- Moazzam Begg is Director for the British organisation, Cageprisoners. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Little seems to have changed regarding the treatment of prisoners held at the U.S. military-run Bagram prison since I was there (2002-2004). The recent study conducted by the BBC shows allegations of sleep deprivation, stress positions, beatings, degrading treatment, religious and racial abuse have gone unabated. On a personal level though, I can’t help wonder if British intelligence services are still involved.

In April this year, a report issued by Cageprisoners entitled Fabricating Terrorism II highlighted through eyewitness testimony the cases of 29 people, all of them either British residents or citizens, who had allegedly been tortured and abused in the presence of British intelligence agents or at their behest.

One of them, the case of Farid Hilali, featured in the Guardian newspaper, showed how allegations of complicity in torture against British intelligence predated the Sept. 11 attacks. The story of Jamil Rahman too – regarding allegations of British complicity in his torture in Bangladesh – would have been included in the report but he was worried at the time about the safety of his family. The recurrent factor in all these cases is the extent to which denial and prevarication remain as much a part of the intelligence services’ arsenal as outsourcing torture and abuse. The others include the British cases of Omar Deghayes, Bisher Al-Rawi, Jamil Elbanna, Richard Belmar, Shaker Aamer and Binyam Mohamed – all of whom were held at Bagram.

Shortly after I returned from Guantanamo my father showed me a letter he received from the British Foreign Office. The letter, written in 2002, claims that UK officials were not given access to prisoners in Bagram. At the time, I was being held captive there by the U.S. military and, amongst other alphabet intelligence agencies, was being interrogated by MI5, who were aware that torture, abusive and degrading treatment was being meted out to prisoners– including British citizens.

During my time there I saw two people being beaten severely: one after he’d lost consciousness following days of having his hands shackled to the top of a cage; the other after a very crude and ultimately futile escape attempt. Both were killed.

In eleven months of custody in Bagram I was hogtied, punched, kicked, shackled to the top of a door, hooded, strip-searched regularly, put in stress positions and deprived of sleep.

Of course, this wasn’t always the case, and there were some decent soldiers who balked at the very idea of such abuse. (Some of the soldiers have even expressed clear remorse and regret to me since my return. One of them is Damien Corsetti who was brought up for charges of detainee abuse in both Bagram and Abu Ghraib prisons).

Nonetheless, such treatment wasn’t unusual. The worst of it for me was hearing the sounds of a woman screaming I was led to believe was my wife being tortured while an interrogator waved pictures of my children in front of me asking: “Do you think you’ll ever see them again?” or “What do you think happened to them the night we took you?” Several months later I learned that my family were safe but, those screams I knew were not make-believe.

In July 2005, four prisoners carried out an unprecedented but successful escape attempt from Bagram. Later, they participated in an interview on an Arabic language television channel describing how they had seen a woman in custody. After his release from Guantanamo earlier this year, Binyam Mohamed told me that he recognised the picture I showed him of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani woman - whom the U.S. authorities deny was ever held at Bagram – who he had last seen in Bagram in a state of near insanity.

I met at least five children in Bagram (2002) – four of whom were taken to Guantanamo and two of whom are still there. One of them, Omar Khadr, a Canadian national, was brought in at the age of fifteen so terribly wounded he looked like he was dead. His left eye was shot out and there were two huge exit wounds to his shoulder and chest. Another, a young Afghan teenager called Shams was shot in his hip by a U.S. soldier and unable to walk. I used to help to carry him to take him to the improvised barrel we had to use as a toilet – amongst 10 of us. Other than that walking and talking were prohibited in Bagram.

Earlier this year, when the new U.S. president was promising the world he’d close down Guantanamo and the secret detention sites and put an end to torture, I was touring the UK with a former U.S. soldier who had guarded some of us in Guantanamo. We were both telling the world that while we welcomed the announcement of the closure of the world’s most infamous prison, nothing was being said about places like Bagram. Several films, including the oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, were made about this place, but still little Bagram was off the international radar. As people who had served time on both sides of the wire we hoped that someone was listening. The truth is that by the time I’d passed through Bagram I was looking forward to Guantanamo.

After becoming the public relations disaster Guantanamo clearly is, we’re told days are numbered. But judging by the escalation of military activity in Afghanistan and the possibility that some Guantanamo prisoners might be transferred there , the abuses in Bagram may continue to get noticed – every couple of years or so.

-Clara Gutteridge is renditions investigator at Reprieve. The opinions expressed are her own.-

The big surprise in Tuesday’s revelations of prisoner abuse at Bagram is how long these stories have taken to reach the international media, given the scale of the problem.

Bagram Airforce Base is Guantanamo Bay’s lesser known - but more evil - twin. Thousands of prisoners have been "through the system" at Bagram, and around 600 are currently held there. Meanwhile President Obama’s lawyers are fighting to hold them incommunicado; stripped of the right to challenge the reasons for their imprisonment.

