Mission Incomplete

[DaMalakandGhar]

?Afghanistan policy is in crisis, at least in the United States. With Osama bin Laden now dead, some are wondering whether it's time to declare this mission accomplished -- or with Afghanistan so troubled, perhaps it's mission impossible? In fact, it is mission incomplete: The Afghanistan mission is going worse than we had all hoped, but better than many understand. With patience and perseverance, we can still struggle to a tolerable outcome.?

" As for peace talks with the Taliban, they are only in their earliest days, and international expectations for success should be limited. But it is an avenue worth exploring, especially given the increasing evidence of tension between the Taliban and their Pakistani patrons. The U.S. relationship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- dysfunctional as it often looks -- is actually more harmonious than the partnership between the Taliban and Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's premier spy agency, on the other side of the hill. Premature withdrawal will sabotage any reconciliation process by suggesting time is on the Taliban's side.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/13/mission_incomplete?page=0,1

[BarakzaiAbdali]

?Afghanistan policy is in crisis, at least in the United States. With Osama bin Laden now dead, some are wondering whether it's time to declare this mission accomplished -- or with Afghanistan so troubled, perhaps it's mission impossible? In fact, it is mission incomplete: The Afghanistan mission is going worse than we had all hoped, but better than many understand. With patience and perseverance, we can still struggle to a tolerable outcome.?

" As for peace talks with the Taliban, they are only in their earliest days, and international expectations for success should be limited. But it is an avenue worth exploring, especially given the increasing evidence of tension between the Taliban and their Pakistani patrons. The U.S. relationship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- dysfunctional as it often looks -- is actually more harmonious than the partnership between the Taliban and Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's premier spy agency, on the other side of the hill. Premature withdrawal will sabotage any reconciliation process by suggesting time is on the Taliban's side.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...plete?page=0,1

Mike Scheuer disagrees with Reidel and assesses his character:

http://non-intervention.com/130/obam...-policy-guide/

Obama’s Afghan-Ignorant Policy Guide

With much ballyhooing, Bruce Riedel led a team that conducted the Obama administration’s "review" of Afghan policy. As is known, the team’s deliberations produced a wonder of either naiveté or stupidity, or perhaps both: 21,000 more U.S. troops to control a country the size of Texas, and a logistical system running vital U.S.-NATO resupply lines through hostile territory in Pakistan and – with Russia’s gleeful support for keeping America bleeding in Afghanistan – the Commonwealth of Independent States. The question must be asked how a man as intelligent as Riedel came up with a plan that amounts to massively reinforcing failure.
The answer lies, I fear, in Riedel’s eagerness to please Obama with a new plan and a deep faith in the rightness of U.S. interventionism. Trying to please the president is a trait so common in some former senior CIA officials jockeying for political sinecures that it hardly comes as a surprise; Riedel very effectively managed analysis on several Middle East issues during his Agency career.

What does surprise me, however, is Riedel’s clear ignorance of his Obama-assigned task, Afghanistan. Writing on the Brookings Institution Web site on April 30, 2009, Riedel bemoans the fact that America has not intervened more fully and aggressively in Afghanistan. In an article titled "Afghanistan: What Is at Stake?" Riedel writes,
"Twice in the last quarter century the United States has squandered great victories achieved in Afghanistan by failing to follow up battlefield success with an enduring and resourced commitment to helping to build a stable government in Afghanistan."

One wonders what Riedel is talking about. The United States has never won a war in Afghanistan. The war against the Red Army and the Afghan communists (1979-1992) was won by the Afghans – period. U.S. arms supplies helped them kill Russians more quickly and effectively, but they, not we, won the war. In the war that commenced in October 2001, we won one battle – that for control of the Afghan cities – but since late March 2002, we have been losing every step of the way. To his credit, Riedel says we are losing the current war. He also says "it is not yet lost." He is wrong; we have lost.

