David Kilcullen knows a thing or two about counter-insurgency.

A former lieutenant-colonel in the Australian army and a senior adviser to U.S. General David Petraeus, he helped shape the “surge” policy that is widely credited with pulling Iraq back from the brink of chaos. He has just written a book entitled “The Accidental Guerrilla: fighting small wars in the midst of a big one” which closely examines insurgencies from Thailand and Indonesia to Afghanistan and Iraq, including what it takes to contain and quell them.

Far from being gung-ho or militaristic, Kilcullen takes an analytical approach, putting a heavy emphasis on the need for cultural and linguistic understanding. Without a deep appreciation of history, politics and anthropology, defeat is all but guaranteed  in complex foreign lands even for the world’s mightiest of armies, he argues.

 Which is why it was particularly notable what he said at a book launch in London this week.

The U.S. military has about 1.6 million personnel all told, from frontline troops to cooks and drivers. But there are just 6,000 foreign service officers in the U.S. State Department, he said. That’s about 260 soldiers to each diplomat, a far higher ratio than in any other major military in the world, according to Kilcullen.

“There are more members of U.S. military marching bands then there are foreign service officers,” he said. “In fact, there are about ten times as many accountants in the U.S. military as there are foreign service officers in the U.S. State Department.”

His point hardly needed reinforcing. The U.S. military spends vast amounts — forecast to be $650 billion in 2009 — on ensuring its armed forces are able to fight whatever threat may emerge anywhere in the world at any given time, but a tiny fraction of that amount on diplomatic and cultural liaison work that might help understand a conflict better or even prevent it.

While it’s true that military officers have received a great deal of intensive training in recent years in understanding customs and culture in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the relevant languages, the amount spent is still miniscule alongside that dedicated to arms and weaponry.

Of course, a war is not won by words and diplomacy alone; Kilcullen was not saying that the United States should ditch its tanks and fighter jets and just sit down to talk things through. But what he did say was this:

“The U.S. military is fabulously well developed but is ready to fight the wrong kind of conflict… It is good at fighting state actors but not so good at fighting non-state actors.” 

And in conclusion on Afghanistan he added: “I fear that in Afghanistan we are getting to the worst of both worlds. In the next year or two, we still won’t have enough troops there to keep everyone safe, but we will have just enough to keep everyone pissed off. It’s the opposite of a sweet spot. It’s a sour spot.”

An overwhelming majority of Americans support President Barack Obama’s decision to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, according to a Gallup poll this week. It said 65 percent approved the measure, with support among Republicans hitting 75 percent, making it one of the rare policy decisions where a president gets greater backing from those who identify with an opposing political party than his own.

And in a still greater boost for his young presidency, 77 percent of those who voted for the surge said they would also approve if  Obama decided to send another 13,000 troops to Afghanistan as many expect after a regional policy review.

What’s the reason for this support for American boots on the ground ? Is Afghanistan really the good war in a way that Iraq was not?

One clue could be found in another poll that Gallup did before the latest one. It showed that a majority of Americans believed that the war was going very or moderately badly for the United States in Afghanistan, continuing a trend that began in mid-2008. And fully 70 percent of those polled felt that the Taliban would re-take control if U.S. forces were withdrawn. So they likely view the decision to send more troops as unfortunate but necessary.

Another interesting finding that was that only 30 percent thought sending troops to Afghanistan was a mistake in contrast to the majority who consistently said from Octber 2008 that deployment in Iraq was a mistake. (more…)

Pakistan and its nuclear weapons are back in the centre  of the U.S. foreign policy frame as a steady stream of reports from think tanks and newspapers build the case for President-elect Barack Obama to recognise and act urgently with regard to the potential threat from the troubled state.

The New York Times Magazine in an extensive article  headlined Obama’s Worst Pakistan Nighmare says the biggest fear is not Islamist militants taking control of the border regions. It’s what happens if the country’s nuclear arsenal falls into the wrong hands. And it then takes a trip to the Chaklala garrison where the headquarters of Strategic Plans Division, the branch of the Pakistani government charged with protecting its growing arsenal of nuclear weapons, are located and led  by Khalid Kidwai, a former army general.

