Afghan Journal

from Bernd Debusmann:

U.S. nation-building in the wrong place?

America's costly efforts at nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq came under intense scrutiny this month in critical reports and a gloomy Senate hearing that prompted a memorable assertion. "If there is any nation in the world that really needs nation-building right now, it is the United States."

That came from a Democratic Senator, Jim Webb, who continued: "When we are putting hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure in another country, it should only be done if we can articulate a vital national interest because we quite frankly need to be doing a lot more of that here."

Webb spoke at the confirmation hearing of the veteran diplomat President Barack Obama nominated to be his next ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, who faced questions from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that left no doubt over the growing impatience of U.S. lawmakers with a military and financial commitment that is producing limited progress.

Webb's juxtaposition of spending on Afghanistan and the state of things in the United States - a stalled economy, stubborn unemployment, an aging infrastructure - is made more often in online debates and private conversations than in official hearings. But it is a subtext for a debate likely to grow in the campaign for the 2012 elections and feature both Afghanistan and Iraq as money pits, object lessons for ill-conceived development projects, and lack of foresighted planning.

A report by the bi-partisan Commission on Wartime Contracting issued early in June set the tone. "U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan are scheduled to begin in July 2011, and the U.S. military presence in Iraq is scheduled to end by December 31, 2011. But America will leave many legacies in both countries carrying large sustainment costs long into the future."

The commission, the report said, saw no sign that the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development were making plans to make sure that the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan could operate and maintain, on their own, the vast array of projects built under U.S. government contracts, from schools and clinics to hospitals and power plants.

An examination of a decade's wartime contracting in the two countries, says the report, had identified tens of billions of dollars of waste. Unless the U.S. paid prompt attention to the "how to" of maintaining, operating and paying for the projects it will leave behind, "the United States faces new waves of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Is the surge failing in Afghanistan?

Six months into the surge in Afghanistan, Americans and Afghans alike are asking the question whether it has worked and the ugly reality is that it has failed to make a difference, writes Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post.

To be sure, as U.S. President Barack Obama said last week only half the reinforcements he ordered in December have arrived and there is still more than a year to go before the troop withdrawals begin.

But comparisons with Iraq – America’s other war – are hard to push away and they don’t look good at all. Diehl says five months into the Iraq surge in 2007, sectarian violence was dropping, Sunni tribes were turning against al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government was delivering on its promises.

Afghanistan, in contrast, is a failure on all these counts. Violence has gone up and it cannot just be because more troops have been deployed in new areas and there is more fighting. As we wrote earlier, there were 400 attacks in one week in April, a majority of them roadside bombs.

On Tuesday, the Taliban struck in heavily-guarded Kabul, killing 18 people including six foreign troops  in a suicide attack on a NATO convoy. It was the biggest loss for NATO since September and the deadliest attack in the capital since a February raid.

On the same day, across the border in Pakistan a bicycle bomb ripped through the northwestern town of Dera Ismail Khan killing 12 people, and you begin to wonder if Obama’s entire regional war strategy policy is at risk of unravelling.

For a panel discussion on Afghanistan organised by the Thomson Reuters Foundation click here

U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan set to overtake Iraq

At some point this month or early June, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan will outnumber those in Iraq, writes Michael E. O ‘Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. It’s an artificial milestone but it is worth noting because it tells you a good deal about the two wars and where the United States stands in each.

The cross-over is also a measure of how big and rapid has the shift been in America’s military power toward Afghanistan since President Barack Obama took office last year promising to bring the troops home.

There are currently around 90,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and just under 100,000 in Iraq. The United States is adding roughly 2,000 more troops each month in Afghanistan as part of a build-up to beat back a resurgent Taliban while drawing down more than 5,000 from Iraq.

By the end of the summer, the troop strength in Afghanistan will hit 100,000 while the number in Iraq would have fallen to half of that. It’s a dramatic shift since Obama was inaugurated as U.S. president in January last year when there were just 35,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The casualty count from the two wars also tells you about which is the hotter theatre, perhaps in part also because more troops mean more fighting.  U.S. casualties in Afghanistan are greater than Iraq by a ratio of roughly 5 to 1, and that imbalance will likely increase over the course of the year, says O’Hanlon.

So is the growing U.S. troop presence making a difference? A progress report issued by the Pentagon this week on the security situation in Afghanistan paints a mixed picture.

Despite the addition of more than 50,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan over the past year, there still aren’t enough forces to conduct operations in the majority of key areas, it said.

A Guantanamo Bay in Afghanistan?

