War in Afghanistan

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.

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.

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.

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.

File this one under "highly unlikely": Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and one of the most powerful men in southern Afghanistan, has reportedly agreed with NATO to "play a less important role" and cede power to other officials.

Apologies for my non-existent blogging over the last few days! I've been swamped with work -- blogging/interviewing people at the Al-Jazeera forum here in Doha, and brainstorming on a new project we're launching in the next few weeks (details to come...).

Anyway. One of the people I interviewed was Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan (his new autobiography is a worthwhile read).

We were talking about the Kandahar offensive (sorry, process) after the interview, which elicited a laugh from Zaeef. He held out his right hand to signify the US troops pushing into Kandahar, then drew a semicircle in the air to symbolize the Taliban. "They will not find us in Kandahar. We will go around them and attack them from behind."

On the wires this afternoon, the kind of news from Afghanistan that has become all too familiar: A prominent cleric who had called for "peace and stability" was shot to death along with two members of his family on Sunday.

Police responding to protests over alleged civilian deaths during an overnight NATO raid in eastern Afghanistan shot and killed at least one demonstrator on Friday, according to the head of a local provincial council.

Hundreds of protesters burned tires and American flags and threw rocks at government buildings to express anger over what locals allege were the deaths of a handful of innocent civilians during a Thursday-night NATO raid in the Surkhrod district of Nangarhar province.

Evan did a comprehensive roundup of the news from Afghan president Hamid Karzai's visit to Washington this week. Just one thing to add from me.

I have a post over on Al-Jazeera's Web site looking at Afghanistan's ongoing governance problems, none of which received much (public) attention during Karzai's visit. One thing I couldn't really address, for space reasons, is how these problems influence perceptions of the upcoming Kandahar campaign/operation/process/whatever we're calling it these days.

During Afghan President Hamid Karzai's first 48 hours in Washington, D.C. -- the first half of a four-day visit that comes at a momentous time in his country's history -- the recently re-elected leader chose a distinctly non-Afghan issue to emphasize: a visit he paid on Tuesday morning to injured American troops at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

During brief remarks after the trip, before his meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Karzai spoke only of the visit, calling it "an extremely painful moment." Later that day, at a reception in his honor, Karzai brought it up again. "That was a moment of immense thinking for me as a person," he said. On Wednesday, during a joint press conference after meeting with President Obama, the Walter Reed visit -- "a very difficult moment" -- was on the tip of Karzai's tongue, to the exclusion of more controversial issues, such as Karzai's April diatribe against alleged Western interference in the October presidential election that he won.

That Karzai was reportedly "visibly moved" by the sight of devastated American soldiers is understandable and even laudable, but Karzai's repeated public mentions of the visit seemed to deliver a political message as well: I understand your sacrifice, I am your friend, but I still need you to be there for me.

The White House held a conference call yesterday afternoon -- well, afternoon DC time; it was close to midnight here -- to discuss Afghan president Hamid Karzai's upcoming visit to Washington.

Karzai arrives in Washington on Monday; he will meet with military and diplomatic officials before a three-hour (!) Oval Office meeting with President Obama on Wednesday. He's also bringing a large delegation of ministers to meet with other U.S. officials.

CNN's "Afghanistan Crossroads" blog points us today to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where a hearing is underway to discuss Operation Moshtarak, NATO's much-ballyhooed February offensive in the southern Afghan hamlet of Marja.

John Kerry, chairing the committee, opened with a prepared statement that praised U.S. soldiers for pushing the Taliban out of a poppy-production stronghold, but he acknowledged that NATO has failed to follow through:

Unfortunately, the initial word from hundreds of villagers of Marjah suggests the full measure of our challenge. A recent survey conducted by the International Council on Security and Development showed that a vast majority of villagers felt negatively about foreign troops and that more young Afghans had joined the Taliban over the last year.

Before I round up the latest facts about confessed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, 30, I want to address one particularly intriguing paragraph from the New York Times' Tuesday profile of the financial analyst-turned-wannabe jihadi:

George LaMonica, a 35-year-old computer consultant, said he bought his two-bedroom condominium in Norwalk, Conn., from Mr. Shahzad for $261,000 in May 2004. A few weeks after he moved in, Mr. LaMonica said, investigators from the national Joint Terrorism Task Force interviewed him, asking for details of the transaction and for information about Mr. Shahzad. It struck Mr. LaMonica as unusual, but he said detectives told him they were simply "checking everything out."

We all know that one's nationality can automatically arouse suspicion and trigger surveillance these days, but counterterrorism officers interviewing the guy who bought Shahzad's house, in 2004, four years after Shahzad immigrated from Pakistan and was already well into his university studies here? Doesn't it seem like they'd need a pretty good reason to be that interested?

The most fragile aspect of President Obama's surge strategy to reverse the Taliban's momentum and remake Afghanistan (in fewer than two years) has always been on the Afghan side. It's comparatively easier for the U.S. military to defeat the Taliban in every encounter than it is for the corrupt Afghan government to reform or for the green Afghan police and army recruits to train up in time. Most of the reporting I've seen since the beginning of the year hasn't done much to inspire confidence in either of those latter two efforts, and yesterday, Reuters added more fuel to the fire:

NATO commanders scrapped a helicopter assault by hundreds of U.S. and Afghan troops last week because the Afghans weren't able to take charge, a U.S. military officer familiar with the planning said.

(Updated below)
First of all, Majlis readers, I'd like to make a bit of an apology for our lackadaisical blogging over here in recent days. As many of you know, Gregg landed in Doha late last week to begin working for Al-Jazeera English, so he is understandably wrapped up in administrative paperwork, not to mention acclimating to the "unseasonably cool" 93-degree Gulf heat. Rest assured, he'll be back in fighting form soon.

Meanwhile, as many of you probably don't know, I too will be heading off to Doha this summer to join Gregg at Al-Jazeera. We'll both be on staff, reporting for their website, but you can expect that our asinine Middle East analysis and commentary will continue, here at the Majlis or elsewhere. So please excuse our scatterbrains in the meantime.

With that out of the way, let's take a look at the most recent news emerging about Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who has reportedly confessed to trying to detonate a car bomb in New York City's Times Square.