The West's Nightmare

Europe's Leaders Fear Libya Could Become Next Afghanistan

The Europeans and Americans would like to help the rebels in Libya, but the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan have spurred fears of a military intervention. So far, the only thing the EU has been able to agree on are financial sanctions. In Germany, leaders fear getting sucked in to the civil war.

By SPIEGEL Staff
March 14, 2011
Courtesy Of "Der Spiegel Online"

There are times when some politicians and diplomats in Europe and the United States wish that someone would die. They wish that a head of state or government would give the order to dispatch a number of aircraft or launch a few missiles. They don't speak openly of this, of course, but they do say these things under their breath. "Why doesn't somebody just shoot him?" they ask. Usually, this hope is directed by Europe toward America.

This is again such a time. A number of politicians and diplomats are quietly hoping that they will hear one morning on the radio that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi has died during the night. According to this scenario, the news bulletin will then inform listeners that an American bomber squadron has safely returned to its aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean.

The current situation calls to mind former US President Ronald Reagan. He tried to eliminate Gadhafi back in April 1986. At the time, Reagan ordered 36 laser-guided bombs to be dropped on the Bab al-Azizija military compound, Gadhafi's command center in the suburbs of Tripoli. Gadhafi survived. Reagan was derided for the failed mission and sharply criticized for the attempt. Some Western countries view such actions as murder -- and thus unacceptable.

When it comes to war and the West, it always boils down to a question of ethics. Now all eyes are directed toward US President Barack Obama. What will he do? He has the arsenal required to make a renewed attempt, but he apparently also has greater scruples.

Merkel Skeptical

The same holds true for the Europeans. At their summit in Brussels on Friday, European Union leaders called for Gadhafi to immediately resign. Although a military operation has not been ruled out, it has been made contingent on the approval of the United Nations, the Arab League and the African Union. Speaking after the meeting, German Chancellor Angela Merkel underscored that she was highly skeptical about a no-fly zone. The EU is relying on economic sanctions for the time being.

This is a nightmarish situation for the West. For years, Europe and America have courted Gadhafi and regarded him as a valuable business partner, without giving so much as a second thought to the suffering of his people. Now a large proportion of this oppressed population is fighting for its freedom, but the West is doing little to halt the advances made by Gadhafi's loyal supporters. The West wants to help, but it remains helpless.

In this situation, the countries of the West are damned if they do, damned if they don't. If they only sit back and watch, they tacitly accept that Gadhafi will probably crush the rebellion and take terrible revenge. If they intervene, they will have to be prepared to kill, and innocent people may die. And if they enter into this conflict, they will need a concrete exit strategy.

Iraq and Afghanistan

As politicians in Europe and America grapple with the issue of Libya, they are strongly influenced by the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two predominantly Muslim countries have been attacked and occupied, also with the aim of creating a better world according to Western models. But these have not been success stories. The regimes backed by the West have been dubious, to say the least, and the security situation remains precarious. After more than nine years of fighting, war continues to rage in Afghanistan.

The negative experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have sown doubt in America and Europe about the morality of these missions. Gadhafi benefits from these misgivings, but that doesn't mean that they are wrong.

There is no easy solution for Libya à la Reagan -- whose botched bombing mission didn't solve anything anyway. There is only a long and difficult search for a way to help the country's population, without upsetting the population in Europe, which would like to avoid at all costs another protracted war in a Muslim country.

As a preliminary step, the US has severed all ties with the "existing Libyan Embassy" in Washington, but continues to maintain diplomatic relations with Libya. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will travel to northern Africa this week to meet with Gadhafi's rivals. According to the State Department, she has already contacted members of the opposition, both inside and outside of Libya.

Obama Rules Out Unilateral Action

Military action is also being discussed. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels last Thursday: "We agree that we will continue with the planning of all military options."

But the Obama administration has ruled out taking unilateral action. White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley recently said: "All options are on the table. But it has to be an international mission."

Since a UN resolution currently appears unlikely, NATO is the only organization that comes into question for joint military operations. A high-ranking US government official said in Brussels last Wednesday: "The US believes that NATO is the natural choice for a military operation."

