US, Afghans near deal on post-2014 mission: Panetta
AFP [via e-Ariana.com]
WASHINGTON — US and Afghan officials are weeks away from clinching a security pact allowing an American military mission to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Tuesday.
The two sides still had to resolve disagreements over controversial night raids by US troops, which Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other officials say have claimed too many civilian lives, and the transfer of US-run prisons in the country, the Pentagon chief said.
"As you know, there are two areas that we still have difficulties with, one of which involves the transfer of detention facilities, the other involves night-time raids," Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"And we continue to try to see if we can work out some kind of compromise on those issues," he said.
But he said most of the elements of a security pact were in place.
"So I'm confident that hopefully, within the next few weeks, we'll be able to reach some kind of agreement."
Top Afghan officials and American commanders have suggested the United States will likely retain a military presence in Afghanistan after 2014, when Afghan army and police are due to take over security for the whole country. But the precise size and role of a post-2014 mission have remained unclear.
Panetta told senators a post-2014 mission would likely include counter-terrorism operations against Al-Qaeda and other militants along with providing US air power, intelligence and logistical support for Afghan forces.
At the hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham called for a US force of about 15,000-20,000 troops after 2014.
Afghanistan last month forged strategic agreements with Britain, France and Italy to govern security ties after NATO combat troops exit by the end of 2014.
Nearly 90,000 US troops are now deployed in Afghanistan amid plans for the force to decline to 68,000 by the end of September.
President Barack Obama, who sent a "surge" of reinforcements after entering office in 2009, is pursuing a gradual troop drawdown in Afghanistan, with the bulk of the American force expected to withdraw after Afghan army and police take the lead by the end of 2014.
But analysts have urged the administration to publicly commit to a long-term military presence to prevent the Taliban from seizing back power and to head off a possible civil war with proxies backed by neighboring countries.
Tuesday, February 14
US military mission in Afghanistan beyond 2014 begins to take shape
February 14, 2012 - 1:50 PM ET:
Monday, February 13
American Raj
MICHAEL WRIGHT: You wrote in one of your recent essays that Americans shouldn't try to help Pakistan, that they're the wrong people to try and help, and that Indians are the only people who could really help because they're family. You know that nobody in Washington is going to listen to your advice. So is there any insight you could give Americans on how to do the least harm in their relations with Pakistan? I know you've given lots of insights and recommendations over the years but if you could get across only one thing what would it be?
PUNDITA: Try and look at things on the Indian subcontinent from the top down, from the viewpoint of the rulers, during the British Raj at the height of its power. From that view, the Indians weren't living in subjugation to a foreign power, a colonialist power, they were an integral reason for the success of the British Raj -- they were the Raj, co-ruling with the British a vast swath of humanity. They sat at the right hand of the most powerful ruler on earth, in a manner of speaking, and that's how they saw themselves.
The British sought their help and advice, and in tribute to the Indian rulers they built and maintained roads, railroads, postal and telegraph systems, flood management systems, and many other infrastructure modernizations and improvements.
Then the unthinkable happened; it all came to an abrupt end. The British could no longer afford to keep up appearances on the subcontinent. They could no longer afford to maintain the infrastructures they built.
Then came Independence. The rulers who stayed on the Indian side, even though soon stripped of the legal power to rule, were better able for a variety of reasons to adjust to the death of the British Raj than the rulers who were on the Pakistan side at the time of Partition.
It's very hard to convey even to today's young generation of Indians, let alone Americans, how traumatic the situation was because Indians tend to focus on the trauma and horror of Partition -- and as with Americans, Indians are steeped in the harshly critical postcolonial views of the subcontinent's rulers, which are mixed with views on democracy and a rejection of monarchism. But the Pakistani rulers had assumed the British Raj would go on forever and that their special relationship with the British would also go on. Then it was all swept away.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: You once mentioned the flooded ballroom in Cameron's Titanic when you were trying to get across what it was like, with all those bodies in evening finery floating in the ocean waters.
PUNDITA: It was the best analogy I could think of at the time. But the point for Americans is that a big part of the special relationship was that the British paid what the Indian rulers considered tribute, in exchange for help from the rulers, and that the tribute included maintaining the subcontinent's infrastructure systems. That's the way things were done, that's the way they were always done. That was the way of the world.
If left to their own devices, as the Indians were after Independence, the Pakistani rulers might have gotten away from the idea of tribute and adjusted to the fact that nobody was going maintain their nation's infrastructures unless they did it.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: I get it; then along came the American Raj.
PUNDITA: Yup. The British maharaja was dead, long live the American maharaja.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: But the American Raj didn't perform to expectations.
PUNDITA: Yes and no. The great difference was that instead of wanting to rule over a vast swath of humanity the American Raj wanted to beat the Soviets. So the Pakistani rulers adjusted the kind of help they gave to this new raj. The trouble was that American aims meant that tribute -- what the Pakistani rulers considered tribute -- flowed more and more to Pakistan's military, which gave the military more and more power. This left the country's traditional rulers, who were soon demoted to the status of feudal landlords by the thinking of the West, in an increasingly desperate position.
And who was going to maintain the infrastructures built by the British Raj? Who was going to finance the building of new infrastructure systems while the rulers were busy with their traditional role of getting a decent day's work out of people who oversaw the laborers and settling the endless disputes that arose between them?
Then, just when it seemed the world was going to end -- drumroll, please.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: [laughing] Along came the World Bank.
PUNDITA: Yup. The Bank was already in existence by then but along came its International Development Association and the accounting practices that for some bizarre reason, from the viewpoint of Pakistan's rulers, the Americans considered corrupt. What corruption? It was simply the modern way for the American Raj to keep up tribute payments.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: [laughing] So much for development philosophy.
PUNDITA: Heck, the Pakistanis practically invented development philosophy. But Americans and Pakistanis had two very different interpretations of what development meant. Americans looked at development as a stepwise process toward modernization: we loan you the money to develop, then you build on that development and progress to more and more development, until voilà! you reach self sufficiency.
From the Pakistani view, the view of the rulers, the point of development was toward closer and closer relations with the American Raj with commensurate increases in tributes.
Fast forward to the present era, which sees Washington tearing its hair out over all the development aid and loans that the West poured into the bottomless hole of Pakistan, and asking what the Pakistanis did with all that money. Everywhere Washington looks, it sees infrastructures built more than a century ago by the British, and left to fall into disrepair.
There's the Pakistani flood management crisis, the water crisis -- which is largely a water management crisis -- education crisis, energy crisis, roads and bridges crises, and on and on.
Whose fault is that? The fault of the American Raj for not keeping things in better repair.
A secondary problem with this attitude is that it trickled down in the society, so people who don't earn any kind of tribute still have the sense of entitlement that goes with earning it.
When Pakistan's mango growers wanted a larger share of the global market, they expected someone else, the Americans it turned out, to build them modern facilities for processing the mangos and giving them training in getting the mangos ready for markets that wanted cleaner mangos.
It's like that with everything. If you want us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps you make the bootstraps, put us in them, then pull. That attitude drives the Chinese up a wall, I might add.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: The really crazy part is that while we were pouring aid into underdeveloped countries, our own infrastructures fell into despair.
PUNDITA: The American Raj turned out to ignore its flanks as much as the British did theirs. But so much of the aid and loans got misused in Pakistan because it actually was a form of tribute. Americans were buying help in fighting the Soviets so if the aid money and IDA loans weren't used correctly, well, there was always more where that came from.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: That view wasn't limited to dealing with Pakistan. But to put it in one sentence, what Washington needs to know is that what it considers to be aid, Pakistani's ruling class still thinks of as tribute.
PUNDITA: I don't like putting things in one sentence but that's close enough, except I'd say that they prefer to think of it as tribute. They're not primitives, Michael. They know the way the modern world works.
But the end of the British Raj was relatively abrupt and so traumatic for Pakistan's leaders that another analogy is an amputation made on the battlefield. The legs are there one minute and then they're gone. Even under the best of conditions, where the person has had some time to adjust to the idea of amputation, there can be the 'ghost limb' phenomenon, where the amputee still thinks he can feel the lost limb.
In the same manner, a way of life was unceremoniously uprooted and with it a sense of order that the American Raj was not able to restore. This sense that 'something is missing but should still be there' percolates down through all levels of the society.
For a time the Pakistani military was able to backfill some of the lost order but at a very high price -- a debilitating cold war with India that exploded into hot war a few times with humiliating defeats. And a brutally enforced military rule that further eroded the sense of order. Neither could Pakistan's place in the world as an Islamic state restore the sense of order.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: Because the sense of order isn't rooted in Islam.
PUNDITA: Right. The Muslims who conquered parts of India took on the traditions they found on the subcontinent, where rulers were seen as living gods and expected in act in that manner.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: Do you think it would help if Pakistanis confronted more about their eras of kings?
PUNDITA: Well in many ways they've never stopped thinking of their kings. But by the mid-twentieth century the democracy advocates, socialists and anti-colonialist philosophers had demonized those eras. In doing so, they stripped away the pride that the peoples of the subcontinent should have about being part of those eras. It's like the British, who've spent the modern era beating themselves up about their colonial rules, whereas in fact there's much to be proud of about those.
You can't demonize or reject a big part of your past without incurring a big psychological cost. So, yes, at some point in the future it might be a help if they confronted the fact that the British Raj was a pretty glorious affair and that they were a big part of that. Seen from up close, the raj had an awful aspect, a very cruel one, but so did all other rules. It was just the way things were.
But you see I don't like to use the word 'help' anymore within earshot of Washington. There are times to attempt to be helpful and times to pull back, and this is one of those times when Washington needs to pull back.
If Washington wants to help, help itself. Going back my entire lifetime, it's misread one situation after another around the globe because it was always blind to how a monarchist past influences many crises.
I understand why the blindness exists. But if you want a better informed foreign policy and even defense policy, you've got to set aside your theories and try to overcome your blind spots, so you can see the way things are and how they were.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: It was never really about the money, was it?
PUNDITA: In British India? Of course not. Many of the subcontinent's rulers were fabulously wealthy. It was about what the tributes meant.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: An acknowledgment from the lord of the modern era, in that time, that the rulers had tremendous importance.
PUNDITA: An important place in that era. And, they thought, an important place in this era with the American Raj.
Recently State had to inform Pakistan that it couldn't have a Most Favored Nation trade agreement with the United States because those were only for major economies. The Pakistanis knew that, but still they wanted special treatment. And yet Pakistan's leaders had been talking for months about putting their relationship with the USA on a purely transactional basis.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: Old attitudes die hard. Maybe more of Pakistan's ruling class should read Gone with the Wind. But as long as they keep spawning terrorism we can't leave them alone to work out their present.
PUNDITA: With all due respect, that is the typical view of the enabler.
PUNDITA: Try and look at things on the Indian subcontinent from the top down, from the viewpoint of the rulers, during the British Raj at the height of its power. From that view, the Indians weren't living in subjugation to a foreign power, a colonialist power, they were an integral reason for the success of the British Raj -- they were the Raj, co-ruling with the British a vast swath of humanity. They sat at the right hand of the most powerful ruler on earth, in a manner of speaking, and that's how they saw themselves.
The British sought their help and advice, and in tribute to the Indian rulers they built and maintained roads, railroads, postal and telegraph systems, flood management systems, and many other infrastructure modernizations and improvements.
Then the unthinkable happened; it all came to an abrupt end. The British could no longer afford to keep up appearances on the subcontinent. They could no longer afford to maintain the infrastructures they built.
Then came Independence. The rulers who stayed on the Indian side, even though soon stripped of the legal power to rule, were better able for a variety of reasons to adjust to the death of the British Raj than the rulers who were on the Pakistan side at the time of Partition.
It's very hard to convey even to today's young generation of Indians, let alone Americans, how traumatic the situation was because Indians tend to focus on the trauma and horror of Partition -- and as with Americans, Indians are steeped in the harshly critical postcolonial views of the subcontinent's rulers, which are mixed with views on democracy and a rejection of monarchism. But the Pakistani rulers had assumed the British Raj would go on forever and that their special relationship with the British would also go on. Then it was all swept away.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: You once mentioned the flooded ballroom in Cameron's Titanic when you were trying to get across what it was like, with all those bodies in evening finery floating in the ocean waters.
PUNDITA: It was the best analogy I could think of at the time. But the point for Americans is that a big part of the special relationship was that the British paid what the Indian rulers considered tribute, in exchange for help from the rulers, and that the tribute included maintaining the subcontinent's infrastructure systems. That's the way things were done, that's the way they were always done. That was the way of the world.
