TALIBAN, AL-QAEDA AWAITING U.S. AFGHANISTAN EXIT
Jeffrey Goldberg
Bloomberg, April 16, 2012
The multipronged attack carried out by a Taliban faction in Afghanistan [on April 15-16], including sustained raids in the capital’s diplomatic quarter and on Parliament, was meant, the New York Times reported, to “undermine confidence in NATO and Afghan military gains.”
Well, mission accomplished. Although Afghan security forces, with help from NATO, eventually ended the assault, the Taliban’s ability to penetrate Kabul, which has been advertised as Afghanistan’s safest city, suggests a certain tenuousness to the overall security situation. And the attacks raise an overarching worry: that the Obama administration, which is increasingly focused on withdrawing from Afghanistan, is acting according to an arbitrary timetable rather than conditions on the ground—which is to say, whether or not the Taliban is actually losing. In doing so, they seem to be avoiding the hardest questions.
By this September, the administration plans to withdraw the remaining troops that were part of the “surge” ordered in 2009. A complete withdrawal is planned by 2014. The American people, we have been told, are tired of spending money and lives on the conflict formerly known as “the good war.”
But what will they think in 2015, if broad stretches of southern and eastern Afghanistan have once again come under Taliban control…and al-Qaeda…uses these regions to train and to execute plots? What will Americans think when they learn that many of Afghanistan’s women have been forced back under the burqa, and girls have been forced from schools built with U.S. tax dollars? Why, they may ask, did we waste so many lives and so much money in a conflict we decided we couldn’t win?…
The Obama administration’s goals seem muddled even to the people who fund the war. [According] to Representative Mike Rogers,…chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, “The policy in Afghanistan is confusing.…The administration is talking about negotiating with the very people we’ve been trying to discredit for 10 years. We’ve been trying to gain the support of people who are scared to death of the Taliban, and now they’re scared to death that we’re trying to bring the Taliban back.”
Rogers, a former Army officer…doesn’t think it’s too late to inflict a strategic defeat on the Taliban. But he argues that this isn’t a goal shared by the Obama administration:.… “We said we were leaving, we don’t care what the circumstances are. It’s a well-known idea that you never go to war thinking that you can’t win.…”
AFGHANISTAN’S BLOODY SPRING
Editorial
Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2012
The Taliban [recently] unleashed a splashy attack, and it was rebuffed with few allied casualties. The attack’s real target wasn’t so much Kabul as Washington, however.… This would be a good moment for the Commander in Chief to speak up for his own military surge.…
When he is asked about Afghanistan, Mr. Obama repeats his commitment to steady U.S. withdrawals ahead of the 2014 handover to the Afghans, rather than to American military success. He seems trapped by one of his signature re-election campaign lines: “The tide of war is receding.” Receding? The line’s author, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, needs to spend more time with his briefing books on South Asia, the Persian Gulf or the Middle East.…
The New York Times reports that National Security Adviser Tom Donilon has suggested that another 10,000 troops should come home by December, following the pullout of 30,000 surge troops this fall, and another 20,000 by mid-2013.…
The tragedy is that this mantra of retreat clashes with allied military progress. The number of insurgent attacks is down over 20% this year. Aggressive night raids and drone strikes have walloped the Taliban’s leadership. Having cleared Taliban strongholds in the south, allied forces are mounting an offensive this spring in the difficult mountainous east. The number and capabilities of the Afghan army and police are growing. Those forces are gradually taking full responsibility for security, starting with the quieter north and west.…
As early as May’s NATO summit in Chicago, the U.S. can…start to spell out its commitment beyond 2014. Think of the decades-long deployment of U.S. troops in South Korea or Germany. To the east of Afghanistan is nuclear-armed Pakistan, the world’s main terror sanctuary. To the west is Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Like it or not, the U.S. will need to be in the region for years to come.… Time and again, the U.S. military has fulfilled its end of the bargain in Afghanistan. The least Mr. Obama can do is let the troops know he still believes in their cause.
THE DEPTH OF OUR AFGHAN COMMITMENT
Max Boot
Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2012
…Significant progress has been made in recent weeks in negotiating a long-term U.S.-Afghan security accord that the Obama administration hopes to unveil at the NATO summit in Chicago next month. The two most contentious issues—“night raids” and the detention of Taliban prisoners by the U.S. military—were resolved by giving Afghan authorities more control while allowing essential operations to continue.
