Barakzai's Recommendations

[BarakzaiAbdali]

The Petraeus to CIA Move is Bad for America Because Petraeus is Inept

General Petreaus is probably the most celebrated American military figure of our time. He dwarfs Schwarzkoph and Powell, the heroes of the 90s era because he has led a war on two fronts and supposedly quelled Iraq. The question though, is whether he really won the Iraq war as if often touted.

One of the key tenants of his surge policy there was to quiet simply pay off Sunni tribal leaders to lay down their guns. There was never any explicit agreement that this bribe to not fight would be sustained. As the money given to these tribal leaders has begun to taper off, the sunni insurgency is once again recovering the men supposedly peeled off with bribes. About a year and half ago, AQ in Iraq sent a strong message to its followers that it was laying low but not out. This news was drowned in the American press, but not all lost on the Arab street:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/wo...st/26iraq.html

It indicated that the insurgency and AQ were doing what they appear to be very good at, biding their time and sending a strong message that they were still there.

Most recently, April was now declared the deadliest month for US soldiers since the draw down:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp...e921687d3b.681

This has to be taken in the context of only 45,000 US troops remaining primarily in bases.

With a Shiite dominated government, and Moqtada Al Sadr playing a very smart game of utilizing US forces to destroy his sunni enemies while trumpeting a nationalist independent role, the situation was untenable to begin with. Iraq's sunnis know where they stand in the new Iraqi order and were bound to turn to local powers to protect themselves.

The other issue is that Petraeus, like Wesley Clark, is a career general. He is not cut in the mold of a General Grant, General Patton, or General Eisenhower. What awaits him on the other side is a series of lucrative contracts and a possible presidential run 2016 should Obama win in 2012. His failed COIN policy and then subsequent failed Afghan surge approach ought to have bought about a storm of criticism... but he is, in the American Press, an untouchable at this juncture. The supposed death of "thousands" of midlevel Taliban commanders was going to break the backbone of the insurgency but has not. Instead, what we are witnessing is a militant movement that has infiltrated the ANA and is operating on its own time, executing its own war of attrition.

A glaring example of Petreaus being unwilling to do what it takes for the benefit of America is this little exchange with Neocon Max Boot after Petraeus correctly identified the American policy toward Israel as a focal point for global Islamic insurgencies to unify over. He also appeared to recognize that the relationship with Israel was very lopsided and brought little national security benefit to American shores:

http://mondoweiss.net/2010/07/petrae...ng-wiesel.html

Here were Petraeus's original comments:

"The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests... Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the [region] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas...."

and then, Once the neconservative sycophants began to focus in, like a laser beam, onto Petraeus, gauranteeing him fa Chaz Freeman moment, Petraeus began to do damage control:


"From: Petraeus, David H GEN MIL USA USCENTCOM CCCC/CCCC
2:37
Thx, Max. (Does it help if folks know that I hosted Elie Wiesel and his
wife at our quarters last Sun night?! And that I will be the speaker at
the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in
mid-Apr at the Capitol Dome...)"

As former director Hayden indicated, the CIA Analysts do not adhere to a military heirarchy and may not take well to a clamp down by Petraeus. In general, the CIA has executed its mission faithfully, but has tenants within Langly that are far more critical of bogging America down in wars that do not serve its true interests but turn America into a weapon to be utilized by effeminate elites with high flying goals:

"Indeed, over the past year the CIA has generally presented a more pessimistic view of the war in Afghanistan than Petraeus has while he has pushed for an extended troop buildup."

http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/177214.html

At the end of the of the day, the real message that discerning Americans get out of this shift, if they can read about it through the unfortunate media smoke screen about royal weddings, is that

A) Petraeus has not been able to simulate his supposed, but unreal Iraq successes
B) He is operating off the president to be paradigm
C) The CIA is about to find itself in a situation where it becomes subordinate to, surprisingly, an even less capable military intelligence leader than Leon Panetta

[BarakzaiAbdali]

I had the good fortune to be hosted by a physician-pashtun from Quetta recently. I met him at a medical center randomly. It turned out we knew many people in common. I personally do not like to turn to anecdote, but I thought that I would pick at his brain regarding his view on the future of KP.

