Abdullah Abdullah is dropping out of the second run of the Afghan elections, essentially because he has no faith that the count will be accurate. This means that Hamid Karzai will be elected to another five-year term, but it also means that any chance that Karzai’s victory would be seen as legitimate has gone out the window.
I really don’t know what Obama should do about this. But I think it should end any consideration of committing for the long haul to expanding the power of the central government. Karzai’s government is inept, corrupt, illegitimate, and incapable of establishing security throughout the country. The fact that Karzai’s brother is a CIA asset who is part of the opium trade is just a symptom of the larger problem.
Rather than making a commitment to the central government, the Obama administration should look at this problem differently. The rise of the Taliban and Taliban-like groups in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan is a national security and human rights issue for the people of those two countries, and potentially a national security problem for us, as well. A serious strategy would analyze the degree of the threat and the best ways to manage it. We should have learned in the early 1960’s that we couldn’t win the support of the conservative rice farmers of the Mekong Delta from the air. As long as the Viet Cong controlled the ground, those villagers were never going to support some far-off central government that could not protect them. Bombing their villages just made things worse.
So, containing these militants is important. But drying up their support has to be part of a much longer-term effort. In my opinion, we can’t really lead that effort. The Saudis and the Pakistanis could stop supporting and tolerating them, and that would be far more effective than drone attacks. I’d work on that strategy. But we should acknowledge that these remote mountainous regions have never really been effectively governed by anyone. We (along with the Pakistanis and Afghans) can work to prevent them from moving down out of the mountains to launch operations in Kabul and Islamabad, but we can’t do much about their effective control of these remote villages.
I think the real threat to our national security comes from Pakistan and their nuclear weapons. So, rather than get bogged down in who controls what valley, we should think primarily about the stability of Pakistan’s government and the status of their nuclear stockpile. And, we ought to work out a strategy for doing that that uses the least amount of troops and costs the least amount of money.
P-I-P-E-L-I-N-E….
you’ve been focused on the pipeline for ever, but it has exactly zero to do with why we’re there.
Here’s Jerome from 2005. Also, see this.
Why are we there?
For the reasons we’ve always said we were there. To prevent a fundamentalist Islamic government there from providing a playground for terrorists who train and plot to attack Indian and Western interests.
recent news report:
“[Brzezinski’s speech on 29 Nov 2009] was notable only for his insistence that the U.S. ought to be more actively engaged in promoting a north-south pipeline through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. He said, for example, that India needs access to the resources of central Asia, an area especially rich in natural gas, as well as oil.”
the best strategy is to leave. we can do it now, or we can do it later, but the price in blood and treasure is just going to escalate.
their is no military solution, period. l, and many more influential and informed people as well, that afghanistan is where empires go to die. the most recent example being the ill fated russian adventure.
unfortunately, the war on drugs…a multi-billion dollar hog trough for any number of organizations from domestic police forces, blackwater, etc. up to the cia, has now become the underlying raison d’être for the u.s involvement there.
the solution has to be primarily economic, imo, and the first step would be to pressure big pharma, world wide, to purchase the opium crop for medicinal use….iirc, there’s a shortage of suitable raw material for morphine and it’s derivatives…the afghani’s are recognized as the pre-emminent poppy growers of the world. it’s what fuels the insurgencies, funds the drug/war lords and creates more chaos than any other single thing.
it’ll never happen….but if that source of income and it’s attendant violence and coercion could be removed from the power structure and applied directly to the population further down the food chain, then the people in the villages…the majority of the population…might just have a chance at a reasonable life. because of that they might just be willing, and able, to figure out a reasonable way to govern their own country.
all the other bs extraneous reasons vis-a-vis the GWOT, can be dealt with through law enforcement and geo-political strategies much more effectively than militarily.
what we’re doing isn’t working, and it’s not going to work.
As logical as your post is, it skirts the problem of who makes what money doing what and who is paying for what. If I can get you to pay my cabfare I’m never going to take public transit. I might just hire a limo if you foot the bill.
Cui bono?
