Afpakia: Afghanistan-Pakistan

[Crafty_Dog]

Did anyone not Sec Def Gates's comments on Afg yesterday?  It read to me like he has been reading Stratfor.

Any comments? 

Also note the following from today's NY Slimes-- are BO's anonymous aides saying the same thing as Sec Def?  Are they channeling our Freki (or did he read this article before posting?  )

========================
Aides Say Obama’s Afghan Aims Elevate War
HELENE COOPER and THOM SHANKER
Published: January 27, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Obama intends to adopt a tougher line toward Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, as part of a new American approach to Afghanistan that will put more emphasis on waging war than on development, senior administration officials said Tuesday.

American soldiers conducted an operation along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan last month. The Obama administration says it plans to send more troops to fight in Afghanistan this year.


President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan can expect a tougher line from the Obama administration, American officials said.
Mr. Karzai is now seen as a potential impediment to American goals in Afghanistan, the officials said, because corruption has become rampant in his government, contributing to a flourishing drug trade and the resurgence of the Taliban.

"The president has recently asked for a comprehensive review of Afghanistan policy, and no final decisions have been made," Michael A. Hammer, spokesman for the National Security Council, said Wednesday.

Among those pressing for Mr. Karzai to do more, the officials said, are Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Richard C. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The officials portrayed the approach as a departure from that of President Bush, who held videoconferences with Mr. Karzai every two weeks and sought to emphasize the American role in rebuilding Afghanistan and its civil institutions.

They said that the Obama administration would work with provincial leaders as an alternative to the central government, and that it would leave economic development and nation-building increasingly to European allies, so that American forces could focus on the fight against insurgents.

“If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who served under Mr. Bush and is staying on under Mr. Obama, told Congress on Tuesday. He said there was not enough “time, patience or money” to pursue overly ambitious goals in Afghanistan, and he called the war there “our greatest military challenge.”

Mr. Gates said last week that previous American goals for Afghanistan had been “too broad and too far into the future,” language that differed from Mr. Bush’s policies.

NATO has not met its pledges for combat troops, transport helicopters, military trainers and other support personnel in Afghanistan, and Mr. Gates has openly criticized the United States’ NATO allies for not fulfilling their promises.

Mr. Holbrooke is preparing to travel to the region, and administration officials said he would ask more of Mr. Karzai, particularly on fighting corruption, aides said, as part of what they described as a “more for more” approach.

Mr. Karzai is facing re-election this year, and it is not clear whether Mr. Obama and his aides intend to support his candidacy. The administration will be watching, aides said, to see if Mr. Karzai responds to demands from the United States and its NATO allies that he arrest associates, including his half-brother, whom Western officials have accused of smuggling drugs in Kandahar.

Shortly before taking office as vice president last week, Mr. Biden traveled to Afghanistan in his role as the departing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He met with Mr. Karzai and warned him that the Obama administration would expect more of him than Mr. Bush did, administration officials said. He told Mr. Karzai that Mr. Obama would be discontinuing the video calls that Mr. Karzai enjoyed with Mr. Bush, said a senior official, who added that Mr. Obama expected Mr. Karzai to do more to crack down on corruption.

After his return from Afghanistan, Mr. Biden, who has had a contentious relationship with Mr. Karzai, described the situation there as “a real mess.”

An election is scheduled to be held no later than the fall, under Afghanistan’s Constitution. Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American who is a former United States ambassador to the United Nations and is viewed as a possible challenger to Mr. Karzai, warned that the Obama administration must tread carefully as it recalibrated its Afghanistan policy.

“If it looks like we’re abandoning the central government and focusing just on the local areas, we will run afoul of Afghan politics,” Mr. Khalilzad said. “Some will regard it as an effort to break up the Afghan state, which would be regarded as hostile policy.”

Mr. Obama is preparing to increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan over the next two years, perhaps to more than 60,000 from about 34,000 now. But Mr. Gates indicated Tuesday that the administration would move slowly, at least for now. He outlined plans for an increase of about 12,000 troops by midsummer but cautioned that any decision on more troops beyond that might have to wait until late 2009, given the need for barracks and other infrastructure.

With the forces of the Taliban and Al Qaeda mounting more aggressive operations in eastern and southern Afghanistan, administration officials said they saw little option but to focus on the military campaign. They said Europeans would be asked to pick up more of the work on reconstruction, police training and cooperation with the Afghan government. They also said much of the international effort might shift to helping local governments and institutions, and away from the government in Kabul.

“It’s not about dumping reconstruction at all,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic delicacy of the subject. “What we’re trying to do is to focus on the Al Qaeda problem. That has to be our first priority.”

Mr. Gates said Tuesday that under the redefined Afghan strategy, it would be vital for NATO allies to “provide more civilian support.” In particular, he said, the allies should be more responsible for building civil society institutions in Afghanistan, a task that had been falling to American forces. He also demanded that allies “step up to the plate” and defray costs of expanding the Afghan Army, an emerging power center, whose leaders could emerge as rivals to Mr. Karzai.

Mr. Gates added that the United States should focus on limited goals. “My own personal view is that our primary goal is to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for terrorists and extremists to attack the United States and our allies, and whatever else we need to do flows from that objective,” he said.

[Crafty_Dog]

As to solutions: One novel idea on opium-and-corruption comes from James Nathan, a political science professor at Auburn University in Alabama and former State Department official. He argues in a forthcoming paper that the most efficient way to tackle the problem would be for the United States or NATO to buy up the entire Afghan opium crop.

"Purchasing the whole crop would take it away from the traffickers without cutting more than half the economy of Afghanistan," Nathan said in an interview. "Such a purchase would directly confront Afghanistan's most corrosive corruption. It would end the Taliban's money stream."

And the cost? By Nathan's reckoning, between $2 billion and $2.5 billion a year, no pocket change but not a large sum compared with the around $200 billion the U.S. taxpayer has already paid for the war in Afghanistan. The idea may sound startling, but its logic is not far from the farm subsidies paid to U.S. and European farmers.

[Freki]

I have heard of this solution before.  I have not formed an opinion on it yet.  The question I am considering when I think of this solution is:  Does buying the crop amount to a form of blackmail?  If so do you want to set this type of precedent for other terrorist or criminals to use to get money out of us?

What do you think?

[Crafty_Dog]

Stratfor:

NATO Members Free To Seek Iranian Supply Route
February 3, 2009 | 0255 GMT

Gen. John Craddock, NATO’s senior military commander, announced late Feb. 2 that the alliance would not oppose individual member nations reaching bilateral deals with Iran for the transit of supplies to Afghanistan. This development follows statements by NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer on Jan. 26, encouraging member states to engage Tehran over the campaign in Afghanistan. These are not small or off-the-cuff statements, and they signal a significant development in the West’s relationship with Iran.

Though it might be too soon for the United States to choose this route to supply its troops in Afghanistan, several European nations could seize the opportunity to end their reliance on vulnerable supply lines through Pakistan. In truth, everyone is looking for the elusive alternative. But some will be more prepared to strike deals with Tehran than others.

No deals have been inked yet, but NATO officials would not make these public announcements out of the blue. Craddock’s statement itself suggests that at least a few member states contributing to the Afghan campaign have been pushing for this green light for some time. By implication, some arrangements between Tehran and select European capitals are likely to follow in short order.

More important, NATO’s recent signals are an enormous development amid the ongoing negotiations between Washington and Moscow over a potential Central Asian supply route. Pakistan has always been the United States’ shortest, most direct route to Afghanistan — precisely because the prospect of cooperation with Iran, after the Bush administration labeled it a member of the Axis of Evil, was politically absurd. But despite the fact that supplies shipped through Iran would traverse more territory in Afghanistan proper (some of it host to a heavy Taliban presence), an Iranian route still makes for an exceptionally competitive alternative — especially in comparison to the long, drawn-out and politically treacherous Central Asian routes under consideration. Supplies would be offloaded at the Iranian port of Chah Bahar on the Arabian Sea and transported by truck directly to Afghan territory.

Simply by raising the prospect of Iran as a viable alternative, Washington’s hand in negotiating other routes becomes stronger.

For Tehran, this is an enormous opportunity to engage directly with the Western world in an area of mutual interest. Iran — a Persian and Shiite power — is enormously threatened by the empowerment of hard-line Sunni extremists across its eastern frontier. (Following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, there were even some backchannel discussions between Washington and Tehran over Iranian support for the planned U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)

If a number of NATO allies — with Germany among the likely inaugural candidates — choose to sustain their national efforts in Afghanistan via the short, accessible route through Iran, the opportunities for wider political rapprochement also expand. Of course, it will not be all smooth sailing. Tehran will be looking to extract significant concessions in exchange for such significant and overt assistance.

From a military perspective, if the United States can lock down the tortuous Central Asian route as well, NATO suddenly would have three independent supply lines to some of the most inaccessible territory on Earth. That would prevent any one route from being too heavily leveraged against the United States, thereby weakening both Islamabad’s and Moscow’s negotiating positions in relation to Washington.

[Crafty_Dog]

Bringing GM's post from the Cognitive Dissonance thread to here.  My comments come at the end:

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http://www.douglasfarah.com/article/447/understanding-the-islamist-agenda-and-negotiations.com

Feb 2, 15:42
Understanding the Islamist Agenda and Negotiations

There are many good reasons for wanting to talk directly to one’s enemies, particularly states that pose a direct threat to one’s security. The Obama administration, facing a host of domestic problems and inheriting the ineffective policies of the previous administration in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program, has incentives to want to get the Iran issue contained, at a minimum.

The same can be said for the Afghanistan crisis, which is lurching from bad to worse. The Taliban, flush with opium money, is making inroads while the corrupt and ineffective government fiddles, and Kabul is close to burning.

But one has to be clear that the other side wants some sort of serious back and forth. This is what is missing in both cases.

One must start from a recognition of what it is Iran wants: the abolition of Israel, the unimpeded sponsorship of armed non-state actors (Hezbollah and Hamas, with the dalliance with al Qaeda when convenient), and imposition of a global theocracy. None of these issues is negotiable.

From this Wall Street Journal piece, it is quite clear that Iran sees nothing to be gained by talks, and much to be gained by trying to humiliate the incoming administration. Perhaps they are simply recognizing the reality that their basic goals leave little room for substantive negotiations.

It seems to me that Fareed Zakaria makes serious mistake in his assessment of Afghanistan policy in calling for talks with the Taliban.

This is largely for the same reason: the lack of a understanding of what the Taliban want and what they are.

Like the Iranians (yes, the Taliban is Sunni and wahhabist, and yes the Iranians are Shi’ite and they have much disdain for each other on many issues) the Taliban has as its bottom line the establishment of a global Islamist caliphate that starts in Afghanistan and from there, the world.

The differences with al Qaeda are cultural clashes and discomfort with the way the Arab forces treat the Taliban, but not over fundamental beliefs, tactics or strategy. A world under Sharia law, as understood by both groups, is a divine mandate and therefore not negotiable.

Zakaria writes that:

The United States is properly and unalterably
opposed to al-Qaeda. We have significant differences with the Taliban on many issues—democracy and the treatment of women being the most serious. But we do not wage war on other Islamist groups with which we similarly disagree (the Saudi monarchy, for example). Were elements of the Taliban to abandon al-Qaeda, we would not have a pressing national security interest in waging war against them.

That is simply not true. As he notes later, al Qaeda (the old guard, perhaps less relevant than ever) is essentially a parasite, living off host groups and nations. But in the case of the Taliban, the host has welcomed the parasite, fed it, clothed it, protected it and embraced it.

The idea that the Taliban would, in a verifiable way, renounce and cut ties to al Qaeda, is simply not realistic. The idea that we should stand by and deal with-and likely assure the ascent to power of-a group whose basic philosophy is to return everything they can back to the Middle Ages is an abandonment of everything we claim to stand for. The fact that we tolerate Saudi Arabia’s abysmal behavior is no reason to watch another country fall under the worst kind of enslavement and barbarism.

Finally, the line about having no pressing national security interest in the Taliban repeats exactly the misguided analysis that led the Taliban to facilitate the execution of the 9/11 attacks. Every major attack (1998 East Africa bombings, USS Cole, 9/11) were carried out by non-state actors (al Qaeda) operating from a “failed” state or sympathetic state (Taliban and Sudan).

Dialogue is a useful, vital tool in international relations. But it is only useful when the bottom lines of both sides are understood and the areas of overlap can be discussed. Otherwise, it is a waste of precious time and resources.
Posted on: February 03, 2009, 08:50:25 PMPosted by: G M 
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Tom Daschle Withdraws: Another Ethics Casualty for Obama
Posted By Jennifer Rubin On February 3, 2009 @ 10:53 am In . Feature 01, Money, Politics, US News | 73 Comments

How quickly they fall. Tom Daschle, who just yesterday had the full backing of President Barack Obama, has announced he is withdrawing his name from consideration as Health and Human Services secretary. For both Daschle and Obama, it has been a rough ride, calling into question the latter’s judgment and skill as a chief executive.

President Barack Obama rode into Washington on a veritable cloud of goodwill and sky-high expectations. The mainstream media had swooned over his transition with some justification. They had swooned over his inaugural speech with far less. But hopes, even among conservatives, were high for a break from business as usual, a degree of bipartisan pragmatism and a can-do approach to solving the nation’s economic problems. But in a mere two weeks, the thrill is gone and nagging questions have begun.

Most glaringly, we have been treated to a raft of embarrassing personnel issues. Tim Geithner made it through the confirmation hearing but Bill Richardson did not; nor did the “[1] chief performance officer” who could not perform the task of paying all her own taxes. Then Tom Daschle, who just yesterday garnered the support of President Obama and Democrats in the Senate, has now announced he is backing out. This followed a storm of criticism from not just conservatives who are aghast at the tax cheats and revolving-door-ism. [2] Marie Cocco summed up:

No need to fumble for words that sum up the stew of hypocrisy, arrogance, and insiderism that is the unfolding saga of Tom Daschle. This is the audacity of audacity. … The rationale for confirming Geithner was that he is a financial wizard — one of a handful of people, it was argued, with the experience and intellect necessary to manage the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression. But surely there is more than one Democrat capable of managing the Department of Health and Human Services. And undoubtedly there is more than one — there are perhaps, hundreds — as committed to the cause of revamping the health care system. Daschle isn’t indispensable. But he is indefensible.

And [3] Richard Cohen was no less critical:

Taken individually, the tax problems of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the health and human services secretary-designate, Tom Daschle, don’t amount to much. Together, though, they amount to a message: If you are beloved by this administration, you don’t necessarily have to play by the rules. Both Geithner and Daschle are good men, but their appointments send the message that Washington’s new broom sweeps a bit like the old one.

The Daschle debacle is not the only problem bedeviling the Obama team. This follows a slew of ethics waivers which has made the so-called ethics rules (prohibiting ex-lobbyists from working on issues for which they previously lobbied) into Swiss cheese. The [4] good-government types are fuming. And even the MSM has noticed the pattern, which includes an ethics waiver for William Lynn, a former lobbyist for defense contractor Raytheon who has been nominated for the Pentagon’s number two job.

[5] TIME magazine explains:

But the controversy over the waivers, which have been criticized by both Democratic and Republican senators, is just one of the perception problems dogging Obama’s new ethics policy. Another issue stems from the people nominated to the administration who have worked in the lobbying business but are not technically lobbyists — people, in other words, like Tom Daschle, or former Senator George Mitchell, the new Middle East peace envoy who had previously served as the chairman of a law firm that has done lobbying and legal work for many clients in the region, including the leader of Dubai.

In short, we are back to the very same Washington, D.C., brew of sleaze, double standards, ethical lapses, and hypocrisy. That it comes from an administration which ran on such a sanctimonious platform only makes it that much more disappointing and indeed infuriating.

But that’s not all. Aside from the ethics issues, the number one priority, the Obama stimulus plan, has run aground. The administration’s stimulus bill has become the subject of widespread criticism from [6] conservatives and [7] mainstream outlets alike for its porked-up spending plans and insufficient attention to fulfill the president’s directives for a temporary and targeted response to the recession. What was supposed to garner bipartisan support has instead invigorated the Republican opposition. As ABC’s [8] The Note summed up: “Team Obama lost the early battle to define the bill — which has become a pork-stuffed monstrosity, instead of economic salvation wrapped in legislation.”

On foreign policy the record is more mixed. The president’s declaration that he will close Guantanamo, as soon as he has figured out what to do with the prisoners, brought conservative criticism and has proven to be [9] unpopular with voters who, come to think of it, don’t like the idea of moving dangerous terrorists to their neighborhoods or releasing them to the battlefield. And liberals are miffed that the Bush-era terrorist [10] rendition program has been retained or indeed expanded. President Obama’s apologetic interview with Al-Arabyia was panned by conservatives and lauded by liberals (but, tellingly, was not echoed by his new secretary of state and was greeted with contempt by Ahmadinejad.)

It is fair to ask: what’s wrong? Several things, it appears, are at work here.

First, the Obama team certainly does not place ethical standards or the appearance of ethical standards above other concerns (e.g., avoiding embarrassment or getting a key player). Now this should come as no surprise from the team which promised to work within the public campaign financing rules and then decided it was better not to. In the course of the campaign, however, against the dreaded Republicans this passed muster. In the glare of the White House press corps lights when expectations are higher, it induces biting criticism and even anger.

Second, Obama has never been an expert legislator and has, it seems, lost control of his own stimulus bill. By deferring to the House Democrats he lost the policy and political high ground. Now an astounding [11] 54% of Americans either want a major reworking of the bill or to block it entirely. The president and his advisors seem to have mistaken his own personal popularity with both the public’s and the Republicans’ willingness to accept anything he and the Democrats could dream up.

And finally, the Republicans have played their cards well on the stimulus — speaking in respectful tones about the president, displaying heretofore unheard of unity, and hammering at the excessive and unwise aspects of the stimulus bill. By holding their ground, they have forced Obama into a tight corner. He must now either revise the bill or pass it on his own. And by standing on principle, they have denied the president the chance to do what he has done successfully throughout his career; namely, to claim the mantle of bipartisanship while advocating a far-left agenda.

Now, President Obama’s approval numbers are still high, but they are [12] floating steadily back to earth. This is the messy business of governing — when rhetoric comes up against reality and the sky-high expectations of supporters are ratcheted down, bit by bit.

It was never realistic to expect President Obama would reinvent politics, but it would have been nice had he not sacrificed his principles quite so quickly. It has not earned him any brownie points. Instead, conservatives are revived, liberals are dismayed, and the general public is left wondering: Didn’t we vote for something better than this?

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/tom-daschle-another-ethics-casualty-for-obama/

URLs in this post:
[1] chief performance officer: http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/02/03/1778480.aspx
[2] Marie Cocco: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/02/daschle_is_indefensible.html
[3] Richard Cohen: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/02/AR2009020202054.html
[4] good-government types: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/23/william-lynn-obamas-first_n_160512.html
[5] TIME magazine: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1876550,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
[6] conservatives: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/100dyjdy.asp
[7] mainstream: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/31/AR2009013101535.html
[8] The Note: http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/02/the-note-2309-s.html
[9] unpopular: http://www.gallup.com/poll/114091/Americans-Approve-Obama-Actions-Date.aspx
[10] rendition program: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/52402
[11] 54%: http://www.gallup.com/poll/114097/Americans-Support-Stimulus-Major-Changes.aspx
[12] floating steadily back: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/polls

======================

GM:

So what does Farah/do you propose?  THAT is the question!  For many months now I have been questioning the coherence of our strategy for Afg-Pak.   I am not alone in this.   Indendent reporter Michael Yon (whom I respect so highly that I donate to him on a monthly basis) says a clusterfcuk comes.  Sec Def Gates, not a weenie, says similar things.   WHAT ARE WE TO DO?   WHAT IS THE STRATEGY?  What does success in Afg look like?

[Crafty_Dog]

Second post of the AM:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090203/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_afghanistan


Pentagon study: US should pare Afghanistan goals
By ROBERT BURNS and PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writers
29 mins ago

WASHINGTON – A classified Pentagon report urges President Barack Obama to shift U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan, de-emphasizing democracy-building and concentrating more on targeting Taliban and al-Qaida sanctuaries inside Pakistan with the aid of Pakistani military forces.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has seen the report prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but it has not yet been presented to the White House, officials said Tuesday. The recommendations are one element of a broad policy reassessment under way along with recommendations to be considered by the White House from the commander of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, and other military leaders.

A senior defense official said Tuesday that it will likely take several weeks before the Obama administration rolls out its long-term strategy for Afghanistan.

The Joint Chiefs' plan reflects growing worries that the U.S. military was taking on more than it could handle in Afghanistan by pursuing the Bush administration's broad goal of nurturing a thriving democratic government.

Instead, the plan calls for a more narrowly focused effort to root out militant strongholds along the Pakistani border and inside the neighboring country, according to officials who confirmed the essence of the report. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plan publicly.

The recommendations are broadly cast and provide limited detail, meant to help develop the overarching strategy for the Afghanistan-Pakistan region rather than propose a detailed military action plan.

During a press conference Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs noted ongoing reviews of Afghan policy, but did not say when they would be made public. Obama intends, he said, to "evaluate the current direction of our policy and make some corrections as he goes forward."

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman would not comment Tuesday on the details of the Joint Chiefs' report, but acknowledged that the U.S. relationship with Pakistan is a critical component for success in Afghanistan.
"When you talk about Afghanistan, you can't help but also recognize the fact that the border region with Pakistan is obviously a contributing factor to the stability and security of Afghanistan, and the work that Pakistan is doing to try to reduce and eliminate those safe havens, and the ability for people to move across that border that are engaged in hostile intentions," Whitman said.

Part of the recommended approach is to search for ways to work more intensively and effectively with the Pakistanis to root out extremist elements in the border area, the senior defense official said.

The heightened emphasis on Pakistan reflects a realization that the root of the problem lies in the militant havens inside its border — a concern outlined last week to Congress in grim testimony by Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen.

But the report does not imply more incursions by U.S. combat forces inside Pakistan or accelerating other forms of U.S. military involvement, the senior defense official emphasized. Pakistani officials have repeatedly raised alarms after a surge of U.S. Hellfire missile strikes from drone predators in recent months, and renewed those complaints after a new strike killed 19 people inside Pakistan days after Obama took office.

"The bottom line is we have to look at what the art of the possible is there," said a U.S. military official who has operated in Afghanistan. The official, who has not seen the Joint Chiefs' report, said the challenge is to craft a strategy that achieves U.S. goals of stabilizing the region and constraining al-Qaida, but also takes into account the powerful tribes that resist a strong central government and the ties among ethnic Pashtuns on either side of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

The Joint Chiefs' report advises a greater emphasis on U.S. military training of Pakistani forces for counter-terror work.

Pakistan's government is well aware of growing U.S. interest in collaborating to improve its military's muscle against al-Qaida and Taliban elements in the border areas. The topic has been broached repeatedly by senior U.S. officials, including Mullen.

The training efforts also would expand and develop the Afghan army and police force, while at the same time work to improve Afghan governance.

The report also stresses that Afghan strategy must be driven by what the Afghans want, and that the U.S. cannot impose its own goals on the Afghanistan government.

During discussions about a new Afghanistan strategy, military leaders expressed worries that the U.S. ambitions in Afghanistan — to stabilize the country and begin to build a democracy there — were beyond its ability.
And as they tried to balance military demands in both Iraq and Afghanistan, some increasingly questioned why the U.S. continued to maintain a war-fighting force in Iraq, even though the mission there has shifted to a more support role. Those fighting forces, they argued, were needed more urgently in Afghanistan.
Military leaders have been signaling for weeks that the focus of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan would change.

Gates told armed services committees in Congress last week that the U.S. should keep its sights on one thing: preventing Afghanistan from being used as a base for terrorists and extremists who would harm the U.S. or its allies. He bluntly added that the military could not root out terrorists while also propping up Afghanistan's fledgling democracy.

"Afghanistan is the fourth or fifth poorest country in the world, and if we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose," Gates said, a mythology reference to heaven.
Sen. John McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday that he was briefed last week on the military's proposed new Afghan strategy, which he called evolving but headed in the right direction.
"There will be no Anbar awakening," McCain, R-Ariz., told The Associated Press, referring to the tribal uprising against al-Qaida in Iraq's Anbar province that triggered a turnaround in that conflict. "It will be long, hard and difficult."

The Joint Chiefs report's overall conclusions were first reported Saturday by The Associated Press. Politico reported additional details of the report Tuesday.

The U.S. is considering doubling its troop presence in Afghanistan this year to roughly 60,000, in response to growing strength by the Islamic militant Taliban, fed by safe havens they and al-Qaida have developed in an increasingly unstable Pakistan.

Obama is expected to announce soon his decision on a request for additional forces from the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David McKiernan. Several officials said they believe the president will approve sending three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, totaling roughly 14,000 troops.
___

Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor, Anne Gearan, Pamela Hess, Lara Jakes and Anne Flaherty contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

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[Crafty_Dog]

French soldiers soluting during a 2006 ceremony.
Domestic distractions allow Sarkozy room to maneuver as he boosts France's presence in Afghanistan despite public skepticism, but funding and resource questions may determine the end game, Thomas Withington writes for ISN Security Watch.

By Thomas Withington for ISN Security Watch
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/Security-Watch/Detail/?ots591=4888CAA0-B3DB-1461-98B9-E20E7B9C13D4&lng=en&id=96200

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


France continues to increase its military presence in Afghanistan as part of Paris' contribution to the continuing NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission.

Reports in early February spoke of additional unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) being deployed to Bagram Air Base north of Kabul to support French Sperwer drones already in theatre. These pilotless aircraft will provide 24-hour reconnaissance and surveillance pictures to French troops on the ground.