I was, admittedly more than a little surprised when he ardently referred to himself as an Afghan and was reasonably happy as this confirmed prior suspicions that Quetta deviated from Peshawar proper and the Vale of peshawar's staunch loyalty to the state. He comes from a prominent family in the Quetta region, hence his ability to attend a more elite private school within the region that would eventually land him here in the US in a difficult to achieve speciality (he is also a very very smart guy no doubt, so i am not implying he purchased his fellowship spot). He was a Khiljaay member of the Andaraab clan that hailed from Ghazni.

I thought he might be ANP as the Quettan region is a bastion for this party. The general surprises kept coming in our conversation. We discussed the fate of FATA and I told him my view regarding the general loyalty to the Pakistani state that I had witnessed during my travels through KP. I also indicated to him that in my view, KP's Pashtuns had the right to determine the fate of who governed them. He countered me with the historical basis that Mehsuds and Wazirs were themselves supposedly intertwined, before they split off, in the Abdali and Ghaljaay confederacies, making my proposition that the Afghan proper tribes had no rightful say in the future of their lands a little suspect. I countered with the resistance the wazirs showed Ahmad Shah Baba and the attempts on Timur's life by Arbab leadership in Peshawar.

However, the kicker and the biggest surprise at the end of the day was in one key question he answered for me. I thought, based on his debate and discussion with me that he would be a proponent of loy Afghanistan. So I flat out asked him about the sentiment of Quettans and whether they want to join with Afghanistan or stay as a part of Pakistan. He said clearly and directly: "Dont take my commentary as meaning that we are not Pakistanis. Quetta should and will be a part of Pakistan and most of us feel this way."

I answered with the fact that some of his prior statements were more in the direction of nationalist sentiments. He said that his tribal affiliation and his ethnicity were and will always be Afghan, but that his nationality will be Pakistani and that he plans on returning there after completing his training in interventional cardiology.

This is a sample size of N = 1, which offers no statistical significance. It is however a common theme I see. I have encounterd Marwats in hospital centers, Swabis, etc and all of these Pakistani physicians were much more cognizant of their links to Afghanistan via blood, but were still unwilling to break links with Pakistani state loyalty.

More than ever, my travels through the states have confirmed my prior experiences in KP proper where I generally encountered a population that appeared to have a great amount of fealty in the Pakistani state.

* On a side note, and I hope Quettan brothers can investigate this further, he indicates that one of the reasons he wants to return is that there are great injustices going on against Afghan refugees in Quetta by a physician. He told me that there is one cath lab in all of Quetta run by a physician that is very stingy about teaching others his skill set (this is against the physician's credo) and that he basically experiments on Afghan refugees. His hope is, that by establishing a separate hospital, medical school, and clinic the locals and refugees will have better options. Once again, no one should take the law into their own hands as we do not know if this physician is actually doing these things (i.e. the people he is stenting may really need to be stented and he may just be a jerk), but it ought to be investigated if it is true.

[faye]

i thought kim and fred kagan and the neocons were the designers of the moves in iraq and afghanistan, not patreus, b.a.

[kakargirl]

Excellent posts and info by my wror the best professional posts, no one can write like my wror ,a powerful writer my wror is mashallah,great information.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

i thought kim and fred kagan and the neocons were the designers of the moves in iraq and afghanistan, not patreus, b.a.

The Kagans did design multiple plans and signed off, I think, on the New American Century protocol, damning us Americans to interventionalism in places we need not do so for any national security benefit. However, Petreaus is a tool of this policy. Read the interaction with Max Boot, a colleague and sycophant to the Kagans and similar ilk.

[Amir al Ghaznavi]

I had the good fortune to be hosted by a physician-pashtun from Quetta recently. I met him at a medical center randomly. It turned out we knew many people in common. I personally do not like to turn to anecdote, but I thought that I would pick at his brain regarding his view on the future of KP.

I was, admittedly more than a little surprised when he ardently referred to himself as an Afghan and was reasonably happy as this confirmed prior suspicions that Quetta deviated from Peshawar proper and the Vale of peshawar's staunch loyalty to the state. He comes from a prominent family in the Quetta region, hence his ability to attend a more elite private school within the region that would eventually land him here in the US in a difficult to achieve speciality (he is also a very very smart guy no doubt, so i am not implying he purchased his fellowship spot). He was a Khiljaay member of the Andaraab clan that hailed from Ghazni.

