Needlenose

I’m with Karzai on condemning the recent NATO attack on a convoy that included women and children.  I seriously doubt we’re going to win this war anyway, but I’m positive we won’t win it by dropping bombs on civilians.

It didn’t work for the Soviets and it won’t work for us.  If we must pursue this war because of our Leader’s peculiar obsessions, then let’s do with with more (multinational) boots on the ground.  At least a sniper would be more likely to see the lil’ kid waving from the back of the mini-van.

*Update 2/25/10* It’s not just air attacks that are killing civilians.  Check out these statistics on the kids killed by both sides in the Afghanistan conflict.

It’s gonna cost us about a $1 million per year for every soldier we send to Afghanistan.  Seems like a crappy investment for a war we are going to lose.

Update on that Pakistan thing (from the link) – their push against the Taliban strongholds appears to have limits, and they are concerned that our escalation will break those limits.

*Update 11/25/09* Juan Cole believes Afghanistan ‘escalation’ will be the albatross around the neck of the Democratic Party in 2012

Well at least I’m glad they are finally talking about the ‘new strategies” for the Afghanistan war.  Not sure why they waited so damn long though.

Frankly I’m with Colin Powell on this one – Mr. Obama, please be clear on what you hope to accomplish with U.S. Troops, and what conditions will trigger the end of the operation – give us a frickin’ exit strategy!!

The unspoken exit strategy, of course, is the neutralization of the Taliban & the destruction of Al Qaeda’s safe haven in the region, which as I’ve suggested before, is impossible without expanding the conflict into Western Pakistan.

Since the Pakistani government is scared to death of inviting US troops into the country to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban on the ground, and since we can’t invade without their permission, this pretty much rules out the current exit strategy.

So I imagine the conversation is pretty much revolving back to the old Nixon standby “how do we translate ‘Peace with Honor’ into Pashtun.”

The conventional wisdom is that the “McChrystal leak” is the Obama Administration getting blindsided by “some on the Obama team [who are] are dismayed at the White House’s slow response and fear that this is an indication that President Obama is leaning towards rejecting the inevitable requests for additional U.S. forces that this report tees up.”

Another possibility is that Obama is trying to backtrack from his campaign promises and early moves to escalate the war, perhaps giving some time for public opinion and debate while he comes up with a new strategy.

Maybe he’s finally come around to my realization that this war was doomed from the get-go.

I know I had a brief twinge of hope when Pakistan entered the fray and whacked some Taliban moles in the Swat Valley that maybe the Taliban could be put down, but even with the occasional capture of a few high-profile leaders, I’m back to my former pessimism – too little, too late.   McChrystal certainly figured out that the real front is in the tribal lands of a weak and untrustworthy ally.  As before, I certainly don’t see how throwing more bodies on the fire on the other side of the border will put out this fire.

*Update* In the spirit of pithiness, I want to rebut McChrystal more succinctly:  Adding more troops to Afghanistan will only postpone the inevitable defeat.

I found this puff piece on ’secret’ negotiations between the US and so-called ‘moderate’ members of the Taliban on HuffPo and I was quickly skimming through it when this bit caught my eye:

Also included in the negotiations is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the notorious renegade Afghan warlord whose active insurgency continues to fight against U.S. and coalition forces.
Two former Pakistani intelligence officials say a deal was underway in which Hekmatyar would call for an end to his insurgency and be allowed to live above ground in Saudi Arabia with a budget of $85 million. At least one Afghan government official confirmed that a deal with Hekmatyar was being assembled.

Seriously?  Gulbuddin Hekmatyar? If there is any credence whatsoever to the article, Obama will just be the next in line to be taken by this consummate “Khan” artist.

Several weeks ago I wrote a despairing post about the state of our war in Afghanistan, criticizing Obama for following Shrubya’s tired strategy of fighting a counter-insurgency conflict in Afghanistan while the enemy thrived, unmolested, across the border in Pakistan.

Since then, Pakistan really bumped up their game and has made major gains in fighting the Taliban, Al Qaeda and their sympathizers in the Swat Valley.

I should probably have posted something about that  earlier, but their past claims of ‘victories’ and gains were either gross hyperbole or outright lies.  However, I’m actually heartened by Osama Bin Laden’s latest missive blaming Obama for “ordering” President Zardari to attack the guerrillas.

Check out the speech – it strikes me as the typical ‘tough talk’ a leader has to give when his followers are backed into a corner – kinda like that some of the speeches given by the (now dead) head of the Tamil Tigers as his guerrillas were increasingly trapped by Sri Lankan forces.  The other comforting thought is that Obama could actually ‘order’ President Zardari to do anything!  Don’t you wish that were true?  I guess American Liberals aren’t the only people that believe Obama has magical powers!