In this way, Bagram Airforce Base is just the latest in a long line of U.S.-created legal black holes. And as evidence of abuse there has begun to leak out, the U.S. military has responded in exactly the same way as it did to similar allegations at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere: by insisting that the torture is just the work of a few low-ranking “bad apples” and repeating that the U.S. “does not torture”.

Sad to say, the truth has revealed itself to be just the opposite. Recently released U.S. government memos have shown the efforts of top U.S. lawyers to justify torture techniques to be used in prisons far from U.S. continental territory. Faced with such evidence, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that prisons like Bagram were created in large part because the U.S. wanted to torture certain people held there.

The Obama administration argues that the prisoners in Bagram are not entitled to challenge their imprisonment because Afghanistan is in a state of war, and that therefore different legal rules apply. But many of the former Bagram prisoners, such as British residents Jamil El-Banna and Bisher Al-Rawi, were captured in countries far from the Afghan “battlefield”, and forcibly transferred into the war-zone. It seems wholly unfair that prisoners be denied rights simply because they have been kidnapped and rendered into a legal black hole.

In such renderings, the U.S. has not acted alone. The British government has recently admitted to capturing two men in Iraq who were handed to the U.S. and subsequently rendered to Afghanistan. Reprieve’s investigations suggest that these men were taken out of Iraq because the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal was breaking, and Afghanistan represented a safer, darker place to hold them indefinitely. Yet the British government refuses to assist us in our efforts to offer the men legal representation, preferring to allow them to languish in Bagram.

And this is the story of Bagram: 600 virtually unknown men are being held “beyond the rule of law” in desperate conditions, whilst the US government seeks to obstruct lawyers who seek to represent them, and other complicit governments such as the British bury their heads in the sand. Does any of this sound familiar?

Related commentary: Britain’s torture memos -- keeping up appearances

— Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own —

The U.S. armed forces, the world’s most powerful, outnumber the country’s diplomatic service and its major aid agency by a ratio of more than 180:1, vastly higher than in other Western democracies. Military giant, diplomatic dwarf?

The ratio applies to people in uniform (or pin-striped suits). In terms of money, the U.S. military towers just as tall. Roughly half of all military spending in the world is American. Even potential adversaries in a conventional war spend puny sums in comparison. The 2010 defense budget now before Congress totals $534 billion, not including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. China’s defense budget is $70 billion, Russia’s around $50 billion.

Is the huge imbalance between the size of the U.S. armed forces and the civilian agencies that make up “soft power” — chiefly the foreign service and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — destined to remain a permanent fixture in the political landscape?

The gap is not likely to shrink dramatically, despite a growing internal debate over how to balance the instruments of power. Ironically, the man who has provided some of the most memorable statistics illustrating the hard power-soft power gap is Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the only holdover from the cabinet of George W. Bush and President Barack Obama’s most inspired choice.

One of Gates’ favorite examples: The 6,600 foreign service professionals of the State Department equal the number of personnel of one (out of 11) aircraft carrier strike group.

The Pentagon spends slightly more on health care for the military than the State Department spends on looking after foreign affairs. And the United States employs more military musicians than professional diplomats.

The gap is meant to shrink, so that the United States can “renew its role as a leader in global development and diplomacy,” in the words of the White House Office of Management and Budget. It lists $53.9 billion for the Department of State and other international programs in the 2010 budget, a tenth of the defense budget.

The Obama administration wants to double foreign assistance by 2015 and “significantly” increase the size of the foreign service and USAID, the foreign assistance agency which shrank from a high of about 15,000 during the Vietnam War to just over 1,100 now.

OBAMA TURNS AWAY FROM OLD NOTIONS

Building up “soft power” is a sign that Obama is turning away from the notion that diplomacy is largely a tool to convey threats - a notion popular among the neoconservatives who drove the Bush administration’s policy - rather than to negotiate compromise and avert war instead of cleaning up the post-war ruins.

Adding people to civilian agencies that promote U.S. foreign policy interests may well be easier than adjusting the arsenal of the armed forces to the wars they are fighting now or are likely to fight in the near future.

Cutting the size of the military itself is not a subject of debate in Washington, not only because it is obvious that they are badly stretched by the two simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but also because few Americans, and even fewer American policymakers, doubt the wisdom of permanent military supremacy for the United States.

How that should be guaranteed is a perennial subject of debate, reignited this month by the defense budget Gates submitted. It calls for a 4 percent increase over the previous year, not insignificant in a country facing a $1.2 trillion deficit next year, and showed that the “military-industrial complex” the late Dwight Eisenhower warned about is alive and well.

In his presidential farewell address in 1961, General Eisenhower said the military establishment and a permanent arms industry combined to create a military-industrial complex whose “influence  –economic, political, even spiritual– is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the federal government.”

That influence is still felt, as shown by the reaction to Gates’ decision to readjust the arsenal, moving more money to the tools of irregular warfare and scrapping high-ticket items originally designed to fight a Cold War enemy who no longer exists. Case in point: the F-22 jet fighter, an aircraft pilots describe as the Ferrari of the air. It costs $140 million apiece.