Another, more important point on which Riedel is dead wrong is in his repetition of the exceedingly durable but completely incorrect urban legend that Washington and the West abandoned Afghanistan after the Red Army withdrew. In the late 1980s, Riedel claims,
"U.S.-supported Afghan mujahedin defeated the Soviet 40th Red Army [sic]. … The mujahedin were badly divided, however, and quickly fell into civil war. The United States could have led an international effort to restore order and rallied key players like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to try to end the conflict. Instead, Afghanistan got virtually no attention from the White House or the Congress."

Riedel’s ignorance of what happened after the Red Army’s withdrawal is almost breathtaking, but such a misrepresentation of reality is politically requisite if anyone is to believe the new-but-doomed Afghan policy approved by Obama has a chance to succeed. One might have hoped that Riedel – who worked on Iraq in the years he is writing about – would have consulted one or more of his Afghan-experienced former colleagues for some factual background before taking up his pen. But then again, the facts would get in the way of justifying more U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.

Riedel argues that a viable post-Soviet Afghan government failed because the "mujahedin were badly divided," Western governments lost interest, and Washington did not seek Saudi and Pakistani involvement. This is palpable nonsense. The mujahedin were, are, and always will be "badly divided," but they still beat the Soviet superpower – as they are on the verge of beating the American superpower – and there is no doubt they eventually would have worked out governing arrangements compatible with Afghan history and society. The West tends to forget that the Afghans have been running their country for 2,000 years and have a bit more experience than we do in managing their tribal and ethnically diverse society.

From the perspective of Washington and its allies, the real post-Soviet trouble was that whatever regime the mujahedin built would not be the one we wanted; namely, one that included none of the Afghans who actually fought and bled to drive out the Soviets. Sadly, therefore, the U.S. government, many of its European allies (especially the UK, France, and Germany), and various UN organizations intervened fully and dictatorially in post-Soviet Afghan politics, thereby preventing any sort of genuine Afghan attempt at self-determination. And as they are today, the Saudis and Pakistanis were also fully involved in telling the Afghans what to do, and, just as today, their recommendations ran exactly counter to U.S. interests.

Notwithstanding Riedel’s assertions, in the late 1980s and early 1990s U.S., Western, and UN diplomats consistently tried to dictate to the Afghans what kind of government they should have. That troika wanted to staff the new secular and centralized Kabul regime with Afghan technocrats; secular Afghans who, like Hamid Karzai, spent the war safely in India, America, or Europe; "Gucci" mujahedin who were nominally Islamic, received wartime aid, but did no fighting; and even former members of the Afghan communist regime. In other words, all were welcome to join the new Western-mandated Afghan government except those who wore beards, carried AK-47s, were devoted Islamists, and fought to expel the Soviets.

In the immediate post-Soviet years, then, Washington spent tens of millions of dollars to try to form exactly the same type of strong and centralized Afghan government – the type of regime that historically causes war in Afghanistan – it is trying to form today. And in a lethally ironic case of déjà vu, the father of current Afghan President Karzai – a far more honorable and competent man than his son – was one of the West’s favorites, and he was guided by Zalmay Khalilzad, the same U.S. diplomat who has brought us the recent disasters in Kabul and Baghdad. In addition, the talented U.S. ambassadors Robert and Phyllis Oakley and Peter Tomsen led numbers of U.S. and UK bureaucrats, contractors, and NGOs into the country to teach Afghans the West’s democratic ways, as well as how to organize and administer national budgets, establish the rule of law, and create a strong central regime. This wildly misplaced intervention went so far as to bring in teams of American lawyers and judges to teach the Afghans a Westernized judicial system to replace what we knew was all that silly old Islamic and tribal stuff.

In the end, the U.S.-led, late-1980s democracy-building intervention in Afghanistan was all for naught, just as Obama’s new Afghan policy will be. The Afghans wanted no part of the secularism the U.S.-led West insisted on then, and they want none of what the U.S.-led coalition has on offer now. While the Afghans will accept medical aid for their kids, electrical generators, and tools for increasing potable water supplies, they will utterly reject and fight measures aimed at eliminating the traditional role of tribalism and Islam in their society in the name of secular democracy. Afghans, like all Muslims, make a clear distinction between the terms modernization and Westernization; they are eager for the former but will fight the latter to the death. For our future relations with the Islamic world, it is a fatal liability that we are so cocksure the two terms are synonyms.

