ASG Blog
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The Afghanistan Weekly Reader – April 22, 2011
Published: April 25th, 2011
The arrival of a high-level delegation of Pakistani officials in Kabul over the weekend provided evidence of first steps towards Afghanistan-Pakistan cooperation in starting a peace process. However, any progress made towards establishing formal talks remains dependent on building the trust of all the stakeholders in the conflict. Among them, an Afghan public that is highly skeptical of the aims of its government in pursuing negotiations with the Taliban, and equally wary Taliban fighters who are confused by the olive branch offered to them by the Karzai government while the U.S. military continues to act as if it, “…only wants to talk with their boots on the Taliban’s neck,” as an EU diplomat put it.
The working week began with American taxpayers sending off a considerable chunk of their paychecks to the federal government to pay for the $120 billion annual cost of American military involvement in Afghanistan. Meanwhile a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the combat wound without visible scars, post-traumatic stress, costs the nation $1 billion every year (and, for those who suffer from it, so much more).
And while Howard Dean found the political courage to break with President Obama over the failed war strategy, House Speaker John Boehner found that a wasteful, unwinnable war in Afghanistan was the one thing he and the president can agree on.
Articles
Afghan and Pakistani Leaders Meet in Peace Bid
New York Times by Alyssa J. Rubin
KABUL, Afghanistan — Much of Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership flew here Saturday for a meeting with Afghanistan’s president to discuss efforts to forge peace with the Taliban. Although leaders from the two countries have met before to discuss a peace deal, the gathering Saturday was unprecedented because of the number of high-level Pakistani officials in attendance.Lack Of Trust Among Afghans Is Major Stumbling Block To Peace Talks
Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty
Lack of trust is emerging as the No. 1 problem as Afghan President Hamid Karzai pushes for a national reconciliation with the Taliban. Faced with increased international military operations, Taliban elements appear to be extremely skeptical of the peace overtures that Afghan and international officials have made to entice the insurgents into negotiations.The War In Afghanistan: How Much Are You Paying?
Huffingpost by Amanda Terkel
WASHINGTON — As Americans breathe a sigh of relief over finally filing the returns on what they owe (or are owed from) Uncle Sam this Tax Day, the progressive group Rethink Afghanistan wants them to consider how much of their money is funding the war in Afghanistan, now in its 10th year. The group, a project of the Brave New Foundation, has created a Cost of War calculator, allowing Americans to figure out how much of their tax dollars are going toward the war, based on their income and filing status.Talks on U.S. Presence in Afghanistan After Pullout Unnerve Region
New York Times by Rod Nordland
KABUL, Afghanistan — First, American officials were talking about July 2011 as the date to begin the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Then, the Americans and their NATO allies began to talk about transition, gradually handing over control of the war to the Afghans until finally pulling out in 2014. Now, however, the talk is all about what happens after 2014.The Cost of Combat Stress: A Billion Dollars a Year
Madhumita Venkataramanan
In a war, death comes in many forms: jury-rigged bombs, sleek fighter jets, assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades. But a stealthier killer lingers long after the fighting is done, in the psychological toll that combat exacts. More than 6,000 veterans take their own lives every year — about 20 percent of the 30,000 American suicides annually. n an effort to quantify the psychological cost of war, a recent report from the National Bureau of Economic Research has come up with the magic numbers.Battered Soldiers, Broken Plan: Afghanistan in Video and Photos
Wired.com by David Axe
RAMSTEIN AIR FORCE BASE, Germany — The 88-foot-long cargo hold of the massive airlifter has been converted into a makeshift intensive care unit. Metal stanchions hold collapsible stretchers fitted with heart monitors. Defibrillators, pumps, intubation kits, oxygen bottles and other equipment lie ready in their hardened cases. For the scheduled seven-and-a-half hour flight between Afghanistan and this U.S. air base near the Pentagon’s Landstuhl hospital, the seven men and women of the Air Force’s 10th Expeditionary Aeromedical Evacuation Flight and their attached critical-care team will try to keep their patients alive. But for now they wait, shuffling foot-to-foot under the cargo hold’s glaring lights.Howard Dean to President Obama: Get Our Troops Out of Afghanistan!