I thought he might be ANP as the Quettan region is a bastion for this party. The general surprises kept coming in our conversation. We discussed the fate of FATA and I told him my view regarding the general loyalty to the Pakistani state that I had witnessed during my travels through KP. I also indicated to him that in my view, KP's Pashtuns had the right to determine the fate of who governed them. He countered me with the historical basis that Mehsuds and Wazirs were themselves supposedly intertwined, before they split off, in the Abdali and Ghaljaay confederacies, making my proposition that the Afghan proper tribes had no rightful say in the future of their lands a little suspect. I countered with the resistance the wazirs showed Ahmad Shah Baba and the attempts on Timur's life by Arbab leadership in Peshawar.

However, the kicker and the biggest surprise at the end of the day was in one key question he answered for me. I thought, based on his debate and discussion with me that he would be a proponent of loy Afghanistan. So I flat out asked him about the sentiment of Quettans and whether they want to join with Afghanistan or stay as a part of Pakistan. He said clearly and directly: "Dont take my commentary as meaning that we are not Pakistanis. Quetta should and will be a part of Pakistan and most of us feel this way."

I answered with the fact that some of his prior statements were more in the direction of nationalist sentiments. He said that his tribal affiliation and his ethnicity were and will always be Afghan, but that his nationality will be Pakistani and that he plans on returning there after completing his training in interventional cardiology.

This is a sample size of N = 1, which offers no statistical significance. It is however a common theme I see. I have encounterd Marwats in hospital centers, Swabis, etc and all of these Pakistani physicians were much more cognizant of their links to Afghanistan via blood, but were still unwilling to break links with Pakistani state loyalty.

More than ever, my travels through the states have confirmed my prior experiences in KP proper where I generally encountered a population that appeared to have a great amount of fealty in the Pakistani state.

* On a side note, and I hope Quettan brothers can investigate this further, he indicates that one of the reasons he wants to return is that there are great injustices going on against Afghan refugees in Quetta by a physician. He told me that there is one cath lab in all of Quetta run by a physician that is very stingy about teaching others his skill set (this is against the physician's credo) and that he basically experiments on Afghan refugees. His hope is, that by establishing a separate hospital, medical school, and clinic the locals and refugees will have better options. Once again, no one should take the law into their own hands as we do not know if this physician is actually doing these things (i.e. the people he is stenting may really need to be stented and he may just be a jerk), but it ought to be investigated if it is true.

very interesting story wrora, thank you for sharing but im a bit surprised at his end conclusions.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

very interesting story wrora, thank you for sharing but im a bit surprised at his end conclusions.

As was I. I take it that he actually is not an ANP member and is simply a member of the Quetta Pashtun elite. He described his grandfather as having left Ghazni to settle in Quetta. For that reason he held strong to his Afghan roots and said he felt uncomfortable if people did not identify his ethnicity correctly. For the first part of the conversation I really thought I was going to eat crow and was about to see a reversal of my many anecdotal interactions.

I once met a Sindhi who had attended Agha Khan Medical and she noted the phenomena existed there. She said she found it surprising, but that the Pashtuns there who were her classmates, who were Pakistani citizens identified with the term Afghan, but stopped just short of wanting to abandon citizenship in their nation state.

In general it appears to coincide with the interactions you and I have independently discussed. This population is pliable and can be talked to, but in general the more animosity they feel is directed to the nation state that they are citizens of, the more they take hold of their citizenship patriotism. This in turn does even less service to Pashtun unity.

I am sure I am about to be derided and accused of making the story up. So what I can offer is that brothers in Quetta can investigate the claim regarding the single interventional cardiologist that caths there. Up to this interaction I had no familiarity with Quetta's medical system at all.

[KingKhan]

Petraues leaving the army to head the CIA, should be embarrassing to him. This is the same man who wrote the COIN manual for the army, and the man who takes credit for winning the Iraq war. Peteaus could not last long in Afghanistan, and his strategy failed big time. Petraues increased Air strikes, and special forces mission and still failed.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Petraues leaving the army to head the CIA, should be embarrassing to him. This is the same man who wrote the COIN manual for the army, and the man who takes credit for winning the Iraq war. Peteaus could not last long in Afghanistan, and his strategy failed big time. Petraues increased Air strikes, and special forces mission and still failed.

The Kandahar offensive today is proof of that. The response will be: what do you mean? We killed them all, etc. They killed civilians etc. Little do they realize that their claim centered around a clean and clear up operation that they deemed a success.