The country's presence is also being beefed-up with the possible arrival of advanced Eurocopter EC-665 Tigre attack helicopters this summer, while Armée de l'Air (French Air Force) Dassault Mirage-2000D combat aircraft are being redeployed from Dushanbe in Tajikistan to Kandahar, southwest Afghanistan. This will shorten their flying time to possible trouble spots in the south of the country.

The increase in France's presence in Afghanistan follows the ambush of troops from the Armée de Terre (French Army) 8e Régiment Parachutiste d'Infanterie de Marine (8th Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment) in Sarobi province, north of Kabul last August, which left 10 troops dead and another 21 injured. This was the largest wartime loss of life for the French armed forces since 23 October 1983 when 58 troops were killed during a bomb attack on their barracks in Beirut. New BAE Systems RG-31 Nyala mine-protected vehicles are also on the way from the US to protect French troops from attack by mines and improvised explosive devices.

Hot on the heels of the attack, the Assemblée nationale (lower house of the French Parliament) voted 340 to 210 in September last year to continue the country's Afghan deployment, and also to authorize an extra 700 troops (to supplement the circa 2,500 soldiers France currently has in Afghanistan) along with additional attack helicopters, UAVs, artillery and logistical support.

Where 'freedom is being decided'

The intensification of France's involvement in Afghanistan follows a statement by President Nicolas Sarkozy in which he explained the country's motivations for remaining in Afghanistan, despite the misgivings of French popular opinion: "Why are we there? Because it is where a large part of the world's freedom is being decided. This is the place where terrorism is being fought. We are not there to fight against the Afghans but with them, not to leave them on their own to fight the dark forces of barbarity."

On the ground, French strategy follows a twin track, according to François Géré, president of the l'Institut Français d'Analyse Stratégique (French Institute for Strategic Analysis) in Paris.

"French troops continue to train and form the Afghan security forces as well as the army, and continue to help the population to protect itself in de-mining. We continue to have medical teams who are bringing healthcare to the population. On the other hand, the increase in French troops is aimed at becoming more offensive with the real commitment to engage the adversary where necessary. Not to avoid the fight," he told ISN Security Watch.

Despite the commitment of the French government to the Afghan operation, the intensification of France's effort is being performed against a backdrop of cutbacks for the country's armed forces. Last year's Livre Blanc (white paper) recommended the disbandment of 20 of the French Army's regiments and battalions. Although these reductions are not being drawn from front-line infantry units - instead being taken from support units such as logistics and engineer personnel, and signalers - the loss of these units could cause problems in terms of supporting a military operation being performed 5,579 kilometers from Paris. The cost of France's involvement in 2008 was reported at around €250 million (US$319 million), almost a 50 percent increase on the cost of the operation for 2007.

Room to maneuver

In the wake of last August's ambush, French opposition to the country's continued involvement in Afghanistan was reported to run at around 55 percent. That said, Gérè believes that Sarkozy and his government "face no significant and well-articulated political position" in opposition to its involvement in Afghanistan.

This has given Sarkozy considerable political room to maneuver in terms of increasing France's commitment in the country - a fact underlined by last September's vote in favor of continuing the French Afghan deployment. However, this political space may not be permanent.

"If we were to suffer additional significant casualties, the government would have to reconsider its position," Géré noted. "I'm not saying that the French government would decide to withdraw," he added.

In fact, some of the blame for the lack of French public support may lie at the administration's door: "The French government has not articulated very well the reasons why we are in Afghanistan and that is the reason why the [skeptical] public is in the majority."

Despite public opposition to the Afghan operation, the government may also be able to benefit from a degree of popular distraction. A general strike on 29 January in which between one and 2.5 million French workers may have taken to the streets to air a host of grievances ranging from disquiet over proposed education reforms to the government's handling of the economic crisis, has kept domestic issues firmly at the top of the political agenda for the time being.

"French people are much more concerned by unemployment and the credit crisis rather than Afghanistan," Géré said. However, we need to take into consideration that if the financial crisis in France aggravates, there could be questions about why we are spending money in Afghanistan."

Playing both sides

Following the inauguration of US President Barack Obama in January, France, along with several NATO members, may soon find themselves under increasing US pressure to pledge more troops to Afghanistan as the new administration embarks on a "surge" against the Taliban in the lead up to the presidential elections in the country in mid-August.

However, Obama and his colleagues may face disappointment in Paris. On 21 January, French Defense Minister Hervé Morin ruled out enlarging the country's military footprint in Afghanistan: "We have made the necessary effort. Considering additional reinforcements is out of the question for now."

Morin, however, also took the opportunity to reiterate France's reasons for its continued presence in Afghanistan, saying that the operation was "indispensable for the Afghans, who have the right to finally know peace. Indispensable for the French themselves because their security hangs in a great part on that region, one of the most instable in the world."

It is possible that Morin chose to tread a careful line in his interview with the Europe 1 radio station; on one hand reiterating his government's commitment to Afghanistan and the ISAF mission in general, while also reassuring skeptical parts of the French population that, even in light of a new US administration pledging a firmer effort in the country, France would not be increasing its commitment beyond the troop and equipment increases promised in September.

The end game

Moreover, there could also be financial motivations for the French government refusing to pledge anything more than what has already been promised. France's GDP is predicted to decline from 0.9 percent for 2008 to -1.2 percent for 2009, according to figures from the Economist Intelligence Unit. The government may be choosing to husband its cash flow as much as possible.

"If we increase the number of troops in Afghanistan, we will obviously need extra money to pay for them," Géré argued.

The only way such a move could be done without significantly increasing costs would be to redeploy some of the circa 2,000 French troops operating with the EU Peacekeeping Force (EUFOR) in Chad in support of the UN/AU peacekeeping efforts in West Darfur, Sudan.

Reducing the numbers of French troops in the EUFOR mission could send a message to President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan that France no longer places as much importance on this mission as it does on the Afghan operation. This could encourage the Sudanese government, armed forces and proxy janjaweed militias to increase their violence in the troubled West Darfur province while EUFOR attempts to redress the loss of French troops with fresh soldiers from other European nations.

A French reduction of its EUFOR presence could also send the wrong message as regards Paris' commitment to European security and defense policy.

Finally, Sarkozy and his colleagues would find that any increase in France's troop numbers in Afghanistan "would be very difficult to do without a debate in Parliament," said Géré.

The president may want to avoid such a move in the current turbulent economic environment, lest it gives opposition parliamentarians the opportunity to ask why money is being found for an increased Afghan commitment while the French economy remains in the doldrums.

France's Afghanistan endgame may not be as far away as the country's population might think. The current global financial crisis and France's economic woes could have a decisive effect on the Sarkozy government's desire and ability to keep French boots on the ground.

"My sense is that for financial reasons, we have no alternative but to stay for a maximum of two years and to transfer the responsibility for security to the Afghan government," noted Géré.

Furthermore, pulling French troops out by 2012 could have the accompanying benefit of avoiding some of the problems that might be caused by the cutbacks of support personnel recommended by last year's white paper.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thomas Withington is an independent defense consultant, writer and analyst based in Toulouse, France. He is a Research Associate at the Centre for Defence Studies, King's College, London and an Associate Member of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

[Crafty_Dog]

By JOSEPH LIEBERMAN
Although President Barack Obama and all of us in Congress are understandably focused on the economic crisis, we also face multiple crises in the rest of the world -- beginning with the war in Afghanistan. Security there has been deteriorating as the insurgents have grown in strength, size and sophistication, expanding their influence over an increasing swath of territory.

Reversing the downward spiral will not be easy. But as Gen. David Petraeus once said of another war, "Hard is not hopeless." And we possess considerable strengths in this fight.

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The biggest strength is the American military, which through the crucible of Iraq has transformed itself into the most effective counterinsurgency force in history. Although Iraq and Afghanistan are very different, many of the guiding principles of counterinsurgency do apply to both theaters -- most importantly, the need to provide security for the population. Moreover, our troops will be redeploying from Iraq to Afghanistan with the momentum, experience and morale that comes with success.

We also have an ally in the Afghan people -- a proud people with a proud history. Although their frustration with our coalition is growing, Afghans are not eager to return to the tyranny and poverty of the Taliban. That is why the insurgents have not won their support and must resort to self-defeating tactics of cruelty and coercion.

The other critical strength, and reason for hope, is the broad support for success in Afghanistan in the new administration and Congress. Mr. Obama has made clear this is a war he intends to win. He has pledged to deploy more troops and appointed one of our most talented diplomats, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, as special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The combination of Mr. Holbrooke and Gen. Petraeus led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is not a team to bet against.

That, then, is the good news. The bad news is that, even if we do everything right, conditions are likely to get worse before they get better, and the path ahead will still be long, costly and hard. The president's pledge to send more troops to Afghanistan is absolutely necessary and right -- but turning the tide will take more than additional troops. In fact, we must match the coming surge in troop strength with at least five other "surges" equally important to success.

- First and most importantly, we need a surge in the strategic coherence of the war effort. As we learned in Iraq, success in counterinsurgency requires integrating military and civilian operations into a seamless and unified strategy. In Afghanistan, we do not have in place a nationwide, civil-military campaign plan to defeat the insurgency.

This is an unacceptable failure. It is also the predictable product of a balkanized military command structure, in which different countries are left to pursue different strategies in different places. The international civilian effort in Afghanistan is even more disorganized, as well as unsynchronized with the military.

Unquestionably, it is a good thing so many countries are contributing to the fight in Afghanistan, and we owe a great debt of gratitude to our allies for their sacrifices. But we also owe them success, and that demands an integrated campaign plan and stronger American leadership.

- Second, we need a surge in civilian capacity. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul needs to be transformed and expanded, with the necessary resources and the explicit direction to work side by side with the military at every level. In particular, the civilian presence must be ramped up outside our embassy -- at the provincial, district and village levels, embedding nonmilitary experts with new military units as they move in.

- Third, we need to help surge the Afghan war effort. This means expanding the Afghan army to 200,000 or more, and ensuring they are properly equipped, paid and mentored.

The U.S. needs to take tough action to combat the pervasive corruption that is destroying the Afghan government and fueling the insurgency. This requires a systemic response, not just threatening specific leaders on an ad hoc basis. Specifically, we must invest comprehensively in Afghan institutions, both from top-down and bottom-up.

In doing so, the U.S. should embrace a policy of "more for more" -- specifically, by offering the Afghan government a large-scale, 10-year package of governance and development aid in exchange for specific benchmarks on performance and progress.

- Fourth, we need a surge in our regional strategy. As many have observed, almost all of Afghanistan's neighbors are active in some way inside that country. Some of this activity is positive -- for instance, aid and investment -- but much of it is malign, providing support to insurgent groups. We must help "harden" Afghanistan by strengthening its institutions at both the national and local levels, empowering Afghans to stop their neighbors from using their country as a geopolitical chessboard.

The U.S. can help by beginning to explore the possibility of a bilateral defense pact with Kabul, which would include explicit security guarantees.

Some neighbors are hedging their bets today because they fear what happens "the day after" America grows tired and disengages from the region, as we did once before, after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Nothing will discourage this destabilizing behavior better than a long-term American commitment to Afghanistan.

- Fifth, success in Afghanistan requires a sustained surge of American political commitment to the mission. Fortunately, and unlike Iraq, the Afghan war still commands bipartisan support in Congress and among the American people. But as more troops are deployed to Afghanistan and casualties rise, this consensus will be tested.

Indeed, there are already whispers on both the left and the right that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, that we should abandon any hope of nation-building there, additional forces sent there will only get bogged down in a quagmire.

Why are these whisperings wrong? Why is this war necessary?

The most direct answer is that Afghanistan is where the attacks of 9/11 were plotted, where al Qaeda made its sanctuary under the Taliban, and where they will do so again if given the chance. We have a vital national interest in preventing that from happening.

It is also important to recognize that, although we face many problems in Afghanistan today, none are because we have made it possible for five million Afghan children -- girls and boys -- to go to school; or because child mortality has dropped 25% since we overthrew the Taliban in 2001; or because Afghan men and women have been able to vote in their first free and fair elections in history.

On the contrary, the reason we have not lost in Afghanistan -- despite our missteps -- is because America still inspires hope of a better life for millions of ordinary Afghans and has worked mightily to deliver it. And the reason we can defeat the extremists is because they do not.

This, ultimately, is how the war on terror will end: not when we capture or kill Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar -- though we must do that too -- but when we have empowered and expanded the mainstream Muslim majority to stand up and defeat the extremist minority.

That is the opportunity we have in Afghanistan today: to make that country into a quagmire, not for America but for al Qaeda, the Taliban and their fellow Islamist extremists, and into a graveyard in which their dreams of an Islamist empire are finally buried.

Mr. Lieberman is an Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut. This op-ed is adapted from a speech he delivered last week at the Brookings Institution.

 

[Crafty_Dog]

Richard Holbrooke is about to visit Pakistan for the first time as President Obama's envoy to the region, and Islamabad has just laid out the welcome mat: A court released nuclear proliferator A.Q. Khan from house arrest.

Khush amdid means welcome in the Urdu language, but the exact translation of Mr. Khan's release can't be printed in a family newspaper. Mr. Holbrooke will understand, having issued more than one such unprintable message himself over his long diplomatic career. Islamabad is telling the new U.S. government that it won't simply be able to dictate terms of cooperation in fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda. Like nearly everyone else around the world these days (see here), the Pakistanis are looking to see how far they can push Mr. Obama before he pushes back.

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The timing of Pakistan's snub is especially pointed given that Mr. Obama's Secretary of State is Hillary Clinton, and Mr. Khan's proliferation salad days came when her husband was President. Before his network was rolled up in the wake of the 2003 Iraq invasion, Mr. Khan spread nuclear know-how to Libya, North Korea, Iran, and who knows where else.

Despite his popularity in Pakistan, Mr. Khan was placed under house arrest by former President Pervez Musharraf after the Bush Administration presented the evidence of Mr. Khan's global WMD sales. But the U.S. has never been allowed to interrogate him. With the cowboys George W. Bush and Dick Cheney safely out of power, the new government of Asif Ali Zardari must figure it's a good time to placate Pakistani opinion and risk upsetting the Yanks.

If a nuclear weapon ever does incinerate a U.S. city, Mr. Khan will be as responsible as anyone. Mr. Obama has said he'll focus on fighting the spread of WMD, but the world's proliferators will interpret Mr. Khan's release as evidence that you can sell anything and get away with it.

[Body-by-Guinness]

February 09, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

Planning Victory in Afghanistan
Nine principles the Obama administration should follow.

By Frederick W. Kagan

President Obama has said many times that America must succeed in Afghanistan. He is right, and he deserves our full support in that effort.

Afghanistan is in many respects harder to understand than Iraq was. Even with a good strategy and sufficient resources, success will almost certainly come much more slowly. But as a great man said two years ago, hard is not hopeless.

The keys to finding the right approach lie in nine fundamental principles.

1. UNDERSTAND WHY WE’RE THERE
Afghanistan is not now a sanctuary for al-Qaeda, but it would likely become one again if we abandoned it. Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban government we removed in 2001, is alive and well in Pakistan. He maintains contacts with Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the other key al-Qaeda leaders, who are also based in Pakistan (although in a different area). Mullah Omar supports Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan from his Pakistani havens, while al-Qaeda and its affiliates support insurgents in eastern Afghanistan. Allowing Afghanistan to fail would mean allowing these determined enemies of the United States to regain the freedom they had before 9/11.

Pakistan itself is another reason Afghanistan is vitally important to America. It’s a country with 170 million people, nuclear weapons, and numerous terrorist groups. As long as Afghanistan is unstable, Pakistan will be unable to bring order to its own tribal areas, where many terrorist sanctuaries persist. It will also be distracted from addressing the more fundamental problems of Islamic radicalism that threaten its very survival as a state. Further, Afghan instability makes the U.S. dependent on Pakistan logistically—there is no way to replace completely the land route from Karachi with another route through Central Asia. This dependence in turn reduces our ability to influence Islamabad on other matters of great importance, such as stabilizing civilian rule in Pakistan and stopping support for terrorist groups like the one that attacked Bombay.

2. KNOW WHAT WE HAVE TO ACHIEVE
Success in Afghanistan does not require creating a paradise in one of the poorest countries on earth, but we cannot define victory down. Preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorists again, helping Pakistan fight its own terrorist problems, and liberating ourselves from dependence on Pakistan will require building an Afghan state with a representative government.

Afghanistan has a longer tradition of such political organization than Iraq has. It has been independent since 1747, and had a functioning constitutional and parliamentary monarchy in the middle of the 20th century. Centrifugal forces in Afghanistan have always been powerful, making the prospects for a strong centralized government in Kabul poor, but the country is neither ungovernable nor artificial. It cannot be stable at this point in history, however, without a representative system. Its multiethnic makeup and decades of internal war mean that any attempt to impose a strongman or to break the country up into effectively independent, warlord-ruled fiefdoms will lead to perpetual violence.

3. UNDERSTAND OUR ENEMIES AND FRIENDS
There is no such thing as “the Taliban” today. Many different groups with different leaders and aims call themselves “Taliban,” and many more are called “Taliban” by their enemies. In addition to Mullah Omar’s Taliban based in Pakistan and indigenous Taliban forces in Afghanistan, there is an indigenous Pakistani Taliban controlled by Baitullah Mehsud (this group is thought to have been responsible for assassinating Benazir Bhutto). Both are linked with al-Qaeda, and both are dangerous and determined. In other areas, however, “Taliban” groups are primarily disaffected tribesmen who find it more convenient to get help from the Taliban than from other sources.

In general terms, any group that calls itself “Taliban” is identifying itself as against the government in Kabul, the U.S., and U.S. allies. Our job is to understand which groups are truly dangerous, which are irreconcilable with our goals for Afghanistan—and which can be fractured or persuaded to rejoin the Afghan polity. We can’t fight them all, and we can’t negotiate with them all. Dropping the term “Taliban” and referring to specific groups instead would be a good way to start understanding who is really causing problems.


Recognizing the limitations of the current government is a good next step. That government is ineffective and deeply corrupt. Provincial governors and district leaders were not elected, but appointed by Pres. Hamid Karzai, often with an eye toward marginalizing potential rivals and consolidating his power. Karzai’s popularity is dwindling, and the postponement of Afghanistan’s presidential elections from May to August allows his opponents to paint him as illegitimate. It is possible that even if Karzai wins the August election, many Afghans will continue to view him as illegitimate.

The U.S. cannot, however, turn away from the central government and seek solutions only at the local level. For one thing, important local leaders are Karzai’s appointees. For another, building local solutions that do not connect with the central government is the path toward renewed warlordism and instability. The key, therefore, is to develop local solutions that are connected to the central government but not necessarily completely controlled by it.

Local governments—possibly at the level of individual villages—will have to play a role in selecting individuals to help maintain security once it has been established. Afghan villages often have representative bodies, or at least local elders who can identify needs and priorities while balancing tribal concerns. Local and provincial governments connected to Kabul will have to provide weapons and compensation to local security forces and will therefore acquire a certain limited control over them.

Similar approaches are likely to be required on the economic front—local groups and leaders, in some cases supported initially with funding from the U.S. Commander’s Emergency Response Program, can get economic projects going, but they will have to connect those projects to central-government representatives for long-term funding and integration into regional and national economic systems. The bottom line is that we must work hard to develop local solutions to local problems, but always with the goal of integrating those solutions into a loose but real central support-and-control system.

4. COMMIT TO THE EFFORT
The consistent unwillingness of the U.S. government to commit to the success of its endeavors in Afghanistan (and Iraq) over the long term is a serious obstacle to progress. The Pakistani leadership appears convinced that America will abandon its efforts in South Asia sooner rather than later, and this conviction fuels Pakistan’s determination to retain support for (and therefore control of) Afghan Taliban groups based in its territory. It also contributes to instability within Pakistan, because Pakistani leaders are tentative about committing to the fight against their internal foes as long as they are unsure of our determination to do our part.

At the local level within Afghanistan, people who are not convinced that coalition forces will stay to support them if they oppose the terrorists are unlikely to risk retaliation by committing to us. When U.S. forces moved into insurgent strongholds in Iraq in 2007, the first thing they were asked was: “Are you going to stay this time?” When the answer was yes (and we proved it by really staying and living among them), the floodgates of local opposition to the insurgents opened. The people of Afghanistan need the same reassurance. Until it is widely believe that the U.S. will remain in the fight until the insurgency is defeated, doubt about our commitment will continue to fuel the insurgency. If we are going to fight this war, as our interests require, we must make it clear that we will do what it takes to win.

Our history is very much against us in this effort. Islamists point to our retreat following the Marine-barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983, the “Blackhawk Down” incident in 1993, our abandonment of Afghanistan following the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1989, and our abandonment of Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis to Saddam Hussein’s retribution in 1991 and 1992. At the end of 2006, our enemies in Iraq were already declaring victory, convinced that the pattern would repeat itself. The question they are now asking is: Was the surge an aberration in U.S. policy or a new pattern?

Our friends have the same question. We are asking them to put their lives on the line in support of shared goals, and they need to know we will stand by them. More rides on the outcome of our effort in Afghanistan than the particular interests we have there. American security would benefit greatly if we changed the global perception that the U.S. does not have the stomach to finish what it starts.

5. LEARN AND ADAPT THE RIGHT LESSONS
We cannot dismiss our extensive and painful experiences in Iraq, but we must recognize the differences between that country and Afghanistan.


Perhaps the most important lesson of Iraq that is transportable to Afghanistan is this: It is impossible to conduct effective counterterrorism operations (i.e., targeting terrorist networks with precise attacks on key leadership nodes) in a fragile state without conducting effective counterinsurgency operations (i.e., protecting the population and using economic and political programs to build support for the government and resistance to insurgents and terrorists). We will never have a better scenario in which to test the limitations of the counterterrorism model than we had in Iraq in 2006. U.S. Special Forces teams had complete freedom to act against al-Qaeda in Iraq, supported by around 150,000 regular U.S. troops, Iraqi military and police forces of several hundred thousand, and liberal airpower. We killed scores of key terrorist leaders, including the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, in June 2006. But terrorist strength, violence, and control only increased over the course of that year. It was not until units already on the ground applied a new approach—a counterinsurgency approach—and received reinforcements that we were able to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq (even without killing its new leader).

In Afghanistan, we have nothing like the freedom of movement we had in Iraq in 2006, and nothing like the force levels. We have, furthermore, been targeting leadership nodes within terrorist networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan for seven years now, yet the groups are not defeated. Absent a counterinsurgency and nation-building strategy that leads the population to reject the terrorists, killing bad guys will not defeat well-organized and determined terrorist networks.

Enthusiasm has been growing for some time over the idea of generating “awakenings” in Afghanistan similar to the Anbar Awakening that helped turn the tide in Iraq in 2007. Conceptually, this enthusiasm is sound. As noted above, success will require developing local solutions that are integrated in some way with the central government—the most abstract rendering of the “awakening” phenomenon in Iraq.

But we must be very careful about trying to apply Iraq “lessons” of greater specificity. For one thing, what happened in Iraq was not a single phenomenon. The Sunni-Arab rejection of al-Qaeda and turn to the coalition consisted of myriad local developments rather than being a coordinated movement. The coalition response to and support of those local developments was coordinated—we coined the term “Sons of Iraq” and treated SOIs as though they were a coherent group for certain funding and bureaucratic purposes—but each group remained independent. The SOIs never developed a corporate identity, and the local movements transformed their local political contexts rather than evolving into a country-wide movement.

The same will be true in Afghanistan. Local groups in Konar will not identify with local groups in Helmand, nor should they. There is no “Sons of Afghanistan” program that can be centrally defined and directed during its formation. As in Iraq, we must allow and encourage local movements to grow organically—in accordance with local conditions and traditions, but moderated by Afghan and coalition forces that understand the local area. It should go without saying that any effort to develop local security forces in areas that have not been cleared of insurgents will fail, either exposing the locals to vicious retribution or helping the insurgents co-opt new fighters.

[Body-by-Guinness]

6. CONSIDER THE HUMAN TERRAIN
Pashtuns are not Arabs. They have different traditions, different tribal structures, different ways of resolving differences. One of the most important (and least remarked-upon) differences is that Iraqis fight in their cities and villages while Pashtuns, on the whole, do not.

Saddam Hussein planned his defenses against U.S. attack with the intention of drawing us into urban fights he thought we would fear. Indigenous Iraqi insurgents dug into villages and cities and blended into the population. So did the external terror groups.

Coalition forces fought their way through Iraqi cities and villages, sometimes doing fearful damage to the cities and local populations. We devastated Fallujah and Ramadi, for example. But local grievances did not focus on the collateral damage. Considering the scale of the destruction, Iraqi complaints about it were very mild. In 2007, victorious coalition troops who had fought their way through insurgent and terrorist sanctuaries in Baghdad were more popular at the end of the fight than at the beginning. Iraqis generally recognize that their wars are fought in their cities, horrible though that is, so they have a fairly high tolerance for collateral damage and even for the presence of foreign forces in their urban areas and villages. They are generally more interested in who is going to win.

Pashtuns don’t work that way. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan at the end of 1979 and quickly occupied all of the major urban areas. The insurgents, for the most part, did not contest that occupation. They focused instead on cutting off communications between the cities, on ambushing Soviet troops moving outside urban areas and villages, and on attacking isolated Soviet outposts. The Soviets did not know how to respond—they had no context for thinking about a rural insurgency. They had fought the Second World War city by city, and had suppressed rebellions in their Eastern European satellites by fighting through their capitals. They tried to subdue the Pashtuns with ferocious and indiscriminate bombing of Afghan villages, generating 5 million refugees and strengthening the resistance rather than breaking it.