The Daily Beast by McKay Coppins
With the U.S. military engaged in three separate Middle Eastern conflicts, Dean—the former governor of Vermont who rallied grassroots Democrats in 2004 by fervently condemning the Iraq war—has been notably absent from the left-wing criticism of President Obama’s defense policy. Once an anti-war icon, Dean has spent the past two years applauding the administration’s troop surge in Afghanistan, defending the slow withdrawal from Iraq, and endorsing the military intervention in Libya. But now, it appears, Dean is returning to his pacifistic roots—and he has a message for President Obama: Get our troops out of Afghanistan.Ethnic Militias Fuel Tensions in Northern Afghanistan
The Wall Street Journal by Marie Abi-Habib
MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan—Government officials in northern Afghanistan are building up their own ethnic-based militia groups to expand their influence and keep the Taliban at bay. But the spread of mostly Tajik and Uzbek militias is aggravating tensions with local Pashtuns—the country’s largest ethnic group but a minority in the north—some of whom say they are being driven to turn to the Taliban, a largely Pashtun group, to defend their interests.Mullen accuses Pakistan of keeping terrorist links
McClatchy Newspapers by Saeed Shah and Jonathan S. Landay
LAHORE, Pakistan — The American military’s top officer used an interview on Pakistani television Wednesday night to accuse the country’s spy agency of supporting an Afghan insurgent group that’s blamed for killing U.S. and Afghan forces, as well as civilians, in some of the bloodiest attacks in Afghanistan. The remarks by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chefs of Staff, were the first time a senior U.S. official has issued in such blunt terms in public what U.S. officials privately have long charged is Pakistani double-dealing on the war against Islamic militants in Afghanistan.Boehner calls on Obama to explain ‘pace’ of Afghan withdrawal
CNNPolictics By the CNN Wire Staff
U.S. House Speaker John Boehner wrapped up a two-day trip to Afghanistan Wednesday with a demand that President Barack Obama explain how the “pace and scope” of a planned U.S. troop withdrawal will not undermine the country’s fragile security gains.Opinion
How the U.S. military fell in love with ‘Three Cups of Tea’
The Washington Post by Greg Jaffe
Spend some time with U.S. Army officers and this much is clear: They are obsessed with drinking tea. At times, tea can seem a bit like the military’s secret weapon. A young U.S. officer bonds with an Afghan elder over cups of the brew, and soon they are working side by side to win the locals’ trust and drive out the insurgents.Bring in the Taliban
The New York Times by Anatol Lieven and Maleeha Lodhi
Washington’s military strategy in Afghanistan now aims to avoid the appearance of defeat for America, but for Afghanistan it is a recipe for unending civil war. In essence, it is a version of the strategy pursued by the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s: to build up the Afghan army to the point where it can contain the insurgents without the help of outside ground forces, while seeking to win over individual insurgent commanders and their supporters.Advancing the Drawdown
Afghanistan Study Group
Wednesday, a group of high-caliber panelists gathered at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to participate in a frank discussion on the United States’ strategy for the Afghanistan War. The panelists included the highly regarded blogger and analyst Josh Foust in conversation with former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering; Afghanistan Study Group Director (and former Marine Captain) Matt Hoh with RAND Corp. Director (and former ambassador) James Dobbins); and American for Tax reform President Grover Norquist along with conservative firebrand Ann Coulter. -
Advancing the Drawdown
Published: April 22nd, 2011
Wednesday, a group of high-caliber panelists gathered at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to participate in a frank discussion on the United States’ strategy for the Afghanistan War. The panelists included the highly regarded blogger and analyst Josh Foust in conversation with former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering; Afghanistan Study Group Director (and former Marine Captain) Matt Hoh with RAND Corp. Director (and former ambassador) James Dobbins); and American for Tax reform President Grover Norquist along with conservative firebrand Ann Coulter.
The panel discussions provided a wealth of insight into the global, regional, local, social, economic, and political dimensions of the conflict. The policy prescriptions laid out, even though they differed in some respects, would all be useful steps forward if they were in fact acted upon by policymakers. In the end, the panelists perspectives on the road ahead were succinctly summarized by former ambassador Pickering:
“Right time to get out? As soon as possible. Right time for negotiations? Now.”
This recommended course of action is increasingly taking on the tone of a mantra chanted by all those paying attention to the failing U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. However, when it comes to determining whether the strategy actually changes, it was the critical voices on the final panel that may carry the most weight.
This is because of the political perfect storm that was created when a Democratic president campaigned against the “war of choice” in Iraq and escalated the “war of necessity” in Afghanistan with the acquiescence of a Democratic Congress unwilling to confront the executive and an American public largely unaware that a trillion dollar unwinnable war was being fought on their behalf.
The result, as ASG co-founder Richard Vague put it in the first panel discussion, is that, “We’re locked into something that’s almost on auto-pilot at the cost of $120 billion a year…in a country whose GDP is only $16 billion. It’s out-of-balance.”
The critical leg of support for keeping that out-of-balance war in Afghanistan from tipping over is made up of conservative voters and legislators who have turned a blind eye towards the Democratic administration’s failure to produce a clear strategy that uses vital national interests as its guide.
In the final panel of the day, Grover Norquist, and Ann Coulter stepped into that void and called out conservatives who had passively accepted a war that runs directly counter to their values.As Coulter put it in her initial salvo against Republican supporters of the decade-long war in Afghanistan:
“I thought the irreducible requirements of Republicanism were being for life, small government and a strong national defense, but I guess permanent war is on the platter now, too.”
A special edition of our newsletter will be emailed Monday. This issue will highlight Coulter’s showdown with the Republican establishment that continues to support Obama’s war as she calls for conservatives to stay true to their values and take action against the failed strategy in Afghanistan.
You can watch the first two panels of the ASG / New America Foundation event, “Afghanistan War: Containing or Leveraging U.S. Power?” on C-SPAN’s website. Find the links below.
Panel 1: “The Afghanistan War: Reviewing America’s Strategic and Economic Position”
Panel 2: “Next Steps in Afghanistan: What are the Options?”
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Say it ain’t so, Dr. Greg
Published: April 19th, 2011
Edward Kenney Afghanistan Study Group
The most influential book on U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan may well be three cups of tea co-authored by Greg Mortenson. The story is by now familiar to even those of us who haven’t read it. A sick climber retreats off of K2 and is nursed back to health by villagers in a remote region of Pakistan; touched by their kindness, he resolves to return to village and set up schools for girls.
