Afghanistan, like Iraq and the Republicans, more broken than ever.
« on: 2008-06-17 00:14:41 »
THE MARCH TO FOLLY ON THE AFGHAN BORDER
Source: EricMargolis.com Authors: Eric Margolis Dated: 2008-06-16
The killing of 11 Pakistani soldiers by US air strikes last week showed that the American-led war in Afghanistan is relentlessly spreading into Pakistan, one of America’s oldest, most faithful allies.
Pakistan’s military branded the air attack `unprovoked and cowardly.’ However, the unstable government in Islamabad, led by the Pakistan People’s Party(PPP), which depends on large infusions of US aid, later softened its protests. This is in good part because the PPP leader, Asif Zardari, is being shielded from judicial corruption investigations through a quiet deal with President Pervez Musharraf and Washington to thwart reinstatement of Pakistan’s ousted supreme court justices.
The US, which used a B-1 heavy bomber and F-15 strike aircraft in the attacks, called its action, `self-defense.’
What actually happened on the wild Pakistan-Afghanistan border remains murky. But there are reports that US and Pakistani troops engaged in a direct clash and heavy firefight that was ended by the American bombing.
In recent months, US aircraft, Predator hunter-killer drones, US Special Forces and CIA teams have been launching attacks inside Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Afghan border. The Pashtun tribes inhabiting this traditionally autonomous mountain region are ardent supporters of their fellow Afghan Pashtuns who form the core of Taliban and reject the current Afghan-Pakistan border, known as the Durand Line, as an artificial creation of British imperialism – which it undeniably was.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been openly advocating major ground and air attacks by US forces into Pakistan. American neoconservatives have been denouncing Pakistan as a `rogue state’ and a `sponsor of international terrorism,’ and are calling for US air and missile strikes against Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and reactors.
But instead of intimidating the pro-Taliban Pakistani Pashtun, limited US air strikes flown from secret US bases inside Pakistan have ignited a firestorm of anti-western fury among FATA’s warlike tribesmen and increased their support for Taliban. Pakistanis are united in their opposition to any US strikes into their nation and enraged at the United States for supporting dictator Pervez Musharraf.
The US is emulating Britain’s colonial divide and rule tactics by offering up to $500,000 to local Pashtun tribal leaders to get them to fight pro-Taliban elements, causing more chaos in the already turbulent region, and stoking old tribal rivalries. The US is using this same tactic in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This week’s deadly US attacks pointedly again illustrate the fact that the 60,000 US and NATO ground troops in Afghanistan are incapable of even holding off Taliban and its allies, even though the Afghan resistance has nothing but small arms to battle the west’s high-tech arsenal. Further evidence was supplied by an audacious Taliban raid on Kandahar prison, which liberated 450-500 [ Hermit : Later acknowledged by official sources to have been 1200 ] Taliban prisoners and humiliated Canadian and NATO forces policing the region.
US air power is almost always called in when there are clashes with Taliban or other anti-western forces. In fact, US and NATO infantry’s main function is to draw Taliban into battle so the Afghan mujahidin can be bombed from the air.
Without the round the clock overhead presence of US airpower, which can respond in minutes, western forces in Afghanistan would risk being isolated, cut off from supplies, and defeated. A sizeable portion of NATO manpower in Afghanistan already goes to defending bases and supply depots. However, NATO’s long supply lines that bring in fuel, food, and ammunition across FATA from US-run bases in Pakistan are increasingly under attack. Forty giant fuel tankers were recently destroyed at the Torkham border crossing.
But these deadly air strikes, as we have seen in recent weeks, are blunt instruments. Guerilla wars are all about controlling civilian populations. The US air attacks often kill as many or even more civilians than Taliban fighters. Dead civilians are routinely described away as `suspected Taliban fighters.’
Mighty US B-1 heavy bombers are not going to win the hearts and minds of Afghans. Each bombed village and massacred caravan wins new recruits to Taliban and its allies.