It’s much too early to determine if this is a true sea change in the battle – who knows how many Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors donned burkhas and slipped out among the civilian refugees?  And don’t forget that Pakistan is only one of the countries bordering Afghanistan suitable for a base for the guerrillas, and that is a horribly corrupt country at that.

But it’s definitely cause for optimism – let’s hope this reduces some of the strain on President Karzai and the NATO forces in Afghanistan!

*Update 6/4/09* A friend of mine just got back from a couple of weeks in Karachi – he tells me things are really messy there right now – lots of internal divisions between groups such as the Muhajirs and the Pashtuns are boiling up to the surface resulting in pitched street fighting.

I did some further reflection on the ’same tired strategy’ issue, and I think the crux of the problem is ’same tired premise.’  Although Obama renamed the ‘War on Terror’ to the Global Contingency Operation, nothing has essentially changed.

After the USSR imploded, the reactionaries were left with gays, aborted fetuses, illegal aliens and Libruhls as The Enemy.   Unfortunately (for them), you can’t justify ridiculous levels of defense spending to fight that  enemy, so their corporate masters in the defense contractor sector were unsatisfied.

9/11 gave Shrubya & Cheney all they needed to create a new bugbear to replace Raygun’s defunct ‘Evil Empire’ – a “global conspiracy” of Islamic terrorists, dedicated to destroying Pax America through the use of terror.  They fanned the flames of fear mercilessly through ‘doomsday’ speeches, Threat Level warnings and airport strip searches.

The reality-based community’s arguments that these threats required greater intelligence and coordinated international police actions were laughed at and shrugged off by the Repugs who for a time completely dominated the MSM.

In the case of Afghanistan, the original goal, was to catch Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive,’ neutralize the threat of the other architects of 9/11 and their sympathizers, the Taliban, then  install and nurture a Western-friendly government and do some nation building to eliminate the terrorist ‘breeding ground.’   Of course Osama and the Taliban had plenty of time to escape into the ‘failed statelet’ of Western Pakistan, which continually threatens to distabilize the installed Karzai government, forcing us to remain and even escalate our presence just to stay in place.

Osama accepted this status quo and just did his first escalation – I guarantee there will be more.  The original premise – that we are in a life-or-death struggle with a global, violent fundamentalist Islam – remains.  The follow-on reactionary addition to the premise is that this threat can and should be dealt with via military means, and that by doing so, we can make America ’safe from Terrorism.’

Current reactionary talking points revolve around Dem rule making America ‘less safe,’ for anything from (re)outlawing torture and closing Gitmo, to cutting boondoggle projects from the defense budget.

Obama needs to attack this premise head-on, or it will continue to drive him down the doomed policy path we are currently on.

Here are the reality-based premises that he needs to push forward to counter the reactionary bullshit.

First, the government can’t make us completely safe from terror.  It’s impossible.  It’s a cheap and easy tactic easily employed by malcontents.  Suspending civil liberties and employing harsh tactics internally just create more and nastier malcontents.

Terrorists come in many flavors.  Notice how the reactionaries freaked out over the government’s report on the danger of our own home-grown, reactionary terrorists.  No mystery there – they want us to ignore the Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and the Anthrax Mailer behind the curtain and focus on the Islamic Fundamentalist bugbear.    This is a critical point – even if we were somehow able to magically lock down all of the Islamic world, we still wouldn’t be safe from terror!

I won’t belabor the third point, that massive occupations of jihadi-prone foreigners punctuated by kid-killing blind airstrikes creates more terrorists – that point has been beaten to death over the last 8 years.

This leads me back to the premise specifically underpinning the current Afghanistan policy – if we pull out, the Karzai government will fall at the hands of the Taliban, leading to failed state and becoming another breeding ground/homebase for terrorists.   Here is the crux of the problem – the Al Qaeda home base has shifted to W. Pakistan, a failed statelet, and neither Shrubya or Obama hase the inclination to take the war there.  Ergo – stalement.

How is that different from just letting Afghanistan fall again?  It’s just a slightly bigger breeding ground.  And going back to the War on Terror – isn’t the supposed Islamic Fundamentalist terror threat supposed to be global?  There are no end of Islamic ‘failed states’ out that, or near-failed states, that could harbor another head of the terrorist hydra – admittedly not as well financed as the Pashtun poppy-growers, but not without access to other funding sources.