When the book was first published, Mortenson was virtually unknown, but three cups of tea soon became a mainstay for book clubs around the country. When senior military officers’ spouses told their husbands about the book, Mortenson’s project to build schools began to be seen as a useful extension of the military counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine predicated on winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan. Three Cups of Tea quickly became “required reading” for senior commanders in Afghanistan trying to win over the Afghans.
But the book played perhaps an even greater role influencing hearts and minds here in the U.S. For an American public increasingly skeptical about the war, the book was a reminder of the morality of the mission. As Afghanistan Study Group Director Matthew Hoh points out, this phenomenon was deeply troubling. It helped “put blinders on our troops, political officers and development advisers by providing a motif of US forces and government personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq wearing “white hats” and doing “good”, while ignoring the complex and deep political causes and realities of the conflict.”
Yesterday, a segment on CBS’s 60 minutes may have begun to remove these blinders. The report examined crucial aspects of Mortenson’s story, including whether he actually visited Korphe, a small village where much of the drama takes place; whether he was kidnapped by the Taliban as his subsequent book claimed, and most damaging whether Central Asia Institute (CAI) is fulfilling its mandate. The report suggested that instead of building schools, the CAI was being used as a personal ATM for Mortenson; almost half the schools the CAI claimed to have were “empty, built by someone else or not receiving help at all.”
No one knows how this saga will play out, and Mr. Mortenson certainly deserves to defend himself, but bigger issues are at stake than one man’s reputation. Over the long-run, improving access to education—particularly girls’ education—is probably the single most important tool to develop Afghanistan and combat extremism. It would be a shame if the 60 Minutes piece undermines some of the good work that is being done to help the Afghan people. But it is also high time Americans confronted some uncomfortable facts about development work.
When money and prestige are on the line, there will be always be an incentive to paint a rosy picture in order to keep the gravy train rolling. Inflating the number of projects and beneficiaries a program supports is just one example of how these perverse incentives can play out. Aid and development can also exacerbate existing local rivalries. My own personal foray into development in Nicaragua ended when two leading village families’ fight over development money became increasingly violent. In Afghanistan, the process has been somewhat different. Development money has increasingly found its way into corrupt public officials, who in turn pay off the insurgents. The end result is the same: Instead of lessening the conflict, aid and development has exacerbated it.
Ideally, the Mortenson saga will drive development organizations and governments to think harder about how aid can be delivered more effectively. If this happens, some good may yet come out of this scandal, but don’t bet on it. More likely the story will blow over, and the same detrimental practices will continue as before. After all, the mission in Afghanistan depends on selling the notion that the military can effectively provide development assistance. A real re-examining of development might well lead to opposite conclusion.
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More Real Talk on Morning Joe
Published: April 18th, 2011
Will Keola Thomas – Afghanistan Study Group
MSNBC’s Morning Joe remains a vital mainstream forum for prominent voices that question the status quo in Afghanistan. This morning the show demonstrated its ongoing commitment to keeping the decade-long war in the public eye with a solid dose of straight talk from former governor of Pennsylvania Ed Rendell, the Pulitzer prize winning former editor of Newsweek Jon Meacham, and Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA).
Rep. McGovern provided several of the highlights. Here’s a preview to whet the appetite, from McGovern to those politicians who demand that the country stay committed to a 10-year-old counterproductive war and wave the flag of fiscal responsibility with one hand while putting the $120 billion annual cost on the national credit card with the other:
“Here’s the deal. To those that want to stay: if you want to stay, pay for it. Go to the American people and say, pay for it. And, yes, it would raise your taxes. A few years back the late congressman John Murtha and former congressman Dave Obey and I introduced a bill to call for a war tax…You would’ve thought we’d ran over a puppy the way people expressed their outrage over the fact that we were talking about raising taxes. Why should our soldiers and their families be the only ones to sacrifice in times of war? If we’re going to go to war, we all need to sacrifice. And if we’re not willing to pay for it we ought not to go. I don’t think we should be there. I think we should get out. But if you want to stay, at least have the guts to say we need to pay for it.”
Unfortunately, intestinal fortitude, while in great supply among the troops risking their lives in Afghanistan, is seriously lacking among those in Washington tasked with ensuring that their sacrifice is justified by the national interests at stake.
Gov. Rendell asked Rep. McGovern why policymakers don’t “strengthen our backs when we see that 70% of the people want out?” The answer is that they are afraid. Washington’s primary concern is not whether the current strategy is succeeding or failing, or whether a trillion dollar war does more to strengthen or weaken national security, but whether speaking out against what is widely understood to be a failed war policy will endanger their chances in the next election.
Thankfully, there is a growing number of representatives in Congress, from both parties, whose political courage warrants the public trust that’s been placed in them. Last Friday, Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Rep. McGovern, two vital members of this group, announced that they will introduce legislation requiring the president to provide Congress with a plan, timetable, and completion date for transferring military operations to the Afghan government. Let’s hope that their example, and growing demands to end the war from two-thirds of the American public, will help stiffen the spines of their congressional colleagues.