But Obama continues to hesitate, and this lack of action is drawing increasing criticism. James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence, recently warned a Senate committee that the opposition won't be able to topple the dictator on its own. Republican Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain and independent Senator Joe Lieberman are both criticizing Obama's reluctance to intervene. They say that he has to do more to support the opposition. McCain, for his part, is calling for a no-fly zone.

'Anybody Who Proposes A No-Fly Zone Should Say Who Will Enforce It'

That step, however, is highly controversial in Washington. The US military, which has already been stretched thin by its deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, has remained rather reticent in its comments. Establishing a no-fly zone would be a "challenge," says General James Mattis, the commander of US Central Command. The US military would first have to destroy Libya's air defenses, he says.

Until now, the US military has limited its engagement to bolstering its fleet in the Mediterranean and sending ships to the waters off the Libyan coast.

For the EU it will be even more difficult to come to a joint position on Libya, although that didn't stop French President Nicolas Sarkozy from unilaterally taking action. Last Thursday, France recognized the Libyan National Transitional Council in Benghazi as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people. Sarkozy says that he intends to dispatch an ambassador there. Furthermore, government officials in Paris say that the French president wants to use targeted air strikes to weaken the Gadhafi regime.

The German government was not informed of Sarkozy's plans. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle was talking with his new French counterpart, Alain Juppé, when he heard about the French proposal. Westerwelle had the impression that Juppé was also unaware of his country's new position.

'We Have To Think This Through'

In Berlin, the Chancellery was indignant over the French initiative. At the summit in Brussels, Merkel voiced her clear opposition: "We cannot recognize the transitional council," she told the assembled heads of state and government. "The former justice minister is a member of this body and look at the role he played in the case of the Bulgarian nurses."

Indeed, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov has claimed that representatives of the transitional council are linked to the mistreatment of a Palestinian doctor and five Bularian nurses held for nearly eight years under what is widely believed to have been a false conviction on charges of infecting children with HIV at a hospital in Benghazi. In 2007, after long negotiations with the EU, the medical workers were pardoned and returned to Bulgaria.

On Friday, Merkel repeated her position in English: "On transitional council, don't recognize."

Merkel also clearly expressed her reservations with regard to a no-fly zone: "What is our plan if we create a no-fly zone and it doesn't work? Do we send in ground troops?" she asked before adding: "We have to think this through. Why should we intervene in Libya when we don't intervene elsewhere?"

It was a sharp rebuff for Sarkozy. European leaders have little doubt about his motives. French foreign policy in Northern Africa has relied far too long on despots like Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Sarkozy now intends to rectify the situation. He fears that France could lose its traditional leadership role in the region.

Until recently, France and Germany have had their separate areas of responsibility: While Paris looked after the Mediterranean area, Berlin was more oriented toward Eastern Europe. But in internal discussions, Westerwelle has already made it clear that this will no longer be the case. Much to the annoyance of the French, Berlin now also wants to have a greater say in the Mediterranean region.

Fears Germany Could Be Drawn In

Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Westerwelle agree that nothing good will come from a no-fly zone over Libya. They both fear that Germany could be be drawn into the civil war in this way. The government also knows, though, that economic sanctions are only effective over the long term, so Berlin doesn't want to entirely rule out the option of military intervention. The obstacles are significant, however, since China and Russia are showing little inclination to approve such a mission in the UN Security Council.

The German government's hesitant stance also arises from the fact that Germany recently won a non-permanent seat on the Security Council. Although this presents an excellent opportunity for Westerwelle to play a more prominent international role as foreign minister, it also means that Germany will probably have to participate in the mission if the Security Council approves a no-fly zone. Anyone who claims a leading role in New York must be prepared to assume certain responsibilities.

The opposition also supports the German government's position. No one in Berlin is calling for a no-fly zone without a mandate from the Security Council. But there are members of parliament who refuse to simply stand by and watch as Gadhafi massacres his own people.

