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An Interview with Matthew Hoh

2009-11-21T15:47:58-05:00

By Derrick Crowe

If Matthew Hoh could tell you one thing to help you understand the U.S.'s predicament in Afghanistan, he'd tell you:

The presence of our ground combat troops is not doing anything to defeat al-Qaida.

Think about that for a moment. We are paying roughly $1 million per troop, per year in Afghanistan. That's roughly twice the per-troop cost in Iraq. We've suffered well more than 800 deaths in Afghanistan. And yet here is the former top civilian official in Afghanistan's Zabul province, a former Marine who served in Anbar province in Iraq, telling us that the presence of our ground forces does nothing to defeat the organization that's supposedly the target of our operations in that country.

So, if we're not going about the business of defeating al-Qaida in Afghanistan, what are we doing?

We're involved in a civil war in Afghanistan. We're only taking one side in that civil war. And, our presence there is only encouraging the civil war to go on.

Hmm. This is all sounding very familiar.

I spoke to Matthew on Friday afternoon by phone. My first call to him went straight to voicemail, where I learned that apparently he'd had so many press calls about his resignation letter that his voicemail message directed inquiries on that topic to his email address. If you recall, the State Department took his letter seriously enough that it prompted job offers from Ambassadors Eikenberry and Holbrooke to get him to stay. Since then, Hoh has been the focus of a great deal of media attention, and for good reasons:

With all the rhetoric about the "success" of the so-called "surge" in Iraq and its supposed lessons for Afghanistan, the opinion of a person with experience with both has a lot of heft.
The fact that his feelings about the situation were strong enough to provoke a resignation and a subsequent rejection of a position in Washington gave him moral authority.
And, Hoh was the beneficiary of good timing: his resignation came at a time when the media and policymakers had been cajoled into a willingness to entertain views outside the Washington, D.C. conventional wisdom that failure to send more troops immediately would lead to disaster.

Over the course of the past year, groups opposed to deepening U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan (such as Brave New Foundation's Rethink Afghanistan project, the Get Afghanistan Right coalition and many other groups and individuals) worked relentlessly to keep a critical perspective on the war in Afghanistan in the public debate. These escalation opponents relentlessly hammered the proponents of a counterinsurgency (COIN) effort for their inconsistencies and self-contradictions, especially with regard to the COIN doctrine's need for a legitimate host-nation partner. By the time the Afghan presidential elections exploded into a showcase of abject corruption and illegitimacy, these activists had laid the groundwork that helped the American people interpret the events of late August 2009 as a serious blow to the assumptions underlying the rationale for a deep military involvement. At the same time, President Obama refused to be rushed into a second troop increase in Afghanistan by an increasingly abrasive Pentagon whisper campaign, allowing the nation to take a collective breath and widen the debate about options. These factors, combined with cratering public support for the war effort, pushed policymakers and the media into a willingness to entertain views dissenting from those presented by General Stanley McChrystal. Enter Matthew Hoh.

Matthew's letter is a four-page punch in the gut to the rhetoric of pro-counterinsurgency factions. It wrecks the idea that the U.S. will ever have a legitimate partner (referred to by the COIN field manual as a "north star") in Afghanistan or that our strategy will lead to the destruction of al-Qaida. He ends the letter with regret that assurances can no longer be given that those who died in Afghanistan gave their lives in a mission worth the cost in "futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept."

Hoh sees our presence driving the conflict in at least two ways. On one hand, our military support for the corrupt Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan assures the Kabul cartel that we will not allow them to be overrun by insurgents. Because of that perception, the GoIRA is not willing to work out a political settlement with their opponents to form a true national government. The support we have given thus far (which is very close to the maximum possible support we can give), however, is not enough to allow the GoIRA to crush the insurgency totally. Thus, within the constraints on U.S. and Afghan national power, the only possible solution to the conflict other than strategic failure is a political solution negotiated between GoIRA and it's opponents--and that's precisely what the GoIRA won't seek as long as they can be assured of our continued military support.

[T]he only way to end this civil war is through political reconciliation, through some kind of political negotiation reaching to some kind of settlement. ...The Afghan officials who are on our side have no interest in doing that. ...They have no interest in giving up the position they have right now. And our presence there keeps them in power that way. I don't really see them having any interest in taking Afghanistan into, you know, a modern age or a progressive country, all of the things we believed we were doing there for the past 8 years.

On the other hand, the U.S. presence fuels the ever-expanding insurgency, pulling people who resent our support for a corrupt, predatory government and who intensely resent outside interference in their lives into conflict with coalition troops.

In both the east and the south, where our troops were heavily engaged in combat...on a daily basis, those are areas populated by rural Pashtuns...The bulk of those people were fighting us just because we're occupying them--not out of any ideology, not out of any real ties to the Taliban, not out of any hatred for the West. It was just because they did not want foreign troops, or, for that matter, the Afghan national army or Afghan national police, which do not represent them, in their valleys and villages.

...If you take the Korengal Valley, for example, which is well-known to the American people as "The Valley of Death," ...it's 15-20 miles long, it only has about 10,000 residents, they speak Korengali...these are people who are not interested in things outside their valley. They prefer to be left alone. Of course, putting more troops in their valley is something they're going to rebel against, especially troops from the central government, which does not represent them. ...It's really a question of these people wanting to determine their own existence and ...govern themselves. For every Korengal we're in, there's a hundred that we're not in, and if we were in [them], it would be the same issue of us having to fight them only because we're occupying them.