Now, the US and its NATO allies are edging ever closer to open warfare against Pakistan at a time when they are unable to defeat Taliban fighters inside Afghanistan due to lack of combat troops. The outgoing commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, US Gen. Dan McNeill, recently admitted he would need 400,000 soldiers to pacify that nation. The US and NATO have a combined force of around 60,000 troops in Afghanistan. [ Hermit : Virians will remember that I said this well before the invasion of Afghanistan on the pretext of capturing bin Laden. ]
`We just need to occupy Pakistan’s tribal territory,’ insists the Pentagon, `to stop its Pashtun tribes from supporting and sheltering Taliban, and shut down Taliban bases there.’ US commanders in Vietnam used the same faulty reasoning to justify their counter-productive expansion of the Indochina War into Cambodia.
A US-led invasion of FATA, as urged by Secretary Gates, will simply push pro-Taliban Pashtun militants further into Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier province, drawing over-extended western troops ever deeper into Pakistan and making their supply lines all the more vulnerable. Already overextended western forces will be stretched even thinner and clashes with Pakistan’s tough regular army may become inevitable.
Widening the Afghan War into Pakistan is military stupidity on a grand scale and political madness. It could very well end up a bigger disaster than Iraq. But Washington and its obedient allies seem hell-bent on charging into a wider regional war that no number of heavy bombers will win.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
The new "precise, surgical" tactics have killed scores of insurgent leaders and made it extremely difficult for Pakistan-based Taliban leaders to prosecute the campaign, according to Brig Mark Carleton-Smith.
In the past two years an estimated 7,000 Taliban have been killed, the majority in southern and eastern Afghanistan. But it is the "very effective targeted decapitation operations" that have removed "several echelons of commanders".
This in turn has left the insurgents on the brink of defeat, the head of Task Force Helmand said.
"The Taliban are much weaker," he said from 16 Air Assault Brigade headquarters in Lashkar Gah.
"The tide is clearly ebbing not flowing for them. Their chain of command is disrupted and they are short of weapons and ammunition."
Last year's killing of Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban chief, most likely by the Special Boat Service, was "a seminal moment in dislocating" their operation in southern Afghanistan, said Brig Carleton-Smith, 44, who has extensive operational experience in Afghanistan and Iraq and has commanded elite Army troops.
"We have seen increasing fissures of stress through the whole organisation that has led to internecine and fratricidal strife between competing groups."
Taliban fighters are apparently becoming increasingly unpopular in Helmand, where they are reliant on the local population for food and water.
They have also been subjected to strikes by the RAF's American-made Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle and the guided Royal Artillery missile system, which have both proved a major battlefield success.
"I can therefore judge the Taliban insurgency a failure at the moment," said Brig Carleton-Smith. "We have reached the tipping point."
The task is now to regenerate the economy to win over the civilian population of Helmand, the base for 8,000 British soldiers.
Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, appears to be a town on the cusp of an economic boom if security remains stable.
A new airport will be ready by the end of this year and a packaging factory by the end of next year.
This could enable the soil-rich "fruit basket of Afghanistan" to export its food.
Alternative crops, such as wheat or rape, could prove a greater attraction than Helmand's massive opium trade, especially as international prices continue to rise.
Much of the Taliban operation is run by Mullah Omar and to a lesser extent al-Qa'eda from their headquarters in Quetta, across the border in Pakistan.
The ability of what is known as the Quetta Shura leadership had been "hugely reduced" and its influence "increasingly marginalised", the brigadier said. Michael Ryder, the senior Foreign Office official in Helmand, agreed that intelligence assessments suggested that the Taliban had become "fractured and fragmented".
"There's a lot of suspicion from southern Taliban commanders of the agenda of Quetta Shura," he said, with the leaders trying to draw in an estimated £20 million a year from the opium trade.
The number of Afghans involved in the insurgency has also fallen, with increasing numbers of Pakistanis, Chechens, Uzbeks and Arabs found dead on the battlefield.