A no-fly zone would entail enormous technical and political problems, argues Kerstin Müller, the foreign policy expert in parliament for Germany's traditionally dovish Green Party. "But if the situation worsens and Gadhafi hunts down people from the air and kills them," she adds, "then the international community will have to seriously consider a no-fly zone area."

Before that happens, however, all non-military options must first be exhausted and the risks of escalation carefully weighed up, Müller says. She points out that an increasing number of Libyan opposition figures are calling for the West to intervene. Müller says that there is also an international responsibility to protect people.

Philipp Missfelder, the foreign policy expert in parliament for Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), also refuses to rule out a no-fly zone. "If you want to show the regime that you mean business," he argues, "then you have to put a few options on the table." He says that using fighter jets to shoot at demonstrators could definitely be classified as a crime against humanity. Missfelder emphasizes that any intervention would first have to be approved by the Security Council.

The chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the German parliament, Ruprecht Polenz (CDU), is also calling for restraint. "What happens if the no-fly zone doesn't work?" he asks. "Then this will immediately be followed by the demand: You have taken the first step, now you have to take the second one."

The clearest arguments against a military intervention by the West are presented by Rainer Stinner, the foreign policy expert in parliament for the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), which is Merkel's government coalition partner. "Anyone who proposes a no-fly zone should (also) say who will enforce it," he contends. Such a decision could lead to aerial combat and other fighting, he says. "Should we then send in the German Luftwaffe?"

Limited Success Of No-Fly Zones

The experience of the West with no-fly zones has shown that such measures can quickly lead to combat situations. For instance, without a prior mandate from the Security Council, between 1991 and 2003 the Americans imposed a ban on flying over the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq and the Shiite regions in the south of the country. There were numerous clashes. US fighter jets shelled Iraqi anti-aircraft positions and shot down Iraqi fighters.

The no-fly zones enjoyed only limited success. Under the protection of coalition forces, the Kurds in northern Iraq were able to establish an autonomous zone. Since helicopter gunships were excluded at first from the flight ban, however, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was able to quash Shiite rebellions in the south of the country.

There were also military clashes in the no-fly zone that NATO established between 1993 to 1995 during the war in Bosnia. NATO aircraft shot down a number of Serbian fighter jets. Nonetheless, this did not allow NATO to prevent the Srebrenica massacre, where 8,000 Bosnians were killed.

Another problem has to do with the issue of who benefits from what type of intervention by the West. 

Too little is known about the rebels and their objectives. Even diplomats in Tripoli know little about most of the men on the opposition's interim governing council. The only exceptions are Ali Al-Issawi, until recently the Libyan ambassador to India and currently the insurgents' "foreign minister," and Mahmoud Jibril, the former Iraqi planning minister. Last week in Paris and Brussels, both men called for international support.

Another Unpopular War?

The chairman of the National Transitional Council, former Libyan Justice Minister Mustafa Abdul Jalil, is not a charismatic figure, but on a number of occasions he has publicly interceded on behalf of political prisoners held by Gadhafi's regime. His National Council is hopelessly divided and could only agree on three points: Gadhafi must go, the West should impose a no-fly zone, but Western troops should not fight on the ground.

Nobody knows what kind of state these men want to build, or what freedoms it would guarantee. President Hamid Karzai -- intensely pandered to by the West -- has turned out to be a corrupt ruler in Afghanistan.

In Libya there is also no solution that would genuinely satisfy the West. There is no clear, promising vision of the future of this country without Gadhafi -- but there is no doubt that it will be disastrous with Gadhafi.

Is military deployment the answer? Germany could easily be drawn into another war at a time when the majority of Germans already oppose their country's military presence in Afghanistan. Sometimes politicians have little choice but to grin and bear the burden of their own decisions.

