It?

This image, published in the Sydney Morning Herald, is said to show an exodus of Syrian Kurds, escaping the brutal civil war to take refuge in the autonomous Kurdish territory in Iraq.

Is it real?  I'm not sure.  There's one fellow with a small travel bag but none of the others seem to be carrying even backpacks.  Usually refugees don't leave their most valuable items behind and they usually wear as much clothing as possible.  Also missing from this image is any sign of the usual family groups we associate with fleeing refugees - the kids, the parents, somebody helping grandma.  It seems to me that these are folks who aren't planning to be gone for long.

Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish area, which shares a border with north-east Syria, threatened to intervene if Kurds came under further attack.

 

Mr Barzani, whose own well-armed forces fought for independence against Saddam Hussein, said that if Kurds were "under threat of death and terrorism" then Iraqi Kurdistan would be "prepared to defend them".

An estimated 154,000 Syrian refugees are already registered in Iraq. The latest influx appears to have been caused by the building of a new pontoon bridge over the Tigris.

"UN refugee agency staff at Sahela report what appears like a river of people coming towards the border," said Claire Bourgeois, the UNHCR's Iraq representative, referring to a border crossing in north Iraq.

 

You Know It's a Coup When

When you're an Egyptian, you know your uprising has actually been a military coup when the authorities release Hosni Mubarak.

It was unclear how Egyptians — particularly those who have welcomed the military action against Mr. Morsi — would respond to the release of a despised autocrat whose downfall united Mr. Mubarak’s secular and Islamist foes. News of the legal maneuvers came at a time of sustained bloodletting.

Just in the past 24 hours, the Egyptian government has acknowledged that its security forces had killed 36 Islamists in its custody, while suspected militants were reported on Monday to have killed at least 24 police officers and wounded 3 others in an attack on their minibuses in the restive northern Sinai region.

Mr. Mubarak, 85, faces an array of legal challenges including allegations of corruption and a retrial on charges of complicity in the murder of protesters whose revolt forced his ouster in February, 2011.

While You Were Surgin'

It was the cornerstone of the McCain-Palin campaign, the mantra of the Bush administration and every other delusional right-winger - "the surge is working," bringing victory to Iraq. As the Brits would say, "bollocks."

Maliki's own Iranian-leaning, Shiite Badr Organization occupies the Iraq security agencies, waiting to pounce. Muqtada al Sadr's nationalist, Shiite Mahdi Army itself lies in wait. Much of the Sunni insurgency, freshly armed and trained by the US military hovers about sullenly while their leaders seethe at being ostracized by their Shiite Arab cousins and driven back by Iraq's Kurdish state in the north. Meanwhile, Iran, Syria and Turkey glower from the sidelines.

Sounds like "peace in our time" doesn't it?

Apparently the Kurds don't think so. The Washington Post reports that the Kurdish Autonomous Region (consider it Iraq's own experiment in Sovereignty Association) has been flying in cargo planeloads of small arms from Bulgaria. Probably the full party pack assortment of grenades, RPG rocket propelled grenade launchers, AK 47s & 74s, rounded off with some PKM and NSV machine guns. Three Hercules loads so far but who's counting?

What for? If you ask the Kurds they'll say it's so they can better fight the war on terror. My grandma, what big teeth you have! Right.

"The large quantity of weapons and the timing of the shipment alarmed U.S. officials, who have grown concerned about the prospect of an armed confrontation between Iraqi Kurds and the government at a time when the Kurds are attempting to expand their control over parts of northern Iraq.
Iraq's ethnic Kurds maintain an autonomous region that comprises three of the country's 18 provinces. In recent months, the Shiite-led central government in Baghdad, which includes some Kurds in prominent positions, has accused Kurdish leaders of attempting to expand their territory by deploying their militia, known as peshmerga, to areas south of the autonomous region. Among other things, the Kurds and Iraq's government are at odds over control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which lies outside the autonomous region, and over how Iraq's oil revenue ought to be distributed.

Iraq's interior minister, Jawad al-Bolani, said in an interview that central government officials did not authorize the purchase of weapons from Bulgaria. He said such an acquisition would constitute a "violation" of Iraqi law because only the Ministries of Interior and Defense are authorized to import weapons."

What the central government, and the Americans for that matter, overlook is the Kurdish constitution. In order to keep the Kurds from splitting off when Saddam was toppled, Baghdad gave in to Kurdish demands that their own constitution be incorporated into the Iraqi constitution and, so far as Kurdish matters are concerned, it trumps Iraqi law.

Baghdad promised the Kurds a referendum to decide whether Kirkuk and its adjacent massive oil fields would be considered part of the Kurdish region but that's been scheduled and postponed twice already due to fears it would spark a war between Iraq's Arabs (Sunni & Shiite) and the Iraqi Kurds. This whole thing is just waiting to blow up.

"You could easily have a huge eruption of violence in the north," said Kenneth B. Katzman, a Middle East specialist at the Congressional Research Service in Washington. "Nothing having to do with the Kurds is resolved."

