Afghan surge - Tag Search

No blogging yesterday while I worked on a couple of reported projects -- so I'll spare you any day-after thoughts on President Obama's choice to replace Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus. You've read enough of those already, I'm sure.

Instead, let's pivot back to what's actually happening in Afghanistan. As I said in my Al-Jazeera piece about McChrystal's departure, the change of command isn't likely to mean a major change in strategy: McChrystal was hardly the only counterinsurgency believer in the military, and many elements of his "new strategy" actually began under his predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan.

(Updated w/article excerpt) I just finished reading the new Rolling Stone profile on Gen. Stanley McChrystal that's generating so much controversy. (It's not yet available online; if you're interested in a copy, e-mail me.)

Here's my quick reaction: Very little about the article is surprising! I think we all knew that McChrystal has a tense relationship with Karl Eikenberry; that he didn't think much of vice president Joe Biden's light-footprint counterterrorism strategy; that the military command feels hamstrung by the summer 2011 withdrawal timeline; and so on.

I'm a little late in responding to Michael Cohen's cri de coeur about liberal silence on Obama's increasingly-on-the-wrong-track Afghan strategy. I agree with his basic premise -- the left, particularly the left-wing media, has been quiet about Afghanistan -- though I think he ignores some contradictory evidence.

Spencer Ackerman outlines most of the reasons for the left's quietude. I would add one other point: It's difficult to outline a good alternative, and it requires a certain degree of local knowledge to do so.

The BBC reports that the NATO offensive in Kandahar will begin in June; Gen. Stanley McChrystal wants to finish the "clear" phase by August, with a shorter "secure and deliver government" phase to run from mid-August through mid-October.

Ramadan begins on August 12, so half of the "secure and deliver government" phase will occur during a month when government offices generally shut down early and accomplish very little.

I was out of town and offline all weekend, so I'm just now catching up on the news (what little there was) from President Obama's quick hop to Afghanistan.

Needless to say, the trip itself won't accomplish much: A six-hour visit to Kabul, half of it spent at Bagram Air Base, won't cause Hamid Karzai to rethink his politics or policy. But it fits into a broader public diplomacy campaign aimed at putting pressure on Karzai. American and European diplomats are whispering (anonymously, of course) about the Afghan president "slipping away from the West," and Karzai's recent visit with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad apparently ruffled some feathers in Washington.

U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates deserves some credit for his fairly reasoned and non-triumphal public statements during this week's trip to Afghanistan. He warned against over-optimism in Afghanistan, stressing that there are "dark days" ahead and that the quick "clear" phase in Marja doesn't suddenly mean the war is won (or even that Operation Moshtarak is won).

In Now Zad yesterday, he commended soldiers and Marines for clearing the area of Taliban, but then said "you own it" -- and warned of a complicated path ahead.

Monica Bernabe, a Spanish journalist writing on the Afghanistan Analysts Network, says Badghis province is basically a mess.

'Everybody has left because of the fighting', the American Major Richard Wade said in June 2009 to justify why very few civilians could be seen in the Bala Murghab bazaar. 'The Taleban have check points outside the town and force the people to pay if they want to enter', he added. ANA captain Abbasi Ghazanfar described the brutality of the insurgents: 'When they capture an Afghan soldier, they take out their eyes first and afterward behead him. Only those soldiers who are Pashtuns have a chance to save their lives.'

The deteriorating security in Badghis could have implications for other provinces in the north, like Faryab. And the minimal Afghan police/army presence in the province isn't large enough to confront an influx of Taliban (on the contrary: a police official was arrested last month for feeding information to the Taliban).

I'm trying to figure out the logic behind NATO's latest rhetorical pivot.

I expected the Marja triumphalism -- the arrival of NATO's hand-picked governor, Haji Zahir, and the well-publicized flag-raising ceremony. Commanders said today that they've finished the "clear" phase of "clear-hold-build-transfer"; a press release from ISAF said NATO and Afghan soldiers have "cleared the last major pocket of resistance," though -- as with past Helmand surges -- the definition of "cleared" isn't necessarily what you think.

Things are already getting better in Afghanistan, according to Gen. Stanley McChrystal:

The commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, noted that last summer he believed security in Afghanistan was at risk of significant decline, but that he felt differently now. "I am not prepared to say that we have turned the corner," he cautioned. "So I'm saying that the situation is serious but I think we have made significant progress in setting the conditions in 2009, and beginning some progress, and that we'll make real progress in 2010."

Listen, I understand that there's a certain damned if you do, damned if you don't quality to McChrystal's public pronouncements about the war. But why not say to the press, listen, guys, the boss just announced his new strategy in December, Holbrooke just unveiled his civilian plan a few weeks ago, most of the surge troops haven't arrived yet, and it's too early to make any pronouncements -- but we're confident this strategy will work.

Instead McChrystal says things have improved in the last two months -- not really a defensible proposition, and also not one that helps a counterinsurgency strategy in the long term, because it cements in the public mind the illusion of quick and easy progress.

I was too busy yesterday to write about the new ABC/BBC poll on Afghanistan. A few things jumped out at me; first, though, everyone should read Christian Bleuer's October 2009 post on Afghanistan polling.

Survey data is always used to reaffirm existing biases -- but doubly so in a country like Afghanistan, where there is such high demand for polling data and such little supply.