If left to their own devices, as the Indians were after Independence, the Pakistani rulers might have gotten away from the idea of tribute and adjusted to the fact that nobody was going maintain their nation's infrastructures unless they did it.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: I get it; then along came the American Raj.
PUNDITA: Yup. The British maharaja was dead, long live the American maharaja.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: But the American Raj didn't perform to expectations.
PUNDITA: Yes and no. The great difference was that instead of wanting to rule over a vast swath of humanity the American Raj wanted to beat the Soviets. So the Pakistani rulers adjusted the kind of help they gave to this new raj. The trouble was that American aims meant that tribute -- what the Pakistani rulers considered tribute -- flowed more and more to Pakistan's military, which gave the military more and more power. This left the country's traditional rulers, who were soon demoted to the status of feudal landlords by the thinking of the West, in an increasingly desperate position.
And who was going to maintain the infrastructures built by the British Raj? Who was going to finance the building of new infrastructure systems while the rulers were busy with their traditional role of getting a decent day's work out of people who oversaw the laborers and settling the endless disputes that arose between them?
Then, just when it seemed the world was going to end -- drumroll, please.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: [laughing] Along came the World Bank.
PUNDITA: Yup. The Bank was already in existence by then but along came its International Development Association and the accounting practices that for some bizarre reason, from the viewpoint of Pakistan's rulers, the Americans considered corrupt. What corruption? It was simply the modern way for the American Raj to keep up tribute payments.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: [laughing] So much for development philosophy.
PUNDITA: Heck, the Pakistanis practically invented development philosophy. But Americans and Pakistanis had two very different interpretations of what development meant. Americans looked at development as a stepwise process toward modernization: we loan you the money to develop, then you build on that development and progress to more and more development, until voilà! you reach self sufficiency.
From the Pakistani view, the view of the rulers, the point of development was toward closer and closer relations with the American Raj with commensurate increases in tributes.
Fast forward to the present era, which sees Washington tearing its hair out over all the development aid and loans that the West poured into the bottomless hole of Pakistan, and asking what the Pakistanis did with all that money. Everywhere Washington looks, it sees infrastructures built more than a century ago by the British, and left to fall into disrepair.
There's the Pakistani flood management crisis, the water crisis -- which is largely a water management crisis -- education crisis, energy crisis, roads and bridges crises, and on and on.
Whose fault is that? The fault of the American Raj for not keeping things in better repair.
A secondary problem with this attitude is that it trickled down in the society, so people who don't earn any kind of tribute still have the sense of entitlement that goes with earning it.
When Pakistan's mango growers wanted a larger share of the global market, they expected someone else, the Americans it turned out, to build them modern facilities for processing the mangos and giving them training in getting the mangos ready for markets that wanted cleaner mangos.
It's like that with everything. If you want us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps you make the bootstraps, put us in them, then pull. That attitude drives the Chinese up a wall, I might add.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: The really crazy part is that while we were pouring aid into underdeveloped countries, our own infrastructures fell into despair.
PUNDITA: The American Raj turned out to ignore its flanks as much as the British did theirs. But so much of the aid and loans got misused in Pakistan because it actually was a form of tribute. Americans were buying help in fighting the Soviets so if the aid money and IDA loans weren't used correctly, well, there was always more where that came from.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: That view wasn't limited to dealing with Pakistan. But to put it in one sentence, what Washington needs to know is that what it considers to be aid, Pakistani's ruling class still thinks of as tribute.
PUNDITA: I don't like putting things in one sentence but that's close enough, except I'd say that they prefer to think of it as tribute. They're not primitives, Michael. They know the way the modern world works.
But the end of the British Raj was relatively abrupt and so traumatic for Pakistan's leaders that another analogy is an amputation made on the battlefield. The legs are there one minute and then they're gone. Even under the best of conditions, where the person has had some time to adjust to the idea of amputation, there can be the 'ghost limb' phenomenon, where the amputee still thinks he can feel the lost limb.
In the same manner, a way of life was unceremoniously uprooted and with it a sense of order that the American Raj was not able to restore. This sense that 'something is missing but should still be there' percolates down through all levels of the society.
For a time the Pakistani military was able to backfill some of the lost order but at a very high price -- a debilitating cold war with India that exploded into hot war a few times with humiliating defeats. And a brutally enforced military rule that further eroded the sense of order. Neither could Pakistan's place in the world as an Islamic state restore the sense of order.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: Because the sense of order isn't rooted in Islam.
PUNDITA: Right. The Muslims who conquered parts of India took on the traditions they found on the subcontinent, where rulers were seen as living gods and expected in act in that manner.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: Do you think it would help if Pakistanis confronted more about their eras of kings?
PUNDITA: Well in many ways they've never stopped thinking of their kings. But by the mid-twentieth century the democracy advocates, socialists and anti-colonialist philosophers had demonized those eras. In doing so, they stripped away the pride that the peoples of the subcontinent should have about being part of those eras. It's like the British, who've spent the modern era beating themselves up about their colonial rules, whereas in fact there's much to be proud of about those.
You can't demonize or reject a big part of your past without incurring a big psychological cost. So, yes, at some point in the future it might be a help if they confronted the fact that the British Raj was a pretty glorious affair and that they were a big part of that. Seen from up close, the raj had an awful aspect, a very cruel one, but so did all other rules. It was just the way things were.
But you see I don't like to use the word 'help' anymore within earshot of Washington. There are times to attempt to be helpful and times to pull back, and this is one of those times when Washington needs to pull back.
If Washington wants to help, help itself. Going back my entire lifetime, it's misread one situation after another around the globe because it was always blind to how a monarchist past influences many crises.
I understand why the blindness exists. But if you want a better informed foreign policy and even defense policy, you've got to set aside your theories and try to overcome your blind spots, so you can see the way things are and how they were.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: It was never really about the money, was it?
PUNDITA: In British India? Of course not. Many of the subcontinent's rulers were fabulously wealthy. It was about what the tributes meant.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: An acknowledgment from the lord of the modern era, in that time, that the rulers had tremendous importance.
PUNDITA: An important place in that era. And, they thought, an important place in this era with the American Raj.
Recently State had to inform Pakistan that it couldn't have a Most Favored Nation trade agreement with the United States because those were only for major economies. The Pakistanis knew that, but still they wanted special treatment. And yet Pakistan's leaders had been talking for months about putting their relationship with the USA on a purely transactional basis.
MICHAEL WRIGHT: Old attitudes die hard. Maybe more of Pakistan's ruling class should read Gone with the Wind. But as long as they keep spawning terrorism we can't leave them alone to work out their present.
PUNDITA: With all due respect, that is the typical view of the enabler.
Friday, February 10
Amrullah Saleh on Afghanistan's neglected majority
Readers who've followed my blog for years would understand why I interrupted my weekend to post the following op-ed at the Wall Street Journal.
My mother once told me that I was a sunny, even-tempered toddler, but that every so often I lost my temper. She said that at those times I expressed outrage by going to the kitchen cabinet where the pot and pans were stored -- the cabinet was at my eye level -- then with all my might hurling every pot and pan out of the cabinet, which of course made a huge racket. Having made my editorial statement I'd then return all the cookware to the cabinet, neatly stacking each one in its proper place.
Reading through Amrullah's latest attempt to talk to reason to Washington, for the first time I understand exactly how I felt when I headed for the kitchen cabinet. For years I've kept my nose to the grindstone of the Afghan War by telling myself that if Amrullah Saleh can see all he's seen and still remain calm and reasonable in his discussions with Washington I have no right to scream and yell on this blog. But sometimes.....
Why Negotiate With the Taliban?
By AMRULLAH SALEH
February 9, 2012 - 8:03 P.M. ET
The Wall Street Journal
Washington's olive branch to the Taliban -- no matter the excuses or justifications -- amounts to the management of failure, not the mark of victory. Negotiating with the Taliban after more than 10 years of fighting means giving legitimacy and space to militant extremism.
The objective of NATO's post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan was to starve militant extremism by defeating the nexus of al Qaeda and the Pakistan-backed Taliban. That now seems like a dream.
With support from Pakistan, the Taliban has managed to protract the fighting and create a strategic deadlock. The U.S. military surge in 2010 weakened the Taliban, but it hardly pressured their strategic support across the Durand line in Pakistan. So the deadlock remains -— chiefly because of Pakistan's unwillingness to cooperate fully with NATO, coupled with the fractured state of Afghan politics since the fraud-marred 2009 presidential elections.
Pakistan and the Taliban have no interest in producing quick positive results from talks. The Taliban has already gained certain advantages, including the possible transfer or release of their commanders from U.S. custody, the opening of an office in Qatar, and the legitimacy to enter into mainstream politics at the time of their choosing. They will definitely use these preliminary gains to further their psychological influence over the Afghan populace. And they won't likely bargain away the gains they have earned by suicide bombings, ambushes and the marginalization of civil society. Now that the Taliban has guaranteed its basic survival, it will fight for domination.
Washington's talks with the Taliban -- taking place, on and off, in Qatar -- come at a time when most anti-Taliban Afghan civil society leaders have deserted President Karzai. He is head of a heavily subsidized state whose pay master (Washington) is now largely bypassing his government to negotiate with the enemy. This raises the question: Who and what does President Karzai represent?
In a bid to make himself relevant, President Karzai has adopted a strategy of meddling. He has demanded that NATO halt night raids, hand over the Bagram detention facility, and place strict restrictions on security companies. He has also refused to echo NATO's mission goals and justifications, and he wanted the Taliban to open an office in Saudi Arabia, not Qatar.
In return, NATO has accused Mr. Karzai of corruption, of committing abuses of human rights, and of being detached from reality. Successful counterinsurgency work requires international troops and the host nation to be seen as unified; that is simply not the case here.
Pakistan and the Taliban are more coordinated in their approaches than are NATO and Afghanistan. This is one of the key reasons why concerned anti-Taliban Afghans are creating a third force to ensure their rights and interests are represented and protected. They no longer see either President Karzai or NATO committed to those rights and interests. Though fragmented in their approach, these forces share a common goal: to counterbalance the growing influence of the Taliban and to fill the vacuum created by the declining relevance of Afghanistan's democratic institutions.
Certainly no Afghan political coalition can stop Washington from talking to the Taliban -- but those talks won't bring stability. Talks and a potential ceasefire may provide the U.S. and its NATO allies their justification for a speedy withdrawal, but it won't change the fundamentals of the problem in Afghanistan. Striking a deal with the Taliban without disarming them will shatter the hope of a strong, viable, pluralistic Afghan state.
The absolute majority of the Afghan people are against the Taliban and the domination of our country by militant extremism. They have wholeheartedly supported and participated in the democratic process, but they are now marginalized both by President Karzai, who controls massive resources with no accountability, and the international community, which is focused disproportionately on transition, withdrawal and the Taliban.
Afghanistan's neglected majority can provide a political alternative for the military mission in Afghanistan. Its inclusion, which the U.S. could secure by pursuing reconciliation in a way that pressures President Karzai to respect the role of parliament and independent judges, would contain or push back the Taliban, increase the cost of war for Pakistan, and provide hope for post-transition Afghanistan. By contrast, should that majority remain outside the strategic calculus, we'll see further fragmentation of political power and legitimacy in Afghanistan. That will weaken Washington's position and endanger the entire mission.
Mr. Saleh, who directed Afghanistan's national security directorate from 2004 to 2010, is now an opposition political activist.
My mother once told me that I was a sunny, even-tempered toddler, but that every so often I lost my temper. She said that at those times I expressed outrage by going to the kitchen cabinet where the pot and pans were stored -- the cabinet was at my eye level -- then with all my might hurling every pot and pan out of the cabinet, which of course made a huge racket. Having made my editorial statement I'd then return all the cookware to the cabinet, neatly stacking each one in its proper place.
Reading through Amrullah's latest attempt to talk to reason to Washington, for the first time I understand exactly how I felt when I headed for the kitchen cabinet. For years I've kept my nose to the grindstone of the Afghan War by telling myself that if Amrullah Saleh can see all he's seen and still remain calm and reasonable in his discussions with Washington I have no right to scream and yell on this blog. But sometimes.....
Why Negotiate With the Taliban?
By AMRULLAH SALEH
February 9, 2012 - 8:03 P.M. ET
The Wall Street Journal
Washington's olive branch to the Taliban -- no matter the excuses or justifications -- amounts to the management of failure, not the mark of victory. Negotiating with the Taliban after more than 10 years of fighting means giving legitimacy and space to militant extremism.
The objective of NATO's post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan was to starve militant extremism by defeating the nexus of al Qaeda and the Pakistan-backed Taliban. That now seems like a dream.
