The Afghanistan troop withdraws

The number announced, 33,000, is more than I was expecting but it is heavily back-loaded into late next year. Withdraws for this year are about as minimal as I expected. I am not counting the chickens before they hatch. There is plenty of potential for the withdraw schedule to slip due to "changing circumstances" -- although fresh evidence that the war goes poorly would be better interpreted as a reason to speed up the drawdown than for slowing it.

Corruption and the "war on terror

From the WaPo:

U.S. to temper stance on Afghan corruption
By Greg Jaffe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 3, 2010; 8:31 PM

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan are developing a strategy that would tolerate some corruption in the country but target the most corrosive abuses by more tightly regulating U.S. contracting procedures, according to senior defense officials.
...

So corruption is Afghanistan is to be tolerated for the sake of military expediency. Do not be shocked that this happens on the "war on terror" home front as well for what else are measures such as warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention and executive assassination orders but corruptions of the Constitution and the rule of law?

There is a difference however. In Afghanistan minor corruption is tolerated while major corruption is still opposed. Here it is the reverse.

General, If I'm going down on this I'm taking you with me.

Obama relieves Gen. Stanley McChrystal from duties as commander of U.S. and NATO troops and names Gen. David Petraeus as replacement

Advice from General Petraeus along with that of General McChrystal helped to put President Obama on the ambitious nation building course in Afghanistan against the advice of others led by Vice President Biden. Now that Obama's choice looks increasingly like a blunder that puts him in the hot seat he perhaps draws satisfaction from making sure that Petraeus will be in a hot seat of his own. I wouldn't be surprised if the selection of Petraeus was a suggestion from VP Biden.

About that withdrawal date.

I am about as certain as I can be that Karzai, the Taliban, the Pakistan military and just about everyone else in the region expected all along that the insurgency would outlast the occupation. If Obama had insisted, Bush-Cheney style, that we would stay as long it takes everyone over there would have dismissed it as chest-thumping bluster. Only our domestic warhawks could possibly talk themselves into actually believing such a thing. No US President could deliver on such a promise. His time in office is limited as is the patience of the American public. Under the circumstances, Obama was wise to use a target date, (not actually a promise), for withdrawal as a spur for Afghan reform, It probably won't work, but there is little else to even try.

How Afganistan will be lost

Over at Antiwar.com Ryan McCarl observes that advocates of General McChrystal's COIN proposals have their excuse for failure built into the strategy:

Because the number of troops that can be reasonably demanded for a COIN operation is essentially limitless, mission failure can be blamed on the executive branch for not sending enough troops rather than on military leaders, the combat environment, or the COIN playbook itself. As Gen. McChrystal wrote in his assessment: "Success is not ensured by additional forces alone, but continued underresourcing will likely cause failure."

Perhaps in anticipation of eventual accusations of underresourcing National Security Adviser James L. Jones in a SPIEGEL interview states:

I believe we will not solve the problem with troops alone. The minimum number is important, of course. But there is no maximum number, however. And what's really important in Afghanistan is that with this new administration we insist on good governance, that it be coordinated with economic development and security, and that we have much, much better success at handing over responsibility for these three things to the Afghans.

This apparently prepares to blame an eventual defeat in Afghanistan on the Afghans.

It is a safe bet that "who lost Afghanistan" will be argued inconclusively for many years afterward. Perhaps 22nd century historians will arrive at a "settled" and generally accepted version -- and that, I predict, will be that the venture had so many causes of failure recognizable in advance that the only hard to explain aspect is why it was attempted in the first place. (You just had to be there).

Afghanistan war is doomed

I have been reading all the arguments that half measures arguments will only lead to a lost war and, frankly, I am convinced they apply just as well to General McChrystal's proposals. The war will be lost his way as well with Vice President Biden's except with greater casualties and expense. There is simply no reasonable way for an occupier so foreign culturally to the occupied to defeat a national resistance. The population will never be sufficiently behind the occupier's puppet government. It would take millions of troops and a permanent curfew just to maintain a semblance of order in the cities. The countryside would remain a hotbed of guerrilla warfare. It would be at best an indefinite stalemate -- until we went broke trying to buy "victory" and/or ran out of cannon fodder and/or faced rebellion at home.

If we were fighting another Western country it would be different. The natives would see a puppet regime as not so different from what they would have had anyhow. These poor, illiterate tribal Muslims, however, would never consent to any government that we, with our modern Western values, could allow. This war is doomed. The best course is to get out.

The theory that the war is necessary to deny Al Qaeda a base makes no sense. Al Qaeda has never needed the kind of base used for training troops. They are not an military organization. They are terrorists. Their kind of attacks can be planed and prepared almost anywhere, including European NATO countries and the United States. Why is this war being fought?