On the topic of that corrupt, unrepresentative government, Hoh offered a couple of anecdotal examples of the corruption that permeates every level of government in Afghanistan:

I know a USAID official who got into a plane...with the governor of his province, and the governor had about $300,000 in a duffel bag with him. ...The governor that I worked with had been removed from another province as the governor because he had been caught red-handed in a fairly extreme corruption case. Now this governor, Governor Sari, has been a friend of President Karzai for 35 years. So, after the U.S. embassy exposed this and complained about it, all Karzai did was move this governor...from one province to another province....To believe that the vast majority of Afghan officials that you're working with have any allegiance to what we're trying to do other than to enrich themselves or to make out in some manner is wrong.

I asked Hoh about the recent report on the quadrupling of the insurgency since 2006. According to at least one estimate, 10 percent of the estimated 25,000-man-strong insurgency were hardcore religious extremists, while the rest accepted training and funds from the "Taliban," but lacked ties to their ideology or broader agenda beyond throwing out the invaders.

I completely agree. The number I've seen is that there are 25,000 "Taliban" (which I believe is an incorrect term to apply to the people who are fighting us because it makes a reference to the Taliban regime of pre-September 11, 2001, and I think that misleads people and causes confusion, particularly among the American public about who we are actually fighting there.). But if you go with that 25,000 number...only a few thousand of those are actual hardcore "Taliban" with a capital "T." The majority of the rest of those groups are local fighters who are pretty independent of one another, just primarily concerned with their local areas, their valleys, their village, and who are tied to the Taliban with a capital "T" only through monetary or funding allegiances, and through a desire not to be occupied by a foreign power or by the other side in a civil war.

...But, if there are 25,000 troops now, Derrick...if we put more troops into the south, if we put 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 troops into the south, next year there will be 30,000, 35,000 or 40,000 enemies fighting us. As we move into more valleys and more villages...people are going to rebel against us.

So, the continued presence of massive numbers of U.S. troops removes the incentives for the GoIRA to negotiate a political settlement while providing the fuel for the growth of the insurgency. Hoh's advice to policymakers? End combat operations and sharply reduce U.S. troop levels. Doing so would pull U.S. troops out of areas where locals fight us just because we are there and would compel the GoIRA to negotiate with their opponents. Otherwise the U.S. presence will continue to fuel an unsustainable dynamic whereby the GoIRA has a near-term upper hand but cannot decisively defeat their opponents while the opponents use our presence as a recruiting tool for the resistance movement.

You're either characterized as all in our all out, and that's wrong. I don't think anyone is calling for us to completely wash our hands of Afghanistan and just walk away. When I call for withdrawal I call for stopping combat operations because it just doesn't make any sense; all it does it just prolong the conflict. I call for some kind of political reconciliation to end the fighting there. So a withdrawal would have to be somewhat gradual while negotiations were going on.

But wait, one might ask: what about al-Qaida? Hoh's policy prescription deals mainly with settling the civil war between the "Taliban" and the GoIRA. How does al-Qaida fit into this? Aren't they the reason we're in Afghanistan in the first place? Wouldn't our withdraw allow them to reestablish "safe havens" and allow them to keep the ones they have in Pakistan?

I don't believe al-Qaida needs or wants safe havens [like they had in 2001]. They just don't operate that way. they recruit worldwide. They are really an ideological force that exists on the Internet. They influence individuals or their operations are carried out by these small, independent, autonomous cells that really don't require much to operate other than a couple of rooms and a satellite phone or an internet connection. and if you look at the vast majority of attacks that have happened over the last decade regarding al-Qaida, they've been carried out by people not from the Afghanistan/Pakistan region, but residents of North Africa, residents of the gulf states or citizens of Europe or citizens and residents of the United States who do their preparation and their training in countries where the attacks occur. So this idea of a safe haven and their requirement for it is not borne out by any evidence of the way al-Qaida has operated for at least the last decade. After 2001, they evolved. They don't need a safe haven. It would be great for the United States if they did have safe havens because then we could bomb them. So we have to attack al-Qaida as the organization as it exists and not as we want it to exist.

The concern that our presence their encourages people to respond to their ideology is a valid one. We're currently occupying two Muslim countries, and we have to understand that lends credence to al-Qaida's argument that it is defending the Muslim world from Western invasion.

How many recruits do they [al-Qaida] get per year? A hundred? Two hundred? The Muslim population is over a billion. You're talking about such a small fraction. It's really associated with such a fringe movement that we have to attack using human intelligence and using law enforcement techniques. Army brigade combat teams do not affect al-Qaida. Having 60,00 troops in Afghanistan is not affecting al-Qaida. ...[T]he destruction of al-Qaida should be our priority...but we need to go after that organization as it exists and not with ground combat troops in Afghanistan.

Matthew said he's pleased with the state of debate following his resignation and return to the United States.

I can tell you that one of the things that pushed me to resign was this feeling that I had, and I think most people had, or a lot of people had, particularly guys I was serving with in Afghanistan, that an escalation of troops and an open-ended commitment to supporting the Karzai regime seemed almost like a done deal all throughout the summer...There was no discussion of any other type of strategy...it seemed almost like a guarantee...I got home in September and that's when I first heard there were debates on this within the administration...I'm very pleased the way the debates have been going. I'm not sure what's going that's going to happen with [the troop ]increase--I'm sure we're going to get one. The best thing though ...is that we're going to get some kind of withdrawal date, which is what we need. If we can get a withdrawal date within a year or two I'll be very happy, because that's so much better, so infinitely better, than some type of open-ended commitment or some type of 4- or 5-year plan. My thoughts are hopefully we can get some type of commitment to withdraw and stop combat operations within the next year or two.