Today’s situation is similar. The major urban centers are not insurgent sanctuaries, and most insurgent attacks occur not only beyond the city limits but outside of the villages as well. American troops accustomed to setting up positions within Iraqi cities and towns may find that the same procedures in Afghanistan incense the population rather than reassure it. That does not mean the problem lies with our overall “footprint” in Afghanistan, but rather that we should rethink where to put our feet. We must also remember that Afghan tolerance for attacks within villages and cities is much lower than Iraqi tolerance, which is why complaints about collateral damage in Afghanistan are much louder than Iraqi complaints were, even though the damage is milder.

Understanding this principle is vital, because if we misinterpret the nature of the “footprint” problem we might come to the erroneous conclusion that success requires fewer forces rather than more—or, as some senior leaders are increasingly suggesting, that our presence is the problem. In fact, to solve the problems in Afghanistan we must have a deep understanding of local dynamics in many different areas. In the current security environment, only American and allied military forces can understand those dynamics, and they can do so only by living among the people in a way that is mutually acceptable to our forces and the Afghans. Pulling back to bases may reduce local resentment of us, but it will also deprive us of any ability to interact with Afghans and their leaders at the level necessary for success. As General Petraeus is fond of saying, you can’t kill your way out of an insurgency. Neither can you defeat one long-distance. Success in Iraq required finding the right way to deploy American forces among the Iraqi population. Success in Afghanistan will require finding the right way for Afghanistan, which will almost certainly be different from the right way in Iraq.

7. UNDERSTAND WHAT WE MUST DO, CAN DO, AND CAN’T DO
The Afghan National Army consists of perhaps 70,000 troops (on paper). This number will rise gradually to 134,000—itself an arbitrary sum, based on assumptions about what the fifth-poorest country in the world can afford to pay for an army that is certainly too small to establish and maintain security. The Afghan National Police are ineffective when not actively part of the problem. Afghanistan is significantly larger than Iraq, its terrain is far more daunting, and its population is greater. The Iraqi Security Forces that defeated the insurgency (with our help) in 2007 and 2008 numbered over 500,000 by the end. There is simply no way that Afghan Security Forces can defeat the insurgents on their own, with or without large numbers of coalition advisers.

Breaking the insurgency will have to be a real team effort. Coalition units must partner with Afghan army units to clear critical areas, and then work with local leaders to develop local security solutions that smaller numbers of residual U.S. and Afghan troops can support while other areas are cleared.

It is better, in general, for Afghans to take the lead in moving into or through Afghan towns, but this is not always as desirable as we might think. In many regions, Afghan villagers are highly localized. Iraqis were accustomed to traveling across their country, maintained active links with and made frequent visits to relatives in various regions, and were willing to see the Iraqi army as their army even when its units were drawn from other parts of the country. Many rural Afghans are not nearly as mobile, particularly after decades of fighting in which the insurgents worked studiously to disrupt communications. In some areas, any outside forces—even Afghan forces—are seen simply as outsiders.

We can observe this phenomenon clearly in Pakistan today, as Pakistani soldiers (largely Punjabis) move into Pashtun areas and are attacked as foreigners. It is not remotely in our interest to generate a similar situation in Afghanistan. We must also remember an important lesson from our efforts to transition security responsibilities prematurely in Iraq in 2005 and 2006: It does not matter much if the local population resents us; it does matter if they resent and mistrust their own security forces. Some counterinsurgency operations are better conducted by outside forces simply because the resentment they generate will leave with them rather than stick to the indigenous government.

8. HAVE A GOOD PLAN
Adding more troops to a failing strategy rarely works. Current military and political leaders recognize this, which is why reviews are underway in CENTCOM, the Joint Staff, and the White House to develop a new strategy for Afghanistan. At the end of the day, however, the detailed campaign plan for implementing a new strategy has to come from the commander in the theater. That commander, Gen. David McKiernan, suffers from a number of significant handicaps that Generals Petraeus and Odierno did not face in Iraq in 2007.


Developing a detailed campaign plan requires a large military staff. Coordinating the use of force with political, economic, and social projects also requires a large staff, on both the military side and the civilian side. In Iraq in 2007, General Petraeus had a large staff (Multinational Force–Iraq). He had a terrific civilian partner in Amb. Ryan Crocker, who headed the largest U.S. embassy in the world and had the power to coordinate most of the non-military efforts in Iraq. Petraeus also had the support of Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno and the large and excellent staff of the III Corps. Odierno and his staff did most of the work developing the military plans to defeat the insurgents, working through five division-level (two-star) commands and as many as 22 combat brigades. Every part of that command structure was necessary to understanding the problem and developing plans to respond to it that were truly integrated at every level.

General McKiernan has no such resources. His staff is too small and is a hodgepodge of U.S. and allied officers whose main function, when the staff was formed, was the coordination of an allied reconstruction effort. The much larger number of allies in Afghanistan, and the fact that NATO took control of the operation in 2006, places an enormous burden on McKiernan and his staff that Petraeus did not face. There is no corps headquarters in Afghanistan, moreover—no equivalent to Odierno’s III Corps and the staff that actually developed the war plan in Iraq. There are five subordinate headquarters (regional commands), but some have few troops and only one has the resources that the five division staffs in Iraq provided. Current plans may put as many as six U.S. brigades on the ground by the end of this year. The U.S. mission in Afghanistan has nothing like the authority that Ambassador Crocker had; on the contrary, the proliferation of allies and international aid efforts has frustrated attempts to unite them in a coherent civil-military campaign plan.

The situation in Afghanistan requires a significant augmentation of McKiernan’s staff: the addition of a corps headquarters under him and at least one division headquarters in the south. It also requires a body that can coordinate international efforts and mesh them with military planning, either through the U.S. mission in Afghanistan or through the U.N.’s special envoy. Without such an increase in headquarters and planning capabilities, even the best work by our commanders can mitigate only a portion of the problems. The solutions that emerge will likely be suboptimal.

Before it departed, the Bush administration decided to send reinforcements to Afghanistan, and the new administration has supported that decision. Rightly so—Afghanistan needs more U.S. troops. But until a thorough and detailed joint campaign plan has been developed in the theater—with buy-in from the overall military commander, our allies, and the civilian organizations that will have to help execute it—it will not be possible to know exactly how many troops are needed, what exactly they should be doing, or what resources they will require. Developing such a plan and evaluating the resource requirements should be an urgent priority—more urgent even than getting more troops into the theater.

Developing a coherent plan for the entire country requires the involvement of our many allies. That involvement, in turn, requires coming to a common understanding of the situation, the tasks to be performed, and the challenges we face. When Afghanistan became a NATO mission, the presumption was that it was primarily a nation-building exercise. Many allied countries committed troops without intending to participate in counterinsurgency efforts. Although it is natural to complain about the national caveats that restrict some (but by no means all) allied troops from leaving their bases or fighting, we must recognize that many of our allies never signed up for this kind of war. They have therefore been reluctant to admit that we now face a full-fledged insurgency. The Obama administration and its newly appointed envoy, Amb. Richard Holbrooke, have a real opportunity for constructive diplomatic engagement here. It should be their priority to help our allies accept the reality in Afghanistan, at the same time making it clear that we do not expect them to engage in combat operations they never intended to undertake. As in Iraq, we should accept whatever contributions they are willing and able to make, but avoid allowing tensions over those contributions to distort the overall understanding of the fight.

9. PRIORITIZE EFFORTS
While the situation in Afghanistan is indeed deteriorating, it would be wrong to rush forces out of Iraq this year in response. Most important, as detailed above, we have not yet established the conditions in Afghanistan that would allow a surge to be decisive. Also, the theater cannot absorb too many reinforcements too quickly. The surge in Iraq brought U.S. troop levels up to something over 160,000 soldiers—about the same number we had had there at the end of 2005. By contrast, coalition force levels in Afghanistan are already at their highest levels. The logistical base that supports them is very sparse. In Iraq there was enough reserve logistical and infrastructure capacity to integrate five additional brigades and two battalions in the space of six months. Because similar resources are lacking, it would be much harder to accomplish such a feat in Afghanistan at this point.


It would also be wrong from the standpoint of U.S. global interests and grand strategy. The dramatic improvement in the situation in Iraq has already increased our options and flexibility—forces are moving from Iraq to Afghanistan this year without imposing unacceptable risks on our position in Iraq. General Odierno has identified 2009 as a critical year for Iraq, starting with the successful Iraqi provincial elections that just occurred and ending with the election of a new central government.

Maintaining American presence in Iraq in support of this effort is essential. Every estimate suggests that, if we maintain such a presence this year, the requirement for continued U.S. forces in Iraq after 2009 will drop dramatically. We can surge troops into Afghanistan, in other words, in 2010 without compromising success in Iraq, and after we have developed the command and logistical structures—and, above all, the plan-to support them in Afghanistan. Therefore, sound grand strategy means using 2009 to set the conditions for decisive operations in Afghanistan while ensuring that Iraq remains stable enough to permit dramatic force reductions.

The key problem with this approach is that Afghanistan must elect a new president this year, and many areas of the country are not secure enough for a legitimate election. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do to address this problem through troop redeployments. Two additional combat brigades are already on the way and will arrive in time to make a difference. Redirecting other combat brigades now meant for deployment to Iraq requires a good six months of advanced warning—among other things, the troops have to train for an entirely different climate, culture, and situation. Any additional brigades would therefore be arriving shortly before the elections. Considering that it takes a unit anywhere from 30 to 60 days on the ground to get deployed and gain enough situational awareness to develop reasonable plans and methods, it is already too late to get more troops to Afghanistan (at least in any prepared and orderly fashion) in time to make much of a difference to the elections.

The theater commander might be able to mitigate the problem to some extent by committing the theater reserve to help; our European allies might be able to help a little with a mini-surge of their own. But rushing out of Iraq now is far more likely to ensure that we are distracted by problems in Mesopotamia in 2010 than to turn the tide in South Asia.

PROLEGOMENON TO A PLAN FOR WINNING IN AFGHANISTAN
This essay does not provide a plan or a strategy for success in Afghanistan. It provides, rather, a set of guidelines for thinking about how to develop one, and for evaluating plans articulated by the administration, its generals, and outsiders. Ultimately, a plan for winning in Afghanistan has to be developed in Afghanistan, just as the plan for winning in Iraq was developed in Iraq. It is a truism that any plan must involve not only the U.S. and allied militaries, but all relevant civilian and international agencies, and must deeply involve the Afghans themselves at every level. Our military and civilian leaders understand that truism. We have failed to date in accomplishing the objective not because we haven’t known that we must, but because it is very hard to do.

But hard is not hopeless in Afghanistan any more than it was in Iraq. The stakes are high, as they always are when America puts its brave young men and women in harm’s way. President Obama has an opportunity in the difficult challenge he faces. So far, he appears determined to try to do the right thing. He deserves the active support and encouragement of every American in that attempt.

— Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGZhOTRhMjRiYjE3ZGZlMTY1ZTA2MmM5YjY1ZTVlMzA=

[Crafty_Dog]

A pleasure to see a serious effort at answering my questions!

I'm on the road at the moment so a long thoughtful post is not possible at the moment, so I simply begin the conversation about this piece by noting my doubts about his perceptions of Pakistan.  Is Pak's IS part of the problem?  Are young officers in the army part of the problem?

Any comments on this piece?

[Crafty_Dog]

Its the NYT, so caveat lector:
=======================

WASHINGTON — Even as C.I.A. drone aircraft pound Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal region, there is growing concern among American military and intelligence officials about different militants’ havens in Pakistan that they fear could thwart American military efforts in Afghanistan this year.
 
American officials are increasingly focusing on the Pakistani city of Quetta, where Taliban leaders are believed to play a significant role in stirring violence in southern Afghanistan.

The Taliban operations in Quetta are different from operations in the mountainous tribal areas of Pakistan that have until now been the main setting for American unease. But as the United States prepares to pour as many as 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan, military and intelligence officials say the effort could be futile unless there is a concerted effort to kill or capture Taliban leaders in Quetta and cut the group’s supply lines into Afghanistan.

From Quetta, Taliban leaders including Mullah Muhammad Omar, a reclusive, one-eyed cleric, guide commanders in southern Afghanistan, raise money from wealthy Persian Gulf donors and deliver guns and fresh fighters to the battlefield, according to Obama administration and military officials.

“When their leadership is where you cannot get to them, it becomes difficult,” said Gen. Dan K. McNeill, who until June was the senior American commander in Afghanistan and recently retired. “You are restrained from doing what you want to do.”

The Taliban leaders have operated from Quetta for several years, but the increasing violence in southern Afghanistan suggests that the flow of arms, fighters and money there from the Pakistani sanctuary may be increasing.

Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province, abuts the provinces in southern Afghanistan where the war’s fiercest fighting has occurred. American intelligence officials said that the dozen or so militants who were thought to make up the Taliban leadership in the area were believed to be hiding either in sprawling Afghan refugee camps near Quetta or in some of the city’s Afghan neighborhoods.

American and other Western officials have long said they suspect that Pakistani security services do little to address the presence of senior Taliban commanders in Quetta. Many of the officials would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the delicate intelligence and diplomatic issues involved.

One former intelligence official with years of experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan likened the situation to America’s difficulties during the Vietnam War, when Vietnamese guerrillas used a haven in Cambodia to bring in fresh troops and weapons.

For the past year, the top American goal in Pakistan has been to press the national government in Islamabad for help elsewhere, in killing and capturing Qaeda fighters in the tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan, who intelligence analysts say pose a direct threat to the United States.

But NATO generals and diplomats have long complained that the command and control of Taliban fighters, distinct from Qaeda insurgents, trace back to southern Pakistan, and that Pakistani security services ignore the threat. Pakistani officials have said they lack good intelligence about the specific locations of Taliban leaders, assertions that some American intelligence operatives greet with some skepticism.

“We’ve made progress going into the tribal areas and North-West Frontier Province against Al Qaeda, but we have not had a counterpart war against the Quetta shura,” said a senior Obama administration official, using the term for the Taliban’s ruling council. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said the Obama administration will adopt a tough love approach to Pakistan: threatening to cut off military aid to Islamabad unless it carries out a crackdown on militants operating throughout the country.

“Pakistan will act against any individuals involved with Al Qaeda or the Taliban about whom we have actionable intelligence,” Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, said in an interview. “The problem is we do not always get actionable intelligence in Quetta in particular. It’s a very messy area.”

Some current and former American intelligence officials are sympathetic to difficulties that the government in Islamabad faces in rounding up Taliban leaders. Baluchistan has long been an area hostile to government control, and even Pakistani spies have difficulty building a network of sources there, they said.

Last week, gunmen in Quetta kidnapped an American working for the United Nations in the city and killed his driver, leading Pakistani security officials to lock down transit routes in and out of the city.

Aides to Richard C. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American military commander in the region, said the issue of crippling the Taliban leadership was getting more attention from their bosses. Mr. Holbrooke is paying his first visit to the region this week in his new job.

The influence of the Taliban leadership over operations on the ground in Afghanistan is a matter of some debate among American commanders and intelligence analysts.

===========

e 2 of 2)



“The Quetta shura is extremely important,” said Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, a retired former commander of American forces in Afghanistan who is advising General Petraeus on a strategic review of his region, including Pakistan and Afghanistan. “They are the intellectual and ideological underpinnings of the Taliban insurgency.”

But Gen. David D. McKiernan, currently the top military commander in Afghanistan, said in a speech in Washington in November that any assessment that said the Quetta shura’s dictates were closely followed by field commanders “gives the Taliban far too much credit for coherency at the operational and strategic level.”

“They don’t have that,” the general added.

That may be true, intelligence analysts say, but few disagree that weakening the Taliban leadership in Pakistan, coupled with achieving battlefield gains with the larger American-led force on the ground in southern Afghanistan, could begin to reverse the adverse momentum in the war.

“It would remove the ideological standard-bearer, which also provides links to external financing in the gulf,” a senior administration official said. “It wouldn’t erase the rural-based insurgency and narcotics trade in Afghanistan, but the notion is, if you can disrupt them at the top levels, it will have an impact at the bottom, down in the provinces.”

Even more intriguing, American officials say, is this prospect: diminishing the Taliban leadership in Quetta and weakening its influence over Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan might open the way to engage more moderate Taliban politically.

“The challenge has always been to exploit some cleavages between the top leadership, which we’ve ruled out of bounds in terms of reconciliation, and the layers one or two layers beneath them,” said Daniel Markey, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former South Asia specialist for the State Department.

In recent years, there have been some significant successes in the hunt for Taliban leaders. Pakistani operatives tracked Mullah Dadullah, a senior aide to Mullah Omar, as he crossed the Afghan border in May 2007, and he was later killed by American and Afghan troops.

Yet most of the arrests in Pakistan have coincided with visits by senior American officials.

The arrest of Mullah Obeidullah, the former Taliban defense minister, in Quetta in February 2007 coincided with the visit of Vice President Dick Cheney to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is unclear whether Mullah Obeidullah is still in Pakistani custody or was secretly released as part of a prisoner exchange to free Pakistan’s ambassador to Afghanistan, who was kidnapped last February and released three months later.

Mullah Rahim, the Taliban’s top commander in Helmand Province, was arrested in Quetta last summer two weeks after Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a top C.I.A. officer visited Islamabad to confront Pakistani leaders with evidence of ties between the country’s powerful spy service and militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas. But an American intelligence official said last week that Mullah Rahim was no longer in custody.

“The dilemma at the moment,” said Seth Jones, a terrorism analyst at the RAND Corporation, “is that some elements of the Pakistani government continue to support the Taliban as a proxy organization in Afghanistan.”

[Body-by-Guinness]

Monday, February 09, 2009

On Afghanistan and Lieberman@Brookings   [NRO Staff]
General Petraeus in Munich:

Afghanistan has been a very tough endeavor.  Certainly, there have been important achievements there over the past seven years – agreement on a constitution, elections, and establishment of a government; increased access to education, health care, media, and telecommunications; construction of a significant number of infrastructure projects; development of the Afghan National Army; and others.

But in recent years the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda has led to an increase in violence, especially in the southern and eastern parts of the country.  Numerous other challenges have emerged as well, among them:  difficulties in the development of governmental institutions that achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people; corruption; expansion – until last year – of poppy production and the illegal narcotics industry; and difficulties in the establishment of the Afghan police.

In fact, there has been nothing easy about Afghanistan.  And, as Senator Lieberman observed in a recent speech to the Brookings Institution, “Reversing Afghanistan’s slide into insecurity will not come quickly, easily, or cheaply.”  Similarly, Secretary Gates told Congress, “This will undoubtedly be a long and difficult fight.”  I agree.  In fact, I think it is important to be clear eyed about the challenges that lie ahead, while also remembering the importance of our objectives in Afghanistan and the importance of the opportunity that exists if we all intensify our efforts and work together to achieve those objectives.

Many observers have noted that there are no purely military solutions in Afghanistan.  That is correct.  Nonetheless, military action, while not sufficient by itself, is absolutely necessary, for security provides the essential foundation for the achievement of progress in all the other so-called lines of operation – recognizing, of course, that progress in other areas made possible by security improvements typically contributes to further progress in the security arena – creating an upward spiral in which improvements in one area reinforce progress in another.

Arresting and then reversing the downward spiral in security in Afghanistan thus will require not just additional military forces, but also more civilian contributions, greater unity of effort between civilian and military elements and with our Afghan partners, and a comprehensive approach, as well as sustained commitment and a strategy that addresses the situations in neighboring countries.   

This morning, I’d like to describe in very general terms the resource requirements that are under discussion in Washington and various other national capitals.  Then I’ll describe briefly a few of the ideas that helped us in Iraq and that, properly adapted for Afghanistan, can help guide GEN McKiernan and ISAF. 

THE NEED FOR MORE FORCES, ENABLERS, AND TRAINERS
In recent months, our President and many others have highlighted the need for additional forces in Afghanistan to reverse the downward spiral in security, help Afghan forces provide security for the elections on August 20th, and enable progress in the tasks essential to achievement of our objectives.  Indeed, as has been announced in recent months, more US forces are entering operations in as part of ISAF in Afghanistan now, more have been ordered to deploy, and the deployment of others is under consideration.  Beyond that, the number of Afghan soldiers to be trained and equipped has been increased, and many of the other troop contributing nations will deploy additional forces, as well, with a number of commitments under discussion.  And I would be remiss if I did not ask individual countries to examine what forces and other contributions they can provide as ISAF intensifies its efforts in preparation for the elections in August.

It is, of course not just additional combat forces that are required.  ISAF also needs more so-called enablers to support the effort in Afghanistan – more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms and the connectivity to exploit the capabilities they bring; more military police, engineers, and logistics elements; additional special operations forces and civil affairs units; more lift and attack helicopters and fixed wing aircraft; additional air medevac assets; increases in information operations capabilities; and so on.  Also required are more Embedded Training Teams, Operational Mentoring and Liaison Teams, and Police Mentoring Teams, all elements that are essential to building capable Afghan National Security Forces.   And I applaud the German Defense Minister’s announcement of additional police and army training teams this morning.  As with combat forces, some additional enabler elements are already flowing to Afghanistan, commitments have been made to provide others, and others are under discussion as well.

As Senator Lieberman highlighted in his Brookings speech, a surge in civilian capacity is needed to match the increase in military forces in order to field adequate numbers of provincial reconstruction teams and other civilian elements – teams and personnel that are essential to help our Afghan partners expand their capabilities in key governmental areas, to support basic economic development, and to assist in the development of various important aspects of the rule of law, including initiatives to support the development of police and various judicial initiatives. 

It is also essential, of course, that sufficient financial resources be provided for the effort in Afghanistan.  It is hugely important that nations deliver on pledges of economic development assistance, that the Afghan National Army and Law and Order Trust Funds be fully financed, that support be maintained for the Afghan Reconstruction Trust Fund, and that resources continue to be provided for the projects conducted by our military units and PRTs at local levels.  And, I applaud the German Defense Minister’s announcement of additional development aid this morning, too. 

Of course, just more troops, civilians, dollars and Euros won’t be enough.  As students of history, we’re keenly aware that Afghanistan has, over the years, been known as the graveyard of empires.  It is, after all, a country that has never taken kindly to outsiders bent on conquering it.  We cannot take that history lightly.  And our awareness of it should caution us to recognize that, while additional forces are essential, their effectiveness will depend on how they are employed, as that, in turn, will determine how they are seen by the Afghan population.

COUNTERINSURGENCY FOR AFGHANISTAN
What I’d like to discuss next, then, are some of the concepts that our commanders have in mind as plans are refined to employ additional forces.   I base this on discussions with GEN McKiernan and others who have served in Afghanistan, as well as on lessons learned in recent years.  I do so with awareness that a number of the elements on the ground are operating along the lines of these ideas – and that their ability to do so will be enhanced by the increased density on the ground of ISAF and Afghan forces as additional elements deploy to the most challenging areas.  Counterinsurgency operations are, after all, troop intensive.  Finally, I want to underscore the fact that commanders on the ground will, as always, operationalize the so-called big ideas in ways that are appropriate for their specific situations on the ground.  So here are some of those ideas:

First and foremost, our forces and those of our Afghan partners have to strive to secure and serve the population.  We have to recognize that the Afghan people are the decisive “terrain.”  And together with our Afghan partners, we have to work to provide the people security, to give them respect, to gain their support, and to facilitate the provision of basic services, the development of the Afghan Security Forces in the area, the promotion of local economic development, and the establishment of governance that includes links to the traditional leaders in society and is viewed as legitimate in the eyes of the people.   

Securing and serving the people requires that our forces be good neighbors.  While it may be less culturally acceptable to live among the people in certain parts of Afghanistan than it was in Iraq, it is necessary to locate Afghan and ISAF forces where they can establish a persistent security presence.  You can’t commute to work in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations.   Positioning outposts and patrol bases, then, requires careful thought, consultation with local leaders, and the establishment of good local relationships to be effective. 

Positioning near those we and our Afghan partners are helping to secure also enables us to understand the neighborhood.  A nuanced appreciation of the local situation is essential.  Leaders and troopers have to understand the tribal structures, the power brokers, the good guys and the bad guys, local cultures and history, and how systems are supposed to work and do work.  This requires listening and being respectful of local elders and mullahs, and farmers and shopkeepers – and it also requires, of course, many cups of tea.

It is also essential that we achieve unity of effort, that we coordinate and synchronize the actions of all ISAF and Afghan forces — and those of our Pakistani partners across the border — and that we do the same with the actions of our embassy and international partners, our Afghan counterparts, local governmental leaders, and international and non-governmental organizations.  Working to a common purpose is essential in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations. 

We also, in support of and in coordination with our Afghan partners, need to help promote local reconciliation, although this has to be done very carefully and in accordance with the principles established in the Afghan Constitution.  In concert with and in support of our Afghan partners, we need to identify and separate the “irreconcilables” from the “reconcilables, striving to create the conditions that can make the reconcilables part of the solution, even as we kill, capture, or drive out the irreconcilables.  In fact, programs already exist in this area and careful application of them will be essential in the effort to fracture and break off elements of the insurgency in order to get various groups to put down their weapons and support the legitimate constitution of Afghanistan.

Having said that, we must pursue the enemy relentlessly and tenaciously.  True irreconcilables, again, must be killed, captured, or driven out of the area.  And we cannot shrink from that any more than we can shrink from being willing to support Afghan reconciliation with those elements that show a willingness to reject the insurgents and help Afghan and ISAF forces.

To ensure that the gains achieved endure, ISAF and Afghan forces have to hold areas that have been cleared.  Once we fight to clear and secure an area, we must ensure that it is retained.  The people – and local security forces – need to know that we will not abandon them.  Additionally, we should look for ways to give local citizens a stake in the success of the local security effort and in the success of the new Afghanistan more broadly as well.  To this end, a reformed, capable Afghan National Police force – with the necessary support from the international community and the alliance – is imperative to ensuring the ability to protect the population.  And the new Afghan Population Protection Program announced by MOI Atmar holds considerable promise and deserves our support as well.