The bad news—and the reason so many well-to-do Afghans are talking of selling homes and businesses and moving abroad—is that there remain major concerns about how much [ongoing] support the U.S. will provide for Afghanistan.…
The White House can take three specific steps to make clear the depth of our commitment. First, pledge to maintain a force of at least 68,000 troops through the end of 2014. Second, maintain a residual presence after 2014 of at least 30,000 troops to advise and assist Afghan forces. Third, maintain funding of at least $6 billion a year for the Afghan National Security Forces indefinitely.
Unfortunately, there is serious reason to wonder if these conditions will be met. The president is already in the process of cutting the U.S. force—which peaked at 100,000 last year—by 32,000 troops. That drawdown will be completed by the end of September, earlier than military commanders deem advisable. The withdrawal of these “surge” forces has imperiled plans to switch the counterinsurgency focus from southern to eastern Afghanistan where Haqqani sanctuaries remain intact a few hours’ drive from Kabul.…
Even after 2014…Afghanistan will need a robust American presence. Afghan troops…need assistance with logistics, medevac flights, air support, intelligence collection, and other higher-level functions. Providing that support will require a substantial contingent of American personnel who in turn will need more troops to protect and supply them. If U.S. force levels post-2014 are minuscule—say, the 5,000 troops that President Obama offered to leave in Iraq—they will not be able to protect themselves, much less carry out their mission.…
If we avoid…unforced errors and stick with the plans developed by Gens. Stanley McChrystal, David Petraeus and John Allen, we have a good chance to maintain a pro-Western regime in power. The Taliban are too weak to defeat us or our Afghan allies. But we can defeat ourselves.
(Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.)
IRAQ’S SLIDE TOWARD RENEWED VIOLENCE
Ayad Allawi
Washington Times, April 9, 2012
It has been nine years since U.S. forces removed a brutal tyrant in Iraq at a huge cost in lives and treasure, but already the country is slipping back into the clutches of a dangerous new one-man rule, which inevitably will lead to full dictatorship, and already it is dashing hopes for a prosperous, stable, federal and democratic Iraq. Exploiting the unconditional support of Tehran and the indifference of Washington, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has violated the constitution to consolidate his own power by using security and military forces to intimidate and oppress political rivals and, indeed, the general population, as manifested in his suppression of peaceful demonstrations in Iraq.
Mr. al-Maliki presides over an increasingly Kafkaesque bureaucracy characterized by corruption and brutality, relying on the compromised judiciary as a weapon against political opponents while concealing the crimes of his cronies. The government falls short of providing basic services, including clean water, electricity and decent health care; the unemployment rate among our frustrated youth is above 30 percent, making them easy recruits for terrorists and prey for gangs; the security situation is deteriorating day by day in spite of an increase in special security forces. Unfortunately, some of these forces turn out to be part of the problem, operating torture chambers tied directly to the prime minister himself, as widely reported by international human rights organizations.
Of even greater concern is the increasing number of attempts to quash or take over institutions that are supposed to be independent, such as the elections, integrity and communication commissions and, most recently, the Central Bank. These, among other disturbing acts, are chilling reminders of the governance pattern established by dictatorship. More recently, Mr. al-Maliki stepped up his rhetoric against the government of the Kurdistan region. This came on the heels of Mr. al-Maliki’s unconstitutional moves to target Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi and Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq immediately after he returned from a trip to the United States. This, in turn, brought Iraqis to make wrongful inferences about Washington’s role in this series of events…[and commitment] to build[ing] a democratic state in Iraq.…
Washington’s evident disengagement gave Mr. al-Maliki the confidence to move even closer to his objective of achieving absolute power by blatantly avoiding the implementation of the power-sharing Erbil Agreement sponsored by [current President of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region and the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party] Masoud Barzani and the White House. Eventually, the political momentum behind the agreement dissolved, allowing the country to drift back into sectarianism and autocratic rule instead of moving forward with reconciliation and reconstruction.…
The fragmentation of Iraq and a return to sectarian violence will not just tear apart the fabric of Iraq, it will further destabilize an already restless region while undoubtedly inviting the unwanted intervention of neighboring countries, which already are competing for influence in Iraq.