The Air Force originally wanted 381 of the planes, Gates wants to halt production at 187 already built or in the pipeline. The aircraft is being built by companies in 44 states. That translates into 88 senators and ensures broad political support in Congress as well as vivid complaints over job losses once production ends.

Before betting on the outcome of the congressional fight over big-ticket weapons systems, keep in mind an old Washington adage: “The president proposes, Congress disposes.”

– Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The views expressed are his own. –

It’s no great surprise in American politics these days, but already a great partisan debate has broken out about President Obama’s foreign policy effectiveness to date. For his enthusiasts, the United States has hit the “reset” button and is reclaiming its place as not only a strong country, but a respected leader among nations. For his detractors, Obama is making the world dangerous by apologizing for America’s alleged misdeeds of the past, naively talking with dictators, and cutting the defense budget.

And as usual, the truth is neither of these polar positions. But as a past critic of Obama, especially during his days of promising a rapid and unconditional exit from Iraq during the presidential campaign, I would nonetheless argue that he has done a good job overall, and that his supporters have the stronger case to date. Still, making too much of provisionally good decisions in the first 100 days verges on playing a silly game of Potomac Jeopardy that only the evening talk shows and political junkies really care about. The bottom line is that Obama is just getting started. But he is off to a more solid start than almost any of his recent predecessors.

Consider the policy towards five key nations. And start with the wars. These are Category A problems. Obama has inherited a more difficult hand than any president since Nixon in terms of active, ongoing conflicts. Already we have lost almost as many American troops in our two wars on Obama’s watch as died in the first year of all of Obama’s predecessors going back to Carter combined.

But that is not a slight on the president, only a reminder of the difficult world that confronts him. And in dealing with these challenges, to date Obama has wisely listened to the counsel of his commanders and other experts on Iraq and Afghanistan. Our drawdown in the former place, while still rapid, will retain up to 50,000 U.S. troops even after it’s over. That is a lot of combat capability, and as such a departure from what Obama promised last year, and a relief to those of us still nervous about Iraq.

In Afghanistan, Obama will roughly double the American troop presence there in his first year in office. That will finally give commanders the wherewithal (or at least most of the wherewithal) to carry out a proper counterinsurgency strategy–with its twin goals of protecting the civilian population and building up Afghan institutions so they can increasingly do the job on their own.

The other crucial set of problems might be described as the nuclear hot spots–Iran, North Korea, Pakistan. On these, Obama’s record is less impressive to date. That is not, however, because he has done anything particularly wrong. Rather, the problems are extremely nettlesome. If Obama deserves any criticism, it is simply that his campaign rhetoric implied these would be far easier problems once George Bush was out of the White House and a new president was ensconced on Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, the main reason these problems are hard is because of who we are dealing with in each case, and not because of George Bush or any other American leader. Since Obama is the one who raised expectations, he deserves to take a bit of a hit perhaps for not quickly fulfilling them–but otherwise his hand seems rather steady on the tiller.

Indeed, President Obama’s Pakistan policy is already an improvement over Bush’s in its emphasis on more military and economic aid, the naming of a special envoy, and related efforts. These steps finally begin to recognize our stakes in this crucial part of the world. Still, to call anybody’s policy towards Pakistan a solid one at a time when that country is practically crumbling before our eyes would go too far. Again, his policy is more “incomplete” than anything else. Which is exactly what you’d expect after 100 days.

– Robin Shepherd is Director, International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society. His areas of expertise are transatlantic relations, American foreign policy, Middle Eastern relations with the West, Russia, eastern Europe, NATO and the European Union. The views expressed are his own. –

It is to be hoped that President Obama has a developed sense of humour. The man heralded by many as the new Messiah of political renewal lands in London this week not to the chorus of approval he might have expected on his first official trip to Europe but to crowds roaring with anger and frustration at the global economic system which his country underpins.

It isn’t personal – yet. Few but the most unreasonable would hold the new American president responsible for woes that he inherited. Nonetheless, Obama campaigned on a platform of change. The implicit claim that his election was a grand, indeed poetic, instance of the time finding the man will be explicitly rejected – in Europe as well as at home – if he fails to deliver. We know he can give a pretty speech. But at the G-20 summit in London this week, that simply won’t be enough. For the first time at a major international gathering the blinding lights of international scrutiny will pour over Obama’s credentials on substance. His mettle is about to be tested.

It is true, of course, that there is tremendous accumulated goodwill towards the new American president in Europe. But time may yet show that much of that was merely the counterpoint to a hostility felt by so many against his predecessor. That, at least, is the risk. Obama can no longer play good cop to George Bush’s bad cop. He alone now has the stage, and when people are losing their jobs and homes they will want to see results. As leader of the Western world, the buck stops with him.

What applies to the economy will also apply to the great issues of international affairs. Obama will be given a chance over his new strategy on Afghanistan, though murmurings of discontent are not hard to detect in liberal-Left circles across the continent even now.