(A protester outside the White House in Washington dressed as a Guantanamo Bay detainee. Photo by Kevin Lamarque)

The United States is considering a proposal to hold foreign terrorism suspects at the Bagram military base in Afghanistan,  the Los Angeles Times reported this week, a  new Guantanamo Bay just as it is trying to close down the original facility in Cuba.

Given the amount of trouble that Washington has run into for running  a detention centre where  prisoners have no access to the U.S. court system, it sounds like a bad idea to be setting it up in Afghanistan, say experts.

A “very bad idea”, actually, says human rights lawyer Sahr Muhammedally, to be doing this at a time when the U.S. military is trying to win the support of the Afghan people as the centrepiece of its strategy to reverse the tide of the eight-year war.

Guantanamo Bay is an ugly name in Afghanistan, with scores of Afghans held for anything from two to five years without any opportunity to defend themselves. To be now trying to create a  mini-Gitmo in the country must come as an affront to many of them, says Muhammedally in this article for Foreign Policy’s AFPAK Channel.

Anger over night raids and arbitrary detentions by international military forces ranks second to that of civilian casualties, the London-based lawyer says.  Expanding the Bagram detention centre, which already stands along with Guantanamo Bay and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib as a symbol of harsh treatment of detainees, must come as a further provocation.

Burying the Powell doctrine in Afghanistan

Early this month Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered what military experts are saying was the final nail in the coffin of  the Powell doctrine, a set of principles that General Colin Powell during his tenure as chairman laid out for the use of military force. A key element was that the military plan should employ decisive and overwhelming force in order to achieve a rapid result. A clear exit strategy must be thought through right from the beginning and the use of force must only be a last resort, Powell said, the experience of Vietnam clearly weighing on him.

U.S. military involvement overseas has deviated far from those principles since then but Mullen finally finished it off, according to Robert Haddick in this piece for Foreign Policy. The United States is faced with low-level warfare and the public must accept it as a way of life. The question no longer is whether to use military force; America’s enemies whether in Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen have settled that issue, ensuring it remains engaged in conflict. The question is how should it use its vast power.

The nature of the threat from irregular warfare is such that it would often make more sense for the United States to turn to use of military force as a first option, according to the new Mullen doctrine. And you don’t need to assemble an armada before going in, as Powell did for Operation Desert Storm. You need to be precise and principled.

Last week another one of Powell’s principles came under withering attack and this goes directly to the heart of the issue of nation-building that the United States has been faced with in Afghanistan and Iraq after invading these countries.  Powell said America had a  moral obligation to countries it got militarily involved in, a sort of a “Pottery Barn rule” which meant  “you break it, you own it.”

Bernard Finel, a senior fellow at the America Security Project, rejects the Pottery Barn rule saying that while the U.S. must launch quick decisive operations in third countries,  it must not get subsequently involved in an open-ended military occupation.  In short, the U.S. military  must play to its strengths and not fight the asymmetric war that its adversaries want it to, as it has discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The U.S. military is a dominant fighting force, capable of rapid global power projection and able to defeat state adversaries quickly and at relatively low cost in American lives and treasure. Unfortunately, American leaders are increasingly trying to transform this force into one optimized for counterinsurgency missions and long-term military occupations,”  Finel writes in the Armed Forces Journal.

So if there is a rogue regime that needs to be removed in the interests of regional stability or for protection of basic human rights for example, the United States would be better off launching quick, decisive military attacks even repeatedly than staying on trying to repair the ”broken dishes.” In the cases of both Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States achieved its core objectives early on in the campaign, Finel argues. But in both wars it has stayed on, even though the benefits flowing from it are limited.

Terror index: Iraq down, but Afghanistan and Pakistan red-hot

Iraqis  are voting today for a new parliament and despite the bombings in the run-up to the election, the over-all trend is down, according to the Brookings Institution. Not so in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre, America ‘s other war, which remains red-hot according to a country index that the Washington-based thinktank  puts out for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The index is a statistical compilation of economic, puiblic opinion and security data.

It’s quite instructive just to look at the numbers in the three  countries. Weekly violent incidents in Iraq are  about 90 percent less frequent than in the months just before the surge.  Violent deaths from the vestiges of war are in the range of 100 to 200 civilians a month, meaning that mundane Iraqi crime is probably now a greater threat to most citizens than politically-motivated violence, Brookings says in its latest update.

Afghanistan is a different story. In terms of raw violence, the situation is at a historic worst level, with early 2010 levels of various types of attacks much higher than even last year at this time. Some of it is because of the offensive in Marjah in Helmand province and the deployment of U.S. and Afghan troops to parts of the country where they were previously not present,  triggering a militant response.

