It was back in October 2006 when I first started hearing knowledgeable western analysts suggest that cutting a deal with the Taliban might be the only way to stabilize Afghanistan. Naturally, such talk was not in favor in political circles in the US, but now it looks as if Hamid Karzai himself is thinking along those lines.
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Retreat and Defeat
29 Sep 2007 06:15 pm
Comments (11)
Karzai has repeatedly offered peace deals, amnesties and political positions to the Taliban. The only thing new in this is the willingess to include Mullah Omar in the deal. However, what Karzai is talking about is different from what some Western analysts mean by a deal, which is to essentially cede large chunks of the south to the Taliban. Regardless, both are largely moot, since the Taliban have consistently taken the position that the only acceptable outcome is their returned control of the entire nation.
I am not sure it HAD to be this way; but Bush/Cheney/neocons/Democratic-warhawks and their powerful propaganda arm (our corporate media at work trying to suppress any unofficial narrative) have so weakened the US that the Karzai/Taliban detente is probably the best outcome possible NOW for the Afghan war. It did not HAVE to be this way, but in the end, given the policy choices made by the far-right with their disastrous consequences, probably negotiating with bin Laden and al-Qaeda will be on the discussion table soon. Sad. But when you are ruled by dishonest, self-important, fools with no countervailing opposition or reason then the very predictable overreach and hubris usually has its hot-air bubble pricked by an unimpressed reality.
The first time the Taliban took power, it was in no small part due to the population's glum preference for a unified if barbaric state over the warlord chaos hell they had suffered since our terrorist "freedom fighter" armies did what gangsters and thugs do, turn to fighting each other once they drove the Soviets out.
If you were them would you make a deal with that Karzai fellow when you can have the entire nation of Pashtunistan?
He's making the offer because of this:
Attacks by Taliban increase, approach Afghanistan cap
http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2007/09/28/attacks_by_taliban_increase_approach_afghanistan_capital/
Bottom line: this war is is lost, too. Only a matter of time.
Money quote:
""The Taliban ability to sustain fighting cells north and south of Kabul is an ominous development and a significant lapse in security," said a recent analysis by NightWatch, an intelligence review written by John McCreary, a former top analyst at the US Defense Intelligence Agency.
While the number of attacks around the capital has been small compared with the number of attacks in other areas of the country, McCreary wrote, the data showed that the Taliban this summer "held the psychological initiative. They still lack the ability to threaten the government, but moved closer to achieving it than they have in six years."
Analyses by the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, a project funded by the European Commission to advise private aid groups about security conditions across the country, found "a significant monthly escalation in conflict" in the first half of the year. Attacks by armed opposition groups increased from 139 in January to 405 in July, according to the project's director, Nic Lee.
"Every month there's a 20 to 25 percent increase in offensive activity," he said, adding that attacks in June and July were 80 percent to 90 percent higher than in the same period last year, showing a general escalation in the conflict, rather than seasonal fluctuations.
"Attacks have spread across the entire southeast border area, with a rapid escalation in the east, and in the last four months in the center" around Kabul as well, Lee said. "These guys have the strategic intent to take back the country."
Here's another nice article which goes back to what I said in another thread about crappy militaries and which explains yet AGAIN why the US is losing in Iraq, Afghanistan, and will continue to lose every war it gets into which is not purely defensive.
On the brink
http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/on-the-brink/2007/09/29/1190486632951.html
Money quote:
"IN a pebble-strewn river valley enclosed by bare jagged mountains, smiling Afghan boys run alongside the foreign soldiers, as boys often do. The foreigners are US Marines and the boys often ask them for a dollar, a biscuit, a pen. And they ask: "How are you?"
On this day a Marine gives his standard reply to a mate, who records it on video.
"I'm on a field op. I have no f---ing money." As for the biscuit: "Do I look like Little Red Riding Hood, carrying around a load of biscuits? What the f---?"
What about the pen? "What the f--- they want a pen for?"
And how is the Marine doing? "I'm doing bad. That's how I'm doing. I'm in this shit-faced country."
The scene, and what it revealed about the attitudes of US troops, shocked US officers when it was posted on Liveleak.com, a video website, earlier this year.
In the video a Marine says to one of the boys: "You know your country stinks like ass? What you think about that? You think it sucks? You stink like ass, too."
The same Marine gives a group of boys an impromptu English lesson, and they recite after him: "I am an idiot! We beg too f---ing much! F--- this country!"
One one level, the video is harmless. Soldiers grumble, their humour is raw. The Marines are young, tired, not knowing what they are doing so far from home, and the Afghan boys seem not to know that they and their country are being mocked.
But on another level the video is a glimpse of part of what's wrong with a foreign military enterprise that includes 1000 Australians — and maybe more if Kevin Rudd is elected.
The video reveals foreign troops who are ignorant about the country they have been sent to save. They either don't know — or don't care — that the kids ask for dollars, biscuits and pens because their country is one of the world's poorest, where almost half of the children under five don't get enough to eat, and only a third finish primary school.
The Marines are stressed, jaded and want to go home. Their cultural awareness is non-existent.
But the boys seem to be quick learners. Chances are one day they — the sons of the Pashtun society that holds hospitality and revenge as prized and equal values — will understand what the foreign soldiers said to them and maybe they won't see the joke."