How To Trap A President In A Losing War

Petraeus, McChrystal, and the Surgettes

By Tom Engelhardt,
September 25, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

Front and center in the debate over the Afghan War these days are General Stanley "Stan" McChrystal, Afghan war commander, whose "classified, pre-decisional" and devastating report — almost eight years and at least $220 billion later, the war is a complete disaster — was conveniently, not to say suspiciously, leaked to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post by we-know-not-who at a particularly embarrassing moment for Barack Obama; Admiral Michael "Mike" Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has been increasingly vocal about a "deteriorating" war and the need for more American boots on the ground; and the president himself, who blitzed every TV show in sight last Sunday and Monday for his health reform program, but spent significant time expressing doubts about sending more American troops to Afghanistan. ("I’m not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan… or sending a message that America is here for the duration.")

On the other hand, here’s someone you haven’t seen front and center for a while: General David Petraeus. He was, of course, George W. Bush’s pick to lead the president’s last-ditch effort in Iraq. He was the poster boy for Bush’s military policies in his last two years. He was the highly praised architect and symbol of "the surge." He appeared repeatedly, his chest a mass of medals and ribbons, for heavily publicized, widely televised congressional testimony, complete with charts and graphs, that was meant, at least in part, for the American public. He was the man who, to use an image from that period which has recently resurfaced, managed to synchronize the American and Baghdad "clocks," pacifying for a time both the home and war fronts.

He never met a journalist, as far as we can tell, he didn’t want to woo. (And he clearly won over the influential Tom Ricks, then of the Washington Post, who wrote The Gamble, a bestselling paean to him and his sub-commanders.) From the look of it, he’s the most political general to come down the pike since, in 1951 in the midst of the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur said his goodbyes to Congress after being cashiered by President Truman for insubordination — for, in effect, wanting to run his own war and the foreign policy that went with it. It was Petraeus who brought Vietnam-era counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) back from the crypt, overseeing the writing of a new Army counterinsurgency manual that would make it central to both the ongoing wars and what are already being referred to as the "next" ones.

Before he left office, Bush advanced his favorite general to the head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees the former president’s Global War on Terror across the energy heartlands of the planet from Egypt to Pakistan. The command is, of course, especially focused on Bush’s two full-scale wars: the Iraq War, now being pursued under Petraeus’s former subordinate, General Ray Odierno, and the Afghan War, for which Petraeus seems to have personally handpicked a new commanding general, Stan McChrystal. From the military’s dark side world of special ops and targeted assassinations, McChrystal had operated in Iraq and was also part of an Army promotion board headed by Petraeus that advanced the careers of officers committed to counterinsurgency. To install McChrystal in May, Obama abruptly sacked the then-Afghan war commander, General David McKiernan, in what was then considered, with some exaggeration, a new MacArthur moment.

On taking over, McChrystal, who had previously been a counterterrorism guy (and isn’t about to give that up, either), swore fealty to counterinsurgency doctrine (that is, to Petraeus) by proclaiming that the American goal in Afghanistan must not be primarily to hunt down and kill Taliban insurgents, but to "protect the population." He also turned to a "team" of civilian experts, largely gathered from Washington think-tanks, a number of whom had been involved in planning out Petraeus’s Iraq surge of 2007, to make an assessment of the state of the war and what needed to be done. Think of them as the Surgettes.

As in many official reassessments, the cast of characters essentially guaranteed the results before a single meeting was held. Based on past history and opinions, this team could only provide one Petraeus-approved answer to the war: more — more troops, up to 40,000-45,000 of them, and other resources for an American counterinsurgency operation without end.

Hence, even if McChrystal’s name is on it, the report slipped to Bob Woodward which just sandbagged the president has a distinctly Petraeusian shape to it. In a piece linked to Woodward’s bombshell in the Washington Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung wrote of unnamed officials in Washington who claimed "the military has been trying to push Obama into a corner." The language in the coverage elsewhere has been similar.

There is, wrote DeYoung a day later, now a "rupture" between the military "pushing for an early decision to send more troops" and civilian policymakers "increasingly doubtful of an escalating nation-building effort." Nancy Youssef of McClatchy News wrote about how "mixed signals" from Washington were causing "increasing ire from U.S. commanders in Afghanistan"; a group of McClatchy reporters talked of military advocates of escalation feeling "frustration" over "White House dithering." David Sanger of the New York Times described "a split between an American military that says it needs more troops now and an American president clearly reluctant to leap into that abyss." "Impatient" is about the calmest word you’ll see for the attitude of the military top command right now.