Bottom line is that Obama needs to start a serious dialog on the broke-ass reactionary fear-mongering premises, attacking the ‘War on Terror’ head on, not just relabeling it and continuing the policy.  And Evil Dick is giving Obama a perfect opportunity to have the dialog.  Obama could take the high ground and just debate him directly, tear him to shreds.  Or we could actually have that truth commission, but open it up to include all the lying and bullshit perpetuated by Cheney to sell the war as well as investigations into renditions, torture and the Valerie Plame scandal.

Otherwise, expect us to continue down this losing path at the cost of tens of thousands of more Afghani and Iraqi civilian lives, hundreds more of our soldiers and budget-busting costs -  and ultimately making this war *the* election question of 2012.

If you thought that by electing Obama we’d get out of the Shrubyian quagmires any sooner, you’d be sadly mistaken.  It looks like Obama is following Shrubya’s brokeass ’strategy,’ i.e. engagements without an exit strategy, no clear goals and a continuing drain of soldiers and cash.

In a move right out of the Shrubya playbook, Obama is replacing one general with another in Afghanistan, saying that it’s time for some ‘fresh thinking.’  Seriously, Mr. President, the only ‘fresh thinking’ we need is from you!!  It doesn’t matter whom you put in the hot seat, he/she will continue to muddle along until such time as it becomes clear what they need to achieve in order to get out of the quicksand.

And in the case of Afghanistan, as long as the Taliban live free and untouchable just across the border this war will drag on for as long as we wish to expend the lives.  Our ally Pakistan will neutralize the Taliban?  Don’t make me laugh, Mr. President, they are already busy getting their asses kicked by the Taliban’s tribal hosts.

And in case you’ve forgotten, Shrubya already tried launching a ‘death from above’ strategy in both quagmires and learned the hard way that for every ‘terrorist’ you kill, you create dozens of pissed-off new terrorists.

If you want to eliminate the Taliban threat to Karzai and ‘new’ Afghanistan, you need to take the war to them…on the ground…where they are.  If you can’t or won’t do that, then get us the hell out of there.  Fresh thinking, Mr. President, fresh thinking!

Last month I argued against Obama’s emerging broke-ass Afghanistan policy.  It looks like he is going forward with an escalation of 17,000 additional US soldiers.  This, is in the face of our increasingly strangled and expensive supply lines.

And as I argued before, if we are dead set on an Afghanistan escalation (that we will eventually lose), we need to first complete the exit from Iraq.  What could possibly go wrong?  How about the existing tensions between the Kurds and Arabs in Northern Iraq flaring up into a full-on war?  And it sure doesn’t help matters when our tactics involve the accidental, but continual slaughter of civilians from aerial bombardment - instead of winning hearts and minds, you need to pick them up from around the target.

Obama has been variously compared to JFK and Lincoln.  Could we in fact be looking at the Reincarnation of LBJ?

Sad, really.

True to his campaign promises, Obama is moving ahead with his broke-ass ’surge’ in Afghanistan.  And Shrubya left-over Gates will continue lobbying militarily ineffective, civilian-killing missiles into Waziristan. 

I’ll give them credit in that they understand that the real ‘insurgency’ is in Waziristan, where the Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders are laughing at us, fueling the insurgency with drug and weapons smuggling while living large in their Wazi safe houses.  I’m sure they are also aware that the Pakistani government has zero military control over the region (having gotten their asses kicked by the Waziban several times over the last few years).   And finally it should be apparent to them that unless the Al-Waziban are defeated on the ground, the insurgency will continue.

So Obama is indicating that he is signing up for a long-term ‘containment’ quagmire, hoping that by keeping some critical mass of troops in the country and by blowing up the occasional Waziri household, he’ll be able to prop up the Karzai government at a low-enough cost that people will ignore the conflict.

Not much of a plan.  NATO troops will still die.  The conflict will gradually heat up.  The missiles will undermine both Obama’s new pro-Muslim ‘messaging’ as Al-Jezeera airs pics of dead kids, and the Pakistani central government (such as it is).  It will drain money out of the economic reconstruction.  And guess what?  We haven’t withdrawn from Iraq yet!  Who knows what might develop there that could slow down or halt our withdrawal?

Long-time Needlenose readers may remember that while I opposed the Iraqi debacle on both ethical and practical grounds, I largely opposed the A’stan invasion largely because it was a fucking stupid idea – there is no way we can prop up Karzai if we can’t stem the flow of Hashshashin and weapons from the hostile and anarchic Waziristan.

Obama would be better off biting the bullet now and starting the withdrawal when he has significant political capital, rather than at the end of his 2nd term, when his legacy will be tainted by the abject failure of his escalation policy.