However, with the shortage of helicopters still a problem, most movement is by road and Brig Carleton-Smith warned that British forces must prepare for an increasingly Iraq-style insurgency as the Taliban modified its tactics from pitched battles to ambushes and roadside bombs.
President George W Bush has enlisted British special forces in a final attempt to capture Osama Bin Laden before he leaves the White House.
Defence and intelligence sources in Washington and London confirmed that a renewed hunt was on for the leader of the September 11 attacks. “If he [Bush] can say he has killed Saddam Hussein and captured Bin Laden, he can claim to have left the world a safer place,” said a US intelligence source.
Bush arrives in Britain today on the final leg of his eight-day farewell tour of Europe. He will have tea with the Queen and dinner with Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah before holding a private meeting with Brown at No 10 tomorrow and flying on to Northern Ireland.
The Special Boat Service (SBS) and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment have been taking part in the US-led operations to capture Bin Laden in the wild frontier region of northern Pakistan. It is the first time they have operated across the Afghan border on a regular basis.
The hunt was “completely sanctioned” by the Pakistani government, according to a UK special forces source. It involves the use of Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles fitted with Hellfire missiles that can be used to take out specific terrorist targets.
One US intelligence source compared the “growing number of clandestine reconnaissance missions” inside Pakistan with those conducted in Laos and Cambodia at the height of the Vietnam war.
America rarely acknowledges the use of Predator and Reaper drones, but the most recent known strike was on a suspected Al-Qaeda safe house in the Pakistani province of North Waziristan earlier in June. Villagers said the house was empty.
Intelligence on the whereabouts of Bin Laden is sketchy, but some analysts believe he is in the Bajaur tribal zone in northwest Pakistan. He has evaded capture for nearly seven years. “Bush is swinging for the fences in the hope of scoring a home run,” said an intelligence source, using a baseball metaphor.
A Pentagon source said US forces were rolling up Al-Qaeda’s network in Pakistan in the hope of pushing Bin Laden towards the Afghan border, where the US military and bombers with guided missiles were lying in wait. “They are prepping for a major battle,” he said.
The main operations in Pakistan are being undertaken by Delta, the US army special operations unit, and the British SBS.
Special forces are being sent to capture or kill Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters based on intelligence provided by the Special Reconnaissance Regiment and its US counterpart, the Security Co-ordination Detachment.
The step-up in military activity has increased tensions between Pakistan and the US. A senior Pakistani government source said President Pervez Musharraf had given tacit support to Predator attacks on Al-Qaeda.
Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, said last week that the US would “partner [the Pakistanis] to the extent they want us to” to combat insurgents.
Pakistan lodged a strong diplomatic protest last week over what it claimed was an airstrike on a border post with Afghanistan that killed 11 of its troops.
The United States declined to accept this version of events. “It is still not exactly clear what happened,” said Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser.