With support from Pakistan, the Taliban has managed to protract the fighting and create a strategic deadlock. The U.S. military surge in 2010 weakened the Taliban, but it hardly pressured their strategic support across the Durand line in Pakistan. So the deadlock remains -— chiefly because of Pakistan's unwillingness to cooperate fully with NATO, coupled with the fractured state of Afghan politics since the fraud-marred 2009 presidential elections.
Pakistan and the Taliban have no interest in producing quick positive results from talks. The Taliban has already gained certain advantages, including the possible transfer or release of their commanders from U.S. custody, the opening of an office in Qatar, and the legitimacy to enter into mainstream politics at the time of their choosing. They will definitely use these preliminary gains to further their psychological influence over the Afghan populace. And they won't likely bargain away the gains they have earned by suicide bombings, ambushes and the marginalization of civil society. Now that the Taliban has guaranteed its basic survival, it will fight for domination.
Washington's talks with the Taliban -- taking place, on and off, in Qatar -- come at a time when most anti-Taliban Afghan civil society leaders have deserted President Karzai. He is head of a heavily subsidized state whose pay master (Washington) is now largely bypassing his government to negotiate with the enemy. This raises the question: Who and what does President Karzai represent?
In a bid to make himself relevant, President Karzai has adopted a strategy of meddling. He has demanded that NATO halt night raids, hand over the Bagram detention facility, and place strict restrictions on security companies. He has also refused to echo NATO's mission goals and justifications, and he wanted the Taliban to open an office in Saudi Arabia, not Qatar.
In return, NATO has accused Mr. Karzai of corruption, of committing abuses of human rights, and of being detached from reality. Successful counterinsurgency work requires international troops and the host nation to be seen as unified; that is simply not the case here.
Pakistan and the Taliban are more coordinated in their approaches than are NATO and Afghanistan. This is one of the key reasons why concerned anti-Taliban Afghans are creating a third force to ensure their rights and interests are represented and protected. They no longer see either President Karzai or NATO committed to those rights and interests. Though fragmented in their approach, these forces share a common goal: to counterbalance the growing influence of the Taliban and to fill the vacuum created by the declining relevance of Afghanistan's democratic institutions.
Certainly no Afghan political coalition can stop Washington from talking to the Taliban -- but those talks won't bring stability. Talks and a potential ceasefire may provide the U.S. and its NATO allies their justification for a speedy withdrawal, but it won't change the fundamentals of the problem in Afghanistan. Striking a deal with the Taliban without disarming them will shatter the hope of a strong, viable, pluralistic Afghan state.
The absolute majority of the Afghan people are against the Taliban and the domination of our country by militant extremism. They have wholeheartedly supported and participated in the democratic process, but they are now marginalized both by President Karzai, who controls massive resources with no accountability, and the international community, which is focused disproportionately on transition, withdrawal and the Taliban.
Afghanistan's neglected majority can provide a political alternative for the military mission in Afghanistan. Its inclusion, which the U.S. could secure by pursuing reconciliation in a way that pressures President Karzai to respect the role of parliament and independent judges, would contain or push back the Taliban, increase the cost of war for Pakistan, and provide hope for post-transition Afghanistan. By contrast, should that majority remain outside the strategic calculus, we'll see further fragmentation of political power and legitimacy in Afghanistan. That will weaken Washington's position and endanger the entire mission.
Mr. Saleh, who directed Afghanistan's national security directorate from 2004 to 2010, is now an opposition political activist.
Madame Ambassador, regimes that live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones
February 10, The News Tribe (Pakistan):
Meanwhile, back at the indoor putting green, the White House announced yesterday that President Obama and his national security team had undertaken a review of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. From (Pakistan's) Dawn, dateline today:
All right; I'm outta here until next week. Have fun reading last night's two posts. Oh, one more thing: last week I guessed that the German command at NATO leaked the top secret NATO report titled, The State of the Taliban, which fingered the ISI as aiding and abetting the Afghan Taliban. I also half-joked that the one time I was willing not to blame the British for something was probably the one time I was wrong about them.
It turns out that the only journalists to read the report prior to its leak worked for two British media outlets: the BBC and the (London) Times; this, according to the Economist.
Heh.
That doesn't make it definite that the leaker was with the British command but it is suggestive. The report was leaked on the eve of a NATO foreign ministers' meeting. The next day the Telegraph reported that a substantial cut in British combat troops would occur in 2013 -- a claim that a defense ministry spokesperson denied but in such a way as to make it seem that the troop cuts were always planned for that year. Not. According to the Telegraph.
Well, if it was the British, I don't hold it against them. The public had a right and a need to know about the report.
Okay, my weekend is now officially underway; I'm off to down a thimblefull of sherry, for medicinal purposes only, of course. Cheers!
Washington: Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States Sherry Rehman has conveyed the reservations of Pakistan to the US administration on the US Congress Comittee debate on Balochistan was tantamount to helping terrorists operating in the province.She was just getting warmed up; News Tribe has her full statement. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the ISI is under judicial fire in Pakistan for the first time in its existence. Does this mean the spy agency is indeed Gen. Kayani's sacrificial goat? We'll find out soon enough.
[...]
Ambassador Rehman, in her meetings with the congressmen and senior officials of the US administration, said that the Congress hearing was marked by a blatant disregard for history and inflammatory use of selective facts.
“It is deeply regrettable that the legislature of a country that calls itself a friend of Pakistan should allow itself to be used as a platform by those advocating the dismemberment of Pakistan and provide justification to terrorists attempting to hold Balochistan, and Pakistan, hostage,” she said.
The subcommittee on oversights and investigations of the House Foreign Affairs Committee had held the hearing on 8th February with testimonies from human rights organizations and policy analysts on the human rights violations and target-killings in Balochistan.
”Pakistan views this hearing with serious concern and considers it unacceptable in no uncertain terms,” she stated adding that this kind of an exercise constituted interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs. The hearing, she observed, would be detrimental to building mutual trust and confidence and “will add to suspicions in Pakistan about the American motives in the region and concerning Pakistan.”
[...]
Meanwhile, back at the indoor putting green, the White House announced yesterday that President Obama and his national security team had undertaken a review of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. From (Pakistan's) Dawn, dateline today:
WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama has reviewed efforts to improve ties with Pakistan with his national security team, the White House said on Thursday as media reports indicated that both countries were trying vigorously to reduce tensions that have bedevilled their relations for more than a year now.So. I gather from Dawn that the good news to emerge from the review is that Obama decided not to give Kayani the shirt off his back. Did he decide to give Kayani the shirt off your back? This is Dawn we're talking about; the glass is always half full on Pakistan's side of the table. I assume we'll have more definite news of Obama's decisions when Gen. Mattis returns from his trip to Pakistan.
At Wednesday’s meeting, President Obama “received an update on our engagement with the Pakistani government on a range of issues of mutual interest, including efforts to strengthen cooperation along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border,” the White House said.
US sources told Dawn that the White House had been regularly consulting Pakistan’s new ambassador in Washington, Sherry Rehman, on these issues.
Last week, Ambassador Rehman and a Pakistani defence team met the head of the US Central Command, General James N. Mattis, at the embassy. Soon after the meeting, The New York Times reported that Gen Mattis would visit Islamabad later this month for talks with Pakistani military chief and other officials and he might also convey an official apology on the Nov 26 Nato attack on a Pakistani post that killed 24 soldiers.
Pakistan has long demanded such an apology as an important step towards improving ties.
Another sign that both sides are making serious efforts to overcome their differences came earlier Thursday when US ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter hinted that Nato supplies might have resumed through Pakistani airspace. Pakistan had blocked the supplies after the Nov 26 attack and Washington wanted Islamabad to open both land and air routes as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, Ms Rehman is having another important meeting with senior White House officials on apparently accelerated attempts by both sides to rebuild a relationship that has gone sour.
She also met Senator John Kerry, who is considered the Obama administration’s unofficial envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan on Capitol Hill and is often sent to Islamabad for dealing with contentious issues.
Asked for comments on these meetings, Ms Rehman said she could not discuss ongoing negotiations but both sides were eager to leave behind the bitterness of the past year and move ahead with a new zeal.
“Pakistan is still reviewing the full spectrum of its relations with the US in a historic parliamentary review, which will anchor forthcoming decisions in the solid background of public consent,” she said.
All right; I'm outta here until next week. Have fun reading last night's two posts. Oh, one more thing: last week I guessed that the German command at NATO leaked the top secret NATO report titled, The State of the Taliban, which fingered the ISI as aiding and abetting the Afghan Taliban. I also half-joked that the one time I was willing not to blame the British for something was probably the one time I was wrong about them.
It turns out that the only journalists to read the report prior to its leak worked for two British media outlets: the BBC and the (London) Times; this, according to the Economist.
Heh.
That doesn't make it definite that the leaker was with the British command but it is suggestive. The report was leaked on the eve of a NATO foreign ministers' meeting. The next day the Telegraph reported that a substantial cut in British combat troops would occur in 2013 -- a claim that a defense ministry spokesperson denied but in such a way as to make it seem that the troop cuts were always planned for that year. Not. According to the Telegraph.
Well, if it was the British, I don't hold it against them. The public had a right and a need to know about the report.
Okay, my weekend is now officially underway; I'm off to down a thimblefull of sherry, for medicinal purposes only, of course. Cheers!
Thursday, February 9
What comes around goes around
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood has suddenly decided that it's not the Egyptian military's new best friend, after all. See the NPR report from earlier tonight, which quotes AP and AFP on the story. During the protests that led to Mubarak's ouster the generals looked on the Brothers as a useful idiot. It will be interesting to see who turned out to be the idiot. For readers who enjoy 3D chess (I don't), the U.S. government has the Muslim Brotherhood on speed dial.
Be less helpful or be less squeamish
The British air command did play a role with Germany but the basic story is that after the United States bombed Germany and Japan to rubble, the American conquerors told what was left of those nations that they were going to have the kind of democracy Americans could live with, then dictated how their governments were to be run. That bought a beleaguered world more than a half century of peace and stability in Western Europe and Japan.
That's how it's done; that's how to establish democracy in lands where the concept of sovereignty is built not on the Westphalian ideal but on the monarchist one. Yet if Americans are too squeamish to do it right, then they must to learn to rein in the urge to be helpful, as headlines from Egypt underscore.
The Wall Street Journal's Matt Bradley reported in the wee hours today from Cairo that America's top military commander, JOC Chairman Martin Dempsey, was on his way to Egypt to negotiate with Egypt's military "over the fate" of the American NGO workers now facing imminent criminal charges relating to "ill-defined political subterfuge" but which could include the charge of espionage.
The problem for General Dempsey is that the Egyptian authorities found maps among the papers they confiscated at those NGOs that could be read as intelligence-gathering as part of a covert U.S. plan to balkanize Egypt. (See Matt's report for details.)
The NGOs have what they consider to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the maps. They used the maps, Matt reports,
It was just such bizarre hybrids that Vladimir Putin was aiming at, when he threw all foreign NGOs out of Russia some years back, even though the NGOs protested that they were just trying to be helpful.
As Moisés Naím indicated, one problem with institutionalizing at the government level the urge to help outside one's borders is the copycat syndrome. That's why authoritarian regimes took a page from the USA and set up their own GONGOs, all in the name of being helpful to peoples in foreign lands.
(For readers unfamiliar with Naím's discussion and the entire issue of GONGOs see my 2007 post, Of Ingos, Gongos, and Rogue Aid: three pieces of the 21st Century puzzle.)
The other big problem is that the election monitoring and other help given by American GONGOs in foreign lands is that these activities are often followed by peoples' revolutions that no matter how nonviolent in the technical sense topple regimes not to America's liking.
To state the problem with greater precision, Gene Sharp, unwittingly perhaps, opened Pandora's Box. He did this by cataloguing, codifying and publishing all the tactics that have been used successfully to mount civil protests against an authoritarian regime. It was a great idea, but the downside is that the tactics can do double duty as a blueprint for staging a soft coup.
That wasn't such a big problem in the era of fax machines and snail mail. But in this era, every authoritarian regime on the planet has downloaded Gene Sharp's rules for nonviolent protest from the Internet. So, now they know every trick in the book about how to pass off a soft coup as a nonviolent revolution.
I'd be surprised to learn that the Obama administration is trying to balkanize Egypt but given the history of GONGOs and the successful soft coups in the post-Soviet era, it's not unreasonable for Egypt's generals to suspect the worst of the American NGOs in Egypt -- particularly because the generals know the Gene Sharp-NGO drill backward and forward.