Buyer’s Remorse, the Afghan War, and the President

In the midst of all this, between Admiral Mullen and General McChrystal is, it seems, a missing man. The most photogenic general in our recent history, the man who created the doctrine and oversees the war, the man who is now shaping the U.S. Army (and its future plans and career patterns), is somehow, at this crucial moment, out of the Washington spotlight. This last week General Petraeus was, in fact, in England, giving a speech and writing an article for the (London) Times laying out his basic "protect the population" version of counterinsurgency and praising our British allies by quoting one of their great imperial plunderers. ("If Cecil Rhodes was correct in his wonderful observation that ‘being an Englishman is the greatest prize in the lottery of life,’ and I’m inclined to think that he was, then the second greatest prize in the lottery of life must be to be a friend of an Englishman, and based on that, the more than 230,000 men and women in uniform who work with your country’s finest day by day are very lucky indeed, as am I.")

Only at mid-week, with Washington aboil, did he arrive in the capital for a counterinsurgency conference at the National Press Club and quietly "endorse" "General McChrystal’s assessment." Whatever the look of things, however, it’s unlikely that Petraeus is actually on the sidelines at this moment of heightened tension. He is undoubtedly still The Man.

So much is, of course, happening just beyond the sightlines of those of us who are mere citizens of this country, which is why inference and guesswork are, unfortunately, the order of the day. Read any account in a major newspaper right now and it’s guaranteed to be chock-a-block full of senior officials and top military officers who are never "authorized to speak," but nonetheless yak away from behind a scrim of anonymity. Petraeus may or may not be one of them, but the odds are reasonable that this is still a Petraeus Moment.

If so, Obama has only himself to blame. He took up Afghanistan ("the right war") in the presidential campaign as proof that, despite wanting to end the war in Iraq, he was tough. (Why is it that a Democratic candidate needs a war or threat of war to trash-talk about in order to prove his "strength," when doing so is obviously a sign of weakness?)

Once in office, Obama compounded the damage by doubling down his bet on the war. In March, he introduced a "comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan" in his first significant public statement on the subject, which had expansion written all over it. He also agreed to send in 21,000 more troops (which, by the way, Petraeus reportedly convinced him to do). In August, in another sign of weakness masquerading as strength, before an unenthusiastic audience at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, he unnecessarily declared: "This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity." All of this he will now pay for at the hands of Petraeus, or if not him, then a coterie of military men behind the latest push for a new kind of Afghan War.

As it happens, this was never Obama’s "war of necessity." It was always Petraeus’s. And the new report from McChrystal and the Surgettes is undoubtedly Petraeus’s progeny as well. It seems, in fact, cleverly put together to catch a cautious president, who wasn’t cautious enough about his war of choice, in a potentially devastating trap. The military insistence on quick action on a troop decision sets up a devastating choice for the president: "Failure to provide adequate resources also risks a longer conflict, greater casualties, higher overall costs, and ultimately, a critical loss of political support. Any of these risks, in turn, are likely to result in mission failure." Go against your chosen general and the failure that follows is yours alone. (Unnamed figures supposedly close to McChrystal are already launching test balloons, passed on by others, suggesting that the general might resign in protest if the president doesn’t deliver — a possibility he has denied even considering.) On the other hand, offer him somewhere between 15,000 and 45,000 more American troops as well as other resources, and the failure that follows will still be yours.

It’s a basic lose-lose proposition and, as journalist Eric Schmitt wrote in a New York Times assessment of the situation, "it will be very hard to say no to General McChrystal." No wonder the president and some of his men are dragging their feet and looking elsewhere. As one typically anonymous "defense analyst" quoted in the Los Angeles Times said, the administration is suffering "buyer’s remorse for this war… They never really thought about what was required, and now they have sticker shock."