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How to Interpret the ASG Report and Blog
Published: April 18th, 2011
Edward Kenney Afghanistan Study Group
An expert on Afghanistan recently brought up two interesting critiques of the Afghanistan Study Group. The first concerns the nature of the war—is it an ethnic or political conflict? The second concerns the appropriateness of drawing parallels between war costs and economic and social problems here at home. Both issues are worth discussing in greater depth.
Ethnicities, Tribes, and Politics
First, to state the obvious, suggesting that the Afghan conflict is partly ethnic is not the same thing as saying Taliban are an ethnically homogenous group, (a conclusion that Study Group Director Matthew Hoh has repeatedly rejected). The ASG Report says the conflict is
“1) partly ethnic, chiefly, but not exclusively, between Pashtuns who dominate the south and other ethnicities such as Tajiks and Uzbeks who are more prevalent in the north, 2) partly rural vs. urban, particularly within the Pashtun community, and 3) partly sectarian”.
This, to me, seems like a fair statement although more emphasis should have probably been placed on the importance of tribal divisions. The fact that we identify the Taliban in south and east as predominately Pashtun, and insurgent groups in the north as primarily Uzbek, highlights the ethnic component of the conflict[i]. But ethnicity, as this report indicates, is by no means the sole point of contention. The war is highly complex, with multiple layers and multiple sides. In some areas of Afghanistan, the conflict is best described as a Hatfield and McCoy type “sectarian” feud between families, clans and villages. The United States invaded Afghanistan without understanding this complexity; it is unclear whether either those who support continuation of the COIN strategy, or those who favor peace talks have come to grips with this.
But there is a broader point here that some “experts” ignore at their peril: Politics in Afghanistan are woven into ethnic and tribal identities. You cannot separate the two. Anand Gopal explains this linkage better than anyone:
“…tribal identity is still an important mechanism through which individual interests are negotiated. In Southern Afghanistan’s system of largely informal networks, a shared tribal or clan background with the holders of power means access to state services, resources , and more.”
Gopal concludes that marginalized tribes “formed the recruiting base for the Taliban.” Even noted historian and anthropologist Thomas Barfield, who comes down strongly in favor of rural vs. urban explanation for the conflict, agrees that in Afghan politics “tribal and ethnic groups take primacy over the individual”.
Yes, political grievances are at the heart of the insurgency, but these political grievances reflect complex ethnic and regional dynamics. To suggest that the Afghan conflict is political and not ethnic or tribal is to fundamentally misunderstand Afghan politics. This is not a trivial error. If political reconciliation is the best hope for peace going forward, longstanding ethnic and regional tensions have to be addressed, or we risk further exacerbating the conflict. Indeed, trying to separate politics from tribal and regional dynamics is undoubtedly an exercise in determined ignorance.
Drawing Parallels between Afghanistan and U.S.: Does it Make Sense?
Will Thomas has written a number of blogs highlighting how the costs of the war reflect a society whose priorities are out of whack. My personal favorite compares Marjah in Afghanistan to Camden New Jersey, one of the most violent cities in the United States. But does this parallel make sense? Camden has a local government. What does it have to do with the federally funded war?
First, (again to state the obvious), Will Thomas was clearly not suggesting that the money for Afghanistan could be immediately reallocated to New Jersey. The point of the post was to broadly illustrate America’s skewed priorities. Second, more importantly, federal funds do go towards local communities like Camden all the time. Just last year, the stimulus spent over 77 million dollars in Camden and federal funds have frequently supported local police and firefighters elsewhere. The 2011 budget agreement is cutting a $52 million program to help municipalities hire police and firefighters. One city that benefited from this program…you guessed it, Camden New Jersey.
There is a real question as to how much good an extra $100+ billion a year could do to stop urban decay in the United States, and no one is suggesting that pulling out of Afghanistan will solve all our social problems. There may well be other priorities, but that’s the point. We need to be asking hard questions about how best to spend our limited resources—a failing war in Afghanistan is probably not the answer.
[i] To be clear the insurgents are identified by their ethnicity, not their political affiliation (Maoist) or even religion (Sunni versus Shia). This suggests that ethnicity is the most important identifier. -
The Afghanistan Weekly Reader – April 15, 2011
Published: April 15th, 2011
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Al Qaeda is staging a comeback in Afghanistan. This prompted Gen. Petraeus to reply that the “…less than 100 or so” AQ fighters in the country had never left. Petraeus’ statement raises the question of whether the escalation of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan has had any impact on the terrorist group and whether it is necessary to keep 130,000 troops in the country to manage the presence of a handful of Al Qaeda militants.
Meanwhile, indictments against the principal figures behind 9/11 were unsealed revealing that the planning, preparation, and execution of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center had very little to do with Afghanistan in the first place (and a study from November found that 91% of men in southern Afghanistan have no knowledge of the 9/11 attacks that prompted foreign troops to invade their country).
In addition to the stubborn presence of a handful of Al Qaeda, a few other long-standing themes were on display in Afghanistan this week: public outrage and protests over ongoing night raids and civilian casualties, staggering levels of corruption in the Afghan government, and the continued intransigence of the government in Pakistan, all of which contribute to the grinding stalemate between the Taliban and international forces with no end in sight.