One final point. Riedel is a senior fellow at the aggressively pro-Israel Brookings Institution. Is it just a coincidence that his very misleading article about the "need" for more and longer U.S. intervention in Afghanistan appears just a week after Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman identified Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq as the three main threats to Israel? I think not, and that is why America will either be defeated or still fighting, bleeding, and losing in Afghanistan and Iraq by Inauguration Day 2013.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Another superb fail for interventionalist Toramana who continues to sit comfortably some of the year eating of Pakistani largesse and other years in Canada eating of that benefactor. Reidel is also now with the extremist Saban Institute, an ardently interventionalist and pro institute with Israel's and not America's interest at heart

[DaMalakandGhar]

Obama won't rule out faster U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan

Reporting from Washington—
President Obama said Tuesday that the United States must "responsibly" wind down the war in Afghanistan but did not rule out stepping up the pace of the withdrawal as anti-American sentiment in the country flares.

Obama vowed justice for the victims of a shooting spree by an American soldier in southern Afghanistan, saying his administration will "spare no effort" in conducting a full investigation and following the facts "wherever they lead us."

As he prepares to host British Prime Minister David Cameron beginning later Tuesday, Obama said the two of them will "consult about the way forward" in Afghanistan.

The United States already has a strategy that will phase out the war effort, Obama noted, one that calls for the return of 23,000 troops by the end of this summer. Obama set a goal of a steady withdrawal of troops until the international forces completely turn over responsibility to Afghan officials by the end of 2014, and his advisors are now trying to figure out what that means in actual numbers.

"Meanwhile, we will continue the work of devastating Al Qaeda leadership," Obama told reporters in the Rose Garden Tuesday morning. "I am confident that we can continue the work of meeting our objectives ... responsibly bringing this war to a close."

The debate about the pace of withdrawal involves not only critics of Obama's current plan but also members of his administration, who have been considering the issue for several weeks.

While Obama left the door open for the possibility of a faster drawdown than U.S. military brass prefer, he emphasized that he doesn't want to see a rush for the exits. He twice used the word "responsibly" to describe how he wants the military drawdown to take place.

The United States takes the weekend shooting of 16 Afghan civilians by a deranged gunman "as seriously as if it were our own citizens and our own children who were murdered," Obama said. "It's not who we are as a country and it does not represent our military."

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics...mes+-+Politics)

[BarakzaiAbdali]

"And when during the presidential debate campaign one heard Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama pledge to send two more US brigades to Afghanistan to 'finish the job' one had to wonder if either man or his senior advisors ever looked up a map of the country. There about 6,000 soldiers in two US combat brigades and probably only half of them ar combatants--shooters if you will. Afghanistan is as big as Texas and shares a 2,600 km border with Pakistan. The Taliban can use about a third of Pakistan's territory--the Pashtun tribal region--for safe haven, training, and launching operations against NATO forces...When then could the two senators have been thinking? Were they both ignorant of geographical facts? ... Or were they simply trying to put off delivering to voters the news that saving Washingtons Afghan nation building project would require 200,000 or more troops and then would still have only the slightest chance of succeeding?

"Then, too, we have conducted the Afghan war with startlingly cavalier disregard for geographic realities. It is a country that is as big as Texas... how many troops do the US and NATO have in Afghanistan to defeat an accelerating insurgency? About fifty thousand at this writing. Yes, no kidding, fifty thousand. And in that total there are contingents-- Germans and Danes, for example-- whose rules of engagement make their primary tasks school-building, police training, and well digging, not combat mean to kill insurgents. Even among the national contingents most aggressively fighting the Taliban... the number of support personal today must be a larger percentage of the total force than was the case with the 120,000 man contingent that the Soviet Union fielded.... It always has surprised me that no one in the US media ever asks the US secretary of defense of charman of the joint chiefs of staff what the 'tooth to nail' ratio is for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, or in Iraq for that matter. I suspect that the actual number of combat troops that can be fielded on any given day is only the fraction of the fifty thousand man total and smaller than the reciprocal total for the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and their allies."

