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“But, in a nod to my point, they also talked about the threat of instability in Pakistan that is presented by the Taliban movement on both sides of the border.”
There is no border in this Af-Pak area and it’s one people. They don’t like Pakistan’s government butting into their lives and least of all some infidel foreigners. Any deeper US involvement will create more blow-back for Pakistan and it’s people. The Pakistan military is on the right track for the first time in eight years, but this takes time … a decade or more. The drone attacks is most the US is permitted to do in this border region. And of course the Taliban was funded and supported by Pakistan’s ISI. Pakistan’s truce with India over the Kashmir province is very fragile as we have seen with the Mumbai attacks originating in Pakistan and the Lashkar-e-Taiba terror group. One of many Islamic terrorist groups involved in Kashmir is Jaish-e-Mohammed.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in remarks to business executives in New York, stressed that the administration’s strategy is to go after not just the al-Qaida terror network but also the Taliban militants allied with it in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“As long as Afghanistan and Pakistan struggle to control their borders and extend their sovereignty to all their territory, the door is open to bad actors, and the result can be an environment in which terrorist groups thrive.”
U.S. military cross-border operations from Afghanistan into Pakistan have become increasingly overt and unilateral since the spring. More than a tactical shift, these operations are meant to address the strategic problem of Pakistan’s lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where Taliban fighters from Afghanistan rest, recuperate and resupply and where other jihadists mount a growing Islamist insurgency in Pakistan.
REMINISCENT OF VIET CONG SANCTUARIES
… developing and implementing a new strategy for Afghanistan. This strategy will have to address the situation in Pakistan, where FATA sanctuaries for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are reminiscent of North Vietnamese army sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
High in the Hindu Kush Mountains
Following up on earlier posts here and here about Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), I’ve been looking closely at the arrest in Chicago on anti-terrorism charges of two men linked to LeT and accused of plotting attacks in Denmark.
Analysts say the Chicago case demonstrates the global reach of the militant group and its ability to plot attacks in India and around the world. The court documents submitted by U.S. authorities also allege that Lashkar-e-Taiba had suggested that attacks on India be given priority over the planned attack in Denmark, highlighting the threat still posed by the group one year after Mumbai.
As discussed in this factbox, analysts cite several reasons for Pakistan’s reluctance to dismantle Lashkar-e-Taiba. These include its role in Kashmir and in India-Pakistan rivalry, and popular support for the humanitarian work of its Jamaat ud-Dawa sister organisation. They also cite an unwillingness to create a new enemy right now when Pakistan is already fighting the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan and facing a wave of reprisal attacks in its cities. Lashkar-e-Taiba is the only Pakistani militant group which is not believed to have been involved in attacking targets within Pakistan itself.
Yes the failure to realise that communities across the world cross borders like they dont exist and to think that countries end and start where some colonialist drew a line is a tad disturbing.
In Afghanistan the Taleban and allies will fade away and reappear in other places and wont tak eany notice of any border as they fight against the occupiers, whihc is what they see us as so no point denying it.
In Pakistan the Taleban, allies, people displaced by some military offensive or polticised by having their wedding party drone bombed, and their shadowy allies in Pakistani security and military apparatus will fade away and reappear in other places to harrass and strike at those they see interffering with their affairs or those they see as collabaorationst, whihc is how they see it so we may as well not deny that either.
What few have learned is that since the end of world war 2 military intervention to influence the affairs of other countries has totally failed to achieve anything in most cases. Considering that Vietnam was one of the biggest examples of this utter fialure you would have thought we would have learned first. Sadly no………
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Bush administration was on the right track in the beginning of the bombing campaign. However, nation building should never have become the policy for Afghan warfare. The border with Pakistan is indefensible and does not separate different people. The tribal areas in Pakistan were not controlled by the military and least of all the Pakistan administration. When the Al Qaeda forces with Osama Bin Laden were allowed to escape in December 2001, it became impossible to achieve any goals in Afghanistan. A ground war does not lead anywhere except more civilian deaths and further troops increase. Cut your losses, get the troops out in a timetable with NATO forces. The mayor of Kabul should start taking responsibility and let the Afghan forces of his war lord buddies make the sacrifice for Afghan’s future state.
What is happening today in Pakistan, the military doing the fighting in Southern Waziristan, comes years late. The focus should have been the Af-Pak situation and the Iraq war push caused a massive failure with many wrongful deaths in Afghan warfare. Al Qaeda was made up of foreign fighters, leftover from the joined CIA/ISI support to bring down the occupation by the Soviet union.