Everyone pays for the military budget and the wars. But who profits? We know that the whole Iraq war was based on falsehoods. So why would anyone think that the Afghanistan war is anything but a parallel operation to gain more profit from petroleum? We know there have been plans for decades to run a pipeline through Afghanistan like a straw to suck oil and natural gas out of Central Asia. You can go over to Asia Times and read all about it. You could get a better understanding of all the recent belligerence in the vicinity of Georgia just by following the flow of oil.
The drug wars? Law enforcement has always known that there is no such thing as a drug-free society. It’s all about who controls the drugs. The drug wars in America have been fought like the Japanese fought their drug wars in China in the 30s and 40s. They invaded China with their secret police and gangsters (Yokio Kodama, for ex) and CONTROLLED the drug industry. They’d oversee the opium and heroin shipments and control the pricing. A coolie or a prince with a needle in his arm wasn’t going to be fighting against your army.
You only need to look around a little to see how the DEA/CIA are involved in the illegal drug industry.
Wally Hilliard, who ran the flight school where Mo Atta trained, had multiple small airline companies in Florida that didn’t fly their routes. How do you stay in business with an airline if you never have paying customers? Well, one of his planes was busted at Orlando International with over 40 lbs of heroin. And Hilliard was never charged with anything.
Asa Hutchinson was the federal prosecutor in Western Arkansas when Mena was being pelted with duffelbags full of cocaine. He did his job so well he got a job in Homeland Security from Dubya guarding our borders. That’s how it works.
If you want to understand Afghanistan you have to understand that the CIA is the Pinkerton Agency for the oligarchy. They are the Japanese secret police in China. They do the dirty work and they control the drug trade. They make tax-free profits through heroin and cocaine, they kill and torture without much fear of prosecution. They make the world safe for Exxon and Unocal. They have a web of friends throughout the media who dutifully tell us lies in order that we don’t see the big picture.
Afghanistan is where Big Oil wants the pipeline. In meantime the CIA sits on top of the biggest pile of opium in the world. What’s not to like about the war?
Why aren’t you saluting the flag hard enough? Where’s your flag pin, pinko?
Maybe it was Yoshio Kodama, who, by the way, worked with the US military and the CIA after WWII. Small world.
you are putting 2 and 2 and 2 together and getting 8.
The pipeline would carry natural gas. Please get that part right, or it really sounds like you are unfamiliar with the debate over this issue.
Look. We abandoned Afghanistan in 1989 precisely because it had no interest to our oligarchy. Perhaps that was the correct decision, since we had no major interests there and we saw what happened to the Russians when they tried to run the place.
The pipeline would be a perfectly legitimate project if it were profitable. The problem is, it wouldn’t be, as Jerome explains.
We took it on the chin on 9/11, and Bush felt someone needed to pay for that. Even Gore would have felt it necessary to disrupt the training camps in Afghanistan and rout the Taliban out of Kabul. That part of it made sense. But it didn’t make economic sense to the oligarchy, which is why we wound up in Iraq.
There is not money to made in Afghanistan. There is money to be made in using our military, but we can do that in Iraq where there is a lot more money to be made. Get it?
Where (or how?) did you address the suggestion that “legit” pharma companies buy up all the opium, effectively removing the illegal supply and funding smaller-scale farmers through open purchase?
The most reasonable suggestion I’ve heard recently. Negotiate a status of forces agreement with the Karzai government that reduces our role to “training the Afghan government forces” and commits us to withdrawing in 18 months.
I also think you are right about a diplomatic initiative with our “good friends” Pakistan and Saudi Arabia asking them to shut off the flow of funds.
I can’t see that staying in Afghanistan is is our best interest. It’s 8 years, NATO is an occupier now. This is a no win situation. We have nothing to win there and we don;t belong there. This latest withdrawal from the run off is a bad sign. I don’t want any more Americans to die there.
Bush has to be condemned for ignoring the situation there for so long. He just walked away from it and to add insult to injury, gets protection and benefits.
No matter what Obama does, it isn’t going to come out well. He has been handed a grenade.
If we stay there, we will be talking about the same awful situation and it won’t be better.
Train and help in civilian matters and getthe combat troops out.
The basis of a successful COIN effort, as spelled out in Field Manual 3-24, which I strongly suggest that progressives read and study, is the successful defense of, and cooperation with, an effective “Host Nation.” The Host Nation is central to any successful COIN effort.