On a related note, to help increase the legitimacy of the Afghan government, we need to help our Afghan partners give the people a reason to support the government and their local authorities.  This includes helping enable Afghan solutions to Afghan problems.  And on a related note, given the importance of Afghan solutions and governance being viewed as legitimate by the people and in view of allegations of corruption, such efforts likely should feature support for what might be called an “Afghan accountability offensive” as well.  That will be an important effort.

In all that we do as we perform various missions, we need to live our values.  While our forces should not hesitate to engage and destroy an enemy, our troopers must also stay true to the values we hold dear.  This is, after all, an important element that distinguishes us from the enemy, and it manifests itself in many ways, including making determined efforts to reduce to the absolute minimum civilian casualties – an effort furthered significantly by the tactical direction and partnering initiatives developed by GEN McKiernan with our Afghan counterparts.

We also must strive to be first with the truth.  We need to beat the insurgents and extremists to the headlines and to pre-empt rumors.  We can do that by getting accurate information to the chain of command, to our Afghan partners, and to the press as soon as is possible.  Integrity is critical to this fight.  Thus, when situations are bad, we should freely acknowledge that fact and avoid temptations to spin. Rather, we should describe the setbacks and failures we suffer and then state what we’ve learned from them and how we’ll adjust to reduce the chances of similar events in the future.

Finally, we always must strive to learn and adapt.  The situation in Afghanistan has changed significantly in the past several years and it continues to evolve.  This makes it incumbent on us to assess the situation continually and to adjust our plans, operations, and tactics as required.  We should share good ideas and best practices, but we also should never forget that what works in an area today may not work there tomorrow, and that what works in one area may not work in another.

IT WILL GET HARDER BEFORE IT GETS EASIER
In conclusion, allow me to reiterate the key points I’ve sought to make.   We have a hugely important interest in ensuring that Afghanistan does not once again become a sanctuary for trans-national terrorists.  Achieving that core objective, in turn, requires the accomplishment of several other significant tasks.  Although there have been impressive achievements in Afghanistan since 2001, the security situation has deteriorated markedly in certain areas in the past two years.  Reversing that trend is necessary to improve security for the population, to permit the conduct of free and fair elections in August, and to enable progress in other important areas.  Achieving security improvements will require more ISAF and Afghan security forces of all types – combat, combat support, logistics, trainers and advisors, special operations, and so on.  Some additional forces are already deploying, further increases have been ordered or pledged, and more are under discussion.  To be effective, the additional military forces will need to be employed in accordance with counterinsurgency concepts applied by leaders who have a nuanced understanding of their areas of operation.  And to complement and capitalize on the increased military resources, more civilian assets, adequate financial resources, close civil-military cooperation, and a comprehensive approach that encompasses regional states will be necessary.  None of this will be easy.  Indeed, as Vice President Biden observed recently, Afghanistan likely will get harder before it gets easier.  And sustained progress will require sustained commitment.  But, again, our objectives are of enormous importance, a significant opportunity is at hand, and we all need to summon the will and the resources necessary to make the most of it.  Thank you very much.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZGY5YjQxZGFmYjgxNzJmYjExMjRiYThiYmM2YmFlYTQ=

[Crafty_Dog]

I have no idea whether whether this writer's suggestions are any good.  I post them because they assay making specific suggestions.
Catching my eye was the datum about a 5% casualty rate for the police.
=================
By ANN MARLOWE
The Taliban's synchronized suicide bombings on government buildings in Kabul this week will no doubt intensify President Barack Obama's desire to bring security to Afghanistan. On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama pledged to make the country the centerpiece of his foreign policy, calling for an Iraq-like surge of thousands of troops. Recently, he and Vice-President Joe Biden have also made it clear that they've lost patience with President Hamid Karzai's weak leadership and his toleration of corruption.

But the surge that Afghanistan needs isn't in U.S. troops, it's in strengthening governance and Afghan security forces. Without improvements in these areas, no president and no amount of troops can stabilize Afghanistan.

Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke, currently in the region, should make it clear to the Afghan people, if necessary through a blunt announcement, that the U.S. prefers Mr. Karzai not seek another term. Mr. Holbrooke should also meet immediately with the Afghan Parliament to discuss what can be done to improve governance, and to discuss possible changes to the disastrous 2004 Afghan constitution.

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There are three big structural problems enshrined in that document. First, the 34 provincial governors are not elected, but appointed and removed at will by the president. Second, members of parliament are elected on a provincial rather than on a district basis. And third, provincial councils are elected on a provincial rather than on a district basis and have no official policy role. Another issue is the absence of political parties.

Mr. Karzai's shuffling of notables from one governorship to another has been reactive, removing governors who either threaten him, criticize him, or are so incompetent that the American military has complained about them. He has swapped some provinces' governors twice in a year; Ghazni had four in 2008. The current system treats Afghan citizens like subjects, forced to suffer whatever their appointed local despot decides. Is it surprising that most Afghans don't stand up to the Taliban?

The system of parliamentary elections also disservices Afghans, since some provinces are the size of European countries and vary considerably in terrain, economy and ethnic composition. Under the current electoral system, the top vote-getters represent a province, but may come from only one district of a province, usually the richest and most populous, and from one tribe or ethnic group. (Imagine the members of the House of Representatives from California all hailing from Los Angeles or San Francisco and all being white men.)

Since provincial councils are also elected province-wide, Afghan citizens can't hold their representative accountable for local conditions, and representatives don't have ties to specific constituencies. (Imagine the entire New York State Assembly coming from Brooklyn.) Worse, these representatives, despite being closest to the people, serve nothing but an advisory role, and it's mainly the American military that listens to them at all.

Mr. Karzai lobbied the United Nations hard to discourage the formation of political parties, and he got his wish. This is the major reason why the country is in the laughable situation of having no declared opposition candidates for a (late) presidential election slated for August. Without parties, power aligns along traditional tribal and ethnic lines, and provides ample opportunity for drug gangs and foreign governments to buy politicians. Any Afghan MP will tell you that the Pakistanis, Iranians and Russians buy MPs.

In terms of security, the U.S. must throw additional support behind Afghan security forces, particularly those who fight the insurgency on the most grass-roots level, the Afghan National Police (ANP). We've poured a lot of money into the ANP since we took over training from our NATO allies -- the current annual budget is around $800 million -- but we should be spending more. It's more effective, and cheaper, than anything we can do with our troops in many areas.

At present, Afghanistan only has a fraction of the number of police it needs. Some 77,000 cops serve a nation of 32 million people, most of them in villages scattered across one of the most mountainous countries in the world. In the east and south, they are under attack from insurgents wielding automatic weapons and planting improvised explosive devices.

This already small force is being eroded by a shocking combat death rate and resulting high attrition. Last year 1,215 out of 77,000 police were slain by insurgents, and an additional 2,600 police were wounded or missing in action. This amounts to one out of 20 cops killed or wounded in 2008.

The numbers are worse when viewed on a local level, because most of the deaths are occurring in a handful of frontline provinces where Afghan police are consequently quitting in droves. Last year, police pay was raised to $180 a month for the lowest-tier job in the most dangerous provinces, but this is still less than private security firms offer for safer work.

With increased American support, the ANP can become a success story like the Afghan National Army. A widely respected institution, the army is modernizing rapidly, with 41 of its 69 battalions "capable of independent planning, execution, and sustainment of counterinsurgency operations," according to American military trainers. Increasing the size of the army is a good idea. So is paying current soldiers enough so they remain in the army.

The Taliban's increasing boldness and the incompetent presidency of Hamid Karzai are symptoms of deeper problems: illiteracy, a nonexistent civil society, undeveloped national institutions, and pervasive corruption. Reversing these trends will take years. But within the term of Mr. Obama's presidency, there's much that can be done to restore Afghanistan to order.

Ms. Marlowe is a New York-based writer who travels frequently to Afghanistan.

[Crafty_Dog]

The following is posted here with permission.  It is from one of our brave soldiers currently in Afg who has just joined the DBMAA.  I asked him what he thought of the Afg-Pak and related threads here on this forum.  With identifying info deleted, here is his response:
================

Sir, I was actually reading the Afg-Pak thread before my meeting, I came back when I  finished and got your e-mail.

 Great stuff on there!  My personal opinion is that most Americans are weak willed (he is saying this in agreement with something I said, without my opening the subject I doubt he would have said anything-- Marc) because they have never really had to pay attention to what was going on in the world.  If some one doesn't want to hear about the war or anything else that they may view as a negative, they simply have to change the channel (plenty of other "reality" on these days), go to a different webpage or find any other thing to divert their attention.  A lot of people may just not care and figure that someone else will take care of the problem while those of us that do care and are trying to take care of the problem, either can't take care of the problem or our impact is minimal because so many just don't care.  Just one man's opinion.
 
I'm a ___________________ so we REALLY have to pay attention to what's going on around here and take into account all of the factors influencing what's going on (the "why" of it all), or we have a better chance of getting blown up when we roll out.
What me and my team do: " , , ,   No war can truly be "won" without the support of the populace and we can't gain the
support of the people by blowing their property up.  Even commie Chairman Mao understood this concept ("The richest source of power to wage war lies in the masses of the people.").  Today's military strategy seems to be the polar opposite of the "bomb the living piss out of 'em" carpet bombing strategy of WW2.
 
Ms. Ann Marlowe's piece on the last post of the Afg-Pak thread was pretty good.  I think she pretty much hit the nail on the head on most points.  I  do disagree with her opinion that we don't need more U.S. troops here.  We can't strengthen governance without security and whatever system of government ends up in place will not be self sustaining without the support
of a competent, well trained and legitimate ASF (Afghan Security Force).   ASF will be unable to attain that level of competency and training without security, i.e. more U.S. troops.  But she is correct when she said "Without improvements in these areas, no president and no amount of troops can stabilize Afghanistan.".  There are so many things contributing to the instability in this region and so little is being done about it.  ANA, ANP, and ASF receive low pay and sometimes go for months without pay at all.
 
 The ANP roll out in unarmored pick-up trucks and minimal if any body armor.  I think that's a big part of the reason for the high rate of casualties among them.  The TB are a bunch of bitches and avoid direct action and instead opt to employ the IED.  Most IEDs can probably vaporize a pick-up truck and whoever is in it.  U.S. forces roll in heavy armored vehicles and we wear so much body armor that we can probably survive ground zero of a nuclear blast.
 
 Incompetent and corrupt political leaders (hmmm... sounds familiar).  A  serious lack of checks and balances in the existing government structure (I do consider political parties one form of it).
 
Ok. Enough rambling for now.  I will definitely be posting on the forum as time permits.  A helluva lot of good stuff on there.
 

[jkrenz]

Good post 

Really the only people who know what's good for Afghanistan are Afghans.  However, in a country messed up by 30 or so years of war it will be quite difficult to implement positive change.  The corruption so readily apparent to us has been the normal way of dealing with things for 30 years.  With an unemployment rate of 40% and 53% of the population living below the poverty line (<$1.00 a day according to the World Bank), how would you take care of your family?  I don't know, but I'd like to be able to provide a little more for my family than what I can get them for a dollar a day.  If I had to live on a dollar a day, hell yeah I would do something that might be wrong or unlawful in order to take care of my family and make sure they are provided for.  I might even say to myself "Damn...  I can't find a job.  I could join the army, but the pay is crap and that's if I even get paid at all.  But these guys over here, what do they call themselves...  Students? (Taliban is Pashto for students).  yeah, the students said that they would take care of me.  The Students pay well and all I would have to do is just bury a bomb on the roadside and push a button when infidels drive by.  Also, if I die while I'm working for the Students, my family will be paid very well and I get 72 virgins".  That's what's happening in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan and its people have so much potential but they're going to need A LOT of guidance and help from others if they are going to progress as a nation.  That guidance and help will have to be in the form of U.S. and Coalition forces to train and help with security issues, political gurus to iron out a hell of a lot of wrinkles in that mess of a government (can't just throw away the shirt), and once those two things are good to go, infrastructure and economy will hopefully follow resulting in an independent Afghanistan able to provide for the welfare of its people.  After that, hopefully no U.S. servicemember will have to worry about going back and possibly not making the return trip home.

"Somewhere a true believer is training to kill you. He trains with minimal food and water, in austere conditions, day and night. The only thing clean on him is his weapon, and he made his web gear. He doesn't worry about what workout to do; his ruck weighs what it weighs, and he runs until the enemy stops chasing him. The true believer is not concerned about how "hard it is"; he knows either he wins or he dies. He doesn't go home at 1700; he is home.  He knows only the cause.  Now, who wants to quit?"  ---Unknown, Fort Bragg, North Carolina


 

[Crafty_Dog]

Delighted to have you with us JKrenz and look forward to more posts from you.

The following was sent to me as an example that the enemy does knife training, but the interview with John Boltono focuses more on the possible collapse of Pak.

http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=3610893&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/

======================================
and this just in
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/02/16/pakistan.taliban.sharia.law/index.html

How on earth can we succeed in Afg if this is happening in Pakistan?!?  JKrenz, would love to get your input on this?

=====================================

Pak govt agrees to Taliban Sharia in major region

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- Pakistani government officials announced Monday an agreement with the Taliban to allow strict Islamic law, or sharia, to be implemented in parts of North West Frontier Province.


Delegation members of pro-Taliban leader Soofi Mohammad at a meeting in Peshawar Monday.

 It marks a major concession by the Pakistani government in its attempt to hold off Taliban militants who have terrorized the region with beheadings, kidnappings, and the destruction of girls' schools.

The government will recognize sharia for the entire Malakand Division, which includes the Swat district -- a two-hour drive from Pakistan's capital, Islamabad -- the chief minister of North West Frontier Province Amir Haider Hoti announced Monday in a news conference. Islamic law is already being practiced in the area, where the Taliban have control.

Hoti said the people of the region want sharia which will fill the "vacuum" left by a lack of access to Pakistan's judicial system. He said he hoped it would bring peace to the region, where Pakistani forces have battled militants aligned with the Taliban.

"Those who chose to take the path of violence because of this decision, I appeal to all of them to work for the sake of peace now," Hoti said.

"There is no accounting for the sacrifice of all the people of Swat and the Malakand division. How many children have been orphaned? How many parents have lost their children? How many young people have been martyred? In my mind, I don't think that anyone can take this any more."

He also stressed that the recognition of Islamic law in the region "isn't something that hasn't happened before." He said previous agreements have been made regarding sharia, but were never implemented. He also said that the Islamic law will not go against basic civil liberties, although he did not explain how the government would make sure that provision would be upheld.

Sharia is defined as Islamic law but is interpreted with wide differences depending on the various sects of both Sunni and Shia Islam.

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So far, the Pakistani Taliban's interpretation of sharia has included banning girls from school, forcing women inside and outlawing forms of entertainment.

The agreement comes amid negotiations between Pakistani provincial officials and Taliban representatives, led by Sufi Mohammed. The Taliban on Sunday declared a 10-day cease-fire in Swat Valley, which Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan said was a gesture of good will towards the government.

The Taliban's control of Swat is believed to be the deepest advance by militants into Pakistan's settled areas -- meaning areas outside its federally administered tribal region along the border with Afghanistan.

The negotiations in North West Frontier Province are the latest attempt by Pakistan's civilian government -- which took power last year -- to achieve peace through diplomacy in areas where Taliban and al Qaeda leaders are believed to have free rein.

But analysts as well as critics within the establishment have warned that Pakistan's previous dealings with the Taliban have only given the fundamentalist Islamic militia time to regroup and gain more ground.

Khadim Hussain, a professor Bahria University in Islamabad who studies Pakistani politics, said the government has effectively surrendered the areas to the Taliban, thereby setting the stage for two contradictory, parallel states in North West Frontier Province.

"If you leave them like that and you give ... a semblance of peace in a particular area, what does that mean?" Hussain said. "It means you're capitulating. It means you're surrendering the state to them. It means your submitting the state authority to them because they are running a parallel state."

He said the government's decision amounts to a marriage of convenience made under duress.

Swat has been overrun by forces loyal to Maulana Fazlullah's banned hardline Islamic group, Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi (TNSM) which has allied itself with Taliban fighters. TNSM was once led by Sufi Mohammed, Fazlullah's father-in-law who is leading the latest negotiations. Sufi Mohammed was released from jail last year by Pakistani authorities after he agreed to cooperate with the government. He was jailed in 2002 after recruiting thousands of fighters to battle U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Fazlullah took over TNSM during Sufi Mohammed's jail stint and vowed to continue his fight to impose fundamentalist Islamic law in the region.

Last May, Pakistan's government announced it reached a peace deal with militants in Swat Valley. In the months that have followed, the Taliban have seized control of the region and carried out a violent campaign against government officials, including local politicians. The head of the Awami National Party -- which represents the region -- was forced to flee to Islamabad amid death threats from the Taliban.

Pakistan is under enormous pressure to control the militants within its borders, blamed for launching attacks in neighboring Afghanistan where U.S. and NATO forces are fighting militants.

The deal with the Taliban comes on the heels of a visit by U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, who is now meeting with leaders in neighboring India. He said he is awaiting more details of Monday's agreement, but said it underlines the challenge of dealing with the rise of the Taliban.

The United States -- using unmanned drones -- has carried out several airstrikes inside Pakistan on suspected militant targets, including one on Monday that killed at least 15 people, Pakistani sources said. Such airstrikes, which sometimes result in civilian casualties, have aggravated tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan.


Pakistan's military operation in the region is unpopular among Pakistanis, but efforts to deal diplomatically with militants have not worked in the past.

Pakistan's previous leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, reached a cease-fire deal with militants in South Waziristan in 2006 which was widely blamed for giving al Qaeda and Taliban a stronger foothold in the

[Crafty_Dog]

An 11 minute clip worth your time:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/feb/13/us-military-afghanistan-outpost

[Crafty_Dog]

Please note the previous entry!

================

This is the most detailed article (2005) I have read about the status of pak nukes...very interesting. The original report by Durrani is googleable.
 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GD06Df04.html
Guarding Pakistan's nuclear estate
By Kaushik Kapisthalam

Even as media and public attention in the United States and South Asia has focused on the issue of nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets going to Pakistan, there has been a series of interesting developments within the US regarding policy toward Pakistan's nuclear program.

Public nonchalance
Publicly, Bush administration officials have been remarkably guarded, and even nonchalant, about Pakistan's leaky nuclear program, even as one revelation after another came out regarding nuclear proliferation from Pakistan to Iran, Libya, North Korea and other unnamed countries. After exerting pressure behind the scenes on Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf, the US has quietly accepted his explanation that all proliferation acts were the responsibility of one man, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, and lent its blessings to Khan being pardoned and kept under house arrest in Pakistan.

The official Washington spin is that the administration of President George W Bush has persuaded Pakistan to end its nuclear trade once and for all and that it is better to move forward than dwell on the past.

Despite this public posture, many experts and former government officials in Washington and elsewhere are not so sanguine. Virtually every report on nuclear security from major US and Western think-tanks, such as the Carnegie Endowment, the Monterrey Institute and the Cato Institute, consistently raise the issue of the leaky nature of Pakistan's nuclear assets. The Congressional Research Service, the advisory arm of the US Congress, has issued numerous reports on Pakistan's nuclear program highlighting the need to do something. However, until recently, Bush administration officials had in effect stonewalled on this issue and avoided talking about it on or off the record, other than a few cryptic remarks on occasion.

That has slowly begun to change.

The curtain lifts?
In testimony to the Senate on March 17, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, who is the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, spoke at length about the fragility of Pakistan. After the usual platitudes about Musharraf's virtues, Jacoby noted in his submitted statement, "Our assessment remains unchanged from last year. If Musharraf were assassinated or otherwise replaced, Pakistan's new leader would be less pro-US. We are concerned that extremist Islamic politicians would gain greater influence."

Interestingly, it was former presidential candidate Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts who was one of the first to talk about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal openly. In a January 2004 debate with other contenders from his Democratic Party, Kerry said that if he were elected president, he would get tough with Pakistan on nuclear safety, noting that past Pakistani leaders had lied to him and the US quite blatantly on the nuclear issue. Kerry added that failing to protect Pakistan's nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands was "one of the most glaring weaknesses in this [Bush] administration's entire foreign policy". More curious, Kerry said the US should work with India to make a plan for taking out Pakistan's nukes in case of an emergency. Another Democratic senator, Barack Obama of Illinois, went a step further and said the US should launch surgical strikes on Pakistan in a nuclear leak eventuality.

After the re-election of Bush, it was Kerry who once again raised the issue. During the Senate hearing to confirm Bush's appointment of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, Kerry had a fiery exchange with Rice, which needs to be quoted in full for readers to appreciate its significance.
Kerry: And what about any initiatives or discussions with President Musharraf and the Indians with respect to fail-safe procedures in the event - I mean, there have been two attempts on President Musharraf's life. If you were to have a successful coup in Pakistan, you could have, conceivably, nuclear weapons in the hand of a radical Islamic state automatically, overnight. And to the best of my knowledge, in all of the inquiries that I've made in the course of the last years, there is now no failsafe procedure in place to guarantee against that weaponry falling into the wrong hands.

Rice: Senator, we have noted this problem, and we are prepared to try to deal with it. I would prefer not in open session to talk about this particular issue.

Kerry:Okay. Well, I raise it again. I must say that in my private briefings as the nominee I found the answers highly unsatisfactory. And so, I press on you the notion that, without saying more, that we need to pay attention to that.

Rice: We're very aware of the problem, Senator, and we have had some discussions. But I really would prefer not to discuss that.
In essence, Kerry noted that as a presidential candidate, the US "secret plan" for Pakistan's nukes as conveyed to him was unsatisfactory. But Rice hinted that while the plan might not be perfect, the administration was working on it. There are some signs that this may already be happening.

Follow the money
In Washington it is said that all plans stay on paper until Congress appropriates funds for them. There are a variety of agencies and bureaus in the US government that deal with various aspects of the nuclear cycle. One such agency is the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

The official budget presented by the NRC for the upcoming 2006 fiscal year includes US$800,000 for "initiatives supporting nuclear safety cooperation with India and Pakistan". One Washington insider noted that while the NRC's cooperation with India was in the realm of providing advice on emergency procedures, fire safety issues and the safety of ageing plants, as well as collaborative nuclear research, the initiatives with Pakistan were likely focused on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and its safety.

"American non-proliferation laws and international treaty commitments may severely restrict direct assistance to the safety of Pakistan's warheads and fissile material, you can wager good money that the Bush administration is not going to let global treaties to compromise American security interests," noted the insider.

The source insisted that it is highly likely that such cooperation is already under way behind the covers, but the NRC budgeting makes it possible on a larger scale with congressional oversight. One possible option is the provision of Permissive Action Links (PALs). A PAL is basically a box with sophisticated cryptography electronics inside that prevents unauthorized access to a nuclear weapon by disarming or disabling the triggering mechanism if the wrong code is entered or if the box is tampered with in any manner. PAL locks could make a nuclear warhead unusable in the wrong hands.

Interestingly, after the two successive assassination attempts on Musharraf in December 2003, NBC News reported that the US had installed PAL locks on Pakistani nuclear warheads. The report quoted former US ambassador to Pakistan Robert Oakley confirming the cooperation behind the scenes. About this time Bush was asked in a press conference whether Pakistan's nukes were secure. Bush replied, "Yes, they are secure," and changed the subject immediately.

However, not everyone agrees that providing PAL locks to Pakistan is a wise choice. Leonard Weiss, a prominent non-proliferation expert and former Senate staffer who helped author many US non-proliferation laws, feels that it is a "hoary idea" and compared it to "providing clean needles to drug addicts, thereby making proliferators seem like helpless victims of uncontrollable physiological appetites". He cautions that PALs may make it easier for a Pakistani leader to consider using a nuclear weapon. Despite this, the Washington insider tells Asia Times Online that PALs and other safety devices are likely to be in the cards for guarding Pakistan's nuclear weapons, if they are not in place already.

Damage control
It is a known fact that foreign governments use seminars and sponsored studies by private and quasi-government think-tanks to explain or elaborate on their country's policies. In recent months, many serving and retired Pakistani military officials and diplomats have launched a seemingly coordinated campaign in the US and Western strategic-policy circles. The goal of this campaign seems to be to reassure the power brokers and academics who often go on to become key players in the US and Western governments that Pakistan's nuclear estate is safe and that Pakistan will take its nuclear non-proliferation commitments seriously, after the Khan scandal.

One such effort was by retired Pakistani army Major-General Mahmud Ali Durrani at the Sandia Labs in New Mexico. It is to be noted that Sandia Labs is owned by defense contractor Lockheed Martin and is affiliated with the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Durrani states in his report titled "Pakistan's Strategic Thinking and the Role of Nuclear Weapons" that he was able to tour many sensitive Pakistani nuclear facilities and found the safety procedures to be credible, though there was room for improvement in certain security aspects.

But not everyone who read the Durrani study was convinced. One former US security official, who did not want to be identified, told Asia Times Online that he had more questions about Pakistan's nuclear safety procedures after reading the Durrani report than before. He noted that Durrani highlighted the claim that Pakistan has a "three-man rule" for nuclear-weapon safety that it claims is superior to the "two-man rule" in practice in the US. What that means in essence is that three people are supposed to enter codes before a nuclear weapon can be deployed, but he pointed out that the three people can sometimes be at a lower level in the military hierarchy, such as the base commander and unit commander. He wondered whether that was really a safe procedure, given that Pakistan has already acknowledged that al-Qaeda has penetrated lower levels of the military forces.