“In the second nuclear age, what happens or fails to happen in Kidwai’s modest compound may prove far  more likely to save or lose an American city than the billions of dollars the United States spends each year  maintaining a nuclear arsenal that will almost certainly never be used, or the thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent in Iraq and Afghanistan  to close down sanctuaries for terrorists,” writes David E. Sanger, author of a forthcoming book: “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power”.

The article quotes a Bush administration official as saying there were two ways Pakistan’s weapons could fall into the wrong hands. One was when the Pakistani military was moving its tactical weapons closer to the frontlines when it could be much more vulnerable to seizure by militants. A time of heightened tensions with India, as is the situation now following the attacks in Mumbai, would be a top reason for Pakistan to begin moving its weapons.  Could that be one of the objectives of the Mumbai attacks, the New York Times asks.

A second route for al Qaeda would be to infiltrate Pakistan’s nuclear labs, put in sleeper cells and then squirrel away the material.

“It is relatively easy to teach Kidwai’s security personnel how to lock down warheads and store them separately from trigger devices and missiles, training that the United  States has conducted, largely in secret, at a cost of almost $100 million.”

“”It is a lot harder for the Americans to keep track of nuclear material being produced inside laboratories,  where it is easier for the Pakistanis to underreport how much nuclear material has been produced, how much is in storage or how much might be ’stuck in the pipes’ during the laborious enrichment process.” And it would be nearly impossible to stop engineers from walking out the door with the knowledge of how to produce fuel and bomb designs.

(more…)

According to The News in a report from Rawalpindi, “the episode of hurling shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush remained talk of the town, as people belonging to different walks of life expressed their extreme excitement over the incident and praised the ‘brave act’ of the Iraqi journalist. ‘The News’ interviewed a number of people who were all praise for Iraqi journalist Muntazar al-Zaidi…” it said.

The shoe-throwing has also fired the imagination of the Pakistan blogosphere, providing a perhaps welcome respite to discussion about the extent of Pakistan’s involvement in the Mumbai attacks. Changing up Pakistan (CHUP) has matched up a YouTube video of Bush in Baghdad with footage of protesters hitting a former chief minister of Sindh province with a sandal.

Other blogs are running with a spoof statement from the Pentagon saying the Americans have proof that the shoes had links to Pakistan. 

For the record, the shoes had no link to Pakistan, nor indeed to any of the other countries that laid claim to them. Reuters reporter Waleed Ibrahim tracked down Zaidi’s brother who confirmed the shoes were made in a Baghdad factory. “One hundred percent they are Iraqi-made shoes,” Udai al-Zaidi said.

(Reuters photo: Donated shoes labelled with names of Iraqis who died during the war in Iraq are displayed during a protest in front of the White House in Washington/Molly Riley)

Does the financial crisis mark the beginning of the end of American global dominance? And if so, what would the decline of American power mean for Afghanistan and Pakistan? It’s early days yet, but here are a few themes that are emerging from the maelstrom.

If you put aside the many arguments over whether the Americans were, or were not, guilty of latter-day imperialism, you can find consensus on two main points: that the U.S. model of free-market capitalism has been sorely challenged by the financial crisis; and that America’s reputation as a military superpower has been tarnished by its less-than-successful campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this respect, there are obvious parallels with the collapse of the British empire after World War Two, starting with its departure from India in 1947. Although Britain likes to think it won the war, its postwar situation carried all the hallmarks of defeat. It was virtually bankrupt and with the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942 it had lost the myth of invincibility that allowed it to rule an empire on which the sun never set.  With neither the money, nor the credibility, to hold India by force in the face of a powerful Indian independence movement, it mustered as much dignity as possible for an emperor stripped of his clothes and left abruptly, partitioning the subcontinent into India and Pakistan on its way out.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this analogy works for the United States, and that it too begins to draw in on itself. The lessons of British imperial history suggest that when empires collapse, they do so not gradually, but in big leaps that create chaos for those left behind (for example in the estimated one million killed at Partition).