Admittedly, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 51% of Americans are against sending in more troops. (Who knows how they would react to a president who went on TV to announce that he had genuinely reconsidered?) Official Washington is another matter. For General Petraeus, who claims to have no political ambitions but is periodically mentioned as the Eisenhower of 2012, how potentially peachy to launch your campaign against the president who lost you the war.

A Petraeus Moment?

In the present context, the media language being used to describe this military-civilian conflict of wills — frustration, impatience, split, rupture, ire — may fall short of capturing the import of a moment which has been brewing, institutionally speaking, for a long time. There have been increasing numbers of generals’ "revolts" of various sorts in our recent past. Of course, George W. Bush was insistent on turning planning over to his generals (though only when he liked them), something Barack Obama criticized him for during the election campaign. ("The job of the commander in chief is to listen to the best counsel available and to listen even to people you don’t agree with and then ultimately you make the final decision and you take responsibility for those actions.")

Now, it looks as if we are about to have a civilian-military encounter of the first order in which Obama will indeed need to take responsibility for difficult actions (or the lack thereof). If a genuine clash heats up, expect more discussion of "MacArthur moments," but this will not be Truman versus MacArthur redux, and not just because Petraeus seems to be a subtler political player than MacArthur ever was.

Over the nearly six decades that separate us from Truman’s great moment, the Pentagon has become a far more overwhelming institution. In Afghanistan, as in Washington, it has swallowed up much of what once was intelligence, as it is swallowing up much of what once was diplomacy. It is linked to one of the two businesses, the Pentagon-subsidized weapons industry, which has proven an American success story even in the worst of economic times (the other remains Hollywood). It now holds a far different position in a society that seems to feed on war.

It’s one thing for the leaders of a country to say that war should be left to the generals when suddenly embroiled in conflict, quite another when that country is eternally in a state of war. In such a case, if you turn crucial war decisions over to the military, you functionally turn foreign policy over to them as well. All of this is made more complicated, because the cast of "civilians" theoretically pitted against the military right now includes Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general who is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Douglas Lute, a lieutenant general who is the president’s special advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan (dubbed the "war czar" when he held the same position in the Bush administration), and James Jones, a retired Marine Corps general, who is national security advisor, not to speak of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The question is: will an already heavily militarized foreign policy geared to endless global war be surrendered to the generals? Depending on what Obama does, the answer to that question may not be fully, or even largely, clarified this time around. He may quietly give way, or they may, or compromises may be reached behind the scenes. After all, careers and political futures are at stake.

But consider us warned. This is a question that is not likely to go away and that may determine what this country becomes.

We know what a MacArthur moment was; we may find out soon enough what a Petraeus moment is.

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

Read more by Tom Engelhardt

• Us or Them in Afghanistan? – September 20th, 2009
• Is America Hooked on War? – September 17th, 2009
• How 9/11 Should Be Remembered – September 10th, 2009
• Measuring a War Gone to Hell – September 8th, 2009
• Whatever Happened to Gary Cooper? – September 3rd, 2009

Insurgent Success In Afghanistan Is Mystifying

By Mary Louise Kelly
September 22, 2009
Courtesy Of The National Public Radio

The insurgency in Afghanistan is getting stronger. According to a leaked assessment of the war, Taliban-led insurgents either control or are fighting in a "significant portion of the country." It's hard to understand why because insurgent fighters are vastly outnumbered by U.S., NATO and Afghan security forces, and their technology is inferior.

Copyright © 2009 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

LINDA WERTHEIMER, host:

It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer, in for Renee Montagne.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning.

A call for more troops in Afghanistan raises a key question for the United States. The question is how the Afghan war grew so difficult.

WERTHEIMER: According to an assessment from the U.S. commander, insurgents now fight in or control a significant portion of the country. That's the situation after almost eight years of American effort. In a moment, we'll ask about the political dilemma for the commander in chief. We begin with what's known about the enemy.

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly reports.

MARY LOUISE KELLY: In many ways, the success of the insurgents is mystifying. Insurgent fighters are vastly outnumbered by the U.S., NATO and Afghan security forces arrayed against them. And their technology is inferior, as made plain by this recent exchange at a Senate hearing between Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.

