Afghanistan
The wars in the middle east, mainly Afghanistan have chipped their way back into the news. Public and policy maker alike divide their opinion between packing up and going home or developing the resoluteness of Ton-kin. Just a few more soldiers and we got this thing right
Military Chief Says More Troops Needed for Afghan War - NYTimes.com. Afghanistan gets compared to the Iraqi situation. I can see that that suggests itself but Iraq was almost well defined by comparison. Three main ethnic groups Sunni's Shiites and Kurds. Shiites are a majority population subjugated, the Sunni's a minority population but long dominant; politically, educationally, and in bureaucracy. Kurds, since the first Gulf war have lived almost as a separate nation strong enough to stand against Sunnis or Shiite, but perhaps not both. We took power from the Baathists (mainly Sunni) and gave it to the Shiites, who were a submerged political force with major fault lines running through them. Among these considerable radicalism, after many years as an oppressed minority. Close ties to Iran and strong sect rivalry's, beyond that. Shiite groups fought us to achieve long standing goals, the Sunnis fought us to regain power. Islamist extremists fought us under the banner of al Qaeda Iraq, because we were there. They all fought each other. Eventually we brought in more troops re-deployed to a population protection stance -- to keep them all separated. This we branded The Surge (tm). We paid every Sunni we could, to form local militias against the extremists, to stay in their neighborhoods, and stay out of trouble. To have a single government that could contract petroleum deals and be less that a total adjunct of the Iranian government in Tehran, was the new face of victory. Anyway we would always have Kurdistan.
The first thing you hear about Afghanistan is that the situation found there is more complex than Iraq. More tribes more divisions more poverty, more and more varied terrain. The harder road in more ways than one. The long southeastern border is an open unsecured frontier and the territories of Pakistan adjacent are an ungoverned sanctuary for the Taliban and other rebel forces. The chief commodity of Afghanistan essentially is heroin. It is a least a major cash crop. Narcotics profits and the criminality associated with the drug trade fund the fighting. The Afghan government in Kabul wants neither to alienate the farmers or give up the portion of poppy money that flows to them. US Forces share this ambivalence on the narcotics trade believing it is a distraction to tackle this issue now, not wishing to drive people to the arms of the Taliban, even as the Russians complain Afghan heroin flows primarily in their direction. The recent election rather than bolstering our handcrafted and preferred government seemed fraudulent enough to make Karzai's government, precariously seated as it was, disappear from legitimacy altogether.
At precisely this point a report written by the office of General McChrystal, the Officer responsible for Afghan operations is leaked; saying the war is in dire and unsure status
McChrystal: More Forces or 'Mission Failure' - washingtonpost.com. Most interpret this as pressure to double down with a further surge similar to Iraq's
Obama to Weigh Buildup Option in Afghan War - NYTimes.com. This seems to be the view of McChrystal, and his supporters in Washington (in the Pentagon, in the White House, elsewhere)
General McChrystal Asks Obama for More Troops - NYTimes.com. Additionally only a relative silence or quiet acquiescence by other theater commanders such as Cent-Com Gen. David Petraeus. The meanings of the leak to Bob Woodward in raw political terms is beyond me, but I imagine the Obama administration rather desired decisions concerning the Afghan and Iraq wars to occur as automatically as possible. The current situation allows them to follow the recommendation of the military professionals
Obama Considers Strategy Shift in Afghan War - NYTimes.com with the latitude offered by the military being seen as overplaying their hand .
McChrystal Rejects Scaling Down Afghan Military Aims - NYTimes.com This is now the eighth year of this war, not the first, the second or even the fifth. This is the first place to start your thinking about the situation. After putting in 20,000 troops half a year ago to hold and stabilize the situation President Obama finds it has accomplished little casualties rise. The war effort slides beyond our control. One Friedman unit ( 6 mos.) into this administration and the military and various vectors of neoconservatives are openly declaring the strategy unworkable and the war nigh on unwinnable.
McChrystal's Review Creates Divide on War in Afghanistan - washingtonpost.com. The election was the precipitating incident of the current concern. It made it difficult to defend the prevailing government (politically if not militarily). It becomes problematic to claim before a skeptical world and unconvinced Afghan people that the military effort is the front of the Afghan people. Karzai attempted to present this as a fait accompli, and leave it to the US to adapt to his reality within his demimonde. The US can respond by establishing unilateral arrangements with segments of the populace until they believe their effort speaks for a true majority. They can bring as much of the former taliban in as stake-holders as possible If the Powell doctrine has any relevancy left I would say give the Afghanistan theater the extra battalions it asks for, as long as the Army can support it. Particularly if this happens in conjunction with a ongoing draw-down in Iraq. I say this because technology is not the force multiplier, the panacea, that so many in the military were lead by their systems analysts to believe it was. Simple uneducated opposition can demonstrate remarkable levels of training resilience and adaptation, confounding static approaches
Changes in Afghanistan, Washington May Require Shift in U.S. War Strategy - washingtonpost.com. There are no true small wars. It takes soldiers to control violent opposition, as much as assassinations. Those thinking further through the Powell doctrine, point out that in recent polling the public has largely turned away from the war (wars), yet they were around and for them when we started them. The notion that if you break you've bought it stands. Afghanistan needs what-ever combination of new tires and a paint-job it takes to get someone to buy the title from us. That, it should be understood, means being able to leave a government in charge with a majority of coercive force in hand. We take charge, with the force needed to build a majority coalition and a policing force, of people signaling they are willing to be citizens of an Afghan state
U.S. Plans to Shift Forces to Populated Areas of Afghanistan - washingtonpost.com. This may take a few years:
Meet-the-Afghan-Army-Is-It-a-Figment-of-Washingtons-Imagination - Metafilter. Then we leave. We don't worry about whether we have won the Program for the New American Century's idiot war or not, we leave.
The Obama administration already signaled, by retaining Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense that the military had a comparatively free hand to work out solutions to these affairs on their own terms. Conduct counter-insurgency with general purpose troops according to best practices. Conduct counter-terrorism with special operations and special applications.
We must decide our true national security interest in these matters, and particularly when it comes to American soldiers, to American lives it must be defined narrowly. A few years ago it was commonly viewed that the world had a basic divide between Integrating / Non Integrating population areas. Integrating areas were those belonging to or being drawn into the worlds trade and commercial system. These areas were considered unlikely to form existential threats to other peoples or nations. Non integrating populations were
Paul R. Pillar - Terrorists' Real Haven Isn't on the Ground, It's Online - washingtonpost.com. The idea was not so much to destroy them, but to peel people away from their recalcitrant leaders until they lead nothing. We cannot be the world's policemen, though. We cannot be everywhere, we do not and never will have the level of manpower and fortune to do such enforcement. Moreover it weakens the principle of sovereignty. The idea that the world's nations must rule (and control) their affairs is what we ought seek to preserve. Bottom up order is the only stable order. The goal is to bring the populations of the world grinding away at the periphery in poverty into the prevailing world economy and integrating them into its rule based meta-society. Imperfection is acceptable. It's an imperfect world.
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