I guess that's being a realist. I'd like to see it stop tomorrow.

Brave New Conversations recently filmed a conversation between Hoh and Daniel Ellsberg. Here's a clip:

You can find the full episode on the Brave New Conversations website. Learn how the war in Afghanistan undermines U.S. security: watch Rethink Afghanistan (Part Six), & visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog.

Note: Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. He blogs regularly at Return Good for Evil.

Make Them Pay For It!

2009-11-21T13:12:36-05:00

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I have said for years that the best way to end foreign misadventures like Iraq and Afghanistan was to make the millionaire pundits and neocons pay for them. Let's see how enthusiastic Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes are when their wars are being paid for by them. So they want to wage war in Afghanistan? Carl Levin says says make them pay for it.

Higher-income Americans should be taxed to pay for more troops sent to Afghanistan and NATO should provide half of the new soldiers, said Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

An “additional income tax to the upper brackets, folks earning more than $200,000 or $250,000” a year, could fund more troops, Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said in an interview for Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt,” airing this weekend.

White House Budget Director Peter Orszag has estimated that each additional soldier in Afghanistan could cost $1 million, for a total that could reach $40 billion if 40,000 more troops are added.

That cost, Levin said, should be paid by wealthier taxpayers. “They have done incredibly well, and I think that it’s important that we pay for it if we possibly can” instead of increasing the federal debt load, the senator said.

I think a surcharge so they can actually see how much their wars are costing them personally might dampen their enthusiasm a bit.

Of Good Intentions And Imperial Overreach

2009-11-21T12:31:40-05:00

By Steve Hynd

Yesterday, my good friend Derrick Crowe posted a quote from a recent piece on just wars by the Center for American Progress. It struck me as perfectly encapsulating the pitfalls of the kind of "we didn't mean to aquire one" notion of benevolent empire Americans seem to have inherited from we Brits.

One of the biggest problems of American foreign policy, Niebuhr contended, is that Americans are tempted to overreach, to overestimate the innocence of our own power, and thus also overestimate its possible effectiveness.

It was still on my mind when I read an op-ed in the L.A. Times by Gerrard Russell, who was senior advisor to the UN's Peter Galbraith in Afghanistan. Russell is plain that the "innocence of our own power" is leading us into a mistaken Afghan escalation.

what is depressing about the situation in Afghanistan is not that it has suddenly gotten much worse but that it steadily fails to get better.

...Until an equilibrium of power has been reached among Afghans that is generally unchallenged, pulling out foreign troops would precipitate a civil war. It would be a tawdry and selfdefeating end to the intervention in Afghanistan. Yet, for as long as foreign troops are dominating the conflict with the Taliban, and for as long as the U.S. is seen as the final arbiter of Afghan politics, an equilibrium of power cannot be reached.

The U.S. presence is the Afghan government's safety net, protecting it from the need to take responsibility for the fight against the Taliban. Until Karzai's government sees its survival at stake, it will not play its best game.

This is exactly the argument that major progressive think tanks like CAP made for Iraq, an argument that eventually led to the SOFA agreement for withdrawal of US combat troops by 2011. Yet its an argument none of those think tanks have deployed for Obama's occupation in Afghanistan - and as far as I can see they've not done so purely for political reasons. Russell's oped is like a breath of fresh air on that score, coming as it does from a a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government with three years experience at the highest levels in Afghanistan.

Russell prescription is simple and threefold. First, give up pressuring other nations for extra troops and shrink the coalition to a manageable size, simplifying command and control feuds. Secondly, "withdraw forces to impregnable bases from which they can back up Afghan forces in cases of extreme need" thus ending Afghan perceptions of being occupied by a hostile force fighting on their land. And thirdly, but perhaps most importantly:

We must also lose the fight to give the Afghans a better government than they have had. It is simply not ours to win. Our views of what makes a good minister are not always right by any means. But, even more important, when a government is seen to be imposed by foreign influence, its failures can be blamed on foreigners. Let every pretense be stripped away. Let the failures of the Afghan government be clearly its failures, and let its successes be just as clearly its own. Expose that government, in other words, to the laws of natural selection. It must adapt or die.

Foreign governments can advise. They can set certain conditions for their aid money, which should be simple and apolitical -- an anti-corruption commission, for example. And once they no longer have ownership of the Afghan government, they will be able to enforce those conditions more effectively.

But the Afghan government must be in the lead, clearly in charge, free to make its own political decisions and to learn its own lessons. And that is what the Afghan people must see.

In the long run, rather than the U.S. putting in more troops, it might have a greater effect by putting them out of harm's way. And it might succeed best by failing first.

Russell understands Niebuhr, one of President Obama's favorite writers - our good intentions have led us into a situation where we're doing everything for the Afghans when all we should be doing is offering to catch them if they fall. That's the very definition of "benevolent Empire" that leads into so many accidental mistakes and so much additional chaos down the line. In this context, it's very significant that the "best counterinsurgent you've never heard of" - Odierno's political advisor Emma Sky - is entirely unsure whether COIN does more than paper over the cracks short-term.