U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates reported last week that more American and "allied" soldiers were killed in May in Afghanistan than in Iraq. The reversal was due, in part, to reduced violence in Iraq. But the change also highlighted ongoing violence in Afghanistan, where Canada (and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) just suffered an undeniable setback. Mr. Gates's accounting arrived before attacks in and around Kandahar city that illustrated how far Canada and its "allies" remain from getting a grip on that troubled province, and how difficult, perhaps intractable, are the challenges of NATO's mission. In Kandahar, a brilliantly executed attack on Sarpoza Provincial Prison liberated hundreds of Taliban fighters and common criminals. A few former prisoners were later rounded up, but most now are safely scattered around the province. Subsequently, the Taliban and its supporters captured whole villages near Kandahar. Maybe these fighters can be dislodged in a pitched battle; maybe they will melt away, having made their point that they can strike with ease; maybe militants will attack parts of the city. Whatever happens, the Afghan government and the Canadian effort in Kandahar have suffered a serious setback on every level: operational, psychological, political. General Rick Hillier can dismiss these attacks as nothing serious; Defence Minister Peter Mackay can conveniently blame the Afghans for the prison debacle. Neither would meet the test set by the Manley task force for "balance and candour" in informing Canadians about the mission. Not only are more militants on the loose, and presumably ready for duty; the Taliban and its allies have shown an ability to launch organized attacks that mock Canadian and Afghan intelligence sources. Even if villages are recovered, or pitched battles are won, it's these kinds of daring, well-executed strikes that are at the heart of successful insurgencies. They make the local population wary of supporting the government. They make the populations back home in the "occupying" countries wonder if the struggle is worth the effort, or can be "won," whatever winning means. And they presage a long war, for which NATO countries, including Canada, are not prepared. Last year, 232 Western soldiers died in Afghanistan, as did about 8,000 Afghans, about 20 per cent of whom were civilians. This year does not promise anything better. It has been widely reported that insurgents who launched the attacks in and around Kandahar were aided by fighters from Pakistan, and that the Afghan insurgents themselves may have taken refuge in that country a while ago. And why not, when the border between the two is so porous, and the new Pakistani government is signing agreements with tribal leaders who, in turn, encourage insurgents in their midst? This porous border mocks one of the cardinal rules of counterinsurgency warfare: Seal the territory. The French, for example, built a vast fence between Tunisia and Algeria during the Algerian war. The Americans bombed neighbouring countries during the Vietnam War to try to stop the Viet Cong from heading south through other lands. It's the reason President Hamid Karzai is blustering about sending Afghan troops into Pakistan to chase militants. And it's also the reason the United States recently launched an air strike inside Pakistan that killed (by accident) 11 Pakistani soldiers and infuriated the country's government. To the porous border can be added another impediment to effective counterinsurgency: inability to starve the insurgents of funds and supplies. Insurgents usually live much more simply than government troops and, in this case, the Canadian ones. In southern Afghanistan, the insurgency is also fuelled by money extorted from local people and by the lucrative opium trade, Afghanistan being the supplier of 93 per cent of the world's opium. NATO's anti-opium policies have failed. Production is down in some areas but up in others, with the sum total being larger than a few years ago. Eradication hasn't worked, nor will it. NATO also has too few troops in the troubled areas of the country, although the arrival of 3,200 Americans and almost 1,000 French will help somewhat. And NATO's aid has been too little and too poorly organized. Almost every rule of successful counterinsurgency is running up against Afghan realities. It's no wonder events like those of recent days happen.
Re:Afghanistan, like Iraq and the Republicans, more broken than ever.
« Reply #3 on: 2008-06-18 18:29:49 »
This guy is nuts Fritz. Let me try to give you some context from my perspective.
For starters what is happening in Afghanistan is not an insurgency. The USA marched in there, into a tribal environment that has never evolved from this stage; palpably without a clue; and eliminated a poor but popular (as in largely supported by the majority of the largest tribe) government and has replaced it with a puppet government acceptable to the Russians (who previously supported the same warlords) and the USA. The puppet government has never ruled except where it is supported by foreign armies and mercenaries. The corruption that lead to the previous overthrow of the warlords is still rife. The fundamentalist opposition which was inculcated and nurtured by the USA to overthrow the warlords when they were supported by the Russians is still present and thriving. Despite all this what we are seeing is tribal warfare being recast in terms of us and them. Only with 42 primary tribes and many sub-groupings within them, the dance is all but unfathomable to an outsider.
Even if it had been a simple insurgency, insurgencies are unwinnable. You can impose military control on an area, even one as inhospitable as Afghanistan, but only if you have enough troops (about 450,000 would have been correct for Afghanistan before it was messed up, now it will need more) with their boots on the ground (i.e. not in nice air-conditioned trucks and bases) and the determination and pockets to take the anticipated losses. But you can't manage a population this way forever or even for very long. The longer you are there, the more disliked you become, and so the more of a target you become. And while your troops will become more familiar with the environment, they will also become more of a known quantity to those who hate them. And so attacks on them will become more numerous and more effective. A military presence can only provide the conditions, briefly, for a political settlement. Something the US is blatantly incompetent to achieve. Indeed, so far the USA has acted as a disruptive force preventing settlements everywhere they touch. I don't think this is going to change before the US disintegrates.