The Taliban has been part of Afghan and Pakistan society, one can never win when fighting a motivated people defending their country. See the failures of the Vietnam war.
Holy Saudi Arabia is the terror state
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
FOB SHANK, Afghanistan — Veterans of Iraq recall rolling to war along asphalted highways, sweltering in flat scrublands and chatting with city-wise university graduates connected to the wider world.
Now fighting in Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers invariably encounter illiterate farmers who may never have talked to an American as they slog into remote villages on dirt tracks through bitterly cold, snow-streaked mountains.
“Before deploying here we were given training on language, culture, everything. I thought that since I was an Iraq combat veteran, I didn’t need any of that stuff. I was wrong. Both countries may be Muslim but this is a totally different place,” says Sgt. Michael McCann, returning from a patrol in the east-central province of Logar.
“The sheer terrain of Afghanistan is much more challenging: the mountains, the altitudes, severity of weather, the distances. That wears on an army,” says Maj. Joseph Matthews, a battalion operations officer in the 10th Mountain Division. “You can flood Baghdad with soldiers but if you want to flood the mountains you are going to need huge numbers and logistics.”
McCann, a military policeman from Enterprise, Ala., says that the highest he ever got during his Iraq tour was a five-story building. In Afghanistan, troops routinely cross passes 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) and higher, descending into valleys where they say villagers “hibernate like bears” for up to five winter months, cut off from the outside world by the snows.
Looking up the upper Keshem Valley“This is not an interconnected society. There is a complete separation of ideas from Pul-i-Alam and Kharwar,” notes Matthews, of Vero Beach, Fla., of the provincial capital and a district just 23 miles (37 kilometers) away. “The difference between a village and a city in this country is about 200 years,” says the officer, who served for more than three years in Iraq and is on his second Afghanistan tour.
Col. David B. Haight, commander of U.S. forces in Logar and neighboring Wardak province, half jokes that some frustrated Afghans come to him and say: “‘You can put a man on the moon so can’t we get a road here?’ and I have to tell them, ‘You know, it’s a lot harder to build a road in Afghanistan than put a man on the moon.'”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
WASHINGTON (Times Online) – Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says.
The report asserts that the failure to kill or capture bin Laden at his most vulnerable in December 2001 has had lasting consequences beyond the fate of one man. Bin Laden’s escape laid the foundation for today’s reinvigorated Afghan insurgency and inflamed the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.
“Cornered in some of the most fobidding terrain on earth, he and several hundred of his men endured relentless pounding by American aircraft, as many as 100 air strikes a day,” it says. “Bin Laden expected to die,” it claimes. “His last will and testament, written on December 14, reflected his fatalism. He instructed his wives not to remarry and apologised to his children for devoting himself to jihad.”
Tora Bora revisted: How we failed to get Bin Laden and why it matters today (pdf)
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
Replace Iraq with Afghanistan, what is the change to Bush/Cheney policy for the surge option in
IraqAfghanistan?"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
Interview with former CIA intelligence officer Paul Pillar.
Why are we there?
He has kept a close watch on the operation in Afghanistan. And he worries that at a time when president Obama is under pressure from the military to send extra troops to Afghanistan there is little or no attention for the one question that matters: why are we still even in Afghanistan?
“The US and other Western governments say we are in Afghanistan in order to deny terror groups like Al Qaeda a safe haven from which to plan new attacks. But that is no longer a valid assumption. Terrorists don’t need a sanctuary to plan attacks from. We are investing enormously in an operation that is based on a flawed assumption. The reality is that the terror threat to the West would not significantly increase if we were to leave Afghanistan.”
“Terror groups will use a safe haven if it is there. I’m not saying it doesn’t make any difference. But is not critical to them. Other things matter more to terrorists: popular support, skills, money, logistics… There is nothing they can do in Afghanistan they couldn’t do some place else. Planning, coordinating and preparing terror attacks can be done from anywhere, I have learnt over the years.”
Mission creep
Are there other justifications for the war in Afghanistan?
“You mean that events in Afghanistan influence what happens in Pakistan? That’s what we call ‘mission creep’: you expand your mission as it lasts longer. But Nato wouldn’t be in Afghanistan if it wasn’t for 9/11. So if the stability of Pakistan was the reason for the war we would never have gone there.”
“I also think the importance of Afghanistan for Pakistan has been exaggerated. It doesn’t amount to much really. We keep hearing scary scenarios about what could happen in Pakistan – mad mullahs getting their hands on nuclear weapons. It is highly unlikely. So I don’t think we can keep justifying our mission in Afghanistan any longer by pointing to the situation in Pakistan.”
