In Washington, calls are increasing, especially among anxious Democrats, for the president to commit to training ever more Afghan troops and police rather than sending in more American troops. Huge numbers for imagined future Afghan army and police forces are now bandied about in Congress and the media – though no one stops to wonder what Afghanistan, the fourth poorest country on the planet, might actually be like with a combined security force of 400,000. Not a “democracy,” you can put your top dollar on that. And with a gross national product of only $23 billion (a striking percentage of which comes from the drug trade) and an annual government budget of only about $600 million, it’s not one that could faintly maintain such a force either. Put bluntly, if U.S. officials were capable of building such a force, a version of Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule for Iraq would kick in and we, the American taxpayers, would own it for all eternity.
On the other hand, not to worry. As Ann Jones makes clear in her revelatory piece below, the odds on such an Afghan force ever being built must be passingly close to nil. Such a program is no more likely to be successful than the massively expensive Afghan aid and reconstruction program has been. In fact, for all the talk about the subject here, it’s remarkable how little we actually know about the staggering expensive American and NATO effort to train the Afghan army and police. Stop and think for a moment. When was the last time you read in any U.S. paper a striking account, or any account for that matter, in which a reporter actually bothered to observe the training process in action? Think how useful that might have been for the present debate in Washington.
Fortunately, TomDispatch is ready to remedy this. Site regular Jones, who first went to Afghanistan in 2002 and, in an elegant memoir, Kabul in Winter, has vividly described her years working with Afghan women, spent time this July visiting U.S. training programs for both the Afghan army and police. She offers an eye-opening, on-the-spot look at certain realities which turn the “debate” in Washington inside out and upside down. Tom