Secondly, the border is unsealable. As the writer correctly observes, the French tried this approach in Algeria. What the writer doesn't continue with is how much of a factor this was in their eventual defeat. A fence (or wall as in Israel) serves as a visible reminder of the causes to dislike the builders, and a huge waste of effort as the key about guerrillas is that they rise out of the population, are supported by it but except when actually fighting, are indistinguishable from it. In this case the challenges are much greater. The theoretical Afghan-Pakistan border runs through some of the most difficult territory in the world. A fence there will cost a fortune and whatever bits of it are built will simply provide a challenge to destroy it and an opportunity to kill the people sent to fix it. If I were a Taliban commander I would regard an attempt to build a fence a gift from heaven, because having built it, it will have to be guarded. Which would guarantee me a lovely supply of juicy targets sitting at the end of what would be a logistical nightmare for the US and its allies. The same futility, only worse, characterized the American bombing of the neighboring countries during the Vietnam War, a major war crime and the direct precursor to the consequential rise of extremism throughout the region.
In any case, the notion of a border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is ridiculous. As I mentioned before we stuck our collective penis into that hornet's nest and then jumped on it, the border there is merely notional, a line drawn on a map by a tidy minded British civil servant. It ignores the realities of the environment, most especially the fact that the Pushtun, the world's largest tribe, one that has never been defeated, that lives on both sides of the theoretical border which they don't recognize, and who value their independence so highly that even the British drafted constitution of Pakistan recognized the areas under their control as "Independent Tribal Areas" where the Pakistan government is still constitutionally precluded from placing military forces except with tribal permission. The fact that this isn't mentioned when attempting to explain why the entire Independent Tribal Region is now in a state of armed uprising does not auger well for comprehension of the complicated realities there.
Thirdly the USSR expended a railway truck of ammunition to kill a guerrilla but did quite well in killing only the guerrillas (although they lost conscripts and equipment at a scary rate, no little because the US provided their enemies with anti tank and anti aircraft materiel). We expend a lot more in the way of munitions o a lot less effect, but we are far less discriminating in the way we kill. This guarantees an increase in the number of enemies we make, with a commensurate increase in people willing to attack us. This isn't limited to Afghans. The Taliban were regarded by most of the Middle East, even by those who didn't like them; as virtuous, in part because we kept them impoverished through brutal, punishing sanctions. Most of the Middle East regards it as virtuous for people to go to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban. As far as they are concerned, the writing is on the wall. This crusade is going to end soon, not in a parade, but in a rout. I suspect that this "street-wisdom" is likely correct. Especially if McSame succeeds Our Dear Leader.
Now it wasn't necessary to fight. We could have taken the traditional path to controlling Afghanistan. Bribery. We were too stupid. Instead we overthrew a cheap government, and have taken on the responsibility of establishing (and paying for) an expensive one instead. But we don't have the right to decide how it happens, or the capacity to put our grandiose plans into effect, no matter what the people in Washington may imagine. This is highly visible, especially to the Afghans, in that we haven't done very well at all to date, and opposition to us is heating up. Not least because we have not improved the lot of many Afghans, bar perhaps our puppet "Mayor of Kabul's" immediate family and hangars on.
In the meantime, the Afghans are finding their own path, using the proceeds from producing opium; something the Taliban prohibited in the hope that we would lift the sanctions against them, to fund their slow victory over the "coalition forces" we have seen fit to put there. Of course, we didn't, couldn't and wouldn't have lifted the sanctions, as we think that the world responds only to sticks and our knowledge is too limited and memory too short to connect the consequent hostilities to our own actions*.