The expert also highlighted that the Durrani report's stated exception to the "three-man rule" is in the case of a Pakistani air force pilot who can solely be given the full weapon-arming code in certain situations. "This is not comforting to anyone [who] does not know what those 'special situations' are and what if any fail-safes are there to prevent a rogue pilot from taking off with a nuclear weapon," the expert cautioned. It is to be noted that the Durrani report includes a sobering note about the safety of Pakistan's nuclear installations, while dismissing the possibility of Islamist radicals being on the inside. "There is an urgent need to improve the technical skills of personnel charged with the security of [Pakistan's] nuclear installations and develop an institutional security culture," the report warns. Coming from a Pakistani insider, this must be alarming to some within the US government, the expert surmised.

Making the plan
Soon after September 11, 2001, American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker magazine of a supposed secret US-Israeli plan to take control of Pakistan's nuclear facilities in the case of an Islamist coup there. In a book by Washington Post's Bob Woodward, President Bush is quoted as telling Musharraf that "Seymour Hersh is a liar" after the Hersh story came out. Whether the US had a secret plan for Pakistan's nukes in 2001 or not, there is evidence that the US government and Congress are beginning to accept the reality that a US military action plan is needed to prepare for taking over and managing a state-failure situation in a country that possesses mass-destruction weapons.

In a public hearing in March conducted by the US Senate's Armed Services Committee on plans for the US Army's transformation, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut raised the question of whether the US military was ready for a "contingency" situation in Pakistan or Iran. In response, General Richard A Cody, the US Army's vice chief of staff, said that such questions were the ones US Army leaders "grapple with every day", without going into details. The timeframe for these plans mentioned a requirement to be ready by as early as 2007.

The US Military Force Structure Review Act of 1996 directed the secretary of defense to conduct a Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) of the strategy, force structure, force modernization plans, infrastructure and other elements of the defense program and policies with an intent of establishing a revised defense program. It is therefore interesting to note that the next QDR, planned to be released this autumn, reportedly includes plans for scenarios such as a rogue commander getting hold of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. "The more the scenarios hit a nerve ... the more I know I am onto something," a Pentagon official working on the QDR 2005 was quoted as saying in the Wall Street Journal recently.

The significance of these hearings and the QDR plans is that the normally secretive US Defense Department does not make its ideas public for the purposes of public relations. These plans are made public to pressure Congress into releasing massive funds to the US military to be able to realize the plans. They also signify that the US considers the eventualities being planned for in the QDR to be realistic enough to happen in the next four years. Previous QDRs had plans for a conventional combat operation against the likes of Iraq. It may very well turn out that the US State Department, always sensitive to Pakistan's concerns, steps in to force the Pentagon to omit any references to Pakistan in the public QDR version, but if the Pentagon wants debate on the matter, a well-timed leak could do the trick.

Islamabad must be watching these developments with a wary eye, but any protestations it might choose to express are unlikely to deter the US from making plans to slowly yet deliberately cast a net around Pakistan's nuclear estate.

Kaushik Kapisthalam is a freelance defense and strategic affairs analyst based in the United States. He can be reached at contact@kapisthalam.com.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)
 

[Crafty_Dog]

The regents are on the ground and commanders are crafting new battle plans: President Obama is girding for a war surge in Afghanistan. Let's hope he's willing to see it through when his most stalwart supporters start to doubt the effort and rue the cost.

 
APAs a statement of principle, the new Administration's preoccupation with Afghanistan signals a welcome commitment to what has been known by that out-of-favor phrase "global war on terror." The Taliban claimed responsibility last week for coordinated suicide attacks in Kabul, which killed 28 people and reinforced perceptions that security is eroding. America's recent success in Iraq showed that the key to victory lies in shifting those perceptions. That means improving security.

More U.S. troops will likely be needed, and Central Command General David Petraeus is undertaking a review of goals and the resources to meet them. Mr. Obama has talked about doubling forces by another 30,000, and we hope he's willing to give his Afghan commander, General David McKiernan, the number he needs to clear and hold areas and protect the population. However, size of force matters less than having the proper counterinsurgency strategy for a conflict that is different than Iraq.

Among other useful things, Mr. Obama's surge may help to educate his friends on the political left about Islamist terror. The National Security Network, an outfit that never missed an opportunity to bash President Bush, has quickly come into line behind the new President. The group says Mr. Obama's strategy must be focused "first and foremost on preventing the Afghanistan-Pakistan region from becoming a staging ground for terrorist attacks against the U.S. and other nations or a source for instability that could throw Pakistan into chaos."

Sounds good to us -- and sounds a lot like the Bush strategy. America's goal isn't to turn a backward Central Asian country into the next Switzerland, but to keep al Qaeda and its Taliban allies from using it as a safe haven. Toward that end, the U.S. and its allies can help build Afghanistan's institutions and army and help a weak Pakistan government flush out the terrorists in its wild west.

No doubt the strategy can be tweaked. That started well before Mr. Obama's election, as America took back ownership of the Afghan mission from an unwieldy NATO command. Though Britain and Canada pull their weight, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has learned that Americans can't count on Europe to fill the troop and equipment gaps, so the U.S. did.

Also like the Bush Administration, Team Obama recognizes the Pakistan dimension to the Afghan problem -- even calling the place "Afpak." The Taliban came back in the past three years only after finding sanctuary around Quetta, in southern Pakistan, and in the country's northwest tribal regions. The U.S. has also won Islamabad's sotto voce cooperation to strike terror leaders, though more should be done around Quetta.

Mr. Obama's special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, has been in Afpak for a week's fact-finding. Before arriving, he said, "In my view it's going to be much tougher than Iraq." Even by Holbrookeian standards, that's hyperbole. The government in Kabul isn't in danger of collapsing, the Taliban isn't popular where it has ruled, and the insurgents are no match for the U.S.-led force on the battlefield.

Ultimately, as in Iraq, the Afghans will need to stand up more for themselves. That may take a while. But start with expanding the increasingly able Afghan army, a bright spot. The force of 80,000 is too small for a country the size of Texas and bordered by enemies. The police are a shambles, alas. Corruption, narco-trafficking, a weak central government: Afghanistan shares vices with other Western protectorates like Bosnia, and could improve on all counts.

However, notwithstanding President Obama's swipe last Monday that "the national government seems very detached from what's going on in the surrounding community," the rulers in Kabul are legitimate. Hamid Karzai has tolerated too much corruption, but any change of leadership should come from an Afghan challenge, not a U.S. desire to play kingmaker. Mr. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden -- who stormed out of a meeting with Mr. Karzai last year -- need to avoid JFK's mistake of toppling South Vietnam ally Ngo Dinh Diem.

The Obama team wants to play up Afghanistan's troubles so it can look good by comparison a year from now. But soon enough Mr. Obama will own those troubles, and talking down Afghanistan carries risks. Our allies and the American people may come to doubt that the conflict is winnable, or worth the cost.

Already, canaries on the left are asking a la columnist Richard Reeves, "Why are we in Afghanistan?" The President's friends at Newsweek are helpfully referring to "Obama's Vietnam." Mr. Obama may find himself relying on some surprising people for wartime support -- to wit, Bush Republicans and neocons.

[Crafty_Dog]

second post of the morning:

Last June, Bakht Bilind Khan, who was living in the Bronx and working at a fast-food restaurant, returned to his village in the volatile Swat Valley of northern Pakistan to visit his wife and seven children for the first time in three years.

Until recently, the Swat Valley was popular as a vacation site.
But at a dinner celebration with his family, his homecoming suddenly turned dark: several heavily armed Taliban fighters wearing masks appeared at the door of their house, accused Mr. Khan of being an American spy and kidnapped him.

During two weeks of captivity in a nearby mountain range, Mr. Khan says, he was interrogated repeatedly about his wealth, property and “mission” in the United States. He was released in exchange for an $8,000 ransom. His family, threatened with death if they did not leave the region, is now hiding elsewhere in Pakistan.

“Our Swat, our paradise, is burning now,” said Mr. Khan, 55, who returned to the United States and is working at a fast-food restaurant in Albany, trying to reimburse the friends and relatives who paid his ransom.

Pakistani immigrants from the Swat Valley, where the Taliban have been battling Pakistani security forces since 2007, say some of their families are being singled out for threats, kidnapping and even murder by Taliban forces, who view them as potential American collaborators and lucrative sources of ransom. Some immigrants also say they, too, have been threatened in the United States by the Taliban or its sympathizers, and some immigrants say they have been attacked or kidnapped when they have returned home.

The threats have brought an added dimension of suffering for the immigrants, who say fresh reports of hardship arrive here every day, sometimes several times a day, and spread quickly among the several thousand Swati immigrants in the New York region: families driven from their villages, houses being destroyed, relatives disappearing. The fate of the valley dominates conversation among the exiles.

“It’s 24/7,” said Zakrya Khan, 30, the owner of two gyro restaurants in New York whose staff of 15 is almost entirely Swati. “This is their only concern now.”

Though every community of exiles from a conflict-ridden country suffers when relatives who remain behind are caught in the fight, the immigrants from Swat also bear the burden of believing that their presence in America is endangering their relatives back home, where the Taliban have imposed their authority over vast swaths of the region, about 100 miles northwest of Islamabad.

More than that, Swati immigrants say they have been left with the sense that the more they try to help their families back home, the more harm they may do, an excruciating dilemma that has filled many with a combination of helplessness, fear, sadness and guilt.

If they speak out, they fear, it could lead to retribution for them or their relatives in Pakistan. Some exiles who have participated in anti-Taliban political demonstrations here or agitated in support of Swat residents say that they and their families have come under pressure as a result of these activities.

And few dare leave the United States for fear of losing the single largest income stream their families have.

“To go to their rescue would actually make the situation worse,” said Mr. Khan, the restaurant owner. “We are the only source of income for these people. If we leave the United States, they’ll have no one supporting them.”

The Pakistan government announced Monday that it had struck a tentative deal with the Taliban amid a 10-day ceasefire to establish Islamic law in the region and suspend military operations there. But some Swati immigrants said they were skeptical the deal would hold — two other accords in the last six months failed — and they were bracing for a resumption of violence.

Iqbal Ali Khan, 50, the general secretary of the American chapter of the Awami National Party, a dominant secular political party in Swat, said he had received three threatening phone calls in the past two months. The callers, who did not identify themselves, told Mr. Khan he was “too active” and ordered him to bring $1 million with him on his next trip to Pakistan.

“Or you know what will happen,” one caller said, according to Mr. Khan, who is also the owner of a limousine company based in Queens. “We know your family.”

The most recent call came last Tuesday. “You’re still active,” Mr. Khan quoted the caller as saying. “This is the last warning.”

On Wednesday, he received a dire call from his brother, who at that very moment was hiding in a forest on the outskirts of the valley’s largest city, Mingora, with their 97-year-old father.

==================
Page 2 of 2)


The elder Mr. Khan had received a letter from the Taliban earlier in the day warning him that he would be kidnapped unless he handed over $200,000. The note specifically instructed the father to get the money from his son in the United States.


Iqbal Ali Khan, the general secretary of the American chapter of the Awami National Party, a dominant secular political party in Swat, says he has been receiving threatening telephone calls.

“My 97-year-old father is on the run,” exclaimed the younger Mr. Khan, his voice choking up in sadness. “Tragedy! Tragedy!”

Before the start of the Taliban’s incursion into the region in 2007, Swat was treasured as a vacation spot, particularly among Pashtuns, the ethnic group that dominates the region. Known as “the Switzerland of Pakistan,” it has snowy peaks, fruit orchards, lakes and flower-covered meadows.

But the tourism industry has evaporated amid the Taliban’s uprising, and by some estimates, hundreds of thousands of residents have abandoned their homes, fleeing for Mingora or other regions of Pakistan. Immigrants have been coming from the Swat Valley for years, well before it became a front in the war between the Taliban and Pakistani government troops. There are an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 people from the Swat Valley in the United States, about half of whom live in the New York metropolitan region, said Taj Akbar Khan, president of the Khyber Society USA, a Pakistani charitable and cultural organization. In New York, Swatis generally live within the larger Pakistani population, which is concentrated in Coney Island, Brooklyn, and Astoria, Queens, among other neighborhoods.

Many Swatis here suspect that the Taliban have spies among them; that insecurity mirrors the rampant mistrust in the valley, where many residents fear the Pakistani security forces almost as much as the Taliban and do not know whom to trust.

Perhaps with the help of stateside sympathizers, the Taliban have been adept at tracking the flow of money from the United states, and have turned increasingly to kidnapping recipients of the money with the goal of securing hefty ransoms, the exiles say.

Ajab, the owner of a fried chicken shop in Paterson, N.J., said the Taliban kidnapped a brother-in-law last year near the family’s village in the Swat Valley.

During 75 days of captivity, the Taliban fighters told the brother-in-law that one of the reasons they had kidnapped him was that he had relatives in the United States, including Ajab. The fighters released him after the family paid a $20,000 ransom.

“We are sad that because of us, our relatives are getting into trouble,” said Ajab, 51, who spoke only on the condition that his last name not be published, to protect his family’s identity.

Not all of the violence visited upon the families of exiles has been due to the exiles’ presence here. But the difficulty of watching it at such a remove has been no less agonizing.

Leaving behind his family in Swat, Jihanzada came to the United States in 2001 to earn money to build his dream house back home and to pay for the future weddings of his five children. He worked numerous menial jobs in Boston and New York.

“Everything I earned I sent back home,” he said in an interview last week at a fast-food restaurant in Brooklyn where he works.

He, too, spoke on the condition that he not be fully identified for fear of alerting the Taliban to his presence in the United States. “If they knew I was here, they would definitely harm my family,” he said. “If they got information that I talked to you, they can come and target me.”

The house was completed early last year; Jihanzada still has not seen it: he has not returned to Pakistan since he left eight years ago.

But during fighting last summer between the Taliban and the Pakistani security forces, a bomb dropped by Pakistani military aircraft demolished the house. Jihanzada’s family had evacuated before the fighting began and are now living in Mingora. His eldest daughter’s wedding, scheduled for next month, was postponed.

Jihanzada, who said he could not return to Pakistan because he had an asylum petition pending, received photographs of the destruction soon after the attack. Asked how he felt when he first saw the photographs, he dropped his head, concealing his face behind the brim of his brown restaurant cap and trying to stem a surge of sadness. He stayed like that for a full minute, saying nothing.

Finally, he continued: “This is every Pashtun’s dream: You earn, you build a home, your children grow up in it and when you get old you go and sit at home and enjoy life. I’m sad because my struggles start again.”

=====================

=====================



ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The government announced Monday that it would accept a system of Islamic law in the Swat valley and agreed to a truce, effectively conceding the area as a Taliban sanctuary and suspending a faltering effort by the army to crush the insurgents.


Pakistanis in Miran Shah, near the Afghan border, on Sunday at funerals of people described as victims of a United States missile attack on a Taliban compound.

The concessions to the militants, who now control about 70 percent of the region just 100 miles from the capital, were criticized by Pakistani analysts as a capitulation by a government desperate to stop Taliban abuses and a military embarrassed at losing ground after more than a year of intermittent fighting. About 3,000 Taliban militants have kept 12,000 government troops at bay and terrorized the local population with floggings and the burning of schools.

The accord came less than a week before the first official visit to Washington of the Pakistani army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to meet Obama administration officials and discuss how Pakistan could improve its tactics against what the American military is now calling an industrial-strength insurgency there of Al Qaeda and the Taliban militants.

The militants have also made deep gains in neighboring Afghanistan, where the United States is sending more troops.

Pakistani government officials insisted the truce with the Taliban and the switch to the Shariah, the Islamic legal code, were consistent with the Constitution and presented no threat to the integrity of the nation.

But the truce offered by the Taliban, and accepted by the authorities, rebuffed American demands for the Pakistani civilian and military authorities to stick with the fight against the militants, not make deals with them.

Under the terms of the accord, the chief minister of the province, Amir Haider Khan Hoti, said that Pakistani troops would now go on “reactive mode” and fight only in retaliation for an attack.

Announced by the government of the North-West Frontier Province after consultation with President Asif Ali Zardari, the pact echoed previous government accords with the militants across Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal areas in North and South Waziristan.

Those regions have since become a mini-state for Qaeda and Taliban militants, who are now the focus of missile strikes by remotely piloted American aircraft. On Monday, what was thought to be a drone strike in Kurram, a separate area close to the Afghan border, killed 31 people, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

Analysts are now suggesting that the drone strikes may be pushing the Taliban, and even some Qaeda elements, out of the tribal belt and into Swat, making the valley more important to the Taliban.

Speaking in India on the last leg of his trip to Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, the Obama administration’s special envoy to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, did not address the truce directly but said the turmoil in Swat served as a reminder that the United States, Pakistan and India faced an “enemy which poses direct threats to our leadership, our capitals, and our people.”

Pakistani legal experts and other analysts warned that the decision by the authorities would embolden militants in other parts of the country.

“This means you have surrendered to a handful of extremists,” said Athar Minallah, a leader of a lawyers’ movement that has campaigned for an independent judiciary. “The state is under attack; instead of dealing with them as aggressors, the government has abdicated.”

Shuja Nawaz, the author of “Crossed Swords,” a book on the Pakistani military, said that with the accord, “the government is ceding a great deal of space” to the militants.

But some Pakistani officials have recently argued that a truce was necessary in Swat because the army was unable to fight a guerrilla insurgency and civilians were suffering in the conflict.

A former interior minister, Aftab Ahmad Sherpao, told the parliamentary committee on national security this month that Shariah ordinances should be introduced to “calm the situation.”

Sherry Rehman, the government information minister, said the deal should not be seen as a concession. “It is in no way a sign of the state’s weakness,” she said. “The public will of the population of the Swat region is at the center of all efforts, and it should be taken into account while debating the merits of this agreement.”

In legislative elections a year ago, the people of Swat, a region that is about the size of Delaware and has 1.3 million residents, voted overwhelmingly for the secular Awami National Party. Since then, the Taliban have singled out elected politicians with suicide bomb attacks and chased virtually all of them from the valley. Several hundred thousand residents have also fled the fighting.

Many of the poor who have stayed in Swat, which until the late 1960s was ruled by a prince, were calling for the Shariah courts as a way of achieving quick justice and dispensing with the long delays and corruption of the civil courts. The authorities in the North-West Frontier Province, which includes Swat, argued that the Shariah courts were not the same as strict Islamic law. The new laws, for instance, would not ban education of females or impose other strict tenets espoused by the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The new accord, they said, would simply activate laws already agreed to by Benazir Bhutto in the early 1990s when she was prime minister. Similarly, the principle of Shariah courts in Swat was also agreed to by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999. In both cases, the courts, though approved, were never put in place.

============

Pakistan Makes a Taliban Truce, Creating a Haven


Page 2 of 2)


A Pakistani official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official did not have permission to speak publicly, said that the government’s acceptance of the courts was an attempt to blunt efforts of the Taliban to woo Swat residents frustrated by the ineffective judiciary.

“The Taliban was trying to take advantage of the local movement and desire for a judicial system,” the official said. The official insisted that the Obama administration, informed of the accord, “showed understanding of our strategy.”

On Monday, a White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said only, “We have seen the press reports and are in touch with the government of Pakistan about the ongoing situation in Swat.”

Provincial officials said the accord in Swat was struck with Maulana Sufi Muhammad. He is the father-in-law of Maulana Fazlullah, a deputy to Baitullah Mehsud, who is the head of the umbrella group for the Taliban in Pakistan.

Mr. Muhammad is often described as more benign than his son-in-law, but the ranks of their followers and their lines of authority are fluid and overlapping.

In 2001, he took thousands of young men across the border into Afghanistan to fight jihad against the Americans. After his return he was imprisoned by Pakistani authorities.

He was released last April after agreeing to denounce violence and work to bring peace to the area.

Despite the insistence that the new legal system in Swat was consistent with existing civil law, some feared that the accord was an ominous sign of the power of the militants to spread into the heartland of Pakistan, including the most populous and wealthiest province, the Punjab.

“The hardest task for the government will be to protect the Punjab against inroads by militants,” wrote I. A. Rehman, a member of the Human Rights Commission, in the daily newspaper, Dawn.

“Already, religious extremists have strong bases across the province and sympathizers in all arenas: political parties, services, the judiciary, the middle class, and even the media,” he wrote. “For its part, the government is handicapped because of its failure to offer good governance, guarantee livelihoods, and restore people’s faith in the frayed judicial system

[jkrenz]

I am by no means an expert on the subject but I will offer my point of view based upon my limited experience.  I do think that sharia is just as complex as other legal systems but it hasn't evolved as most other forms of law have evolved to fit in with the modern world.  Punishments are overly brutal and sharia has remained virtually unchanged since its inception.  

a brief overview of sharia law from the Council on Foreign Relations website...

http://www.cfr.org/publication/8034/

and I hate to do it, but it is actually a very in depth explanation and although the validity of legal scholar John Makdisi's claim that English law, the predecessor of American law, has roots in medieval Islamic law thanks to the Normans is questionable, anything is possible.  The Normans did play a role in the crusades and occupied Muslim lands for a brief period of time.  But yeah...  Wikipedia...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia

For sharia law to be accepted by the rest of the world, many compromises will have to be made by the ones who uphold the law in that part of the world.  Shuria has strong roots in The Qur'an, Sunnah, and hadith and since the words and deeds of the prophet Mohammed are absolutely infallible, these compromises may never be accepted among hard line Muslims.

Another issue with sharia is that there is no rock solid, in black and white, this is the way it is and is going to be when someone f----s up "Sharia Law Book" in existence which states clearly the crimes and punishments in Islam.  There is only the Qur'an and the wide open interpretation of the words of the prophet by the mullah or whoever is relied upon to enact Islamic law against an offender.  Now, personal opinion,  if that dude is having a bad day or doesn't like you for some reason or has any ulterior motives whatsoever, he can pretty much do what he wants and it kinda gives him some power.   The Ottoman Empire apparently codified sharia and that pretty much replaced the legal scholars and jurists who upheld the law.  Still it would need to be toned down quite a bit.

Or if the IMPOSSIBLE were to happen in that region.... SEPARATION of MOSQUE AND STATE and the conversion or destruction of Muslim extremists in that part of the world, the code of honor of the Pashtun could serve as a foundation for a form of law a little more lenient than sharia.  

Here's an overview of Pashtunwali from www.Afghanland.com

Pashtunwalai, literally means the way of the Pashtuns, it’s the rules and regulations and laws of the Pashtun tribes which protected the world’s biggest tribal society. These rules are responsible for the survival of the Pashtun tribes for over 2000 years. Some of the rules go back to the days of Adam and eve and are still puritan today

NANEWATEI: Under Nanewatei a penitent enemy is forgiven and the feuding factions resume peaceful and friendly relations. Thus it creates a congenial atmosphere for peaceful co-existence and mutual understanding through eventual reconciliation.

TEEGA OR KANRAY: Teega or Kanray is cessation of bloodshed between contending parties. Teega (putting down of a stone) in other words means a temporary truce declared by a Jirga. The word stone is used figuratively as actually no stone is put at the time of the cessation of hostilities. Once the truce is enforced, no party dares violate it for fear of punitive measures.

BADAL: (Eye for an Eye) Self-respect and sensitivity to insult is another essential trait of Pashtun character. The poorest among them has his own sense of dignity and honor and he vehemently refuses to submit to any insult. In fact every Pashtun considers himself equal if not better than his fellow tribesmen and an insult is, therefore, taken as scurrilous reflection on his character. An insult is sure to evoke insult and murder is likely to lead to a murder.

JirgaMELMASTIA: Pashtun have been described as one of the most hospitable peoples of the world. They consider Melmastia or generous hospitality as one of the finest virtues and greet their guest warmly with a broad smile on their faces. A Pashtun feels delighted to receive a guest regardless of his past relations or acquaintance and prepares a delicious meal for him and offers up to their ability the finest meals available to them.

TOR: Pashtuns are sensitive about the honor of their women folk and slight touching of the women is at times considered a serious and an intolerable offence. The cases of adultery and illicit relations are put down with iron hand in and no quarter is given to culprits either male or female. Casting of an evil eye on woman is tantamount to imperil one's life. Both sexes, therefore, scrupulously avoid indulgence in immoral practices.

GHUNDI: Ghundi is a classic case of balance of power in tribal areas. It is derived from Pashto word Ghund, meaning a political party but it is used for an alliance. As modern states enter into bilateral agreements for promotion of trade, cultivation of friendly relations and mutual defense, similarly various sections of a tribe align themselves in blocs or Ghunds to safeguard their common interests. Ghundi is entered into defeat the aggressive and nefarious designs of a hostile neighbor. In tribal fighting the Ghundi members espouse their mutual interests against their common enemy and act as a corporate body with all the resources at their command.

LOKHAY WARKAWAL: Lokhay Warkawal literally means `giving of a pot' but it implies the protection of an individual or a tribe. A weaker tribe to a stronger one with the object of ensuring its safety and security generally gives Lokhay. It is accepted in the form of a sacrificial animal such as a goat or a sheep. When a tribe accepts a Lokhay from another tribe, it undertakes the responsibility of safeguarding the latter's interests against its enemies and protects it at all costs.

Afghan Lashkar Lead by Wazir Akbar KhanLASHKAR: Lashkar is an armed party, which goes out from a village or tribe for warlike purposes. The Lashkar may consist of a hundred to several thousand men. The Lashkar assembled for Jihad (Holy Struggle) is usually very large. The decisions of a Jirga, if violated by a party, are enforced through a tribal Lashkar. The Lashkar thus performs the functions of police in the event of a breach of tribal law.