The idea that the war is unwinnable is gaining currency, especially in Britain. If, as the veteran political commentator Simon Jenkins put it in the Guardian this week, Afghanistan comes to be perceived as a “Vietnam for slow learners”, then it is Obama who will be handed the dunce’s cap if things do not improve. The president’s sensible and predictable modifications to earlier intimations about a complete and quick withdrawal from Iraq have also raised eyebrows. America’s critics did not die with Bush.

The NATO summit which follows the G-20 will provide a welcome opportunity to grandstand, especially with the re-incorporation of France into the alliance’s strategic command. The new deal with Paris marks an important symbolic turnaround with a country which more than any other symbolised transatlantic rifts under Bush. Obama will bask in it.

But even at NATO, he will have to tread carefully. As relations with the western part of Europe improve, there are rising concerns in some parts that the administration’s mooted new deal with Russia could herald a partial climb down from some long-standing American strategies, not least to expand the sphere of democracy in Europe’s east. Appeasement of Putin and Medvedev is not the kind of change the Poles and the Balts are looking for.

But that, of course, is the nature of the beast. You can’t please all of the people all of the time. Sometimes it really is a zero sum game, even for a leader with the charisma of Barack Obama.

The honeymoon is definitively over. Obama’s trip across the Atlantic marks the end of his transition from symbol of change to politician with a job to do. In the end, he will be judged like all the rest of them.

- Joshua Foust is a defense consultant who has just spent the last 10 weeks embedded with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. He also blogs at Registan.net. Any opinions expressed are his own. -

It is a cliché that, in counterinsurgency, one must be among "the people". In Iraq, the U.S. Army did this to great effect under the leadership of General David Petraeus, moving large numbers of soldiers off the enormous bases and into smaller, community-oriented security outposts. As a result, in densely populated urban areas like Baghdad, an active presence of troops played a significant role in calming the worst of the violence. The Western Coalition forces in Afghanistan, however, face an altogether different problem. Kabul is not Baghdad - far less of Afghanistan's population lives there than in Iraq, and the insurgency is concentrated outside the country's largest urban areas. In many urban areas-Herat in the west, Jalalabad in the east, Mazar-i Sharif in the north-a westerner is far safer in the city itself than out in the countryside.

A rural insurgency is a devil's game. It is difficult for a foreign counterinsurgent force to concentrate itself to maximize effectiveness, in part because the insurgency itself is not concentrated. When there are no obvious population clusters, there are no obvious choices for bases. Bagram Air Base, the country's largest military base, is in the middle of nowhere, comparatively speaking - dozens of miles north of Kabul, and a 45-minute drive from Charikar, the nearest city in Parwan Province. FOB Salerno, a large base in Khost Province, is miles away from Khost City, the province's capital-and the road in between is riddled with IEDs.

The many smaller bases strung in between are surrounded by enormous Hesco barriers, concertina wire, and guard towers. No one is allowed on the base without being badged and interviewed by base security, and in many places delivery trucks are forced to wait in the open for 24 hours before completing their trips to the dining halls, clinics, or technology offices.

There are other ways in which Coalition Forces are separated from the people of Afghanistan beyond their heavily fortified bases. Most transit - on patrol, on delivery runs, or on humanitarian missions - is performed through Mine Resistance Ambush Protection, or MRAP vehicles. These enormous trucks, thickly plated with metal blast shields on the bottom with tiny blue-tinted ballistic glass, make it near-impossible to even see the surrounding countryside from another other than the front seat.

On the narrow mountain roads that sometimes collapse under the mutli-ton trucks, soldiers drive, too, in up-armored Humvees, which are similarly coated in thick plates of armor and heavy glass windows they aren't allowed to open.

When soldiers emerge from their imposing vehicles, they are covered from head to groin in various forms of shielding: thick ceramic plates on the torso, the ubiquitous Kevlar helmets, tinted ballistic eye glasses, neck and nape guards, heavy shrapnel-resistant flaps of fabric about the shoulders and groin, and fire-resistant uniforms. A common sentiment among Afghans who see these men and women wandering in their midst is that they look like aliens, or, if they know of them, robots.

There is no doubt that MRAPs, up-armored Humvees, and the seventy pounds or so of bullet and blast shielding has saved the lives of countless soldiers. But counterinsurgency is counterintuitive: in the relentless quest to ensure a casualty-free war, it seems the West has begun to engineer its own defeat.

By separating itself so completely from the population it claims to be trying to win-even at Bagram, where there is almost no combat, ever, it is almost impossible for a soldier or civilian to walk outside the gates to purchase something in the nearby bazaar-there remain precious few opportunities to do the gritty work of actually trying to "win hearts and minds".

The end result is stark: in a war that is desperately short of the troops needed to provide security to increasingly less remote communities, 93% of the soldiers stationed at the Coalition's primary base never walk outside the gates. Instead of a focus on separating the insurgents from the population - another clichéd pillar of counterinsurgency - the focus seems instead to be simply killing as many of the enemy as can be identified.

