Arms and influence

Leviathan in Afghanistan

I guess Scalia wasn't kidding when he said that the Guantanamo Bay prisoners should count their lucky stars that they weren't in a different US facility, such as Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that's used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.

The theme du jour here at Arms and Influence is the price we pay when we play games with the Constitution. Nothing about the 9/11 attacks, or anything that has happened since, has merited a revision of over 200 years of Constitutional interpretation. For example, as I said in the earlier post about Scalia's dissent in the Bournediene decision, the justices who arguing that the executive branch can make up any  criminal procedures it damn well pleases, when handling foreign prisoners in foreign lands, won't find any support in the Constitution itself. Nor will Scalia find support, in the Constitution or Federalist papers, for his peculiar argument that, if the Congress and President agree on how to treat these prisoners, the judiciary has no right to review and possibly overturn these policies.

We need these restraints in place to protect us from ourselves. During frightening times, the laws should keep us from doing stupid things. During wartime, the Constitution still applies, and the Supreme Court still has a role to play, other than stepping aside to let the President do anything he deems necessary to protect American lives.

Often, these measures to protect Americans do exactly the opposite. You can go back to Hobbes and Locke for the Ur-arguments about how, without "civil society," people are bad judges of cases in which they have been wronged. We're not in a state of nature today--nor should we construct one, in the name of defending ourselves. We should be preventing the mistreatment of Americans as prisoners. We should be robbing our adversaries of arguments that the United States is a brutal, imperialist power. And we should be preventing another terrorist attack on the United States. These are all compatible objectives.

Swaggering know-nothings who like to cite books they have not read will often pull out Machiavelli's famous dictum that it is better to be feared than loved. However, it's important to read hos whole argument, which Machiavelli, being a good writer, summarizes in the concluding paragraph of that section of The Prince:

Returning to the question of being feared or loved, I come to the conclusion that, men loving according to their own will and fearing according to that of the prince, a wise prince should establish himself on that which is in his own control and not in that of others; he must endeavour only to avoid hatred, as is noted.

Which is why the title of the book is The Prince, not The Thug.

[Thanks to Steve Taylor for the original link to this news story.]

Best damn infographic ever

Democracy Arsenal has an outstanding table contrasting the war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Among many points of comparison--number of American troops, overall cost, amount of public support--the critical one might be the two alliances.

Success in counterinsurgency depends on staying power, which in turn increases substantially when Americans aren't fighting alone. Only half the troops in Afghanistan are American soldiers. Because we went to war as part of NATO, instead of a goofy "coalition of the willing," the United States is enjoying the support of 36 countries in Afghanistan, as opposed to only 20 countries in Iraq.

The Iraq war has been a long, expensive, violent reminder that multilateralism helps more than it hurts.

Afghanistan's suggestion box

The cynical, snarky view of the new "complaints office" in Afghanistan: Well, if you control only 31% of the country, you have some time on your hands.

Less snarky view: Karzai's office may need a few independent sources of information. Leaders in other counterinsurgency wars, such as Ramon Magsaysay during the Huk Rebellion, had similar programs, if for no other reason than to increase the appearance of government responses. (Magsaysay actually followed up on many of the complaints, however.)

Ultimately, any program like this depends on the power, influence, and energy of the leader in question.

News from a forgotten war

Remember Afghanistan? Other than the occasional, information-free story about Taliban bombings or NATO operations, we don't hear much from The Forgotten War. Obviously, there's way too many important things to say about flag pins and senatorial mistresses to waste our time discussing a war we've been fighting for the last six years. Or, at least, that's how the US news outlets treat Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, history marches on. This post at Arrgghhh! shows us what we're missing. If every news item now has to have a presidential election spin, it's also a snapshot of what the next US president will be facing. Whatever happens in Iraq--stay, leave, draw up, draw down--we'll still be in Afghanistan. However, we won't necessarily have a national consensus about what we should be doing there.

The news item quoted at Castle Arrgghhh! might be accurate reporting, or it might be wishful thinking wrapped in a press release. Either way, it's a picture of what should be happening--and still could.

Pashtun or Tajik, Afghans are tired of decades of war. They're sick of the Taliban mucking up their lives. A lot of expatriate and refugee Afghans would also like to return home.  An ANA capable of the operation described is well within the realm of possibility, all stereotypes about the Afghans aside.

If I were making a run for the White House (again with the election!), I'd make Afghanistan a big part of the debates. Turn any national security discussion into a detailed discussion of Afghanistan. Here are the people we abandoned once before, and we're abandoning again. Here is where the mettle of the United States in the Islamic world is being tested. Here is where we can learn how to fight these small but challenging wars a lot better than we are now. Unless you have a real strategy for Afghanistan, you're yet another irresponsible American politician.

Recycled weapons

Take a few minutes to read this Intel Dump post. It's the sort of informed, measured discussion of military affairs that's increasingly important during this election season.

Yes, American soldiers have recycled the enemy's weapons in every war they've fought. No, the frequency with which they're forced to do it in Afghanistan is not an excusable sign of "warfare as usual." Quite the opposite--it's yet another sign of how the war in Iraq has hurt the war in Afghanistan.

(Here's another piece of the story from ABC News.)

SOFs not being drawn down

Worth noting in discussions of withdrawing troops from Iraq: US special operations forces  (SOFs) are not part of that reduction. In fact, their numbers may be increasing.

That's good news, if the mix of forces in Iraq tilts more in the direction of the SOFs. While unconventional warfare as waged by the SOFs is not necessarily the same thing as counterinsurgency, the SOFs have a better track record of understanding and contributing to counterinsurgency campaigns than many conventional units.

Unfortunately, US troop levels will not return to pre-escalation levels. The numbers will still be 8,000 soldiers higher than in January 2007. The strain on the Army and Marines remains, as does the strategic vacuum at the theater level.

When you have real alliances...

...You can actually get NATO to escalate the effort in Afghanistan, even though the war isn't terribly popular in Germany and other parts of Europe. (Some good news, at least.)