CHIGHA: Chigha means a pursuit party. The Chigha party is formed or taken out in case armed bandits with the object of lifting cattle, looting property or abducting an inmate of the village, raid a village. Composed of armed persons, the Chigha party goes in pursuit of the raiders to affect the release of the cattle etc or recover the stolen property.

TARR: A mutual accord between two tribes or villagers themselves with regard to a certain matter is called Tarr. For instance, after sowing wheat or any other crop, the people of the village agree not to let loose their cattle to graze in the fields and thus damage the crop. The man whose cattle are found grazing in the fields in violation of this agreement has no right to claim compensation for an injury caused to his cattle by the owner of the field.

MLA TARR: Mla Tarr, which literally means `girding up of loins' denotes two things. Firstly it is used for all such members of a family who are capable of carrying and using firearms. Secondly, it means espousing the cause of a man against his enemies and providing him with an armed party. The tribesmen resort to Mla Tarr when a person belonging to their village or tribe is attacked, mal-treated or disgraced by their enemies.

BADRAGHA: An armed party escorting a fugitive or a visitor to his destination is called Badragha. Badragha is a guarantee for the safety of a man who is either hotly pursued by his enemies or there is an apprehension of his being killed on his way home. An armed party accompanies such a man as Badragha or `escort' to ensure his safe return to the place of his abode. Badragha is never attacked by the second party because of fear of reprisals and the blood feud that is sure to follow if an attack is made on it. The Badragha convoy can be depended upon only within its own geographical limits; beyond it, the people of other tribes take the charge to convoy the traveler.

Treaty of GandomakBILGA: The word Bilga is used for stolen property. A man is held responsible for theft or burglary if any of the stolen articles are recovered from his house. In such a case he is obliged to make good the loss sustained by the afflicted person. He, however, stands absolved of Bilga if he discloses the source or the persons from whom he had purchased the stolen articles.

BOTA: Bota means carrying away. It is a sort of retaliatory action against an aggressor. For instance, if a creditor fails to recover his debt from the debtor, he resorts to Bota by seizing his cattle or one of his kith and kin. The creditor keeps them as hostages till his dues are fully realized or the debtor has furnished a security to make payment within a specified period to the creditor.

BARAMTA: Baramta like Bota is resorted to when the grievances of a party are not redressed or a debtor adopts delaying tactics in respect of payment of a debt to the creditor. The word Baramta is derived from Persian word Baramad, which means recovery or restitution of property etc. Under Baramta hostages are held to ransom till the accused returns the claimed property. The Pashtuns consider it an act against their sense of honor and contrary to the principles of Pashtunwali to lay their hands on dependent classes such as blacksmiths, tailors, barbers and butchers etc belonging to the debtor's village.

BALANDRA OR ASHAR: Balandra or Ashar can be best described as a village aid program under which a particular task is accomplished on the basis of mutual cooperation and assistance. At the time of sowing or harvesting, the villagers lend a helping hand to the man who seeks their help. They take out their pair of bullocks to plough his fields at sowing time and assist him in reaping his crops at the time of harvest. The man, thus obliged, by the fellow villagers holds a feast in their honor in the evening.

MEERATA: Meerata means complete annihilation of the male members of a family by brutal assassination. This is not a custom but a criminal act. Under Meerata, the stronger member of family used to assassinate their weak but near relatives with the sole object of removing them from the line of inheritance and gaining forcible possession of their lands, houses and other property. The tribal law seriously views this kind of cold-blooded murder and persons responsible for such an inhumane and ghastly act cannot escape the wrath of Pashtuns. The Jirga immediately assembles to take suitable action against the culprits. The penalty is usually in the form of setting on fire their houses and other property and expulsion of the culprits from their area.

SAZ: The word Saz is used for blood money or compensation in lieu of killing. Under the custom of Saz a person who feels penitent after committing a deliberate murder, approaches the deceased's family through a Jirga and offers to make payment of blood money to end enmity between them. All hostilities come to an end between the parties after acceptance of Saz. Sometimes the payment of compensation takes the form of giving a girl in marriage to the aggrieved party. It is also called Swarah, which binds together the two parties in blood relations and thus helps in eradicating ill will and feelings of enmity.

ITBAR: Itbar, which means trust, or guaranteed assurance or is the arch of society, which is governed by un-written laws or conventions. All business including contracts relating to sale and mortgage or disposal of property, is transacted on the basis of trust or Itbar. Such transactions are verbal and are entered into in the presence of the village elders or a few witnesses. The violation of Itbar is considered to be dishonorable act, un-becoming of gentleman and contrary to the norms of Pashtunwali.

HAMSAYA: The word Hamsaya stands for a neighbor but in Pashto it applies to a man who abandons his home either due to poverty or blood feud and seeks protection of an elder of another village. In this way the latter becomes his client or vassal. It is, therefore, incumbent upon the protector to save his Hamsaya from insult or injury from any source.

Or maybe a blend of Pashtunwali and sharia.  


The fact of the matter is that we cannot and are never going to change the culture, the people or their way of thinking.  We can only try to bring out the best in them and nurture that as an international community.  Then, you might have peace and stability over there.

However, giving the Taliban the right to anything at all is the wrong answer  .  "...the recognition of Islamic law in the region "isn't something that hasn't happened before."  No shiite, but for the Pakistani govt to allow those fahk-heads to have any right to anything is the beginning of the end for Pakistan.  If it keeps up the TB will eventually have access to nuke to use against whoever they perceive as an "infidel"    

[jkrenz]

It's a good start of a good old-fashioned ass-whoopin' for the TB

From http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090216/ap_on_re_as/as_afghan_surge_begins

Obama to decide soon on more troops for Afghan war AFP/File – US Army soliders set out on a patrol in Paktika province, along the Afghan-Pakistan border, in 2008. …

LOGAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan – Close to 3,000 American soldiers who recently arrived in Afghanistan to secure two violent provinces near Kabul have begun operations in the field and already are seeing combat, the unit's spokesman said Monday.

The new troops are the first wave of an expected surge of reinforcements this year. The process began to take shape under President George Bush but has been given impetus by President Barack Obama's call for an increased focus on Afghanistan.

U.S. commanders have been contemplating sending up to 30,000 more soldiers to bolster the 33,000 already here, but the new administration is expected to initially approve only a portion of that amount. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday the president would decide soon.

The new unit — the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division — moved into Logar and Wardak provinces last month, and the soldiers from Fort Drum, N.Y., are now stationed in combat outposts throughout the provinces.

Militants have attacked several patrols with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, including one ambush by 30 insurgents, Lt. Col. Steve Osterhozer, the brigade spokesman, said.

Several roadside bombs also have exploded next to the unit's MRAPs — mine-resistance patrol vehicles — but caused no casualties, he said.

"In every case our vehicles returned with overwhelming fire," Ostehozer said. "We have not suffered anything more than a few bruises, while several insurgents have been killed."

Commanders are in the planning stages of larger scale operations expected to be launched in the coming weeks.

Militant activity has spiked in Logar and Wardak over the last year as the resurgent Taliban has spread north toward Kabul from its traditional southern power base. Residents say insurgents roam wide swaths of Wardak, a mountainous province whose capital is about 35 miles from Kabul.

The region has been covered in snow recently, but Col. David B. Haight, commander of the 3rd Brigade, said last week that he expects contact with insurgents to increase soon.

"The weather has made it so the enemy activity is somewhat decreased right now, and I expect it to increase in the next two to three months," Haight said at a news conference.

Haight said he believes the increase of militant activity in the two provinces is not ideologically based but stems from poor Afghans being enticed into fighting by their need for money. Quoting the governor of Logar, the colonel called it an "economic war."

Afghan officials "don't believe it's hardcore al-Qaida operatives that you're never going to convert anyway," Haight said. "They believe that it's the guys who say, 'Hey you want $100 to shoot an RPG at a Humvee when it goes by,' and the guy says, 'Yeah I'll do that, because I've got to feed my family.'"

Still, Haight said there are hardcore fighters in the region, some of them allied with Jalaludin Haqqani and his son Siraj, a fighting family with a long history in Afghanistan. The two militant leaders are believed to be in Pakistan.

Logar Gov. Atiqullah Ludin said at a news conference alongside Haight that U.S. troops will need to improve both security and the economic situation.

"There is a gap between the people and the government," Ludin said. "Assistance in Logar is very weak, and the life of the common man has not improved."

Ludin also urged that U.S. forces be careful and not act on bad intelligence to launch night raids on Afghans who turn out to be innocent.

It is a common complaint from Afghan leaders. President Hamid Karzai has long pleaded with U.S. forces not to kill innocent Afghans during military operations and says he hopes to see night raids curtailed.

Pointing to the value of such operations, the U.S. military said Monday that a raid in northwest Badghis province killed a feared militant leader named Ghulam Dastagir and eight other fighters.

Other raids, though, have killed innocent Afghans who were only defending their village against a nighttime incursion by forces they didn't know, officials say.

"We need to step back and look at those carefully, because the danger they carry is exponential," Ludin said.

Haight cautioned last week that civilian casualties could increase with the presence of his 2,700 soldiers.

"We understand the probability of increased civilian casualties is there because of increased U.S. forces," said the colonel, who has also commanded Special Operations task forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. "Our plan is to do no operations without ANA (Afghan army) and ANP (Afghan police), to help us be more precise."

The U.S. military and Afghan Defense Ministry announced last week that Afghan officers and soldiers would take on a greater role in military operations, including in specialized night raids, with the aim of decreasing civilian deaths.

The presence of U.S. troops in Wardak and Logar is the first time such a large contingent of American power has been so close to Kabul, fueling concerns that militants could be massing for a push at the capital. Haight dismissed those fears.

"Our provinces butt up against the southern boundary of Kabul and therefore there is the perception that Kabul could be surrounded," Haight said. "But the enemy cannot threaten Kabul. He's not big enough, he's not strong enough, he doesn't have the technology. He can conduct attacks but he can't completely disrupt the governance in Kabul."

More to follow...

[Crafty_Dog]

Woof JKrenz:

We are very glad to have you here with us.  Thank you.

Question:  The article mentions the money paid to shoot an RPG at a HumVee of ours.   From where does this money come?  Is is not the opium trade?  And do we not fear to take on the opium trade because some huge % of all economic activity there is based upon the opium trade?  How can success be built from this dynamic?

Thank you,
Marc

[jkrenz]

Yes sir, it's no big secret, that's a BIG part of where the TB gets the money they need to continue their "jihad".  Opium accounted for an estimated 25% of Afghanistan's overall GDP in 2008 or the equivalent of 33% of licit GDP.  Overall gross profits for the Afghan drug traffickers was estimated to be about 2.7 billion dollars.  The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime 2008 Opium Survey for Afghanistan is right here:

http://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan_Opium_Survey_2008.pdf

And also take a look here to get an idea of Afghanistan's economy:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/us.html

then compare the numbers to other neighboring countries to kinda put things into perspective.   

I honestly don't know why we don't just wipe out the entire poppy crop.  No poppy=no money for the TB.  Without money to fund the "jihad" and pay their "fighters", they'll fizzle away.  The only reason I think dudes "fight" for the TB is because they have to feed their families.  Just like a lot of people in the world, Afghans believe in money.  If the TB has no money to pay, then the "believers" quit believing. Does that make sense?  Now if the "fighters" quit "fighting", they'll most likely end up going back to the fields or being a productive member of Afghan society somehow.  All that would be left is the true believers hardcore TB. 

Success cannot be built in Afghanistan until the main underlying cause of instability is taken care of.  First and foremost, Afghanistan needs to be rid of the Taliban once and for all.  All they really do is cause the people to live in fear.  I hope the people get sick of them and just start running them out of villages all over Afghanistan.  After that, people hopefully wont have to live in a country that the rest of the world has to worry about.  I also think that once things do start getting better for them that they will start taking pride in their country.  Who knows...

Opium cultivation is on the decline since last year but in the few years before that it was on the rise.  Hopefully it stays on the decline.       

[Crafty_Dog]

Thank you.  I hope to have time to continue our conversation in a few hours.  Right now I simply do a drive-by paste of a post on matters only distantly related to what we were discussing, but nonetheless I hope you find it of interest.

Pakistan: Negotiating Away the Writ of the State
Stratfor Today » February 17, 2009 | 1515 GMT

TARIQ MAHMOOD/AFP/Getty Images
A delegation from an Islamist militant movement leaves after talks with Pakistani officials in PeshawarSummary
Provincial authorities in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province announced Feb. 16 that they will implement a new Shariah-based regulation as part of a deal with Pashtun jihadist forces in the Swat region to end the insurgency there. This move likely will not achieve the authorities’ desired results, due to disagreements among Pakistan’s various stakeholders regarding this initiative and the Taliban’s drive to expand their sphere of operations in Pakistan. Not only will the process further erode the writ of the Pakistani state it will also undermine U.S. interests in neighboring Afghanistan.

Analysis
The provincial government of the left-leaning secular Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) announced Feb. 16 that it reached an agreement with Maulana Sufi Muhammad, the founder of the Islamist militant group Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM), or Movement for the Enforcement of Shariah, to end the jihadist insurgency in the area. In exchange for peace, the government has agreed to implement Shariah-based regulations in a wide area of the province formerly known as the Malakand Division and is centered around the restive Swat region. Militants in the Swat region called a 10-day cease-fire the night before talks with the government, and in another gesture of goodwill released a Chinese engineer on Feb. 14, kidnapped five months earlier. Maulana Sufi is now expected to convene a meeting of the TNSM’s leadership council to get the movement to agree to end the fighting.

The TNSM is one of the two largest Pashtun jihadist groups in Pakistan that fall under the Taliban umbrella and have ties to al Qaeda. The Feb. 16 deal is the latest in a string of peace initiatives attempted over the past several months to contain the insurgency, given Pakistan’s inability to use force to settle the issue.

Getting the militants to end the fighting is not the only complication in carrying out this preliminary peace deal (which has no set time frame). There are disagreements within the government at various levels about the idea of bending to the Taliban’s demands. While NWFP Chief Minister Amir Haider Khan Hoti has called for support for his government’s move to implement the Shariah-based laws — the Nizam-i-Adl (Justice System) Regulations-2009 — and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has expressed for the negotiated settlement, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said he would not endorse the new deal unless it was clear that the insurgency had been brought to an end.

Furthermore, there are growing rifts between the prime minister and president (both from the ruling Pakistan People’s Party), with the army reportedly backing Gilani to contain Zardari. But even before the central government makes a decision on the peace deal, the provincial government must craft the new legislation. This presents another world of problems, since there are already several existing Shariah laws on the books as a result of several decades’ worth of attempts to deal with the problem of a non-functioning legal and judicial system. The TNSM’s rise was due largely in part to its ability to exploit the chaotic situation with law and order in the area and the ultraconservative religious local culture.


Assuming that the negotiated area does get a new set of religious laws — which is not likely — the move will not lead to the containment of the jihadist insurgency. If anything, the government’s weak negotiating position will only consolidate the Taliban’s influence in the region — not only in Swat, but in the area covered by the deal, including at least the districts of Malakand, Dir, Swat, Shangla and Buner. This is not the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) — the historically autonomous small region straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border — but Pakistan proper, and these districts form a major sub-set of the northern part of the NWFP. This indicates just how far things have deteriorated.

With the NWFP’s southern districts along the tribal badlands also experiencing a creeping Talibanization, a Pakistani Taliban stronghold in the north could very well translate into the province falling to the Taliban in the not too distant future. Put differently, the FATA, NWFP and even the northwestern part of Balochistan (the southwestern province’s Pashtun corridor) could exhibit Afghanistan-like conditions where Pakistani security forces would have to struggle harder to impose the waning writ of the state.

Clearly, this potential scenario has massive implications for the new U.S. strategy for Afghanistan. Washington, already alarmed at Pakistan’s inability and/or unwillingness to contain the jihadist threat, has intensified its unilateral air strikes inside Pakistan’s tribal belt. The largest such attacks took place Feb. 14, and one occurred Feb. 16 in Kurram agency — an area where U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle attacks have not happened before. Should the situation continue to deteriorate as a result of this peacemaking, U.S. forces could be forced to strike deeper into Pakistan proper in the NWFP and Balochistan provinces where both al Qaeda and Taliban high-value targets are likely located. Furthermore, the Feb. 16 deal raises more doubts about the viability of the NATO supply route that runs from Peshawar to the Khyber Pass.

More importantly, this peace deal offers the Obama administration a glimpse of what to expect as it moves toward a political settlement with Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Should the deal with the militants in Pakistan lead to the establishment of a Taliban “emirate” of sorts centered in Swat, it will only further embolden the Afghan Taliban as they push for a comeback. And a return of the Taliban to the corridors of power in Afghanistan could prove detrimental to the security of Pakistan.

This is ironic considering that the Pakistani state supports the return of a Taliban-dominated regime in Kabul. In the past, such a regime served Pakistani national security interests . But with the Talibanization of the Pakistani northwest — especially in the last two years — the Pakistanis have lost control of their own territory and are not in a position to regain influence in Afghanistan. Therefore, if the United States allows Pakistan to become involved in Washington’s negotiations with the Taliban, Islamabad will not be seizing an opportunity to project power beyond its borders; rather, it will be looking to protect itself from a threat that is both internal and external.

Between the Pakistanis playing defense and the United States struggling to craft a strategy for Afghanistan, the outlook is very bleak for Southwest Asia.

[jkrenz]

Has anyone ever heard the old saying that goes something like "If one is building a house by the side of the road and if he takes advice of everyone who passes by, the house will never be finished".

That's Afghanistan.

[Crafty_Dog]

Fair enough 

Returning to the discussion of the opium drug trade:

Like you, I have often wondered why we simply don't burn the fields.   As best as I can tell it is because we fear a massive response of anger on the part of all those who benefit from it.  Yet the opium trade finances the war against us, even as apparently it finances major corrupt chunks of the central government.

The cognitive dissonance of all this is perhaps the single hardest thing for me to get my mind around.
=======================


Stratfor

Summary
With the spring thaw fast approaching in Afghanistan, the White House and the Pentagon are trying to finalize a new strategy for the Afghan war. Meanwhile, logistical links to the isolated country are becoming more vulnerable, and Taliban attacks are on the rise in critical areas such as Kabul, the capital. As Washington continues to grapple with the complex challenges and objectives of its mission in Afghanistan, the clock is ticking for making much of an operational impact in 2009.

Analysis
Reports emerged Feb. 17 that U.S. President Barack Obama will soon make an announcement authorizing the deployment of 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. There are roughly 60,000 U.S. and NATO troops there now (split about evenly). Nearly 3,000 soldiers of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team (BCT) of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division — the first additional unit to arrive as part of the surge strategy — landed in January. An additional 17,000 troops (first 8,000 Marines, followed by 9,000 soldiers) would bring the total to about 50,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Taking into account NATO forces, this would still be almost 30,000 shy of the peak Soviet military presence that failed to subdue U.S.-backed Islamist rebels in the country in the 1980s.

The 3rd BCT is already engaged in combat outside Kabul, and this fighting will only escalate as the weather improves. Beginning in March, the spring thaw in Afghanistan traditionally marks the beginning of campaign season as insurgents become more mobile. Attacks in Kabul and on supply routes in Pakistan already have increased, and Washington is trying to lock down alternative supply routes (part of broader negotiations with Russia) as U.S. and NATO forces face an entrenched insurgency that has extensive tribal contacts, support and refuge on the Pakistani side of the border.





(click image to enlarge)
Any surge in U.S./NATO troops and any increase in operational tempo will require a significant expansion of supporting infrastructure and supplies. As a proportion of forces already in country, the most aggressive proposed surge into Afghanistan would be much larger than the surge into Iraq. This means that existing infrastructure and supply lines will be even more heavily taxed than the ones in Iraq, even as these supply lines grow increasingly vulnerable and negotiations on alternatives continue to drag on. (Indeed, last week Bishkek threatened to close the heavily utilized air base at Manas in Kyrgyzstan.) The surge into Afghanistan has been anticipated, preparations are under way and the Pakistani supply lines remain open — if increasingly tenuous. But March is fast approaching.

The Iraq surge provides an increasingly stark contrast to the proposed surge in Afghanistan (which, granted, will not simply be a cut-and-paste repeat of the Iraq strategy). Although the surge in Iraq was controversial, then-President George W. Bush was able to work from an already-defined strategy to move in decisive reinforcements over the course of five months. By this time in 2007, the second of five BCTs had already arrived in country. Commanders had a clear sense of the mission, the additional forces they would receive and the timetable on which they would arrive. Supply lines were short and secure.

Related Links
Afghanistan, Pakistan: The Battlespace of the Border
Pakistan: The Khyber Pass and Western Logistics in Afghanistan
Strategic Divergence: The War Against the Taliban and the War Against Al Qaeda
Countries in Crisis: Pakistan
Part 1: The Perils of Using Islamism to Protect the Core
Part 2: A Crisis in Indian-Pakistani Relations
Part 3: Making It on Its Own
But in Afghanistan, seasonal changes are far more extreme than those in Iraq, and they are compounded by high altitudes and rugged terrain. Hence, operational timing in Afghanistan is much more critical. Ideally, had there not been a U.S. presidential transition over the last few months, and had the Army deployment rotation schedule not been still reeling from the Iraq surge, a surge to Afghanistan would already be in place, with fresh forces taking advantage of the winter lull to establish security around the capital and, as spring took hold, to begin securing surrounding territory. Positioning forces before campaign season would maximize the time available to succeed before the next Afghan winter rolled around.

The reality is that the strategy and force structure of a surge in Afghanistan have continued to be formulated even after the surge began, and deployment of the additional 17,000 troops reportedly would not be complete until late summer (in time for Afghan elections in August).

In Iraq, history may well decide that the stars finally aligned for an effective surge of U.S. military force, which could be credited with breaking the cycle of violence long enough to allow for political accommodation. It is not at all clear how the stars will align in the Afghan theater, which is beset by cross-border issues with Pakistan, and where governments in Kabul and Islamabad are wracked with infighting and myriad other internal problems. Indeed, the deteriorating conditions in both countries are inextricably linked, and any security gains and tactical victories made thanks to more U.S. boots on the ground in Afghanistan might make little difference.

[G M]

Returning to the discussion of the opium drug trade:

Like you, I have often wondered why we simply don't burn the fields.   As best as I can tell it is because we fear a massive response of anger on the part of all those who benefit from it.  Yet the opium trade finances the war against us, even as apparently it finances major corrupt chunks of the central government.

The cognitive dissonance of all this is perhaps the single hardest thing for me to get my mind around.
=======================

As I understand our current efforts, we are trying to destroy the crops as best we can. The scale of the crops and the profitability of opiates tharwts our best attempts thus far.

[Crafty_Dog]

I don't understand.   There no jungle canopy in Afg, the crops are in plain sight.  My understanding (you have PM) is that we are not fully trying because we fear the anger of all the people who make money from it.
============================================
The Taliban get their first wish
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - Many Muslims believe that ancient Khorasan - which covers parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan - is the promised land from where they will secure the first victory in the end-of-time battle in which the final round, according to their beliefs, will be fought in Bilad-i-Sham (Palestine-Lebanon-Syria).

The geographical borders of Bilad-i-Sham-Khorasan extend from Samarkand in Uzbekistan to the small Malakand division in the northern fringe of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) that includes the militant-dominated Swat Valley.

On Monday, at a time when United States Central Command chief General David Petraeus was trying to set up a supply route for troops in Afghanistan through Uzbekistan, in this extreme corner of the promised land of Khorasan - Malakand division - militants had every reason to celebrate.

Asif Ali Zardari, the strongly American-backed Pakistani president, and the provincial government of NWFP gave in to the demands of militants and announced a ceasefire, lifted a two-year-old curfew and announced the implementation of Islamic sharia law.

"All un-Islamic laws in the Malakand division of Swat, which is geographically one third of the whole [NWFP] province, have been abolished," the chief minister of NWFP, Amir Haider Khan Hoti, told the media after reaching an agreement with the Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi, which is headed by Sufi Mohammad, the symbol of the sharia movement in Malakand division. The Islamic judicial system will be enforced by Islamic judges - qazi.

The accord is a significant victory for the Pakistan Taliban and could end two years of strife in the region which has seen militants pitted against Pakistani security forces.

The peace agreement will be complemented by a compensation package for the families of those killed and injured in the military operations. "[Families] of those who were killed will get 300,000 rupees [US$3,760] and those who were wounded will get 100,000 rupees," Hoti said. "The entire deal, Islamic laws and other packages related to the deal were completely approved by the president of Pakistan," he said.

"We have established a task force which will monitor the implementation of Islamic law, but enforcement will be bound by peace and the writ of the state," said Hoti. "The security forces now [after the signing of the agreement] will be in reactive rather than proactive mode. They will only retaliate if somebody tries to challenge the writ of the state," Hoti said.

The army's Inter-Services Public Relations confirmed that the curfew has been lifted, after two years, in Swat Valley. Militants have also announced a ceasefire for 10 days which is likely to extend for an indefinite period.

The developments in Malakand division coincide with the arrival in Afghanistan of close to 3,000 American soldiers as part of an extra 30,000 to boost the already 30,000 US troops in the country. The new contingent will be deployed in Logar province to secure violent provinces near the capital Kabul. Petraeus must now be thinking of how many more troops he will need to confront the additional Taliban fighters that will come from Malakand.

Taliban's victory: A curtain raiser to the spring battle

A key factor in the Taliban's revival after being driven from power by US-led forces in 2001 was that from 2004 they established a strong network in Pakistan that was coordinated by al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.

A focal point of this was the radical Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad, which was stormed in July 2007 by Pakistani security forces to clear it of militants. The network extended into the Swat Valley, streamed into Bajaur Agency and Mohmand Agency from where militants fed the Afghan insurgency in Kunar and Nooristan provinces.

