23 Sept - Of Mice and Men...and Murder

A Pathway to Disaster

The Huge Hole in Gen. McChrystal's Afghan Counterinsurgency Strategy 

  There is nothing new in General McChrystal's strategy, it is merely a rehash of the failed oil spot (tache d'huile) strategy, first tried by French colonialist General Louis-Hubert-Gonsalve Lyautey, and then tried again under various guises, again without lasting success, by the Americans in Vietnam.

The training and expansion of the indigenous Afghan National Security Forces (the Army and Police forces) -- has generally been taken as a given, and has not been subject to a serious examination or public debate.

This omission is very odd, particularly when viewed in the light our complete failure to build a non-corrupt professional national army in South Vietnam, not to mention our catastrophic failure to build a competent honest national government, together with our ultimate failure to secure the hearts and mind of the South Vietnamese people. And the omission of our previous Vietnam experiences in this regard is made doubly odd, given the growing mountain of reportage indicating the same kind of massive corruption now repeating itself in the US-installed Karzai government in Afghanistan.
And to make matters even wierder, this intellectual black hole has been compounded by the stunning absence of a critical analysis and discussion of any shortcomings of the Afghan National Security Forces in General McChrystal's new strategy document. Yet the ANSF lays at the center of McChrystal's strategy. 
It looks like General McChrystal, the senior officer in Afghanistan, is telling the President of the United States that, with the exception of what be some relatively minor maturation problems, we can double the size of and field an effective Afghan National Security Force in the short term, and together with a major escalation of US manpower in the short term, we can jointly regain the initiative (which McChrystal acknowledges has been lost) and turn around the deteriorating situation in Afghanstan in the near term.
Given the military's clear failure to do this in Afghanistan over the last eight years, together with its catastrophic failure to do exactly this in Vietnam, I think the President of the United States and the American people deserve a little more information about just how good ANSF is.
Anna Jones has recently produced such a critical analysis of this question.

Eight Years Later

The United States in Afghanistan 

 What is called “Afghanistan” is really a collection of tribes and ethnic groups - Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and more - there are seven major ethnic groups, each with their own language. There are 30 minor languages. Pashtuns are 42 per cent of the population and the Taliban comes from them. Its borders are contested and highly porous, and al-Qaeda is most powerful in the Pashtun regions of northern Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. “The fate of Afghanistan and Pakistan are inextricably tied,” President George Bush declared in December 2007. This fact makes the war far more complicated, not the least because the  enormous quantities of military aid sent to Pakistan are mostly wasted.   

Worse yet, Pakistan possesses about 70 to 90 nuclear weapons and the U.S. fears some may fall into the hands of Islamic extremists.  At least three-quarters of the supplies essential for America’s and its allies’ war effort flow through Pakistan, and they are often attacked. Moreover, a large and growing majority of the Pakistanis distrusts U.S. motives. The U.S.’s tilt to New Delhi after 2007, which greatly augmented Indian nuclear power, made Pakistan far more reluctant to do Washington’s bidding.      

Afghanistan is a mess, complex beyond description, with mountainous terrain to match. Its principal problems are political, social, and cultural - in large part because Great Britain concocted it arbitrarily. There is no durable military solution to its many problems. As in Vietnam, the U.S. will win battles but it has no strategy for winning this war.

Above all, the regional geo-political context is decisive, involving, India-Pakistan relations - a factor that will prevail whatever the United States and its allies do. Pakistan’s most vital interest is seeing a friendly government rule Afghanistan - no matter who it is. They will not waver on this principle. The Pakistani military is adamant about making India its key focus, and while it is opposed to al Qaeda and the Arab membership, it maintains good relations with the anti-Karzai Taliban - with whom it worked when it fought the Soviets.

 Obama thinks he will win the war by escalation - an illusion that also marked the futile war in Vietnam. He also believes he can “Afghanisize” the war - like Nixon thought he could “Vietnamize” that conflict - even though recruits for Karzai’s army have little motivation apart from collecting their salary, and are scarcely a match for the Taliban - a quite divided, complex organization which today dominates much of the country.   

A growing majority of the Afghan population now oppose the U.S. effort because they have led to frightful civilian casualties without attaining decisive military successes. “The mission is on the verge of failing,” a writer in the U.S. Army’s quarterly, Parameters, concluded last spring.

That, indeed, may be an understatement. 

(  Country restoration : low humour indeed ) 

The Taliban’s Air Force

The Taliban’s air force recently delivered another devastating strike, hitting two fuel tanker trucks that had been captured by local Taliban-affiliated forces in northern Afghanistan. As usual, many civilians were killed, inflaming the local population against NATO forces in an area that had been relatively quiet. The air strike was thus not merely tactical but operational in its effects.
As is always the case with the Taliban’s air force, the air strike was a “pseudo-op.” A pseudo-op is where one side dresses up in the other side’s uniforms or otherwise duplicates his signatures, then does something that works against the goals of the simulated party.
You say you did not know the Taliban had an air force? It has a very powerful air force, not restricted to traditional flying carpets but employing all the latest combat aircraft: F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, Harriers, Tornados, the works. That air force has been one of the main factors in the Taliban’s resurgence. Many of the strike missions it has carried out have had positive results (for the Talibs) at the operational and moral levels, if not always at the tactical and physical levels of war.