The survivor

Someone asked me last night, "How long do you think Musharraf can last? Another year? Less?"

I estimated that Musharraf would endure a lot longer than a mere year. Musharraf has been skilled at tilting in one political direction, then another, skillfully enough that both sides are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Today's news was a case in point. The US is inflicting some pressure on Musharraf (the exact amount is unclear) to do something about the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces ensconced in the "tribal region" of western Pakistan. While US pressure had something to do with the planned summit between Musharraf and tribal leaders who are ignoring or helping these insurgents, it was surely not the only reason behind the meeting. Musharraf needed to show the clans that span this region of Pakistan and Afghanistan that he still has the clout to expect good turn-out, and some willingness to listen to what he has to say.

Unfortunately, the meeting gave Musharraf a golden opportunity to pull out at the last minute. He can say that he is not willing to attend any conference that might jeopardize the interests of the Pashtuns, Baluchis, and other groups in this region. He can also make himself look, to a broader audience of Pakistanis, like a more independent leader than the other president in attendance, Hamid Karzai.

It was unlikely that anything substantive was going to emerge from this meeting, unless something had been worked out in advance. If American diplomats are fuming over his withdrawal, their frustration may be largely for show--or else they really don't understand the politics of Central Asia.

Afghan's growing problem

The bumper crop of poppies in Afghanistan is bad, bad, bad on many levels, not least of which is how the opium trade creates rampant corruption. This is not a problem that US officials can be addressed on a part-time basis, after all the Iraqi agenda items are given attention.

The view from the Pakistan border

Via Aargghh!, here's a thumbnail sketch from the front lines of the messy conflict that doesn't respect the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

If only history had a rewind button

The Al Qaeda organization in Pakistan--Osama bin Laden's personal staff, plus the fighters occasionally crossing into Afghanistan--are the happy beneficiaries of the war in Iraq. The US occupation of Iraq has increasingly radicalized many Muslims, who are then willing to contribute to Al Qaeda.

Once again, we cannot afford to let Iraq crowd out every national security priority, including the war with the enemy that attacked the United States on 9/11/01. Hunting down bin Laden is tough, as the LA Times article explains:

"We're not any closer," said a senior U.S. military official who monitors the intelligence on the hunt for Bin Laden.

The lack of progress underscores the difficulty of the search more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks. Despite a $25-million U.S. reward, current and former intelligence officials said, the United States has not had a lead on Bin Laden since he fled American and Afghan forces in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan in early 2002.

"We've had no significant report of him being anywhere," said a former senior CIA official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing U.S. intelligence operations. U.S. spy agencies have not even had information that "you could validate historically," the official said, meaning a tip on a previous Bin Laden location that could subsequently be verified.

Of course, having the Pakistani government as an ally is a mixed blessing:

Driven by domestic political pressures and rising anti-American sentiment, the agreements called for the tribes to rein in the activities of foreign fighters, and bar them from launching attacks in Afghanistan, in exchange for a Pakistani military pullback.

But U.S. officials said there was little evidence that the tribal groups had followed through.

"Everything was undermined by the so-called peace agreement in north Waziristan," said a senior U.S. intelligence official responsible for overseeing counter-terrorism operations. "Of all the things that work against us in the global war on terror, that's the most damaging development. The one thing Al Qaeda needs to plan an attack is a relatively safe place to operate."

Some in the administration initially expressed concern over the Pakistani move, but Bush later praised it, following a White House meeting with Musharraf.

The pullback took significant pressure off Al Qaeda leaders and the tribal groups protecting them. It also made travel easier for operatives migrating to Pakistan after taking part in the insurgency in Iraq.

We have enough to do here, with Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda. If you don't believe me, look at the slow progress that the US government made against the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador, a country much closer geographically, historically, and culturally to the United States than Pakistan. Who's a tougher ally to prod in the right direction, the right-wing ARENA government of Roberto D'Aubuisson, or the nuclear-armed regime of Pakistan, with a semi-independent intelligence agency more sympathetic with the Taliban than the United States?

These problems require all the necessary resources, expertise, and attention of the US government merely to contain them, let alone help solve them.

Pat Tillman, our Ellsworth

With the recent news about Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan, I thought I'd link back to this post I did some time ago, comparing Tillman to Elmer Ellsworth, "the first casualty of the Civil War."

Mythologizing seems inevitable whenever you discuss the sainted martyr of a war, particularly among the first to fall. A blatant effort to lie about the way Pat Tillman died, followed by a horribly bungled cover-up, is another matter entirely.

Uphill in Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan remains an uphill battle--quite literally, for the unit of the 10th Mountain Division profiled in this Salon article. Worth reading for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the work still left to be done. One of my greatest fears is that the Iraq hangover will cause many Americans to lose interest in Afghanistan, too.

The Taliban mini-Tet

IN THE NEWS
Guerrillas in both Afghanistan and Iraq are likely to test American resolve this year through what you might call "mini-Tets." Rather than huge, all-out, do-or-die assaults, like the 1968 Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, today's guerrillas are more likely to gamble on regular, low-cost attacks that nonetheless grab headlines and inspire anxiety.

That's the best way to frame news items like this one:

The Taliban promised a spring offensive of thousands of suicide bombers as the United States, doubling its combat troops in Afghanistan, took over command of the 33,000-strong NATO force in the country on Sunday.

The previous NATO commander, British General David Richards, may be technically correct, from a very narrow perspective, that, "The Taliban did not achieve a single objective." The Taliban are in the phase of guerrilla operations where survival is the primary concern. However, the Taliban is clearly not just on the run from NATO forces. Unless the Taliban leaders make an enormous strategic bungle, every attack is a tap on the shoulder of Afghans, Americans, and Europeans, to remind them that the Taliban may be more patient and successful in the long run than their enemies.