That's because they were tacitly supporting the organizers of the Tahrir Square 'nonviolent' protests, who were admittedly working from Sharp's playbook -- although the admission didn't reach the American public until after Hosni Mubarak was driven from office. The New York Times broke the story a day or two after Hosni decamped; this was followed about 10 days later by Frontline's documentary, Revolution in Cairo, aired on PBS.
Watch the documentary, and read all the supplemental material available on the PBS Frontline website and through links it provides, to understand more of this part of the story of Egypt's revolution.
What the reporters for Frontline didn't emphasize was that Egypt's military rulers found the Tahrir Square democracy activists, including the self-described "youth wing" of the Muslim Brotherhood (see the Frontline documentary), to be very useful, which is why they stood down during the protests. I think at all costs they needed to get rid of Gamal Mubarak and the Gamalists, who were methodically stripping the military of its power and who gave every indication that they meant to escalate their efforts in an upcoming election. The mass protests against Hosni Mubarak and his regime were the way to neuter the Gamalists without staging assassinations.
And, I might add, there is no instance of Sharp's tactics bringing about a soft coup without tacit cooperation from a country's security apparatus. For readers who believe in the power of nonviolent protest and Tinkerbell, I repeat: no instance.
In short, the generals cooperated with the democracy activists during the Tahrir Square protests because they saw a way to turn Gene Sharp's tactics for promoting civil rights and democracy into a tactic to reinforce their authoritarian rule.
This curious inversion is one of the many oddities of post-Mubarak Egypt, which finds the country's ultraconservative Salafist party defending the democracy-building efforts of American NGOs now facing criminal charges, and the absolute monarch Saudi King Abdullah still angry at the democratically elected Barack Obama for betraying the Gamalists -- who were trying to prepare Egypt for real democracy by breaking the military's power!
This tangled Egyptian tale is just one of the many tangled tales that Americans got tangled up with in their effort to be helpful to the cause of democracy without actually conquering other countries.
The irony is that the more America has tiptoed around in the name of being helpful, the more it's been accused of being an expansionist empire. But if Americans don't want to impose democracy through conquest, they're wise to take the present situation in Egypt -- and in Pakistan, where the generals there are also maneuvering to hold onto their power -- as a lesson. A lesson on the limits to being helpful when you don't have the power to manage unintended consequences.
The same observation holds for staging bombing raids in the name of being helpful. Last August, Mark Safranski, in a discussion with me in his blog's comment section about the militarized 'Right to Protect' doctrine, observed :
What the proponents of the Right to Protect doctrine don't come right out and say is how they plan to impose order in a country after they've bombed its wicked regime to smithereens. But of course they plan to send in a veritable army of NGOs (actually, GONGOs) to monitor free and fair elections and in other ways help establish a genuine democracy.
The glitch in the plan is evident in today's Egypt -- where the generals have popular support for their accusation that Americans are meddling their country -- and in today's Libya. Earlier this week a BBC correspondent gave an eyewitness report that the nation's capital was now blanketed by armed militias roaming around the streets and representing various and presumably opposing factions in Libya.
You want to send election monitors into that? Hand out pamphlets on how stage a genuine democratic election? (Here; hold my AK-47 for a minute while I read.) Not without a contingent of U.S. Marines at your back, which the European Parliament very well knows.
So what to do, if the half-baked militarized approach to being helpful and the NGO approach carry such serious downsides that they're counterproductive? Well, there's always the combination militarized-NGO approach: send in Special Forces to sneak around and be helpful to the cause of democracy. (Kid, don't touch that box marked "Pamphlets" if you don't want to blow up half your village.)
Not a new approach, to be sure, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn it's being deployed in Libya or will be soon. But in this era, when it seems half the world's nations are selling weapons to the other half, and when it's easy to order enough light arms from the Internet to start a civil war, the combo approach presents the same fundamental problem as the other two half-baked approaches: again, Americans don't have the power to manage the inevitable unintended and often completely unforeseen consequences.
So in Libya, as in Afghanistan and other countries, the bloodbath your intervention was meant stop or avert easily touches off a bloodbath that can be harder to stop than the first because it's more diffuse than the one launched by the central governing authority you toppled, or flimflammed out of office.
(I suppose I should note here that the United States didn't actually conquer Iraq; it conquered the Iranian military and Baghdad. Then because it didn't want to deploy enough troops to pacify the rest of the country it left a British command in charge of the key city of Basra. That turned out to be a tragic mistake.)
Then what's the solution, if my fellow Americans blanch at the thought of the United States becoming an expansionist empire? In my view there is no solution, although I think the globalized labor union movement would argue with me. My reply would be that switching out GONGOs for U.S. government-supported labor unions is simply putting a new face on the same downside that exists for GONGOs.
But it's possible to kick the can of armed conquest down the road by revising the approach to being helpful that became standard procedure for the U.S. government during the latter part of the Cold War. The approach was never updated for the present era, during which every authoritarian regime has a library of Gene Sharp books and has learned to play the IMF like a fiddle.
Before revision, though, must come thinking. Toward this end, it's helpful to review the Westphalian concept of sovereignty, the history of the United Arab Republic, and the British Raj. (You're not looking to become historians here; just get in the ballpark and for that, Wikipedia has prefectly serviceable articles on all three topics.)
The review can produce an understanding in Americans that our government's pro forma way of promoting democracy, which focuses on free and fair elections and civil rights, misses a crucial step.
The real battle of ideas today is not in the arena of democratically electing leaders. It's in the arena of sovereignty. Get that part down pat, and Americans don't need GONGOs in the era when a terrorist spokesman, hiding out in the boonies in Waziristan or wherever, emailed Long War Journal's Bill Roggio to inform him that he was right to be suspicious of government announcements that Hakimullah Mehsud was dead.
And in an era when villages in Afghanistan are Tweeting each other like mad on their cell phones to share stories of Taliban misdeeds. (Huh. And here we thought we were the only ones the Taliban were taxing to death.)
I add that Twittermania is a recent twist in the tangled tale of Afghanistan that's putting the Afghan Taliban, and I imagine Pakistan's military, on the back foot. Money says that's why those two are now scrambling to negotiate a power-sharing deal in Afghanistan -- before the Obama administration wakes up and realizes it's not necessary to negotiate.
Where was I? To wrap it up: if Americans really want to be helpful in this era, they can focus on making their own story hang together. The rest of the world will be all ears.
As to how to dismantle the American INGO industry that's sprouted up, get a hammerlock on American CEOs with transnational corporations who see themselves as Gandhi reborn, and elbow U.S. weapons merchants back across the line -- well, that's all part of getting our story straight.
That's how it's done; that's how to establish democracy in lands where the concept of sovereignty is built not on the Westphalian ideal but on the monarchist one. Yet if Americans are too squeamish to do it right, then they must to learn to rein in the urge to be helpful, as headlines from Egypt underscore.
The Wall Street Journal's Matt Bradley reported in the wee hours today from Cairo that America's top military commander, JOC Chairman Martin Dempsey, was on his way to Egypt to negotiate with Egypt's military "over the fate" of the American NGO workers now facing imminent criminal charges relating to "ill-defined political subterfuge" but which could include the charge of espionage.
The problem for General Dempsey is that the Egyptian authorities found maps among the papers they confiscated at those NGOs that could be read as intelligence-gathering as part of a covert U.S. plan to balkanize Egypt. (See Matt's report for details.)
The NGOs have what they consider to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the maps. They used the maps, Matt reports,
... to plan monitoring missions during parliamentary elections late last year.So the NGOs were just trying to be helpful, as State underscored:
In Washington on Wednesday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the U.S. is concerned that the investigation "could have implications for the whole relationship, including our ability to deliver the assistance that we have planned…to support Egypt in its democratic transition and the traditional assistance that we provide for security purposes. We do not want that to happen."The problem for State is that the organizations those Americans now holed up in the U.S. embassy in Cairo work for are NGOs -- nongovernmental organizations -- only in the most technical legal sense of the term, as Matt's report indicates:
The targeted Americans work for four NGOs, all of which have close connections to Capitol Hill and operate almost entirely on congressional financing. In addition to Mr. LaHood's IRI, Egyptian prosecutors are investigating the National Democratic Institute, Freedom House and the International Center for Journalists.That last one is new to me, but the others, as I've mentioned several times on this blog, are notorious GONGOs -- governmental nongovernmental organizations, which of course is a contradiction in terms. They're also INGOs -- international nongovernmental organizations.
It was just such bizarre hybrids that Vladimir Putin was aiming at, when he threw all foreign NGOs out of Russia some years back, even though the NGOs protested that they were just trying to be helpful.
As Moisés Naím indicated, one problem with institutionalizing at the government level the urge to help outside one's borders is the copycat syndrome. That's why authoritarian regimes took a page from the USA and set up their own GONGOs, all in the name of being helpful to peoples in foreign lands.
(For readers unfamiliar with Naím's discussion and the entire issue of GONGOs see my 2007 post, Of Ingos, Gongos, and Rogue Aid: three pieces of the 21st Century puzzle.)
The other big problem is that the election monitoring and other help given by American GONGOs in foreign lands is that these activities are often followed by peoples' revolutions that no matter how nonviolent in the technical sense topple regimes not to America's liking.
To state the problem with greater precision, Gene Sharp, unwittingly perhaps, opened Pandora's Box. He did this by cataloguing, codifying and publishing all the tactics that have been used successfully to mount civil protests against an authoritarian regime. It was a great idea, but the downside is that the tactics can do double duty as a blueprint for staging a soft coup.
That wasn't such a big problem in the era of fax machines and snail mail. But in this era, every authoritarian regime on the planet has downloaded Gene Sharp's rules for nonviolent protest from the Internet. So, now they know every trick in the book about how to pass off a soft coup as a nonviolent revolution.
I'd be surprised to learn that the Obama administration is trying to balkanize Egypt but given the history of GONGOs and the successful soft coups in the post-Soviet era, it's not unreasonable for Egypt's generals to suspect the worst of the American NGOs in Egypt -- particularly because the generals know the Gene Sharp-NGO drill backward and forward.
That's because they were tacitly supporting the organizers of the Tahrir Square 'nonviolent' protests, who were admittedly working from Sharp's playbook -- although the admission didn't reach the American public until after Hosni Mubarak was driven from office. The New York Times broke the story a day or two after Hosni decamped; this was followed about 10 days later by Frontline's documentary, Revolution in Cairo, aired on PBS.
Watch the documentary, and read all the supplemental material available on the PBS Frontline website and through links it provides, to understand more of this part of the story of Egypt's revolution.
What the reporters for Frontline didn't emphasize was that Egypt's military rulers found the Tahrir Square democracy activists, including the self-described "youth wing" of the Muslim Brotherhood (see the Frontline documentary), to be very useful, which is why they stood down during the protests. I think at all costs they needed to get rid of Gamal Mubarak and the Gamalists, who were methodically stripping the military of its power and who gave every indication that they meant to escalate their efforts in an upcoming election. The mass protests against Hosni Mubarak and his regime were the way to neuter the Gamalists without staging assassinations.
And, I might add, there is no instance of Sharp's tactics bringing about a soft coup without tacit cooperation from a country's security apparatus. For readers who believe in the power of nonviolent protest and Tinkerbell, I repeat: no instance.
In short, the generals cooperated with the democracy activists during the Tahrir Square protests because they saw a way to turn Gene Sharp's tactics for promoting civil rights and democracy into a tactic to reinforce their authoritarian rule.
This curious inversion is one of the many oddities of post-Mubarak Egypt, which finds the country's ultraconservative Salafist party defending the democracy-building efforts of American NGOs now facing criminal charges, and the absolute monarch Saudi King Abdullah still angry at the democratically elected Barack Obama for betraying the Gamalists -- who were trying to prepare Egypt for real democracy by breaking the military's power!
This tangled Egyptian tale is just one of the many tangled tales that Americans got tangled up with in their effort to be helpful to the cause of democracy without actually conquering other countries.
The irony is that the more America has tiptoed around in the name of being helpful, the more it's been accused of being an expansionist empire. But if Americans don't want to impose democracy through conquest, they're wise to take the present situation in Egypt -- and in Pakistan, where the generals there are also maneuvering to hold onto their power -- as a lesson. A lesson on the limits to being helpful when you don't have the power to manage unintended consequences.
The same observation holds for staging bombing raids in the name of being helpful. Last August, Mark Safranski, in a discussion with me in his blog's comment section about the militarized 'Right to Protect' doctrine, observed :
[...] Moreover, the Libyan intervention was an astrategic mess carried out in a half-baked, amateur manner that harms US long-term interests in talking states off the nuclear non-proliferation-state sponsor of terrorism ledge. What dictator in his right mind will believe our diplomatic assurances of reconciliation if they give up WMDs or change their policies after what happened to Gaddafi? We have just incentivized every potential rogue state into adopting a posture of maximum intransigence, mutual aid to fellow dictators and strategic courtship of Beijing.Mark hit the mark so squarely that he might as well have been reading from Rawalpindi's playbook ever since Pakistan's generals saw what happened to Gaddafi.