In an analysis in TomDispatch.com, Aziz Huq writes about how Britain, even after being forced to withdraw from India, only properly realised the limitations of its power in 1956, after its hopelessly miscalculated attack on Egypt following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. “The country’s monetary weakness led directly to its military collapse in the crisis,” he writes. ”The Suez fiasco … also marked the end of British imperial ambitions.”

This is not to suggest that the Americans are about to suddenly abandon Afghanistan and Pakistan.  In the short term, both U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are committed to stepping up the campaign in Afghanistan. At the same time, Western leaders are already lowering their sights on Afghanistan, according to this analysis from Reuters Kabul correspondent Jon Hemming. In a country that is ”famously unforgiving to foreign forces”, this may well have happened even without the financial crisis.

But it does suggest that whatever the next U.S. President decides to do about Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is unlikely to be smooth.

Now add into this mix the growing power of Afghanistan’s neighbours — Iran and Russia, traditional U.S. rivals buoyed up by petrodollars and so likely to benefit from the clipping of America’s wings that they have been dubbed along with Venezuela as a new “axis of oil“. Both Iran and Russia, along with India, supported Afghanistan’s anti-Taliban Northern Alliance when the Taliban were in power in Kabul, and are seen as likely to resist any attempt by the United States to seek reconciliation with the Taliban as a face-saving way out of the Afghan quagmire.

Then there is China, sitting on $2 trillion of foreign exchange reserves.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari just visited China to seek help to bail out Pakistan’s economy, in a trip that also marked out his independence from the United States. China has yet to fully show its hand in how far it intends to use its new-found economic might to exercise global political power.  But it’s worth remembering that the United States, when it rescued Britain from bankruptcy after World War Two, insisted on an end to British imperialism and a withdrawal from its overseas colonies. We don’t yet know what China will demand.

Does anyone want to hazard a guess how all this will play out? America’s status as the lone superpower looks vulnerable; Iran and Russia are loudly assertive, and China is quietly buying up the world’s economy.  Personally, I think there are so many variables that we can’t possibly know yet; but whatever happens, it’s likely to catch us by surprise.

Update - Since filing this blog,  Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud has said he is pulling out of the peace deal with the government after it refused to withdraw the army from tribal lands on the Afghan border. So were the sceptics right all along? And what does this mean for the government’s new strategy?

On the same subject, here is an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor comparing Pakistan’s policy to that of the United States in Iraq. “Americans can hardly complain that Pakistan is on the verge of a deal with jihadists,” it says. “The US has already done a similar deal with Iraqi Sunni terrorists. In both cases, a prime goal is simply to isolate Al Qaeda.”

No doubt many more twists and turns are yet to come before the picture becomes clearer.

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Pakistan’s impending deal with the Mehsud tribes to end hostilities in South Waziristan could either turn out to be the door to a wider peace along the troubled corridor with Afghanistan or a strategic blunder with consequences not just for Pakistan, but for Afghanistan and beyond including the West.

Is Pakistan ready for it ? How far have the country’s new civilian leaders — who had pledged a radically different approach to the northwest region considered the haven of the Taliban and al Qaeda — thought it through?

Newspaper editorials, military experts and blogs are debating those questions both in Pakistan and a world away in the United States, Britain and even Canada, which worries whether its troops in Afghanistan will end up paying a price.

The 15-point agreement, according to a draft that has appeared in the media, essentially calls for an end to militant activity and an exchange of prisoners in return for the gradual withdrawal of the Pakistani military from parts of South Waziristan. There would be no more attacks or kidnapping of military and government officials, roads will be opened and the Frontier Corps, the local security force, will be allowed free movement.