Staying focused on Afghanistan

IN THE NEWS
Here's an obvious antidote to the silly "cut and run" calumny about Iraq: talk about the cost that Iraq is imposing on Afghanistan. Iraq may create a de facto "cut and run" for the NATO effort in Afghanistan, if US and British resources and attention continue to be diverted into keeping Iraq from getting worse than it already is.

Counterinsurgency requires, above all else, focus. Focus requires patience. Patience requires commitment. Although more NATO troops does not equal better counterinsurgency, there's reason to be concerned about the flagging commitment that the numbers imply. Meanwhile, the war is hardly won: on the heels of an offensive against the Taliban, a suicide bomber on a bicycle
killed four Canadian soldiers.

While people continue to intone gravely that we cannot afford to lose in Iraq, Afghanistan continues to get little attention. We can't afford to lose in Afghanistan--the country that actually had a connection to the 9/11 attacks, and which we've abandoned before, to our deep regret.

Taliban wants anti-armor weapons

IN THE NEWS
According to this CTV report, the Taliban is looking for anti-armor weapons. But why?

Certainly, the Taliban guerrillas in question may be shopping around for anti-tank mines and rockets for all the wrong reasons. Insurgents aren't supermen, immune from error. For example, the ELAS guerrillas in Greece's civil war tried to use conventional methods at the operational level of strategy, and the Greek government thanked them for this chivalric gesture by cutting them to pieces. The current Taliban leadership, or some faction within the Taliban, may just be making the same mistake, looking for ways to fight battles that don't need to be fought.

Not too long ago, the Taliban defeated the mujahideen government (later, the Northern Alliance, and now the coalition behind the current government in Kabul) without a healthy arsenal of anti-armor weapons. The mujahideen had a healthy arsenal of tanks and armored personnel carriers, many appropriated from the former Najibullah government. While the Taliban wasn't exactly powerless against these weapons, Kabul didn't fall because of some Kursk-like clash of armor, or waves of anti-tank rockets fired against government vehicles.

You could make the argument that the mujahideen used their tanks and APCs poorly, while the NATO allies are not making the same mistakes. Mujahideen armored units often did act more like mobile artillery, driving from one fixed position to another, blasting any enemies they found at each point. NATO APCs are highly mobile and well-armored, and the tactical doctrine that guides their use is much better than what the Taliban faced in the past.

However, what happens at the technical and tactical levels of the current war in Afghanistan won't decide the conflict. The Taliban's essential strategy remains the same: maintain a military and political presence until the NATO allies withdraw and the Kabul government collapses (in whatever order those two events occur). Meanwhile, the Taliban has to avoid being shut out of whatever enclaves the Kabul government and its foreign patrons can establish, in an ever-widening swath of the Afghan countryside.

Anti-tank weapons may help the Taliban keep any potential enclave from being totally secure. They may also be an important political tool: destroying NATO vehicles--and killing a lot of enemy soldiers in the process--is good PR for the Taliban. If, as the CTV article suggests, the Taliban is planning on raiding NATO and Afghan National Army (ANA) bases, the goal is the same: demonstrate that nowhere, no one, is safe.

Afghan man gets worse than acquittal

IN THE NEWS
Abdul Rahman, the Afghan man facing the death penalty for converting to Christianity, is now acquitted—sort of. In the sort of compromise that makes perfect sense in Afghan politics, the judges who had convicted Rahman ordered his release, but still insist that he deserves to die. The Afghan regime got what it needed, the avoidance of a major diplomatic rift between the Karzai government and its Western patrons. The Islamists also got what they wanted, a potential de facto death penalty for Rahman, if not a de jure one. Rahman is now a marked man, who may have to flee the country (and even then may not be completely safe).

There's not much to do at this point, other than try to help Rahman in whatever way possible. It's unclear from the resolution of this particular imbroglio whether future Rahmans will also face the death penalty. It's clear that the Islamists have a card to play, and many of the warlords who are unhappy with President Karzai will encourage them to play it. The Karzai government will only come out ahead if it is able to prevent further prosecutions and verdicts like this one.

The Taliban's revenge?

IN THE NEWS
The Afghan government's plan to execute Abdul Rahman, who recently converted to Christianity, poses a serious problem for American leaders. Does the US government throw up its hands, claiming it's the sovereign right of an elected government to apply capital punishments outlined in that nation's constitution—especially when we went to great pains to see that constitution drafted? Or do we risk alienating our ally, and possibly a few others in the region, by pressing the claim that universal concepts of human rights supersede any constitutional or religious claims?

I think most people would agree that the US government is making a morally justified argument: no one, regardless of national origin or creed, should be executed for their faith. It remains to be seen how effective the Bush Administration's diplomatic approach will be.

In most ways, this "crisis" is not as bad as it looks; unfortunately, in some ways, it's worse. The Afghan government is highly dependent on American financial and military support, which gives President Karzai and other leaders a strong incentive to find a clever, face-saving route out of this standoff. Even so, it's important for Americans to phrase their appeal for an Afghan audience—particularly since Muslims in other parts of the world are listening to the Afghan-American conversation. In short, US officials need to make the case that the Dar al-Harb is no threat to the Dar al-Islam, to the extent that it exists in Afghanistan. Further, executing a Christian convert is contrary to Islam's history of toleration for other "religions of the book." The judges who have sentenced Rahman to death are also basing their decision on a very narrow view of Islamic law, a position with which not everyone, including many Afghan citizens, would agree.