In an encouraging development, another longstanding but overlooked theme gained increased attention this week as a narrowly-averted government shutdown and ongoing budget battle brought the incredible waste of the $120 billion a year war in Afghanistan into the headlines. On Thursday a bipartisan group of lawmakers transcended the poisonous political climate on Capitol Hill to launch Rethink Afghanistan’s War Tax I.O.U campaign which aims to focus attention on the tremendous costs the war imposes on the American taxpayer. The assembled representatives differed on policy prescriptions, but all agreed that the greatest long term threat to America’s national security is not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, but the national debt.
Articles
Member Of John Boehner’s ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ Of Economists Supports Afghanistan Withdrawal
Huffington Post by Amanda Terkel
WASHINGTON — As Congress looks at all sorts of discretionary non-defense projects to cut to reduce the deficit, a core member of House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) circle of economic advisers is advocating the United States reduce its footprint internationally, including by pulling out of the war in Afghanistan.Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy
Los Angeles Times by David S. Cloud
Nearly three miles above the rugged hills of central Afghanistan, American eyes silently tracked two SUVs and a pickup truck as they snaked down a dirt road in the pre-dawn darkness.The vehicles, packed with people, were 3 1/2 miles from a dozen U.S. special operations soldiers, who had been dropped into the area hours earlier to root out insurgents. The convoy was closing in on them.
War in Afghanistan is destabilising Pakistan, says president
guardian.co.uk by Simon Tisdall
The war in Afghanistan is destabilising Pakistan and seriously undermining efforts to restore its democratic institutions and economic prosperity after a decade of military dictatorship, Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, has told the Guardian.A Motley Consensus on the Afghanistan Line Item
New York Times by James Dao
It isn’t every day that liberals like Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, appear at Capitol Hill news conferences with conservative stalwarts like Representative Walter B. Jones, a Republican from North Carolina.War Pulls Apart Afghan Families
The Washington post with Foreign Policy by Joshua Partlow
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — For most of their lives, Gul and Razziq slept under the same dusty blankets on the same dirt floors. They toiled side by side in the same potato fields and prayed in the same mosque, two poor brothers in a forgotten corner of the Afghanistan war.Opinion
As debt grows, so does US exposure to attack
The Christian Science Monitor by Travis Sharp
On Wednesday, President Obama grabbed onto one of the most highly charged issues in American politics: deficit reduction. The president’s speech offered a sensible way forward, even if his proposal was light on specifics. Now that the cameras are off, however, the real political challenges begin. Whether pursued through changes to tax rates, Medicare, or military spending, deficit reduction presents limitless ways for politicians to lose their jobs. And yet the American people demand that their elected leaders accept these risks, and are right to make such demands, because they sense what many experts now know: Growing federal debt threatens the long-term national security of the United StatesFew politicians say it, but most think it: our Afghan war is a disaster
guardian.co.uk by Julian Glover
Now, in Helmand, the military are doing just this. They call their murderous night raids against insurgents a bold strategy for success, when really the intensification of violence is evidence of failure. We are, as David Miliband will warn in a speech on Wednesday, trapped in a war with no plan other than to kill as many baddies as we can before fleeing.One Week in Vain: An operation in Nerkh
Afghanistan Analysts Network by Thomas Ruttig
In March, US troops carried out an operation to secure the volatile district of Nerkh, just south of Kabul. They thought it will take them less than a week to bring ‘visible improvements’, establish a couple of shuras and ‘local police’. A Spanish journalist witnessed this operation and found that nothing of this finally materialised – a case far from the positive picture General Petraeus recently presented to his country’ Congress. AAN has translated and summarised her articles; the context is by AAN’s Senior Analyst Thomas Ruttig.An Endgame for Afghanistan
The New York Times by David Miliband
The epochal events in the Middle East this year have redefined foreign policy. There are new priorities and challenges that need intensive Western engagement. But it is imperative that the war in Afghanistan does not become the “forgotten war,” as happened with such dangerous consequences after 2002The Surge Still to Come
The Afghanistan Study Group by Will Keola Thomas
Perhaps it’s the partisan gridlock and imminent threat of government shutdown over the proposed $33 – $40 billion in budget cuts that is leading folks to ponder the hundreds of billions that have been spent over the last decade in support of a corrupt government in Kabul. Or maybe it’s the possibility of a catastrophic default should Congress not agree to raise the U.S.’s $14.3 trillion debt limit before it is reached sometime between now and May 16 that is beginning to draw more attention to the cost of the war.Al Qaeda Returns: They Say Timing Is Everything
The Afghanistan Study Group by Ed Kenney
One day after a White House Report on Afghanistan and Pakistan stated that “al-Qa’ida’s senior leadership in Pakistan is weaker and under more sustained pressure than at any other point since it fled Afghanistan”, journalists from the Wall Street Journal report that al Qaeda (AQ) is moving back into Konar province…Does this fundamentally change the Afghanistan Study Group’s recommendations? The answer is an unequivocal no. -
Al Qaeda Returns: They say timing is everything
Published: April 14th, 2011
Edward Kenney Afghanistan Study Group
One day after a White House Report on Afghanistan and Pakistan stated that “al-Qa’ida’s senior leadership in Pakistan is weaker and under more sustained pressure than at any other point since it fled Afghanistan”, journalists from the Wall Street Journal report that al Qaeda (AQ) is moving back into Konar province and that as recently as last September, U.S. jets bombed an AQ terrorist training camp in Konar’s Korengal Valley killing two senior operatives.