[faye]

re; the dodgy doctor; b.a. for years now in india pharmaceutical companies have been paying doctors to test their drugs on patients, some of the patients are not even told what is being done and are told lies, like 'we don't have the other tablets in stock, try this'. not sure if that is indicative of what is occuring.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

From Al Jazeera:


Breaking bread with terrorists Asymmetric warfare is the result of conflict between the powerful and the powerless, reinforcing a cycle of violence.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth...424785830.html


In an earlier moment of resistance against the Western world order, the Hong Kong Chinese opened a front in the bakeries. They nearly wiped out the entire European community on the island by kneading arsenic into their bread. But the bakers were too generous with the arsenic, which caused the Europeans to vomit before the poison could take effect.

The British were trying to open up Chinese markets for the sale of Indian opium. It took them two wars to do so in the mid-nineteenth century and the "terrorist bakers" provided part of the excuse to get the second war started. The prime minister, Lord Palmerston, railed against those who would kill British subjects by "murder, assassination, and poison".

The irony that he was practising narco-colonialism on a grand scale by force of arms, addicting Chinese in order to balance payments, perhaps never occurred to him.
When those who are weak in conventional military terms seek to fight the strong, they often do so through unconventional tactics and ruses. To do otherwise is to be stupid and risk being mown down by superior firepower. Yet tactics like poisoning families as they break bread expose the weak to charges of barbarity.

These tactics fuel the desire for righteous revenge in the West, for "justice" as those US citizens celebrating bin Laden's death called it. Palmerston made his remarks at an election rally, where he also spoke of insolent barbarians. Such desires have a way of licensing their own forms of savagery and reprisal.

A blinkered vision of warfare
This cycle in the war of the weak against the strong is an old one. The strong can afford traditions of warfare which prize decisive combat between military forces. They are genuinely shocked and horrified when their opponents find ways to shoot them in the back or massacre their loved ones. Yet the strong somehow do not see the great suffering they inflict, whether through violence or the kinds of mass slow death that capitalism specialises in for those enmeshed in its lower rungs.

As Victor Davis Hanson comments, "we in the West call the few casualties we suffer from terrorism and surprise 'cowardly', the frightful losses we inflict through open and direct assault 'fair'."

The great problem for those leading revolts in the era of European empire was that their local resources, no matter how cleverly deployed, rarely could match the global power of the West. A troop convoy on the way to fight Palmerston's war of choice in China was diverted to crush the 1857 rebellion in India.

Guerrilla warfare could beguile and tie down Western armies, but ordinarily it could not achieve decisive results. One of bin Laden's predecessors in resistance, Omar Mukhtar of what is now Eastern Libya, repeatedly flummoxed Italian forces with his lightning raids and local support in a fight that lasted twenty years from 1911.
The Italians responded with one of the great tools of counterinsurgency: concentration camps. They transferred and locked up around 100,000 people from Mukhtar's home region, draining the sea around the guerrilla fish in the Maoist idiom.
Invented by the British to deprive Boer guerrillas of their civilian support, the concentration camp would morph into the strategic hamlet in Malaya and Vietnam and the concrete barrier in Iraq, all designed to separate insurgents from those who succour them.

Mukhtar had but the resources of one mountainous area with which to oppose the modern state of Italy. How could a local people counter the weight of the strong and their world order?

End of empire
It was the Second World War which finished off the European empires, draining their resources while Japanese victories punctured forever the myth of white superiority. For those who tried to hang on to colonies, Mao, Fanon, Ho Chi Minh and others had evolved answers.

In various ways, they developed political strategies that could be served by guerrilla tactics. Military operations became armed propaganda exercises, aimed at local and faraway populations. They turned to the idea of the nation to mobilise the masses, requiring the West to devote large numbers of troops to obscure, hot places.
Back in the West, a combination of media and democratic politics made those wars politically unsustainable over time, leading to the axiom that guerrillas only had to avoid defeat to win. Western armies were very rarely defeated in the field, but eventually were forced to withdraw by their own politicians and publics.

But victories in taking over countries only reproduced the problem of the local and the global in new form. Another of bin Laden's predecessors, Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi of the Sudan, had managed to wrest control of the Sudan from Britain's Egyptian clients in 1885. No matter, the country could be left isolated for fifteen years before it was convenient to organise an expeditionary force to retake it.