Iraq is going through a revolution. While we all may hope that the worst of the violence is behind us, Iraq still has a long way to go before it becomes a viable state and its people come to terms with past injustices and learn to move forward together. 2007 may come to be viewed as the year that set the conditions for sustainable stability. Alternatively, it might be remembered as the year in which the country became more fractured and divided into fiefdoms run by warlords; or as the year in which the various factions positioned themselves for a future civil war, with the United States assisting the Sunni Arabs. We have witnessed notable success in bringing down the violence, but the government has yet to make sufficient progress in developing its capacity and legitimacy, and in narrowing the gap between itself and the people.

Yet that unsure, unproven model is the one Obama is ready to escalate. Instead, he should be taking away the props which stop the Afghan government from being empowered to do things for itself.

Milliband's Lies and Spin for Continued Occupation

2009-11-21T11:33:32-05:00

By Steve Hynd

David Milliband, the British Foreign Secretary, is a typical Blairite. If his lips are moving, he's spinning something - nothing gets said without it serving a domestic political purpose. Yesterday he had this to say about Afghanistan:

In an interview with the Guardian at the end of a visit to Kabul for the presidential inauguration of Hamid Karzai, the foreign secretary said: "If international forces leave, you can choose a time – five minutes, 24 hours or seven days – but the insurgent forces will overrun those forces that are prepared to put up resistance and we would be back to square one."

At the end of a day spent visiting British troops and officials at the headquarters of the international military effort, Miliband said that Afghans were "sad that they need anyone, but they are passionate that my goodness they do – because if we weren't here their country would be rolled over".

It's sheer crap, of course. The Karzai government is stuffed full of former Northern Alliance warlords who have been fighting the Taliban for about thirty years now. The present situation is that these mostly not-nice people are better armed and have bigger war chests than they've ever had while the equally not-nice Taliban is recovering from its lowest ebb. It no longer has tanks, for example. But it serves Milliband's purpose: which is to make Britain's continued involvement in the Afghan quagmire seem like a noble fight to hold back barbarism instead of a lapdog following of US foreign policy.

Then there's this:

"I don't think British opinion is about to flip to a position that says withdraw now," he said. "But there is a high degree of concern about the casualties, understandably, there is a high degree of concern about the complexity of effecting a strategy in a country with history as complex as this, and there is a high degree of concern about all the partners that we have got.

More spin. Few even of those who favor withdrawal are talking about "withdrawal now" - it should be done responsibly and on a timetable. And 71 percent of the British people already back that withdrawal.

Milliband's political calculation is that the Labour Party will get hammered at next years general election as the party that led Britain into two U.S. quagmires. He's thus trying to stake out a position the opposition parties cannot deny without opening themselves to charges of enabling barbarism and being defeatist. He's doing that because admitting the Labour Party were wrong before the election would be just as damaging to its electoral chances as what's happening on the domestic political front now. There is exactly zero care or consideration for Afghans involved. When it doesn't work by January, Milliband will turn a full 180 and, along with his party, head to the exit. All he needs is the political cover afforded by a NATO summit.

How Do You Interrogate A Dead Man?

2009-11-19T21:27:21-05:00

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The wingers are outraged. Why? Because Sen. Patrick Leahy said there was no reason to interrogate Osama bin Laden if he's captured. This was a stupid thing for Leahy to say but the outrage is just as stupid.

The writers of fiction know it, movie makers know it and politicians know it. What is it you ask? A hero can only be as good as the villain is bad. In other words to push the War On Terror and look like a hero the western world needed a villain - they needed Osama the villain to make them look like heroes. But Osama bin Laden is dead and has been for years.

This week, still more questions have been raised with the publication in America and Britain of a book called Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?

Written by political analyst and philosopher Professor David Ray Griffin, former emeritus professor at California's Claremont School of Theology, it is provoking shock waves - for it goes into far more detail about his supposed death and suggests there has been a cover-up by the West.

The book claims that Bin Laden died of kidney failure, or a linked complaint, on December 13, 2001, while living in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains close to the border with Waziristan.

His burial took place within 24 hours, in line with Muslim religious rules, and in an unmarked grave, which is a Wahhabi custom.

The author insists that the many Bin Laden tapes made since that date have been concocted by the West to make the world believe Bin Laden is alive. The purpose? To stoke up waning support for the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When George W. Bush said he didn't think about Osama much it was because he knew he was dead. But Osama was Bush's villain and had to remain alive. How far down does the conspiracy go? Does Leahy know Osama is dead? Do his critics?

Oh why are we waiting, why-y are we waaaiting?

2009-11-19T13:25:52-05:00

By Steve Hynd

Dan Froomkin asks today what I asked yesterday: what's taking so long with Obama's AfPak decision? And he comes to the same answer: fear of the Wuss Factor.

according to Paul R. Pillar, a Georgetown University professor who formerly served as the CIA's chief intelligence analyst for the Middle East, it's pretty clear that the goal of leaving behind a stable, democratic Afghanistan is unattainable.

"With the application of military force, some degree of short-term stability over some portion of Afghanistan is probably achievable," Pillar told me. "That is not to say that we have stabilized Afghanistan or that whenever we get out we'll have established some long-term basis for peace and stability. I don't think we can do that."

So is there any alternative to an open-ended commitment? The only genuine exit strategy left involves unilateral disengagement. But politically, that's a nonstarter -- at least for now. It is widely considered inevitable that if Obama began to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan without being able to declare some form of victory, he would be derided in the press and by Republicans as a coward and a quitter.

..."If political realities were not a constraint, disengagement from Afghanistan would be the best course of action," Pillar says. "But I accept the political reality that that is off the table. The president would get pilloried as being a softie and as not having the courage and determination supposedly to stand up for U.S. security. I don't buy any of that criticism myself, but that would be the political reality he's facing."