Gaddafi is odious but he served a use, like Ceaucescu did, in demonstrating that America would negotiate a deal with enemies and stick to it. That card is now lost, or if not lost, seriously devalued to a short term, low-trust, expediency.
What the proponents of the Right to Protect doctrine don't come right out and say is how they plan to impose order in a country after they've bombed its wicked regime to smithereens. But of course they plan to send in a veritable army of NGOs (actually, GONGOs) to monitor free and fair elections and in other ways help establish a genuine democracy.
The glitch in the plan is evident in today's Egypt -- where the generals have popular support for their accusation that Americans are meddling their country -- and in today's Libya. Earlier this week a BBC correspondent gave an eyewitness report that the nation's capital was now blanketed by armed militias roaming around the streets and representing various and presumably opposing factions in Libya.
You want to send election monitors into that? Hand out pamphlets on how stage a genuine democratic election? (Here; hold my AK-47 for a minute while I read.) Not without a contingent of U.S. Marines at your back, which the European Parliament very well knows.
So what to do, if the half-baked militarized approach to being helpful and the NGO approach carry such serious downsides that they're counterproductive? Well, there's always the combination militarized-NGO approach: send in Special Forces to sneak around and be helpful to the cause of democracy. (Kid, don't touch that box marked "Pamphlets" if you don't want to blow up half your village.)
Not a new approach, to be sure, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn it's being deployed in Libya or will be soon. But in this era, when it seems half the world's nations are selling weapons to the other half, and when it's easy to order enough light arms from the Internet to start a civil war, the combo approach presents the same fundamental problem as the other two half-baked approaches: again, Americans don't have the power to manage the inevitable unintended and often completely unforeseen consequences.
So in Libya, as in Afghanistan and other countries, the bloodbath your intervention was meant stop or avert easily touches off a bloodbath that can be harder to stop than the first because it's more diffuse than the one launched by the central governing authority you toppled, or flimflammed out of office.
(I suppose I should note here that the United States didn't actually conquer Iraq; it conquered the Iranian military and Baghdad. Then because it didn't want to deploy enough troops to pacify the rest of the country it left a British command in charge of the key city of Basra. That turned out to be a tragic mistake.)
Then what's the solution, if my fellow Americans blanch at the thought of the United States becoming an expansionist empire? In my view there is no solution, although I think the globalized labor union movement would argue with me. My reply would be that switching out GONGOs for U.S. government-supported labor unions is simply putting a new face on the same downside that exists for GONGOs.
But it's possible to kick the can of armed conquest down the road by revising the approach to being helpful that became standard procedure for the U.S. government during the latter part of the Cold War. The approach was never updated for the present era, during which every authoritarian regime has a library of Gene Sharp books and has learned to play the IMF like a fiddle.
Before revision, though, must come thinking. Toward this end, it's helpful to review the Westphalian concept of sovereignty, the history of the United Arab Republic, and the British Raj. (You're not looking to become historians here; just get in the ballpark and for that, Wikipedia has prefectly serviceable articles on all three topics.)
The review can produce an understanding in Americans that our government's pro forma way of promoting democracy, which focuses on free and fair elections and civil rights, misses a crucial step.
The real battle of ideas today is not in the arena of democratically electing leaders. It's in the arena of sovereignty. Get that part down pat, and Americans don't need GONGOs in the era when a terrorist spokesman, hiding out in the boonies in Waziristan or wherever, emailed Long War Journal's Bill Roggio to inform him that he was right to be suspicious of government announcements that Hakimullah Mehsud was dead.
And in an era when villages in Afghanistan are Tweeting each other like mad on their cell phones to share stories of Taliban misdeeds. (Huh. And here we thought we were the only ones the Taliban were taxing to death.)
I add that Twittermania is a recent twist in the tangled tale of Afghanistan that's putting the Afghan Taliban, and I imagine Pakistan's military, on the back foot. Money says that's why those two are now scrambling to negotiate a power-sharing deal in Afghanistan -- before the Obama administration wakes up and realizes it's not necessary to negotiate.
Where was I? To wrap it up: if Americans really want to be helpful in this era, they can focus on making their own story hang together. The rest of the world will be all ears.
As to how to dismantle the American INGO industry that's sprouted up, get a hammerlock on American CEOs with transnational corporations who see themselves as Gandhi reborn, and elbow U.S. weapons merchants back across the line -- well, that's all part of getting our story straight.
Friday, February 3
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.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.
[...]
Thursday, February 2
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.You will note from the rest of the report that Panetta brings up the money topic more than once.
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.
[...]
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.
Wednesday, February 1
Obama caves into pressure from NATO allies: Panetta announces 2013 as end to U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan
UPDATE 7:30 PM ET
Jennifer Griffin reporting frm Pentagon 7:07 PM for Fox: White House unnamed official claiming Panetta might have jumped the gun on Obama's planned announcement at May NATO summit to move up timeline for end of combat operations. Panetta told reporters that 2013 end "may" be the end of U.S. combat operations. Point is that O is trying to pin blame on his Secretary of Defense for moving up the announcement. What a boss to work for, eh?
************
Obama decided not to wait until the May NATO summit in Chicago to talk timelines for withdrawal. See the New York Times report if you haven't already heard the news. U.S. trainers for ANA will remain through 2014 -- maybe. See this VOA report, 'Insider' Attacks Against Coalition Forces by Afghan Security Forces Probed in US Congress.
Jennifer Griffin reporting frm Pentagon 7:07 PM for Fox: White House unnamed official claiming Panetta might have jumped the gun on Obama's planned announcement at May NATO summit to move up timeline for end of combat operations. Panetta told reporters that 2013 end "may" be the end of U.S. combat operations. Point is that O is trying to pin blame on his Secretary of Defense for moving up the announcement. What a boss to work for, eh?
************
Obama decided not to wait until the May NATO summit in Chicago to talk timelines for withdrawal. See the New York Times report if you haven't already heard the news. U.S. trainers for ANA will remain through 2014 -- maybe. See this VOA report, 'Insider' Attacks Against Coalition Forces by Afghan Security Forces Probed in US Congress.
Who was the leaker at NATO? (UPDATED 2X)
(First updated version, at 4:55 PM ET, added a few clarifications. The second update, at the end of the post, is a question from a reader and my reply.)
A reader asked, in response to the Dragon Lady post, if I was implying that the British command at NATO was behind the leaked report. No; I was simply responding to Rashid's comment. As much as I like to blame the British foreign office for too much rain in Washington or too little, I can't feature Cameron or anyone in the MoD authorizing such a leak. Of course the one time I'm willing to let the British off the hook could be the time I was wrong, but if I had to take a guess as to which government had its fingerprints on the leak, it would be Germany.
Here's the reasoning behind my guess:
The real point of the NATO leak is that most Afghans are willing to put up with the Taliban; that's not true but that's the meta-message of the report -- the part of the report that was leaked. The implied conclusion is, 'So then what is NATO doing in Afghanistan?'
Germany's government wants out of Afghanistan even more than the French or the British. The German command in NATO might have become concerned that Obama was building a case for war with Pakistan -- or at least military operations in the country that would drag the EU even deeper into the mess.
The Germans have more on their plate right now than any other major country including the United States because the EU is staring into the abyss. The concern in many quarters is that the 2008 financial meltdown might have been just a prelude to what's coming. There are too many variables at this point to call how it will all shake out. But I think whether or not the worst-case economic scenario materializes, the Germans feel it's imperative to wash their hands of the entire 'AFPAK' matter right now, and leave it to the Northern Alliance, with covert help from India, Russia and Iran (and posssibly China) to settle Pakistan's hash in Afghanistan. As to whether that means they'd go as far as to leak that report to drum up more support for a very early exit from Afghanistan, well, desperation is the mother of many things.
Again, I'm guessing.
*************
UPDATE 6:10 PM ET
Reader question: "Pundita, you don't think the leaker could be Sarkozy, who hates Karzai?"
I think that's too obvious. Sarkozy has already made his case publicly known and in spectacular fashion. But Sarkozy's announced plan to leave A'stan a year early would be the perfect opportunity for Germany. I think Merkel wants Europe out of A'stan even earlier than Sarkozy does. So if ever there was a perfect time for Germany to try and tip the scales of NATO involvement in A'Stan, it's now. Bonus for Merkel: the leak would be blamed on the USA (that's who Islamabad is blaming -- see Rashid's interview -- or France.)
It's possible that Panetta's statements on 60 Minutes about Pak-OBL, most of which were made available at least two days in advance of the broadcast, might have raised alarms that Obama was starting to make a case for boots on the ground in Pakistan, even though State scrambled to do damage control in Islamabad about Panetta's statements.
One other point about Sarkozy: A big question in my mind is whether the US command in A'stan managed to hide from other ISAF members the pattern of increasing number of NATO troops killed by ANA soldiers, or the number of troops killed, until the NYT report ripped the lid off the situation.
If the answer is yes -- if the French command at NATO had to learn the story from the Times -- I think Sarkozy's fury might have been directed more at Obama or the US command at NATO than Karzai.
Again, it's just a question I have but one that keeps me up at night.
Pundita
A reader asked, in response to the Dragon Lady post, if I was implying that the British command at NATO was behind the leaked report. No; I was simply responding to Rashid's comment. As much as I like to blame the British foreign office for too much rain in Washington or too little, I can't feature Cameron or anyone in the MoD authorizing such a leak. Of course the one time I'm willing to let the British off the hook could be the time I was wrong, but if I had to take a guess as to which government had its fingerprints on the leak, it would be Germany.
Here's the reasoning behind my guess:
The real point of the NATO leak is that most Afghans are willing to put up with the Taliban; that's not true but that's the meta-message of the report -- the part of the report that was leaked. The implied conclusion is, 'So then what is NATO doing in Afghanistan?'
Germany's government wants out of Afghanistan even more than the French or the British. The German command in NATO might have become concerned that Obama was building a case for war with Pakistan -- or at least military operations in the country that would drag the EU even deeper into the mess.
The Germans have more on their plate right now than any other major country including the United States because the EU is staring into the abyss. The concern in many quarters is that the 2008 financial meltdown might have been just a prelude to what's coming. There are too many variables at this point to call how it will all shake out. But I think whether or not the worst-case economic scenario materializes, the Germans feel it's imperative to wash their hands of the entire 'AFPAK' matter right now, and leave it to the Northern Alliance, with covert help from India, Russia and Iran (and posssibly China) to settle Pakistan's hash in Afghanistan. As to whether that means they'd go as far as to leak that report to drum up more support for a very early exit from Afghanistan, well, desperation is the mother of many things.
Again, I'm guessing.
*************
UPDATE 6:10 PM ET
Reader question: "Pundita, you don't think the leaker could be Sarkozy, who hates Karzai?"
I think that's too obvious. Sarkozy has already made his case publicly known and in spectacular fashion. But Sarkozy's announced plan to leave A'stan a year early would be the perfect opportunity for Germany. I think Merkel wants Europe out of A'stan even earlier than Sarkozy does. So if ever there was a perfect time for Germany to try and tip the scales of NATO involvement in A'Stan, it's now. Bonus for Merkel: the leak would be blamed on the USA (that's who Islamabad is blaming -- see Rashid's interview -- or France.)
It's possible that Panetta's statements on 60 Minutes about Pak-OBL, most of which were made available at least two days in advance of the broadcast, might have raised alarms that Obama was starting to make a case for boots on the ground in Pakistan, even though State scrambled to do damage control in Islamabad about Panetta's statements.
One other point about Sarkozy: A big question in my mind is whether the US command in A'stan managed to hide from other ISAF members the pattern of increasing number of NATO troops killed by ANA soldiers, or the number of troops killed, until the NYT report ripped the lid off the situation.
If the answer is yes -- if the French command at NATO had to learn the story from the Times -- I think Sarkozy's fury might have been directed more at Obama or the US command at NATO than Karzai.
Again, it's just a question I have but one that keeps me up at night.
Pundita
Deputy Barney Fife meets the Dragon Lady
"Afghan President Hamid Karzai meets with Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar in Kabul on February 1." Pix from RFERL interview today with Ahmed Rashid about the leaked NATO report fingering the ISI. Rashid thinks the report was leaked to time with the Karzai-Khar meeting. It would have been leaked anyway.
