Vanishing Act

Leon Panetta set off such an uproar on Wednesday afternoon with his mention of (maybe) a 2013 exit from Afghanistan for U.S. combat troops that -- well, you'll never guess what. By Thursday the topic of the leaked NATO report (leaked Wednesday morning) fingering Pakistan's support for the Afghan Taliban and other groups fighting NATO troops in Afghanistan was nowhere to be found on American TV!

Wait, I take that back -- maybe the BBC (U.S. version on PBS) spoke a sentence about it in passing or maybe I was hallucinating. Anyhow, with regard to the Afghan war, newscasts last night on both cable and broadcast TV stations were fixed on, nay welded to, discussions revolving around Panetta's remarks. These of course generated debates between talking heads about whether it was a good idea to end combat operations in 2013.

The problem was that after materializing a three-ring circus out of thin air, Panetta then had to explain to a bunch of confused defense ministers from NATO countries what he meant by his remarks:

(Reuters) - U.S. forces will cede the lead role in combat operations in Afghanistan next year, but will keep fighting alongside Afghan troops, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Thursday, as the Obama administration struggled to clear up confusion over its Afghan exit strategy. Panetta surprised allies on Wednesday by suggesting the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan would end in 2013, the first time Washington had floated such a deadline.
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Did Panetta or Obama or both of them stage a magic show, or were Panetta's remarks simply a panic reaction to the leadking of NATO report? The crystal ball is out for repairs again so I have no idea what really happened. One thing is clear, though: if the motive for leaking the NATO report was to raise public awareness about Pakistan's role in attacks on NATO troops, news of it vanished too quickly from the public sphere to make an impression. The report will be studied by defense analysts and country experts specializing in South Asian affairs, but its news value was overtaken by bigger news of the day.

Afghan War, Groundhog Day chapter

Many things happened with blinding speed yesterday after Washington awakened to the news, already all over Europe, Kabul, Tehran and Rawalpindi, of a leaked NATO report that pointed to Pakistan's ISI as supporting the Afghan Taliban's war against NATO troops. I haven't checked which press source broke the story yesterday morning, European time, but if the BBC wasn't the first it was among the first.

The leaked report coincided with a visit to Kabul by Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Hina Rabani Khar, and was leaked on the eve of a NATO defense ministers' meeting in Brussels, which U.S. SecDec Leon Panetta was preparing to attend.

The rest of the news day went by in a blur of rumors, speculations and damage-control, all of which heated up when Panetta announced to reporters (on the flight to Brussels, if I recall) that the U.S. "might" move up to 2013 the end of U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan instead of staying with the agreed-on timeline of the end of 2014.

By the evening, when Jennifer Griffin reported on Fox that an unnamed White House official told her that Panetta had jumped the gun and that Obama had planned to make the announcement of the 2013 pullout in May at the NATO summit in Chicago, the confusion threatened to collapse into farce, as diplomats and reporters scrambled to keep up with the spin from official sources here and abroad.

Here, three reports that provide a window on how the day shook out:

> It was announced yesterday after his meeting in Kabul with Pakistan's Foreign Minister that he'll attend a trilateral meeting in Pakistan on February 16-17 that will include a (presumably high-ranking) member of Iran's government. See this report from Online News (Pakistan) for details.

> Last night David S. Cloud reported for the Los Angeles Times:

By announcing a specific timetable, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is hoping to head off a push by military allies to pull out their Afghan forces more quickly. [...]

Last night Robert Burns reported on the situation for the Associated Press (with contributions from AP writer Anne Gearan). The report, headlined, Panetta: US combat in Afghanistan to end next year, is on the long side because it goes into detail to dispel, to the extent possible at this time, the confusion raised by Panetta's announcement. But I'm going to cherry pick just a few passages because I think they have significance with regard to the leaked NATO report (see my Feb. 1 post Who was the leaker at NATO?), which the Burns report doesn't mention, and leave you to pore over the rest:

[...] On his second trip to Europe since becoming Pentagon chief last July 1, Panetta is gathering with his counterparts at a delicate time for NATO, not only because of the uncertainty surrounding the military mission in Afghanistan but also because of a growing gap in military power between the U.S. and nearly all other European members of the alliance.

That chasm is not expected to narrow even as the U.S. reduces its defense budget by nearly $490 billion over the coming decade and reduces the size of the Army and Marine Corps.