A basic tenet of Islam is the distinction between Dar al-Islam ("the house of submission"), the parts of the world where Muslim leaders apply Shari'a law, and the Dar al-Harb ('the house of conflict"), the rest of the world. Not surprisingly, the Dar al-Islam is depicted in a much more positive light than the Dar al-Harb, but for most Muslims, the distinction is not Manichean. People of other faiths can live within the Dar al-Islam without being pressured to convert to other faiths. For example, Jews evicted from Spain during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella found the Ottoman Empire far more tolerant than the Castilian monarchs, for whom even the conversos were suspect. The connotation of Dar al-Harb is a world of strife, since (from a Muslim perspective) the just, harmonizing influence of Islam is not guiding its rulers. Muslims in the Dar al-Islam can therefore be content that they don't live in the Dar al-Harb. In mainstream Islam, therefore, there has not been a strong spiritual justification for conquest. Suleiman the Magnificent did not justify his invasion of Eastern Europe on presumed threats to Muslims living there (there weren't that many), nor on the need to spread Islam by the sword (the Ottomans largely left the Christian population alone, with the exception of Europeans required to convert before they could help administer the empire or join the elite Janissary corps). To the extent that Suleiman felt he needed a justification, it was to build a wider buffer around the core Ottoman territories, to keep the Dar al-Harb at bay. The primary interests of Suleiman and other Ottoman rulers were the princely pursuit of wealth, territory, and power, something neither Suleiman nor his European contemporaries needed to justify.

The sense of threat from the Dar al-Harb has waxed and waned during the history of Islam. Sometimes, the missionary zeal of Christians represented a real threat to Islam; at other times, like the Fatimid ruler Hakem's persecution of Christians, the "threat" was largely imaginary. Nonetheless, a great deal of the historical tension between Islam and Christianity is focused on the question of conversion. The residents of predominantly Muslim countries can easily see Christian missionary work as a deliberate undermining of the Dar al-Islam, however imperfectly it exists under their current governments. Just as easily, Christians hear in the demand of many Muslims to live under Shari'a law the expansion of Islam through a political, not missionary, avenue.

When American leaders supported the drafting of the new Afghan constitution, they knew that they were acting as midwife to a child of both secular and Islamic thinking. The preamble to the 2004 constitution begins:

We the people of Afghanistan:

1. With firm faith in God Almighty and relying on His lawful mercy, and believing in the sacred religion of Islam…

Later, the first articles of the constitution echo the Islamic basis of the Afghan constitution:

Article One
Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary and indivisible state.

Article Two
The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam. Followers of other religions are free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of law.

Article Three
In Afghanistan no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.

Other sections echo the spirit of tolerance for different strains of Islam, as well as other faiths, that's the traditional connotation of the Dar al-Islam:

Article Six
The state is obliged to create a prosperous and progressive society based on social justice, protection of human dignity, protection of human rights, realization of democracy, and to ensure national unity and equality among all ethnic groups and tribes and to provide for balanced development in all areas of the country.

Article Seven
The state shall observe Charter of the United Nations, international treaties, international conventions that Afghanistan is a part to, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The state prevents all types of terrorist activities, cultivation and smuggling of narcotic drugs and production and consumption of intoxicants (muskirat).

Other parts of the constitution echo the democratic, universalist principles common to modern societies. For example:

Article Thirty- Four                           
Freedom of expression is inviolable.
Every Afghan has the right to express thoughts through speech, writing, or illustration or other means by observing the provisions of this Constitution.
Every Afghan has the right to print or publish topics without prior submission to the state authorities in accordance with the law. Directives related to printing house, radio, television, press, and other mass media, shall be regulated by law…

Article Thirty-Seven
Confidentiality and freedom of correspondence and communication whether in the form of letters or through telephone, telegraph and other means are immune from invasion.
The state does not have the right to inspect personal correspondence and communication unless authorized by the provisions of law.

The constitution also explicitly binds Afghanistan to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which protects freedom of religion, including the freedom to convert. Nowhere in the Afghan constitution is there a death penalty to conversion. The judges who have decreed Rahman's death base their decision on their reading of Shari'a law, which is indirectly the law of the land, according to the constitution. The judges' argument, therefore, is not necessarily the final word. Both their interpretation of the Quran and their application of Shari'a within the Afghan constitutional framework are highly debatable. There is also room to debate whether the interpretation or application of the Shari'a can be influenced by sources outside the Quran and the Hadith Reports. Islamic history is, in large part, a debate between advocates of this broader approach (ijtihad) and those who argue for strictly cleaving to these sources (taqlid).

The Rahman controversy is larger than the constitution's uncomfortable mixture of Islamic and secular principles, both of which can be abused. (Take a look at the "state of emergency" section of the constitution for a potentially dangerous, purely secular law.) The problem is even larger than the Afghan judiciary, in which "conservatives" (i.e, those who want the government to strictly apply a particular interpretation of the Shari'a, and are hostile to purely secular arguments) predominate. Undoubtedly, behind the scenes, some of Karzai's chief political opponents, the leaders of "warlord" factions, are exploiting this situation.

"Warlords" like Ismail Khan have been testing the limits of their fealty to the new Afghan government ever since the United States and its NATO allies ousted the Taliban in 2001. Warlordism, as Karzai bluntly tells anyone willing to listen, is the number one defect of Afghanistan, making it far harder for the new Afghan regime to defeat the Taliban once and for all, curb the production and shipment of opium (a problem that has exploded since 2001), build some measure of economic prosperity and security, and cement a sense of Afghan national identity that's needed to make any other improvements permanent. Even if the Rahman controversy wasn't engineered by one of the warlords, it's safe to say that they're enjoying the political troubles in which this imbroglio has placed Karzai. The more the Americans press Karzai in terms that many Afghans find incomprehensible, even offensive, the easier time his opponents will have undermining him.

To save Rahman's life and extricate our closest allies in Kabul from this political mess, American leaders need to speak in more than one diplomatic language. It's important to press the Afghan government on its adherence to the Universal Declaration of Human rights, not to mention the promises of tolerance in its own constitution. It's also important to respectfully disagree with this draconian, narrow reading of the Shari'a. After all, the Quran itself says, in Surah 2:256:

Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil and believes in God hath grasped the most trustworthy hand- hold, that never breaks. And God heareth and knoweth all things.