The dog and pony show that Gilani and Kayani put on, in the attempt to persuade the IMF that there was something approximating a civilian government in Pakistan, backfired. So then Gilani had to run around Davos last week assuring everyone that there was not going to be a coup in Pakistan.
My favorite part of the Rashid interview:
RFE/RL: Is the revelation in this NATO report about Islamabad's support for the Taliban news to you?"Ignored?" So Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had nothing to do with anything. They were just sitting there in Downing Street, pure as the driven snow.
Ahmed Rashid: It's very well known amongst NATO militaries [and] amongst the U.S. military. I was told by senior American generals that they approached [U.S.] President [George W.] Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld back in 2005 about the support that the Taliban were getting from Pakistan. But it was ignored by Bush at that time.
See this what I keep warning: the longer Americans stay in there and play with NATO, the more bags we're going to be left holding.
Has Kayani decided ISI is the sacrificial goat?
Well, the general has to find some means to placate the IMF fast, or he's in deep doo-doo. However, we can't learn the answer until we discover where President Obama has hidden the bunny. If this makes no sense, it's just because there are some readers who're trying to make sense of things that I never added a quote from a famous figure in the U.S. news media to the Puffy Head part of this blog's sidebar: "Pundita is Alice in Washington's Wonderland."
NATO's Superduper Top Secret You Mustn't Read This leaked report: "ISI supporting Afghan Taliban" or what NATO and waterbugs have in common
Once I was chasing a waterbug around the house to kill it when it made an executive decision to hide instead of run.
"You do realize I can see you, you nitwit," I said peevishly.
It didn't realize; it thought that because it could no longer see me, I couldn't see the back of its body sticking out from the hiding place.
I couldn't bring myself to kill a creature that meant me no harm and couldn't comprehend that its attempts at subterfuge were completely transparent.
So, in the manner of the samurai who sheathed his sword and walked away when the thief he'd cornered spat in his face, I lowered the swatter then made enough noise to scare the waterbug into running again. The chase resumed until the waterbug lucked into a cranny big enough to hide its entire body from my eyes.
At least as far back as 2005, when the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan became evident, the British government has wanted a 'political' settlement with them, and other NATO nations that haven't wanted to confront Pakistan's regime have wanted the same settlement. And hang the facts that most Afghans hate the Taliban and don't want any settlement that puts Pakistan and its Taliban proxies in control of their country. The following report, which has set off another predictable cascade of denials from Pakistan's regime, is best understood with those facts in mind:
"You do realize I can see you, you nitwit," I said peevishly.
It didn't realize; it thought that because it could no longer see me, I couldn't see the back of its body sticking out from the hiding place.
I couldn't bring myself to kill a creature that meant me no harm and couldn't comprehend that its attempts at subterfuge were completely transparent.
So, in the manner of the samurai who sheathed his sword and walked away when the thief he'd cornered spat in his face, I lowered the swatter then made enough noise to scare the waterbug into running again. The chase resumed until the waterbug lucked into a cranny big enough to hide its entire body from my eyes.
At least as far back as 2005, when the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan became evident, the British government has wanted a 'political' settlement with them, and other NATO nations that haven't wanted to confront Pakistan's regime have wanted the same settlement. And hang the facts that most Afghans hate the Taliban and don't want any settlement that puts Pakistan and its Taliban proxies in control of their country. The following report, which has set off another predictable cascade of denials from Pakistan's regime, is best understood with those facts in mind:
Pakistan helping Afghan Taliban - Nato
February 1, 2012
"The Taliban are not Islam. The Taliban are Islamabad."
The Taliban in Afghanistan are being directly assisted by Pakistani security services, according to a secret Nato report seen by the BBC.
The leaked report, derived from thousands of interrogations, claims the Taliban remain defiant and have wide support among the Afghan people.
[...]
The report alleges that Pakistan knows the locations of senior Taliban leaders.
"We have long been concerned about ties between elements of the ISI [Pakistan's intelligence service] and some extremist networks," said US Pentagon spokesman Captain John Kirby, adding that the US Defence Department had not yet seen the report.
[...]
The BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Kabul says the report - on the state of the Taliban - fully exposes for the first time the relationship between the ISI and the Taliban.
The report is based on material from 27,000 interrogations with more than 4,000 captured Taliban, al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters and civilians.
The report notes: "Pakistan's manipulation of the Taliban senior leadership continues unabatedly".
It also says that Pakistan is aware of the locations of senior Taliban leaders.
"Senior Taliban representatives, such as Nasiruddin Haqqani, maintain residences in the immediate vicinity of ISI headquarters in Islamabad," it said.
It quotes a senior al-Qaeda detainee as saying: "Pakistan knows everything. They control everything. I can't [expletive] on a tree in Kunar without them knowing. The Taliban are not Islam. The Taliban are Islamabad."
Pakistan is finding it harder to convince outsiders it is not helping the Afghan Taliban and giving safe haven to its leaders.
In effect, the accusation is that Pakistan is betting on the insurgents being the strongest power in Afghanistan and most likely ally once Nato leaves - something Islamabad of course strenuously denies.
The leak of this report comes at a particularly sensitive time. Pakistan is already blocking the supply route to coalition forces in Afghanistan, following a Nato attack in which 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed.
With increasing pressure being heaped on Pakistan, public support here for formally ending co-operation with the West simply grows.
Our correspondent says the report seems to suggest that the Taliban feel trapped by ISI control and fear they will never escape its influence.
However, it states: "As this document is derived directly from insurgents it should be considered informational and not necessarily analytical."
Adm Mike Mullen, former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has explained Pakistan's closeness to the Afghan Taliban by pointing to infiltration of its army by the religious right, but he also says it is part of a grand strategy to increase leverage in the region via "proxies".
Despite Nato's strategy to secure the country with Afghan forces, the secret document details widespread collaboration between the insurgents and Afghan police and military.
Lt Col Jimmie Cummings, a spokesman for Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan, said the document was "a classified internal document that is not meant to be released to the public".
"It is a matter of policy that documents that are classified are not discussed under any circumstances," he said.
The report also depicts the depth of continuing support among the Afghan population for the Taliban, our correspondent says.
It paints a picture of al-Qaeda's influence diminishing but the Taliban's influence increasing, he adds.
Taliban influence
In a damning conclusion, the document says that in the last year there has been unprecedented interest, even from members of the Afghan government, in joining the Taliban cause.
It adds: "Afghan civilians frequently prefer Taliban governance over the Afghan government, usually as a result of government corruption."
The report has evidence that the Taliban are purposely hastening Nato's withdrawal by deliberately reducing their attacks in some areas and then initiating a comprehensive hearts-and-minds campaign.
It says that in areas where Isaf has withdrawn, Taliban influence has increased, often with little or no resistance from government security forces. And in many cases, with the active help of the Afghan police and army.
When foreign soldiers leave, Afghan security forces are expected to take control.
The report says that surrender is far from their collective mindset.
"For the moment, they believe that continuing the fight and expanding Taliban governance are their only viable courses of action," it adds.
According to the report, rifles, pistols and heavy weapons have been sold by Afghan security forces in bazaars in Pakistan.
The report adds that Taliban members "do not receive salaries or other financial incentives for their work", but their operations are funded by the narcotics trade and they frequently take a cut from the trade.
Their main revenue, though, is from donations, and they travel around the country from door to door making no secret of their affliation, it says.
Tuesday, January 31
Obama announces continued big U.S. aid to Pakistan's regime. Will this encourage it to continue stealth ethnic cleansing in FATA?
January 31, CNN-IBN:
The situation is something like the early stage of the clearing operation in Sudan, which morphed into what was called "genocide in slow motion." Only in the case of FATA it's Pakistan's military that does the initial clearing, not Janjaweed-type militias, ostensibly to drive out what it considers to be 'bad' Taliban (those who attack the regime). Then the military pulls out and looks the other way while other Taliban burn down villages and kill tribe members -- or claims it doesn't have enough troops to control the Taliban.
Reports on the plight of the tribes in FATA are few and far between in the Western media, but this one from 2011 conveys the picture:
[During an online town hall] US President Barack Obama hit out at Pakistan for its inability to fight terrorism. Obama was responding to a war veteran's question but defended his government's move to continue giving Islamabad millions in aid.I don't know what reasoning informed President Obama's decision to acknowledge the U.S. drone strikes; perhaps the announcement is part of a new tactic for dealing with Pakistan's regime. In any event, handing the regime a virtual blank check risks encouraging it to continue what's been de facto ethnic cleansing in FATA -- and against tribes that are defenseless, and voiceless in Washington and on the world stage.
"When it comes to the fight against terror, Pakistan either lacks resources or the will," said Obama, saying America needs to pump in funds to tackle terror.
American drones regularly target terrorists in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, Obama has also said in the first such acknowledgment by the top US leadership on its highly successful but secretive programme.
"A lot of these strikes have been in the FATA, and going after al-Qaeda suspects who are up in very tough terrain along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan," Obama said in response to a question [...]
"For us to be able to get them in another way would involve probably a lot more intrusive military action than the ones we're already engaging in," Obama said.
[...]
Obama said these strikes by unmanned drones are regularly carried out and these are "targeted focussed effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists".
"For the most part, they've been very precise precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates, and we're very careful in terms of how it's been applied," he said, responding to the question.
This is the first time that the US has publicly acknowledged the drone attacks inside Pakistan. The United States so far had refrained from publicly speaking on this issue.
[...]
The situation is something like the early stage of the clearing operation in Sudan, which morphed into what was called "genocide in slow motion." Only in the case of FATA it's Pakistan's military that does the initial clearing, not Janjaweed-type militias, ostensibly to drive out what it considers to be 'bad' Taliban (those who attack the regime). Then the military pulls out and looks the other way while other Taliban burn down villages and kill tribe members -- or claims it doesn't have enough troops to control the Taliban.
Reports on the plight of the tribes in FATA are few and far between in the Western media, but this one from 2011 conveys the picture:
'Clearing' Kurram: What Pakistan's Army Didn't Do in Kurram Agency
By Daud Khattak
August 25, 2011
AFPAK Channel, Foreign Policy magazine
On Aug. 18, Pakistan's most powerful man, Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, secretly flew to Kurram agency in the country's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and declared it free of "miscreants."
No doubt the Pakistani Army did a great job clearing militants from Central Kurram, the focus of the operation, as it did in areas like the Swat Valley. But Kayani's visit and announcement raise the following question: What do "clear" and "miscreants" mean for a Pakistani Army fighting to regain control of the area from a discreet force that can shift, hit, kill, and target anywhere, any place, and any time? And if the area had been successfully cleared, why did Kayani not travel by road, and why did he not meet the open jirgas of tribal elders in that area, as was the tradition when top Pakistani officials visited the tribal belt before 2001?
Indeed, it would have been great fun if Kayani had taken the governor of Khyber-Puktunkhwa province (the federal government figure who is actually in charge of administering the FATA) along with him, traveling by road to the "cleared" area so that the youth of Kurram could welcome them with the beating of drums and traditional dance, attan, instead of welcoming Kayani's visit from afar while begging him to finish the job and lift the siege on Kurram's main city, Parachinar. Only then would the people of Kurram come to believe that their area had truly been secured.
However, what is clear in Kurram and the rest of the tribal areas is that the people continue to live under the threat of terrorists operating under different names, from Jaish to Lashkar to Tehrik, despite numerous operations and claims of victory by Pakistan's security forces.
Although the Army announced that the Kurram operation was launched after a demand from the area's tribal elders, locals contradicted that statement in conversations with the author, saying they never asked for the military operation, whose key objective was to open the Tal-Parachinar road for people traveling to Parachinar, the center of Upper Kurram, from Peshawar via Sadda, the headquarters of Lower Kurram Agency. Instead, they had been asking for more than two years for the government simply to provide them basic security, with no response in return.
However, locals told this writer, they still cannot travel on the Tal-Parachinar road without risking their security, despite the two-month-long operation and ensuing "victory."
All the available accounts from Central Kurram suggest that one of the major impacts of the operation was that it forced the local population to leave their homes, allowing the Taliban to go from village to village, burning the villages vacated by the people.
According to reports aired by the Pashto-language radio station Mashaal, so far 16 villages have been burned to the ground by the Taliban in spite of the Army operation, with each village consisting of an average of 50 to 60 houses.
Similar operations have already been conducted in other tribal agencies -- South Waziristan, Mohmand, Bajaur, and the Bara area of Khyber, where the security forces have been engaged in combat operations for the past two years while the people live under a curfew -- and been declared successes.