from Marching Toward Hell

[randolph85]

AQ is practically dead in afghanistan and was never a force to begin with. its greatest accomplishments have been bombing civilians, mostly in iraq. that while its been the true indigenous fighters of afghanistan and iraq who have been giving america hell. AQ at its height didn't amount to more than a relatively few arabs who have never dictated any results on a battlefield.

as for the american that slaughtered afghans, if american justice in past and present conflicts are any indication, this guy has nothing to worry about. no american soldier spent any time behind bars for the haditha massacre in iraq, or even the my lai massacre in vietnam. i see a multi million dollar book deal in this psychos future.

[DaMalakandGhar]

Another superb fail for interventionalist Toramana who continues to sit comfortably some of the year eating of Pakistani largesse and other years in Canada eating of that benefactor. Reidel is also now with the extremist Saban Institute, an ardently interventionalist and pro institute with Israel's and not America's interest at heart

You seems to be a patient of paranoia if not subject to occasional fits of neurosis (kidding ).

Why should you tie me to someone I am not? More importantly, can you tell me whom you are truly loyal to --- America that you have chosen as your home and on whose largess/lavishes you live or Osama Bin Laden and his ideology of terror? I should mention here that America has declared Osama and his ideology as her enemy ---so whom do you stand by America or her enemy?

I am asking this because after reading your posts, your pretensions disguised as non-interventionism seem to me more geared towards serving Osama Bin Laden's and Aiman Al-Zawahiri's ideological/strategic goals than any concern for American soldiers' lives or American tax-payer money. The way you have poured scorn on Farhat Taj (I have just completed a perusal of your posts on PF) calling her Mandrson for the mere fault that she has a Christian sounding name or converted to Christianity indicates you might not be considering the lives of infidel Americans worthy of any value and would like them to burn in "zodakh".

But I wonder in America, what may be your feelings seeing so many sinful infidels roaming around you?

Rest for you and your Jehadi buddies like Ghundal, shadogaygoverner, Afghanistan0000, Manzareh (Mr Tiger), Rundolf, etc.: America and NATO are not in Afg in my interest---they are there in their self-interests---and they would not hesitate to seat Taleban on power if Taleban oblige to do their bidding as Wahabis are doing in the holy kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Who knows people of the book get aligned to subdue communist infidels in Sinkiang.

[DaMalakandGhar]

Shape a Peaceful Afghan Exit

President Obama has been correct in one part of his response to the killing of 16 Afghan civilians by an American soldier on Sunday: Such disasters must not lead to a panic-stricken “rush for the exit” by America and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

If the United States is to emerge from this conflict with some honor, and if Afghanistan is to have any chance of avoiding future civil war, it is essential that Obama stick to his promise.

A flight by the United States would be seen purely as a response to Western losses, reflect callous disregard for the plight of the Afghan people, and lead to justified feelings of triumph on the part of the Taliban and their allies.

Equally important, it would undercut Washington’s ability to shape a peace settlement. The present deadline for a withdrawal of U.S. and NATO ground forces by the end of 2014 allows a reasonable time to search for such a settlement — if the United States uses that time well. On this point, unfortunately, the Obama administration’s approach is not encouraging. If it continues, the current U.S. strategy will likely bring disaster to Afghanistan after 2014.

In the first place, Western talk of success in building up the Afghan state seems little more than whistling in the dark. Not only is that state incorrigibly corrupt, in much of the country it barely exists. If the Western presence has not achieved major improvement in these areas over the last 10 years, it is hard to see what can be achieved over the next two years as the West withdraws.

The Afghan police forces, for example, are riddled with corruption and are loathed by many ordinary Afghans. Moreover, the auxiliary police forces promoted by the United States to fight the Taliban in southern Afghanistan are in many ways a throwback to the heroin-trading, grossly oppressive local militias of the early 1990s — which the Taliban came into being to crush.