To refresh the memory, international forces abandoned the Korengal last spring, deeming the valley strategically unimportant. The Afghanistan Study Group, including yours truly, applauded the decision. So the obvious, uncomfortable question is this: Does this development fundamentally change the Afghanistan Study Group’s recommendations? The answer is an unequivocal no.
The likelihood that al Qaeda would move back to Afghanistan from its sanctuaries in Pakistan always seemed remote, given the U.S.’s tactical capabilities. If al Qaeda attempted to return, the thinking went, they would likely face the full fury of the U.S. military. The bombing of the AQ training camp in the Korengal in many ways supports this analysis. By withdrawing coalition forces and drawing al Qaeda into this power vacuum, the U.S. probably increased its ability to target the terrorists[i]. Furthermore, it is not clear how significant the withdrawal was to al Qaeda’s “resurgence”. Subsequent reports show strikes against al Qaeda which predate coalition withdrawal, and General Petraeus is on record this week as saying that al Qaeda is “less of a presence” in Afghanistan.
The Wall Street Journal article does not discuss the U.S.’s counter-terror operations in Pakistan, but most of the evidence suggests that our efforts in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are failing and ineffective: The initial success of drone strikes in Pakistan is showing serious diminishing returns with only two high ranking terrorist on the most wanted list killed in 2010 despite a dramatic increase in aerial strikes. Furthermore, as the new progress report admits, Pakistani forces have failed to maintain control of the FATA. According to the progress report, in one “agency” in the tribal areas, the Pakistani military has had to clear insurgents three times in the past two years. Afghanistan seems like a much more vulnerable space for al Qaeda at present.
Furthermore, as the Wall Street Journal makes clear, our counter-terror resources—particularly the Joint Special Operations Command—are already spread quite thin between troubled hot spots Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. If limited resources are the problem, it seems fairly obvious that garrisoning troops ad infinitum in all of these problem countries is clearly not the answer. So, before committing ourselves to increasingly costly strategy, let’s remember that al Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan is a likely strategic blunder for the terrorists. As long as the U.S. maintains its counter-terror capabilities—a key Afghanistan Study Group recommendation—Afghanistan will be a very dangerous place for al Qaeda.
[i] There are obvious parallels to Iraq, where al Qaeda was drawn into the chaos and eventually suffered a major strategic defeat, not to justify by any means Bush’s ill-advised Iraq invasion.
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How much can we learn about the Taliban in just seven days?
Published: April 12th, 2011
Edward Kenney
Afghanistan Study Group BloggerNow that Afghanistan is awash with rumors that the Taliban and the Karzai government may be engaged in secret talks—with the prospect of more formal peace arrangement to take place in Turkey later this year—there have been a number of articles deconstructing the Taliban in just the last week. So what have we learned?
*Newsweek has a who’s who guide to the Taliban. Similar to the Karzai government, most of the senior Talibs have long complicated histories dating back to the 1990s or even earlier. Many commanders either led forces against the Northern Alliance or were ministers under Mullah Omar. If the Newsweek article accurately depicts the governing structure of the insurgency, there is perhaps greater hope that a comprehensive peace deal with Omar will be honored by the various Taliban groups.
This report also raises a number of questions. How much do we really know about the Taliban “shadow” government? We know that many of these individuals worked under Omar previously, but how much influence does the Taliban leader still maintain? The uniformity of the Taliban leadership is contradicted by Anand Gopal’s report from last autumn which points out that key members of the insurgency were wiling to break with the Taliban early in the war. Their entreaties were rejected by Kandahar Governor Gul Agha Sherzai at the behest of U.S. Also left unanswered: how much of insurgency’s command and control structure has been compromised due to the troop surge? The Newsweek “guide” doesn’t answer these questions, which are crucial to the coalition’s strategy going into negotiations.
*A recent report from the Washington Post looks at the Taliban foot soldiers, and comes away with similar conclusions. For years now, Karzai has been referring to the insurgency as his “Taliban brothers”. Turns out, this isn’t even hyperbole. According to this report, many families have been torn apart by the war. The article follows two brothers—one of whom supports the U.S./Karzai, the other the Taliban. Both acknowledge that they may face each other in battle, but also hope that some day the family can be reconciled. As with the Newsweek article, this report probably indicates that the prospects for reconciliation are better than some might think. To the extent that kinship ties both improve the ability to communicate with the enemy and incentivize the peace process, these familial relationships between ally and enemy can be utilized effectively. But we should also not underestimate the tribal and ethnic divisions that do still exist.
*Adding to this note of caution, Lael Adams writes that international forces have a fundamentally misguided view of the Taliban’s ideology. “…the determination to preserve national and personal freedom and independence [is] the true Afghan ideology,” she writes. She concludes that
“the international community’s refusal to reconsider the actual threat and composition of their enemy on the battlefield is based on their belief that a Talib equals a terrorist and that international troops are defending their respective homelands by fighting in Afghanistan”
Such a belief has led to an unwillingness on the part of the coalition to forcefully push for the reconciliation process.
For the first time since the war began, there is a broader effort to understand the enemy. This trend could not come at a more urgent time, as reports of peace talks continue to increase. Unfortunately there remains a decent chance that our understanding of the Taliban—from the leadership to the lowly foot soldier—remains fundamentally flawed.