"Afghanistan is in danger of capsizing in a perfect storm of insurgency, terrorism, narcotics and warlords," according to US experts Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason, writing in Orbis, a US foreign policy journal.
"The US is losing the war in Afghanistan one Pashtun village at a time," they write, "bursting into schoolyards full of children with guns bristling, kicking in village doors, searching women, speeding down city streets, and putting out cross-cultural gibberish in totally ineffective InfoOps (information operations) and PsyOps (psychological operations) campaigns — all of which are anathema to the Afghans."
Without a major change in strategy, more troops and more development aid, they predict, "the US will lose this war".
Johnson and Mason, respected researchers who teach at US military colleges, are not isolated voices.
Retired US Lieutenant-General David Barno, who commanded 20,000 troops in Afghanistan from 2003-2005, fears popular Afghan support for the coalition is slipping away.
Writing in The Military Review, a US Army journal, he warns that the coalition depends on a finite "bag of capital" — the tolerance of the local people. This, he says, "appears to be diminishing".
Respect for Afghans is the key to success, he writes, but the efforts of NATO, in which Australia is a partner, are "threatened by the prospect of mounting disaffection among the Afghan people"."
"Naturally, such talk was not in favor in political circles in the US, but now it looks as if Hamid Karzai himself is thinking along those lines."
Political circles don't always know what we're actually doing, either. While I expect American Thinker may not make this crowd's normal reading list, if you can get past the "quiet triumphalism," Ray Robison is one of a very few who really picked up on a fact that intrigued me at the time, but barely seemed to cross anybody else's radar. Just before the al Qaeda camps emptied out back in August, the U.S. (per Asia Times Online) "had presented Islamabad with a dossier detailing the location of the bases as advance information on likely US targets." Contra Asia TImes' contemporaneous reporting, however, it appears that the camps were, indeed, abandoned in some haste, not methodically dismantled.
I was suprised that this rather significant piece of the puzzle (and the obvious security breach it implied) received so little attention in the U.S. at the time. It's worth noting that the putative clearing project was part and parcel of an "ongoing three-day peace jirga (council) involving hundreds of tribal leaders from Pakistan and Afghanistan" which "aimed at identifying and rooting out Taliban and al-Qaeda militancy on both sides of the border." I wouldn't be so quick to assume that Karzai and the Adminstration have been or are on different pages here based on what anybody is saying in public -- or to assume that the Administration has simply been ignoring the divergence between Taliban & al Qaeda interests, rather than preparing to capitalize on it, or even quietly doing so already. Considering the Bush crowd's reputation for disinformation in so many of those "political circles" here at home, I'm always amazed that folks make such confident pronouncements about what they are supposedly thinking and doing. Of course, maybe by "political circles" you just meant the usual political suspects extrapolating from the same kind of information everybody else is looking at or supposedly leaking.
In any case, I'm not suggesting that Robison's theorizing nails it either, but he is one of the first people I've come across who has taken a real shot tying a lot of the most recent developments from disparate sources together into some sort of coherent timeline. The kind of scenario he posits seems worth contemplating, unless, of course, you start out assuming that the Adminstration is, by definition, incapable of rational decision making.
While I read the American Thinker piece, and I don't have any counter information concerning this alleged "operation" against Al Qaeda in Pakistan, this statement:
"The jihadist threat to the Pakistani government has in fact been significantly reduced."
appears to be bullshit, based on articles I've seen in Asia Times.
The Pakistani military - that is, on the individual solder level - is not terribly interested in attacking the Waziristan tribes. Nearly 300 of them supposedly gave up their weapons and surrendered to those tribes in recent weeks, and over 500 of them have been "captured" by the jihadists.
Perhaps Al Qaeda is in dire straits in Pakistan and perhaps not. What is clear, however, is that Musharaf is still in trouble and the government in Pakistan is shaky at best.
The following article in Asia Times by Syed Saleem Shahzad on September 26, following a related article by Shahzad on September 6, indicates that the jihadis now have a clear plan of attack against the Pakistan state, and a trained group of ex-Pakistani military officers to carry it out.
It also discusses the fact that Saudi Arabia was so concerned about Al Qaeda's strength in Pakistan that they sent an envoy there to try to convince Al Qaeda to back down from its "regime change" policies.
Al Qaeda refused.
Military brains plot Pakistan's downfall
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/II26Df02.html
Jihadis strike back at Pakistan
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/II06Df02.html
I think "quiet triumph" is well back from the appropriate attitude at this point.
Richard Steven Hack:
I certainly won't argue the quiet triumph point! Probably should have left the last sentence off my previous post too; sometimes my knee just jerks despite my better judgment.
What intrigued me most was the idea of relying on Pakistan leaking like a sieve in order to jumpstart an a quasi-managed exodus toward Tora Bora.
This is clearly a pivotal moment in time in Pakistan, fraught with both unpredictability and uncertain consequences. Thanks for the links, which taken together make a useful backgrounder.
Comments closed October 13, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Karzai is just following the lead of those in Iraq who have struck a deal with the Sunni insurgents.
Posted by gregor | September 29, 2007 7:08 PM