Obama, Karzai and an Afghan mirage
Last year, under the leadership of President Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan slipped three places on a widely respected international index of corruption and became the world’s second-most corrupt country. It now ranks 179th out of 180, a place long held by Somalia.
According to a United Nations report published in January, Afghans paid $2.5 billion in bribes in 2009, roughly a quarter of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (not counting revenue from the opium trade). The survey, based on interviews with 7,600 people, said corruption was the biggest concern of Afghans.
On the military front in a war more than halfway through its ninth year, attacks on U.S. forces and their NATO allies totaled 21,000 in 2009, a 75 percent increase over 2008, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) a week before Karzai’s visit to Washington. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, noted that Taliban insurgents had set up a “widespread paramilitary shadow government…in a majority of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.”
The Pentagon, also in advance of Karzai’s visit (in the second week of May), reported that Afghans support his government in only 29 of the 121 districts the U.S. military consider most strategically important.
“The insurgents perceive 2009 as their most successful year,” the Pentagon said. “The Afghan insurgency has. ..a ready supply of recruits drawn from the frustrated population, where insurgents exploit poverty, tribal friction and lack of governance to grow their ranks.” As to corruption: “Real…change remains elusive and political will, in particular, remains doubtful.”
In case all this has led you to the conclusion that the Afghan glass is half empty at best, that’s not the way President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton portrayed it during Karzai’s visit. Yes, there were difficulties ahead, they said, but overall things were looking up. “We are steadily making progress,” Obama said. “Progress in Afghanistan is real,” echoed Clinton.
Was this a matter of two leaders seeing a mirage, or a 21st century version of the “we see light at the end of the tunnel” assurance Americans heard during the Vietnam war? Or was it simply overdue recognition that Obama is stuck with Karzai no matter how unpopular he might be or how much credibility he lacks?
War and Peace, by Barack Obama
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
It is a timeline rich in irony. On Dec. 10, Barack Obama will star at a glittering ceremony in Oslo to receive the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. That’s just nine days after he ordered 30,000 additional American troops into a war many of his fellow citizens think the U.S. can neither win nor afford.
Whether the sharp escalation of the war in Afghanistan he ordered on December 1 will achieve its stated aim – disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan – remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: more troops equals more fighting equals more deaths — of soldiers, insurgents and the hapless civilians caught in the middle. Not exactly a scenario of peace.
In Oslo, Obama will become the fourth American president (after Jimmy Carter, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt) to be handed the coveted peace medal and invited to give the traditional Nobel Lecture. It is meant to spell out the award winner’s vision of peace, a challenging task for a man who just picked a much bigger war from a range of options that included reducing the U.S. military presence.
Resolving the contradiction will require the mastery of words of Leo Tolstoy, author of the epic novel War and Peace about the run-up to the unsuccessful invasion of Russia by Napoleon.
The deployment Obama announced at the U.S. military academy at West Point will bring U.S. forces to around 100,000, more than three times as many as when the president took office in January. The combined strength of American troops and soldiers from 42 other nations will be 140,000 – the same level as the peak of Soviet forces during an eight-year war that ended in a humiliating defeat.
Obama and his war council are as confident that the U.S. will not share the same fate as they are determined to reject comparisons between the American involvement in Afghanistan and the war in Vietnam. “This argument depends upon a false reading of history,” Obama said in his West Point speech.
The concept of corporate entities was introduced back in the roman ages and has been with us since then.
It is as old and solid a principle of law as any other you could care to name. Almost as old as the concept of legal rights or private property rights. And certainly older then very recent legal concepts such as international human rights.
And even if we removed corporate citizenship, it wouldn’t have any effect on the arms industry.
Corporations are individuals. People are individuals. Corporations can manufacture weapons for governments. People can manufacture weapons for governments.
The situation would be exactly the same. The only distinction would be whether people manufacture and sell weapons as a corporation or a partnership. The legality remains the same.
So if there was as you say, a ‘military industrial complex’ that exists, then the difference between corporate and partnership would mean very little.
from The Great Debate UK:
Is Iraq stable enough to cope without U.S. troops?
-Tim Cocks is a Reuters correspondent based in Baghdad.-
For the U.S. military, it's the million dollar question -- or rather the $687 billion question, according to a recent estimate of the Iraq war's total cost. Is Iraq now stable enough for them to take a permanent back seat?