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The Surge Still to Come
Published: April 11th, 2011
Will Keola Thomas – Afghanistan Study Group
(Costs for the care of WWI vets didn’t peak until 1969)
It seems the fiscal impact of the United States’ entanglement in Afghanistan is getting a little more attention these days, but it always bears repeating: the U.S. has budgeted $119 billion dollars for the war in 2011.
Perhaps it’s the partisan gridlock and imminent threat of government shutdown over the proposed $33 – $40 billion in budget cuts that is leading folks to ponder the hundreds of billions that have been spent over the last decade in support of a corrupt government in Kabul. Or maybe it’s the possibility of a catastrophic default should Congress not agree to raise the U.S.’s $14.3 trillion debt limit before it is reached sometime between now and May 16 that is beginning to draw more attention to the cost of the war.
At least $30 billion of that yearly price tag is a result of the Obama administration’s escalation of the war in December of 2009. The price paid in the lives of soldiers and marines is a more frequently cited figure, though it can never be repeated enough: 598 Americans have lost their lives since the announcement of the troop surge.
The majority of these deaths were caused by insurgents’ increased use of improvised explosive devices. When the troop surge met the surge in the Taliban’s use of IEDs, it resulted in a tripling of soldiers with wounds requiring the amputation of more than one limb. A report in The LA Times highlights a recent study on the increase of these wounds which should be included in any accounting of the war’s costs.
The study was undertaken by doctors at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where most troops are treated after being wounded in Afghanistan. Officials say that Landstuhl is the busiest it has been since it received the wounded from the battle for the Iraqi city of Fallouja in 2004, but that the number and severity of the wounds requiring treatment at the hospital is unprecedented.
“Everybody was taken aback by the frequency of these injuries: the double amputations, the injuries to the penis and testicles…Nothing like this has been seen before.”
It hasn’t been seen before and it hasn’t been accounted for.
There is no measure for what soldiers who have suffered a catastrophic injury must endure. But there are figures for the cost that the United States must shoulder in order to fulfill its obligations towards those who have sacrificed so much. Those numbers are staggering and very real, but they aren’t included in government figures about the cost of the war.
While the Congressional Budget Office uses accounting methods that consider the budget costs of the war over ten years, “[The evidence shows] the cost of caring for war veterans continues [and] typically rises for several decades and peaks in 30 to 40 years or more… The costs rise over time as veterans get older and their medical needs grow,” according to Prof. Linda Bilmes, a professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, a 2001 Nobel Laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank, have written extensively on the long term costs of America’s wars. They note that the cost of caring for war veterans rises for decades after the last shot is fired. The peak year for payment of disability claims to the veterans of World War I didn’t occur until 1969, fifty years after the armistice was signed. The costs of caring for Vietnam veterans have not yet peaked. The U.S. currently spends $4 billion a year to care for veterans of the first Gulf War. The sum of those payments will soon surpass Desert Storm’s $61 billion initial cost.
For those troops returning to the United States through the hospital at Landstuhl the war in Afghanistan has already taken an enormous toll. The country as a whole, however, has not been informed of the tremendous costs still to come. Bilmes and Stiglitz estimate that providing medical care and disability for returning veterans will cost the United States between $589 and $984 billion over the coming decades.
Politicians from both parties are demanding fiscal responsibility so that the economic opportunities of future generations aren’t mortgaged for today’s failed policies. If their demands are to be taken seriously Congress must direct its attention to the long-term costs of the failed policy in Afghanistan and hold the Obama administration to its promise to begin bringing the troops home in July.
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The Afghanistan Weekly Reader – April 8, 2011
Published: April 8th, 2011
This week the White House released its bi-annual Afghanistan – Pakistan progress report which contained the traditional “cautiously optimistic” tone that has characterized the assessments of both Republican and Democratic administrations throughout the longest war in U.S. history. However, buried among the boilerplate were a few bombshells that further call into question the strategy behind the United States’ continued military commitment. Namely, that despite the United States’ prodding and pleading, Pakistan remains either unwilling or unable to eliminate Taliban sanctuaries along the border.
Some members of Congress rejected the White House’ assertions of progress and had to look no further than the riots that broke out across Afghanistan in response to a Florida pastor’s burning of the Koran to conclude: “We spend all this money and they still hate us.”
The federal government’s money problems were the primary concern of politicians in Washington this week. While the prospect of a government shutdown crept ever closer as a result of partisan gridlock over $30 to $40 billion in proposed budget cuts, the $119 billion spent annually on a failing strategy in Afghanistan wasn’t up for debate.
On the other hand, the debate over whether President Obama will begin to bring home the troops in July grew louder this week. The battle lines are once again being drawn between military officials who want to stay the course and those in the White House who want to keep Obama’s promise to voters.