In reality, Iraq remains a mess of ticking time bombs waiting to go off. There's the internal Shiite struggle between the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army. There's the looming Shiite versus Sunni challenge. And, of course, ticking the loudest is the Arab versus Kurd conflict. In short, Iraq remains as three, possibly four civil wars waiting to break out. Each of these issues has been around since America invaded. Not one of them has been resolved since. Not one. And there's no resolution to any of them on the horizon either.

The American military command in Iraq has become so mired, confused and hapless that it's gone on record as saying that, in the event of civil war between the Kurds and Baghdad, it will pull all US forces back into their bases and just let the games proceed.

Don't blame the Americans save for their naivete and their hubris. The roots of these apparently nascent conflicts actually go back almost a century to the Ottoman empire and World War One. They were shaped by Britain's duplicity and betrayal of the Kurds in the treaty of Sevres and the sellout, three years later, in the treaty Lausanne with Ataturk and the manner in which the Brits and the French then carved up the region.

How the Bushies thought they could knock over Saddam, toss together a democratic government and see it survive without re-opening these blood-soaked religious and ethnic disputes is astonishing.

Tying the American military presence in Iraq to the level of violence in Iraq is to shackle American foreign policy to every mistake inflicted on Iraq and the greater region by the British and French in 1920. America can't make that right and it doesn't even intend to try. Why not just declare "mission accomplished" and di di mau out of their before this all hits the fan?

Iraq's Viet Cong

Nouri al-Maliki may just have transformed a troublesome militia into Iraq's own Viet Cong. It's the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al Sadr, an outfit that's making effective use of the most potent guerrilla tactics to grind down the numerically and technologically dominant Iraq Army.


Whereas the Viet Cong used the jungles, waterways, backroads and even networks of tunnels to wage their war against the South Vietnamese and American forces, the Mahdi Army operates in its own jungle, the congested slums of Iraq's key cities and their intricate mazes of alleys where tanks can't reach and fighting is one-on-one.

James Glanz wrote a brilliant article in yesterday's New York Times in which he explains why this latest war, pitting Shiite against Shiite, is different and may just be the undoing of the Maliki government. This isn't about resisting the occupiers. It's about dethroning the Baghdad government and, in this fight, time is not on Maliki's side.

Glanz writes that this battle, this war, bears an eerie resemblance to a recurring dream he developed in his four years covering Iraq:

"Here is what happens in the dream: Because I know a little Arabic, I somehow find myself a translator for the invaders, even as some of my Chicago buddies are in the alleys plotting against my employers. And each night when I walk home along my beloved Dearborn Street under the rusty elevated tracks and past the White Hen grocery store, I wonder what the guys poring over maps in their armored vehicles plan to accomplish against a few million South Siders fighting in their own alleys. That’s usually when I wake up.

That dream, a nightmare, really, flashed through my mind as I stood at the end of a filthy, pothole-riddled alley talking with a small-time deputy commander in the Mahdi Army, the militia that is the armed wing of Mr. Sadr’s political movement. Standing there with his arms folded over his potbelly as his fighters scurried about behind him, the man who called himself Riadh, 34 years old, was effectively deputy commander of an alley.

“We can’t face the armored tanks of the Americans face to face, because all we have is light guns,” he said. “So we just wait for a chance to attack something.”

Alleys: they are dangerous only when used by those who grew up in them. That is the basic reason Mr. Sadr and his fighters simply will not go away in this war.

What makes the case so difficult is that it is not just a question of a battle with American troops, here from half a world away carrying out operations that Mr. Sadr and his fighters consider an abhorrent occupation. Some 3,500 troops in the Basra fight are Iraqis from outside the province, and witnesses say it is clear that few if any of the Iraqi security forces in the assault know the neighborhoods the way the Mahdi Army does. Its fighters literally pop in and out of alleys, battling a federal force of nearly 30,000 to what is, so far, a stalemate.

No one has ever accused Mr. Sadr of being brilliant, charismatic, or even above average in the intellectual realm. But he has one thing few of those leaders have: he never left, even in the worst years of Saddam Hussein. And that does not just give him credibility on the streets. In a country where sheer social, religious, political, historical, geographic and psychological complexities are what seem to defeat all easy solutions, Mr. Sadr is one of the few who have been here continuously, absorbing the shifting lessons of the place. He has done his homework, he has put in his time.

As I sit here writing this piece, listening to the intermittent whooshes and booms of rockets and mortars fired into the Green Zone, almost certainly by Mr. Sadr’s fighters, I can no more predict where the conflict is headed than I can say what will be in my dreams tonight during the few hours of sleep that this war and my editors allow me. But when it comes to Mr. Sadr’s loyalists in the alleys of Basra and Baghdad, one thing is irrefutable.

In those alleys, waking up will not end the dream."

Glanz has filed a piece in today's NYT, in which he reports that the Mahdi Army has consolidated control of at least half and, by some accounts, possibly much more of Basra, taking over police stations and establishing roadblocks.

Maliki's weakening has been dramatic. From beginning with a "surrender or die" edict, he switched to a 72-hour amnesty for surrender and then extending that by a further week and offering to pay rewards for those who turn in their guns. That doesn't sound like a guy who figures he's winning this battle. It sounds like someone who is very worried about his own ability to survive the conflict.