 Obama Echoes Bush on State Secrets?

Is "the most transparent administration ever" echoing the Bush administration's position on a key transparency provision?
On Wednesday, the Justice Department released new guidelines for how it will invoke the State Secrets privilege, a doctrine that allows the government to exclude information from legal cases when it believes its release could threaten national security. But the new rules are weak reforms to the way the doctrine was used during the Bush years, when it was invoked to shield government torture, detention, and rendition policies from outside scrutiny and frequently used to dismiss entire cases.
The new rules require the DOJ "be satisfied" that it has evidence for its assertion of the privilege, run its decision by an internal committee and the Attorney General, and consider turning over evidence of government wrongdoing to agency inspector generals when state secrets might otherwise "preclude the case from going forward." But the executive branch retains the power to make the most important decisions about whether, when, and how it uses the privilege. That has raised speculation that the new rules may be an attempt to preempt legislation offered by three prominent Democrats that would totally overhaul the use of the doctrine.
"It seems intended to undercut and preempt legislation that would address the broader structural problem," with the State Secrets claim, said Ben Wizner, an ACLU staff attorney who represented five rendition victims in a lawsuit against a Boeing subsidiary that allegedly served as the CIA's travel agent for the agency's extraordinary rendition program. (At one point their case was dismissed because the Bush administration claimed the State Secrets privilege.) Now, Wizner said, "The same executive branch that engages in torture and illegal surveillance and extraordinary rendition can, on the basis of an affidavit from the perpetrator himself, have a case thrown out."

 U.S. Credibility And Israeli Settlements 

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) told the Politico that President Obama doesn’t seem to be a “true friend” of Israel. When you think about it, it’s a pretty odd charge for an American legislator to be making about a foreign country. What the congressman from Richmond, Virginia, U.S.A should be asking is whether Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is a true friend of America.

Given Netanyahu’s continuing intransigence on settlements, President Obama’s decision to move past the U.S. request for a settlement freeze in order to begin outlining a final status agreement is the right one. But it’s still very much worth highlighting how central Israel’s intransigence is to the current difficulties — and how shameful it is that so many American neoconservatives have been openly supporting this intransigence against the Obama administration’s attempts to hold Israel to its past commitments on settlements.  [Continue reading]

 

Even the Part-Time Jobs are Disappearing

The Economy is a Lie, Too

Consumer spending is 70% of the US economy. It is the driving force, and it has been shut down. Except for the super rich, there has been no growth in consumer incomes in the 21st century. Statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com reports that real household income has never recovered its pre-2001 peak.
The US economy has been kept going by substituting growth in consumer debt for growth in consumer income. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan encouraged consumer debt with low interest rates. The low interest rates pushed up home prices, enabling Americans to refinance their homes and spend the equity. Credit cards were maxed out in expectations of rising real estate and equity values to pay the accumulated debt. The binge was halted when the real estate and equity bubbles burst.
As consumers no longer can expand their indebtedness and their incomes are not rising, there is no basis for a growing consumer economy. Indeed, statistics indicate that consumers are paying down debt in their efforts to survive financially. In an economy in which the consumer is the driving force, that is bad news. 

Russians Look Abroad For Political News

From:  Internet and Democracy    By:  Bruce Etling

In the Russian newspaper Moskovskii Komsomolets, Mikhail Rostovsky and Mikhail Zubov argue that Russians must now turn to foreign media to learn about politics in their own country:

Russian society learns about important political developments from foreign experts and foreign media outlets, these days. Consider the news that Medvedev and Putin will decide what to do about presidency in 2012 among themselves instead of letting the people make the decision. Who do we owe this knowledge to? Correct. To American political scientist Nikolai Zlobin. Who did ex-President Mikhail Gorbachev choose to inform that this was not how presidents were supposed to behave? He told it to BBC. Finally, who was Yurgens talking to when he made his startling discovery? He was talking to Reuters.

They are talking about Igor Yurgens, an advisor to Russian President Medvedev who, it seems, is not afraid to tell it like it is to the foreign media. He recently compared Putin to the tottering Brezhnev, and here’s what he told Newsweek last February when he was blaming the government for the economic crisis and the need for democratic reforms:  [Continue reading]

Gates on Missile Defense 

Last week, President Obama — on my recommendation and with the advice of his national-security team and the unanimous support of our senior military leadership — decided to discard that plan in favor of a vastly more suitable approach. In the first phase, to be completed by 2011, we will deploy proven, sea-based SM-3 interceptor missiles — weapons that are growing in capability — in the areas where we see the greatest threat to Europe.  [Continue reading]

(  Noting the Zemanta picks...Iran pummeling Israel and the US spouting 'open-mindedness'. It just goes on and on. Do watch the YouTube Ahmadinejad 'Holocaust' interview for yourself. It was a psyops PR trap : and the trapper became the trappee. )

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