Senator LINDSEY GRAHAM (Republican, Arizona): How many tanks do the Taliban have?

Admiral MIKE MULLEN(Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff): I'm not aware they have any.

Sen. GRAHAM: How many air planes?

Admiral MULLEN: None.

Sen. GRAHAM: Well, how are they doing this?

KELLY: It's their country, Admiral Mullen replied. And the insurgents excel at intimidating Afghan civilians, which makes them unpopular. Senator Graham pressed on.

Sen. GRAHAM: So, they are not held in high regard. They don't have an air force, they don't have any armor. But they're winning. So, that makes me conclude something is going awry in Afghanistan.

KELLY: In his report General McChrystal attempts to lay out what's gone awry. He describes an insurgency that's well-funded and well-organized. McChrystal also points out that insurgents have figured out how to use Afghan prisons as a training ground. He says Taliban and al-Qaida leaders are able to hatch plans from inside prison and recruit new members, quote "there are more insurgents per square foot in corrections facilities than anywhere else in Afghanistan" end quote. General McChrystal also describes an enemy that uses its downtime efficiently. Every winter, McChrystal writes, the Taliban conducts a formal campaign review, after which, Taliban leader Mullah Omar announces his guidance and plans for the coming year. Combat usually slows in the winter when heavy snows arrive. But McChrystal says, it's time to stop thinking about the Afghan war as an annual cyclical campaign. Admiral Mullen made the point in his recent Senate testimony.

Admiral MULLEN: In discussions with General McChrystal, there's a term that we use and have used in Afghanistan which is the fighting season. But in fact we don't believe there is a fighting season. We think it's a 365 day a year fight for the people.

KELLY: A fight against not one insurgency, but three, that all intersect in the war zone. The three insurgencies, ranked by McChrystal in order of the threat they pose, are number one: the Quetta Shura Taliban. This is the most familiar group, the one headed by Mullah Omar and operating from the Pakistani city of Quetta. Mullah Omar's group has established an elaborate alternative government, McChrystal writes, including shadow governors for most provinces and Islamic courts.

Second: there's the Haqqani network, which gets its money mostly from Pakistani and Gulf Arab donors, and whose links with al-Qaida are growing. The third is the group led by former Mujahideen commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who quote "aims to negotiate a major role in a future Taliban government." There are tensions among all these players. Tensions that McChrystal thinks can be exploited. The relationship among these three groups has shifted over time.

Dr. AMIN TARZI (Director, Middle East Studies, Marine Corps University): This is not the same group that we defeated in 2001.

KELLY: That's Amin Tarzi, director of Middle East studies at Marine Corps University. Tarzi says the McChrystal report makes an important contribution by recognizing that while these groups pursue their own individual strategies, they do share some common goals.

Dr. TARZI: They do have an agenda. And their agenda is basically to win over, either by force or by acts of governor's injustice, the Afghan population.

KELLY: In his report, General McChrystal concludes while the situation is serious, success is still achievable. But right now, despite the best efforts of Afghan and Western security forces over the last eight years, quote "the insurgents currently have the initiative".

Mary Louise Kelly, NPR News, Washington.

Last Exit Before Quagmire

By William S. Lind,
September 23, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

The Washington Post yesterday made available an unclassified version of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s long-awaited report on the war in Afghanistan. Politically, the report is bold, in that it acknowledges the enemy has the initiative and we have been fighting the war – for eight years – in counterproductive ways. But intellectually, both as analysis and as prescription, it is five pounds of substance in a 50-pound bag.

The report’s message can be summarized in one sentence: we need to start doing classic counterinsurgency, and to do so, we need more "resources," i.e., troops. In a narrow, technical sense, that statement is valid. Classic counterinsurgency doctrine says we need hundreds of thousands more troops in Afghanistan.

Past that syllogism, the report’s validity becomes questionable. Defects begin with the study’s failure to address Fourth Generation war’s first and most important question: Is there a state in Afghanistan? At times, the report appears to assume a state; elsewhere, it speaks of the Afghan state’s weaknesses. It never addresses the main fact, namely that at present there is no state, and under the current Afghan government there is no prospect of creating one.