Meantime, the Taliban, who do understand guerrilla tactics through centuries of use of them, honed by American support and training, are moving into the country's richest farmland. The dense undergrowth will protect them from aerial observation. Their carefully dug positions will allow them to survive most barrages. The dirt roads and limited alternatives allow them to mine access routes and wage a war of attrition against patrols. Should our patrols take to the fields, the destruction they cause will lead to a massive defection to the Taliban by the countryside. Meantime, the Taliban's position, ensconced in and controlling access to the fertile basin assures the population that the Taliban are winning - while any attacks on them will have a devastating effect on the villages and farms - which are recognized by the population as the true wealth of the country. Meaning that attacks on the Taliban will be seen, no matter how it is spun in the Western media, as an attack on the livelihood of Afghans by the inhabitants. Heads they win, tails we lose. What is fascinating is that so many commentators prove their incompetence through not recognizing these very basic facts.
The assertion that we killed Pakistan forces "by accident" is likely disingenuous. Far more likely there was an accidental firefight, possibly even begun by the Taliban, punctuated explosively when the US called in an airstrike. The trouble is that the attack by the US was undoubtedly on the forces of Pakistan while they were on their home territory. Making this yet another attack on another country and breach of international law by the US. Given that they no longer have as obliging a puppet in Pakistan, the consequences may yet be severe and dismaying to the US.
*Rather like Roosevelt instigating Pearl Harbor by preventing our historic allies, the Japanese, from accessing needed supplies, particularly oil, in order to establish a causus bella with Germany to help out his buddy Winston and rescue the huge amounts the US had invested in the war.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Afghanistan, like Iraq and the Republicans, more broken than ever.
« Reply #4 on: 2008-06-18 22:48:04 »
Quote:
[Fritz]<snip>Eradication hasn't worked, nor will it. NATO also has too few troops in the troubled areas of the country, although the arrival of 3,200 Americans and almost 1,000 French will help somewhat. And NATO's aid has been too little and too poorly organized. Almost every rule of successful counterinsurgency is running up against Afghan realities. It's no wonder events like those of recent days happen. <snip>
Quote:
[Hermit]<snip>What is fascinating is that so many commentators prove their incompetence through not recognizing these very basic facts.<snip>
[Fritz] Hermit your points all well taken and I have to agree. I read the article I posted, differently and with rolling eyes. A preamble on my part would have been useful to make my position clear. I had recently watched “Charlie Wilson’s War” (Tom Hanks & Julia Roberts) and that is floating in the back of my mind as well. Though, Simpson’s concessions albeit trite still seem to point to an change in the underlying premise that Afghanistan can be fixed, using the tactics applied so far, whether we are able to conjure up tactics that would succeed is doubtful. As you point out an admission that we are not willing to acknowledge an inherently different paradigm is in play in the that region, underscores in my mind why we are butting heads rather then forging any sort of positive, mutually beneficial, alliances with the communities in Persia/IndoAsia region (Till recently even India rather work with Russia then the US). I agree as you point out that to reference Pakistan-Afghanistan-Iran-Iraq as autonomous regions to be governed is just wrong; but would appear to be how the ‘West’ is continuing to engage which I find even more ironic since if its is not for altruistic reasons we are there we are messing it up for our selfish interests as well.
Quote:
[Hermit] <snip>Even if it had been a simple insurgency, insurgencies are unwinnable. <snip>
[Fritz]given the last 1000 years of struggle in that region I agree that you are bang on. Plus, a 1000 year learning curve provides them with cultural imperative that I suspect the lure of a Big Mac and Coke, and even fries will not undo
Thanks for keeping me on my toes Hermit.
Cheers
Fritz
Quote:
PS[Hernit]http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=60;action=display;threadid=29337;start=0 if you can't see it let me know and I will post it somewhere where it makes sense), delivered to the US Senate before the invasion, interesting.
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