The struggle for liberation
The nation-state can serve as a kind of large concentration camp, walling off from one another peoples with shared interests in resisting the West. Revolutionary leaders in places like Egypt, Cuba and Vietnam took state power amid a hostile world. They could be subject to sanctions, embargoes, and covert attack while they struggled with their own internecine conflicts, inflicted disastrous economic policies on their populations, and became corrupt.

Eventually they faced a choice between withering on the vine or re-entering the capitalist world order on unfavourable terms.

This was the stalemate between the local and the global that bin Laden sought to bust open with his spectacular attacks on the US. With the greatest armed propaganda operation in world history he sought to generate a revolt that did not respect sovereign borders.

Westerners mocked his idea of the Caliphate as a seventh-century throwback. They did not appreciate what a creative response it was to the division of the world into nation-states, which could so easily be turned into clients of the West and partitioned off from one another. As an al-Qaeda website once noted with contempt, "A 'Karzai' regime exists officially in all the Muslim countries."

But bin Laden lacked a politics with which to capitalise on his armed success. His brand of Islam divided rather than unified even those who shared the faith, and had no appeal for those outside it no matter how much they suffered from Western power. After all, who wants to fight a revolution only to live in something like the Taliban's Afghanistan?

In the late 1980s, El Salvadoran guerrillas struggling against a US-supported client regime considered using their immigrant population in Washington DC for terrorist attacks on the city's subway. Despite their desire for revenge, they cool-headedly rejected the idea out of fears that it would simply call forth a more direct and violent reprisal from the Americans.

In essence, 9/11 was like a brilliant guerrilla raid that exhilarates young fighters and gives them the taste of a victory they can never achieve. Its immediate effect is to call forth legions of imperial storm troopers on missions of reprisal, missions that wreck the rebellion and inflict suffering on those it sought to liberate.

Like bad schoolboys, bin Laden's followers never quite learned the lesson. They repeated smaller scale terrorist attacks that sowed division and generated reprisal. About the only people receptive to their propaganda were other groups of would-be young terrorists. They were enough to keep the conflict going

–

and the reprisals coming

–

but never sufficient or minded to build anything serious politically.
In the long arc of the decline of empires and great powers, the main consequence of 9/11 and the wars that followed is to hasten the decline of the US. Precious resources needed to regenerate the US have been spent on wars of reprisal as well as the fantastically corrupt arrangements for economic reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. Having allowed business to feed so well at the public trough for a decade, US politicians now deny their own people desperately needed funds for healthcare, education, and modernisation.

Guerrilla raids and imperial reprisals both achieve little but further human suffering. Nonetheless there may come a day not too far off, in the violent world of competing powers to come, that we may long for the world order built by the Anglo-Americans and for the grand ideals of many of those who resisted them.
Tarak Barkawi is Senior Lecturer, Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge. He specialises in the study of war, armed forces and society with a focus on conflict between the West and the global South in historical and contemporary perspective. He is author of Globalisation and War, as well as many scholarly articles.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Breaking bread with terrorists Asymmetric warfare is the result of conflict between the powerful and the powerless, reinforcing a cycle of violence.

[MDresden]

Petraues leaving the army to head the CIA, should be embarrassing to him. This is the same man who wrote the COIN manual for the army, and the man who takes credit for winning the Iraq war. Peteaus could not last long in Afghanistan, and his strategy failed big time. Petraues increased Air strikes, and special forces mission and still failed.

Not at all. CIA means covert missions...where are we do covert missions...I think you see the sensibility behind the shift.

[faye]

are you meaning the assassinations you do. like the 9 afghan children and osama etc?

[MDresden]

are you meaning the assassinations you do. like the 9 afghan children and osama etc?

Covert missions meaning those going on in paki land, libya and other areas where the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are. I don't think that people realize when they do any terrorist act anywhere in the world they are tracked for life.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Not at all. CIA means covert missions...where are we do covert missions...I think you see the sensibility behind the shift.

Matt I think its problematic because Petreus is a career general. He paid a bunch of tribes off in Iraq to not fight and that is beginning to unravel because once you stop paying a ton of sunni tribes (which we cannot afford anymore endlessly) then you're going to see the men returning to the insurgency. Look for iraq to unravel alongside of Afghanistan escalating.