Articles
Inside the Massacre at Afghan Compound
The Wall Street Journal by Dion Nissenbaum and Maria Abi-Habib
Officials are painting the weekend killings at the United Nations mission in northern Afghanistan’s largest city—which sparked cascading violence across the nation—as the handiwork of a small band of insurgents that used a protest against a Quran-burning as cover for a murderous plot…a Wall Street Journal reconstruction of Friday’s assault, based on unreleased videos, interviews with demonstrators and the U.N.’s own recounting of events, shows a more complex picture and indicates that ordinary Afghan demonstrators played a critical role in the attack.Budget hawks may not turn a blind eye to Pentagon
The Washington Times by Seth McLaughlin
Despite a near-consensus on Capitol Hill on the need to cut spending, about a fifth of the federal budget has been placed entirely off limits: the Defense Department, which is so awash in cash that even its auditors have a tough time telling where all the money is going.592 American Soldiers Have Died In Afghanistan Since President Obama Announced The Surge
Think Progress by Zaid Jelani
During the height of the Iraq war, the U.S. media paid close attention to troop deaths and fatalities, often making casualties among American soldiers leading stories in newspapers and on the airwaves. As ThinkProgress previously noted, the American press has essentially withdrawn from covering the war in Afghanistan, with the Pew Center finding that the media only devoted four percent of its coverage to the war during 2010.Top Afghan Official Confirms Talks with the Taliban
The New York Times by Rod Nordland
A top Afghan official confirmed on Wednesday that the country’s government had been in peace talks with the Taliban. The official, Mohammad Massoom Stanekzai, secretary of the High Peace Council and an adviser to the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said reconciliation talks had been under way with insurgents for some time.U.S. Sends New Elite Forces to Afghanistan As Drawdown Looms
The National Journal byYochi J. Dreazen
The Pentagon is quietly deploying a new detachment of Army Rangers to Afghanistan, increasing the number of elite U.S. commandos on the ground there as the Obama administration prepares to begin withdrawing conventional forces from the country this summer, military officials told National Journal.Opinion
This Attack is Different
UN Dispatch by Una Moore
Foreigners have been killed in Afghanistan before, and today’s attack was not the first fatal attack on UN staff. But it was different than previous fatal attacks. Very different. The killers were ordinary residents of a city deemed peaceful enough to be one of the first places transferred to the control of Afghan security forces. The men who broke into the UN compound, set fires and killed eight people weren’t Taliban, or henchmen of a brutal warlord, or members of a criminal gang. They weren’t even armed when the protests began –they took weapons from the UN guards who were their first victims.Obama Vs. Petraeus: Round Two
The Nation by Robert Dreyfuss
Last week, at an event sponsored by the Century Foundation, I spoke to Gen. Douglas Lute, Obama’s top adviser on Afghanistan, who serves on the National Security Council in the White House. When I asked Lute about a suggestion from Larry Korb of the Center for American Progress that the 30,000 troops added by Obama in December, 2009, could be withdrawn within six months, starting in July, Lute said that taking out that many forces is at the very highest end of what the administration is thinking about, though he didn’t rule it out. Far more likely, Lute said, the White House will order the orderly withdrawal of the surge over 12 to 18 months.America’s Costliest War- William Hartung
Huffington Post by William Hartung
The tax dollars being spent on Afghanistan are enough to offset the $100 billion per year that House Republicans are seeking to cut from next year’s budget, or enough to fill the projected budget gaps of the 44 states that expect to run deficits in 2012. In other words, if the Afghan war ended and the funds allocated for it were returned to the states, no state in America would run a deficit next year.”Al Qaeda returns to Afghanistan: Why is the U.S. failing to keep terrorists out of the country?
need to know on PBS by Josh Foust
The Journal’s story also brings up another angle to consider: the Special Forces. For the most part, the few, scattered Al Qaeda-allied compounds in northeastern Afghanistan have been tracked and monitored by small groups of elite soldiers — and not the large Army brigades that make up the 30,000 surge forces President Obama authorized last year. This would suggest that focusing more on these Special Forces troops – the “CT Approach,” as Vice-President Biden has called it – would be just as effective at disrupting Al Qaeda as the 100,000 soldiers currently there.The Misleading Optics of Progress in Afghanistan
The National Interest by Paul Pillar
The counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is something like the elephant that was described differently by blind men touching different parts of the animal. Descriptions of the entire enterprise vary considerably, depending on what part of the effort whoever is offering the description has come to know directly. Some of the shaping of descriptions is motivated by self-interest; it is in the interest of a field commander, for example, to portray the situation he took over as a mess, and then to portray the situation later in his tour of duty as showing substantial progress.Why It’s Time to Negotiate With the Taliban
The Atlantic by Daniel Serwer
News that the U.S. may negotiate with the Taliban to end the war in Afghanistan raises many questions, the most important of which is, should we, or shouldn’t we? That question has generated a small cyberspace library of its own in recent weeks, with the consensus so far in favor. It is widely believed that there are at least informal official talks about talks going on behind closed doors. But should we harbor any continuing doubts? And what can we expect from negotiations?The War in Afghanistan Comes Home to Camden
The Afghanistan Study Group by Will Keola
The United States is just days away from the first shutdown of its federal government in more than 15 years. Democrats and Republicans in Congress remain deadlocked over proposed spending cuts after months of political posturing and stopgap measures that have temporarily allowed the ship of state to steam ahead without an agreed upon budget. But the clock runs out this Friday at midnight and the prospects of a compromise being reached by that time look grim. Some economists are warning that a shutdown could jeopardize the country’s fragile economic recovery and increase the odds of a “double-dip” recession.