Meet the Afghan Army

Is it a figment of Washington’s imagination?
by Ann Jones
The big Afghanistan debate in Washington is not over whether more troops are needed, but just who they should be: Americans or Afghans – Us or Them. Having just spent time in Afghanistan seeing how things stand, I wouldn’t bet on Them.
Frankly, I wouldn’t bet on Us either. In eight years, American troops have worn out their welcome. Their very presence now incites opposition, but that’s another story. It’s Them – the Afghans – I want to talk about.
Afghans are Afghans. They have their own history, their own culture, their own habitual ways of thinking and behaving, all complicated by a modern experience of decades of war, displacement, abject poverty, and incessant meddling by foreign governments near and far – of which the United States has been the most powerful and persistent. Afghans do not think or act like Americans. Yet Americans in power refuse to grasp that inconvenient point.
In the heat of this summer, I went out to the training fields near Kabul where Afghan army recruits are put through their paces, and it was quickly evident just what’s getting lost in translation. Our trainers, soldiers from the Illinois National Guard, were masterful. Professional and highly skilled, they were dedicated to carrying out their mission – and doing the job well. They were also big, strong, camouflaged, combat-booted, supersized American men, their bodies swollen by flack jackets and lashed with knives, handguns, and god only knows what else. Any American could be proud of their commitment to tough duty.
The Afghans were puny by comparison: Hundreds of little Davids to the overstuffed American Goliaths training them. Keep in mind: Afghan recruits come from a world of desperate poverty. They are almost uniformly malnourished and underweight. Many are no bigger than I am (5′4″ and thin) – and some probably not much stronger. Like me, many sag under the weight of a standard-issue flack jacket.
Their American trainers spoke of “upper-body strength deficiency” and prescribed pushups because their trainees buckle under the backpacks filled with 50 pounds of equipment and ammo they are expected to carry. All this material must seem absurd to men whose fathers and brothers, wearing only the old cotton shirts and baggy pants of everyday life and carrying battered Russian Kalashnikov rifles, defeated the Red Army two decades ago. American trainers marvel that, freed from heavy equipment and uniforms, Afghan soldiers can run through the mountains all day – as the Taliban guerrillas in fact do with great effect – but the U.S. military is determined to train them for another style of war.
Still, the new recruits turn out for training in the blistering heat in this stony desert landscape wearing, beneath their heavy uniforms, the smart red, green, and black warm-up outfits intended to encourage them to engage in off-duty exercise. American trainers recognize that recruits regularly wear all their gear at once for fear somebody will steal anything left behind in the barracks, but they take this overdressing as a sign of how much Afghans love the military. My own reading, based on my observations of Afghan life during the years I’ve spent in that country, is this: It’s a sign of how little they trust one another, or the Americans who gave them the snazzy suits. I think it also indicates the obvious: that these impoverished men in a country without work have joined the Afghan National Army for what they can get out of it (and keep or sell) – and that doesn’t include democracy or glory.
In the current policy debate about the Afghan War in Washington, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin wants the Afghans to defend their country. Sen. John McCain, the top Republican on the committee, agrees but says they need even more help from even more Americans. The common ground – the sacred territory President Obama gropes for – is that, whatever else happens, the U.S. must speed up the training of “the Afghan security forces.”
American military planners and policymakers already proceed as if, with sufficient training, Afghans can be transformed into scale-model, wind-up American Marines. That is not going to happen. Not now. Not ever. No matter how many of our leaders concur that it must happen – and ever faster.
“Basic Warrior Training”
So who are these security forces? They include the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Afghan National Police (ANP). International forces and private contractors have been training Afghan recruits for both of them since 2001. In fact, the determination of Western military planners to create a national army and police force has been so great that some seem to have suppressed for years the reports of Canadian soldiers who witnessed members of the Afghan security forces engaging in a fairly common pastime, sodomizing young boys.
Current training and mentoring is provided by the U.S., Great Britain, France, Canada, Romania, Poland, Mongolia, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as by the private for-profit contractors MPRI, KBR (formerly a division of Halliburton), Pulau, Paravant, and RONCO.
Almost eight years and counting since the “mentoring” process began, officers at the Kabul Military Training Center report that the army now numbers between 88,000 and 92,000 soldiers, depending on who you talk to; and the basic training course financed and led by Americans, called “Basic Warrior Training,” is turning out 28,800 new soldiers every year, according to a Kabul Military Training Center “fact sheet.” The current projected “end strength” for the ANA, to be reached in December 2011, is 134,000 men; but Afghan officers told me they’re planning for a force of 200,000, while the Western press often cites 240,000 as the final figure.