It is a brutal catch-22. The United States operates an incomprehensibly sophisticated Army - its ability to see things from afar, monitor and decode transmissions, and snoop on anything electronic is unmatched, and quite daunting.

But without strong Human Intelligence, there is little chance to contextualize the many streams of data they receive each day: is that man digging near the road emplacing a bomb, or is he digging up rocks for his fence? When this man identifies the elder from across the valley as a Taliban commander, is he telling the truth or pursuing some decades-old rivalry? Is that firefight the result of Jalaluddin Haqqani's foot soldiers, or are they villagers worried their timber harvest might be impounded?

These are the sorts of questions that cannot be answered while holed up on a large base. Military bases are societies in miniature: they have their own politics, their own players, a separate culture, and even their own language. When focused on themselves, they develop into a so-called "garrison mentality" - a focus on rules, administration, and process, rather than accomplishing any larger strategic objectives.

There are entire swaths of territory that have been ceded to the militants in Afghanistan. In some cases, entire districts are essentially "no go" areas, starved of development and even regular security resources. The abandonment of these areas - at a cost in Afghan lives - has not resulted in any punishments or reprimands of the commanders who did so. Rather, they were praised for reducing their own casualties.

It is a mindset bred into the very framework of the U.S. Army. If a soldier dies in combat, his or her commanding officer is investigated. A "15-6," as they are called, is convened by Court Martial authority, and should any fault be found on the commander's part, his or her career could be destroyed.

"No one has ever gotten a 15-6 for losing a village in Afghanistan," a Lieutenant Colonel who worked at the U.S. Army's headquarters in Afghanistan recently said, "but if he loses a soldier defending that village from the Taliban, he gets investigated."

Under such a threat, can a mid-level Army officer be blamed for taking few risks? The problem is much higher than individual battalion and brigade commanders: a command obsessed over casualties in the short term misses the chance to create an environment that results in fewer casualties over the long term.

In Afghanistan, that process is growing worse by the month: already in January of 2009, casualties were several times higher than they were the previous winter, when fighting is normally at its least intense.

It is that mentality - severe risk aversion, coupled with attention paid to process rather than outcome - that risks ultimately undoing the Western mission in Afghanistan. As an institution, the U.S. Army seems unwilling to make the difficult choices necessary to create the conditions for peace: a population that is adequately protected from the crime, drug, and war lords, and therefore no longer contributing to the desperate regional instability.

It is also a mentality that can be challenged in small doses from below, but demands concerted action from above. Command at the highest levels is vital in changing course, and admitting that war is actually a terrible and ghastly thing that requires your own people dying to win. It is a choice not many at the top seem willing to consider.

(Photos by Joshua Foust: ANP officer in Charikar, Parwan Province; the Nijrab Bazaar in Kapisa Province and FOB Salerno, in Khost Province.)

– Willis Sparks is a Global Macro analyst at the political risk consulting firm Eurasia Group. The views expressed are his own. –

Few things in life amused my dad more than a good karate movie. I once asked what he found so funny about Bruce Lee’s jaw-dropping display of poise and power. “Nice of the bad guys to attack him one at a time,” he said. In the real world, threats don’t arrive single-file, like jets lining up for takeoff.

President Barack Obama’s toughest foreign-policy challenge will be in managing the sheer number of complex problems he’s inherited and their refusal to arrive in orderly fashion. In addition, the still-metastasizing global financial crisis will exacerbate several of these problems, by depriving a number of governments of the funding they need to maintain social stability and to meet internal and external threats to their security.

AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN

There is clearly a risk of collision at the intersection of Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of them plagued with floundering elected governments and deteriorating security environments. In Afghanistan, once Obama keeps his promise to provide thousands more U.S. troops, he must decide whether his team can afford to work around President Hamid Karzai (who may win reelection in August) and more directly engage tribal leaders and willing members of the Taliban to restore stability.

But Afghanistan’s security continues to depend on the ability of U.S. forces to stem the flow of militants and supplies into the country from tribal areas in Pakistan. Aware that Pakistan’s armed forces are neither reliably willing nor able to help, the Obama team must find a way to neutralize Pakistani militants without arousing broad public anger across the country and destabilizing its cash-strapped government.

IRAN

The new president also inherits a central role in the international conflict over Iran’s nuclear program. Publicly committed to warnings that a nuclear Iran is “unacceptable,” some within the Obama team say the steep recent drop in oil prices fueled by the financial crisis will further hobble Iran’s already unsteady economy, adding bite to U.S. sanctions and raising hopes that direct engagement might bear fruit.

But however sharp the sticks or sweet the carrots, a broad consensus has developed within Iran in favor of the nuclear program, one that has so far proven immune to external pressure. Obama will eventually face a tough choice: He can accept the need for military action against Iranian nuclear sites or tacitly accept that no one can prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

IRAQ

Across the border in Iraq, recent local election results generally bolstered moderates at the expense of radicals. But the inability of Iraqi lawmakers to forge durable compromises on the equitable distribution of political power and oil revenue, on the disputed status of energy-rich Kirkuk, and on the balance of power between federal and provincial governments leave Obama in a tough spot. He can hold to campaign promises of a near-term withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops or accept the political fallout that comes with approving Pentagon requests for a go-slow approach meant to protect recent security gains.