More success has been achieved in building up the Afghan National Army; but the weakness of the civilian state could well make this army as much of a liability as a strength. The recent history of Pakistan, much of Africa, and Afghanistan in the 1970s shows what is likely to happen when the military is the only strong institution in a very weak state.

A future military takeover in Afghanistan is made more likely by the fact that Washington has no plan for who to put in place after President Hamid Karzai steps down, as he is constitutionally bound to do, in 2014. This is not the Obama administration’s fault. Even the anti-Taliban elements of Afghan society are so fractured along ethnic and political lines that it may be impossible to find a candidate who could take over as an executive president without bringing down the entire existing political order.

Some senior Western military figures say they believe a “half-way decent military dictatorship” is the best that can be hoped for. That might be true if Afghan soldiers were united. But the National Army too is deeply divided ethnically — and many Pashtun families deliberately have one son or nephew with the army and another with the Taliban to be sure of protection regardless of which side comes out on top.

If enough Pashtun soldiers are alienated by developments in Kabul, they will desert with their weapons to join either the Taliban or local warlords — and the army will collapse.

Given all these threats, it would make far more sense for the United States to seek a settlement with the Taliban while it still has cards to play. The Obama administration has opened direct talks with the Taliban, through a Taliban office being established in Qatar. Unfortunately, powerful sections of the Washington establishment wish to use these talks not to seek an agreement with the Taliban as a whole, but to try to split that organization. They are counting on divisions among the Taliban, even as they forget that the West’s side in the Afghan civil war is even more divided.

Moreover, one element of the Obama administration’s strategy would make agreement impossible. This is the insistence, deeply unpopular among many Afghans, that the United States retain bases, special forces and military advisers in Afghanistan until at least 2024.

Washington wants to keep forces on the ground that can both continue to hunt Al Qaeda and prop up an administration in Kabul. In practice, however, this plan risks landing the United States with the worst of all worlds. The continued presence of such forces will make agreement with the Taliban impossible, so the war will continue. And if the Kabul administration and army disintegrate, then U.S. advisers will be mired in the resulting disaster.

Instead, Washington should pursue a peace settlement along the following lines: the guarantee of a complete withdrawal of Western forces; the exclusion by the Taliban of all international terrorists from the areas they control; and a Taliban crackdown on heroin production in return for international development aid to those areas.

Central to such a settlement would be an Afghan national debate on a new constitution, abandoning the present highly centralized form of government in favor of decentralization and a nonexecutive presidency. That would allow the United States to escape from the trap of how to replace Karzai, and allow the Taliban and their allies to take effective control of the south and east of the country, while acknowledging the right of other groups to administer their own areas.

America and its allies should seek such a settlement because, after 2014, the attempt to suppress the Taliban in the south and east promises, at best, an unending conflict, at worst, a catastrophic collapse of the Afghan state. All the evidence of the past 10 years suggests that the Taliban simply have too much support in these areas and among the Pashtuns of Pakistan ever to be defeated.

The reason the Taliban should accept such a settlement is that taking over Pashtun areas where they have strong support is not at all the same thing as conquering non-Pashtun populations who are bitterly hostile to them. They had great difficulty doing this in the 1990s when only Iran and a weak Russia supported their opponents. This time, the anti-Taliban forces would receive aid from the United States, Russia and India.

In other words, another decade of civil war would be very likely to end with a de facto territorial settlement close to the one that I am advocating today. The difference would be that in the meantime innumerable more Afghans and Americans would have died.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/opinion/shape-a-peaceful-afghan-exit.html?pagewanted=2

[DaMalakandGhar]

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is discussing whether to reduce American forces in Afghanistan by at least an additional 20,000 troops by 2013, reflecting a growing belief within the White House that the mission there has now reached the point of diminishing returns....

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/world/asia/us-officials-debate-speeding-up-afghan-pullout.html?ref=opinion