More importantly, the Mehsud elders have also promised to expel all foreign militants from their territory starting within a month and the Pakistani government hopes to replicate the agreement in other parts of the region as well, aiming to drive the wedge deeper between the home grown elements and al Qaeda.

Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the umbrella group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Taliban Movement of Pakistan) has already announced a ceasefire and threatened to string anyone violating it upside down in a bazaar. So far so good although there was a car bombing on Friday near a police station in North West Frontier Province. The Taliban said it was in retaliation for a police shootout and the ceasefire remained in place.

The government justifies the policy change saying it believes negotiations, significantly increased development aid for the tribal region and legislation designed to eventually integrate it with the rest of Pakistan offer the most effective strategy for turning the population there against al Qaeda.

In any case the military option has been tried, and it hasn’t produced results ; the military has lost hundreds of soldiers in the fighting, it has brought forth a spate of suicide bombings, and the operations have been deeply unpopular across the country.

Indeed, even the U.S. Congress’ investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a report this month accused the Bush administration of failing to develop a comprehensive strategy to prevent — let alone decisively defeat — the al Qaeda leadership that fled to Pakistan after U.S.-led forces chased it out of Afghanistan more than six years ago.

The report, which was based on intelligence reports and interviews with U.S. diplomats and military and intelligence officers, found that Washington had relied too heavily on President Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani army to deal with al Qaeda and that virtually all of the nearly six billion dollars in aid Washington had provided to help Pakistan fight al Qaeda and the Taliban in the tribal areas had gone to the military, while only a tiny fraction was earmarked for economic and other forms assistance for the largely Pashtun population there.

So then where is the rub ? The main criticism is that Pakistan might be buying peace for itself, while letting the militants devote their energy to the fight against U.S. forces in Afghanistan which they say is the “mother of all the problems there.”
There is no mention in the draft agreement of ending cross-border attacks into Afghanistan.

Secondly, deals with militants in both North and South Waziristan have been tried before, with disastrous consequences. A report by the International Crisis Group said Musharraf’s 2006 North Waziristan agreement was directly responsible for creating a safe haven for al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.

And finally there is an issue of principle. Pakistani defence specialist Ikram Sehgal argues that while “all militants are not terrorists”, he says “one cannot (and should not) negotiate with terrorists. Baitullah Mehsud is a terrorist.”

In a posting this week, the blog fiverupees says Pakistan must pause and consider if it is ready to face the consequences of another 9/11 or 7/7 , but this time originating directly from the areas it is supposed to control.

The United States, beginning with President George W. Bush himself, has this past two weeks trained its crosshairs on Pakistan, warning that another Sept. 11,  if it were to happen, would most likely not be plotted out of Iraq, Afghanistan or even Iran,  but Pakistan.

Like the steady drumbeat that has often preceded major moves by the administration, the threat from Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, considered the home of the top ranks of al Qaeda, has been articulated from the White House, at Congressional hearings and abroad.

Al Qaeda “won’t go away quietly in the night”, having found sanctuaries in ungoverned places, tribal areas and the Frontier Province of Pakistan, FBI director Robert Mueller said in the latest remarks on the matter, according to Pakistan’s Daily Times.

The issue is starting to create ripples, both at home in America and quite obviously in Pakistan, although for different reasons. For Bush critics at home, the barrage of statements is an admission, at the very least, that America is tied down in Iraq when it should be focusing on the threat along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. At worst, it’s an admission that American blood and treasure have been spent in the wrong place.

In Pakistan, the reaction is measured but concern over U.S. intentions is unmistakable.

“That the Americans are up to mischief is also evident from their extraordinary interest in the internal politics of Pakistan and formation of the government, which they are desperately trying to influence to suit their own objectives,” Pakistan Defence says in a posting arguing that Washington, faced with a strong new national coalition government in Islamabad, had stepped up covert and public pressure.

Raids in Pakistan’s tribal areas have already been carried out by U.S. drones,  the News said, warning that any further U.S. intervention in region will aggravate the considerable problems there, including the legacy of the militant armies set up to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.