The failure to acknowledge the absence of a state leads the rest of the report through the looking glass. For example, it puts great emphasis on expanding the Afghan National Security Forces (army and police). But absent a state, there are no state armed forces. The ANSF are militiamen who take a salary paid, through intermediaries, by foreign governments. How many Pashtun do you find in the ANSF?

Similarly, the report laments that Afghanistan’s prisons have become recruiting centers for the Taliban. It calls for getting the U.S. out of the prison business and turning it all over to the Afghan government. But who will then run those "state" prisons? The Taliban, of course, just as they do now.

In a curious passage, the report says, on page 2-20,

"The greater resources [ISAF requires] will not be sufficient to achieve success, but will enable implementation of the new strategy. Conversely, inadequate resources will likely result in failure. However, without a new strategy, the mission should not be resourced."

Here we encounter the report’s most dangerous failing. It confuses the strategic and the operational levels of war. In fact, the report does not offer a new strategy, but a new operational-level plan. How the war is fought, i.e., by following classic counter-insurgency doctrine, is operational, not strategic.

America must find a new strategy, since the current strategy depends on an Afghan state that does not exist. But the report offers no new strategy. The passage on page 2-20 thus ends up saying, "If you don’t give us more troops, we will fail. But you shouldn’t give us more troops unless we adopt a new strategy, which we don’t have. And even if you do give us the troops we want for the new strategy we haven’t got, they will not be enough to achieve success." This reveals utter intellectual confusion.

The proper response of the White House, the Pentagon, and Congress to Gen. McChrystal’s report is, "Back to the drawing board, fellas."

How might Fourth Generation theory help us rewrite the report? At the operational level, most of what it recommends under the rubric of counterinsurgency is sound. Drawing on the report’s concept of "proper resourcing" that allows for "appropriate and acceptable risk," we would concentrate our counterinsurgency efforts in a few provinces, such as Helmand, to show the Taliban we can fight it to a stalemate. We would endeavor to do so while gradually drawing troop levels down, not sending in more troops. The goal of these actions on the operational level would be to buy time both in Afghanistan and on the home front.

We would use that time to implement a genuine new strategy. It would proceed from these facts:

• There is no state in Afghanistan, and none can be created by or for the current Afghan government.
• Our strategic goal, as Gen. McChrystal’s report states in its first paragraph, is to prevent al-Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan.
• There is currently no evidence of al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan. One of the best open sources of intelligence, Nightwatch, recently stated this directly, and Gen. McChrystal’s report hints at it.

Our strategic goal would be to see the creation of a state in Afghanistan that can and will prevent al-Qaeda’s return. Who can do that? The Taliban. We would use the time bought by counterinsurgency operations to negotiate with the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, the Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin, and other Afghan leaders, including some in the current Afghan government, toward a power-sharing arrangement. A government that includes the Taliban can create a state.

The risk is the Taliban’s willingness to keep al-Qaeda out. Why should Mullah Omar agree to that? Because al-Qaeda no longer needs Afghan bases. It has far more useful ones in Pakistan. That is why it is not in Afghanistan now.

If President Obama and Congress accept Gen. McChrystal’s report and adopt a new operational plan in support of the current strategy, building an Afghan state around the regime now in Kabul, they will guarantee an American defeat. Sending more American troops to Afghanistan will only magnify the defeat. Ironically, what Washington needs to do is follow Gen. McChrystal’s own recommendation and refuse more resources without a new strategy.

Let’s hope the politicians realize this is their last exit before a bottomless quagmire.

Read more by William S. Lind

• The Silence of the Sheep – August 4th, 2009
• One Step Forward,
  One Step Back – July 7th, 2009
• Going Nowhere Fast in Afghanistan – June 29th, 2009
• The Iran Crisis and 4th Generation Warfare – June 22nd, 2009
• Stop Letting Cheney Frame
  the Torture Debate – June 2nd, 2009