The number 400,000 is often mentioned as the supposed end-strength quota for the combined security forces – an army of 240,000 soldiers and a police force with 160,000 men. Yet Afghan National Police officials also speak of a far more inflated figure, 250,000, and they claim that 149,000 men have already been trained. Police training has always proven problematic, however, in part because, from the start, the European allies fundamentally disagreed with the Bush administration about what the role of the Afghan police should be. Germany initiated the training of what it saw as an unarmed force that would direct traffic, deter crime, and keep civic order for the benefit of the civilian population. The U.S. took over in 2003, handed the task off to a private for-profit military contractor, DynCorp, and proceeded to produce a heavily armed, undisciplined, and thoroughly venal paramilitary force despised by Kabulis and feared by Afghan civilians in the countryside.
Contradicting that widespread public view, an Afghan commanding officer of the ANP assured me that today the police are trained as police, not as a paramilitary auxiliary of the ANA. “But policing is different in Afghanistan,” he said, because the police operate in active war zones.
Washington sends mixed messages on this subject. It farms out responsibility for the ANP to a private contractor that hires as mentors retired American law enforcement officers – a Kentucky state trooper, a Texas county lawman, a North Carolina cop, and so on. Yet Washington policymakers continue to couple the police with the army as “the Afghan security forces” – the most basic police rank is “soldier” – in a merger that must influence what DynCorp puts in its training syllabus. At the Afghan National Police training camp outside Kabul, I watched a squad of trainees learn (reluctantly) how to respond to a full-scale ambush. Though they were armed only with red rubber Kalashnikovs, the exercise looked to me much like the military maneuvers I’d witnessed at the army training camp.
Like army training, police training, too, was accelerated months ago to ensure “security” during the run-up to the presidential election. With that goal in mind, DynCorp mentors shrunk the basic police training course from eight weeks to three, after which the police were dispatched to villages all across the country, including areas controlled by the Taliban. After the election, the surviving short-course police “soldiers” were to be brought back to Kabul for the rest of the basic training program. There’s no word yet on how many returned.
You have to wonder about the wisdom of rushing out this half-baked product. How would you feel if the police in your community were turned loose, heavily armed, after three weeks of training? And how would you feel if you were given a three-week training course with a rubber gun and then dispatched, with a real one, to defend your country?
Training security forces is not cheap. So far, the estimated cost of training and mentoring the police since 2001 is at least $10 billion. Any reliable figure on the cost of training and mentoring the Afghan army since 2001 is as invisible as the army itself. But the U.S. currently spends some $4 billion a month on military operations in Afghanistan.
The Invisible Men
What is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training? Although in Washington they may talk about the 90,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army, no one has reported actually seeing such an army anywhere in Afghanistan. When 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police. Why, you might ask, didn’t the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own? No explanation has been offered. American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to “operate independently,” but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?
My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist. It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of “Basic Warrior Training” 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.
In a country where 40 percent of men are unemployed, joining the ANA for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it’s a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid. Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahedin – the Islamist fundamentalists the U.S. once paid to fight the Soviets – and many are undoubtedly Taliban.
American trainers have taken careful note of the fact that, when ANA soldiers were given leave after basic training to return home with their pay, they generally didn’t come back. To foil paycheck scams and decrease soaring rates of desertion, they recently devised a money-transfer system that allows the soldiers to send pay home without ever leaving their base. That sounds like a good idea, but like many expensive American solutions to Afghan problems, it misses the point. It’s not just the money the soldier wants to transfer home, it’s himself as well.
Earlier this year, the U.S. training program became slightly more compelling with the introduction of a U.S.-made weapon, the M-16 rifle, which was phased in over four months as a replacement for the venerable Kalashnikov. Even U.S. trainers admit that, in Afghanistan, the Kalashnikov is actually the superior weapon. Light and accurate, it requires no cleaning even in the dust of the high desert, and every man and boy already knows it well. The strange and sensitive M-16, on the other hand, may be more accurate at slightly greater distances, but only if a soldier can keep it clean, while managing to adjust and readjust its notoriously sensitive sights. The struggling soldiers of the ANA may not ace that test, but now that the U.S. military has generously passed on its old M-16s to Afghans, it can buy new ones at taxpayer expense, a prospect certain to gladden the heart of any arms manufacturer. (Incidentally, thanks must go to the Illinois National Guard for risking their lives to make possible such handsome corporate profits.)