In other words, Afghanistan's government can make it easier for the pious Muslim to follow the path to salvation. However, salvation will always be God's decision, not an Afghan court's. American leaders also need to distance themselves from Christian missionaries working in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries, since many pious Muslims see these missionaries as a deliberate incursion of the Dar al-Harb into the Dar al-Islam.

Measuring progress in Afghanistan

IN THE NEWS
I've calmed down enough from that last post about Ryan Henry, the Pentagon's Jimmy Olsen, to recommend an excellent article in Parameters about the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan. The PRTs are the closest thing to a classic civil-military counterinsurgency model that the United States has going today, and so far they've received a lot of praise from people who have been examining their work.

Although the PRTs are doing a better job than their counterparts in Iraq, it's important to note where they haven't succeeded, or where they could have made more progress. The Parameters article provides just this sort of sober look at the PRTs, including some matter-of-fact statements about how to measure their success:

Broadly assessed against these measures, the PRTs are clearly having a positive impact in Afghanistan. But this assessment is still only partially better than the “smiles on Afghan faces” methodology. More robust metrics are needed to more fully determine the effectiveness of the PRT program, individual PRTs, and specific PRT initiatives. Such metrics are under development, but this effort, too, is a bit of a muddle. As PRTs cross programmatic and organizational boundaries, different groups are working on ways to measure the effectiveness of the PRTs. One hopes the PRT Executive Steering Committee will be able to integrate their work into a single useful tool for all PRTs.

After you read Henry's article for the sheer comic value, read the article about Afghanistan. It's good on its own merits, and it's the sort of analysis that's a lot more representative of the good work the editors of Parameters have been doing in the last couple of decades.

P.S. I still haven't run out of bad things to say about the QDR. Unintentionally, the Afghanistan article sets the record straight about a passage in the QDR that must have raised a few hackles in the Marine Corps:

The Marine Corps has increased both its capacity and its capability to conduct irregular warfare. Since 2001, the Marines Corps has realigned its force structure to address lessons learned in recent operations, resulting in a 12% increase in infantry capacity and related intelligence support to infantry units, an additional Active Component rotary wing aircraft squadron, a 25% increase in light armor units, a 38% increase in reconnaissance capacity, 50% more Joint Fire Liaison Teams and a 30% increase in reserve intelligence structure.

This excerpt makes it sound as though the Marines just discovered "irregular warfare," when in fact they quite literally wrote the book on it. Here's a key quote from the piece on Afghanistan:

The US Marine Corps’ draft Small Wars manual observes: “Military planners might choose to consider the initial conventional combat phase as the shaping phase, rather than the decisive phase. . . . [I]f our political objectives can only be accomplished after a successful stability phase, then the stability phase is, de facto, the decisive phase.” Events in Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate that the stability phase of war is often more challenging than the combat phase. America’s inability to achieve its goals in both countries more quickly has sparked much-needed debates about how America and the world should prepare for and conduct stabilization and reconstruction (S&R) activities.

The US Marine Corps published the Small Wars manual in 1940, not 2006.

Resurgence or spasm?

IN THE NEWS

A lead article in today's Washington Post notes a disturbing change in strategy for the Taliban. In 2005, suicide bombings, a new phenomenon in this insurgency, raised both the level of casualties (significantly higher than in 2004) and the shock value of the attacks. While the situation in Afghanistan is nowhere near as perilous as in Iraq, the escalation leads to the natural question, Is the tide turning against the Karzai government and its NATO allies?

My answer is, Not necessarily. Suicide bombings are not a de facto sign that the Taliban is doing better, even if this is evidence that it is collaborating with Iraqi insurgents. Taken alone, neither the number of casualties nor the fact of foreign assistance is significant. Suicide bombings are a cheap way to increase casualties, since you don't have to limit the scope and frequency of violence as much as if you cared whether the attackers returned home. As long as you have a ready supply of willing martyrs, you can afford to be more ambitious—for a while.

It's unclear from the press accounts about suicide bombings in Afghanistan how big the pool of prospective bombers is. If there are not many native Afghanis willing to die for the Taliban, or if the supply of foreign-born suicide bombers is low, you would expect a dramatic rise in the number of attacks and casualties. Once the new tactic has run its course, the violence would hit a ceiling, or perhaps even subside.

That's an entirely plausible reading of these attacks, given what we know of the Taliban movement. The Taliban replaced the mujahideen's rule of capricious violence and rampant corruption with its own regime of capricious violence and unrelenting repression. When NATO forces invaded in 2001, many people who once welcomed the Taliban were overjoyed to see them go.

However, the Taliban proved resilient enough to survive through four years of civil war, in part because of the ethnic strands that, like the history of Afghanistan in general, weave through events. The Taliban is a predominantly Pashtun organization, which already caused some suspicion among many non-Pashtuns when the movement first took form in the 1990s. Once in power, the Taliban never lost its overwhelmingly Pashtun complexion. Although it would be unfair to call them yet another clan, led by yet another set of warlords, the Taliban would not have survived had they not been able to use their Pashtun connections to their advantage. Although ideologically and rhetorically pan-Islamic, the Taliban has never completely shed its parochial character.

In other words, there's a lot of bad feeling between the Taliban and the vast majority of the Afghan population—including many Pashtuns who felt that the Taliban betrayed its promise to replace the mujahideen with a just Islamic state. Suicide bombings may alienate the Afghan population further, while the Taliban gambles that these attacks will dramatically change the political situation in Afghanistan or the United States. Certainly, suicide bombings have not shattered the government's control over previously secure areas. In that critical sense, Afghanistan has not followed the same course as Iraq, where a typhoon of violence dramatically changed the political and military situation in the entire country. As long as the United States and other allies of the regime in Kabul keep their focus on Afghanistan, this kind of dramatic reversal is unlikely to occur. The more Iraq remains a distraction from Afghanistan, the more likely it will.