Timetable
Your advice is that Nato should withdraw?
“If general McChrystal [the US commander in Afghanistan, Ed.] gets his way – I understand he wants 45,000 extra troops – then the US will reach the level of the Russians at the peak of their deployment in the eighties: more than 100,000. You don’t want to go there. I’m not in favour of a precipitate withdrawal. I would envision something parallel to what is going on in in Iraq, where we’re pulling out all the troops by the end of 2011. A timetable for withdrawal.”
So the president, who has called this ‘a necessary war’, was wrong?
“The president has gotten himself in a box. That is against the backdrop of the whole way Afghanistan played a role in the campaign. He didn’t want to look like a wimp on national security. And now he’s stuck with it. He called Afghanistan a necessary war as recently as March. It is hard to back away from a statement like that just a few months later.”
Charlie Rose: A conversation with Paul Pillar of the CIA
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."How to fight an enemy that knows no borders, recognizes no nations, etc. etc? ONE WORD:
Crack.
The absence of border btween Afghanistan and Pakistan is what Obama addressed with his 3 points (and I was very happy to hear that) – but mainly I don’t share your optimism about Pakistan’s gov. What about ISI? is there any control over it outside of it? and who was responsible for Benazir Bhutto’s death? I really have no ideas or theories on any of those questions, I just know from friends and colleagues working there and writing about that it is immensely complicated and full of unknowns and that the principle known about the situation is corruption all around.
Presumably this is the “the situation is so complicated we shouldn’t rush to simplistic analysis” argument that Booman is now pushing. This Rumsfeldian embrace of the mystical “complexity” of the situation, as if that somehow served as a reasonable justification for the outrageous destruction of resources and lives that Obama is now engaging upon, is amusing to me.
Oui just told you precisely whats going on, and you reply by insisting on the unknown properties of the problem in order to screen Obama from criticism. This is just like the “no one knows if Iraq will be a success or not in 10 years” junk that I fell for the first time. 100,000 (+100,000 “contractors”) soldiers literally cannot accomplish anything in this vast, intractable and deeply alien place. The loose nukes/India-Pakistan war fear-mongering is simply a rhetorical device.
The taliban, as a native group, can no more be “defeated” by an occupation than the french could be “defeated” once Germany occupied the country, short of enslavement and genocide. Particularly given their freedom of operation in Pakistan. The connection between the taliban and Al qaeda exists but is irrelevant, since Al Qeada can be and is in many other places. Far from suppressing them, our presence radicalizes the society and destabilizes a region the Pakistanis have no desire (and little capacity) to suppress themselves, and which otherwise has very little to do with what happens in Islamabad, much less America! This radicalized society then becomes a perfect ally of Al Qaeda. The greatest threat bin Laden heard in Obama’s speech was not the surge but the claim of withdrawal in 18 months, however hollow that promise is likely to be.
At best Obama can offer a “We created this monster that is threatening Pakistan and regional stability, so we have to take it out.” But even that minimal honesty has no credibility, since it is almost entirely America that is destabilizing the region. The much more convincing argument is given by Oui in his link: Obama is boxed in by largely domestic political concerns. The surge is political kabuki.
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My comment became a bit extended, see my new diary – Easier Said Than Done: More Afghan Police on the Streets. An excellent documentary also by NatDeoTV: Inside the Green Berets.
The task cannot be accomplished in 18 months, the training of illiterate, young Afghan men will take a decade. Corruption at all levels in Afghan life is insurmountable. The Afghan will switch sides for a few bucks a day more from the next warlord. That’s how they survive. Afghanistan area is 50% larger than Iraq and it’s foreign to NATO and US forces. To survey the border from Kandahar to Jalalabad is an immense task for so few troops and resources.
China’s interest in Pakistan rail links
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."glad you are amused and glad you caught on to my resemblance to Donald Rumsfeld. I don’t find the analogy between the usa in afghanistan and nazi germany in france convincing, nor do I hold much with Viet Nam analogies for the present situation either.
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(The New Yorker) July 9, 2007 – Working first with the D.E.A. and then with the State Department, Douglas Wankel helped create the Afghan Eradication Force, with troops of the Afghan National Police drawn from the Ministry of the Interior. Last year, an estimated four hundred thousand acres of opium poppies were planted in Afghanistan, a fifty-nine-per-cent increase over the previous year. Afghanistan now supplies more than ninety-two per cent of the world’s opium, the raw ingredient of heroin. More than half the country’s annual G.D.P., some $3.1 billion, is believed to come from the drug trade, and narcotics officials believe that part of the money is funding the Taliban insurgency.