Other flows of militants into South Waziristan and North Waziristan, Kurram Agency and Khyber Agency respectively fed the Afghan insurgency in the provinces of Paktia, Paktika, Khost and Nangarhar provinces.

By this time, Western intelligence had realized that these developments in Pakistan were a major factor behind the "fireworks" in Afghanistan, and Islamabad was told as much. The Pakistanis were also warned that the militants could also launch a revolution in Pakistan. This was a major turning point in the "war on terror" in the South Asian theater.

For the first time, Islamabad felt a chill up its spine and viewed the situation from a different perspective - not as an American war in which its participation was drawn out of compulsion, but as a war necessary to maintain the status quo of its own system. This system was a blend of the country's deep relationship with the US and the perpetuation of the military oligarchy, combined with a particular brand of Islam that could co-exist with this setup.

The attack on the Lal Masjid was the first shot fired in this battle, and its reverberations soon spread to the Swat Valley, South Waziristan and then Bajaur Agency, in effect turning the whole of NWFP into a war theater. A series of military operations in the tribal areas drove the militants from stand-alone sanctuaries into population centers.

In Malakand, which includes the Swat area, the militants are a part of the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Taliban and the vanguard of the Taliban's cause in the region against Western occupation forces in Afghanistan and their ally - Pakistan. They have established their own writ with a parallel system that includes courts, police and even a electric power-distribution network and road construction, and all this is now official in the eyes of Islamabad.

All intelligence indicated that further concentration on military operations in Swat could lead to an expansion of the war theater into Pakistan's non-Pashtun cities, such as Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. The security forces were already stretched and even faced rebellions.

These combined factors culminated in Monday's peace agreement, which is a major defeat for Washington as well as Pakistan, and it could also lead to a major setback for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Afghanistan come spring when hordes of better-trained fighters from Swat pour into Afghanistan.

The Taliban defeat American interests

To tame the militancy, Washington and London devised a plan in 2007, one aspect of which was for the military to take on the militants. At the same time, Pakistan was to move from a military dictatorship under president general Pervez Musharraf to a political government.

This happened in the beginning of last year with the formation of a democratically elected coalition government of secular and liberal parties involving among others the Pakistan People's Party, the Muttehida Quami Movement, the Pashtun sub-nationalist Awami National Party (ANP), the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam and the Pakistan Muslim League-Qaid-i-Azam. It was envisaged that these parties would fully back the US's "war on terror".

Earlier, Washington had brokered a deal between former premier Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf, who was also chief of army staff, under which a National Reconciliation Ordinance was enacted to have all corruption cases against Bhutto and her spouse Asif Ali Zardari dropped. Under this arrangement, later, NWFP was handed over to the ANP, recognized as the most genuine secular political party.

The militants were onto the game. The first shot was the assassination of Bhutto by al-Qaeda in December 2007, which practically turned the whole American plan on its head and created a situation in which Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, an anti-Musharraf party, secured an unprecedented number of seats in parliament, leaving no option but for Musharraf, the most important American ally, to resign. But in time, the secular and liberal political parties in the capital became hostage to the militants.

Another setback for the pro-American forces was the brazen militant attack late last year on Asfandyar Wali, the leader of the ANP, at his home about 20 kilometers from the NWFP capital, Peshawar. He then fled first to Islamabad and later to Europe. Asfandyar had been groomed by the US through many visits to the US.

Asfandyar's departure resulted in half the leadership of the ANP, including the head of their foreign relations committee, Dr Himayun Khan, resigning. Their departure was hastened by dire threats from the Taliban. It was only a matter of time before the ANP's influence in NWFP was severely eroded. Ironically, the ANP, which sided with the Soviets against the Islamic Afghan resistance in the 1980s and put up fierce resistance to the enactment of Islamic laws in the country, has now become the main engine for the enforcement of sharia in NWFP where it technically rules.

On Tuesday, while Asfandyar has chosen to remain silent, his nephew and the chief minister of the province, Hoti, warned the federal government that any obstruction of the deal with the militants would be unacceptable.

Meanwhile, all schools in Swat, including girls' schools, were opened on Tuesday and thousands of people flocked to a cricket stadium to greet Sufi Mohammad, who will soon travel to Matta, a sub-district of Swat, to visit his son-in-law Mullah Fazlullah to try to persuade him to end the insurgency. For the first time in many months, all members of the provincial and federal parliament will visit the Swat Valley.

Pakistan's failure: How it tackled the militancy

During Musharraf's eight years in power, Pakistan was on board with both the US and Saudi Arabia over the "war on terror". This ensured that Pakistan received a steady supply of all sorts of resources, including deferment on oil payments from Saudi Arabia and special aid packages when Pakistan was badly hit by an earthquake in 2005. Washington mostly looked after Pakistan's military aid packages and reimbursement of expenses incurred in the "war on terror".

A few steps taken by Zardari, however, crumbled the setup like a house of cards. Immediately after taking over as president last September, in a very high-handed manner, Pakistan withdrew the hunting privileges of two Saudi princes located in the district of Dera Ghazi Khan in southern Punjab. To add salt to the wound, the facility was given to a rival sheikh from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The action was taken at a time when Pakistan badly needed Saudi oil on deferred terms due to soaring prices, and the UAE was in no position to fill the gap. Islamabad now enjoys very good relations with the UAE - which is unable to help Pakistan - due to the family friendship between the Bhutto family and the UAE's rulers. But Pakistan's relations with Saudi Arabia and its two major allies - Qatar and Bahrain - are at an all-time low because of the insult to the Saudi royal family. (The issue of Zardari's Shi'ite background is a secondary factor.)

Asia Times Online has learned that the newly installed US envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, was impressed in recent talks with the government to learn that chief of army staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani works fully in coordination with the political government and does not intervene in its affairs. The Swat operation is an example: the military immediately stopped action when the government announced the peace deal with the militants. All the same, the Pentagon will be waiting to receive Kiani in Washington soon to discuss why the Pakistan army failed in Swat.

However, Holbrooke was apparently concerned when he interacted with Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gillani and members of the cabinet. Gillani expressed his fears that the poor economic situation in Pakistan could hamper its efforts in the "war on terror". Holbrooke is said to have asked the premier how much money he would need to revive the economy. "As much as we can get," the premier replied, without giving specifics.

The dynamics of the region have changed once again. Nizam-i-Adal Regulation 2009, which proclaims the enforcement of sharia law in Malakand division, is indeed a written document of Pakistan's defeat in the American-inspired war in NWFP.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.) 

[G M]

http://www.state.gov/p/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2008/vol1/html/100779.htm

Southwest Asia
International Narcotics Control Strategy Report
Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs
March 2008

Afghanistan
I. Summary

Narcotics production in Afghanistan hit historic highs in 2007 for the second straight year. Afghanistan grew 93 percent of the world’s opium poppy, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Opium poppy cultivation expanded from 165,000 ha in 2006 to 193,000 ha in 2007, an increase of 17 percent in land under cultivation. Favorable weather conditions and expanded planting in more fertile agricultural areas also boosted Afghanistan’s yield per hectare. UNODC estimates that Afghanistan produced 8,200 MT of opium in 2007, an increase of 2,556 MT over the 5,644 MT produced in 2006. In 2007, opium production was 34 percent above 2006 levels and nearly double the amount produced in 2005. The export value of this year’s illicit opium harvest, $4 billion, made up more than a third of Afghanistan’s combined total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $11.5 billion.

Afghanistan’s drug trade is undercutting efforts to establish a stable democracy with a licit economic free market in the country. The narcotics trade has strong links with the anti-government insurgency, most commonly associated with the Taliban. Narcotics traffickers provide revenue and arms to the Taliban, while the Taliban provides protection to growers and traffickers and keeps the government from interfering with their activities. During recent years, poppy production has soared in provinces where the Taliban is most active. Five relatively higher-income, agriculturally rich provinces along the Pakistan border accounted for 70 percent of Afghanistan’s 2007 poppy production, with Helmand Province alone accounting for 50 percent. At the same time, poppy cultivation declined in many of the poorer, but more secure northern and central provinces, with 13 provinces poppy-free in 2007, compared with only six provinces so designated in 2006. These statistics address the misconception that most farmers grow poppy because they have no economic alternative; poppy is flourishing in the areas with the richest land and best developed agricultural marketing and distribution networks. Nationwide, UNODC estimates that approximately 14.3 percent of Afghans were involved in poppy cultivation in 2007, up from 12.6 percent in 2006.

For the most part, farmers choose to plant opium poppy because it is a profitable, hardy, and low-risk crop. Credit is available, abundant manual labor makes harvesting cheap, and it is easy to market. Economic assistance alone will not overcome the overall narcotics problem in Afghanistan. Some provincial governors have reduced or eliminated cultivation through determined campaigns of persuasion, law enforcement, and eradication. Alternative development opportunities can yield acceptable incomes, but must also be backed by measures to increase risk to those who plant poppy. This risk should fall heaviest on those who plant the most.

The Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GOIRA) is working cooperatively with the international community to implement its current counternarcotics strategy more effectively. Eliminating narcotics cultivation and trafficking in Afghanistan will require a long-term national and international commitment. The Afghan government must take decisive action against poppy cultivation soon to turn back the drug threat before its further growth and consolidation make it even more difficult to defeat. During 2007, President Karzai weighed the possibility of limited aerial spray eradication of opium poppy, but ultimately declined to approve the program.

II. Status of Country

During 2007, Afghanistan increased its position as the world’s largest heroin producing and trafficking country, with 93 percent of world cultivation. Afghanistan is involved in the full narcotics production cycle, from cultivation to finished heroin, with drug traffickers trading in all forms of opiates, including unrefined opium, semi-refined morphine base, and refined heroin. Terrorist violence such as roadside bombs, suicide bombings, and attacks on police rose across the country during 2007. Still, the overall Afghan economy continued its brisk growth rate of more than 10 percent annually over the last five years. Improvements to Afghanistan’s infrastructure since 2002 have created more economic alternatives and enhanced the Afghan government’s ability to combat drug trafficking in some parts of the country, even though improvements such as roads and modern communications can also be exploited by narcotics traffickers. Increased insecurity in Afghanistan’s south, where most poppy was grown, impeded the extension there of governance and law enforcement. Narcotics traffickers also exploited government weakness and corruption. Large parts of Afghanistan’s best agricultural lands in Nangarhar, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Nimruz, Farah, and Helmand provinces suffered from Taliban activity.

III. Country Actions Against Drugs in 2007

Policy Initiatives. In January 2006, the Afghan government inaugurated an eight-pillar National Drug Control Strategy (NDCS) calling for coordinated action in the areas of Public Information, Alternative Livelihoods, Law Enforcement, Criminal Justice, Eradication, Institutional Development, Regional Cooperation, and Demand Reduction. The NDCS approach is similar to U.S. and UK counternarcotics strategies for Afghanistan. While the NDCS is generally viewed as a sound strategy, the Afghan government failed in 2006 and 2007 to implement it in ways that could stop the growth of the country’s narcotics problem. The Ministry of Counter Narcotics, charged with directing implementation of the NDCS, was unable to effectively influence other government agencies. Counter Narcotics Minister, Habibullah Qaderi, resigned in July 2007 for personal reasons; the delay in appointing a successor struck some observers as indicative of the Afghan government’s lack of commitment to the fight against narcotics.

Following UNODC’s announcement of poppy cultivation figures in August 2007, President Karzai convened the second annual national counternarcotics conference. This meeting brought together representatives from key Afghan government Ministries, governors from the 17 largest poppy producing provinces, tribal elders, police chiefs, religious leaders, and members of the international community. Afterward, the Ministry of Counter Narcotics (MCN) held a pre-planting season planning session for the 17 governors in attendance. The Afghan government instructed provincial and district leaders to launch pre-planting information campaigns to reduce poppy cultivation. The response from governors was uneven. Some governors (notably those in Balkh, Nangarhar, and Badakhshan) developed vigorous anti-poppy campaigns, while others did little to discourage poppy cultivation. The acting Minister of Counter Narcotics led government delegations to key narcotics-producing provinces to hold anti-narcotics shuras or community councils.

In mid 2007, the Afghan government’s Policy Advisory Group (PAG) added counternarcotics as one of its key policy pillars. The PAG was formed in late 2006 by the Afghan Government, in cooperation with the U.S., UK, Canada, the Netherlands, NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), and United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), to deal with critical issues in the unstable southern provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, Farah, Zabol, Nimroz, and Uruzgan. In October 2007, the Afghan government agreed in the PAG to a 50,000 hectare national eradication target for 2008, 25 percent of the expected crop. The Afghan government also agreed to arrest high-level traffickers and provide one to two battalions (140-280 personnel) of Afghan National Army forces as protection for police eradication operations. Concerned that his forces would be stretched too thin, the Minister of Defense raised objections to their deployment to provide force protection to poppy eradicators. To date, the situation remains unresolved.

In November 2007, President Karzai issued an edict announcing the 2008 terms of the Good Performers Initiative (GPI), a U.S.-UK-funded initiative started in 2006 to reward provinces for successful counternarcotics performance. On the basis of UNODC poppy cultivation estimates to be released in August 2008, GPI will fund development projects proposed by governors of poppy-free provinces, provinces that reduce their poppy crop by more than 10 percent, and provinces that make a good faith effort to reduce poppy but fail to meet other GPI criteria. To date, the U.S. government has agreed to contribute $35 million to the GPI, while the UK has promised $6.5 million.

The Counter Narcotics Trust Fund (CNTF), in which some GPI funds are deposited, frustrated governors with delays in approving and implementing 2007 GPI projects. As of November 2007, CNTF had disbursed just $4.1 million of $10 million deposited a year earlier for GPI projects. Under U.S. and UK pressure, CNTF undertook to reform its grant-administration procedure in the fall of 2007. In order to promote faster disbursal of smaller GPI grants and provide additional incentives to governors, the U.S. Embassy is establishing a process by which it can directly disburse up to $50,000 for 2008 GPI projects.

The U.S.-funded Afghan government Poppy Elimination Program (PEP) developed and disseminated counternarcotics information to farmers and the general public in seven major poppy-growing provinces. In addition to organizing local shuras during pre-planting season, the provincial PEP teams worked to build public support for eradication activities undertaken by authorities.

Justice Reform. The Afghan government’s Criminal Justice Task Force (CJTF), with assistance from the U.S., UK and other donors, uses modern investigative techniques to investigate and prosecute narcotics traffickers under the December 2005 Counter Narcotics Law. Narcotics cases are tried before the Counter Narcotics Tribunal (CNT), which has exclusive national jurisdiction over mid- and high-level narcotics cases in Afghanistan. Under the new law, all drug cases that reach certain thresholds must be prosecuted by the CJTF before the CNT. The thresholds are possession of two kg of heroin, ten kg of opium, and 50 kg of hashish. Secure facilities, including offices, courtrooms, and a detention facility, for the CJTF and CNT will be opened at the Counternarcotics Justice Center (CNJC), constructed by the U.S. government in early 2008.

The Afghan government, with assistance from the U.S. and UNODC, refurbished a section of the Pol-i-Charkhi prison to house 100 maximum-security narcotics convicts. This prison is Afghanistan’s largest and is the site of frequent disturbances and unrest due to poor conditions, poor prison management, and lack of resources. Through the Corrections System Support Program (CSSP), the United States is helping to improve the corrections system with training, capacity-building, and infrastructure. The CSSP works closely with the U.S.-funded Justice Sector Support Program (JSSP), which has over 60 U.S. and Afghan justice advisors in Kabul and four provinces providing training, mentoring, and capacity-building for Afghanistan’s criminal justice system.

Law Enforcement Efforts. Eradication efforts, though stronger in 2007 than 2006, failed to keep pace with expanded poppy cultivation. Without an aerial eradication program, poppy reduction was limited to labor-intensive manual eradication efforts in medium to high threat areas. According to UNODC estimates, 19,047 ha were eradicated in 2007 compared to 15,300 ha in 2006. Governor-led eradication (GLE) accounted for 15,898 ha, and the Poppy Eradication Force (PEF), a U.S.-supported, centrally-deployed police unit specifically trained and equipped for eradication activities, eradicated another 3,149 ha of poppy in Helmand, Uruzgan, and Takhar provinces. The percent of the poppy crop eradicated increased from 8.9 percent of planted poppy in 2006 to 9.9 percent in 2007. For the most part, both GLE and PEF eradication were arranged through negotiations with poppy-growing communities, a practice that reduced eradication’s deterrent effect. Even so, violent resistance to manual ground-based eradication increased in 2007, resulting in 17 fatalities.

Narcotics law enforcement was hampered by corruption and incompetence within the justice system as well as the absence of governance in large sections of the country. Although narcotics make up one-third of Afghanistan’s GDP, no major drug traffickers have been arrested and convicted in Afghanistan since 2006. In addition, too few high-level drug traffickers served terms in Afghanistan’s prisons during 2007. However, from January to October 2007, the CJTF prosecuted 409 lower-level cases.

In 2003, the Ministry of Interior (MOI) established the Counter Narcotics Police of Afghanistan (CNPA), comprised of investigation, intelligence, and interdiction units. At the end of 2006, the CNPA had approximately 1,500 of its 2,900 authorized staff, including the 500-member PEF. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) works closely with the CNPA to offer training, mentoring, and investigative assistance in order to develop MOI capacity.

The DEA operates permanently assigned personnel and the Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Teams (FAST) in Afghanistan. The FAST teams, which consist of eight special agents, one intelligence analyst, and one supervisor, operate in Afghanistan on 120-day rotations and deploy around the country with the Afghan National Interdiction Unit (NIU). During 2007, FAST and the NIU deployed to Herat, Farah, Helmand, Kandahar, Kunduz, and Nangarhar Provinces to conduct operations.

From September 2006 through September 2007, the CNPA reported the following seizures: 4,249 kg of heroin, 617 kg of morphine base, 39,304 kg of opium, and 71,078 kg of hashish. During the same period, the CNPA also destroyed 50 drug labs. The CNPA seized 37,509 kg of solid precursor chemicals and 33,008 liters of liquid precursors. The CNPA also reported 760 arrests for trafficking under the provisions of the Afghan Counter Narcotics law where possession of 2 kg of heroin (or morphine base), 10 kg of opium, or 50 kg of hashish mandates automatic jurisdiction for the CNT.

During 2007, the Afghan government, with DEA support, created two vetted units, the Sensitive Investigative Unit (SIU) and the Technical Investigative Unit (TIU), to investigate high-value targets. They will gather evidence through means authorized under Afghanistan’s Counter Narcotics Law and approved through the Afghan legal system. Personnel in these units were recruited from a wide variety of Afghan law enforcement agencies and had to pass rigorous examinations. The SIU was fully functional by the end of 2007, while the TIU will begin its work in 2008.

[G M]

The SIU and TIU will carry on their work in a secure facility within the new National Interdiction Unit (NIU) base that opened in 2007. The Afghan government established the NIU in 2004 with DEA assistance. The NIU currently consists of 181 members, with an authorized strength 216. NIU officers receive a substantial amount of tactical training. The aim of this program is to have SIU and TIU investigations culminate in the issuance of arrest and search warrants executed by the NIU. The investigations conducted by the SIU and NIU with DEA assistance will be prosecuted at the Counter Narcotics Tribunal through the Criminal Justice Task Force (CJTF), which consists of Afghan prosecutors and investigators mentored by experienced Assistant U.S. Attorneys and U.S. Department of Justice Senior Trial Attorneys. The CJTF mentors have also been working with the Afghan authorities to create a formal legal process to gain authority for controlled deliveries of narcotics to trafficking suspects.

Haji Baz Mohammad, a major Afghan trafficker, was extradited to the United States in October 2005. In July 2006, he pled guilty to conspiracy to import heroin into the U.S. and in October 2007 was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for running an international narcotics-trafficking organization that imported millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs into the United States. Similar to the indictment of Haji Bashir Noorzai, an Afghan drug kingpin who was indicted and then arrested in the United States in 2005, Baz Mohammad’s indictment also alleged that he was closely aligned with the Taliban.

During 2007, two drug traffickers with links to the insurgency volunteered to be transported from Afghanistan to stand trial in the United States. The first, Mohammad Essa, was a key heroin distributor for the Haji Baz Mohammad network in the United States. Essa had fled the United States when Baz Mohammad was sent to stand trial in New York. In December 2006, he was apprehended in Kandahar Province by the U.S. military, during a battle with insurgents, and he was voluntarily transferred to the United States in April 2007. The second was Khan Mohammad, who was a supporter of the insurgency and arrested in Nangarhar Province in October 2006. He was indicted for selling opium and heroin to CNPA/NIU informants, knowing that the drugs were destined for the United States. He agreed to return to the United States for trial and was transferred to U.S. authorities in November 2007 and will stand trial in Washington, D.C.

Corruption. Although the illicit production or distribution of narcotic or psychotropic drugs and other controlled substances and the laundering of proceeds from illegal drug transactions are illegal, many Afghan government officials are believed to profit from the drug trade. Narcotics-related corruption is particularly pervasive at the provincial and district levels of government. Corrupt practices range from facilitating drug activities to benefiting from revenue streams that the drug trade produces.

On June 28, 2007, five Afghan Border Police officers were arrested while transporting 123.5 kg of heroin from Nangarhar to Takhar Province. The heroin was seized outside Kabul. At the time, the officers were transporting the heroin in a Border Police truck. The officers worked for Border Police Commander Haji Zahir, also alleged to be a drug trafficker. Defendants in the case included his personal body guard and his nephew, who acts as his personal secretary. Though this seizure did not result in Zahir’s arrest, he was suspended from his position as commander in Takhar Province. The investigation into his involvement with this shipment continues.

Since Attorney General Sabit’s appointment in September 2006, he has become an anti-corruption activist, dismissing prosecutors across the country for corruption and pursuing corruption investigations against politically sensitive targets. A new reform-oriented Supreme Court Justice, Abdul Salam Azimi, was also appointed by President Karzai in August 2006. Azimi was asked by President Karzai to lead a completely Afghan-driven interagency commission to develop a government-wide anti-corruption strategy, the report of which is expected to be released in 2008.

Agreements and Treaties. Afghanistan is a party to the 1988 UN Drug Convention, the 1971 UN Convention, and the 1961 UN Single Convention on Psychotropic Substances. Afghanistan is also a party to the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. Afghanistan has signed, but has not yet ratified, the UN Convention Against Corruption. The Afghan government has no formal extradition or legal assistance arrangements with the United States, but American mentors are working with the Criminal Justice Task Force to help draft such a law. The 2005 Afghan Counter Narcotics law, however, allows the extradition of drug offenders under the 1988 UN Drug Convention. Haji Baz Muhammad, mentioned above, was extradited to the United States under the authority of the 1988 UN Drug Convention in October 2005. In 2006, however, a similar effort to extradite Misri Khan, a major trafficker, and his associates met with a request from President Karzai that the defendants first stand trial at Afghanistan’s Counter Narcotics Tribunal, which subsequently sentenced the defendants to 17 years in prison. The defendants are still incarcerated in Afghanistan as of December 2007.

Illicit Cultivation/Production. Based on UNODC data, the number of hectares under poppy cultivation in Afghanistan increased 17 percent, from 165,000 ha in 2006 to 193,000 in 2007. Resulting opium production reached a record 8,200 MT. The opium yield per hectare was the highest in five years, increasing from 37 kg/ha in 2006 to 42.5 kg/ha in 2007. UNODC attributed the high yield to ideal weather conditions, even though floods in Uruzgan moderated intensive poppy cultivation in that province. The number of people involved in opium cultivation increased in 2007 from 2.9 million to 3.3 million. According to UNODC estimates, 14.3 percent of Afghans were involved in opium cultivation during 2007. Considered in terms of its estimated $4 billion illicit export value, opium represented about one-third of Afghanistan’s total GDP (licit and illicit). On the other hand, the portion of narcotics money actually received by farmers was a small share of the whole: opium poppy’s $1 billion farm-gate value accounted for only 11 percent of total licit and illicit GDP.

Poppy is a hardy, low risk crop. High profits, access to land and credit, and trafficker-facilitated access to illicit markets outside of Afghanistan make poppy immensely attractive to farmers in Afghanistan’s circumstances. However, the reduction of poppy cultivation in the poorer northern and central provinces and the explosion of poppy cultivation in agriculturally rich areas such as Helmand, Kandahar, and Nangarhar, where poppy has displaced wheat and other legitimate crops, disproves the notion that most farmers grow poppy because they have no viable alternatives. In its 2007 Opium Survey for Afghanistan, UNODC stated “opium cultivation is no longer associated with poverty and is closely linked to the insurgency.”

Thirteen of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces were poppy-free in 2007. This compares favorably to the six provinces that were declared poppy free in 2006. In Badakhshan, according to UNODC, the governor combined persuasion and eradication to slash cultivation from 13,056 ha in 2006 to 3,642 ha in 2007. Governor-led eradication cut opium production in Balkh from 10,037 ha in 2006 to zero in 2007. Many farmers in Balkh province reverted to planting marijuana, a traditional crop in Balkh. UNODC estimated that 70,000 ha of marijuana were cultivated country-wide in 2007, an increase of 20,000 ha over 2006.

The eastern province of Nangarhar demonstrated the historic volatility of Afghan poppy cultivation with a 285 percent jump in area planted in 2007 to 18,739 ha, placing the province second to Helmand in total cultivation. Nangarhar farmers had previously responded to a strong anti-narcotics campaign by the governor by virtually ceasing to grow poppy altogether in 2005. This fluctuating trend continued in fall and winter 2007, when the new governor, Gul Agha Sherzai, pursued his own pre-planting and eradication campaign, which is anticipated to cause a substantial drop in cultivation in 2008.