Hope for Afghanistan

IN THE NEWS
Well worth reading in the latest Parameters is "Afghanistan Four Years On: An Assessment" by Sean Maloney. It works hard to depict a central Afghan government slowly building both legitimacy and control. I don't dispute the facts of Maloney's piece, and I do agree that the mainstream press has overlooked many of the details of what's happening in Afghanistan today, including the more positive stories to be told. However, I think Maloney is a bit more optimistic than the situation warrants.

It's definitely good news that the new regime in Kabul has survived four years. That alone is an encouraging sign, but it's not a definitive sign of success. President Karzai identified warlordism as the chief threat to the new government, and to date, that threat has been kept on a leash. Warlords like Khan and Hekmatyar, who might have fragmented the country even if they didn't help overthrow the Karzai government, have been problematic at times, but never a major threat.

In fact, the situation as it stands today might be seen as a perfect situation for reconstructing Afghanistan. The Taliban/Al Qaeda threat is often overstated, but they present enough of a security problem that it gives the different ethnic and clan divisions a common enemy to fight. NATO has remained a steady partner. The Afghan National Army (ANA) has taken on significant operational responsibilities, and local police forces have been slowly professionalized. All in all, not a bad picture, compared to the doomsday scenarios, often based on the assumption that the Afghanis were almost congenitally predisposed to fight among themselves.

However, Maloney's article overlooks some important aspects of Afghanistan, and overstates the success in other areas. For example:

• The Taliban/Al Qaeda threat does give the various Afghani factions something common to fight against. It therefore suspends an historic tendency to fight over other things--sources of wealth, power, and prestige. However, the much-expanded drug trade does introduce a destabilizing element into the mix, since it is definitely something to fight over.
• At the same time that the reconstruction effort has to reduce the number of things over which Afghan groups can fight, it also needs to foster a stronger sense of common national identity. That step will require more common service in the same military units, police organizations, and government agencies than the Karzai government has achieved to date. If these postings are divided strictly along clan or ethnic lines, whatever regime exists today will be that much easier to disassemble tomorrow.
• Control over Kabul and surrounding regions is not the same as control of Afghanistan. Many reconstruction projects depend on control over more territory than the government in Kabul can claim today. For the economy to prosper, trucks need to be able to move across the country without being preyed upon by local militias. For the "blue sky" pipeline projects conceived in the 1990s to ever have a hope of success, there definitely needs to be a much different military map of Afghanistan than exists today.
• The fact that Hekmatyar has not been brought to heel is not something to be overlooked. If the Karzai government's political or military base of support suddenly collapses, an enemy army, which represents the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, is sitting right on the doorstep of Kabul.
• The NATO mission, various relief and aid efforts, and other forms of support for Afghanistan are still underfunded and understaffed. Not only does that fact hurt the effort in Afghanistan itself, but it also feeds the perception across the region that the West will only make a serious effort to help Muslim countries when oil is at stake.

Still, I don't want to rain on Maloney's parade too much. He does point out some very important advances, made by people who aren't getting the attention they deserve for their good efforts.

From Tarawa to Tora Bora

IN THE NEWS
Yesterday, the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, The New York Times carried a lengthy piece about the failed attempt to capture Osama bin Laden during the siege of Tora Bora. According to the article, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld rejected the proposal from Brigadier General James Mattis to use the 4,000 Marines under his command to encircle and reduce the 1,500 to 2,000 Al Qaeda defenders of Tora Bora. Instead, the US military presence during the siege consisted of three Special Forces A teams, who apparently were used primarily to coordinate air and artillery strikes against the cave complexes in which the Al Qaeda fighters had taken refuge. The responsibility for storming the mountain fell to 2,500 Afghani troops under the command of Yunis Khalis, a Pashtun clan leader.

The Afghanis lacked the superior numbers needed to overwhelm the Tora Bora defenses, which were inaccessible and well-prepared. The rugged terrain blunted the United States' technological edge, making the Afghanis' job that much harder. Precision munitions proved less effective against the poorly-charted, resilient, and sheltered Tora Bora caves than against the Taliban and Al Qaeda targets hit out in the open in the first weeks of the war. (The Soviet Union faced similar problems trying to blast the mujahideen out of the very same mountain range.) Khalis' troops may also have been not as well-equipped as their foes, and certainly not as motivated as the Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, for whom there was no choice but fight or die.

With the offensive stalled, Ramadan coming to a close, and frustrated with his subordinate commanders, Khalis negotiated a cease-fire with the Tora Bora defenders. American officials were outraged, but were powerless to stop Khalis from striking a deal that allowed an estimated 800 fighters, plus Osama bin Laden, to escape.

Learning from Tarawa
Marine General Mattis undoubtedly understood the difficulty of the Tora Bora operation, a brutal slugging match across difficult terrain to defeat a well-entrenched, well-equipped, and well-disciplined foe. The Marines have faced similar challenges before, such as the bloody invasion of Tarawa during WWII.

The Tarawa operation was one of the earliest amphibious assaults against Japan's network of island fortresses. The invasion force--approximately 18,000 Marines and sailors of the Marine 2nd Division, consisting of five regiments and two attached battalions--faced 5,000 Japanese defenders. The chief obstacle was a reef that, at high tide, lay under only a few feet of water. Many of the American landing craft ran aground on the reef, forcing the Marines to cross the razor-sharp coral, slogging through the surf, weighed down by their equipment, under withering fire from Japanese shore batteries and machine gun emplacements.

However, nature wasn't the only force responsible for the 1,000 dead and 2,000 wounded the Marines suffered at Tarawa. Although the naval task force at Tarawa consisted of three battleships, four cruisers, and over twenty destroyers, there was often poor coordination between the naval bombardment and the amphibious landings. Even worse, there was no radio communication between the Marines and the aircraft that were supporting them. American planes strafed the Japanese defenses too early--air support that provided no actual support at all. In any case, naval gunnery and air strikes often failed to destroy the concrete and steel "pillboxes" that the Japanese had constructed.