With that caveat, let's look at the data.

Ann Friedman takes to The American Prospect to argue against the feminist rationale for sending more troops to Afghanistan. Many U.S. feminist groups support escalation because they think it will improve the lives of Afghan women; Friedman criticizes them for ignoring Afghan views.

As the American left debates, I'm struck by a desire to know what Afghan women, who have been living under the U.S. occupation for roughly eight years now, think would be best for their country.

She bases her critique on a representative sample of exactly three Afghan women, including Malalai Joya, the politician and activist who's quoted in every single story about women in Afghanistan.

We've never placed much stock in Barack Obama's July 2011 "deadline" for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. As we've noted before, that date merely marks the beginning of a withdrawal of indeterminate speed. Obama could withdraw a single squad -- or, as Steve Kroft suggested on 60 Minutes last week, only half-jokingly, "the military band and a few cooks" -- and claim he met his "deadline."

Recent events in Afghanistan only cast further doubt on that target. Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the second-in-command of U.S. and NATO forces, told reporters yesterday that it would take until November to finish "surging" new troops into the country. Obama said it would only take six months in his West Point speech earlier this month.

60 Minutes' Steve Kroft interviewed Barack Obama last week, and they spent much of the segment discussing Obama's new Afghanistan strategy.

There's not much new here, to be honest. Kroft isn't an Afghanistan expert, and he's serving up questions for a general-interest prime-time television program. So while he touches on the controversy over Obama's July 2011 withdrawal deadline, for example, he doesn't probe specifics. Kroft doesn't ask Obama, "Are you concerned that your deadline will rattle Afghan elites, given their past experiences with the Soviet withdrawal?" Instead, we get a slightly more eloquent rendering of, "There's controversy surrounding your decision. Discuss!"

I took yesterday off from blogging to catch up on some "real" work, so I'm just now reading up on the latest developments from Afghanistan.

First, there was a bit of good news yesterday: Kai Eide, the head of the United Nations mission in Kabul, announced that he will step down when his term ends in March. Eide insists this isn't a resignation -- "I'm just not renewing my contract," he said yesterday. But it's clear that he sees the writing on the wall, after months of controversy over his handling of the Afghan election.

Robin Wright, the Washington Post's longtime diplomatic correspondent, has an op-ed today offering some truly credulous justifications for escalating the war in Afghanistan. Here's the one that troubles me most:

U.S. standing in the Islamic world is also at stake. The historic rule of thumb is that winners have influence; losers don't. Winners get to set standards. Their ideas get more attention. Their leaders gain greater authority.

This seems to be a slightly more eloquent version of the "Muslims only respect force" argument (or, as Tom Friedman memorably put it, the "suck on this" argument). Problem is... we've tried that approach for the last eight years. We've tried to improve our standing through force and coercion. Where did it get us? America's public standing in the Muslim world hit all-time lows.

I started writing a post this morning about the incoherent military operations in Afghanistan that have followed Obama's surge announcement. I left it unfinished because I had to run to Capitol Hill for an interview about Lebanon; I came back to this tweet from Matt Yglesias, which sums up my thoughts quite well:

Too many words being written generals testifying on the Hill, not enough about actual events in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Karl Eikenberry really did not make news in their first round of congressional testimony yesterday -- despite the thousands of stories and blog posts written about the hearings.

I'm alternately amused and annoyed when I read headlines like McChrystal backs Afghan plan to skeptical Congress. McChrystal is an officer in the United States military; the president of the United States is his boss. He has a simple choice: He can support the president's plan, or he can resign. If he does the former, it's not newsworthy.

Same goes for headlines about how McChrystal thinks the war plan will succeed. What did everyone expect? That he would take the witness stand yesterday and say, "sorry, guys, we're fucked"?

Spencer Ackerman thinks David Sanger's Iraq-surge-vs.-Afghanistan-surge piece, which I panned earlier this morning, is useful -- particularly this paragraph:

Both surges aimed to knock back an insurgency that had gained territory and caused high casualties, and to buy time and space to train local forces for combat. "Neither one of these surges," said one officer involved in both decisions, "was born to exploit success. They were designed to reverse momentum."

"That's an overlooked point and a useful, precise concept," Spencer writes. But is it, really? Sanger says nothing about the reasons why the insurgency is ascendant, or why U.S. strategy isn't working, or about the success of training foreign forces, or about the insurgency's sources of funding, or its ideology... he simply says that both surges aimed to deal with strong and growing insurgencies.

That's a similarity, to be sure, but I don't see how it informs strategy, or how it suggests that an Iraq-style escalation is the best course of action for Afghanistan.

David Sanger has a piece in the New York Times today, headlined "Similarities to Iraq Surge Plan Mask Risks in Afghanistan," which is truly one of the dumbest pieces of "analysis" I've ever read. His argument is that the Obama administration might have been fooled by the "striking" similarities between the Iraq surge and the Afghanistan surge -- and thus overlooked the key differences between the two. What are the similarities, you ask?

Pajhwok has been posting and tweeting reactions to Obama's Afghan strategy from actual Afghans. They seem, for the most part, fairly disillusioned.

Criticisms cut along a few common themes. One: More troops? What have NATO troops done for us so far? There's a lot of talk about how the Afghan people have lost confidence in Western troops.