Afghanistan’s poppy free provinces are in the relatively secure central and northern parts of the country, while poppy cultivation has exploded where the insurgency is strong, particularly in the south and southwest. The United States, UK, UNODC, ISAF and other major international stakeholders now acknowledge that a symbiotic relationship exists between the insurgency and narcotics trafficking in Afghanistan. The Taliban taxes poppy farmers to fund the insurgency. Traffickers provide weapons, funding, and personnel to the insurgency in exchange for the protection of drug trade routes, poppy fields, and members of their organizations. For their part, narcotics traffickers thrive in the insecurity and absence of governance in areas where the Taliban is active. The nexus between militants and narcotics trafficking was vividly illustrated when the Taliban gained control in February 2007 of the Musa Qala district in northern Helmand. When Afghan and coalition troops retook the district nine months later, they found that Taliban governance had deliberately sheltered a flourishing narcotics industry. The full production cycle, from raw opium to finished heroin, was traded in Musa Qala’s open narcotics markets, benefiting local traffickers and Taliban tax-collectors alike.

The southern province of Helmand province was in a class of its own in 2007, growing 53 percent of Afghanistan’s poppy crop with 102,770 ha under cultivation. Helmand’s 2007 poppy crop increased 48 percent over 2006. Poppy cultivation has quadrupled in Helmand since 2005 and has almost entirely taken over a once prosperous agricultural region growing legal crops. Helmand opium production is organized on a large scale, employing thousands of seasonal migrant laborers and supporting cultivation with systems of credit and distribution. Massive amounts of development assistance to Helmand have not held back the explosion of poppy cultivation and trafficking there. As the recipient of $270 million in FY2007 alone, if Helmand were an independent country, it would be the sixth largest recipient of bilateral USAID development assistance in the world.

Drug Flow/Transit. Drug traffickers and financiers lend money to Afghan farmers in order to promote drug cultivation in the country. Traffickers buy the farmers’ crops at previously set prices or accept repayment of loans with deliveries of raw opium. In many provinces, opium markets exist under the control of regional warlords who also control the illicit arms trade and other criminal activities, including trafficking in persons. Traders sell to the highest bidder in these markets with little fear of legal consequences, and gangsters and insurgent groups tax the trade.

Drug labs operating within Afghanistan process an increasingly large portion of the country’s raw opium into heroin and morphine base. This process reduces the bulk of raw opium about one-tenth, which facilitates its movement to markets in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East with transit routes through Iran, Pakistan, and Central Asia. Opiates are transported to Turkey, Russia, and the rest of Europe by organized criminal groups that are often organized along regional and ethnic kinship lines. Pakistani nationals play a prominent role in all aspects of the drug trade along the Afghan/Pakistan border.

Precursor chemicals used in heroin production must be imported into Afghanistan. Limited police and administrative capacity hampered efforts to interdict precursor substances and processing equipment. Afghan law requires the tracking of precursor substances, but the MCN has failed to create an active registry to record data. Progress in this regard requires the establishment of new laws, a system for distinguishing between licit and potentially illicit uses of dual-use chemicals, and a specialized police force to enforce the new system. UNODC has established a five-man unit at CNPA that is charged with tracking precursor chemicals.

Domestic Programs/Demand Reduction. The Afghan government acknowledges a growing domestic drug abuse problem, particularly opium and increasingly heroin. In 2005, Afghanistan’s first nationwide survey on drug use was conducted in cooperation with UNODC. This survey estimated that Afghanistan had 920,000 drug users, including 150,000 users of opium and 50,000 heroin addicts, with 7,000 intravenous users.

The NDCS includes rehabilitation and demand reduction programs for drug abusers. Given Afghanistan’s shortage of general medical services, however, the government can only devote minimal resources to these programs. To address demand reduction needs, the UK and Germany have funded specific demand reduction and rehabilitation programs. For its part, the United States is funding five, 20-bed residential drug treatment centers in Afghanistan, including the only residential facility in the country dedicated to serving female addicts. In 2007, the United States also supported 26 mosque-based drug education programs, five drug prevention/life skills pilot programs in Afghan schools, drug prevention public awareness programs, and a research study on the effects of second-hand opium smoke.

IV. U.S. Policy Initiatives and Programs

Bilateral Cooperation/The Road Ahead. In 2007, the United States enhanced its five pillar Afghanistan counternarcotics strategy, which calls for decisive action in the near term and identifies a more extensive array of tactics in all sectors, including:

Use public information campaigns to win support for the Afghan government’s counternarcotics program. The U.S. Embassy will increase support for radio, print media, and person-to-person outreach campaigns. Particular emphasis will be placed on grassroots, person-to-person community outreach activities through the Multiplying Messengers and PEP programs, which engage local community, religious, and tribal leaders on counternarcotics issues.
Attack the problem at the provincial level. The U.S. expanded the Good Performer’s Initiative in 2007 to provide greater incentives to governors, including those who succeed in keeping their provinces poppy-free. Provincial counternarcotics planning will be integrated with military planning at local commands in key provinces such as Helmand and Nangarhar.
Engage in a stronger eradication campaign. Until such time as the Government of Afghanistan approves more efficient and safe methods of eradication, the United States will continue to support the centrally-led PEF program, which conducts non-negotiated eradication to increase the impact of eradication by targeting large landowners and by encouraging governors to eradicate where it will have the greatest deterrent impact.
Develop alternative sources of income to poppy in rural areas. USAID continued its comprehensive Alternative Development Program (AD), which is providing $228,950,000 for AD projects in the major opium cultivation areas of Afghanistan. Starting in late 2006, USAID implemented a rural finance program that provides credit to farmers and small- and medium-sized enterprises in areas where financial services were previously unavailable.
Accelerate narcotics-related investigations, arrests, prosecutions, and incarcerations. In keeping with the overall justice sector strategy pursued jointly by Afghanistan, the United States, and international partners, the United States will expand its training efforts in Afghanistan for provincial and district-level prosecutors during 2008.
Destroy drug labs and stockpiles. The NIU and the U.K.-sponsored Afghan Special Narcotics Force (ASNF), in cooperation with the DEA, will target drug labs and seize drug stockpiles.
Dismantle drug trafficking/refining networks. DEA will work closely with the CNPA, NIU, and ASNF in pursuing criminal investigations and disrupting the narcotics trade.

[Crafty_Dog]

GM:  Any chance you could be persuaded to give a summary of all that, including your interpretation of the meaning of what was said there?

[Crafty_Dog]

Pakistan: Negotiating Away the Writ of the State
Stratfor Today » February 17, 2009 | 1515 GMT

TARIQ MAHMOOD/AFP/Getty Images
A delegation from an Islamist militant movement leaves after talks with
Pakistani officials in Peshawar
Summary
Provincial authorities in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province announced
Feb. 16 that they will implement a new Shariah-based regulation as part of a
deal with Pashtun jihadist forces in the Swat region to end the insurgency
there. This move likely will not achieve the authorities' desired results,
due to disagreements among Pakistan's various stakeholders regarding this
initiative and the Taliban's drive to expand their sphere of operations in
Pakistan. Not only will the process further erode the writ of the Pakistani
state it will also undermine U.S. interests in neighboring Afghanistan.

Analysis
The provincial government of the left-leaning secular Pashtun nationalist
Awami National Party in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP)
announced Feb. 16 that it reached an agreement with Maulana Sufi Muhammad,
the founder of the Islamist militant group
Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM), or Movement for the Enforcement
of Shariah, to end the jihadist insurgency in the area. In exchange for
peace, the government has agreed to implement Shariah-based regulations in a
wide area of the province formerly known as the Malakand Division and is
centered around the restive Swat region. Militants in the Swat region called
a 10-day cease-fire the night before talks with the government, and in
another gesture of goodwill released a Chinese engineer on Feb. 14,
kidnapped five months earlier. Maulana Sufi is now expected to convene a
meeting of the TNSM's leadership council to get the movement to agree to end
the fighting.

The TNSM is one of the two largest Pashtun jihadist groups in Pakistan that
fall under the Taliban umbrella and have ties to al Qaeda. The Feb. 16 deal
is the latest in a string of peace initiatives attempted over the past
several months to contain the insurgency, given Pakistan's inability to use
force to settle the issue.

Getting the militants to end the fighting is not the only complication in
carrying out this preliminary peace deal (which has no set time frame).
There are disagreements within the government at various levels about the
idea of bending to the Taliban's demands. While NWFP Chief Minister Amir
Haider Khan Hoti has called for support for his government's move to
implement the Shariah-based laws - the Nizam-i-Adl (Justice System)
Regulations-2009 - and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has
expressed for the negotiated settlement, Pakistani President Asif Ali
Zardari said he would not endorse the new deal unless it was clear that the
insurgency had been brought to an end.

Furthermore, there are growing rifts between the prime minister and
president (both from the ruling Pakistan People's Party), with the army
reportedly backing Gilani to contain Zardari. But even before the central
government makes a decision on the peace deal, the provincial government
must craft the new legislation. This presents another world of problems,
since there are already several existing Shariah laws on the books as a
result of several decades' worth of attempts to deal with the problem of a
non-functioning legal and judicial system. The TNSM's rise was due largely
in part to its ability to exploit the chaotic situation with law and order
in the area and the ultraconservative religious local culture.





(click image to enlarge)

Assuming that the negotiated area does get a new set of religious laws -
which is not likely - the move will not lead to the containment of the
jihadist insurgency. If anything, the government's weak negotiating position
will only consolidate the Taliban's influence in the region - not only in
Swat, but in the area covered by the deal, including at least the districts
of Malakand, Dir, Swat, Shangla and Buner. This is not the Federally
Administered Tribal Area (FATA) - the historically autonomous small region
straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border - but Pakistan proper, and these
districts form a major sub-set of the northern part of the NWFP. This
indicates just how far things have deteriorated.

With the NWFP's southern districts along the tribal badlands also
experiencing a creeping Talibanization, a Pakistani Taliban stronghold in
the north could very well translate into the province falling to the Taliban
in the not too distant future. Put differently, the FATA, NWFP and even the
northwestern part of Balochistan (the southwestern province's Pashtun
corridor) could exhibit Afghanistan-like conditions where Pakistani security
forces would have to struggle harder to impose the waning writ of the state.

Clearly, this potential scenario has massive implications for the new U.S.
strategy for Afghanistan. Washington, already alarmed at Pakistan's
inability and/or unwillingness to contain the jihadist threat, has
intensified its unilateral air strikes inside Pakistan's tribal belt. The
largest such attacks took place Feb. 14, and one occurred Feb. 16 in Kurram
agency - an area where U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle attacks have not
happened before. Should the situation continue to deteriorate as a result of
this peacemaking, U.S. forces could be forced to strike deeper into Pakistan
proper in the NWFP and Balochistan provinces where both al Qaeda and Taliban
high-value targets are likely located. Furthermore, the Feb. 16 deal raises
more doubts about the viability of the NATO supply route that runs from
Peshawar to the Khyber Pass.

More importantly, this peace deal offers the Obama administration a glimpse
of what to expect as it moves toward a political settlement with Taliban
forces in Afghanistan. Should the deal with the militants in Pakistan lead
to the establishment of a Taliban "emirate" of sorts centered in Swat, it
will only further embolden the Afghan Taliban as they push for a comeback.
And a return of the Taliban to the corridors of power in Afghanistan could
prove detrimental to the security of Pakistan.

This is ironic considering that the Pakistani state supports the return of a
Taliban-dominated regime in Kabul. In the past, such a regime served
Pakistani national security interests . But with the Talibanization of the
Pakistani northwest - especially in the last two years - the Pakistanis have
lost control of their own territory and are not in a position to regain
influence in Afghanistan. Therefore, if the United States allows Pakistan to
become involved in Washington's negotiations with the Taliban, Islamabad
will not be seizing an opportunity to project power beyond its borders;
rather, it will be looking to protect itself from a threat that is both
internal and external.

Between the Pakistanis playing defense and the United States struggling to
craft a strategy for Afghanistan, the outlook is very bleak for Southwest
Asia.

[Crafty_Dog]

Second post of the AM:

I've yet to hear what seems to be a coherent suggestion to Afpakia, though I am willing to consider outside the box variables which result in the collapse of Pakistan as such, but I gotta say this RP piece has its appeal.

====================

PAKISTAN'S US POWS

By RALPH PETERS , NY Post

February 17, 2009 --

THE 36,000 US troops in Afghanistan are prisoners of war. They're still armed and fighting. But their fate lies in Pakistan's hands, not ours.

It's time to rethink our nonstrategy in Kabul. We got our initial actions right in the autumn of 2001, slaughtering terrorists, toppling the Taliban and empowering would-be allies. But we've been getting it wrong every year since.

We're now on the verge of doubling our troop commitment to a mismanaged war that lacks sane goals and teeters toward inanity. And we're putting our troops at the mercy of one of the world's most-corrupt states - Pakistan - which has cut a deal with extremists to enforce Sharia law a short drive from the capital.

After taking apart al Qaeda's base network and punishing the Taliban, we should have left the smoking ruins. This should have been a classic punitive expedition: We're not obliged to rehabilitate foreign murderers.

As for those who exclaim that "We would have had to go back!" - well, so what? Had we needed to hammer Afghanistan again in 2007 or 2008, that still would've been cheaper in blood (ours and the Afghans') and treasure than trying to build a "rule of law" state where no real state ever existed.

Staying left us with criminally vulnerable logistics - ever the bane of campaigns in the region. The Brits and the Soviets both learned the hard way that superior fighting skills don't suffice in Afghanistan: You need dependable, redundant supply lines.

But we rely on a long, imperiled land route through Pakistan for up to 80 percent of our supplies - a route that Pakistan can close at any time.

And the Pakistanis have closed it, just to make a point.

I'm convinced that the recent flurry of successful attacks on supply yards in Peshawar and along the Khyber Pass route were tacitly - if not actively - approved by the Pakistani intelligence service (the ISI) and the military.

Previous attacks were rare and unsuccessful. Suddenly, in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks, our trucks were burning. The Pakistanis were making the point that we're at their mercy: They wanted us to rein in a (rightly) outraged India.

They also want the new US administration to multiply foreign-aid bribes. (There isn't enough cash left in the country for Pakistan's elite to steal.)

Our response? We're paying up. Plus, dumber than dirt, we're turning to the Russians for an alternate supply line - after they bullied the Kyrgyz government into ending our access to a vital airbase north of the Afghan border.

But the central problem is the blind-alley mission. We kidded ourselves that we could conjure up a functioning rule-of-law state in the obstinately lawless territory known as Afghanistan, whose various ethnic groups hate each other unto death.

Instead of setting a realistic goal - mortally punishing our enemies - we decided to create a model democracy in a territory that hasn't reached the sophistication of medieval Europe.

And our own politics only complicate the mess. Since Iraq was "Bush's war," the American left rejected it out of hand. For Democrats seeking to prove they're tough on terror, Afghanistan became the "good war" by default.

Yet partial success in Iraq could spark positive change across the Middle East. Success in Afghanistan - whatever that is - changes nothing. Iraq is the old, evocative heart of Arab civilization. Afghanistan is history's black hole.

But President Obama has made Afghanistan his baby to show that he's strong on security.

What's the end-state, Mr. President? How do we get there? How do you solve the greater Pakistan problem?

By sending another 30,000 US hostages in uniform? De- fine the mission - what, specifically, are they sup- posed to accomplish?

God knows, every decent American should want this ragamuffin surge to succeed - but it's the military equivalent of the financial bailout package: Just throw more resources at a problem and hope something works.

Personally, I'm sick of seeing our troops used as a substitute for intelligent policies - while every wonk in Washington drones on about there being no military solution to war, for God's sake.

No military solution? Great. Bring the troops home and deploy more diplomats, contractors and accountants. See how long they survive.

It's grimly entertaining to observe how American leftists, who shrieked that we should "support the troops, bring them home" while Iraq was all the rage, won't say "Boo!" about Obama's war of choice. (They're still not enlisting, either.)

Our botched deployment to Afghanistan as warriors who morphed into squatters defies military logic, history and common sense. The Brits learned - finally - that you deal with Afghan problems by occasionally hammering Afghans, then leaving them to sort out their own mess. You kill the guilty and leave.

Not us. We're going to build Disneyworld on the Kabul River.

Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of "Looking for Trouble."
 

[G M]

Crafty,

Mostly this appears to be boilerplate drug eradication procedure.

This caught my attention:

During 2007, President Karzai weighed the possibility of limited aerial spray eradication of opium poppy, but ultimately declined to approve the program.

My jaded, cynical nature makes me wonder who got paid and how much for this policy decision. It is my understanding that opium poppies grow like weeds in Afghanistan, requiring very little in the way of cultivation.

[Crafty_Dog]

"Mostly this appears to be boilerplate drug eradication procedure."

Exactly what my doggy nose was telling me; hence my request for a summary 

[Crafty_Dog]

This is a few days old

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...,1099409.story
Quote:
Predator drones flown from base in Pakistan, U.S. lawmaker says
Sen. Feinstein's surprise disclosure likely to complicate joint campaign against Taliban militants
Greg Miller | Washington Bureau
7:06 PM CST, February 12, 2009

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an airbase inside that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counterterrorism collaboration with the United States.

The disclosure by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a U.S. official had publicly commented on where the Predator aircraft patrolling Pakistan take off and land.

At a hearing, Feinstein expressed surprise at Pakistani opposition to the ongoing campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Al Qaeda targets along Pakistan's northwest border.

"As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base," she said of the planes.



The basing of the pilotless aircraft in Pakistan suggests a much deeper relationship with the United States on counterterrorism matters than has been publicly acknowledged. Such an arrangement would be at odds with protests lodged by officials in Islamabad and could inflame anti-American sentiment in the country.

The CIA declined to comment, but former U.S. intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, confirmed that Feinstein's account was accurate.

Phil LaVelle, a spokesman for Feinstein, said her comment was based solely on previous news reports that Predators were operated from bases near Islamabad.

"We strongly object to Sen. Feinstein's remarks being characterized as anything other than a reference" to a article that appeared last March in the Washington Post, LaVelle said. Feinstein did not refer to newspaper accounts during the hearing.

Many in counterterrorism experts have assumed that the aircraft were operated from U.S. military installations in Afghanistan, and remotely piloted from locations in the United States. Experts said the disclosure could create political problems for the fledgling government in Islamabad.

"If accurate, what this says is that Pakistani involvement, or at least acquiescence, has been much more extensive than has previously been known," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. "It puts the Pakistani government in a far more difficult position [in terms of] its credibility with its own people. Unfortunately it also has the potential to threaten Pakistani-American relations."

Feinstein's disclosure came during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee by U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair on the nation's security threats. Blair did not respond directly to Feinstein's remark, except to say that Pakistan is "sorting out" its cooperation with the United States.

Pakistani officials have long denied that they ever granted the United States permission to fly the Predator planes over Pakistani territory, let alone to operate the aircraft from within the country.

The new civilian leadership has gone to significant lengths to distance itself from the Predator strikes, which are extremely unpopular in Pakistan, in part because they are widely reported to kill civilians as well as militants.

The Pakistani government regularly lodges diplomatic protests against the strikes as a violation of its sovereignty, and officials said the subject was raised with Richard C. Holbrooke, a newly appointed U.S. envoy to the region, who completed his first visit to the country on Thursday.

Nevertheless, most Pakistanis believe the civilian leadership has continued former President Pervez Musharraf's policy giving the United States tacit permission to carry out the strikes.

The CIA has been working to step up its presence in Pakistan in recent years. The CIA has deployed as many as 200 people to Pakistan, one of its largest overseas operations outside of Iraq, current and former agency officials have estimated. That contingent works alongside other U.S. operatives who specialize in electronic communications and spy satellites.

The use of Predator planes armed with Hellfire anti-tank missiles has emerged as perhaps the important U.S. tool in its ongoing efforts to attack Al Qaeda in its sanctuary in Pakistan's tribal belt. Last month, a New Year's Day strike killed two senior Al Qaeda operatives who were suspected of involvement in the bombing of Islamabad's Marriott They were among at least eight senior Al Qaeda figures reportedly killed in Predator strikes over the past seven months as part of a stepped-up missile campaign that U.S. intelligence officials have characterized as major success against Al Qaeda.

In his prepared testimony Thursday, Blair said that Al Qaeda has "lost significant parts of its command structure since 2008 in a succession of blows as damaging to the group as any since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001." 

[SB_Mig]

Just found these two links on Afghasnistan through an Executive Protection blog. Mostly observations on security and military embeds.

Good reads from not the usual blogging suspects:

http://www.battlefieldtourist.com/content/

http://blog.freerangeinternational.com/

[jkrenz]

  ...absolutely mind boggling...

===========================

 MINGORA, Pakistan, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Taliban fighters have agreed to a "permanent ceasefire" in Pakistan's northwestern valley of Swat, a senior government official said on Saturday.

On Friday, the militants' commander Maulana Fazlullah met his father-in-law, radical cleric Maulana Sufi Mohammad who was freed by the government to negotiate peace.

"They have made a commitment that they will observe a permanent ceasefire and we'll do the same," Syed Mohammad Javed, the commissioner of Malakand, a region of Northwest Frontier Province, told reporters after meeting elders. (Reporting by Junaid Khan; Writing by Kamran Haider)

===========================

Somebody is getting paid,  Somebody is scared, or the TB is finally coming around and ready to shape up 

[G M]

Who can tell me what "hudna" means?

[jkrenz]

hudna = quiet or truce

[G M]

A truce, until muslims are strong enough to defeat those they made a truce with. Then the truce is ended.

[jkrenz]

This sums it up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudna

and according to this site, it's "a tactical cease-fire that allows the Arabs to rebuild their terrorist infrastructure in order to be more effective when the "cease-fire" is called off."

http://www.omdurman.org/hudna.html

[G M]

In islam, there is no concept of "let's live in peace with non-muslims forever". There is only "Smite unbelivers until they submit" or make a hudna until you can "smite the unbelivers until they submit".

“I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them.” Qur'an 8:12.

 “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem.” Qur'an 9:5.

“And an announcement from Allah and His Messenger, to the people (assembled) on the day of the Great Pilgrimage- that Allah and His Messenger dissolve (treaty) obligations with the Pagans....grievous penalty to those who reject Faith.” Qur'an 9:3.

“Fight them, and Allah will punish them by your hands, cover them with shame....” Qur'an 9:14.

“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” Qur'an 9:29.

[jkrenz]

It's not too hard to understand the religious fervor that comes from this region when an estimated 11 million Afghans over the age of 15 can't read or write.  In rural areas, where three-fourths of all Afghans live, 90 percent of the women and over 60 percent of the men are illiterate and the only book available is the Qur'an.  Afghans are simple thinking people due to the fact that there is little exposure to outside influences.  Free thinking is not encouraged.  The word of the prophet is truth because it has been truth handed down from one generation to the next for 1500 years.  Their faith is the only thing these people are sure of.  Give them about 500 more years in this part of the world and I'm sure they'll be ok.

Sounds like Europe around 1100 about when the crusades kicked off.  The crusades lasted a couple of hundred years.  The inquisitions began around 1200.  The Spanish inquisition kicked off in the late 1400s and didn't really end until the 1800s.  The bible was probably the only book around for a lot of people then.  Look at all the madness caused by the Christians back then. 

Illiteracy is a MoFo.

The only "People of the Book" that don't act crazy and start trouble are the Jews.  Look at the Israelis, they never really start a fight, but they sure as hell can finish them.
 

[G M]

Keep in mind that the crusades only kicked off after about 300 years of jihad being waged against europe.

[prentice crawford]

Woof,
 Pakistan is a powder keg. The new government is not only unable to deal with the tribal regions, it's also beginning to lose control over the numerous radical groups that seem to be growing in power. The Mumbai attacks has brought them to light and the country is just now recognising how dangerous they've become.
 I think for right now the U.S. should continue to show restraint on going into Pakistan. We can put more effort on controlling the border and intercepting Taliban coming into Afghanistan and cutting into the drug trade without pushing Pakistan into a civil war and possibly having more hostilities with India. I know our military is ten feet tall and bullet proof but those mountains take away many of our advantages as well. We might do better than the Russians did but we won't go unscathed if we put boots on the ground there.
 On top of that if there's going to be a nuclear war in my lifetime; I would put money on this being the place where it starts.
                                     P.C.

[jkrenz]

Cool deal G M   you taught me something new today.  

So they dealt the first blow and they're still sore about how the crusaders invaded the holy land...

I went ahead and did a search on pre-crusade jihad and came across this site: http://www.historyofjihad.com/sitemap.html

And a little thing I found interesting from the above site

===================================

"The Hudna (Temporary Peace Treaty) of Hudaibiya demonstrates in a very telling way, the evil genius that Mohammad was. And this character of his has been filtered down to the last Muslim, who uses it to cheat and trick non-Muslims in every small thing in day-to-day life in a practice popularly known among the Muslims as Taquiyya (also spelt as Taqiyya or Taqiya) which means deception.

Pervez Musharraf the President of Pakistan, referred to this Hudna (Temporary Peace Treaty) of Hudaibiya (and to the double-crossing that exists in it), when he announced after 9/11 that he was making a pact with America to fight the Taliban who then ruled Afghanistan and whose guest was that, horror of all horrors, Osama Bin Laden."

===================================

Pakistan made the pact just to dupe U.S.  And now they're getting ready to something stupid with the TB.  They've got nukes too.  They could team up with Iran and nuke Afghanistan from each side but they're probably waiting for America to get out of Iraq so Iran doesn't have to worry about that side of the border and before you know it we'll have the United Islamic States of Ahmadinejad.

I'm sure the scenarios are endless.....  

Has that been talked about in the WW3 thread yet?  I haven't had a chance to read that much of it yet.