Yet, it is possible to avoid this scenario. The United States must step up its efforts through the United Nations to put the political process back on track without delay.… While it is up to the Iraqis to find a solution within the terms of our constitution, the United States has always been an important ally in Iraq’s democratic transformation, which is yet incomplete. Today more than ever, America’s support is an imperative if we want to avoid seeing Iraq fall back in the hands of one person and his party.…
(Ayad Allawi is the former interim prime minister of Iraq.)
AFGHAN AND IRAQI WOES
Conrad Black
National Review, April 19, 2012
It must be said that the War on Terror has substantially been a success. After the 9/11 atrocities, the conventional wisdom—which was reflected in the claims of bin Laden and others in their bloodcurdling videos—was that terrorism would be routine and devastating against any countries that displeased militant Islam. There was the fear and the promise of unlimited numbers of suicide attackers. But despite close calls over Detroit (the panty-bomber) and in Times Square, and doubtless many quietly foiled efforts, there has been no return to terrorism in North America, and very little in Latin America. Even in Europe and Australasia, prime targets, there has not been much beyond the London buses, Madrid commuter trains, and the Australian-frequented bar in Bali.
The Israelis stopped the suicide bombing in their country by killing the outstanding surviving Hamas leader after each outrage; lo and behold, the eagerness for heroic violent death did not extend to those commissioning the suicide attacks, as bin Laden and the rest cowered and skulked in caves or anonymously behind high walls. Thus, the principal raison d’être of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars has been achieved.…
In 2011, only 1,500 Iraqis died of political violence, the lowest total since Saddam’s time. But the road, rail, and air transport facilities remain in shambles, millions of households are left without power for up to 20 hours a day, tankers can’t dock near Basra because of the size of bribes that are extorted from them, and the nearly $60 billion that the U.S. spent in Iraq on reconstruction seems to have been consumed almost entirely by anti-blast barricades. The former electricity minister, Raad Shalal, was fired last year for embezzling $1.7 billion (in an Iraqi GDP of $80 billion, that’s like a $300 billion theft by an American public official), and the Fertile Crescent, where cultivated agriculture originated, at least in the Western world, now imports 80 percent of its food.…
Though comparisons to Vietnam are nonsense, because the United States was completely militarily successful in Iraq—with volunteer armed forces on a congressionally authorized mission, with fewer than 10 percent of the casualties in Vietnam, and with the government it left behind not under full-scale invasion by another country, as South Vietnam was—it is not clear that the U.S. will ultimately have much more to show for its effort in Iraq than it does for Vietnam.…
Afghanistan is an even cloudier picture. It is a poor and land-locked country inhabited by fierce, xenophobic tribes divided by the mountainous terrain. The British Empire and the Soviet Union gave up on it as not worth, geopolitically, a fraction of the cost that would be incurred to subdue it. Of course, the U.S. and its allies had no interest in occupying or colonizing Afghanistan, and after chasing out bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorists and the knuckle-dragging Taliban Islamist government (and the two were far from interchangeable and not overly friendly), the international forces’ objective there has been to keep the Taliban out, and, at least until recently, enact some version of George W.’s scatter-gun democratization crusade.
At over ten years, this has been the longest foreign combat role in American history, and for six of those years it was largely an under-manned holding operation while the main regional military operation was in Iraq. The Hamid Karzai government in Kabul is corrupt, undemocratic, treacherous, and steeped in the insolence of ingratitude. American political tactics have become ever more peculiar, as the final Allied military offensive has been extensively, publicly described in advance, and the U.S. is encouraging talks with the Taliban.… The U.S. has also lavished assistance on Pakistan, which is the chief backer of one of the most murderous Taliban factions in Afghanistan, the Haqqani.
It is no longer clear what the American war goals are. A Pentagon study indicates that half of those in the Defense Department familiar with the mission in Afghanistan think it will fail whatever its objective now is.…
The pressure of remaining ten years in an ambiguous war effort in Afghanistan has seriously strained American volunteer personnel. Many have done multiple tours, and while the casualty levels are not high by the standards of conventional wars, this conflict is no less nerve-wracking.… The terrible strain of such a long and uncertain commitment is what explains American soldiers’ burning the Koran and the American soldier who went berserk and killed civilians. The ability of the United States to carry out such actions is shrinking and clearly much more selectivity will be necessary in future, because of our failure to clearly analyze our strategic goals.…