All the while, the displaced people from those areas continue to live in tents, leaving the field open for the Army and the Taliban. Once the playing fields for their children, the land of the tribesmen is now known as a recruiting center for suicide bombers and jihadists.
FATA's nearly 7 million tribesmen, once fiercely independent, stunningly hospitable, and unbelievably proud, are now living as a vanquished nation robbed of their land, resources, independence, customs, and traditions by the imported jihadists and the state security agencies.
Many in these tribal areas can't live and even visit their homes and villages for fear of being kidnapped by armed bandits, killed by the Taliban, arrested by the Army or intelligence agencies, or targeted accidentally by American drones. And those who have not left or have since returned can't dare to utter a word either against the Army or against the militants.
Two weeks ago, when armed Taliban raided some shops in the central bazaar in Miram Shah, the capital of North Waziristan, and burned pieces of women's garments for being un-Islamic and too thin, this writer tried to talk to some shop owners about the incident. Those who would speak agreed to do so only on the condition that they would not condemn the act and would only discuss their financial losses. Yet the situation is little different between the Taliban-controlled Miram Shah and in "cleared" areas of Mohmand, South Waziristan, Bajaur, and Kurram.
In fact, the threat for the common citizen in all those areas is as widespread as it was before the military operations. And this is the reason they are staying in tented villages despite the hot summer and chilly winter, with no proper food, water, medicines, and schooling for their children. Many others have migrated to other cities and towns, shutting down their businesses and leaving their farms.
While the sacrifices of the Pakistani Army and Frontier Corps over the years are no secret, the failure to achieve peace and security despite the substantial use of force and displacement of hundreds of thousands leaves room for many questions -- most importantly, whether the Army is unwilling to definitively crush the militants, or instead if it is incapable of doing so.
In Kurram, the road to Parachinar has been closed by militants for the last few years, while the security forces have merely looked on. Suddenly and unexpectedly, these same forces announced a clearing operation, but only in an area where the situation was quite calm and peaceful. Thousands of families were displaced to live in camps, and then suddenly the Army announced victory one evening while the displaced people, as scared as before, find their situation unchanged.
The road to Upper Kurram that goes from Peshawar to Parachinar via Tal is still closed, and the people, scared of being kidnapped or killed, still travel through the Afghan cities of Jalalabad, Kabul, Khost, and Gardez to reach Parachinar.
Many locals with whom this writer talked on the phone say the real militant problem existed in Lower Kurram, while the Army was engaged for the past two months in Central Kurram. During the whole operation, it was not made clear who or which group of militants was being targeted, or whether any prominent militant leaders had been killed or arrested.
It is equal parts interesting and tragic that only a day after Gen. Kayani's visit to Central Kurram and the announcement regarding the "clearance" of the area, a teenage bomber wreaked havoc on worshippers in a mosque offering Friday congregational prayers in the Jamrud subdivision of Khyber agency, an area previously declared "clear" of militants.
Seeing the bomb blasts in a supposedly secure area, how could people in Kurram be expected to believe that their lives and property would be safe following the military operation in their backyard? And while the key road to Parachinar stays closed, it does not matter much for the people if some portion of the agency is cleared or not; the agency will always struggle to survive while its heart remains blocked.
Daud Khattak is a journalist working with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Pashto-language Mashaal Radio in Prague.
Monday, January 30
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.
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.
Yo, State: how do you explain this?
China wins first Afghan oil extraction contract. Oh but that's right I forgot: you were so busy helping Pakistan scare up American investors to mine Thar coal after China pulled out of the deal that you didn't have time to negotiate with that bunch of losers in Kabul's ministry of mines and precious metals, or whatever it's called.
Speaking of Thar coal, if you want to start the week with a belly laugh read Fouad Khan's beautifully researched and written analysis for the (Pakistan) Express Tribune, Chasing a pipe dream: three reasons why Thar coal will not save Pakistan. Just a little preview:
Where was I? China snapping up contracts in Afghanistan that should have gone to the USA seeing how Americans are spilling so much of their blood there and all.
I know; it's not State's fault. It's never State's fault because it was born under an unlucky star. When you're wrong there's a President in office who follows your advice. When you're right it so happens there's a President who won't listen to a word you say. And then there are presidents, such as Obama, with a built-in homing device: if State is right that means he doesn't listen; if it's wrong he loves the advice.
But has it ever occurred to State that Foggy Bottom might be built on top of a Native Indian burial ground? I'm serious; maybe the problem is not in the stars. It could be ghosts. In that case State doesn't need a bigger budget; it needs a shaman or two. Have them do a blessing ceremony to pacify any angry spirits hanging out in the halls. Or State could always solve the problem by relocating its headquarters to somewhere else. Like Brussels.
All right, all right, Pundita; somebody get the hook because I could on like this for the rest of week.
Speaking of Thar coal, if you want to start the week with a belly laugh read Fouad Khan's beautifully researched and written analysis for the (Pakistan) Express Tribune, Chasing a pipe dream: three reasons why Thar coal will not save Pakistan. Just a little preview:
The fixed carbon content of Thar coal is less than 22%. The low carbon content translates into low energy generation capacity, which means that if energy is invested into transporting the lignite from source to point of consumption, the net energy output of the mining, extraction, transportation and conversion process becomes less than zero; you end up investing more energy making energy out of coal than you get out of it in terms of megawatts. In order to get any energy out of lignite, it has to be converted into electricity almost entirely onsite; where it is being mined. Which brings us to the first reason why Thar coal will not save Pakistan.Gee I hope the Thar-Pak folks don't read the Express Tribune if their intention is actually to help Pakistan; I think that's the name of the American coal-mining consortium that was thrown together.
There isn’t enough water
[...]
Where was I? China snapping up contracts in Afghanistan that should have gone to the USA seeing how Americans are spilling so much of their blood there and all.
I know; it's not State's fault. It's never State's fault because it was born under an unlucky star. When you're wrong there's a President in office who follows your advice. When you're right it so happens there's a President who won't listen to a word you say. And then there are presidents, such as Obama, with a built-in homing device: if State is right that means he doesn't listen; if it's wrong he loves the advice.
But has it ever occurred to State that Foggy Bottom might be built on top of a Native Indian burial ground? I'm serious; maybe the problem is not in the stars. It could be ghosts. In that case State doesn't need a bigger budget; it needs a shaman or two. Have them do a blessing ceremony to pacify any angry spirits hanging out in the halls. Or State could always solve the problem by relocating its headquarters to somewhere else. Like Brussels.
All right, all right, Pundita; somebody get the hook because I could on like this for the rest of week.
Friday, January 27
Urgent advice for State: Warn Obama to stop pushing the envelope (UPDATED 2X)
UPDATE 2:05 PM ET January 29
Adding two important news reports to the footnotes, both of which I'd misplaced at the time I published this post and just found.
Footnote #1: Egypt faces hurdles in securing IMF aid, January 25, Reuters. Although the January 25 report doesn't contain the news about the billion dollar-'bridge' loan that I'd mentioned in the text, it presents key observations that were dropped from the updated January 26 Reuters report I'd originally linked to.
Footnote #8: Pakistan stoking anti-Indian sentiments to divert attention from the heat at home, January 26, Times of India. At first glance this report doesn't differ markedly from the one in The Hindu about the LeT 'resurgence' in Pakistan but it brings out points which underscore the seriousness of the development, and not only for India. LeT is one of the world's most dangerous international terrorist organizations; that Pakistan's military let its leader out of his cage at home at this juncture is almost beyond belief. Almost.
******************
I was sitting on the patio one morning six years ago, enjoying the quiet and early Spring weather, when I heard the most godawful sound. I'd barely blurted, "What the --?" when I learned the sound was a squirrel's idea of a battle cry issuing from maybe 200 squirrel throats. All the squirrels in the neighborhood, it seemed, had banded together to run off a large rat and the chase was taking them through my back yard. I never saw or heard anything like it my life. And let me tell you that rat was burning rubber. Never saw a rat run so fast.
I told this story not to insult any government but to graphically illustrate that when sufficiently provoked and desperate, even the weakest governments can set the mighty United States back on its heels. Once this gets underway it can snowball into a trend.
With all such situations it's perceptions of American actions that count, or to be more precise the perceived pattern of actions. During the past year the perceived pattern is that President Barack Obama is throwing his weight around the world, everywhere he can.
I understand that Obama can cite reasons for each instance in which he's crashed national borders in pursuit of the bad guys. Yet the perception is that Obama has gotten hold of two very efficient lethal weapons -- U.S. Special Forces teams and armed drones -- and is deploying them anywhere in the world he sees fit.
But even President George W. Bush and his most aggressive predecessors in the Cold War managed to meddle in ways that didn't make it look as if the entire planet was suddenly under surprise attack from the United States. They knew when to back off -- and they were operating in a communications era when their every move in a foreign country wasn't broadcast around the world.
Times have changed. It's the piling-on phenomenon that's leading people to these perceptions Okay, so you wanted to shoot rockets at al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan's badlands. Okay, so you had to support Sarkozy's war against Gaddafi. Okay, so you had shoot rockets at al Qaeda in Yemen. Okay, so you had to take out Osama bin Laden when you found him. Okay, so you had to rescue an American citizen who was kidnapped by common criminals.
But all of these "okay" situations are piled on top of Obama expressing public support for Egypt's democracy activists and as much telling Mubarak to decamp. And piled on top of meddling in spectacular fashion in Pakistan's internal affairs. And starting a cold war with Iran's regime not to mention starting a cold war with Syria's regime.
All this within the space of a year.
I don't need to tell State that the juntas in Pakistan and Egypt are in absolutely desperate straits. They are both staring at the imminent prospect of a complete economic collapse in their countries. And the fear is that raising loans amounting to a billion dollars from the World Bank and African Development Bank until the IMF can (if it chooses) to bail them out might not be enough to stave off economic collapse in Egypt. (1)
Nor should I need to tell State that both juntas have broad and deep support in their respective countries, if for no other reason than the large number of civilians the businesses owned by the juntas employ.
So a reasonable person would assume that last month, after Egypt's junta gave a clear warning to the Obama administration to back off in Egypt, State would have immediately yanked the Democratic and Republican party NGOs that were operating in Egypt. I mean -- how much more of a warning do you need, when a security force raids the NGOs and confiscates their computers while the junta accuses the NGOs of being fronts for the American government and meddling in Egypt's internal affairs? (2)
But no, the NGOs continued to operate in Egypt -- all for a good cause, of course -- after State pulled their irons out of the fire in December. Now we learn as of yesterday some Americans working for the NGOs have been barred from leaving Egypt. This is a prelude to arrest warrants being issued -- or at least that's the implied threat of the action to prevent the Americans (and some Europeans who work for othe ngos from leaving Egypt. (2)
Obama is understandably furious about the situation but he could have seen this coming even before Mubarak left office. And now Egypt's generals believe they have no other choice but to find a scapegoat for the country's economic crisis. The Obama administration's ill-conceived attempt to bring more democracy to Egypt, which is using a very small number of Egyptians, has handed the junta the perfect goat.
Now I turn to Pakistan. The country is not only facing economic collapse but it's also in the throes of the worst fuel crisis in its history. (3) So why has the Obama administration decided that this is the perfect time to turn the heat up on Iran by trying to get Pakistan's regime to abandon the gas pipeline Iran is building for them, and sign up to get gas from the TAPI pipeline? (4)(5)
Is the answer that chipmunks are managing the Pakistan portfolio for the Obama administration? I ask this also because this is the same question they're asking in Afghanistan. I mean -- our war office and State couldn't even keep track of containers being transshipped through Pakistan, many of those containers containing desperately needed food supplies for Afghans.
Why "desperate?" Because the Obama administration and Congress haven't wanted the Afghan government to use an Iranian route for shipping food to Afghanistan and because the Northern Distribution Network, where it's the middle of winter anyway, is full up with shipping war supplies for NATO. So they've had a food shortage in Afghanistan, which has driven food prices, even for food basics, through the roof.
But how can you lose track of almost 160,000 shipping containers? The containers have disappeared in Pakistan. Gone! Poof! (6)
And not to put too fine a point on it but the U.S. command can't even win a war against a bunch of guys in baggy pants who take their orders from Rawalpindi. What's been the Obama strategy to deal with this situation? Play patty-cake with the Emir of Qatar and increase meddling in Pakistan. (7)
What has the answer been from Pakistan's junta? They've let Lashkar-e-Taiba out of its cage in Pakistan. (8) Do I have to draw stick figures to explain to State what that implies?