As it happens, in this case political reality actually diverges quite markedly from public opinion. The public overwhelmingly opposes the war -- 57 percent to 39 percent, according to the latest Associated Press poll. And disengagement from Afghanistan -- even though it's not even being discussed as a serious option in political circles -- is considerably more popular with the American public than escalation, which is almost all anyone in Washington can talk about. The latest CNN poll found that 49 percent of Americans favored reducing the number of troops in Afghanistan -- with 28 percent saying they should all be withdrawn immediately -- compared to less than 40 percent who want to send more.

Generalized public sentiment alone, however, is unlikely to force any American president to consider a military withdrawal without victory. "It is always easier in the short term to stay in than to get out," says Walt. "And therefore the temptation to take one more drink is always there."

What it would take is a great deal of organized political pressure. But there is no significant peace movement pushing for withdrawal. There is, in fact, almost no political manifestation whatsoever of what is the majority view. The political pressure is all coming from one side.

As Pillar explains, Democrats have long been on the defense on national security issues -- and they know that "Republicans could be skillful at exploiting this." He adds: "All it takes is one terrorist attack, nothing even on the 9/11 scale, with some sort of Afghan connections, to punctuate emphatically that line of criticism."

Froomkin joins the likes of Peter Hitchens, Hugh De Santis and Thomas Rid in recognising that the main obstacles to an Afghan disengagement are domestic. Politicians and military leaders are too afraid to admit getting involved was a mistake to begin with, too afraid of the embarassment of being seen to withdraw "in defeat". There are no other real reasons.

King Karzai?

2009-11-19T12:26:10-05:00

This is a country ruled by kings. The king’s brothers, cousins and sons are all powerful. - Ahmed Wali Karzai, the President’s brother

By Steve Hynd

Hamid Karzai has survived his inauguration for a second term as Afghanitan's president, and has spoken like a King: he has promised to end graft, appoint a clean cabinet, kick private security companies out of his nation within two years and a drawdown of foreign troops within five. He's also promised a "loyal jirga" to help reconcile the various factions within his fractured country.

It would be an ambitious agenda for any national ruler. The big question is: can he actually deliver any of it? Western leaders, desperate for any measure of legitimacy they can confer on the man who blatantly stole an election he would have won anyway, are making as many encouraging noises as they can.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said it showed Karzai understood the demands being made on him.

"When you've been re-elected, it's delivery time and I think that's what came through in President Karzai's speech," Miliband said. "It's a very challenging country to govern but you've got a very strong, substantial statement today."

European Union special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Ettore Sequi called the speech "a very good statement which reflected the right priorities the right way."

"Let's encourage and support the president and we shall have opportunities to see how that program will be translated into reality," he told Reuters.

But the reality is that Karzai isn't a King able to rule by fiat - he's a Western mostly-puppet juggling a whole bunch of intenselly rich and violent warlord supporters while looking over his shoulder at the Taliban-led insurgency.

Stopping corruption and electing a clean cabinet will require Karzai to subdue bloody warlords like his own brother quoted above, designated vice-president Mohammad Qasim Fahim or power-broker General Dostum. None are going to take marginalisation and exclusion easily. There's a good chance some will just try to have Karzai killed and figure they can do a deal with his successor.

Halting the operations of both domestic and international security companies within two years will mean seriously upsetting the likes of Hamed Wardak, son of the Afghan defense minister, and Karzai's own cousins Ahmad Rateb Popal and Rashid Popal. They and other operators of security companies have been accused of making out like literal bandits from protection kickbacks on their already lucrative trucking contracts. It will also mean stepping up the Afghan security forces to the point where they can take over from those security companies - presumably without copying their tactics of bribing local brigands to let convoys past. Such a rapid increase in both numbers and capability seems like a pipe dream to many.

And finally, to get foreign troops out of Afghanistan within five years, or even just getting Afghan forces in the lead, will mean not just doing all of the above on steroids but doing it without upsetting his Western leash-holders enough that they simply decide to replace him. Too, there are major factions within those Western nations that don't want to leave in anything even marginally close to five years. For them, "staying the course" has become a reason in and off itself: witness the shenannigans over the last year from the U.S. neocon lobby and from General Odierno over the prospect of pulling out to an agreed timetable in Iraq. Karzai's five year timeline overlaps the nest U.S. presidential election and from here it looks like Obama is by no means certain to win a second term. A new hardline Republican administration in D.C. would be inclined to tear up any timetable for withdrawal if it could justify staying longer.

Before any of Karzai's edicts can come to pass, he'll have to deal with his own robber barons, his Western liege-lords and a troublesome rebellion - all while under constant threat of being unseated and of assassination from disaffected factions. I personally would love there to be a clear and unambiguous timetable for withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan and so I wish Karzai the very best of luck if he's serious. But it's unclear, on the past evidence, either that he means what he says or if he does that he has the lion heart needed for the task.

Waiting For Obama To Solve The Gordian Knot

2009-11-18T14:56:35-05:00

An Afghan policeman auditions for the role of Estragon

By Steve Hynd

Even those of us who oppose any kind of McChrystal Plan for troop escalation in Afghanistan are getting a bit antsy waiting for Godot Obama to make his mind up. I realise that its a complex set of issues - a real Gordian Knot, in fact - and that all the options are bad ones. But ferchissakes, it's the sixth or seventh "strategic review" carried out by the administration or the military since Obama took office; I'm not sure any longer because there have been so many I've lost count.

