Peter Bergen - Tag Search

The New America Foundation's "dronology" tag-team of Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann released a new paper on the U.S. drone campaign in northwest Pakistan last week, and the accompanying Web page devoted to tracking all strikes since 2004 is the most exhaustive open source account of the drone war I've yet seen.

The Google Map documenting six years of strikes, sourced from publicly accessible press accounts, is highly useful, but the news value of the new NAF report is Bergen and Tiedemann's conclusion that the rate of civilian deaths from drone attacks is somewhere around 32 percent.

Leah Farrell has a truly insightful op-ed in The Australian about the complex relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. There's been a lot of ink spilled about whether the two groups are connected or merged. Much of it is based on circumstantial evidence, at best, and uninformed guesswork at worst.

Farrell, though, actually posed this question to Abu Walid al-Masri, a senior member of the mujahideen with close ties to the Taliban. His responses are illuminating. (No excerpts: Just go read her op-ed.)

I'll have some more detailed thoughts on this in the next few days, after I've had a chance to read the correspondence from al-Masri that informed the op-ed (available in its original Arabic and an English translation on Farrell's excellent blog).

Stephen Walt, Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank are debating the issue of "safe havens" in Afghanistan. It's a think tank throwdown!

I've already made it clear that I don't like the safe havens argument. So let me just offer a couple of criticisms of Bergen's and Cruickshank's arguments, both of which support the idea that the U.S. needs to escalate the war in Afghanistan to prevent Al-Qaeda from regaining a safe haven in that country.

Peter Bergen has an optimistic take on Afghanistan -- what he calls "the good war" -- in this month's Washington Monthly. Bergen's thesis is that most critics of Obama's Afghan policy don't understand Afghanistan -- that they throw out "facile comparisons" to Vietnam and Iraq.

To illustrate this, Bergen mostly cites statistics, none of which are terribly convincing.

Bergen points out, for example, that two million Afghan children are in school. Not terribly impressive in a country of 33 million people -- two-thirds of whom are under the age of 25.

Or mobile phone penetration, which Bergen notes has hit 16 percent in Afghanistan. That's notable, given that Afghanistan didn't have a mobile phone system under the Taliban. But it trails far behind its neighbors -- Pakistan, for example, with 50 percent penetration, or Iran with 61 percent.

I'm not trying to be glib about Afghanistan, which has suffered terrible brutality over the last few decades and has good reason to lag its neighbors. That's exactly the point, though: Bergen draws an optimistic conclusion from a few scattered indicators of economic development, but the fundamentals are grim. 53 percent of the Afghanistan population lives below the poverty line. At least 40 percent of Afghans are unemployed. The country has no meaningful industry; its chief export is opium. The Afghan road system is one of the worst in the world, and rail is nonexistent.

So while Afghanistan's mobile phone penetration rate is commendable, it's also a sideshow. The Obama administration has identified creating a viable economy in Afghanistan as one of its goals for the war -- but that outcome is decades away.