The short answer is no one knows. The only way they were ever going to find out was to leave Iraq's own forces to it and hope the whole thing doesn't come tumbling down. They started doing that on Tuesday when they pulled out of Iraqi cities.
It's been an encouraging start. A big bomb in Kirkuk cast a shadow over Iraq's celebrations of its new-found sovereignty, but since then things have been relatively quiet. Militants might try to take advantage by stepping up attacks, but for the moment they seem content with celebrating a "victory" over the occupation -- and setting off the odd bomb, of course.
The United States' coalition partners have for the most part long since departed. British forces handed over southern Iraq to the Americans in April, but since 2007 their 4,000 odd troops left had been largely confined to Basra airport anyway.
And one thing the crystal ball gazers have learned about Iraq's hugely complicated, many-sided conflict is that the past is rarely a reliable guide to the future.
When optimists thought Iraq was poised to enjoy democracy after the fall of Saddam, it spiralled into years of bloody insurgency and sectarian killing. Later, just when it seemed all hope was lost and Iraq would have to be partitioned, things starting getting dramatically better.
No, there will be a struggle for power as soon as the Us leaves the country. Iraq is too divided, and there are too many unsolved cultural, polital and religious issues for Iraq to become a peaceful and safe place to live.
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
Do Obama’s Afghan plans still make sense post-Mumbai?
The United States is aiming to send 20,000 to 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan by the beginning of next summer, according to the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The plan is not unexpected, and from a military point of view is meant to allow U.S. and NATO troops not just to clear out Taliban insurgents but also to bring enough stability to allow economic development, as highlighted in this analysis by Reuters Kabul correspondent Jon Hemming.
But does it still make sense after the Mumbai attacks -- intentionally or otherwise -- sabotaged the peace process between India and Pakistan?
As discussed many times on this blog, most recently here, a crucial element of President-elect Barack Obama's Afghan strategy was to combine sending extra troops with a new diplomatic approach looking at the Afghanistan-Pakistan-India region as a whole. The argument was that Pakistan would never fully turn its back on Islamist militants as long as it felt threatened by India on its eastern border and by growing Indian influence in Afghanistan on its western border. India and Pakistan, so the argument went, should therefore be encouraged to make peace over Kashmir, to reduce tensions in Afghanistan and pave the way for a successful operation by the extra U.S. troops.
Where does that plan stand now? India-Pakistan relations are extremely strained and vulnerable to any second militant attack on India. It's hard to imagine the two countries sitting down any time soon for serious peace talks, and certainly not at the United States' behest, given that outside interference on Kashmir has always been anathema to India.
Yet as the Soviet Union discovered during its failed occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, no matter how many troops you send in, you can't win there as long as the Islamist mujahideen have sanctuary in Pakistan. The United States knows this too having backed the mujahideen against the Soviets (this being a war that America has fought on both sides), which is presumably why it had begun to look at Afghanistan in a broader regional context.
So have the Americans reverted to a piecemeal approach with this plan to send in the extra troops? Are they just pushing on regardless and hoping for the best, perhaps thinking they have no other choice? Or should they have gone back to the drawing-board post-Mumbai and come up with a different plan?
No, they don’t make sense. The biggest problem is not Afghanistan, Taliban, Al Qaeda, Kashmir or anything of that sort.
The fundamental issue that will decide the fate of South Asia including Afghanistan, is Pakistan. To be precise, the issue is – can Obama use multilateral diplomacy, leverage with Pakistan and military means to persuade Pakistani Generals to abandon the use of Taliban and jihadi elements as a means to pursue Pakistan’s foreign policy interests?
As long as Pakistan is allowed to play both sides in the war on terror, the region will remain unstable and an tinderbox. Post Mumbai, there is a developing consensus in the US, UK, Europe and elsewhere that Pakistan is more of a problem right now than a solution. It’s good that this realization has come, albeit several years late.
I hope Pakistan is persuaded to stop using terror as a policy tool. The fig leaf of deniability is gone. No one is fooled anymore.
@avid
Perhaps you should try to clarify the so called ‘capability’ which the USA has but was not able to defeat the so called enemy in Korea and Vietnam?
Rex Minor