RUSSIA

There are plenty more potential flashpoints, but the most important international relationships Obama must cultivate are those with newly insecure Russia and increasingly self-confident China. Some within the Kremlin fear that U.S. influence in Russia’s neighborhood threatens the country’s long-term security, even as the global recession thins its (still considerable) financial reserves. A series of recent confrontations—over Kosovo, U.S. missile defense systems in Central Europe, Russia’s war with Georgia—have allowed Russian officials to capitalize on domestic anti-American sentiment and have pushed U.S. policymakers in search of a new approach.

But willingness to “press the reset button,” as Vice President Biden recently suggested, might breed misunderstanding. If Russians believe this signals that Obama will turn a blind eye toward Kremlin bullying at home or abroad, a luxury the new U.S. president cannot afford, his administration may have to reboot again—and sooner rather than later.

CHINA

The Bush administration’s first international test came in April 2001, when a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet, killing the Chinese pilot and provoking a diplomatic standoff over detention of the U.S. flight crew. But China has become a status-quo power in recent years, as the leadership’s reliance on strong growth to bolster its domestic political capital has given Beijing a growing stake in global stability. Over time, the Bush team helped cultivate steady and predictable bilateral ties with China by focusing negotiations on subjects its leaders are willing to talk about—currency conflicts rather than human rights.

Obama says he means to broaden the conversation—a shift that will require plenty of patience on both sides. The stakes are high, particularly as the global financial crisis provokes anxiety in both capitals. This is the world’s most important bilateral relationship. Investing it with predictability and mutual trust will take considerable time and care.

So far, the new president has been lucky. He’s been able to devote time and energy to the stimulus package and financial rescue plan that he hopes will help refloat the U.S. economy. But the administration should recognize that this same financial crisis will add to the complexity of the foreign-policy challenges it faces—challenges that won’t come one at a time.

–Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own–

Twenty years ago this month, the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan after a disastrous war that lasted nine years, seven weeks and three days. Barring military and political miracles, the United States will stay longer in Afghanistan than the Soviets did. Considerably longer.

Present U.S. plans to reinforce troops fighting a war that is, by most accounts, going badly, provide for up to 30,000 additional soldiers to be deployed over the next 12 to 18 months. By that time, the U.S. presence will almost have matched the Soviets’ stay and will exceed it by the end of 2010.

And if U.S. history is any guide, politicians running for the 2012 presidential election will describe the Afghan war as Barack Obama’s war because he switched emphasis and carried out a campaign pledge to draw down troops in Iraq and bolster U.S. forces in Afghanistan, now 36,000 strong.

Obama critics will complain about the Afghan war’s cost — probably around $70 billion a year — and demand an accounting on what it has achieved and when it will end. So far, nobody is venturing forecasts beyond “it will be long.”

General David Petraeus, the man credited with turning the tide of the war in Iraq, has spoken of Afghanistan as “the longest campaign of the long war.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates predicts “a long and difficult fight.”

By an ironic twist of history, Gates was instrumental in getting Soviet troops out of Afghanistan when he was deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the U.S. supplied anti-Soviet fighters with cash, weapons and intelligence.

Now Gates is involved in getting more American troops into Afghanistan and it is not difficult to imagine that eventually the United States will face the same agonizing decisions the Soviets faced in the end. Gates, the only Bush White House cabinet secretary retained by Obama, wrote about exit problems from a war gone wrong for the Soviets in his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows.

He said that by 1987, the CIA had concluded the Soviets wanted out. “But tough decisions were still in front of them - how to get out, when and without losing face … I was truly convinced that the Soviets would have difficulty arranging a face-saving way out.”

They did get out, under an agreement signed in Geneva, and the last soldier to leave, Lieutenant General Boris Gromov, walked across the bridge that links Afghanistan with the Uzbek town of Termez on February 15, 1989. The war had killed about 15,000 Soviet soldiers and an estimated one million Afghans.

RETALIATION TO MASS MURDER
By early February, the U.S. death toll in Afghanistan stood at 644 and that of the NATO-led multinational coalition of the International Security Assistance Force at 427. Afghan casualties, both military and civilian, are a fraction of those of the Soviet war.

The Soviet and American wars in Afghanistan differ vastly in scale and purpose. Moscow wanted to prop up a Marxist government and at the height of its involvement, had a 115,000-strong force in the country. More than 600,000 of its soldiers served there and the invasion drew international condemnation, complete with a (partial) Western boycott of the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow.

In contrast, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was in retaliation to the mass murder of 3,000 people in New York’s World Trade Center and at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. That attack was carried out by members of al Qaeda, which had been given support and safe haven by the Taliban government of Afghanistan.