As for the police, U.S.-funded training offers a similar revolving door. In Afghanistan, however, it is far more dangerous to be a policeman than a soldier. While soldiers on patrol can slip away, policemen stuck at their posts are killed almost every day. Assigned in small numbers to staff small-town police stations or highway checkpoints, they are sitting ducks for Taliban fighters. As representatives of the now thoroughly discredited government of President Hamid Karzai, the hapless police make handy symbolic targets. British commanders in Helmand province estimated that 60 percent of Afghan police are on drugs – and little wonder why.
In the Pashtun provinces of southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban is strong, recruiting men for the Afghan National Police is a “problem,” as an ANP commander told me. Consequently, non-Pashtun police trainees of Hazara, Tajik, Uzbek, or other ethnic backgrounds are dispatched to maintain order in Pashtun territory. They might as well paint targets on their foreheads. The police who accompanied the U.S. Marines into Helmand province reportedly refused to leave their heavily armed mentors to take up suicidal posts in provincial villages. Some police and army soldiers, when asked by reporters, claimed to be “visiting” Helmand province only for “vacation.”
Training Day
In many districts, the police recently supplemented their low pay and demonstrated allegiance to local warlords by stuffing ballot boxes for President Karzai in the presidential election. Consider that but one more indication – like the defection of those great Islamist fundamentalist mujahedin allies the U.S. sponsored in the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s who are now fighting with the Taliban – that no amount of American training, mentoring, or cash will determine who or what Afghans will fight for, if indeed they fight at all.
Afghans are world famous fighters, in part because they have a knack for gravitating to the winning side, and they’re ready to change sides with alacrity until they get it right. Recognizing that Afghans back a winner, U.S. military strategists are now banking on a counterinsurgency strategy that seeks to “clear, hold, and build” – that is, to stick around long enough to win the Afghans over. But it’s way too late for that to work. These days, U.S. troops sticking around look ever more like a foreign occupying army and, to the Taliban, like targets.
Recently Karen DeYoung noted in the Washington Post that the Taliban now regularly use very sophisticated military techniques – “as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the U.S. Army’s Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments.” Of course, some of them have attended training sessions which teach them to fight in “austere environments,” probably time and time again. If you were a Talib, wouldn’t you scout the training being offered to Afghans on the other side? And wouldn’t you do it more than once if you could get well paid every time?
Such training is bound to come in handy – as it may have for the Talib policeman who, just last week, bumped off eight other comrades at his police post in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan and turned it over to the Taliban. On the other hand, such training can be deadly to American trainers. Take the case of the American trainer who was shot and wounded that same week by one of his trainees. Reportedly, a dispute arose because the trainer was drinking water “in front of locals,” while the trainees were fasting for the Muslim holy month of Ramazan.
There is, by the way, plenty of evidence that Taliban fighters get along just fine, fighting fiercely and well without the training lavished on the ANA and the ANP. Why is it that Afghan Taliban fighters seem so bold and effective, while the Afghan National Police are so dismally corrupt and the Afghan National Army a washout?
When I visited bases and training grounds in July, I heard some American trainers describe their Afghan trainees in the same racist terms once applied to African slaves in the U.S.: lazy, irresponsible, stupid, childish, and so on. That’s how Afghan resistance, avoidance, and sabotage look to American eyes. The Taliban fight for something they believe – that their country should be freed from foreign occupation. “Our” Afghans try to get by.
Yet one amazing thing happens to ANA trainees who stick it out for the whole 10 weeks of basic training. Their slight bodies begin to fill out a little. They gain more energy and better spirits – all because for the first time in their lives they have enough nutritious food to eat.
Better nutrition notwithstanding – Sen. Levin, Sen. McCain – “our” Afghans are never going to fight for an American cause, with or without American troops, the way we imagine they should. They’re never going to fight with the energy of the Taliban for a national government that we installed against Afghan wishes, then more recently set up to steal another election, and now seem about to ratify in office, despite incontrovertible evidence of flagrant fraud. Why should they? Even if the U.S. could win their minds, their hearts are not in it.
One small warning: Don’t take the insecurity of the Afghan security forces as an argument for sending yet more American troops to Afghanistan. Aggressive Americans (now numbering 68,000) are likely to be even less successful than reluctant Afghan forces. Afghans want peace, but the kharaji (foreign) troops (100,000, if you include U.S. allies in NATO) bring death and destruction wherever they go. Think instead about what you might have won – and could still win – had you spent all those military billions on food. Or maybe agriculture. Or health care. Or a civilian job corps. Is it too late for that now?
Ann Jones is the author of Kabul in Winter (Metropolitan, 2006) and writes often about Afghanistan for TomDispatch and the Nation. War Is Not Over When It’s Over, her new book about the impact of war on women, will be published next year.
Copyright 2009 Ann Jones