And indications are that the players are just running over the same old ground and hoping for a pony. The portion of a NATO conference scheduled for Monday which was supposed to discuss force levels in Afghanistan has been postponed until at least December so that it can "take into account the latest developments in that country and the outcome of President Barack Obama's strategic review of the war". The UK's Gordon Brown has been running around like a lackey trying to drum up support for Obama's War - he's asked eight NATO countries for extra troops and so far only Slovakia has said yes. They'll double their commitment to 490 soldiers for a non-combat mission at Kabul Airport. Big fat hairy deal. Germany has extended its mission for a year but won't send extras and plans to be out by 2013. France has said "non" and Italy has said "Non c'è verso". While the main British parties have coalesced around supporting US signals that any surge will be aimed primarily at training Afghan security forces and only be backed by a political exit plan even Afghanistan can only commit to a measly 5,000 extra troops in Helmand.

And while we're on that subject of Afghan security forces, the overall idea of "they'll stand up so we can stand down" that the Obama administration has adopted wholesale from the Bush one is looking increasingly unrealistic.

While Mr. Obama ponders his options, the Afghans remain a force of largely illiterate soldiers led by corrupt, incompetent officers. Every year, one out of every four or five recruits quits, which makes increasing their overall numbers rather difficult. According to The New York Times, recent internal U.S. government reports indicate that the number of Afghan battalions able to fight independently has actually declined in the past six months.

Two public reports – from the Inspector-General of the U.S. Defence Department and the Special Inspector-General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, both available on the Web – point to a mix of progress and setbacks. However, nothing in them suggests that training an effective Afghan military or police will be easy or speedy. Certainly, these forces will not be up to serious tasks in the next year or two.

The idea, therefore, of thrusting in tens of thousands of additional U.S. soldiers to stem a deteriorating security situation, then withdrawing them and letting the Afghans smartly carry on the fight, appears more pipe dream than grounded in reality.

More pipe dream still if the surge further breaks a U.S. military that is already crippled by PTSD.

Worse, all of that will become moot if the Afghan government can't get its shit together to deliver some modicum of effective governance. I personally doubt that common Afghans would give a fig about their leaders making out like bandits in the graft stakes if they also did some actual governing work, but the indolent elite of Kabul's narcopalaces have all the sense of entitlement of feudal royalty without the sense of responsibility that used to accompany that status.

On the fringes of Karzai's inauguration - an event from which journalists have been banned lest some world leader gets their picture snapped with a warlord or drug trafficker - his own brother illustrated that feudal thinking and the way it fuels corruption.

One person that none of the foreign dignitaries will want to be seen with is Ahmed Wali Karzai, the President’s brother, who has become a symbol of everything that is wrong about the administration. Although only a member of the Kandahar provincial council, he is in reality one of the most powerful people in the country. He has repeatedly been linked by Western officials to Afghanistan’s lucrative narcotics industry.

Yesterday the President’s brother admitted that he enjoyed his influence because of his family ties. “Yes, I am powerful because I am the President’s brother,” he said. “This is a country ruled by kings. The king’s brothers, cousins and sons are all powerful. This is Afghanistan. It will change but it will not change overnight.”

Karzai understands that he'll have to make some sacrifices, but he also understands that his own neck is on the line if his faux anti-corruption drive goes too high or too far. Thus he'll throw some tokens out to the wolves. His attorney general told Der Spiegel in an interview reported today that he plans to indict three former and two current ministers for graft - all doubtless minor political players and not even the tip of the iceberg. One may well be the current Afghan Minister of Mines, who has been accused by an anonymous Obama official of taking a $30million bribe to green light China's copper mine at Aynak. Given the whopping level of bribery and graft U.S. based corporations have engaged in, that's sheerest hypocrisy in the service of the U.S. corporatocracy and will only serve to piss off the Chinese, who had been offering ways to help America out of its self-induced quagmire. And still, none of this will touch fol like Karzai's brother or other powerful warlords he can't afford to get on the wrong side of. As Der Spiegel reported:

Just how Karzai should meet the demands of the international community remains unclear. Washington and London are pressuring him to discard his designated vice president, the feared former warlord Mohammad Qasim Fahim, known to Afghans simply as "Marshall Fahim." Fahim isn't just considered to be corrupt, but is also thought to head up the country's lucrative kidnapping industry. Karzai chose Fahim for the votes he brought with him.

Diplomats in Kabul merely roll their eyes when asked about Fahim. "Fahim is for us a non-person who we would rather see before the International Criminal Court in The Hague instead of in the presidential palace," one high-level NATO official from Brussels recently told SPIEGEL ONLINE. Just as problematic for NATO is General Dostum, who Karzai recalled from his exile in Turkey in an effort to secure the support of those in northern Afghanistan who remain loyal to Dostum. Dostum is now demanding a number of top posts for his followers.

Throwing "bags of gold" at Taliban types is the latest British solution to all this Gordian knottiness, echoing the good old days of colonialism when the "wogs start at Calais" and everyone who wasn't a Briton could be assumed to be bribeable or shootable with impunity. As Human Rights Watch points out, its a fatally flawed assumption nowadays.

At best this buys a temporary space to build the government and security forces. At worst it backfires through bad intelligence, fuels corruption and creates grievances among Afghans who did not take up arms, and were not rewarded with gold. Engaging in lawlessness to address lawlessness seems perverse at best.