The American assault on Afghanistan initially dislodged the Taliban but failed to destroy al Qaeda or eliminate its leader, Osama bin Laden, whom George W. Bush had promised to catch “dead or alive.” Even with a $25 million bounty on his head, bin Laden has eluded capture and broadcast a new audio tape just a week before Obama’s inauguration on January 20.

Meanwhile, the Taliban have recovered and are steadily extending their influence with a permanent presence in more than 70 percent of Afghanistan, up from 54 percent a year ago, according to the International Council on Security and Development, a think tank based in London which closely monitors the war. NATO officials dispute that percentage but there’s no dispute that three out of four main highways into Kabul, the capital, are being harassed by the Taliban.

It is a situation that lends itself to General Petraeus’s oft-repeated dictum: “You can’t kill or capture your way out of a complex insurgency. The challenge … is how to reduce substantially the number of those who have to be killed or captured.”

That’s a task made more difficult by the fact that Taliban and al Qaeda elements can count on sanctuaries across the border with Pakistan and hot-pursuit U.S. air strikes into Pakistan carry the risk of destabilizing the fragile government there - the government of a nuclear-armed state.

Another complicating factor: Afghans don’t like outsiders to interfere in their affairs as successive invaders, from Alexander the Great to the British and later the Soviets, learned at great cost. In his memoir, Gates hails the departure of the Soviets as a great victory and adds: “Afghanistan was at last free of the foreign invader.”

That’s not how the Taliban see it, 20 years later.

– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –

To understand why the war in Afghanistan, now in its eighth year, is not going well for the United States and its NATO allies, take a look at two statistics.

One is Afghanistan’s ranking on an international index measuring corruption: 176 out of 180 countries. (Somalia is 180th). The other is Afghanistan’s position as the world’s Number 1 producer of illicit opium, the raw material for heroin.

The two statistics are inextricably linked and, a year ago, prompted Richard Holbrooke, the man President Barack Obama has just picked as special envoy for Afghanistan, to write: “Breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential or all else will fail.”

Holbrooke, who was not in government service at the time, took particular issue with the counter-narcotics strategy the Bush administration pursued in Afghanistan.

“The … program, which costs around $1 billion a year, may be the single most ineffective policy in the history of American foreign policy,” he wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “It’s not just a waste of money. It actually strengthens the Taliban and al Qaeda, as well as criminal elements within Afghanistan.”

Exactly what the Obama administration intends to do about that, and how it might break the narco-state, has yet to be articulated. Sending more troops to fight a growing insurgency does not necessarily translate into progress towards dismantling the “narco-state,” eliminating corruption or cutting down on the opium production whose proceeds help finance the Taliban.

“WAR ON DRUGS”

The counter-narcotics strategy Holbrooke criticized so harshly centers on the eradication of drug crops, and has been the main weapon in the “war on drugs” the United States has been waging for decades around the world. That war failed to curb the production of illicit drugs and often proved counter-productive.

In Bolivia, for example, Evo Morales, a left-wing opponent of the United States, rose to political prominence and finally the presidency because he rallied a protest movement against U.S.-sponsored attempts to wipe out the cultivation of coca leaf, the raw material for cocaine.

De-emphasizing eradication in Afghanistan would amount to an implicit admission of the failure of policies pursued since the 1970s by both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, addressing the Senate Armed Services Committee this week, described Afghanistan as “our greatest military challenge right now” but said there could be no purely military solution — not even with the additional 30,000 troops Obama plans to dispatch over the next 18 months.

So if there’s no purely military solution, what are the chances of progress on the political front? An unnamed White House official sounded hopeful this week that the United States could push Afghan President Hamid Karzai into extending government control beyond the capital and stepping up the fight against corruption.

It is the same Karzai who declared jihad (holy war) on the drugs trade in 2004, a few days after he was sworn in as Afghanistan’s first democratically elected leader. That holy war made no dent in opium production and corruption blossomed.

“Karzai was playing us like a fiddle,” Thomas Schweich, a former top anti-narcotics official in Afghanistan, wrote in the New York Times last summer. “The U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends would get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term.”

KARZAI THE PROBLEM

In other words, Karzai is not part of the solution, he’s part of the problem. As to solutions: One novel idea on opium-and-corruption comes from James Nathan, a political science professor at Auburn University in Alabama and former State Department official. He argues in a forthcoming paper that the most efficient way to tackle the problem would be for the United States or NATO to buy up the entire Afghan opium crop.

“Purchasing the whole crop would take it away from the traffickers without cutting more than half the economy of Afghanistan,” Nathan said in an interview. “Such a purchase would directly confront Afghanistan’s most corrosive corruption. It would end the Taliban’s money stream.”

And the cost? By Nathan’s reckoning, between $2 billion and $2.5 billion a year, no pocket change but not a large sum compared with the around $200 billion the U.S. taxpayer has already paid for the war in Afghanistan. The idea may sound startling but its logic is not far from the farm subsidies paid to U.S. and European farmers.

On a more modest scale than Nathan’s buy-it-all idea, a European think tank, the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS), is lobbying for an alternative to traditional counter-narcotics policies dubbed Poppy for Medicine.