"Not in Anyone's Backyard": Andrew Yeo on the "No Bases" Network

From: The Duck of Minerva By: Charli Carpenter

This issue of International Studies Quarterly includes an article by Andrew Yeo on the emergence of an advocacy network against foreign military bases. Aside from the minor fact that Yeo omits reference to an important recent contribution to the literature on basing politics, I found his process-tracing of the No Bases Network fascinating. Here's the abstract:

"Providing an overview of the emergence, characteristics, trajectory, and potential limitations of the transnational anti-base network, this article focuses on two broad questions relevant to transnational politics. First, what processes and mechanisms enabled local and transnational activists to form the international No Bases network? Second, how did activists juxtapose existing local anti-base identity and frames to emerging transnational ones? Following existing transnational movement theories, I argue that the global anti-base network slowly emerged through processes of diffusion and scale shift in its early stages. The onset of the Iraq War, however, injected new life into the transnational anti-base movement, eventually leading to the inaugural International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Bases in 2007. Although loose transnational ties existed among anti-base activists prior to 2003, the U.S. war in Iraq presented anti-base activists the global frames necessary to accelerate the pace of diffusion, scale-shift, and brokerage, and hence, the consolidation of a transnational anti-base network. Paradoxically, however, even as No Bases leaders attempted to forge a new transnational identity, anti-base activists, as "rooted cosmopolitans," continued to anchor their struggle in local initiatives."

I liked this article because it's a great substantive example of what I look for in my work: good ideas that have attracted supporters but have not yet hit the mainstream human rights/human security/disarmament agenda. Yeo is interested in network emergence and identity; I'm more interested in how a network mobilized around a new idea like this manages to market itself to the mainstream NGOs who most have the ear of governments and the UN. This one's the kind of "aha" case I like to find - something that makes intuitive sense but I hadn't thought of or heard articulated before.
Which is just another way of saying, here's a network that's not yet being heard at the global level, whose issue is not yet "on the agenda" the way many other global problems are. But Yeo's analysis of the Iraq war as a focusing event that triggered the consolidation of disparate domestic networks into a transnational movement suggests an obstacle they'll need to overcome in order to attract support from large NGOs and achieve anything like real international norm change: the perception that this is really an anti-US movement instead of a movement to address a problem that's inherently global.

Original article and comments(09/23/2009 Wed 2:14pm)

Politics Daily Hat Tip The American Conservative

Donald Rumsfeld's Dysfunctional Pentagon

DeepBackground | David Corn

This seems to be the season for books from political insiders. Taylor Branch's "The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President" is loaded with intriguing info on the Clinton years, courtesy of Bill Clinton himself. Ted Kennedy's "True Compass" offers posthumous reflections on life as a Kennedy brother. And Matt Latimer, a former White House speechwriter for George W. Bush, has written a memoir entitled "Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor," which garnered early bloggable attention for disclosing that Bush was not so kind when it came to talking about Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But it was the section on Donald Rumsfeld in Latimer's book that I've found especially intriguing.

Before becoming a word-slinger for the president, Latimer crafted speeches at the Pentagon for Rumsfeld from 2004 through 2006. Though he depicts Rumsfeld in glowing terms -- Latimer recalls he cried when the defense secretary resigned after the GOP lost the 2006 congressional elections -- he portrays Rummy's Pentagon as a dysfunctional world run by toadying sycophants and bureaucratic bunglers. In his account, the top echelons of the Defense Department under Rumsfeld were a Catch-22ish circus of the absurd.

Some of the high jinks:

* During his job interview, Latimer asked Rumsfeld why he had decided to use the term "old Europe" to describe France and Germany, countries that were not riding merrily along with the Bush-Cheney administration on Iraq. This phrase had been widely seen as an insult and had caused an uproar. "Actually," Rumsfeld replied, "it was an accident." He had meant to refer to critics of the Iraq war as being part of "old NATO" -- to distinguish them from the new NATO members of Eastern Europe (who were, let's be fair, more eager to kowtow to U.S. aims). But Rumsfeld was proud of this slip, telling Latimer, "It turns out it was the smartest thing I ever did."

* In Latimer's account, Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy and one of the leading advocates of the Iraq war, was kind of a weirdo. At one point, he whistled Latimer into his office and asked him if he would write speeches for him. Feith was upset with his own speechwriter. In particular, he was incensed with the opening line of congressional testimony his writer had drafted for him. The offending sentence: "Mr. Chairman, thank you for inviting me to testify today." There was nothing wrong with the line, Latimer notes in the book, leaving the impression that there was something wrong with Feith.