...Foreign embassies and armies must also change the way they operate. By having security alliances and holding high level meetings with known criminals, and hiring the armed men of former warlords or drug traffickers to provide security or logistics, they expose themselves as hypocrites to Afghans taking risks to reform their country. This short-termist deal making must change.

And finally, hovering over all like the spectre at the feast, is Pakistan's on-again, off-again entanglement with its own varieties of Taliban - bot the ones it supports and the ones it doesn't. There, all the indications are that the Pakistani military are about to play whack-a-mole again in South Waziristan, declaring victory and getting out before guerrilla tactics can attrit their own glowing propaganda.

Obama's decision is not an easy one, that I freely admit, and I'll take the vanity option of quoting myself on that:

It's a perfect Gordian Knot; when you tease out one bit to untangle it, another bit just gets pulled tighter, and there's no sword sharp enough to cut it. Anyone (including myself) who puts forward a solution for one tangle without mentioning how their solution would make other bits of the knot more intransigent is just blowing smoke up their reader's asses. Frankly, though, the notion that all of this can be untangled by military forces - practising counter-insurgency or otherwise - is truly worthy of the description "laughable".

But he could do far worse - and likely will do - than take the advice of the Guardian's Simon Jenkins:

Britain and America should demilitarize the war on terror, surely the most counterproductive main-force deployment in recent history. They need no longer rely on grand armies, popinjay generals and crippling budgets; on bringing death, destruction and exile to hundreds of thousands of foreigners in the faint belief that this might stop a few bombs going off back home. They would hand that job to the appropriate authorities; to the police and security services.

The modalities of withdrawal need obvious attention. Only idiots talk of leaving "overnight", but only idiots make departure conditional on some unachievable objective, such as more European troops or an operational Afghan army or honesty in Kabul. Defeat must be spun as victory. Retreat must be covered by the smokescreen of a loya jirga or "surge, bribe and leave". But it cannot be conditional on fantasy.

This war was never to be won, any more than that in Iraq. Both were neocon nation-building stunts that ran amok on too much money. Three million Iraqis, including almost all Iraq's Christians, were driven into exile. The same is starting in Afghanistan and will become a flood as NATO retreats. That nation's agony is not over yet, but the end cannot begin until the invaders depart. That will happen only when the pain outweighs the pride. The question is, how many corpses will that take?

The only question Obama has left to answer is: does he have the courage to overcome the Wuss Factor say that the pain already outweighs the pride. What's taking him so long?

Hump Day Hoglets of FAIL

2009-11-18T14:19:36-05:00

By Dave Anderson:

Just a few quick hits on institutional and governmental capture and failure. I would write more, but I have to change diapers and get to a play-date in a few minutes (I have my priorities.)

Brad Delong on institutional failure and a Depression:

In my estimation the chances of another big downward shock to the U.S. economy--a shock that would carry us from the 1/3-of-a-Great-Depression we have now to 2/3 or more--are about 5%. And it now looks very much as if if such a shock hits the U.S. government will be unable to do a d----- thing about it.
We could cushion the impact of another big downward shock by a lot more deficit spending--unemployment, after all, goes down whenever anybody spends more (even though sometimes falling unemployment comes at too-high a price in rising inflation), and the government's money is as good as anybody else's. But the centrist Democratic legislative caucus has now dug in its heels behind the position that we cannot undertake more deficit spending right now because we have a dire structural health-care financing proble afrer 2030. The Republican legislative causes has now dug in its heels behind the position that the fact that unemployment is 10% shows not that policy earlier this year was too cautious but rather that it was ineffective. And the Obama administration has not been able or has not tried to move either of those groups out of their current entrenchments.
We could cushion the impact of another big downward shock by recapitalizing the banks again. But the failure of the Fed and the Treasury in the aftermath of Lehman to grab a share of the upside from its capital injection and purchase operations for the public in the form of warrants means that there is no coalition anywhere for a repeat or anything like a repeat of propping-up the banking system: the right thinks it is an unwarranted intervention in the free market, the left thinks that it is a giveaway to the undeserving and feckless superrich, and the center is bewildered because it is an enormous and poorly-structured intervention in the market, it is a giveaway to the undeserving and feckless superrich, and the optics are terrible.

Shocking, public and visible looting diminshes trust and legitimacy the next time that the government needs to function as the insurer, lender and borrower of last resort.
Paul Krugman on where interest rates "should" be:

I like to use Glenn Rudebusch’s estimate of the Taylor Rule — a rule relating interest rates to unemployment and inflation — that appears to track past Fed behavior. The chart below shows the rate predicted by the rule versus the actual rate on 3-month T-bills (I’m using that rather than the target Fed funds rate for trivial computational convenience)....
right now the Taylor rule says that the Fed funds rate should be minus 6.7%.

Inflation is not a concern right now. Using the monetarist dictum that inflation is a monetary problem at all times due to a mismatch between non-market set interest rates and the market clearing interest rates, deflation is the problem on the horizon.

Jerome Armstrong being stupid at MyDD as he does not realize that the deficit is an amphorous blob of unidentified economic fears, and not the cause of economic problems right now:

The dollar hit a new low today against other currencies. If you google Obama's deficit plan, you'll pull up a Page Not Found*.

The Pittsburgh Comet continues to bang the drum on Wall Street looting municipal governments in interest rate swaps:

Last year the authority's debt surpassed that of the city government, which has a budget three times the size of the water system's. That was driven by the authority's decision to enter into a complex $414 million debt package that included instruments called swaps, in which the authority and finance firms make payments to each other. The amounts of the payments shift as variable rate debt interest rates change. (ibid)

That made a bad situation almost comedic. And it was not impossible to know at the time that that maneuver was a risky maneuver to make on the behalf of the public, and we should remember that. But here we are.