The U.S. remains the leader of a 28-nation NATO, but the Obama administration has made no secret of its intention to shift focus toward Asia and the Middle East. It announced last week that it will remove two Army brigades from Europe in the next two years, leaving one in Germany and one in Italy. The alliance also is quietly discussing the possible withdrawal of American nuclear weapons from Europe in coming years. The nuclear issue is on the agenda for the Brussels meeting.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, said last week that the two brigades being removed from Europe will be eliminated rather than reassigned to U.S. bases. Both are based in Germany — the 172nd Infantry Brigade, in Grafenwoehr, and the 170th Infantry Brigade, in Baumholder.

Odierno said that in the long run [Pundita emphasis] this change will benefit both the United States and its European partners because U.S. Army combat and support units will periodically rotate in and out of Europe for training and joint exercises that are designed to meet the needs of the European forces.
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You will note from the rest of the report that Panetta brings up the money topic more than once.

One more point about the AP report: I don't like arguing with Burns, who is a respected veteran reporter, but I think he's wrong if he's implying that the sudden decision to move up the end of combat operations was motivated by Obama's campaigning for reelection. ("The [new] timeline fits neatly into the U.S. political calendar, enabling President Barack Obama to declare on the campaign trail this year that in addition to bringing all U.S. troops home from Iraq and beginning a troop drawdown in Afghanistan, he also has a target period for ending the U.S. combat role there.")

I think the Obama administration was caught flat-footed by the leak of such a highly sensitive NATO report, which goes further than any other report that's come to public light in pointing to the fact that the U.S. has been pandering to a regime that it has known aids and abets the killing of NATO troops.

The best Obama could do, to douse a scandal that could bring down his administration, was to immediately signal that he was yanking U.S. combat troops out of the sights of Pakistan's military/ISI as soon as possible.

Of course I could be wrong and the unnamed White House official could have been right; maybe it was Panetta who made the decision on his own initiative to announce a change in the timeline. If that's the case I'd say he saw the leaked report's danger to the Obama administration, and the Pentagon, faster than Obama did. The danger is very real given the implications of the leaked report. If a Republican had been in the White House when the report was leaked, by the start of next week ranking Democrats in Congress could have been calling for the President's impeachment.

The only way out for the Obama administration, other than announcing an early end to combat operations, would have been to signal a radically different U.S. approach to Pakistan. Obama and his counterparts in the other major NATO countries, who've also pandered to Pakistan's regime, have not to this point displayed the inclination to make such a change.

That's the way things stand, as official Washington prepares to awaken to Groundhog Day.

The tell

During his discussion with Scott Pelley for CBS 60 Minutes, aired last night, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta went through a short list of reasons as to why he believed that "someone" must have known the identity of the occupant in the Abbottabad compound; while he didn't elaborate it was clear that he meant someone in authority in Pakistan's military.

The problem with the list is that it could just as well have pointed to the occupant being a known major dealer in illicit drugs: the high walls, the Pakistani military helicopter(s) that U.S. intell had observed flying over the compound, and so on. This was a point one of John Batchelor's guests mentioned soon after the Abbottabad raid. Even the expensive SUVs seen routinely leaving and entering the compound could have belonged to a honcho in the drug trade, which is a big part of Pakistan's unofficial foreign exchange. That would also explain why folks who lived nearby weren't nosy neighbors.

However, at the end of the discussion Panetta told Pelley that there was one other thing: inspection of the compound after the U.S. raid turned up that there was no alternate or secret escape route from there.

That was the tell. That was how President Obama knew for certain he'd been right not to alert Pakistan's government to the planned raid. Only if bin Laden had expected to be warned of any impending raid would he have lived for years in the compound without installing an exit other than the front gate.

Note to Pakistan's junta: Learn to listen when Leon Panetta speaks

From a September 15, 2011 Bloomberg report headlined U.S. says Kabul embassy hit by group tied to Pakistan’s army:

[U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan] Ryan Crocker and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the Haqqani group also was behind the Sept. 10 truck-bomb attack on a U.S. base southwest of Kabul that injured 77 Americans. Panetta called the Haqqani group’s continued “safe haven” in Pakistan “unacceptable.”

“I’m not going to talk about how we’re going to respond,” Panetta told reporters. “I’ll just let you know we are not going to allow these kinds of attacks to go on.”