Wankel was in Uruzgan to oversee a poppy-eradication campaign–the first major effort to disrupt the harvest in the province. He had brought with him a two-hundred-and-fifty-man A.E.F. contingent, including forty-odd contractors supplied by DynCorp, a Virginia-based private military company, which has a number of large U.S. government contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world. In Colombia, DynCorp helps implement the multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia, to eradicate coca.
The Taliban instituted a strict Islamist policy against the opium trade during the final years of their regime, and by the time of their overthrow they had virtually eliminated it. But now, Lieutenant General Mohammad Daud-Daud, Afghanistan’s deputy minister of the interior for counter-narcotics, told me, “there has been a coalition between the Taliban and the opium smugglers. This year, they have set up a commission to tax the harvest.” In return, he said, the Taliban had offered opium farmers protection from the government’s eradication efforts. The switch in strategy has an obvious logic: it provides opium money for the Taliban to sustain itself and helps it to win over the farming communities.
Dutch battle Taliban in Tarin Kowt
Sadly, that has meant increased numbers of deaths and wounded among our soldiers and Marines. But over and over again, we have tactically defeated the Taliban, and the local population is well aware of our gains and thankful for them.
We also have seen other successes, including the capture of 102 tons of opium and drug equipment in Helmand – the largest drug seizure since the foreign troops arrived in 2001. When I was in Helmand last month, Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, commander of “Task Force Leatherneck” which conducted the raid, told me that the cache was so large that the only way it could be destroyed was by bombing it from the air.
Helmand and the other provinces of RC/South – the area now so capably led by the Dutch commander Major General Mart de Kruif – gets much of the attention these days. And understandably so. It’s where the violence is most acute. And where we are pursuing the counterinsurgency strategy of “shaping, clearing, holding, and building.”
After we shape, clear, and hold territory, we are increasingly better at building as a key phase in our strategy. The most important concept of this are the 26 Provincial Reconstruction Teams that are deployed throughout Afghanistan. These PRTs embody a joint military and civilian approach to stabilizing Afghanistan and, increasingly, will be used to facilitate development and reconstruction. Activities in the field include rebuilding damaged schools and hospitals, restoring water supplies and infrastructure, and supporting local governance.
CIVILIAN SUPPORT CRUCIAL
Civilian support is crucial, as the Dutch have already demonstrated in Uruzgan Province. There, the number of children in school has quadrupled – from 12,000 to 50,000; 100 health centers have been built; there are now 31 doctors, up from just two; and infant mortality in Uruzgan has dropped to 25 percent. The former commander of the NATO Task Force in Uruzgan, General Tom Middendorp, says that 75-80 percent of the population in Uruzgan now lives in a much more secure environment.
But in a country where much of the land seems still mired in the Middle Ages, changing the infrastructure from the ground up requires money and expertise – and a great deal of both. Despite the high cost, the international community remains committed to Afghanistan’s development, and has altogether pledged $110 billion since 2001 (pdf), with the United States supplying about half that total. The Dutch contribution to security and reconstruction is more than $2 billion just for the period from 2006 to 2011.
In a country where the average daily income hovers at around $1.50 a day, these totals mean the difference between food on a plate and no food at all. Or perhaps access to a doctor for a pregnant woman. Or a chance to learn to read and write for a young girl; to grow wheat or corn rather than poppies. In short, to have a life worth living.
The strategy we now have in place will not crush the insurgency quickly or immediately. As President Obama has said, “The insurgency in Afghanistan didn’t just happen overnight, and we won’t defeat it overnight.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
HELMAND, Afghanistan (SF Chronicle/AP) – U.S. Marines swooped down behind Taliban lines in helicopters and MV-22 Osprey VTOL aircraft in the first offensive since President Barack Obama announced an American troop surge.
About 1,000 Marines and 150 Afghan troops were taking part in “Operation Cobra’s Anger” in a bid to disrupt Taliban supply and communications lines in the Now Zad Valley of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, the scene of heavy fighting last summer, according to Marine spokesman Maj. William Pelletier.
Hundreds of troops from the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines and the Marine reconnaissance unit Task Force Raider dropped by helicopters and MV-22 Osprey aircraft in the northern end of the valley while a second, larger Marine force pushed northward from the main Marine base in the town of Now Zad.
VIDEO: Marines Launch New Offensive ‘Cobra’s Anger’
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."