War and Terrorism

I have to say, I'm a little skeptical of reports that Sirajuddin Haqqani, one of NATO's primary targets, got on a plane and flew to Kabul to meet with Hamid Karzai.

That's not to say negotiations aren't happening. Nick Schifrin reported for ABC News tonight that Karzai is holding indirect talks with Haqqani (should we call them proximity talks?) via Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.

"We don't need to deal with Haqqani directly. We can deal with the ISI," says [a] senior Afghan government official.

Haqqani has well-documented ties to the ISI -- senior Pakistani officials have reportedly referred to his network as a "strategic asset" -- and Islamabad has recently claimed that it can "deliver" the Haqqani leadership to Karzai, according to the New York Times.

The latest UN quarterly report on Afghanistan concluded that the Afghan army and police are ahead of their interim training goals. US and NATO officials routinely cite those figures as evidence that they're making progress in Afghanistan.

But a new report from the US special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR) concludes that NATO has overestimated the capabilities of those units.

And he's planning to go back. There's nothing I can add. Just... watch (h/t Andrew Exum).

Iran's semi-official Fars news agency claimed yesterday that Israeli helicopters and/or cargo planes unloaded military equipment "meant for attacking a Muslim state" at an airport in northwestern Saudi Arabia.

According to the report, the IDF built a military base approximately 9 km (5.5 miles) from Tabuk, and while Israeli planes landed there on June 18 and 19, all civilian flights were cancelled at the local airport.

It's an impossible-to-verify report, much like the Times of London's recent claim that Saudi Arabia granted Israel overflight rights to bomb Iran. But we can add a bit of context.

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 don't want to speculate too much here about the recidivism rate in Saudi Arabia's terrorist rehabilitation program; I'm working on a longer reported piece on the subject and I don't want to get too far ahead of myself.

But a few early thoughts. The story here is that 20 percent of the "Guantanamo alumni" returned to terrorism after completing the rehab program -- compared to just 9.5 percent of the non-GTMO population.

Roughly a dozen people were killed and several suspected militants escaped after an attack on the Aden office of the Political Security Organization, Yemen's main internal intelligence agency.

Gunmen used machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades during the hour-long assault. At least six of the victims were members of Yemen's security forces. It's unclear exactly how many people escaped, or who they were.

The latest United Nations quarterly report on Afghanistan (pdf), released today, is a mix of bleak pronouncements about security and neutral-or-slightly improved news about governance.

The "overall security situation has not improved" since the UN's previous report in March 2010.

I wrote a piece for Al Jazeera earlier this week that said most of what I wanted to say about the New York Times' much-maligned Afghan minerals story. (If you haven't seen it, here's James Risen's remarkably testy response to his critics.)

Michael Ross is correct that we shouldn't just assume Afghanistan will fall prey to the "resource curse." Evidence certainly suggests that it will: I can't think of a resource-rich country, outside of Norway, that doesn't suffer from at least some of the classic rentier-state problems. But that's a conjecture, and we shouldn't dwell on it.

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 Times of London reports this morning that Saudi Arabia will allow Israel to fly over its territory in order to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, and that Saudi defense officials have already conducted tests to make sure they don't accidentally shoot down Israeli jets.

Is the report accurate? I have no idea. But I will point out, as a cautionary note, that the Times runs a similar story every few months, all of them thinly-sourced. Here's a virtually identical piece from July 2009, for example (which the Saudi government quickly denied).

Even with Saudi overflight rights, bombing Iran would be a logistical nightmare for Israel.

Back in December, American and Yemeni sources accused the US of taking part in a deadly air raid in Yemen's Abyan province. The attack was a major screwup: Local residents said it killed dozens of civilians; Yemeni newspapers called it the "Abyan massacre"; and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula later used it as recruiting propaganda during a rally in Abyan.

US officials denied any involvement, though, and the Yemeni government -- always keen to publicly distance itself from Washington -- insisted that the whole operation was planned and conducted in Sana'a.

Security officials in Diyala province have withdrawn permits allowing some 10,000 Sunni Awakening members to carry weapons (عربي).

A spokesman for the Iraqi military said the Awakening members are civilians, "so it is not reasonable to authorize around 10,000 personnel to carry weapons in this province." Awakening leaders responded by threatening to withdraw their men from checkpoints in Diyala.

Last week's deadly attacks at two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore -- and the follow-up attack on survivors in a Lahore hospital -- highlighted the strength of the Punjabi Taliban, a group that provincial officials have long preferred to ignore.

Rehman Malik, Pakistan's interior minister, called the Punjabi Taliban "a big threat" in parliamentary testimony this week, and warned (without elaborating, it seems) that the group is planning "a major attack."

Philip Alston's report on targeted killings, delivered to the United Nations' Human Rights Council this week, has received a lot of attention for being the first big takedown of the United States' clandestine drone program.

Alston makes a measured and reasoned legal attack on the general use of targeted killings by governments against non-state actors, but he specifically criticizes the American drone campaign in the Middle East, expressing doubt that the U.S. can claim to be in an armed conflict with Al-Qaeda and concluding that, "[o]utside the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal." 

But Howard Koh, the top Obama administration official to attempt a public legal defense of the use of drones, has invoked America's "armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces" as a justification for taking out individual fighters and leaders. So who's right when everybody's wrong?

It's day three of the Afghan peace jirga -- the event being (somewhat absurdly) hailed by participants and Western diplomats as Afghanistan's "last chance for peace."

Roughly 1,600 delegates are discussing a "peace plan" promoted by Afghan president Hamid Karzai, the details of which have leaked out over the last few weeks. Al-Jazeera's James Bays posted some of the highlights, which focus on the logistics of the program: identifying and vetting Taliban fighters who are open to reconciliation, finding them jobs, establishing "deradicalization programs," etc.

Updated: It's been a day since the deadly raid on the so-called "Freedom Flotilla," and the fallout for Israel continues.

Although initial reports said that as many as 19 activists on board the Mavi Mamara had been killed during a nighttime Israeli Navy commando raid early on Monday morning, that toll has since been revised by both the Israeli government and the organizing groups to either nine or 10. Israeli has not released the identities of the flotilla passengers, despite facing a court challenge to do so.

The headline is sarcastic, of course. But Amitai Etzioni, an Israeli-American professor at George Washington University, is quite serious: He wants the U.S. to threaten a massive bombing campaign (pdf) against Iran in order to derail its nuclear weapons program.

Etzioni's article was published in the U.S. Army journal Military Review (and it's already getting favorable reviews in the Israeli press). To call it a superficial and deeply flawed piece of analysis would be charitable.

More than 80 people were killed today in two brutal attacks in Lahore, the latest bloody outcome from decades of state-sanctioned discrimination against a religious sect (and the Pakistani government's inability, or unwillingness, to crack down on the Punjabi Taliban).

Gunmen seized two mosques after Friday prayers, one in the Model Town district, the other in Garhi Sarhu. The resulting hours-long shootout -- at one mosque, gunmen climbed the minaret and opened fire on the streets below -- left dozens dead. Scores more were wounded.