That involves granting international licenses to poppy farmers in Afghan villages, where the crop would be turned into opiate-based medicines such as morphine or codeine, and then shipped out to the legal market.

It would place Afghanistan alongside Turkey (where the United States helped to introduce a similar program in 1974), India and Australia as legal producers of opium. Could it work? When ICOS, formerly known as the Senlis Council, first came up with the idea, the State Department cold-shouldered it.

But that was before Obama, who promised to listen to new approaches. Both the buy-it-all and the licensing concepts deserve a hearing.

For previous columns by Bernd Debusmann, click here.

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Barack Obama says he will make Afghanistan the central front in his fight against terrorism but the incoming U.S. president will have to scale back the war aims he inherits from George W. Bush and redefine success.

Bush ordered the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 to oust a Taliban government that was harboring al Qaeda militants blamed for the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

His declared goals were to defeat the Taliban, create a stable democracy and promote economic development, but he turned his attention quickly to Iraq before the task was done.

Since 2005, a revived Taliban insurgency has made growing inroads against understaffed U.S., NATO and Afghan forces, while President Hamid Karzai’s ineffective government has been mired in corruption and a booming illegal drugs trade.

The most Obama can hope to achieve in a mountainous country that wore down British and Soviet invaders is probably an ethnic power-sharing pact, including tribes that now help the Taliban, in hopes of keeping al Qaeda at bay once Western forces leave.

That is far from assured and would require cooperation from a weak Pakistani government transfixed by tension with India.

NATO officials see 2009 as crucial to turning the military and political tide before some allies start to withdraw in 2010.

“The basic problem in Afghanistan is not too much Taliban; it’s too little good governance,” NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer wrote in a Washington Post article on Sunday.

“We have paid enough, in blood and treasure, to demand that the Afghan government take more concrete and vigorous action to root out corruption and increase efficiency, even where that means difficult political choices,” he said.

Yet despite disenchantment with Karzai, no alternative leader is in sight with a presidential election due in September.

PROSPECT REMOTE

Asked in a Reuters interview last July what would constitute success in Afghanistan, Obama said: “I think our goals have to be very modest but they will still be very difficult to meet. We should want a functioning Afghan government that can maintain its own security and territorial integrity.

“…Our highest priority is making sure that the Taliban and al Qaeda can’t continue to use that region from which to launch attacks around the world. If we have routed them and scattered them, that would be success,” he said.

Despite plans to send up to 30,000 additional U.S. troops to reinforce the 32,000 already in Afghanistan, of whom about half serve in the 50,000-strong NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, the prospect of routing the Taliban is remote.

Without extra forces, the West risks “a stalemate situation where we are not losing, but also not winning,” says De Hoop Scheffer.

NATO casualties rose by 34 percent last year, fueling public and parliamentary unease in many allied nations. Long, vulnerable supply lines from Pakistan to land-locked Afghanistan are under attack.

Attacks on Afghan government property and personnel were up by 134 percent and civilian casualties by 50 percent.

The British military is gloomy about security in the southern province of Helmand, where it is in the front line.

The Taliban are gaining public support, partly due to anger over civilian casualties from NATO air strikes. Despite heavy losses, they seem to have no problem recruiting fighters.

Sensing that time is on their side, Taliban leaders see little interest in local reconciliation talks offered by Kabul.

Karzai, stung by the civilian toll and perhaps with one eye on the elections, has been increasingly outspoken in criticism of foreign troops, further undermining public support for their presence and aggravating mistrust with his Western backers.

On a visit to Berlin last July, Obama challenged NATO allies to do more, saying the United States and Germany had a stake in seeing NATO’s first mission outside Europe succeed.

But European allies are unlikely to send more troops, and NATO officials expect Obama to present a shopping list of requests for police training, financial and development assistance, as well as military equipment such as helicopters, to avoid a public failure at his first alliance summit in April.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy says the key to success lies in Afghan public support and “Afghanisation” of the war. That requires accelerated training of the Afghan army and police and enrolling some tribal militias as security forces.

The European Union could do more than its present paltry 200 police trainers. But after pledging to double that number, it is having difficulty finding volunteers.

Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, veteran Pakistani expert Ahmed Rashid and U.S. Afghan specialist Barnett Rubin said: “The goal of the next U.S. president must be to put aside the past, Washington’s keenness for ‘victory’ as the solution to all problems, and the United States’ reluctance to involve competitors, opponents or enemies in diplomacy.”

They advocated a major diplomatic initiative involving India, Iran, Russia and China in a regional “contact group” to stabilize both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

General David Petraeus, who changed U.S. tactics in Iraq to roll back a Sunni insurgency, has advocated such a regional political approach in Afghanistan, and veteran troubleshooter Richard Holbrooke may lead that diplomatic drive.

But Obama has little time to find a more effective combination of military pressure and diplomatic incentives to avoid being ground down in Afghanistan.

For previous columns by Paul Taylor, click here.