* Stephen Cambone, Latimer writes, had to be promoted out of his job as Rumsfeld's special assistant because he was detached, disdainful and non-communicative -- that is, he did not have the people skills to be a bridge between Rumsfeld's office "and the rest of the building." Yet instead of booting him out of the Pentagon, Rumsfeld named him to one of the department's most important positions: undersecretary of intelligence. Why did Cambone thrive in Rummyland? Cambone, Latimer notes, mastered the technique of repeating whatever Rumsfeld had said "back to him as if it were Cambone's idea."

* Jim O'Beirne, the White House liaison at the Pentagon, was a political hack, in Latimer's telling. When Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," reported that O'Beirne had hired unqualified people for key positions in Iraq based on loyalty to the Republican Party, O'Beirne demanded that the Defense Department come to his rescue. "But," Latimer writes, "nearly everybody could cite examples of O'Beirne's office pushing unqualified candidates, or blocking the hiring of candidates they didn't like." He wasn't defended -- but he stayed in the job. According to Latimer, O'Beirne and his deputy spent two years blocking him from hiring a woman to be an editor for the speechwriting office. Why? "I have strong reason to suspect," he explains, that it was due to "her sexual orientation." He adds, O'Beirne's "ideal candidates for Pentagon jobs . . . tended to possess one or more of the following characteristics: they were just out of college (usually an evangelical one), they had no relevant work experience, or they had been home-schooled. It made no sense."

* At one point, Latimer and his fellow speechwriters were ordered to write a report on the Abu Ghraib controversy -- what had happened and what the Pentagon was doing about it. "We were also asked," he recalls, "to put in an appendix that absolved three people being criticized in the press as architects of the detainee issue: DoD general counsel Jim Haynes, Steve Cambone, and Doug Feith. I think the exoneration idea came from Haynes, Cambone, and Feith. It was a long, convoluted digression that basically said that no one was responsible for any of the abuses that took place. And even if someone was responsible, it wasn't them." This "detainee book" was never released to the public.

* Pentagon public affairs chief Larry Di Rita, Latimer relates, wielded "near-absolute power" and "built a bubble around Rumsfeld that was not easily pierced." And a lot of Pentagon officials gave up trying to tell Rumsfeld information Di Rita didn't want Rumsfeld to know: "They resented Larry, but they saw the obvious affection Rumsfeld had for him. So they gave up. It's impossible to know how much damage that caused the secretary or how much information he was never allowed to hear."

* Latimer depicts Di Rita's top assistant, Eric Ruff, as bumbler with ADD. Usually when a problem came up, Ruff would suggest that the speechwriters draft an op-ed that would present the department's side. But days would go by, while Ruff edited the drafts -- until the crisis had passed: "With that strategy, we never effectively rebutted an attack on Rumsfeld or the Pentagon." One time, according to Latimer, Ruff had the brilliant idea that Rumsfeld, during a press briefing, should declare that "we found WMD in Iraq" and keep on talking as if he had said nothing momentous. If subsequently asked to explain, Rumsfeld would note that American forces had uncovered traces of chemical weapons in Iraq. When Latimer pointed out to Ruff that these traces were generally assumed to be from old armaments, Ruff replied, "We don't know that for sure."

Latimer offers other examples of Pentagon inanities. (Don't get him started on the Defense Department press office.) Still, he raves about the wonders of Donald Rumsfeld -- without ever holding the man responsible for assembling a McHale's Navy crew of officials who created an environment in which the free flow of information was squelched and unqualified party loyalists were handed critical positions. After all, who hired all these ninnies Latimer denigrates? Latimer wants the reader to be impressed by Rumsfeld, but his book is a guilt-by-association indictment of his hero. Rumsfeld is now writing his own memoirs. (A friend of his tells me that Rumsfeld has insisted on writing the book in chronological fashion, starting with his childhood and painstakingly covering the whole expanse of his life, while his publisher has been pushing him to focus on his combative tenure at the Pentagon during the W. years.) Latimer's book is hardly helpful source material for him.

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