The only supporters of this war who have a clear and superficially achievable purpose are the neocons and their military industrial allies. Between them they envision a benevolent global US hegemony, a form of empire, maintained by overwhelming military superiority over any potential rival. One reason for the Afghanistan venture in particular is its proximity to China which, as it grows in economic power. may need to be intimidated into subservience. But this utopian neocon enterprise is beyond achievement. The cost in blood and treasure is unbearable and there will always be the Afghanistans and Vietnams of the world which will not surrender and will be nothing but permanent bloody killing fields for US and allied troops, (unless and until they leave).

The Project for the Upcoming Chinese Century, (PUCC)

Practically all the relevant history from the British and Soviet experiences in Afghanistan for General McChrystal's all out counter-insurgency war points to the likelihood of a very expensive and tragic failure. Afghanistan misadventures were major factors in the decline of both the British and Soviet empires. The "strategy" announced by President Obama in March ignored those histories and also largely passed over the subject of means, focusing instead on what the desired ends should be. Now the strongest arguments against McChrystal's proposals are his own estimates of the resources required which must have come as a shock to President Obama.

Even in the unlikely event that public support can be sustained over the many years long effort anticipated the cost will virtually guarantee that China will overtake the US economically. The McChrystal plan can justly be named as the Project for the Upcoming Chinese Century, (PUCC).

The conquest of Afghanistan

From Evidence of fraud could force Afghan runoff vote at McClatchy:

Administration officials Monday said that given the likelihood of an eventual Karzai victory, the U.S. and its allies should press him to form a coalition government that would include Abdullah and some Western-educated technocrats and to crack down on rampant official corruption.

More honest would be to declare Afghanistan a conquered territory and impose direct military occupation rule, letting it be known that Karzai, Abdullah and others would be serving as informers and translators. That's what it will have to amount to anyhow since any actual Afghan government would be a liability, not an asset, in the war.

Obama can be the new LBJ

Whipping up adequate support for a full scale anti-insurgency war in Afghanistan, as proposed by General McChrystal, requires the skills of a demagogue. He must be willing to lie about the prospects of success and to demonize the enemy beyond even its real sins. Anything less and the patience of the public will soon run out.

I think Obama can be pushed far enough by politics and cynicism into committing to the war but not far enough to pull it off as a "wartime president". The most likely result is that like LBJ he will become too unpopular to run for a second term and will be succeeded by a Republican running on a pledge to bring the troops home.

Our Afghan allies

From Military.com, Afghan Police Say no to US Troop Surge:

Mohammad Pashtun, the chief of the criminal investigation unit in southern Kandahar province, the Taliban's heartland, said that the money would be better off going to Afghan forces.

"Increasing international troops is not useful," he said. "For the expense of one American soldier, we can pay for 15 Afghan soldiers or police."

The top U.S. and NATO spokesman in Afghanistan, Adm. Gregory Smith, agreed that Afghan forces would be key to defeating the Taliban. But he added that the "major way forward" was to partner international troops with Afghan ones on a day-to-day basis, and not simply for the West to train Afghan forces and send them out on their own.

There are numerous reports of Afghan National Police (ANP) corruption so the Afgan cops have an ulterior motive for wanting to go out on their own; i.e., they want to be able to shake down villagers, or even take bribes from the enemy, without witnesses or interference. I believe their US trainers do not really trust the ANP, or the Afghan National Army (ANA), to be very effective even without corruption. They know that many of their trainees are there only for the pay and may avoid battle with the enemy given the chance. They know that some are actually Taliban spies.

There is a valuable report at Asia Times on the status of the Afghan forces: US wins minds, Afghan hearts are lost By Ann Jones.

In my estimation the old search and destroy approach was rightly abandoned by the generals as counterproductive. However the new more restrained counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy is not even close to being sufficiently better to "win" the war in Afghanistan, (whatever that means). It has uneven support among the troops. It only leads to a Viet Nam-like quagmire war and eventual humiliating withdraw ordered by a successor US President who will have campaigned on a pledge to bring the troops home. Neither can a campaign limited to missile and air strikes and special forces raids do much beyond providing some political cover for withdraw of stationed land forces.

The fact is that the main defenses against future terror strikes at home are what can be done within our own borders and, along with that, what can be done with diplomacy and foreign policy to discredit terrorist organizations abroad and minimize their support. Military force is, at its best. almost useless against organized terror much as it is usually an ineffective and inappropriate tool for use against organized crime. At much less than its best, military force is counterproductive and that it how it tends to be applied even when the strategists and military historians and theorists know better.