After Tarawa, the Navy and Marines revised their operational methods for amphibious landings. To quote Ronald Spector's one-volume history of the Pacific War, Eagle Against the Sun:

Tarawa made an indelible impression on Pacific commanders as well. Communications were completely revamped, and amphibious task force leaders were provided with specially fitted command ships to replace the ill-suited battleships and cruisers used previously. On gunnery ranges near Pearl Harbor, navy and marine experts painstakingly constructed exact copies of the Japanese pillboxes on Tarawa, then set out the best way to destroy them. More amphtracs were ordered; better speed and protection was included; some of the new models even sported 37-mm cannon or rockets.

From admirals to boat drivers and platoon leaders, the men who had survived turned to analyzing in detail the mistakes at Tarawa, for mistakes there were in plenty. But it was the shallow water over the reef which had been the great killer. It was among the marines forced to wade ashore that the greatest slaughter had taken place. It was a slaughter that might have been avoided or diminished by waiting for a full moon and a higher tide.

Refusing to learn from Tora Bora
In contrast, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and his immediate subordinates at the Pentagon refused to admit failure at Tora Bora. In Congressional testimony, General Tommy Franks stated:

On Tora Bora, early December 2001, United States of America at that time had about 1,300 Americans in country in 17 different locations. Kandahar was, as of that time, still not fully under control. We had our Marine forces operating out of Camp Rhino, which was our initial point of entry into Afghanistan.

Somehow, Mattis' 4,000 Marines didn't factor into Franks' calculations. Rumsfeld himself declared the siege a success--in fact, he considered the entire Afghanistan campaign a vindication of his theories about a light, mobile US force, supported by local allies, as the new model for this type of operation. Afghanistan, therefore, became the justification for a smaller force than the US could have deployed in Iraq, with now-tragic consequences.

Warfare always has its unexpected elements. Defenders of the Bush Administration's handling of Afghanistan and Iraq often cite Clausewitz's famous maxim about how every plan fails to survive the first contact with the enemy. Civilian leaders often have better innovations than their colleagues in uniform, and even the most seasoned military professionals get mired in unproductive or counterproductive strategies. Left to its own devices, the US Army in Vietnam would have continued the ineffective "big unit" operations that had been designed for defeating the Warsaw Pact. On the other hand, the first Bush Administration let the military alone to craft a highly conventional strategy that successfully ejected Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

Knowing when to overrule the generals, and when to leave them alone to do their jobs, is undoubtedly a tough call to make. However, Rumsfeld showed poor judgement in both experimenting with a radical new strategy on the scale of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, and then refusing to admit the obvious defects in his thinking. To recycle another famous quote, war may be too important to leave to the generals. When you overrule or ignore them and the US fails to meet its objectives, such as capturing Osama bin Laden, it's time to pay the consequences. Otherwise, you throw the complex civilian-military compact in a democracy into jeopardy. It might take four years for The New York Times to finally print a more complete account of the Tora Bora operation, but this story isn't news to many frustrated, angry people in the US military.

State-building

IN THE NEWS
I was just reading some material on Afghanistan when a semantic point hit me. The project that we've undertaken in Afghanistan is by no means nation-building. Instead, the job at hand is really state-building. The difference may seem casual, but in reality, it's critical.

What is the US interest in Afghanistan? The shortest version is, Prevent another anti-Western regime, or another failed state. The anti-Western regime part of that equation is simple to figure out. The "failed state" component is a bit fuzzier, but equally important.

Once the regime in Kabul reaches the "failed state" threshold, Afghanistan quickly becomes a breeding ground for groups that make problems for US national security—terrorists and drug traffickers most prominently. The primary US interest, therefore, is in an Afghan state that can police its own borders.

Nation-building—creating a common sense of Afghan national identity—might help state-building, if it were successful. Unfortunately, even if nation-building were as simple an engineering problem as building a bridge, Afghanistan is one of the hardest places to undertake such a project. The country, whose borders exist as a result of arbitrary decisions made  by Russia and Britain during the 19th century, contains ethnically distinct populations—Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hezara, and smaller groups—each of which is further divided into different clans. (I've never liked the word "tribes," so I'm using a different word that is slightly less flawed.) These ethnic groups and their clan sub-divisions span national boundaries, so any attempt to build an Afghan national identity runs into hard geographic and demographic barriers. Why should a Pashtun consider himself more Afghan than Pakistani, if a significant part of his extended family lives just across the border in Pakistan?

In Western Europe, nation-building took a long time, and arguably, it did not precede state-building. For example, the French monarchy built an efficient civil administration and national military before French nationalism reached the fevered pitch of the French Revolution and the First Empire. The centralized state often helped the process of nation-building more than the reverse. For example, the modern standing armies of Europe were a major change from the feudal levies of the medieval period. Not only did they give monarchs the ability to wage war longer and more effectively, but they also became a kind of school of national identity. Military service provided the same set of experiences, skills, career path, and identification with a military unit (usually at a regimental level), regardless of whether you were born in the Languedoc, Normandy the Ile-de-France, or Brittany. Obviously, the centralized state was just one of several historical forces—for example, increased internal trade, urbanization, the widespread availability of printed literature, the differences among nations that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation created—that contributed to nationalism.

To make the picture more complex, every Frenchmen did not embrace national identity at the same rate. Just as cosmopolitan Afghanis are more likely to embrace the concept of an Afghan nation than a Tajik villager, the French urban elite of merchants, courtiers, bureaucrats, and tradesmen often had a different sense of identity than a Norman farmer. However, that's not to imply that villagers and farmers are unsophisticated, now in Afghanistan or centuries ago in Western Europe. Frances and Joseph Gies' Life in a Medieval Village, for example, depicts English serfs as people with lives and attitudes that are not alien or incomprehensible to 21st century readers.

Afghan regional, ethnic, linguistic, sectarian, and clan identifications are, to say the least, much different than those of France in the Age of Reason. Nonetheless, we should be circumspect about accelerating a process which normally takes decades or centuries. We should be even more humble about our ability to engineer this outcome. Whatever your opinion of political science as a science, it's clearly less mature than the cornerstone of engineering, physics.