By way of comparison, the rate of attacks in Afghanistan countrywide is now more than double the level seen in Iraq, the Brookings data shows. The number of civilian deaths is similar, though, mostly because the militants in Afghanistan target security forces  more than civilians. A renewed drive by  U.S. and NAT’O commander General Stanley McChyrstal to adjust war strategy to avoid civilian deaths at all costs may also be making a difference.

Pakistan presents a similar picture  in terms of recent  trends and dynamics, the index shows. “Viewing all the data, the bottom line is continued improvement in Iraq, and more fighting in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater,” Brookings said summing up the results of study.

Indeed, militants based in Pakistan, despite the security forces’  successful ground offensive in South Waziristan and a spate of arrests of top leaders of the Taliban, remain a clear and present danger to the world outside,  according to another study by the New America Foundation.  

Paul Cruickshank, an investigative researcher focused on al Qaeda, says that in  the majority of the 21 ‘serious’ terrorist plots against the west since 2004, plotters either received direction from or trained with al-Qaeda or its allies in Pakistan.  Here’s a PDF of his study.

from UK News:

How chaplains find peace during wartime

A British military chaplain prepares a Remembrance Day ceremony at the British cemetery in Kabul November 11, 2009/Jerry Lampen

Dozens of chaplains from the Church of England are serving with British armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are there when soldiers seek redemption around the time of battle, and they there are, standing in the operating theatre, waiting until the surgeon can do no more.

They serve the needs of soldiers sent to war, and they also serve God.

While they adminster balm on the battlefield, their peers preach peace from the pulpit. Which is the more important for the CoE at a time of war?

A recruitment advert for the Royal Air Force in a Christian publication recently said it needed chaplains "to take the church to where it's needed most" - moving with troops and air-crew, providing support on the front line and at the altar back at base.

Some vicars in the shires and cities would say they are most needed in the pulpit, preaching pacifism.

Sharing information with the enemy in Iraq, Afghanistan

U.S. military commanders on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan are not the only ones watching live video feeds of the battle zone from unmanned Predator surveillance planes. The militants too have been looking at the same images thanks to an off-the-shelf software that allowed them to hack into the data feed from the drones.

“Skygrabber”, originally designed to allow customers to download songs and movies off the Internet, costs barely $26 . It allowed insurgents to tap into the overhead video feeds from the million-dollar surveillance planes, the Wall Street Journal reported recently.

U.S. forces became aware of it only after they captured a Shiite militia member in Iraq, whose laptop had files of the pirated footage saved on it.

While most of the breach seems to have taken place in Iraq, adversaries have also intercepted drone video feeds in Afghanistan, the newspaper said, citing unnamed officials. These intercept techniques could be employed in other locations where the U.S. is using pilotless planes, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, they said. One more example of how America’s enemies have found simple ways to counter its sophisticated military technology.

The Pentagon has since closed the breach, defence officials said, but the question experts are asking is how come it was so easy to penetrate the communications systems. Brookings’ P.W. Singer who has written a book “Wired for War: the Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century” says one reason is the rapid proliferation of the unmanned systems in U.S. warfare.  Back in 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq there were only a handful of these ‘eyes in the skies” and zero on the ground in the invasion force.

Today, there are more than 7,000 in the air, ranging from Predator to the tiny ones that can fit in a soldier’s backpack.  Most of these systems were not encrypted as pressure increased to push them out as fast as possible. “There was a war on, and these unmanned systems were proving to be far more useful to our troops than what the regular Pentagon acquisitions process had been providing,” he says.

Afghanistan: neither Vietnam nor Iraq, but closer home perhaps

[Women at a cemetery in Kabul, picture by Reuters' Ahmad Masood]

As U.S. President Barack Obama makes up his mind on comitting more troops to Afghanistan, the search for analogies continues. Clearly, Afghanistan cannot be compared with Vietnam or Iraq  beyond a point. The history, geography, the culture and the politics are just too different.

The best analogy to Afghanistan may well the very area in dispute – the rugged Pashtun lands straddling the border with Pakistan and where  the Pakistani army is in the middle of an offensive, argues William Tobey in a piece for Foreign Policy.

Tobey, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfar Center and who served on the National Security Council staff under three U.S. presidents, takes a walk down history to the 1936 uprising against British rule in Waziristan.

The rebels were driven by radical Islam, Pashtun nationalism and armed opportunism, much the same factors firing up the modern Taliban campaign.  

“The rebels improvised roadside bombs, ambushed convoys, and launched hit and run attacks on isolated outposts to drive out alien forces. They kidnapped and beheaded British soldiers and civilians. In unprotected villages, they massacred civilians who did not support them. ”