So the main consideration in Afghanistan is not military, nor militants, nor extremists, but the government of Afghanistan, and we know what that’s like.
Some snippets from FM 3-24 (which I again suggest progressives study in its entirety):
———————
The primary objective of any COIN operation is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government.
Six possible indicators of legitimacy that can be used to analyze threats to stability include the following:
The ability to provide security for the populace (including protection from internal and external threats).
Selection of leaders at a frequency and in a manner considered just and fair by a substantial majority of the populace.
A high level of popular participation in or support for political processes.
A culturally acceptable level of corruption.
A culturally acceptable level and rate of political, economic, and social development.
A high level of regime acceptance by major social institutions.
General Chang Ting-chen of Mao Zedong’s central committee once stated that revolutionary war was 80 percent political action and only 20 percent military. Such an assertion is arguable and certainly depends on the insurgency’s stage of development; it does, however, capture the fact that political factors have primacy in COIN.
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf
———
When one focuses on the government angle, and writes like this—
“I really don’t know what Obama should do about this. But I think it should end any consideration of committing for the long haul to expanding the power of the central government. Karzai’s government is inept, corrupt, illegitimate, and incapable of establishing security throughout the country.”
—then the course of action is obvious, isn’t it.
I think those are the reasons I said we should give up on the idea of strengthening the central government. But there is a flip side, too. And that is to look at the insurgency end of things and ask how much legitimacy they have. Where they rule the ground, the rule the ground. But they don’t have any kind of nationalistic legitimacy like Ho Chi Minh’s armies did. There is nothing inevitable about a resurrection of Taliban rule. It wouldn’t be remotely desirable to the vast majority of Afghans. So, the way forward may be somewhere between doubling down on a hopeless Karzai government and abandoning the country to lunatics. Whatever it is, though, it won’t fit into an nice box about promoting democracy.
With due respect, you’re not getting it. There is no “flip side.” The legitimacy of the insurgency doesn’t matter. The fact that they may be “lunatics”, or may be unpopular, doesn’t matter. Focus only on the government, or rather the lack of one, and understand that w/o a government COIN won’t work and Afghanistan is best left to Afghans.
Since when does an unstable Afghanistan really threaten the US of A? This poor, unstable country is on the opposite side of the earth! And the earth isn’t small. Plus it isn’t like the US, Britain and Russia, among others, haven’t failed at this sort of thing before. At a hundred and seventy million dollars per day it’s a lousy gamble and not something that true progressives should countenance.
The US continues to call the Afghanistan effort COIN in spite of the lack of a COIN basis — an effective Host Nation. I urge progressives to read FM 3-24, the COIN bible recently produced by Saint David of Petraeus. No Host Nation equals no COIN, and regarding a war policy there is no alternative to COIN.
Since when? Hmm. Let me think about that. Gee. I can’t remember any time our national security was threatened from that region. Oh wait!! I remember. There was that time that a plane flew into the Pentagon, and two others leveled lower Manhattan. A fourth was either headed for Congress, which was in session, or the White House.
That must be some kind of false memory I have formed.
In any case, I’m not talking about a classic counterinsurgency effort and neither is Biden, or really have the people debating what to do right now inside the administration.
Yes, it is a false memory. There was no threat to US national security as a result of the nineteen men with box cutters who trained in the US according to a plot hatched in Germany. Are you afraid, very afraid? In any case studies have shown that military operations exacerbate terrorism, not lessen it.
In any case, you are off-topic in refusing a dialogue on the topic which is indeed COIN, and which is now being transformed (yet again) into nation-building, this tine in a nation that won’t be built.
Why do you call this a “progressive community”, by the way, and not more accurately neo-liberal and pro-Democratic, of the DLC variety?
I can’t really think of a bigger threat to our national security than having someone target the Pentagon and try to decapitate our government while bringing Wall Street to its knees. That kind of defines non-nuclear threats to national security at the highest level.
Remember that the 9/11 Hamburg Cell originally wanted to fight the Russians, but were flipped.
They received their indoctrination there (for suicide missions) and only received their pilot training in the United States.