Matthew Yglesias notes the Afghanistan escalation has already happened

One point here is that we now seem to be looking at the consequences of a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to Afghanistan. Maybe if we’d just been spending $30-$40 billion a year from the get-go the situation never would have deteriorated to the point where we’re looking at appropriations of $170 billion and rising. Another point is that it’s a little bit odd that the big escalation debate is happening now, since any further increases in expenditures will probably be smaller than the increase that already happened back when nobody was paying attention.

Cannonfire has an interesting catch from the New York Times on the flow of Mexican remittances:

Also in Chiapas, a poor state that sends many migrants to the United States, María del Carmen Montufar has pooled money with her husband and other family members to wire financial assistance to her daughter Candelaria in North Carolina....
At one small bank in Chiapas that used to see money flowing in from the United States, more money is going out than coming in.

Blue Gal at They Gave us a Republic talks about her experience in the risk v. reward of early detection screening for breast cancer:

We are testing 1900 women unnecessarily in order to save one, the argument goes, and it just isn't worth it.
Okay. Tell it to the other 1899, but as for me? I don't care to hear it.
Wanna guess which one of the 1900 I am?
I am the poster child for early detection. My brush with the disease was a non-event that cost less than ten grand to treat because of early detection and screening.

Blondsense shows how “freedom” has been brought to Afghanistan’s women:

fghan women, in order to escape a life of domestic torture and abuse are burning themselves. Can you imagine being so distraught that you literally set yourself on fire? Some women were forced to get married as early as 7 years old. Domestic violence is still prevalent in Afghanistan despite the Taliban supposedly being overthrown. Women have no rights and it's very hard to get a divorce.

Okay, time to change diapers...

Surging To A Broken Army?

2009-11-18T11:21:24-05:00

By Steve Hynd

Yesterday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen told reporters that the Army isn't at a "tipping point" yet, even though the stress of repeated combat deployments has driven Army and Marine Corps suicides up to a record rate alongside cases of post-traumatic stress.

Today, Spencer Ackerman crunches the hard numbers and details just how little flexibility is left in the Army for any surge deployment to Afghanistan (all emphasis is mine):

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

Spencer continues:

The 2007 troop surge in Iraq was a one-time increase of five combat brigades that ended with those brigades’ tours. By contrast, a troop increase to implement McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy is more likely to be a sustained escalation lasting beyond the tours of the initially deployed brigades. And the brigades themselves called upon to implement the troop increase will have already served numerous deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 14 active-duty brigades that will be available for deployment in December, five have already served three tours abroad since 2002 and four have already served two. If either the 3rd brigade of the 101st Airborne Division or the 1st brigade of the 10th Mountain Division are asked to deploy to Afghanistan, it will be their fifth tour since 2002.

Krepinevich said the stress on soldiers called upon to serve repeated tours was a problem for a troop escalation. “You really have to start worrying about greater incidents of post-traumatic stress disorder, [and] that we’re already seeing in terms of the the NCO corps,” he said, referring to non-commissioned officers like sergeants who play crucial leadership roles in enforcing soldier discipline and standards. “Yes, they’re experienced but they’re just so worn out. And that has to be a concern.”

And he writes that neither Gen. McChrystal nor DefSec. Gates would respond to requests for comment on how McChrystal's proposals for an Afghan escalation might affect dwell times, the crucial rests between deployments that have been cut back as far as twelve months from an ideal of two years. For two of the brigades that might be deployed to Afghanistan as part of that surge it would be their fifth combat deployment since 2002.

Tim Fernholz at The American Prospect today points to the essential stupidity of the surge (again, all emphasis is mine):

there is one true similarity between Iraq and Afghanistan, which is that the ultimate solution is political and economic, not military. That means considering approaches that don't rely on major troop escalation. The question of whether or not the Karzai regime can be an effective partner is critical: without a legitimate partner on the ground, no strategy predicated on keeping the Taliban from coming back to power can work. Withholding additional forces that Karzai needs to prop up his government may be the only way to ensure that the Afghan leader makes real effort to fix his corrupt and ineffectual government, as Ambassador Karl Eikenberry reportedly argued to the president last week. That's one reason why escalation can't be a fait accompli, and troops need to be at the center of the debate.

Similarly, no amount of additional military force will work without commensurate efforts on the civilian and development side, but thus far it's not at all apparent that those efforts are forthcoming. Sending more troops without appropriate civilian resources, or at the expense of those resources, will likely be a futile effort.

...Separating strategy from questions of resources and personnel undercuts the debate before it begins. The simple fact that both Americans and Afghans understand is that the war is over when American troops are no longer sent to Afghanistan. Obama has to figure out how, and when, that will happen.

As I've noted before now, Gen. Eikenberry has led where people like the Center For American Progress think-tank have failed to do so applying CAP's arguments - now vindicated by events - about Iraq both before and after the surge there to Afghanistan. There are all kinds of good reasons for Obama to listen to the ambassadorial general and the danger of pushing the Army and Marines past Mullen's "tipping point" is just one of them. Ret. Gen. Wesley K. Clark yesterday compared Afghanistan to Vietnam and echoed Eikenberry when he said that any troop escalation should be put on hold while an exit strategy is put in place.