For starters, the junta is saying to forget Doha; the Obama administration can negotiate a truce with Mullah Omar all it wants, and it won't mean squat to LeT, which just might take the prize as the world's most dangerous international terrorist organization. (9) The larger implication is that the junta is signaling Obama that if he's worried about international terrorists taking over Pakistan's nuke weapons, the worry is misplaced because the junta will simply hand them a nuke if they get any angrier at him.
I understand that little blame for the entire mess I've described above can be laid at State's door. But someone has to take responsibility for conveying the facts of life to President Obama and State has to be the designated fool in this instance.
In summary, this is one of those times it's crucial for the American government to practice message discipline across the board. Sometimes you can have it all, but if you try to have it all at the same time, you sow the impression that you're crazy. That's a fast way to replace respect with fear. When people become afraid that you're both crazy and hogging their turf, they act in the same way a bunch of Washington squirrels did one fine morning.
1) January 26, Egypt says to seek extra $1 billion to support budget; Reuters
2) January 27, 2012: Egypt Bans Travel for 10 U.S. Citizens; Ben Hubbard, Associated Press via TIME online
4) In the first version of this post I referred to the TAPI pipeline as "crazy;" without getting into a discussion of TAPI, I had it confused in my mind with the Nabucco gas pipeline. So many pipelines to keep straight.
5) This report is undated although it was surely published within the past week; I'm linking to this version rather than the International Herald Tribune report because of the wording of the title supplied by the Pakistani website that quotes IHT: US enticing Pakistan with cheap gas; Online International News Network (Pakistan)
6) January 27, 2012: Afghanistan bound 157,736 US containers; Aftab Maken, The News International (Pakistan)
8) January 24, 2012:Hafiz Saeed ‘threatens' India; Hasan Suror, The Hindu
9) January 26, 2012: What's wrong with the following sentence?, Pundita
Adding two important news reports to the footnotes, both of which I'd misplaced at the time I published this post and just found.
Footnote #1: Egypt faces hurdles in securing IMF aid, January 25, Reuters. Although the January 25 report doesn't contain the news about the billion dollar-'bridge' loan that I'd mentioned in the text, it presents key observations that were dropped from the updated January 26 Reuters report I'd originally linked to.
Footnote #8: Pakistan stoking anti-Indian sentiments to divert attention from the heat at home, January 26, Times of India. At first glance this report doesn't differ markedly from the one in The Hindu about the LeT 'resurgence' in Pakistan but it brings out points which underscore the seriousness of the development, and not only for India. LeT is one of the world's most dangerous international terrorist organizations; that Pakistan's military let its leader out of his cage at home at this juncture is almost beyond belief. Almost.
******************
I was sitting on the patio one morning six years ago, enjoying the quiet and early Spring weather, when I heard the most godawful sound. I'd barely blurted, "What the --?" when I learned the sound was a squirrel's idea of a battle cry issuing from maybe 200 squirrel throats. All the squirrels in the neighborhood, it seemed, had banded together to run off a large rat and the chase was taking them through my back yard. I never saw or heard anything like it my life. And let me tell you that rat was burning rubber. Never saw a rat run so fast.
I told this story not to insult any government but to graphically illustrate that when sufficiently provoked and desperate, even the weakest governments can set the mighty United States back on its heels. Once this gets underway it can snowball into a trend.
With all such situations it's perceptions of American actions that count, or to be more precise the perceived pattern of actions. During the past year the perceived pattern is that President Barack Obama is throwing his weight around the world, everywhere he can.
I understand that Obama can cite reasons for each instance in which he's crashed national borders in pursuit of the bad guys. Yet the perception is that Obama has gotten hold of two very efficient lethal weapons -- U.S. Special Forces teams and armed drones -- and is deploying them anywhere in the world he sees fit.
But even President George W. Bush and his most aggressive predecessors in the Cold War managed to meddle in ways that didn't make it look as if the entire planet was suddenly under surprise attack from the United States. They knew when to back off -- and they were operating in a communications era when their every move in a foreign country wasn't broadcast around the world.
Times have changed. It's the piling-on phenomenon that's leading people to these perceptions Okay, so you wanted to shoot rockets at al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan's badlands. Okay, so you had to support Sarkozy's war against Gaddafi. Okay, so you had shoot rockets at al Qaeda in Yemen. Okay, so you had to take out Osama bin Laden when you found him. Okay, so you had to rescue an American citizen who was kidnapped by common criminals.
But all of these "okay" situations are piled on top of Obama expressing public support for Egypt's democracy activists and as much telling Mubarak to decamp. And piled on top of meddling in spectacular fashion in Pakistan's internal affairs. And starting a cold war with Iran's regime not to mention starting a cold war with Syria's regime.
All this within the space of a year.
I don't need to tell State that the juntas in Pakistan and Egypt are in absolutely desperate straits. They are both staring at the imminent prospect of a complete economic collapse in their countries. And the fear is that raising loans amounting to a billion dollars from the World Bank and African Development Bank until the IMF can (if it chooses) to bail them out might not be enough to stave off economic collapse in Egypt. (1)
Nor should I need to tell State that both juntas have broad and deep support in their respective countries, if for no other reason than the large number of civilians the businesses owned by the juntas employ.
So a reasonable person would assume that last month, after Egypt's junta gave a clear warning to the Obama administration to back off in Egypt, State would have immediately yanked the Democratic and Republican party NGOs that were operating in Egypt. I mean -- how much more of a warning do you need, when a security force raids the NGOs and confiscates their computers while the junta accuses the NGOs of being fronts for the American government and meddling in Egypt's internal affairs? (2)
But no, the NGOs continued to operate in Egypt -- all for a good cause, of course -- after State pulled their irons out of the fire in December. Now we learn as of yesterday some Americans working for the NGOs have been barred from leaving Egypt. This is a prelude to arrest warrants being issued -- or at least that's the implied threat of the action to prevent the Americans (and some Europeans who work for othe ngos from leaving Egypt. (2)
Obama is understandably furious about the situation but he could have seen this coming even before Mubarak left office. And now Egypt's generals believe they have no other choice but to find a scapegoat for the country's economic crisis. The Obama administration's ill-conceived attempt to bring more democracy to Egypt, which is using a very small number of Egyptians, has handed the junta the perfect goat.
Now I turn to Pakistan. The country is not only facing economic collapse but it's also in the throes of the worst fuel crisis in its history. (3) So why has the Obama administration decided that this is the perfect time to turn the heat up on Iran by trying to get Pakistan's regime to abandon the gas pipeline Iran is building for them, and sign up to get gas from the TAPI pipeline? (4)(5)
Is the answer that chipmunks are managing the Pakistan portfolio for the Obama administration? I ask this also because this is the same question they're asking in Afghanistan. I mean -- our war office and State couldn't even keep track of containers being transshipped through Pakistan, many of those containers containing desperately needed food supplies for Afghans.
Why "desperate?" Because the Obama administration and Congress haven't wanted the Afghan government to use an Iranian route for shipping food to Afghanistan and because the Northern Distribution Network, where it's the middle of winter anyway, is full up with shipping war supplies for NATO. So they've had a food shortage in Afghanistan, which has driven food prices, even for food basics, through the roof.
But how can you lose track of almost 160,000 shipping containers? The containers have disappeared in Pakistan. Gone! Poof! (6)
And not to put too fine a point on it but the U.S. command can't even win a war against a bunch of guys in baggy pants who take their orders from Rawalpindi. What's been the Obama strategy to deal with this situation? Play patty-cake with the Emir of Qatar and increase meddling in Pakistan. (7)
What has the answer been from Pakistan's junta? They've let Lashkar-e-Taiba out of its cage in Pakistan. (8) Do I have to draw stick figures to explain to State what that implies?
For starters, the junta is saying to forget Doha; the Obama administration can negotiate a truce with Mullah Omar all it wants, and it won't mean squat to LeT, which just might take the prize as the world's most dangerous international terrorist organization. (9) The larger implication is that the junta is signaling Obama that if he's worried about international terrorists taking over Pakistan's nuke weapons, the worry is misplaced because the junta will simply hand them a nuke if they get any angrier at him.
I understand that little blame for the entire mess I've described above can be laid at State's door. But someone has to take responsibility for conveying the facts of life to President Obama and State has to be the designated fool in this instance.
In summary, this is one of those times it's crucial for the American government to practice message discipline across the board. Sometimes you can have it all, but if you try to have it all at the same time, you sow the impression that you're crazy. That's a fast way to replace respect with fear. When people become afraid that you're both crazy and hogging their turf, they act in the same way a bunch of Washington squirrels did one fine morning.
1) January 26, Egypt says to seek extra $1 billion to support budget; Reuters
Egypt said on Thursday it would ask the World Bank for a $500 million loan and another $500 million loan from the African Development Bank to help it fill a budget gap widened by a year of political and economic turmoil.January 25, Egypt faces hurdles in securing IMF aid; Patrick Werr, Reuters
Egypt has also persuaded the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to reduce the interest rate it would charge on $3.2 billion loan Cairo had requested from the IMF, Planning and International Cooperation Minister Faiza Abu el-Naga told reporters.
"We have achieved a reduction from the IMF on the interest rate on the loan from 1.5 to 1.1 percent," she said, adding that this would put the cost of the finance more in line with interest rates worldwide.
The turmoil in Egypt has pushed up unemployment, widened its budget and balance of payments deficits and drained its foreign reserves. Many economists believe a currency devaluation is imminent.
Egypt announced earlier this month it had formally asked the IMF for an aid package, saying it wanted the money as soon as possible and hoped an agreement would be signed within weeks.
The IMF, however, says any agreement would have to be accompanied by financial commitments from other international donors and attract broad political support within the country.
Thrashing out the technical details of a loan will take two to three months, it said.
The World Bank and African Development Bank loans would carry an interest rate of between 7 and 8 percent, Abu el-Naga said. Egypt would request a mission from the World Bank come to Egypt soon, she added, without giving details or a date.The central bank, trying to keep the Egyptian pound stable against the dollar, has run through $9 billion of its foreign reserves since June, when the government rejected an IMF agreement similar to the one it is now seeking.
The depletion accelerated before the parliamentary election and during a series of violent political protests in November and December, with the central bank spending at least $2 billion in each of the last three months. By the end of December, reserves had fallen to $18 billion.
2) January 27, 2012: Egypt Bans Travel for 10 U.S. Citizens; Ben Hubbard, Associated Press via TIME online
CAIRO) — Egypt banned at least 10 Americans and Europeans from leaving the country, including the son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood, hiking tensions with Washington over a campaign by Egypt's military against groups promoting democracy and human rights.3) January 25, 2012: Energy Deficit Renders Punjab Uncompetitive; Dawn (Pakistan)
The United States warned Thursday that the campaign raised concerns about Egypt's transition to democracy and could jeopardize American aid that Egypt's battered economy needs badly after a year of unrest. [...]
The travel ban was part of an Egyptian criminal investigation into foreign-funded democracy organizations after soldiers raided the offices of 10 such groups last month, including those of two American groups.
The investigation is closely intertwined with Egypt's political turmoil since the fall of Hosni Mubarak nearly a year ago. The generals who took power have accused "foreign hands" of being behind protests against their rule and they frequently depict the protesters themselves as receiving foreign funds in a plot to destabilize the country.
[...]
4) In the first version of this post I referred to the TAPI pipeline as "crazy;" without getting into a discussion of TAPI, I had it confused in my mind with the Nabucco gas pipeline. So many pipelines to keep straight.
5) This report is undated although it was surely published within the past week; I'm linking to this version rather than the International Herald Tribune report because of the wording of the title supplied by the Pakistani website that quotes IHT: US enticing Pakistan with cheap gas; Online International News Network (Pakistan)
6) January 27, 2012: Afghanistan bound 157,736 US containers; Aftab Maken, The News International (Pakistan)
ISLAMABAD: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) on Thursday made a stunning revelation before the Senate Standing Committee on Commerce that a total of 157,736 containers of the United States destined to Afghanistan have never reached the landlocked country and disappeared inside Pakistan.7) January 25, 2012: Brahma Chellaney learns U.S. Afghan War exit strategy is literally full of gas; Pundita
[...]
8) January 24, 2012:Hafiz Saeed ‘threatens' India; Hasan Suror, The Hindu
In a spectacle guaranteed to “send a chill through New Delhi,” as The Financial Times put it, Hafiz Saeed, the suspected mastermind behind the 2008 Mumbai terror bombings, is being feted in Pakistan as a “hero” attracting thousands of people as he “criss-crosses” the country at the head of a radical road-show targeting India and calling for “jihad.”January 26, 2012: Pakistan stoking anti-Indian sentiments to divert attention from the heat at home; Times of India
[...]
9) January 26, 2012: What's wrong with the following sentence?, Pundita
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