That doesn't mean the United States and its allies can't help the current Afghan regime build a more effective state. State-building involves many pedestrian and better-understood processes, such as training and equipping police forces, building more durable roads and electrical grids, and planning health care for rural populations.

State-building has to be effective in clear, obvious ways—and not always kind ones. The term might evoke kind, helpful projects like the civil-military Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) that have enjoyed some success in Afghanistan. It will also have less attractive faces, such as violent showdowns with warlords like Hekmatyar. State-building can't be a half-measure, since its rival—the politics among the clans—is a well-entrenched, well-understood, and predictable part of life in Afghanistan. Like the European balance of power during the 18th and 19th centuries, "the rules of the game" of clan politics are the one universal that all groups share. Alliances may shift, but that's just a norm that everyone understands. The new Afghan state is a norm many Afghans don't yet understand.

Slipped out the back door

IN THE NEWS
One reason I don't watch TV news is that it constantly passes my TMBM. I watch what amounts to a snippet of information, and I'm left with the nagging feeling that there must be more (TMBM). Then I wonder why I wasted my time watching the news at all, when there are other sources with more information.

Or, maybe not. Today's Washington Post published an Associated Press story about an Afghan leader released from Guantanamo Bay that got my TMBM alarms ringing. US forces arrested Haji Naeem Kuchai, the leader of the Kuchi nomads in southern Afghanistan, at the end of 2002 (sometimes reported as the first days of 2003--the exact timeline is murky, then quickly sent him to our infamous prison in Cuba. Kuchai sided with the Taliban, fled to Pakistan during the 2001 invasion, then returned to Afghanistan to represent his people at the loya jirga that created the interim government and elected Hamid Karzai president. After the loya jirga, Kuchai continued representing the nomads to the central government. In fact, he was en route to a meeting with Karzai when American troops detained him.

You've now read about all the information that was in the AP article, and you might be experiencing the same nagging sense I had that key facts are missing. Since we live in the Internet age, the next logical thing to do is go to Google.

I'll save you the few ergs it might take to type the search keywords, and the few minutes it took me to discover the alternate spellings of his name. There is more to the story, and it follows an all-too-familiar script.

From Reuters, published on the same day on the Post's web site: Karzai had personally requested the release of the 11 prisoners, including Kuchai, flown out of Guantanamo Bay yesterday. In fact, the Afghan government spokesman quoted in the article used the phrase "repeated requests," which makes me wish I had a tape recording of the conversations on this topic between Karzai and US officials from January 2003 until yesterday. I'm also guessing that there were some heated discussions with Kuchai after his release, since Karzai's office also made a point of saying, "The prisoners have shown their strong support for the peace-building and reconstruction process of the country and have intended to take active part in it." (This quote comes from the original AP article, not the Reuters piece.)

From the web sites of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International: The Associated Press may have little interest in Kuchai's story, but human rights organizations have been trying to draw attention to Kuchai's detention for over a year and a half with no charges filed. The only information Human Rights Watch could get from the Defense Department is summarized in this sentence: "In April 2003, U.S. Department of Defense officials told Human Rights Watch that Kuchi [sic] was a former Taliban official and a 'scumbag' involved in smuggling arms over the Pakistani border." If working with the Taliban before the invasion, then with the new government after the invasion, earns you a trip to Guantanamo Bay, the prison authorities there should be prepared for a new influx of thousands of tribal leaders. The US officials in Kabul should be prepared to have no one to represent a substantial fraction of the Afghan population, especially in the Pashtun-dominated south, the stronghold of the Taliban that, someday, Karzai or some other president will have to govern.

From somewhere on the Internet: Amnesty International organizes regular letter-writing campaigns on behalf of political prisoners and torture victims. For decades, new Amnesty members have been surprised to discover that repressive regimes in places like Chile, Libya, South Africa, and the USSR answer these letters. Unfortunately, the US government has been notably unresponsive to Amnesty International "urgent action" letter-writing campaigns on behalf of prisoners held in the "war on terror."

From Afgha.com: Meanwhile, the Kuchi people appear occasionally as the poster children for Afghanistan's problems. In this story, reprinted from Relief Web, Ruud Lubbers, head of the United Nations' refugee efforts, cites the plight of the Kuchi as representative of Afghanistan's larger humanitarian crisis. The refugee problem is both a cause and symptom of Afghanistan's continued political turmoil, so the US official who called Kuchai a "scumbag" is truly clueless. Even if he were, in his heart of hearts, a Taliban loyalist, the Kuchi people's sad story gives him an excuse to side with the Taliban. On the other hand, if he's too furious after a year and a half in Guantanamo Bay to ever work with Karzai and the Americans again, he might be interested in having a chat with the local Taliban guerrillas, even if he had only been trying to survive while their regime was still in power. (If you want to learn more about the Kuchi refugee problem, aid organizations have been posting information in everything from official reports to meeting minutes.)

From Fact-index.com: Various web sites like Fact-index.com have been tracking what little information there has been about Kuchai's detention. His name repeatedly appears in chronologies like the one linked here, as well as summaries of stories about detentions, human rights concerns, and security challenges.

A few minutes, and I found more information about the Kuchai story than Stephen Graham, the AP reporter in question, included in the story that got me Googling. Unlike Graham, I'm not based in Kabul, so I can't ask the obvious follow-up questions to Karzai, Kuchai, and US officials there, so I stil can't give you all the information you might like. Sorry.

Even so, as an unpaid blogger, not a paid journalist, I wonder if the AP would provide me with a retainer for doing their legwork (fingerwork?) for them? Nah, I didn't think so.

I'm being a bit too flip, I'm afraid. Afghanistan has become the forgotten war, which most Americans probably think we won. We haven't won it yet, and we probably won't if we keep ignoring Kuchai and the other 29 million Afghanis this way.